No New Ideas in the GOP?

The Dallas Morning News reports in its Sunday Edition that Texas Republican representatives Jeb Hensarling wants to become the next chairman of the powerful House Financial Service Committee. And in such a role, Hensarling wants to roll back the regulations placed on financial institutions under the Obama administration. (Passed, by the way, by the way by a bi-partisan congress and Senate.)

So we’ve got Romney and Ryan wanting to go back to Trickle Down, which has never worked, and now a Republican Representative wanting to deregulate the banking system– the very people who got us in this financial mess to begin with (with the help of Two Wars and no way to pay for them…) It seems the only ideas that the Republican Party can come up with are backward facing ideas. Ideas that are intellectually and fiscally bankrupt.

So, if you thought this election is not important, think again. 

The GOP wants to line the pockets of its rich friends and contributors and leave the rest of America to fend for itself. I don’t know about you, but I trust the small businesses along main Street a heck of a lot more than the Goldman Sucks on Wall Street. And for a fellow Texan, who claims to represent us, say he wants to tear down the safety net we’ve put in place to protect us from the greed monsters of the big board, is ridiculous. He does not represent the smart thinking middle class of Texas anymore than Romney (the one that is on this side of the most recent flip flop) represents America’s working class citizens.

The GOP is out of touch, and apparently out of ideas.

A Jew, a Christian and a Muslim walk into a blog...

A friend posted this the other day. I approve and pass it along.  A Jewish idiot makes a film that a Christian idiot posts on You Tube that upsets the Muslim idiots and now we have this mess.  It is time we get rid of religions. 

They foster idiots.

Correction:

Yesterday I wrote a blog about Michael Ennis’ new novel, The Malice of Fortune a Doubleday release.

I made a mistake.

Here is what I wrote on Tuesday: Ennis’ book is a mystery set in 16^th Century Italy with non other than Michelangelo and Machiavelli turning into sleuths to solve the caper. I’ll let you buy the book and figure the rest out. But there is more to Ennis’ story that should captivate us.

It should have said: Ennis’ book is a mystery set in 16^th Century Italy with non other than Da Vinci and Machiavelli turning into sleuths to solve the caper. I’ll let you buy the book and figure the rest out. But there is more to Ennis’ story that should captivate us.

My bad, but I wanted to make the correction so you know you can generally trust this blog.   

Like when I say Republicans’ policies are out to lunch – well you can take that to the bank.  It is fact, not just hyperbole opinion. And that Romney and Ryan don’t have a clue about what they are talking about when it comes to the balancing the budget with regards to reinstating Trickle Down economics, you can take that to the bank, too. Trickle Down has not worked for three Presidents. It will not work for Romney. That means it is going to cost you in the short run and in the long haul. Trickle Down is a bankrupt intellectual exercise.

So you see that it is good that I corrected the article on a new book coming out by Dallas author, Michael Ennis.  By giving you a correction, you know I am watching the details. And that is good to know, if only the Republicans had some details.

By the way, Ennis’ book is wonderful. Buy it. Read it. It has more facts in it than anything that came out of Tampa. Promise.

Check out my new website at www.johncrawleybooks.com

Book It, Danno.

Today we celebrate a fellow Dallasite (is that what we are called?) for a truly amazing breakthrough in the literary world. I am talking about Michael Ennis and his new novel The Malice of Fortune a Doubleday release.

Ennis has a book signing and reading this evening at the Barnes and Noble across Northwest Highway from North Park Shopping mall. He has already been featured in the Dallas Morning News and will soon have an interview on All Things Considered on NPR with Lynn Neary. This is huge for the hundreds of North Texas writers who sit behind a typewriter everyday grinding out their due diligence. One of us has made it BIG.

Ennis’ book is a mystery set in 16^th Century Italy with non other than Michelangelo and Machiavelli turning into sleuths to solve the caper. I’ll let you buy the book and figure the rest out. But there is more to Ennis’ story that should captivate us.

I found it interesting as a former self-published author, that Ennis and his agent turned to self publishing to get the big publishing houses interested in his work. He had quite the creative strategy. It seems that Ennis had about 50 hardbound copies printed and sent to booksellers around the U.S. He got responses from over 20 of them, which he used as proof to the New York publishing houses that they were missing the boat in not taking a hard look at The Malice of Fortune. He landed a deal in three days with this effort. Three days! (Notice I used an exclamation point. I never use an exclamation point. Never!!!)

Now this is not to say that every writer reading this blog go out and inundate the booksellers of America with your self-printed, bound masterpieces. But it does show that a bit of ingenuity in marketing is sometimes required these days to awaken the sleeping giants in Manhattan– to get them to open their eyes to new writers with new works, many of which are breathtakingly wonderful, such as Ennis and his Renaissance mystery.

