What I Learned On Twitter Today  . . .

Oct 18, 2012

1. It is an anomoly to me that women still let men tell them their issues don't matter. As I see more and more attacks from the right on womens rights, there is also an awkward move to the right for some women. The narrative of the story is, that even though these issues matter to women, (equal pay, reproductive rights, etc) that they are not more important than what has been labeled "the bigger issues." I don't accept this and I have a hard time understanding why any woman would. The tone is dismissive as women's issues are treated as if they have nothing to do with the bigger economic picture. This is one of the most blatant offenses to intelligent women I have wittnessed in my adult lifetime. We are asked to believe that your reproductive rights have nothing to do with your economic picture, we are told that we should be happy we have a job at all and stop trying to be paid fairly because it's just not that important. Your chances of success as a woman are not as important as your opportunity to labor. This is a false ideology of course, but women can, and are, buying into it everyday.

2. I realized that the right was never as mad about Bush's blunders as they pretended to be. That phony outrage has been used by the right to enhance many positions, but that they would gladly impose Bush on the majority again if it were legal to do so. They are lined up and ready to pounce on the white house once again, this time with the face of Mitt Romney. Basically they've taken the mother board out of the Bush administration and installed it into the Romney agenda. Republican voters will no doubt be dissappointed again as Romney takes us through similar situations starting but not ending with a 7+ trillion dollar spending plan that seems to be lost on the voters who claim that fiscal responsibility is the main issue. People seem to hear what they want to hear and leave the rest behind.

3. Nothing is sacred when a democrat is in the white house. There's really no other way to put this. No country, no hero, no effort is more important than the effort to put the right wing back in charge. There is no such thing as the popular liberal media, and pundits can reinterpret anything to mean what they want you to hear. We knew this, or we should, as Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson can attest. Sometimes serving your country well is exactly what Republicans don't want. No success for the opposing party is more important than foreign policy success, domestic policy success and damn well more important than passing anything as effective as the American Jobs Act is likely to be. That kind of success the Republicans don't need. At this point it is clear, the power their party covets, is more important to them than any other American issue. Not because they are better for America, but because they want control of the treasury, control of the military and control of the American people. They are looking less and less like the party of natural rights and more and more like 21st century control freaks.

4. Trickle down economics dies hard. Not everyone can be as smart as Allen Greenspan who spent his career believing business would self regulate and that if the people at the top do better then the scraps will fall from the table. Ending his career with the shame of the banking fraud and wall street scandals put him in a unique perspective to understand why Mitt Romney's policies just won't work. That said, millions of people are ready to give it another try. there are many reasons I suppose that could be cited to explain this, but it seems that one must get deep in the weeds to justify it. The truth is simple. Trickle down economics failed.