Good Morning, everyone. The weather wasn't as bad as predicted. Thankfully. Not as much snow and temps a bit on the warm side which should melt what fell and a little more.

Moving on, I found this link at Huffington Post this morning. Don't you just love it when these moral cretins get points for voting against these measures and then line up to make sure they can garner votes by pointing out how they 'brought' this windfall to their constituents? The good people of those districts would not have gotten any of the benefit if their representatives votes had killed the program. I guess hypocrisy pays--big!!!

To continue on the hypocrisy front--Paul Krugman has a good opinion piece in the New York Times on the Republicans and Social Security. I have long suspected that the Republican strategy for at least the last 40 years or so has been to destroy Social Security either by making it over into a poverty program (because on one wants to provide a free ride to the undeserving poor) or by running up the deficits to the point where the only way to save the whole financial system was to cut anything and everything in the so-called safety net. So we have had a plethora of tax cuts for the wealthy, tax evasions by major companies and well-heeled individuals, and off the books wars while social security recipients are denied cost of living raises because the core inflation rate (which discounts food and energy cost increases) says that we have had no inflation over the past year. I have a lot of words to describe this mess but none of them are in the least polite so I will let you supply your own descriptors.

And for a third installment on this theme here is NewsHound's commentary on Glenn Beck's notion that we should all 'toughen up' and give up our Social Security and Medicare. I would let this one slide if Beck weren't so typical of the far right and their notions. Take the idea that the young should care for the old. I remember first hearing this spouted by a news anchor some thirty years ago while I was living in Colorado. I am assuming that he meant (and Beck means) that young people should care for their elderly relatives. However, how many young people live with or near their parents or grandparents? Americans have been on the move since the first Europeans hit these shores. The pace of movement has only increased over time. Next question--without Social Security or some other form of income and without Medicare, what kind of a burden would caring for the elderly place on the young? So what Beck and his ilk propose is that we shift the burden from all young people through Social Security taxes to specific young people who would be saddled with the sole responsibility of care without the wherewithal to care. Then, of course, there is the ritual nod to charity and other local helping organizations. But what the Great Recession (and the Great Depression before it) should have made crystal clear is that those organizations have been severely hurt and the demand for help far outstrips what they can provide. Maybe Beck thinks that older people should just die relieving the young of any responsibility for caring. Would he like to lead the way?