Well…I have been following this whole NSA/spying flap over the past couple of days and the question that pops into my head is: “What’s wrong with transparency?” Why is it so terrible that we, as citizens, know what the hell our government is up to…especially when it directly affects us? It’s not like they’ve foiled hundreds of terrorist plots gathering all of this data…in fact, the head of the NSA has said that there may have been one plot foiled…and don’t give me that crap that it is worth it if one plot is foiled…since we don’t even know what the definition of “plot” is…is a full scale terrorist attack that was foiled or was it a couple of wannabes talking back and forth on facebook? Even with all of this money being spent…and there are over 400,000 people that are working on gathering and analyzing the data…they didn’t catch the Boston bombers and they are the sort of people that the NSA is supposed to be protecting us from….all the while we spend billions upon billions of dollars on this nonsense while bridges collapse and thousands of people die from gun violence every year…and thousands more from preventable diseases that could be cured if they had health insurance. I think we are at the point where we really do need to bring some light to these programs so we, as a people, can actually have a say in how we want to be kept safe and how much liberty we are prepared to cede to do it…geez…
Category Archives: Politics
What happened to the fourth amendment?
Well…for quite a while now, I have been concerned by the daily erosion of the protections of the fourth amendment both by the courts and by the legislature of the federal government. I don’t understand it, either…when there is so much outcry about any infringement of the 2nd amendment and the rabid howls from the right when even sensible laws controlling guns are proposed, and yet with the revelations that the NSA has been infringing on the 4th on a daily basis…only a few repubs have come forward to oppose this big brother dragnet. The most egregious justification for it is the general one of “safety” and that the government is “protecting” us from some amorphous threat that is out there but they won’t tell us what the threat is or what they are doing to protect us…this creates the next question which is why should we believe agencies that lie on a daily basis?”. This boils down to one quote that I use quite often that distills the balance between risk and freedom: “..those who give up essential liberty for temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety…” Ben Franklin…geez…
Heartless bastards….
Well…just a short one on a jaw-dropper that I read somewhere today…our buddy Eric Cantor, had a wonderful idea (yep, that’s snark) to eliminate government funding of elections that would do nothing but increase the influence of corporations and the rich, but he tried a little bit of misdirection to confuse people what the whole thing was about…including a clause that would take some of the money and put it towards funding medical care for sick kids…but the sick, heartless bastards of the hard right (yeah, you can read that tea partiers) came out in full howl that helping sick kids would create a “constituency” that would then have to be helped forever…just like people that get food stamps or unemployment insurance. I am at a loss how to respond to someone as heartless as this…of course you should help sick kids forever! Who is a government supposed to help forever? Oil companies? Oh…I forgot…that is exactly who these bastards want to help while kids die from lack of health care…geez…
Typical republicans…
Well…just a short one a little article that just came over Twitter about the student loan debacle…in case you haven’t heard, the interest rate on student loans is set to double if the senate doesn’t do something about it in the next week or so….and the dems had a perfectly reasonable plan to pay for it by cutting some corporate subsidies and tax loopholes for the rich..but, in typical fashion, the repubs are protecting these tax giveaways and have basically said to all the students that have loans to go to hell…they would rather have students pay more tax (and that is what it is is a tax and the extra money goes straight to the big banks) than to have the rich folks pay their fair share. I just can’t believe…oh, wait…I can believe the repubs would do that…it just shows they don’t give a damn about anyone but their donors…geez…
No one does stupid like the repubs…
Well…have been thinking about doing a weekly series on the abject stupidity coming out of the repubs these days, and that may happen, but I just think I’ll do this one first and see how it goes…not sure if you know but there is still a huge controversy going on in Alabama where the repub idiots there are spending most of their time trying to get around court decisions that outlaw teaching creationism in their schools…and one of the reasons that was used in the debate why evolution just can’t be true is that no one has been able to take an e-coli bacteria and make it evolve into a human in a laboratory…yep, I am not making this up…this was suggested by one of the elected repubs there…man, the stupid runs deep in Alabama.
The second bit of stupid goes out to all of the repub governors who have decided that the poor residents of their states do not deserve any type of healthcare and have rejected the Medicaid expansion that would be paid for by the feds…and the funny part (well..none of this is funny) is that it has been calculated that rejecting this expansion is going to cost these states almost 9 billion dollars in uncompensated care that these idiots are going to end up paying for anyway….so, to recap, cover all your people for free, or cost your states billions….which would a smart person choose?…as always, it just all ideology to these idiots…and poor people pay…geez…
Just some stuff…
Well….already running late for the month and I’m not sure how that happened…so, I thought I’d come back and do a mish mash one with just random thoughts in it….I may have gotten the squeak out of the bike…two days and counting and it is still quiet so I do have a little hope….I do have a question…why the hell are there any young republicans? Unless they are certain to be a part of the right wing money scam, what would appeal to a thinking young person? Hating on your gay friends? Ensuring that you will never be able to pay back your student loans? Limiting the rights of everyone unless you are one of the 1%? I can understand some young people who are well connected into the old boy network like the Romney spawn being repubs, but what young person that actually has to work for a living would think tax cuts for the rich at the expense of a secure future would be a good idea? Just can’t understand any appeal of the current repubs to anyone and I’m supposedly their base constituency…and old white guy…something to think about….oh, one last thing…my face is still puffy around my eyes and I am really hoping it goes away soon…it’s a pain continually massaging my eyelids to keep the fluid out of them so I can open my eyes…
Darrel Issa called someone a liar?
