I’ve
noticed over the years, there are some fundamental differences in the
way Republican and Democratic politicians think. Here are just 15
examples.
Still think there’s no difference between Democrats and Republicans?
I’ve noticed over the years, there are
some fundamental differences in the way Republican and Democratic
politicians think. Here are just 15 examples.
(1) Republicans fear that the government has too much control over corporations. Democrats fear that corporations have too much control over our government. (2) Democrats believe it benefits all of us to help the weakest and the poorest among us. Republicans believe it benefits all of us to help the wealthiest and most powerful among us. (3) Republicans believe large corporations will always do what is best for the American people if the government stays out of the way. Democrats believe large corporations would disembowel you and sell your organs to the highest bidder if the government didn’t stop them. (4) Democrats believe everyone is entitled to health care regardless of their ability to pay. Republicans believe everyone is entitled to jack squat if they can’t pay for health care. (5) Democrats believe too much of our money goes to
crooked corporate executives who take government subsidies and pay
themselves $80 million salaries. Republicans believe too much of our money goes to teachers who make $30,000 a year. (6) Democrats believe anything that helps the American people during a recession or a time of crisis is the true essence of patriotism. Republicans believe anything that helps the American people during a recession or a time of crisis is the true essence of communism. (7) Democrats believe that we need to set high standards for clean air and drinking water. Republicans believe that standards for clean air and water are burdensome over-regulation. (8) Democrats believe the President and Congress need to work together to create jobs during a weak economy. Republicans believe that Congress should do nothing to create jobs and then blame the President. (9) Democrats believe that corporate polluters should be made to pay for the cleanup of their pollution. Republicans believe that making corporations clean up their pollution is burdensome over-regulation. (10) Democrats believe our health care system exists solely for the purpose of making people healthy. Republicans believe our health care system exists solely for the purpose of making a healthy profit. (11) Democrats believe Congress should be of the people, by the people and for the people. Republicans believe corporations are the people. (12) Democrats believe that corporations have too much influence over Congress due to their lobbyists and huge campaign contributions. Republicans believe the middle class has too much influence over Congress due to their voting and paying taxes. (13) Democrats believe we need to protect victims of corporate negligence by allowing Americans to file lawsuits against corporations. Republicans believe we need to protect large corporations from lawsuits by Americans who’ve been victimized by them. (14) Democrats believe that the rich should be taxed more than the poor and middle class. Republicans believe
that the rich should be allowed to keep all their wealth, except for
the millions in campaign contributions they give to politicians. (15) Democrats believe that too much money in politics produces corruption and destroys the American way of life. Republicans believe that money and corruption in politics are the American way of life.
These are just my observations from a lifetime of watching Democratic and Republican politicians.
In contrast to the Republican plan to cut financial
aid and make college more expensive for students, Sen. Bernie Sanders
(I-VT) is set to propose legislation that would give students free
tuition at four-year public colleges and universities.
The Republican budget would end mandatory funding
for Pell grants, the end of the in-school subsidy on Stafford loans, and
the budget would also end income-based student loan repayment programs.
Sen. Sanders is going in the opposite direction.
In a statement, Sen. Sanders said:
We live in a highly competitive global economy and, if our economy is to
be strong, we need the best-educated workforce in the world. That will
not happen if, every year, hundreds of thousands of bright young people
cannot afford to go to college, and if millions more leave school
deeply in debt.
Countries like Germany, Denmark, Sweden and many
more are providing free or inexpensive higher education for their young
people. They understand how important it is to be investing in their
youth. We should be doing the same.
We used to lead the world in the percentage of our
people who graduated college. Today we are in 12th place. We used to
have great universities tuition free. Today they are unaffordable. I
want a more educated workforce. I want everybody to be able to get a
higher education regardless of their income.
Republicans are trying to make higher education less
affordable. Their goal is to give people one less avenue for economic
advancement. Sanders was correct. If the United States hopes to regain
its status as the land of opportunity, a key piece to the puzzle is
affordable higher education.
It is a tense time for students who are just
graduating or still in school. The Republican-controlled Congress has
targeted programs that aid students by making college more affordable
for budget cuts. Sen. Sanders is making the line between the left and
right clear. Democrats and the left are fighting to expand educational
opportunities.
The contest on the left is a competition to see who
can deliver a plan that will make college affordable for the most
people. Republicans try to avoid any discussion of their plans by
burying their cuts deep in their budget.
Bernie Sanders is shining a light on those plans while setting a new bar for the left for making college more affordable.
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders will introduce a
bill on Tuesday that would eliminate tuition for college undergraduate
students through the use of a “Robin Hood tax.”
On
May 6, a white man and a black man conducted a high-risk experiment.
