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>Have you ever wondered:
Why people wear heavy, or hooded coats when it’s 100 degrees outside?
Why people wear their belt/waistline under their buttox?
Why people listen to their car stereos so loud, they can be heard blocks away?
Why people buy lotto tickets with a one in a one hundred eighty MILLION chance of winning?
Why someone would leave their child/pet in a car when it’s 100 degrees outside?
Why people buy houses they cannot afford?
Why people have their cell phone ring on loud enough to hear it throug a solid brick wall?
Why someone would start a charcoal grill and grill inside their garage?
Why a credit card company who have sued you for a $4,000.00 balance, then offer to accept $2,000.00 to clear your account, IF you open an account with another one of their credit cards?
Why, if your relative murdered someone (beyond doubt) that you would sacrafice everything you have (including your home) for bail, just so they could be out of jail until the trial?
Why Republicans lie?
Why people vote for these Republican liars?
Why Republican talking heads like Hanity and others, do not have a college education, but are followed by millions of Americans who think they are the smartest people on Earth?
Why Republicans think social programs are a give away, after all of us have spent decades paying taxes for those programs?
I could go on, but it will just make Republicans look dumber and dumber.
Why Andy Rooney is still on television?
Posted in Commentary | 9 Comments »
>Republicans and other conservatives say Obama is a Socialist, or a Communist. He is not an American citizen. He is bankrupting America, and so many other lies, it’s not funny. It gives the public a false sense of the true facts and a lack of confidence (undeserved) in the President. If these people ever read a book on American History, they would be shocked at the truth.
Is Obama instituting the policies of LBJ, or FDR?
The New Deal, or the Great Society projects might be called Socialist, except they worked, served millions of Americans well, raised our standard of living and life expectancy, created the great middle class, and are one of the reasons we call our country great.
That we could end centuries old problems like early death among our senior citizens, starvation, bad medical care, massive homelessness, child (slave) labor, and pay wages enough to allow even the poor to have the basics of life.
It was not like that before these social programs, not at all.
It was the key to creating the great middle class, which was the key to our fantastic growth and financial stability from 1948-1983.
That all ended in 1983 when the Republican President (Reagan) cut our taxes in half. GREAT ! We all hate paying taxes!
Then the debts started to grow. 3 trillion under Reagan. 13 trillion by the time Bush left office. Then the overevaluation of homes and property. Then the frauds of Wall Street. Then the unemployment. Then the crash.
It is a lesson from History we did not learn. Similar situations happened just before the Great Depression. Read the History. Except, back then there were no safety net programs. That’s the difference between now and then.
Didn’t your parents ever tell you there was no such thing as a free lunch?
Who in the Hell did you think was paying the bills of America while the Republicans were promising you tax cuts?
How in the Hell can we pass this debt onto our children and grandchildren?
Who in the Hell are we (baby boomer generation) to pass on an America that is worse off than it was given to us?
Posted in Commentary | 5 Comments »
>One year ago today !
I have turned into writing about only politics. That is not what I intended, but what seems to interest people. Up until my surgery, I posted many things. Food, cars, space, politics, and commentary. Now, it’s mainly commentary. I suppose that’s because it’s easier.
Below is a re-post of my first post. Peruse the archives to see what kind of ride it has been.
Thank you all for your interest, especially rockync, my first reader and still reading (I think).
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I just started this blog today, July 27, 2009.
I call it “Stay A While” for no real reason, but I hope you will.
I like many things.
Politics is fine, but there are so many other things in life I find more interesting. I am a moderate. I like President Obama, but not all his policies. I do not want this blog to be a place where fights and name calling over politics is the main offering. It’s probably inevitable to have disagreements, and although I am not a prude, vulgarity and personal attacks will not be allowed on this blog.
I like sports, but at my age watching is the way I participate. I will not bore you with my past athletic glories, but I did have them.
I like cars, especially antique cars. You will see me post pictures and my dreams of owning a great classic car.
