Head-Spinning Political Shit!

[Vanessa Emma Goldman]

Originally Posted by MsDemeanor

Paladino's a fucking nut job. His platform seems to be "I'm angry and I have stupid ideas". That's it.
And let's not forget that the repugs killed TANF, effectively firing 240,000 Americans. They want to find jobs for Americans, my ass!
linkyloo

"We are angry and we have stoopid ideas" should be the Official Slogan of the Republican Party.

complete with the misspelling of "stupid."

[Nat]

[DapperButch]

Originally Posted by Nat

Wow. Jackass.

[AtLast]

Originally Posted by MsDemeanor

I'm not surprised. This is just the sort of thing that sexual repression does to folks.

Remember, the GOP is lead by people who keep getting caught in (same and opposite) sex scandals, practice serial marriage ("honey, I know you're kinda busy here in this hospital bed, but I want a divorce"), use taxpayer dollars to visit girlfriends in other countries, hold fundraisers at lesbian bondage clubs, and held a convention in Tampa, aka the Strip Club Capital of America.

linkyloo

The GOP is PINO - Puritanical in Name Only.

Yes, the "family values folks!"

[iamkeri1]

This is so astonishing to me, that I posted it on two different threads. Talk about head-spinning - thought my neck was going to SNAP over this one.
Smooches,
Keri

Please note - this bill was introduced BY A WOMAN!!!!
AZ Introduces Bill Allowing Employers to Fire Women for Using Contraception

Posted by Kevin Farrell on Mar 14, 2012 in Genital Warfare | 10 comments
Share461







The Senate Judiciary Committee voted 6-2 Monday to endorse a controversial bill that would allow Arizona employers the right to deny health insurance coverage for contraceptives based on religious objections.
Arizona House Bill 2625, authored by Majority Whip Debbie Lesko, R-Glendale, would permit employers to ask their employees for proof of medical prescription if they seek contraceptives for non-reproductive purposes, such as hormone control or acne treatment.
“I believe we live in America. We don’t live in the Soviet Union,” Lesko said. “So, government should not be telling the organizations or mom and pop employers to do something against their moral beliefs.”



It all sounds rather condescending and Arizonish when you put it like that, but there’s more to this bill than meets the eye.
Arizona is an at-will employment state, which means bosses can fire you just because. The type of employer who wishes to deny women access to contraception unless absolutely medically required to do so (think ovarian cysts) is the type of employer that may give women a pink slip for failing to provide medical records showing a non-birth control necessity for well, birth control.
In short, if your boss objects to you taking the pill, under Arizona House Bill 2625 your boss is protected by the law in terminating your employment.
Jezebel’s Erin Gloria Ryan has a fantastic piece up explaining this all far better than I’m able to. (Because I’m leaving for the airport, not because I lack ovaries.) Go read it.
Please, dear readers, make a giant stink about this. Share this. Spread the word. The war on women in our country is bizarre and real and very much happening. Attention gays, stand up for the women standing up for you.
How is this real life?

[AtLast]

I am just plain discusted with the far right's attacks on women via politics. Brings me back to pre Roe v Wade decision as an activist in my 20's and all the struggles. I am hopeful with seeing young women standing up as we did back the- and my grandmother before me for the right for women to vote. This battle is never really won, even with a large cadre of feminist men coming up with us. Letting down our guard always seems to bring these attempts to push women back.

I feel like whe women become complacent, even take things for granted as "always being so," misogyny seeps back into our lives. But, the current right wing legislative ploys are just plain alarming.

[tonaderspeisung]

H.R. 5736: To amend the United States Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948 to authorize the domestic dissemination of information and material about the United States intended primarily for foreign audiences, and for other purposes.

or as the article asserts - lifting the propaganda ban

buzzfeed article - http://www.buzzfeed.com/mhastings/co...0Daily%20Email

bill text - http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/112/hr5736/text

i think the us population is already inundated with propaganda and adding this amendment seems almost silly
but it's also given me pause - so what's the purpose - possibly the death knell of critical thinking?

[Licious]

It is surreal to watch all this happening. Throwing in my two cents...

