Tell me if this doesn’t wrap up the situation in a sad twist.

Thinking of Bobby Kennedy’s real passion during his ‘68 campaign for the American worker highlights exactly why our candidates - and our next president - needs to pay some serious attention to the plight of Americans, especially those of the working and middle class.

Yet everybody better start paying attention to the American worker, who is greater in debt (less and less see any relief from debt outside of bankruptcy or death), more likely to have to work two jobs or more just to survive, less likely to receive appropriate and timely health care, and under greater measures levels of clinical depression, fatigue, and stress than ever before. See my next (up) post.

New studies show Americans across the board (rather than pockets of wild wealth in a sea of people who have relatively little to nothing in comparison) are doing much worse financially than their European peers, AND that both our height and life expectancy is turning from new longevity to a shortening (yes, we’re living less longer and no longer growing as tall as our European neighbors, which is believed due to our harsh working schedule, bad diet, and far less accessibility to health care since most civilized nations have some type of universal access to care).

Oh, and our infant mortality rate is on its way back up. Not good.

Interestingly, the beginning of the “change” we’re seeing in less health for Americans dates back to about 1982. Hmmm… Reagan was in office, and advocating an economy that allowed for a handful of rich fatcats with the rest forced to buy his bumper sticker foreign policy. Much of the rule since 1982 has been Republican. Coincidence?

No joke. With crude oil prices already well past the record $100/barrel that we used to treat as the great marker for “peak oil”, where was the price going to go but WAAAAY up when Bush does the following in the past week:

* More saber rattling at Iran with “evil” charges amounting to the same damned things the U.S. is doing in Iraq
* Goes to Israeli Knesset (their Congress), plants a huge wet kiss on PM Olmert, and manages to dis both Iran and Barack Obama in the same charge as he also indicts Muslims in general
* Only then does he go to Saudi Arabia to ask them to increase oil production, at which point the Sauds flipped him the bird and sent him home as gas prices jumped by as much as 30 cents in a 24-hour period in some locations
* Threatens our own Congress who stopped the record levels of oil reserves Bush has been spending a fortune in storing (waaay above what any other admin has done, and Bush increases the reserve everytime the price rises like he wants to just hand energy companies all the tax dollars not being spent on the Pentagon)

Oil just closed on the stock market at a record $133.17/barrel. Thanks, President Bush! What latest horror will you enact?

We haven’t heralded this move by House Democrats last week (joined by two whole Republicans) that kept Bush from getting another blank check from them (on our dime and the lives of our countrymen and women) to wage endless, pointless war. It brought cheers and happy tears from this progressive!

As noted, however, the battle isn’t over. The Senate could pass the latest Iraq-Afghanistan spending bill from Bush, which would bring it back to the House to work through, perhaps as a newly minted entity. And unless the bill is defeated by a LOT, Bush will veto anything that comes to him with less than he demands (the tin-plated God he thinks he is).

So give your support by telling your House and Senate reps to vote AGAINST more blank checks that do nothing but kill and maim Americans, Iraqs, and Afghans while making war profiteers like Bush and Cheney’s best friends even richer than they were before.

Just how many McCain finance chairman, etc., have either had to step down or pretend they don’t hear the questions being asked about their participation in the ironically-entitled Straight Talk Express?

Far, far too many.

For Dems and perhaps for most of the country, the biggest enemy we face isn’t Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, maybe not even al Qaeda. It’s the threat of a McCain Administration that would continue the loathful, lousy work of the Bush Admin (aka Dewey, Cheatem, and How!).

(Cough. I hope this headline doesn’t get picked up the wrong way. Cough.)

Bush has fallen to yet NEW lows of presidential approval. But I have the same question I’ve had for his entire monarchy: how the hell did even one person approve of him in the first place, let alone now?

And let me know where the big differences between Bussssshed and McCain lie; short of an electron microscope, I’m thinking maybe we won’t see many.

With each new economic poll, more and more Americans express real concern about the economy and their declining ability to meet their financial obligations with fast-escalating food, fuel, housing, and medical costs when their paychecks haven’t shown any significant lift throughout most of the Bush Administration.

I found this piece in The Observer fascinating about the new MTV show “The Paper” showing kids (the piece notes Baby Woodwards, but I’d prefer perhaps a Baby Bernstein all things considered) on a school paper in Florida that I somehow managed not to know existed.

As a card carrying member of the press (try not to think less of me considering a good prostitute makes a HELL of a lot more and with dollops more respect), I grew up just knowing I had to be a journo; I learned how to read BEFORE kindergarten so I could read the newspaper and not have to trust my grandmother to faithfully tell me what it said.

Sadly, the only April Fool’s joke here is that I’ve yet to see a Senate or House inquiry into price-gouging and corporate welfare for energy companies EVER change a damned thing at the pumps or the heating/power bills.

