WE TRIED

From Randi Rhodes website

We tried courteous. We tried inviting. We tried group hug. What'd we get?

The same pit bull Republican extremism that got us into this mess. Okay. Plan B. Time to take the gloves off and take these petulant corpses to task.

"Corpses" because that's what they are. The walking dead. The Republican Party is utterly out of ideas, hope, vigor and the stamina needed to pull this country through her critically dangerous hour of economic peril. Their leaders are codgy, ghost white advertisements for funeral home makeup....Mitch McConnell? John McCain? John Boehner? Newt Gingrich? Tired relics of nearly two decades of failed financial Darwinism. Wallowing in the bitterness of defeat, this whole crew knows they likely won't live long enough to see their worldviews ever regain prominence. It's their leafless, cracking dried up tree, and they despise the fact that they're sitting in it. Their solutions are as dead as Milton Friedman, and so are they. It's just that no one bothered to tell the oxygen in their lungs.

The Republican solution....the only one, by the way, which we're supposed to believe is a one-size-fits-all answer to everything from unemployment to bank execs charging hookers to the firm....is to cut taxes. Cut, baby, cut. Nevermind the glaring FACT that whatever cash Americans have right now they're hoarding....that's how scared we are. Nevermind the fact that the last universal tax refund we supposedly got went from the US Treasury directly to an oil industry that conveniently decided we needed $4 dollar a gallon gas just as the checks arrived. Nevermind that no one....from your neighbor looking to replace their 8 year old Honda to private equity firms looking to gobble up 8 more companies....has ANY kind of credit to use any quick cash infusion as a base for.

No one is SPENDING. That's why the government has to.

This is NOT tough math, here, folks. Trickle down tax cuts are a 4 minute rainstorm in a parched desert. The Stimulus is a slow but steady release of dam water that pools here, pools there....and gradually fills up the entire economy. And the key to opening those floodgates are JOBS. Today we find out that our national jobless rate is creeping toward double digits. We find out that every time a job comes open, 4 people are ready to grab it. That leaves 3 out in the cold. Literally. President Obama knows that once that ratio is brought down, when each one of those 4 jobseekers is secured with a paycheck, then they'll actually be confident enough to spend a little cash. A family pizza night at first. Then maybe the whole crew gets new shoes. Before long, they might be confident enough to think about a new mini van. And then, wonder of wonders.....there are some cheap houses out there, and the family is growing.

That's how it'll work. If you believe. If you have hope.

Last night on the floor of the Senate, Lindsay Graham....bitter neo-Confederate, failed guardian of our well being...actually said 'America's best days are behind it.' No, Senator. Your best days are behind you. You & the fawning cowboy capitalists, the chuckling power company execs, the high flying Wall Streeters, the smirking hedge funders, the pious free marketeers, the menacing oil oligarchs. The best days in America for all of you was when you could operate unhindred, unregulated, at will and for your own greedy ends.

You're right, Senator. If those were the days you thought were the best, they're dead. As dead as you look & sound.