firefly

Why do people who benefit so greatly, while needing it the least, from government handouts (farm subsidies, tax breaks for big corporations, financial institutions, etc.) support cutting food stamps?

Example: Rep. Congresswoman Vicky Hartzler of Missouri voted to make cuts to the food stamp program. Her farm received more than $800,000 in Department of Agriculture subsidies from 1995-2012. In 2001, her farm received $135,482 in subsidies. Rep. Stephen Fincher rakes in millions in farm subsidies while misquoting the Bible in favor of deep cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program

(Abe) Foxman (co-author of the new book "Viral Hate: Containing its Spread on the Internet) said many good things have come out of the Internet, but it has a dark underbelly & one step would be to work with Internet providers to help stamp out the abuse.

http://www.newsmax.com/newswidget/foxman-internet-...

Contractor to plead guilty over deleted computer simulations testing methods used to cement Deepwater Horizon well.

Halliburton has agreed to plead guilty to destroying evidence related to the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the US department of justice said on Thursday. The government said Halliburton's guilty plea was the third by a company over the spill and would require the world's second-largest oilfield services company to pay a maximum US$200,000 statutory fine.

Halliburton also agreed to three years' probation and to continue co-operating with the criminal probe into the 20 April 2010 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig.

By Reuters - 26 July 13

It certainly seems that our instant world-wide technological advances in communication & information gathering have eliminated any and all expectations of privacy – globally. We can't go backwards, so is there an answer, or are we all doomed to being the "open book" for all to read, along with the constant feed of mis-information?

Judge Murray Snow ruled against Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio on the grounds he violated the constitutional rights of Latinos who were stopped and detained as part of a crackdown on illegal immigrants and that Arpaio’s office cannot detain Latino drivers & passengers only on the suspicion they are illegal immigrants or use race as a reason to stop a vehicle.

The Sheriff’s office was also ordered not to detain Latinos stopped for a traffic violation longer than needed to resolve the violation. Latinos, since Jan. 2007, have been stopped, detained, questioned or searched by sheriff deputies in Maricopa County.

CAIRO (AP) — Egypt's bickering government and opposition need to overcome their differences to create "a sense of political and economic viability" if the country is to thrive as a democracy, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Saturday. He urged them to compromise for the good of the country.

A finger-pointing answer is a waste of time. This is "together" a Democrat AND Republican problem.

Joseph Stiglitz of the New York Times says that it is indeed a myth. That there’s a wide gap between aspiration and reality & the U.S. has less equality of opportunity than almost any other advanced industrial country.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/16/eq...

We must consider the time frame in which the 2nd Amendment was written and what our forefathers could only have meant within that time-frame & their experiences. They certainly were not talking about military-style assault weapons, including semi-automatic rifles and pistols like AK-47s and Uzis nor high capacity ammunition magazines to be used against each other. They were talking about militias & people being allowed to own a gun(s) to form those militias & respond during an outside threat to our form of government; our liberty. We now have well-trained militias (Nat’l Guard) along with our armed forces. We’ve come a long way since then.

We spent $30 billion to extend unemployment benefits last year. At the same time, we spent $205 billion last year to give mostly multi-billion dollar corporations (most of whom made record profits) tax breaks & subsidies along with tax loopholes. Many of these paid no US income taxes & haven’t for years.

Mourdock recently stated that pregnancies resulting from rape are a “gift from God” and something “God intended to happen.” Shortly thereafter, Romney doubled-down on his endorsement of Mourdock’s campaign.

Regulators are investigating whether several major U.S. banks failed to monitor transactions properly, allowing criminals to launder money. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the federal agency that oversees the biggest banks, is leading the money-laundering investigation.

Republican election officials who promised to root out voter fraud so far are finding little evidence of a widespread problem.

State officials in key presidential battleground states have found only a tiny fraction of the illegal voters they initially suspected existed. Searches in Colorado and Florida have yielded numbers that amount to less than one-tenth of 1 percent of all registered voters in either state.

Critics of the searches say, is that the efforts are focused on crucial swing states from Colorado to Florida, where both political parties and the presidential campaigns are watching every vote. And in Colorado, most of those who received letters are either Democrats or unaffiliated with a party. It's a similar story in Florida, too.

COLORADO

Last year, Gessler estimated that 11,805 non-citizens were on the rolls. But the number kept getting smaller. After his office sent letters to 3,903 registered voters questioning their status, the number of non-citizens now stands at 141, based on checks using a federal immigration database. Of those 141, Gessler said 35 have voted in the past. The 141 are .004 percent of the state's nearly 3.5 million voters. Even those numbers could be fewer. The Denver clerk and recorder's office, which had records on eight of the 35 voters who cast ballots in the past, did its own verification and found that those eight people appear to be citizens.

