Potpourri

There was a Bald Eagle at the Chargers game Sunday, which was given free flight during the National Anthem. It was, apparently, simply supposed to fly from one end of the stadium to the other, but it was having so much fun that it soared to the top of the stadium and circled about three times before returning to its handler. The crowd loved it.

I wonder how many people picked up on the tidbit that the military overflight which occurred just as the Eagle was landing was made by a Bell-Boeing V-22 flown by the Marine Corps, known as an Osprey.

Now Obama is blatting about the “jobs bill” being “paid for” with taxes on rich people, oil company deductions and taxes on corporate jets. The amount of money that will be raised by taxing corporate jets will pay for peanuts to provide snacks for the elephants in the National Zoo. He’s using corporate jets because he knows that they are a symbol of the hatred that America now holds for anyone who has enough money to be called “rich.”

Republicans accuse Democrats of “wealth redistribution,” and the longer Obama prattles about “taxing the rich” to pay for programs to support the “working class” the more he gives them ammunition to make that claim.

The need to "pay for" the bill is a sop to Republicans and, as usual when catering to one's opposition, he merely weakens his own case and provides the opposition with ammunition in their own case against him. This guy is the most inept fighter in the history of politics.

Do you see anything ironic that Mexico, one of the most violent nations in the world with its ongoing drug war, where bodies litter the street on a regular basis, considers capital punishment barbaric and will not extradite to the United States unless we promise not to apply the death penalty?

Now, how many people are going to respond by suggesting that that is why they cannot win their drug war? How successful are we at winning our drug war? Anybody ever think that their drug war is actually our drug war?

If you think that the right wing has a monopoly on closed minds and blind ideological loyalty, you should visit some of the “liberal” blogs that I read. Some are as rabid as anything the right has to offer, permitting nothing in their comments other than vitriolic hatred of Republicans. It’s not even permissible to talk about Democrats at all, good or bad; the purpose there is merely to spew hatred of the other side. They haven’t even looked up the word “liberal” in the dictionary, let alone studied its political meaning.

I have mentioned here, more than once I believe, that I was opposed to the continuation of the tax cutting policy that Obama had followed, and that I had voted for him because I had hoped that he would end Republican tax cuts and follow Democratic principles of not cutting taxes. Well, Eleanor Clift spells out the facts for us.

Obama has invested so much time demonizing the Bush-era tax cuts for the rich that he has obscured the true narrative of his presidency. Class-war rhetoric aside, Obama is one of the most prolific tax cutters in recent history, with a record that puts him squarely alongside that of George W. Bush.

Crunching the numbers at the liberal think tank the Center for American Progress, analyst Michael Linden found that if one compares the cost of tax cuts in just the first four years of Bush’s term (2001–04) to the first four years of Obama's (2009–12), Obama’s tax cuts are bigger. The value of the Bush tax cuts were about $475 billion in those first four years, or about 1.1 percent of GDP. Obama’s total about $1 trillion, or 1.6 percent of GDP.

My opposition to “Obama the tax cutter” has not been empty rhetoric. Make all the excuses you want to make, Obama has continued the Bush policy of starting wars (Libya, Yemen, Somalia) and cutting taxes at the same time.

There was an article, can’t find it now, which said that the attack on the embassy in Kabul “raised questions about security” in Afghanistan. That struck me as a rather odd phrase, because to me the attack rather answered questions about security, and the answer was probably not the one we wanted.