The two pro-gun, open carry supporters walked the streets of their
neighborhoods with the exact same type of gun — an AR 15 — slung over
their backs. They both live in places where it’s legal to open carry,
and they both got stopped by police.
That’s where their similarities end. It’s awfully strange how the
NRA-sponsored GOP loves open carry — and law enforcement tolerates it —
but not when black people do it.
The two men each went on their open carry strolls as someone followed
with a video camera. The videos — which they spliced together and
shared on Live Leak — show encounters with police that are disturbingly different.
The video first shows the white man — who hails from the state of
Oregon and posts lots of YouTube videos of his open carry adventures
under his Marked Guardian
handle — getting approached by a cop. The police officer clearly
dislikes the AR 15, demands Marked Guardian’s I.D., and asks a few
questions. Marked Guardian refuses to give the officer his ID,
explaining that open carry is perfectly legal in their state. And that’s
it.
If you search “Open Carry” on YouTube, you’ll see oodles of tense but
ultimately peaceful interactions like this, because these mostly white
people often record their walks and their interactions with police. What
we don’t see as often is what happens to black people who open carry.
The video switches over to the black man sauntering down the street
with his perfectly legal AR 15. When the police come, they don’t bother
asking him any questions, they just pull out their guns and order him to
drop his weapon and lie prone on the ground or they’ll shoot. Who
cares if open carry’s legal, they’ll arrest him anyway. Seconds later,
there are two police cars and three cops with guns drawn as the fourth
takes the black man into custody.
Now, this writer harbors a strong revulsion towards the open carry
movement and guns in general. Nonetheless, this black man was open
carrying an AR 15, which is LEGAL in his state and which he was not
pointing at anyone or waving around threateningly or doing anything
different than what the white man was doing. Yet the cops threatened him
with their guns, forced him to the ground, called another squad car for
help, and then illegally arrested him.
There’s something seriously wrong with open carry being legal, but there’s something even more seriously
wrong with black open carry activists getting abused and detained
illegally while their white counterparts walk away Scot-free.
Watching this video is almost enough to make you wonder whether open carry is
justified in some communities, and that’s a scary thing. You’d think
that communities of color would have more reason to fear police and
embrace open carry than white folks, but try explaining that to a bunch
of paranoid white tea baggers.
This is not the first time cops discriminated against black open carry activists.
White liberal folks (including this writer) love to tar the open
carry movement with the viscous brush of racism, but in some cases, it’s
more complicated than that. Last September Hell’s Saints, a mixed-race open carry group from Michigan, raised a hullabaloo after a black member got arrested for open carrying in Detroit. Naturally, he was the only
one who got arrested. At the time, this writer was unable to get the
standard police report information because Detroit’s GOP-run “Emergency
Manager” has privatized all the record-keeping and not only requires a
fee (which this writer would have paid), but requires you to come to the
Detroit Police Dept.’s main office in person.
Here’s the video with the sharp and disturbing contrast between the
white and the black open carry activists’ encounters with police in
Oregon — a state in which open carry is perfectly legal.
Note: This experiment is not exactly scientific, as
some commenters have pointed out. The incidents shown happened in
different locations, and others pointed out that the position of the
black man’s AR 15, slung alongside his hip instead of over his back, may
have provoked the police officer. Still, given what we see in the news
headlines every day, it is hard to see how an encounter between police
and a black man open carrying could have ended any differently than
this. Correction notice: An earlier version of this post
lumped law enforcement in with the “NRA-sponsored GOP” that “loves “open
carry. Obviously, that is not true. Anyone who has watched the numerous
open carry videos showing confrontations with police (as this writer
has) knows that people in law enforcement do not seem fond of
open carry at all, though they are forced by law to tolerate it. In
February, the Dallas News reported that a survey of 200 police officers
in Texas — ground zero for the open carry movement — revealed that 75
percent oppose open carry. This writer regrets the error.
STELTER: Here’s what almost everybody missed
about the panel discussion. The president was talking about what he
called a 40-year effort to stir up class divisions. FOX, of course, has
only been around 15 years. Let’s go back to the original video, but
let’s let it keep playing, so Obama finishes his thought.
FOX only played this part of the clip once. It was
in a news report by Howie Kurtz. Notice that Obama is talking about the
whole news media’s responsibility to make sure the middle class and poor
Americans know — I’m sorry — what middle class and rich Americans know
what it’s like to be poor.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
OBAMA: And that becomes an entire narrative, right,
that gets worked up. And very rarely do you hear an interview of a
waitress, which is much more typical, who’s raising a couple of kids and
is doing everything right, but still can’t pay the bills.
And so if we’re going to change how John Boehner and
Mitch McConnell think, we’re going to have to change how our body
politic thinks, which means we’re going to have to change how the media
reports on these issues and how people’s impressions of what it’s like
to struggle in this economy looks like and how budgets connect to that.
