Just a Few of the Things We Need to Change in America

We have big and small issues in America now that certainly need addressing but if you just look at the following facts, it's obvious we have things we badly, sorely need to address and fix.

Just a few of them:

--Most expensive health care in the world

--Worst mortality rates, in spite of what we pay, out of the top 17 industrialized nations

--Spending more on defense, again, far and away, than any other nation in the world

--More people shot and killed by weapons, by a huge measure, than any other nation in the world

--Longest election seasons of any nation in the world

--More paid for those elections, by any measure, than any other nation

--Wages in the nation have stagnated for not just years but for many years and so,

--America's middle class is shrinking

--More paid to government representatives and candidates for office than any other nation since we legalized bribery and call it "campaign contributions

These 9 things alone show we have huge problems in our nation.


Oh, yeah, we have things we need to change. Absolutely. And we need to get started.

#FeeltheBern

Bernie Sanders For President

Kansas and Kansas Republicans in NY Times today

A breaking article on the sad, sad state of Kansas politics in general and the Kansas Republican Party, specifically:

The End of a Kansas Tradition: Moderation

I doubt there is any better (worse?) example of a group of people voting against their own best self-interests than middle- and lower-class Kansans voting the Republican Party but there you are.

Link to full story here: http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/19/the-end-of-a-kansas-tradition-moderation/

Election night results--and likely results

I see on the news just now that, of the Republican challengers to US House of Representatives Emanuel Cleaver, one Nick Nolte is shown to have 51% of the vote with 10% reporting while Jacob Turk holds 37% of the vote.

If this holds--and there's every expectation and likelihood that it will, this means two things.

First, this means that Emanuel Cleaver will be re-elected to represent Kansas City Missouri in his district.

Second? It means Representative Cleaver's longtime challenger, that same Jacob Turk, will likely then, now and fovever give up on his trying to unseat Mr. Cleaver.

At least, that looks highly like exactly what will happen in both cases.

Stay tuned.

Other issues: It looks as though it is highly likely Jay Nixon will be returned to the governor's office as relatively unknown Dave Spence was elected to be his challenger. Unless he and the Republicans can and do spends loads of money in advertising, Mr. Nixon will be returned to office.

Finally, it looks really bad for Kansas as the far right wing Republicans were strengthened tonight while the moderates were fairly well trounced.

I feel nearly sick for Kansas.

Links: http://fox4kc.com/2012/08/06/fox-4-for-election-coverage-results/

http://midwestdemocracy.com/articles/spence-wins-right-to-challenge-nixon-for-missouri-governor/

Kansas GOP in the news

Yessirree, Bob, good ol' Kansas Republicans are in none other than the New York Times yesterday and for good things, as far as the rest of us thinking humans are concerned. It seems they just can't stand fellow Republicans, less'n they think Right Wing, like they do.

Make that FAR Right Wing:

In Kansas, Conservatives Vilify Fellow Republicans

Kansas politics have been tilting more to the right for at least the last two decades. And now that shift is prompting a bitter clash within the state’s Republican Party. Conservatives are feverishly working to win the Senate and drive out the last remnants of what they see as moderate Republicanism in a state with a deep-rooted history of centrist Republicans in the mold of Bob Dole, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Nancy Kassebaum.

The divisive primary campaign reflects the ambivalence gripping Republicans across the country, yet the situation here is more complicated than the typical conservative-versus-establishment disputes.

What sets the battle in Kansas apart is the distance between the factions. Conservative and moderate Republicans essentially operate as separate parties, and so far, no one — including Mr. Brownback — has stepped forward to try to bridge that gap in the popular tradition of moderation. Instead, each side claims to represent the soul of the party.

“We don’t even know what it means to be a Republican in the state of Kansas,” said Casey W. Moore, a conservative Senate candidate from the Topeka area.

Personally, I like the smell of Right Wing cannibalism in the morning.

Heck, I love that any time of day or night.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/06/us/in-kansas-primaries-conservatives-attack-fellow-republicans.html?_r=1&smid=fb-share

Request for Washington

It's simple, really. Would you people please, please, put the nation first? Would you put the country before all else, please, for the love of God, country and all that is good? Is that so much to ask? Would you forget your political party and, to repeat, PUT THE COUNTRY FIRST? Please. We're begging you. (You chuckleheads). Oh, and put yourelves last.

Quote of the day

"There are no moderates in the other party. 'Moderate Republican' is like 'friendly shark' or 'straight priest.' It just doesn't exist."  --Bill Maher


(I personally take exception here.  I think there are, in fact, moderate Republicans--David Brook being a moderate Conservative.  It's just that the moderates aren't involved and engaged.  The leadership of the Republican Party is held hostage by the extremists who are outspoken and engaged in the process.  They are, at times, too, handing out money as in the cases of the Koch brothers and the Heritage Foundation).

Link:   http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/bill-maher-the-rolling-stone-interview-20110420

Quote of the day--on cooperation

"We must all learn to live together as brothers or we shall perish together as fools."  --The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

This so applies, I strongly believe, to all America and Americans now, today.

Instead of calling out our differences and emphasizing those--especially as they relate to what political party or group we identify with (Democrat, Republican, Tea Party, Libertarian, Left, Right, Independent, whatever), it can't be said enough--we need to work together as Americans, first and last, in identifying and prioritizing our problems and then doing the same with solutions.  Then, when finished with all that, to "roll up our sleeves", figuratively or literally, as required, and again, work together on those solutions.

Let's stop with the names.  Let's start with the solutions.

