NEON GODS

Some states are subsidizing private school parents under the guise of helping poor kids get a better education

Here's a good example of why I recently subscribed to the NYTimes.  We can't afford to lose investigative reporting like this.

State's phony tax breaks to help poor kids trapped in substandard schools get a better education actually end up subsidizing students already enrolled in private, often religious, schools.  This diverts tax dollars that could have gone to struggling schools.  

--Trakker

Catholic Church - where men wear dresses and funny hats, and women should just STFU.

I don't read Maureen Dowd very often.  Like Richard Cohen of the Washington Post she can make words sing, but often the targets of their ire make me face-palm.

But today Dowd hit a home run today when she excoriated her church.

I ALWAYS liked that the name of my religion was also an adjective meaning all-embracing.

I was a Catholic and I wanted to be catholic, someone engaged in a wide variety of things... So it makes me sad to see the Catholic Church grow so uncatholic, intent on loyalty testing, mind control and heresy hunting. ...

Absolute intolerance is always a sign of uncertainty and panic. Why do you have to hunt down everyone unless you’re weak? The church doesn’t seem to care if its members’ beliefs are based on faith or fear, conviction or coercion. But what is the quality of a belief that exists simply because it’s enforced?

For the life of me I can't understand why any reasonably intelligent human being would remain in the Catholic Church.  Of course they are a great fit for today's Republican party since both want to take America back to the 19th century!

--Trakker

Grow up Republicans. You're embarrassing yourselves!

More and more I'm thinking that Republicans are just adult adolescents who just can't let go of their childhood when it was okay to believe in fairy tales.  Reality obviously scares the dickens out of them.

Barack Obama was born in the state of Hawaii.  Hawaii was a state at the time.  It still is (I'm going slow so Republicans can follow me).  His birth announcement was published in local Honolulu newspapers at the time. Barack Obama has published a certified copy of his birth certificate on the Internet for everyone to see and officials of the state of Hawaii have looked at it and said it is an exact digital copy of his birth certificate.  People who knew the Obamas at the time have said they remember his birth and that the family was in Hawaii at the time of his birth.

And YET.........Republicans refuse to believe it!  My previous post tells of a Republican Congressman who has expressed doubts, Republican Joe Arpaio, Sheriff of his own warped mind claims to have investigated this and found that the birth certificate Obama posted is a FORGERY, and now Arizona's Secretary of State has opened his own investigation because 1,200 of his constituents believe the crazy Sheriff and not Hawaii.  PEOPLE, you are fools and the rest of us are beginning to think maybe Republicans are agents of an alien culture that is trying to destroy our country and our sanity.

Barack Obama, he of the foreign sounding name, brown skin, and all, believed that by 2008 the people of this country were mature and smart enough to look at the person running for office, and not skin color or funny name.  He was right, a majority of Americans broke with tradition and elected him.  But not Republicans.  They can't accept that this brown-skinned man who has an international background can actually be President of their white nation.  They are certain that if they say Obama's middle name enough, if the call him a Kenyan often enough, if they remind us of his race enough, and if they keep yammering about how "no one is really sure Obama is an American" that the rest of us will suddenly become bigots like them.  I guess that's how out of touch they are with the majority of Americans in the 21st century.  They should consider joining the 21st century sometime.

--Trakker

THIS is the best the Republicans can come up with?

Jeesh, this news flash shows a) how desperate Republican politicians have become trying to scare their base into action, and b) what kind of snakes their politicians are.

Rep. Mike Coffman (R-CO) is apologizing after being caught on tape delivering a birther rant about how President Obama is “not an American.” “I don’t know whether Barack Obama was born in the United States of America. I don’t know that,” Coffman said at a fundraiser last week. “But I do know this, that in his heart, he’s not an American. He’s just not an American,” he said, local NBC affiliate 9NEWS reports.

This is the kind of lies GOP Congressman use to energize their gullible, dimwitted, partisan audiences, but when those remarks get disseminated to a larger, saner audience, the Congressman runs for cover!

But now, Coffman, who has tried to paint himself as a moderate, is backtracking. “I misspoke and I apologize,” he said in a statement. “I have confidence in President Obama’s citizenship and legitimacy as President of the United States. … I don’t believe the president shares my belief in American Exceptionalism,” he explained.

You can't have it both ways asshole!  Do you believe our President is an American or not?  Was he born in the United States or not?  Who did you lie to, your partisan, "We believe everything bad about Obama no mater how stupid" base, or the rest of your constituents?

--Trakker

If there never will be enough jobs for all our workers, what do we do with the permanent jobless?

Okay, here's what I'm hearing.  Companies in America have found that they can meet their production goals with far less workers than ever before.  This is due to a variety of reasons: computers, automation/robotics, offshoring, lower wages, and desperate workers willing to work long hours without demanding overtime, etc.

This looks like the way things are going to be for the foreseeable future.  So if America only has enough jobs for about 65% of it's adults who are capable of working, what do we do with the remaining 35% who cannot find a job because they just aren't there?  These are adults who want a job, NEED a job, need a certain amount of money each week for food and shelter, and in many cases feed and clothe their kids.

Can 65% of the adults who do have jobs support those who don't (and remember, these are people who are jobless because the jobs aren't there and never will be.  Some will try to make the problem go away by labelling these people as lazy or parasites and thus they aren't our problem)?

This is a problem that must be faced and soon.  We can already see hundreds of thousands of American workers who have been jobless for more than six months, many for over a year, and companies are doing just fine without them.

So, what do we do? 

--Trakker

Politics sucks and it's the Republican's fault. Yeah!

