What if Wednesday

What if someone watched the watchdogs?

Thomas Jefferson made a notable observation about the role of the newspaper in a democracy:
The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. -- Letter to Edward Carrington, 1787.

What if Education is the next Civil Rights movement?

As the memorial to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is unveiled this week, tens of thousands will assemble at the spot where 38 years ago, Dr. King delivered his "I Have a Dream Speech," and taught Americans a lesson in tolerance, equality, and perseverance.
But for millions of African-Americans, that dream has been deferred. Unemployment, which was 31 percent among black teenagers in 1963 and 32 percent among black teenagers in 1993, is now near 40 percent. Among all blacks, the rate of unemployment is nearly double that of whites.
But the biggest disparity -- which can be directly linked to joblessness and poverty -- is in education, where America as a nation has fallen behind 17 other industrialized nations. But among blacks, it's even more dismal, as our youth are more than 25 points behind whites in reading according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

What if Jon Stewart were President?

“The poors,” Stewart calls them. Obama needs to recognize that the world economy is shuddering to a halt because the global rich are so focused on wealth protection into a distant future that capitalism can’t find the money to function and grow. The time that his paltry stimulus bought the system has run out. As they did by going after Saddam instead of Al Qaeda, the political class is again setting off weapons of mass distraction—this time, by going after “spending” and the deficit instead of unemployment and the foreclosure crisis.

The time for muddling through—for saying you can see “both” sides of the argument—is past. Obama is so smart, right? Then he must know this, too.

What if The newest political strategy is to turn the African-American community against the first black president.

There are forces working very hard at making sure that President Obama is defeated in 2012. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if they took an oath or signed a pledge to that effect.

The newest political strategy is to turn the African-American community against the first black president. The idea is to get black folks to scream at the President and to threaten to withhold our support come November 2012. Due to the very high unemployment rate in the black community, this could be an easy sell.

What if it's working?

Dear Mr. President,

Every four years one question drives those of us that are not blinded by religious pandering and single minded dogma to the polls. This question is the one question that outside of speeches, kissing babies, American flag lapel pins, standing on stage with the carefully set up all American family with the canned answers is the one thing that is important. "Am I better off today than I was four years ago?" I can say without hesitation, HELL TO THE NO, I am worse off than I was four years ago and millions of people agree with me. I fall into the category of the long term unemployed who can't find a job but who has the misfortune of being educated, therefore I am "overqualified" or "qualified" but not the "highest qualified" if we are talking about federal jobs, which usajobs.com should be labeled a complete joke web site. Oh, but you decided to implement a hiring freeze for federal jobs, didn't you? Smart.

What if republicans take control of our government again?

The Associated Press reports that a New Jersey Republican lawmaker resigned after his wife sent "an offensive and racist" email to the Democratic state Senate campaign of nine-time Olympic gold medalist Carl Lewis.

What if people fall for Manipulative role-reversal at it's finest?

It's implied that blacks are now the "most racist people ever." This comes from a group of people who were responsible for rampant legal and extralegal discrimination against blacks, native Americans, Hispanics and other ethnic groups they didn't like. Whenever non-whites broach the subject of color-aroused mistreatment, the Freeper/Teabagger whites immediately accuse them of being racist pricks for even bringing up the subject of race in our newly post-racial society. Those people got themselves a darkie in the White House -- what more do they want?

It's the aggressor calling the victim an "aggressor" while painting himself as the "victim." Manipulative role-reversal at it's finest.

What if the winners are turned into the losers and the losers are turned into the winners?

You can fool uniformed people all of the time

Today is the day the gop baffles their base with BullPoo. They are going to waste time and tax dollars with a *ahem* symbolic vote to repeal the Affordable Health Care Act, also known as ObamaCare or the job killing health care reform bill.

The gop is counting on the uninformed and the misinformed not knowing the media enabled TeaPublicans are voting for the following:
1. Forcing vulnerable seniors to pay thousands of additional out-of-pocket dollars for their medication.

2. Allowing insurers insurers to discriminate against children with pre-existing conditions.

3.Raising taxes on small businesses, forcing young people off their family's insurance plan.

4. Forcing young people off their family's insurance plan.

Because the TeaPublicans control the House the bill will pass but die quickly in the democratically controlled Senate. Then comes round two of Baffle the uninformed with BullPoo.

Republicans, who already know that repeal will fail, are preparing to begin the longer and more complex campaign to replace, rewrite, or simply undermine various parts of the bill. [. . .] That will allow them to focus their energies on the parts of the legislation that are tough for Democrats to defend, rather than letting the Democrats force them to focus on the parts of the legislation that are easy for Democrats to defend.

Now if democrats were smart, and if the media would do it's J-O-B and inform the public with facts and not spin, they would connect health care with J-O-B-S.

In a great example of farcical rhetoric, House Republicans have named their health care bill the "Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act," as part of a silly campaign to argue the law is responsible for job losses.

Just at the surface level, the charge is transparently false. Since the Affordable Care Act was signed into law, the private sector has added 1.1 million jobs. Roughly a fifth of that total -- more than 200,000 -- were jobs created in the health care industry. If GOP rhetoric were true, these jobs wouldn't have been created.

If we had more Jon Stewarts and Bill Mahers and fewer Talking TeeVeePundit Heads the country wouldn't be in this mess because the American people would know support for expanding the health care bill is stronger than for repeal.

The right (who is wrong about everything) has managed to convince the uniformed they don't need no stinking access to affordable health reform because they are unaware half of Americans under the age of 65 have pre-existing conditions.

Republicans immediately disparaged the analysis as "public relations." An insurance industry spokesman acknowledged that sick people can have trouble buying insurance on their own but said the analysis overstates the problem.

The study found that one-fifth to one-half of non-elderly people in the United States have ailments that trigger rejection or higher prices in the individual insurance market. They range from cancer to chronic illnesses such as heart disease, asthma and high blood pressure.

We don't know what we don't know we don't know~Donald Rumsfield