Well…have been reading all morning trying to find topics to get caught up on these and ran across a story that is the true distillation of republicanism playing out in Florida…with the tax cuts for the rich decimating the budget there, the gov, Rick Scott, has indiscriminately slashed the budgets of all departments of the government…with huge cuts to child and family services that Scott said is necessary to “grow jobs” in Florida. But the unintended consequence, or maybe it is intended, is that over the past few months, 40 children have died because there are just no longer enough case workers to go around and highly at risk children were returned to dangerous home situations. I’m not sure what else to say about it…but, it point outs the callousness and disdain that the poor get from republicans since they are “takers” in their eyes…geez…
Category Archives: Politics
Need to pick on Walker again…
Well…I am feeling considerably better now that I have my Walkman working again and I have played 5 songs without the battery going dead..so, I thought I pick on one of my favorite targets again and his dismal record of job creation that has been mirrored in every other state that is run by the repubs…the latest data from the BLS shows that Wisconsin’s job creation rate under Walker is less than half the national average and trails dem run states by as much as 50%…yep, Walker, the poster boy for the repub agenda of right to work for less, less taxes for corporations, and union busting has basically trashed Wisconsin’s economy by that nonsense…just as Snyder has done here in Michigan…where the only job growth has been in the auto industry and whose assistance by the federal government was opposed by every repub here in this state. I can’t stress this enough…the states are laboratories for repub ideas and by the objective numbers in every measure, they fall far short of progressive policies that serve to protect the middle class and reign in the egregious income inequality that the repub policies are designed to make worse while they enrich the 1%. I will be really interested to see how this idiot spins these numbers…oh, that’s right, they go by gut feel, not no stinkin numbers…geez…
Obamacare polls…
Well…after the bottom was reached in the polling on Obamacare a few weeks back, and after the website was fixed to where most users are now able to use it, the numbers have come back to where it has an almost even favorable/unfavorable rating…but that doesn’t stop the right from continuing to lie about the program and say that a great majority of the people in the US don’t like the law…one thing that I have to keep stressing to people is to go deeper into the numbers…while it is true that the numbers are even right now, there has always been 15-20 points of those in the disapproval column that disapprove because the law is not single payer and does not cut the insurance companies out completely. So, if you add even the low side of 15% back to the approval side of 46%, you get a good majority of people who approve of the law, although some of them hold their noses while doing it since it is better than the previous system. It is clear that the majority of people in the US, other than the tea party idiots, want the system changed and want it to be given a chance while improving the law as flaws surface…as things have been done since this country started…at least until the right wing infection of the repub party…geez…
A win for us and the 4th amendment..
Well…have been trying to figure out what to write today..there are plenty of topics but none of them have been grabbing me…but, this one just came across my Twitter feed and it is a cheerable moment for me and should be for everyone in the US…and across the world…just this aft, a federal judge has ruled that the gross capturing of all of our phone records by the NSA is unconstitutional…saying that it violates the 4th amendment and that “James Madison would be spinning in his grave…”.
Finally, a judge that has said enough to all this nonsense…anyone who has ever read the constitution knows that the 4th is very simple…you can’t search peoples lives without probable cause that a crime has been committed….and just using the phone is not illegal so the leap to collecting every phone record has to be against the law. Period. The only bad thing is that he stayed his decision until the appeal is completed…but, with how the decision was worded, this judge feels that the plaintiffs will prevail in any appeal…he should have made it immediate…would have saved billions of dollars…a good piece of deficit reduction….geez…
Just have to hate the repubs…and the dems that go along…
Well…just a short one on the budget that was reached over the past couple of days and all of the cheering that has been done to celebrate it..well..I for one won’t be celebrating since they gave billions more to the military that they just don’t need while taking away extended UE benefits for 1.7 million people…so, what are these people supposed to do, starve? I have had enough of feeding the military machine and the obscene profits that their cronies continue to suck out of this country…when are we going to get our priorities straight? I just don’t blame the repubs..after all, you expect them to screw people…it’s in their nature…but to the dems that are going along I same shame on you…where are your principles? Where is the caring for people like me who just can’t find work in this repub stifled economy? I’ve sent the letter out to my reps to let them know what I think…more people should…geez…
You just gotta love Bernie Sanders…
Well…just a shorty on a couple of things…not sure if I am going to comment on this stuff but just pass it on…read the other day that Senator Bernie Sanders is readying legislation to institute a single payer plan for people to get health insurance to cut the insurance companies out of the profits and immediately lower the cost to everyone…this would help in a couple of ways…with a pool that large, it would be easy for the plan to control costs of medical procedures across the country and you wouldn’t have different costs depending on where you live…one example of this is the spread from high to low for an appendectomy…one study showed a cost that ran from 1,000 dollars to 14,000 dollars for comparable cases…and, in Bernies plan, the single player plan would be allowed to negotiate drug prices with the drug companies which could save billions of dollars every year. So, give em hell, Bernie…we need people like you….
