The Preponderance of Evidence Is Enough

I got a mailer and was on my way to throw it in the trash (recycling actually) when I made the mistake to look.

“Sean Barney wants to tax the rich to pay more in Social Security Benefits…. ‘

That is awesome!  It caught my attention..”Yay. ‘Bout time someone gets it… Maybe I was too hasty in writing him off… ”

(Because if you don’t know by now, you do live under a rock.. that rock could be one-sided news, I don’t know, but you DO live under a rock.)

All of society’s problems today are caused by less money being in the active economy because it is locked up in the vaults of the 1%…

Everything from schools, highways, hunger, poverty, crime, guns, abortion, religion, climate change, could be solved if we’d just move some of that money from the private economy, into the public one…

And Sean Barney is on the right path…. All our problems come from the huge amounts of money that USED TO BE ACTIVE IN OUR ECONOMY which now, are not there;…  money now lying dormant which could be better served if seniors were spending it to better their lives, and everyone else for that matter.

That a former Carper aide, and former Markell aide, now finally “GETS IT” was reassuring and gave me incredible hope for our future…

But Sean is not alone in the field. There are other candidates, one of which is Bryan Townsend.

Whereas Sean Barney is “getting it” now, Bryan Townsend “got it” 4 years ago.  To paraphrase someone else’s former campaign: we only send one, let’s send our best.

When we were battling the takeover of Wilmington’s schools, Bryan Townsend was there, at the meeting, not for himself, but to argue for our children.

When there was no hope to stop bad Sokolian policy from being railroaded through the General Assembly, Bryan Townsend was able to add passable amendments that put those policies under review.  A review that is right now, turning people’s minds against all the one-sided crap once fed to us about how bad all public schools were.

When there was no hope to stop the horrible Smarter Balanced Assessment from being our measuring device (actually there was and his name was Greg Lavelle but that is a story for another time),  Bryan was one of those arguing against it…

When we were deciding to allow marriage to include other than Men/Women, Bryan Townsend weed-killed the General Assembly by moving first to establish a ground floor of logic based on our national beliefs.  The weed-seeds of dissension, divisiveness, division, demolition, were never able to take root….

Immediately upon entering the General Assembly, Bryan Townsend exhibited that he’d gained knowledge of how to manipulate the Delaware’s power structure to get progress for real people initiated…

Markell could take lessons from him.  But then again, these two’s motives are completely opposite.  Markell pushes corporate policy meaning he needs to sneak his diabolical and damaging policies past us We The People, because when We find out what he’s done to us, it makes us angry. His modus operandi has been to say… “oops, fait accompli, sorry you’re too late”.  Bryan argues out loud and in public for how his policies better us all and the positive outcomes we can expect to achieve should we all get behind him and they get implemented.  He makes things happen by consensus, by convincing the opposition they will be better off; not quick sucker punches in the dark while they sleep.

So there may be nothing wrong with Sean Barney after all.   He may make a good Congressperson and carry progressive values into the Senate.  But we have seen over four years that there is someone better.

For all others it would be easy to follow a crowd and be lead to cheer-lead behind a enthusiastic leader, which Hillary supposes to be… WE can expect a majority of members in both Democratic majority of Congressional Houses to do that next session.  But, what we need is someone who is in advance of the mainstream, who is capable of creating and developing and not afraid of the hard work necessary to not just follow, but lead Congress forward into the unknown… For the unknown is what we face…

We only have one, and should send our best… Although all the candidates may be quality individuals and have many redeeming qualities, we can only pick one… Our best is beyond all doubt, highly visible to all, even those emerging out from under their rocks, our Bryan Townsend….

In my lifetime, covering backwards through Carney, Castle, and Carper, we have never put into the House anyone as qualified from the start as is Bryan Townsend…His track record is astounding.  There is no equal comparison in abilities between him or any of the other candidates.  Really, No comparison at all.  His stature is so far above the rest of the field, this endorsement is an easy one and needs no further discussion.

 

 

 

 

Vetoes

I really didn’t know that much about them.  So I looked them up.

Did you know that one has to go back as far as James Garfield to find a Commander in Chief who has used less vetoes? (And he was in office only 6 and half months).

Did you know that Barack Obama, our commander in chief, has to veto up to 633 vetoes these next two years before he ties the record of the most by any one president (FDR: 3 and a half terms)?  Does that not put a damper on any argument of over-reaching his authority?

Can you name all the presidents who have the same or fewer vetoes than our current commander in chief?  I’ll try.

• James Garfield (6 months as President)
• Milliard Fillmore (2.8 years as President)
• Zachery Taylor (1.3 years as President)
• William Harrison (32 days as President)
• Thomas Jefferson (2 terms)
• John Adams (1 terms)

All with zero.  He is tied with George Washington, at two.

Now can you name the top ten presidential veto-ers?  Again, I’ll try.

