Conservatives and Liberals (yes... this is a rant)

I read a lot of articles from both sides, from conservatives and liberals alike and I have to say that I see more hate coming from both than I see even coming from Muslims that would like nothing more than to blow up a few of us when they die.

This hate has blinded them to some fundamental facts about their respective sides. Republicans and Democrats are pretty much the same when it comes right down to it. They both will say whatever they need to to get elected. There are some things they hardly ever do, like a Republican is usually not for gun control and a Democrat hardly ever sticks up for the Oil companies, but I've seen plenty of fence hopping when the going gets tough.. The boundaries are certainly not rock solid.  Lieberman taught us that. They both want the same things though; corporate supremacy and government controls. The differences are in which corporate leaders and which government controls they are in favor of.

Regan increased the deficit by the largest percentage in history since Truman. Bush Jr threw money at the banks to try to stop the crash his own people helped engineer. He got us into a war using fabricated intelligence. He passed the Military Commissions Act, which took governors out of the loop during Martial Law and gave control of the National Guards to the White House. He started the torture policies at Gitmo and stands by them to this day in spite of the fact that military intelligence and every interrogation expert there is says that it is ineffective at getting information from the enemy and the fact that it is against both United States law AND the international law that our country has beaten other countries over the head when they stray too close to the line.

Bush Jr began secret wiretaps on United States citizens in violation of Federal Law then introduced legislation to nullify those laws when he was caught. Both Nixon and Cheney have said that if the White House does something it isn't illegal... with straight faces.. both of them. Mike Huckabee has said that United States law should be changed to be more in line with Gods law and it didn't end his career. Conservatives are almost unanimous in their opposition to gay marriage and call it a threat to traditional marriage but no one can explain how it is a threat. Conservatives are almost unanimous in their support of oil companies like BP who lie to the government and to the public and refuse to do anything but the absolute minimum when it comes to environmental controls. Conservatives don't believe in Global Climate Change despite the mountains of evidence supporting it. Conservatives decided to block spending on Unemployment payments for everyone.. EVERYONE who has been unemployed for longer than 99 weeks regardless of their personal situation and at a time when unemployment is at it's peak, claiming it will 'encourage' the unemployed to get a job, as if laziness was all that was keeping them that way. Conservatives voted to remove the restrictions on corporate campaign donations using the argument that..... well actually they haven't even tried to justify that yet. Bush also gave us the Patriot Act and Homeland security that turned every American citizen into a potential terrorist.

Who can forget Carter's mess while trying to free the hostages in Iran, or Clinton's itch that an intern just had to scratch, the mess with the Savings and Loans, the US peacekeepers who were deployed without ammunition in Serbia and told to get political authorization before calling in support if they were attacked?  The Clinton administration also removed the SEC restrictions and made the housing crisis possible.

Obama voted in favor of continuing the Patriot Act, in favor of continuing illegal wiretaps (except they are legal now so it's okay right?), he continued throwing money at the banks to stave off a collapse that happened anyway and billions of dollars of bailout money has simply vanished. It was under his administration that the Fed decided that they didn't want to tell us where the bailout money was being spent and the White House looked the other way. The Democrats hold all the cards. They own the White House and they have a majority in the Senate and the House. Why was Healthcare not passed then? They all said they wanted it, but compromise after compromise turned it into something that neither side wanted and the Democrats had to pass it because they had to look like they were doing something.  "We'll fix it later" they said.  What we're left with is something that isn't going to do what we want it to do and it's going to cost us more.  Who thinks it will be fixed later.  The Democrats will remove it because it doesn't work or the Republicans will remove it because it's a "evil liberal thing"  Either way, it's going to go at some point or get tinkered with until it's more broken than it is now.

