Education, The Political Pawn That Could Lead To The Downfall Of America

Education, The Political Pawn That Could Lead To The Downfall Of America

April 27, 2012  By D. DiFrancesco

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." 

Thomas Jefferson

President Thomas Jefferson

For all of his faults, Thomas Jefferson was a huge proponent of free public education up through and including university education.  He viewed educating the populace as one of, if not the most important safeguards to preserving our democracy.

Why is it then that education is always one of the first things that gets put on the chopping block when budget discussions occur.

1786 August 13. (to George Wythe) "I think by far the most important bill in our whole code is that for the diffusion of knowledge among the people. No other sure foundation can be devised, for the preservation of freedom and happiness...Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish & improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against these evils [tyranny, oppression, etc.] and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance."

Thomas Jefferson

For the first time in our history, our children are receiving less of an education than previous generations did.  In a country as great as ours, this is an absolute disgrace.

If you want to see examples of this, you need to look no further than this weeks headlines. Contained within you will find examples of our nations educational system being used as a pawn for political gain, and in some cases profit.

The Washington Post reports, House approves student loan plan; White House vows veto over health fund depletion,  Please tell me how bankrupting college students before they even get to truly contribute to society is in this nations best interest!  What we are looking at is the Republican Party tying their student loan plan to an attempt to destroy the President's health care initiative.

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Has President Obama Overstepped His Constitutional Authority As Republicans Claim?

President Barack Obama

Read the complete article at my new blog site!

April 25, 2012

By: D. DiFrancesco

We Can’t Wait - President Obama's slogan signifying the administrations unwillingness to wait for Congress to decide on domestic policy issues.

President Obama is not letting congressional gridlock slow our economic growth.

"Without a doubt, the most urgent challenge that we face right now is getting our economy to grow faster and to create more jobs…. we can’t wait for an increasingly dysfunctional Congress to do its job. Where they won’t act, I will."

- President Barack Obama, October 24, 2011

Is President Barack Obama's willingness to use all of the tools at his disposal, and in the process bypassing Congress, appropriate in light of the ongoing gridlock caused by the extreme partisanship and inflexibility that exists in the right wing of the Republican Party?

Selfishly, I would say yes, but does history support this?

Read the complete article at my new blog site!

Hatred Has No Place In American Politics Unless You Are A Republican

April 23, 2012

Hatred Has No Place In American Politics Unless You Are A Republican

Like anything else, when you repeat something often enough, there will be an element in society that starts to believe it.  This is the case with the repeated statements that try to portray President Barack Obama as anti-American.

Rocker and Republican Mouthpiece Ted Nugent

Symptomatic of the problem would be comments made recently by rocker Ted Nugent at the NRA convention in St. Louis on April 14, 2012.

Nugent's statement that the Obama administration is a "vile, evil America-hating administration" that is "wiping its ass with the Constitution" and his claim that "If Barack Obama becomes the president in November, again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year", were not uncharacteristic seeing that he has spewed similar hate talk in 2007.

What is disturbing, and should be to everyone regardless of party affiliation, is that this type of commentary is tolerated.  Lets look at the words and actions of those who portend to speak for the Republican party.

In a prepared statement, Romney's campaign, in response to Nugent's comments said that, "Mitt Romney believes everyone needs to be civil."

Read the complete story at my new blog site.

Do Higher Income Tax Rates Produce Lower Unemployment? History Says They Do!

April 18, 2012

By: D. DiFrancesco

Out of my own curiosity, I decided to look at the relationship between the top income tax rates by year and the annual unemployment rate.  My conclusions are based on the years 1950 through 2011.  I would also like to state that I am neither an accountant nor an economist so the statements I am making are my personal opinion based on what I see in the numbers.

The figures used for my conclusions were derived from two sources, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Tax Policy Center.

In the process of doing this analysis I learned some things which I found pretty fascinating...

• The top tax rate during the 61  years being reviewed  occurred in 1953 with a rate of 92% and ironically, the annual unemployment rate was the lowest of any of the years sampled at 2.93%.

