Dee Evans: Google's Offensive Michelle Obama Image -- Reposted!

Seems as if the writer of the post has his own anger issues and that will color one's outlook.  The First Lady is a gracious, intelligent, and thoughtful person and the misread of her "proud" comment during the campaign is a redux of a dead horse flogging.  What she said was that she had never been as proud of her country as she was at the moment.

As a career senior Navy officer ('Nam through Desert Storm) I'm as patriotic as anyone and I have had times I was more or less "proud" of what our country was doing.  The writer seems to be in a less proud moment.  You'll have that.  

Growing up in the South, racism was embedded in the way it was and it takes work to overcome prejudice and one's response to it--perhaps on both sides--but Michelle Obama is no more racist than anyone I know and she certainly isn't a disgrace, just the opposite in fact.  I, an Irish American descendent, am proud to see we've overcome a great deal of our prejudice and elected a mixed race person as President, one who has a loving family that supports his efforts as President.

It is pathetic that we've had a wealth shift from the bottom 95% to the top 5% of us.  It didn't just happen on the Bush watch.  It began with the Reagan Administration and their "trickle down" monitarist policy--Voodoo Economics!  Under Ike we had a 90% top tax rate, under Nixon it was 70% and at the beginning of the Reagan Administration it was 50%.  We have had a shift from a 60/40 to a 80/20 percent split of wealth between the haves and the have nots.  In other words the bottom 95% has lost half its share of the nations wealth.  That shift started in 1980 and continued through Bush/Cheney.

I don't agree with a lot of the "bail out", particularly since few concessions were gained from the Wall Street folks, but another Great Depression would have been worse.  If Wall Street produced any real products it wouldn't be so bad, but all they do is skim money from the truly productive workers--the source of our real wealth--and play Monopoly with it.  

In an ideal world our elected representatives would re-regulate Wall Street investment banks, the Fed would truly closely monitor and control the Monopoly game, and the top tax rate would go back up to a sensibly high level on incomes over, say, $250K.  Wage and price controls after WWII along with manufacturing and consumerism produced the strongest middle class in the world.  We were much more egalitarian and could see a much better future ahead.  Another Gilded Age holds no promise for the rest of us.