He Lied

And then he lied

Today, former President George W. Bush was briefly interviewed on "Good Morning America" about a fundraiser he is supporting to help wounded troops. He was his usual jovial self, cracking a witty joke, that immediately put me at ease (I am reluctant to admit that). He looked great, relaxed; in stark contrast to President Obama who shows the stress of the office.

He was asked one political question, a softball question about gasoline prices. And then, in an instant the good feeling died.

He looked straight into the camera and, as usual, LIED.

The question was what should be done about rising gasoline prices. George W. hesitated, said he didn't what to get political (or something to that effect) and then responded, "The American People have to understand basic supply and demand. If you restrict supply you will affect demand."

I thought immediately there must be someone, or something that is restricting the supply. We couldn't be running out of gas, it is someone, a "you" who is causing America's pain.

And who is "you" I wonder? He could not help himself, he took a shot at the President even though he was in his mountain biking clothes.

He lied. He should have said, "Americans will have to adjust to and conserve the declining oil supply". He should have told the American people the truth, that worldwide demand is fast outstripping the declining supply. The United States has only nine (9) years of oil reserves left! That is NINE (9), not ninety!

The world's known oil reserves will yield increasingly reduced supplies for the next 100 years and then run out. That is 100 years! In the last 100 years the world has burned up the sweet crude oil in two world wars, in spasms of gluttony.

In 100 years it will be all gone, except of course for all those oil sand deposits, and oil shale, and oil miracles that conservatives love to scream the environmentalists are keeping away from us. More lies!

Every wonder why oil exploration is taking place hundreds of miles out in the oceans, in risky gambles, to find oil? Did you ever even ask why there are so many dry oil wells in Pennsylvania, Texas and California?

The "you" who is responsible for this, is US. The United States has approximately 2% of the world's population and consumes 35% of the energy supplies (that includes oil, coal; etc)!

These are the facts, no matter how many times the Exxon President goes on T.V. and tell us, with a sickening smile, that natural gas will power our nation for 100 years due to "technology" advances.

What he is NOT telling you is that your present car must be radically altered to burn natural gas, and the "technology" used to extract the gas locked in rock formations, known as "fracturing" is proving to be very dangerous to the environment and the water supply.

And "fracturing" uses huge amounts of water in areas that are often arid already. I guess we can go without water to get our precious fuel!

The Exxon C.E.O., who is being paid millions, looks straight into the camera and LIES.

The fact is, if you take a minute to THINK, is that natural gas is not a straight substitute for petroleum. I suppose airplanes can fly right now on natural gas? If they could, then why aren't they using natural gas now? They can't; he is lying.

No, this means all new engines, and a host of safety issues that we have not encountered. It won't be cheap. Do not trust his rich C.E.O. smile! And don't trust George W.; we did that more than once remember, with disastrous results!

Why don't both of these men look into the camera and say we need to conserve in the face of dwindling supply. We need to rebuild our public transportation systems, we need to go all in for solar, wind and other alternatives. We need to move freight back to the rails. We need to demand public rail transporation.

Oil will still be part of our future, but we need to adapt to its declining supply. We need to conserve. And, we will need to pay for all this. President Obama keeps telling us we need to re-invest in America. This is what he is talking about! He is not lying! And we hate him for it.

We did this before with Jimmy Carter. President Carter has the fantastic idea that oil was a finite resource, and the OPEC Cartel's embargo was a warning of what blind oil dependency could do to America's economy. We hated him for it, and voted for Reagan, who LIED. Reagan told us there was an ocean of oil, and it would never run out. He rolled back all the conservation efforts Carter had started, even taking the solar panels off the White House.

The Gipper, who lied all the time, mislead the American people, got them to trust him, and set us up for the disaster that is now happening. And who was behind him, rooting the lies on? The oil and gas corporations of course!

America is hopelessly addicted to oil. Our economy is fatally connected to a cheap energy that no longer exists , and we do a rotten job of conservation. In fact, we don't conserve at all! For forty years, since the OPEC embargo, we have driven faster, built bigger cars, and worse, moved nearly all our freight to the highways. We have burned precious oil at a ridiculous rate, as if there is no tomorrow.

