Elitism is the belief or attitude that those individuals who are considered members of the elite—a select group of people with outstanding personal abilities, intellect, wealth, specialized training or experience, or other distinctive attributes—are those whose views on a matter are to be taken the most seriously or carry the most weight or those who view their own views as so; whose views and/or actions are most likely to be constructive to society as a whole; or whose extraordinary skills, abilities or wisdom render them especially fit to govern.

^{If you watch Fox News, you know elitism is a bad thing.  I’ve heard this a lot in my personal life too.  Strangely the “accuser” always knows that I’m in an MBA program – and almost always has little or no post secondary education themselves.  I normally attempt to explain my “elitist” opinions through logical choices that any person should be able to deduce.  However, after seeing the “town hall reactions” on the news recently in response to the “failure” of the cash for clunkers program, I want to go in a different direction for a minute.}

^{Who do you want to fly your plane on your next trip?  Someone with specialized training, or Bob, the UPS delivery man?  What?  You want someone capable of landing a plane in the Hudson River without killing anyone?} 

^{Then you’re an elitist.} 

^{Apparently we DON’T want people with outstanding personal abilities, intellect, specialized training or experience, etc. running our country.  How ridiculous.  The founding fathers weren’t a bunch of stable-hands, they were well educated, experienced men.  In other words – the Elite at the time.}

^{That is why it pains me so much to see Fox News’ latest attacks.  This time covering the (insurance company paid) citizens heckling politicians at town hall meetings.  It also pains me (recarding the CARS program) that the democrats (and all the republicans who supported this program and are now curiously quiet) don’t bother to defend themselves with some simple common sense and economics.}

^{In a recession you need to stimulate the economy.  In a recession is when you want to (if necessary) expand the supply of money and raise the deficit in order to push cash into the hands of citizens.   We know this for a few reasons, but the most obvious is that we did exactly opposite that (what apparently the Republicans want now) in the 30s and guess what happened… it was called the Great Depression.}

^{So – to review – we needed stimulus (and an unfortunate byproduct is raising the deficit), so stop protesting about that.}

^{Step two – the stimulus needs to get out into the economy as fast as possible.  Although a little bit has been spent, the majority of the stimulus we’ve still not seen.  One of the programs the current administration pushed through to get cash out there quickly was a rebate for new car buying (if the cars are more environmentally friendly).  Based on estimates (predicting the future is hard, just ask New York on September 10th) the government put aside what they thought would be enough funding to last for 90 days.}

^{The response was so overwhelming that the money was gone in one week.}

^{Let me put that to you again.  The government moved 1 billion dollars into the economy in one week.} 

^{Not only that, but the news today is that the domestic auto manufacturers (a misnomer since toyota and honda both manufacture their vehicles here) got more of that money than foreign auto companies.}

^{So, to recap, the Obama administration oversaw a program that moved one billion dollars into the economy AND benefited the US automakers.  What do conservatives (except those who were originally on-board for this program in the first place) want?   If running out of money you wanted to give away quickly is a failure I suppose they wanted it to last for 90 days or more.  In which case they’d most likely complain that the program didn’t work well and “nobody took advantage of this program because of the mismanagement.”  In short, if a real success = bad, then failure = good.  The republican soothsayers WANT Obama to fail.} 

^{That point should be obvious by now.  The republicans NEED Obama’sstrategies to fail in order to have a viable presidential candidate in 2012.  The only problem with that is that if Obama “fails,” we’re all hurting.  And the republicans wonder why their approval rating is so incredibly low.} 

^{Try telling Joe who got laid off at the Ford plant to vote for your candidate after telling him that Ford making money (and not laying Joe off) from cash for clunkers is a terrible thing.  This even goes against the conservative classical model of trickle down economics, so they can’t even follow their own rules.}

^{Basically the government is subsidizing car sales at the moment.  Car sales go up, car manufacturing goes up and jobs in that industry are added (or at least kept).  This is all short run of course, but the hope is that the effects multiply over time.}

^{Republican mouthpieces went on a rampage last weekend and early this week asking “why not a cash for chickens program?” The irony is astounding.  A stimulus is an influx of cash.  You could have went out and bought $700 worthof CHICKEN if you wanted to with your check from the Bush Administration two years ago.  It is the SAME THING, except …. Obama did it smarter.  A direct check to the public only puts money in savings, in fact, when all was said and done we were told the only industry that really benefited greatly from those checks was the porn industry!  The rest went into savings accounts (you know mine did).  Economists know this saving is good for individuals, but not for the economy.  That money has to be spent to generate jobs.  Obama’s plan put money into the economy immediately – not savings accounts.  And at the same time he made good on a campaign promise to do more (at least than Bush) to protect the environment.}

^{The thing is – Obama knows these little tid bits of economics.  I don’t know if Nancy P knows it, or if she’s just towing the party line.  Regardless, the public by and large doesn’t know these things at all.  You’d better believe that the higher-ups in the republican party know these things as well (except for morons like Joe Barton who doesn’t even “believe” in plate tectonics), but are counting on the furthering of public ignorance to forward their political careers (god knows you’d never get Moose and his drinkin’ pals to reelect you if you admitted Obama did something good for the country).}

