Tom Toles for November 06, 2013

Sitting in Virginia, watching the election map here, it is interesting to notice that the Democratic gubernatorial candidate carried just about every town and city, and lost everywhere else. The rural population went solidly Republican. The election map is largely red, with blue dots in just about every densely-populated spot. The governor’s race was close, but clear. The lieutenant governor’s results are 55% (D) to 45%® . The attorney general’s race, at 6 a.m., with all but a handful of precincts reporting, is STILL too close to call, the Democrat is about 600 votes ahead out of about 2,200,000 cast. This means, of course, that at least 10% of the voters did not vote along party lines.

My abbreviation for Republican got turned into something else. No comment intended.

The Democrats and the Republicans are just two sides of the same coin. They are BOTH the problem. Unless a third party takes control, this country will continue it’s head long fall.

And doubling your health care costs, makng a mortgage too expensive to obtain, and making darn sure you won’t be going anywhere fast with high speed rail boondoggles!

You can’t keep that which no longer exists.Obama should have not said “you can keep…” as insurance companies have changed providers and policies somewhat routinely.

Agribusiness has proven that even though money doesn’t grow on trees, subsidies do grow from fields……..

“Able bodied male on food stamps? The low information voters have sunk to a new low.”

Able bodied males have been getting food stamps for decades. From the seventies at least, in my personal recollection.

I could never see any reason for it – they have never stopped screaming that welfare and food stamps are bringing the country down, but they seem happy to support the unencumbered single male.

The resentment comes when women and children are being fed. And disabled vets, the elderly and impaired.

You didn’t even believe that able bodied males are getting food stamps, did you?

But they are.

“Lies the whole lot, but your comment simply demonstrates how your stories change when the old one no longer suits your propaganda needs.”

Be fair, though – Enoki et al don’t generate the propaganda, they only swallow it. They don’t see it for what it is.

What I want to know is: how clear is the picture we are getting, really? I’ve been caught by propaganda here and there, I’m not immune. I doubt anyone is, really. Some of us just have better memories and have had lucked into some enlightenment here and there.

There are plenty of lies to go around. I’ve long thought, like the poster above whose id I missed, that it’s been a long time since there was any difference in the two parties. Each continues to reinforce all the ‘bad’ policies of the other, when it comes right down to it.

What we need is a new government.

“I mean, of course, the servant problem: how do decent Americans find enough legal footmen, maids, valets, gardeners (to do the topiary, and do it right), butlers, housekeepers, etc., etc.?”

Quite right, too. Priorities must certainly be set appropriately. If only the idiot 99% could grasp that.

The country is doomed.

“Ever hear about the “working poor”?”

Actually, no one in the GOP believes any of the poor work, or that any of them earn a paycheck or pay taxes. They do, of course, but to the GOP, a person working ten hours a week should be able to manage. If he can’t manage on it, he’s probably blowing it on the ponies or something. People need to learn to manage their money.

I think, though, that Debt Free may have been referring to the single, fit, males who collect not only food stamps, but also welfare. There are some, certainly.

Years ago a neighbours teenage son was arrested for driving a car unlicenced and uninsured. He had no income, and no way to pay the fines. Jail, right?

The State paid his fines, put him on welfare and gave him food stamps. They made him jump through some bureaucratic hoops on the DL, but nothing draconic. The kid ended up better off than his parents, who actually were working, though also deeply impoverished.

That was perhaps the least offensive case I knew of. You don’t want to know about the others.

Should we help out the single guys when they are down and out?

I don’t know, really, but I do think there is something wrong with the idea that the majority of recipients who are encumbered or impaired in some way should be daily slandered for everything about their lives, while most people don’t realize that single, able bodied, unencumbered adults are eligible too. Are there a lot of them? Probably not – the issue is, why should their needs be quietly accomodated with no fuss, while those in need are constantly chivvied, accused, disqualified and treated with contempt.

I’m not saying the contempt should be extended to those able bodied single men – only that maybe things aren’t as obviously black and white as we are supposed to see them.

“You know what, Obama has lied so many times and you believe him so much, how can he be responsible for anything?”

Harley, you are the Believer. I don’t speak for anyone but myself, but if any politician is talking, I assume he is misrepresenting the situation, if he is not actually telling barefaced lies.

Why would you believe any of them? I think that’s where our basic disagreement lies. I don’t believe any of them, I believe what I see them do.

You apparently do believe the GOP rhetoric. There’s where you are going wrong. Your cynicism doesn’t go nearly far enough.

Come on in! The water’s fine! You, too, can think for yourself! They haven’t managed to outlaw that yet! And it really doesn’t hurt all that much, once you’ve established the habit. Really. All you have to do is reject them all out of hand, and start all over.

