America? Unfair??

And racist??

Nah....

Couldn't be.

Right??

The one thing, the only thing that mattered in the George Zimmerman case

Police dispatcher:  "Are you following him?"

 Zimmerman:  "Yes"

 Dispatcher:  "Okay. We don't need you to do that."

Entertainment overnight

Texas does it again

Congress' continued work for the wealthy. And corporations

From The New York Times today, news that the Senate and House can keep in millions and billions for war and defense and weapons of war we don't need--or even use--but nothing for "the least of us":

Missing: The Food Stamp Program

As the Times said:  "By brutally stripping food aid from its farm bill, the House ended a tradition of decency."

Then, on top of that, this one:

Pain on the Reservation

"Legislation specifically exempted many programs that benefit low-income Americans, but virtually none aiding American Indians were included."

Not that we, as Americans, ever really showed that we gave a collective damn about Native Americans, though, right?

One last note. This same group of government legislators also want to strip out two tax deductions:

Two Tax Credits That Work

 It seems these two tax credits that help build up and rejuvenate poorer neighborhoods--and so, the poor--are being considered for elimination.

Nice, huh?

Our legislators just keep heaping benefits on the wealthy and corporations while they take from the poor.

Yay, us, huh?

How is it the churches and religious people--the ones who are supposed to be "moral"--aren't screaming about these atrocities?

I will never understand the last 20 years in America

Quote of the day--on progress

Local girl makes more good

From Facebook earlier this evening from the GREAT PERFORMANCES l PBS page.

 

Click below to watch Joyce DiDonato give an incredibly moving performance of Mary's (Maria's) prayer, "Deh! Tu di un'umile preghiera" from the upcoming Sunday broadcast of Donizetti's 'Maria Stuarda'



Links: http://to.pbs.org/12lVwTp

 Photo credit: Ken Howard / The Metropolitan Opera

The Insanity that is US Defense Spending

And we can't begin to even touch Defense spending, in spite of all this insanity, in spite of their losing and not being able to account for millions and billions of dollars, annually.

I tell you, our Defense budget is weakening us, not making or keeping us stronger.

Entertainment overnight

We're going to kill ourselves

There was another great, rather important article on NPR yesterday about Monsanto, farmers in the country and insecticides:

As Biotech Seed Falters, Insecticide Use Surges In Corn Belt

Really, fascinating.

It seems the genetically-modified seeds that Monsanto created some years ago have--SURPRISE!!--evolved (take that, Right Wing Christians!) and so now they aren't as effective keeping parasitic bugs away.

Imagine that.

Wouldn't Charles Darwin have told us this was bound to happen?

Couldn't ANY scientist have told us that is PRECISELY what would happen, given enough time?

I mean, come on.  The little guys who couldn't take it died. The ones who could, lived and then their offspring lived.  Sheesh.  It's not that complicated.

And the thing is, now, the farmers are buying up yet more and more insecticides, for pity's sake, to spray on their crops--our food, thank you--in order TO KILL THE BUGS.

\

In the first place, that's what Monsanto said their seeds would do. That is, repel the bugs.

Second, again, Monsanto should have known this would happen. For that matter, the farmers should have known.  Heck we all knew better and we aren't growing the stuff.

So now the farmers will all start getting sick again, applying the insecticide (it's in the article, straight from a farmer) and then the stuff is in our food, in our food supply.

This is no way to live, folks, no way to grow our food.  It makes no sense.

The article also points out the solution, too.  You likely heard it in grade school.  I know I did.

All the farmers have to do is rotate their crops.

That's right, all they have to do to avoid these problems is grow a different crop, simple as that.

But then they won't be growing the big cash-cow crop that is, right now, corn.

So instead, we're going to poison ourselves.

Brilliant.

We'll be sick, at minimum, those of us who don't get cancer or other diseases but we'll have out corn.

Oh, and our money.

Yeehaw.

Americans one, big, real problem with "Obamacare"

The fact is, the facts are, we here in America have THE MOST EXPENSIVE HEALTH CARE SYSTEM IN THE WORLD.

Bar none.

It's no way even remotely debatable.

Added to that, we have the worst health outcomes for that system OF THE TOP 17 INDUSTRIALIZED NATIONS.