Well tomorrrow is here. As long as we continue to be lied to, and worse believe the lies, we are screwed! This time the prices will not come back down. This time the reality of supply and demand, that Geoge W. commented about is here.

He did what he always did before...he LIED.

Birther Madness

Today I received an email from a man I quite frankly used to respect. He is a retired school superintendent, was president of a club I belong to, has a great sense of humor, and generally is a pleasant man to be around.

I have visited his home, met his wife; they seem like nice, decent people.

But he is a birther. He confronted me about a year ago, all excited that Obama can’t produce his birth certificate!

Frankly I had not paid much attention to the birther madness, seeing it for what it was (and is), radical right wing lunacy; conspiracy theory that attests to the panic they had pre-2010, that they were losing big politically.

The political motivations of what I perceived as bald faced lies were hugely transparent. At least I though most rational clear thinking people saw that.

Reluctantly I did some searching around the Internet to look into the lies.

It didn’t take very long before I was routed to WebPages that were filled with falsehoods, lies, and fantasy.

Then, I searched for fact based sites than operate to refute Internet lies. This was not hard to do at all, and I immediately found a host of sites that refuted what is basically birther lies.

Today, my friend’s email breathlessly proclaimed a story that Obama had not attended Columbia University at all, and in fact had mysteriously appeared in the mid 1980s and “nobody at Columbia” remembered him. Very mysterious, my friend proclaimed, and that is why conservatives like Donald Trump are “curious”.

I happened to remember a small issue in the 2008 campaign about a “theses” that Obama had allegedly written at Columbia that was un-American. As I recalled it was not a theses at all but a paper in an advanced Political Science class, that was anti-war in tone.

Obama claimed he had lost the paper, and his professor said he once had it but “threw it out” in a house cleaning.

Conservative pundits at the time accused the presidential candidate of covering up his un-American paper that he wrote at Columbia. The anti-Americanism of Obama was the gist of that lie.

Hmmm. He wrote the controversial paper at Columbia, and cons were making a big deal about it in 2008.

In 2010, the story has been resurrected that he never attended Columbia at all!

It appears the cons are trying to have it both ways, criticizing the candidate for a college paper he wrote, but now claiming he never attended the college at all. You can’t have it both ways!

So, back to the Internet I went and quickly found the absence of Obama at Columbia is pure fiction. In fact his roommate has come forward and told of his friendship with Obama the last two years at Columbia (Obama transferred from Occidental College in California as a junior). There is even a newspaper article he wrote that was published at Columbia, has been claimed by the Columbia Alumni Association as the “first Columbia graduate to be President of the United States” and so on (college transcripts, attendance records; et al).

So, I did something that cons do all the time, I papered my friend’s email with refutations of this nonsense, with links to many pieces of evidence that prove President Obama was: 1. Born in Hawaii in 1962. 2. Attended prep school in Hawaii, Occidental College, graduated from Columbia and Harvard Law. There are pictures, personal accounts; etc.

I then thought about my own past. I wonder what I would do if someone outright lied about my past, in an effort to portray me as some kind of mysterious threat, or undercover foreign agent. I have the yearbooks, I have the diplomas, but I would be highly upset, and would be very reluctant to discuss my past, in the face of outright lies. It is perfectly understandable that the President refuses to even acknowledge this nonsense. Of course, cons see this as a cover up.

I told my friend he was a fool, and our friendship had been jeopardized.

We all need to start doing this. If a conservative friend goes off into birther la la land we need to attack back with facts and figures. Ultimately friendships need to end.

Why? Because, and I have to warn you this is controversial, the tactics of the Birthers are exactly the same kind of propaganda lies the Nazi Party used to come to power in Germany. In that case, the Jews were the target, and German right wingers lied constantly about Jews causing the depression, Jews killing Christian children, Jewish conspiracies to destroy Germany; etc.

Progressive Germans at the time derided this radical foolishness as harmless, and suffered in concentration camps as a result.

