Bits & Pieces #49

 

“I personally believe in Jesus Christ as my lord and savior, but I am also a killer. I’ve killed a lot and if I need to, I’ll kill a whole bunch more. If you don’t want to get killed don’t show up in front of me. I have no problems with it. God did not raise me to be a coward. I’m into diversity – I kill everybody. I don’t care”

 

Statement made by 35 year veteran police officer Dan Page St. Louis County police dept: in ront of the Oath keepers a right wing Christian organization featuring police and other law enforcement officers.

 

This is a statement by a cop who was seen pushing a CNN anchor during the Ferguson protests. It was brought to the attention of County Police Chief Jon Belmar by CNNs Don Lemon. Chief Belmar said the comments on killing deeply disturbed him. Really? Of course one is forced to ask oneself what kind of Christian organization would embrace such unchristian thoughts, but we all know the answer to that.

 

Chief Belmar states that Page will be suspended pending a psychiatric exam. It would seem that the above statement is all the exam any competent psychiatrist would need to put this potential mass murderer in a padded cell, but the real problem is that our police forces across the country are home to many like Page. They give their fellow officers a bad name and they create incidents that reflect back on all cops, good and bad. It’s time to stop shielding these nut cases and weed them out of otherwise functional departments.

 

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How bad is it when Google, one of the images of corporate America dumps one of the outfits it is supporting because they are lying about climate change? That’s what just happened when Google jettisoned its support for, the Right Wing-Koch funding group ALEC, over its lies about climate change. ALEC, the American Exchange Legislative Council has, from the beginning been a staunch backer of the idea that climate change doesn’t exist, and in their attempts to put forth their flawed science have issued one lie after another denying the reality of the problem. Even Google couldn’t take it anymore and has dumped all support for the science deniers.

 

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The GOP will never learn to keep its mouth shut. Now, after all the other crazies have had their say about women’s issues, poverty, unemployment and immigration, John Boehner, the House Speaker comes out saying that Americans are just lazy and don’t want to go out and work, that they would rather sit around than take advantage of the jobs that he and his party are keeping from existing.

 

There’s only one way to deal with this kind of hubris and stupidity. All those who are out of work should get up from their couches on election day and vote every dumb Republican candidate out of office.

 

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Saw New York Congressman Hakeem Jefferies on Kornacki and this guy is a potential star. He’s smart, articulate and is able to explain very complicated problems in clear precise language. Watch this guy, he’s a real comer.

 

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A discussion of healthcare reveals, an interesting phenomena; although most people who have adopted it love it, some of those same people hate Obamacare. How could this be possible? Are the American people really too stupid to breathe on their own? It has been revealed that in Kentucky where many were enrolled into Medicaid through the ACA, most of them don’t understand that this area of Medicaid is actually part of Obamacare. The stupidity of many Americans, especially in the southern states is just plain depressing.

 

Healthcare, is not something that people seem to think about a lot. It is, in fact fifth, on a Gallup poll of what holds people’s attention in the world. Americans care about the following:

Dissatisfaction with Government

Immigration

Foreign Policy

Ethics, moral religious decline

Healthcare

 

Followed by: Terrorism, Fear of war, Education, Poverty, Iran, Our Judicial system, Race relations. The environment is way down at #17which just shows why we need 400,000 people in the streets to get congress’s attention.

 

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Two Senators Democrat Chris Murphy and Republican Ron Johnson spoke about the ISIS problem on Meet the Press. They came to a pretty intelligent conclusion. Diplomacy will be needed but that diplomacy will not involve ISIS because they are not open to anything as civilized as that. The diplomacy must be between the US and the Arab nations involved in this struggle, There are 4 civil wars currently going on in this area. And the Arab states just ignore them. There is the Sunni/ Shia mess in Iraq, the who knows, against who knows, bigger mess in Lybia, the Sunni/Assad fight in Syria and the ISIS versus everyone fight in Syria & Iraq.

While all this goes on, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and the UAE sit on their butts and wait for us to solve their problems. Only Jordan under President Abdullah is doing the right thing. They have absorbed over a million refugees, roughly 20% of their entire population and we have a bunch of creepy, selfish Republicans worried about 52,000 kids crossing the border and giving themselves up, in this country. They should be ashamed.

