Great video from Bill Maher’s “Real Time” last night….
He talks about the “promiscuous” Republican electorate that falls in love with a new Candidate every month- until they get to know them.
Then, he closes with how even Jesus of Nazareth wouldn’t be able to please these people….
Which should give the GOP voters something to think about.
But if Republicans really thought-and felt- well, would they be Republicans?
Filed under Elections, Politics, Religion, Uncategorized
The more I see of Elizabeth Warren, the more I love her….
She is one smart – brilliant- woman and I hope to God she gets elected to the Massachusetts Senate seat so she has a platform to run for President in 2016.
I also love that she talks about the Social Contract. I was thinking I was the only one left who believed there was such a thing….
We desperately need more politicians like Elizabeth Warren…
Filed under Congress, Elections, Politics, The Economy, Uncategorized
How can people be so blind- and so cruel?
I guess it’s easy to be hard….
Ron Paul told TPM on Wednesday that even if there’s a “case or two” that makes Americans uncomfortable, the government should stay out of the health care business. Even if one of the cases in question is his former campaign manager, Kent Snyder, who died with $400,000 in unpaid medical bills after being unable to secure health insurance due to a pre-existing condition.
via Ron Paul Says Aide Who Died With $400k Medical Bill Didn’t Need Government Help | Election 2012.
Filed under Elections, Health Care, Medicare, Politics, Uncategorized
The White House really needs to start playing up the benefits of Health Care Response and this is a big one….
For years, the insurance companies required parents to drop their children from their policies when they reached either the age of 18 or 21 if they were in college.
Now, thanks to Health Care Reform, they can carry them until they are 26. This is a great benefit to young people and their parents. It’s just no one seems to know it….
And when the GOP talks about “repealing Obamacare”, remember, this is what they are talking about repealing….
From the New York Times:
Young adults, long the group most likely to be uninsured, are gaining health coverage faster than expected since the 2010 health law began allowing parents to cover them as dependents on family policies.
Three new surveys, including two released on Wednesday, show that adults under 26 made significant and unique gains in insurance coverage in 2010 and the first half of 2011. One of them, by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, estimates that in the first quarter of 2011 there were 900,000 fewer uninsured adults in the 19-to-25 age bracket than in 2010.
This was despite deep hardship imposed by the recession, which has left young adults unemployed at nearly double the rate of older Americans, with incomes sliding far faster than the national average.
The Obama administration, intent on showcasing the benefits of a law that has been pilloried by Republicans, attributes the improvement to a provision of the Affordable Care Act that permits parents to cover dependents up to their 26th birthdays. Until that measure took effect one year ago this week, children typically had to roll off their parents’ family policies at 18 or 21 or when they left college.
via Young Adults Make Gains in Health Insurance Coverage – NYTimes.com.
Filed under Elections, Health Care, Politics
NOTE: Please see the updated guide for today’s General Election here:
https://lostinthe21stcentury.com/2011/11/06/greensboro-voter-guide-for-general-election/
I want to share this with my fellow Progressives in Greensboro, NC, Jamestown and Guilford County….
Below is the list of endorsements from Replacements Pac for the October Primary elections.
These candidates are not just supportive of GLBT rights, but are good Progressive choices for City Council and Mayor.
I encourage you to consider supporting these candidates on the Primary Election on October 11th and during early voting starting September 22nd.
PLEASE VOTE!!!! It does matter. A lot…..
Unless you are a Republican, then I would suggest just spending the day at the Spa…..
The Candidates in Bold Red Print are the ones I know I will be personally voting for in my District or At-Large. You may vote for 3 At-Large City Council candidates and I have wish we had the chance to vote for 4 as I really like Marikay Abuzuaiter, too…
Please do NOT vote for Bill Knight for Mayor or Mary Rakestraw in District 4
Early Voting
September 22 – October 8
Primary Election: Tuesday, October 11th, 2011
2011 LGBT Primary Voter Guide
Guilford County
Greensboro Mayor
(R) Robbie Perkins
Greensboro City Council At-Large
(U) Nancy Barakat Vaughan
Greensboro City Council At-Large
(D) Yvonne J. Johnson
Greensboro City Council At-Large
(D) Wayne Abraham
Greensboro City Council Dist 1
No Primary
Greensboro City Council Dist 2
(D) Jim Kee
Greensboro City Council Dist 3
No Primary
Greensboro City Council Dist 4
(D) Nancy Hoffmann
Greensboro City Council Dist 5
No Endorsement
Jamestown
Jamestown Town Council
(D) Frank Gray
Jamestown Town Council
(R) Brock Thomas
Jamestown Town Council
(U) Robert Wenzel
Jamestown Town Council
(D) Tommy Walls
Our data about candidates is obtained through survey responses, conversations with candidates and a candidate’s public record. Following are primary candidates who returned surveys and are supportive of LGBT issues in varying degrees.
Greensboro
Bradford Cone
(D) Very Supportive
Tom Phillips
(R) Very Supportive
Marikay Abuzuaiter
(D) Very Supportive
Clarence Easter
(D) Very Supportive
Cyndy Hayworth
(D) Somewhat Supportive
Hayden Jesserer
(D) Very Supportive
Chris Lawyer
(R) Very Supportive
Sal Leone
(D) Very Supportive
Christopher McLaughlin
(D) Very Supportive
Dan Fisher
(U) Very Supportive
David Crawford
(D) Very Supportive
Jamestown
(R) John Regis Fete
(R) Somewhat Supportive
via Replacements Ltd PAC.
Filed under Elections, Greensboro, North Carolina, Politics, Uncategorized
Poor baby….