America is no different. The Birther nonsense is not nonsense, it is a carefully planned propaganda war, directed at the President of the United States, African-Americans, and progressives in general.

The Birthers have shown they will do ANYTHING to discredit political opinion that does not merge with theirs. And worse, by stirring up irrational fears about the President, that he is somehow a foreign entity that mysteriously appeared to wreck havoc in America (the anti-Christ), they are purposely hoping some wing nut acts in unspeakable ways. In short, they are setting the President up!

If you don’t think this is the intent, remember what just happened in Arizona, where a U.S. Congresswoman was gunned down, with a nine year old, by a deranged man.

This is not fair, shout the cons. We didn’t put him up to it, he was mad.

Irrationality appeals to the irrational, the sick, and the perverted. The SS Storm troopers, supposedly Hitler’s elite, were irrational, sick and certainly perverted. Many of their members had been in insane asylums before Hitler came to power. Hitler was jailed during the 1920s for irrational behavior.

How else can you explain the systematic extermination of six million men, women and children? Madmen essentially took over the country and led it to ruin based on fantasy, lies and madness. There are several books about Hitler than chronicle his fantasy, his lies, his base madness.

Hate needs a fuse to start. The birthers are doing this on purpose to stir fear and hate

If we do not react and fight back against this, we could suffer the same fate as the progressive German of 1935.

It is called fascism.

Oil Fools

Oil Fools

In 1910 in Southern California the Lakeview Gusher poured thousands of barrels of oil onto the ground. It was the largest gusher in history. It was hailed as a technology breakthrough, perhaps foretelling the century long fatal attraction human beings have labored under with this remarkable yet destructive resource.

Because the drillers did not know how to cap gushers at the time, it went on for a year and a half. About 1/2 of the oil was actually recovered. The rest seeped into the ground,

The impact to California was remarkable, the price of gasoline and oil related products fell sharply. Of course, the amount of gasoline and other products in 1910 was vastly less than today.

For the next 100 years we have drilled, spilled, and tied our entire economy and culture to this "Black Gold".

The Lakeview Gusher should have been a warning as well as a boon.

One half of the oil was lost, soaked into the ground, turned into a black mist that floated around in the atmosphere for years.

But the worst thing was it gave us the impression that crude oil was unlimited. After all, something that could gush like that for 18 months must be limitless, right?

Wrong; what actually happened was a rare deposit was accidentally hit by the drill, and drained the reservoir completely. Other wells were drilled in the immediate area, with dry results.

Oil drilling is a risky business. For every gusher there are hundreds of dry wells. Oil is NOT a limitless resource and is fairly rare in the earth's overall resource scheme of things.

In 100 years mankind has used up about 1/2 or more of the earth's crude oil resources. And that was at a rate that for nearly fifty years was way less than the rate of use today.

Why? From 1910 to 1960 only the "developed nations" used vast amounts of oil. Oil fueled two destructive World Wars, helped kill millions of people, and after World War II helped rebuild and fuel the post-war economy that saw the largest economic boom in human history.

Now, scarcely 100 years after the Lakeview Gusher, we are hitting the wall of supply and demand.

We have tied our economic survival to oil, and are running out of it. The United States, where gushers were first found, has nine years of oil reserves left. THAT IS NINE (9) YEARS!!! Saudi Arabia, the ocean of oil capital, has about fifty years left!

Our entire transportation system is set on the automobile. We have closed our railroads to passenger travel (especially in the west), bankrupted our bus systems, and junked our electric trains (Los Angeles 1930s).

Yesterday I googled a bus ride to Monterey from Redding. One way cost $75.00, and took 18 hours. When I was in college during the 1960s, I would take the bus to San Francisco in five hours with a cost of about $15.00! And, I could go virtually any time during the day. Now, there are two buses a day. The train is worse, Amtrak still lumbers up and down the rails, but in Redding you catch the train (there is only one every 24 hours in either direction ) at 3:00 A.M. There is absolutely no timeliness to the trains either; they can be hours late. And, the trip to San Francisco (about 220 miles) can take 15 to 20 hours! You can drive it in four!

