by Glenn Littrell
Like the 1st time voters in 2008 that put Barrack Obama over the top and into the White House, the 2010 election saw the invigorated and equally uninformed stay at home voters of 2008 rally to install their reactionaries, AKA the Tea Party, into the Congress and State Legislatures across the country.
In both 2008 and 2010 the fired up electorate that was so bent on facilitating their own ideologue or agenda made the same mistake of going home after the election with the expectation that everything they wanted would happen, only to find that you have to stick around and monitor, encourage and demand that your expectations be met. 
Obama, with a popularly supported agenda of Health Care Reform, Immigration change, and bring our boys home mandate, was abandoned and left to flounder as right-wing conservatives (Republicans) and Blue Dog (moderate/conservative) Democrats entrenched themselves in a policy of ‘just say no…to everything” and earned the well deserved moniker of ‘'”the do-nothing Congress”
Ironically the Blue Dog Democrats have not been heard from since the 2010 General Elections.
When the 2010 Tea Party swept primaries, only to suffer defeats in the General Election, they still managed to obtain adequate numbers to affect the Republican agenda in Congress even if they couldn’t follow through on the floor of Congress. Their only real affect was to further glorify the politics of obstruction. The end result was the continuation of a dysfunctional Congress. Unfortunately the Tea Party made enough progress at the state levels to allow the loonies they elected to promote the Tea Party pro corporate, pro-big and interfering government at the state level and an unannounced love of social issues that were covert during the election.
By the time the 2012 election rolled around the Tea Party and extreme elements of the conservative right had managed to ‘rowdy-up’ some of the 1st time voters from 2008 and some even more dormant progressive voters to step-up in response to the radical agendas and battles that occurred at the state level.
The end result over the period from 2008 to 2014 is that the legislative bodies have done nothing on jobs or the economy outside of continuing tax breaks for the rich, corporations and further erosion of the working/middle class. Attacking teachers, unions, the poor, the recently unemployed, conducting unproductive Congressional investigations, trumped up deficit emergencies, equal pay for women,voter suppression and birth certificate infatuations have proven to be more important than getting people back to work, stabilizing our economy, or rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure.
With Congresses inability to pass any laws its hard to blame Obama for using Executive Orders.
So after Bush won without the popular vote and ran the economy into the ground by waging an unnecessary and unfunded second war…
after the Republicans fizzled in 2010…
and after the Republicans won in a 2014 General Election that only involved local and state offices, they claimed a National “Mandate’ from the voters in each election…
but, when Obama won decisive victories in 2008 and 2012 Republicans swore to stop, and subsequently obstructed, the issues that he campaigned on and was elected to do.
When Republicans spent 40 million dollars, and tied Congress up for 4 years just proving that a married man would lie about an affair, between two consenting adults, I didn’t think they could sink any lower. It was so bad I was almost relieved when Clintons term was over.
Surely it couldn’t get worse than that.
I was wrong.
The last 6 years have been worse. Besides the 40 million 4 year fiasco the only thing the Republicans accomplished without Clinton’s help was stopping Hilary’s Health Care Reform. This time around their nastiness has poisoned the political well so bad that more people are voting against candidates than are voting for candidates. As a bleeding-heart moderate I have for the first time in my life voted a straight party ballot.
So now we have two years for the Republicans to concentrate on fighting fights that will fail or result in stalemates, because they won’t concentrate on fights that they could win. Its imperative they win all or nothing so they can either take all the credit or give all the blame.
You see the next election, just like all the elections since 2006 (and then some), have grown to be more important than what's best for the country. It will be interesting to see whether polarizing tactics will inspire their constituency or their opposition to go to the polls in 2016. by Glenn Littrell
“…Between 1998 to 2005, GAO found that about 72 percent of large foreign controlled companies and 55 percent of large U.S. controlled companies reported zero tax liability for at least one year. About 57 percent of foreign controlled large companies and 42 percent of U.S. large companies paid no taxes in two or more years, and a third of the foreign companies and one quarter of their U.S. counterparts paid no taxes for at least four of those years. Just 45 percent of large U.S. companies and 28 percent of foreign companies reported a tax liability for each of the eight years. The report defined large companies as those with at least $250 million in assets, or at least $50 million in receipts…”
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