FREEDOM!!!!!!

I’m really sick today.. You see, when I was growing up, I was a history buff. I read childhood biographies of famous people, usually with the book behind the textbook while the teachers droned on and on, but once as a tyke, who upon seeing the obligatory National Park Film in the Williamsburg Visitors Center, after Patrick Henry sat down, I swore, I would always fight to protect the Constitution…. At that moment, even little as I was, I think I understood that I was temporary… But the Constitution like God, needed to be around forever…

With childish enthusiasm I imagined myself at times on the bridges of Lexington and Concord, roaming the swamps of South Carolina, and firing my muskets at King’s Mountain, and most importantly, crossing that line in the dirt on December 31, 1776 when no one else wanted to, to enlist till the end of the war.. . When it made the real difference, I said, I would step up at my own peril..

Today, I feel as George Washington must have, perched upon his horse on the New Jersey banks of the Hudson, watching the British inhabit New York and knowing there was nothing he or anyone else could do about it… Overmatched, the cause of freedom had taken a body slam.

Perhaps it is more like going back 2000 some years though. And being full of great optimism and hope for a burgeoning empire, a group of city states destined to prosper and rise, one whose morals would be impeccable, and suddenly without warning, ones best friend pulls out a knife and shoves it into your flesh and others pull out theirs, opening wounds where they can.

The Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution states that …. oh damn, here it is in it’s entirety.

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

Granted there have been times, particularly at war, when protecting Americans meant going against the grain of this… If someone is about to shoot you, I mean, it certainly would help if you know about it first…..

The problem with too much accumulation of information, is that once you have it, it can be used. Assurances along the lines of “I’ll never do that”… always down the line get replace with platitudes of…. ” I did it because I could…” or… ” I needed to.”

So having every thing you’ve ever done electronically in a file instantly accessed by simply typing in your name, can be a bit disconcerting… It’s a catch 22. If you have not a single demerit because you lead such a bland life, you get castigated for being a wallflower and uninteresting. On the other hand, if you take risks to live life fully, you get castigated for the errors you made… Either way, those with the power will use it to castigate you for something…. And though disguised as their trying to put you in your place, it is really their effective attempt to prove to others they wield power…

Today’s Senate voted overwhelmingly to continue the FISA Admendments Act. Like ACTA or CISPA or any other internet freedom restricting acts, had opposition been organized, it may have demanded another outcome. But today’s bill arose out of nowhere, and leadership demanded it pass, and pass it did….

Numb today, I understand the implications. It is like we chose to keep Japanese interned in concentration camps after the war was over. It is that bad.. If we are doing it for the Japanese, eventually someone argues, why not anyone else? And really, how else can one answer such an argument except to expand the offense to a greater scale?

I didn’t find about the attempted coup until waking up 3 am today. I did see outrage that Zuckerman’s picture was Twittered off a private feed! The silence over government taking our freedom, and the outrage over the release of privacy, is a stunning comparison. It begs the question: what is wrong with all of us? Shouldn’t the outrage be the other way around?

For the first time that I can find, we as a nation, have chosen to continue a war-powers act, on into peace-time. 9/11 is gone. Bin Laden is dead. We’ve preditor’d out Al Qaieda’s 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, in command. We are out of Iraq. We will soon be out of Afghanistan. We are not in a war for our nation’s survival. So why does the government need access into every American’s email, facebook account, twitter, photo’s? Why does the FBI need to show up at your facebook friends home, with a letter stating that you are under surveillance and then asking questions of their relationship with you, then forcing their silence by telling them that they can be prosecuted themselves if they even reveal to you that they’d had contact with government officials? Gee, did you ever had a friend get weird on you suddenly, like for no reason?

Should our government be allowed to do that?

According to the text of the Fourth Amendment listed above…. Absolutely Not.

And it was over before the child in me could even get his powder cartridge out of his gunnysack…

Parents, Administrators, and Politicians….

We all have a lot to do.

But, seriously, how can anyone prepare for tomorrows lesson, when they have this to do? No wonder our schools are failing”

From the Mind of Mike Matthews….

Donald Trump doesn’t even have this much to do. He has assistants. Administrators don’t have this much to do. They have assistants. Politicians don’t have this much to do. They have assistants. Not even Santa has this much work to do. He has assistants. But we are being told by all these that teachers don’t do their jobs….

Well, duh.

