Friday Funday: Making Memories

As we remind you every year, on this particular Friday, Memorial Day weekend begins today, carrying with it the usual broad variety of meanings; the end of the school year, the unofficial beginning of summer, high school graduations, and - as usual - our one week Memorial Day vacation.

While the holiday is officially Monday, we hope that you remember our U.S. servicemembers all year 'round - those currently serving, those whose active duty years are in the past, and most importantly, those that gave their lives for our nation.

This will be a special holiday this year, the first Memorial Day since the official end of the Iraq war - and hopefully one of the last before the end of the Afghan conflict. We offer our thanks to all of those who have served, and wish this year - as we have every year - that all of our service members come home sooner, rather than later, alive and well. For those that did not make it home, this holiday was meant to make us remember their sacrifices.

To us, Memorial Day is first about remembering those who gave all for their fellow Americans, without regard for their fellow Americans' race, gender, sexual preference, age, economic status, or any other factor.

It should also be a bit about remembering those who made it home - but we then forgot about.

Sadly, many in America have forgotten the sacrifices of our service members, in the past. Korea and Vietnam are perfect - and shameful - examples of how Americans ignored those who served, once they came home.

Others in the media have strongly noted over the last couple of years - including, more than anyone else, Rachel Maddow - that although the war in Iraq is done, as a nation we still haven't publicly celebrated the return of our Iraq War vets and those vets from Afghanistan who are also now home for good.

We firmly agree with Rachel's sentiment, that there should some way to publicly remember, celebrate and thank the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, wherever they live.

Although the official position of the Pentagon is that we should not celebrate Iraq and Afghanistan until all troops are home from both wars, some cities across the nation have already decided to go ahead with their own parades - and we hope your hometown is one of those places.

Even if it isn't, if you know someone who has been a member of our armed forces, or if you see someone this weekend who served, or is still serving, thank them. All our service members, past and present, are well worth remembering this weekend and throughout the year.

As we noted last year, to us this weekend shouldn't just be about remembering. It should also be about celebrating the things many of our nation's finest gave their lives for.

In that spirit, we salute the millions of young people graduating from high school this weekend, and celebrate their accomplishments.

If you're spending this weekend volunteering your time, energy, and effort helping others? We salute you too.

As we've said previously, America isn't just a country. It's a series of communities and people tied together by common bonds, including the belief that things can always improve if we work together and believe in one another. We give each other hope to keep reaching farther; to keep working harder (and smarter);  to do the right thing, when it would be easier to do the wrong one. All of that is possible, thanks to those who were willing to give their last measure so that the rest of us might have one more day, week, month, or trip around the sun.

We hope you remember this weekend, and our service members - but we also hope you celebrate the opportunities they allowed all of us to have.

Enjoy the weekend.

We'll see you when we return June 4.

Missing The Point - Repeatedly

We've gotten more than a few grumbles from certain quarters lately - a few subscribers have even dropped their daily e-mail subscriptions - because of how harsh we've been on the Republican Party and its candidates in recent commentaries.

As is typical these days, there are those on the right who think we're "in the tank" for the Democrats, ignoring comments like our obvious - and deliberate - calling out of formerly rising Democratic star Cory Booker, in Wednesday's edition. There are also those on the left who are equally disgruntled, and who insist Obama and the Democrats haven't done enough - no matter what they have actually done.

From our perspective, we've just been telling the truth - to both of the above groups, and everyone else too. Right now, the truth is, as Vice President Joe Biden noted this week: "This is NOT your father's Republican Party."

Unless, of course, your father was a Cro-Magnon, with a penchant for beating on things.

As we and many others have noted many times recently, the un-evolved style of racism, bigotry, and classism in the modern GOP,  may be the end of their party. Unless the GOP moves away from its offensive and nativist policy positions, the simple facts of changing demographics in the United States that keep appearing in piles of studies and polls - including the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC poll -may render the GOP extinct in the not-too-distant future.

Even so, right-winger Kevin Williamson over at the National Journal attempts to avoid the GOP's recent knuckle-dragging attitudes on race, immigration, and sexual orientation by re-writing history, the way conservatives wish it were - or as Jonathan Chait says, in a way that "absolves their own ideology of any guilt."

No matter what lies conservative extremists tell themselves on this issue, it won't change the fact that their political actions - like denying an honest DREAM Act - will continue to divide factions of the GOP from itself.

This isn't the only way Republicans are driving wedges into their own party - and the country.

There are also those who keep insisting Mitt Romney's experience as a casino capitalist, at vulture capital firm Bain Capital, is a good measure of his fitness for the job of President - including Mr. Romney himself.

