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Sat Mar 20, 2010 at 14:07:15 PM EDT
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You have to laugh at Jon Stewart's remarkable satirize and spot-on impersonation of radical ideologue Glenn Beck. You can find it here. I recommend the Daily Show clip. It's very funny. But I know that too many low-information or high-hating voters take this man seriously. How low-information? Take a look at this article by Bruce Bartlett at Forbes. Tea Partiers are so ignorant they think that President Obama raised their taxes instead of cutting them. That's only one of the items they do not get.
On a daily basis, Beck tries to fan the ignorance and hatred of (and possibly foment violence toward) millions of America's people for no reason but that he disagrees with them and they are progressive. He's Ann Coulter, with a crew-cut and on steroids. (You'll recall Coulter once said that you should talk to liberals ("if you must") with "baseball bats.") But Ann Coulter always comes across as smug and snarky. Glenn Beck cries on cue. It is on cue because he conjures up the same tears during rehearsal (yes, rehearsals). This is staged to fire us the masses. It's a dangerous act and Roger Ailes is playing with fire.
Recently, Beck has taken to referring to progressives as "the cancer that is destroying our values," "socialists," "communists" and more. Daily his rants defame us. And we let him get away with it, or at least some of us do.
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Sat Mar 20, 2010 at 07:04:12 AM EDT
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Taxes are being raised. Draconian cuts in services are being made. Public employees are being fired. The tissue-thin national economic recovery is being undermined. And in many cases, the most vulnerable populations - the sick, the elderly, the young and the poor - are getting badly hurt.
What, you say, Obama isn't raising taxes, not even on the wealthy.
Not yet. And that is not the issue. Because the quote, the 2nd paragraph is Bob Herbert's column this morning, is about state governments, and local governments, and especially schools. Believe me, I know.
I am, after all, a school teacher. Our system is cutting over 200 teaching jobs. Those on 12 or 11th month contract are being furloughed for 10 days, those on 10 months (most teachers including me) for 5.
And that was announced BEFORE we found out that further cuts are forthcoming in the state funding for our districts.
But this is not about me, or other teachers. It is about children, about the sick and the elderly, about the least well off. And more.
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Fri Mar 19, 2010 at 18:24:37 PM EDT
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You can go to this link to get the two versions.
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Fri Mar 19, 2010 at 10:57:53 AM EDT
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Texas has gone too far. Too far. I really didn't care when their bouffant-haired governor made his veiled threat to secede from the Union, as if the Civil War was just a bad dream. I even thought it was kind of nice how warmly Texans welcomed their most famous - or infamous - son home after he finished the most disastrous presidency since Herbert Hoover.
Now, however, that Texas State School Board has gone too far.
There are two truisms about Virginia that have lasted down the ages. The first is what William Faulkner's realized. All Southerners, and especially Virginians, never forget the past because it isn't even past to us. We revere our history. We treasure it, warts and all. Our history is like our family, worth defending at all costs.
The other truism is that there are three "saints" in Virginia's history, men who are above criticism, flawed as they might have been: Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Thomas Jefferson.
How dare those twerpy, right-wing upstarts in Texas say that Thomas Jefferson's role in American history has to be downplayed simply because he understood that common sense demanded a separation between church and state!
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Thu Mar 18, 2010 at 16:34:48 PM EDT
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In the 1960s my father-in-law provided health insurance for employees of his small business. Little did we know how ahead of his time he was. A survey by the Small Business Majority found that even today only 46% of small business owners provide health insurance, but 76% of them struggle meeting their premiums. The 54% who do not provide coverage say they cannot afford it. Let me pause here: The majority of small business owners do not provide health insurance for their employees. It is their employees who most likely are caught in private individual plans which get slammed over and over and which get canceled at the drop of a hat. Some companies drive up the cost of policies solely to induce "high risk" patients to drop their policies. It is clear that both individuals and small businesses need both relief and reform.
Meanwhile, the upward trajectory of health care costs for small businesses continues. In 2009 costs are around 3.42 billion. MIT economist Jonathan Gruber estimates they will go up to around 7.43 billion in 2018. One of the most vocal opponents of health insurance reform is the national Chamber of Commerce, which runs particularly troublesome and questionable ads. They do not get it. Not only would health insurance reform reduce personnel costs, a real public option would could ultimately produce far greater savings. With Medicare overhead costing only 4%, private insurance pales in efficiency of delivery. Further efficiencies in delivery of Medicare services, such as elimination of over-payments to the so-called (fake) Medicare "Advantage" plans and greater effort at fraud reduction will drive home even more savings. (Proponents of reform failed utterly to explain these over-payments and their ruinous effect on the future of Medicare. It is the absence of reform which hurts Medicare.)
