Dear President Obama,

I told you so. I told you so. I told you so.


Look, as you are fond of saying, yesterday you finally got some people all up in your face on national television. I especially liked the nice lady who said she was disappointed, tired of defending you, and still waiting for your promises to happen. As I have said to you several times in the past- the republicans have you right where they want you. Of course, any sensible politician could have seen this coming for republicans have been screwing the country up at every turn, getting thrown out of office, letting democrats take the blame, and then coming on back into office as ‘conservatives.” I guess that you and your staff of numskulls didn’t know it because you so far have not been sharp enough to head off the republicans nor have you been brave enough to head off your own party when it wants to act like a bunch of idiots. Say, here are a couple of ideas to trot on by the boys and girls responsible for selling your goods. They will not be popular with the Pelosi set (I don’t like her but can’t do a damned thing about her; that’s how the Founders set all this up,) and the pseudo-conservatives will have a field day. But what have you got to lose?

1. Truman had the balls to segregate the Army by executive order. That took guts considering national opinion. You could get rid of all the debate and anguish over the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell horse-hockey by eliminating DADT with an executive order that eighty percent of the general public would agree as the right thing to do. Screw the folks who want you to wait to hear from the military. The military in this country, according to the Founders, is supposed to be ordered by civilians of whom you are one. So, put the Constitution into effect, suck it up, and let all the gay boys and gals do their jobs without having to sneak off and around regulations. There are enough codes of conduct in all forms of the military to handle unseemly behavior if you are worried about some dude slipping into a bedroll with another dude out on guard duty some night. Turn the gay folk loose in the military. Civil rights are supposed to be for everyone, like them or not.

2. Cut another executive order that freezes, retroactively to 2007, all federal pay grades from the first level to the fifth and mandates incremental cuts in all pay grades all the way up to a 50 percent cut in pay of any politically appointed positions. Upon passing a competency test based on skills and understanding of the department they head, said political appointees may reapply for up to 20 percent pay increase. My thinking here, sir, is that political appointees are pretty much know- nothing fuck-ups who are wasting tax dollars. You would go a long way to insuring your legacy, if you did an executive order firing every dammed one of them. Just too bad you could not personally get rid of that Liz Cheney moron who worked as on under secretary for something or somebody.

3. Introduce a bill requiring Congress to reduce its pay by the percent of increases it has awarded itself and staff for the last five years, plus interest. This bill will also eliminate the link between the pay raises of Congress and federal judges and senior government executives. Let the Congress, judges, and other employees of the federal government get raises by proving they are worth it and by placing proposed raises on a federal referendum every 2 years.

4. Fire up that bill generating machine and introduce a bill that disallows public employees from going to work for lobbyist for five years after they quit or lose their jobs. I am sick and tired of learning that regulations and codes are being written by folks to whom I paid a salary to get experience that they use to subvert regulations and laws that were put in place by the democratic process.

5. Since we outright saved the asses of the Wall Street, investment banking crowds, and hedge fund crowds, introduce a bill that taxes ONLY those industries PLUS eliminates every tax deduction and subsidy they now enjoy. But let that tax expire when we have collected a couple trillion from the greedy bastards.

6. Get rid of all the damn Congressional perks for jayzus sake! No more private military flights, cars, drivers, haircuts,etc.for anyone working for the guvment. An executive order would work here nicely; you may continue to use Air Force One for official business and for your paid vacation. Take your wife with you; she doesn’t need to hop around the world doing stuff. None of them ever did. You won’t get near doing this but you would get some applause for trying.

7. Finally, for today, get the hell out of Iraq and Afghanistan like you promised.

Folks are pissed off, sir. I think most of us are angry because we can do nothing about any of the excesses, mismanagement, and greed we see and read about every day. Setting up any one of the above sure would improve the mood of an American public which is in desperate need of mood improvement. I figure you won’t get reelected anyway so why not have some fun by torturing the republicans and democrats who have made your life so miserable? Just ignore all the piggish squealing in DC and on Wall Street; the more they squeal, the better it is for me. Besides that is what pigs do, Mr. President, they squeal.

A guy is entitled, isn’t he, to kick back once in a while and say, “Dang that’s good government, or hey that took some guts to do”?