• Franklin D Roosevelt  635
• Grover Cleveland 584
• Harry Truman 250
• Dwight Eisenhower 181
• Ulysses Grant 93
• Theodore Roosevelt 82
• Ronald Reagan 78
• Gerald Ford 66
• Calvin Coolidge 50
• Woodrow Wilson 44 (tie)
• Benjamin Harrison 44 (tie)
• George H.W. Bush 44 (tie)

And just out of curiosity.  Know who had the most vetoes overridden?  The first guy who got impeached:  Andrew Johnson with 15.

It is quite clear that a veto is just another tool put at the president’s disposal.. If the president is provided the opportunity to weld it, one must, both out of Constitutional necessity and a considerable amount of precedence. And if today’s Republicans are thinking of black-balling our president with excessive vetoes, they should think again.  It also appears that vetoing insane pieces of legislation will provide zero negative fall-out, either politically or against ones legacy.

War On Math! Dynamic Scoring

Yesterday, the first day of the Republican Congress, a bill was rushed through the House and passed:  requiring the Congressional Budget Office to use dynamic scoring when figuring out future budgets…

Republicans have been saying lower taxes cause the economy to grow and that growth generates more revenue. They’ve said that for years… We’ve tried it for the past 15 but things got worse for all of us, instead of better…

Last couple of years, under Paul Ryan (that little whiz-boy from Wisconsin), they tried writing budgets for their first time and found, that everything they have been saying, was indeed wrong…  The math would not work out…

The reason the math would not work out, is because of a simple fact that when you don’t pay your bills and instead splurge and waste that bill-money, at some future point there will be a reckoning.   Like if you choose spend your mortgage, electricity bill, water bill, gas bill money on big-ticket orgies, there comes a point where you are left dry, cold, in the dark, and have no domicile.

This is terrible they said… What can we do… ..

The answer obvious to any 5 year old, is to pretend.    We can pretend that we will get tons of money later and pay our debts off then…

So we convince ourselves that IF we spend $10,000 over budget, we will soon be making $100,000 more so we can pay it back then.  IF we get a $10,000 raise every year, then next year we just run the same as this, and have $10,000 extra dollars with which to pay it back.

Now this does work if you are indeed guaranteed to get $10,000 increases every year… What dynamic scoring does is make the assumption we will set-in-stone increases to our salary by $10,000 every year for ten years straight.  So your yearly income will climb like this:

• Base rate:  $40,000 per year
• After Year One:  $50,000 per year
• After Year Two   $60,000 per year
• After Year Three  $70,000 per year
• After Year Four   $ 80,000 per year
• After Year Five   $90,000 per year
• After Year Six   $100,000 per year
• After Year Seven $110,000 per year
• After Year Eight $120,000 per year
• After Year Nine $130,000 per year
• After Year Ten:  $140,000 per year

Then what they do is add all these together and come up with an argument like this…  We can easily afford this orgy and hire Taylor Swift to sing for it because look, over ten years we are going to earn $990,000 so we can easily pay back the $10,000 we blow on ourselves right now… ( Now if you’ve been a Republican shut out from parties for a long while, not being invited to do the bump with Jerry Jones) just hearing this may make you decide to jump in, no clothes and all.

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But here is reality… You probably are not going to get a $10,000 (25%) raise… Let us look at this logically.. How long have you been working?  How many $10,000 raises have you ever gotten before?  Did any of your costs also rise with that raise, so you really didn’t have all that money to spend?  Across history, was there ever a time when $10,000 raises per year were the norm?  If not, why would they suddenly start now?

So what usually happens in households that pursue false dreams, is that if they do not tie expenses to actual income, they usually come up short and that shorted gap grows bigger and bigger.

Here is what to expect in reality… The first year we spend $10,000 over what we make.  It is either loaned to us, or we simply just skip paying our bills for one year… The next year we not only again spend $10,000 more than we make, but we still make the same $40,000… So that year on our $40,000 income we owe $10,000 from year one, and $10,000 from year two. We can’t live on just $20,000 in order to pay it all back… So, assuming we will get much more income the following year, we stretch the loan a little further…  But again, no raise comes that year.

Where we pretended that we would be making $60,000 by that year (year 3) {and over the three year span would have accumulated $150,000 (40,000 + 50,000 + 60,000), enabling us to pay back three years ($30,000) of $10,000 overdrafts having $120,000 left over}… Instead due to a lack of “pretended raise” amounts,  we only got $120,000 over those three years, and borrowed $10,000 each year, so our net balance is $90, 000, which as you see divided by 3, equals $30,000 per year, whereas our regular living expenses continued at the original $40,000 per year.Yet we live like we are making $50,000, $60,000, $70,000 each subsequent year due to our over-extended loans….

This is dynamic scoring…. It should be illegal, and until yesterday, it was.

