Speakeasy forum: Toni, back about 2004 2005 I posted a list of 44 undeniably

conservative main stream media hosts, journalists, and talking heads called upon daily for their opinions, and asked for a similar number of liberal mainstream journalists. I got lots of abuse, but I never ever got even one name of a liberal. Now I can offer the names of Liberals, mostly on MSNBC, and at small magazines like Mother Jones or The Nation, or the New Republic, and a couple like Krugman at the NYT, though I don't think he'd accept the categorization. I think he'd say "he calls it as he sees it" and has certainly criticized President Obama and those around him roundly for insufficiently decisive action.

I'd be happy to accept your accusation that All Main Stream Media is biased if it were true. But if it were true, Why did Fox start out with so many journalists from the Main Stream Media as its hosts? People like Chris Wallace and Bernard Kalb, and dozens of others.

In fact I would be happy if it were true, and I were happier with the content I read or hear in the MSM. (and may we please dispense with the Sarah Palinism you use so often?). I'm not happy with what I read. It is neither critically written, by which I mean using the brain to try to see what is behind or wrong with what is being presented as a news story or a White House Press Release, nor does it look forward enough to see impacts in the offing. Most often it is the Mimeograph machine for the Administration repeating uncritically and unthinkingly what it is fed.

Nothing could represent this better than the reporting going into and coming out of Gulf War 2. The idiocy about WMDs which were never found (except for a large pile of unrefined Uranium ore called Yellow Cake, which could have been for creating nuclear fuel for their reactors). No refining facilities, no parts for Nuclear Refining Facilities, no stockpiles of Nerve agents, nothing despite a lap dog press that repeated every lie as the truth. And the fictiious linkage of Saddam Insane with Al Qaeda which even I knew was not true, because of news stories of Iraq hunting its members inside Iraq, which was in British Papers but, I gather, not American ones.

That is the Main Stream Media I'm complaining about. No questions, not even the simple one of "Is there a refining site for all this Uranium Ore?" " Is there a facility even being built?" "Is there any evidence of an Iraqi Nuclear Program?, and if so please show us." The same was true for nerve agents. Small scale trials, no stockpiles. There were stockpiles of Poison Gas from the Iran Iraq war, which were not used against Americans that I ever heard except in IED's.

Colin Powell whom I respect greatly, was driven out of the Bush Administration because he didn't believe what he was being told, and couldn't therefore put it forward with the enthusiasm of the admirable but gullible Condoleeza Rice. She's a great American, and a credit to the Republican party, but she certainly became little more than a shill for Cheney and Rummy and all the Neo Con Cold Warriors who were desperately searching for a new enemy to justify their existence.

But compare the Spending figures from 2000 and 2012:

Health, rose 2% of Gross Domestic expenditures. Pensions were reduced by 2%
Education was reduced by 2%
Defense rose by 3%
Welfare rose by a whopping 1%
Remainder reduced by 5%

and should you think I'm quoting Liberal statistics, this is from
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com

The Home page said:
"Hi, I'm Christopher Chantrill and I'm a conservative"

Now having done all that, including recording the percentages side by side for comparison, I returned to get the web address and to copy and paste the Christopher Chantrill info from the Home Page. What I got was a whole different presentation. Nor could I get clock pie charts in different colours with the figures I quoted above, I got sloped oval pie charts in barely distinguishable shades of orange, with different figures. Welfare for example was quoted as 11% not 10%. If that doesn't show you what the Conservatives are doing (i.e. making up their statistics and obfuscating the truth) I don't know what will. Different statistics in two different pie charts for the same year??? Sound like a presentation on FoxNews.

Nevertheless, even using his own figures he shows spending hasn't gone wild, it is barely increased over late Clinton Percentages. What has dropped is Revenue. Check out Corporate Taxes versus Personal Taxes for 2010 or 2012. I think we can agree that all Corporations taken as a whole are at least as wealthy if not more so than the American people as a whole, but they pay barely 18% of Incoming Revenue. It's you and I who carry the government, paying over 50%. Corporate Taxes have shown a steady, and fairly steep decline since 1981. Gee, what happened then, I wonder? Use his site and compare the Incoming Revenue from the 50's or the 60's, or even the 70's.

If you remove two major sources of revenue, and give a tax holiday while fighting two wars on the Nations Credit Card and crashing the economy to boot, then there's liable to be a Revenue Shortfall. Call me a heretic but when you've got a horrible fever and an infection (and current Republican thinking is that infection) you don't pile on the bed clothes send your temperature higher and fry your brain, you get some medicine, choke it down and shiver under a single sheet until the fever breaks. In hospitals they have rubber cooling blankets that circulate cold water through tubing to bring the patient's temperature down, or to warm people up if their temperature drops during surgery.

So far the Republicans have been immune or afraid to recognize that their policies brought us to this mess. They think more tax cuts will solve the problem. They are clearly old fashioned absinthe drinkers, or meth smokers who think they can fly off the World Trade Centre (oops, they destroyed that too, didn't they). The Sears Tower then. If they weren't proposing to take the country with them, I'd say fine, Happy Landings, but I'm not eager to become a cement pizza along with them, and neither should any of you.

If Romney is elected, his first statement will be to say "It is far worse than we were led to believe, and we can't do what we promised," his first lie in office, but all the while giving breaks to his donors and probably reversing the prohibition on Off Shore Accounts out the back door of various Government Agencies.

Americans have been buying "pie in the sky" from a sequence of Slick Polished Heavily Scripted Medicine Show artists, and I don't exempt Bill Clinton from that category (though George H.W. Bush was anything but slick). Even Barack Obama is a great speaker, but he has at least been talking about reality, and programs desperately needed, like the Health Care Plan, and the still to be enacted Infrastructure Plan and has done what he had to to avert 1929, and most of its calamities. Hope and especially Change is what the US desperately needs.

Go ahead, though, elect Mitt Romney. I won't be there to suffer with you, but the collapse of the US economy which I see as the likely result, will damage the whole world, though not quite as badly as 1929. For America however it will mean Third World status, and crime statistics through the roof. Welcome to the realities of Honduras folks.

Rob

And since you care so much, Toni, Yes, I'm taking my anti-depressant regularly every day. I just wish it worked better and could cushion me from all this worry for my Country.