 

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The GOP American Values convention was on this week in Washington, and we heard from all the empty heads that need to make noise, just to know they’re alive, spewing out propaganda about what’s wrong, not with the country but what’s wrong with Obama. Naturally the emptiest head made the most noise when Ted Cruz started babbling about the vacuum of American leadership but now that Obama is forging ahead in his plans to defend the world from ISIS, Cruz is on vacation and not able to vote for or against Obama’s plans. This cowardly slime is typical of the entire Tea Party.

 

 

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It’s interesting to note that neither Jeb Bush nor Chris Christie were invited to this cabal of fanatic right wing interests, The American Values Convention. This just proves that the far right doesn’t care about victory, only about making love to its ignorant base. Bush and Christie are still the only candidates with a chance in the 2016 election and yet in a move toward suicide, the Right rejects them. If anything ever destroys democracy, it will be the Tea Party and its know nothing followers.

 

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America is entering a very strange place in political history. We have experienced a groundswell of populist expression but it is not all coming from the same place. There is a huge outpouring of expression, regarding problems like the environment, immigration, poverty, equal rights and the like, from the left and at the same time there is an almost equally large push from the religious right for a say in how the government is run and how we should be responding to worldwide themes. Haven’t we learned anything from the Middle East? If you give a religion too much power, look what happens.

 

 

 

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The resignation of Eric Holder creates a very interesting problem for the Right. No one except Obama himself and Harry Reid has been more hated by the GOP than Holder. Now they have a chance to get rid of him but he has already stated that he isn’t going anywhere until his successor is confirmed. But the Right doesn’t want to confirm anybody. They just want to go along doing nothing as long as they can. Which means they will still have Holder in place until they move against themselves.

 

Although Holder has been the sweetheart of the equal rights movement of late, he did not prove himself as being too far left during his tenure. He was an enemy of the free press and a cowardly sycophant of NSA and other government agencies that have attacked the need and existence of reporters and whistleblowers.

 

In addition this was a guy who completely abrogated his authority by not going after the Banker, Wall Street frauds or the Mortgage crooks, who, through their acts of outright thievery, brought the country to its knees with the worst depression since 1929. This was the disgrace of the whole Obama administration. No one should be too big to be stopped from stealing. In the end, Holder, despite his work on civil rights in the area of equality, was pretty much a disaster as an AG.

 

 

 

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Then there is Dallas Woodhouse, a moron who is one of the few politicians still dumb enough to attack the ACA. This poke attacks Kay Hagen because of her vote for the ACA which gave his backward state the benefits of Obamacare. The fact that he isn’t bright enough to understand this, disqualifies him from public debate on the grounds of stupidity overload.

 

 

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John McCain rambled around on Face the Nation, telling us all why we should be getting into a full scale war in the Middle East and then he progressed to the Ukraine. He starts out by saying tat we should be arming the Ukrainians to fight the Russians. Why us? We have no dog in that fight. Why not the surrounding nations or the European nations that are right there facing Russia. Maybe if they got up off their collective butts and showed a little gumption they would have some effect on Putin. Hell, they don’t even want t stop using Russia’s oil and gas. Sure it would cost them money, so would a Russian invasion of Poland, Italy or France.

 

McCain thinks that it is a very complicated and dangerous situation to have American medical assets rushed to West Africa to help with the Ebola crisis but he doesn’t seem to think it would be complicated for us to get into the Russia-Ukraine mess. Poor old John is obviously ready for the home.

 

But we should support Ukraine by giving them what we can. After all, we created this government so we do owe it support. Give them all the weapons they can handle, make it painful for Putin to move forward. Most of Europe was too cowardly to defend themselves during WWII. It sure looks like the same people are still living there.

 

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Mary Landrieu running for the senate in Louisiana finally came out and spoke to the fact that Obama is unpopular in the south and in her state because African Americans are unpopular with white voters in the south. This has caused a firestorm all over the Republican media but can anyone really look at that statement and deny it?

 

Anyone who doesn’t think that there is resentment toward our President because he’s black, especially in the south and in certain rural northern areas just isn’t facing reality. I was present at a Tea Party rally in 2010 in Hartford, Ct, where I observed signs that said openly, “No Niggers” with pictures of Obama on them. You can call that freedom of speech. I call it racism and bigotry.

 

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