A Most Evil Cut. By Eric Smith

Starting tomorrow the sequester is going to start causing severe cuts in food stamp programs across America which means that because of these damn Republicans people; men, women, and children. are going to go hungry. Yet if these same folks in turn resort to violence out of desperation due to seeing they and their families being denied needed food to eat because of tone deaf cold hearted Republican politicians, these same bastards who are starving these folks will get on their high horse and condemn them for resorting to violence because they are being forced to go without food. This is immoral, this is wrong, this is wicked, and it is evil!

Let me tell your something, if these folks do go off they will be more than justified because you don't go around starving people and then expect them to act within the law and remain peaceful. It doesn't work that way. Starting tomorrow we may very well see the beginning of food riots in this nation; the kind we used to see in Communist countries and in impoverished nations today and if it comes to something like that don't go blaming those starving fellow citizens of ours who are rioting; blame those who will really be responsible for this; those political parasites in the Republican Party who evilly believe that it is sound public policy to literally starve their fellow citizens for partisan gain!

At the Mountain Top. By Eric Smith

The fatal miscalculation now being made by Senator Ted "Lynch" Cruz and his fellow crazy racist reactionary Republican colleagues is that while they are primarily motivated by a racist hatred of African Americans in general and President Obama in particular, it will not just be we African Americans who rise up en mass to conquer them. For we live in a new time; a time where the American people as a whole celebrate and embrace diversity.

It is a time when in spite of all the terrible things that are happening before us, we really are entering a post racial era. I have no doubt; no doubt whatsoever, that there are many who are alive today, albeit very young, who will live to see a truly post racial United States; an America where racism is truly a thing of the past. Some will swear that I am naive at best and crazy at worst, to make such a prediction in light of all the virulent racist hatred now infecting so many parts of this land.

Yet a large part of this faith comes from the quality of the people that I know. It comes from my realization of their having planted the seeds not so much of tolerance but of acceptance without question of those who are different and that that message of acceptance will be passed down from one generation to the next; with each of these generations taking the place of a generation dominated by racial intolerance as it dies off.

That is how we have gotten this far and why I believe all claims that racism will infect us forever are false. I see that change coming and I feel it coming with every fiber of my being. We of this time and place are now standing where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the night of April 3rd, 1968. We are standing at the mountain top and through our growing collective embrace of diversity, we are peering over that Mountaintop and seeing before our very eyes the Promised Land. It matters not if you or I will ever get there. What matters is that you recognize that we as a people; we the American people will get there for we the people, we the American people have come too far to allow anyone to turn us around now.

A Line in the Stand. By Eric Smith

This is what Senator Ted "Lynch" Cruz and his fellow racist Republican crazies will really be up against if they seriously attempt to carry out their plan to return America to the dark days of slavery, segregation, and Judge Lynch. We in the African American community have absolutely nothing to lose and if necessary we will collectively stop at nothing to stop them!

"If We Must Die"

by Claude McKay

"If we must die—let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die—oh, let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
Oh, Kinsmen! We must meet the common foe;
Though far outnumbered, let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!"

Senator Ted "Lynch em' high!" Cruz. By Eric Smith

Today, during a Congressional Hearing on Stand Your Ground Laws, Senator Ted Cruz said to Trayvon Martin's mother that those who seek to change these laws "are exploiting and inflaming racial tensions." No, what is inflaming racial tensions is racist Teabagging firebrands like Ted Cruz who either turn a blind eye to or encourage his followers to wave the Confederate flag in front of the White House with an African American president & his family in residence! If there is a race war in these United States it will be triggered by the likes of Ted Cruz and his racist reactionary Republican Party colleagues who are collectively determined to return America to the dark days of slavery, segregation, and Judge Lynch!

The Real Culprits Behind Our National Debt. By Eric Smith

To those Conservative/Republican friends of mine (yes, I have a few) who say that we can't keep raising the debt ceiling because doing so only encourages us to keep spending money we don't have let me remind them that we only need to borrow money to pay our bills when we are running a deficit. On January 20th, 2001; the final day of Democratic President Bill Clinton's presidency, America did not have a deficit; it had a surplus. We did not need to borrow money to pay our bills because our government was bringing in more money than it was spending.

