December 1, 2014

Today is 59th Anniversary of Rosa Parks' refusal to sit

In the back of the bus.

Her arrest and the reaction of the African American community to it became the beginning of a historic bus boycott.





Rosa Parks Was Arrested for Civil Disobedience
December 1, 1955
Rosa Parks stood up for what she believed, or rather, sat down for what she believed. On the evening of December 1, 1955, Parks, an African American, was tired after a long day of work and decided to take a seat on the bus on her ride home. Because she sat down and refused to give up her seat to a white passenger, she was arrested for disobeying an Alabama law requiring black people to relinquish seats to white people when the bus was full. (Blacks also had to sit at the back of the bus.) Her arrest sparked a 381-day boycott of the Montgomery bus system. It also led to a 1956 Supreme Court decision banning segregation on public transportation.

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November 24, 2014

Here is a must see video if you are on the side of med cannabis patients -

I don't know how many here are living in areas where the state intitiative of Prop 215 is something you embrace.

But bit by bit, the planning commissions and county officials have snatched away the citizens' right to grow med cannabis inside our gardens.

Here in Lake County, the county officals put together Measure N, which was accepted by the voters, and then they unleashed the county sheriff. the sheriff went on to conduct many warrantless searches.

The rationale behind the "need" for Measure N was that there are cartel people using the hills and open forest areas of Lake County to grow. These people often destroy the environment, and are, of course, violent. In recent history, a couple from New England was hired by some cartel folks to watch over the grow site, and they were found murdered by their employer. (Often undocumented migrant workers are forced into this work, and when they are killed, no one knows where they were, and their bodies are never discovered, and their deths remain unknown.)

So since there are cartel people in the County, and plenty enough of the cartel forces abund that the police would have their hands full should they go after them, so why then is it that almost all of the SWAT-like raids have come down on mere individual citizens, who are growing modest amounts of marijuana? (Usually less than fourteen plants!)

Recently a federal judge sided with Lake County resident plaintiffs. In his statements, the judge indicated that the plantiffs have the right to sue Lake County for the damage done to their property. (including the loss of pet dogs, when SWAT-like police broke down gates and fences.) The lawsuits now total over $ 600,000, and this is the first group of plaintiffs - it is easy to fear that the monetary damage done to the County could be over five million dollars when everyone so injured by the sheriff and police take to the courts. (This is a small county and many legit services could be in trouble when these monetary judgements against the county go into effect.)

The judge also stated that the warrantless searches are not in keeping with either the US or state Constitution.

One of the five Lake County supervisors happens to be a Bail Bondsman! A few years ago, he himself was found to have over 4,000 plants growing on his property, but those plants were items he claims he knew nothing about. He was not even ticketed for this infraction of the law.

Oh, and unlike everyone else's plants, they were cut down but left on his property, for him to dispose of!

Watch a local activist, Terri Larson, denounce the County Supervisors and what has been going on here. She starts after the 14 or 15 minute mark, so feel free to scroll through to her:

http://lakecounty.granicus.com/MediaPlayer.php?view_id=1&clip_id=37

November 18, 2014

Over the last 72 hrs, my computr decided it doesn't have a sound system???

I couldn't get my computer to play any Youtubes today. Since the youtubes site had played several youtube music videos for me Friday the 14th of Nov, this is confusing.

I went into control panel, found the sound icon, and clicked. I saw that my volume had been turned down, by looking at a volume meter.

I might hve done tthat late Sat night so as to not keep other people up in the household.

But when I clicked through the rest of the sound tabs, tryng to maximize the volume setting, I was told I don't have any sound devices connected to my computer. What gives?

I have a reliable Windows XP, and with the exception of my adding the Ad Muncher program to it about ten days ago, everything should be operating the same way it ws late Sat or early Sudnay Am. (As nothing has been done to my system since adding that Ad muncher thing-ee.)

Any help appreciated.

November 17, 2014

Here is why, jwirr

MediCare for all means the government has a program they run, and it is considered a benefit to you the citizen. However there is that age restriction. A person must have trained the age of 65 to qualify.

MediCaid is a program that is offered up to poor people, and there is no age requirement.

You can be a single parent in your late teens getting MediCaid; you can be a fifty year old.

However, what is rarely told to people being offered MediCaid, is this: when you obtain a medical service through the umbrella of Medicaid, you are responsible for the expenses. Oh, not the day the services are incurred, but the day you die.

