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Courtesy of NASA
This past month, 36% of gas pulled out of the ground in North Dakota was wasted and went up as smoke. That is more than one third of all gas pulled out of the ground.
The reason. Profits.
“I’ll tell you why people flare: It’s cheap,” Troy Anderson, lead operator of a North Dakota gas-processing plant owned by Whiting Petroleum told The New York Times. “Pipelines are expensive: You have to maintain them. You need permits to build them. They are a pain.”This is why you need regulation. The idiocy of throwing away one’s future gold because it gets in the way of you currently getting more gold, is easily grasped by those with common sense….
Energy is yesterday’s food. Whereas during the Depression thousands of pigs were killed and buried in the Midwest to keep the cost high, while the cities were starving, today, it is energy that needs regulated to prevent that from occurring. While propane was going up in smoke, both North Dakota and South Dakota were suffering propane shortages due to the excessively cold winter….
If North Dakota simply had a state law that said no flaring, then companies would not flare, and a prescious resource would not be sent up to the stratosphere unused…..
Likewise when ever someone begins complaining about “too much regulation,” perhaps the first thing we should question, should be his motives?…
The free market has stopped working in ways that benefit America. As in 1932, we are due for a new reset… Sooner is better than later.
Dear fellow members of the Human Race.
I speak to you now from the heart. People are people. Some have good souls and some do not. You know as well as do I that no nation is composed of all of one type or all of the other… Each of our nations have both good and bad people in them. With every choice of direction taken, we must analyze if either of our nations are making a correct or incorrect step…. In fact across every life, each person must daily battle over whether what they are doing, the course of action they are pursuing, is indeed the correct one they should be upon….
This is coming to you from the heart. Your nation’s course of action is puzzling to me, to my nation, and to your fellow members of the human race now scattered across the planet. Your nation has come so far since the 1992, You are a highly respected member of the international community. You recently awed us by your mastery in hosting the entire world at your Olympics in Sochi.
With all that behind you today it is puzzling that your nation is embarking on a course of action that negates all that. One that makes you appear to be less of a great power in this world. Instead of greatness one would expect from the pageantry of Sochi, the very nation that beget Tchaikovsky and Tolstoy, we are getting the behavior of a warlord existing in a land in which there is no law and there is no order.
Among our species, there will always be disputes. There will always be disagreements between nations for as long as there will be disagreements between individual people. But civilized people have forged a means that deal with such. We have institutions that we respect and that we trust will not side with either one or another solely because of personal favoritism, but decide what they do, because they honestly think their decision will make the world a better place. For one to take a course of action because one has a superiority of force, is not conducive to a better future for anyone.
For it will cause my side to react. It will cause your government to react to our reaction. It will cause us to react to that new threat imposed on us by your reaction to what we did…. in all regards, further continence on the current path will be a step backwards for the world community, and for the entire species of man… It will be a return to the Cold War Days, where as one of your diplomats stated, “our tanks are again on your front lawn.” I hope you can see that if your nation’s current threat of force is continued, and that if this old retired idea that taking sovereignty from other nations were again to become the norm of Russia’s international behavior, then our nation and allies will have no recourse but to implant ourselves on the soil of those nations bordering next to your great country, for only the sole purpose to keep each of them from becoming the next Crimea.
This will of course intensify an arms race for both our nations. A race of resources that will have great negative economic consequences for your country, as well as ours. We are prepared and capable of undergoing it again, and you the Russian people should not doubt, that based on a comparison of our two economies, all global experts predict our side will win, again.
I hereby ask you to challenge your ruler, who seems bent on pursuing this destructive action. And one can make no mistake that it parallels a course our nation chose a decade ago when we wrongly under the guise of protecting our national interests, did something similar. However there are vast differences between our past, and this present. We tried diplomacy first; we used the UN weapons’ inspectors; we took our case before our own people, then to the United Nations, and from both we got a consensus of support. Unlike us, your nation just moved in.
To your nation’s credit, there has not yet been violence. You have acted far more civilized than did ours. There is still time for your nation to chose to return to the previous status quo of two weeks ago, then make your case to the UN, the US, and the EU. As is all diplomacy among civilized human beings, nothing will be dismissed out of hand.