And that’s a — it’s a hard process, because that
requires a much broader conversation than typically we have on the
nightly news.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
STELTER: He called for a broader conversation, but FOX ended up having a very small conversation.
Anyway, that’s “Red News/Blue News” for this week.
It would be nice to think that the media is finally
catching on to Fox News’ selective editing tricks, but outside of the
cable news competition at CNN and MSNBC, most of the mainstream press
doesn’t bother to call out their lies.
If more members of the media would stand up to the
Fox News propaganda machine, not only would the news be more
trustworthy, viewers would be better informed. The bulk of the press is
terrified of Fox News, so they will never directly criticize, debunk, or
call out the Republican talking point network.
Brian
Stelter of CNN took a few minutes of his show to debunk a major Fox
News lie of omission, and if more members of his profession did the
same, the Fox News blight could be removed from journalism.
These days, it seems that the majority of wingnuts
tend to view the world through a very simplistic scope that allows
little room for discussion, interpretation, or compromise. We have
reached a point where any questioning of unregulated capitalism
automatically gets you labeled as a socialist, communist, Marxist, or
Fascist because those are all interchangeable right?
When President Obama became the Democratic nominee in 2008,
conservatives unleashed a vicious tornado of attacks labeling him a
Kenyan born dictator who supported redistribution of wealth, taking from
those who have, and giving it to those who do not. They were right
about part of that. He does believe in redistribution of wealth but
guess what? So do most Americans.
If your children go to a public school, if your streets are patrolled by
the city or county law enforcement, if your garbage is picked up by
city workers, if you have ever dialed 911, if you or anyone in your
family has worked in the public sector, if you’ve ever claimed
deductions on your taxes, and if you’ve ever driven on a public road,
not only have you condoned redistribution, you have supported it.
The modern day wingnuts are led to believe that all government is
bad, and that they don’t need government in their everyday lives. We
have reached a point of insanity where an average Joe making 30,000 a
year drives on a public road, to drop his kids off at a public school,
all while listening to wingnut hate speech radio tell him how evil every
aspect of government is. This disconnect from reality is unreal.
The truth is, many of the services that Americans rely on are rooted in
redistribution. Social Security, Medicaid, public safety services, and
emergency services are just a few of the redistributive services that
all Americans enjoy, while never even realizing that they are a form of
democratic socialism.
Why then do wingnut Americans freak out when a family needs food
stamps to eat, or when a young mother needs WIC, or TANF to survive? The
answer is racism.
I’ve had friends over the years that took advantage of public assistance
services for their families such as WIC or Food stamps. The truth of
the matter was, they really didn’t need them, but in their minds, they
earned the right to use these public services since they worked and paid
taxes. The problem was, they were all white, and they all shared a
disdain for minorities that receive public assistance. You see, when
white people use public assistance, they are getting back what they’ve
paid in – but when black people or other minorities use public
assistance, they are lazy and entitled. Sadly, that’s how wingnuts think.
The Republican Party has done a wonderful job of getting everyday, white
Americans to look down upon, and demonize minorities for doing the
same thing that they do, all while being oblivious to the fact that they
are being robbed blind by the billionaires behind the Republican party
money machine. In the South, there is an understood but subtle racism
among many white people that is rarely talked about, but always present.
Just delve into any comment section of a local news story on virtually
any city in a southern state that involves the subject of an African
American, and those dog whistles turn into sirens very quickly.
You see, it all goes back to looking at a very complex world through a
very simplistic lens. It doesn’t work. Modern day wingnuts truly
believe that everyone is given the same exact opportunity to succeed
regardless of their race or where they come from, and that is just not
true. Study upon study proves that African Americans and minorities have
a much harder path to success than their white counterparts, yet when
they look to take advantage of the same public assistance services that
many white people enjoy, they are demonized, they are called lazy
freeloaders, they are made into the punch lines of jokes, and they are
ridiculed beyond belief – all because of an obvious double standard that
is rooted in white privilege.
Brownback’s fanatical war on the poor backfires yet again, this
time to the tune of $100 million. How much longer will Kansas voters
keep supporting him?
Mack Butler (R-AL)
introduced legislation this week requiring medical professionals to
notify police within two hours if they suspect a pregnant woman of
having consumed illegal substances — regardless of whether she tests
positive for drugs or not.
According to the State of Wyoming, ignorance is a civic virtue and
investigation and free thought a crime. The state’s conservative
government has pulled ahead of the pack in the Republican-led campaign
against science when Governor Matt Mead (R) signed into law a bill that
criminalizes collecting information about the state of the environment
“with the intent” to share it with the state or federal government.The
law is incredibly broad in scope, making it a crime to “collect
resource data” or “preserve information in any form” from any “open
land,” whether publicly or privately owned. Thus it is now a crime in
Wyoming to engage in any form of citizen science – even taking a
photograph of the environment – if it is shared with government in any
way. Coming hot on the heels of efforts in Wisconsin and Florida to ban
any research into or even discussion of climate change, the new Wyoming
law is only the latest and most extreme example of a wide-reaching
Republican crusade against science and knowledge.
