Why should poor people think they have some kind of a right to eat?

Rand Paul would tell you this himself: Food, like healthcare, is not a right! If some Americans have to starve to death, this is what it takes to preserve our freedom!

They call the poor “useless eaters” and seriously don’t give a crap if we all starve.

This may be how the rich really feel about the working class. But they are not going to say that, at least not all of them, all of the time.

They do have more palatable ways to get those of us who are not yet hungry to agree with their austerity measures. They have skewed, suspect and just plain "old" outdated data that they can use to spin fairy tales about the really, really well off poor people who live in the US. You know the ones who live in the realm of the Welfare Queen.

For example the Washington DC based conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation has been telling us for years that there are no poor people in the US.

They say stuff like the average family with very low food security ( here is an even more innocuous term than food insecure, when did we stop saying hungry?) experienced disrupted food intakes in only seven months of the year, for one to seven days per month. They say it like it is a good thing. So if you only go without food for one week a month for more than half the year you are not really poor and your children are not really hungry. Hunger is what kids in developing countries suffer. According to the Heritage Foundation only 2.6% of American children’s growth is stunted by malnutrition compared to 42.7% in developing countries. And to these brilliant conservative minds that means we can take a lot more from the 99% than we have up to this point before we are on par with developing nations. A lofty goal indeed.

They say that “the mainstream press and activist groups frequently conflate poverty with homelessness. They insist this depiction is seriously misleading because only a small portion of persons 'living in poverty' will become homeless over the course of a year. The overwhelming majority of the poor reside throughout the year in non-crowded housing that is in good repair.” Seriously. Good repair? They have statistics that say 50% of the poor live in single family homes and not in apartments or mobile homes. WTF? Really? I’ve never lived in a single family home in my entire life. Never. And I don’t consider myself as living below the poverty line. But all around me families whose incomes do fall under the poverty line own their own homes. Who knew? Conservatives that’s who!

Not only that but “nearly all poor households have commonplace amenities such as color TVs, telephones, and kitchens equipped with an oven, stove, and refrigerator. WOW! The nerve of these people.

In 2005, more than half of poor households had at least five of the following 10 conveniences: a computer, cable or satellite TV, air conditioning, Internet service, a large-screen TV, non-portable stereo, computer printer, separate freezer or second refrigerator, microwave, and at least one color TV. One-fourth of the poor had seven or more of these 10 items in their homes.” I wonder if when gathering all this skewed and suspect data these geniuses take in to account the reality that most poor households didn’t just manifest themselves into existence fully actualized as poverty stricken. Contrary to popular belief the poor are made not born. Many poor people were not always “useless eaters”. They actually had jobs back in the day when there were jobs to be had. Maybe they bought some of that stuff then? Back in 2005 (since this is when this data was compiled) before Wall St. destroyed the economy and then got the government to bail them out by taking the food out of mouths of the working class. Maybe even back before the government gave corporations humongous tax cuts for taking jobs and businesses out of the US and bringing them to other countries. Probably the very countries where the brains at the Heritage Foundation explain the “real poor people live” countries where the government doesn’t even have to pretend to give a shit about its people, where corporations can pollute, pillage and use up people to their hearts content. But we can all cheer up because if conservatives like those highly intelligent individuals at the Heritage Foundation think tank have anything to say about it soon enough the real poor people will live here as well. More austerity measures coming soon to a town near you.

Crossing children off their laundry list for now, elderly people get ready, they're coming for you next. And our beloved veterans as well. You know all that supposed support we have for you? Well they forgot to mention that's just while you are actually troops, once you are no longer active then you are subject to being screwed like the rest of the 99%.

I'm adding this link to show where I got some of my information. It is by no means an endorsement of or encouragement to read this shit.

http://www.heritage.org/research/rep...-americas-poor

Hey, Miss Tick. I saw that the article was written two years ago (9/2011), which they based off of 2010 census data (which no doubt that twisted into a pretty bow).

I am wondering why you are posting this now?

It's an old article because I want to show how it has been a long held belief, an old meme of conservatives that the poor in the US do not exist. This belief justifies their actions against social programs at a time when only a small elite percentage of Americans are recovering and these same elite continue to get social welfare. It's not about the article it's about the mindset.

I posted the first article about the food stamp cut and thought it would be useful to examine and understand the process that goes into twisting yourself into believing its a good, adult, grown up decision (phraseology the GOP is using now in 2013)to cut food stamps at a time when more people than ever are using them to make ends meet. What I did was look at the ideas the GOP has long held to justify their belief in the non existence of poor in the US and the brilliant conservative minds who mold data and twist facts to support their beliefs. This is how they cut social programs, this is how they will cut social security and make our golden years financially insecure. It's the mind set i was trying to show. The article was just an afterthought to prove I don't pull this shit out of my ass.

I hope this makes sense. It's not like anything has changed. This is what they believe whether it's 1972 or 2013. And it's only news in that it helps justify current cuts in social programs.

I just want to add if you try to find data to prove there are no poor in the US in 2013 all that comes up are articles exploding with indignation at the cutting of social programs. Articles talking about how terrible it is and Republicans talking about how necessary it is and how grown up and adult it is. It's easy to talk about how insensitive the GOP is and how cruel etc. but it doesn't show how they think and why they believe what they are doing is perfectly fine and logical. I want to understand my enemy. I want to know what makes them tic.

This is actually the "In The News" article that is important as a current immediate issue that is happening as we speak. The other post is about why the conservatives believe cutting social programs is warranted. It a look at the mindset that allows them to take the food out of the mouths of babies and still sleep at night and pray to their god on Sunday.

GOP rep.: Slashing food stamps by $40 billion means ‘more money’ for the hungry

Rep. Andy Harris (R-MA) in September asserted that cutting $40 billion from the food stamp program over the next 10 years would actually provide “more money” to hungry Americans.

A bill introduced by House Republicans this month almost doubled the cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) proposed earlier this year after that plan was rejected by conservative lawmakers. GOP leaders were expected to bring the bill up for a vote on Thursday.

CNN’s Carol Costello pointed out to Harris in a Thursday interview that critics had said that a $40 billion cut was “way too much” because the poverty rate in the United States has risen to more than 13 percent.

“It’s a 5 percent decrease, when we know that there is 10.5 percent of the stores that take food stamps are engaged in trafficking,” Harris replied. “So we know the fraud stands at 10 percent of the stores. We only want to cut 5 percent.”

“That ought to leave more money getting to the hands of the people who do need it,” he added. “And there are millions of Americans who need that benefit.”

“But if you change the requirement, some people will be eliminated from qualifying for food stamps,” Costello noted. “There are critics who say that those people need them too. And how do you decide who needs food stamps and who doesn’t?”

“Well, again, there’s the one study that showed — by the Dept. of Agriculture — 10.5 percent of stores are committing fraud,” Harris insisted. “And, you know what we’re doing, is we’re just saying, ‘Look, if we’re going to help you with food stamps — and we are — then we need you to either work, look for employment — if you’re able bodied, not disabled and able to work — either look for work or engage in job training.’ We think that’s a common-sense trade-off for getting help from the American taxpayer that needy people need.”

“Well, some might say it’s easy to say, ‘Get some job training, get a new job, get a better paying job,’” Costello observed. “But there aren’t that many jobs available at this particular time in our economy to accomplish that.”

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has estimated that 14 million less people would be participating in the SNAP program by 2023 if the Republican House bill was enacted.

“Critics’ attempts to justify big cuts by claiming that SNAP participants are eschewing work are unfounded,” according to the Center on Budget Policy and Priorities. “The fact that the majority of SNAP households with an adult who is not elderly or disabled work while they receive SNAP assistance, and that more than 80 percent of such households work in the year before or after SNAP receipt, makes clear the program is an important support for working families that fall on hard times.”

“As the nation slowly climbs out of the deepest recession in decades, many families continue to face a shortage of jobs or to be paid wages too low to enable them to provide adequate food, and struggle to meet basic nutritional needs. The House SNAP proposal pays little heed to these economic conditions. Instead, it would deny food assistance to millions of low-income Americans and cause substantial increases in hardship.”

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/09/1...or-the-hungry/


How Republicans Who Took Millions In Farm Subsidies Justify Cutting Food Stamps

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/201...g-food-stamps/

There are a lot of justifications used to explain why it is okay to cut food stamps and social programs from invoking the soviet constitution and Lenin to misquoting the bible but the truth is that when conservatives bother to think of the poor they don't believe in them. This is why it is so easy to do what they do. They don't believe there are really poor people or rather I should say they don't believe there are any deserving poor. And to examine that we could actually go back to the early 1800s and see how decisions were made surrounding who is deserving and who is not.