I love music of all kinds, but I guess I’m a little old to appreciate Rap, or Hip Hop. I listen to a lot of classical, Rock, Jazz, and Blues. I love the big band sound. I grew up with Folk music. I might consider putting a “play list” on this blog, but not right away.
I have a primitive computer set up. I am a dial up customer and rarely download videos, it just takes to long. I cannot download music. Photographs post fine, and you will see those. I do not have call waiting and my friends know enough to email me when they get a busy signal. I always check my email (hint).
I like going to antique shops and second hand stores. I stay away from the big malls. I am a frugal person, or as my family says, CHEAP. I cut coupons, buy on sale pretty much exclusively, two for one deals, I’ll eat anything so I buy what’s on sale. I’m proud that my cable is $9.99 a month. My phone is $25.00 a month. My electric bill is below $80.00 a month.
I have been into photography for 50 years and actually worked in the profession for a few years. This blog will not be a photo blog, but occasionally I will post some of my photo’s.
I read dry stuff like History, Biography’s, Poetry, Science. I will post poems once in a while.
I like space and the NASA program. That’s space fact, not fiction. I track the Hubble telescope. As soon as I get this blog together, you will find links to space projects and the Hubble.
I like movies, old and new. Movies of all kinds, but comedies are my favorite.
I do not have a green thumb, and over the years have given up on growing inside, or outside flowers. I plant shrubs.
Well that’s enough. This blog will change daily, as I get it to what I want.
I will gladly add your site as a link, or you can add yourself as one of my followers.
Feel free to comment. I am not judgmental, but will delete pointless vulgarity. That does not mean you cannot use a bad word once in a while. I’m old enough to not be shocked and you do not have to agree with me to state you honest thoughts. I will post my honest thoughts, and do not mean to offend anyone.
Posted in Introduction first post | 4 Comments »
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The Milky Way Over Bryce Canyon
Credit & Copyright: Ben Cooper
Explanation: What are those strange rock structures? They are towers and walls of sedimentary rock that are particularly plentiful in Bryce Canyon in Utah, USA. The rock columns may rise higher than 50 meters and are called hoodoos. On the far left is Thor‘s Hammer, perhaps the most famous hoodoo. The tall rock columns were carved, most typically, when a unusually dense cap of rock provided a layer of protection to rock underneath from rain-based erosion. In the above panoramic picture taken earlier this month and compressed horizontally, the foreground rocks were momentarily illuminated by a roving spotlight. Visible in the background are a few water clouds a few kilometers away hovering over the nearby Earth. Visible well beyond that are thousands of individually discernible stars averaging a few hundred light years away in the nearby Milky Way Galaxy. Far in the distance lie billions of stars that are thousands of light years away and compose the faintly glowing arch that is the visible central band of the flat disk of our Milky Way. Over many years, wind and rain will eventually cause the tops of the hoodoos to topple, whereafter the underlying column will likely completely erode away.
Posted in Astronomy | Leave a Comment »
>If you were homeless, where would you go? What would you do? Where would you sleep? Most cities have laws against sleeping in parks, or outside. You cannot just hike in and sleep in a federal park. You need money. You need to pay a fee every night. It’s not that you mind sleeping outside, but you cannot. Didn’t you pay taxes for 35 years to pay for those parks?
Didn’t you pay taxes for 35 years to pay for welfare programs? Now (and you never thought you would) you need those programs, but the hoops you have to jump through are crazy. You are treated like a criminal by the system. The public thinks your a bum and just ripping off the system. And the money to help, is not enough to get buy in the current economy.
Didn’t you pay taxes for 35 years for Social Security? Now your told that there will probably not be money left in the fund when you retire. If the politicians were negligent with that money, is that your fault? Doesn’t the government still owe you that benefit? After all, if you were not paying taxes for that program, you could have saved for yourself. And if the Congress had not spent that money on everything except what it was supposed to be for, there would be more than enough for everybody.
