What will it take for blue-collar, middle-to-lower suburbia, struggling rural, and working poor to understand that they do not benefit from the policies and aims of this administration? I do not understand how this administration has been able to mislead demographics like NASCAR fans and Southern Baptists into the ranks of the supporters. As interest rates and prices rise, recognition is growing.

Here’s another piece of sneaky legislation: Frist has proposed holding a vote to see if estate tax cuts can get through the Senate if they are linked to a modest minimum wage increase. Insidious. The current minimum wage bill would finally grant a little boost in minimum wage (a $2.10 increase over three years, and tips are counted) – but only if it’s tied to yet more welfare for the superrich!

Don’t get excited about his latest incarnation of the estate tax reduction bill unless you and your family are pretty loaded. Most Americans don’t pay much if anything in estate tax now anyway. Next time you do your taxes, just ask about grandma’s house (if she has one). But if you’re really really rich, this is a big payoff. A married couple won’t pay penny one in estate tax on property unless it’s worth more than ten million dollars. The very top estate tax rate would fall from 46% to 30%. Another tax break for the people who least need it, more lost revenue for the government that Republicans want to break back to pre-FDR.

Yes, I understand that this kind of bundling is a way to pass things that wouldn’t otherwise pass, or even see a vote at all. But to combine unlike proposals like this in the same bill means that the public really doesn’t have a sense of what their representatives are voting for and against. How does a member of Congress, on either side or in the middle, decide how to vote on something like this?

1. Is it more important to boost minimimum wage for the lower classes, or to oppose additional huge gifts to the upper classes that drastically cut already-dwindling revenues (about $753 billion over the next decade)?
2. Is it more important to oppose any minimum wage increase, or to grant buddies and sponsors in the upper classes more favors?

Give just a few cakecrumbs to the bottom-level wage earners (be happy with the crumbs), strengthen the class divide (plan the excessively huge banquest of millions of designer cakes), and work to bankrupt the federal services and entitlements at the same time (get rid of any security for the American people) – nice class warfare (the use of cake imagery is intentional). When do we get to use the word aristocrats? When do we get to actually say that the class warfare is from the top down, and that the top isn’t even human, but protected and corporate?

Have a care, Congress. An election is coming up, and Americans are starting to get a sense of priorities again. What you do and what you are is more and more obvious with every passing day.

Look around the world – just look. We need real leadership, real ethics, real diplomacy, real intelligence and real planning.

To the party formerly known as Republicans: Don’t bother with your pitiful claims to empire. Don’t bother with your Constitutional disregard. Don’t bother with your gestures toward theocracy. Don’t bother with your transparent propaganda. Don’t bother with a staged terrorist attack. Don’t bother with your hate. Don’t bother trying to hide your mother lode of corruption. Don’t bother with your secrecy, your deceptions, your lies. Don’t bother scapegoating critical voices. Don’t bother with a rigged electoral system.

The multiple voices of America will be heard again. We will take back our democracy.