Hey, Miss Tick. I had no concern you had any sort of "agenda" behind the posting of an older article. I was just curious. I suppose I was also surprised that an older article was posted, without the poster making a note of that fact. That's all.

I didn't think you did. I just get so excited when someone asks me something about a news article I tend to overkill I guess. I either disturb them with my over zealousness or I overwhelm them with way too much information that it seems like an attack of some sort. Please don't take it that way. I just thought if you were interested enough to ask a question you might enjoy a lot of answer.

Sorry I didn't make a note of the fact that it was an older article. In retrospect I probably should have. I was side tracked for the reasons I explained. It wasn't about the time frame of the article it was the thinking behind the think tank. And in my defense i did say when introducing the information that "the Washington DC based conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation has been telling us for years that there are no poor people in the US." I also mentioned the dates of the data a few times: "In 2005, more than half of poor households had at least five of the following 10 conveniences" and "Back in 2005 (since this is when this data was compiled)"

Anyway sorry if I gave too much information but I hope it at least makes sense why i would post the information. The article was not the post really, a lot of the words contained in the post were my words and not the words of an article, I Just posted the article for back up as reference for where i pulled some of the stuff i was responding too from.

My wife often tells me that for such a clarity freak I am sometimes not very clear.

Oh dear I hope I didn't do it again and say too much that it feels like well, like too much. Besides trying to explain my thought process for referencing the article my only other concern is trying to ascertain if my response makes sense to you?

And honestly I didn't take it any way at all except as a question. I wouldn't take it as anything but a question from anyone, but from you I certainly wouldn't give it a second thought except to try extra hard to explain to you my thought process.

I just want to add that when I originally posted the article "America's Greatest Shame: Child Poverty Rises and Food Stamps Cut While Billionaires Boom" I considered adding my second post to that instead of making a whole new one.

It was early and I had just woke up and was still sleepy and decided it might be too long and too confusing so I added the second post which was really an extension of the first and it ended up that the first post ended a page and the second post was the first post on a new page. So that really separated the first article from my post and the reference article. Maybe it would have made more sense if they had been together. Or maybe not. I'm just going to stop explaining now. LOL. I even tire myself out:|

Wow. You are way worse than me. I love it. ha! :seeingstars:

Be Very Afraid: The American Economy Is Cannibalizing Itself, and We the People Are Going to Pay a Huge Price
The bottom 90 percent of Americans have disappeared from official Washington.
November 3, 2013

So how to explain this paradox?

As of November 1 more than 47 million Americans have lost some or all of their food stamp benefits. House Republicans are pushing for further cuts. If the sequester isn’t stopped everything else poor and working-class Americans depend on will be further squeezed.

We’re not talking about a small sliver of America here. Half of all children get food stamps at some point during their childhood. Half of all adults get them sometime between ages 18 and 65. Many employers – including the nation’s largest, Walmart – now pay so little that food stamps are necessary in order to keep food on the family table, and other forms of assistance are required to keep a roof overhead.

The larger reality is that most Americans are still living in the Great Recession. Median household income continues to drop. In last week’s Washington Post-ABC poll, 75 percent rated the state of the economy as “negative” or “poor.”

So why is Washington whacking safety nets and services that a large portion of Americans need, when we still very much need them?

It’s easy to blame Republicans and the rightwing billionaires that bankroll them, and their unceasing demonization of “big government” as well as deficits. But Democrats in Washington bear some of the responsibility. In last year’s fiscal cliff debate neither party pushed to extend the payroll tax holiday or find other ways to help the working middle class and poor.

Here’s a clue: A new survey of families in the top 10 percent of net worth (done by the American Affluence Research Center) shows they’re feeling better than they’ve felt since 2007, before the Great Recession.

It’s not just that the top 10 percent have jobs and their wages are rising. The top 10 percent also owns 80 percent of the stock market. And the stock market is up a whopping 24 percent this year.

The stock market is up even though most Americans are down for two big reasons.

First, businesses are busily handing their cash back to their shareholders – buying back their stock and thereby boosting share prices – rather than using the cash to expand and hire. It makes no sense to expand and hire when most Americans don’t have the money to buy.

The S&P 500 “Buyback Index,” which measures the 100 stocks with the highest buyback ratios, has surged 40 percent this year, compared with a 24% rally for the S&P 500.

IBM has just approved another $15 billion for share buybacks on top of about $5.6 billion it set aside previously, thereby boosting its share prices even though business is sluggish. In April, Apple announced a $50 billion increase in buybacks plus a 15% rise in dividends, but even this wasn’t enough for multi-billionaire Carl Icahn, who’s now demanding that Apple use more of its $170 billion cash stash to buy back its stock and make Ichan even richer.

Big corporations can also borrow at rock-bottom rates these days in order to buy back even more of their stock — courtesy of the Fed’s $85 billion a month bond-buying program. (Ichan also wants Apple to borrow $150 billion at 3 percent interest, in order to buy back more stock and further enrich himself.)

The second big reason why shares are up while most Americans are down is corporations continue to find new ways to boost profits and share prices by cutting their labor costs – substituting software for people, cutting wages and benefits, and piling more responsibilities on each of the employees that remain.

Neither of these two strategies – buying back stock and paring payrolls – can be sustained over the long run (so you have every right to worry about another Wall Street bubble). They don’t improve a company’s products or customer service.

But in an era of sluggish sales – when the vast American middle class lacks the purchasing power to keep the economy going – these two strategies at least keep shareholders happy. And that means they keep the top 10 percent happy.

Congress, meanwhile, doesn’t know much about the bottom 90 percent. The top 10 percent provide almost all campaign contributions and funding of “independent” ads.

Moreover, just about all members of Congress are drawn from the same top 10 percent – as are almost all their friends and associates, and even the media who report on them.

Get it? The bottom 90 percent of Americans — most of whom are still suffering from the Great Recession, most of whom have been on a downward escalator for decades — have disappeared from official Washington.

http://www.alternet.org/economy/be-v...age=1#bookmark

Senate passes ENDA

With 61 votes, the U.S. Senate voted in favor of cloture on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, clearing the way for a final up-or-down vote later this week.

BY SUNNIVIE BRYDUM NOVEMBER 04 2013 6:18 PM ET UPDATED: NOVEMBER 04 2013 9:16 PM ET

For the first time since it was originally introduced in 1996, the U.S. Senate took an important step toward passing the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, voting in favor of cloture — a procedural move intended to overcome any attempted filibuster — in a bipartisan vote of 61-30.

Several senators from both sides of the aisle rose to speak in support of the legislation, which would make it a federal offense for employers to fire, refuse to hire, or decline to promote employees on the basis of their actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity.

Following Monday's vote for cloture, the Senate is expected to take a final vote on ENDA after additional testimony is filed, likely on Wednesday.

The bipartisan vote included 54 Senate Democrats (Missouri Democratic senator Claire McCaskill was absent), and seven Republicans, including some surprising "aye" votes from New Hampshire's Kelly Ayotte, Pennsylvania's Pat Toomey, and Ohio's Rob Portman, who came out for marriage equality earlier this year. Among Republicans who had previously expressed support for the legislation were Utah's Orrin Hatch, Illinois's Mark Kirk, Nevada's Dean Heller, and Maine's Susan Collins. Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican who voted for the bill in committee, was absent from the chamber when roll call was taken.

The nation's first openly gay senator elected took the Senate floor first, asking her colleagues to vote in favor of ENDA and stand on the right side of history.

"I realize that for some, this is not an easy vote," said Wisconsin Democrat Tammy Baldwin on the Senate floor. "I understand that for some, they may believe that it’s not good politics. But I want to say that I have a deep respect for those who choose to stand on the side of progress for our country this week. So for those that stand up this week and answer the call for courage, I can say with confidence your courage will be respected and remembered when the history of this struggle is written."

Both senators from Illinois also rose in support of the bill, including Republican Mark Kirk, who has been largely silent and absent from congressional debate on the legislation through the past two years due to a stroke.

"This is not a major change to law," said Kirk. "It's already the law in 21 states, and I think it's particularly appropriate for an Illinois Republican to speak on behalf of this measure, in the true spirit of Everett McKinley Dirksen and Abraham Lincoln, who gave us the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 13th Amendment to the Constitution."

Kirk wasn't the only Republican to rise in support of the bill — Sen. Susan Collins of Maine also testified in support, saying ENDA provides all Americans a fair opportunity to pursue the American dream. "I'm dismayed that so many years have gone by — more than a decade — and this bill still has not become law," said Collins. "It is time for us to enact this important legislation.