So, we have no choice. We have to drive.

Commuters in California average over forty miles one way to work (we have spread our cities out due to our love of cars).

Most are driving in cars that get less than 20 miles to the gallon, especially in slow rush hour traffic (10 miles an hour with countless stop and go's).

Do the math: 80 miles a day times 5 days is 400 miles a week. At about 10 miles a gallon this means 40 gallons a week at $4.50 a gallon is $180.00 a week times 52 weeks a year is $9360. Add to this the cost of the car, insurance;etc., and our addiction to the automobile is costing us 1/3 of our income a year (or more since the middle class wages have plummeted). Fun huh?

The United States burns billions of gallons of oil a day. We use 35% of the worlds petroleum every year. We do this because: one, we want to, we are addicted to our cars. Two, we have no choice. There are, the more west to go, literally no alternatives. Public transportation, thanks to American's infatuation with the automobile and the oil companies lobbying to destroy train and bus travel, is virtually nonexistent in most western states communities.

And we are fast running out of oil . We simply will not face reality that the faster we use it, the sooner all of it is gone.

Conservatives scream that we need to just drill more, the oil is there; we are allowing environmentalists to stop us from getting it. Really?

If that is true, then why are we having to resort to drilling hundreds of miles out into the ocean seeking another Lakeview Gusher. And, if we get lucky enough to find it, there is a large chance we will spill it (see BP spill, Gulf of Mexico).

The bottom line is that in 100 years human beings have used over 1/2 of the oil reserves up! And, with China, Brazil, India; etc; developing large middle classes, the world will use up what oil in left much faster than we did in the previous hundred years.

So, what do we do? Native Americans, when faced with the destruction of the buffalo herds on which they staked their survival did what all human civilizations do when resources decline, they declined. They starved. A few adapted, but basically their culture was obliterated.

And that will be our fate as well unless we wake up fast. Conservation should become the watchword of every American. We should demand that government get involved in public transportation in a big way, by putting taxes on gasoline and literally forcing us to conserve; investing that money in rebuilding rail and bus transportation. We need to force shipping back to the rails. This will be devastating to the trucking industry, but it is the most wasteful of all transportation modalities today.

You can move a ton of freight for about 75% less in energy use on a train compared to the thousands of trucks lumbering up and down our freeways.

And free enterprise cannot do this. Free enterprise is what got us into this mess in the first place. Free enterprise is the middle name of the oil industry, taking risks, failing most of the time, but then hitting a gusher and getting rich. This risky, destructive behavior has addicted the world to a resource that is fast disappearing, with no plan B!

We need to divert our money for freeways to rail renovation. We need to investigate bus trains, that still use our freeways, but have several "cars" that so hundreds can be pulled up and down the road by one engine!

Electric cars and hybrids need to be pushed and rewarded by government tax credits for those who purchase them.

In short, we need an ENERGY POLICY for the United States. We need to DEMAND this be done!

An energy policy has been stopped by endless lobbying by big oil, who has also adopted the Republican Party as their surrogate, blocking every effort to conserve oil in practically every way. As voters we need to stop rewarding this behavior. Nothing gets a politicians attention faster than voter approval dropping.

An old, but telling example, was the assault on the 55 miles speed limit that was adopted to deal with the OPEC Oil crisis of the 1970 and 80s. Conservatives (backed by the oil lobby) were successful in overturning the lower speed limit, resulting in billions of oil over consumed. That is oil we can NEVER get back. Mpg standards were set on the 55 miles per hour standard and people drive 75. They purchase cars that advertise 28 miles per gallon on the highway IF you drive 55. Everyone drives 75 and gets far less mpg and huge cost.

And who benefits from this? The oil companies of course. And what do they do with the excess profits (that even our oilman President George W. Bush was shocked by), they pour them into schemes to addict Americans even more hopelessly to their dwindling product!

