* After the devastation of Hurricane Irene, Republican leader, Eric Cantor, Koch Brothers friend, said the following--- Fredericksburg.com:
....Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Henrico, has said he believes federal aid should be offset by spending cuts in other areas. Cantor repeated those comments today on national television....
A government exists to protect and help the people. Eric Cantor is wrong in trying to balance out the budget by taking from one group of people to give to another. I think that Cantor is too easily influenced by the Koch Brothers.
I also find the response by Republican Rep. Ron Paul unsatisfactory.
Think Progress:
Ron Paul On Hurricane Irene: Response Should Be Like It Was In 1900 | Taking his anti-government ideology to its logical extreme, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) told NBC News’ Jo Ling Kent today that there should be no national response to Hurricane Irene, and that government responses should revert back to how they were over 100 years ago. “We should be like 1900, we should be like 1940 1950 1960,” he said. “I live on the gulf coast, we deal with hurricanes all the time.” Of course, the Gulf Coast sometimes deals with them less well thanks to a botched national response. Paul, who has called for abolishing FEMA, dismissed the organization because it is “a great contribution to deficit financing.”
If Ron Paul wants to return to the way things were 50 to over 100 years ago, I think he should be able to live that way. If he wants to go live in the jungle/woods somewhere in a cabin, without running water, electricity, toilets, telephones, the internet, automobiles, and modern medicine, he should be able to make that choice for himself. However, his admiration for the "olden days" is not shared by a majority of Americans. Americans want our government to respond to emergencies and disasters. We want our government there to help us, provide services, and safety.
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Politico had a very interesting article today: Is Rick Perry Dumb?
Here are some excerpts from the Politico piece:
....Strip away the euphemisms and Rick Perry is confronting an unavoidable question: Is he dumb — or just “misunderestimated?”
Doubts about Perry’s intellect have hounded him since he was first elected as a state legislator nearly three decades ago. In Austin, he’s been derided as a right-place, right-time pol who looks the part but isn’t so deep — “Gov. Goodhair.” Now, with the chatter picking back up among his enemies and taking flight in elite Republican circles, the rap threatens to follow him to the national stage.
Whoa!
Gov. Perry keeps talking about his jobs program, but according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Texas has an unemployment rate of 8.4%. That is dismal. (Ohio's unemployment rate is 9% under the guidance of John Kasich.)
The MeasureofAmerica (data provided by the American Human Development Project of the Social Science Research Council) has this statistic about Texas:
20.4% of Texans have less than a high school diploma.
