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Why the GOP IS the root of all evil...
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techno900



Joined: 28 Mar 2001
Posts: 4161

PostPosted: Thu Dec 17, 2015 9:17 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

The best and brightest????????

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/12/16/yale-fail-ivy-leaguers-caught-on-video-clamoring-to-kill-first-amendment/
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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
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Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Thu Dec 17, 2015 12:03 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

With the National Review, mainstay of conservative "thinking" reaching its 60the birthday, it is useful to look at just a few of the more contemptible things that they have published.

From William F. Buckley. In 1957 he called Francisco Franco "An authentic national hero." In 1961, a bold and courageous early voice against apartheid? Not. "Black Africans, when left to their own devices, tend to revert to savagery" In 1965, on ending segregation he used the most poetic terms to describe his bigotry:

Quote:
A suddenly enfranchised, violently embittered Negro population...will take the vote and wield it as an instrument of vengeance, shaking down toe walls of Jericho, even to their foundations, and reawakening the terrible genocidal antagonisms that scarred the Southern psyche during the days of Reconstruction."

Oh, those poor Southern bigots. Violence is attributed to those who were lynched, and sympathy to the slave owners and lynchers. How telling to invoke a Biblical reference in justification of segregation.

For those who would argue that Buckley was just reflecting his times, and was not someone who should be socially shunned if not run out of town on a rail, we have this commentary on AIDS from 1986:

Quote:
Everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm, to protect common-needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals.


Perhaps this is what he had in mind?
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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
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PostPosted: Wed Dec 30, 2015 3:50 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Time to look again at the record of the anti-regulatory Republicans preaching fiscal austerity. In today's news is the resignation of Dan Wyant, appointed by Republican Governor and austerity guru Rick Snyder to head the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality--and put it on a business footing. Oops, it meant that children in Flint Michigan were exposed to unhealthy levels of lead in their drinking water, which was shown to accumulate in their bodies. Was this simply an accident--or policy?

Quote:
This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch.
Something is rotten in the state of Michigan.

One city neglected to inform its residents that its water supply was laced with cancerous chemicals. Another dissolved its public school district and replaced it with a charter school system, only to witness the for-profit management company it hired flee the scene after determining it couldn’t turn a profit. Numerous cities and school districts in the state are now run by single, state-appointed technocrats, as permitted under an emergency financial manager law pushed through by Rick Snyder, Michigan’s austerity-promoting governor. This legislation not only strips residents of their local voting rights, but gives Snyder’s appointee the power to do just about anything, including dissolving the city itself — all (no matter how disastrous) in the name of “fiscal responsibility.”

If you’re thinking, “Who cares?” since what happens in Michigan stays in Michigan, think again. The state’s aggressive balance-the-books style of governance has already spread beyond its borders. In January, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie appointed bankruptcy lawyer and former Detroit emergency manager Kevyn Orr to be a “legal adviser” to Atlantic City. The Detroit Free Press described the move as “a state takeover similar to Gov. Rick Snyder’s state intervention in the Motor City.”

And this spring, amid the hullabaloo of Republicans entering the 2016 presidential race, Governor Snyder launched his own national tour to sell “the Michigan story to the rest of the country.” His trip was funded by a nonprofit (fed, naturally, by undisclosed donations) named “Making Government Accountable: The Michigan Story.”

To many Michiganders, this sounded as ridiculous as Jeb Bush launching a super PAC dubbed “Making Iraq Free: The Bush Family Story.” Except Snyder wasn’t planning to enter the presidential rat race. Instead, he was attempting to mainstream Michigan’s form of austerity politics and its signature emergency management legislation, which stripped more than half of the state’s African American residents of their local voting rights in 2013 and 2014.

As the governor jaunted around the country, Ann Arbor-based photographer Eduardo García and I decided to set out on what we thought of as our own two-week Magical Michigan Tour. And while we weren’t driving a specially outfitted psychedelic tour bus — we spent most of the trip in my grandmother’s 2005 Prius — our journey was nevertheless remarkably surreal. From the southwest banks of Lake Michigan to the eastern tips of the peninsula, we crisscrossed the state visiting more than half a dozen cities to see if there was another side to the governor’s story and whether Michigan really was, as one Detroit resident put it, “a massive experiment in unraveling U.S. democracy.”

Stop One: Water Wars in Flint

Just as we arrive, the march spills off the sidewalk in front of the city council building.

“Stop poisoning our children!” chants a little girl as the crowd tumbles down South Saginaw Street, the city’s main drag. We’re in Flint, Michigan, a place that hit the headlines last year for its brown, chemical-laced, possibly toxic water. A wispy white-haired woman waves a gallon jug filled with pee-colored liquid from her home tap. “They don’t care that they’re killing us!” she cries.