I salute Michael Ennis in his success of breaking into the BIG time.  I salute him on producing what many believe will be a best-seller on all charts. I salute him for the creativity of researching and placing a story in such a rich historical period. I cross my fingers for him that Hollywood will discover his story, too. But what I truly applaud him for, is the sheer tenacity in marketing a great idea.

Hats off to you Mr. Ennis. You inspire all of us who toil with the verb and adverb, the gerund and the pronoun. You have done us well.

Check out my new web site at www.johncrawleybooks.com

The devil is in the details

This is short but sweet today. Both parties, both candidates are woefully short on details about how thier pans will work and what they will actually do to the debt reduction.

Come on Obama...come on Mitt... let's have real deatils for the people to examine and see what it is you are proposing.

Let us have details spelled out in open letters on or about October 1st, so the electorate can see your plan, evaluate it and decide it they agree with it or not. Do not cut corners. We want the real skinny on what you are planning to do for us and to us.

We are tired to the name-calling, finger-pointing and junior-high level of campaigning.  Give us facts. Both sides give us facts.

Check out my new website at www.johncrawleybooks.com

Pay the Piper

 If you are like me, you do not like paying income tax. I don’t like to pay sales tax, either. Or highway tax on gasoline or any of the other taxes we have to fork over on a daily and annual basis in our lives.

But we are going broke in the U.S. We have a debt that is eating up a huge chunk of our national budget, and sooner or later we are going to have to dance with the devil that brung us. 

We are going to have to pay it off.

And the best way in which to raise revenues in a country is to raise taxes.  I do not like it; I will scream and complain with the best of you, but it has to be done. Let me give you a simple example of how this works.

Let say you make $60,000 a year net. (That’s after taxes.) That means you bring home $12,000 a month or roughly $3,000 a week.  And you are spending all of it. Putting nothing aside for a rainy day.

Now lets say you have a credit card that has maxed out at $75,000.  Don’t know how you got into that kind of debt – don’t care. But you owe it.  And the interest rate on it is causing you to pay bills of $1,300 a month. But that is just the interest. You haven’t paid down the bill at all.  It is still $75,000 at the start of the next month. Now lets add your mortgage and your car note and your Macy’s credit card to all of that and you are paying about $7,500 a month just in interest. See the problem? You are swimming up stream.

Suddenly you have an emergency medical procedure and now you owe an additional $25,000. You are now going backwards.  That is what happened when we had our economic meltdown in 2008-2009. Suddenly any breathing room we had as a nation just went away.

We got no more money, honey.

Now in the real world you’d get a second job. Your wife and kids would get work. You would try and make as much money as you could to pay off the debts.

America has to do the same thing. We have to get more people back to work. And we have to raise revenues from those workers and pay off our huge national debt. We’re not going to do it all in one or two years either. It stands at $16 trillion right now. The President says his plan can lower it by $4 trillion in ten years. That means a decade from now we will only owe $12 trillion – and that’s if we don’t go into another war somewhere around the globe.

So here is what all this means. President Obama or President Romney – doesn’t matter which – he is going to have to raise taxes. On the rich. On the middle class. Even on the poor.  Corporations are going to have to pay more.  Loopholes are going to have to close and we are going to have to slash government programs we all enjoy.

I love NPR.  But it might be better to let is become totally public supported and not have any tax money going to it; that money should go to deficit reduction. National endowment for the arts. The Pentagon, the Medicare/Medicaid plans. Farm subsidies. Depletion allowances for the oil and gas industry and many more things we love, like and cherish are all going to have to have their belts tightened. And tightened a lot.

Sorry. That’s the way it is.

If your family owes all that much money and you are trying to pay it off, you can’t go to the movie every night. You have to eat at home and not dine out all the time. You might have to buy used cars instead of a new one.  It is called being smart with your money and doing what is right.

Paying off the debt is right.

But there is a right and fair way to do that.  And asking the upper 1 to 2% to carry more of the load than they are carrying, to request that corporations using the infrastructure of America all pay up a little more, there is nothing wrong with that.  And don’t be surprised if Congress and the President (whichever one is in the White House) asks you in the middle class to pony up some more, too.

I hate to start your weekend on such a downer, but let’s get real. We owe $16 Trillion dollars. We all ran up that number together. We’re all going to have to pay it down together, as well.

Did I mention I hated paying taxes.  But I know I’ve got to.

Visit my new website at www.johncrawleybooks.com

The proof is in the pudding, Mitt.

