The Coming Budget Battle, Election and Stuff…

Well friends, it looks as if we are going to have to endure another long and heated election cycle again. The first battle in the coming struggle between the left and the right for control of the White House and Congress will be the question of government spending, the deficit and the Federal budget. I think we should stock up on bandages and antiseptic –it’s going to get bloody.

We have already had a taste of what is coming. The fight over the 2011 budget nearly resulted in a shutdown of the government, with both sides drawing lines in the sand and digging in over ideological differences. 

Nancy Pelosi has not wasted any time getting her nonsensical rhetoric started. On a conference call with bloggers, Nancy Pelosi urged Democrats to fashion their response to Paul Ryan’s Medicare proposals on the Democratic Party’s successful defeat of Social Security privatization, and made a critical point: Democrats succeeded in 2005 because they did not take the Republican’s bait by offering their own plan to “fix” Social Security.

Pelosi — who is widely viewed as the person most responsible for ensuring that Democrats drew a hard line against Bush’s privatization proposals — said that so doing would have persuaded people there must have been something wrong with Social Security that needed fixing in the first place. She suggested that Democrats should keep that message in mind as they prepare to do battle over Ryan’s Medicare proposals. “We got criticized for it, but it was the most important thing,” Pelosi said. “We couldn’t have our own proposal on Social Security because it would confuse the public.”

So don’t expect the Democrats to even admit there is a fiscal crisis in Social Security, Medicare or even Health Care in general. They are unlikely to offer a plan of their own because doing so would imply there is a problem to begin with. Besides, it is much easier that way –they can attack the Republican position without giving the Republicans something solid to hit back at.

In another foreshadowing of things to come, Wisconsin has taken the lead in “Voter Fraud” with their Supreme Court Justice race. Citizens and election experts there are questioning the veracity of the election, which the Associated Press reports left-wing legal activist JoAnne Kloppenburg won by 204 votes over Justice David Prosser, out of the more than 1.4 million votes, kicking in an automatic recount.

On an estimated more than 10,000 ballots in Dane County, Wisconsin, where the state capital Madison is, voters selected only a pick in the Supreme Court race, while leaving even the hotly contested mayoral and county executive choices blank. That raises red flags for election experts. “This is the state that wrote the book on squeaker elections,” said one official, “I wouldn’t put it past somebody in Wisconsin to be selectively revealing ballots or conveniently finding ballots because this is the kind of stuff we’ve seen in the past before. I think it’s also important to note that Wisconsin and Illinois are neighbors and how they vote in Chicago doesn’t necessarily stop at the state line.”

This is the United States of America in the year 2011. We have been holding elections for 230 years in this country and we still can not get it right. It is really inexcusable. We are the most technologically advanced and innovated people in the history of the world –and we can not conduct a simple election without ballot stuffing, allowing dead people and comic book characters to register and vote, polling place intimidation and fraudulent counts. We should be ashamed of ourselves.

Political candidates for President in 2012 are starting to line up. President Obama officially announced his intention to seek re-election and has already held several fund raising events. They are saying the amount each side will have to spend in this election cycle will be in the billions. What a waste. They should have a firm cap on the amount each candidate can spend but that is unlikely as it would severely restrict the lobbyists and corporate interests (and that is something our “elected” officials would never permit, although in my opinion it is the only way to get a fair and honest election).

But, I suppose it won’t matter much anyway if gas prices keep going up. If that happens the economy will slip back into recession, we will loose the resent gains in the unemployment numbers and under those conditions the Republicans could run Mickey Mouse for President and win. Otherwise it is going to be tough to beat Obama and, frankly speaking, I have yet to see a Republican candidate hat excites me. There is still time. The sides are just beginning to form so let’s keep our fingers crossed.

I don’t know about you but I am breaking out my DVD collection and getting it ready for times when I will need to escape the news coverage of this fight ---before the guys in white jackets come and tell me they have a nice padded room for me…..

Live Long and Prosper.....