WELCOME TO OPINIONS BASED ON FACTS (OBOF)

Name	Published
OVERVIEW	Dec. 28, 2010
SOCIAL SECURITY PART 1	Dec. 30, 2010
SOCIAL SECURITY PART 2	Jan. 10, 2011
SOCIAL SECURITY PART 3	Jan. 17, 2011
SOCIAL SECURITY PART 4	Jan. 24, 2011
SOCIAL SECURITY PART 5	Jan. 31, 2011
SOCIAL SECURITY PART 6	Feb. 07, 2011
SOCIAL SECURITY PART 7	Feb. 14, 2011
SPECIAL ISSUE	Feb. 18, 2011
SOCIAL SECURITY PART 8	Feb. 21, 2011
SOCIAL SECURITY PART 9	Mar. 01, 2011
SOCIAL SECURITY PART 10	Mar. 07, 2011
SS & MORE PART 1	Mar. 14, 2011
SS & MORE PART 1A	Mar. 21, 2011
SS & MORE PART 2	Mar. 25, 2011
SS & MORE PART 3	Mar. 29, 2011
SS & MORE PART 4	Apr. 04, 2011
SS & MORE PART 5	Apr. 11, 2011
SS & MORE PART 6	Apr. 18, 2011
SS & MORE PART 7	Apr. 25, 2011
SS & MORE PART 7A	Apr. 29, 2011
SS & MORE PART 8	May 02, 2011
SS & MORE PART 9	May 09, 2011
SS & MORE PART 10	May 16, 2011
SS & MORE PART 11	May 24, 2011
SS & MORE PART 12	Jun. 06, 2011
SS & MORE PART 13	Jun. 20, 2011
SS & MORE PART 14	July 05, 2011
SS & MORE PART 14A	July 18, 2011
SS & MORE PART 15	July 19, 2011
SS & MORE PART 16	Aug. 03, 2011
SS & MORE PART 17	Aug. 15, 2011
SS & MORE PART 18	Aug. 29, 2011
SS & MORE PART 19	Sept. 12, 2011
SS & MORE PART 20	Sept. 26, 2011
SS & MORE PART 21	Oct. 10, 2011
SS & MORE PART 22	Oct. 24, 2011
SS & MORE PART 22 EXTRA	Nov. 04, 2011
SS & MORE PART 23	Nov. 07, 2011
SS & MORE PART 24	Nov. 21, 2011
SS & MORE PART 25	Dec. 05, 2011
SS & MORE PART 26	Dec. 19, 2011
SS & MORE PART 27	JAN. 03, 2012
SS & MORE PART 27A	JAN. 05, 2012
SS & MORE PART 28	JAN. 17, 2012
SS & MORE PART 29	JAN. 31, 2012
SS & MORE PART 30	Feb. 14, 2012
SS & MORE PART CL1	Feb. 21, 2012
SS & MORE PART 30 EXTRA	Feb. 23, 2012
SS & MORE PART 31	Feb. 28, 2012
SS & MORE PART CL2 - 59	Mar. 06, 2012
SS & MORE PART 31 EXTRA	Mar. 07, 2012
SS & MORE PART 32	Mar. 13, 2012
SS & MORE PART CL3 - 1	Mar. 20, 2012
SS & MORE PART 32 EXTRA	Mar. 24, 2012
SS & MORE PART 33	Apr. 10, 2012
SS & MORE PART CL 4 - 2	Apr. 17, 2012
SS & MORE PART 34	Apr. 24, 2012
SS & MORE PART CL5 - 49	May 01, 2012
SS & MORE PART 35	May 09, 2012
SS & MORE PART CL6 - 19	May 15, 2012
SS & MORE PART 35 EXTRA	May 18, 2012
SS & MORE PART 36	May 22, 2012
SS & MORE PART 36 EXTRA	May 25, 2012
SS & MORE PART 36
EXTRA II	June 01, 2012
SS & MORE PART 37	June 05. 2012
SS & MORE PART 37 EXTRA	June 07, 2012
SS & MORE PART 38	June 12, 2012
SS & MORE PART 39	June 19, 2012
SS & MORE PART 40	June 26, 2012
SS & MORE PART 41	July 03, 2012
SS & MORE PART 42	July 10, 2012
SS & MORE PART 43	July 17, 2012
SS & MORE PART 44	July 24,2012
SS & MORE PART 45	July 31, 2012
SS & MORE PART 46	Aug. 07, 2012
SS & MORE PART 46 EXTRA	Aug. 09, 2012
SS & MORE PART 47	Aug. 14, 2012
SS & MORE PART 48	Aug. 21, 2012
SS & MORE PART 49	Aug. 28, 2012
SS & MORE PART 50	Sept. 04. 2012

IN THIS ISSUE

1. Hope for the future.

2. One down -- One to go.

3. The world's most corrupt(ed) Republic.

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"VOTE, AN EDUCATED VOTE"

What is an educated vote? It is one that has been made with as much knowledge, based on facts, not misinformation, that an individual can obtain.