I was a young feminist in junior high and high school, I was so grateful when family planning became readily available.

I remember Roe V. Wade being settled.

Many younger people do not remember:

Women trying to get adequate birth control.

Women trying to save up money to get an abortion and have their friends
drive them to another state.

Poor women going to secret abortion clinics, also called "butcher shops"
and getting infections, or worse.

Desperate young teens trying to abort themselves, getting hurt and often
dying, (hence the old "coat hanger" insignias).

It was great, the issue of abortion was finally settled and family planning clinics opened up, and women could move on to issues of equal pay, education, glass ceilings and working to liberate less fortunate countries.

If you had told me this would ever slide backwards, at that time... I would have not believed it. As I grew older, however, I read many a cautionary tale, some historical, some fictional, all with the same message. History can repeat itself.

The saying "Freedom is not Free" is terribly overused and many equate it with war. I feel it means freedom requires vigilance and ongoing work.

The right wing types are clever; they can't just overturn this at the Federal level, so they are working state by state.

To say I am aghast at the numerous bills going through all over the country - is an understatement.

"Head-spinning" describes it perfectly.

[Cin]

How the Corporate Media Obscure the Truth About Mitt Romney's 'Vulture Capitalism' at Bain

The media's knee-jerk hostility to criticism of Wall Street is muddying the waters.
June 3, 2012 |

Were it not such a sad statement about how superficial our political discourse has become, the indignant defenses of Bain Capital by self-flattering “centrists” in the media would be almost comical.

The simple reality that has been totally obscured in most of the coverage of what has been reduced to a “political flap,” is that finance is what's known as an “intermediary good” – it doesn't produce anything directly. It can -- and does -- stimulate the larger economy. But the financial sector can also extract wealth from the real economy, at a cost.

The lion's share of Mitt Romney's fortune was made doing the latter through leveraged buy-outs (LBOs), a reality that Romney doesn't like to talk about on the campaign trail. Instead, he wants to talk about Staples, or Sports Authority -- two among a small handful of his venture capital deals -- and just about every mainstream media report elides the distinction between those very different things.

Perhaps the media, like much of the American public, doesn’t understand what LBO artists like Romney really do. Here’s a quick refresher.

Venture capital deals represent a very basic free-market transaction. Investors put money into a company at its early stages in exchange for a share of the company. If the start-up doesn't pan out, the investors lose their stake; if it grows and matures, they make a healthy profit. In venture capital deals, investors only make a profit when the company they put their cash into does well.

Leveraged buy-outs are a different creature entirely. LBO firms also deal with risky companies – usually those struggling to stay afloat – but they don't actually take on much risk themselves as they structure the deals so that they profit whether the target company becomes healthy and grows, or collapses, often under the weight of debt piled onto it by the private equity firm itself.

Here's how the deal works. The leveraged buy-out firm will put down a fraction of the cost of buying an ailing company. The balance of the transaction is borrowed, but the debt goes onto the books of the target company, not the private equity firm – the struggling company basically finances the lion's share of its own sale.

The target company's debt payments then increase significantly, and that debt service is written off, reducing its tax burden a great deal. This subsidy increases short-term revenues (at the expense of long-term debt) and that, in turn, is paid out to the firm's investors along with a fat stream of management fees that Romney and his partners skimmed off the top.

(The industry-standard structure of these deals is known as “2 and 20.” Management gets 2 percent of the capital they invest as a fee, and 20 percent of the profits that the fund realizes. That 2 percent represents between two to four times what the average management fees for a mutual fund usually run, and is collected regardless of how the fund does.)

This is a win-win deal for the leveraged buyout firm. A recent study by researchers at the University of Chicago estimated that the average tax benefit of these companies' increased debt-loads in 1980s equaled “10 to 20 percent of firm value,” which, as Mike Konczai noted recently, “is value that comes from taxpayers to private equity as a result of the tax code.

Now look at how this story has been covered. Let's focus on CNN, which is supposedly the most “neutral” of the cable news outlets.