It is possible, it can work if the assumptions work out… So one must look at the assumptions very carefully to see if they are realistic… Dynamic scoring has only one reason for existence.  To convince people who don’t want to spend that hard earned money of theirs on a risky venture, to go ahead and spend it on that risky venture by consoling them it will be painless when looked back upon from the future.

And the” risky venture” this time, is again take the bulk of your money and hand it over to the top one percent, giving them even more power over you… If you do that these people say, money will just grow for them and everyone will be rich…. give them your money; give it to them now.

Alas we’ve tried that already… We didn’t get rich. For it, we got a very deep recession, We got the 1% owning more than ever; the 99% owning less. We got 80% of our population living day to day, week to week, just a little above subsistence…  We went backward.  Now with this Congress we are about to have a new battle of inequality on a level unseen in America, And this time: it will all take place up within the top 1%… Who among them will win the final championship monopoly game?.. Who will lose?… It matters little to most of us, Most of us were eliminated long time ago.

But first, for all of this to occur, they first have to change the way we do math itself in order to justify it, because it doesn’t work out their way using real numbers.  And that, my friends,… is what was done yesterday.

Delaware Has First National Park

In the Omnibus bill, lies a buried treasure… Delaware’s first national park.

The following sites have been authorized to be included in the park:

(From WDEL)
New Castle County, DE / Delaware County, PA:
· Woodlawn Trustees Property

New Castle County, DE:
· The Old Sheriff’s House
· Old New Castle Courthouse
· New Castle Green
· Old Swedes Church National Historic Landmark
· Fort Christina National Historic Landmark

Kent County, DE:
· Dover Green
· John Dickinson Plantation National Historic Landmark

Sussex County, DE:
· Ryves Holt House

I believe Carper had something to do with this…

Give Me A Ticket For An Airplane; John Carney Forgets To Sign Important Letter

That letter was this one.  Signed by 100 House Democrats and 4 Republicans to say they support the peaceful effort being under taken by John Kerry in Iran, and that unlike the others (mostly bitter old Republican and apparently John Carney) who want Iran nuked  to show their support for Israel, and afterwards pursue any diplomatic solution, those undersigned instead, prefer the pursuit of a peaceful solution over that of a warmongering one.

Carney did not sign it.  On Monday we will try to determine if he was AWOL on some hiatus, far, far away from performing his governmental duties, or, if he is trying to snuggle up to the Republicans by pretending to be one, at least being too cozy and timid to ruffle their feathers…

Both are odd.  Both question his capacity to represent Delaware in the United States Congress.

If someone says do you agree with me, please sign this letter, usually the failure to sign it, means you do not agree with them, is that correct?  So the assumption whether correct or erroneous, has no other choice than to be that John Carney doesn’t want the peace plan in Iran to work… He supports the Likud.  The radical Israeli’s who want war all the time.

Here are excerpts from the letter, followed by what John is really saying to us by not signing it….

“As Members of Congress—and as Americans—we are united in our unequivocal commitment to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon”….

Unbelievably, John Carney is not.

The proliferation of nuclear weapons in the Middle East would threaten the security of the United States and our allies in the region, particularly Israel.

Unbelievably, John Carney thinks it does the opposite.

At present, however, we believe that Congress must give diplomacy a chance. A bill or resolution that risks fracturing our international coalition or, worse yet, undermining our credibility in future negotiations and jeopardizing hard-won progress toward a verifiable final agreement, must be avoided.…

Unbelievably, by not signing, John Carney thinks we should bomb Iran before we negotiate.. As if one held up another at gunpoint, asked for his money, shot him then took it anyway.

We remain wary of the Iranian regime.

Apparently John Carney isn’t.  He must expect them to be nuked out of existence any day now.

We believe that robust diplomacy remains our best possible strategic option, and we commend you and your designees for the developments in Geneva. Should negotiations fail or falter, nothing precludes a change in strategy. But we must not imperil the possibility of a diplomatic success before we even have a chance to pursue it.

John Carney, like those in the despicable other party, think diplomacy is overrated and that only force can be the method  used.  That vision killed Americans in Iraq.  It is killing Americans in  Afghanistan.  It is a dumb vision, and every knowledgeable person has denounce that war-mongering posture with Iran.  That posture has only one motive behind it:  to force Israel to independently bomb Iran and then let America protect Israel from retaliation.

John Carney’s  not signing moves him over to the Republican plan which prefers to  antagonize Iran instead of negotiate with it.  Such an idea for lack of better words,  is just stupid.  Stupid as would be Japan’s  thinking it should torpedo the battleship Missouri as it steams into Tokyo for the signing of the end of hostilities… It is just plain stupid and John Carney apparently fell for it.  If he falls for this, what else will he fall for?

Delaware needs someone who is not stupid, representing us in Washington….