Posted: March 3, 2015 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: Barack Obama, Foreign Affairs, U.S. Politics | Tags: Benjamin Netanyahu, John Boehner, partisan foreign policy, US-Israel relations |
This morning at 10:45, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will address a joint session of Congress. You can watch it on C-Span. I might try watching for awhile to see what kind of reaction he gets.
I plan to put up another post a little later. There’s another far more significant event happening tomorrow. The Supreme Court will hear arguments in King vs. Burwell, a lawsuit based on a ludicrous misreading of the ACA law. It will be up to John Roberts to decide if he wants to throw 8,000,000 people off their health care plans, and that’s exactly what Republicans are hoping for.
The other “issues” in the news are a tempest in a teapot over Hillary Clinton using private e-mail when she was Secretary of State and another fuss over when the State Department properly vetted contributions to Bill Clinton’s foundation. If we want Hillary to run for president, we are going to have to get used to this garbage.
For now, here are some quick links on the Netnyahu speech and the negotiations with Iran.
CNN: White House warns Netanyahu not to reveal Iran details.
The White House is uncertain what precise details may come out but aides spent Monday frantically mobilizing after Israeli officials said that the prime minister planned to disclose sensitive details of an agreement taking shape in talks between six world powers and Iran, which has entered a delicate final stage.
Concern and anger among American officials about the nature of what Netanyahu might expose heightened already roiling tensions between the two countries. Secretary of State John Kerry cautioned about the damage such revelations might have on the negotiations and President Barack Obama himself attacked Netanyahu’s judgment.
Netanyahu is expected to use the details to bolster his argument before Congress that the deal under discussion will not prevent Iran from getting a bomb and could therefore threaten the Jewish state’s existence.
From the AP via Syracuse.com: Kerry working on Iran nuke deal, Netanyahu to criticize in speech to Congress.
As Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and their teams sought to hammer out an agreement at a luxury hotel in the Swiss resort of Montreux, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was set to make his case against one 4,090 miles away in Washington.
The U.S. and Iranian sides met for two hours on Tuesday morning before taking a break, according to U.S. officials. The officials said they expected the talks would resume later and likely continue through Netanyahu’s address to a joint session of Congress, which will be delivered in the late afternoon local time in Montreux.
“We’re working away, productively,” Kerry told reporters.
“We are moving and we are talking to be able to make progress,” said Zarif. “There are issues and we want to address them. But there is a seriousness that we need to move forward. As we have said all along we need the necessary political will to understand that the only way to move forward is to negotiate.”
However, in a sign that Netanyahu’s speech is resonating outside Washington, Zarif decried comments that President Barack Obama made on Monday — as part of an administration-wide effort to push back on the Israeli’s criticism — in which he said that Iran would have to suspend its nuclear activities for at least a decade as part of any final agreement.
“It is clear that Obama’s stance is aimed at confronting propaganda by Zionist regime’s prime minister and other extremist opponents of the negotiations,” Zarif told Iranian reporters, calling it “unacceptable and threatening.” Zarif’s remarks were carried by Iran’s official news agency IRNA.
This speech that John Boehner and Netanyahu cooked up is causing all kinds of mischief.
According to John Ferziger at Bloomberg Politics, Netanyahu Risks Diplomatic, Political Pain If Speech Is Flat.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu goes to Congress on Tuesday gambling that disclosing compromises the U.S. made in trying to negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran will delay or derail any agreement.
Netanyahu, a former Israeli army commando, has further damaged his frayed relationship with the White House by ignoring administration warnings and trying to undermine President Barack Obama’s effort to resurrect ties with the Islamic Republic. If his speech to a joint meeting of the House and Senate proves unpersuasive, Israelis may vote him out of office.
The Israeli leader, running for his fourth term in a March 17 election, will seek to “reinforce doubts that people have” and raise congressional pressure to better answer “the legitimate questions that are out there,” said Dennis Ross, a former special adviser to Obama on Iran and the Middle East.
However, said Yoram Meital, a political scientist at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba, Israel: “If he doesn’t reveal something significant or provides little hard evidence for his claims, it could affect the vote. Israelis are, by and large, afraid of Iran’s nuclear program, but they are ready to punish Netanyahu if he doesn’t deliver in this speech.”
Netanyahu will reveal details of the agreement being negotiated with Iran against a late March deadline by the U.S. and five other world powers that will show why he’s afraid it could lead to Israel’s nuclear annihilation, an official who asked not to be named because of the trip’s diplomatic sensitivity told reporters aboard the prime minister’s flight to the U.S.
