bush

Bob Cesca has posted the following chart, showing how the share of income labor sees is at a historic low:

What's interesting is how much the share dipped during the Bush years. During Clinton's term, the rate was on the rise, after a substantial fall during the Reagan and Bush 41 years.

So what does all that mean? Trickle down works!

Of course the trickle down I'm talking about isn't the one Republicans push. Instead it's one that see's the wealth of America rapidly decrease as the money trickles down to the mass population.

And speaking of Republican economics, this highlights another problem. Look again at the big dip in the Bush years. Republicans constantly told us how bigger tax cuts to corporate America would mean more jobs and better wages. Care to re-think that position?

In a world of supply side economics, the equating factor is simple - if the people have more money then they will buy more goods. Instead Republicans want you to think that if the big corporations have more money, they'll hire more people and put out more goods, even if those goods won't sell. It's that kind of thinking that will keep us in a recession and cause our middle class to keep declining. It's that kind of thinking that the media and right wing has pushed for years and so many Americans now buy into it, despite the historic numbers showing something totally different.

Following up on my earlier post, Speaker Boehner was just handed another defeat:

In a sign that some freshman Republicans were willing to cut military spending, the House voted 233-198 on Wednesday to cancel an alternate fighter jet engine that the Bush and Obama administrations had tried to kill for the last five years.

The vote marked another instance in which some of the new legislators, including members of the Tea Party, broke ranks with the House speaker, John A. Boehner, a Republican from Ohio, where the engine provided more than 1,000 jobs.

Many of the 87 freshman Republicans in the House had initially been hesitant to trim military spending as part of their drive to reduce the budget deficit.

It’s going to be interesting to hear the spin Boehner puts on this. Will he call it job killing, when he constantly tries to say that the government doesn’t create jobs? I am eagerly waiting to hear.

For the past couple of weeks Matt Drudge has become mister outspoken advocate of privacy, going after the TSA for the full body scanners and pat downs at airports. Today he decided to post this headline:

What’s really interesting about this is how the right were the big defenders of these techniques prior to January 20, 2009. As soon as Bush left office the right becomes the big privacy concern trolls.

And if that doesn’t make you wonder enough, it turns out that picture Drudge is pushing is actually from 2007:

Only problem: if the terrorists did win, it happened in September 2007 — when this picture was taken by Dean Shaddock and posted at Flickr.

I remembered this because I posted the image at LGF in 2007, and titled it “Homeland Absurdity.”

Keep up the great work Matt! You’re really showing the whole world your hypocrisy.

Courtesy of, well you guessed it – Drudge:

OMG! Abandon ship!

Of course it is still about 2,000 points higher than it was 2 years ago, specifically on January 20, 2009. Now who was in office until that date?

And just for the record, the Dow did drop 163 points today on more European stock fears. Still, it’s a lot better than the 8,000 point level we saw when Bush turned things over.

And we can thank Tom Coburn for this:

Extended unemployment benefits will temporarily expire for thousands of Americans on Monday because the Senate went on its spring recess without approving a one-month deadline extension.

The extension, which had bipartisan support, would have cost about $10 billion, but a lone Republican, Sen. Tom Coburn, said no until the costs are offset.

The Oklahoma senator objected to a commonly used unanimous-consent agreement to pass the bill under emergency conditions, even if it increases the federal deficit. Coburn wants to eliminate additional government spending to pay for the bill.

Could you imagine if a Democrat did this on one of Bush’s bills for the Iraq War? People like Tom Coburn didn’t mind draining the bank book for that, but if a Democrat did block it, we would hear cries of traitor and treason from the right. 

But here’s something to ponder. A lot of the Tea Party people are unemployed. I wonder how many will see their benefits dry up today because of Coburn? I also wonder who quickly the Republicans will try to shift blame to the Democrats on this and if the Tea Party people will buy into it? In those two questions pose the reality that Tea Party people don’t really know what is happening in the government, or what the two parties really stand for.

It amazes me every time I hear Boehner decry federal money as being a failure. He tried to do it on the stimulus by saying there were no stimulus projects happening in Ohio, despite one going on a couple of miles from his own house. Now we have this issue:

Nearly a year and a half after federal lawmakers gave Butler County $4.2 million to deal with the housing crisis, county leaders are still trying to figure out what to do with it.

With only six months to go before the federal government takes unused money back, commissioners heard a list of options today, Feb. 25, from county Community Development Director Donna Everson.

This money is from the Neighborhood Stabilization Program, a program created in 2008 to help combat high foreclosures. You know, 2008, a time when Bush was President.

Now for some facts:

• Butler County is the home of John Boehner (and me)
• Butler County is 100% Republican run.

Enough facts. Now see the problem? It’s not that the programs don’t work – it’s that Republicans don’t know what the hell to do with them. People have been losing their houses around here and there’s money sitting there to help, yet the corrupt Republicans that run this county just sit there doing nothing. These are all friends of Boehner and as our representative, he should be working to remedy this problem instead of playing politician all the time.

When you ignore Afghanistan for 7 years then you never get stories like this:

The Taliban’s top military commander was captured several days ago in Karachi, Pakistan, in a secret joint operation by Pakistani and American intelligence forces, according to American government officials.

The commander, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, is an Afghan described by American officials as the most significant Taliban figure to be detained since the American-led war in Afghanistan started more than eight years ago. He ranks second in influence only to Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban’s founder and a close associate of Osama bin Laden before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Mullah Baradar has been in Pakistani custody for several days, with American and Pakistani intelligence officials both taking part in interrogations, according to the officials.

This is a great accomplishment for the military and administration, but for some reason I feel Dick Cheney will consider it a major failure.

Yesterday the king of idiots, Andrew Breitbart, started claiming that James O’Keefe and his pack of Little Rascals were denied access to an attorney for hours. Let’s think about that for a minute. These guys were caught on federal property, without authorization and carrying electronic devices in a post 9/11 America. Talk about something that could set off the terrorist alarms. If Bush was still President then they would end up at Gitmo.