Please join us as we wish our friend Lydia Cornell a Happy Birthday! Please give Lydia your birthday greetings, and then please read Lydia's amazing article following this birthday greeting titled "When The Peasants Revolt.
Instead of counting candles,
Or tallying the years,
Contemplate your blessings,
As your birthday nears.
Consider special people
Who love you, and who care,
And others who’ve enriched your life
Just by being there.
Think about the memories
Passing years can never mar,
Experiences great and small
That have made you who you are.
Another year is a happy gift,
So cut your cake, and say,
"Instead of counting birthdays,
I count blessings every day!"
By Joanna Fuchs
Suzie Q has another Birthday tribute!
Lydia, you make our lives better and we hope you have a very Happy Birthday!
Happy Birthday Lydia!
ReplyDeleteGee Lucky Me!
ReplyDeleteI am honored to be one of the first to wish you a Happy Birthday. That's 21 right? And lucky you and yours on a great vacation. You have a wonderful day and all the luck in the world as you go into the future.
Lydia have a Great Birthday!
ReplyDeleteAnd a great vacation........btw, this is the trip you won from the Travel Awards back in October 2005 right?
I caught the very end of that show back then, please let us know if you will be on TV again so we can catch it.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY LYDIA!
ReplyDeleteI hope you have a wonderful day!
I always do as I'm told: Happy birthday, Lydia!
ReplyDeleteI would like to say, Happy Birthday Lydia and you guys enjoy yourself and be safe.
ReplyDeleteHappy Birthday, Lydia! May you have a wonderful day and celebrate it in whatever manner you most enjoy!
ReplyDelete!!!!!!!!!!HAPPY BIRTHDAY LYDIA!!!!!!!!
ReplyDeleteHave a Happy Birthday Lydia! :)
ReplyDeletePlease check out my post for you on my blog! ;)
Happy Birthday Lydia!
Have a happy birthday, young 'un, and here's hopes for many more happy ones to come!
ReplyDeleteHappy Birthday, Lydia! May the best of past years follow you through the years to come!
ReplyDeleteHappy Birthday! Have a great 21st Birthday!!! Right?
ReplyDeletehey- have a happy, happy birthday!!!! :)
ReplyDeleteHappy Birthday, Lydia!
ReplyDeleteHope you are enjoying yourself.
Weee! A birthday party. I see balloons, a cake and presents. It's perfect!
ReplyDeleteHappy Birthday, Lydia. Now cut the cake and I'll scoop the ice cream. :)
Happy Birthday, Lydia!! What is it? 22? 23?
ReplyDeleteNow for the fun part! ;-)
Hi Tomcat!
ReplyDeleteHi Lydia - Happy Birthday to you!
ReplyDeleteLet's hope that by the time the next b'day rolls around, that we are Bush-free! That would be the best present of all!
Rock on, my sista! You are bad-ass.
Hi Alicia,
ReplyDeleteYou had some great articles up to comment on your blog.
Happy Birthday you fantastic, wonderful voice for the progresive movement!
ReplyDeleteWe are indeed lucky to have you on our side both as a woman and a progressive.
May you have a wonderful day with lots of kudos bestowed on you,all deserved.
Happy Birthday dear Lydia . . .
ReplyDeleteHeh. Lydia's older than I am!
ReplyDeleteHappy birthday, honey!
HAPPY BIRTHDAY LYDIA I hope you are having a wonderful day.
ReplyDeleteHey POP How you doing?
ReplyDeletedusty
ReplyDeleteNice to see you here too!
Have a wonderful birthday...may it be peaceful and quiet and full of anything that feeds your soul....namaste.
ReplyDelete"This, in my judgment, is the highest philosophy: First, do not regret having lost yesterday; second, do not fear that you will lose tomorrow; third, enjoy today."
ReplyDeleteRobert Ingersoll
Hey Moo Moo/Ron...........shut your mouth before I shut it FOR YOU!!!!!!!!