Isn’t that just ducky? Boehner’s decision to invite a foreign leader to speak to Congress without informing the White House is unprecedented in U.S. history. The next time Republicans control the White House, Democrats could now feel invite a foreign leader to speak against that president’s policies. It’s a terrible precedent.
Two days ago Diane Feinstein called Netanyahu “arrogant” and added that “he doesn’t speak for her.” CNN reported:
The California Democrat’s comments to CNN’s Dana Bash on Sunday’s “State of the Union” come days ahead of Netanyahu’s high-profile speech to Congress, in which he’s set to lobby against a deal to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
“My responsibility is to worry not only about the state of Israel, but also the future of the Jewish people,” Netanyahu said Saturday in Jerusalem. “And for that reason, we are strongly opposed to the agreement being formulated between the world powers and Iran that could endanger Israel’s very existence.”
Feinstein said she’ll attend Netanyahu’s speech — which President Barack Obama’s administration has heavily criticized. But she wasn’t happy with those comments.
“He doesn’t speak for me on this,” she said. “I think it’s a rather arrogant statement. I think the Jewish community is like any other community. There are different points of view. I think that arrogance does not befit Israel, candidly.”
From the Boston Herald: U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern blasts Netanyahu for ‘disrespectful’ speech.
Congressman Jim McGovern, one of a growing number of Democrats refusing to attend Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s controversial speech before Congress tomorrow, ripped the foreign leader for turning Capitol Hill into a campaign “rally” point just weeks before his own county’s election.
“Joint sessions of Congress are not supposed to be political speeches … This is not a place for a foreign leader to do a re-election rally,” the Democrat said today in an interview on Boston Herald Radio’s “Morning Meeting” with hosts Hillary Chabot and Jaclyn Cashman.
“With joint session so close to his own reelection campaign and before we have reached a (nuclear) deal with negotiators with Iran, I think it’s disrespectful to our president, I think it’s disrespectful to our foreign policy leaders who are trying … to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon,” he added. “I don’t feel like I want to be a prop in a campaign ad for Prime Minster Netanyahu.”
McGovern, who called the speech’s timing “unprecedented” given the March 17 vote in Israel, also echoed Democratic slams of Speaker John Boehner, who has been criticized, including by the White House, for inviting Netanyahu to speak to the joint session of Congress without consulting the president.
The Worcester Democrat said Netanyahu should have sought a different avenue to speak with members of Congress, noting attempts by some Senate Democrats to arrange a separate meeting with him.
Fellow Bay State Congresswoman Katherine Clark has said she also plans to skip the speech, and U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren last month called on officials to postpone it, saying she sides with the Anti-Defamation League’s stance on the address.
From Slate’s Joshua Keating: What Does it Mean for the Leader of a Foreign Country to Be a Republican?
In his speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee on Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected charges that he is injecting partisanship into the U.S.-Israel relationship. “The last thing anyone who cares about Israel, the last thing that I would want, is for Israel to become a partisan issue, and I regret that some people have misperceived my visit here this week as doing that,” he said. “Israel has always been a bipartisan issue. Israel should always remain a bipartisan issue.”
It’s a little late for that, Bibi. Tuesday, Netanyahu is giving what was billed from the moment it was announced as a rebuttal to President Obama’s State of the Union address. Much of the controversy surrounding the visit has been over the perceived mutual snubbing and sniping between Netanyahu’s office and the White House and what it says about the relationship between the two leaders. (Nothing good.) But the bigger story is Netanyahu firmly aligning himself in the camp of one of America’s political parties to the exclusion of the other one—a strategy that could, in the long term, be extremely detrimental to Israel’s interests.
Given the “very real difference” between Obama and Netanyahu over Iran’s nuclear program, the Israeli leader’s decision to accept John Boehner’s invitation to address Congress made some tactical sense. Netanyahu believes Obama is on the verge of making a historically dangerous deal with Iran and doesn’t see any prospect for changing his mind. Given that his officials say he’s “written off” Obama and doesn’t see any chance of changing his mind, why not reach out to Congress, the “last brake” to stop the deal, diplomatic niceties be damned?
