kpete
kpete's JournalObama Trolls Tea Party With Bumper Sticker
http://a2.img.talkingpointsmemo.com/image/upload/c_fill,fl_keep_iptc,g_faces,h_365,w_652/a2snlfbd0iq1amiy33hg.jpgPresident Barack Obama's new Obamacare bumper sticker sure looks familiar.
...............
If the art work looks unoriginal, it should. It's a play on the tea party-embraced "don't tread on me" slogan, which dates back to the country's founding but has been a fixture at anti-Obamacare conservative rallies in recent years.
more:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/obama-tea-party-slogan-obamacare
Women Oppose Birth Control Limits: "92% of Dems-83% of independents-63% of Repubs-79% of Catholics"
Women Overwhelmingly Oppose Birth Control Limits
A new Hart Research poll finds that 68% of U.S. women voters oppose allowing corporations to refuse to cover contraception in their health plans because of religious objections.
Key findings: "Women of all demographics overwhelmingly support the provision of the Affordable Care Act requiring employers to cover contraception and other preventive health services for women, including 92% of Democrats, 83% of independents, 63% of Republicans and 79% of Catholics."
MORE:
http://plannedparenthoodaction.org/files/1813/9568/4790/3-24-14-Birth-Control-Hart-Research-Poll-Memo.pdf
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/24/hobby-lobby-poll_n_5022238.html?utm_hp_ref=politics
via:
http://politicalwire.com/archives/2014/03/24/women_overwhelmingly_oppose_birth_control_limits.html
Didn't see this coming..."'There Is No G8'"... Putin Booted
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — Seeking to isolate Russia, President Barack Obama and Western and Asian allies moved to indefinitely cut Moscow out of a major international coalition on Monday, including canceling an economic summit President Vladimir Putin planned to host this summer
.......................
Obama huddled with the leaders of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan for an emergency meeting of the Group of Seven. In a joint statement after the evening meeting, the leaders said they were suspending their participation with Russia in the Group of Eight major industrial nations until Moscow "changes course."
The G-7 leaders instead plan to meet this summer in Brussels, symbolically putting the meeting in the headquarters city of the European Union and NATO, two organizations seeking to bolster ties with Ukraine.
"Today, we reaffirm that Russia's actions will have significant consequences," the leaders' statement said. "This clear violation of international law is a serious challenge to the rule of law around the world and should be a concern for all nations."
MORE:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/24/g8-summit-canceled_n_5023219.html
McAuliffe proposes expanding Medicaid in two-year pilot
Source: Richmond Times Dispatch
McAuliffe said he has assurance from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that Virginia can launch a two year pilot to use the federal funds and get out of it with no obligation.
If expansion ends, he says he will take the responsibility.
"It's a risk that I am willing to take for our families from one end of Virginia to the other."
"Everybody else is off the hook," he said.
Read more: http://www.timesdispatch.com/news/state-regional/virginia-politics/mcauliffe-proposes-expanding-medicaid-in-two-year-pilot/article_5e26da70-b2de-11e3-b80e-001a4bcf6878.html
Kindergarten teacher: My job is now about tests and data — not children. I quit.
Kindergarten teacher: My job is now about tests and data — not children. I quit.I have watched as my job requirements swung away from a focus on the children, their individual learning styles, emotional needs, and their individual families, interests and strengths to a focus on testing, assessing, and scoring young children, thereby ramping up the academic demands and pressures on them.
Each year, I have been required to spend more time attending classes and workshops to learn about new academic demands that smack of 1st and 2nd grade, instead of kindergarten and PreK. I have needed to schedule and attend more and more meetings about increasingly extreme behaviors and emotional needs of children in my classroom; I recognize many of these behaviors as children shouting out to the adults in their world, “I can’t do this! Look at me! Know me! Help me! See me!” I have changed my practice over the years to allow the necessary time and focus for all the demands coming down from above. Each year there are more. Each year I have had less and less time to teach the children I love in the way I know best—and in the way child development experts recommend. I reached the place last year where I began to feel I was part of a broken system that was causing damage to those very children I was there to serve.
I was trying to survive in a community of colleagues who were struggling to do the same: to adapt and survive, to continue to hold onto what we could, and to affirm what we believe to be quality teaching for an early childhood classroom. I began to feel a deep sense of loss of integrity. I felt my spirit, my passion as a teacher, slip away. I felt anger rise inside me. I felt I needed to survive by looking elsewhere and leaving the community I love so dearly. I did not feel I was leaving my job. I felt then and feel now that my job left me.
the rest:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/03/23/kindergarten-teacher-my-job-is-now-about-tests-and-data-not-children-i-quit/?Post+generic=%3Ftid%3Dsm_twitter_washingtonpost
KRUGMAN nails it, Again: "Wealth Over Work"--- "And the drift toward oligarchy continues"
Wealth Over Work
Paul Krugman
NY Times (OpEd)
MARCH 23, 2014 (March 24th Edition)
It seems safe to say that “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” the magnum opus of the French economist Thomas Piketty, will be the most important economics book of the year — and maybe of the decade. Mr. Piketty, arguably the world’s leading expert on income and wealth inequality, does more than document the growing concentration of income in the hands of a small economic elite. He also makes a powerful case that we’re on the way back to “patrimonial capitalism,” in which the commanding heights of the economy are dominated not just by wealth, but also by inherited wealth, in which birth matters more than effort and talent.
To be sure, Mr. Piketty concedes that we aren’t there yet. So far, the rise of America’s 1 percent has mainly been driven by executive salaries and bonuses rather than income from investments, let alone inherited wealth. But six of the 10 wealthiest Americans are already heirs rather than self-made entrepreneurs, and the children of today’s economic elite start from a position of immense privilege. As Mr. Piketty notes, “the risk of a drift toward oligarchy is real and gives little reason for optimism.”
