Quote of the day

This one is from Time Magazine:

Large numbers of Americans are not well informed about the tenets, practices, history and leading figures of major faith traditions — including their own.

-- Pew Research Center, in a statement, on a new study showing that U.S. residents lack basic knowledge about religion

This is really quite disturbing when you think about it. No wonder there's so much religious conflict and bigotry when people don't even know what it's all about.
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Here's your headline

Take a look:

Bill Maher: When Will Obscenely Rich A**holes Stop Crying About Taxes?

The piece gets started like this:

New Rule: The next rich person who publicly complains about being vilified by the Obama administration must be publicly vilified by the Obama administration. It's so hard for one person to tell another person what constitutes being "rich", or what tax rate is "too much." But I've done some math that indicates that, considering the hole this country is in, if you are earning more than a million dollars a year and are complaining about a 3.6% tax increase, then you are by definition a greedy asshole.

And let's be clear: that's 3.6% only on income above 250 grand -- your first 250, that's still on the house. Now, this week we got some horrible news: that one in seven Americans are now living below the poverty line.

Someone once said that taxes are what we pay for a civilized society.

I recommend that you click through and read the rest of what Bill Maher has to say. You won't be sorry.
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This is going around. Good.

Sunday art blogging

Artist: Konstantin Alekseevich Korovin

Image from Wikimedia Commons

It's a headline for animals today

My sweet Tara

Look at this:

It's Adopt-a-Less-Adoptable-Pet Week

Here's an excerpt:

A recent survey from Petfinder.com of shelters and rescue groups found that 95% of their shelter and rescue group members currently have adoptable pets for whom they are having extremely hard time finding homes. Another 33% of their adoption groups have had pets who were posted on Petfinder for 1-2 years without being adopted, and 27% have had pets who've waited more than two years for a forever home.

Who are these animals? Mostly senior animals, followed by pets with medical issues, victims of breed discrimination, shy animals and the ones who need to be the only pet in the family. Sometimes they’re just the wrong color, or not the breed someone had in mind.

"It breaks my heart to think that some pets are homeless for years when they are just as wonderful as the younger, fluffier puppy next to them," [said Petfinder co-founder Betsy Banks Saul.]
...
"The goal of this initiative is to bring the issue to the forefront and help find forever homes for these special animals."

As someone who not too long ago adopted a senior animal, I really want to support this effort. My wonderful Tara (a nine year old chocolate lab) is undoubted the sweetest dog in the universe and she really needed a forever home.

Please think about this!
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Headline of the day

Here you go:

The unlikely but powerful radicalizing impact of the Tooth Fairy

And the opening paragraphs of this article offer one of the best summaries I've seen yet of what has happened in and to this country:

Many decades ago, exploitative robber barons mercilessly worked our immigrant forebears, for negligible pay and no benefits, under dangerously unsafe conditions.

Only the hard struggle of organized labor won everyday Americans better lives.

Then came the union-busting Reagan era, which dropped working-class living standards to dire levels.

As that decline occurred, upper crust prosperity commensurately grew. What workers were losing in lower wages and vanishing benefits was appropriated as immense profit by corporations and banks.

Republicans subsequently rewarded them, and their elite executives, with huge tax breaks, and rampant deregulation, the destructive consequences of which tanked our entire economy in 2008.

I do urge you to click through and read the rest of it - especially if you want to know what's behind that headline.
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Friday cat blogging!

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

Quote of the day -- maybe of the YEAR

This is simply excellent. It's also freakin' logical:

[W]hen a country needs more income, they should get it from the people that have it.

-- Warren Buffet

I found it right here.
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The Smearing of the President

Wow. Do I ever agree with this:

I don’t believe that the Republicans deserve to win. They have not merited it. They have operated by trying to drag down President Obama and his programs by obstruction through lack of any positive ideas of his time. I personally find the smearing of President Obama as an issue of national discussion. It is repulsive and ought to be discussed. I think it ought to discredit the Republican Party from consideration.

-- Sidney Blumenthal

You can see the context right here.
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Headline of the day

My dear friend, Damian (who's a regular reader of "Child of Illusion"), sent me the following with this comment: "Thought you'd be interested in this (shocking and depressing) info..."

Shocking and depressing is so right:

Americans Have No Idea About Wealth Inequality in America

Here's part of what it says:

Disagreements about the optimal level of wealth inequality underlie policy debates ranging from taxation to welfare. We attempt to insert the desires of "regular" Americans into these debates by asking a nationally representative online panel to estimate the current distribution of wealth in the United States and to "build a better America" by constructing distributions with their ideal level of inequality. First, respondents dramatically underestimated the current level of wealth inequality. Second, respondents constructed ideal wealth distributions that were far more equitable than even their erroneously low estimates of the actual distribution. Most important from a policy perspective, we observed a surprising level of consensus: all demographic groups—even those not usually associated with wealth redistribution such as Republicans and the wealthy—desired a more equal distribution of wealth than the status quo.

If you click through to the article, you will find a very interesting graph illustrating the above point. You will also find some interesting comments (some of which are also shocking and depressing.)
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Quote of the day

Think about this. Really think about it:

If we actually ended the Bush-era tax cuts, that would pretty much do it.

-- Peter Orszag, President Obama's recently departed budget director, saying that letting tax rates for all taxpayers return to the levels before George W. Bush's presidency would bring the country within reach of Obama's goal to balance the budget by 2015

So what's the problem? Did we not have prosperity before the Bush era?
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Delicious snark

See what I mean:

I do miss George Bush. Compared to these teabaggers and the people who are pandering to them, he looks like a professor.

–Bill Maher

A grateful hat tip to Lisa over at All Hat No Cattle.
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Headline of the day

Every article I've read by Donna Smith has been excellent. Here's the latest:

A Divide So Wide, A Healthcare Disconnection So Deep

I'm going to give you a rather substantial excerpt from the beginning:

Our national obsession with individualism and the attainment of personal wealth is so sick and so deep for some of our fellow citizens that even the bonds of marriage are often no match for the selfishness.

A woman with advanced breast cancer schedules her chemo and her radiation so that by the time the worst physical side-effects set in, she is at the weekend and can sufficiently recover to allow a return to work on Mondays. She has negotiated remote work-time on chemo days and the day after. She pays for her family’s for-profit, private health insurance because her husband is a small business owner whose business has felt deep losses during the recession. She must keep working if she wants the care that is attacking her cancer.

If it sounds brutal, that’s because it is.

I had occasion to chat with her husband. He believes that I am misguided in my work for a progressively financed, single standard of high quality care for all. He said, “You know, government can’t and shouldn’t do everything for us. It’s up to us to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps.” Huh?

He really used those words. While his wife struggles to keep the premiums for the for-profit, health insurance paid, his bootstraps are sagging. Yet, he shows no sign of wavering from his entrenched position. He is not particularly active politically. He is not in the Tea Party or the Republican Party or any party. Yet his obsessive selfishness learned through intense cultural and societal indoctrination is so strong that he can bury the reality his wife is living and cloak himself in righteous anti-establishment, anti-government propaganda.

The rest of it is good, too.

I've listened to conservatives who don't have insurance argue with me against universal health care. It boggles my mind - really.
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Quote of the day

This is a bit chilling when you think about it:

If you can imagine it, scientists can try to do it.

-- David Edwards, of the Biotechnology Industry Association, as the FDA begins a two-day meeting on whether to approve the marketing of genetically engineered salmon, which would be the first such animal approved for human consumption

It's from the TIME Magazine website.
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Monday morning music blogging

This is utterly delightful.

If you're not familiar with Paul Bowles, you can learn a bit about him right here.
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