The Big Man Has Left The Band

**Clarence Clemons, the fab sax player for the E-Street band, had a stroke at his Florida home and his family says it's serious. Big Man get well.

**Harry Camping, the man who predicted the end of the earth and Rapture, also had a stroke at the age of 89. I guess he couldn't wait until October.

**Yes, Gabby Giffords looks great but the Arizona Republic did a piece on how hard her recovery from getting shot point-blank in the head has been. It's looking doubtful that she will be able to take her seat in the House again.

**Poor Bob Dole, no one has told him yet about the nature of his Republican Party. He suggests General Petraeus should run in 2012. He says it's time for another Eisenhower. Petraeus can't run because he believes in contraception and evolution. Besides, the last remaining Eisenhower Republican is Col. Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff.

**It's not looking so good for General Petraeus anyway. It seems of the 4,000 Taliban militants he claims to have captured during the surge in Afghanistan,80% of them were apolitical civilians.

**The auditors report is in. Over $6.6 billion in aid to Iraq is unaccounted for and is believed to have been robbed. This would make it the largest robbery in history--outside of our banks and Wall Street.

**Herman Cain claims that Obama was raised in Kenya. As the President wrote in his memoirs, it took him years to finally get to Kenya.

**Rick Perry, the new potential presidential candidate, blasted President Obama over the issue of abortion,claiming the President was making it an export product of the United States. Perry will be hosting one of the few Christian--only prayer meetings in Texas with the American Family Association.

**A new CNN poll has Romney at 24% and Palin at 20% for GOP favorites.

**For four decades, the great state of Maine has been the leader in the country on same-day voting. The teabag controlled legislature just repealed that law because "democrats have a habit of stealing elections." Missouri has just passed a law that new voters have to register one year before an election to qualify. There are about a dozen other states that are trying to curtail voting rights. In my opinion, this is the most serious threat to Obama's re-election. Republican controlled legislatures around the country are concentrating on suppressing the votes of minorities,students and single mothers. This is a slow-motion process of disenfranchisement and is the most serious development in violating voting rights since the 1965 law.

**Tonight is another Republican debate in New Hampshire. This one will include Romney, Gingrich and Bachmann. I'm taking a by. I've read too much of the Republican so-called plans for the economy I want to scream. If you want to follow analyses of how bad they are, read Ezra Klein, Paul Krugman,Steve Benen and Think Progress. I don't have the stomach for it anymore. The bottom line is that all the Republican programs to date are simply rehashes of their economic plans prior to Hebert Hoover. I may have to start defending Herbert Hoover, who had a small stimulus package.

**The trouble I see is that no one in our media will ask any of the Republicans to explain the empirical results of the last ten years, which show that massive tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations only impoverished the middle class and didn't create jobs. Instead, we hear Obama inherited a bad economy and made it worse--as if House Republicans with their preoccupation with the war against the uteri porposed anything concrete.

**How far can Romney go with his new "I'm not a bump" ads and his ads with him driving around Detroit and implying its ruins are the result of Barack Obama? Or Tbag Pawlenty with his ads on his nutty plan with GE's Jack Welch saying, "Pawlenty makes alot of sense?" And when are real Christians going to attack Michelle Bachmann, the Christianist candidate, for her program to drop corporate taxes to 9% and increase taxes on the poor and middle class? I guess her Jesus has absolutely nothing to do with social justice, even at a rudimentary level.

**The Republicans are banking on their media machine to create a state of amnesia. And I don't underestimate them. They are already recycling Obama is weak on national security only weeks after he got bin Laden. So by the time of the general election, they will persuade Americans that 2008's global meltdown didn't happen, corporations are hoarding trillions of dollars because they are uncertain about regulation and taxation, and even CEOs deserve their pay because they are the "producers". I hail progressive bloggers who are creating a firewall of reality-based analysis to counter all this but they are like King Canute shouting at the sea.

**Another question I want MSM to ask the Republican contenders,"What are some of the public sector activities they support?" All of them worship the private. Or they should ask how they feel about Abraham Lincoln favoring Labor over Capitol.

**Robert Kennedy, Jr. just ended his march with the unions to protest mountain top removal mining in West Virginia. He has finished a new documentary on how Appalachia has been devastated by this practice and how the area has become polluted. Is he going to protest mining near the Grand Canyon next? I think he's found a boom market.

** David Koch just quit the National Institute for Health because he finally lost his multi-year campaign to keep formaldehyde off the list of carcingens. His company Georgia-Pacific uses it in treating their wood products.

**Speaking of which, Charles and David Koch are hosting another one of their get-togethers of conservative billionaires to discuss how the United States is being facing the greatest threat to its freedom by our government trying to regulate the economy. Maybe they should look in the mirror for real threats. The purpose of this gathering is to raise millions upon millions to seize control of the government and oust President Obama. Charles will start off the two day seminar with a lecture all his own. The meeting raises the profound,philosophical question, "Why do terrorists always get their targets wrong?"

**The new and improved John Birch Society printed a lengthy article in the New American praising Daddy Fred Koch for his pioneering role in alerting America to the dangers of Communists infiltrating our society and government and hailing his stalwart sons.

**As we enter debt ceiling season, let us remember that FDR bought into the pressure by the GOP to cut government expenditures in 1938. That turned out really great.

** While Steve Benen has dissected Romney's failure to create jobs in his life over at the Washington Monthly, Stephen Colbert did this with comic genius in a segment of "the Word" on the Colbert Report.