We catch up with Claire McClinton, the formidable if grandmotherly organizer of the Flint Democracy Defense League, as we approach the roiling Flint River. It’s been a longtime dumping ground for the riverfront factories of General Motors and, as of one year ago today, the only source of the city’s drinking water. On April 25, 2014, on the instruction of the city’s emergency manager, Flint stopped buying its supplies from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department and started drawing water directly from the river, which meant a budgetary savings of $12 million a year. The downside: people started getting sick.

Since then, tests have detectedE. coli and fecal bacteria in the water, as well as high levels of trihalomethanes, a carcinogenic chemical cocktail known as THMs. For months, the city concealed the presence of THMs, which over years can lead to increased rates of cancer, kidney failure, and birth defects. Still, it was obvious to local residents that something was up. Some of them were breaking out in mysterious rashes or experiencing bouts of severe diarrhea, while others watched as their eyelashes and hair began to fall out.

As we cross a small footbridge, McClinton recounts how the city council recently voted to “do all things necessary” to get Detroit’s water back. The emergency manager, however, immediately overrode their decision, terming it “incomprehensible.”

“This is a whole different model of control,” she comments drily and explains that she’s now working with other residents to file an injunction compelling the city to return to the use of Detroit’s water. One problem, though: it has to be filed in Ingham County, home to Lansing, the state capital, rather than in Flint’s Genesee County, because the decision of a state-appointed emergency manager is being challenged. “Under state rule, that’s where you go to redress grievances,” she says. “Just another undermining of our local authority.”

In the meantime, many city residents remain frustrated and confused. A few weeks before the march, the city sent out two notices on the same day, packaged in the same envelope. One, printed in black-and-white, stated bluntly: “Our water system recently violated a drinking water standard.” The second, in flashy color, had this cheery message: “We are pleased to report that City of Flint water is safe and meets U.S. Environmental Protection Agency guidelines… You can be confident that the water provided to you today meets all safety standards.” As one recipient of the notices commented, “I can only surmise that the point was to confuse us all.”

McClinton marches in silence for a few minutes as the crowd doubles back across the bridge and begins the ascent up Saginaw Street. Suddenly, a man jumps onto a life-size statue of a runner at the Riverfront Plaza and begins to cloak him in one of the group’s T-shirts.

“Honey, I don’t want you getting in any trouble!” his wife calls out to him.

He’s struggling to pull a sleeve over one of the cast-iron arms when the droning weeoo-weeooo-weeoo of a police siren blares, causing a brief frenzy until the man’s son realizes he’s mistakenly hit the siren feature on the megaphone he’s carrying.

After a few more tense moments, the crowd surges forward, leaving behind the statue, legs stretched in mid-stride, arms raised triumphantly, and on his chest a new cotton T-shirt with the slogan: “Water You Fighting For?”

Stop Two: The Tri-Cities of Cancer

The next afternoon, we barrel down Interstate 75 into an industrial hellscape of smoke stacks, flare offs, and 18-wheelers, en route to another toxicity and accountability crisis. This one was caused by a massive tar sands refinery and dozens of other industrial polluters in southwest Detroit and neighboring River Rouge and Ecorse, cities which lie along the banks of the Detroit River.

Already with a slight headache from a haze of emissions, we meet photographer and community leader Emma Lockridge and her neighbor Anthony Parker in front of their homes, which sit right in the backyard of that tar sands refinery.

In 2006, the toxicity levels in their neighborhood, known simply by its zip code as “48217,” were 45 times higher than the state average. And that was before Detroit gave $175 million in tax breaks to the billion-dollar Marathon Petroleum Corporation to help it expand its refinery complex to process a surge of high-sulfur tar sands from Alberta, Canada.

“We’re a donor zip,” explains Lockridge as she settles into the driver’s seat of our car. “We have all the industry and a tax base, but we get nothing back.”

We set off on a whirlwind tour of their neighborhood, where schools have been torn down and parks closed due to the toxicity of the soil, while so many residents have died of cancer that it’s hard for their neighbors to keep track. “We used to play on the swings here,” says Lockridge, pointing to a rusted yellow swing set in a fenced-off lot where the soil has tested for high levels of lead, arsenic, and other poisonous chemicals. “Jumping right into the lead.”

As in other regions of Michigan, people have been fleeing 48217 in droves. Here, however, the depopulation results not from deindustrialization, but from toxicity, thanks to an ever-expanding set of factories. These include a wastewater treatment complex, salt mines, asphalt factories, cement plants, a lime and stone foundry, and a handful of steel mills all clustered in the tri-cities region.