Every wonder why would a business intentionally devise schemes to sell their product faster, which hastens their running out of it sooner? It is the same as running your lemonade stand when you were a kid, and selling all your lemonade in a day, buying candy with the profits, but not having any left to sell tomorrow. No candy!

We are selling our children and especially our grandchildren's future out every day we allow this madness to continue. Every day we worry about gas prices going up, but throw up our hands and say we are powerless to do anything about it, we guarantee economic disaster in our future. Every day we listen to the B.S. of limitless supplies of oil reserves in sand deposits in Utah, or unlimited oil in the Arctic, we hasten the beginning of the end of modern society,

Once the oil is gone, it will be gone. Your car won't run anymore. Planes will not fly. Trains won't run at all, much less on time. Truckers will not truck. The Ipad I am typing this on will never get out of China, where Apple now makes it, costing Americans jobs.

We will be broke, hungry and will encounter the same fate Native Americans on the Plains had when the buffalo ran out. We will die!

Redding as Potterville

The Tea Party hits poor Redding California.

At least three decades ago our county was a fairly progressive area to live. The Democratic Party was competitive owing to the New Deal, the Central Valley Project, and many public works projects that saved us from the economic ruin of the Great Depression. Redding grew into a prosperous area, along the newly build I-5 corridor, another federal project; people moved here as a medial center grew up, serving a very active housing and woods products sector.

Then, the cons moved in. Southern California began laying off millions of national defense workers when the Cold War stopped. Many retired to Northern California. Many were way more conservative than Shasta County natives.

Then, the logging industry stopped. This resulted mostly because old growth forests had been logged out on private lands, and public lands were being held away from logging because they were the only ones left. Moreover, environmental interests became active, pointing out that the clear cutting practice of past was destroying vast eco-systems.

The new comer cons immediately seized on this, angry about being laid off from defense plants, and blamed "tree huggers" for the decline of the logging industry. Few were able to point out that environmentalists were not responsible for the logging industry decline, the greedy practices of half a century of cutting everything down that was standing was the real cause of the downturn.

In fact, we ran out of timber to cut because we clear cut it all down!

And, the meager cutting that still was happening, was shipped overseas for milling and finishing. Outsourcing costs thousands of jobs in the wood products industry.

Of course the cons blamed unions, teachers, public workers, big government; etc.

Today, in Redding, we have the Tea Party, Koch Brothers backed, Express pushing for what amounts to a takeover of the city government. The idea is to go to a charter system, of a strong mayor and city council, and junk the city manager plan we have now.

The driving reason is to (guess what) cut city spending on the city manager and other public administration professionals who in the past produced a city government that was the envy of the north state (winning several awards for good government).

Redding, for example, enjoys a very low utility rate due to the professionalism of city staff. PG&E, who I am sure are involved in the attempted Tea Party takeover, charge almost double in the surrounding area. Redding is the envy of the north state for our electrical rates.

But, the issue of the Tea Party is prevailing wage. The Tea Party is up in arms because Redding pays prevailing wage on city projects to construction unions. In effect, the goal is to break yet another union and reduce wages.

This in a city and county that is among the worst casualties of the Great Recession. Unemployment is in double digits, poverty is at 40%, the young are leaving because the area is becoming a wasteland of economic activity, and the Tea Party wants to cut wages more.

This, of course, will suck what little is left out of the economy. These idiots don't understand that when you cut wages you reduce economic vitality. Today, I angrily responded to a comment in the local paper that said, "Macro-economics proves that cutting wages increases jobs". I am not kidding about that. The Great Depression and EVERY recession shows that cutting wages and laying off workers, results in more jobs being lost. Have you heard about G.M. cutting wages and suddenly jobs increasing? What planet are these guys from???

Right now, I mean NOW, American corporations (what is left of them) are at the highest productivity rate in history, sitting on huge profits, and not hiring hardly ANYONE! Wages have been cut everywhere in this economy, where are the jobs?

In fact, where are the jobs the Republicans promised when they PROMISED to concentrate on jobs, when they conned the American people into the disaster of 2010? Where are they? Right now I am watching as the government is about to shut down. What will happen to jobs if that happens? Billions will be sucked out of a recovering economy, with disastrous results.