Just scraping by on $400k a year….
After deductions, I’m sure….
Rep. John Fleming (R-La.) appeared on MSNBC Monday morning to express opposition to President Barack Obama’s deficit reduction plan, which includes a proposal to raise taxes on the wealthy.
Fleming charged that the plan is a terrible idea which kills jobs provided by wealthy “job creators” who pay personal income taxes. When asked about his business ventures — including his role in a number of Subway restaurants and UPS stores — from which he earned $6.3 million last year, Fleming told MSNBC host Chris Jansing that his business expenses left him with little to tax “by the time I feed my family.”
Fleming told Jansing that the $6.3 million is “before you pay 500 employees, you pay rent, you pay equipment and food.”
“The actual net income of that was a mere fraction of that amount.”
“By the time I feed my family, I have maybe $400,000 left over,” Fleming said.
via John Fleming, GOP Congressman, Blasts Obama Over Buffett Rule: I Can’t Afford A Tax Hike.
Filed under Congress, Elections, Politics, The Economy
Just in case anyone doesn’t know it yet, these Tea Party Conservatives are scary people….
They don’t really care about representative Democracy. They want to use force and intimidation to get their way. They don’t respect anyone who disagrees with them and are willing to use any method to get their way and drive their agenda.
Their goal is to suppress votes and, if that doesn’t work, they keep talking about driving their agenda by force.
And remember, they are not the majority, no matter how many times they claim to be so….
That’s not exactly the American Way….
That is unless you believe D.H. Lawrence when he said: “”The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer.”
That’s not the open and generous American Soul I know, but it sure seems to be an accurate statement about the soul of the Tea Party and these hard right conservatives.
From Raw Story.com. Emphasis is mine….
Speaking to a Massachusetts tea party group recently, conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart made some comments that are raising eyebrows online this week, telling the small gathering of Republicans that he sometimes wants to “fire the first shot.”
“I’m under attack all the time,” he said. “The call me gay. There are death threats… There are times when I’m not thinking as clearly as I should, and in those unclear moments, I always think to myself, ‘Fire the first shot. Bring it on.’ Because I know who’s on our side.
“They can only win a rhetorical and propaganda war. They cannot win. We outnumber them in this country and we have the guns… I’m not kidding. They talk a mean game, but they will not cross that line because they know what they’re dealing with. ”
Breitbart added that “major named people in the military” will sometimes “grab” him and say, “Thank you for what you’re doing, we’ve got your back.”
via Breitbart: Conservatives ‘outnumber’ liberals, ‘and we have the guns’ | Raw Replay.
So much for Governor GoodHair’s jobs record….
I do hope people are paying attention. If Rick Perry wants to run on his record, so be it! It’s not much of a record unless you are for crony capitalism, job losses and executing innocent people….
From the Austin Statesman:
The Texas unemployment rate reached 8.5 percent in August, its highest rate since June of 1987.
That’s an increase from 8.4 percent in July.
Those numbers come from the U.S. Department of Labor. The numbers were confirmed by the Texas Workforce Commission, which says the state lost 1,300 jobs in August. Texas gained 8,100 private-sector jobs, but those jobs were wiped out by job losses in the public sector.
For the year, Texas has added 272,000 jobs in the private sector but lost 19,000 government jobs. In August alone, the state lost 11,500 jobs in local government, for a net loss of 9,400 government jobs.
The Texas unemployment rate ranks 27th, tied with Colorado.
Gov. Rick Perry is trying to make the Texas jobs record the centerpiece of his campaign.
Interesting article from Alternet…
I’ve always said the Republicans look backwards with fear while the Democrats look forward with hope.
Should Perry be the GOP nominee, it would definitely set up an interesting group of dynamics. Rich vs the Poor and Middle Class. Past vs Future. Corporate Power vs The People. Ignorance vs Science and Knowledge. And yes, many, many more….including North vs South.
It would be one nasty, scary battle as Perry fights in the gutter. I just hope he’s done himself in with his comments about ending Social Security, Secession, and many, many more totally stupid comments….
However, America elected George W Bush, at least once, so I never under-estimate the power of ignorance and venality to triumph in this country….
Should Perry win the GOP presidential nomination, an obvious subtext of the presidential contest will be “Confederacy v. Union — The Rematch.” And, at the visual level, the theme will be conveniently reinforced by each man’s respective race.
Earlier this week, Perry delivered a speech from the stage of the 10,000-seat amphitheater at Liberty University, the evangelical institution founded by the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, one of the early leaders of the religious right and an opponent of school desegregation. “When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line,” Falwell told his flock in 1958, according to a report by Sarah Posner for AlterNet.
In introducing Perry to the Liberty U audience this week, Falwell’s son, Jerry Jr., lauded the Texas governor “for having the guts to say things that weren’t exactly politically correct, like when Gov. Perry said Texas might secede one day from the union.”
Indeed, Perry made such intimations more than once during the rancorous debate over the president’s health-care reform legislation. At the time, Tea Party leaders were vociferously talking up the 10th Amendment to the Constitution, which reserves to the states all powers not enumerated within the document, as the means for challenging the health-care bill’s mandate for individual purchase of health insurance. The impetus for all the 10th Amendment love comes from states’ rights advocates, often known as Tenthers, many of whom view the Civil War as the result of unlawful usurpation of power from the states by the federal government.
via Would a Perry v. Obama Contest Be a Confederacy v. Union Rematch? | | AlterNet.
Filed under Elections, Uncategorized
This is the best summation of the truth about Social Security and the Deficit that I’ve seen:
Hat Tip: MoveOn.org
Lost in the 21st Century 