Notably, no senators rose to speak in opposition to the bill, though that's unlikely to be the case in the Republican-controlled House, where the bill faces a much tougher journey to becoming law.

Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy closed his remarks with a none-too-subtle message for those lawmakers opposed to outlawing discrimination in the lower chamber of Congress.

"So I hope my fellow senators will come together and support this important bipartisan bill without delay," said Leahy in his closing remarks. "And If the other body has the courage of standing up for America, to stand up for all Americans — every single american there is — and vote for the same legislation."

Late Sunday night, President Obama published an op-ed in The Huffington Post urging the Senate to pass the legislation, and Monday morning, Nevada Republican Dean Heller announced his support for ENDA, breaching the 60-vote threshold needed for a successful cloture vote to move debate on the bill forward.

http://www.advocate.com/politics/201...rocedural-vote

Fired For Being LGBT: ENDA gets another vote

BY NEAL BROVERMAN AND MICHELLE GARCIA MAY 08 2013 2:00 AM ET UPDATED: NOVEMBER 01 2013 7:33 PM ET
151

Sixty years ago, the federal government spearheaded a massive purge of gay employees, no matter how qualified or essential they were to their department's operations. The firings were the result of an executive order by President Dwight D. Eisenhower on April 27, 1953. As told in the documentary Lavender Scare, even LGBT private sector workers who were under contract with the federal government were also fired or forced to resign.

Why? Because gay people were viewed as a godless, immoral group likely to work with communists to spill government secrets.

After decades of activism, policy changes at federal agencies, and state laws protecting LGBT citizens, 94 percent of the top 100 companies in the U.S. — the top 50 federal contractors and the top 50 Fortune 500 companies — have policies prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation, and 78 percent of the companies have policies prohibiting discrimination based on gender identity.

Nine in every 10 American voters believe that there are already laws to protect employees in the workplace, just like policies for women, people with disabilities, racial minorities, or people with particular religious affiliations. But that's not the case. An employee could still be fired in 29 states for being gay, and in 34 states for being transgender or gender non-conforming.

So as we mark 60 years since the federal government's mass firings, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act is finally set for a vote in the Senate on Monday (the 19th time Congress has considered it). With a Republican-dominated House of Representatives, ENDA might be tough to gain momentum even though, according to the Center for American Progress, 73 percent of voters support protections for LGBT workers (even 66 percent among Republicans voters).


http://www.advocate.com/politics/201...lgbt?page=full


http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-s...dies-enda-vote

I guess Rand Paul wants to challenge Rachel Maddow to a duel. He laments the fact that it would be illegal to shoot her in the face. I suppose it would definitely cut down on the amount of 'truth out' we would see from journalists if you could just challenge them to a duel and kill them if they caught you doing something wrong. Sheesh, wouldn't it be easier to just own it, apologize for the mistake and make sure it doesn't happen again? Politicians seeking public office need to be more careful that's all. And when caught screwing up they need to act like adults. I mean aren't the Republicans big on acting like adults or is that just when they are talking about having to starve children and steal money from old people.


Rand Paul’s Wacko Public Meltdown
The proven plagiarist trashes his “haters” and wishes he could challenge them to a duel.

Just when Sen. Ted Cruz’s self-promoting extremism seemed to create room for a far-right 2016 rival who wouldn’t scare children (and the donor class), Sen. Rand Paul is blowing his big chance.

Last week the New York Times reported that in the wake of Cruz’s implosion, Paul’s aides had taken to calling Cruz “the chief of the wacko birds,” using John McCain’s memorable epithet for the junior Texas senator. Paul himself, Jonathan Martin reported, “has quietly been reaching out to more establishment forces within the Republican Party, trying to prove to big donors and mainline Republican organizations that he is more than a Tea Party figure or a rerun of his father’s failed candidacies.” And establishment Republicans were beginning to use the word “grown” and “matured” to describe Paul.

That’s not the word they’re using today, on the heels of a crazy appearance on ABC’s “This Week” where he wished he could challenge the journalists who’ve accused him of plagiarism to a duel.

On the one hand, the revelation that he lifted material from several speeches as well as whole pages of his book from other sources, without attribution, isn’t necessarily a 2016 candidacy-ender. What’s most politically self-destructive is Paul’s bizarre reaction to the charges – which really aren’t “charges,” they’re fact. Instead of admitting he or someone on his staff made an error and promising to toughen his standards, he’s attacked Rachel Maddow, who found the first instance of plagiarism, repeatedly and personally.

“This is really about information and attacks coming from haters,” he told ABC’s Latino-focused network Fusion. “The person who’s leading this attack — she’s been spreading hate on me for about three years now.” Ew, “spreading hate on me,” that sounds kind of disgusting, Rachel – really?

And then, in a bizarre, likely candidacy-ending interview with ABC’s “This Week,” he began talking about a duel.

“Yes, there are times when [speeches] have been sloppy or not correct or we’ve made an error,” Paul said. “But the difference is, I take it as an insult and I will not lie down and say people can call me dishonest, misleading or misrepresenting. I have never intentionally done so.”

He went on: “And like I say, if, you know, if dueling were legal in Kentucky, if they keep it up, you know, it would be a duel challenge. But I can’t do that, because I can’t hold office in Kentucky then.”

“I think I’m being unfairly targeted by a bunch of hacks and haters.”

Paul’s assumption that normal people will hear his reference to fighting a duel and say, “Hell yeah!” betrays his permanent residency on the American fringe. He lives in a world where it’s always the 19th century south, and troubles are best handled with guns and guts, not government. Paul acts like nobody’s ever been either smart enough, or brave enough, to tell the plain truth – and once he does, common sense voters will recognize it and reward him. Instead, they recoil and go, “Huh?”

It reminds me of his first run-in with Rachel Maddow, in May 2010, when he told her he didn’t think the Civil Rights Act should apply to private businesses. He bobbed and he weaved but when Maddow asked point blank, “Do you think that a private business has the right to say ‘we don’t serve black people?’” He answered, “Yes,” and defended their “right” to discriminate as “freedom of speech.” (He also said he thought if he’d been alive back then, he’d have marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.) That’s the interview that made Maddow a “hater,” in Paul’s view.

I saw the same thing in his under-covered response to the revelation that his aide Jack Hunter was a neo-confederate racist who’d written a column headlined “John Wilkes Booth was right,” defending the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Paul, of course, came out against assassination – but then he went on to describe Lincoln the way neo-confederates do, as a tyrannical racist hypocrite who fought the Civil War not to end slavery but to consolidate Northern power. He thought he could get away with repudiating the most extreme expression of neo-confederate beliefs while validating their core. And that time, at least, he did.

There’s another problem with Paul’s over the top response to the plagiarism controversy: It suggests that he doesn’t understand the meaning of the term “plagiarism.” He has repeatedly insisted that he credited the original source of his speech material – the movie “Gattaca,” in one instance, and “Stand and Deliver” in another. But he does not seem to get that you can’t lift words directly from Wikipedia and claim them as your own – even though that’s something every sixth-grader knows.

Only a few days after Tailgunner Ted Cruz seemed to be facing a credible Tea Party rival, that rival is melting down. For his part, in the Times piece Cruz was said to be telling GOP donors that Paul can never be elected president “because he can never fully detach himself from the strident libertarianism of his father.” An even bigger problem: Rand Paul can never fully detach himself from himself.

'12 Years a Slave' Highlights America’s Shocking Record of Female Subjugation
The U.S. has not yet reckoned with the trauma of enslaved and oppressed women.


Excerpt:
Did Patsey survive to have children? We’ll never know. Enslaved women sometimes used abortion and infanticide to undermine their oppressions. If she did have children who survived, it’s sobering to imagine where their descendants might be today if chance had kept them on Louisiana’s bayous.

For African Americans living in Louisiana, hunger rates are twice the national average, and the poverty rate is 45 percent. According to a study by the Center for American Progress, Louisiana is the worst place to be a woman in the nation. Women get paid 67 cents on the dollar compared to men, their jobs are more insecure, they hold fewer public offices, and they fare worse in health outcomes. Louisiana ranks ninth in the rate of women murdered by men.

Louisiana is one of the only states in the country that does not have its own minimum wage law. It is a state that relies on the service industry, and we can imagine a descendant of Patsey finding herself in a job—if she could even find a job at all— without health benefits or basic protections, like paid sick leave. Maybe she’s a domestic worker. Or perhaps she packs boxes at a Walmart factory. She would have to stay at work regardless of whether there were sick children at home. With high job insecurity, saying no to whatever her employer’s demands might be could easily lead to firing, so she works extra hours without overtime and tries to ignore it when her manager eyes her lustfully.

