Tag Archives: Daily Kos

Didn’t expect this from Kos…

Well…cripes we lost twitter when ole elon took it over and now it looks like we’re going to lose Daily Kos, too…one of the last progressive sites left on the internet but they are now threatening the writers guild that represents the writers there that they are going lay off 30% of the staff and it looks like Kos is not operating in good faith or is willing to work with the guild to try to figure out how to make the site profitable again….all this from a progressive? I guess that once you build a business with the help of lots of others, you turn into an asshole and abandon the very things that made the place profitable in the first place…support of workers and unions and you learn to treat people like crap…shame on you Kos…geez…

Back on Daily Kos…

Well..not sure what prompted me to go back to the Daily Kos website yesterday but I guess I wanted to see if my username was still usable…and to be honest, I was bored silly and it gave me something to do…so I went out there and tried to sign on and it didn’t work…so after a message to the help desk, they informed me that everyone was asked to reset their passwords back in 2016 and then gave me the instructions to change it and it worked…and I did one post out there that they call diaries, and after that went out to my profile and found that yow! I hadn’t been out there to post since 2013…now I read the site every day to get some news and some good natured, progressive friendliness…but to not be signed on since 2013 was certainly a surprise to me…so now I have to think what part Kos is going to play in chronicling my life that I do here most of the time…probably not much since I control this site and one of the reasons I left Kos was the people who were trying to critique my writing and to prove my opinions wrong…now, I do that to people who are so damn wrong it’s obvious…but to do it to someone just to start a pie fight and to feel like you’ve scored points has no appeal to me…so, we’ll see what happens going forward….at least I’ll drop in there for some comments until it gets to be too much work…

Why?

Well…not going to talk about the WH idiot today…as I’ve said, I need to talk about other things to keep my sanity…what little there is of it…intact…over the past couple of months after going out to Kos a few times a day, I’ve noticed a couple of things…first, even with the pie fights that erupt sometimes over politics, there are a lot of really nice people that hang out there and the mood is normally pretty upbeat with the overriding theme that we can make the world a better place by staying true to progressive values, supporting a science and fact based world, and looking for and valuing the truth in our daily discourse. One thing that has alarmed me some is the almost daily fundraising that is necessary to keep our fellow members from homelessness and medical bankruptcy…and my question is why? In a country as rich as ours, why the hell can’t we take care of everyone’s health like almost every other first world country does? Just today, there was a couple at Kos that were running a fundraiser to get to the 1,500 dollars they needed for copays so that one of them could go for cancer treatment…let that sink in…there are many people who don’t have the money to save their lives because medical care is not covered…just like the woman here in GR who was turned away from a life saving heart transplant and told that she needed to go out and fund raise the 15K to get the process started before the hospital would do anything…that is just one the most sick things I have ever heard…we have trillions to give away to the rich and corporations but people who are months away from dying without proper medical care are told they are on their own and need to come up with cash before they can be saved. I lived that life for 16 years before Medicare kicked in…there was not one day that the small pain in my chest didn’t trigger dread in my mind that I was going to end up in the hospital and lose every thing I worked my entire life for just because health insurance was too expensive for me to afford…and the stress was there every day, wondering if there was some chronic disease like cancer or heart disease that was building up and just waiting to attack…something that could have been so much less serious if it would have been caught in the early stages by preventive care that I couldn’t afford. Why? I worked my whole life until our rotten society deemed that I was no longer worth a job just because I had gotten older…and corporations were allowed  or even encouraged to discriminate against mature workers by chasing every dime of profit for the owner class while wages stagnated and everyone else kept going backwards. Again, I ask why? Even now, with moving to a Medicare advantage plan, I am still on the hook for 4,000 dollars a year if anything happens to put me in the hospital…right now, I can afford that, but that is almost 20% of what I get from SS every year and if that happens, I can see having to make some hard decisions like do I eat or pay my bills…and, no one should have to make those decisions after a lifetime of hard work and education….

A progressive split…

Well…you’re probably not aware that there is a huge progressive shindig going on in Detroit this week where activists meet up to plan how to strategize to get progressive candidates elected…and to fight back against the billions of dollars that the owners of the rights politicians will spend to make sure that business and the rich continue to gut the middle class and poison everyone. This year, it was a pretty good meet up but there was one little bomb that was dropped near the end that has all of us on the left a little bewildered….the choosing of Arizona as the 2015 site for Net roots nation…as the meet up is called. This choice has split the progressive movement…well…maybe not split from the comments that I have read…but pissed us off..starting with the originator of the meetups, Kos, (or Markos Moulitsos) whose site, the Daily Kos, is the largest and most active of the progressive ones out there…with Kos going so far as saying they can go there without him or any support from his site or network. I agree with him…with all of the nasty, racist, anti gay crap that has been going on there over the past few years, to reward them by bringing millions of dollars into the state would just be wrong…we on the left have to live our principles and ensure that we don’t help the right wing asses continue to do what they do…hate and fear monger and get elected…it will be interesting to see if the decision sticks…with the outcry, I’ll bet that there will be another state chosen…one where the people are trying to restore the true American values of inclusiveness and cooperation to make this a better country for all…not just for the rich….geez…

What’s going on at Kos?

Well….you’ve heard me criticize the right here many, many times over the past few years and they have deserved it…but, I have tried to make it on the facts, not name calling, or lies like you normally hear out of the right and I think that is what separates the right from the left. But now, when I’m over at one of my favorite progressive sites, I see that many of the commenters there are starting to devolve into the same type of inflammatory name calling nonsense that greets us every day from the right…and I sure don’t like it at all…we have been proud over the years to make our arguments based on the facts and sound policy that we feel is best for the country, not the talking point sound bites that passed for good policy on the right. We are better than that…let me repeat, we on the left are supposed to be better than that and when any one of us goes so low as to match what the right does, it just feeds into the idea that the right pushes every day that “everyone does it” that has given them a pass to discriminate and use the government to hurt people, not help them. So, stop this crap Kossacks…we are better than that and we need to show that the quality of our ideas is all we need to win the day…geez…

Just wow…

Well…I have been laughing a little today about one of the features out on Kos where Kos goes out to the right wing echo chamber and finds the craziest ideas and people out there…and this week was a special one since there seems to be a surge in people hating us over at Kos since we are starting to win some of the political battles that are being fought…and what I find the funniest thing are the comments that we are violent socialist, totalitarians that are the worst people who have ever lived on the earth because we care for other people, want healthcare, and want the tea party to go back under the rock they crawled from….and then the righties that are posting invariably say they are coming with their guns and we’d better watch out…and much other violent imagery…..so who are the violent ones? I’ve never seen anyone on Kos say anything but that we need to continue to win elections…and the right thinks that is violent? I think these idiots are really, really, confused, since they equate losing elections to coups, government takeovers, and a loss of freedom….just a big ole bag of stupid over there on the right…geez…