Emma Berry

Posts Tagged ‘Tea Party’

The primary organization who supply the millions of dollars for buses, training speakers, pamphlets, organizing events is an organization called AMERICANS FOR PROSPERITY.  Over the past two years I’ve written numerous articles about this group. The two men who bankroll Americans for Prosperity are David and Charles Koch–the 16th richest men in the world.

“Americans for Prosperity” is anything but a group that supports prosperity for the majority of Americans. For example, when the USA lost their bid in 2009 to bring the next  World Olympics to Chicago, members of this group are on tape for cheering!  Yes cheering–in spite of the fact that winning this bid would have brought thousands of jobs and billions of dollars to the American economy. They are not about prosperity for our nation.  And they are not about Christianity.  They are more about an ideology of hatred that is designed to further the wealth of the top 1% of the richest in our nation.

Ironically, the inherited wealth on which the Koch brothers live was made by their father who made his money in the 20’s and 30’s by helping Joseph Stalin build the oil infrastructure for communist Russia.

Yasha Levine has recently published a devastating article on the Koch brother that appeared in the New York Observer on 7 ways the Kochs make their money that really doesn’t’ jibe with the the ideology that they pour tens of millions into every year.  In other words, the Koch brothers are conservative hypocrites. The Kochs make a fortune through state government welfare — American and Venezuelan — in all kinds of ways.   Instead of being puppets for the Koch brothers, the Tea Party anarchists should work to cut off the Kochs’ access to our money, common wealth and private property, which they in turn use to fund an ideology that makes it harder for normal people to get their own fair share and enjoy on some kind of human, as opposed to billionaire-inhuman, scale.

Here are the four most outrageous activities associated with the Koch brothers include:

1.“In 1998, Koch Industries entered into a lucrative partnership with two state-owned companies-one Venezuelan, the other Italian-to open a massive $1 billion nitrogen-based fertilizer plant in Venezuela called Fertinitro. … For Koch Industries, whose role in the partnership is to unload half of the 6 million tons of fertilizer produced by Fertinitro every year on the American market, that equals up to $123.6 million in subsidies every year.” Get that? A billion-dollar double partnership with two state-owned companies.

2. “Two years before founding the influential Cato Institute, Charles Koch bought a supertanker from a communist regime.”

3. “For the past fifty years, through its Matador Cattle Company subsidiary, Koch Industries has been quietly milking a New Deal program that allows ranchers to use federal land basically for free. Matador … has something in the neighborhood of 300,000 acres of grazing land for its cows—two-thirds of which belong to American taxpayers, who will never see a penny of profit.”

4. “In 2006, Koch Industries acquired pulp and paper giant Georgia-Pacific for a $21-billion cash payment, allowing the Koch brothers to tap into a whole new area of government largess: the ability to log public forests for private gain and have taxpayers cover the operating costs.”

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Links to a few other articles that I’ve posted on the Koch Brothers over the past year:

Maybe someday ordinary Americans will wise up to the frauds that the rich perpetrate against them such as the Tea Party Movement(August 3, 2010)

Koch Brothers: Bus your Tea Party People down to the Gulf to Clean Up the Oil Spill (June 15, 2010)

The Republican Leadership and Shadow Men Behind the Tea Party Movement are literally  using propaganda tactics that Adolf Hitler promoted (April 25, 2010)

Tea Party members don’t even know what they are talking about.  They yell socialism and yet they want Medicare, government job creation and for government to rein in Wall Street. (March 27, 2010)

In the USA and in fact most of the world we make poverty the fault of the poor. (November 5, 2009)

Our Battle should be with the people who fund the hate groups (Oct. 28,2009)

Tom Phillips, “Mr.Americans for Prosperity” appeared on Rachel Maddow (Oct 15, 2009)

This is the violence that Chuck Grassley and David Koch incite with their rhetoric (August 25, 2009)

Look at the vile propaganda that David Koch helps to fund and promote (August 20, 2009)