Patsey’s descendant would face the fact that in Louisiana, her right to control her own body is constantly under assault. She would be forced to undergo an invasive and unnecessary ultrasound procedure before a doctor could perform an abortion—if she could even find a clinic.

In the very state where her foremother was tortured, deprived and violated, Patsey’s descendant would stand a good chance of getting trapped in unrelenting poverty, health crises and humiliation. During slavery, many Americans justified oppression by claiming that black people were naturally inferior and thus deserved their condition. Today, conservative Republicans suggest that the poor are poor because of their own inferiority, and do not deserve any better than what they have. The ideology of slavery posited a false God who instated a natural order in which some human beings were made to suffer at the hands of others. The ideology of capitalism proposes the supernatural force of the "market," which can never be wrong. Those whom the invisible hand crushes deserve their fate.

http://www.alternet.org/culture/12-y...age=1#bookmark

It's easy to watch a movie about particular times in history and believe the past is the past and these injustices no longer exist. The truth is the same ideology that allows one human being to erase the humanity of another is alive and well in our society. Many still believe there are deserving and undeserving people and we are taught to care little for the undeserving among us. Their fates are of their own doing. Soon many more people will learn first hand how unfair and unjust that belief is.

Isn't Ted Cruz ineligible to be president? That alone makes the prospect of him ending up the GOP frontrunner extremely amusing, and would make me feel much more confident in a Democratic win in 2016. More confident than I already am, I mean.

Ya, his mother was an American citizen at the time of his birth. A natural born citizen includes those who are entitled to US citizenship at birth. And I'm sure Canada will be more than happy to cut him lose.

Thanks for clearing that up. I'd heard he's Canadian. Apparently that's true, but not in the way that I had thought. I don't doubt he'd give up his dual citizenship for the presidency, so the prospect of him being the Republican frontrunner is now considerably less amusing. The man is batshit--Paul is at least right about that, in the same way that even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Well, not exactly the same way. President Obama was born in the U.S., (Hawaii to be exact), to an American mother and a Kenyan father. Cruz was born in Canada to an American mother and a Canadian father. If Cruz does run it will be interesting to see the Tea Baggers and crazed Birthers tie themselves in knots about why that's OK when they never stopped nattering about Obama's supposed Kenyan birthplace.

Actually I think Cruz's father was born in Cuba. Doesn't change anything but it is interesting I think.

And John McCain was born in Panama. Well, if I were to recognise as legitimate the past colonization of the area by the U.S. I would say he was born in the americanized Panama Canal Zone, which was under U.S. control at the time.

LOL. I don't suppose it matters since I assume he was born to US citizens which makes him a naturalized citizen. At least I think that is what they have decided to go with for the definition of naturalized citizen. But I bet that won't be the last we hear of it come 2016.

But by that definition all people born at that time in Panama are also US citizens.

It seems to me the whole South and Central America went through some Americanized rough patches (although not exactly recognized). I mean the US has long looked at all of it as our backyard to do what as we wish. They should all be considered citizens. Especially Mexico since half their country somehow ended up in the US. Well maybe not half, but a sizable chunk

MI Police 'Pursue Charges' Against Homeowner Who Shot 19-Year-Old Black Woman Dead After She Knocked on His Door

But in a 'stand-your-ground' state, will they stick?

Police say they are seeking charges against the Dearborn Heights, Michigan resident who shot a young African-American woman dead after she knocked on his door for help after a car accident. But since Michigan has a "Stand-your-ground" law, many wonder if charges, even if filed, will stick, since the law gives wide latitude to homeowners who claim they felt threatened.

The facts, as have been reported by several news outlets, are as startling as they are outrageous, and have the family of the victim, Renisha McBride, both asking why and demanding action.

McBride, all of 19 years old, had a car accident at roughly 2:30 am on Saturday in Dearborn Heights, a predominantly white neighborhood of Detroit. Her cellphone battery dead, she knocked on the door of a home in the 16000 block of Outer Drive. As she turned to leave the porch, she was shot in the head with a shotgun. The homeowner, whom police have refused to name, was initially arrested and released, having apparently convnced police that he thought she was an intruder trying to break in.

“He shot her in the head, [and] for what? For knocking on his door,” McBride’s aunt, Bernita Spinks said to the Detroit Free Press. “If he felt scared or threatened, he should have called 911.”

Police also reportedly mislead the family about where McBride's body was found. According to Raw Story, they were first told that her body had been dumped near Warren Avenue, some blocks away, where it was later found by authorities. Police soon, however, recanted their prior statement, saying instead that the woman died on the home’s front porch.

Race is an inescapable part of the story, McBride's family and other observers have pointed out, as is often the case when "Stand your ground" laws are applied to incidents where African Americans end up on the wrong end of the gun. McBride's murder follows the September 14 shooting of 24-year-old Jonathan Ferrell, a Black former college football player, who was shot and killed by police in North Carolina while seeking asistance after a car crash late at night from a nearby home. In that case, an officer who responded to the homeowner’s 911 call fired 12 shots at the already injured Ferrell, hitting him 10 times, and is now charged with voluntary manslaughter.

Few details have been released about the details of McBride’s death, but police on Wednesday reportedly asked the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office to issue a warrant for the resident charged with the fatal shooting. However the office sent the request back late Wednesday, asking for “further investigation by the police that must be submitted before a decision will be made.” T The halting of a potential arrest is devastating sign, perhaps, that Michigan’s upholding of the Stand-Your-Ground-Law may derail any charges.

“She didn’t break in his house; she didn’t break a window,”Spinks has said. “What, you see somebody on your porch and you just start shooting? And then you say it was accidental? That wasn’t accidental; that wasn’t accidental, no.”

http://www.alternet.org/civil-libert...ack-woman-dead

How the Unholy Alliance Between the Christian Right and Wall Street Is 'Crucifying America'

A new book argues that the Atheist's battles are misplaced… Polls show a majority of Americans favor liberal policies, but our courts and legislatures are increasingly controlled and driven by the Christian Right.
November 8, 2013 |

The following is an excerpt from Crucifying America: the unholy alliance between the Christian Right and Wall Street by CJ Werleman (Dangerous Little Books, 2013).

Atheist groups, associations, and networks have literally sprung up in every town and city in America. Million dollar social awareness campaigns have rolled across small towns and big cities throughout America. In major cities, you see billboards with messages like, “Are you Good Without God? Millions Are!” “Don’t Believe in God? You Are Not Alone.” Others say, “In the Beginning, Man Created God.” These campaigns have helped coerce millions of Americans out of the theological closet. They have helped many in-private atheists step out of the shadows. The trend is very much that Americans raised in Christian households are shunning the religion of their parents for any number of reasons: the advancement of human understanding; greater access to information; the scandals of the Catholic Church; and the over zealousness of the Christian Right.

Political scientists Robert Putman and David Campbell, and authors of American Grace, argue that the Christian Right’s politicization of faith in the 1990s turned younger, socially liberal Christians away from churches, even as conservatives became more zealous. “While the Republican base has become ever more committed to mixing religion and politics, the rest of the country has been moving in the opposite direction.”

When you add all these things together, it leads you to a dramatic yet never mentioned dynamic: atheists are the fastest growing minority in the U.S. today. More significantly, we make for being one of the most powerful voting blocs in the country, at least potentially. We now have the required critical mass to shape elections, laws, and leaders. Safety in numbers is growing into power in numbers. In 10, 20, 50 years, the Christian Right will hold little to no sway over the nation’s identity. From these facts, among others, we can boast that ideological victory is within sight.

Now for the bad news:

We are winning the wrong game!

We are losing the right game. We are winning the cultural war, but the Christian Right is winning in the race to control the levers of power. They hold the keys to our democracy, while we have clever bumper stickers, funny t-shirts, and books that deride virgin births and angry sky gods. The soldiers of God are playing a game that can only be described as Jedi Knight-ish. Meanwhile, we are being made to look juvenile, bellicose, and down right moronic. The Christian Right is ripping our arms off at the shoulder and then slapping us in the face with the soggy bits. It’s embarrassing, and if this were a football game the scoreboard would read: Christian right –120 versus free thinkers – 3. Someone invoke the mercy rule! Also, I hate football metaphors.

You see, all around this great country, atheists are meeting in cafes, living rooms and Holiday Inn conference rooms to meet, share donuts and talk about how we can remove “In God We Trust” from the dollar bill; and how best we deal with removing “One nation under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance, in an attempt to reverse the sneaky-handed 1954 bill pushed through congress in 1954 by Christian zealot President Eisenhower. We protest home school conventions; any display of the Ten Commandments; and there are even atheist groups who file lawsuits every winter in their respective cities to ensure nothing but the secular “meaning” of Christmas is promoted.