From where,
however, did Wyoming’s Republican overlords get the idea that citizens
taking pictures of the state’s natural beauty were a threat? The answer,
as is so often the case with abusive and totalitarian laws, is big
business and lobbying groups. And in Wyoming, where cattle ranching is a
multi-billion dollar industry, big business means Big Cattle.
The
problem for Big Cattle is that not only has overgrazing led to land
degradation throughout the state, but inadequate regulation has led to
pollution of numerous Wyoming streams and rivers with a dangerous and
potentially-fatal strand of the E. coli bacteria, which is found largely
in cow excrement.
The Western Watersheds Project and several
recent studies have confirmed the presence of E. coli concentrations in
Wyoming waterways far in excess of what is considered safe, and have of
course traced the source to cattle ranchers. The sensible solution would
be to implement regulations and controls to assure that ranchers manage
their herds properly, but Wyoming and its Big Cattle business would
rather pretend the problem doesn’t exist to maintain their bottom lines.
The
Wyoming Stock Grower’s Association, a cattle ranching lobby that is one
of the most influential groups in the state and once launched a war on
the state government, took its case to Cheyene. And, sure enough, the
Republican-dominated government quickly bowed before the interests of
big agribusiness, even if that meant contaminating the environment and
endangering public safety.
Wyoming is not the first state to
prioritize its big agriculture over decency and democracy – Idaho made
it a crime to film animal abuse last year – but the scope of the new
law, and all the ways it violates the Constitution Republican’s claim to
swear by, is unprecedented. First of all, the new law is a blatant
violation of the supremacy clause, which states that federal laws are
the highest laws in the land.
A certain federal law called the
Clean Water Act mandates that efforts be made to reduce contamination in
surface water and encourages citizens to share information about unsafe
conditions with their government, the latter of which is now punishable
in Wyoming by a $1,000 fine and a year in prison. More fundamentally,
the law makes a mockery of the First Amendment, not only criminalizing
certain forms of speech and expression that are inconvenient to cattle
ranchers, but also removing citizens’ right to petition and present
information to their government.
It is an increasing trend among
Republicans to ignore science when it doesn’t support their world view
(which is almost all of the time) and to pretend that problems don’t
exist if fixing them would be inconvenient. The new Wyoming law breaks
new ground in this field by literally making it impossible to bring any
case against the dangerous polluting cattle herders. According to the
law, “no resource or data collected in violation of this section is
admissible in any civil, criminal, or administrative proceeding” and
such data “shall not be used in determining any agency action.”
There
is clearly something drastically wrong in America when willed ignorance
at the expense of public safety is the norm in Republican states
nationwide and the Big Cow Manure lobby can determine state
environmental policy.
Thanks to Louisiana’s ‘it’s not rape if she doesn’t resist’ law, a
pastor can’t be charged for having sex with a 20-year-old woman, even
though she has the mental capacity of a seven-year-old child.
On CNN’s State Of The Union, Democratic presidential
candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) announced that his presidential
campaign against corporate greed, the attempted Koch hostile takeover of
the government, and income inequality has now raised over $4 million
from 100,000 contributors.
Sanders was asked if he really had a pathway to victory.
Sen. Sanders answered:
I think there is more discontent with
establishment politics, with the greed of corporate America than many
people perceive. I think we have a good shot. I am not going to deny for
one moment that I go into this race an underdog. Hillary Clinton will
have a lot more money than we have. But let me say this, even in terms
of money, we’ve been in this race for a couple of weeks, and we’ve
raised over $4 million, because people are sending on average, not a
million dollars, not ten thousand dollars. Forty-three dollars per
contributor to berniesanders.com. We have now 100,000 contributions.
Sen. Sanders promised to hold a civil debate with
former Sec. of State Hillary Clinton, but he openly questioned whether
the media would give them coverage if they focused on issues instead of
tearing each other apart.
Bernie Sanders is not running a vanity campaign.
Unlike many of those who are running for the Republican nomination, his
candidacy is not a stunt that is being done for personal financial gain
and publicity. Sanders is running because there is no other candidate
that is expressing hardcore liberal positions.
Hillary Clinton has done a great job of getting in
touch with where the majority of Democrats are on several key issues.
Despite the grumbling from both media and Democratic circles, Hillary
Clinton has run a really good early campaign, but Democrats deserve to
have their choice of candidates for the party’s nomination.
