August 29, 2012

Another warning about the analysis of "yet another glitch" in the ACA

Apparently, when the government is deciding if your family needs a subsidy or not to afford your health insurance, that evaluation will only examine if the person in the household working for the company can afford that insurance.

So if you work for a large employer, and they have decent health insurance, and for you as an individual, it is affordable, but not if you add in the three kids and the spouse.

As the ACA is now written, the examination that is made only looks at whether as an individual your salary can offer you the means to pay.

We really need to be shouting about this to any and all Congress critters that want our vote. Especially any that mention how decent a thing their vote for the ACA happened to be.

Please visit the URl to read the entire discussion:
http://www.healthcare-now.org/a-glitch-in-health-care-reform

August 29, 2012

Desmond Tutu refuses to share stage with Blair -

http://www.commondreams.org/further/2012/08/28-5

He is the man of the hour, as far as I can tell.

If you read the above article, make sure you read the comments as well.

My hat is off to you Mr. Tutu.

On edit: And how totally cool is it - this OP is my 25K post here on DU (May 2005, to now)

Glad the subject is worthy of my milestone.

August 28, 2012

So you know how horrified Republicans are about voter fraud?

The issue being - we really can't let people vote in an illegal manner -

Well here's a nice BWAHAHAHAHA!!

In the June primary in Wisconsin,it seems that something must have been in the drinking water, because some rather elite Republicans got caught in attempting to vote fraudulently.

So maybe we should support the Republican meme that voter fraud is not that unusual - but remind them:

it's people in their party that are doing it.

From the Bradblog article, here is the full report:
http://addins.wkow.com/blogs/scoop/2012/08/lawmakers-wife-casts-vote-while-idaho-resident


On edit - apology that at first I had a different voting issue story up instead of the one about Wisconsin election fraud.

August 19, 2012

He posted about "revolution" on FB - now he is held by NDAA

Provisions:

http://www.businessinsider.com/brandon-raub-marine-911-detained-2012-8

August 16, 2012

Assange didn't make any money - that's all been taken away from him.

And I am sure he is clever enough that he knew back when the project was in its inception, that should any step of the Wikileaks project fail, he'd be right where he is.


However, and this is pertinent to any discussion about Wikileaks - every single day of every single week, our Big News Media gives up poop on a stick.

So if you' re the sort of viewer that wants to know about Lindsey Lohan, you can Tune in for film tonight at eleven. Believe it or not - in July in California, we ahd a bigger fire than the one reported on in Colorado - but our local news stations don't have the money from the parent company to send reporters three hours down the road from their headquarters to report on such a story!

The fact of the matter remains that the need for Wikileaks existence would never have come about IF the major Main$tream media had been doing its job. But it hasn't. Not for several decades.

Why is it that Dan Ellsberg supports Julian?

Because Ellsberg was able to survive and avoid imprisonment precisely because back in the early seventies, The New York Times and 27 other major news organzations were all still heavily invested in reporting news. Today ZERO news organizations, except for websites like RT, and Colbert, Stewart and Rolling Stone magazine, have any interest in doing anything but sensationalism on the topics about which Wikileaks gave us both the big picture and the tiny details.

August 14, 2012

Texas woman's court battle defeats Keystone XL Pipeline

Sp a lady in Texas is refusing to let her property be seized by the Keystone XL pipeline interests as they use the power of "eminent domain" to attempt to take her property from her.

Her right to remain the owner of her land and to remain on it has temporarily been secured by a court of appeals.

However, over in The House Of Representatives, H.R. 1433 is going to legally install an exemption such that property owners will not have the right to protect their properties from such seizures that might be needed for the expansion of the Keystone XL Pipeline.

In other words, if this bill succeeds, and it is right now sitting inside the Senate Judiciary Committee, not only could she lose her property, but thousands of other land owners could lose theirs. And who knows - maybe the Lakota reservation, Pine Ridge, in the Dakotas, could be knocked out from under the Lakota people. (The Lakota Nation has stood steadfast in its determination to protect its aquifers from the polluting forces of this pipeline.)

Full article on this topic is here:

http://www.examiner.com/article/texas-delivers-victory-for-property-rights-keystone-pipeline-fight

August 14, 2012

I wanted to add my two cents. Although I have tremendous

Sympathy for anyone in the iT crowd who cannot find work in this time of "Globalization," how did people in this crowd feel when the textile workers lost their jobs back in the mid-eighties as those jobs went overseas?