Look, all these actions are fine with me but, let’s be honest, they make us look like assholes. And frankly, if you’re filing legal action to prevent others from declaring, “Merry Christmas”, then you most definitely are an asshole!

What’s worse is that atheists are wasting far too much intellectual and emotional energy on battles that lack real political gain or consequence. In other words, we’re taking pot shots at an ideological enemy that’s out of range and forward marching in another direction, and where they’re dropping their ordinance is hurting us. Greatly!

While we are busy playing the role of the nation’s police force for political correctness, they are gerrymandering voting districts to ensure they regain and maintain control of the levers of congressional and gubernatorial power. While we chant, “Keep the Bible out of the classroom”, they are helping legislate voter ID laws that disenfranchise millions of black, Hispanic, and student voters. While we demand a removal of God from the Pledge of Allegiance, they are stacking the courts with their ideological judicial wingnuts. While we are correcting Christmas carolers with, “Happy Holidays”, they are mobilizing to ensure money buys them judges, congressmen and governors, which not only protects the interests of big corporations at the expense of the little guy, but will also protect the interests of the Christian Right – namely, putting an end to the gay, secular, liberal agenda, and, in turn, setting gender and racial equality back 50 years.

Poll after poll shows that a majority of Americans favor liberal policies, but our courts and legislatures are increasingly becoming controlled and driven by the Christian Right. Their victories are having a far more reaching impact on our lives and our secular democratic values than our small-minded wins to remove the 10 Commandments from some hic town’s courthouse.

The 2012 election was a rejection of the Ayn Rand, “Fuck you, I have mine” thinking that permeates the Republican base. Recall that moment during the 2012 GOP debates when the moderator asked the following hypothetical: “What should happen if a healthy 30-year-old man who can afford insurance chooses not to buy it and then becomes catastrophically ill and needs intensive care for six months?” In unison, the predominantly Tea Party (Christian Right) audience yelled, “Let him die!” Thankfully a majority of the American public spurned that callous thinking, as the national electorate went on to demonstrate that a majority of Americans see this country as a center-left country. Simply, we don’t want to be a country that says there’s legitimate rape and there’s illegitimate rape. There’s just rape! We don’t want to be a country that rejects science and facts. We want our kids to accept what 99.9 percent of the scientific community agrees to when it comes to evolution. We want our kids to accept climate change as fact, then fight to do something about it, so as to preserve their kids’ future. We don’t want our politicians to hold prayer sessions as the main means for fighting poverty. We don’t want our political leaders to believe poverty is caused by the individual’s lack of religious faith. We don’t want a country that demonizes the less fortunate. We want a country that judges a person by the content of their character, and not by the color of their skin. We want our laws to not only favor the interests of business but equally or more so favor our communities, our skies, our water, and our food. We want a representative democracy. We want “One nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all” – not all of one kind, but all. These are the ideals that a majority of Americans want in this great nation today.

Well, that’s what we wanted, and that’s kind of what we were getting, to some degree, until something really bad happened on January 21, 2010. A date of infamy! For that was the day the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the billionaire Koch brothers over the Federal Election Commission. In that ruling, the highest court in the land ruled that money equals free speech, and corporations equal people. That was the moment that whatever chance we had of righting the wrongs that have led to growing social inequalities in this country was lost. That was the moment that all but guarantees a continuation of the shrinking of the middle class. That was the moment that presented billionaires and the wealthiest corporations an opportunity to partner with the Christian Right, so that a new era of pro-business and anti-government policies could be enacted in this country.

http://www.alternet.org/belief/athei...age=1#bookmark

I don't know where to put this but I thought it was cool and I guess it's news.

http://www.alternet.org/video/could-...bal-revolution

This is just too much fun not to read.
 

Who Is Chief Right Wing Wacko this Week? It Might Surprise You
The Wacko-in-Chief's ignorant banter — and 9 other wacky statements from right-wing nutjobs.

Rand Paul may have assumed the mantle of Wacko-in-Chief this week, but lots of lesser known right-wing nutjobs had banner weeks as well.

1. Christian historian: Abortions caused Typhoon Haiyan.

This might come as news to the grieving survivors of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines: the cause of the powerful storm was abortion. Not necessarily their abortions, but just the fact that anyone has abortions, especially legally, even though abortion is illegal in the Philippines. God is very, very pissed about that, and that’s why he sent a typhoon that killed all those Filipinos on its way to Vietnam. He’s vindictive like that. That is why he is causing all these very destructive and scary storms.

What is not causing any of this climatological havoc is global warming—not that it even exists. Burning fossil fuels is something God actually wants us to do more of. So goes the theory of Christian denialist, oops, we mean “historian” David Barton. The blanket explanation for all this “climate stuff that we can’t explain,” he said this week in a conversation with televangelist Kenneth Copeland, as well as murder and pedophilia, is legalized abortion. America voted for politicians who support abortion rights, and in doing so “opened the door to the curse.”

Here is the historical background. In the good old days, when America was first starting out, Barton explained that if there was really bad weather, leaders would “call for a national day of repentance, humiliation, fasting and prayer … and today we’re saying, ‘Oh no, it’s global warming.’”

That’s how we lost God’s protection. We chose to lose it. What did we expect?

2. Radio host Damon Bruce: Sports are set to the dial of men.

Sports are for men, and Richie Incognito is a man, acting manly in a man’s world. And if you don’t like it, ladies, you can lump it. That is the short version of a nine-minute tirade against women in sports this week by KNBR sports radio host Damon Bruce.

Bruce is mad at women because women are to blame for the suspension of Miami Dolphins guard Richie Incognito after his alleged (and apparently legendary) harassment, bullying and threats against teammate Jonathan Martin drove Martin from the team.

Here’s how the tirade starts:

“A lot of sports has lost its way and I’m gonna tell you, part of the reason is because we’ve got women giving us directions. For some of you, this is going to come across as very misogynistic. I don’t care, because I’m very right. I'm willing to share my sandbox, as long as you remember you're in my box. I didn’t slip into your box....”

Allowing women to “slip into the box” of professional sports has pretty much ruined sports, Bruce thinks. It has feminized men and made it hard for men to bond the way they like to bond—by being assholes. That’s what Jonathan Martin didn’t understand. Incognito was trying to bond with him when he called him racial slurs and threatened to rape his sister.

Here’s Bruce’s sage advice to women sports journalists who can’t hack it: “If sports get too gruesome for you, go write a restaurant column. Go write a housekeeping column.”

Sweet of him to be concerned.

3. Rand Paul overtakes Ted Cruz as chief Republican wacko bird.

This is a tightly contested race—neck and neck. Lately, Texas Tea Partier Cruz has been relatively subdued since his widely ridiculed Obamacare filibuster which led to the widely reviled government shutdown.

So, Kentucky libertarian Paul was good enough to step into the breach to fulfill the role of what Senator John McCain coined as “chief of the wacko birds.” Paul has distinguished himself in the last week or so with his passionate defense, or is it ignorance, of plagiarism, challenging Rachel Maddow to a duel for repeatedly pointing out that he lifts passages from Wikipedia wholesale for speeches, articles, books, whatever. She’s impugning his honor by doing so, “spreading hate” on him. Besides libertarians don’t attribute stuff; that’s for big government suckers.

A plagiarism scandal, or multiple plagiarism scandals, need not be devastating. Hey, mistakes happen. Admit them and move on, we say. But no, Paul started talking “duel” during an interview with ABC’s “This Week.”

“If, you know, if dueling were legal in Kentucky, if they keep it up, you know, it would be a duel challenge. But I can’t do that, because I can’t hold office in Kentucky then.”

Note to Paul: Toto, you’re not in 19th-century Kentucky anymore.

4. Antonin Scalia brings up the devil in case about prayer.

It’s almost as if there’s a little red guy with horns and a tail sitting on the shoulder of the Supreme Court’s most verbose right-winger, making him say really off-the-wall things. Justice Antonin Scalia just keeps seeing the devil and his worshippers everywhere, bringing them up during oral arguments in a case about the constitutionality of legislative prayer. This, just weeks after a somewhat embarrassing interview in New Yorkmagazine in which he gleefully affirmed his belief in the Antichrist. And what’s wrong with that?

During this week’s case, fellow conservative jurist Samuel Alito was asking questions about whether any kind of prayer would be permissible before a legislative session, one that would not offend Christians, Jews, Muslims, or Hindus.

"What about devil worshippers?" Scalia interjected. Laughter ensued. He’s such a card.