Why, because of GREED THAT IS WHY. When wages are cut, or you can outsource the job to someone making 50 cents an hour, you don't necessarily hire more workers in America..you many move everything overseas to cheap labor markets, but Americans have been left high and dry!

The progressive, affluent area that used to be Redding is long gone, and now the Tea Party is striving to drive it even further into the hell hole of despair.

And the idiots still vote for them up here. They have learned to hate all government (we do have a rather large marijuana culture up here, with a high crime rate). Redding is now a solid Red area, progressive candidates have absolutely no chance. We have a Congressman, Wally "do nothing" Herger, who has done absolutely nothing for the economy of the area. Redding is dead last in almost every economic category that you can list.

The cons have done the same job that was depicted in the classic movie, "It's a Wonderful Life", when Jimmie Stuart got his wish and was never born. Remember the villain Mr. Potter, the greedy and vengeful banker won out, and the city was a wasteland of broken promises and dreams. The town was owned by Potter, everyone else were losers, barely making enough to stay alive. In those depression days, the greedy rich were actually depicted for who they are, not for who they are depicted by P.R. agencies. Donald Trump is polling second (SECOND) as a Republican candidate for President. That is what we need, a hopeless ego maniac rich jerk, as President.

That is where Redding is headed, Potterville, where the rich rule, behind gates of greed, and everyone else suffers.

So we are becoming a trailer city, with hosts of homeless, and despair everywhere.

Don't come to Redding, land of the Tea Party paradise!!!!!

Another day in Gridlock

Another Day in Ideological Deadlock

Remember, "it isn't a revenue problem, it's a spending problem".

This coming from cons who in the past ten years (eight under George W) cut revenue (taxes are revenue for government) and raised spending (two wars) and a whole lot more.

Now, they are deficit hawks, willing to shut the government down in their zeal to "save us from ourselves".

And what do they cut the most, why discretionary programs for the poor, the elderly and the young, all groups that have the least defense. And who profits from this? The rich of course; and multi-national corporations, and the completely fascist Koch brothers who represent a oil industry that is tone death to everything that would help anybody but themselves.

We in California have been living with this for years. Prop 13 discovered a trick, that most Californians have still not figured out. Anybody and anything can win elections if they promise to cut taxes and raise spending. George W. Bush proved this in 2004, when he cleverly hid his absolute incompetence during 9-11 (sitting frozen for 30 minutes while planes destroyed buildings) by pushing a huge tax cut, and spending money like there was no tomorrow.

Two wars, trillions of dollars later, and huge tax cuts (especially for the rich) left the United State starved for revenue, drove government borrowing to record levels, and yes, sucked the vitality out of the economy leading directly to the melt-down of 2007-2008.

Add to this the inevitable cuts to government regulations of the banking industry, caused by cuts to regulatory agencies, and you had the perfect storm, low government revenues leading to cuts in regulations and economic disaster.

The American People have a very short attention span. They have forgot 2007 already, and bought the lies from the cons in the 2010 elections that the economic recession was caused solely by spending.

California has endured this nonsense for over thirty years, and is poised on the edge of an economic cliff that is about ready to destroy public education k-16. The university and college system that drove the innovations of silicon valley are about to be destroyed because of the "spending" problem of government.

The truth that Californians pay way to few taxes for the size and complexity of the state is hidden behind the myth of high taxes. Greed and nihilism is rewarded by the Howard Jarvis Tax Association and others; the idea is to starve government to death.

And they are winning! Right now a majority of Americans actually believe that tax cuts stimulate the economy always (they don') and believe the government is bloated and wasteful (it isn't).

So teachers are cut, Medicare is a viable target of conservatives who have always hated it, and the poor are fair game.

The public, in California and in the United States believes a mythology that does not exist. Public policy is being enacted that is basically destroying democracy in its tracks, turning power over to corporations and the rich who are essentially installing an aristocracy.

Freedom is dying in the burst of conservatives lies and falsehoods. The myth that small government is best runs headlong into the demands for regulations and services in the 21st century.

