One way for us just to get along with each other a bit better:

I hope nobody is offended by the language here. (Ha! I don't really think it could be expressed any other way as effectively....)


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What a REAL Democrat sounds like

Sunday art blogging

Artist: Alexander Kanoldt

Image from Wikimedia commons

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"There's something wrong with these people!"

Yes, indeed there is. Just watch:

The Sojourners Quote of the Week

This is heartbreaking, really:

"I don't think of it as stealing. These things were planted by a person who was going to harvest them. That person no longer has the ability to. It's not like the bank people who sit in their offices are going to come out here and pick figs."

-- Kelly Callahan, Atlanta, on why she forages for fruits and vegetables in the yards of her neighborhood’s vacant properties (Source: New York Times)

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The President's plan for Social Security

I want to call your attention to a short piece entitled "Why is President Obama so Anxious to Cut Social Security?" by Dean Baker. Here's a little bit of what it says:

For an average retiree who can expect to get benefits for 20 years, President Obama’s plan would cut their lifetime Social Security benefits by roughly 3 percent. By comparison, his much feared tax increases on the rich would reduce the after-tax income of someone earning $300,000 a year by just 0.5 percent. In this case, a beneficiary who will be mostly dependent on their Social Security income in retirement will take about six times as large a hit relative to their income under President Obama’s plan to cut to Social Security than a couple earning $300,000 would from his plan to raise their taxes.
...
The determination to cut Social Security is especially strange given the finances of the program. Under the law, Social Security is financed by the designated Social Security tax. It does not contribute to the deficit, since the law prohibits payments from being made if there is not money in the Social Security trust fund. That means that if the trust fund were drained, rather than contributing to the deficit, full benefits would not be paid.

Mr. Baker does not answer the question in his title. The reason, sadly, remains a mystery.
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How sensible; how fair; how obvious:

What's happening regarding recent disability claims

This is truly horrible. What is wrong with our nation that we don't have the political will to do something about the desperation Mr. Astrue speaks of here?

It's primarily economic desperation — people on the margins who ... have no other place to go, and they take a shot at disability.

-- Michael Astrue, Social Security commissioner, as laid-off workers and aging baby boomers flood Social Security's disability program with benefit claims, pushing the financially strapped system toward insolvency
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Kicking the elderly to the curb

This just makes me sick - especially since I live in Oklahoma:

I also find it STUNNING that Coburn got applause for those remarks.

Also, you know what? Coburn was elected to the Senate in 2004. I don't remember him saying that Medicare and Social Security were unconstitutional while Bush was president. Do you think he's doing this now because Obama has turned out to be such a pushover?

I don't know. I just think it's odd that Republicans are jumping on this stuff now.

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An old but still pertinent cartoon:

You'd think the Secretary of Education would know better....

Oh, dear:

Far too few of their high school graduates are actually prepared to go on to college. I feel very, very badly for the children there.

-- Arnie Duncan, U.S. Education Secretary, speaking about problems in the Texas public school system

And I feel bad for the United States that its Secretary of Education makes errors in grammar such as the one above. (To "feel badly" is to have one's sense of touch be impaired. What is needed in the quotation above is a predicate adjective - not an adverb.)

Okay, okay. Call me a grammar nazi. I don't care.
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Saddest paragraph I've read in a long time

This one:

A despair grips America today, a cold fear that our best days are behind us, that we are adrift and powerless. Yes, the Republicans are to blame. But so is a president who treats core American values as bargaining chips, who won’t fight for anything, who refuses to lead. It turns out hope does matter.

It's from a Newsweek article entitled "Oval Office Appeaser" by William Broyles. It's a short piece and one that is powerfully written. I do urge you to go read the whole thing.
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The phone hacking scandal

Truly appalling:

This practice was widely discussed in daily editorial conferences.

-- Clive Goodman, former royal correspondent for News of the World, in a letter written in 2007, but published August 16, claiming that phone hacking was widely known throughout the News International organization

Well, at least the more complete truth is starting to come out.
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