No one to blame but themselves, and those of you who vote for them. As the Republican Party moved farther and farther out into the right wing stratosphere, they've alienated everyone left of straight up right, including not only the center, but all the center right folks, too.

You reap what you sow...so long as you keep voting for those right wing whackos, the more you alienate the other 70% of the country...no one to blame but yourselves.

Fish on...

Todd

Look at Obama's popularity polls...he's popular from the far left all the way to the center right...the other 20 or 21 percent are reserved for the far right.

Fear mongering about socialism coming here is what got you in this "mess" in the first place...start there if you want to fix it...stop voting for knuckleheads, and stop letting the Religious Right Whack Jobs set a political agenda for your party.

No one thinks this kind of spending is sustainable...but it's not being done as a sustainable plan. Unlike the War on Terrah, this actual problem has a solution, and an end in sight...it's not going to have to go on indefinitely to siphon off the money of taxpayers and pack it into the pockets of the military-industrial complex...it's actually going to help those who are paying for it.

Fish on...

Todd

"D's" and "R's" are pretty similar in that neither of them represent the people.

The media hyping the flu is merely a diversion from the financial system rape that still needs to be covered up, and yes, both parties are involved up to their ears.

Abortion, Mexicans, Gun Control, Homosexuals, Drugs, Terrorists, all diversions to make it easier to loot the finances of not only todays citizens, but the future too. It's flat amazing that something on this scale can go down in broad daylight !

Ronnie might have been a bit of a "dolt", but I liked him. Did what he said he would. Fawk yeah.

Why won't anyone switch sides and grab my gun?????

Jerry Flagel, a lifelong Republican, sent me a letter the other day about what he called "a threat to our nation's future."

Enclosed in the letter was evidence — a mass political mailing. Flagel, a retired engineer outside Renton, got it in the mail last week.

"I don't think people realize how bad it is; that's why I sent it to you," Flagel said when I called. "These people have no intentions of trying to fix our nation's problems. There's no attempt at coming up with any solutions."

All this sounds like typical political trash talk about the other side. Except: Flagel's beef is with his own party.

The mailing he sent me, from the Republican National Committee, is all about obstructionism and name-calling. Barack Obama, for example, is repeatedly labeled a socialist and the "most far-left President in American history."

But the letter is most revealing in its laying out of the party's principles. You can sum it up in one word: "no."

No aid to banks or car companies. No tax increases. No stimulus measures. No cuts in military. No troop pullbacks.

The mailing is impressively contorted to be against stuff.

"Should we resist Barack Obama's proposal to spend billions of federal taxpayer dollars to pay 'volunteers' to perform his chosen tasks?" it asks.

You mean like road work?

Then there are examples of the party's deep denial.

"Should Republicans work to keep our pro-growth achievements from the past eight years by blocking new regulation and red tape?"



Pro-growth achievements from the past eight years? Are we living on the same planet?

I bring all this up to you for the same reason Flagel brought it up to me — as a sort of shout into the political wilderness. Can Republicans please get serious?

"I don't agree with a lot of what Obama is doing, because I'm more conservative than he is," said Flagel, who voted for George W. Bush twice. But Obama "seems to have some intelligence about governing. He's trying to work through problems. The Republicans just seem to say: 'I want more of mine and to heck with everybody else.' "

That was the sense I got from last week's protest Tea Parties, too. I'm on the tea partyers' side about how the federal budget deficits are a generational disaster. What I didn't hear was: What are we going to do about it?

There aren't many options beyond raising taxes or big cuts to Medicare, Social Security and probably the military. Yet the tea partyers don't touch that. They shout for lower taxes. Even though the burden from income taxes already is the lowest it's been in three decades.

When I wrote a column chastising Obama for sending us yet another tax rebate, I also called on him to make entitlement spending cuts. More money in or less money out or both — that's what it's going to take to end the credit binge we're on. For this I got called a socialist. Derided as a hopeless liberal weenie.

Yes, name-calling is part of politics. That's not what bugs me.

It's that we're having a bit of a crisis. So where are the ideas to solve it? Obama's got some. But we need some from the other side. Surely Republicans could offer up something more substantive than the trolls in our Web site's comment threads?

"It's sad," Flagel says. "There's no attempt to say — 'let's put forward our own plans.' It seems so far from what the Republican Party used to be about."

Sounds about where the Democrats were five years back. Shrieking at Bush and little else. Until a guy named Obama pulled them out of that funk.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Sunday.

No party affiliation but get a kick out of those who are always correct in all views.

Todd, you stick to your talking points and keep coming back to the amount of days counting in which Obama hasn't come to your house to confiscate your guns. That's not the issue and you know it. People who are just across the fence from you within a handshakes distance are just pointing out the eroding of our rights. Well within grasp of agreeing on most issues but in your view are just a bunch of RWWJ's.

This is a republic and as such our laws get crafted.

http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/ro...&vote=00313

And while Shrub did get elected twice it was the people of the the US who voted for him. Just as Obama has been elected. How in the hell that happened I'll never know but he didn't declare marshall law as many LWWJ's had feared.

"Shrub did get elected twice " no only once he was appointed the first time.

The point is why do the same people who were all for our rights being stepped on if it "made us safer" now in near hysteria about the second amendment? You can't pick and choose from the constitution. It's all one set of rights. Give up one you have given up the entire document. Too late to cry foul.

the same could be said about you

Isn't it a bit early to be smoking? It's all been discussed well before you were born yesterday.

good one.....really had to use your thinker didnt ya

I'm still trying to find in the constitution where it says we all have a right to healthcare based on those folks who actually pay the taxes to afford that right to others. Or, how do people who pay zero federal taxes get a stimulus check because others are "wealth" enough to pay the taxes which in turn are redirected to others who didn't.

Constitution is pretty simple. It's the slow eroding of it that is methodical. And no particular party can claim to be It's gatekeeper.

I don't see where we give everyone the right to healthcare. Certainly not equal healthcare. The alternative is if you can't pay we let you die which would lead to anarchy. Senior citizens on a rampage.
If you have insurance and look at a bill you'll see the doctor/hospital rate and then the agreed upon insurance rate which is much less. When someone does not have insurance you and I pick up the tab but at the original rate. Plus they tend to visit emergency where they have to be treated instead of a regular doctor which is much cheaper. In other words it would be cheaper for us taxpayers to buy them insurance than to keep footing the bill at the larger rate or dealing with the economic fallout of anarchy. Plus if we offer regular checkups we'd reduce long term costs by catching or preventing much costlier future bad ju ju. Even if we let them die we'd need to pay someone to dispose of the bodies unless you want that stink around.

Two thoughts stlhead:

1) You're a damn communist

c) Soilent Green

Liberal/Socialist/Communist/Gun grabber

In the case of the elderly it's soilent green jerky. yum.
When we run out of that ship the young ones to Arizona to be laid out to dry.

i havent yet smoked today....and for the life of me i cant understand this sentence.

It says "young ones, go to Arizona and get laid."

Arizona must be the new Alaska, but with pussy too !

roger

So now you are making your own interpretation of how our constitution was written and also how that affects other tax payers?

Just saying...... It's a slow erosion. That's why some people tend to interpret the constitution the way it was written in the first place.

Too bad our legislators have other hands filling their pockets.