As Lockridge and Parker explain, they have demanded that Marathon buy their homes. They have also implored the state to cap emission levels and have filed lawsuits against particularly toxic factories. In response, all they’ve seen are more factories given more breaks, while the residents of 48217 get none. Last spring, for example, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality permitted the AK Steel plant, located close to the neighborhood, to increase its toxic emissions as much as 725 times. The approval, according to the Detroit Free Press, came after “Gov. Rick Snyder’s business-promoting agency worked for months behind the scenes” lobbying the Department of Environmental Quality.

“Look at this cute little tree out of nowhere over here!” Lockridge exclaims, slowing the car in front of a scrawny plant whose branches, in the midst of this industrial wasteland, bend under the weight of white blossoms.

“That tree ain’t gonna grow up,” Parker responds. “It’s dead already.”

“It’s trying,” Lockridge insists. “Aww, it’s kind of sad. It’s a Charlie Brown tree.”

The absurdity of life in such an environment is highlighted when we reach a half-mile stretch of sidewalk sandwiched between a massive steel mill and a coal-fired power plant that has been designated a “Wellness Walk.”

“Energize your Life!” implores the sign affixed to a chain-link fence surrounding the power plant. It’s an unlikely site for an exercise walk, given that the state’s health officials considerthis strip and the nearby park “the epicenter of the state’s asthma burden.”

After a sad laugh, we head for Zug Island, a Homeland Security-patrolled area populated by what look to be giant black vacuum cleaners but are actually blast furnaces. The island was named for millionaire Samuel Zug, who built a lavish mansion there only to discover that it was sinking into swampland. It is now home to U.S. Steel, the largest steel manufacturer in the nation.

On our way back, we make a final stop at Oakwood Heights, an almost entirely vacant and partially razed subdivision located on the other side of the Marathon plant. “This is the white area that was bought out,” says Lockridge. The scene is eerie: small residential streets lined by grassy fields and the occasional empty house. That Marathon paid residents to evacuate their homes in this predominantly white section of town, while refusing to do the same in the predominantly African American 48217, which sits closer to the refinery, strikes neither Lockridge and Parker nor their neighbors as a coincidence.

We survey the remnants of the former neighborhood: bundles of ragged newspapers someone was once supposed to deliver, a stuffed teddy bear abandoned on a wooden porch, and a childless triangle-shaped playground whose construction, a sign reads, was “made possible by generous donations from Marathon.”

As this particularly unmagical stop on our Michigan tour comes to an end, Parker says quietly, “I’ve got to get my family out of here.”

Lockridge agrees. “I just wish we had a refuge place we could go to while we’re fighting,” she says. “You see we’re surrounded.”

Stop Three: The Great White North

Not all of Michigan’s problems are caused by emergency management, but this sweeping new power does lie at the heart of many local controversies. Later that night we meet with retired Detroit city worker, journalist, and organizer Russ Bellant who has made himself something of an expert on the subject.

In 2011, he explains, Governor Snyder signed an emergency manager law known as Public Act 4. The impact of this law and its predecessor, Public Act 72, was dramatic. In the city of Pontiac, for instance, the number of public employees plummeted from 600 to 50. In Detroit, the emergency manager of the school district waged a six-year slash-and-burn campaign that, in the end, shuttered 95 schools. In Benton Harbor, the manager effectively dissolved the city government, declaring: “The fact of the matter is, the city manager is now gone. I am the city manager. I replace the financial director, so I’m the financial director and the city manager. I am the mayor and the commission. And I don’t need them.”

So in 2012, Bellant cancelled all his commitments in Detroit, packed his car full of chocolate pudding snacks, canned juices, and fliers and headed north to support a statewide campaign to repeal the law through a ballot referendum in that fall’s general election. For two months, he crisscrossed the upper reaches of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, the part of the state that people say looks like a hand, as well as the remote Upper Peninsula that borders Wisconsin and Canada.

“Seven or eight hours a day, I would just knock on doors,” he says.

In November, the efforts paid off and voters repealed the act, but the celebration was short-lived. Less than two months later, during a lame-duck session of the state legislature, Governor Snyder pushed through and signed Public Act 436, a broader version of the legislation that was referendum-proof. Since then, financial managers have continued to shut down fire departments, outsource police departments, sell off parking meters and public parks. In Flint, the manager even auctioned off the plastic Santa Claus that once adorned city hall, setting the initial bidding price at $5.

And here’s one fact of life in Michigan: emergency management is normally only imposed on majority-black cities. From 2013 to 2014, 52% of the African American residents in the state lived under emergency management, compared to only 2% of white residents. And yet the repeal vote against the previous version of the act was a demographic landslide: 75 out of 83 counties voted to nix the legislation, including all of Michigan’s northern, overwhelmingly white, rural counties. “I think people just internalized that P.A. 4 was undemocratic,” Bellant says.
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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
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Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Sun Jan 10, 2016 3:05 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Since there seem to be only three cards in the GOP deck--repeal the ACA, cut taxes and cut regulations--I am surprised that nobody on the right is bragging about cutting regulations. After all, there is a huge gas leak in Southern California--caused by the developer not installing a shut off valve. This is what the future looks like with fewer regulations.