You are a great nation. one that has come far. I ask the Russian people to consider whether going backwards in time, returning again to a Cold War, is truly the best option available to your nation… Isn’t cooperation, as was seen in the Olympic games held on Russian soil, a far more productive, a far more fruitful enterprise of action, than exerting one’s will through military occupation?
The stakes are not high. Yet your leaders hold them much higher and stress them far more important than most others think they seem to be. We simply ask that your nation returns to your rightful bases; that the referendum is postponed and allowed to be done properly with adequate international observation solely to provide credibility to its results. Our intelligence tells us the outcome is not in question; the numbers seem to be in your favor. However by rushing the referendum and having it take place in occupied territory, certainly will cast a shadow over many decades to come, of whether or not those results were indeed legitimate. As Russian people you should have no fear of legitimacy.. You have spawned many new nations since 1992, because those people chose through elections to be independent from Russia. It would certainly be fair in the eyes of the international community, if a nation or part of one, wanted to come back in…
But there needs to be legitimacy. It needs to be done in a certain way, under certain guiding principles, with the approval of the global community… Being wrong in the international community’s eyes is a costly endeavor; one of wasted investment. Again, many in the world community likewise disapproved of my nation, the United States’ military intervention into the Mideast now over a decade ago. Many Russian people were among them… I ask you now, speaking from the heart, if it was wrong for us, and it was, why would it not be wrong for Russia to do exactly the same thing?
There are many commonalities between the Russian people and those of the United States of America. We both have children, and grandchildren. We both want what is best for them probably more than we care about ourselves… The collision course our two nations are headed towards now, is not good for either of our progeny, no matter where they call home….
We have no quarrel with where Crimea itself wishes to end up. My only concern is how that gets determined, and whether I have to expend expensive resources to make sure that no other nation with a border touching Russia, ever has to worry about the same thing happening to them… Western Europe is thriving and prosperous today, because of actions that the US took 70 years ago. Indeed our investment back then has paid off handsomely. We are prepared to do it again if we must. However our doing so, does not help your children or our children, have the better future which they could have, if our two nations were to always work within the structure and framework provided by, for and to the global community, in order to achieve our interests and build to better future…
I ask all Russian people to make their will known, that they as we suspect, would also prefer a peaceful world, a civilized world, a world whose future is based on the best intentions of mankind, to one day hand over to both our children…
There is still time for Russia to act magnanimously; if there is the Will. …By the grace of the God present in us all on either continent, we pray for the sake of the civilized future of both our nations, that deep within every Russian, that Will is still there….
From the CBO, we have it outlined like this… If we raise minimum wage to 10.10, we lose 500,000 jobs. If we raise it to $9.00 we lose 100,000 jobs…
Is it better to work and receive more money, or is it better to have more people working for less, but at least they are working….
Great question. There were 3.3 million people making minimum wage in 2013…. The wage will jump from $7.25 to $10.10 or jump from $7.25 to $9.00. The first is an increase of $2.85; the second is an increase of $1.75… The impact of that increase on 3.3 million people are as follows.
3.3 million X $2.85 = $9.405 million/hour increased purchasing power
3.3 million x $1.75 = $5.775 million/hour increased purchasing power
3.3 million X $0 (no change) = $0.00 No change; same as it every was.
But wait. Job losses are bound to occur. If we take the CBO’s estimate, we get the first minus 500,000; the second minus 100,000.
(3.3 million -500,000) X $2.85 = $ 7.98 million/hour economic benefit
(3.3 million -100,000) X $1.75 = $ 5.60 million/hour economic benefit
(3.3 million- 0) X $ 0 (no change) = $0.00 no change from the past
There you go… We get more economic push by going with the $10.10 number despite the possible loss of jobs. .We got an answer. Gee. What was so hard about that?
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Appendix:
Someone else brought up the idea that those people put out of work, have a negative influence upon the equation… To be honest prior to their mentioning it, at first, I really hadn’t thought about it. It never occurred to me, because mathematically they would be zeros. Interesting, huh? How the brain works? My focus was on how much positivity a minimum wage increase would generate… And because of my positivity I have trouble accepting that there is a negative influence for letting those people go. But just in case there is, let me put it down here as well since someone brought up the fact that those leaving the work force would be decreasing the total pool of potential earnings by their future estimated earnings with which had they been previously working. Which in this case, would be the minimum wage rate… applied at both the levels of 500,000 and 100,000….