In the House there is a bill to raise our $7.25 an hour minimum wage to slightly less than $10 an hour over a two-year period, indexing it to the consumer price index so it rises annually as the cost of living goes up.

It would put a little more change in the pockets of hard working people who are barely keeping their heads above water.

Why is the Republican-controlled House refusing to even bring up such a bill for debate? Some say “Get a job” but these people have jobs – jobs that barely keep them breathing oxygen. What they make a year would not furnish the office of a CEO.

Keep in mind that corporate profits are at an all-time high, while wages are at an all-time low. The gap between the average pay of a CEO and the “average” worker is more than 231 to 1.

His dad did when he ran for President.

Obama has done so.

He has released 2010 & 2011 returns, but that is the least amount of disclosure of any presidential candidate of either political party in the last 36 years.

Perhaps it is because it would shine a light on his foreign investments in Switzerland, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands & the benefit he got from using special tax loopholes?

In fiction author Frederik Pohl’s 1952 “The Space Merchant,” the Space Merchant states: “If you like philosophical problems, here is one for you: should each human being’s vote register alike, as the law books pretend and as some say the founders of our nation desired? Or should a vote be weighed according to wisdom, the power and the influence – that is, the money – of the voter?”

What is your opinion?

1. A recent proposal by N.Y. Mayor Michael Bloomberg looks to ban the sale of sodas and other sugary drinks over 16 ounces at city food establishments.

2. City of Fort Lee N.J. has decided to fine pedestrians busy texting & not watching where they are going $85.

3. Summer 2011, King County, Wash., required everyone “on or in a major river” wear a life jacket. This includes swimming, floating, or boating. Swimmers are required to don the life vest if they are in waters more than five feet from shore or in waters more than four feet deep. Not wearing an approved floating device can result in a fine of $86.

4. The state of Tennessee is telling its children to pull their pants up by passing a law preventing students from exposing underwear or body parts in an “indecent manner.” In effect, the law dictates what clothes the state's children should wear and how they should wear them. The fine for violating the law is a $250, or up to 160 hours of community service.

5. In Minnetonka, Minn., it is considered a public nuisance, and therefore illegal, for “a truck or other vehicle whose wheels or tires deposit mud, dirt, sticky substances, litter or other material on any street or highway.” All violations of the Minnetonka code are subject to fines up to $2,000.

6. 2011 the state of Maryland passed a set of guidelines to protect children from inappropriate physical contact. The guidelines extended to procedures routinely performed by camp counselors, such as the application of sunscreen to campers. The guidelines required that parents wishing to protect their children from the sun’s ultraviolet rays with sunscreen had to give camp counselors permission to apply it

When prosperity is more widely shared, as it has been in the best of times, it equates to more jobs being created and that gives the middle class greater purchasing power which then drives the economy. The needed prosperity of the middle class has been dropping steadily over the last 30 years.

“We may have a democracy or we may have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both."

It was written in 1897 by Louis Brandeis, one of the most celebrated Justices in the history of the Supreme Court.

Or do you believe that those of great wealth have earned the right through their accumulation of that wealth to run the peoples Democracy?

The current G.O.P. majority is the most conservative since 1879, which is as far back as estimates go.

Rick Santorum: Pres. Obama is getting America hooked on “the narcotic of dependency.”

Romney warns that government programs “foster passivity and sloth.” He also attacked the new Obama budget for not taking on entitlement spending — and in the very next breath attacked him for cutting Medicare (an entitlement program).

The truth, of course, is that the vast bulk of entitlement spending goes to the elderly, the disabled, and working families, so any significant cuts would have to fall largely on people who believe that they don’t use any government programs.

People in the very regions of our country where government programs account for the largest share of personal income elect ultra conservatives. The same regions claim to be the land of traditional values filled with people who don’t rely on handouts. In 2010 the top 10 states ranked as most conservative received 21.2 % of their income in government transfers while the 10 most liberal states received 17.2%.

Yet they still elect politicians who want to tear down the very safety nets they rely on so heavily. It is a total disconnect and a pitiful, lazy lack of knowledge. These voters continue to believe that it is those lazy moochers who collect under entitlement programs when it is they who are doing the collecting. These same voters would be both shocked and angry if their ultra-conservative politicians actually went to DC & imposed their small-government agenda. The truth must be too bitter a pill to swallow.