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.