((3.3 million -500,000) X $2.85) – (500,000 X $7.25) = $ 4.355 million/hour economic benefit
((3.3 million -100,000) X $1.75) – (100,000 X $7.25) = $ 4.875 million/hour economic benefit
(3.3 million- 0) X $ 0 (no change) = $0.00 no change from the past….
That changes the impact. There are several problems with this last model. One, is that its total, is a theoretical rate representing everyone working per hour. Those being laid off can’t really be a negative against this because everyone who is still working, IS making that much… This is the net increase amount which will be reported, earned, and taxed. Secondly, if you are out of work you are making zero dollars, and not an actual negative amount which challenges whether the principle is sound to deduct a cost away from the benefit when making this particular comparison. One could do so, if one was expostulating a potential benefit which would have to be benchmarked against full employment, and not against the incremental amounts. For example if we had access to the number of hours worked at minimum wage in this country over a set time period, we could actually make that comparison by plugging in these two rates..
As it stands we can already compare these totals to the status quo, and there is a definite positive bump in economic activity… Plus, if those temporarily laid-off people get other jobs, ones that actually pay more than minimum wage, then they are off the chart, and that negative is not there at all. The underlying assumption for there to be an existing negative, is that these people losing their jobs, immediately and forever stop contributing to the economy…
Therefore probably the best comparison to achieve that would be painted like this…
3.3 million X $2.85 = $9.405 million/hour increased purchasing power – (.5 million X 7.250 = $9.405 – $3.625 = $5.78)
3.3 million x $1.75 = $5.775 million/hour increased purchasing power – (.1 million X 7.250 = $5.775 – $0.725 = $5.05 )
3.3 million X $0 (no change) = $0.00 No change; same as it every was.
That probably is the best description since it contrasts against the potential possibility of earnings.
But as policy this shows Delaware’s Tom Carper to be very wrong when he was quoted as saying that the lower amount of increase would be best for this country…
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In a recent piece I did on Biden, as I read over his biography I was reminded of his plagiarism incident in 1988. He dropped out of running for the presidency because he forgot to attribute an Irish speaker before quoting him on one of his hundreds of stops that day… The “uproar” caused him to drop out of the race.
He dropped out for that little thing?
Today we have Ron Paul plagiarizing every line said this past legislative session. As if to reward that, he is now considered a top contender for the Republican presidential nomination. Today we have Fox News blatantly lie through careful edits, and no one cares. We have CBS create a fake story about Benghazi, and no one cares…. We are fed daily lies in the House of Representatives; no one calls them out anymore… Our own News Journal publishes gross misstatements by our Secretary of Education, and only bloggers call them out.
But Biden was ridiculed and totally forced out of the race for forgetting one time to mention Kinnock before he borrowed a line from him…
The big difference is the uproar… It started deteriorating after 1994.
I remember Newt Gingrich throwing irrational after irrational accusations out against Clinton. I asked an old politico what he was doing… ” Sounds like he is just throwing mud to see what will stick.”
It hasn’t stopped sense. Ridiculous claims get emailed to the press. The press puts them up, and others talk about how ridiculous such accusations are. Then someone finds a similarity to something that may have really happened and suddenly a scandal is born. The crime is solely in the similarity, not the actual action… Next the press is talking about how much damage these items will cause the person being accused. The person himself gets asked, and we all will then judge his guilt by his demeanor in giving back his rebuttal… If his eyes shift, we discuss his guilt. If he misses a point, we discuss how he missed his point….and whether or not both show weakness in their leadership…
Yet it was all over something absolutely ridiculous originally said by someone making things up out of thin air and throwing mud…
Today, when I hear news from any of the main media, my first response is not to believe it…. “yeah, right I say”.