Meet one of the Architects of the Corporate Nation: David Koch (August 20, 2009)

Learn about a Group who Sponsor anti-health care reform: “Americans for Prosperity“ (August 20, 2009)

1. WANT CRUMBS? Vote for John Lingenfelder, the Democratic choice. John will do better than many Democratic candidates in representing the majority of this district, but he will still be tied to Democratic party politics which are run by the Clinton corporate centrists–the same bunch that brought us NAFTA and the deregulation of the entire financial industry.  Yes the “Bank Modernization Act of 1999″ which made our current economic crash possible was created by a Republican Congress, but Bill Clinton signed it into law in late November of 1999. He could have let that disaster die on his desk without signing it.

2.  WANT TO RETURN TO THE HIGH ROLLING WAR SPENDING STATUS QUO OF THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION? WANT TO HAVE THE SOCIAL SECURITY COFFERS ROBBED?  Want a Representative who thinks that the solution to disagreements with other nations is to “nuke” them?    Then by all means vote for Sam Johnson. Sam rubber stamped all of Bush’s  UNFUNDED requests for military appropriations for Iraq–the single most reason for our current national debt.  To use an example from his 80 year old era, Sam Johnson is about as “fiscally conservative” as one of the Gabor sisters.

Sam Johnson is part of the same current Republican corrupted government of Collin County whose commissioners gave Johnson’s son a no-bid multi-million dollar contract in 2006 to manage the North Central Texas Fusion Center. [A Fusion center is a data-mining center that is designed to spy on Americans in some of the same ways that the East German Stasi spied on its citizens.  Don’t take my word for it.  Google North Central Texas Fusion Center.  There are 40 such centers all over the USA.  They were established during the Bush years via the Patriot Act.

The Collin County Clerk’s office is so corrupt that the Texas Rangers raided this nest of Republican corruption in the spring of this year and confiscated hard drives .  It seems that the county clerk used taxpayers money to help pay for her campaign.  There is more to the story than that. They even allowed county employees to campaign on county time and paid them overtime.  Read more in The Collin County Observer.  These are Sam Johnson’s good ole boy and good ole girl Republican pals.

3.  WANT AN ANARCHIST?  Then by all means vote for a Tea Party candidate because that is what these people stand for:  Anarchy. Listen to their rhetoric.  They are Republicans on steroids.  Their vision is no taxes except for war.  No health care, no public schools, no public institutions.  I guess their idea of health care is that people go off into the woods to die if they can’t afford to pay for Wall Street sponsored  health care insurance.  Their idea of education is home schooling with the Bible as the only textbook.  Instead of police, everyone will pack their own weapons and shoot to kill on sight.

By and large these people are angry Americans who are venting their anger via this movement.   Listen to them and their rhetoric.  What actual solutions are they offering?  They offer even less than the party of no, the ‘Knights of Knee’.  They have no workable solutions.

4.  WANT SOMEONE WHO REALIZES THAT NONE OF THESE SOLUTIONS ARE GOOD ENOUGH FOR THE MAJORITY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE? Then vote for Emma Berry and other true independents who will represent the majority of Americans. And yes I do offer solutions and not more of the same–despite what some misguided people from the Party of NO may say about me.

First of all we need to do all we can to encourage small businesses and to do this we can begin by changing the definition of a small business from “less than 500 employees”  to “less than 50 employees”.  That is right.  The current definition of small business in Washington is “less than 500 employees”.   THAT IS ABSURD!  This means that the 29 million mom and pop operations all over the USA must compete with subsidiaries of large Wall Street corporations like Bechtel for small business incentives.

Second of all, we need to rebuild the manufacturing base in the USA. We were sold a bill of goods beginning in the mid 1990’s–not unlike the deal that the tailors in The Emperor’s New Clothes sold to the people in that story.  We were told that manufacturing was obsolete, that this is a new era for the USA.  We are to become a “service” economy.  We would be retrained to use computers.  The other “lesser” countries would be the ones who manufacture goods.

