Sojka's Call

The latest from Brin and surprise - he is quoting a Fox News article and not to bash it! These are strange times. From Fox....   "'Compromise,' to these demagogues, is to mandate that Democrats scrap President Obama’s signature domestic legislative accomplishment, which was passed by Congress, signed into law by the president, upheld by the Supreme Court and ratified by voters who returned its architect to the White House last November." "Senate Democrats, of course, had been begging for a budget compromise for months – ever since the Senate passed its budget last spring. But Republicans rejected this attempt at compromise 18 times, refusing to allow the Senate and House of Representatives to go to a budget conference to hammer out a deal that would have put an end to this cycle of continuing resolutions," writes Julie Roginsky . If you watch the news the last couple days and listen to the Pubs complain about the unwillingness of the Senate ...

This is incendiary talk from David Brin : Despite all the pundit-ravings about a "civil war within the GOP," The 21st Century Republican Party remains (for now at least) the most tightly disciplined political force we have seen in American political life since the "solid south" of the old Dixiecrats, seventy years ago. Pundits tell us that discipline and the Hastert Rule are maintained by fear of Tea Party insurrections in next spring's GOP primary. Don't you believe the pundits. In fact, nothing happens in the Tea Party without say-so from Fox News. Fox is co-owned by Rupert Murdoch and several Saudi princes who have made their agenda clear. The government of the United States of America, which has functioned -- overall -- far better than anything else the world ever saw , helping to lead a consortium of other free nations and peoples to transform civilization for the better... that government and even the concept of "government" must be unde...

Two interesting articles came to my attention. The first one by David Frum, former WSJ and Forbes writer, speechwriter in Bush II administration, and American Enterprise Institute (a Pub think-tank) policy writer. He wrote When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality ? The second was by Jonathan Chait, currently a writer for New York Magazine, on liberal disappointment with Obama called When Did Liberals Become So Unreasonable ? He writes that if liberals are always disappointed with the Dem president maybe it has something to do with unrealistic expectations. This subject makes me feel a little crazy. If the GOP has lost touch with reality and by extension, the far-right side of the population and if we see far-left liberals as unreasonable which is fairly easy for most folks to understand and when we look at our dysfunctional congress that abdicates its responsibility to the executive branch, refuses to tackle the real problems with deficits, executive branch war making, corporate t...

 This article details the involvement of the Koch Brothers with the Tea Party. It is a long and very worth your time and effort to read and digest.  If you want to understand the Tea Party, where it came from, and how it is funded read this entire article.  There are some key names in here that show up over time.  Remember them and when you read other articles in the future make the connections.  Personally, I have mixed feelings about the Tea Party, the Koch brothers and the agenda being pushed.  I embrace many Libertarian values and much of their agenda.  However, we should all understand where the messages are coming from, who is crafting them, their goals, and who is ultimately behind these seemingly disparate groups that are tied together in many complex and interesting ways.  Strongly recommended use of your time to read and understand.  The billionaire Koch brothers’ war against Obama: newyorker.com