Random, occasionally rambling thoughts with links to interesting, scandalous, or partisan news of the day.

Fair and Balanced

Dead Heroes
• Thomas Paine
• Thomas Jefferson
• Benjamin Franklin
  

Living Heroes
We owe the liberty and freedom we take for granted to the enlisted men and women in the armed forces. They sacrifice family, ease, and even life laboring in service to all of us. The least we can do for them is honor their devotion with dignified pay scales, decent education for themselves and their children, and reasonable compensation for service away from their families and death on the battlefield. Flag waving politicians who praise the troops on one hand and cut their pay and benefits with the other should be deeply ashamed of themselves.

Blogs I Read Often
• Talking Points Memo
• Atrios
• FireDogLake
• Brad DeLong
• The Daily Howler
• Daily Kos
• Glenn Greenwald
• MyDD
• The News Blog
• Oliver Willis
• Political Wire
• The Volokh Conspiracy
  

President Tells a Big Fat Lie:
"Some in our country think that Social Security is a trust fund -- in other words, there's a pile of money being accumulated. That's just simply not true. The money -- payroll taxes going into the Social Security are spent. They're spent on benefits and they're spent on government programs. (ed: read "tax cuts" for government programs)There is no trust. We're on the ultimate pay-as-you-go system -- what goes in comes out. And so, starting in 2018, what's going in -- what's coming out is greater than what's going in. It says we've got a problem. And we'd better start dealing with it now. The longer we wait, the harder it is to fix the problem. "

Alan Greenspan has a lot to answer for. For the last 22 years I've been pre-paying my own retirement. All the boomers have been. We've accumulated over $1.5 TRILLION over the "pay as you go" amount necessary for our parents. The fact that Bush wants to break open the lock box and pass our our prepayments to his rich friends is a problem he has to deal with. And so does Greenspan. He's the one that flashed the green light that let Congress go on this spending and tax-cutting spree. Maroons, one and all.
posted by Dave on 4:30 PM | 0 comments link

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