Or when Flint Michigan shut down in the late eighties and the well- paying auto jobs were sent south of the border? If the subject of the auto workers losing their jobs was broached, I heard lots of derisive comments, about what did the unwashed, unschooled, illiterate, non-skilled workers expect - a lifetime doing nothing for huge Union Pay? (Never mind that some of the people on the auto line had more common sense, mechanical expertise and ability than some couch-potatoey computer person ever would have. )

I lived in Silicon Valley in the Eighties, and it was a constant litany of: "I've done the right thing and gone to school and gotten my degree in math/computer science, and gotten certified by Apple. And/
Or IBM or MicroSoft, and I know my programming languages.

"Anyone else in the world that didn't do this is pretty much an idiot, and who can cry for them when their job goes away? If the textile workers really wanted a job, they'd have gone to the schools I attended and taken the classes I took, and then they'd still have jobs."

Anyway that was the mantra I heard again and again. Some of my friends from, SV didn't even want to watch "Roger and Me" when it was released, as after all the car industry workers were lazy assed sluggards who should have, you guessed it, gone to computer school.

I was at some point in my life afflicted with Multiple Chemical Sensitivities, which meant I couldn't be around fragrances and other substances prevalent in offices. I went into the home health field, in part because I was suited for it, and in part because I was therefore away from the constant perfume, the toner and fax machine chems (Those weren't digital operations, back in the day) etc. present in offices everywhere.

And when for a year or two in the early nineties, my job opportunities dropped significantly because of the open border policy, I got little sympathy from the Silicon Valley crowd.

If someone from south of the border wanted to do my job for a lot less, well more power to my employer. The IT crowd members were clueless about considering whether is it really fair to have granma around someone from Shanghai who doesn't speak English and doesn't know the slightest thing about how medicines can be mis-prescribed, nor would they understand that the therapy routines printed out on the refrigerator actually need to be be done, and what not.

Now the tight and painful shoes of job competition from open borders and globalization are being laced up on the IT crowd's darling feet. And suddenly it is the end of the world. But you know something - if you IT crowd folks hadn't been so clueless about how workers in America needed protection - right from the get go - thirty five years ago -and had united with other workers, now we wouldn't be in this damn situation now!

[font color=red]
United We Stand - Divided We Fall. Well we are falling now and it may be too damn late as the PTB understood to take us down one industry at a time!
[/font color=red]

August 11, 2012

If Ryan had never said the words "my Catholic upbringing"

Then the nuns on the bus wouldn't have made the effort to do their tour:

http://nunsonthebus.com/

For whatever reason, far too many modern era "Christians" and "Catholics" forget that Jesus was after all, a man who spent most of his time hanging out with riffraff, healing the lepers, and knocking around the Money Changers.

If someone wants to practice Christianity, fine. But they should remember that Jesus was here on earth to bring a DIFFERENT message than that of the Old Testament. And that message was to love your neighbor as yourself, and to remember that when you help someone who is less fortunate, you help Him.

August 9, 2012

Goldman Sachs escapes untouched, yet again.

So in a regulatory filing, GS lets the economic world know that it is off the hook for its predatory gambling and then selling those gambles to an unsuspecting public. So what if such maneuvers caused the investors to lose Billions. It's only money, right?

And the SEC apparently has other things to do than tangle with GS.

Only sigh of relief in David Dryden's article: Goldman Sachs still might incur some wrath from the Federal Housing Finance Agency. I guess it will all depend on whether or not those regulators want a job at Goldman's after they have done their stint as "public servants."

Full article here:
http://news.firedoglake.com/2012/08/09/goldman-sachs-escapes-liability-from-sec-in-mortgage-backed-securities-case/

August 3, 2012

As far as Dan Cathy, Chick-Fil-A CEO, my household is thinking

Of mailing him a stone. In keeping with the statement of Jesus Christ: "Let he who is without sin, cast the first stone amongst you."

I guess he and the rest of Chick Fil A are the purest of the pure.

We are also trying to come up with a simple statement to attach to said stone, to the effect that Christ himself never even weighed in on the idea that an alternate lifestyle is a sin. Although some "Christian" websites are stating that we should "read between the lines" - which I find preposterous. In all other matters, the "Christians" want ONLY to recite chapter and verse, with no reading in between the lines allowed.