yurbud
yurbud's JournalPIC: Mitt Romney or Mr. Burns?
I'd like to think something like this could keep a guy out of the White House, but Baby Bush was everything Romney is and stupid and cruel on top of it, so who knows.
Who Should Decide Your Health Care Choices, You or Your Boss?
If the Democrats don't make a talking point out of that title, they should be fired for incompetence.
Another way to put it: when it comes to a conflict between you and your boss, the GOP will side with your boss every time.
What if your boss is a Jehovah's Witness? Should you be denied a blood transfusion? What if your boss is an Orthodox Jew? Does that mean you can't go to the doctor of Saturday? What if your boss is morally against vaccines? Does that mean you can't get vaccination coverage for your children? And your boss gets to determine if you get birth control coverage? Give me a break!
I'm beginning to think that this is all a distraction so that we don't focus on the fact that Republicans caused this depression are currently in and they want to distract us so we don't remember they are the part of Bush. Every day they become more and more ridiculous.
http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/13355?destination=node%2F13355
Do Businessmen Make Good Presidents? Public Radio sidesteps Bush/Cheney answer
When I heard the host ask the question and continue with,
http://www.theworld.org/2012/02/do-businessmen-make-good-presidents/
I assumed they were going to go for the obvious recent example in American history: George W. Bush and his Halliburton CEO VP, Dick Cheney.
Instead, the story went on to talk about Vicente Fox, a president of Thailand, Silvio Berlusconi of Italy, and even non-president, Donald Trump.
As odd as the absence of Bush and Cheney was the absence of a very obvious question: do businessmen in office use their skills for the public good, or do they simply use the office to help their business and cronies who will reciprocate later? I'm sure their are lots of the first kind, but far more often, businessmen see public office as a way to pursue business by other means, just as their campaign donations are far from altruistic, and a pretty strong relationship exists between an industry's donations and getting a favorable outcome on legislation that effects them.
Another odd twist on this story was how they described Romney's business experience, as doing ''business turnaround as a management consultant.''
Isn't that a bit like calling a cannibal as doing health turnaround as a weight loss consultant?
NPR and Public Radio International do the public a disservice when they practice historical revision like this, and making conservative epic catastrophe that which shall not be mentioned.
Blue Dog Democrats have a Facebook page. This is my post to their wall
Go like it quick, before they take it down! [font color=red]on edit: it looks like my comment fits the general sentiment on their wall.[/font]
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Blue-Dog-Democrats/160211630734694?sk=wall
I would rather vote for Democrats who look out for the interests of average Americans rather than split the difference or even agree with Republicans even when it hurts middle and working class Americans like starting unnecessary wars, deregulating banks and Wall Street, and trade deals that gutted our manufacturing base those were Republican ideas that couldn't have been enacted without Blue Dog support. Blue Dogs even embrace right wing education reforms that want to break teachers unions and replace public schools with corporate run charter schools so Wall Street can siphon off some of our tax money meant for schools as profits.
Blue Dogs want your vote, but they want the money of big corporations and Wall Street banks more, first as campaign donations, then as big paychecks as lobbyists, CEO's, and do-nothing corporate board members when they leave office.
Blue Dogs should be honest about what they are: Republicans who don't have the stomach to suck up to the religious right, racists, and homophobes of that party's base, but do want to prove to the rich that they are more competent and reliable servants than the out of the closet Republicans.
Casting HBO's election 2012 movie...
Since HBO is releasing their 2008 campaign movie, I'm wondering who they will get to play the Republican primary candidates.
Some suggestions:
Mitt Romney: John Hamm or James Van Der Beek (just for the giant forehead real estate)
Santorum is a tough one. Maybe Crispin Glover, not for looks, but similar degree of weirdness:
http://www4.pictures.zimbio.com/gi/Crispin+Glover+BAFTA+Los+Angeles+2010+Britannia+UfxGTPR-uv0l.jpg
Newt could be any number of elderly men or women. For example, imagine Edie McClurg with a white wig:
She's definitely got the smarm to be Newt.
