Politics Plus

Marie Antoinette got a bad rap for the statement “Let them Eat Cake.”  The statement was actually made my the wife of Louis XIV, Marie Thérèse.  So even if she is the wrong Marie. she still ende3d up a head shorter because of it.  The statement itself represents a callous disregard for the suffering of the common people.  That disregard is reflected by many in the 1% and the Republican Party represents them.  I found a fascinating article analyzing nine questions 1% Republicans use to blame the poor for the suffering that they cause.  Here is just one of them.

…Shouldn't we cut public assistance and force people into the job market?

At some point in any discussion of jobs, someone will drop the nuclear option: cut federal and state benefits and do away with most public assistance. That'll motivate people to find jobs — or starve. Unemployment money and food stamps (now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) encourage people to be lazy. Why should tax dollars be used to give food to people who won't work for it? “If you’re able-bodied, you should be willing to work,” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said discussing food stamp cuts.

The problem with such statements is 73% of those enrolled in the country’s major public benefits programs are, in fact, from working families — just in jobs whose paychecks don’t cover life’s basic necessities. McDonald’s workers alone receive $1.2 billion in federal assistance per year.

Why do so many of the employed need food stamps? It’s not complicated. Workers in the minimum-wage economy often need them simply to survive. All in all, 47 million people get SNAP nationwide because without it they would go hungry.

In Ohio, where I did some of the research for my book Ghosts of Tom Joad, the state pays out benefits on the first of each month. Pay Day, Food Day, Mother’s Day, people call it. SNAP is distributed in the form of an Electronic Bank Transfer card, or EBT, which, recipients will tell you, stands for “Eat Better Tonight.” EBT-friendly stores open early and stay open late on the first of the month because most people are pretty hungry come the Day.

A single person with nothing to her name in the lower 48 states would qualify for no more than $189 a month in SNAP. If she works, her net monthly income is multiplied by .3, and the result is subtracted from the maximum allotment. Less than fifty bucks a week for food isn’t exactly luxury fare. Sure, she can skip a meal if she needs to, and she likely does. However, she may have kids; almost two-thirds of SNAP children live in single-parent households. Twenty percent or more of the child population in 37 states lived in “food insecure households” in 2011, with New Mexico (30.6%) and the District of Columbia (30%) topping the list. And it's not just kids. Households with disabled people account for 16% of SNAP benefits, while 9% go to households with senior citizens.

Almost 22% of American children under age 18 lived in poverty in 2012; for those under age five, it’s more than 25%. Almost 1 in 10 live in extreme poverty.

Our system is trending toward asking kids (and the disabled, and the elderly) to go to hell if they're hungry. Many are already there…

Inserted from <Alternet>

As long as this excerpt appears, it is just a very small part of a very large article.  You owe it to yourselves to read it in it’s entirety to prepare you to handle the Republican lies you will hear over and over again.  I urge you to click through.

Finally the quote falsely attributed to Marie Antoinette is no longer appropriate.  It should be upgraded to Let Them Eat Koch!

There are two nations on earth, not allied with the US, that could engage the US using conventional military means.  They are China and Russia.  For any other nation or group, engaging the US militarily using conventional means would be suicide.  Therefore those that do fight us use nonconventional warfare.  For propaganda value, we label them terrorists, just like Great Britain labeled US patriots terrorists during the Revolutionary War.  Therefore the notion that we can not negotiate with terrorists is obsolete, with one key exception.

After five years as a prisoner of Afghan militants, U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl has been returned to American custody. But because President Obama released five Afghan detainees from Guantanamo Bay in trade for Bergdahl’s freedom, several Republican lawmakers have attacked the administration for “negotiating with terrorists.”

According to Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-CA) and Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), the exchange “may have consequences for the rest of our forces and all Americans,” because “our terrorist adversaries now have a strong incentive to capture Americans.” House Intelligence Chair Mike Rogers (R-MI) added that he is “extremely troubled that the United States negotiated with terrorists,” suggesting that the exchange “signals to terrorists around the world a greater incentive to take U.S. hostages.”…

…National Security Advisor Susan Rice took to several of the Sunday shows to defend the exchange. On This Week, she explained that Bergdahl was not a “hostage,” but a “prisoner of war, taken on the battlefield,” and that the U.S. has a “sacred obligation” to free such prisoners of war. She also clarified on State of the Union that the U.S. did not negotiate directly with the terrorist Haqqani network, but with the government of Qatar, which will hold the five released Taliban prisoners for another year.

One of the other complaints lodged against the exchange is that President Obama did not provide Congress with the 30-day notice required for releasing prisoners of war. Rice explained that the Departments of Defense and Justice had reasons to be seriously concerned about the urgent state of Sgt. Bergdahl’s health, and noted that Congress had long been informed that such negotiations were already underway…

Inserted from <Think Progress>

First let’s get real.  Contrary to the Republican excuse for condemning Obama, the Taliban (or anyone else with whom we are at war) already has a strong incentive to capture American soldiers.  It’s what battlefield enemies do.

Here is a clip of the infamous (in Republican fantasy) Susan Rice in an interview with a Republican mouthpiece at CNN.

Lopsided journalism aside, Rice is technically correct.  We did not negotiate directly with the Taliban, but it would not bother me, if we did.  Without negotiation withy enemies, how can peace be achieved?

Another angle to this is that the five “terrorists” released numbered among those that we could not bring to trial, because the Bush Reich extracted evidence against them illegally.  Congress still refuses to allow Obama to imprison detainees here, and Afghanistan does not want them, so in the process, Obama got five people closer to closing the GOP Gulag at Gitmo.

Republicans had one more beef and that’s where the key exception in my intro comes into play.  Republicans say Congress should have ad a 30 day notice.  Obama had noted that he felt that restriction violated his Article II authority  at the time he signed the NDAA.  To do otherwise he would have had to veto all defense spending.  Also, given the Republican track record for leaking top-secret data to score political points, and given the posture of congressional Republicans, they are a greater threat to America than Al Qaeda ever was.  By informing them of the process, while keeping them out of the loop on the specifics, Obama fulfilled his obligation out to negotiate with terrorists.