ReplyDeleteLooks like you wannna do this the hard way little troll.........fine by me its always fun to show the world just what a pathetic, irrelevnt and impotent little loser you are Moo Moo...........welcome to irrelevancy loser.....i'm gonna toss you right out the door like the piece of human garbage you are!
ReplyDeleteHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!
ReplyDeleteWhat kind of person would have such a pathetic empty life as to have NOTHING better to do than come into a place where they dont agree with people and act like a retarded idiot insulting people and atacking them personally......on their birthday no less......its a testament to what total hippocritical losers attach themselves to the Reich Wings dishonest cause.
ReplyDeleteWhat a pathetic excuse for a human being Moo Moo is!!!!!
Whatever! Happy B-Day Lydia...I'm sending you the song from "The Fisher King"...sung by Michael Jeeter to Amanda Plummer in her work cubicle. If you remember her name was Lydia. Robin Williams loved her so...as we all appreciate you here too. It's just one of my favorite scenes in the movie...you can't miss it!
ReplyDeleteFor the record I am not talking to myself........there was a troll spamming the blog with vulgar insults.
ReplyDeleteMike
ReplyDeleteI have to laugh! I was wondering how you saw that and we didn't. It's funny, it looked like you were wrestling with yourself. Now I see what you were talking about.
AP:
ReplyDeleteFrustrated by delays in health care, injured Iraq war veterans accused VA Secretary Jim Nicholson in a lawsuit of breaking the law by denying them disability pay and mental health treatment.The lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, filed Monday in federal court in San Francisco, seeks broad changes in the agency as it struggles to meet growing demands from veterans returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Bush sure takes care of the troops he sends to war!
We are a nation of sheep, and
ReplyDeletesomeone else owns the grass.
George Carlin
What a fun birthday tribute. I add my congrats to the choir. ;)
ReplyDeleteHugs,
Holly
Happy Birthday
ReplyDeleteHappy Birthday Lydia. Keep on givin' 'em hell.
ReplyDeleteWho Hijacked Our Country
Happy Birthday Lydia. May it be joyous and may you have many more.
ReplyDeleteGod Bless.
Happiest of Birthday wishes to you Lydia!
ReplyDeleteLet us celebrate your next birthday in a society where the rule of law prevails, and tyrants are safely locked away.
ReplyDeleteAnyone watch the Democratic debate?
ReplyDeleteNo one really distinguished themselves in my opinion!
Bush's Tax Cuts
ReplyDeleteA Form of National Insanity
By ROBERT FREEMAN
Insanity, said Albert Einstein, is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results. By this measure, the latest Bush tax cuts qualify as certifiably insane.
Where have we seen this deranged fiscal strategy before? Remember Ronald Reagan and Supply Side Economics? In the early 1980s, Reagan promised the nation that if we lowered tax rates on the wealthy, the economy would grow so much the federal budget would be balanced "within three years, maybe even two."
Sober people were skeptical-and rightly so. Reagan's Republican opponent for the 1980 presidential election, George H.W. Bush called it "voodoo economics." His own Budget Director, David Stockman, called it a "Trojan horse," a scam intended really to funnel more money to the already rich. Stockman was quickly dismissed.
The results, we now know, were a disaster. In 1982, the first full year after the tax cuts were enacted, the economy actually shrank 2.2%, the worst performance since the Great Depression. And the effect on the federal budget was catastrophic.
Jimmy Carter's last budget deficit was $77 billion. Reagan's first deficit was $128 billion. His second deficit exploded to $208 billion. By the time the "Reagan Revolution" was over, George H.W. Bush was running an annual deficit of $290 billion per year.
Yearly deficits, of course, add up to national debt. When Reagan took office, the national debt stood at $994 billion. When Bush left office, it had reached $4.3 trillion. In other words, the national debt had taken 200 years to reach $1 trillion. Reagan's Supply Side experiment quadrupled it in the next 12 years.
Is there anything to compare this to? When Bill Clinton took office he intentionally reversed the Supply Side formula, raising taxes on the wealthy and reducing them on the lowest wage earners. Supply Side true believers predicted the arrival of the Apocalypse. Bob Dole said the stock market would collapse. Newt Gingrich said the world would fall into another Great Depression.
