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What has happened to this country…
I looked and looked online trying to find the funding sources for the National Rifle Association (NRA). I did not have a lot of luck.
Here is an article from Mother Jones that sheds some light on that murky subject.
Who Does the NRA Advocate For?
To answer their question…it is not the average gun owner, but the corporations that funnel money to them.
It is past time for sensible gun regulation in this country.
No more candle light vigils. No more piles of teddy bears. No more stacks of flowers. No more fences covered with ribbons. No more platitudes or speeches of remembrance. We react compassionately to tragic events after the fact. They fade from memory and we fail to act to prevent the next one.
There were probably a multitude of factors that collided in the Tucson shooting that left 6 dead and many more wounded.
First, it is much, much too easy to get guns in this country. I read recently that there are 85 guns for every 100 people in the US. If they were evenly distributed that would be almost be a gun for every man, woman and child in the US.
Secondly, access to health care in this country is atrocious Continue reading “No More Teddy Bears”
Cheney says he may have to have heart transplant — Link removed
To belabor the obvious: We can only regret he did not do that a few years earlier!
Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times Equality, a True Soul Food
He is summarizing a British report on the societal effects of wealth inequality.
Currently in America “the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans possess a greater collective net worth than the bottom 90 percent.” I do not understand why everyone, except the 1%, is not shocked and up in arms over this fact. But that is me.
The basic premise of the study, backed up by tons of data is this. With great wealth inequality you create a wide variety of personal and social stressors. There are increases in crime, Continue reading “Wealth Inequality = Social Problems”
From Robert Reich’s Blog…
The GOP Is Spreading a Big Fat Lie About the Economy — We Need Obama to Put an End to It
A friend sent me the following link: Scalia: Women Don’t Have Constitutional Protection Against Discrimination
The gist of the article is this. The 14th Amendment, specifically the Equal Protection clause, requires the states to provide equal protection to all people within its jurisdiction. Scalia is arguing that the Constitution and this amendment does not prohibit the passage of laws discriminating based on gender or sexual orientation. Continue reading “A New God Given Document”
I was in Lowe’s the other day. The fact that it was Lowe’s is only incidental. It could have been any of the many big box store chains that dot Generica.
They provided to me a pretty clear snapshot of the some issues that are troubling me about American business. It all seems to boil down to corporations being willing to sell out this country because they are more concerned about the quarterly profit statement and executive pay than anything else.
My first observation is that Spanish is nearly as prominent in the store as English. The lettering was not quite as big as the English, but it was only a small percentage less so. Continue reading “I Want to Buy American”
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I am still trying to figure out how I feel about all the illegal immigrants in this country and the various action plans floating around to deal with them. My gut reaction is not kind, but I know there is much more to the picture than what my knee-jerk emotions are telling me. I do know that many legal immigrants that I have spoken to resent the illegal immigrants that have not jumped through all the hoops they have, yet seem to be able to stay in this country unbothered.
Towards the end of clarifying my thought process I thought I would gather up some of the arguments, favoring and oppositional.
We have a tendency due to our dysfunctional political system to not act, to drift, to let the status quo rock on. This should not be the case with immigration reform as the current system is full of abuse, personal and systematic. Continue reading “Illegal Immigration – Pros and Cons”
Winner-Take-All Politics by Hacker & Pierson available at Amazon.com
The book is subtitled: How Washington Made the Rich Richer – And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class
This book needs another review like a hole in the head. Typing the full title into Google resulted in close to 30,000 hits. But hey, why not!
First and foremost, while I found the book deeply troubling and depressing, it is an important book to read if you want to really understand what is happening in Washington currently. This book really did not tell me anything that I did not intuitively already know from decades of watching the American political scene. It did reaffirm and document my intuition. Continue reading “Winner-Take-All Politics”