Again, not debatable.  Fact.

So someone in Washington comes up with a solution--some solutions--in federal legislation out of Washington and sure, it's nor perfect, far from it.  No way close.

But it's an improvement.

And it's for us this time, not just for the health insurance companies and corporations.

But what's our big response to this legislation for us?

We're agin' it.

I got to thinking about it and I've been thinking about it for some time.  I've come to a conclusion why we a lot of us don't like or want this legislation, too.  It's so obvious.

We don't like being told what to do.

Especially by government.

And especially by this guy:

"Thank you"

Thank you.

Yes, thank you.

Thank you and have a great day.

Yes, please, thank you.

There.

Is that so difficult?

How is it these few little words--possibly as few as two--are so rare in business today?

So beautiful, so easy, so nice to hear.

You go to a store or restaurant (more likely a retail store, I think)--maybe out of your way to go there--and it gets nearly impossible to have the person at the register say "Thank you."

Is that so difficult?

And "Have a nice day" is not "thank you", okay?  It's not a substitute.

Retail and grocery stores are the biggest offenders, by far, I think. The businesses want your business and they want you to come back but I'll be danged if the person at the register has been trained to say those two little words. Once in a great while it will come out but extremely rarely.

I need to give Human Resource training on it to company's employees.

I'd make millions.

"YOU KIDS GET OFF MY LAWN!!!"

Kansas makes it into the news again

Yet another person, this time a person with a limerick/political blog, rightly mocks Kansas legislators:

Kansas Gun Law Backfires (Multi-Verse Limerick)

The Kansas legislature, in its great wisdom, recently passed a law allowing gun owners to carry weapons in public buildings. And surprise, surprise, insurance companies think this is dangerous.

The EMC Insurance Cos. insures 85 percent to 90 percent of all Kansas school districts and has refused to renew coverage for schools that permit teachers and custodians to carry concealed firearms on their campuses under the new law, which took effect July 1. It’s not a political decision, but a financial one based on the riskier climate it estimates would be created, the insurer said.

Kansas Gun Law Backfires (Multi-Verse Limerick)
By Madeleine Begun Kane
In municipal spots, like a school,
Concealed weapons in Kansas are cool.

But the pols that decreed this
May soon have to heed this:
They’ve entered a sky-high risk pool.

“You are too great a risk,” said the co
That insured Kansas schools. What a blow!
“We do NOT mean to screw you,
But just can’t renew you.
It’s financial — a matter of dough.”

Forrest Knox, who’s an NRA shill
And the fellow who sponsored the bill
That started this mess,
Says insurers should bless
Teachers toting their weapons at will.

“This will make us all safer,” he swears.
“What do carriers know about scares,
And dangers and risk
And hazards. Tsk-Tsk!
I know better than they!” he declares.
What’s next? It remains to be seen.

At the least, it will take far more green
To insure any school
Where an NRA tool
Hides a gun in her purse or his jean.

Link:  MAD KANE’S HUMOR BLOG

So much Catholic news popping up lately

Really, the stories are hitting all over--mostly good ones, for the people and children.

First there was this in The New York Times Sunday from op/ed columnist Frank Bruni:

The Church's Errant Shepherds

Mr. Bruni rightly points out that yet more extremely damaging but sadly predictable documents are coming out from the Catholic Church on their sex scandals, this time, from Milwaukee:

BOSTON, Philadelphia, Los Angeles. The archdioceses change but the overarching story line doesn’t, and last week Milwaukee had a turn in the spotlight, with the release of roughly 6,000 pages of records detailing decades of child sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests there, a sweeping, searing encyclopedia of crime and insufficient punishment.

The one thing that has to be kept in mind foremost at all times are the children and their families that are hurt and affected, just as SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, always insists.

Behind that, however, are the many millions of dollars spent on covering up the Catholic Church's transgressions because, in the first place, the sexual abuse of their students occurs and then the Church compounds the gravity of the situation by covering it up, time and again, and trying to protect the priests that commit these acts, instead of protecting those same children, both the ones already abused and the ones who might be, in the future.