His larger point was that not letting people pray before legislative meetings deprives them of their religious freedom, and that it is impossible to design a prayer that satisfies all faiths—not to mention lack thereof.

"What is the equivalent of prayer for someone who is not religious?" Scalia asked. "There are many people who do not believe in God. ... If you had an atheist [town] board, you would not have any prayer. I guarantee you."

After all, who do you think makes people atheists? Guy with the horns, we’re talking to you.

5. Louie Gohmert: Shutdown was necessary to save people from Obamacare.

Two quick refreshers: 1) Obamacare is the “worst law known to man,” worse than slavery, Nuremberg laws, Indian removal act—you get the idea; and 2) Tea Partiers received a drubbing in this week’s election, but seem not to realize it.

Texas Tea Partier Louie Gohmert was out stumping this week, bizarrely bragging that the devastating shutdown was necessary because people would “suffer and potentially die” because of the Affordable Care Act. Yup, nothing kills people faster than health insurance. It is deadly stuff.

He made the statement at a nursing home in East Texas, where he hoped to scare the bejeezus out of seniors so they won’t sign up for the dreaded healthcare coverage. “Anybody that thinks the Affordable Care Act helps seniors doesn’t really understand what’s unaffordable to seniors,” Gohmert helpfully and misleadingly explained. “It makes most of the Medicare Advantage plans go up, but you’ve got to remember, Obamacare actually cut $716 billion from Medicare and seniors rely on Medicare.”

That, of course, is either a lie or make-believe, or both, but since when has that stopped the opponents of Obamacare?

6. Rep. Steve King knows personally—don’t ask him how—that Saddam Hussein purchased uranium from Niger.

Who can forget the fiction that fueled the invasion of Iraq in 2003? Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, was building the bomb, and was ready to use all of it against us or Israel. He got his uranium from Niger, high-level intelligence said. President George Bush even said so in a speech.

Cut to a couple months after “Shock and Awe” and not even Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney or President Bush was standing by that statement. They were misled by some bum intelligence. Sorry. Our bad.

But crazy Iowa Rep. Steve King still believes it because, as he said on Jan Mickelson’s radio show this week: “I have had hands-on evidence that what George Bush said in that State of the Union address was the truth.”

What Bush said was: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

When the claim unraveled, the Bush administration had to eat crow and admit the so-called intelligence was “bogus,” documents “forged.” Spokesman Ari Fleischer admitted the statement should never have found its way into the president’s speech. But nobody took the war back.

But King has “hands-on” knowledge. He just does.

7. Illinois Rep.: Marriage equality has nothing to do with rights; it’s about the Bible.

As the Illinois legislature began to debate whether to join the growing number of enlightened states that have legalized same-sex marriage, State Rep. Dwight Kay (R-Glen Carbon) pointed out that everyone has it bass-ackwards. Our nation was built on “the scriptures, then came the Constitution. Is that not right?”

It was, of course, a rhetorical question. “I think it is,” Kay continued. A brief course in American history could clear this up for the confused legislator, but never mind.

Kay is at a loss to understand why everyone keeps talking about human rights, and civil rights, and equal rights all the time when they talk about marriage equality. What do human rights have to do with a nation built on scripture? Who you gonna believe, that Constitution with its Bill of Rights written by men, or the word of God?

8. Larry Pratt: Trayvon Martin’s broken family is what killed him.

It’s never too late to pile more pain onto the grieving parents and loved ones of slain teenager Trayvon Martin. His killer is free, Trayvon has been blamed for his own death, and now, taking it one step further, Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America has suggested that Martin's dysfunctional family is responsible for the boy’s death.

That’s what he said in an interview with NewsMax’s Steve Malzberg this week: Trayvon Martin was killed because he had a “broken family.”

Who else can you blame? Triggerman, neighborhood-watch volunteer George Zimmerman was just lawfully “standing his ground” when he shot unarmed Martin. “Stand Your Ground” laws can’t be to blame because, as Sen. Ted Cruz explained to Martin's mother Sybrina Fulton in a Senate hearing on the controversial law, she’s just “mourning the loss of her son.” Stand-your-ground laws in fact “protect those in African-American communities,” he said.

Facts be damned, gun nuts and Tea Partiers agree. According to Right-Wing Watch, a recent “Tampa Bay Times analysis of stand-your-ground cases in Florida found substantial racial disparities in the application of the law, including that ‘people who killed a black person walked free 73 percent of the time, while those who killed a white person went free 59 percent of the time. A national studyfound a similar disparity.”

But, it’s Trayvon Martin's family’s fault he’s dead. Probably his mother’s.

9. White, anti-LGBT Texan wins office by pretending to be black.

Dave Wilson, a Houston electrician, has become pretty adept at creating literature for the causes he believes in. While not rewiring people’s homes, he long pursued his sideline of mailing homophobic fliers to thousands of Houston voters attacking the city’s lesbian mayor Annise Parker. His argument is pretty simple. Open homosexuality is bad. It leads to extinction. (Closeted homosexuality, not so much.)

Recently, Wilson expanded his literary efforts into fiction, when he got himself elected to the Houston Community College Board of Trustees by out-and-out pretending to be someone else. He pretended to be a black man, defeating longtime incumbent Bruce Austin, who actually is black, in an overwhelmingly African-American district.

According to Right-Wing Watch, “Wilson’s campaign fliers were filled with black faces that he admits to simply pulling off of websites, along with captions such as ‘Please vote for our friend and neighbor Dave Wilson.’ Another flier announces that he was ‘Endorsed by Ron Wilson,’ which is the name of an African-American former state representative. Only by reading the fine print will voters discover that the ‘Ron Wilson’ who actually endorsed Dave is his cousin. The cousin lives in Iowa.”

Wilson is fine with this whole deception thing. After all, lying is what politicians do, he points out.

10. Nutjob former classmate of Obama reminisces about his cocaine-snorting, gay-hustling high school days.

Scott Lively's "Defend The Family" website got a real scoop this week with an interview that nutjob preacher James David Manning conducted with Mia Marie Pope, who says—and why would we not believe her?—that she knew President Obama back in high school in Hawaii in the 1970s, when he was a foreigner (this is a birther website, after all) and a gay druggie.

"He very much was within sort of the gay community," Pope claimed. "And we knew Barry as just common knowledge that girls were never anything that he ever was interested in ... He would get with these older white gay men, and this is how we just pretty much had the impression that that's how he was procuring his cocaine. In other words, he was having sex with these older white guys and that's how he was getting this cocaine to be able to freebase."

That clears a lot up.

New downtown light system capable of more than illumination

http://www.mynews3.com/mostpopular/story/New-downtown-light-system-capable-of-more-than/226vPp0cdkyVfwul9kos9g.cspx

"The lights are capable of all sorts of fancy features and they may save the city money, but there's a concern. These new street lights are also capable of recording video and audio.

The system is entirely adaptable. The lights are currently being tested in Las Vegas but they could soon be positioned on public streets throughout the city."

Futuristic water-recycling shower cuts bills by over $1,000

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/11/11/tech/innovation/futuristic-water-recycling-shower-orbsys/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

"...... it saves more than 90% in water usage and 80% in energy every time you shower, while also producing water that is cleaner than your average tap."

Makes me thankful I am not fond of chicken.....
 

Chicken In Popular Products May Soon Be Made In China

BOSTON (CBS) — As soon as next summer, nuggets and other popular chicken products could be made with chicken processed in China, all because of a recent change in regulations.

China has a long history of serving up unsafe food, including the industrial chemical melamine that was deliberately put in pet food and infant formula. There were also cases of tainted rat meat passed off as lamb.

“To me it’s a big leap of faith for us to now have to accept that foods coming from china are going to be safe,” says Elizabeth Scott, a food safety expert at Simmons College.

But despite consumer concern, the USDA has cleared the way for Chinese poultry processors to ship meat to America. The poultry must be raised and slaughtered in approved countries like the US or Canada. And it has to come back to the US fully cooked. Bill Mattos, President of the California Poultry Foundation, says ” If its cooked, it should be perfectly safe.”

But how does it make economic sense to send raw chicken thousands of miles away to China only to have it sent back to the US cooked? Some say it’s about a much bigger plan.

“We think the USDA cut corners in this instance due to trade concerns,” says Tony Corbo a senior lobbyist for the food campaign at Food and Water Watch.

Corbo is critical of the new rule. The deal puts an end to a long trade war with China over poultry. And in return it could open more doors for American grown food to be sold in China. “This is really a big deal for trade. If China likes what we’re doing they’ll buy more products and China has a lot more people,” says Mattos.