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Thu Mar 18, 2010 at 12:17:38 PM EDT
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President Obama will speak at a pre-vote rally for health care reform tomorrow, Friday the 19th of March at the Patriot Center on the campus of George Mason University. The doors open at 9 AM; the President is sceduled to speak around 11 AM. The event is open to the public, no ticket required. This means Tea Party Republicans and other corporate finks (strike that, should read "Tea Partyers, Republican activists") are also expected to attend. Since many of them are retirees or paid to demonstrate, the local Democratic Committees are in high gear to rally support for health care. If you care about health care and President Obama's success, please show up.
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Thu Mar 18, 2010 at 11:20:47 AM EDT
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Last week, a majority of the Roanoke City School Board voted to look into pursuing legal action against the Commonwealth of Virginia for an alleged breach of state constitutional rights. The board voted 5-2 on a motion that said the state - by cutting hundreds of millions of dollars in state aid to localities again in this budget - is not fulfilling its constitutional requirement to establish and maintain a high-quality program of education.
Specifically, the state constitution says that "the General Assembly shall provide for a system of free public elementary and secondary schools for all children of school age throughout the Commonwealth, and shall seek to ensure that an educational program of high quality is established and continually maintained."
Roanoke schools are facing another deficit of between $4 million and $16 million, depending on the details of the budget just passed by the state. Last year, the city privatized its transportation, closed two schools, eliminated all teacher aides except those required by federal mandates, and enlarged class size. This year, the worst case scenario would be the elimination more than 150 additional jobs, including 140 teachers.
While I seriously doubt that a lawsuit can accomplish anything other than to shine another spotlight on the drastic cuts in educational funding in the last few years and those in the upcoming biennium, localities are in a double bind because they have regularly supplemented state aid with additional dollars because the state funding has never met what most educators - or parents - believe constitutes a "quality education."
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Wed Mar 17, 2010 at 20:37:09 PM EDT
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( - promoted by KathyinBlacksburg)
cross-posted from Sum of Change (also at Congress Matters, if you have a Daily Kos account then you have a Congress Matters account)
UPDATE: Just got off the phone with C-Span, they confirmed our research. Congressman Dreier was incorrect when he claimed that C-Span covered the House Rules Committee meetings when Medicare Part D was "rammed down our throats" at 3:00am. We have reached out to Congressman Dreier's office for a response and await their reply.
Today, I sat in on the Rules Committee hearing. It was a rather arcane meeting today to authorize suspension bills to be brought to the House floor over the next couple days and the weekend. Currently, House rules prohibit suspension bills from being brought to the floor between Thursday and Sunday without the rules committee specifically allowing it. (Why? I am still trying to figure that out.)
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Wed Mar 17, 2010 at 14:20:00 PM EDT
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Last week, increasingly neo-fascist and radical flamethrower, Glenn Beck, ironically urged his followers to leave their churches if they ever mention the words "social justice." It didn't occur to him that nearly every faith does. And so he bandied about absurd charges that social justice is "code word" for communism and socialism. It isn't. However, we do have abundant corporate socialism, which apparently floats right by him. As if the main thrust of his rant weren't enough, in such finely honed neo-McCarthyism, he added, turn in your minister to "the authorities," if they mention social justice.
The most outrageous aspect of this was his effort to turn American against American due only to their personal religious beliefs. Additionally, there is an (anti-) establishment clause in the Constitution. The framers would not be please, Beck's ignorance notwithstanding. The conservative answer to this no doubt will be to ban separation-of-church-and-state founding father Thomas Jefferson from school curricula, as they are trying to do in Texas.
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Wed Mar 17, 2010 at 11:26:44 AM EDT
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Here we go again. The cable layers and their ditch-witch are just a block away. It appears, one more time we will have to redo our lawn. Contractors will do their usual dig, fill (no smoothing), seed-and-straw toss. And homeowners will take two seasons to get our lawns back as they were. Even as I roll my eyes, I realize that upgrading the speed and quality of our service is long overdue. And we are among the lucky ones here in Blacksburg. At least we have "broadband." But it usually falls short of "real" broadband speeds. Many in rural Virginia don't have "high speed" at all. Enter the FCC. In its widely hyped announcement of expanded national broadband service, the FCC perhaps thought we'd cheer and go about our business.
However, Neiman Watchdog of Harvard University cautions that the FCCs plans to improve this nation's broadband position is far less than it appears. Here is just the teaser:
Bruce Kushnick writes that giant telecoms and cable companies -- and the lobbyists, think tanks and astroturf groups they fund -- have so corrupted the debate over broadband that what may look like progress actually amounts to small steps toward antiquated standards that taxpayers have already paid for many times over.
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