Ken Quinnell has some disturbing observations about initiatives to privatize everything, kill the Affordable Care Act on a state-by-state basis, destroy public education, undermine prevailing wage laws, destroy unions, and more. Here's just one example:

Public Education (37 states): Education is one of the largest budget items that states deal with and it is a goldmine for private interests looking to profit off of public funding. Proposals that make money for private interests are growing and include charter schools, vouchers, online education and other initiatives that hurt both students and teachers. Example: Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam (R) created a task force to craft a plan toimplement school vouchers.

This is where the real destruction is happening. For 30 years, the right wing has been quietly building a state-by-state network of right wing organizations. Think tanks, right wing press shops, propaganda-spinners and, of course, ALEC are all linked together to destroy public services on a state-by-state basis.

The problem is that they're able to distract everyone from statewide initiatives with the federal nonsense, to the point where no one really pays attention to what's going on until it's quite nearly too late.

Well, not quite no one. The AFL-CIO is paying attention, and they can use your help. You can find out how to get involved here.

And the answer is...No!

And if they did, America wouldn't even know it. Take a look at the above chart. Paul Krugman then writes:

But the political argument against focusing on the deficit is even stronger than he realizes — because there are very good odds that even if Obama exhibited iron fiscal discipline, voters wouldn’t notice. There’s a remarkable, depressing paper by Achen and Bartels that includes an analysis of voter views of the deficit in 1996 — by which time the huge deficit that Bill Clinton inherited had been drastically reduced.

Yep: after one of the biggest moves toward budget balance in history, a majority of Republicans, and a plurality of all voters, believed that deficits had increased.

Not to put too fine a point on it: if Obama succeeded in reducing the deficit, would Fox News or the Washington Times report it? The truth is that the truth about budgets plays almost no role in real politics.

Bill Clinton actually reduced the deficit and Americans thought just the opposite and that was before FOX News had existed. Ask any of your friends that are deficit scolds this simple question. How is the deficit hurting their life? Ask them to give you real examples. They can't. It's fiction created by Grover Norquist and his conservatives cronies to tear down anything that has to do with the left. I'm not dismissing the deficit, but it's beyond belief the nonsense America believes about it.

The United States is projected to spend more on defense in FY 2009 than the next 45 highest spending countries combined, yet a push by conservatives and the military, backed by arms companies, is trying to lock the defense budget at 4% of GDP.

The unholy triumvirate of Pentagon deskwarriors, arms manufacturers and conservative fans of defense pork are ramping up a pressure campaign right now designed to inflate the military's budget requirements and thus provide a cushion for what they believe will be an Obama administration's pullback from record defense spending levels under Bush. By January, that campaign will be in high gear, with lobbyists and pundits enlisted to push for money to fund everything from missile defense plans against non-existant threats to stealth jets as counter-terrorism platforms against small groups of men with improvised bombs.

The centerpiece of their pressure plan is “Four Percent for Freedom” - a notion that defense spending should be pegged at a baseline of four percent of national GDP, forever amen. It's a dishonest and misleading slogan invented by the neoconservative Heritage Foundation but pushed by Dubya, John McCain, Republican lawmakers, CJCS Admiral Mullen and SecDef Bob Gates - one which if turned into policy will hamstring Obama's budget options, perpetuate a massive world of pork and undermine civilian control of the military. In this quarter's Parameters, the journal of the Army War College, Travis Sharp of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation lays out the reasons why Obama and the nation should say "No" to the triumvirate's lobbying.

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Two weeks ago, Huffington Post reminded Americans that John McCain by his own admission doesn't know how to use a computer. Now, McCain campaign aide Mark Soohoo reassured voters that "John McCain is aware of the Internet" and "You don’t actually have to use a computer to understand how it shapes the country."

No doubt, as with so much that for his public policy pronouncements, John McCain didn't let his ignorance get in the way of speaking out. As it turns out, back in April the self-described computer "illiterate" proclaimed eBay was the answer to poverty and recession in the United States.

Earlier this year, the Politico's Mike Allen (video here) asked the GOP presidential contenders whether they used a PC or Mac. In his response, McCain revealed that when it comes to high tech devices large (like private jets) or small (like personal computers), he is dependent on his beer heiress wife:

"Neither. I'm an illiterate that has to rely on my wife for all of the assistance I can get."

But just because John McCain doesn't know how to connect to eBay doesn't mean he doesn't have connections to eBay. As it turns out, former eBay CEO Meg Whitman is not only a senior adviser to John McCain, but plays ventriloquist with him when it comes to the economy.

During his now-forgotten "Forgotten Places" tour two months ago, McCain told an audience in Inez, Kentucky, "You have a right to expect us to show as much concern for helping you create more and better choices to make for yourselves as we show any other community in America." And one of those better choices, according to John McCain, is to become a seller on the auction site, eBay:

"Today, for example, 1.3 million people in the world make a living off eBay, most of those are in the United State of America."

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When it comes to the nation’s finances, Republicans in Washington have shown, shall we say, a certain lackadaisical attitude. Deficits, debts, expensive tax giveaways, lax regulations on the financial industry, Enron-omics — when it comes to looking after our money, GOP officials don’t exactly inspire confidence.

But what about when they’re tasked with looking after their own money? Well, it’s a funny story, actually.

The accounting scandal now haunting the National Republican Congressional Committee was preceded by a series of decisions over the past decade to relax internal financial controls at the committee, according to numerous Republican sources familiar with the NRCC’s operations during those years.