At one level, Sanders is offering voters another
option. As one looks deeper, it is clear that Sen. Sanders is
effectively tapping a deep well of discontent among voters. Voters are
outraged about the Citizens United enabled billionaire takeover of the
federal government. People are feeling and seeing the impact of income
inequality in their daily lives. The ladder of economic advancement has
been taken away from most Americans.
The
media is focused on Sanders versus Clinton, but the real people who
should be worried about the success of the Bernie Sanders campaign are
the Koch brothers and other billionaires. What Sanders has launched is a
populist Koch killing campaign, and forces are mobilizing behind the
Senator from Vermont to take their country back from the billionaire
class.
Senator
Bernie Sanders let CNN's Brianna Keilar have it for her continual
demands that Sanders throw some "sharp elbows" at his 2016 rival,
Hillary Clinton.
Republicans made a big deal out of George
Stephanopoulos’s donations to the Clinton Foundation, but an examination
of the list of donors reveals that wingnuts have donated millions
of dollars to the charitable organization.
An examination of the Clinton Foundation’s donations from media companies by Politico revealed that wingnut media donated millions to the charity.
Newsmax Media was listed as a donor in the
1,000,000-$5,000,000 range. News Corporation Foundation, the arm of Fox
News’s former parent company, has donated $500,000-$1,000,000.
Conservative billionaire and Clinton political enemy, Richard
Mellon-Scaife has donated $250,000-$500,000.
George Stephanopoulos should have disclosed his
donations to the Clinton Foundation on the air, but if Republicans are
hoping to parlay the ABC anchor’s mistake into a revival of a scandal
involving the Foundation, they are going to be sorely disappointed.
The Republican attempt to turn the Clinton
Foundation into some shady pay to play scandal was undercut by the fact
that conservative media also donated to the organization. In fact, The
Washington Post investigated the claims in Clinton Cash even though they
also have given to the Foundation.
The idea that the Clinton Foundation can be turned
into a major partisan scandal has been dealt a death blow. Fox News
continues to try to build something out of nothing even though their
former parent company has made large donations, and their owner’s
liberal son (James Murdoch) has also donated millions of dollars.
There
is no smoke, no fire, and no scandal. The Clinton Foundation is a
non-partisan NGO, not a political organization. The Republican attempts
to bring down a global charity for partisan political gain have been
undone by their own wingnuts.
Scott Walker melted down into a pile of nonsensical gibberish when
asked about his foreign policy credentials ...
One sentence is all it took for Scott Walker to reveal himself as the next in a long line of failed Republicans.
Face The Nation’s Bob Schieffer asked Walker what his foreign policy credentials are, and the answer was revealing.
Walker said:
Well, I think as a governor, it’s really
ultimately about leadership. To me, in my lifetime, one of the best
presidents when it comes to foreign policy was a governor from
California. My lifetime, one of the worst presidents when it comes to
foreign policy, was a freshman senator from Illinois. So I think it’s
not just about past experience. It’s about leadership. As a governor,
you have to put a cabinet in place. Hopefully, you pick people who are
as smart or smarter than you on any given topic.
I think that’s something that’s required of
a successful president is putting people in place, be it Secretary of
Defense, National Security Advisor, Secretary of State and others, and
then having the good sense to listen to them and to others, chain of
command in the military, consulting with the Congress. All of those
sorts of things I think are important to the president, and I think a
successful governors in either party have to do that every day.
George W. Bush’s administration was a foreign policy
disaster for the country. Scott Walker is promising a return to the bad
old days of Bush if he is elected. It is also ironic Walker would call
President Obama the worst foreign policy president of his lifetime at
the same time that Obama is receiving bipartisan praise for the successful raid on ISIL in Syria.
Scott Walker has no foreign policy experience. He is
an empty suit who does what he is told. That’s why the Koch brothers
love him.
The
bottom line is that when Scott Walkers opens his mouth about foreign
policy, he shows voters why he is unfit to be president.
Sometimes an unfortunate incident that happens unexpectedly and
unintentionally and results in damage and injury may technically be
considered an accident unless the incident could have been prevented. By
now it is relatively certain that the Amtrak derailment in Philadelphia
that claimed the lives of eight passengers could have been avoided if
Congress had provided the necessary funding to rail carriers commiserate
with the mandate to install the Positive Train Control (PTC) feature
that would have saved eight lives. Congressional Republicans have not
taken any responsibility for their contribution to the deadly derailment
or taken any steps to adequately provide funding to ensure the safety
of other American travelers whether it is on trains, planes, or
automobiles. According to Republicans, America’s transportation
infrastructure just does not warrant investment any more than schools,
hospitals, electrical grids, or waterways because as House Ways and
Means Committee Chairman Paul Ryan claims Republican focus is on saving
more money and lying about providing safe rail service for Americans.