So what happened over the next eight years? Why Republican President George W. Bush, with the support & encouragement of those very Republicans in Congress who are now screaming about the dangers of deficits and deficit spending gave tax cuts to the wealthy and funded two wars and a prescription drug plan without raising taxes in order to meet the added expense of these three things. As a result our surplus disappeared, we again had a deficit, and Congress again had to go back to borrowing money in order to acquire the funds needed to pay the bills it wracked up.

Had it not been for the deficit spending of President Bush and the Republicans in Congress we would by this time have been so far ahead in terms of bringing in revenue that exceeded our expenses that we would no longer need to raise the debt ceiling today; in fact we wouldn't need the debt ceiling period because our nation's coffers would be growing exponentially by the day; providing more than enough money to fund Social Security & Medicare to infinity; rebuild our roads & infrastructure, build high speed rail, and eventually lower unemployment to the point where we could conceivably eradicate poverty itself, and reduce the number of economic classes in the United States to two; the wealthy and the middle class.

This is the sane fiscal path President Clinton and the Democrats in Congress set us on. It was a Republican President and Republicans in Congress alone who screwed this up. No one else bears any responsibility for the resulting economic calamity for it was of course the Republicans who held both the presidency and the House of Representatives in the first six years of the Bush Administration when these destructive economic policies took root. In fact, it was Republican Vice President Dick Cheney who said in 2004 that "deficits do not matter." Well of course he was wrong but as anyone who has ever worked with a budget will tell you; once you are in a deficit situation you must first momentarily increase that deficit and spend more money and spend that money wisely in order to eventually get out of it.

That's what President Clinton did in the 1990's when he reordered our national fiscal priorities in order to undo the damage done to our economy caused by exploding deficits under the Republican presidential administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. That's what President Obama has been doing since he took office in 2009 and as a result our national debt has been dropping at a faster rate than it ever has in our history and but for Republican obstructionism in Congress we may very well have been operating at a surplus already with no need to even worry about the debt ceiling because we'd be bringing in more than enough money to pay our bills like we were doing at the end of the Clinton Administration.

So to my Conservative/Republican friends who keep complaining about runaway spending & deficits, don't be pointing your fingers at this president and those of us on the Left because we didn't vote for the fiscal idiots who put this country in this fix; you did! This disaster was caused by one party and one party alone; the Republican Party and so if there is any blame to be had; if you really wish to know who is actually responsible for this, then all you have to do is point to that mirror. The person looking back at you will be the person who bears ultimate responsibility for our national debt and our need to raise the debt ceiling for it is the person looking back at you who voted for those people who turned a national deficit back into a deficit.

A Question of Human Rights. By Eric Smith

To put the current LGBT debate in proper perspective, a person who is born gay has no more idea as to what it is to love a person of the opposite sex than we heterosexuals have of what it is to love a person of the same sex. It just so just happens that for whatever rhyme or reason it is heterosexuals who have gotten to make the rules when comes to determining what is love and who should and who should not marry whom. That doesn't make the heterosexual way of doing things any better. It is just a different perspective, that's all.

People are entitled to be opposed to the gay lifestyle. They are entitled to feel that marriage should only be between a man and woman and to use their religious beliefs as a justification for having such a position. Yet that is where the thing stops for while we have the right to belief as we wish on these matters, we do not have the right to use our beliefs as a justification to impose them on others.

We as heterosexuals do not have the right to tell the LGBT community that their love is invalid, that they can't marry the person of their choice, and should be condemned for a lifestyle and world view that is no more their choice than the lifestyle and world views we have as heterosexuals for in the end we are not dealing with LGBT rights or heterosexual rights; we are dealing with human rights, period.

A case can be made that homosexual behavior is a matter of choice. Well the same can be said for heterosexual behavior as well. We can come up with any kind of argument to de-legitimize or denigrate any kind of lifestyle or life choices that we personally find offensive but that doesn't make us right.

Now some will compare the LGBT lifestyle to that of people marrying an animal, a man marrying a boy, and a woman marrying a little girl. This kind of reasoning, if you wish to call it that, is not only flat out wrong, it is pure garbage. Why, because the animal and the child have no choice in the thing. In these matters the acts of love & marriage are not matters of choice, but acts of force; they are imposed by the human/adult and that negates the whole idea of love & marriage itself for love & marriage is grounded on mutual respect, mutual consent, and an understanding of both the two adult parties involved.