These programs were and are good ideas. Politicians have screwed it up. Mainly by sending the money somewhere else. People believe they are “entitled.” They paid the taxes, now they need the service. Politicians put the money somewhere else, and now they say “sorry” we don’t have the money. Of course after paying taxes for 35 years, the Republicans (who created the 13 trillion dollar debt) say the government should not have safety net programs. A little late! Now that they got your money, then spent it on something else, they tell you they don’t believe in those services and your out of luck.
People talk about not giving hard earned money to help others. Well it’s already been done. The same people needing help now, have been paying taxes (from their hard earned money) for decades. Some cannot bring themselves to ask for the help they already paid for, and others get insulted and frustrated by the system. This is not a give away! These are programs we have been paying for. After decades of paying to support these programs, now the politicians say no, we won’t.
Put yourself in the place of those who need help and paid taxes for programs that helped millions over the decades, and now you need that help. You don’t want to beg friends , or family, or a church you don’t believe in; and if you accept government money there is a public shame attached to it. WHY?
Do we feel shame when we use tax funded military weapons in anger? Do we feel shame when we use tax funded roads and highways? Do we feel shame if we use a public library, call a cop, or a fireman? It’s all the same. Using communally taxed services, knowing full well what those services are and who can use them.
You want to stop those programs, I disagree with that philosophy, but at least give me my money back! With interest please.
Posted in Commentary | 7 Comments »
>I’ve been repeating myself a lot lately. Mostly against those who refuse to admit the Republicans have brought us to bankruptcy; and the Historical fact that tax cuts DO NOT grow the economy, or create jobs as I showed in my “Mondale Was Right” post last year.
President Obama is not a political messiah. He is a good politician, with all the good and bad that implies. He compromises to much, especially since his party has majority in Congress. He wasted his time and votes trying to get bipartisan votes in Congress. He’s not using his “bully pulpit” strategically enough. He’s not keeping control of the ultra left in his administration. I could go on, but he’s still a far sight better than the last President.
The banks and corporations are the Scrooges in this mess. They are not helping America by simply cutting costs and employees to make higher profits, or keeping credit lines high and stunting growth of small business. There is more of an obligation for businesses in America, than just making money.
Republicans are right in one sense; it’s business that has to restart this economy. So why aren’t they? And if they do not, are we to let Americans linger in poverty, while denying them help from the federal government?
Republicans cry they won’t support any legislation that is not paid for. I sure wish they had that attitude for the last 30 years. They put America 13 Trillion dollars in debt, while pandering to voters by saying “No New Taxes.” What hypocrites, and dangerous leadership too. It’s no surprise that we are in a bad way, and no surprise Republicans are blaming Obama. That’s taking responsibility?
If you are not smart enough to educate yourself with the facts, then bow out, go play tennis. But don’t spew lies that foster false facts and turn a decent debate into a Jr. High School discussion. If you attack peoples blogs. or bloggers personally, well that’s grade school stuff and you deserve to be show up for the jerk that you are. And those who befriend that kind of behavior should not be surprised to find yourselves without readers.
So all you Republicans lets set the discussion on a higher level. What should we do to erase the bad policies of your party, that has built this 13 trillion dollar debt and high unemployment?
Leave out how badly you think Obama is and tell me what your national Republican party leaders should do about the serious mess your party and its leaders have gotten us into.
So far your leaders are saying no to everything and blaming Obama for the mess. That’s grade school stuff.
Got any better ideas, or behaviors?
Posted in Commentary | 4 Comments »
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Lightning Over Athens Credit & Copyright: Chris Kotsiopoulos
Explanation: Have you ever watched a lightning storm in awe? Join the crowd. Oddly, nobody knows exactly how lightning is produced. What is known is that charges slowly separate in some clouds causing rapid electrical discharges (lightning), but how electrical charges get separated in clouds remains a topic of much research. Lightning usually takes a jagged course, rapidly heating a thin column of air to about three times the surface temperature of the Sun. The resulting shock wave starts supersonically and decays into the loud sound known as thunder. Lightning bolts are common in clouds during rainstorms, and on average 6,000 lightning bolts occur between clouds and the Earth every minute. Pictured above, an active lightning storm was recorded over Athens, Greece earlier this month.