Indeed. And if you want to feel even less optimistic, consider what many U.S. politicians are up to. America’s nascent oligarchy may not yet be fully formed — but one of our two main political parties already seems committed to defending the oligarchy’s interests.
Despite the frantic efforts of some Republicans to pretend otherwise, most people realize that today’s G.O.P. favors the interests of the rich over those of ordinary families. I suspect, however, that fewer people realize the extent to which the party favors returns on wealth over wages and salaries. And the dominance of income from capital, which can be inherited, over wages — the dominance of wealth over work — is what patrimonial capitalism is all about…
…
the rest:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/24/opinion/krugman-wealth-over-work.html?hp&rref=opinion&_r=0
GOP Knew This Aortic Aneurysm Would Happen & Cheered
SUN MAR 23, 2014 AT 06:30 PM PDT
by Reinvented Daddy
It's been a common refrain on the pages of DKos over the past years that the Republican Party is intentionally, with harmful intent, misleading people about the Affordable Care Act. We understand that people will NOT buy insurance thanks to the lies put into the national discussion. Many of these uninsured would get sick and some would surely die. Well, with a week to go until the end of the Open Enrollment Period there are still some out there who have been scared off of Obamacare beyond their window of luck. Here is a sterling example of someone who, fortunately didn't die, but will probably end up in Medically Induced Bankruptcy courtesy of the Lies O' the GOP, aided and abetted by it's media stenographers.
A Letter To The Kaiser Foundation:
Meanwhile, a couple of weeks ago I went to the emergency department with an aneurysm of my aorta. I had surgery and spent time in the intensive care unit, and as a result, my hospital bill is nearly $200,000. I am retired and don't have much money coming in each month. I have heard that if your hospital bill is the result of an emergency condition, it is possible to get Obamacare retroactively and have these expenses covered under the plan. I would appreciate any insight that you can provide.
The helpful writer at Kaiser News spent three paragraphs explaining how Open Enrollment Periods work and deadline extension but they didn't seem to have the heart to say what each of us Kossacks knew reading that letter: She didn't have insurance when the bills were incurred and therefore no insurance company on this big Earth will pay those bills.
She can thank God, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Barrack Motherfuckin' Obama that she can get affordable, quality insurance tomorrow morning despite an existing aortic aneurysm but she is responsible for that $200,000 hospital bill in the eyes of the law. She will have bill collectors hounding her until lawyers take over, then the court will intervene and if she's lucky, they can use a Chapter 7 Bankruptcy to protect her home... maybe. In the eyes of ME, the responsibility sits with the craven GOP politicians and supporters who calculated that sabotaging the laws of the land would reward them with wins and jobs and windfalls of cash. They were right in the shortest term and Aortic Aneurysm will pay for that success for the rest of his or her life.
No doubt, by now, this letter is reflective of hundreds, may be thousands of souls who have allowed their Tea Party inspired fears to steer them into bad decisions but no there can be no doubt about who is responsible for these fears. The loathsome Republican Party takes more victims each day. And that is why we fight.
.....................................
http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Stories/2014/March/21/Andrew-Reader-Asks--After-I-Was-In-The-Hospital-Can-I-Buy-Insurance-To-Cover-My-Bills.aspx
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/03/23/1286885/-GOP-Knew-This-Aortic-Aneurysm-Would-Happen-Cheered
The Lessons of My Father – Nathan Phelps Speaks Out on Fred Phelps’ Death
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: March 24 2014 – On behalf of Nathan Phelps, son of former Westboro Baptist Church leader Fred Phelps, Recovering From Religion issues the following official statement:
“Fred Phelps is now the past. The present and the future are for the living. Unfortunately, Fred’s ideas have not died with him, but live on, not just among the members of Westboro Baptist Church, but among the many communities and small minds that refuse to recognize the equality and humanity of our brothers and sisters on this small planet we share. I will mourn his passing, not for the man he was, but for the man he could have been. I deeply mourn the grief and pain felt by my family members denied their right to visit him in his final days. They deserved the right to finally have closure to decades of rejection, and that was stolen from them.
Even more, I mourn the ongoing injustices against the LGBT community, the unfortunate target of his 23 year campaign of hate. His life impacted many outside the walls of the WBC compound, uniting us across all spectrums of orientation and belief as we realized our strength lies in our commonalities, and not our differences. How many times have communities risen up together in a united wall against the harassment of my family? Differences have been set aside for that cause, tremendous and loving joint efforts mobilized within hours…and because of that, I ask this of everyone – let his death mean something. Let every mention of his name and of his church be a constant reminder of the tremendous good we are all capable of doing in our communities.
The lessons of my father were not unique to him, nor will this be the last we hear of his words, which are echoed from pulpits as close as other churches in Topeka, Kansas, where WBC headquarters remain, and as far away as Uganda. Let’s end the support of hateful and divisive teachings describing the LGBT community as “less than,” “sinful,” or “abnormal.” Embrace the LGBT community as our equals, our true brothers and sisters, by promoting equal rights for everyone, without exception. My father was a man of action, and I implore us all to embrace that small portion of his faulty legacy by doing the same.”
http://recoveringfromreligion.org/584-2/
bzzz, Hillary Clinton caught my attention
Clinton Says She's Weighing 2016 Run
TEMPE, Ariz. – Hillary Rodham Clinton said here Saturday night that she is weighing another presidential campaign and is “very much concerned” about the direction of the country, citing climate change as a particular focus.
.............
hmmmm more:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2014/03/22/hillary-clinton-says-shes-weighing-2016-campaign/
Profile Information
Member since: Fri Sep 17, 2004, 03:59 PMNumber of posts: 72,035