This was utter nonsense!  As long as there are human beings on the face of the earth we will need goods that are made by other human beings. ALWAYS!  Use your god-given common sense for five seconds.

The real reason behind this bill of goods that the American people were sold was the greed of Wall Street.  They wanted cheap labor to increase their profits and thus the size of the dividend they could give to their rich investors.  In the USA, the American workers demanded fair wages and decent (or at least half-way decent and safe working conditions).  Such demands cut into their profits.

As a nation we are more vulnerable and insecure as a result of having our manufacturing base decimated by the rich.  For example, at the moment we are enjoying the cheap goods that Wal-Mart provide us through their deals with China.  But what happens when China decides to raise their prices?  What recourse do Americans have?  We can either pay the prices or do without.  That will be our choices because we do not make the goods here on US soil (or goods that we trade with them on which we could raise prices).

Third and finally, communities need to establish locally owned corporations. These corporations are set up in ways similar to Wall Street Corporations, but with some differences.  The ownership of these corporations is limited to people who live in the area.  When people move out of the area, their stock does not travel with them.  They must either sell it or turn it back to the corporation.  They agree to this in the very beginning when they purchase the stock.  It is part of the corporation’s legal charter.  Yes it can be done.

The products and goods produced by these local corporations are intended primarily for use and consumption by local residents.  The raw materials used to create these goods and services comes from the local area and/or region.

WHY ARE LOCAL CORPORATIONS A GOOD IDEA?
They stabilize the local economy.  These businesses, unlike Wall Street corporations, are anchored in the community.  Wall Street corporations exist to pay the largest dividends possible to their investors.  Their investors are scattered all over the world.  This means that even if a factory may be making a profit in a particular community, that if it serves the greater good of the global investors of that corporation for that factory to be shut down and its assets sold off, then that is what will happen and often does.

Because of the bad deals that the local city governments and Chamber of Commerce have made with these Wall Street corporations, the citizens of the community are left holding the bag of unemployment, reduced property values and neighborhood blight.

Local corporations stabilize local economies and provide leverage that community government representatives can use when bargaining with Wall Street corporations who may want to locate in their communities.

Right now local government do nothing but give away huge chunks of taxpayer assets to Wall Street pirates in exchange for a promise of jobs in the community. “Oh sure, here is a large piece of land that you can have tax free.   Oh no, of course we will look the other way while you pollute our air. etc.”

Who do you think pays for these deals?  Some one does.  It’s YOU the taxpayer.  No finer example than our nearby city of Plano.  Plano has raised property taxes $75 a year over the past two years (based on medium price of $250,000 home).  Why?  Oh you will hear righter wingers yammering about public schools (since many of them send their kids to private schools anyway) but that is not why property taxes are raised on the people of Plano.  It is raised on them because of the bad deals that their local city council make with Wall Street organization like Pizza Hut.  You want to know why you are paying higher property taxes in your community?  Then look to the Wall Street deals that your local government leaders cut.

Again.  Several local corporations stabilize the local economy and reduce the need for these kinds of back room Wall Street deals that taxpayers end up paying for.

Democrat: It depends on the Democrat.  About half of the Democratic Party are Corporate Centrist Clintonites like the Obama Administration.  A vote for these Democrats is just a tad better than voting for a Republican but a lot better than voting for a Tea Party candidate.  If you are an ordinary American who earns less than $200,000 a year and (like 85% of Americans) owns no Wall Street stock, you will get a few crumbs. There are a few Democrats running for office who are progressive populists who will fight for the change and jobs that ordinary American workers need. But the key word is “few.”

