Reaping What Was Sown

When a person lives any length of time in Nebraska, if they're any sort of observant individual, there are a few things they'll likely pick up on.

For example, Nebraskans tend to wear a lot of red. Especially on days that a Husker football, volleyball, basketball, baseball, softball, or other team has a game or match - which pretty much means Nebraskans wear red most of the time.

Nebraskans also tend to be proud of their state capitol building, with the statue on the top named "The Sower". For those of you unfamiliar with Nebraska, The Sower is a  massive bronze statue of a man sowing - or planting - the seeds of the future. Like any farmer, when those seeds have grown into crops, and are fully mature, they'll need to be harvested. If a farmer sows seeds that are filled with weeds and bad seed, they'll likely reap crops filled with weeds and rot.

Sadly, it appears many Republicans, both in Nebraska and around the country - including U.S. Sen. Mike Johanns, the former governor of Nebraska - have yet to learn that simple lesson: that you reap what you sow.

If Senator Johanns had better recall of his Nebraska roots, he might have been more prepared for what he encountered at his town hall meeting on Monday, at the Cornhusker Hotel in Lincoln. To say that his constituents were unhappy would be a bit of an understatement. From a source we had at the event, it wasn't just Democrats, liberals or progressives that were calling for taxes to be raised on the rich - some Republicans were also behind that idea. Sadly, Johanns not only openly opposed that idea, but he made things worse by sowing more lies about GOP plans for Social Security.

Senator Johanns' friend, Sen. John McCain didn't fare much better halfway across the nation in Arizona.

Americans across the country are beginning to comprehend the effects of the bitter seed Republicans have sown all over the nation.

In the latest CNN poll, released on Tuesday, for the first time in history Americans don't believe their elected representatives in Washington deserve re-election. On fact, only 41 percent of Americans think their U.S. House member deserves another term.

The numbers are far worse for Republicans than Democrats.

Fifty-nine percent of Americans disapprove of the Republican party, nearly two out of every three U.S. citizens. At the same time, while 47 percent of Americans disapprove of the Democratic Party, an equal 47 percent approve of Democrats in Congress. Compared to Republicans, that's a 14-point lean by Americans towards the Democratic Party, and away from Republicans.

Tea Party candidates have only harvested growing distain from the people they purport to represent. Only 31 percent of voters have a favorable opinion of the Tea Party, continuing the downward slide of opinion- one of the worst showings since Tea Party numbers started to be measured about 18 months ago.

The results of some the recall elections in Wisconsin last night only further prove our point. [The results of at least one race in Wisconsin can't be trusted as honest - though it appears that Wisconsin Democrats have caved and won't be contesting the results, as they should.]

While many of these numbers seem to have surprised more than a few pundits, we're not surprised at all about the way the pendulum is now swinging back towards the political left.

Instead of making the hard choices, and fighting to conserve those things which have been good about our government - which is what being conservative truly is - the Republican party over the last decade has continually reached for candidates and actions that have merely gained them attention. Whether that attention has been positive or not hasn't seemed to concern the GOP. They've sown the seeds of anger, hatred, ignorance, and arrogance indiscriminately.

It appears, heading toward 2012, the American political right may now be about to reap the fruits of their actions.

No Bull

We pride ourselves on being straight with you, our readers, every day - and today is no exception.

We're not going to say that we're completely unconcerned about the massive drop in the stock market yesterday. Like millions of people, we also have investments, and we also lost some value on those instruments yesterday - so we understand the economic pessimism that seems to be rampant.

That being said, the idea that the American economy is mortally wounded, and that the vultures are sweeping in to clean up the kill is ridiculous. As Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman points out, while stocks dropped like a rock, U.S. Treasury bond prices rose.

That is far from a sign that U.S. debt isn't a safe investment.

It's a sign that the U.S. continues to have a weak economy, and is being held back by two things: a lack of jobs, and a barely functional political system - which we've discussed before. Yesterday, in fact.

The jobs problem in America may not be able to be fixed today - but the political problem may get a jump start towards repair today, with the latest round of the Wisconsin recall elections.

Today Wisconsinites are heading to the polls to vote in six recall races across the state. A mass recall of this nature has never been held anywhere in the U.S. Some officials are expecting turnout rates of seventy-to-eighty percent, which is a level of participation most legislative districts in the U.S. never see, even in Presidential election years.