Isn’t that terrible? I’m just like those Soviets reading the Pravda. The assumption being made by me is that the story is reported only after being edited by the propaganda officer of the news corporation. No matter whether that media is grounded from the right or left, if it comes from any commercial media, it can’t be believed. I’m not sure how your mind works today but to borrow from computer technology, I tend to put all main media stories into a nebulous cloud, a purgatory of thought so to speak. As more nuggets get offered, I let them settle them into either columns of pros or cons supporting or denying the original nugget, and then have to use my guessing powers to determined which story of the pro or con is the more truthful….
It’s a lot of work.
The point is, our society has moved past telling the truth....
Truth is not what is important anymore.. Making you believe what they want, is the sole purpose of messaging… It is not about telling you that such and such happened… Absolutely almost all of our messaging system is set up to tell us that such and such a thing happened … because of this reason….
Hate Liberals! Because this thing happened.
Hate Conservatives! Because this thing happened.
Hate Communists and Socialists! Because this thing happened.
Hate Corporate America! Because this thing happened….
And the erosion of telling truth is huge…. Our courts for the most part have determined political discourse does not have to be factual, certainly not the ads. A new industry has developed to test the truth of political statements, because the press fell down on the job. Our courts have determined for the most part, that lying shall not to be punished. Whenever our government speaks today, it is not believed.
“We have nor will ever have any means or desire to collect American’s metadata and store it so we can go back and look through it” said May 2013 by the head of the NSA; Snowden released the truth just over a month later.
Truth no longer relates to the science of what happens; truth has become the art of stretching belief up to the edge of the envelope without going too far.
Our real lives are always fret with uncertainty, of intrigue, of mistrust. Which is why it was reassuring to have laws on the books regarding the truth being told by our media. We could trust it as being true to the best of their knowledge, because they would be incarcerated if it were not so….
It freed our minds considerably.
So in a proper frame of mind, in a world of truth, Obamacare would be framed as thus:
Obama had a mandate through the electoral process to improve the health insurance system for everyday citizens, but Republicans sought to represent the Large Insurance Companies all who would make less profit if they had to fairly pay out claims… Every little fight was then laid out in that context.
What is sad, is that our children as were those children once of Communist China, Soviet Russia, East Germany, Albania, and Bulgaria, are growing skeptical of all official pronouncements.
Slogans saying “capitalism is corrupt” ring hollow when you have to stand in line for a daily loaf of bread, and you see Americans shopping in supermarkets lined with products. Our news media is now in the same boat.
When was the last time you saw a major media state we seriously need to raise taxes on the top one percent if we are ever going to have a strong America again?
Never?
When you do, stick close to that source. They are close to telling the truth….
Gate’s Slams Biden the headline read… In it the paper went directly to the money quote by Bob Gates: “I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” Four decades is a long time. Going back from today it would begin in 1974.
Of course making decisions invites controversy. In any decision, there are those who agree, those who don’t. The only effective judge of any action plan, is how it stands up historically. One can be on the least popular side, and be proven right as perhaps one considers those who protested the Vietnam War in the 60’s and 70’s for example. Or one can be on the more popular side and be proven wrong, such as our move into the War in Iraq in 2003.
I quickly found an account that outlined Biden’s foreign policy over 4 decades and simply listed what was forthcoming. You can judge for yourself, the right and wrong choices Biden made… I predict you will find that unless you yourself are one who consistently chooses wrong when it comes to our nation’s future (as in Conservative), you will find that Gate’s exaggeration is a bit overblown….
Biden in the beginning focused on arms control issues. In response to the refusal of Congress to pass the SALT II, Biden took the initiative to meet the Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, educated him about American concerns and interests, and secured several changes to address objections of the Foreign Relations Committee.
When the Reagan administration wanted to interpret the 1972 SALT I Treaty too loosely in order to allow the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars) to proceed, Biden was who argued for strict adherence to the treaty’s terms.
Biden clashed again with the Reagan administration in 1986 over economic sanctions against South Africa. Reagan was against them. Biden for.
Biden can be classified generally as a liberal internationalist in foreign policy; he collaborated effectively with important Republican Senate figures such as Richard Lugar and Jesse Helms and sometimes went against elements of his own party
Biden was co-chair of the NATO Observer Group in the Senate. Biden met with some 150 leaders from nearly 60 countries and international organizations; three times he chaired the Subcommittee on European Affairs..