It really is quite refreshing. I know you’d love it.

" HE KNEW THIS! HE LIED"

So, you bought the lie, but now you’re choking on it.

I hate to think that Obama might have been naive enough to have believed it himself at some point, because it wouldn’t surprise me if some insurance goon hadn’t assured him of something of the kind. If so, he should have taken it to mean ’ nothing in our practise will change’, not ‘we won’t change people’s coverage’.

Insurers have always screwed their policy holders on any point they could find. You knew, that, right? So why on earth would you believe that something was going to change, with them still front and center in the mix?

Sorry, Harley. Raving that someone lied, because you grasp that you have been royally screwed again, and mostly by your own side – you don’t get to take out your resentment on the rest of us. We understood from the beginning that nothing was changing for the better.

C’mon, Harley, straighten up and take it like a man. You got screwed with the rest of us. It’s absolutely true – we were lied to. Pretending we weren’t is just setting ourselves up for the next round. If you want to get off the bus, you have to look in the mirror, accept that you bought a pup, and resolve to avoid that vendor in future. Bashing the pup won’t improve the situation.

No, the pup I’m referring to isn’t Obama. It’s Congress in general, and in your case, the GOP. If a right wing president pulled this on you, you would still be blaming the ‘libtards’, possibly with more cause, depending on the composition of Congress at the time.

I know. It’s just easier to keep shrieking ‘Obama lied! Obama lied!’. It’s just that doing that won’t change anything. Has exactly the same effect as lying on the floor kicking and screaming and banging your head.

TTM, mortages were too easy to get. But, it wasn’t “the poor” that was the problem in the real estate meltdown it was the upper middle class with enough funds to speculate on real estate.It was allowing “interest only” mortagages that made it possible to rent-to-own and walk away with no loss and over buy. It was ARM mortagages that got people in in the short term and then ensured that they would end up in foreclosure in the long run when the market tanked. It was Zero down that allowed speculators to snap up properties as rentals and do house flipping and then walk away with no loss when the market went down..Frank and Dodd the same idiot Democrats who framed the “fix” were the ones that caused most of the damage to begin with. The government’s role in the mess was creating laws that allowed it to happen.

I am for simple, basic, and rational regulation by the government. For decades mortgages were simple loans with a fixed rate of interest and a requirement for a certain percentage down. The lenght, interest, and down payment could vary some but this made it much more likely that a buyer would not end up in foreclosure or a short sell.Wall street wasn’t the problem in the mortgage meltdown nearly so much as government who made a huge number of convoluted and disingenious rules and regulations that allowed Wall Street and others to do questionable and risking things with the mortgage market.

And there were plenty of people out scamming the banks and using the rules the government put in place to fenagle their own financial position.Allowing people to take out second and third mortgages based on “paper” value of their home in a rising market is one example. How many people did that just to buy an expensive car or take a European vacation while their home was on a primary “Interest only” mortgage?The banks are only partially to blame. They were greedy and more than willingly colluded with equally greedy (and in their case stupid) politicians who more than readily wrote rules and regulations to benefit the banks so long as the campaign contributions were big enough. Then there are the mortgage holders who took advantage of the system to enrich themselves at only small risk..Oh yes, there’s plenty of blame to go around; Democrats and Republicans alike. Banks and buyers too. It is the Progressives that are oblivious here. They want to singularly blame “cons” and Republicans along with those evil "big corporations (banks in this case) while holding their own politicians and the “little guy” totally innocent..Well, Progressive politicians were in the forefront of this right up there with everybody else. So, I can blame Bush in part, the Democrats in large part (they wrote much of the legislation), Republicans in Congress too (they helped and wrote the rest), banks for doing what they do best (finding ways to boost profits), and even people who took advantage of the system.

“Your sin belongs in a dryer”?

You’re possibly confusing his sin with your sheets.

As far as I’m aware, when a president’s term is up, all his works do not vanish with him, and it would have taken more Democratic votes than Obama had to make even half of Bush’s economic damage go away. Much of it is in commitments we can’t dance away from, and a hell of a lot is debt that Bush swept under the carpet which came to light during Obama’s term.

So many of Bush’s willing helpers are still in office. Perhaps the problem is in not naming each and every one of them along with Bush each time, but that would take all night.

Short on history again? TARP started under Bush. Why? Because his policies of tax cuts/increased war spending/off-the-books financing of those wars caused the economy to tank BEFORE Obama took office!The “deficit” increased because Obama had the stones to put the war financing ON BUDGET, which increased the deficit to his disadvantage, even though it was there all along.