2011's BEST NEW WORD

kardashian (noun); a shameless ploy to promote the career or brand of a semi attractive but otherwise talentless near celebrity. Example: That new reality show is nothing but a kardashian.

THE CONGRESSMAN AND THE LOBBYIST: PLEDGED TOGETHER FOR THE UPPER 1%

I, Peter J. Roskam, pledge to the taxpayers of the 6th district of the state of Illinois and to the American people that I will: ONE, oppose any and all efforts to increase the marginal income tax rate for individuals and business; and TWO, oppose any net reduction or elimination of deductions and credits, unless matched dollar for dollar by further reducing tax rates.


Upon entering Congress in 2007, Congressman Roskam joined 237 other Congressmen, 236 of which are Republican, and 41 Senators, 40 of which are Republican, in signing conservative lobbyist Grover Norquist's Taxpayer Protection Pledge. It is more accurate to call this document "The Upper 1%'s Tax Protection Pledge" because it is solely focused on further redistribution of middle class wealth to the wealthiest Americans, to the detriment of the rest of society. While 26 million Americans seek full time work, 40 million Americans go without adequate health insurance, 45 million subsist on food stamps and 49 million fall into poverty, Norquist works tirelessly to shrink the social safety net to pay for endless tax relief so the most privileged can engorge their portfolios.

Amazingly, Speaker John Boehner, Roskam's boss in the GOP controlled House, has called Norquist, "some random individual" even though 55% of the House has pledged fealty to Norquist's infamous dictum: "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub".

Next November, the 700,000 residents of the 6th district will be selecting a Congressman for the 113th Congress. I know how 7,000 of them are likely to vote. I wonder what kind of pledge and what kind of Congressman the other 693,000 will be thinking about when they enter the voting booth.

ONLY IN WHERE?

My sleepy eyes tried to focus on the You Tube video of police dispassionately pepper spraying the faces of peaceful, non-violent demonstrators and figured I must have stumbled onto some Middle East dictatorship crazyness perpetrated against folks trying to exercise free speech and assembly; something we enjoy so fully here in the USA. Once the cobwebs cleared I realized this wasn't Ubeckybeckystan or some such place, but the University of California at Davis.

Memo to Unlce Sam: quit channeling the tyrants who we are supposed to be reforming. They have nothing to teach us except what not to do

IRAN IS WINNING - ADDITIONAL COMMENTARY ON TRIB EDITORIAL

Your November 12th editorial "Iran is winning" is particularly disturbing because it starts with a false premise and posits but two courses of action, both of which are not only doomed to failure, but likely to be self destructive.

The false premise is that Iran is building nuclear weapons, when in fact that is far from conclusive. Even if true, does it not dawn on the Trib editorial board that possible motivation for building nuclear weapons stems from the hundred or so Israeli nuclear weapons pointed at Iran; and that the US, with Trib backing, tends to only invade perceived unfriendly nations that don't have nuclear weapons? Check out our last three major interventions, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, and the pass given to North Korea, as evidence.

The two courses of action considered, military war on the Iranian government or economic war designed to collapse the Central Bank or Iran, should both be off the table instead of the only morsels on the Trib's menu.

The essence of your editorial was that collapsing the Central Bank of Iran is the only way to prevent Israel, with tacit US support, from launching a military strike against Iran. By so doing you pretend to take the high ground as the adults working furiously to avoid a self destructive shooting war.

But nowhere in your editorial to do consider that even cooler heads than yours have described collapsing the Iran's Central Bank the "nuclear option" because it could push an already teetering global economy over the edge while inflicting massive human suffering in Iran. While Senators like Mark Kirk and most of the GOP presidential field promote this idea, the real adults residing in the Obama Administration have pushed back arguing "such sanctions could disrupt oil markets and further damage US and world and world economies".

You would do well to consult with University of Chicago political scientist and founder of the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism, Robert Pape, who offered the following against such sanctions at a recent congressional briefing:

"Imagine, if....the Iranians were..able to create a banking crisis in the US that made it impossible to cash our checks...I don't think it would make
us do what the Iranians wanted."

Professor Pape has extensively studied modern-day sanctions and found that they failed to achieve their objectives over 95% of the time since World War 1, and they are THREE TIMES more likely to end in a shooting war than in success.

Is the Trib editorial board aware that the Central Bank of Iran regulates Iranian currency, just as our Federal Reserve regulates the US dollar. Since central banks are accorded sovereign immunity, it can be argued that sanctioning the Central Bank of Iran violates international law and some Iranian officials have already stated that such sanctions on their Central Bank would be considered an act of war.

After sixty years of reading the Trib, going back to when Col. McCormick was still recovering from "Dewey Defeats Truman" and plotting to abolish the New Deal in his Wheaton lair just a short hike from where I write this, I will not give up encouraging the Trib editorial board to refrain from ginning up the next war, military or economic. But time is running out folks...so get with it.