Exactly a day after Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee voted in concert to cut about one-fifth
of Amtrak’s budget from $1.4 to $1.1 billion for 2016, Paul Ryan did
what Republicans do according to their shared party pathology; he lied.
Ryan emphatically told Fox News on Wednesday after the Amtrak derailment
that, yes, Republicans in Congress had already fully funded
implementation of the Positive Train Control safety system it mandated
in 2008. Instead of acknowledging that as an austerity-minded Republican
his only priority and primary goal for serving in the House is cutting infrastructure spending, Ryan warned that Congress is in no way going to “rush to judgment and try doubling the size of government programs” just because some people died in an accident he said was caused by “human error.”
Ryan asserted that Republicans had already “authorized and mandated the sort of speed control systems to be put in place,” even though he admitted “it wasn’t put in place here at this time”
or that it was not in place due to Republican austerity. When Fox &
Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade asked Ryan whether Congress had actually
funded those systems, Ryan lied and responded, “Yes! Yeah, we already passed Amtrak funding, and the appropriations process is working its way through right now.”
What Ryan failed to mention is that Republicans passed cuts to Amtrak’s
funding for next year and that the appropriation was well below
Amtrak’s request which specifically included an allotment to fully
implement PTC. In fact, the Republicans’ latest Amtrak funding cuts are
well below
the past several years’ funding levels. If at any time over the past
few years Congress had appropriated the necessary funds to install PTC
across the country, there would have been no necessity for the Senate
bill filed a couple of weeks ago authorizing a five year delay of the mandatory PTC implementation deadline from December 2015 to 2020.
Not only did Congress not appropriate funding to
complete the PTC implementation by this year or by 2020, according to
Ryan Republicans have no intent to fund any infrastructure improvements
either now or in the future. The Ayn Rand devotee said he hoped “cooler
heads can prevail and that people won’t seize on political
opportunities out of tragedies like this to spend any more money.”
It was an incredibly telling statement, and a portent of more
Republican-made disasters, that when Ryan was asked whether he thought
rebuilding America’s infrastructure should be a priority he said no. In
fact, he acknowledged that yes, the Highway Trust Fund will be bankrupt
later this month, but that he will not back increases for infrastructure
improvement to “save more money and be more efficient.”
Now Amtrak is reporting that the train that derailed
in Philadelphia on Tuesday was equipped with the automatic speed
control system (PTC) that would have prevented the deadly derailment.
However, although rail officials said the system “was tantalizingly close to being operational,”
they admitted that implementation was delayed by budgetary shortfalls,
technical hurdles, and bureaucratic rules in dealing with private
airwave carriers. Republicans have failed to report that the day after
the fatal crash congressional staff members were briefed and learned
that “The transponders were on the tracks, but they weren’t operational because of this ongoing spectrum issue.”
Republicans in Congress have consistently failed to
provide the railroads with crucial funding or access to the wireless
frequencies required to make the PTC system operational. The
Republicans’ loyalty to privatization of the airwaves forced Amtrak to
spend years negotiating for access to airwaves owned by private
corporations that has resulted in a four-year losing battle to pay for
the right to access the necessary airwaves in the Northeast Corridor
that would allow them to turn the system on. Rail officials confirmed
that Amtrak had made installation of the congressionally-mandated safety
system a top priority and was ahead of most other railroads around the
country. Like everything with Republicans, it is always a lack of
adequate funding and in the case of the deadly derailment, it was
funding and access to airwaves from private broadband carriers
Republicans protect.
As noted above, Republicans are opposed to
appropriating any funding for infrastructure while they demand tax cuts
for the rich according to Ryan and Republicans’ plan to “save more money
and be more efficient” and it is not a new policy. In 2011 “every Senate Republican voted to filibuster and blocked President Obama’s American Jobs Act (AJA) that included appropriating $2 billion to fund repairs and renovation for Amtrak.”
The President’s $447 billion jobs act proposed creating
hundreds-of-thousands of new jobs, and particular to this topic was the
desperately-needed “large scale investment” in rebuilding and
repairing the nation’s crumbling infrastructure. In truth, the $447
billion is really a small-scale investment according to the American
Society of Civil Engineers’ estimate that about $3 trillion is required
to get America’s infrastructure close to a point where the United States
can be competitive with the rest of the industrialized world.
As commented
on Thursday, “Under Subtitle E, Section 241 titled “Immediate
Transportation Infrastructure Investments,” the American Jobs Act
featured this nugget for the National Railroad Passenger Corporation,
also known as Amtrak. In Subsection (e) the AJA makes available $2
billion to Amtrak for the repair, rehabilitation, and upgrade of
Amtrak’s assets and infrastructure, including rolling stock.” That $2
billion would have went a long way toward implementing the 2008 Train
Safety Act’s mandate that ‘Positive Train Control’ be installed and
operational on all passenger and freight trains by the end of 2015;
including buying access to private corporations’ wireless networks. The
Senate just voted to extend the deadline for PTC implementation about
two weeks prior to the Philadelphia derailment and prior to Republicans
slashing Amtrak funding by about one-fifth.