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HOPE FOR THE FUTURE

by Floyd Bowman

Published Sept. 4, 2012

As usual, there is plenty of bad news, plenty of important news, but not much good news. We read about young people not caring about getting an education or thinking much about the future and even going around shooting people. So many simply don't care about becoming productive citizens in our wonderful country.

Well, I had an experience last Sunday that really made me feel good about our young people and the future. I am sure there are a lot of young people like the ones I am going to refer to, but we just don't hear about them, or see them, or talk about them when we do see them.

I eat often at an IHOP (International House Of Pancakes). Most IHOPs that I know about are quite strict about the manner in which their servers are suppose to treat customers. They follow those directions or they are gone. However, under these rules there are still some differences between servers, particularly, in regard to personality and how they respond to customers.

I have been very impressed by one young man in particular and I always enjoy my meal extra good when he is there and can serve me. He is a Junior in High School and works there every hour he can. He has a top personality and makes you feel like you are the only one he is there to serve.

Sunday evening he was there and served me and I found out that he has two bothers that also work there. They were there at that time and I met them. They are both a little older than him. I would guess they all range from about 17 to 22 and they are just like he is. A great personality, really on the ball and doing everything they can to make your meal an enjoyable experience.

Three boys, out of the same family, who all function the same and seem to have their heads on straight. I have not talked to any of them about politics or our countries situation, but they project a feeling that they are concerned about the future and are trying to decide just what the next steps in life should be. At least, this is the impression that I have of them now. There are a number of fine people that work at this IHOP, but these three l find encouraging for the future of our country. They, and others like them, are the future of our country.

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ONE DOWN -- ONE TO GO.

CONVENTIONS, THAT IS.

by Floyd Bowman

Publisher

"Opinions Based On Facts."

Well, the Republican National Convention is over and the Democrat National Convention starts today, the 4th of September. There has been considerable coverage of all that took place at the Republican Convention so, I am not going to go over a lot of info that I am pretty sure you already have read or heard about.

I am so tired of hearing this word "lie." It is a very serous word to use against anyone, but it does seem that some of the things said by Paul Ryan, the Republican VP Nominee and Mitt Romney, the Republican Presidential Nominee, do fall in that category.

Robert Reich reports “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers,” says Neil Newhouse, a Romney pollster.

A half dozen fact-checking organizations and websites have refuted Romney’s claims that Obama removed the work requirement from the welfare law and will cut Medicare benefits by $716 billion.

The fact of the matter is that the President did not remove the work requirement from welfare. Instead, he responded to requests from a number of Governors, including two that were Republican, for States to be more flexible in implementing the requirement. The requirement remains.

With regard to the claim that the President has reduced Medicare benefits by $716 billion, benefits were not reduced at all. The $716 billion savings is from reduced payments to doctors and hospitals. Benefits remain the same.

So, you see while there were changes in the work requirement and savings in the Medicare program, they in no way did what Romney and Ryan are claiming.

Aviva Siten of Think Progress/New Analysis reports that Ryan's speech was riddled with false claims, so much so that even Fox News wrote, “To anyone paying the slightest bit of attention to facts, Ryan’s speech was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech.”

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The World’s Most Corrupt(ed) Republic

by THOMAS MAGSTADT

NATIONofCHANGE OP--ED.

Published Friday Aug. 31, 2012.

The following article is the clearest statement relating to our Republic, how it developed, changes from time to time and where we are now and how we got here. A little long, but very informative. I think it is very worthwhile to read.

Floyd

Okay, okay. As some self-appointed representative of the cocktail cognoscenti will unfailingly point out whenever anyone in the room mentions the “D” word, WE DO NOT LIVE IN A DEMOCRACY. And, yes, Madison, Hamilton, and Jay made that absolutely clear when they quite deliberately used the word “republic” in the Federalist Papers. What we have wrought, Madison reminds us through the ages, is a “commercial republic.”

Madison apparently did not contemplate the possibility of a “corrupt republic” or what to do in the event that the commercial republic – that marvelous engine of progress – was at some point in the far-distant future hot-wired and hijacked. Too bad because that far-distant future Madison failed to consider has arrived.

Some readers, even those highly critical of our current system, will no doubt take exception to the thesis that the US is the MOST corrupt republic. What about the Democratic Republic of the Congo? Surely that’s more corrupt than the US. True enough, but the DRC isn’t really a republic. Neither is Syria, North Korea, Rwanda, or Russia. All four claim this distinction, but only Russia belongs in the debatable column. In fact, most countries in today’s world call themselves “republics” but only a few dozen meet the most basic criterion, the acid test.

What’s the acid test? Free and fair elections.