Posted in Astronomy | 2 Comments »
>Top Secret America grows out of control
DANA PRIEST and W ILLIAM M. ARKIN, Washington Post
The top secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.
These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by the Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.
The investigation’s other findings include:
• Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in some 10,000 locations across the United States.
•An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1 1/2 times as many people as live in Washington, hold top secret security clearances.
• In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings — about 17 million square feet of space.
• Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.
• Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year — a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.
These are not academic issues; lack of focus, not lack of resources, was at the heart of the Fort Hood, Texas, shooting that left 13 dead, as well as the Christmas Day bomb attempt near Detroit thwarted not by the thousands of analysts employed to find lone terrorists but by an alert airline passenger who saw smoke coming from his seatmate.
They are also issues that greatly concern some of the people in charge of the nation’s security.
“There has been so much growth since 9/11 that getting your arms around that — not just for the DNI [Director of National Intelligence], but for any individual, for the director of the CIA, for the secretary of defense — is a challenge,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in an interview last week.
At the Defense Department, where more than two-thirds of the intelligence programs reside, only a handful of senior officials — called Super Users — have the ability to even know about all of the department’s activities. But as two Super Users indicated in interviews, there is simply no way they can keep up with the nation’s most sensitive work.
“I’m not going to live long enough to be briefed on everything” was how one Super User put it. The other recounted that for his initial briefing, he was escorted into a tiny, dark room, seated at a small table and told he couldn’t take notes. Program after program began flashing on a screen, he said, until he yelled, “Stop!” in frustration.
Underscoring the seriousness of these issues are the conclusions of retired Army Lt. Gen. John Vines, who was asked last year to review the method for tracking the Defense Department’s most sensitive programs. Vines, who is familiar with complex problems, was stunned by what he discovered.
“I’m not aware of any agency with the authority, responsibility or a process in place to coordinate all these interagency and commercial activities,” he said in an interview. “The complexity of this system defies description.”
The result, he added, is that it’s impossible to tell whether the country is safer because of all this spending and all these activities. “Because it lacks a synchronizing process, it inevitably results in message dissonance, reduced effectiveness and waste,” Vines said. “We consequently can’t effectively assess whether it is making us more safe.”
The Post’s investigation is based on government documents and contracts, job descriptions, property records, corporate and social networking websites, additional records, and hundreds of interviews with intelligence, military and corporate officials and former officials. Most requested anonymity either because they are prohibited from speaking publicly or because, they said, they feared retaliation at work for describing their concerns.
The Post’s online database of government organizations and private companies was built entirely on public records. The investigation focused on top secret work because the amount classified at the secret level is too large to accurately track.
Gates said that he does not believe the system has become too big to manage but that getting precise data is sometimes difficult. Singling out the growth of intelligence units in the Defense Department, he said he intends to review those programs for waste. “Nine years after 9/11, it makes a lot of sense to sort of take a look at this and say, ‘OK, we’ve built tremendous capability, but do we have more than we need?'” he said.
CIA Director Leon Panetta, who was also interviewed last week, said he’s begun mapping out a five-year plan for his agency because the levels of spending since 9/11 are not sustainable. “Particularly with these deficits, we’re going to hit the wall. I want to be prepared for that,” he said. “Frankly, I think everyone in intelligence ought to be doing that.”
In an interview before he resigned as the director of national intelligence in May, retired Adm. Dennis Blair said he did not believe there was overlap and redundancy in the intelligence world. “Much of what appears to be redundancy is, in fact, providing tailored intelligence for many different customers,” he said.
Blair also expressed confidence that subordinates told him what he needed to know.