Again such is not possible when one discusses love & marriage between a human being and an animal or an adult and a child for neither the animal nor the child understands the true meaning of love & marriage and therefore by lacking this understanding it is not possible for either to give their informed consent to the actions in question and that is why comparing LGBT love & marriage to this is so fundamentally wrong for in the case of LGBT love & marriage we are talking about actions taken by two consenting adults and therefore that makes their actions & justifications for their actions identical to those of us heterosexuals in every way save the gender of their partners.

So again it all comes down to simple human rights; the fundamental right of two consenting adults to love and marry the person of their choice. The respective gender of the couples involved is completely irrelevant and if we find the image of a man kissing a man or a woman kissing a woman personally offensive then fine; we have the right to turn away but we do not have the right to try to stop them; we have no right to stop them whatsoever regardless of our personal beliefs or convictions to the contrary since it is their lives in question are not ours and thus how they choose to live their lives & with whom is none of our business. Let me repeat, the LGBT community has the exact same right as we heterosexuals do to live their lives however they see fit and to love and marry the person of their choice. In the end it is as simple as that.

The True Nature of Conservatism. By Eric Smith

I am a Liberal because of social issues and by that I mean I support a social safety net and I am 100% opposed to discrimination and policies that lead to discriminatory results on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and economic class. If these five things were taken out of the equation I'd be a Conservative hands down because i have no problem with smaller government if by smaller government you mean a smaller government streamlined to eliminate waste.

I have no problem with trickle down economics so long as the wealth that does trickle down is sufficient to put out the fires of poverty and keep the middle class afloat. I have no problem with a strong military and the use of military force to protect our national interests so long as it is properly determined that these interests are at risk and a failure to protect them poses a clear and clear and present danger to the nation.

I believe that Conservatism when exercised in the true spirit of Conservatism is beneficial to us all but that is not and has sadly never been the case in this nation. Conservatism in theory is a system where everyone shares equally in the sacrifice to make a country more lean and fit. it is practiced however in a manner that is equivalent to an exercise instructor and/or dietitian pushing their charges to the point of exhaustive starvation while at the same indulging in and getting fat off those very donuts they say it is unhealthy for everyone else to have.

Conservatism as practiced is really a form of Soviet Communism when you get right down to it. They keep telling everyone to do without, to tighten their belts, to stop spending so much while like the leaders of the old Soviet politburos they indulge in the very luxuries such as government regulated health care paid for by the taxpayers that they swear is bad for everyone else. Take a look at these so called Conservative leaders who keep preaching the virtues of fiscal abstinence. Take a good look at the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Louis Gohmert, Donald Trump, Glenn Beck, Ted Cruz, and John Boehner and then ask yourselves when did these so called fiscal dietitians last miss a meal? When did they last not spend like a drunken sailor to indulge themselves in material goods they keep telling their fellow Americans to deny themselves; goods paid for in the form of taxes paid by those very Americans they keep urging to go on a fiscal diet?

These so called Conservatives are no different than those self indulgent pigs in George Orwell's "Animal Farm." These people are not Conservative; they are snout nosed moochers who grow ever more fat by feeding themselves at the public trough; denying sustenance to those they would rule while they get bloated over the spoils of public largess that they claim to be theirs and theirs alone.

To be a true Conservative, fiscal prudence does not equal social injustice. It does mean in leaving people behind, forcing people to fend for themselves, or those in need being forced to do without. True Conservatism does not mean scapegoating other people to advance partisan interests and nor does it mean seeking to rule by dividing Americans along the lines of race, gender, class, religion, economic status, and sexual orientation.

Yet most importantly true Conservatism does not believe in selfish self indulgence on the part of those who are privileged to lead for a privileged class is the antithesis of Conservatism in that a privileged class is one where you have leaders who tell the masses "to do what I say and ignore what I do."

A true Conservative believes that one should practice what one preaches rather than do what these so called Conservatives are doing today and that is to preach what they don't practice. So if Conservatism is to ever again be viable in this country it must become what it really is and stop being what it is now and has been for far too long; code for discrimination, intolerance, selfishness, and self indulgence.