What actually happened?
Between 1992 and 2000, the U.S. economy produced the longest sustained economic expansion in U.S. history. It created more than 18 million new jobs, the highest level of job creation ever recorded. Inflation fell to 2.5% per year compared to the 4.7% average over the prior 12 years.
Real interest rates fell by over 40% producing the greatest housing boom ever. Overall economic growth averaged 4.0% per year compared to 2.8% average growth over the 12 years of the Reagan/Bush administrations. Most impressively, Clinton reversed the mammoth deficits of the Supply Side years, turning them into surpluses. He used these surpluses to begin paying down the national debt.
By virtually every meaningful measure-employment, growth, inflation, interest rates, investment, deficits and debt-the economy performed better once the Supply Side experiment was terminated and replaced with a more honest economic policy where we actually pay our bills as we go.
This might all be ancient history if the spectre of Supply Side economics had not reared its ugly head again once Bush II took office. In selling his $1.6 trillion tax cut-half of which went to the wealthiest 1% of Americans-Bush promised in 2001 that it would produce 800,000 new jobs. In fact, the economy has lost 2.7 million jobs since Bush took office, again, the worst economic performance since the Great Depression.
The effects of Bush's tax cut on the deficit and debt are exactly what we would expect having seen Reagan's results-only worse. Bush inherited from Clinton a fiscal surplus of $127 billion. In his first year he turned that into a deficit of $158 billion. In this, his second year, he will run a deficit of over $400 billion-a swing to the worse of over $600 billion in only two years.
Now Bush has sold us on still another megadose of this same Supply Side voodoo. Two thirds of his new $350 billion tax cut will go to the top 10% of income earners. Bush's Congressional ally, Tom DeLay, promises more such cuts for every year Bush is in office.
The long term effects of these policies are profoundly damaging. When Bush took office, the government's ten year surplus was forecast to total $5.6 trillion. This was critical to building fiscal soundness as the Baby Boomers begin to retire.
Now, the ten year forecast projects a cumulative deficit of $1.1 trillion, a net loss of $6.7 trillion in only two years. With the exception of World Wars, this is the greatest, most rapid destruction of public wealth in the history of the world.
This is $6.7 trillion that is not available to pay for an entire generation's retirement as we promised. It cannot rebuild the nation's schools or retrain the technologically unemployed. It cannot shore up a foundering Medicare system or provide insurance to the more than 40 million Americans without it. The interest costs of funding this debt will soon approach half a trillion dollars a year and will retard investment and, therefore, economic growth for decades to come.
All this torrent of debt does-and we shouldn't underestimate the prodigious potency of this feat-is line the pockets of Bush's already gorged campaign contributors.
Rarely in public affairs do we have the luxury of such starkly clear, empirically proven, historically sound contrasts. If Bush's tax cuts do not represent a fiscal process wildly out of control it is hard to imagine what does. And sadly, per Einstein's insanity dictum, we've seen it all before.
Bush wants people to believe these losses are due to a recession he inherited from Bill Clinton. But the economy has grown for seven of the last eight quarters Bush has been in office, hardly a recessionary environment. In truth, the losses owe to a reckless economic philosophy, the failings of which have been conclusively, and now repeatedly, demonstrated.
We need to wake up from our patriotism-besotted, war-induced stupor. Losses and debts of this magnitude threaten our nation's well being far more than do fictive weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a two bit, third world thug. Destroying our fiscal patrimony at the very moment we need it most-when history shows we should know better-is nothing short of national insanity.
Robert Freeman writes about economics, technology and education from Palo Alto, CA. He can be reached at:
Jolly Roger said...
ReplyDeleteLet us celebrate your next birthday in a society where the rule of law prevails, and tyrants are safely locked away.
Sweden?
Thank you SO MUCH everyone for your beautiful birthday wishes.
ReplyDeleteI am so grateful to have all of you as bloggers and visitors -- trying to save the world.
God Bless you all, and thank you Larry for posting this and choosing such a great cake! Wish I could eat it.
Luv
xoxo
Lyd