Once the Bosnian War broke out, Biden was among the first to call for the “lift and strike” policy of lifting the arms embargo, training Bosnian Muslims, and supporting them with NATO air strikes, and investigating war crimes.
In 1999, during the Kosovo War, Biden supported the NATO bombing campaign against Serbia and Montenegro,and co-sponsored with his friend John McCain the McCain-Biden Kosovo Resolution, which called on President Clinton to use all necessary force, including ground troops, to confront Milosevic over Serbian actions in Kosovo…
In 1998, Congressional Quarterly named Biden one of “Twelve Who Made a Difference” for playing a lead role in several foreign policy matters, including NATO enlargement and the successful passage of bills to streamline foreign affairs agencies and punish religious persecution overseas…
Biden had voted against authorization for the Gulf War in 1991 siding with 45 of the 55 Democratic senators
Biden was a strong supporter of the 2001 war in Afghanistan, saying “Whatever it takes, we should do it.”
The Bush administration rejected an effort Biden undertook with Senator Richard Lugar to pass a resolution authorizing military action only after the exhaustion of diplomatic efforts before the Bush invasion of 2003.
Biden argued repeatedly that the Iraqi war should be internationalized, that more soldiers were needed, and that the Bush administration should “level with the American people” about the cost and length of the conflict.
Biden’s stance had shifted, and Biden opposed the troop surge of 2007, saying General David Petraeus was “dead, flat wrong” in believing the surge could work….
Biden was a leading advocate for dividing Iraq into a loose federation of three ethnic states…. similar to how the US is formed.
Biden lost an internal debate to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton regarding his opposition to sending 21,000 new troops to the war in Afghanistan.
Joe Biden became the administration’s point man in delivering messages to Iraqi leadership about expected progress in the country.
Biden’s January 2010 visit to Iraq in the midst of turmoil over banned candidates from the upcoming Iraqi parliamentary election resulted in 59 of those candidates being reinstated by the Iraqi government two days later.
In a controversy arising over how much influence Russia still had on a global scale, Secretary of State Clinton quickly disavowed Biden’s remarks disparaging Russia as a power.
Biden led the successful administration effort to gain Senate approval for the New START treaty.
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So what was your score? By my count and it should differ by each person’s outtake and priorities, I count him wrong on five out of the list of the above. (and even two of them were very hard choices)
So …. why the contrarian role announced by Gates? This may well be the reason.
Biden’s most important role within the administration has been to question assumptions and playing a contrarian role. Obama said that, “The best thing about Joe is that when we get everybody together, he really forces people to think and defend their positions, to look at things from every angle, and that is very valuable for me.” Another senior Obama advisor said Biden “is always prepared to be the skunk at the family picnic to make sure we are as intellectually honest as possible.”
Simply based on an apolitical history across his lifetime, it now seems obvious that when someone in ignorance makes a disparagement over the effectiveness of one former Senator and current Vice-President Joe Biden , what they are really saying, is a rather negative commentary about a lack of their own astuteness, and not a disparagement about the real Joe Biden….
- One: This is Gate’s retirement: it needs to be big.
- Two: if this was a praise Obama book, it would sell very few copies.
- Three: Releasing the name-callings did it’s job: this book is now hyped.
- Four: We are only seeing the parts released by the book’s propagandists.
- Five: Most of the statements are not news.
- Six: The Afghanistan Story was already told by Bernstein. Gates replays the same conversations.
- Seven: It’s a book. It’s about money. And we know that Gates did work well with Obama as he did with Bush W.
- Eight: We now know that Biden-Obama get along far better than did Bush-Cheney….
What is amazing is how quickly the extremists in the media raced to hype the slurs, as if they were given bonuses to make Obama look bad… As for the rest of us… Yawn. Based on what I’ve heard, I don’t think I’m buying the book. Are you?
America survived a crises that will be in our grand children’s history books. I’m sure they will wonder about us, just as we often wondered what America was thinking during the Republican Era of the 20’s, when they actually outlawed alcoholic beverages.
Here is a potpourri of takeaways…
Extremism should be shunned, not idolized. There is no place in a civilized world for extremism. We’re adults now, We’ve grown past that. Whether the Tea Party, Al Qaeda, or the Koch Brothers, the world was a safer place when we kept people like that locked up.