Or Dwight from the Office:
Ron Paul is tough. Ian McKellen has the look, but he's got too much gravitas. Maybe some helium would fix the voice.
There might be someone more appropriate to play Herman Cain than Mike Tyson, but Tyson would eat that person and get the part any way:
John Huntsman could be played by any local newscaster who isn't busy.
Michelle Bachmann? I would again have to go with Jon Hamm, which would require some cgi when she is in scenes with Romney.
TOON: THIS MODERN WORLD--a NEW controversy erupts!
We should send this to the bishops in case they are losing their GOP-destroying mojo.
SEE IT FULL-SIZED in TOMORROW VISION & PAST TOONS
on contraception fights: GOP again chooses rights of powerful over powerless
Isn't it odd that they are worried about the freedom of religion of the employer but not the employee?
On what issue do they stand with working people against the financially powerful?
It must take a lot of courage to always side with those with all the money and political power.
When will we get polls back?
They are crucial to keeping the DEMOCRACY in democraticunderground.
Otherwise, a handful of trolls can make this seem like a neocon, DLC think tank.
TOON: THIS MODERN WORLD--Sex Talk with Rick Santorum!
Evangelical Christians should find this format eerily familiar even if some of the Catholic details are different.
Why We'll Still Be Fighting About Birth Control 100 Years From Now
This is crucial historical analysis about the scope of the impact of birth control and how quickly we've come to take for granted being able to plan if, when, and how many kids we have.
***
But the third one is the silent one, the one that I've never seen come up on anybody’s list of Innovations That Changed The World, but matters perhaps more deeply than any of the more obvious things that usually come to mind. And that’s the mass availability of nearly 100% effective contraception. Far from being a mere 500-year event, we may have to go back to the invention of the wheel or the discovery of fire to find something that’s so completely disruptive to the way humans have lived for the entire duration of our remembered history.
***
If you’re a woman of childbearing age in the US, you’ve had access to effective contraception your entire fertile life; and odds are good that your mother and grandmother did, too. If you're a heterosexual man of almost any age, odds are good that you also enjoy a lifetime of opportunities for sexual openness and variety that your grandfathers probably couldn't have imagined -- also thanks entirely to good contraception. From our individual personal perspectives, it feels like we’ve had this right, and this technology, forever. We take it so completely for granted that we simply cannot imagine that it could ever go away. It leads to a sweet complacency: birth control is something that’s always been there for us, and we’re rather stunned that anybody could possibly find it controversial enough to pick a fight over.
But if we’re wise, we’ll keep our eyes on the long game, because you can bet that those angry men are, too. The hard fact is this: We’re only 50 years into a revolution that may ultimately take two or three centuries to completely work its way through the world’s many cultures and religions. (To put this in perspective: it was 300 years from Gutenberg’s printing press to the scientific and intellectual re-alignments of the Enlightenment, and to the French and American revolutions that that liberating technology ultimately made possible. These things can take a loooong time to work all the way out.) Our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will, in all likelihood, still be working out the details of these new gender agreements a century from now; and it may be a century after that before their grandkids can truly start taking any of this for granted.
Full Text
It's tough to snip this one down to 4 paragraphs. The other point it makes is that the lurch toward fundamentalist religions in the last 50 years is a reaction to this profound change (though I think some other changes play a role too).
Another medical advance has also changed the ballgame: in the past, part of the premium on virginity was to ensure a guy was paying to raise HIS kids, but also served women too: a promiscuous woman would be unable to pin down any particular guy for child support since it could just as easily be someone else's.
DNA testing has changed that--and discovered that 1 in 10 guys are raising a kid he thinks is his but ain't.
The piece of this we haven't nailed down yet is when exactly it's best for women to have kids: if they do it when their young, society tsk tsks at them for interfering with their education, but if they wait until later, it can either interfere with their career or lead to long hours in daycare. Waiting would work better if we adjusted our approach to work so mom and/or dad have more time to do childcare.
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Member since: Sun Jul 11, 2004, 07:58 PMNumber of posts: 39,405
