I Will Vote For President Next Year ...

... only if Obama and Michelle Bachmann are locked in a dead heat.

With that proviso, this blog still endorses nobody for President.

As I'm sitting here watching with growing alarm at the prospect of my retirement being set on fire so that those who already have much too much can have even more, I agree with Robert Reich that the real issue is jobs, and that there's no jobs because no one is spending money, and businesses have no demand. Instead of doing something urgent to put money in people's pockets and create demand, the twin ghosts of Heinrich Brünning and Herbert Hoover roam the earth demanding that government budgets should be balanced in the face of depressed economies with high unemployment. The historical record on that approach to governing in times of economic crisis is not encouraging. I see a spike in unemployment and no end to this disaster no matter whose budget balancing plan prevails in the end. I am utterly amazed that anyone who calls himself a Democrat would put Social Security on the table as part of a budget negotiation. Social Security funds itself. It is not part of the federal budget at all. The Social Security budget is solvent and will remain so for another 35 years. Both sides are proposing drastic cuts to Medicare. One side wants to eliminate it entirely by turning it into a voucher program. The other side is willing countenance benefit cuts and changes in age requirements that would cause very great hardship for millions of people. And all of this is solely for the sake of preserving tax breaks and historically low tax rates for the top income earners in the USA.

I feel like I'm being played here. I'm getting some small but very real gains in gay civil rights with one hand, while the things I've worked for and paid into all of my life are now tossed up for grabs by the other hand. I'm watching both sides now arguing over how best to unravel the social safety net (and destroy the social fabric), and I wish a pox on all of them. I'm watching one side make outrageous and extreme demands while the other talks about how much to cave in.

Fuck all the bipartisanship rhetoric! I want MORE partisanship, not less! I want someone in there standing up to this nonsense instead of letting it set all the terms of the debate! I want someone in there fighting on my behalf and not bargaining away the whole store and the deed to the house. I feel like I'm being deliberately dissed so that the President can somehow impress the "independent voter" with his centrist creds. And then said President has the gall to turnaround and ask for my enthusiastic support for re-election. That's the one thing I've always hated about the Democratic party, that sucker's deal that says "too bad jack, you ain't got no place else to go." I think I'll just go home.