Regardless the number of lies from Republicans or
Paul Ryan that they have provided funding to complete PTC, the Federal
Railroad Administration (FRA) has twice sought extra funding from
Congress to finance the PTC technology for Amtrak and other commuter
rails. The FRA’s first request for $825 million was ignored, and a
second request for extra funding was made just this year for the 2016
budget as part of the Department of Transportation’s Grow America
budget. House Republicans not only ignored the second request again this
past week, they cut total Amtrak funding guaranteeing Amtrak will not
be able to implement the train safety feature in the next fiscal year.
The former administrator for the FRA, Joseph C.
Szabo, said; “Clearly, one of the hurdles that Amtrak has and the
commuter rail industry has is that this very expensive technology was
never funded. The failure to invest in Amtrak’s capital program clearly
has been a hindrance in more timely deployment. The way to make public
rail a priority would be with public funding.” However, part and parcel
of the Republican withholding adequately funding for Amtrak, or any
public transportation, is to bankrupt it into oblivion for
privatization. There is little doubt the impending wrongful death
lawsuits will hasten the financial demise of Amtrak. That human beings
perished to achieve their privatization goal is as inconsequential to
Republicans as withholding healthcare and food from hungry Americans
that according to Republicans like Paul Ryan is crucial to “saving more money” for tax cuts for the rich.
A Republican effort to pass a bill that
would prohibit government employees from issuing marriage licenses to
same-sex couples in Texas failed to come to a vote,
as Texas Democrats successfully ran out the clock on Friday.
Republicans had until midnight Friday to pass the bill, which had nearly
unanimous GOP support in the Republican-controlled chamber. However, Democrats stalled by engaging in long debates over noncontroversial pieces of legislation, and by introducing measures sure to be voted down, like raising the state’s minimum wage.
The anti-gay marriage bill’s sponsor Cecil Bell
(R-Montgomery County) expressed frustration that the GOP had been
outmaneuvered by the Democratic minority. Bell complained, ”there
was a bunch of folks who don’t think that state sovereignty is a high
priority”. Democratic Rep. Celia Israel (North Austin/Pflugerville)
offered a different perspective from Bell’s. She exclaimed:
We’re sending a message
to Texas that this is worth fighting for. We’re not in the majority. We
don’t control the ship. But we can help to steer it in the right
direction.
This is not the first time Texas Republicans have been defeated by a passionate Democratic minority in the Lone Star State. In June 2013, State Senator Wendy Davis (Fort Worth) led a successful Democratic filibuster
of anti-abortion legislation in the state’s upper chamber, running out
the Senate clock, and forcing Republicans to regroup in order to push
through anti-abortion legislation in a later session. Davis’ long floor
speech captured national attention and caused the GOP some
embarrassment.
As time expired on the anti-gay marriage bill
Friday, more than 20 pieces of legislation were still stacked ahead of
Bell’s bill. The Democrats had placed enough procedural hurdles in the
way to prevent the GOP bill from coming to a floor vote.
Although
the Texas legislature is dominated by Republicans, Lone Star state
Democrats continue to fight for the rights of everyday Texans. Those
Democrats are determined to stand up and fight, using whatever legal
means possible to ensure that LGBT Texans are not denied the right to
marry the person they love.
Republicans like McConnell (R-KY) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) have been forced to admit
on the Sunday shows that the Obama approved raid on ISIL in Syria has
been successful.
On ABC’s This Week, McConnell said, “Well, the president has done a good job with
these special operations type missions. Where I think the administration
has fallen down is they tend not to favor, generally speaking, capture
and interrogation. Although it’s good that the wife of this terrorist
was captured and will be interrogated. I’ve been distressed, for
example, about the willingness to release prisoners at Guantanamo. Look,
this is not a criminal type matter. This is a defense matter. What you
want to do is you want to capture people, you want to interrogate them,
and you want to try to prevent the next atrocity. I wish we’d had, you
know, frankly, more emphasis on capturing, detaining and interrogation
than on strikes. Although the strikes are important, and I congratulate
those who carried it out. It sounds like it was a very successful
mission.”
Marco Rubio (R-FL) said on Fox News Sunday,
“For now, let’s just say it was a successful raid, and it’s good news.
Obviously, anytime you can take away and degrade top leadership of an
organization it’s a positive step forward….It remains a risk, but
obviously we want to congratulate the men and women in uniform who
carried it out and the President for undertaking the mission.”