When a lefty-leaning Brookings Institution fellow and a righty American Enterprise Institute scholar co-author a political op-ed like this, one must take notice:

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

Ya' think?  This has been obvious for years, even back in the Clinton administration, so when something like this appears in the oh-so-uptight WaPost of the Fred Hiatt domain, the dysfunction of the Republican party must be reaching psychotic.

I liked the way they opened their column,

Rep. Allen West, a Florida Republican, was recently captured on video asserting that there are “78 to 81” Democrats in Congress who are members of the Communist Party. Of course, it’s not unusual for some renegade lawmaker from either side of the aisle to say something outrageous. What made West’s comment — right out of the McCarthyite playbook of the 1950s — so striking was the almost complete lack of condemnation from Republican congressional leaders or other major party figures, including the remaining presidential candidates.

Republicans go positively bonkers when Obama claims many on the right cling to guns and religion (which any casual observer must admit is true), but when one of their own lies, LIES(!), that 80 Democrats are members of the Communist Party, they shrug their shoulders and ask "What's the big deal?"  The big deal is that there is no line the Republicans won't cross to regain power.

Read the op-ed.  It only says what I've been saying since I began blogging, but they say it nicer and far more articulately.

--Trakker

Nope. No racism here in America. None. And Unicorns are real, too.

A black couple buys a house in Newton County, Georgia, and when they begin working on it to get ready to move in they are confronted by armed neighbors and told to put their hands up and leave the house or they will be shot.  When the couple complains, the cops come, arrest them, and take them to jail!  For working on their own house.

But, no, there is no racism or racial profiling here in America.  Black people just like to whine and play the victim.

Right...

This is what African Americans have to put up with all the time.  Sometimes they end up dead (e.g., Trayvon Martin), sometimes they just end up being humiliated like this couple.  But every African American knows that a significant percentage of white people assume blacks are dishonest, lazy, and violent, and act accordingly.  And as long as this is the case, you better damn well expect their anger to be expressed like it was in the Martin case.  In fat the Martin case shows just how many whites are incapable of feeling any empathy for people of other races.  To them I offer my erect middle finger.

--Trakker

An editorial cartoon is worth a thousand words

Matt Wuerker, at Politico, won this year's Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning.  I'm a big fan of political cartoons, have been since I was a kid, but since I rarely visit Politico I wasn't familiar with his cartoons. 

Turns out they are great and certainly worthy of a Pulitzer.  Get thee over to this link and check out 20 of his best.

--Trakker

It's your country. You get what you pay for.

The Associated Press has good news and bad news for us.  The good news is that in response to higher gas prices more people are taking mass transit to work and for other trips.  Good.  That's good for the environment.  But wait, America's mass transit systems are crumbling and the added burden of more and more riders could force their collapse.

Driven by high gas prices and an uncertain economy, Americans are turning to trains and buses to get around in greater numbers than ever before. But the aging transit systems they're riding face an $80 billion maintenance backlog that jeopardizes service just when it's most in demand.

...decades of deferred repairs and modernization projects also have many transit agencies scrambling to keep trains and buses in operation. The transit administration estimated in 2010 that it would take $78 billion to get transit systems into shape, and officials say the backlog has grown since then.

In Philadelphia, for example, commuters ride trains over rusty steel bridges, some of them dating back to the 19th century. The Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority — which operates subway, trolley, bus and commuter rail systems — is responsible for 346 bridges that are on average 80 years old. Officials said they may be forced to slow trains or even stop them from crossing one bridge that's 1,000 feet long and 90 feet above the ground if it deteriorates further, leaving stations on the other side without service.

A key power substation relies on electrical equipment manufactured in 1926. There's no hope for acquiring spare parts, so workers try to open the boxes housing the equipment as infrequently as possible to prevent damage from exposure to the environment.

I recall Washington, DC's Metro subway system when it opened in 1976.  It was a delight to use, the trains and stations were clean and attractive.  Today, 36 years later the cars are worn out, the stations are drab, and the escalators are out of service at least a third of the time.

These systems, like our highways, are largely funded and subsidized by the government, and are falling apart because the right has convinced the people of America that our taxes are too high and that government is bad.  So our transportation infrastructure is falling apart - and the right continues to demand more tax cuts!

America used to have the best, most modern infrastructure in the world.  We used to be proud of our highways, airports, and subway systems and we paid high taxes to keep them that way, but now we're told by the radical right that the government is too big, it's bloated, it's wasteful. Instead we must rely on the private sector to make us great again.

Well, I'm waiting for WalMart to expand and modernize Washington's Metro.  Philadelphia is waiting for AT&T to rehabilitate their rusty, dangerous bridges.  It's going to be a long wait.

This is just more evidence that ever since Reagan, the right has pushed an agenda that will eventually usher America back to the 1870s, and the right won't quit until people starve and the trains stop running.

It's our country, people.  Just remember, you get what you pay for.

--Trakker

America: screw the future, it's more fun to attack strawmen and let big business run the country

Paul Krugman put to words exactly what's been bothering me,

America used to be a country that thought big about the future. Major public projects, from the Erie Canal to the interstate highway system, used to be a well-understood component of our national greatness. Nowadays, however, the only big projects politicians are willing to undertake — with expense no object — seem to be wars. Funny how that works.

As the radical right has taken over this country, it has done all it can to insure that America becomes an 18th century country in a 21st century world.  A nation of high unemployment, low wages, crumbling infrastructure, extremely high college tuition (that only the rich from all over the world can afford), and run by big business for big business, not the people.

The NYTimes, in an article today, reports that a lot of immigrant's kids, especially those from India, China and other countries with booming economies, are leaving the U.S. and returning home because they can see they have no future here.  So true.

--Trakker