Quote of the Day -- On Liberals -- And Conservatives

"Liberals got women the right to vote.

Liberals got African-Americans the right to vote. 

Liberals created Social Security and lifted millions of elderly people out of poverty. 

Liberals ended segregation. Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. 

Liberals created Medicare. 

Liberals passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. 

What did Conservatives do? 

They opposed them on every one of those things...every one.

So when you try to hurl that label at my feet, 'Liberal,' as if it were something to be ashamed of, something dirty, something to run away from, it won't work, Senator, because I will pick up that label and I will wear it as a badge of honor."

--Matt Santos, character in "The West Wing"

Two Holiday Movie Classics: Rich v Poor, Republican v Democrat

Yes, there are two holiday movie classics, at least here in America, and not only do we love them, lots of us, but they also show the great struggle of rich vs poor. The first, Dickens' "A Christmas Carol.

It's a very simplified view of the movie but it is, in fact, true and accurate. It's very like a present situation where a man named Bezos is worth 200 billion dollars--and growing--but he doesn't offer all his employees heath insurance. And that's just one current day example.

And the other holiday movie classic? Why "It's a Wonderful Life", of course.

Is there any question, any question at all that George Bailey, fighting for the "little man", the working and middle classes, is a Democrat/Liberal while the obscenely greedy, already rich Mr. Potter is a Republican and conservative? If you do question it, George Bailey's speech should clear it up. 

"Just remember this, Mr. Potter, that this rabble you’re talking about, they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath? Anyway, my father didn’t think so. People were human beings to him, but to you, a warped, frustrated old man, they’re cattle.”

Oh, yeah. Both good to great movies in their own ways and both show current day situations of, again, rich v poor and very well.

Happy holidays, everyone. Stay safe out there.

I hope.

Those Rotten Libruls

The Ugliest, Most Dangerous, Most Untrue Advertisement I've ever seen.

A friend posted this on his Facebook page today. It says it's from the NRA.


And what he said about it is dead on, too, no pun intended.

Beware folks, the NRA is advocating basically a civil war with this ad that is nothing short of stochastic terrorism. They are calling for gun owners to make a violent response to freedom of assembly, a First Amendment right. This is a message to incite domestic terrorism. The use of words like "assassinate" are a dogwhistle to the faithful gun cult.

Liberals hate that the rightwing is so misinformed. The Right Wing has marketed the message to hate Liberals. 

This may not end well. 

I have seen many Right Wingers saying lately that Liberals should be rounded up and shot. or worse. with folks inciting people to take action on that. 

We are all Americans and we should be working together to make America a better , more equitable place. Liberty, equality and fraternity.

This video inciting hatred of neighbor on neighbor is a most shocking and unpatriotic piece of propaganda. 

It is stochastic terrorism and should be branded a hate crime.

--Richard Trombly

If there is any silver lining, so to speak, on these clouds of ugliness, it's this.

Fewer and Fewer Americans Own Guns

American gun ownership drops to 

lowest in nearly 40 years

Fewer Americans Own Guns, 

But Those Who Do Own More Than Ever

Fewer Americans Own Guns, 

But Those Who Do Own More Than Ever

Here's hoping sanity and intelligence and calm, rational thought and true patriotism wins out, ultimately.

Happy Fourth, y'all.

Hope for the Left, In Spite of Yesterday's Loss

Okay, sure, Jon Ossoff lost yesterday against Republican Karen Handel in Georgia's 6th District.

You wouldn't think anyone in this nation could say, publicly, in the middle of a political campaign, as Ms. Handel did, that she's against a living wage and still win an election but here we are.

That said, even with knowledge of yet one more loss today, last evening, there are two things to keep in mind. First, there is this from the  New York Times a few days ago (link below).

If Mr. Ossoff wins the election, Republicans can argue — with some credibility — that Georgia’s Sixth was a particularly ripe opportunity for Democrats at a time when Mr. Trump’s ratings among college-educated voters have sunk into the low 30s.

But even if he loses, Mr. Ossoff’s strong performance has already demonstrated that Republicans in well-educated but traditionally conservative areas now shoulder the burden of Mr. Trump’s weak performance. It suggests that previously safe Republican incumbents in Orange County, Calif., or the suburbs of Dallas and Houston could face serious challenges next November. And most important, a close race in Georgia’s Sixth suggests that control of the House is in play, regardless of which candidate comes out on top.

Second, next, there is this today, from Professor Robert Reich's Facebook page.

