What used to be a pledge of allegiance to the United States has in more recent times become a pledge of allegiance by Republican politicians to just one dorky-looking guy named Grover Norquist and his infamous “no new taxes” platform.
Not to belittle the man, but who gives a rat’s ass about a pledge invented by some nobody fundraising type whose most important contribution to our democracy so far is laundering money for crooked lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Are we the people really going to get pushed off the fiscal cliff just because Republican politicians are afraid they can’t get reelected if they offend this guy? The answer is likely yes, because it isn’t Norquist that these spineless politicos fear.
Thanks to the research of Lee Fang, investigative reporter for The Nation, we now know who is behind the curtain of the all-powerful Wizard of Norquist. Surprise! It’s a handful of billionaires who personally benefit by avoiding paying the kind of high tax rates that their secretaries are subjected to.
Americans for Tax Reform, Norquist’s group, receives more than 60 percent of its total funding from just two groups: The Center to Protect Patients Rights, which gave more than $4 million to Norquist, and Crossroads GPS, which also contributed more than $4 million. The former is an organization the Koch brothers use to funnel money to their pet causes, and the latter is the group of uberwealthy donors run by Norquist’s evil political twin Karl Rove.
Translation: Our elected Republican representatives in Congress have pledged their allegiance to a few billionaires like the Koch brothers, Steve Bechtel of Bechtel Corporation and the Blackstone Group’s Steve Schwarzman, while pushing the rest of us off the cliff. Makes you wonder what they won’t sell.
LAWS WE SHOULDN’T NEED, BUT APPARENTLY DO
Did we used to have more common sense, or have we always been so ignorant as a species that we need really bizarre laws to protect us from ourselves?
For instance, it’s illegal in Maryland to take a lion into a theater. We actually need that law?
There’s a federal law that says you can be fined up to $1 million for committing genocide. Is that really an effective deterrent for the likes of Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot and George Armstrong Custer? Apparently this law came after the West was won? In California you can’t bathe two babies at the same time in the same tub. Does this mean that washing two babies in two separate tubs in two separate rooms is actually preferable?
And now comes Colorado’s entry into the weird laws category. The U.S. Forest service has just announced that it is no longer legal to do your recreational shooting at night in Lefthand Canyon or the Nederland dump. This new law assumes people have actually been shooting guns at night in our local forest and thought this was a good idea.
Look at the bright side, all you angry, former nighttime gun shooters, at least you can still take your lion to the movies in Boulder.
Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