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Mitt Romney, Wayne LaPierre, and the NRA Perfect Together...None Of Them Can Tell The Truth

National Rifle Association President Wayne LaPierre

Back in November of 2011, then executive vice president of the National Rifle Association Wayne LaPierre said, "It's bad politics to be on the wrong side of the Second Amendment at election time.  They're [Democrats] trying to fog the issue through the 2012 election and deceive gun owners into thinking he's [President Obama]  something he's not, which is pro-Second Amendment."

As expected the portrayal of President Obama as being anti-gun is resurfacing as the 2012 Presidential election nears, with Mitt Romney jumping on the pro-gun bandwagon in an attempt to score brownie points with the NRA and its now president Wayne LaPierre.

Romney speaking at the Annual National Rifle Association Convention in St. Louis on April 13, 2012 said, "We need a president who will enforce current laws, not create new ones that only serve to burden lawful gun owners. President Obama has not. I will."

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Vermont Passes Landmark Resolution Calling for Constitutional Amendment to End Corporate Personhood

A demonstration calling for the overturn of Citizens United in front of the U.S. Supreme Court on February 23. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

In what I hope is the first of many, the Vermont State Senate voted 26-3 to call for a constitutional amendment to make it clear that corporations are not people.

The measure, spearheaded by State Senator Virgina Lyons (D) in conjuction with Move to Amend was supported in a bipartisen fashion.

Aquene Freechild, the senior organizer with Public Citizen’s Democracy Is For People Campaign says, “Support for the resolution cut across party lines. Six towns in Republican districts and 13 cities and towns that have sent both Democrats and Republicans to the state Legislature voted for the resolution by wide margins.  This bipartisan opposition to the Citizens United ruling mirrors several nationwide polls on the issue.”

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Rep. Allen West's Ignorant Comments Show Why the Republican Party Is Not The Party of the American People

With all of the negative and horribly unhelpful comments made by representatives of both the Republican and Democratic party's this election season, Rep. Allen West's (R-FL) has to be some of the most inflammatory I have heard.

We have had Republican talking head, Rush Limbaugh's insulting remarks to Sandra Fluke, calling her a slut and a prostitute after her testimony before House Democrats.  And just yesterday, Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen's comment about Ann Romney, who as a stay at home mom, "never worked a day in her life." inciting a Republican backlash and causing everyone from the White House to RNC chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz to apologize and distance themselves from her comments.

Rep. Allen West (R-FL)

As if these were not enough, now we have Rep. Allen West, who when asked by a constituent at a town hall meeting in Jensen Beach, FL, how many members of Congress are "card-carrying Marxists?"  stated, "I believe there's about 78 to 81 members of the Democratic Party that are members of the Communist Party."  Has the entire Republican Party gone off the deep-end?

West's campaign manager, Tim Edison, in what appears to be an attempt to soften the inflammatory rhetoric spewed by the Representative, says the members in question belong to the Congressional Progressive Caucus.  What does that mean as if it is any less disrespectful.

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Mitt Romney is Unelectable and I think the Republicans Know It

Rick Santorum - (Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)

Its fun to hypothesize about where the Republican party goes from here with the sudden departure of Rick Santorum from the race.

Clearly, short of some stunning revelation completely disparaging Mitt Romney, he is certain to be the Republican presidential nominee running against Barack Obama.

That being said, there is a theory floating around more liberal circles, that Rick Santorum left the race to position himself to run in 2016 should Mitt Romney lose the 2012 Presidential election.  In reality this isn’t very far fetched.

Mitt Romney is one of the weaker candidates that either party has put forward in many years.  A case could be made that his frontrunner status was achieved by simply out-fundraising and outspending his competitors.

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Santorum Out, Mitt Romney...Last Man Standing, Almost

You just have to love the Republicans and the absolute disfunction they operate under and the disdain the candidates have for each other.

Rick Santorum at Exit Speech

Rick Santorum decided to suspend his campaign today culminating with a 14 minute speech in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Ironically...or maybe not so ironically, Santorum did not endorse Mitt Romney.

RNC Chairman Reince Priebus issued this statement on Santorum's decision to suspend his campaign:

"Today, Senator Santorum has made a commendable decision. He has decided to put his country, party, and desire to defeat President Obama ahead of any personal ambition. I applaud his decision and congratulate him on the campaign he has run."

Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney

Mitt Romney's campaign issued their own statement on Santorum's decision:

"Senator Santorum is an able and worthy competitor, and I congratulate him on the campaign he ran. He has proven himself to be an important voice in our party and in the nation. We both recognize that what is most important is putting the failures of the last three years behind us and setting America back on the path to prosperity."

In a classic narcissistic fashion, Newt Gingrich says, "I think it makes it clearer that there's a conservative, named Newt Gingrich, and there's Mitt Romney, I have a great, great respect for how hard Rick worked, he was the personification of courage."

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Republicans Hope for Economy to Fail...More Suffering for the Middle Class

It should come as no surprise that the Republican party and its candidates are hoping for the failure of President Barack Obama's economic policies going into November's election.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz

Appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz said criticism from Republicans on Friday’s worse-than-expected jobs report was reflective of their political motives.

“What's really bothersome to me is that it almost seems like my Republican colleagues in Congress and Mitt Romney are rooting for economic failure,” Wasserman Schultz told CNN chief political correspondent Candy Crowley. “I mean, they've been hyper focused on one job, Barack Obama's, for really the last two years. And we all need to be pulling together to focus on moving the economy forward for the middle class and for working families.”

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Corporate Personhood and Citizens United Will be the Death of America if Not Reversed

President Thomas Jefferson

The plight of our nation can best be seen in the rise of corporate influence in our electoral process and in its insertion into our legislative process.

Our founding fathers made it abundantly clear that corporations and banking were the greatest threats to the “Grand Experiment”, The United States of America.

With the prominence of the Tea Party movement and the loathing of the American citizenry by the Republican party, we seeing the greatest fears of Jefferson, Madison and Lincoln coming true in our lifetime.

It thought it would serve as a fitting example to provide some of the more memorable quotes regarding the corporatization of our government below.

“I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”
--Thomas Jefferson, 1816

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Romney Out of Touch and Spouting Lies in Preparation for the General Election

April, 5, 2012

By: D. DiFrancesco

Mitt Romney

I am now firmly convinced of what I had only suspected for months now, the Republican presidential candidates have run out of things to complain about.

Mitt Romney, the likely Republican nominee for President is beginning to firm up his talking points  for the general election in November. Items such as the economy, gas prices, the middle class, and the size of government are key on his list.

Lets take a look at these one by one and see how things stand.

The Economy

Mitt Romney stated the following on Tuesday, "There is no question that under this president, this recovery has been the most tepid, the most weak, the most painful since the beginning of our recorded economic history, and I'm including the Great Depression."

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White House Justifies President's Comments Made to the Supreme Court Over Obamacare

April 4, 2012

By D. DiFrancesco, newsviewsandtools.com

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney attempted to defend President Barack Obama’s remarks to the Supreme Court, stating that he did not intend to question the court’s authority to rule on the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare.

In reviewing the President’s comments below, one could easily construe his statements as implying that the justices could not overturn the law because it would set a legal precedent that overturned the vote of a democratically elected congress..

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Obama Confronts Republicans for Covertly Promoting Social Darwinism on the Backs of the Poor

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis)

During a speech today at an Associated Press luncheon, President Barack Obama finally called the House budget plan supported by Mitt Romney and a vast majority of Republicans exactly what it is, “social darwinism”.

This budget, proposed by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis) and passed by the house on a primarily partisan 228 -191 vote will be disastrous for the middle class, the poor, and the elderly and the Republicans don’t seem to care in the least.

This budget will lower the tax rates by eliminating the six tax brackets in favor of two, one at 10% and the upper level at 25% down from 35% for the wealthiest Americans.  In addition, this budget aims to slow the growth of the federal deficit at the expense of social programs that help the poor and elderly.

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Obama Comments on Obamacare Case Currently Before the Supreme Court

President Barack Obama

April 2, 2012

During a press conference at the White House attended by Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Mexican President Felipe Calderon, President Barack Obama issued a bold statement to the Justices of the Supreme Court regarding his healthcare initiative, the Affordable Care Act, also know as "Obamacare".

Obama stated, "I'm confident this (Obamacare) will be upheld because it should be upheld". He went on to say that overturning the law would be "an unprecedented and extraordinary step", comparing a rejection of the law to judicial activism.

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