But even if he’s not particularly interested in what the White House thinks of him at this point, what’s harder to understand is the cold shoulder Netanyahu has given congressional Democrats, some of whom have been willing in the past to push back against the White House on the Iran issue. The most striking moment in this whole mess was not so much Netanyahu accepting Boehner’s invitation, though that could certainly have been handled more deftly. It was when Netanyahu declined a closed-door meeting with congressional Democrats. This would seem to have been a welcome opportunity for some fence-mending given that a number of prominent members of Congress, including the most senior senator, Patrick Leahy, and a number of members of the Congressional Black Caucus, are skipping his speech over the perceived insult to Obama. Instead, Netanyahu dug in deeper, making the long-standing joke about Netanyahu being the “Republican senator” from Israel seeming not really like a joke anymore.
It’s certainly troubling. What kind of precedent is this going to set? What do you think? If you’re planning to watch the speech, I hope you’ll post comments about it with me below. And please check back later for a regular Tuesday post.
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Posted: March 2, 2015 | Author: dakinikat | Filed under: income inequality, morning reads, poverty |
Good Morning!
Recently, I’ve been cooking a lot of my Nana’s depression years recipes and thinking of ways to tighten my belt. I’ve been watching the stock market go crazy and corporate profits improve in the macroeconomy. It’s beginning to translate into the labor markets but it really varies state to state. As you know, my right wing Republican Governor Bobby Jindal has been running away from his responsibilities and record here in Louisiana and spending time on the road. He’s made visits to CPAC and FOX and even the lawn of the White House trying unsuccessfully to draw attention to his “possible” presidential bid. He’s going nowhere but down in Republican Straw polls which is karma as far as I’m concerned.
What has been getting attention is his record of failure here. It’s a doozy. It doesn’t get much worse than having MSN’s Wall Street 24/7 call your state the worst place to do business and then list the reasons that your state resembles Somalia more than a developed nation.
> Real GDP growth, 2012-2013: 1.3% (17th lowest)
> Average wages and salaries, 2013: $44,828 (23rd lowest)
> Pct. of adults with bachelor’s degree, 2013: 22.5% (5th lowest)
> Patents issued to residents, 2013: 395 (13th lowest)
> Projected working-age population growth, 2010-2020: -3.2% (13th lowest)
No state fared worse on 24/7 Wall St.’s business climate index than Louisiana. The state is not the worst place to run all businesses, however. The manufacturing sector accounted for more than 20% of Louisiana’s economic output in 2013, the fourth highest such contribution in the country. Despite the strong sector, Louisiana generally provides poor conditions for business.
Nearly one in five residents lived in poverty in 2013 — nearly the worst rate in the nation — contributing to both the low quality of the labor force as well as a low quality of life in the state. The working-age population was projected to decline by 3.2% from 2010 through 2020, one of the worst declines in the nation. While nearly 30% of Americans had at least a bachelor’s degree as of 2013, only 22.5% of Louisiana adults had at least such a degree, also nearly the lowest rate. Poor education contributed to poor scores in innovation. The state was one of only a handful of states where the average venture capital investment was less than $1 million.
Jindal’s been slavishly following Grover Norquist’s prescriptions for drowning the state government in his bathtub. He’s also part and parcel passed legislation straight from ALEC and the Koch Brothers. As a result, we have a $1.6 million dollar deficit that’s going to be challenging to eliminate. This is especially true since he’s spent the last 6 years pulling every slight of hand accounting trick in the book, sold off all possible state assets, and siphoned most all reserve funds. His first draft basically put all the state’s public universities in financial exigency which is a public entity’s version of bankruptcy reorganization. It also looks like the public health system is on the verge of collapse.
So, this is now the “new” idea being floated by some.. There’s discussion going on to basically tell a lot of the universities to go privatize themselves.
Years of deep cuts to state funding for Louisiana’s colleges and universities — and the threat of even further reductions in the near future — have some leaders looking at drastic measures that could change the face of Louisiana higher education.
One idea that has recently been floated: Why not encourage some of the state’s public schools to go private?
The idea, which experts agree is radical and may not ever be feasible, came up during a recent meeting of the state Board of Regents, a group appointed by Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal, whose administration has led the charge for recent state budgets that have left Louisiana with some of the nation’s most severe cuts to higher education funding. Regents board members have instructed state higher education staff members to examine the concept and report back on whether the plan would work and what it would take.
“You look at some areas of the state, there may be a university or a college inside of a university that could do better as a private entity,” Board of Regents Chairman Roy Martin said in a follow-up interview with The Advocate.
Martin stressed that he was speaking as an individual, not for the board.
It’s hard to describe how the years of defunding basic education, roads, and public health and safety service has impacted everyone’s life around here. I see homeless people on every major street corner. I have friends looking for second jobs or first jobs. Many people I know have either left town or moved out of the historical districts. This is not the post Katrina revival that we were promised. However, it’s not that way for some folks.