Well…I am just laughing at the caliber of person that the repubs are calling leaders these days starting with the crook Darrel Issa who is leading the witch hunt against the IRS…let’s look at this idiots history and it will make you laugh, too. First, this guy was arrested and charged with stealing a Maserati a few years back…then, there was the suspicious fire at his business that fire investigators said was deliberately set…and the fact that ole Darrel didn’t get the entire claim paid by his insurance company says that they believed that ole Darrel had something to do with it. Now, this guy is calling Jay Carney a liar? Look, I can understand why the IRS looked at a bunch of the tea party non-profit applications….they were buried in them when the tea party nonsense was at it’s peak…and if you know anything about the repubs behavior, you know they don’t think the rules apply to them so to look at these folks would be a good idea. The last thing to remember is that there wasn’t one of the apps rejected…not one, so how is that targeting? I think the best thing to do would be to ignore ole Darrel and maybe he’ll crawl back under the rock he came from…what an idiot…geez…
Why do repubs hate women so much?
Well…you know that I’ve talked about the continuing lack of respect for womens rights that oozes from the repubs daily from the 967 laws that have been introduced in repub controlled legislatures to limit womens access to abortion and even to contraception over the past year…and, with these idiots, you knew there would be new attacks. The latest is the hand wringing over the fact that some married women make more money than their husbands and the repubs are blaming this fact for all of the ills in society and they think this is the reason that men are being marginalized…if they are. My thoughts are that, yeah, on the right a woman earning more than a man is a huge problem…on the left, not so much. But, the whole thing comes down to the control that men on the right think they should have over the women in their lives and they are threatened that if they continue to be the mistreating assholes they are, the woman in their life that has the means to kick him to curb, will. It’s just about fear of change that these guys can’t take….it’s one thing that I taught my children over the years is that men and women are equal…period…no discussion on that point..just wish the idiot repubs would do the same…geez…
What’s with all the gun threats?
Well…I’m not sure why this is happening, but I think it may be the rise of the tea party idiots out there and their limited ability to think of anything but being bullies. I am startled to read of all of the gun threats by the tea partiers from the governor of Maine to this nut that is organizing the armed march on Washington DC….and I am really getting tired of these bullies using the protections of the 2nd amendment to get their way outside the normal processes that make democracies work. First, the governor of Maine was smacked down by the legislature there when he tried to run over the house processes and intrude on a legislative meeting that he was not invited to…the one thing he doesn’t understand is that being governor is not being king…you just don’t get to do whatever you want and the dems in legislature were all to happy to make him follow the rules. So, what does this tea party idiot do? He starts to scream that his first amendment rights are being violated since they won’t let him intrude into their meeting and bully everyone there and then says “it looks like we’ll have to go home, roll up our sleeves and get our guns”, threatening that if he doesn’t get his way he will start shooting people that don’t agree with him. Then we have the Russian tea party idiot that is organizing the armed march on DC who, when told by the DC chief of police that they will be arrested if they show up in DC armed, has a new idea…to get groups of armed people to head to all of the state legislatures and try to force them to disband the US…yep, you heard it this guy now wants to commit treason…what I think the feds should do is go find this idiot and lock him up before he really does shoot someone…it is a crime to threaten the safety of the US after all…and he has already committed a felony by proposing this nonsense…it’s just the same old thing…bullies that think they don’t need to follow the law or any rules…that’s the modern repub party in a nutshell…geez…
Ding dong, the witch is dead…
Well…this pretty average day has just gotten so much better with the announcement that the craziest house member that the US has ever seen, Michelle Bachmann, is not going to run again in 2014…and immediately the average intelligence of the House just went up by 30 points. She ran out the normal platitudes on why except the tired old “to spend more time with my family” but we all know that she took a look at the easy, rich life that sister Sarah got from the right when she became the half-governor and wanted to slop at that trough before she gets out crazied by the new crop of even crazier righties. I could list a list of the stupidity that has spewed from this idiot but google does a much better job at it so just google it and see…the last thing I have to say is “ding dong, the witch is dead”…good riddance…geez…