But it doesn't matter whether the Democrats or the Republicans win the next election. Special interest will still win out because both parties need that cash coming in to their elections. The Liberals like to say that they are against the oil lobby, but when it comes right down to it, they want that money and those jobs in this country too. They only do the absolute minimum to satisfy the environmental lobby which is massively underfunded compared to the oil lobby. Global Climate Change was decided for the scientists in the 80's and the 90's, yet absolutely nothing has been done to combat it. Clinton signed the Kyoto Protocols, which were a joke designed to mollify the stupid, and then Bush "unsigned" the treaty without even sending it to the Congress for ratification. Al Gore goes stumping for the environmental lobby and his personal efforts to curb his own pollution are laughable, but the environmentalists are grateful to have any politician supporting him, so they continue to back his donkey. When you look at the "scientists" who come out denying GCC, whether they are conservatives or liberals, they are paid for by the oil industry. Clean coal, carbon sequestration..... Those are technologies that are decades away, if they can EVER be made to be profitable, and Cap and Trade was tried by Enron with buying and selling shares of our energy distribution network... and we all know how THAT turned out. Cap and Trade is just another way to make it profitable to continue to pollute, only now the numbers will say things are getting better when they almost certainly aren't. The oil industry is backing it. That by itself should be sending up red flags for everyone.

Social Security is part of the general fund. This means that the government doesn't have to have any real money there. Every year, money to pay retiree's is coming from TAXES. That money was supposed to be untouchable, earning interest while it sat and waited to be spent on retirement checks. The government could put money into it, but not take money out. Now it doesn't even exist except on paper. It's a box with a broken lock and stack of forgotten IOUs in it. How did it get that way? Republicans AND Democrats, chipping away at it until it was all gone.  Now some from both sides are saying that it's broken because it never worked, when in reality no one really gave it a chance to work.

$700 billion doesn't sound like much when $Billion numbers are thrown out in the papers on a daily basis, but to give you an idea of what that sum really means.... If you divide up the all the money that the government gave the banks during the bailout, it comes to just about $25,000 for every man woman and child in this country if you go by the numbers in the Census. If you go by just families, that's around $75K per household. This is without excluding anyone, rich or poor even corporate CEOs. I have yet to find anyone who can explain to me why $700 billion does better in the hand of the banks than $75K does in the hands of the American families. If the banks fail and fire every single employee they have (which probably won't happen as they declare bankruptcy and get swallowed by other banks), new banks will take their place and all those workers can work on their $75K (which is more than a years salary for some of them) until they're on their feet again. It would have cost LESS than the bailout and done more, and I'm not even counting the billions we have already spent on Unemployment payouts for this mess. Even if whoever got the money just went out and bought crap, they would at the very least spend it on businesses who make things that people actually want which puts that money into circulation and much of it will still end up in the hands of the banks with one critical difference; it would be used to pay off loans instead of winding up in the pocket of the execs as bonuses. Instead, the Democrats know what we would do with that money better than we do, so they gave it to the banks. You'd do that too wouldn't you? Walk to your local bank and slap that $75K in the hands of the bank manager and say "Put it in the company coffers" Never mind putting it in YOUR account so it can earn interest for both you AND the bank.... don't apply it to your ailing mortgage so you can keep your house...no.. You don't need the money. Give it to the bank and the economy will be healed overnight.  Yeah, right.

No.. that money is gone, we don't know where it's gone and only a trickle has come back yet, and what do you suppose the chances are of us citizens getting a refund with a note saying "Here you go. Thanks for the $700 billion loan." or even a freaking IOU? We wont see a dime because the government is contemplating ANOTHER bailout. Talk about throwing good money after bad. The Democrats don't lower taxes. They just don't raise taxes on anyone who makes under $200K a year, and the Republicans don't raise taxes on anyone who makes over $200K a year. If people really wanted to do something useful, they should all send bills to the government for their $25K and demand it back. That's our money, and we certainly didn't get what we were promised for giving it up. In the real world, that's called fraud.

Yeah, I dislike the Republicans slightly more than I dislike the Democrats right now because I'm still smarting from what Bush did to us and the Democrats haven't been in power that long, but they seem to be trying to catch up.  As I said, the Republicans can't be held accountable for all of this. The Democrats have the White House, the Senate AND the House in their pocket. They can get everything they want if they all agreed on it. So why isn't the country fixed? What is stopping them?

Ask your liberal candidate THAT come the next election? While you're at it, ask them where our money is?