One of the strangest things that’s going on here is the boom
in real estate which is being driven by the purchase of huge, million dollar homes. A group of us have been trying to figure out where the jobs are to support these kinds of purchases. Essentially, we found out that most of these sales are going to people who are looking for second homes and they’re coming from out of state. So, the feel of a banana republic tropical island is getting a complete workout here.
The top-of-the-market houses are “rising in price at least as fast as the market as a whole,” Ragas said, based on conversations with Realtors.
“In the higher market, it is a much brisker market now,” said Rick Haase, president of Latter & Blum Inc., which sold nearly one-third of the 158 homes priced at $1 million or more that were sold during the 12-month period ending Jan. 31.
The highest-priced home to sell in the New Orleans area last year was advertised as a “stately Queen Anne home” featuring seven bedrooms, 5 ½ bathrooms, “lush gardens with organically grown citrus trees and grapes,” and a heated pool. The property at 3 Audubon Place was listed for sale at $5.25 million and sold 86 days later for $5 million, or $583.57 per square foot.
Haase said the average number of days that properties selling at more than $1 million stay on the market has dropped from more than 150 to 90.
It took just one day for the sixth most-expensive New Orleans-area property to sell last year. The three-bedroom, three-bathroom single-family home at 828 Chartres St. in the French Quarter sold for its full asking price of $2.3 million, or $575 a square foot.
“It’s not like every house flies off the market. But if it’s priced appropriately, in the right location, has the right pedigree, then, yeah, the numbers are going up and up,” said Keller Williams Realtor Ricky Lemann, who was the listing agent on a $2.25 million property on First Street that sold last year. “There will be no adjustment in that luxury market until the (interest) rates go up.”
I’ve really noticed that the kinds of people moving into my part of town are not the same kinds of people that are selling and leaving. The house next door went from rental property to a starter home using the Obama Tax incentives to a home away from home for two Northeasterners within a period of about 5 years. It now spends most of its time as an unlicensed short term rental which is basically illegal. But, one owner is in NJ and the other came from Philadelphia so they don’t seem to care much about that.
The split between rich and poor is becoming more accentuated and its address is changing as the downtowns of large cities have become gentrified and homes priced out of the reach of middle and working class families. 
This is having some appalling impacts on children as the majority of U.S. public schools now have children that are classified as living in poverty. It’s now first tier suburbs where poverty issues are playing out.
For the first time in at least 50 years, a majority of U.S. public school students come from low-income families, according to a new analysis of 2013 federal data, a statistic that has profound implications for the nation.
The Southern Education Foundation reports that 51 percent of students in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade in the 2012-2013 school year were eligible for the federal program that provides free and reduced-price lunches. The lunch program is a rough proxy for poverty, but the explosion in the number of needy children in the nation’s public classrooms is a recent phenomenon that has been gaining attention among educators, public officials and researchers.
“We’ve all known this was the trend, that we would get to a majority, but it’s here sooner rather than later,” said Michael A. Rebell of the Campaign for Educational Equity at Teachers College at Columbia University, noting that the poverty rate has been increasing even as the economy has improved. “A lot of people at the top are doing much better, but the people at the bottom are not doing better at all. Those are the people who have the most children and send their children to public school.”
More Americans are now living in poverty in suburbs than in urban areas. This is pushing problems into areas ill-equipped and financed to handle them.
City centers around the country are becoming younger, more affluent and more educated, while inner suburbs are seeing poverty rates rise, according to a new study from the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service.
The new study is based on an analysis of demographic changes in 66 cities between 1990 and 2012. It comes just months after a surge of headlines about suburban poverty following a Brookings Institution study that found that more Americans are now living in poverty in the suburbs than in rural or urban areas.
News of this demographic shift comes as no surprise to suburban school superintendents and school boards. They know their student populations are shifting, and they are wrestling with how to adequately serve the rising number of poor children who come to class with far more needs than their more affluent peers.
Children and Seniors are being particularly hard hit by the defunding of services on both the state and federal level but zealous Republicans look to score points by poor shaming. They make scapegoats of the nation’s most vulnerable people. While Social Security has been indexed to increase with price increases, Seniors are not exempt from income inequality. Part of the issue with Social Security funding is the cap on income subject to FICA taxes. The cap has created a funding gap.
