Jon Stewart points out just how new the ideas are in the Pledge on America.

The Worcester T & G published its usual political cartoon by Hitch.

George Bush nearly sank the capitalist economy into a depression that could have exceeded the Great Depression and Barack Obama rescued it. I guess that’s all the proof you need to know that Obama hates capitalism.

Has Hitch got a crack in his dark colored glasses that he uses when a Democrat is President after giving up his Bush era rose colored glasses?

See, it is fine with the voters to be honest about the witchcraft you once practiced. The sin is to say you are a Christian and deny that you ever were a Muslim.

The article ‘Cookies’ Cause Bitter Backlash in The Wall Street Journal is a must read if you are a computer user.  (If you aren’t a computer user, how are you reading this blog post? 🙂 ).  If you use an IPhone, you might want to read this twice.

Here is a little teaser from the article:

Another suit, filed earlier this month, accuses Fox Entertainment Group and the American idol.com website of using a new kind of cookie—known as a Flash cookie—that can “re-spawn” tracking files that users have deleted, without users’ knowledge.

This is the first I have read about flash cookies.  Wouldn’t you know Fox would be involved?  By the way, who is it that just bought The Wall Street Journal?

Update on October 25, 2010

I found the following article that was released on October 20, 2010 from PC Magazine.

Flash Cookie Cop: Protect Yourself from Insidious Flash Cookies

I am going to check it out.  Oops!, it is not free.  Costs $8.00.  Maybe I’ll wait until Firefox builds in the flash cop for free.

Update October 26, 2010

To fix this problem for free, visit the Adobe Flash Settings Manager. At that site you will be able to manage the flash cookies. Go through all the tabs and delete cookies that you wish to delete and change settings to the way you prefer them.

I was talking to Gordon Gekko today.  He aired his complaints about the anti-business attitude of the Democrats.

I had such a sweet deal going,  It was the Ponzi scheme called financial derivatives.  My friends and I were raking in billions of dollars a year.  I even had the victims of the Ponzi scheme believe they were getting rich too.  Everybody was just so ecstatic.

Then comes the Democrats to burst my little bubble with such foolish thoughts that Ponzi schemes are somehow dishonest.  They want to make laws and rules that will hinder my business in the future.

Don’t they realize how important people like me are to economic growth and the recovery of jobs?

Why, if I could just get another giant Ponzi scheme going, we’d all feel rich again.  Perhaps we can even exceed the heights of just a few years ago.  Do I ever long for those good old days.

I just don’t understand why those Socialist, anti-American Democrats don’t like rich business people like me.

The article A Page or Two from the Tea Party Book had some good points with which I could wholeheartedly agree.

Merely saving the House and Senate is not enough. … We must increase our majority in the House by ten votes and take two or three additional seats in the Senate.

I couldn’t quite agree with some of the pages to be taken from the Tea Party Book, especially the ones about negative campaigning.  My two responses to the article contain thoughts that I have expressed on this web site before and in many other places.

My first response was titled A Positive Kind Of Negative Campaigning.

Negative campaigning works really well for the underdog. For the assumed leader, not so much.

Just ask Senator Martha Coakley from Massachusetts and retired, under-dog politician Scott Brown who ran against her. What? Did you say it’s Senator Brown and Coakley went back to her job as Attorney General. I thought that was just a nightmare. You mean that really happened?

It is easy for the underdog, out-of-power to attack the programs of the assumed leaders and the in-power. There are real disappointments in any actual program and great promise in ones that have not been tried and tested. Scare tactics are not so easy to use against the underdog and out-of-power unless everything is going just great – and even then there are problems. Just ask President Al Gore.

I suggest positive kind of negative campaigning and ads. You keep driving home the reasons why your programs are necessary. You keep driving home how much better things will be when you do even more than what you have done so far. In passing you can mention the negative consequences of not marching boldly ahead. You can talk about what happens when you don’t have the courage to face the future and want to return to the false safety of an imagined past. You don’t even have to mention the other party nor the other candidates, or not hardly mention them. You might make it clear in the way you describe the good and bad alternatives that the ones that are good are yours and the ones that are bad are theirs.

If you cannot come up with a slew of positive reasons for your being in office and remaining in office, then perhaps you don’t really belong in office. People who really believe in the principles are disheartened by weak kneed defenses of those principles. Anything less than a vigorous defense of the positive cuts your chances of winning in three ways. 1. It emboldens your enemies. 2. It doesn’t attract many uncommitted. 3. It disheartens your supporters.

If you still can’t muster the strength to get up on your hind legs and fight, then you are the problem as much as the Republicans are. If the grass-roots have to teach the politicians how to do it, then teach we must.

With this positive kind of negative campaigning, you can win and even feel proud of the way you won.  You can feel proud that you didn’t have to destroy politics to save it.

My second response was titled Pretend This Campaign Is A Job Interview.

If you can pretend this campaign is a job interview, then you can imagine the interviewer has asked you what are you greatest strengths. After you answer the question, they ask you what are your greatest weaknesses.

The savvy candidate says that the greatest weakness was not pushing hard enough for his superior programs. Another weakness was allowing the people who did not know how to run the country to water down your programs for the sake of bipartisanship. Another weakness was letting the minority threaten you without your standing up to the threat. When you have the strength, a bully will back down when confronted. But, you have learned from your mistakes. Tomorrow is a new day, and a revitalized candidate will hold onto her strengths and overcome those aforementioned weaknesses.

What the voters want to see is confidence that appears well justified. I don’t think the phrase, “I am confident that if I appease the Republicans just a little more, then we’ll get more done.”