Quote of the day--on the election

"It is depressingly clear, in the aftermath of Tuesday’s midterm elections, that the key to political success is effective coalition-building. Created through the ceaseless, strident repetition of patent untruths, a coalition of the uninformed, the misinformed, the racially bigoted and the obscenely privileged has made serious progress toward its goal."   --none other than our own, very local Mr. Charles Guswelle, columnist, The Kansas City Star







Link to original post: http://www.kansascity.com/news/#ixzz14ZioI8z8

Want better government? Get behind the "Fair Elections Now Act"

Everyone complains about government. Sure. We always have and always will. But doesn't it seem as though it's gotten far worse? Doesn't it seem as though the big corporate money and lobbyists and problems have pretty much taken over? Would you want to take our government back? I know I would. This is a big part of how we could do it: In a push to implement a publicly-financed election system and curb moneyed interests in politics, a pair of good-government groups is launching a television ad campaign with a noteworthy price tag. Common Cause and Public Campaign, two organizations known for exposing the murkier influences on legislative and electoral processes, are staking $8 million to try and burnish Congress with the willpower to pass the Fair Elections Now Act. And they're willing to spend as much as $15 million on their campaign-season gambit. We need to get campaign finance reform, shorten our elections as the British have done (this isn't pushing for that, unfortunately), and get big money, the corporations and their lobbyists out of our government. We need to take our government back and this is how to do it. You need to be aware of this and we all--Right, Left, Center, Republicans, Libertarians, Democrats, everyone--need to get behind this. It's not about taking a voice away from any one of these groups (except maybe fatcat, corporate Republicans). It's about giving a voice BACK to the American people. Let's do this. Link to original post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/07/good-government-ad-campaign_n_638887.html

A column someone from the "left" could have written

A column from The New York Times, written by Consevative David Brooks, also posted in The Kansas City Star, yesterday, that could have been written by someone from the Liberal "left":

The Story of an Angry Voter

By DAVID BROOKS

Let’s imagine a character named Ben. A couple of decades ago, Ben went to high school.

It wasn’t easy. His parents were splitting up. His friends would cut class to smoke weed. His sister got pregnant. But Ben worked hard and graduated with decent grades and then studied at East Stroudsburg University and the University of Phoenix.

That wasn’t easy either. Ben would like to have majored in history, but he needed a skill so he studied hotel management. Others spent their college years partying, but Ben worked hard. After graduation, he got a job with a hotel chain. A few years later, he got a different job and then a different one.

He didn’t have lifetime security or a fabulous salary, but Ben worked. He filled in for the night manager, hired staff and cleaned up the breakfast area when that needed doing.

In other words, in school, he labored when others didn’t. At work, he sacrificed when others didn’t. He bought a house he could afford when others didn’t.

This wasn’t a robotic suburban life. It was a satisfying, moral way of living. Ben lived according to an ethos of what you might call “earned success.” Arthur Brooks has a good description of this ethos in his new book “The Battle.” As Brooks (no relation) observes, the key to happiness is not being rich; it’s doing something arduous and creating something of value and then being able to reflect on the fruits of your labor.

For Ben, right and wrong is contained in the relationship between effort and reward. If people do not work but get rewarded, that’s wrong. If people work and do not get rewarded, that’s wrong. But Ben believed that America is fundamentally a just society. He loved his country because people who work hard can usually overcome whatever unfairness is thrust in their way.

But when Ben looked at Washington, he saw a political system that undermined the relationship between effort and reward. People in Washington spent money they didn’t have. They just borrowed it from the Chinese. People in Washington taxed those with responsible homes to bail out people who’d bought homes they couldn’t afford.

People in Congress were caught up in a spoils system in which money was taken from those who worked and given to those with connections. Money was taken from those who produced and used to bail out the reckless, who were supposedly too big to fail.

This was an affront to the core values of Ben’s life.

Once there was a group in the political center that would have understood Ben’s outrage. Moderates like Abraham Lincoln believed in the free labor ideology. Their entire governing system was built around encouraging labor and rewarding labor.

But these days, the political center is a feckless shell. It has no governing philosophy. Its paragons seem from the outside opportunistic, like Arlen Specter, or caught in some wishy-washy middle, like Blanche Lincoln. The right and left have organized, but the center hasn’t bothered to. The right and left have media outlets and think tanks, but the centrists are content to complain about polarization and go home. By their genteel passivity, moderates have ceded power to the extremes.

So when Ben looked around for leaders who might understand his outrage, he only found them among the ideological hard-liners. In Arkansas, he saw a MoveOn candidate, Bill Halter, crusading against the bailouts and the spoils culture. On the right, he saw the Tea Party candidate Rand Paul crusading against runaway spending and debt.

Ben wasn’t naturally an extremist sort of guy. He didn’t live his life for politics or go in for the over-the-top stuff he heard on talk radio. But he did have some sense that the American work ethic was being threatened by debt and decadence.

It was going to take spit and vinegar to turn things around. So he voted for one of the outsiders. This is not time for a tinkerer, he figured. It’s time for a demolition man.

In a few years’ time, Ben is going to be disappointed again. He’s going to find that the outsiders he sent to Washington just screamed at each other at ever higher decibels. He’s going to find that he and voters like him unwittingly created a political culture in which compromise is impermissible, in which institutions are decimated by lone-wolf narcissists who have no interest in or talent for crafting legislation. Nothing will get done.

In a few years’ time, Ben is going to look for something else. It will be interesting to see if, by that time, any moderates have had the foresight and energy to revive and define the free labor tradition — a tradition that uses government to encourage work, to reward work, and to uphold the values at the core of Ben’s life.

Food for thought.

As Mr. King asked, "Can't we all just get along?"