Republican: If you work for a living and earn less than $200,000 a year and vote for a Republican then you are your own worst enemy. The Republican leadership really don’t give a damn about the majority of ordinary Americans.  The Republicans, along with the corporate centrist Democrats have shipped millions of manufacturing jobs overseas where they can get cheap labor and thus increase dividends for the rich Wall Street investors.  The Republicans have two solutions:  tax cuts (which actually increase the deficit since they reduce revenue needed to pay for things like their wars and our already crumbling infrastructure).  Their solution is to rob the coffers of Social Security, unemployment insurance and Medicare.    They call these institutions “entitlements”–probably because they think that they are entitled to rob them.  Their rumor mill has several horror stories going such as the ridiculous claim that Social Security is bankrupt.  The truth is that Social Security will continue to pay 100% even if we did nothing until 2037.  After then it will pay 75%. And that’s only if our elected officials do nothing!  One thing they could do is to start taxing the full amount of income earned by people whose annual income exceeds $106,000.  That’s right.  After $106,000 those incomes are not taxed for Social Security.  How would you like to have only 1/10 of YOUR income taxed for social security?  The other solution offered by the Republicans is tort reform.  All credible economists estimate that this would impact about ½ of one percent of our economy.

Tea Party: These people are Republicans on steroids.  They are anarchists.  If they get their way, our government would be replaced by a lawless anarchy.  Their vision is no taxes except for war.  No health care, no public schools, no public institutions. I guess their idea of healthcare is that people go off into the woods to die if they can’t afford private health care insurance.  Their idea of education is home schooling with the Bible as the only textbook.  Instead of police, everyone will just pack their own heat.  They don’t want to “take back our government.”  They want to destroy it.

Independents: Once upon a time they were only conservatives.  This season, however populists like me are moving into this arena.  You will have to carefully read what a candidate who claims to be an Independent really stands for. Some of them are just more of the same Republicans and Tea Party nuts.

For eight long years Republicans and the Wall Street Corporate Centrist Democrats ran up the deficit.  The didn’t give a damn as they rubber stamped George Bush’s trillion dollar tax cuts for the upper 1% and the unfunded Military appropriations bill AND no one rubber stamped faster than the tres Amigos:  Sam Johnson, Pete Sessions and Joe Barton.  UNFUNDED MILITARY APPROPRIATIONS  and for what?  to reduce Iraq to rubble and to give their good ole boy Wall Street cronies like Halliburton fat no-bid contracts.

THE REPUBLICANS, ALWAYS A BUNCH TO TAKE HYPERBOLE TO A NEW LEVEL HAVE OUTDONE THEMSELVES.  SOME OF THEM ARE ACTUALLY CAMPAIGNING ON THE PROMISE THAT THEY WILL CUT EVEN MORE JOBS FOR AMERICANS!

LOL!  Do you believe it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!   It’s true.

Dan Maes told the Denver Petroleum Club he would cut at least 2,000 workers “just like that” from the state budget, with projected savings of $200 million.

I’ll bet the good ole boys lapped that right up.

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Private employers added just 1,420 jobs per state in July — not nearly enough to make up for job losses in the government, 50,000 of which were local-government layoffs. Unemployment remains high, at 9.5 percent, and many economists expect it to track higher in the fall.

Jason Linkins in his article,  “First punish the unemployed, then declare war on the unemployed“  asked a very salient question:

Where are the people who would lose their jobs to go, exactly, other than off into the woods to die?

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EMMA’S COMMENT:

Sounds to me like the Republican solution for unemployment is similar to their solution for health care.  You may recall that, as Alan Grayson so eloquently pointed out for us:  The Republican health care solution is to not get sick and if you do, to die quickly.

If you work for a living, you better start paying attention to the class war.

If you work for a living and get a w-2 and vote for a Republican, a Tea Party nut or a corporate centrist Democrat when you have any other choice, you are voting against your own best interests.

HERE’S WHAT I THINK OF A FEW OF THE REPUBLICAN AND TEA PARTY INCOMPETENTS WHO CLAIM THEY ARE GOING TO “TAKE BACK AMERICA”

THEY WOULD TAKE US “BACK” ALL RIGHT BACK TO EVEN WORSE TIMES!

