bewitchingbritain: Awww Dudders is just too cute in his straw boater! And so is dontchatango. She is my niece, the poor girl. As is thepaisleyelf. I have nieces everywhere!! My older sisters were early, profligate breeders.
bewitchingbritain: Oh this is fabulous. The Edinburgh lust flares up again. I am a person of many lusts, ha. You might have noticed.
I live here!
A chart to remember 2011 by. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 2011 proved a banner year for passing abortion restrictions into law in the United States. These restrictions included everything from attacking insurance coverage to requiring women to go through ultrasounds and waiting periods.
Read the Guttmacher Institute’s review of 2011’s state reproductive health policies.
No.
No matter how many times conservatives repeat this, it’s simply not true. The social security trust fund has about $2.6 trillion in assets. Those assets are comprised of long term, interest-bearing U.S. bonds.
Without some changes, the social security trust fund will eventually run out…due to demographic shifts. Until 2010, the money paid into the fund exceeded the money paid out every year since 1983. If we only consider the retirement portion of Social Security (which is what most people think of when they say “social security”), its income (including interest) will exceed outgoes until 2025. The current exhaustion date is 2038. At that point, benefits would be reduced to something like 75% of what it was. This is if we make no change whatsoever.
If we make a few minor changes, the solvency of the fund can easily be extended indefinitely. The deficit commission, for example, proposed raising the cap on payroll taxes and gradually increasing the retirement age by two years by 2075. Another possible change is changing from one way to calculate cost of living increases to another.
So yes. Some changes in social security will eventually be necessary. Things will be a lot easier if we do them sooner rather than later. But the idea that social security is failing on some systemic level is simply false. If you’re hiking on a long, straight trail, you aren’t about to fall off a cliff if the cliff is 26 miles away and all you need to do is change course, slightly, somewhere in the next 26 miles to avoid it.
Some of the conservatives will also claim that the bonds in the trust fund aren’t actually valuable or that it is essentially a pyramid scheme. The money is invested in U.S. bonds—which are backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government—sort of like cash. This is about as conservative an investment plan as you can get. While the money that was used to purchase the bonds has, of course, been spent, the bonds are quite real and the fund is quite solvent.
[Flash 10 is required to watch video]
WWII: Europe: France; “American soldiers watch as the Tricolor flies from the Eiffel Tower again”, ca. 08/25/1944
One of my favorite scenes of The West Wing
Do you mind if I stand here and pretend we’re talking but actually don’t?
oh man, also one of my favorite scenes.
Rep. Charlotte T. Reid (R-Ill.) was the first woman to wear pants on the floor of the House of Representatives. She did so 42 years ago tomorrow. From The Washington Post’s story:
How did her male colleagues react? One incredulous congressman told her, “I was told there was a lady here in trousers, so I had to come over and see for myself.”
The caption under this photo is “a matter of scale and distortion.” I would add “and oh my god I feel like I’m going to puke this is terrifying.”
wow, this is really cool. i’d love to be on that building, looking out on the whole region. in summer. feeling some nice warm morning air off of the lake. i miss America.
Swedes are the world’s best dressed people, hands down.
Everyone is fashion conscious. Everyone is making a fashion statement all the time.
Christmas in Goteborg is quite an odd thing. The streets have a “roof” of lights above them, and occasionally an enormous hanging crown.
Public Christmas trees are not trees whatsoever. There is a pole from which long strings of little lights dangle down making a sort of cone of light. Then, at the bottom, they place evergreen branches in a pile. And that’s a public Christmas tree.
1. Ron Paul does not value equal rights for minorities. Ron Paul has sponsored legislation that would repeal affirmative action, keep the IRS from investigating private schools who may have used race as a factor in denying entrance, thus losing their tax exempt status, would limit the scope of Brown versus Board of Education, and would deny citizenship for those born in the US if their parents are not citizens. Here are links to these bills: H.R.3863, H.R.5909, H.J.RES.46, andH.J.RES.42.
2. Ron Paul would deny women control of their bodies and reproductive rights. Ron Paul makes it very clear that one of his aims is to repeal Roe v. Wade. He has also co sponsored 4 separate bills to “To provide that human life shall be deemed to exist from conception.” This, of course, goes against current medical and scientific information as well as our existing laws and precedents. Please see these links: H.R.2597 and H.R.392
3. Ron Paul would be disastrous for the working class. He supports abolishing the Federal minimum wage, has twice introduced legislation to repeal OSHA, or the Occupational Safety and Health Act and would deal devastating blows to Social Security including repealing the act that makes it mandatory for employees of nonprofits, to make “coverage completely optional for both present and future workers”, and would “freeze benefit levels”. He has also twice sponsored legislation seeking to repeal the Davis-Bacon Act and the Copeland Act which among other things provide that contractors for the federal government must provide the prevailing wage and prohibits corporate “kick backs.” Here are the related legislative links: H.R.2030, H.R.4604, H.R.736, and H.R.2720
4. Ron Paul’s tax plan is unfair to lower earners and would greatly benefit those with the highest incomes. He has repeatedly submitted amendments to the tax code that would get rid of the estate and gift taxes, tax all earners at 10%, disallow income tax credits to individuals who are not corporations, repeal the elderly tax credit, child care credit, earned income credit, and other common credits for working class citizens. Please see this link for more information: H.R.05484 Summary
5. Ron Paul’s policies would cause irreparable damage to our already strained environment. Among other travesties he supports off shore drilling, building more oil refineries, mining on federal lands, no taxes on the production of fuel, and would stop conservation efforts that could be a “Federal obstacle” to building and maintaining refineries. He has also sought to amend the Clean Air Act, repeal the Soil and Water Conservation Act of 1977, and to amend the Federal Water Pollution Control Act to “restrict the jurisdiction of the United States over the discharge of dredged or fill material to discharges into waters”. To see for yourself the possible extent of the damage to the environment that would happen under a Paul administration please follow these links: H.R.2504,H.R.7079, H.R.7245, H.R.2415, H.R.393, H.R.4639, H.R.5293, and H.R.6936