As the national political and media world focused heavily on the Georgia race, an underfunded, overlooked Democrat, Archie Parnell, also a first-time candidate, almost pulled off a huge upset in the South Carolina seat vacated by Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s budget director. Parnell lost by about 2,800 votes, a little more than 3 percentage points, after party leaders decided to devote all their attention in the run-up to Tuesday’s elections to the Ossoff-Handel race.

Bottom line: Democrats are doing extraordinarily well in traditionally red districts -- and have an excellent chance of taking back the House next year.

So take heart all you Liberals (libruls), Lefties, Democrats, Progressives and Socialists out there. There is cause and room and reason for hope.

We just have to get out there and work our tails off.

And VOTE, of course.

Links:

The 15 Best-Educated Districts in the U.S., 

and Why It Matters in the Georgia Race

Robert Reich

The Democratic Party Must Finally Abandon Centrism

Don't get demoralized by the big Georgia loss, Democrats

I'm Not Demoralized by Jon Ossoff's Loss

Neither Triumph Nor Despair: Sizing Up a Loss in Georgia

Buck Up, Democrats

The Right Wing and Republican Fear Platform

Tiresome. So tiresome.

To All the Liberals and Left Wingers and Progressives

Think about this.

At minimum, at minimum, when Hillary Clinton takes office next year, this coming January 20, as president---and she will--she will, at the very least be appointing first one and then another or more Supreme Court Justices. At the very minimum.

And at that very least, the Democrats and Liberals and Progressives and anyone and everyone of any political stripe that realizes we need to get the money out of our politics will all get together and come up with a legal challenge to the earlier Citizens United ruling.

And it will be overturned.

So if you're maybe frustrated that Senator Sanders didn't make it to where we are now and to the White House, at least realize you have this. And it is no small thing.

Count on it.

The Current, Nearly Unbelievable Presidential Election

Donald Trump speaks nearly exclusively of why Hillary is wrong for America.

Hillary Clinton only talks of how Mr. Trump is wrong for America.

Senator Bernie Sanders is the only one talking about what we, as a nation, need to do for Americans and America, about our problems, our challenges and solutions.

And there's a question of for whom we should vote?

Really?

Since When, America?

From a friend's Facebook post today:

Since when did wanting a society:

* that is as inclusive as possible
* that works effectively for all its members
* that provides opportunity equally regardless of accidents of birth
* that places the rights of people above the rights of corporations.
* that protects its resources for future generations
* that treats its citizens equally before the law
* that protects its most vulnerable members
* that cooperates in preference to dominating
* that values education and wisdom

become a "radical" idea?

Thanks, Doug.

Hate Liberals?

Is that you?

You hate "libruls"?

They're--we're--libtards?

Really?

"Liberals got women the right to vote.

Liberals got African-Americans the right to vote.

Liberals created Social Security and lifted millions of elderly people out of poverty.

Liberals ended segregation.

Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act.

Liberals created Medicare.

Liberals passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act.

What did Conservatives do?

They opposed them on every one of those things...every one!

So when you try to hurl that label at my feet, 'Liberal,' as if it were something to be ashamed of, something dirty, something to run away from, it won't work, Senator, because I will pick up that label and I will wear it as a badge of honor."

--Matt Santos, character in The West Wing

Conservatives, also, under the George W. Bush administration, got us into two, count 'em, two wars and crashed the economy, too, by the way. And by economy, I don't just mean the US, national economy, I mean the world economy. There was very nearly a global, economic meltdown.

More.

“If by a "Liberal" they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people-their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights and their civil liberties-someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a "Liberal", then I'm proud to say I'm a "Liberal.”

--President John F. Kennedy

They, Liberals, are for the people, first and foremost.

So yeah, call me a Liberal.  I'm good with that. 

Link:  150 Achievements Of Liberalism

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

Quote of the day--on fairness

A Liberal's dream

It may only be one evening and one night's entertainment but check it out:

Our black, "Liberal" president, first.

And he gives us this:

In Performance at the White House: Memphis Soul

 

It's on PBS, of course.

 

Then, it's followed by this on the same channel:

 

THE CENTRAL PARK FIVE - PBS

 

And it's by none other than Ken Burns.

 

Entertainment. The Blues. History. Education.

 

Mmmmm.