Obamacare Saves 5600 Delawareans A Total of $1.8 Million

(Courtesy of Delaware Liberal’s Hot & On Top Reporting)

Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced that 5,600 Delaware residents will benefit from $1.8 million in rebates from insurance companies this summer, because of the Affordable Care Act’s 80/20 rule. These rebates will average $351 for the 5,300 Delaware families covered by a policy.

Obamacare is working!  Obamacare is saving people money.  They were at the mercy of insurance companies before.  Now, they have $1.8 million in their pocket.

It is not because of Republicans!.. They are the ones taking money out of your pocket, handing it to the insurance companies, and saying “don’t forget about that campaign contribution in October.”

No one can trust Republicans unless you are making more then 10 million a year. No one.

So when they say the first thing they want to do in January is repeal Obamacare,  and now you can see why.

That want insurance campaign contributions… and that is all.  They don’t give a fuck about you.

Only Democrats can right the wrongs… Do what you know you must.  Swear on a stack of Bibles, never, never,  never, never vote for a squirmy, sluggish, beetle-infested, putrid, maggotty, caterpillerish, centipedific, millipederishes, multi-lensed eyeballed, appendage ringed mouthed, stinger-embedded, infectious bacterial infested, food coveting, ooze secreting, spontaneously defecating  insect who swears allegiance to the Republican Party….

Spray them with insecticide instead…..

(Wow, what a great demo idea for the Republican National Convention……)

Sometimes after reading truth like this, you just want to walk into a room of thronging with roaches, pretend they’re Republicans and squish them each and every one ………

Then There’s Newt Gingrich….

Again, lifted from Der Spiegal

The current favorite? He’s a political dinosaur, dishonored and discredited. Or so we thought. Yet just because he studied history and speaks in more complex sentences than his rivals, the US media now reflexively hails him as a “Man of Ideas” (The Washington Post) — even though most of these ideas are lousy if not downright offensive, such as firing unionized school janitors, so poor children could do their jobs.

Pompous and blustering, Gingrich gets away with this humdinger as well as with selling himself as a Washington outsider — despite having made millions of dollars as a lobbyist in Washington. At least the man’s got chutzpah.

The hypocrisy doesn’t end here. Gingrich claims moral authority on issues such as the “sanctity of marriage,” yet he’s been divorced twice. He sprang the divorce on his first wife while she was sick with cancer. (His supporters’ excuse: It’s been 31 years, and she’s still alive.) He cheated on his second wife just as he was pressing ahead with Bill Clinton’s impeachment during the Monica Lewinsky affair, unaware of the irony. The woman he cheated with, by the way, was one of his House aides and 23 years his junior — and is now his perpetually smiling third wife.

Americans have a short memory. They forget, too, that Gingrich was driven out of Congress in disgrace, the first speaker of the house to be disciplined for ethical wrongdoing. Or that he consistently flirts with racism when he speaks of Barack Obama. Or that he enjoyed a $500,000 credit line at Tiffany’s just as his campaign was financially in the toilet and he ranted about the national debt. Chutzpah, indeed.

Yet the US media rewards him with a daily kowtow. And the Republicans reward him too, by having put him on top in the latest polls. Mr. Hypocrisy, the bearer of his party’s hope.

“I think he’s doing well just because he’s thinking,” former President Clinton told the conservative online magazine NewsMax. “People are hungry for ideas that make some sense.” Sense? Apparently it’s not just the Republicans who have lost their minds here.

In A Perfect World….

Call it temporary insanity but let’s pretend, let’s just say, …that at one moment in time, if I chose to donate my youth out for my country, to be compensated back in the form of low pay; to completely and unjudgingly offer my fate up to the will of bureaucrats, all for the loss of my own self esteem, all for unending stretches of boredom, sparsed with interludes of a few intense seconds, that fortunately thorough my reactions and training, enabled me to continue living as I do today………….

I could reasonably be expected to be honored for that service to my nation, right?

In a perfect world, that is….

One would think, that in a perfect world, as needs were being debated across the universe of public funding, that a hierarchy resembling this, would sort of be the guideline, if not the rule?

National Heroes…..

over

We, The People…..

over

LLC corporations….

After all, if it weren’t for us, there’s a good chance those LLC. corporations wouldn’t be able to do business in a free and prosperous society, you would think?….

One would think, that if one of these heroes needed medical care, with the tremendous amounts of money being thrown away by our government daily, in the forms of corporate tax breaks enabling corporations to make “record breaking profits”…. that they would be put at the top of the list.. don’t you think?