The article goes on:

"...over the last few decades we’ve watched an organization that claims a special moral authority in the world pursue many of the same legal and public-relations strategies — shuttling around money, looking for loopholes, tarring accusers, massaging the truth — that are employed by organizations devoted to nothing more than the bottom line.
      

In San Diego, diocesan leaders who filed for bankruptcy were rebuked by a judge for misrepresenting the local church’s financial situation to parishioners being asked to help pay for sex-abuse settlements.

      

In St. Louis church leaders claimed not to be liable for an abusive priest because while he had gotten to know a victim on church property, the abuse itself happened elsewhere."

And here, ladies and gentlemen, is where it gets REALLY good, at least for Kansas Citians and what we've been exposed to and seen in the last few decades:

       

In Kansas City, Mo., Rebecca Randles, a lawyer who has represented abuse victims, says that the church floods the courtroom with attorneys who in turn drown her in paperwork. In one case, she recently told me, “the motion-to-dismiss pile is higher than my head — I’m 5-foot-4.”

And, for me, the clincher, since Bishop Finn still holds his office, even though he was found guilty in a court of law:

      

Also in Kansas City, Bishop Robert Finn still inhabits his post as the head of the diocese despite his conviction last September for failing to report a priest suspected of child sexual abuse to the police. This is how the church is in fact unlike a corporation. It coddles its own at the expense of its image.

Can you say "Travesty of justice"?

It's beyond disgusting, besides being deeply, deeply immoral and out and out ugly and wrong, in so many ways.

Yet these are the people who are supposed to be "Godly" and moral. 

And they still don't "get it."

 Finally, at least today, there's the breaking news this week you may already have seen:

Diocese settles suit alleging abuse by priest led to suicide

KC Diocese Settles Sex Abuse Death Case On Trial Eve

And of course, this is both good and bad news. There wouldn't be anything good about it at all but the Church is being held accountable yet one more time, if only financially, for transgressions of their male hierarch (read: priests).

Once again, we all have to ask--Catholic, non-Catholic, all of us--when does this end?  When do these people learn? When will there stop being if not any physical or sexual abuse acts and reports of Catholic children and students, at least far less?  And then, when will they begin truly not covering up for the abusive priests and transferring them to other parts of the country or world?

Five decades ago would have been too soon.

The excuses by them and for them, by others, have to stop.

The abuse must end.

Austerity and why we need a jobs bill from Congress

Proof:  Why we need an infrastructure/jobs bill from this Congress and the sooner the better:

Austerity Won't Work if the Roof Is Leaking

This is an excellent article in today's New York Times showing Germany as one very appropriate example of precisely why we so sorely need an infrastructure/jobs bill now and have for some time.  Just a few of the best snippets:

Lately...fears about growing public debt have caused wholesale cuts in American public investment. The Germans, of course, yield to no one in their distaste for indebtedness. But they also understand the distinction between consumption and investment. By borrowing, they’ve made investments whose future benefits will far outweigh repayment costs. There’s nothing foolhardy about that...

The Germans are investing in infrastructure not to provide short-term economic stimulus, but because those investments promise high returns. Yet their undeniable side effect has been to bolster employment substantially in the short run...

According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, the nation has a backlog of some $3.6 trillion in overdue infrastructure maintenance. No one in Congress seriously proposes that we just abandon our crumbling roads and bridges, and everyone agrees that the repair cost will grow sharply the longer we wait.

The case for accelerated infrastructure investment becomes more compelling with our economy still in the doldrums. That’s because many of the needed workers and machines are now idle. If we wait, we’ll need to bid them away from other tasks. Also because of the sluggish economy, the materials required for the work are now relatively cheap. If we wait, they will become more expensive. And long-term interest rates for the money to pay for the work continue to hover near record lows. They, too, will be higher if we wait...

Now austerity backers urge — preposterously — that infrastructure repairs be postponed until government budgets are in balance. But would they also tell an indebted family to postpone fixing a leaky roof until it paid off all its debts? Not only would the repair grow more costly with the delay, but the water damage would mount in the interim. Families should pay off debts, yes, but not in ways that actually increase their indebtedness in the longer term. The logic is the same for infrastructure.