Handshakegate….
Well…with the improvement of the ACA website and the spate of good news stories coming out, we just knew that there would be another shiny object that the right and Fox “news” would trot out to keep their rabid followers salivating on how bad Obama is…the latest, as you can see from the snark headline above, is the fact that Obama shook Raul Castro’s hand at the funeral for Mandela. Now, is this the next impeachable offense that the tea partiers will bring to the House? Look, this is one of the stupidist controversies that I can remember the right pushing…well, no, all of them are stupid, but these folks think that no one remembers history anymore…like maybe Nixon shaking Mao’s hand? Or Cheney fawning all all over Saddam? Or Eisenhower shaking Khruschev’s hand? These guys on Fox seem like they just aren’t trying anymore…if you have to gin up a controversy over a handshake, it just means they have nothing…and never have…geez…
Delusions and lies…
Well…just read an interesting article about the post mortem of the Virgina races that was done by one of the higher ups in the RNC and all I can say is that these folks really have gone over the line into delusions…what this idiot comes out and says is that the conventional wisdom that they lost the election because they were too far to the right is just wrong…if they had only talked more about taking way womens rights, about hating gays, and the ACA, they would have won in a landslide…no matter what the polls said…they were just not mean and assholish enough. The only thing I have to say to that is “please proceed” keep reminding people that you don’t care about anyone unless they are rich and white…people will just flock to that kind of message and vote you in for life. They just don’t get that the country is getting away from them…and with these changes, they can’t even beat a weak dem candidate for governor.
Oh, the lies part…just one more reason to understand what the repub party has become…they have set up a fake website in California and sent out official fliers on official stationary sending people to the fake website that is full of lies about the ACA that have all been debunked…and the taxpayers of Cali are footing the bill for this crap…I hope the repubs feel good when they convince people to not sign up for insurance and they either go bankrupt when a medical emergency happens or they die since they don’t get the care they need….what a bunch of absolute assholes….geez…
Cruel, wonderful irony…
Well…if there wasn’t enough evidence that the repubs are irony challenged, we have just one of the most delicious ones I have seen n a long, long time with the refusal of the idiot repub governors to allow for Medicaid expansion in their states. Since Medicaid is funded by general tax revenues, the people in the red states that refuse the expansion are going to have to help pay for the expansion in the states that accepted it…so, for example, Texas is going to be contributing 9 billion dollars that they will get nothing for…the same for other red states like Georgia who will pay 3 billion and get nothing, and Florida who will pay 5 billion and get nothing. so, let’s recap…just because these prick governors just don’t give a damn about poor people and are trying to do anything to derail the ACA,, they are going to help pay for Michigan’s expansion while their people get nothing for their money…if I lived in one of those states, I would be really pissed off…but, they keep electing these thugs so maybe they deserve it…geez…
Politics?
Well…another budget showdown looms and I read one line from one of the hardline righties in the House that made me laugh my butt off…in defending the lowered funding in the sequester budget, one of these idiots said that the sequester is “the law of the land” and said that the dems should respect that. To quote Daffy Duck “it is to laugh”…from these same idiots who have railed against and tried to remove the ACA 41 times…which is also “the law of the land”, I wonder if they are so irony impaired that they don’t realize that this one is an ocean of irony? I long for the days when there were big politicians who could put party nonsense behind and do what is right for the country…which is not to continue to waste time taking insurance away from millions of Americans. There are days when I wonder if anything can be done to fix these idiots…probably not…geez…