Weeks later, he mused about the Post’s findings. “After 9/11, when we decided to attack violent extremism, we did as we so often do in this country,” he said. “The attitude was, if it’s worth doing, it’s probably worth overdoing.”
The intelligence complex
Outside a gated subdivision of mansions in suburban McLean, Va., and past the armed guards and the hydraulic steel barriers, at least 1,700 federal employees and 1,200 private contractors work at Liberty Crossing, the nickname for the two headquarters of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and its National Counterterrorism Center.
Liberty Crossing is at the center of the collection of U.S. government agencies and corporate contractors that mushroomed after the 2001 attacks. But it is not nearly the biggest, the most costly or even the most secretive part of the 9/11 enterprise.
In an Arlington, Va., office building, the lobby directory doesn’t include the Air Force’s mysteriously named XOIWS unit, but there’s a big “Welcome!” sign in the hallway greeting visitors who know to step off the elevator on the third floor. In Elkridge, Md., a clandestine program hides in a tall concrete structure fitted with false windows to look like a normal office building. In Arnold, Mo., the location is across the street from a Target and a Home Depot. In St. Petersburg, Fla., it’s in a modest brick bungalow in a rundown business park.
Every day across the United States, 854,000 civil servants, military personnel and private contractors with top-secret security clearances are scanned into offices protected by electromagnetic locks, retinal cameras and fortified walls that eavesdropping equipment cannot penetrate.
This is not exactly President Dwight Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex,” centered on building nuclear weapons to deter the Soviet Union. This is a national security enterprise with a more amorphous mission: defeating transnational violent extremists.
Much of the information about this mission is classified. And that lack of specifics is one reason it is so difficult to gauge the success and identify the problems of Top Secret America, including whether money is being spent wisely.
A vast budget
The U.S. intelligence budget is vast, publicly announced last year as $75 billion, which is 2 1/2 times the size it was on Sept. 10, 2001. But the figure doesn’t include many military activities or domestic counterterrorism programs.
At least 20 percent of the government organizations that exist to fend off terrorist threats were established or refashioned in the wake of 9/11. Many that existed before the attacks grew to historic proportions as the Bush administration and Congress gave agencies more money than they were capable of responsibly spending.
The Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, for example, has gone from 7,500 employees in 2002 to 16,500 today. The budget of the National Security Agency, which conducts electronic eavesdropping, doubled. Thirty-five FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces became 106. It was phenomenal growth that began almost as soon as the Sept. 11 attacks ended.
Nine days after the attacks, Congress committed $40 billion beyond what was in the federal budget to fortify domestic defenses and to launch a global offensive against Al-Qaida. It followed that up with an additional $36.5 billion in 2002 and $44 billion in 2003. That was only a beginning.
With the quick infusion of money, military and intelligence agencies multiplied. Twenty-four organizations were created by the end of 2001, including the Office of Homeland Security and the Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Task Force. In 2002, 37 more were created to track weapons of mass destruction, collect threat tips and coordinate the new focus on counterterrorism. That was followed the next year by 36 new organizations; and 26 after that; and 31 more; and 32 more; and 20 or more each in 2007, 2008 and 2009.
In all, at least 263 organizations have been created or reorganized as a response to 9/11. Each has required more people, and those people have required more administrative and logistic support: phone operators, librarians, carpenters, construction workers, mechanics and, because of where they work, even janitors with top-secret clearances.
With so many more employees, units and organizations, the lines of responsibility began to blur. To remedy this, at the recommendation of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, the George W. Bush administration and Congress created an agency in 2004 with overarching responsibilities called the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to bring the colossal effort under control.
Not as planned
While that was the idea, Washington has its own ways.
The first problem was that the law passed by Congress did not give the director clear legal or budgetary authority over intelligence matters, which meant he wouldn’t have power over the individual agencies he was supposed to control.
The second problem: Even before the first director, John Negroponte, was on the job, the turf battles began. The Defense Department shifted billions of dollars out of one budget and into another so that the ODNI could not touch it, according to two senior officials who watched the process. The CIA reclassified some of its most sensitive information at a higher level so the National Counterterrorism Center staff, part of the ODNI, would not be allowed to see it, said former intelligence officers involved.
