Anti-Gay Mission America, Cruz, And Huckabee Returns
Last week’s bad 'christians' are all about the fake 'christian' persecution complex. Read on to see how they’re using it. 
Monday, August 24, 2015
Last Week In Bad Christianity
Last week’s bad 'christians' are all about the fake 'christian' persecution complex. Read on to see how they’re using it. 
The Top 5 Stupid Things Pseudo-Christians Said Last Week
Our weekly feast of dumb courtesy of the pseudo-christians.
Orlando airport’s prayer room is tailored to Muslims ...
Sunday, August 23, 2015
The Daily Drift
Welcome to the Sunday Edition of The Truth be Told.
Our latest comment:
Giving the wingnuts hell.
~Deana Petersen
Our latest comment:
Giving the wingnuts hell.
~Deana Petersen
The Truth Be Told is read in 205 countries around the world.
Women adored Rudolph Valentino - Republicans hated him... !
Don't forget to visit our sister blog Carolina Naturally
Some of our readers today have been in:
The Americas
Argentina - Brazil - Canada - Colombia - Dominican Republic - Nicaragua - Puerto Rico - United States - Venezuela
Europe
Belarus
- Belgium - Bosnia/Herzegovina - Bulgaria - Cyprus - Czech Republic -
England - France - Ireland - Germany - Italy - Latvia - Macedonia -
Malta - Netherlands - Norway - Portugal - Russia - Scotland - Serbia -
Slovakia - Slovenia - Spain - Switzerland - Turkey - Ukraine - Wales
Asia
Bangladesh
- India - Indonesia - Korea - Malaysia - Mauritius - Nepal - Pakistan -
Singapore - Sri Lanka - Thailand - United Arab Emirates
Africa
Cameroon - Morocco - South Africa
The Pacific
Australia - Papua New Guinea - Philippines
Petition Calling For Jon Stewart To Moderate A Presidential Debate Is Being Signed By Thousands
A petition on Change.org calling for Jon Stewart to moderate a 2016
presidential debate is currently the fastest growing on the site.
Bernie Sanders’ Red State Revolution Causes 2 SC Rallies To Move To Bigger Venues
In a statement, the Sanders campaign announced that two rallies in South Carolina had to be moved to larger venues after crowd
projections outgrew the original locations.
…
The demand to see Bernie Sanders is so high that his
campaign was forced to move two rallies in South Carolina to larger
locations.
In a statement, the Sanders campaign announced that
two upcoming rallies in South Carolina had to be moved to larger venues
after crowd projections outgrew the original locations.
The Sanders campaign announced, “With turnout
projections mounting, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign has shifted the
location of Sunday’s rally in Charleston, South Carolina, to the
Charleston Convention Center. The two-day swing includes stops in
Greenville, Columbia and Sumter.”
Bernie Sanders has found fantastic success in red
states. Sanders has drawn big crowds in Texas and Louisana, and he drew a
then 2016 record crowd when 11,000 showed up to support him at a rally in Arizona.
There is a valuable lesson about the generalities of
political polarization in what Sen. Sanders is accomplishing. The
Sanders message that the government must work for ordinary Americans and
that the billionaires and special interests must be defeated in order
to return power back to the people is a natural fit for many residents
of red states.
Red state Democrats who get little attention from
the national Democratic Party are coming out in droves to hear a
presidential candidate ask them for their support. The message in both
the Obama 2008 campaign and what Sanders is doing in 2016 is that
Democrats shouldn’t limit themselves to a box of blue states and a few
swing states.
A liberal economic message can be popular in all
parts of the country. Sen. Sanders is leading a political grassroots
revolution, and it is logical that some of the people who would be most
willing to join the cause are the ones who have experienced the tyranny
of the wingnut billionaires first hand in their own states.
Bernie Sanders is building a national movement of
people in both red and blue states who are fed up with a corrupt system
that is being controlled by a handful of billionaire donors.
Senator Sanders is challenging the billionaires on their own turf, and judging from the response of the people, he’s winning.
The Country’s Job Creators Are Increasingly Women Of Color
Somebody better not tell the wingnut racists ... it will destroy their little minds
It’s the Stupid Economy: Why Income Inequality Ought To Be This Election’s Hot Topic
The health of an economy should correlate directly to the health of
the people living within it, not to their economic impoverishment.
Bernie Sanders’ socialist presence in the
presidential primary mix as well as populist sentiment brewing on both
sides of the political aisle promise, hopefully, to keep the much-needed
conversation on income inequality front and center in our national
debates.