Smoke Gets in my Eyes

So, there I was, last Saturday night, sitting on the porch swing, blowing blue smoke rings, scrubbing Fuzz’s belly, and though I looked the epitome of contentment, my mind was simply abuzz with thoughts about how we taxpayers are constantly exposed to the smoke from politicians’ tightly rolled, horseshit (HS) cigars.

Take all that smoke currently billowing about the Bush tax cuts, passed, initially, to be temporary and supposed,at the time, to increase revenues while giving folks more dough to spend on whatever. Well, none of the proposed or supposed happened- revenues decreased, 250 billion dollar surplus became trillion point four deficit, and good old boys and girls, like you and me, lost six percent in actual earning power over the time these cuts were in place. When it comes to taxes, republicans and dim-witted democrats are quick to anoint Ronnie Regan as an economic savant; the top tax rate during his tenure was 50 percent and after cuts in 1981, three years later, his administration reduced tax cuts (that’s increased taxes) especially on business.-Just more smoke. Or republicans will label the Clinton times as foolish tax-and-spend times aimed at screwing middle class Americans. BUT by the time Dumya showed up, we, that would be you and I, had a government with 280 billion dollars in the bank and a projected 10 year surplus of 5.6 TRILLION dollars. So, if Bush II had not cut taxes nor bought his midterm elections by issuing stimulus checks, we would still have a balanced budget plus at least 5 trillion in the federal booty. Thus, when republicans begin to chant BS about tax-and-spend liberals ruining the country, simply remember that they are blowing smoke from a horse dung cigar. Yep, and you can quote me.

Another huge cloud of good old political smoke is blown our way in discussions about how returning to Clinton era taxes will ruin small businesses. As soon as a republican politician says something about ruining small business you would do well to break out your smoke detector. In the first place, republicans never quit blowing smoke; they want us in a fog about all sorts of stuff. In the second place, there has never breathed a republican who is concerned about a small anything; republicans give not one goodly fuck about small business as you and I think about it. Unless you are from another planet, you probably think “Mom-and-Pop” when you think small business- I think of my buddy with the plumbing business with no more than 5 employees, about George the Mason’s business with maybe 10 full timers depending on the ebb and flow of government and private spending on construction; I would, in my dim brain, what with government’s propensity to BIGNESS allow 250 employees as being still “small.” But damn- go check- in 2006 (that’s the most current I can find) of the 13.6 million small “firms and establishments” in the US, 60 percent) were in size from 1 to 248. The other 40 percent of what politicians call small businesses have more than 249 employees. The catch is that the 40 percent of businesses with more than 249 employees account for more than 60 percent of the revenue earned by small businesses. So, politicians have lit up a HS cigar, called firms that have more than 250, “small,” blown more smoke of confusion by designating a difference between firms and establishments (but hide the definitions in the bowels of federal regulations) and use all that confusion to scare real small business owners into thinking they are going to be taxed out of existence, or worse yet, that by increasing taxes now we will encourage small businesses not to hire people. But, and I won’t go into it in detail today, LLCs and Chapter S corporations already allow owners of “small businesses” to move business profits into their private pay checks so that individual-tax-rates instead of corporate-tax-rates can be paid on profits. Oh yeah, what kind of revenue do you think the average American would account as average for a “small business?’ Before you guess consider the following from Fortune 500’s fastest growing small businesses as cited on CNN: LCA-Vision (500 employees)-192 millions; La Barge (1100 employees) 177.7 millions; TALX (1900) 193.3; BJ’s Restaurants (5424!) 178.2. Go figure- small business are pretty damn big.

I am quite sure that we could benefit from more current data and some honest clarification about what impact tax increases would have on folks who own and who are employed by small businesses plus benefit, too, from recognizing that small businesses, on a national scope, ain't really so small; I am equally sure that instead of clarification we will get the blue smoke from dopey-assed politicians’ cigars. Those boys and girls at play with our money and sanity do not want the smoke to ever clear; if the smoke moved on out, some might figure where politicians were really standing.

http://www.sba.gov/advo/research/us_pay_mi.pdf
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fsb/fsb100/2006/full_list/