Remember when you read this that I am not pleased with the Democrats either.  Like their Republican and Tea Party pals, most of the Democrats in Congress fork over all but a few crumbs of the cake to the rich and Wall Street as well.

The Republicans and Tea Party Fanatics will take the entire cake and leave ordinary Americans with nothing.  The Democrats will take most of the cake and leave you with a few crumbs.  If you can vote a for a true progressive Independent, then vote for that candidate.  Otherwise, if you work for a living, vote for a Democrat.  At least they will leave  you with a few crumbs.

If you are rich and don’t give a damn about the majority of the people in the USA, then by all means vote these incompetents into office.

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John Boehner as Speaker of the House?

You gotta be kidding!

Imagine John Boehner as the man who would be in charge of the House of Representative if the Republicans got the majority in the HOUSE.  Yes THAT John Boehner from Ohio, the one who lies to the public and who was on the golf course 119 days out of the 365 days for 2009.  HE would really do a great job as a leaders of the House, now wouldn’t he?  He wouldn’t even bother to show up much less provide leadership for over a third of the year.  THAT KIND OF A LAZY SELF-SERVING JACKASS IS GOING TO “TAKE OUR COUNTRY BACK?”  PLEASE DON’T MAKE ME  LAUGH.

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Carly Fiorina is going to “take back our country”?

What a flipping sick joke!

• As CEO, she nearly ran Hewlett-Packard into the ground, laid off 33,000 workers and was named one of the nation’s worst CEOs by Portfolio magazine

• After being forced out, she collected a $42 million golden parachute

• Endorsed by Sarah Palin as one of her “Mama Grizzlies”    –  “Mama Grizzly my ass. Fiorina is as self-serving as Sarah Palin who didn’t even have the integrity to finish her commitment to the people of Alaska by completing her first term as governor.  She preferred to run around the country making speeches like Bill Clinton.

• Endorsed by Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, who said Fiorina shares his goal of weakening the Environmental Protection.  Any endorsement by an idiot like Inofe should be taken as a negative.

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That’s right.  Many Tea Party people don’t seem to understand that the GOP is saying no to THEM.  They seem to think that they belong to the same club.

And that is nothing but dumb.

They would rather turn down unemployment benefits to keep food on the table for Main Street out of work Americans– adding $33 Billion to the deficit.  And at the same time they approve keeping George Bush’s tax breaks to the upper 5%  adding $600 billion to our deficit.  If the upper 5% had to pay their fair share of taxes, we could reduce our deficit by $600 billion.

and here is dumber: There are those in the Tea Party who rant and rave about “Obama-care” as socialized medicine and at the same time demand that “the government” doesn’t touch their Medicare.

Mark that down as another rare occasion when I agree with a Republican. Most of the members of the Tea Party are dumb-asses who are their own worst enemy.  As I’ve said before, they are like mice who are cheerleaders for the cat.  They are so dumb they don’t even know what team they are on.

Mr. Buck made the a comment to a staffer after an event in Pueblo, Colorado.

He was unaware that the conversation was being recorded.

“Will you tell those dumbasses at the Tea Party to stop asking questions about birth certificates while I’m on the camera,” Buck said to the staffer. “God, what am I supposed to do?”

SOMEONE NEEDS TO TELL DUMB AND DUMBER AND THE TEA PARTY WITH THEM THAT THEY NEED TO CHOOSE BETWEEN CORPORATE RULE [over which they will have no control] OR GOVERNMENT CONTROL BY VOTE OF THE PEOPLE.

The Washington Post reported on “Signs of the times:  Oil Spill Victims on Grand Isle Protest”

In this article by  Yian Mui, we read that “. . . If you want to know how residents here feel about the oil spill, just read the signs that are posted on seemingly every electrical pole, planted in front yards or hung on the 10-foot stilts that keep houses off the ground in case of flooding. . .”

