Main Street Small Businesses

I've been thinking about the real small businessman on 3rd Street in a small town in New Jersey. He bemoans that he does not understand why everyone says the small business community is doing so well when he isn't. Of course, this self proclaimed Independent blames it on President Obama and the fact that he cannot secure a line of credit. Perhaps his mens clothing store would be doing better if the GOP led House had been busy fulfilling its 2010 promise to work on jobs, jobs, jobs - or if the Senate GOP wasn't more worried about making President Obama a single term president. Maybe the line of credit would be easier to obtain if his community banks were given the same favorable treatment as the too big to fail national banks. Perhaps he could have heeded the Randian philosophies the GOP was adopting and realized his little town no longer needed his haberdashery and opened a frozen yogurt shop in its place.

 Instead of making it his fault for not fully analyzing the situation and the roles played by the GOP that affected his overall well-being I'd like to focus on the common misunderstanding of a single term - "small business".

This term, by many, is assumed to mean just the mom and pop type of businesses but this guy is playing in a division that includes the Koch brothers and many others we would commonly call big business. In fact, despite the Kochs not being on this list, the top 10 on Forbes 100 for 2009 had revenues between $197.8m and $181.8m - not a revenue complaint in the bunch. So when the main stream press uses the collective referred to as "small business" they do us all a disfavor by blurring the difference between the real Main Street small business man and the privately held behemoths like Koch and the publicly held companies listed in the Forbes list.

So may I suggest to the Main Street small business people that are too busy working to make the American dream a reality in their lives that they can't look at the facts on the ground. Don't be swayed to vote for Romney just because hes made a ton of money stealing other people's dreams and he talks about small businesses. Remember small businesses were on the menu for Bain Capital and that a vote for Romney doesn't fix the economy in a way that will benefit you. As long as the middle and working poor have less money to buy a new suit or frozen treat you will not benefit.

 http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/evil-liberals-keep-making-republican

 http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fsb/fsb100/2009/snapshots/1.html

Benghazi Madness

Wow - has it really been almost a year since I felt I needed to get some thoughts off my chest?

Since I last sat at a keyboard the major event in my life is the loss of my mother and father-in-law within a few days of each other. Allow me a moment to acknowledge the lives of these two people that would never be considered wealthy in a monetary sense but were wealthy in ways that make every life most meaningful - yes there is more than just a little bias on my part here.

I've not been far from my Twitter account - publishing my pithy 140 character comments almost daily during my commutes to and from my job at a large, urban hospital struggling in today's economy. My opinions are mine and most likely wouldn't be appreciated by my bosses - or the president of the university that owns the facility. Hopefully I'll never hear from the bosses how a vote for Obama could mean my job or how my internet activities have made me expendable. So let me begin...

Today I replied to this tweet...

James Rosen ‏@JamesRosenFNC

For the AM crowd: My op-ed for @WSJ on #Benghazi: Is it a Watergate-style "coverup"? http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444868204578062420490836106.html …

My response was...

Jim Ehlen ‏@jpe33180

@JamesRosenFNC @WSJ shameful conflation of Benghazi w/Watergate & the need to politicize a tragedy by Obama's opponents w/o all the facts. 

Little did I realize that I would be inundated by the largest response to any of my prior tweets - ever.  None of the responses sent made any sense or to my knowledge were from Mr. Rosen. Instead of trying to address all the various shades of bullshit directed to me by Rosen's Trolls - I'll try to make my comment clearer for his troops.

So far - the information surrounding the horrors of the Benghazi incident continue to develop and be discovered by several ongoing investigations. The GOP leaning conspiracy corps ought to realize if there is any there there it will come out in time and that reacting in a knee-jerk fashion to every new revelation serves nothing but the politicization of a national tragedy. 

As to the thought that this is a Watergate-style coverup the conflation is dishonest as it is just plain stupid. We all know that the coverup is always worse than the transgression - and as I have said if there is any there there it will be discovered in time. The conflation only serves to confuse the situation - Watergate was not a Democratic Party nightmare - it was brought on by nefarious activities planned by people in a GOP White House close to the President and is now seen as an attempt to subvert our democracy. Until proven otherwise  Benghazi was not brought on by any White House activities. 

I will not play the game of conjecture on what conspired on 9/11/2012 in Benghazi since I do not have any more information than the rest of the general public. I do know that I will not make this a political issue or jump to conclusions or conspiracies as others have. As noted by many of the responses on Twitter four good people died during that terrorist attack. They were noble in they chose to serve their country in an unstable part of the world. A part where many of our country's enemies have many advantages but have certainly signed their own death warrants.