Quote of the day--punish the impoverished

On Dubya's chosen Iraq War then and Israel's occupation now

Chris Hedges, over at Truthdig, posts a magnificent column today on the George W. Bush/Dick Cheney wildly illegal and irresponsible Iraq War they dragged us into and on Israel's oppression of the Palestinians now and why it all matters:

The Treason of the Intellectuals

Just a bit from it:

The rewriting of history by the power elite was painfully evident as the nation marked the 10th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. Some claimed they had opposed the war when they had not. Others among “Bush’s useful idiots” argued that they had merely acted in good faith on the information available; if they had known then what they know now, they assured us, they would have acted differently. This, of course, is false. The war boosters, especially the “liberal hawks”—who included Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Al Franken and John Kerry, along with academics, writers and journalists such as Bill Keller, Michael Ignatieff, Nicholas Kristof, David Remnick, Fareed Zakaria, Michael Walzer, Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman,George Packer, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Kanan Makiya and the late Christopher Hitchens—did what they always have done: engage in acts of self-preservation. To oppose the war would have been a career killer. And they knew it.

These apologists, however, acted not only as cheerleaders for war; in most cases they ridiculed and attempted to discredit anyone who questioned the call to invade Iraq. Kristof, in The New York Times, attacked the filmmaker Michael Moore as a conspiracy theorist and wrote that anti-war voices were only polarizing what he termed “the political cesspool.” Hitchens said that those who opposed the attack on Iraq “do not think that Saddam Hussein is a bad guy at all.” He called the typical anti-war protester a “blithering ex-flower child or ranting neo-Stalinist.” The halfhearted mea culpas by many of these courtiers a decade later always fail to mention the most pernicious and fundamental role they played in the buildup to the war—shutting down public debate. Those of us who spoke out against the war, faced with the onslaught of right-wing “patriots” and their liberal apologists, became pariahs. In my case it did not matter that I was an Arabic speaker. It did not matter that I had spent seven years in the Middle East, including months in Iraq, as a foreign correspondent. It did not matter that I knew the instrument of war. The critique that I and other opponents of war delivered, no matter how well grounded in fact and experience, turned us into objects of scorn by a liberal elite that cravenly wanted to demonstrate its own “patriotism” and “realism” about national security. The liberal class fueled a rabid, irrational hatred of all war critics. Many of us received death threats and lost our jobs, for me one at The New York Times. These liberal warmongers, 10 years later, remain both clueless about their moral bankruptcy and cloyingly sanctimonious. They have the blood of hundreds of thousands of innocents on their hands.

The power elite, especially the liberal elite, has always been willing to sacrifice integrity and truth for power, personal advancement, foundation grants, awards, tenured professorships, columns, book contracts, television appearances, generous lecture fees and social status. They know what they need to say. They know which ideology they have to serve. They know what lies must be told—the biggest being that they take moral stances on issues that aren’t safe and anodyne. They have been at this game a long time. And they will, should their careers require it, happily sell us out again.

We need to be better than that 2nd Iraq War and we need to make certain nothing like it happens again.

Speaking up now, against the oppression of the Palestinian people, even if it is by the Israelis, is merely the right thing to do.

Exasperating

‎

Great ideas to cut defense spending---from Conservatives

I am extremely heartened by the fact that I found an article from a very Conservative magazine--The American Conservative--on how we, the US, could and should cut our very bloated defense spending.

Sure, you can always find this kind of thing from those (us) Lefties but here was one with 16 terrific ideas from Conservatives for cutting defense spending and having it all make far more sense:



16 Ways to Cut Defense Spending

 

The greatest threat to our national security is how much our militarism costs.

 

A synopsis of those 16 ideas:

 

1) The military is top-heavy with officers and generals;

 

2)  If every missile and bomb hits its target—unlike in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam—why do we need so many planes, tanks, and warships?

 

3) Combine military medical services. Each of the armed forces has its own medical corps;

 

4) Former Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England urged cutting 100,000 civilian employees from the Defense Department when it had 700,000 employees, the same number as during World War 2. Now the number has grown to 800,000;

 

5) Tricare costs the Pentagon budget over $50 billion per year to provide almost free healthcare to all military retirees and their families for life, even if they are working in other jobs with health insurance. Former Secretary of Defense Gates tried in vain to establish reasonable co-pays and reforms;

 

6) Senator Coburn complained that the military schools were costing $50,000 per student. He urged reforms such as using more local civilian schools near military bases;

 

7) The military maintains some 4,000 bases inside the U.S. and 1,000 overseas with personnel in 140 nations; many installations have fewer than 100 troops. (see The Hidden Cost of Empire);