Consider a remarkably obtuse “Letter to the President” penned by CNN political correspondent Tom Foreman – “an Emmy award-winning journalist whose experience spans more than three decades.” The thrust of it was that Newark Mayor Cory Booker “spoke truth to power” when he said he was “nauseated” by Democrats' criticism of Bain. Of course, nobody knows what was in Booker's heart, but we do know that he got $565,000 in campaign funds from Wall Street to get elected, with at least $36,000 coming from Bain and its employees, and in that context one has to be willfully naïve to jump to the conclusion that he was just speaking the truth as he sees it.

Then there was host Christina Romans saying that “what private equity does” is “comes in, cleans up a company, sells it, or moves it forward.” When Bain “cleans up” companies, more often than not it means looting pension funds, laying off workers, and saddling the firms with huge amounts of debt before flipping them.

Another anchor, Ashleigh Banfield, attacked Ben La Bolt, the Obama campaign's press secretary, saying, “Ben, come on, you and I also know that he had plenty of success, as the Washington Post has outlined many successes... that Bain Capital has had in creating jobs, in saving people's companies from going under.”

But Bain Capital was not in the business of creating jobs, or even saving companies over the long-term. Its model had a relatively low rate of success. A study by Deutche Bank found that 33 out of 68 major deals cut on Romney's watch lost money for the firm's investors. Its richest deals made up for the flops, however, and Bain's partners were guaranteed hefty fees regardless of how the businesses they “restructured” ultimately performed.

That gets to a crucial difference between venture capital and leveraged buy-outs. With the former, the private equity firm only makes money if the companies it invests in succeed. By using loopholes in the tax code, LBO firms are essentially guaranteed to make money – for their partners, if not always their investors – regardless of how their investments do. Yet David Gergen suggested on “Out Front with Erin Burnett” that attacks on Bain are attacks on “free enterprise.” “There has been, as you know, an anxiety, a fear and anger on the part of many in the business community by what they regard as a hostility toward private enterprise, toward business,” he said. “And the messages to -- that many are taking away from the president's campaign right now is not just about Bain Capital. It's about people who are in private sector.”

Erin Burnett crowed about a study, which found that “companies bought out by private equity firms lose about one percent of their workforce.” For Burnett, those layoffs “support the more positive view of private equity which is that firms like Bain take over weak or faltering companies where everyone might lose their jobs, build a stronger company where the remaining jobs are more stable.” But as Paul Krugman noted, “The real complaint about Mr. Romney and his colleagues isn’t that they destroyed jobs, but that they destroyed good jobs.”

When the dust settled after the companies that Bain restructured were downsized — or, as happened all too often, went bankrupt — total U.S. employment was probably about the same as it would have been in any case. But the jobs that were lost paid more and had better benefits than the jobs that replaced them. Mr. Romney and those like him didn’t destroy jobs, but they did enrich themselves while helping to destroy the American middle class.

And Burnett was echoing Bain's own talking points. The firm has claimed that only 5 percent of the companies it acquired went bankrupt “while under our control.” As the Washington Post pointed out, those were “the operative words in the Bain statement” That's because, as the Wall Street Journal discovered, once saddled with mountains of debt, more than four times as many companies with which Bain was involved – 22 percent – “either filed for bankruptcy or liquidated by the end of the eighth year after Bain invested.”

We hear a lot about how this is a good debate for the American people to have. And it should be. We should consider how our financial sector has become bloated, swimming in capacity the larger economy doesn’t need. Historically, it’s grown and contracted along with the business cycle. When the economy was going gang-busters and businesses were expanding, it was there to provide capital and insurance and connect investors with entrepreneurs and innovators. Then, when the business cycle took its inevitable turn and the economy slowed down, it would contract. But as the Associated Press noted, "when the Internet bubble burst in 2000, the sector never stopped growing. Instead, it ballooned over the past eight years to around 10 percent of the U.S. economy, puzzling economists."

We should also have a discussion of the influence the financial sector has on the behavior of the rest of the corporate economy. The original function of the financial markets -- to link investors’ capital with innovative firms -- has been turned on its head by Wall Street. Today, corporate behavior is very much dictated by the markets -- quarterly earnings, stock prices and the like -- and not the other way around. That’s not a good thing.