American poultry producers say only a small amount of US chicken will actually be processed in China. But critics warn it could end up as an ingredient in pot pies, chicken noodle soup, and yes, nuggets, but you won’t even know it.

“China” won’t be on the label, thanks to a loophole in the law. Shipping in food from China is not new. Last year, China sent more than 4 billion pounds of food to the US including half the apple juice we drink, 30% of the garlic we use, and 85% of the tilapia we eat. Now processed chicken may be the next thing on the menu.

http://boston.cbslocal.com/2013/11/1...made-in-china/

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?f...type=1&theater

WoooHoooo! Aloha!

Why the Hate-Filled, Retrograde Politics of the Tea Party Are Here to Stay
The Tea Party is not a movement, it’s a geographical region: the Old South.

After last Tuesday’s creaming in the Virginia governor’s race, and with Tea Party negatives creeping toward 75 percent, the political punditry class has divided itself into one of two camps: those celebrating the demise of the Tea Party versus those forecasting its inevitable end. Who’s right? They're both wrong, because it’s not a movement. It’s a geographical region, and if history has taught us anything, southern folk are a pugnacious bunch.

Despite political feel-good rhetoric, there are two Americas. Not just ideologically, but geographically. That’s what still makes this country unique among other Western democracies. America is two distinct nations with a distinguishable border that runs the breadth of the country from the Mason-Dixon line across the southern border of Pennsylvania, finishing in some Baptist church somewhere in rural Texas.

The Tea Party is overwhelmingly Southern. Michael Lind, author of Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States, writes, “The facts show that the Tea Party in Congress is merely the familiar old neo-Confederate Southern right under a new label.” If you include Texas as a member of the Old South (banning tampons from the state house earns the Lone Star state that honor), nearly 80 percent of the Tea Party’s support comes from the former Confederate states. So, stop calling it a movement.

The Republican Party is not only the party of plutocrats and oligarchs; it’s also the party of the South. The party’s leaders are predominantly southern. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is from Kentucky. House Speaker John Boehner is from Cincinnati, Ohio, but Cincinnati is as close to the South as a northern city can be, given the city’s airport is actually in Kentucky. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor is from Virginia. '

And then there are the likely 2016 presidential hopefuls. With the exception of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and the pathologically homophobic Rick Santorum, the rest of them are as southern as Colonel Sanders. Rand Paul is from Kentucky. Bobby Jindal is from Louisiana. Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio are from Florida.

While movements and ideas may die, a land mass does not, and while that southern land mass is occupied by a people who are willing to destroy the country in order to get their way, and while the GOP remains dependent on its "Southern strategy," the South’s fixation on everything related to controlling race, sex, religious practice, abortion laws, and dismantling the federal government will remain the revolutionary fervor of not only the Tea Party but also the GOP.

The trend lines in America are moving against the South thanks to increasing urbanization, the "browning of America," and the declining place for religion in American life. These are great challenges to the South’s way of life, and southerners don’t like it. So don’t expect one governor’s race in an off-year election to read as an obituary for the Tea Party. As much as the media and the GOP establishment would like you to believe Chris Christie, a moderate only by Tea Party standards, to be the presumptive nominee, the neo-Confederates are more likely to pick a gay atheist from San Francisco.

The GOP’s most agitated and mobilized voting bloc is its predominantly southern evangelical base. In their minds, they’ve experimented with non-Southern “moderates” in the form of John McCain and Mitt Romney, and they got trounced. The base gets its cues from Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity, all of whom are juicing the base for a “severely conservative” 2016 candidate. Thus a northern governor who supports climate change, evolution, immigration and gun control will likely be sacrificed on the altar of southern radicalism—a fate realized by one former northern mayor in 2008, Rudy Giuliani.

The South, and by association the GOP, sees America increasingly through the prism of race. It’s central to their worldview. In 2012, 92% of the Republican vote came from white people who, within the next three decades, will no longer be in the majority. Despite losing the gubernatorial race, Ken Cuccinelli received more than 70% of the white vote. White southern voters view entitlements and immigration reform as liberal programs to buy votes. They believe food stamps and healthcare are an effort to take money from hard-working white people, and in turn, redistribute it to lazy black people. When Reagan spoke about a “welfare queen,” he didn’t need to mention her race. White southern voters had already painted a picture in their own minds.

In his seminal Better Off Without ‘Em: A Northern Manifesto for Southern Secession, Chuck Thompson writes:
The unified southern resistance to every initiative from any "liberal" administration has deep historic roots. The persistent defiance of every Democratic attempt to deal intelligently with national problems—be they recession, debt, or childhood obesity—has nothing to with political ideology, taxes, healthcare, or acceptable degrees of federal authority. It has everything to do with nullification, disruption, zealotry, and division. It’s part of a time-sharpened effort to debilitate nearly every northern-led government by injecting it with the Seven Deadly Sins of Southern Politics: demagogic dishonesty, religious fanaticism, willful obstructionism, disregard for own self-interest, corporate supplication, disproportionate influence, and military adventurism.

The next Republican Party presidential nominee will need to speak to these white southern fears and attitudes. Given that Civil War hostilities ended more than 150 years ago, and given the GOP is now backed by unprecedented levels of campaign finance thanks to Citizens United, don’t fool yourself into thinking the Tea Party strain of Republicanism is going away anytime soon. It's more likely they've only just arrived.

http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-an...age=1#bookmark

Bill Maher Blasts Selfish Christian Hypocrites Who Don't Tip Waiters
New Rule: It's OK if you don't want to feed the hungry, or heal the sick, or house the homeless. Just don't say you're doing it for their own good.

Elizabeth Warren’s Populist Insurgency Enters Next Phase: Blow up the Finance Sector, Restore the Economy

If asked, Americans of all political persuasions will say overwhelmingly that they prefer “tougher rules” for Wall Street. But what does that actually mean?

You can frame this conventionally: supporting regulators, punishing rules violators, mopping up 2008-style disasters to limit the damage and attempting to prevent such chaos from happening again. But by “tougher rules,” maybe Americans are really signaling a vague but persistent dissatisfaction with an economy that has become dominated by the financial sector. And you can see within that how transforming banking back to its traditional purpose — as a conduit for putting capital in the hands of worthwhile business ventures and driving shared prosperity — would be one antidote to an unequal society full of financial titan gatekeepers, who confiscate a giant share of the money flowing through the system.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren — in many ways the avatar of a new populist insurgency within the Democratic Party that seeks to combine financial reform and economic restoration — will speak later today in Washington at the launch of a new report that marks a key new phase in this movement. Released by Americans for Financial Reform and the Roosevelt Institute – and called “An Unfinished Mission: Making Wall Street Work for Us” — the report is a revelation, because it finally invites fundamental discussions about these issues. Its 11 chapters from some of the leading thinkers on financial reform do look back at the successes and failures of the signal financial reform law of this generation, the Dodd-Frank Act. But the report also weaves in a story about how we can reorient finance as a complement to the real economy, rather than its overriding force. Mike Konczal, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and the co-editor of the report, tells Salon, “The financial sector is still eating up a lot of GDP [gross domestic product], and it’s not clear what we’re getting out of it. We want to get the conversation at that level.”

This report fills in the details, creating definable action items and goals that could serve as a marker for legislative and regulatory action, as well as primaries in the next several election cycles.

The roots of this conversation go back decades, if not hundreds of years. One of the report’s authors, John Parsons of MIT, notes that the debate over whether to force derivative trades — the bets on top of bets that helped accelerate and magnify the financial crisis — into central and transparent clearinghouses dates back to the Minneapolis Grain Exchange of 1896. The concept of a fiduciary standard, which states that anyone offering advice on investment strategies should act in the interests of their individual clients rather than trying to enrich themselves, was initially settled in the Investment Advisors Act of 1940. Even Ben Bernanke last week drew parallels between the 2008 crisis and the Panic of 1907, which led to the creation of the Federal Reserve.

In the past few decades, Wall Street has devised financial “innovations” with the primary purpose of outpacing regulatory reach, surmounting decades-old reforms. This frees non-bank financial firms from oversight by the watchdogs, and allows them to accumulate risk in search of greater profits. For example, Marcus Stanley of Americans for Financial Reform looks at shadow banking, the lending markets that “convert illiquid, risky, long-term assets into ‘safe,’ liquid short-term securities.” This creates an illusion of safety and puts massive amounts of money outside the New Deal-era regulatory apparatus, where the firms involved don’t have requirements to carry capital to guard against inevitable losses, for example. In 2008, the breakdown of parts of the shadow banking system made it impossible for large financial actors to access short-term funding, turning a downturn into a crisis.