So if we had MediCare for all, I assume it would be paid by taxes. (Maybe by charging some of the larger Corporations some type of tax - look at how Verizon makes a gazillion dollars in profits and spends not a dime on Corporate tax!)

But when a 55 year old signs up for Medicaid, about six weeks later, they will get a brochure in the mail, letting them know that when they die, the state will audit their estate. So before your double wide can be left to your kids, the state needs to make sure that it gets re-imbursed for the monies that have been spent on you. That amount could d be $ 100; or it could be tens of thousands of dollars.

And that is why before we make the decision to choose MediCaid over MediCare, we need to consider whether we think it better to tax some large corporations rather than making Ma and Pa Kettle end up with nothing to give their kids and grandkids. My thoughts on this are that since every other civilized nation takes care of its people through a situation similar to our MediCare without forcing the citizens to re-imburse them, then we should too.

November 15, 2014

Understanding the Corporate Welfare Giveaway known as the ACA...

There are certainly significant "positives" contained in the legislation known as the ACA.

Among them are the fact that there are no longer any Americans who can be told they cannot be insured due to a "pre-existing condition."

Many Americans who previously did not find insurance affordable now have subsidies to help them afford such. Due to the fact that such individuals number in the millions, it is not difficult to realize that many lives will be saved that would have been lost.

But the actual "reform" was much more of a give away to the biggest, already most profitable business in th USA, health care insurers, than being a net gain to consumers. For instance, many poorer individuals will strive to avoid using the insurance, due to the fact that for many folks seeking a cheaper premium, the deductibles are about half or one third of their income. ($ 5,000 is a lot of money if you make less than $ 60,000. And with rent and groceries and housing prices extremely high, that $ 5,000 deductible is a lot even to someone making $ 60,000!).


Let's look at one facet of what the public wanted and then explained that they wanted in almost every poll taken between 2008 and Dec 2009, an important facet that was not realized - the public option... According to the second article I link to in this OP, "This latter provision, one of the positive elements in Obamacare, was not forced upon the insurers; they themselves had proposed it. If they had not agreed to accept patients with pre-existing conditions, the law would have had to include a “public option” to guarantee that such patients could access health insurance, thus creating public competition that would give at least some consumers a non-private insurance option.

"Whether a public option would have constituted a meaningful alternative that competed with private companies would have depended partly on the details of its design; it is certainly possible that it would have served as a place for private insurers to dump
sick customers, making it expensive and unsustainable
(especially if the already-insured were not given the public
option, as seems likely). "
13

Edward Luce, “Gloves Off in Health Reform Battle,”
Financial Times

In any case, it would inevitably have been inferior to a
system. See Physicians for a National Health Program, “The
‘Public Plan Option’; Myths and Facts,” available at
http://www.pnhp.org/change/Public_Option_Myths_and_Facts.pdf

.

Just who were the "stakeholders" that the Obama Administration was catering to? The following URL has an excellent thesis regarding the ACA, and defines the word "stakeholder" as used by the Administration. (Wanna guess the meaning of the word "stakeholder?" Let's just say it is not you or me.)
http://www.academia.edu/7048015/Healthy_Wealthy_and_Wise_How_
Corporate_Power_Shaped_the_Affordable_Care_Act


From the above linked to thesis:
(4)
The subsequent process by which the reform was shaped is
much clearer: the administration invited the key corporate
powerholders into the policymaking process from the
beginning. In the words of White House communications
director Dan Pfeiffer, the Obama strategy was to “bring every stakeholder to the table.”
(10)
Journalist Ryan Lizza makes clear that “stakeholder” referred to capitalist interests and not the general public, noting, for example, that Obama “sent his toughest political operatives — like Rahm Emanuel and Jim Messina — to cut deals with the pharmaceutical industry and hospitals.”
(11)
One major agreement that derived from this process of
negotiation promised the health insurance industry tens of
millions of new customers, who would be forced by the law to
buy plans from private insurers. In exchange, the industry
agreed to provide coverage to patients with pre-existing
conditions.
(12)
In another major negotiation, administration operatives and
Democratic Senator Max Baucus (Chair of the Senate Finance
Committee) gained assent from the Pharmaceutical Research and
Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) to the proposed law by
renouncing the government’s power to negotiate drug prices
and import lower-cost drugs.
(13)
The final product was generally deemed “a good deal” by industry
insiders (the opinion of the senior vice president of PhRMA, which actually bought ads supporting the bill).
(14)
Except for the five biggest private insurers (Aetna, Cigna,
Humana, UnitedHealth, and WellPoint), most major players in
the healthcare industry supported the reform or at least did
not actively oppose it. This assent from the industry
— a reversal of its decades of vigorous opposition —
resulted from from the shaping of the reform into a familiar
form of corporate welfare: “a big injection of public subsidy to
expand the overall size of the US healthcare market,” as the
Financial Times noted.
(15)


The corporate welfare aspect of the bill can be clearly seen
in the negotiations with America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the main health insurers’ lobbying organization.