Under Virginia Rep. Tom Davis and New York Rep. Thomas Reynolds, who chaired the committee from 1999 until the end of 2006, the NRCC waived rules requiring the executive committee — made up of elected leaders and rank-and-file Republican lawmakers — to sign off on expenditures exceeding $10,000, merged the various department budgets into a single account and rolled back a prohibition on committee staff earning an income from outside companies.

And wouldn’t you know it, the lack of oversight led to abuse — and apparent felonies.

As Josh Patashnik concluded, “House Republicans can be accused of many things, but at least inconsistency isn’t one of them: They adhere to the same low standards of ethics and competence in their own affairs that they expect of the federal government as a whole.”

Addressing California's 14 billion dollar deficit, Ahnold is a one-trick nightmare.

For everyone living in CA like myself, Governor Schwarzenegger's State of the State earlier this year was reprehensible. You can see it here.

We now have no way out except to face our budget demons. It does not raise taxes, it cuts the increase in spending and it cuts that spending across the board. As governor, I of course see first hand that the consequences of cuts are not just dollars but people. I recently brought leaders and advocates of various communities into my office to tell them about what we face financially. I had to look them in their eyes and tell them. I mean talking about fiscal responsibility sounds so cold when you have a representative for AIDS patients or poor children or the elderly sitting across from you. It's one of the worst things about being governor---yet, fiscal responsibility like compassion is a virtue because it allows the necessary programs in the first place.

Steve Lopez of the LA Times wrote a great piece about the Governor and said that we're basically in the same situation that California was in when the Davis recall was instituted.

Only a year ago, Gov. Schwarzenegger was telling us we were in good shape financially, with no need for a rainy day fund. Now he says the wolf is at the door. He's planning to lock the gates at 48 California state parks and beaches. And give get-out-of-jail-free cards to tens of thousands of prisoners statewide. And slash school budgets.

These and many other draconian horrors have been proposed by the governor who rose to power on three main recall promises: No more gaping budget holes. No more reckless borrowing. No more out-of-control fundraising and caving in to special interests. Is it time for Total Recall: The Sequel?

(guest blogged by Logan Murphy)

It's a sign of the times.

Reuters -

More than 30 Vermont towns passed resolutions on Tuesday seeking to impeach President Bush, while at least 16 towns in the tiny New England state called on Washington to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq.

"We're putting impeachment on the table," said James Leas, a Vermont lawyer who helped to draft the resolutions and is tracking the votes. "The people in all these towns are voting to get this process started and bring the troops home now."

After casting votes on budgets and other routine items, citizens of 32 towns in Vermont backed a measure calling on the U.S. Congress to file articles of impeachment against Bush for misleading the nation on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and for engaging in illegal wiretapping, among other charges.

Read the rest of this article

WaPo Editorial staff writer Ruth Marcus wrote an op-ed for the Sunday paper that just had me gritting my teeth.

If George W. Bush proposes something, it must be bad. Such is the knee-jerk state of partisan suspiciousness that when the president actually endorses a tax increase -- a tax increase that would primarily hit the well-off, no less -- Democrats still howl.

[..]Listening to Democratic reaction to Bush's new health insurance proposal, you get the sense that if Bush picked a plank right out of the Democratic platform -- if he introduced Hillarycare itself -- and stuck it in his State of the Union address, Democrats would churn out press releases denouncing it.

Right. It's a good thing, but we all hate it because it came out of Bush's mouth. This meme that we're all just knee-jerk Bush haters needs to stop. Marcus does make a half-hearted attempt to say that this distrust is Bush's "fault", but bends over backwards to not put too much of the blame on Bush.

Here's a newsflash, Ruth: Democrats are howling because what little had been released about Bush's health insurance program is not good. Period. Notwithstanding the number of changes Bush has promised in his six SoTU speeches versus what he's actually delivered, there is a very justifiable concern that this program will assist insurance corporations at the expense of the citizens it's supposed to be helping.

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Police Scoff At Ashcroft Speech Yahoo! News

A day after Attorney General John Ashcroft (news - web sites) told the nation's largest association of law enforcement executives that the Bush administration had made the nation more secure from terrorist attacks and violent criminals, the group lashed back at the White House.

The International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) said that cuts by the administration in federal aid to local police agencies have left the nation more vulnerable than ever to public safety threats. The 20,000-member group also said in a statement that new anti-terrorism duties for local cops - which have come as state and local budgets have declined and historically low crime rates have crept upward - have pushed police agencies to "the breaking point."

The statement reflected the ongoing tension between the administration and many local police chiefs, who believe the White House has saddled them with anti-terrorism tasks without much regard to the cost.

Among other things, members of the chiefs' group have long complained about localities having to pay millions of dollars in overtime costs when the U.S. government issued terrorism alerts. The group also is annoyed that President Bush (news - web sites) is phasing out a $10 billion program begun by the Clinton administration in 1996 to help local departments hire tens of thousands more cops.

via Huffington Post : A House bill authorizing intelligence budgets for next year was derailed last night when Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) mounted a last-minute effort to limit the ability of the director of national intelligence to transfer workers from one agency to another -- a key power of the new office. The bill, most of which is classified, was slated for passage on the House floor today, but Republican officials said it now will not be considered until next week...

What is wrong with this guy? I know the answer. Power, he can't let go.