Guest post on Sar's blog leads to 'Fuzzy Math in a Nutshell'

I won't be here for the weekend, as we are going to head over to Moriarty, NM, where we used to live and take the kids to McCall's pumpkin patch (they get to pick out a pumpkin, but that is the last thing you do-- before that, the family we who runs it has made it a business and it's a lot of fun for the kids to go through their hay maze (or a fifteen acre corn maze if they are really adventurous) and play games (like 'gemstone panning' with a sluice box and lassoing and pedal cart racing) and just generally having a good time.

So what I would recommend you do if you want to read/comment on what I write is head over to Sar's blog, Belle of the Brawl, where I am honored to be the guest poster this week and posted why conservatives can't be trusted to lead the war on terrorism. I will probably repost it here next week sometime but I promised Sar I wouldn't post it anywhere else for a few days. Also, I am featured this week on Shayna's Music Highway Project.

I also will mention here that I got into a slightly off topic discussion in the comments over there in that a commenter started discussing fiscal conservatism and the deficit, so I made the following response (which has nothing to do with the war on terror but it's worth cutting and pasting here):




He [Bush] claims he is fiscally conservative as he cuts everything from the national parks to the veteran's administration. But look WHY the budget deficit has exploded (aside from the hundreds of billions in tax cuts, which were also geared towards the wealthy): Trillions handed out in corporate welfare, and almost all of it to industries or companies (like pharmaceutical companies and oil companies and credit card companies) that would be making billions even without all this government largesse.

True, the same industries gave millions to the GOP (and much smaller though still substantial amounts to Democrats) over the years.

So here is your fuzzy math: The wealthy corporations give millions to (mainly but not exclusively Republican) politicians, and also pay lobbyists to wine and dine said politicians when they are in Washington. They can do this because they are earning billions in profits. So then the politicians pass laws like the energy bill and the prescription drug bill that give them trillions in corporate welfare.

Oh, and then they go back home and campaign as 'fiscal conservatives' because they have tightened the rules on individual welfare and so cut some more people off the roles, even though the amount spent by the government on individual welfare is a tiny fraction by now of what is spent on corporate welfare, which they voted for.