Andre's Executive Order

In the CNN/Tea Party Republican debate, Ron Paul was asked about a hypothetical involving a 30 year old man of middle class means with a job who decides not to get medical insurance. The man suffers a medical calamity and is in need of care to save his life. The question posed to Paul was: 'should society pick up the check.' Paul says: 'that would be the expectation of the welfare state but the man had made a choice and needed to live with the consequences of that choice.' “So should society let him die?” was the continuing pressure from CNN moderator Wolf Blitzer. Several people in the crowd yelled “Yes!” What does this mean? To American conservatives it is a code of orthodoxy. A statement of faith concerning the role of individual responsibility and self determination taken to an acknowledged extreme but asserted with vehemence. The point is not to cheer a man's death, but to make a firm statement and rail against government involvement in the lives of citizen...

Republican senator Paul Ryan from Wisconsin is charging people $15.00 to come to his 'town hall' meetings. While he avoids putting it that way, he does it because the protesters in Wisconsin will shout him down, yell, and express their outrage in a way that makes him almost unable to speak. The anger against Paul Ryan is a rage that comes from fear and resentment over his policies and a belief that Paul and others like him are hijacking the job they were voted in to do for another agenda. Democrat Anthony Weiner of New York had a strange and almost teenage pseudo-sexual exchange with women across the country involving photos sent over cell phones. The outrage over his odd behavior, not quite cheating but strangely morally disturbing, got so bad that he resigned his congressional seat under pressure from the minority leader and others. Republican Michelle Bachmann of Minnesota broadcast a response to the presidential State of the Union address speaking for nobody at all and ...

This is part two of a series of articles challenging the Republican establishment to defend their representation of Conservative interests and to challenge current Republican talking points with common sense. Today's topic: Taxation Every single Republican running for federal elected office is asked (rather heavy handedly) to sign Grover Norquist's pledge to never raise, or cause to be raised, any income tax for corporations or individuals or to reduce any deduction available that in effect raises those taxes. The effects of this pledge and the mentality behind it saturate the Republican political landscape these days and was plainly visible in the debt ceiling debate earlier this month. The suggestion of raising revenues caused Cantor to storm out of a critical meeting and was a hard line in the sand drawn by all Republican leadership in both the Senate and the House. The opposition to tax increases was so vehement that the Republican party passed up two trillion in addit...

Alright, I didn't really want to go here because it's being hammered to death, but I'm getting a lot of questions about the debt ceiling, and most of the explanations I'm seeing from the media suck. So here's my take. Why do we have a debt ceiling? A government the size of the United States has an amazingly large financial gray area lurking in predicting the funding necessary to do its job. This gray area is the necessary costs to running the government that we can't predict in advance of a regular budget. By way of example, a single day of operations in Iraq or Afghanistan costs roughly 720 million dollars. Generally speaking, nobody can predict the outbreak, start, or end of war. Similar expenses include natural disasters such as Katrina or man made disasters such as the Wall Street scandals. Not all such gray expenses are negative either. Unexpected opportunities can arise that defy the planned budget or were dependent on unlikely legislation for infrastru...

The birther movement is finally over after Obama releases his long form birth certificate, giving the critics everything they wanted and have been demanding! As if. Not only have the birthers not thrown in the towel, but they have called fraud, doubted the document, and ramped up their demands as to what they need to see from this president to, in theory, legitimize him: college transcripts seem to be the next document du jour, but make no mistake, this too would be inadequate. Compare this situation to Bush v. Gore in 2004. The popular vote suggested and in fact was ultimately concluded to have made Gore the winner of the general election. Democrats were outraged at the supreme court decision that handed the presidency to Bush. However after the decision and the rage and the snarling, the vast majority of democrats dug in to accept the unfortunate reality that George W. Bush was their president. Six months after the ruling, the idea of protesting Bush on that grounds was considered mo...

Taxation. It's one of the big talk-points and battle lines between the two moderate parties we have. Republicans love to slam Democrats for raising taxes and hurting business while Democrats love to slam Republicans for using tax cuts to benefit corporate deals made to further corporate greed at the expense of Americans. The Tea Party has recently brought taxation to the forefront of the news by raging in a nearly incoherent way against the increases in tax funded programs, taking a nearly libertarian stance on the potential tax impacts. Again, the #1 cited reason for this rage? The interference with business that such costs would have. What the hell do politicans mean when they say 'Business'? It's convenient to lump every kind of economic effort into a single word like 'business' and then use broad generalizations to talk about how a tax or legislation is for or against it. But pay attention folks. Doing business in the US has changed enormously in the last fi...