Sorry, CEO… your operation will have to wait… We have a veteran who is in dire need ahead of you….

In a perfect world….

One would think, that a voucher system would be in place, or a blank check, where any veteran could walk into any hospital, and get immediate, necessary medical attention, have his prescriptions filled as a privilege for his service, and that the bill would be willing be paid by those with monetary resources more than adequate for their own needs?

One would think, (right?)… that it would be CEO’s, those who give pink slips so they can break profit records, those who cut benefits so they can break profit records, those who don’t invest in America so they can break record profits, ….who should be the ones finding themselves regulated to CEO hospitals, where they would then have to settle in on a waiting list for the next opening to occur, where they had to endure budget cutbacks and go without life-saving medicine because there was no money left in the CEO fund, perhaps because it had all gone to Veterans to pay THEIR expenses?

In a perfect world…..

In a perfect world, veterans would need no freebies…. They would not need welfare, or a pension, or a humble stipend to eke an existence… They would be working, contributing to society, in any way they could… If they had no legs, they would be outfitted at corporate’s expense, so that would not be an issue… If they had no arms, they could be outfitted at corporate’s expense so that was not an issue. If they had psychological damage, (and who wouldn’t?) they could be treated at corporate’s expense… so that was not an issue.

If they were so badly damaged that they create an efficiency drain on society, they could be honored for their sacrifice, and a useful voluntary capacity could be created to honor that commitment once made so long ago… Perhaps speaking about serving one’s country in every class, in every school, in every county? Can you think of any better civic’s lesson?

There’s a lot that can be done…

The problem is that veterans are deemed as just another expense…. Because to corporate America, that is just what they are… An expense, an obligation to be met that gets in the way of their making more money…

Unfortunately, our Congress is owned by Corporate America….

What should and does need to happen, is this relationship needs to be exposed. We need to call them out on it…

Republicans and Democrats are both complicit in allowing corporate raiders this unprecedented power. But Republicans are the symbol of Corporate America. Republicans are the ones who championed the Corporate Takeover. Republicans are the ones who dismanteled the safeguards that had been put in place to prevent that takeover from happening. That is why they need to go. Disappear… Whoever is left, the remainder, most likely after seeing the elimination of a large majority of their peers, will think twice before following their Dark Lord, now a soul less wanderer eking existence.. ……

In a perfect world…

Unfortunately, today we need to contend with obscene amounts of money saying Corporate is Good; Government Fairness is Bad….

But we have our lives telling us the opposite… It will take courage and strong will, to override all the overload of sensory data being pipelined into our soul, but we still have hearts, and those hearts are attuned to what makes America special. great, and the best place to live on this earth….

WE can still dream….

And those dreams should include a perfect world… one we CAN make happen, at least for those without whom we would not have the freedom, the resources, the nation, we have today….

Here’s to a perfect world?

A Most Wonderful Thanksgiving

Today I woke up above ground.

Wake Up Mike2 (squared)

Kilroy Nails it Good   This is exactly what it is all about….

Who Is This?

This is a guessing game. It’s supposed to be fun. You do the guessing. I’ll reveal the answer at some point in the future. Bottom line, I am interested in how this plays out. (To keep answers out of moderation, no links please.) You may use the categories above for some helpful hints, but knowing me, don’t expect to find the answer that easily.) 🙂

1) Foreign policy/defense: I want American imperialism rolled back and American interventionism halted, as the same time we begin to pull free from the military/industrial complex by slashing the budgets for defense and homeland security to reasonable levels.

2) Civil libertarian issues: I want to see gay marriage legalized; drugs decriminalized; Real ID abolished; the Patriot Act gutted; and immigrants viewed as human beings. I want intrusive government the hell out of my life.

3) Fiscal sanity: I want a government that stops growing and taking an ever-expanding bite out of my paycheck; I want to see wasteful programs cut, and to have Congress faced with the same sort of imperative the Delaware General Assembly had to face this year: balancing the budget.

Delmarva Just Doesn’t “Get It”

In an effort to educate my children, quite often old National Geographics are left around the house in various places. Usually they are teasers, one only has a few minutes to spare, but in those few minutes, lot’s can be learned.

Today, the one on top was June 2007’s titled “The Big Thaw.” I finally got a chance to read the entire article and gaze at all the pictures. Later when I went online, somehow my first two clicks put me here, which covers exactly the same material, and interviews the same persons. The visuals are stunning; the implications are horrific.