^{This leads to another little gripe I have with conservatives.  Why did you reelect a president that failed to protect you against the largest terrorist attack in the United States …. ever?  When I watched the clips every night in 2004 I was amazed every time that the Bushiteswere able to turn the biggest failure of national security ever ON THEIR WATCH into a selling point.  Let’s look at it this way:  You’re going out of town for a month.  You need someone to watch your house.  You have a choice of two neighbors, Mr. Kerry and Mr. Bush.  Four years ago you gave Mr. Bush your keys and you came back to a burnt down house.   Which neighbor are you going to give the keys to today?  We learn from mistakes what we need to improve upon.  We learn from absolute and total failures what we can’t do (and should refocus on something else).  I don’t know how 9/11 was not a complete and total failure of national security.  In fact the only way Bush can defend his ability to defend the country is if he admits he let it happen and was “in control” the whole time.  But that is a whole other road we won’t walk down today.}

^{I don’t suppose if Obama took us into another great depression he could come out and say “look, you need me to protect you from another depression.”  The irony gets even greater as the conservatives try to blame Obama now for the recession (that is starting to flatten out), as if our memories are really THAT SHORT and everything was just peachy before November 4th 2008.}

^{Just to review – in case you HAVE had your memory erased – the failure of Lehman Brothers is acknowledged as the collapse that led to banks pulling back funding (business loans) – and that was what immediately precipitated the giant downfall in the economy.  Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy in September of 2008.  Who was picking their nose in the oval office back then?} 

^{“oh, but it’s Clinton’s fault for forcing Fan/Fred to make those loans”  If you sign up for something you can’t afford it usually doesn’t take ten years for you to finally default.   The “bad loans” that Fan/Fred were forced to give out in the 90s had ten solid years (or more) of mortgage payments.  During those years the Fed increased the interest rates – thus pushing up the payments on those flexible rate loans… why was it that they didn’t default until now?  (because they didn’t, the bad loans that were traded were more recent loans that were made during the Bush administration when lending requirements loosened up)In fact, in the mid 90s the interest rates were the highest they’ve ever been.  Bush also had eight years to fix the Fan/Fred problem if it existed.  Couldn’t that have been part of his “mandate” after winning reelection?  Curious how less than 3 million votes was a “mandate” in 2004, but 10 million in 2008 is a “hey half the country (actually 45%) didn’t vote for you, asshole!” that should make the President sensitive to conservative views.  If 3 million voters makes a mandate, then surely 10 million is fulfilling divine prophecy and Obama shouldn’t answer to anyone.  But this is where the short memory of the public comes in handy (“what mandate?  we never said that! You liberals are so partisan!”)} 

^{The worst thing about all of this is that I’m now seen as some sort of de facto Democrat.  I didn’t vote for Obama (or McCain) and I’m registered as independent.  Yet I find myself having to “stick up” for the liberals (which is infuriating, that they don’t do it for themselves) all the time; not to support their own views, but simply point out the complete lunacy of what has become of the Republican party.  A great example are the Republican politicians trying to convince Americans that the new healthcare plan/s will “force the killing of the elderly” when in fact the very part that they’re paraphrasing details “end of life services” intended to help elderly organize wills/power of attorney/etc.  that they would otherwise be on their own to figure out.  Oh, and that is completely ignoring the CURRENT insurance company practice of rescission.  Google it.  Other propaganda campaigns (this one is used by churches a lot) give examples like “government marriage counseling services” in the plan to say that the government will “control your marriage.”  Right.  With a divorce rate over 50% the last thing we need is more marriage counseling!}

^{And if you think I’m making this up (because it sounds made up to a rational person, doesn’t it???), here is just one of the things that has been sent to me or posted by my “red” friends in recent days.  I haven’t even got to the best part – most of these bulletins compare Obama to Hitler?  I mean the point is already made for them, why compare Obama to Hitler.  We already saw the genocide that Churchill unleashed after the NHS was introduced, right? Universal health care always leads to mass murder, just like in France, England, Canada, Japan, Finland, Netherlands (remember the Van Tienhoven massacres?), Australia, etc.}

^{UPDATE: the link there now goes to a “part II” (apparently part I has been erased from existance) explaining that they “overstated” some things in the original bulletin (part I) and didn’t “get the chance to properly research.”  Curiously EVERY SINGLE descriptive interpretation of the lines of the bill (and they did A LOT of them) in the original article have been removed… every one.  Meaning EVERY ONE was ridiculously overstated to foster fear mongering.  If only Fox News would make retractions like that…}

^{UPDATE #2: The conservative talking points by August 5th (after having John Bolton explain how we should have left those two American citizens in NK there to rot)had shifted to complaining about “who was going to pay” for inserting another 2 billion dollars into the clunker program, implying a stimulus totalling 3 billion dollars would do terrible things to our future.  Remember that guy talking about how we might as well have a cash for chickens program?  Well, that sounds eerily like the 190 billion dollar farm stimulus that Bush passed in 2002… doesn’t it?  Even more ironically we can use Bush’s words himself to fight back the dissenters at town-hall meetings (complainging about how the bill isn’t perfect):}

^{“It’s not a perfect bill, I know that. But you know, no bill ever is,” Bush said with a chuckle. “There’s no such thing as a perfect bill. Or otherwise, I’d get to write every one of them.”}

^{Hey Everybody, I heard that Rick Joyner is a child molester!} 

(Note: I didn’t have time to research that before going to press)