Lawrence Mitchell, a professor of business law at George Washington University, notes in his book, The Speculation Economy, that a survey of CEOs running major American corporations found that almost 80 percent would have "at least moderately mutilated their businesses in order to meet [financial] analysts’ quarterly profit estimates."

Cutting the budgets for research and development, advertising and maintenance and delaying hiring and new projects are some of the long-term harms they would readily inflict on their corporations. Why? Because in modern American corporate capitalism, the failure to meet quarterly numbers almost always guarantees a punishing hit to the corporation’s stock price.

These dynamics are epitomized by leveraged buy-out artists like Mitt Romney. So, yes, this would be a very valuable discussion to have, but the traditional media's mewling about people daring to criticize Bain, and their instinctive deference to Big Finance, are doing more to obscure the issue than illuminate it. And that's preventing us from having a real debate.

[Nat]

This isn't capital-P Political but it still spins my head and ties into my feelings about the current political climate:

Man cited for littering after cash to panhandler hits ground

John Davis says he was cited for littering, which carries a $344 fine, rather than for giving money to a panhandler, which carries a much smaller penalty.

Davis, who pleaded not guilty on Tuesday in a Cleveland court, tells WJW that he was pulled over by a police officer after handing the money to the panhandler, who was in a wheelchair and holding a religious sign.

"Obviously he's needing some money or he wouldn't be out there," he told Fox 8.

Davis says court costs alone could run as much as $500, not including attorney fees.

"I never thought that a couple dollars could turn into a couple hundred dollars or whatever it may be at this point," Davis tells WJW-TV.

[*Anya*]

Nat, this is both head-spinning shit and it is political! A disabled panhandler clearly must have issues with poverty to need to ask for money.

That cop was also clearly punishing the generous man for giving him some.

Once again, only in America.

Some facts on poverty in general, which also are head-spinning:

"*Almost half the world — over 3 billion people — live on less than $2.50 a day.

*The GDP (Gross Domestic Product) of the 41 Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (567 million people) is less than the wealth of the world’s 7 richest people combined.

*Nearly a billion people entered the 21st century unable to read a book or sign their names.

*Less than one per cent of what the world spent every year on weapons was needed to put every child into school by the year 2000 and yet it didn’t happen.

* 1 billion children live in poverty (1 in 2 children in the world). 640 million live without adequate shelter, 400 million have no access to safe water, 270 million have no access to health services. 10.6 million died in 2003 before they reached the age of 5 (or roughly 29,000 children per day).

— More Facts (and Sources) »

Poverty is the state for the majority of the world’s people and nations. Why is this? Is it enough to blame poor people for their own predicament? Have they been lazy, made poor decisions, and been solely responsible for their plight?

What about their governments? Have they pursued policies that actually harm successful development? Such causes of poverty and inequality are no doubt real. But deeper and more global causes of poverty are often less discussed.

Behind the increasing interconnectedness promised by globalization are global decisions, policies, and practices. These are typically influenced, driven, or formulated by the rich and powerful. These can be leaders of rich countries or other global actors such as multinational corporations, institutions, and influential people.

In the face of such enormous external influence, the governments of poor nations and their people are often powerless. As a result, in the global context, a few get wealthy while the majority struggle.

These next few sections explore various poverty issues in more depth:

Most of humanity lives on just a few dollars a day. Whether you live in the wealthiest nations in the world or the poorest, you will see high levels of inequality.

The poorest people will also have less access to health, education and other services. Problems of hunger, malnutrition and disease afflict the poorest in society. The poorest are also typically marginalized from society and have little representation or voice in public and political debates, making it even harder to escape poverty.

By contrast, the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to benefit from economic or political policies. The amount the world spends on military, financial bailouts and other areas that benefit the wealthy, compared to the amount spent to address the daily crisis of poverty and related problems are often staggering.