 

8) The military is paid vastly more than civilians. Officers and enlisted men earn an average cash income some 80 percent higher than civilians with similar skills and education. Their pension and medical benefits put them far beyond what any worker in the private sector earns;

 

9) Retirement ages were set well over a hundred years ago when life spans were under 60 years;

 

10) Retired generals and admirals should be prohibited for five years from working for the military-industrial complex so that they will use their skills elsewhere to help the civilian economy;

 

11) It’s not just Pentagon waste. The CIA and other intelligence agencies have virtual blank checks without oversight;

 

12) It cost half a million in Iraq and nearly a million dollars in Afghanistan to maintain each soldier per year. Obviously fewer foreign interventions would save hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars. (Imagine that--fewer wars);

 

13) Weaponry is the greatest money sink of all. Weapons are designed to be built in key congressional districts, not to be the most efficient or cost effective, as during the Second World War;

 

14) Half of defense manufacturing workers are unionized, many with outdated work rules and few of the efficiencies instituted by competitive private industry, e.g., cutting out much middle management and using labor to maximum efficiency. (This one, personally, I'm staunchly against--breaking up unions but that's another matter);

 

15) America maintains duplicate forces: two armies (i.e., Army and Marine Corps.) and four air forces (the Air Force, Marine Corps aviation, Naval Air Forces, and the CIA’s fleet of aircraft and drones). (This is at least irresponsible, if not insanity);

 

16) Rand Paul has demanded that the Pentagon be audited, something Congress has so far been unable to do. The Defense Department does not even know all the cash, supplies, foreign bases, and inventory it has. Much more vast and incredible waste remains to be discovered.

 

A great start. This should be the beginning of an excellent, long term conversation.

 

And then we need to get busy.

 

(It's a terrific article, folks. You would do yourself--and your country--well to read it all. There isn't that much more to it beyond the above, too, but it is beyond worth it and important, I think).

What those daffy Liberals and Lefties and Communists believe

Just crazy, aren't they?

Can you imagine?

America, Americans and drones

I opened an email today from a very Right Wing, Republican "news" source today--GOPUSA, to be exact--and there was a writer there who was railing against drones.

It got me thinking.

Here was this guy from the very, very Right Wing, a Republican, going on about how he hates/they hate and don't want drones.

And sure, he doesn't and surely lots of his groups don't--well, except the military and the corporations who make them.

But I have news for him.

The Left Wing, the Liberals as well as Libertarians (the reputedly "VERY small government people) don't want the things, either.

Come on, most Americans, if polled would, I'd nearly bet, be absolutely against them. We don't want those things of whatever size, flying in our air space and spying on us.

Heck, here in Kansas City, we don't even want cameras at stoplights so people don't run those same lights and end up crashing into us and hurting or killing us. We want "freedom" that much, lots of us.

I don't think this has been thought out too well, either.

I mean, face it, if the military and our government and the Defense Department is going to have these things, private corporations may well--likely?---have these, too, keeping an eye on us for who knows what reason.

Yet here we sit, idly by, as technology and corporations advance and bring this ever closer to us and to reality.

And the big drones we've seen in media or on TV are nothing compared to what is apparently also possible:

 

Look closely. Besides scary, it's rather fascinating, technologically. And this is the early technology of these things, too:

US military developing insect surveillance drones

My only point here, now, is that first, we need to stay aware of what's going on in technology, in our government and finally, in our courts so we know what we're being exposed to and what's happening.

 

Second, we need now to, besides working on killing campaign contributions to our state and federal legislators so the wealthy and corporations don't own them and so, our government (any longer), we now need to fight these drones, too. We need to be in charge of our world in all aspects.

 

This will take some doing, folks.

 

This will require we get and stay further involved and for the long run and in virtually all aspects of our lives.

 

We need to get and stay busy. We need to get and stay and be engaged on this.

 

The one great thing, however, is that this issue about drones should be one thing that all Americans should and actually, likely do, agree on. That is, the Left and Right Wings of the political spectrum, the middle, the independents, the Libertarians, certainly, the Tea Party members, all of us out here on the streets, likely agree we don't want these things in our lives, spying on us.

 

If we don't use that against them, we will lose on this issue. We need to keep that in mind.

 

We need to come together, as Americans, and fight this.

 

Link:  Patton: Here Come The Drones

Those crazy, Leftist, Pinko, Commies are at it stil