Cash Kashkari

In his advertisement, Neel Kashkari brags about not being a politician. He wants us to believe he will make a better Governor than a politician would because “politicians don’t know how to earn money.” What?  Does this lunkhead think the government should be a profit making organization or that politicians should use their elected offices to make as much money for themselves as they can? Are you sure this guy’s name is not really Cashcarry?

The rest of the ad seems like a non-sequitur after that nonsense. He indulges in the usual demagoguery by saying he will cut taxes. But only a Republican would think that will put the government in the black. Democrats know those cuts will not stimulate the economy because Republicans always give the largest tax cuts to people who can already afford to buy whatever they want. Ah but not to worry. If elected, Governor Kashkari will also slash government programs to reduce spending. So whatever revenue the government takes in after that will not be earned; thereby proving that even former businessmen turned politicians no longer know how to “earn” money.

Kashkari also says he will take an ax to Governor Brown’s crazy train! I think he better explain what train he is talking about, because it sounds like the one he is on.

Herr No-No

Almost all references to Adolph Hitler and the NAZIS are considered out of bounds unless you are teaching the history of WWII and/or the holocaust. This is true regardless of whether you are an idiot, like Rush Limbaugh, saying Obama is acting like Hitler or you are Hillary Clinton saying that Putin’s seizure of another sovereign nation’s territory was like something Hitler did. The latest person to get in trouble for saying Putin is acting like Hitler is Prince Charles. The comparison of Putin’s behavior and Hitler’s behavior is understandable given Putin’s usage of the alleged threat to ethnic Russians as a pretext for taking over the Crimea and threatening eastern Ukraine, but there is another comparison that is as valid and less loaded. During the years leading up to WWI there was the Pan Germanic movement and the Pan Slavic movement. There were also extreme nationalistic movements caused by smaller ethnic groups wanting to break away from empires that had dominated the European continent for so long. Hitler’s contentions about racial and ethnic superiority were not formed in a vacuum; they were shaped by events during this turbulent period when culture and language were used to unify and expand nations and when all of the major powers felt so superior to each other. The bottom line is that the jingoism of the large nations combined with the aspirations of ethnic groups that felt oppressed created a powder keg which was set off when a Serbian nationalist assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. The fact that 17 million people died as a direct result of WWI should be enough to tell us how dangerous it is to use ethnic concerns as an excuse for armed aggression. I will grant you that Herr No-No is the most infamous example of that danger, but the unspeakable evil of the holocaust makes that example too horrible to cite.

Death By State

Now that the drugs used for lethal injections have become so difficult to obtain several states are considering other, “humane,” ways to execute criminals. Unfortunately, I have learned far more about death than I ever wanted to know. In less than a year my brother and my mother have died while on home hospice care (one from cancer and the other from congestive heart failure). I also had to have the vet euthanize my old dog. The one thing I learned from all of this is that although some ways of dying are worse than others, there is no good way to die. In spite of our best pharmaceuticals, death  always involves some pain and suffering! Even euthanasia is a matter of temporarily inflicting pain to end prolonged pain. My point is that there is no such thing as a humane execution! I suppose the question of whether there is such a thing as a just execution is debatable.

Benghazi Again! Must You?

The Republican Party’s credo seems to be, if it is worth doing at all it is worth doing over and over and over, even when everyone who is too smart to be a Republican will tell you that doing it in the first place turned out to be an exercise in futility. So here we go again. The Obama administration recently produced more documents on Benghazi. Those documents did not add any information we did not already know, nor did they implicate anyone in a cover-up or an act of gross negligence. But Republicans are using the production of those documents to advance once more their absurd accusations and conspiracy theories. The lame stream media is too busy hocking the wares of their sponsors to trouble themselves with any facts; journalistic integrity to them means merely reporting what was said and by whom. So the lame stream media dutifully repeats the ridiculous accusations of the Republican shills and their babbling buffoons to an audience that greets those accusations with a collective yawn.

If you are looking for people who care about this phony issue of Benghazi you can find them among the viewers of MSNBC or Fox News. Viewers of MSNBC care about this trumped up issue because MSNBC uses the GOP’S wild accusations to show just how vicious and absurd the Republicans have become. The viewers of Fox News care about this trumped up issue because they are stupid enough to believe that Fox News is actually a news organization and a “news organization” that supports conspiracy theories validates their paranoia. In regard to Benghazi being an election issue, I would like to say it is a wash, but I am afraid that liberals are more inclined to laugh at it than vote on it, and right wingers are more inclined to vote on it. In other words, the Republicans can use it to stir up the dumb asses and bring out their base. There are, however, some very important issues that should still make reasonable people vote.