By this definition, the United States has arguably been a republic for only about 45 of the 224 years of its existence (from 1965 to 2010) – or about one-fifth of its lifespan. At its inception, the United States was an infantile republic, at best. That is to say it enshrined a severely constricted form of popular sovereignty as only propertied white males of a certain age were allowed to vote (and slaves, of course, had no rights at all).

That infantile condition persisted even after the Civil War ended slavery (most African-Americans, of course, continued to be shut out of the political process by Jim Crow laws in the South for another century). Women continued to be denied the vote until the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920! Only then did the possibility of achieving the status of a mature republic begin to materialize; it did not become a reality until the 1960s with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The Vietnam War marred that historic achievement but did not vitiate it. In fact, the role of the electorate in the course of that unpopular war is instructive. First, in 1968 voters turned LBJ, an incumbent president, out of office in wartime (contrast that result with the re-election of FDR to third and fourth terms during WWII). Second, despite having rejected anti-war candidate George McGovern in 1972, the country backed a massive student protest movement that forced the US to withdraw from Vietnam. And it was this same outbreak of student activism that led to passage of the 26th Amendment giving 18-year-olds the right to vote in 1971.

So it is that in the turbulent years 1965-1971, the US matured into a full-blown republic. At long last, all adults (except convicted felons) had the right to vote regardless of race, gender, or wealth. But if voting qualifications based on wealth (property ownership) limited the legitimacy of elections as instruments of majority rule in 1789, we are again witnessing a phenomenon that severely limits elections as an expression of the general will or a pathway to policy in the service of the public interest.

The growing wealth gap, the power of television to shape public perceptions of reality, and the unrestricted flow of private funds into political campaigns combine to transform Madison’s “commercial republic” into a republic so corrupted by billionaire bankers, hedge fund managers, venture capitalists, and casino moguls that voters can expect no honesty, truth, or even serious discourse from the politicians who run for office. Under such circumstances elections are a farce.

How did we get to this impasse? There’s no simple answer, but the Reagan Revolution that eulogized the “free” market and deregulated business and banking while cutting taxes and pursuing a costly futuristic “Star Wars” military fantasy played a big role in radically changing the distribution of wealth and power in this country. The Bush tax cuts finished what Reagan started. Since the early 1980s, the rich have gotten fabulously richer while the middle class has gone sideways or backwards. But even this widening wealth gap that now defines and drives the US economy doesn’t explain what’s happened to the political system.

The fact that wealth easily translates into political power is nothing new. But it’s never been so easy as it is now. In 2010 five judges sitting on the United States Supreme Court opened the floodgates, ruling that any amount of private money spent to influence the outcome of public elections counts as a form of free speech protected under the First Amendment. According to the reasoning of the five “deciders” in the Citizens United case, campaign finance reform aimed at protecting or restoring the integrity of elections is therefore unconstitutional!

In other words, in the opinion of these five judges freedom of political expression is essentially a function of wealth. The richer you are, the more freedom you have to amplify your voice. In this novel interpretation, the voice of the poor is inaudible, while the voice of the middle class is heard, if at all, only as a kind of muffled background noise largely unintelligible to anyone who fails to tune into FOX News regularly.

So on the eve of another presidential election let’s be crystal clear about what’s happened to the republic it took us so long to build. It is being utterly corrupted and debilitated by massive injections of big-money “heroine” directly into the veins of the body politic. So long as millionaire politicians can turn to billionaire bankers and oil barons for carloads of cash they need to stay in office, so long as the dirty dance of collusion, bribery, and legalized corruption continues to decide the fate of the nation, elections will be meaningless. And this republic cannot stand against the most basic test of legitimacy.

ABOUT Thomas Magstadt

Tom Magstadt earned his Ph.D. at The Johns Hopkins University School of International Studies. He is the author of "An Empire If You Can Keep It: Power and Principle in American Foreign Policy," "Understanding Politics: Ideas, Institutions and Issues," and "Nations and Governments: Comparative Politics in Regional Perspective." He was a regular contributor to the Prague Post in 1998-99 and has published widely in newspapers, magazines and journals in the United States. He was a Fulbright Scholar in the Czech Republic in the mid-1990s and a visiting professor at the Air War College in 1990-92. He has taught at several universities, chaired two political science departments, and also did a stint as an intelligence analyst at the CIA. He is a member of the board of the International Relations Council of Kansas City. Now working mainly as a free-lance writer, he lives in Westwood Hills, Kansas.

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If, the good Lord is willing and the creek don't rise I'll talk with you again on Tuesday September 11, 2012 if not before.

"God Bless All Of You

God Bless The United States Of America"

Floyd

Opinions Based on Facts

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

OBOF SS & MORE PART 50

The World’s Most Corrupt(ed) Republic

by THOMAS MAGSTADT

NATIONofCHANGE OP--ED.

Published Friday Aug. 31, 2012.

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