So, almost as soon as Bill Clinton got through speaking to the DNC the other night in North Carolina, a friend wrote me and said, “More of the same old Democratic lies.”  Forget that fact check bore out the former President’s claims.  Forget that he has been there in the oval office facing the pressures just like President Obama has. Forget that he pointed out the Republican math just doesn’t add up.

Forget all of that; just show me what the other side plans to do. Real plans not stump speeches. Give me the facts and I WILL LISTEN. I PROMISE.

So I asked my buddy, what’s Romney’s plan on tax cuts?  Who gets them how will they work? And what are the revenue consequences to the Federal Treasury with these massive cuts?

He didn’t know.

The loopholes he wants to close to tighten the federal budget to make up the difference in lost revenue from the tax cuts; what are they? 

He didn’t know.

Why?

Because the Republicans haven’t discussed them. Their answer is, “See us after the elections.”

The huge increase in military spending, where are the revenues going to come from, Mr. Romney? 

See me after the elections.

The roll back of Medicare and Medicaid insurances without losing any benefits; how are you going to do it?

See me after the elections.

How are you going to put 23 million Americans to work while downgrading infrastructure investments in roads, bridges, cities, transportation, schools and scientific research? What about education and retooling the American worker for the new jobs of the 21^st Century? What is your jobs plan? How will you put America back to work?

See me after the elections.

How are you going to get the middle class to carry more of the weight of the increasing debt load while the upper 2% get a huge break?

See me after the elections.

You say you want to dismantle Obamacare (a plan you instituted in Massachusetts, in case you had forgotten, Mitt.) You say you are going to repeal it. And replace it with what?  It has already saved American businesses and individuals billions in cost savings and direct cash back from insurance companies. Billions.  And what will you do to replace this groundbreaking, free enterprise system?

See me after the elections.

Well, here’s some bad news for you, Mr. Romney. We want answers now.

I am on your soon-to-be board of directors. I’m a stockholder in this corporation you call America. I want answers before I turn your loose in the boardroom at the White House. American deserves to know what you are really going to do and how you going to do it before we give you the most important job in the free world.

You see, I don’t trust you.  A lot of us don’t trust you. We think you are an empty suit.

Oh, you’re a good guy and all. We just don’t think you have a clue as to what you are going to do.  You want to return us to Trickle Down economics. Well get this, Governor – it hasn’t worked. It is a bankrupt idea. You know all about bankruptcies, don’t you, Mitt.  You’ve taken a ton of businesses down and cost America thousands of jobs in the name of putting profits in your pockets, during forced bankruptcies. Heck, Bain Partners made an art form out of this act.

But hear me when I say, you can’t do that as President. You have to represent ALL the people. You have to look out for the children and the elderly and the unemployed. It comes with the office.  You don’t just get to govern your buddies at the yacht club.

So, I’d like to have some answers before November 6^th.

I’d like to know how you are going to do things. The competition has laid out a detailed plan as to how they are going to steer us back on course. So what is yours?

I know, your friends on the far right in Congress will do everything in their power to disrupt the President and his policies of trying to get us to turn the ship of state around. They have even said they don’t care about putting Americans back to work as long as the can get Obama out of his current job. That’s real mature, now isn’t it, Mitt? But even with that interference, President Obama has a string of major success for America and its middle class.  I mean members of your party even voted against six job bills that would have put millions of Americans back to work and would have done it now.  Not after November 6^th.

So you see, there are a lot of us who question you and your party’s ideas about restoring America to its greatness. We’re waiting to hear some details. We want to know where all this extra income is going to be coming from and where it will go to buy down our huge national debt. We want to know what you are going to be spending all that hard-earned money in the military build-up on. The Pentagon has even said that they don’t need it. But you must think they do. Or is it more pork barrel chits for your buddies in Congress to spread around to their districts? Is that It, Mitt?  Is all this about gland handing the American people and giving us the old wink and nod while you go and grease the palms of your friends?

That is so old school, governor. So very old school. We need modern, new thinking. Not backward thinking.

We need some concrete facts, sir. Not any more of your Right-wing sound bite rhetoric. We had enough of that from W and Chaney and Rove. And even though your speeches have avoided mentioning them, theirs were the same policies that got us into this mess to begin with – the same ones you advocate today. (Is that why they were not invited to the convention?) As a good business man you should know that if a plan has failed three times, it is high time to move on to something new and different. Or do you want us to fail? Do you want to take America itself into bankruptcy?  What’s in it for you, Mitt?

I’m afraid you’ve flipped flopped so many times; we don’t know what to believe from you, Mitt. So, show us your plan.  Let us see if you have an idea with real substance backing it.

If not, then I am afraid your fifteen minutes of fame are over.

Check out my new website at www.johncrawleybooks.com