Sure, the Republicans and Right Wing and all the current President-haters want--and in the case of the Republicans, need--Mr. Obama to fail in his job but that desire or need should clearly pale next to the need for the nation to succeed.  We need our people--at least more of them, if not all--working and our economy to be chugging along.

Besides, this would give Congress something to do.

But for the hugely stupid and illegal Iraq War

Thank you, George W. Bush and Company.

Quote of the day--one world

We must end campaign contributions

We have to get the big, ugly, corrupting influence of money from the wealthy and corporations out of our election system and government.

We must.

It's the only way we'll get our government and so, our country, back for the people and good of the nation.

The political party of "small government"

But only for themselves:

Quote of the day--on truth

"The truth is not always beautiful

Nor beautiful words the truth."

--Lao Tzu

Quote of the day--on Americans and poverty

"America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters."

--Kurt Vonnegut

I saw that one today and it naturally reminded me of the quote by John Steinbeck:

"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."

_____________________
Down through the ages, we Americans just haven't been that smart. At least, not as smart as we might, could or should have been.

Have a great weekend, y'all.

Links:  VONNEGUT•COM -- The Official Website of Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut - Wikipedia

John Steinbeck - Wikipedia

Republican Chutzpah from Representative Graves

Missouri Representative from Northwest Missouri Sam Graves posted the following on his Facebook page last evening:

"We have already seen that the health care law implementation is grossly behind schedule. Today's news that the employer mandate will be delayed a year may provide more relief for the administration, but not for small businesses.

Small companies have told us they are confused by the law and are simply finding it difficult to comply with, no matter when it goes into effect. Instead of providing relief for businesses, this simply kicks the can down the road. It was a bad law in 2010. It's a bad law today and it will be a bad law in 2015."

It was followed by this link:  http://m.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/07/02/white-house-delays-employer-mandate-requirement-until-2015/?print=1

Well, let's see.  Why would this legislation be delayed?

Would it be because every Republican in both houses of Congress have been dragging their own feet and not supporting it--bringing up 37 votes against it--so this President and legislation isn't successful? 

Mightn't that be a part of it?

Or how about because so many Republican Governors and State Legislatures--like that in Kansas and Missouri--are also fighting it, in spite of the people's and nation's need for this sorely needed relief?

Might not all that have a great deal to to with it?

For a Republican--any, really--to blame either the legislation or this President for the slow pace this has come online is nerve and hypocrisy, both, of the first order.

As examples, Californians and Montanans, as just two groups, are already gaining benefits from it:

The Obamacare Shock

Obamacare Is Working in California

Under Obamacare, Montana Residents Will Get Better Benefits

And here's a business--and their employees--that are benefiting from Obamacare:

Retailer improves benefits as Obamacare rule looms

And that's not yet with the full rollout, as we know.

The people--we--need this.

Congress should be proposing and passing jobs bills to rework infrastructure instead of wasting time with a 38th attempt and vote on overturning the Affordable Care Act.

The bloody, shameless hypocrites.

Quote of the day---from a very unexpected source

"In a country whose legitimacy is rooted in its people, then there is no fear from free media."

--Newly elected President-elect Hassan Rouhani of Iran


Link:  President-Elect of Iran Says He Will Engage With the West

In this Independence Day, patriotic week

In this week of patriotism, in the build-up to our Independence Day, the Fourth of July, it's important to note what these very American companies pay as their fair share to keep the country functioning:

Money they're keeping away from the rest of us.

They don't even want to help keep up the infrastructure that make their businesses function and successful.

Quote of the day--on war, from a warrior

"The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience.  Our is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.

We know more about war that we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living."

--General Omar N. Bradley

 Link:  Omar Bradley - Wikipedia

Omar Bradley Biography

The article and development Americans need to be aware of

A few days ago I wrote about how corporations are crushing the American middle class with their wages below a true, living wage.  Today, further proof, in this article:

How the Temps Who Power Corporate Giants Are Getting Crushed

Instead of paying a good, true, living wage wherein a person could pay the rent and keep food on the table and have health care for their family and live a decent life with self-respect, corporations and companies are, instead, hiring for more and more part-time positions or, worse, as in this case, and only hiring "temps"--temporary workers who only get a small, temporary wage with no benefits whatever.