We are a pluralistic society. We really do have districts that believe and support what the Tea Party stands for. We have the same for Democrats, and for moderate Republicans. Our political system needs to represent reality, by evolving to 3 parties. No one objects to Bernie Sanders being neither a Democrat or Republican. In fact he is revered for speaking his mind. Really. Were he forced to toe the line of any party, we’d all be poorer for it. The Republicans need to shove off the teas, and look towards the BlueDogs to augment their numbers. Suddenly we’d have clarity.
It’s time to work with people. Stop going it “my way or the highway” … That is posturing. It gets nothing done.
A lot of people lost a lot of money, for something that we all knew would pan out just this way a long time ago… We could have handled it differently. It is time to change the House and Senate rules that make us worship obstruction and damn cooperation.
Shutting the government down and risking economic default, is very similar to extending a huddle while the clock is running and the other team has control of the ball. Our huddle is a bubble; not the real world. We now have to come from behind vis a vis China. They scored a couple of touchdowns during our intra-team argument.
Things get done in the Senate, not the House. I would venture it is because Senators, as are governors, are elected by their entire state. They can’t be too extreme because they have to represent everyone. House members in gerrymandered districts, don’t have to represent anyone. That makes them ideal pawns to used by larger forces to wreak havoc upon the normal governmental process. One could say (with a wink and a nod) that this compromise was forged in great degree, by the influence of Mitch McConnell’s challenger.
If someone is dead wrong, and you don’t flinch, they will. The American people are the ultimate judge and they usually get it right.
I heard more honest reporting in the American media on this episode, than I have ever heard in my life. Real facts. The truth. Things one usually does not find in the American media. I heard spin too, but the media cleaned itself up pretty well, making it obvious those doing the spin were spinning, and all those doing the spinning turned out to be pretty pathetic jokes. Seriously, jokes. Kind of puts new meaning into the phrase: “Does anyone know what (the) Fox says?”
We do this entire thing, all over again in thirteen weeks… Starting from scratch… Again. Go figure.
When you discuss single sex marriage with Conservatives you discover early on that they really don’t have a problem with single sexes marrying and living together over a lifetime in a relationship of trust; they just don’t like gay sex.
For them, as soon as sodomy laws went off the books, society went to hell…
Not every one is going to enjoy gay sex. Just like everyone is not going to enjoy heterosexual sex. People are different. People want different things.
But Gay Marriage is not about gay sex. Just like heterosexual marriage is not all about vaginal sex. How do we know this? Because before Viagra, heterosexual marriages still lasted till the end of a partner’s lifetime, way long after sex was a distant memory.
Marriage has nothing to do with sex. Never has. Never will. Marriage is about the pursuit of happiness. It is a) about being wanted, b) about showing your love, and c) about taking care of the one you love after you’ve passed on.
Conservatives have big misconceptions when it comes to what marriage is… It is not about family. Large numbers of heterosexual couples do not have children. It is not about the particular God of their ancestors; marriage stretches across all religions. It is not about sharing lives together till the end; that doesn’t happen very often these days. Divorce does.
And Marriage is not about wholesomeness. I could meet someone of the opposite sex and walk into a courthouse somewhere, get married and that document would be honored anywhere in the world. It makes no difference to anyone if I just met a perfect stranger and tied the knot on a whim. All that matters to them is that I have a document…
For you see, because I’m heterosexual and because Conservatives even though they dispise women still don’t hate heterosexuals, as one, I can marry…. and so can you.
So in essence, the sole reason boiling down to having a sanction as to why gays cannot marry, is because if we do allow them to do so, then they are no longer subservient to us. They are not a “caste” beneath us. They are equal and can then heaven forbid, be free to climb up the status ladder to levels even above us. Yep. that is the only Conservative argument still standing as to why gays should not get married….
The way they say it when they’re stone-ass drunk? You can’t get married because I’m a bitter old fart and my life sucks so you are going to have to be more miserable than I am… , so suffer bitch….
I couldn’t have characterized conservatives any better myself….