Imagine where we would be with the world of no regulation as we enter an era of dramatically dwindling oil reserves. Do we just have the poor walk? Do we shut down public transportation as gas goes to 7 dollars a gallon? This is crazy!

Once before this nation had to make a decision between cons who were advocating cuts and policies that were deepening the depression (read about 1930 to 1932); and wisely went with progressivism under F.D.R.

Today, we are faced with the same decision.

Common Sense

Common Sense

Common sense: A phrase that for most of American History has represented what most felt was a great advantage for America. Our democratic traditions have encouraged the public to believe that they had a unique perspective that somehow led to intelligent decisions.

Common Sense: Thomas Paine used that as a tittle for one of the many pamphlets that he wrote to encourage the American Revolution.

Common Sense: A sense that no matter what, Americans would somehow get it right, and marked them as different from the "Old World" who had got it so wrong in the past.

The Tea Party Patriots represent this notion. Somehow they have "common sense" that distinguished them from other groups, and sees the American political reality in a way that other cannot see.

Part of the mythology of "common sense" is that Americans were somehow separate from Europeans and had a unique, American perspective that saw things as others could not see. For example, "common sense" meant that Americans saw Hitler for what he was earlier than others, not being sucked into appeasement that led to ruin and war.

Of course, this was nonsense. Americans in the late 30s were as fooled as the rest of the world by Hitler and his fascist, expansionist policies. But, the mythology persists.

In the 21st century this myth persists in the Tea Party. Somehow, they don't say exactly how, the Tea Party members have a unique American perspective in political reality that supersedes all others. Leaders of this highly conservative movement somehow have a refreshed, new world view, that if followed, will return the nation to its past glories.

Mythology can be a powerful thing. It can distort reality, distort perceptions, and cloud decision making.

That is exactly what is happening today with the Tea Party and its alleged corner on "common sense". The facts do not support reality.

To maintain the many illusions that are essential to the "common sense" con, lies have to be told. Propaganda techniques are used to "fill in the gaps" of truth.

An industry has grown up, supporting the illusion that tea party members have a corner on "common sense".

And, in their desperate attempts to conform a reality that will non cooperate; the Tea Party lies.

The worst thing that could have happened to this "con" was when the Tea Party members got elected to Congress. It was so much easier to tell lies about political reality. When you get elected, simply saying that you have a corner on "common sense" is not enough. As an elected official, you must govern, make laws and make "common sense".

Yesterday this out of touch reached a tipping point, when Tea Party sponsored legislation concerning the debt ceiling was passed with the provision that if it was not approved by the Senate it would immediately become law.

This of course is unconstitutional. It represents a loss of touch of both common sense and reality that is startling. Americans are suddenly confronted with a political party that seems to have lost touch, is doing silly things that are at odds with "common sense"..

Of course, these gaffes are pointing to huge disconnects in Tea Party political philosophy. In fact, their world views are more fascist than anything else, common sense is just a propaganda tool to gain middle class support.

Hitler was most afraid when the German people started to figure it out and applied "common sense" to the propaganda that was engulfing them. Tea Party members, whose political behavior is basically fascist, are of the same mindset.

As their propaganda is exposed, then push harder to lie and deceive.

The results are the same, if we compare the 30s in Germany to America today. As the "con" is exposed, Tea Party members get more belligerent, more violent, as they desperately attempt to maintain their "common sense" lies.

Americans need to splash their faces with cold water, stop watching Fox News 24/7 and realize that the "common sense" con is just that; a con. Lies are being told.

Tea Party Patriots, who were elected with copies of the Constitution in their pockets, pass laws that are blatantly unconstitutional and just plain silly.

Could it be that the real motivators for their political zeal are greedy corporations who will do anything for political advantage (another fascist behavior) Could it be that forces are at work that hate democracy no matter how much "common sense" they avow?

You be the judge. Take a deep breath and wonder, is this common sense or is it B.S.?

It won't take very long to reach the correct decision because remember, American have always had "common sense".....