To be sure, the ODNI has made some progress, especially in intelligence-sharing, information technology and budget reform. But improvements have been overtaken by volume at the ODNI, as the increased flow of intelligence data overwhelms the system’s ability to analyze and use it.
Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications. The NSA sorts a fraction of those into 70 databases. The same problem bedevils every other intelligence agency, none of which has enough analysts and translators for all this work.
Among the most important people in this enterprise are low-paid employees carrying their lunches to work to save money. They are the analysts, the 20- and 30-year-olds making $41,000 to $65,000 a year, whose job is at the core of everything Top Secret America tries to do.
At its best, analysis melds cultural understanding with snippets of conversations, coded dialogue, anonymous tips, even scraps of trash, turning them into clues that lead to individuals and groups trying to harm the United States.
Their work is greatly enhanced by computers that sort through and categorize data. But in the end, analysis requires human judgment, and half the analysts are relatively inexperienced, having been hired in the past several years, said a senior ODNI official. Contract analysts are often straight out of college.
When hired, a typical analyst knows very little about the priority countries — Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan — and is not fluent in their languages. Still, the number of intelligence reports they produce on these key countries is overwhelming, say current and former intelligence officials who try to cull them everyday. The ODNI doesn’t know exactly how many reports are issued each year, but in the process of trying to find out, the chief of analysis discovered 60 classified websites still in operation that were supposed to have been closed down for lack of usefulness. “Like a zombie, it keeps on living,” one official said.
The overload of hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and annual reports is counterproductive, say people who receive them. Some policymakers and senior officials instead rely on personal briefers, and those briefers usually rely on their own agency’s analysis, re-creating the very problem identified as a main cause of the failure to thwart the attacks: a lack of information-sharing.
The ODNI’s analysis office knows this is a problem. Yet its solution was another publication, this one a daily online newspaper, Intelligence Today. Every day, a staff of 22 sorts through more than two dozen agencies’ reports and 63 websites, selects the best information and packages it by originality, topic and region.
Still building
A $1.7 billion National Security Agency data-processing center will be under construction soon near Salt Lake City. In Tampa, Fla., the U.S. Central Command’s new 270,000-square-foot intelligence office will be matched next year by an equally large headquarters building, and then, the year after that, by a 51,000-square-foot office just for its special operations section.
Meanwhile, five miles southeast of the White House, the Department of Homeland Security has broken ground for its new headquarters, to be shared with the Coast Guard. DHS, in existence for only seven years, already has a 230,000-person workforce, the third-largest after the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs.
The $3.4 billion showcase will be the largest government complex built since the Pentagon, a major landmark in the alternative geography of Top Secret America and four times as big as Liberty Crossing.
Posted in Government | 4 Comments »
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Andes Sunset Eclipse
Credit & Copyright: Janne Pyykkö
Explanation: On July 11, after a long trek eastward across the southern Pacific Ocean, the Moon’s shadow reached landfall in South America. In a total solar eclipse close to sunset, silhouetted Moon and Sun hugged the western horizon, seen here above the Andes mountains near the continent’s southern tip. To enjoy a good vantage point, the photographer hiked to a windy spot about 400 meters above a lake, Lago Argentino, climbing into the picture after setting up his camera on a tripod. At left, the sky outside the shadow cone is still bright. Below, the lights of El Calafate, Patagonia, Argentina, shine by the lake shore.
Posted in Astronomy | 4 Comments »
>Republicans really have a lot of gall to be screaming government waste about social programs (like food stamps) after they put this country into bankruptcy paying back their corporate buddies with tax breaks.
WASTE.
The investigations and screams should be aimed at corporations like Haliburton (Cheney’s old firm) for the waste in government contracts they received. Not only did this company get rich on the war, they did it at the expense of the lives of our soldiers.
