RICH LEVY / Truth, Justice and the American Way

June 28, 2011 at 3:29 PM

Police Lead the Way

What better than combining patriotic political activity with a vacation? If you're near Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on July 16, you can visit the Police Benevolent Association and enjoy the "Party to Leave the Party"!

Florida cops have been predominantly Republicans for many years. But the anti-police, anti-government-worker, union busting of Republican governor Rick Scott, which mirrors Republican aspirations for the whole nation, Maryland included if they thought they had a shot, has been too much for Florida's finest. The "Party to Leave the Party" will feature a mass changing of Republican policemen's voter registrations to Democratic and Independent. They are welcoming disillusioned, wised-up members of the public, in addition to state and local law enforcement officers.

The Republican Party does what it does in coordinated lockstep. This isn't about just Rick Scott; it's the national vision of his party, from Florida to Wisconsin, from Speaker Boehner all the way down to Andy Harris.

Praise to the police for doing what most of us wouldn't and couldn't do. Police officers get a pretty regular, close-up look at the worst society has to offer. So, like the old joke about bomb disposal squads, when you see a lot of cops sprinting away from something - like a political party -  it's a good idea for everyone to beat feet! 

Schools Are Key to Prosperity
If America's workers are learning nothing else from our coming long slog out of this recessionary hole, we're learning that the strengthening Dow has little relation to our personal prosperity. With 9 percent unemployment, reductions in new unemployment slowing down, and foreclosures continuing, that 12,500 Dow is a sun in someone else's sky. Believe me, we'll still be clambering out of this recession by the time our current school kids are entering the job market.

Therefore, I follow with dismay the calls to slash education budgets, across the nation as well as in Talbot county. How will America crawl out of the recession and into the remainder of the 21st century global economy with an ill-educated, technologically disadvantaged new workforce? Isn't choking our schools equivalent to eating our seed corn?

Nuclear Reaction
Displaying as much foolhardy ignorance as they did in the "Drill, baby, drill" days of BP's huge Gulf oil spill, intellectually corrupt members of Andy Harris' Republican party are diving for microphones to tell us to disregard all good sense, that the Fukishima nuclear disaster is of no significance (except as it provides fodder for GOP leader Rush Limbaugh's hilarious stylings), and nuclear power is as safe as it ever was!

Here's a tip for spotting liars: They'll tell you the disaster in Japan is little more serious than Three Mile Island, which had "no fatalities".  Maybe not that day, but what the liars don't tell you, is that after the TMI disaster, in the area of the radioactive plume, lung cancer rates increased by 400%, leukemia rates increased by 700%, and significant spikes were noted in infant deaths and hyperthyroidism. This is among the conclusions in a UNorthCarolina epidemiological study of Columbia University data on the aftermath of Three Mile Island. 

Pennsylvania's then Secretary of Health, Dr.Gordon McLeod, attempted to keep the public informed of all health impacts, but he was fired for his trouble by Republican Gov.Dick Thornburgh. There are no coincidences.

Celebrities Hog the News
We are thankful for brave celebrity meltdowns, for they have sacrificed themselves so that the rest of us may live free - of day-to-day news coverage of over 4,700 dead American troops in Iraq, and one in eleven U.S. workers unemployed. In fact, I'd like to propose a Monument to the Republican Salvation of America: 
In larger-than-life bronze, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Lindsay Lohan, and Charlie Sheen, atop a marble base inscribed "NEVER REMEMBER."

The Republicans’ Deficit Game
There is no debating at the "knifepoint" of the Republicans’ ruin-the-nation, no-tax intransigence. That posture will go on forever, damaging the country steadily as it goes.
I believe the Democrats and the President should stand their ground unconditionally. Once we face face the consequence of default, everyone will finally understand what the GOP considered an acceptable risk on behalf of their owners.

Unfortunately for us all, there is a significant minority in America who cannot let themselves see that the GOP is holding that knife to their and all of the working class' throats, and they do not understand who is paying the thug, and paying for the knife. They won't believe, between the conscience-free part of the wealthy class and the certain corporations through whom they act, that an uncivil portion of that rarified economic class doesn't give a damn for the "lower" 98 percent, or their quaint "nation."

Good, deluded innocent people will argue against the existence of that knife, and the culpability of its wielder and owner,  right up to the moment that blade moves. Those of us left alive will then be told the stained shirt is a sign of insufficient effort, laziness, drugs, poor preparation, failure to strive, bad choices, why he might as well have thrown himself at that blade. The market has spoken. 

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