A bit from the article:

In cities all across the country, workers stand on street corners, line up in alleys or wait in a neon-lit beauty salon for rickety vans to whisk them off to warehouses miles away. Some vans are so packed that to get to work, people must squat on milk crates, sit on the laps of passengers they do not know or sometimes lie on the floor, the other workers’ feet on top of them.
 
This is not Mexico. It is not Guatemala or Honduras. This is Chicago, New Jersey, Boston.
 
The people here are not day laborers looking for an odd job from a passing contractor. They are regular employees of temp agencies working in the supply chain of many of America’s largest companies – Walmart, Macy’s, Nike, Frito-Lay. They make our frozen pizzas, sort the recycling from our trash, cut our vegetables and clean our imported fish. They unload clothing and toys made overseas and pack them to fill our store shelves. They are as important to the global economy as shipping containers and Asian garment workers.

Many get by on minimum wage, renting rooms in rundown houses, eating dinners of beans and potatoes, and surviving on food banks and taxpayer-funded health care. They almost never get benefits and have little opportunity for advancement.

Across America, temporary work has become a mainstay of the economy, leading to the proliferation of what researchers have begun to call “temp towns.” They are often dense Latino neighborhoods teeming with temp agencies. Or they are cities where it has become nearly impossible even for whites and African-Americans with vocational training to find factory and warehouse work without first being directed to a temp firm.

This is no way to treat people.

This is no way to have or keep a middle class in America, either.

Worse, it's immoral.  It's vile.  It's bought of greed and short-sighted profit searching.

We need to stand up, we Americans.

More craziness--and huge hypocrisy--out of Texas

First Texans were angry they couldn't get more millions out of the federal government for the West, Texas explosion and catastrophe, recently:

Texas wants federal disaster aid it refused to give others

It seems the Uncle Sugar agreed to give millions to Texas, to support them after this horrible tragedy but Republican, "Small Government" Rick Perry, his cohorts and other Republicans came back, hat in hand, asking for more.

The feds said they thought it was enough, first, and that Texas had plenty of money to draw from, too, to boot, for their troubles.

Well, the current situation, with that same Governor Perry calling out yet a second special session of their legislature, this time to pass yet another very harsh, very restrictive measure  on abortion and women's reproductive rights seems to clearly make that point:

 

Legislature reconvenes for Round 2 of Texas abortion battle

So they're saying they need money, federal money yet they had first one extra and expensive special session of their legislature and now they're having a second.

And all so they can limit women's reproductive rights which, by the way, were declared legal decades ago.

Insane.

And grossly hypocritical.

Don't say you're broke and then blow at least many more thousands of dollars on arbitrary sessions of legislature that could and should be avoided.

We seem to be getting more stupid, as a nation

I couldn't believe it when I read it:

Texas Teen Jailed For Sarcastic Facebook Comment

So bankers can take literally millions upon millions of dollars from people--stealing it, factually--and aren't even charged with a crime but let one teenager type something sarcastic on a social page and HE'S jailed?

Where on Earth are our priorities?

And that one, above, is on top of this one from the recent past:

Police arrest sidewalk chalk-drawers in LA Occupy protest 

We don't arrest the thieves and liars at Bank of America but we arrest the people outside their banks, writing on the sidewalks in chalk.

Does any of this make any sense at all?  To anyone?  

Well, except to the banksters.

What Republican policies begat

National exceptionalism is when citizens perceive that their home country is extraordinary, special, and the best place on the planet to live, and in many Americans’ minds is based on absolutist ideology and gross lack of knowledge of comparative circumstances. There may have been a time that America was exceptional over thirty years ago when white people had the opportunity to attain the American dream of a middle class income through hard work and perseverance, and could live out their golden years with the knowledge their children would at least accomplish as much as their parents. However, about thirty years ago a b-movie actor ushered in the era of America’s decline when his directors gave him a script to convince ignorant Americans that handing over the nation’s wealth and assets to the rich and their corporations was the key to success and the results have been that America is no longer exceptional, or even mediocre, and is rapidly deteriorating into inferior and second-rate status compared to the rest of the developed world.