Showers that electrocuted soldiers. Water that made soldiers sick. Food that made soldiers sick. Defective supplies, that did not work. After documented negligence like these, they got their government contracts renewed.
But, of course, food stamp fraud (about 5% of the fraud in Defense contracts) is more important than soldiers lives.
These Republicans are playing sick political games. Trying to get the public to forget about their fraud, and use their positions of authority and bully pulpits to raise public anger against liberal government help programs.
They not only helped kill our soldiers with their negligence and fraud, but they now attack the programs millions of Americans are depending on, to get them through this depression that the Republicans created.
Takes a singular sick bastard(s) to behave in such a manner.
Of course food stamp fraud is happening. It has since the food stamp program started. There is fraud in every government program since they all started. That does not mean these programs do not serve the people well, they do.
What kind of politician would put the small amount of food stamp fraud as a priority over the much larger abuses, that killed our soldiers?
Playing politics with our soldiers lives, AGAIN.
These Republicans have no morals. They have no conscience. They don’t care if American soldiers die for their selfish purposes. They only know the politics of fear and hate. That exposes a weak opponent, which means a weaker majority leadership.
If Democrats cannot use the true facts to convince Americans what Republicans have done to America, has hurt America, then they deserve to lose majority.
Posted in Commentary | 3 Comments »
>”If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot help the few that are rich.”
President Kennedy – 1961
I’m sure rich people read this as the Democratic entryway to Socialist government. But it is a true statement. If the poor are to poor, where will the rich get there money from?
The rich need us poor folk!
It’s way past time we start using that leverage. Actions of customers (boycots, negative press, 100’s of thousands of complaints, etc) will have a greater effect on large business, than trying to get elected representatives to stop bending to corporate bribery.
Capitalism still works. Companies still listen to the demands of customers. So lets start demanding.
Companies bet on quiet voices, to pass their bullshit onto the public. If your upset about the oil spill, stop buying BP gas and products. If you want to end fosil fuel usage, then pay more to buy alternative products.
Of course the key is getting a large minority to do the same. No company is going to change, if only 5% of its customers complain about something.
We have to become activist consumers and citizens. Flood Congress with calls and letters, and the same with companies.
If capitalism has a national, patriotic responsibility (I believe it does) it is to fill the needs of the people at affordable prices. Just because a company can survive serving the needs of a small minority (rich and well off) doesn’t mean it’s helping America. Making money was/is never the total object, or goal of a company within a capitalistic system.
Companies have a responsibility to provide for its employees and customers a business atmosphere that enhances the society they do business in, that includes a small consideration for what’s best for the country they do business in, America.
Posted in Commentary | 7 Comments »
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Concept Plane: Supersonic Green Machine
Illustration Credit: NASA, Lockheed Martin Co.
Explanation: What will passenger airplanes be like in the future? To help brain storm desirable and workable attributes, NASA sponsors design competitions. Shown here is an artist’s depiction of a concept plane that has been recently suggested. This futuristic plane would be expected to achieve supersonic speeds, possibly surpassing the speeds of the supersonic transport planes that ran commercially in the late twentieth century. In terms of noise reduction, the future aircraft has been drawn featuring an inverted V wing stretched over its engines. The structure is intended to reduce the sound from annoying sonic booms. Additionally, future airplanes would aim to have relatively little impact on our environment, including green limits on pollution and fuel consumption. Aircraft utilizing similar design concepts might well become operational by the 2030s.
Posted in NASA | 1 Comment »
Stay A While 
>In The Begining
August 1, 2010 by TOM
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These acts are not long ago acts by a less educated society. They are 21st century discrimination and racism of the most violent kind. Prosecutors and judges find the motivation for a crime most important in deciding punishment.
Lets not look to the past for the meaning of what rights an American has. Lets continue to enhance and include all citizens in the full umbrella of rights and opportunities. Why would the founding fathers include an amendment process, if they did not believe we could do better in future generations?
Posted in Commentary | 8 Comments »