As America recovers from the recession, wealthy households are recovering faster than low-income ones, whose incomes have stagnated or declined since the crash. A new report says that this widening gap is sapping Social Security.
Currently, two-thirds of seniors rely on the program for their retirement income. The wage gap may have cost Social Security$1 trillion over the last 30 years, according to a report last week from the Center for American Progress.
And as more Americans reach retirement age, Social Security is set to eat through its funding by 2033, assuming that Congress takes no action to bolster it. After that it would only be able to cover 77 percent of its claims.
“For low-income seniors, Social Security represents nearly 85 percent of income. Even for seniors right in the middle, Social Security represents nearly two-thirds of their retirement income,” said Rebecca Vallas, director of CAP’s poverty program.
Small wages, big shortfalls
The pension and disability insurance program is funded by a payroll tax that applies to wages of $118,500 and below. But the money flowing into the program is not as large as it could be, according to the report, now that an increasing share of wage growth is going to people who make more than that, and low-wage workers make less.
Why does that matter for Social Security? Because highest earners reach the$118,500 “cap” quickly and stop paying into the fund for the rest of the year. “Social Security funding is directly tied to the full wages of low and middle income workers,” Vallas says. “It’s their wages that matter.”
The payroll tax cap was set in 1983 by President Reagan, which at the time captured 90 percent of wages. “Reagan essentially said, let’s go for 90 percent, and we will let 10 percent go,” says Vallas.
But since 1983, that cap hasn’t been adjusted for wage growth to keep up with the 90 percent goal. “What they didn’t anticipate is income inequality,” says Vallas. “The highest earners have seen growth much faster than the average worker.”
Now the tax cap only captures 83 percent of wages, instead of 90. The missing 7 percent is part of the Social Security shortfall.
Of course, all of these issues have come because we’ve shifted the burden of paying for things from businesses and the wealthiest. We’ve also shifted the subsidizes to businesses and the wealthiest. As a result, fewer and fewer services are being offered, few people are covered, and fewer jobs are available.
Hand-in-hand with reducing taxes and reducing government services has been the demonization of public servants. Scott Walker–one of the front runners for the Republican presidential nomination–likened fire 
fighter and teacher unions to ISIS while talking to CPAC over the weekend.
At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) just outside Washington, DC, Wisconsin Governor and likely presidential candidate Scott Walker was asked what his plan would be, were he in the White House, to combat the terrorism perpetuated by the Islamic State In Syria (ISIS).
As an enthusiastic crowd cheered, he responded not with a plan but with an argument for why his battles against organized labor in his state makes him the most qualified for the job.
“We need have someone who leads and ultimately will send a message that not only will we protect American soil, but…freedom-loving people anywhere else in the world. We need that confidence,” he said. “If I can take on a hundred thousand protesters, I can do the same across the world.”
These kinds of jobs have been central to working and middle class upward mobility in the past. They’ve also been jobs that have traditionally been much more integrated and diverse. Scott Walker linked public servants to terrorists. Think about that.
In 2011, Walker pushed through a law, Act 10, that slashed the power of public employee unions to bargain, and cut pay for most public sector workers. As a special slap to teachers, Walker exempted the unions of police, firefighters and state troopers from the changes in collective bargaining rights but not educators. Teachers protested for a long time, closing schools for days, but the law passed, and the impact on teachers unions in Wisconsin has been dramatic: according to this piece by my Post colleague Robert Samuels. The state branch of the National Education Association, once 100,000 strong, has seen its membership drop by a third, and the American Federation of Teachers, which organized in the college system, has seen a 50 percent decline.
This week may bring down a central tenet of the ACA which has brought private health insurance to millions of people. It has been one policy that has successfully increased the day to day life of ordinary people. Will the Supremes bring it down? Will it be drowned in Scalia’s bathtub? I am one of the 7 1/2 million people who were forced onto the federal exchange because my Republican governor is an asshole. Will I join the ranks of uninsured this week? Me with a chronic condition and a cancer history?