It is true that America is the richest nation on Earth, has the most powerful military in the world, and is home to the most millionaires and billionaires of any country on the planet, but that is where the exceptionalism ends. In just about every other category, America is inferior and that is being extremely generous. However, there are millions of ignorant Americans arming themselves to maintain the status quo and prove their belief that the United States is number one and it is down to their ignorance and acceptance that if it is American, it is the best. Many Americans are led to believe the country’s storied “great middle class” is proof positive the nation is exceptional, but according to the “Global Wealth Databook 2012″ the great middle class ranks 27^th in the developed world behind poorer nations such as Spain, Ireland, France, and Cyprus. Even in countries struggling with double and triple-dip recessions, the middle class holds four times the wealth as the average middle class American who is watching what little they have left transferred to the richest one-percent due to thirty years of Republican policies.

Just a few of Republicans’ favorite policies that are creating a second-rate nation and a population of peasants are weak labor laws that give corporations and big business the ability to pay poverty wages without any benefits. In fact, the woefully inadequate poverty level minimum wage is 13^th among developed nations, and in nearly every industrialized country, every job provides at least a month of guaranteed paid vacation and as many paid sick days as one needs to recover from illness or injury. Republicans are busy passing laws making it illegal to provide paid sick leave, suggest eliminating worker compensation rules for on-the-job injuries, and panting to abolish the pitiful minimum wage to put American labor on par with peasants in Communist China. The Republican House of Representative just passed legislation eliminating overtime pay, and ALEC’s Republican right-to-work states have more poverty-level residents while the states’ corporations haul in record profits.

America has the worst healthcare system in the world because few can afford it, and even if they can this country’s people have the worst health outcomes of “all other industrialized countries” on Earth. In the event of a serious health issue or injury, Americans are guaranteed to join the poverty ranks and it makes Republican and health insurance industry’s drive to destroy the Affordable Care Act all the more Draconian and informs keeping Americans sick and impoverished is their ultimate goal. In many Republican states, at the behest of the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity, Medicaid expansion is out of the question and the GOP is desperate to make senior citizens’ Medicare a thing of the past regardless they paid into it their entire working lives.

In nearly every country on Earth a college education is virtually tuition-free and yet in America, Republicans decry spending on any education and are driving college students into life-long unsustainable debt to enrich the banking industry. In most Republican states, ALEC templates are diverting public school funds to the private religious schools to enrich corporations and create the next generation of ignorant Americans claiming the nation is exceptional as they reject established science to assist their precious oil industry decimate the environment.

America is at the end of its thirty year slide into second-rate status and it is all down to the Republican drive to give every last bit of wealth to the richest one-percent that controls the fate of this nation. It began with Reagan-Republican deregulation of the financial industry that gave Wall Street power to transfer wealth from the middle class into the wealthy’s coffers they hide offshore to avoid paying taxes. America’s social programs and safety nets are among the worst in the world, and instead of bolstering them to help Americans claw out of poverty, Republicans slash them to provide tax breaks for the rich and corporations. Last week House Republicans passed legislation to deregulate derivative trading again that resulted in the 2008 Great Recession killing tens-of-millions of Americans’ jobs, bankrupting retirement accounts, and causing millions of middle class Americans to lose their greatest assets; their homes.

America became an exceptional nation with the rise of the great middle class, and it is sliding into a nation of peasants as Republicans thirty year effort to destroy the middle class is reaching fruition. Nearly a quarter of America’s children are living in poverty, millions of Americans earn a pathetic minimum wage insufficient to put a roof over their heads, and the idea of ever achieving anything more is being thwarted by Republicans in all areas of government, but particularly the states. Right to work laws, banning minimum wage, eliminating healthcare, prohibiting paid sick leave, robbing food and housing assistance for seniors and the poor to provide more of the nation’s wealth for the rich and their corporations are all part of the Republicans’ three decade effort to destroy the middle class and still, Republicans have convinced a large segment of the population that America is number one. Well it is number one; number one in guns, number one in prison population, number one in billionaires and millionaires, number one in military might, and after thirty years of Republican economic policy and deregulation, it is the number one poverty creator and nothing whatsoever to be proud of or consider exceptional.

From the PoliticusUSA website and their article How Republicans Made America A Top Poverty Creator