Patience, My Ass

I've kept my mouth shut for long enough about the new Congress, hoping that justice would finally be served and the cabal of war criminals in the White House, Pentagon, and State Department would be summarily impeached/indicted, tried, sentenced, and our dark national legacy finally lightened at least a little. But, exactly as we feared, the Democrats are going to continue their campaign of gutless inaction. The only changes you see will be cosmetic or rhetorical, and the same interests continue to control the levers of government. When the Dems assume power in January, they will lightfoot their way around Iraq, civil liberties, the Patriot Act, etc. They won't fix Medicare, and they may well try to sell out Social Security by failing to do the one simple thing that would ensure its liquidity for 100 years or more--remove the cap on FICA from the present $97,500 per year set for 2007.

You may not care about this, but you should...unless you earn more than $97,500 per year. Here's what opponents to eliminating the cap say (from a paper in 2004, hence the lower cap):

Eliminating the payroll tax cap immediately affects the 9.2 million Americans who earn more than $87,900, raising their marginal tax rate — the tax paid on each additional dollar of wage income — by 12.4 percent. As a result, earners in the top income tax bracket (35 percent) would pay more than half of each additional dollar they earn in taxes.

Let me ask you a question--does that bother you? Do those top tax bracket folks face homelessness and starvation?

Moving on to other things that won't change, now that NBC has decided that the civil war in Iraq is actually a civil war in Iraq, it will be interesting to see two things develop. For one, the White House will stretch language to unimaginable distortions to deny the fact. This should launch a dozen dissertations in linguistics, at least. The second will be to watch the Democrats squirm away from actually doing anything to get us the fuck out of being in the middle of 5? 6? 7? factions killing each other. A ghoulish pool to start would be to speculate how many more Americans will die before the Democratic Congress finally acknowledges the idiocy and criminality of starting this war and pulls the troops out of the shooting gallery.

But they won't, because amoral political opportunists on the Dem's side voted to give this stupid monarchy of the Chimp's the authority to go to war, and that includes the Kerrys, Clintons, Edwards, etc. Any of these Democratic politicians who voted to authorize the war should be denied any attempt at the presidency in 2008, and should be constantly reminded of how they are all as morally culpable for this disaster as Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney, and the rest of the criminals.

Meet the new boss--same as the old boss.

Feel fooled again?