As we and a pile of others pointed out this week, Romney's experience maximizing profits at the expense of jobs, for a small group of investors doesn't qualify him for the job of President anymore than it did Michael Milken, back in the 1980s.

It also doesn't help Mr. Romney's position when he calls himself a 'numbers guy', and then proceeds to get all the numbers wrong on critical issues like unemployment. He also can't even explain what - exactly - he learned in business school, when asked directly, as he was by journalist Mark Halperin.

Furthermore, while Republicans keep trying to push the idea that President Obama is some kind of "tax and spend" boogeyman, the facts simply don't support them there either. As the Wall Street Journal - that bastion of liberal journalism - made blazingly clear on Wednesday, Federal spending under President Obama has increased at the slowest rate since the end of the 1950s. As former journalist and current White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told the press corps, "Do not buy into the B.S. that you hear about spending and fiscal constraint with regard to this administration. I think doing so is a sign of sloth and laziness."

On subject after subject, time and time again, Republicans and conservatives keep being intellectually lazy on nearly every major subject we can think of. [And yes, it IS making them dumber, and more conservative, as studies keep proving - which is a vicious cycle.]

This is not the Republican Party of days gone by. Those kind of Republicans could usually admit when they were wrong, and move forward, together, with Democrats and independents to make progress happen again.

Today's Republicans need to put down their metaphorical mallets, and quit driving wedges into their party, and our country.

The Unbearable Truth About Wall Street

Today's commentary may bite a bit more for some - and that may be a good thing for everyone.

In case you'd missed it, the big message that extremist political hack and well-known liar Karl Rove and his Crossroads SuperPAC is saturating the media airwaves with right now, is an ad filled to the brim with untruths and outright lies about President Obama, spending, and even Wall Street.

As Steve Benen and Jamelle Bouie both point out, the ad lies about all kinds of things - for example the Wall Street bailouts. Rove's smear blames the bailouts on Obama - when the bailouts really happened under George W. Bush.

The ad also talks about debt - but fails to mention that Mitt Romney's budget plans would increase the debt by several trillion over the next decade, while Obama's budget plans would decrease the debt by two trillion over the same period.

The ad tries to paint Obama as horrible for student loans, when the reality is that President Obama yanked out the expensive private company middlemen of the student loan industry - which made more money available for student loans. President Obama and the Democrats also have fought - and continue to fight - to keep the interest rate low on student loans, while Republicans in Congress filibustered against the Democrats, the President - and poor students.

Rove's ad lies on nearly every front - but it's easy to see why.

It's the same reason that Democratic Mayor of Newark, Cory Booker, has been tap-dancing around the issue of vulture capital firms (which are different than venture capital firms) - and the same reason Mitt Romney and the GOP keep saying we should go back to a less regulated era of Wall Street.

It is because the big-money backers of Wall Street are yanking the chains of so many politicians in our post-Citizens United era.

The problem, as President Obama recently pointed out, is that the legalized gambling that Wall Street firms like JP Morgan are still involved in, are still backstopped by U.S. taxpayer dollars - which means we pay for their losses, while they get to keep most of their winnings.

What's more, because Federal spending has in fact NOT gone up - as Karl Rove's ad also lies about - our Federal regulators are fiscally outmatched and outgunned by the modern day robber barons of Wall Street.

So what tricks do the bears on Wall Street want Congress to perform?

How about rolling over, and having the Wall Street regulators play dead? That's not hyperbole. There are nine bills before lawmakers right now designed to kill off the minor regulations that Obama, Democrats, and the Dodd-Frank bill put back in place after the disastrous market crash of 2008 - when George W. Bush was still President.

Some of the best economic experts today - including Paul Krugman and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich - have made it clear: President Obama, and frankly the Democratic Party in general, should not do any more favors for Wall Street. They agree, Obama and the Democrats should forge ahead with the fight against 'casino capitalism' - the kind of Wall Street activity that was responsible for most of the massive financial destruction around the world over the last decade.

Now, we're all well aware of the snarling and roaring (and crying and whining) that continues to come from the canyons of Wall Street any time the word "regulation" is mentioned. But the facts don't lie. Since "the market" was re-regulated, the stock indexes are doing better than ever, there's been 26 months of private sector job growth - even the economic confidence level has hit a new high.

When you get right down to it, even Republicans think we need to stand up to the casino capitalists on Wall Street. They made that plenty clear during the GOP Presidential primary, over the last year.

It's long past time for the wild animals of Wall Street to re-learn who the masters are, and who is supposed to be performing for the masses.