We are losing ice at rates long past alarming. So alarming that perhaps in as short as 15 years, many of Delaware’s homes will have to be abandoned to the sea…….. That means the year 2022. To those entering kindergartens this this year, by the time they graduate (which goes very fast by the way), going to the beach will be more of a “mission trip”, than a romp in the sand………

It is against this back drop that Delmarva is playing games. As Nancy Willing show us, while we face the oblivion of a large part of our state, Delmarva has hired a “Fudge Factor” operation, to bother Delawareans with this question:

If private citizens were willing to pay X dollars for wind turbines, and the government was willing to pay the same amount for wind turbines, would you prefer that private citizens pay for the turbines or the government?

Two more questions that were exposed were these:

“Would you be willing to pay for wind energy if it cost: $3 extra/month, $6 extra/month, $9 extra/month, $12 extra/month, $15 extra/month, $18 extra/month, $21 extra/month, $24 extra/month, $27 extra/month,…all the way up to $30/month (stated as “$360/yr.), or more?”

And just to show how caring Delmarva really is about the environment, they pull this question:

“Do you prefer Delaware offshore wind or wind energy from Pennsylvania?”

Nancy nails it. They are fishing for any negative information they can find to scuttle the deal they do not want. As most of us, including Matt Denn, Blue Water Wind, and NRG, who have commented, know too well that even if the information culled from the Delaware public is directly opposite to what Delmarva wants to hear, there is no guarantee that this Fudge Factor company, otherwise know as “Issues and Answers,” has no qualms about manipulating whatever information they find out.

It will require independent collaboration and the subsequent dismissal of Delmarva’s statistics, to forge a deal forward in this truly planetary endeavor…….

Does Delmarva Present An Undesclosed Financial Risk to Investors?

You may not like Hillary Clinton……perhaps her negatives are too high for you……but regardless of what you think of her personality and politics, she comes from New York. And that makes her something…………

You may think I came to praise her, but I am really going in the opposite direction and praising New York. What gives Hillary her credibility, is that some of the greatest people on earth chose her to be their Senator……

There is something different about New York. Not just the city, but the entire state has a distinctive unique characteristic. I guess it stems from the fact that no one, no one intimidates them. They don’t prance around Celia-like to politicians; they hold them accountable. Either the politician performs, or “he’s outta there.” ( The fact that a majority of them ‘dis Giuliani, speaks highly of them also. )

Today I got this snippet of news from the paper of a tiny little town near Minot…….It was an AP announcement that was deemed irrelevant every where but North Dakota……. It was an “A ha” moment, because it provides a solution that may have some bearing on Delmarva’s recalcitrance to “play ball by the rules.”

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is investigating five major energy companies to determine if plans to create coal-fired power plants present an undisclosed financial risk to investors.

There are so many parallels to our situation. First both of our Attorney Generals are sons of famous political fathers. Second, if creating coal fired power plants presents an undisclosed financial risk to investors, what does that say about Delmarva, who is spurning Blue Water Wind, a triple A+ investment, for continuing to receive power from coal fired power plants, a triple F- investment?…….

Obviously New York is staging an “strong offense” as their primary “defense” to open the Long Island Sound Wind Farm. Should they succeed and open their wind farm before Delmarva allows us to open ours, we might as well turn all positive financial growth opportunities for this state, over to them………..

What is ironical is that their AG is suing the “old school” of power generation for the same reason Delmarva is suing to stop the “new school” of power generation.

As I mentioned in a comment over on Tommywonk, one option we have is for our AG to sue Delmarva Power for presenting an undisclosed risk to the people of Delaware by their not allowing us a healthy, environmentally friendly, and far cheaper electricity than we pay already……But ideally, taking the investors side of the equation would be much cleaner, easier to prosecute, and based on evidence found in Delawares blogs, and all over the internet, ….”a slam dunk.”

As I pointed out before, Delmarva bases their cost on figures consumers were paying BEFORE THE 60% RATE HIKES TOOK EFFECT IN MAY 2006. (All their calculations use 2005 numbers). They use these outdated cheap numbers to make their case that Delaware consumers will pay more if they go with Blue Water Wind.

Therefore they are misleading their investors. I am not a legal expert, but I believe there are laws against that? Duh! That should put them squarely in the same boat as Enron. And we know what happened to those cronies……….

Delaware needs to pursue the same strategy as New York. Why should they get all the glory. After all, compare their two AG’s! Only one has a father who has run for the Presidency…….. twice.