During this critical political season, separating fact from fiction has never been more important. When a story breaks, you want to know the facts right away and spread them to your networks before the conservatives spin it all wrong. So, our partners at Think Progress launched the Wonk Room, the first public policy rapid response blog, to do just that; to give you the facts and arguments you need to be the most effective activist in town on key issues facing our nation, including climate, the economy, health care, and national security.

Even if I were a Republican (oops… hands started to shake at that thought, sorry), I would be asking two HUGE questions after watching the media the last few months:

- How is it John McCain can spew the most ridiculous, bombastic, often hateful and WRONG claptrap while the media spends all its time discussing blacks, women, and Hispanics like each is a single separate personality and mindset?
- How is it that the media can spend so little time on anything of real value re: Clinton and Barack Obama while hitting us endlessly with questions about race, religion, lies-turned-into-truth and other issues that aren’t paramount to voters who want help with ending the war, restarting the economy, keeping their homes, and finding a way to afford groceries, fuel, and medical care?

Oh wait, here’s a third question:

Why should we believe a mainstream media on any of this WHEN they told us for months that Hillary Clinton couldn’t lose and McCain couldn’t win when they now flip it to suggest Hillary can’t get nominated and McCain can’t lose?

CNN is reporting - in the wake of much talk that Bush’s popularity had finally bottomed out as people stopped paying attention to him - that President Bush has hit a new all-time low in both presidential polling as a whole and his own numbers specifically. The 31% approval for Bush CNN just reported is the lowest in Bush history for the cable news network’s polling.

Gee, I’m sure these new lows have nothing to do with the reminder of the lies he took us to war in Iraq with five years ago, Bush’s “let the mortgage CEOs eat cake while starving homeowners heat their houses with burned default delinquency notes”, or his latest claims that all in Iraq is hunky-dory.

Think very carefully about who you want to represent you in the White House come January.

Can we afford a John McCain who made that silly gaffe subsituting Iran with Iraq (something Bush Washington has made very easy to do) until latter-day-neocon-nutcase Joe Lieberman corrected him?

I say no. A yes for McCain is a vote for more bloodshed.

Note, too, that no less than seven out of every 10 Americans feels the Iraq War is directly hurting our economy (the other three, I suppose, believe that the war IS what remains of our economy ::sigh::) and that even if the war ended now, we will continue paying costs for it for many, MANY years into the future.

As you may have noticed the last few days, Bush’s rhetoric last month where he announced the government would sit back and not involve themselves in “individual contracts” private between mortgage brokers and mortgage holders so Americans “can pull themselves up by their own boot straps, like I never had to do even once in my life”, says Bush WILL rush in to bail out the billionaire CEOs and other financial institutions hurt themselves by the mortgage industry collapse.

So if you’re losing your home, tough. But the Bushies still need your tax dollars to bail out the people foreclosing upon you. Get out! Personally, I can’t see why anyone who either owns a home or wishes someday he or she may be able to do so would vote for McCain. Those who own the banks who own those houses, however, probably would vote Mac.

Gee, 100-200 MORE banks are expected to go belly-up soon. Makes you want to maintain that really great Republican “compassionate conservative” financial wizardry that the Bushies brought us with as many as 1 in 10 American homes now in foreclosure, default, or in serious danger of going into default right now which doesn’t count the tens of thousands of homes already seized.

Yet Bush is threatening to veto any effort by Congress to put a moratorium on foreclosure actions. As Keith Olbermann put it Wednesday night, Bush’s kind, compassionate message to scared American home owners is, “Screw you!” Doesn’t matter that the foreclosure crisis is very likely, many economists say, to result in a full-scale U.S. economic depression (recession’s much nastier stepmother).

(But, hey, at least the banks are willing to WORK with Michael Jackson whose California “Neverland” estate is due to be sold at sheriff’s auction in mid-March. Whew! Wouldn’t want him to curtail those half million dollar afternoon shopping sprees! What? His buddy, the Sultan of Brunei can’t bail him out as often as the Saudis have bailed out President George W. Bush long before he hit office?)

As I sat battling the entire long weekend with pesky hardware problems among two different PC systems in addition to household leaks following some record snowfall all while experiencing the joy of feeling my glands swell and my nose turn raw while I also reviewed my tax returns, I couldn’t help but think that if misery loves company, I’ve got a multitude of new pals.

Sure, some Americans are having a decent time of it, but that percentage is literally dropping more everyday. Even among those who identify themselves as mostly maintaining their current living standard in one of the roughest prolonged financial “repressions” in the last century, many agree that not only is the U.S. in trouble economically, but our mental state is suffering, too.

In the last decade