Yes, the signs are angry, even the ones with humor, but they still are indicative of a lack of understanding of the conservative political ideology that made the BP oil spill possible in the first place. BP was NOT an “accident”.  BP was the direct result of what happens when corporations are allowed to take risks because profits come before people’s safety. The BP spill is the result of calculated risks that a Wall Street corporation was allowed to take because their was no government oversight in place to protect the people when that well was dug under the Bush Administration and it’s good ole boy oil  business regime.

AND paradoxically, like many Tea Party enthusiasts, they blame “big” government on one hand while demanding that it take care of them on the other hand.

We see this from the dumb and dumber of the  Tea Party enthusiasts who decry “socialism” out of one corner of their mouth while demanding that “the government” keep its hands off their medicare and social security on the other.  If these people were to get what they are demanding, many of them would be on the streets without a pot to piss in in about two years.  They are indeed like dumb mice advertising mouse traps for the fat cats.

Someone needs to tell dumb and dumber that you cannot have it both ways.

And while they are at it, they can tell the people in Grand Isle who turned  a mannequin into a bloody torso and attached it to a billboard: “BP took our arms. The government is taking our legs. How will we stand?” Pitre said the sign is a reference to commercial fishing closures and the deepwater drilling moratorium that have decimated the local economy.

THAT’S JUST IT FOLKS. BP “took your arms” because government regulations were not in place to demand than an acoustic switch be installed on that well as it is on all the wells in the north seas of Norway. [Because the "big" government that  you decry  and people like Joe Baron apologise for] demands it of BP and they damn well comply because they know if they don’t, they don’t get to do business there.

The “government” is not taking your leg with a moratorium on continued deepwater drilling.  The government is doing what governments are supposed to do–protect the people.

What do you want?  Another spill like the BP spill?  Do you want to help the oil industry make the USA  and the Gulf coast in particular the junkyard of the world?

Well you cannot have it both ways folks.

You need to make up your minds and soon. Either Wall Street corporations with their CEO’s like Tony Hayward, Lloyd Blankfien, and Bernie Madoff are going to be “representing” the people with their Republican pals and running our nation with their Orwellian world view of corporate privatization–or a government by the people.  The choice is still ours, but we are losing ground because of people who don’t understand that they are on the wrong side, standing with the wrong people.

If you think that Republicans like Joe Barton who call our President’s action toward BP a “shakedown” are correct–then you are either dumb and dumber, or rich and richer.  But you are NOT a working American who has a lick of sense.  That much, I’m certain of.

and no, I’m not praising the Obama Administration either.

BUT UNTIL SOMETHING BETTER COMES ALONG, THEY ARE A BETTER CHOICE THAN ANY REPUBLICAN.

At least with them we get crumbs.

With Republicans in charge you will get N-O-T-H-I-N-G but a kick in the face.

Too bad the Tea Party people don’t think for themselves instead of regurgitating what the minions of the Koch brothers feed them.  If they did, they would know that it is the “conservatives” who created the debt–not the liberals or progressives.

My messages to the Tea Party ignoramuses–GET A LIFE and while you are at it, get an education and with it the facts.  The very people that you rail against are the ones, for your and your children’s  sake  that you should be cheering on–not tearing down.  Ronald Reagan, one of the icons of the Republican Party doubled the national debt in one term!

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Bush doubled the entire pre-existing national debt. Not just through tax cuts but also through greatly increased spending. And this doesn’t even count the money spent on wars in Afghanistan and Iraq–those were off-budget, paid for by occasional ‘emergency’ bills to hide the cost.

Reagan and both Bushes all campaigned as strict budget-hawks, promising to make balancing the budget a top priority. But once in office they ALL behaved as if debt simply didn’t matter. Reagan doubled the whole national debt in a single term! It took Bush two terms, but then it was a much larger debt by then.

Ironically the ONLY president in recent decades to make good on the perennial Republican promise of reducing costs, cutting deficits, -and- giving the middle class a tax cut was a Democrat. Clinton had us on track towards a balanced budget, but as soon as Bush came to office he couldn’t wait to undo all the work Clinton had done.