Unfortunately, the discussions of income inequality
too often get subsumed into questions about the health of the U.S.
economy overall—as politicians preach to Bill Clinton’s same old song,
“It’s the economy, stupid.” We need, though, to recognize that these are
not the same discussions at all. In fact, many proposals to prop up—or
restore the health of–our current economic system are actually at odds
with improving the standard of living for workers in America. For
example, while “Right-to Work” laws might to some extent be effective
in creating business-friendly environments attractive to corporations,
in states with such legislation workers tend to receive less in both
wages and benefits. Nonetheless, despite this data, Governor Bruce Rauner of Illinois is pushing for right-to-work legislation by creating “economic empowerment zones” in
which local communities could decide if workers can opt out of paying
dues to the unions which protect them in the workplace and bargain for
their wages and benefits. In this case, empowering the economy means
disempowering workers and decreasing their wages and benefits.
We have to ask, is this the type of economy we want to improve, stupid? Can’t we organize our economic life more smartly?
Brownback’s efforts to improve the local economy in Kansas by
dramatically slashing taxes on businesses and the wealthy overall have
resulted in severe social decay, leaving a wasteland without adequate
revenue to sustain public schools or vital social services.
So much for trickle-down economics. But even the
ludicrous pretense that the wealth redistributed to the top will trickle
down has been dropped.
Trump, for example, in a recent interview with The Detroit News actually
outlined a plan to drive down wages, pointing the finger at
auto-workers who, he believes, earn too high of a wage. Expressing
dismay that Ford plans to open a factory in Mexico, Trump proposed an
alternative strategy for lowering labor costs that would keep jobs in
the U.S. by closing plants in Michigan and moving production to more
corporate-friendly regions: “You can go to different parts of the United
States and then ultimately you’d full-circle—you’ll come back to
Michigan because those guys are going to want their jobs back even if it
is less. We can do rotation in the United States—it doesn’t have to be
in Mexico.”
We see here no plan to address income inequality as a
social ill but only to exacerbate it as a corporate benefit for the
wealthy. Moreover, Trump reveals that the sought-after boosts in
corporate profits are not intended at all to trickle down. The wealth
only trickles up from wage reductions workers suffer, perpetrating
another mass re-distribution of wealth from the bottom to the top.
For all their railing against calls for
re-distribution of wealth, our nation’s economic elite seem to engage
quite a bit in the practice.
Of course, even many of the most persistent
arguments marshaled to defend policies aimed at addressing the wealth
gap rely, typically, on their own brand of trickle up economics. Nick
Hanauer, for example, a venture capitalist with the Seattle-based firm
Second Avenue partners, dismisses “the dire warnings of economic
calamity [that] rain down” whenever the prospect of raising wages
arises. He terms this alarmist response “Chicken Little economics,”
documenting that these alarms have sounded with every substantial
increase in the minimum wage since 1938 without the economic sky ever
having fallen. In urging New York to raise its minimum wage to fifteen
dollars, he points to Seattle and San Francisco as cities that
significantly increased their minimum wage to the benefit rather than
detriment of their economies. Raising the minimum wage, so goes the
argument, creates more able consumers, buoying the economy as a whole
and causing wealth to trickle up.
Still, these arguments center around the question of
whether raising the minimum wage—a small step in addressing income
inequality—helps or hurts the economy. They never question the current
economic arrangement in any fundamental way. Consider, for example, some
of the following headlines on stories covering this ongoing issue on
CNBC.Com: “State Minimum Wage Hikes: Help or Hindrance?” and “Easy Street or the Breadline?: New Year Wage Hike Debated.”
The debate usually goes like this: Opponents of a
minimum wage increase offer the threatening prospect that the strain on
employers will be so great that businesses, particularly small ones,
will be forced to eliminate positions, especially entry-level jobs,
resulting in more bust than boom for American workers. The other side
usually represented asserts that since raising the minimum wage provides
more disposable income for the lowest paid workers struggling to meet
their needs, the increase will function as an immediate economic
stimulus since the money earned will be immediately pumped back into the
economy, which is largely driven by consumer spending. These proponents
who see the increase as economic stimulus tend to downplay the
Congressional Budget Office’s forecast that while 24.5 million workers
will get a raise, 500,000 workers might lose their jobs were the federal
minimum wage to be raised to $10.10.
While there is plenty of illogic in this debate,
first we have to highlight the ill-conceived nature of the question
itself, as asking whether increasing the minimum wage will hurt or help
the economy leads us down a dead end.
Here’s what I mean:
From a progressive political perspective, what if we
discover that raising the minimum wage would hurt the economy? Should
we then cease to advocate for the infinitesimal redistribution of wealth
that would help low-wage workers, who play such a key role in producing
the wealth of our nation, meet their basic needs? Should the
progressive position be that those working for low wages must continue
to do so and stop asking for more, regardless of whether or not they can
meet their basic needs on those wages, so that more people aren’t
thrown out of work and the economy isn’t hurt?