Shortly after the A.C.A. passed, in 2010, a group of conservative lawyers met at a conference in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute, and scoured the nine-hundred-page text of the law, looking for grist for possible lawsuits. Michael Greve, a board member of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian outfit funded by, among others, the Koch brothers, said, of the law, “This bastard has to be killed as a matter of political hygiene. I do not care how this is done, whether it’s dismembered, whether we drive a stake through its heart, whether we tar and feather it and drive it out of town, whether we strangle it.” In time, lawyers hired by the C.E.I. discovered four words buried in Section 36B, which refers to the exchanges—now known as marketplaces—where people can buy health-insurance policies. The A.C.A. created federal tax subsidies for those earning less than a certain income to help pay for their premiums and other expenses, and, in describing who is eligible, Section 36B refers to exchanges “established by the State.” However, thirty-four states, most of them under Republican control, refused to create exchanges; for residents of such states, the law had established a federal exchange. But, according to the conjurings of the C.E.I. attorneys, the subsidies should be granted only to people who bought policies on the state exchanges, because of those four words in Section 36B. The lawyers recruited plaintiffs and filed a lawsuit; their goal is to revoke the subsidies provided to the roughly seven and a half million people who were left no choice by the states where they live but to buy on the federal exchange.
The claim borders on the frivolous. The plaintiffs can’t assert that the A.C.A. violates the Constitution, because the Justices narrowly upheld the validity of the law in 2012. Rather, the suit claims that the Obama Administration is violating the terms of its own law. But the A.C.A. never even suggests that customers on the federal exchange are ineligible for subsidies. In fact, there’s a provision that says that, if a state refuses to open an exchange, the federal government will “establish and operate such Exchange within the State.” The congressional debate over the A.C.A. included fifty-three meetings of the Senate Finance Committee and seven days of committee debates on amendments. The full Senate spent twenty-five consecutive days on it, the second-longest session ever on a single piece of legislation. There were similar marathons in the House. Yet no member of Congress ever suggested that the subsidies were available only on the state exchanges. This lawsuit is not an attempt to enforce the terms of the law; it’s an attempt to use what is at most a semantic infelicity to kill the law altogether.
I spent the weekend and a few days before that watching people I went to high school with that mostly didn’t attend college squawk about people on disability, unemployment, and government waste and give away. They say all Obama supporters are the ones that want 
benefits but no jobs. It’s just all kinds of drivel that Fox spews that’s easy to debunk with facts but impossible to debunk to hard core idiots who aren’t interested in facts, truth, or reality. What has happened to the country that I grew up in and even to the state that I moved to 20 years ago? I turn 60 this year. I’ve never seen so much vitriol aimed at the wrong people in my life and for what?
I want to point you back to the kind of crap spewed by Republicans recently with a quote from an Indiana office seeker from the last election. This guy basically said let the poor “wither and die”. It’s basically what they all think but don’t say.
“For almost three generations people, in some cases, have been given handouts. They have been ‘enabled’ so much that their paradigm in life is simply being given the stuff of life, however meager.
What you see is a setting for a life of misery is life to them never-the-less. No one has the guts to just let them wither and die. No one who wants votes is willing to call a spade a spade. As long as the Dems can get their votes the enabling will continue. The Republicans need their votes and dare not cut the fiscal tether. It is really a political Catch-22.”
I’m sitting here wondering what you’re supposed to do to get a job any more in a state like mine. I’m even wondering what you’ve got to do to get a decent education. I’m so glad my kids have gotten out of LSU so that they’re missing the impact of Jindal’s scourge.
So here’s a good lesson in karma if you want one. A gun loving Obama and Obamacare hating Sheriff who is now trying to recover medical costs by using Go Fund me. Evidently, Obamacare was too bad for him but begging at this point isn’t. Also, guess who is funding him the most? Liberals. Lessons are really hard to learn, aren’t they?
Sheriff Richard Mack is the right wing former sheriff of Graham County, Arizona. He is the head of an organization called “Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association,” a member of the NRA’s Hall Of Fame, and a staunch opponent of the policies of President Obama, including Obamacare.
Richard Mack has run into some medical problems and since he is uninsured, he’s asking for help. Mack suffered a heart attack on January 12. This apparently came right on the heels of some serious medical issues that were suffered by his wife. His son, Jimmy Mack, has set up a GoFundMe campaign, asking for donations to help offset the cost of medical treatment. Apparently the Macks were expecting right wing supporters to step up to the plate and help out but, judging by the comments that accompany many of the donations, Mack is getting the bulk of his support from liberals.
As of this writing, Mack has received close to $20,000 in donations from 439 people. The commenters are sympathetic to Mack’s situation — far more sympathetic than Mack and his supporters have been to the plight of those without health insurance. Many hope that he will use it as a learning experience, to change his views about the Affordable Care Act.
Some times I just want to cook my Nana’s hamhocks and beans and read Grapes of Wrath while never turning on the TV or computer again. However, that never happens either. I rant, therefore I blog. I blog, therefore I wonder why so few people really get it?
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