Whereas that characterization may have been perfectly fine if we lived in Idi Amin’s Uganda all the way back in the 70’s, it doesn’t represent the values within our Declaration of Independence. Nor does it reflect the principles of our Constitution.
All men are created equal. It does say “all”, correct?
Granted. It took America too long to realize that people with melanin in their skin were people too. It took America too long to realize that people with estrogen and breasts, were people too. It has likewise taken too long for America to understand that people who like people who happen to be of the same gender as themselves, are people too….
It is simply time, ladies and gentlemen.
(And who says they have to have sex? You? Who probably haven’t gotten “the good stuff” in your marriage for… how long?)
It is simply time.
By now, everyone knows the Republicans are the ones who created the sequester. So let us look at what they did to us,here living in both the first state and second smallest state.
If sequestration were to take effect, some examples of the impacts on Delaware this year alone are:
Teachers and Schools Delaware will lose approximately $1.4 million in funding for primary and secondary education, putting around 20 teacher and aide jobs at risk. In addition about 2,000 fewer students would be served and approximately 4 fewer schools would receive funding.
Education for Children with Disabilities: In addition, Delaware will lose approximately $1.8 million in funds for about 20 teachers, aides, and staff who help children with disabilities.
Work-Study Jobs:Around 150 fewer low income students in Delaware would receive aid to help them finance the costs of college and around 50 fewer students will get work-study jobs that help them pay for college.
Head Start: Head Start and Early Head Start services would be eliminated for approximately 100 children in Delaware, reducing access to critical early education.
Protections for Clean Air and Clean Water Delaware would lose about $1.1 million in environmental funding to ensure clean water and air quality, as well as prevent pollution from pesticides and hazardous waste. In addition, Delaware would lose another $359,000 in grants for fish and wildlife protection.
Military Readiness:In Delaware, approximately 2,000 civilian Department of Defense employees would be furloughed, reducing gross pay by around $7.6 million in total. Army: Base operation funding would be cut by about $0.6 million in Delaware. Air Force: Funding for Air Force operations in Delaware would be cut by about $1 million.
Law Enforcement and Public Safety Funds for Crime Prevention and Prosecution: Delaware
will lose about $83,000 in Justice Assistance Grants that support law enforcement, prosecution and courts, crime prevention and education, corrections and community corrections, drug treatment and enforcement, and crime victim and witness initiatives.
Job Search Assistance to Help those in Delaware find Employment and Training: Delaware
will lose about $86,000 in funding for job search assistance, referral, and placement, meaning around 3,230 fewer people will get the help and skills they need to find employment.
Child Care:Up to 100 disadvantaged and vulnerable children could lose access to child care, which is also essential for working parents to hold down a job.
Vaccines for Children: In Delaware around 380 fewer children will receive vaccines for diseases such as measles, mumps, rubella, tetanus, whooping cough, influenza, and Hepatitis B due to reduced funding for vaccinations of about $26,000.
Public Health Delaware will lose approximately $86,000 in funds to help upgrade its ability to respond to public health threats including infectious diseases, natural disasters, and biological, chemical, nuclear, and radiological events. In addition, Delaware will lose about $330,000 in grants to help prevent and treat substance abuse, resulting in around 400 fewer admissions to substance abuse programs. And the Delaware Division of Public Health will lose about $70,000 resulting in
around 1,800 fewer HIV tests.
STOP Violence Against Women Program Delaware could lose up to $19,000 in funds that provide services to victims of domestic violence, resulting in up to 100 fewer victims being served.
Nutrition Assistance for Seniors: Delaware would lose approximately $201,000 in funds that provide meals for seniors.
Delaware loses 15.1 million at least in funding forever if the sequester goes through….
Not only is that money lost, but the ripple effect impounds and deepens that loss. With every loss of a government job, there is a loss of a .67 of a private sector job…. The predicted loss or 700,000 jobs in March will be accompanied by 469,000 in the private sector….
Roughly Republicans driving us over the cliff, will put another 1.2 million Americans out of work…. again…..
And if you read Republican blogs like this one, they are laughing and laughing at how bad they are going to hurt America, how they are going to teach us all a lesson because we didn’t vote for their billionaire president….. They are smirking over the hardship and suffering everyone else will be living…
kavips 