Then there is the story of the GOP Senator, Tom Cotton (ark) who was paid $1 millio to lobby against the Iran deal.
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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
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PostPosted: Fri Apr 08, 2016 11:35 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Just saying...

Quote:
The chief of staff to Rep. Mimi Walters resigned on Wednesday following an eight-count indictment related to his time in another member’s office, Politico reported.

David Bowser was charged with using nearly $44,000 of congressional office funds of his former boss, former Georgia Republican Congressman Paul Broun, to pay one of Broun’s campaign consultants, according to the Athens Banner-Herald. Bowser was also charged with obstructing a congressional investigation and making false statements.
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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
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Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Sun Apr 17, 2016 7:48 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Republicans refuse to spend money to fight the Zika virus. I guess they think some private party will find a cure? Or that brain-damaged children will be foolish enough to vote Republican?
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MalibuGuru



Joined: 11 Nov 1993
Posts: 9293

PostPosted: Sun Apr 17, 2016 9:46 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

mac wrote:
Republicans refuse to spend money to fight the Zika virus. I guess they think some private party will find a cure? Or that brain-damaged children will be foolish enough to vote Republican?


CDC director Anthony Fauci said today they'd be using money from other less important programs to fund the research until congress gave their approval. Better take some Midal Mac.
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mac



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PostPosted: Mon Apr 18, 2016 9:52 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Bardie boy. The Obama administration is smart enough to find a temporary workaround? That doesn't mean that the Rep's are not dinosaurs. Did you take spelling lessons with NW?
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MalibuGuru



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PostPosted: Mon Apr 18, 2016 9:31 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Does not compute


Meanwhile at the Whitehouse...
http://www.tmz.com/2016/04/18/rick-ross-white-house-ankle-bracelet-obama/
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techno900



Joined: 28 Mar 2001
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PostPosted: Tue Apr 19, 2016 8:22 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

From Fox News Politics:

Quote:
Dr. Anthony Fauci, a top Obama administration doctor, urged Congress on Sunday to promptly agree to appropriate an additional roughly $2 billion to fight against Zika -- the latest in the back and forth between the White House and GOP-led House about funding against the deadly virus.

“We have to act now,” Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told “Fox News Sunday.”

House Republican leaders have argued that the federal government has enough money now to fight the virus and that additional funding should come through the regular appropriations process this fall.

However, House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers suggested last week that he would support immediate supplemental funding, with a White House request that includes a detailed spending plan.

“We can’t do it without the numbers,” the Kentucky Republican said Wednesday on Capitol Hill.

While Rogers also has tried to assure the public that Congress will not allow a public health crisis, he has suggested that the administration might not get all of the roughly $2 billion, which he has referred to as a “slush fund.”

“I disagree with that,” Fauci said, arguing the administration has presented Congress with a “project-by-project approach” and that it will also use money left from fighting the Ebola virus.

There has so far been no documented Zika infections in the United States from mosquitoes that carry the virus. But nearly 350 illnesses have been reported across all 50 states, each linked to travel to Zika outbreak regions, largely the Caribbean and Latin America. Thirty-two of the infected women were pregnant. The virus can also be spread through sex.

“The regular appropriations process takes too long,” Fauci said Sunday. “I don’t want to wait to have to develop a vaccine.”

The House agreed late last week on a bipartisan measure to speed up development of a treatment.

However, on Friday, Democratic Reps. Nita Lowey, N.Y.; Rosa DeLauro, Conn.; and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Fla., urged Rogers to hold a special meeting on the administration’s request for emergency supplemental funding.

Under the rules of the Appropriations Committee, three members may request the chairman convene a special meeting. If the chairman fails to schedule such a meeting within seven calendar days, a majority of the committee members may convene a special meeting on their own.

A Zika infection causes only a mild and brief illness in most people. But in the last year, infections in pregnant women have been strongly linked to fetal deaths and devastating birth defects, mostly in Brazil, where 1,113 cases of related microcephaly have been confirmed since October.


So, what's the big issue?

A couple of weeks ago from CBS News:

Quote:
In a blog post Wednesday, Office of Management and Budget Director Shaun Donovan said the administration has identified $589 million, including $510 million in existing Ebola funds, that can be quickly shifted to fight the Zika virus.

The decision comes two months after the administration first asked Congress to approve nearly $2 billion in emergency supplemental funding to fight Zika, which Donovan said is spreading in Puerto Rico, the U.S Virgin Islands, American Samoa and abroad. Republican lawmakers have insisted that the U.S. first use remaining funds from the Ebola fight.
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