Some facts and figures on poverty presented in this page are eye-openers, to say the least."

http://www.globalissues.org/issue/2/causes-of-poverty

Originally Posted by Nat

This isn't capital-P Political but it still spins my head and ties into my feelings about the current political climate:

Man cited for littering after cash to panhandler hits ground

John Davis says he was cited for littering, which carries a $344 fine, rather than for giving money to a panhandler, which carries a much smaller penalty.

Davis, who pleaded not guilty on Tuesday in a Cleveland court, tells WJW that he was pulled over by a police officer after handing the money to the panhandler, who was in a wheelchair and holding a religious sign.

"Obviously he's needing some money or he wouldn't be out there," he told Fox 8.

Davis says court costs alone could run as much as $500, not including attorney fees.

"I never thought that a couple dollars could turn into a couple hundred dollars or whatever it may be at this point," Davis tells WJW-TV.

[DMW]

http://http://truth-out.org/news/ite...x-pas-and-more

Just sharing latest news from Thom Hartmann and truthout with bfp

Love... Thom Hartmann, Bill Moyers and Amy Goodman

[Toughy]

Originally Posted by DMW

http://http://truth-out.org/news/ite...x-pas-and-more

Just sharing latest news from Thom Hartmann and truthout with bfp

Love... Thom Hartmann, Bill Moyers and Amy Goodman

The link does not work but I think this is what you are talking about

http://www.collegenews.com/article/m...mment_faux-pas

I sometimes wonder if nit-picking every word someone says is actually useful but some of them are down right funny.....not that this one is funny...

[DMW]

I should have checked the link after i posted. Now i can't find it.
Here are the homepages of Thomhartmann and Truthout. I should put up Democracy Now also. I didn't realize i was in the head - spinning thread when i posted either.. However, if enough is read...head - spinning will probably occur unfortunately.


http://www.thomhartmann.com/

http://http://truth-out.org/news/

[Toughy]

lmao..............you linked to the Thom Hartman home page (which story?) and the truthout link does not work.........

my head is spinning...........laughin....

[DMW]

That is just too damn funny... Ok..reminder to self...always check the links before moving on...Funny. Not the first time...and it won't be the last.
Thanks for telling me Toughy. Otherwise, i wouldn't have known.

Well, the front page of truth out isn't though. I swear...this fraking stuff
is Not somethin to shake a stick at. Better to drill for oil (without the fraking) in the land than do
this. Natural Gas...my ass. It is sickening. They found a way to get to it quicker, faster, cheaper and more more more...Sickening
Now, i am gonna go read about more states being ruined
from fracking. Maybe... if i have time and can stand it.

truthout.org.... and i checked it...and it works...
http://truth-out.org/

[iamkeri1]

Don't try to stand it. They think they can tell us the same story over and over, but tell us that THIS time "the bad thing" won't happen. Well it will happen and it has already happened. Don't try to stand it. Try to do something to stop it. Without a doubt this will be a tough road because fracking is providing lots of jobs, and jobs trump just about everything else including making the world no longer livable. But if you try to stand it, I think your head will blow off, so be careful.
Smooches,
Keri

[dreadgeek]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...n_1789716.html

In Kentucky, a state elected official wants creationism given the same status as evolutionary theory on the ACT. Money quote is:

"The theory of evolution is a theory, and essentially the theory of evolution is not science -- Darwin made it up," state Sen. Ben Waide (R) said. "My objection is they should ensure whatever scientific material is being put forth as a standard should at least stand up to scientific method. Under the most rudimentary, basic scientific examination, the theory of evolution has never stood up to scientific scrutiny."

This is not even wrong. I don't even know where to begin. Evolutionary theory not only holds up but it is one of the most successful theories in *any* scientific domain. How sure are biologists about evolutionary theory? It is *at least* as established as the following ideas that everyone accepts:

water is made up of two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom
the Earth orbits the Sun
the atomic model

That is as established as things get.

Cheers
Aj

[Corkey]

http://assets.dstatic.org/dnc-platfo...l-Platform.pdf

DNC National Platform in pdf.

[Nat]

Romney suggests Emergency Room as alternative to health insurance