McConnell and Rubio are two of the Republicans who
tried to sabotage President Obama’s foreign policy with their letter to
Iran, so for Republicans to not only admit the mission was a success,
but also praise the president is something that has been virtually
unseen during the Obama presidency.
Reports
are that the US raid in Syria has killed 32 ISIS members including four
leaders. The symbolic message that the raid sends is that terrorists
are not safe anywhere on this Earth. It takes an unspeakable amount of
leadership for the President to authorize a mission where special
operations forces are going into a territory where they have no allies
on the ground.
The
courage showed by those who carried out the mission is immeasurable,
but they wouldn’t have been there if Obama would not have approved the
mission. As much as it must drive Republicans crazy, even they are
admitting that President Obama has been successful.
Last month, Ohio Republican
Bill Johnson stopped by “The Tom Roten Morning Show,” where he said
that just as many did not grasp the Nazi threat in the run-up to World
War II, the Obama administration is ignoring the dangers posed by
terrorist groups today.
The idiot’s so... MORE
The felon who killed NYPD officer Brian Moore got his illegal gun from a
state that has become a de facto exporter of crime weapons.
Last
week, our society once again paid the price in blood for a government
run by the galactically stupid and ideologically inept.
In New
York, a police officer died. While a tragedy, that is not the story
here. It's why this 25-year old member of the NYPD, Brian Moore, lost
his life in a hail of bullets a week ago. It is once again a story about
those of us living in the 21st century, suffering due to the actions of
those bathing in a sea of branded myth and intellectual decay. Or as
it's known in common parlance: Georgia.
Last year, when I first
started writing this column, I covered the many foibles, distortions and
atavistic tics of those who would seek to put guns in nursery schools,
bars and cults, and give Stand Your Ground rights to felons. But you
gotta give credit to Georgia legislators, for whom it takes a lot more
than legal precedent, common sense and the opposition of constituents
and law enforcement to prevail upon them to do something rash, like
preventing people from getting shot. As dog is their witness, they'll
never go hungry for bullets again!
The problem is that decisions
made by pencil-dick provincial legislators in one state affect the
health and safety of those living in every other contiguous state, which
is where we now find ourselves. In
New York City, a city in a state that chooses not to hand over policy
to those with the cognitive capacity of a worn-out whoopee cushion, 90
percent of guns recovered from crimes come from out of state..
New
York, you see, is among the states that have common-sense background
checks to prevent felons, domestic abusers and the mentally incapable
from getting guns—states that don't think it should be harder to get
birth control than an assault rifle. Georgia,
on the other hand, exported two times the national average of guns used
in crimes. Guess which of these models for gun regulation leads to 48
percent fewer law enforcement officers killed?
We know that the firearm that led to Moore's murder, a .38-caliber revolver, was stolen from a gun store in Georgia in 2011.
I'll give you some time, especially if your name is John Lott.
So
what do we know? We know Officer Moore was killed by a violent felon
(attempted murder charge and nine arrests, two for assaulting police
officers) not allowed to possess a firearm. We know that the firearm
that led to Moore's murder, a .38-caliber revolver, was stolen from a
gun store in Georgia in 2011. We know that it was one of 23 guns stolen
overall, nine of which ended up on the streets of New York in crime
scenes. We know that in 2006 and 2009, Georgia was the leading exporter of crime guns to other states.
We
know that Georgia is so concerned about the welfare of its citizens,
that it not only doesn't require one to report lost or stolen guns, but
it prohibits localities in the state from doing so (so much for
right-wing talking points about "local control!"). We know the effect of
this is to allow a vibrant gun-smuggling operation of "straw purchases"
for people who can't have guns, very lucrative for dealers or others
who lack a conscience but love to charge a premium. And we know that
Georgia lacks universal background checks by design, so any loon,
terrorist or person with an axe to grind can walk into a gun show or go
online, and buy guns that possess military firepower.
Let your
kids walk alone to a playground a mile away, we'll swoop in like
jacked-up Kal-El and threaten to take them away. That also goes for
people who say there are positive benefits from smoking pot. Clearly,
the only response is to have someone resembling a Terminator T-800
Cyberdine Systems Model 101 with a badge kick through your door through
your window and deprive you of a child. Wanna sell a gun to a psychopath
and serial killer? Or kill someone else's kid by "accidentally"
shooting through a wall? No worries! it's just how we roll.
So
right around the time we celebrate the 15-year anniversary of the The
Brady Campaign's Million Mom March on Washington, D.C., an officer died.
He didn't have to die. It was a choice that legislators made. To make
it that much easier for this to happen. In the words of a dolt of a
Tennessee legislator, while adding guns to their state parks as a sop to
the National Rifle Association, "an act of dog."
Dog seems to get a lot of help from pretzel-logic, bullshit wranglers, if you ask me.