6. A Ron Paul administration would continue to proliferate the negative image of the US among other nations. Ron Paul supports withdrawing the US from the UN, when that has not happened he has fought to at least have the US withdrawn from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. He has introduced legislation to keep the US from giving any funds to the UN. He also submitted that the US funds should not be used in any UN peacekeeping mission or any UN program at all. He has sponsored a bill calling for us to “terminate all participation by the United States in the United Nations, and to remove all privileges, exemptions, and immunities of the United Nations.”Ron Paul twice supported stopping the destruction of intercontinental ballistic missile silos in the United States. He also would continue with Bush’s plan of ignoring international laws by maintaining an insistence that the International Criminal Court does not apply to the US, despite President Clinton’s signature on the original treaty. The International Criminal Court is used for, among other things, prosecution of war crimes. Please see the following links: H.R.3891,H.AMDT.191, H.AMDT.190, H.R.3769, H.R.1665, H.CON.RES.23, and H.R.1154
7. Ron Paul discriminates on the basis of sexual orientation and would not provide equal rights and protections to glbt citizens. This is an issue that Paul sort of dances around. He has been praised for stating that the federal government should not regulate who a person marries. This has been construed by some to mean that he is somewhat open to the idea of same sex marriage, he is not. Paul was an original co sponsor of the Marriage Protection Act in the House in 2004. Among other things this discriminatory piece of legislation placed a prohibition on the recognition of a same sex marriage across state borders. He said in 2004 that if he was in the Texas legislature he would not allow judges to come up with “new definitions” of marriage. Paul is a very religious conservative and though he is careful with his words his record shows that he is not a supporter of same sex marriage. In 1980 he introduced a particularly bigoted bill entitled “A bill to strengthen the American family and promote the virtues of family life.” or H.R.7955 A direct quote from the legislation “Prohibits the expenditure of Federal funds to any organization which presents male or female homosexuality as an acceptable alternative life style or which suggest that it can be an acceptable life style.” shows that he is unequivocally opposed to lifestyles other than heterosexual.
8. Ron Paul has an unnatural obsession with guns. One of Paul’s loudest gripes is that the second amendment of the constitution is being eroded. In fact, he believes that September 11 would not have happened if that wasn’t true. He advocates for there to be no restrictions on personal ownership of semi-automatic weaponry or large capacity ammunition feeding devices, would repeal the Gun-Free School Zones Act (because we all know our schools are just missing more guns), wants guns to be allowed in our National Parks, and repeal the Gun Control Act of 1968. Now, I’m pretty damn certain that when the Constitution was written our founding fathers never intended for people to be walking around the streets with AK47′s and “large capacity ammunition feeding devices.” (That just sounds scary.) Throughout the years our Constitution has been amended and is indeed a living document needing changes to stay relevant in our society. Paul has no problem changing the Constitution when it fits his needs, such as no longer allowing those born in the US to be citizens if their parents are not. On the gun issue though he is no holds barred. I know he’s from Texas but really, common sense tells us that the amendments he is seeking to repeal have their place. In fact, the gun control act was put into place after the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy. Please view the following links: H.R.2424, H.R.1897, H.R.1096,H.R.407, H.R.1147, and H.R.3892.
9. Ron Paul would butcher our already sad educational system. The fact is that Ron Paul wants to privatize everything and that includes education. Where we run into problems is that it has been shown (think our current health care system) that this doesn’t work so well in practice. Ron Paul has introduced legislation that would keep the Federal Government “from planning, developing, implementing, or administering any national teacher test or method of certification and from withholding funds from States or local educational agencies that fail to adopt a specific method of teacher certification.” In a separate piece of legislation he seeks to “prohibit the payment of Federal Education assistance in States which require the licensing or certification of private schools or private school teachers.” So basically the federal government can’t regulate teaching credentials and if states opt to require them for private schools they get no aid. That sounds like a marvelous idea teachers with no certification teaching in private schools that are allowed to discriminate on the basis of race. He is certainly moving forward with these proposals!Remember his “bill to strengthen the American family and promote the virtues of family life.” or H.R.7955? Guess what? He basically advocates for segregation in schools once again. It “Forbids any court of the United States from requiring the attendance at a particular school of any student because of race, color, creed, or sex.” Without thinking about this statement it doesn’t sound bad at all. But remember, when desegregating schools that this is done by having children go to different schools, often after a court decision as in Brown Vs. Board of Education. If this were a bill that passed, schools would no longer be compelled to comply and the schools would go back to segregation based on their locations. Ron Paul is really starting to look like a pretty bigoted guy don’t you think?
10. Ron Paul is opposed to the separation of church and state. This reason is probably behind every other thing that I disagree with in regards to Paul’s positions. Ron Paul is among those who believes that there is a war on religion, he stated “Through perverse court decisions and years of cultural indoctrination, the elitist, secular Left has managed to convince many in our nation that religion must be driven from public view.” (( Koyaanisqatsi Blog: Wrong Paul Why I Do Not Want Ron Paul to be My President )) Though he talks a good talk, at times, Ron Paul can’t get away from his far right, conservative views. He would support “alternative views” to evolution taught in public schools (i.e. Intelligent Design.) We’ve already taken a look at his “bill to strengthen the American family and promote the virtues of family life.” or H.R.7955 Besides hating the gays he takes a very religious stance on many other things. He is attempting to force his beliefs on the rest of America, exactly what he would do as president.
From the continuing series of “What’s Wrong with Ron Paul”