While shadow banking does not have access to the public safety net (things like bank deposit insurance, or access to Federal Reserve liquidity programs), in reality it is hooked into mega-banks inside the safety net. AIG was bailed out because its counterparties were corporations like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, determined to be too big to fail. So you have the worst of all possible worlds; a giant alternative banking system not subject to any of the rules that limit risk, vulnerable to old-style bank runs, but able to get government relief if their gambles turn sour. You get privatized profits and socialized losses. You also create more fragility in the system, because shadow banking involves multiple links from borrower to lender, and as Stanley told Salon, “Each link in the chain is another opportunity to lie about what’s inside the loan.”

There are two ways to look at this problem. One is seen in the way Dodd-Frank tried, with varying success, to bring New Deal-era structures to the broader financial sector, pulling systemically important activities like insurance and hedge funds under a regulatory regime. Unfortunately, the maddening complexity of financial innovations generates uncertainty over what really falls under the rules, giving Wall Street and compliant regulators the opportunity to take advantage of loopholes. Orderly liquidation authority, the new measures for regulators to wind down large financial institutions, is so full of holes, argues Stephen Lubben of Seton Hall University, that it could quickly devolve into “a bailout in all but name.” Regulators have not even begun to reckon with large elements of the system, like money market funds or the overnight “repo” markets, which made significant contributions to the financial crisis. “Many of the conditions that helped cause the 2008 crisis persist,” writes Jennifer Taub of Vermont Law School in one of the report’s chapters.

The other way to deal with financial innovations is to simply eliminate those activities that only serve to pool risk without productive social purpose. For example, Wallace Turbeville of the think tank Demos, in a section on derivatives purchased by state and local governments, concludes that these municipalities would be better off hedging their risks by building a cash reserve, instead of paying the financial sector exorbitant fees for a product they don’t understand. “Inefficiencies that transfer earnings to the financial sector are like a tax that redistributes wealth upward,” Turbeville concludes.

Similarly, we can ban mega-banks from, as Saule Omarova of the University of North Carolina School of Law puts it, becoming “financial-industrial conglomerates,” pushing into commercial business like energy, transportation and physical commodities and distorting those industries for profit. We can give shareholders a greater say in executive compensation, tying it to actual performance. We can significantly boost capital requirements so financial institutions cover their own risk rather than allow taxpayer dollars to serve that purpose. We can restrict shadow banking, and reestablish the link between borrower and lender so that the lender has a stake in the borrower’s success. We can empower regulators with easy-to-implement, clear rules that place limits on banking activities and bank size. We can demand that law enforcement creates deterrents to fraud by legitimately punishing wrongdoing on Wall Street. All of these recommendations and more are in the comprehensive report.

There’s a real-world consequence to keeping unnecessary financial innovation in place, argues Brad Miller, former congressman now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. “The yawning inequality of income and wealth is not because the middle class isn’t working hard enough or because the richest fraction of a percent is making an enormous contribution,” he told Salon. “Much of the reason is what economists call ‘rent seeking,’ or extracting money without doing anything useful, mostly in the financial sector. It’s a wonder the economy has the strength to get out of bed in the morning.”

This core debate – whether to build a new regulatory regime for 21st-century financial products, or to just bar “innovations” that merely allow financial interests to capture money that should cycle through the economy – has not been part of the Obama administration’s approach to Wall Street reform, Mike Konczal says. “Paul Volcker said there wasn’t a financial innovation with a useful purpose in the last 30 years except the ATM. But the administration didn’t engage in this debate.”

The administration has seemingly taken the position that any effort to build on financial reform would reflect a tacit admission that Dodd-Frank didn’t solve the problem, and therefore nothing else can be done.

But in three years, President Obama will leave office, and these core issues will not. The age of “boring” banking, without these innovations, coincides directly with the creation of the broad middle class and a time of unparalleled economic expansion. Kleptocracies aren’t known for their economic vitality, but that’s what we have with a Wall Street-dominated economy.

The issue of Wall Street reform isn’t just about which regulations are sufficient to the task. It’s about what kind of economy we want for all our citizens.

http://www.alternet.org/economy/eliz...age=1#bookmark

15-year-old Girl Asks Apple to Remove MacBook's Offensive Dictionary Definition of ‘Gay’
Plucky teen takes a stand against the global corporation for defining gay as "stupid" and "foolish"

A Massachusetts teenager courageously took on giant conglomerate Apple in advocating for gay rights, after discovering an offensive definition of the term ‘gay’ on her Apple MacBook, Fox Boston reported.

Fifteen-year-old, Becca Gorman, was writing a history essay on gay rights when she typed the word, “gay” into her MacBook dictionary only to find two very derogatory informal definitions of the term: “foolish” and “stupid”, as well as the following offensive example - “making students wait for the light is kind of a gay rule”.

The teenager, who has lesbian parents, said that despite being accustomed to hearing the term ‘that’s so gay’ used in everyday conversation, she was highly offended that a global company like Apple which claims to be enlightened and has an openly gay CEO would legitimize such insulting definitions:

“At first, I was kind of in disbelief…I felt like they had to take care of it," she said,

After consulting with her mothers, Gorman decided to take action and wrote to Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, to express her utter disgust.

Within an hour, to her surprise, an Apple representative called her back and also expressed dismay.

"They said that Apple streams its dictionary from four separate sources so they'd have to figure out how to get it removed, but they were also really surprised," the teen said to WCB-TV.

But while Gordan says the representative said Apple would look into the problem, to date, the MacBook definition remained unchanged.

Still, Gordan is not about to give up:

“I feel like we’re going to have to make a bigger deal about it before they actually act on it,” she said in the interview.

http://www.alternet.org/civil-libert...definition-gay

Ahh, the good old days when Christians were, well, Christian.
 

If Only Right-Wing Christians Knew Where Their Ideas Came From
Progressive evangelical Christianity is not merely a relic of the 19th century; it’s making a comeback.

http://www.alternet.org/belief/if-on...ame?page=0%2C0

Corporate America’s New Scam: Industry P.R. Firm Poses as Think Tank!
How the media fell hook, line and sinker for the propagandist, respectable-sounding "Employment Policies Institute"

http://www.alternet.org/corporate-am...ses-think-tank

Mom as the New Face of Anarchy? Police Terrorize Americans Who Object to Right-Wing Lunacy by Using "Anarchist" Label

http://www.alternet.org/activism/ana...mmunist-labels

Gay son of slain San Francisco mayor Moscone marries at City Hall

Jonathan Moscone, son of San Francisco mayor George Moscone who was assassinated in 1978 alongside Harvey Milk, has married partner Darryl Carbonaro at the city hall where his father served and died

12 NOVEMBER 2013 | BY ANDREW POTTS

The openly gay son of the San Francisco mayor murdered alongside gay political pioneer Harvey Milk has been married at the City Hall where they were slain by another former mayor of the city - Willie Brown.

Brown is a family friend of Jonathan Moscone – the son of murdered San Francisco mayor George Moscone – and was married Friday to partner of one year Darryl Carbonaro.

Moscone, 49, is the artistic director of the California Shakespeare Theater in Berkeley and Carbonaro, 46, is the associate general counsel for Clean Power Finance.

Their wedding was conducted on the Mayoral Balcony of San Francisco's City Hall by Brown in front of 80 guests.

The couple reportedly met online in November last year. Two days after their first date at a bar they met again for dinner and they have been together ever since.

In 2011 Jonathan Moscone directed a play about his father’s assassination and its effect on his life called ‘Ghost Light’ which had been written by friend Tony Taccone.

He told the New York Times that directing the play had helped him reconcile some of his feelings about his father’s murder.

‘The play became about wishing him back,’ Moscone told the newspaper, ‘After living for years without even thinking about him. And I think the not thinking about someone is a way of not missing them.’

Moscone was killed by former San Francisco city supervisor Dan White on November 27, 1978, after he refused to allow him to rescind his resignation from the City Board of Supervisors.

White then went into the office of pioneering gay rights campaigner Harvey Milk and shot him too.

What appeared to be lenient treatment of the murders and White sparked San Francisco’s White Night Riots a year later. (**My note: Dan White and the "Twinkie Defense" at his trial).

- See more at: http://www.gaystarnews.com/article/g....GHza6s3w.dpuf

The Gospel of Selfishness in American Christianity
How the philosophers of selfishness came to use Christianity as their cover story.

http://www.alternet.org/belief/gospe...n-christianity

Pope Francis Is ‘Too Liberal’ for Her Holiness, Sarah Palin
The former vice presidential candidate expressed concern over the Pope’s 'liberal agenda' and of course blamed mainstream media…

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-pol...ss-sarah-palin