Though AHIP never formally endorsed the bill, it agreed to
the basic framework and did not mobilize its legislative weight against it. The law’s central component— the individual mandate
in exchange for “no pre-existing condition exclusions”—
was precisely what AHIP and the right-wing Heritage
Foundation had previously proposed, and which

November 12, 2014

So who are these dead American Journalists in the MidWest of our nation?

This map is making the rounds on social media - I found it on both DailyKos and Twitter.

https://twitter.com/ianbremmer/status/532542489950179328

But I have to ask, just who are the jounalists who have supposedly died in the MidWest? Somewhere along the way, these deaths slipped my consciousness... As in, I have never heard of them?

November 8, 2014

Why is it that discussions don't necessarily "tree" properly?

It seems to me that when the change happened taking DU from DU 2 to DU 3, that the "treeing" capabilities got lost in the shuffle.

For instance, let's examine the following interchange from a DU'er named "Natasha"
> >
> > An OP From "Natasha"
> >
> > "I hate squirrels."
> >
> > First Reply from "Boris"-- I agree. Let us shoot all of 'em, after we have had our borscht!.
> >
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> > Second Reply From "Bullwinkle"-- What is wrong with both the poster of this OP and you? Squirrels are adorable. And a squirrel is my best friend.
> >
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> > Third Reply from "Boris"-- If you meant to say "fried" and not "friend" then I agree with you.
> >
> >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Fourth Reply from "Bullwinkle"-- I would never say "fried" in reference to my best friend Rocky.
> >
> > >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Fifth Reply from Home Cooking Dem-- If cooked properly, your little friend would taste like chicken. Which is totally YUM!
> >
> > >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Sixth Reply from "Animal Lover"-- You people are sick.
> >
> >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Seventh reply From "Blogger"-- You are sick.

#################################################################
As we all know, the first few replies to one another always tree properly. But after a little bit, then the treeing no longer works.

In reading the above, you might infer from the DU user Id that "Animal Lover" is probably actually agreeing with Bullwinkle, but because at that point, the tree-ing capability of the DU software is not in effect, should this user have had a less descriptive user id, then the reader would not know if that poster agreed or didn't agree with Bullwinkle - as maybe they were replying to Home Cooking Dem.

And the seventh response from "Blogger" - is that poster replying to Bullwinkle, or Home Cooking Dem or to Animal Lover?

Anyway that fact makes it hard to carry on a decent conversation with someone about something, as once the responding back and forth goes on for a while, there is this further level in difficulty! Especially if others join in. Before we went from DU 2 to DU 3, the treeing capabilities were stronger, I believe. Therefore, what is a person supposed to do in terms of a conversation?

I encounter this quite frequently, and then of course, heaven help you should an alert be sent and you are on a jury trying to unscramble such a mess!

November 2, 2014

So let's slam the citizens with the costs of doing these things, even as the Big Problems,

In the forms of wter theft, and water pollution, continue on without penalty.

Nestle and the other big water theft artists have sweetheart deals that were conceived and acted out in total secret, and are stealing water out of pristine water aquifers all across the state.

Mainstream media doesn't mention it - why, they can't afford to lose all that nice ad money coming from the water bottling companies. But they will take the time to have nightly news spots about Ma and Pa kettle watering their lawn (Gasp, the horrors!)

Does Prop One take them to task? It seems to mee that only the citizens are required to pay for the wrongs of these energy firms. (And remember, when all is done and said, we still pay more at the pump than any other population of any of the other 47 states, here in Mainland USA)

And then there are the basic Big Energy "we will dump our fracking materials and sludge into yr aquifers" companies, who apparently are getting the usual free pass.

Must we citizens really pay to clean up pollution, without putting any provisons into place that will stop this practice of Big Energy dumping toxic fracking solutions into our aquifers?.