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AGAIN, THIS ALL TRACES BACK TO THE CONSERVATIVE IDEOLOGY.  There is nothing that these people would like better to do than destroy government entirely and they damn near have done it.

What the Tea  Party people and other middle class and working class people need to do is to take five minutes to imagine a world with no government:

WHO IS IN CHARGE?  The rich and corporations.

You will work for them at rates that THEY DECIDE.  We have seen a sample of the “fair” wages that they pay to guest workers in our country–whatever they want—and its damn sure not minimum wage.

You will not have social security.

You will not have health care.

You want to drive to work, then plan to pay whatever toll they want to charge because conservative ideology believes in privatizing everything.

YES THIS IS A CLASS WAR.

YES THE TEA PARTY PEOPLE ARE DUMB AND DUMBER AS THEY CHEER ON THOSE WHO WOULD DESTROY THEM .

In fact, the so-called “conservatives” are the WORST offenders for building big government.

NO FINER EXAMPLE THAN GEORGE BUSH.

BUSH WAS THE BIGGEST SPENDER IN PRESIDENTIAL HISTORY
BUDGET?  Please!  Bush and his Republican Party don’t even know the definition of the word.

If increases in government spending matter, then Bush is worse than any president in recent history. During his first four years in office—a period during which his party controlled Congress—he added a whopping $345 billion (in constant dollars) to the federal budget.  The only other presidential term that comes close? Bush’s second term. As of November 2008, he had added at least an additional $287 billion on top of that (and the months since then will add significantly to the bill). To put that in perspective, consider that the spendthrift LBJ added a mere $223 billion in total additional outlays during his one full term as President.

BUSH INCREASED THE NATIONAL DEBT MORE THAN ANY PRESIDENT IN HISTORY

With no fanfare and little notice, the national debt has grown by more than $4 trillion during George W. Bush’s presidency.  It’s the biggest increase under any president in U.S history. On the day President Bush took office, the national debt stood at $5.727 trillion. The latest number from the Treasury Department from September of 2008 that I have (and this is before the Henry Paulson heist)  shows the national debt now stands at more than $9.849 trillion. That’s a 71.9 percent increase on Mr. Bush’s watch.

BUSH GREW  “BIG GOVERNMENT” WITH THE CREATION OF NEW CABINET DEPARTMENT HOMELAND SECURITY
Homeland Security today employs 216,00 people and has an annual budget of $52 billion dollars

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EQUALLY TELLING ARE THE EXECUTIVE OFFICIALS THAT BUSH REMOVED FROM CABINET RANK:

Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (1996–2001): created as an independent agency in 1979, raised to Cabinet rank in 1996,^[3] lost Cabinet rank in 2001.

Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (1993–2009)

Administrator of the Small Business Administration (1994–2001)  and Republicans love to crow about how they support small business?

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AND IF YOU ARE THINKING ABOUT THE TEA PARTY WACKO LEADERS AS NOT BEING FOR “BIG GOVERNMENT” YOU CAN LET GO THAT MYTH TOO.

“The newest myth of American politics is that the Tea Party movement is challenging mainstream Republicans with its commitment to an anti-government liberation philosophy.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  Tea Party activists may speak more loudly than establish Republicans, but they carry the same big government stick.

Both mainstream and Tea Party Republicans use libertarian rhetoric to target liberal welfare programs and let corporate interests off the regulatory hood while upholding a conservative form of big government through massive defense and police establishments, wars on drugs and terrorism, immigration control and government compulsion of personal morality.  .  .

Consider the three poster children for the Tea Party movement–Sarah Palin, candidate for U.S. Senate Sharron Angle of Nevada; and Rand Paul of Kentucky.  Their views mirror those of George Bush, not his libertarian critics.  Not surprisingly, according to a New York Time/CBS News poll this April, 57 percent of Tea Party supporters have a favorable opinion of Bush (15% are “unsure”)  .  . .”  from THINK POLITICS