If the Democrats appear to be backsliding a little from their program of the last few years, it just adds fuel to the idea that they were wrong and the Republicans have been right.  Even for the Democrats who never really believed in the program in the first place, they ought to realize that there is no reason to vote for a faux Republican when they can have a real one.  If you don’t go down fighting for your team, you will go down anyway.

In The Tax-Cut Racket, Paul Krugman almost gets to the point I am making about this tax cut war.

Almost everyone agrees that raising taxes on the middle class in the middle of an economic slump is a bad idea, unless the effects are offset by other job-creation programs — and Republicans are blocking those, too.

If he could only get to the point of explaining that raising the taxes of the wealthy in the middle of an economic slump is not a bad idea if the effects are offset by other job-creation programs, then he will reach the epiphany that I have reached.

I am afraid that the previous paragraph’s cut and paste operation that I did on Krugman’s statement is too complicated for people to figure out on their own.  Someone in the administration has to come out and actually say it explicitly.

The McClatchy news story Obama Puts Bark In Consumer Watchdog: Elizabeth Warren, says:

President Barack Obama’s decision to appoint Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Warren on Friday to oversee the creation of the new Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection cheered consumer advocates and Democrats Thursday, while dismaying Republicans and business groups.

That is the glass half full version of the story.  For the glass half empty version we have to go to OpEdNews, Triumph of the Money Party!!! Warren’s role downgraded, reports to Geithner, which starts out with:

The White House snatched back one of the few bones it’s thrown to the people outraged at the looting of the United States Treasury by failed financial concerns – the big banks and Wall Street. The promised appointment Elizabeth Warren  as head of the new agency to protect consumers from the financial services industry has been seriously downgraded. Instead of running the Consumer Finance Protection Agency, Warren’s role has been diminished to that of special assistant to the president and adviser to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

The OpEdNews story predates the one in the McClatchy news.  My response to OpEdNews was:

There is a way of looking at this move by Obama in a charitable light. I am not saying this charitable way of looking at it is more correct than the name calling going on here, but it is a possible alternative.

Of course she is opposed by the banking crooks. That is exactly why she is needed. It is possible that Obama realizing he does not have the political muscle to get her approved the normal way, this is his way of sneaking her in the back door. Once she sets up the agency, it would be harder to argue that she shouldn’t head it. Getting Warren’s foot in the door may be Obama’s getting her in a position from which she can shove it open later. By giving Geithner this so-called subordinate, this may be Obama’s warning to him to shape up or ship out.

Also this will postpone the fight over her appointment until after the election. If the Progressives do not abandon Obama now, the political pundits might be proved wrong. The Democrats might still have control over both houses after the election.

Do you want to hold out for the hope of this positive spin on the story, or do you want to make sure that only the negative outcome is possible?

An addendum to my OpEdNews response was:

By the way, do you want Obama to openly admit his stealth plan so that you can support him? Maybe he has a way of communicating to progressives in a way that the Republicans won’t hear.

How plainly do you want him to spell out his negotiating bottom line so that the opposition has all the advantages?

Do you go into the car dealer saying, my absolute bottom line is to pay $20,000 for this car, but my first offer is $18.000? Do you think you are going to get the car for anything like $20,000 or less? When did you fall off the turnip truck?

In response to the author’s claim is that all he wants people to do is to tell the truth about the redistribution of wealth to the wealthy, I had this to say:

One style of motivation is to focus on what people do right and don’t make too big a deal of the things they do that do not live up to your expectations.

Apparently the other style of “motivation” is to find something to fault in whatever people do and never mention the things they do that you like.

In reality, there needs to be a balance. However, I favor a preponderance of the first style. Especially with people who I think can be or are motivated to do good.

So, sure, tell people what you want them to do – talk about the redistribution of wealth to the wealthy. However, castigating them for every thing that doesn’t quite go the way you want seems very counter-productive to me. Even worse is the attribution of evil motives to those people rather than considering that they may have a different tactical approach than you do.

That castigation and evil motive attribution kind of behavior might motivate you, but it doesn’t motivate me. In applying the golden rule, I try to treat others as I would have them treat me. I much prefer that tack until proven that something else needs to be tried. I don’t start off with the stick approach, which much on OpEdNews seems to do.

I am sure you have heard about all the upsets by the Republican Tea Party on the right in Tuesday’s primaries.

Those of you in Massachusetts probably also heard lots of news reports about the progressive win in New Hampshire.  What’s that, you heard not a peep?  What’s wrong with those left leaning media that are always shilling for the Democrats?  Did they let you down?

You can read some news and see a video interview on the PCCC web site.

WE DID IT! Bold progressive Ann McLane Kuster defeated Joe Lieberman’s presidential campaign co-chair Katrina Swett in Tuesday’s New Hampshire congressional primary. PCCC members made thousands of phone calls and chipped in nearly $100,000 toward her people-powered victory.

Perhaps some of my readers from New Hampshire can tell us more.

Since I live out in the red part of Massachusetts, I didn’t see anything in the local Worcester paper.  However, I do watch the Boston television stations, and I heard nothing.

There is a Boston Globe article Democrats pick Kuster in NH’s 2nd District.  Still there is not quite the enthusiasm about the national implications of a progressive winning the campaign.  If Kuster had been a Tea Party candidate, can you imagine the publicity?  Maybe it is just that the media cannot believe that people would actually vote for Tea Party candidates, so it  is news when they do.

“We report that the only exciting candidates are from the Tea Party, and we let you decide.  What could be more fair and balanced than that?”