Then again, we've never seen the kind of corruption and disregard for the law exhibited by the Wisconsin Republican Party and their extremist, far-right wing, corporatist boosters over the last year. Recently, the right-wing lobbyist group "Americans For Prosperity" (as if there were Americans who wished for decay and failure, other than themselves) purposely sent out blatantly misleading absentee ballots to the six districts having recall elections today -- mail-in ballots which had the date of the recall elections wrong. If voters were to have followed the advice of this group of cheats and liars, their votes would have come in long after the races had already been decided.

Of course, the right-wing group feigned incompetence (which we don't think was completely an act) for the misleading ballots, and blamed the printer for their mistake. For an organization that often crows about individual responsibility, we find their hypocrisy both sadly ironic and par for the course.

These GOP state legislators are the same people who have been aiming to kill union rules in the state that gave birth to the union movement in America, who want to roll back child labor laws, wipe out protections for both tenants and landlords (both private and commercial), and enact a far-right wing ideological agenda on a generally moderate Midwestern state.

We agree with the Wausau Daily Herald that the recall elections Wisconsinites are engaged in today are indeed a direct check by the populace over elected legislators.

We also agree with many who have said there far more important things going on in the world today than whether the stock market goes up or down a bit.

In Wisconsin, there's an election today to put the power back in the hands of the people. Let's hope the best candidates win.

Pointing Out The Obvious

As we and many others pointed out recently - more than once - after the ridiculous and unnecessary debt & budget battle of this summer, it was likely that at least one of the credit rating agencies would downgrade our credit, even after the debt deal was signed last week. After waiting until the market closed on Friday, Standard & Poors downgraded the credit of the United States last Friday, proving us right once again.

The fact that Standard & Poors is one of the primary agencies that got the United States into the fiscal mess we now face has not escaped us. The trustworthiness of a group that gave AAA credit ratings to banks it knew were making thousands of questionable loans in the last decade - and notoriously gave Lehman Brothers a AAA rating the month before it collapsed - should be seriously investigated. The fact that on the day they downgraded the U.S., they also had to admit a $2 trillion error in their calculations - one that was a severely amateur mistake - should also give MANY people great pause.

We don't think we need to point out that if the officials refereeing the action have proven themselves to have poor judgement - as Standard & Poors has - their fitness as fair judges should be questioned until they prove, beyond all doubt, their credibility once again.

As unethical and questionable as the judgement of S&P is, they are not the true culprits we still face today for our collective inability to act in our own national interests. There is plenty of blame to go around, after nearly a decade where regulations and tax rates fell, and unethical behavior and corporate profit-taking for the richest rose, all while too many people sat by and did little or nothing.

That said, there is at least one group of people who clearly hold more blame than others. In fact, the folks at Standard & Poors bluntly told us who is to blame.

In their official reasoning they stated, "Republicans saying that they refuse to accept any tax increases as part of a larger deal" was one of the three major reasons given for downgrading the U.S credit rating. The other reasons included, "the political confusion surrounding the process of raising the debt ceiling and lack of confidence that the political system will be able to agree to more deficit reduction."

In short, because we have a group of obstinate fools in the Republican Party, in the House and Senate of the United States who are ignorant of their responsibilities to the nation, the rest of us will now likely have to pay higher prices on everything.

We had warned this day would come, more than once - and we would rather that we had been proven wrong than right.

That proof, or the questionable judgement of the ratings agency, won't repair our credit rating right away.

What will repair our credit rating, and fix our economy is the same thing that we and MANY others have been pushing for several years now: MORE JOBS.

The fact that there are still political hurdles to our government attempting to spur more job creation has not escaped us or others. The need to get the fat corporate interests and wealthy individuals off their asses to start spending some of the billions they are holding in cash liquidity is key to creating more jobs, and will not be easy.

Sadly, the only tools the government truly has left is either to offer tax breaks that companies would get only by generating jobs for poor and middle class Americans, or through direct tax hikes that penalize the rich and corporations for holding onto their cash and not investing it in America.

Either task will be long, heated, and dirty - and will likely last long after the dog days of summer have come and gone. We're certain the right will attempt to point blame at the left for any economic problems caused by their failure to cooperate; they were already pointing fingers on the Sunday morning talking heads shows. All their pointing and yelling won't change the facts we've pointed out here.

America needs jobs. NOW. Period.