Of course not, but progressives need to re-frame the
debate. To those who argue that raising the minimum wage will hurt the
economy, we need to ask how smartly organized is an economy in which
those who do vital and necessary work cannot afford to meet their most
basic needs.
The health of an economy, it seems to me, should
correlate directly to the health of the people living within it, not to
their economic impoverishment. If a healthy or strong economy requires
that those who work within it to produce and distribute goods and
services are not able themselves to access those goods and services to
meet their needs, then we need to question the human viability of that
economy, not worry about whether we’re hurting the economy with our
policies. Indeed, an economy that achieves health when the people
working within it suffer is one that we need to hurt by dismantling and
overhauling it. The economy is supposed to serve us; we aren’t supposed
to serve the economy.
What
we need to do is remind ourselves that the purpose of an economy is, in
the most efficient way, to produce and distribute goods and services to
meet the needs of those living within the economy. As the wealth gap
increases, it seems clear our economy is not doing that. Malcolm X
famously said, “We didn’t land on Plymouth rock. Plymouth rock landed on
us.” We might adapt this saying to characterize an economy that seems
to land hard on the people who work within it rather than working hard
for its people.
Madeline Albright Calls Out Jeb On His Lies About ISIS And On the shrub’s Record In Iraq
Republican pretender candidate Jeb Bush’s brazen attempts to rewrite history in a series of campaign appearances last week cannot go unchallenged. By blaming President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for the rise of ISIL, Jeb is clearly seeking to absolve his brother’s junta of responsibility for today’s problems in Iraq. This argument may serve Jeb’s political interests, but it does a disservice to the truth.Albright, the country’s first female Secretary of State, shared the ACTUAL history of ISIL, reminding us that the cabal emerged after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, LONG before President Obama and Hillary Clinton (acting as Secretary of State) were on the scene. Secretary Albright went on to castigate ‘the smartest shrub’ for forgetting that his brother, the shrub, negotiated the military pull-out date from Iraq. President Obama wanted to stay in Iraq longer to further stabilize the country, but could not because the Iraq government refused to grant U.S. soldiers immunity from prosecution. She continued to criticize Jeb for his rhetoric, which she believes is damaging to diplomatic efforts in the region, as well as how the United States is perceived globally.
In conclusion, Secretary Albright slams it home by stating,
“The United States cannot afford another shrub who blinds himself to global reality and who forges ahead into chaos. Americans deserve a president who will acknowledge the past and will forge a better future.”Well played, Madam Secretary … well played.
Hillary Clinton Just Used Two Tweets To Show Republican Candidates Are Being Racist Assholes
This is how Democrats will win — by standing up for the victims of Republican hate-speech. Kudos to Hillary Clinton!
The Crazies Overrun North Carolina As Trump Leads In New Poll
Trump leads Clinton 45-42 in North Carolina, raising Republican
cabal fears that he might be more electable than his critics realize.…
Trump also holds a commanding lead over his Republican cabal competitors in North Carolina. In the Republican primary race,
Trump has 24 percent support, well ahead of Carson (14 percent) and Jeb (13 percent).
North Carolina is a pivotal swing state. Barack Obama won the Tar Heel State in 2008, defeating John McCain by a narrow 49.7 to 49.4 margin. In 2012, Mitt Romney won the state over Obama 50.4 to 48.4 percent.
While Democrats don’t need to carry North Carolina
to win a general election, the state has become a competitive state that
can serve as a barometer for a candidate’s political viability. A
Republican cannot afford to lose North Carolina. A Democrat can win
without it, but failure to carry the state all but guarantees a tight
election, since North Carolina only leans slightly more red than the
nation as a whole.
The PPP poll is one of the first indications that
while Trump’s ideas remain a joke, his campaign may not be a
joke. His viability in North Carolina hints at the discomforting
possibility that he may turn out to be electable. At the very least, his
43-40 edge over Clinton shows he is an upgrade over Jeb, who
manages just a 42-42 tie with Clinton in North Carolina.
Of
course, the general election is still over a year away, and Trump is certainly a volatile candidate who could say or do something
that disqualifies him from consideration by a large cross section of the
electorate. However, he has already said outrageous things that should
have derailed his campaign, and voters have either agreed with him or
simply shrugged their shoulders. For Democrats, it is far too early to
panic about the thought of a Trump junta. However, it is not
too early to take the threat seriously and to start mobilizing voters
to make sure it never happens.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)