Bits & Pieces #28

 

On This Week with Whoever Shows Up,  Ed Gillespie, the Republican Party’s attack liar used a quote by George Stephanopoulos.  George noted the misquote but didn’t even have the stones to seriously call him on it. What use is a host if he lets his guests lie to the public. George, get a pair!!

 

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It appears that Todd Akin isn’t alone in his stupidity and decadence. There’s a guy named Charlie Fuqua who ran for a seat in the house down in Arkansas. He is the party’s choice in his race against Democrat James McLean who is only running because he has an A- rating from the NRA. It’s interesting to see what it takes to run for office in some states. There’s another guy running for same legislature named Jon Hubbard who has written a book where he claims that slavery was a blessing in disguise. Probably was, Jon, if you happened to own a few.

 

Anyway Fuqua has written a book too, yeah, he can actually write, in which he endorses the death penalty for children who do not honor their parents. How’d you like to be his kid? His guidelines for administering the coup de grace to kids, is taken from, what else, the bible. Deut 21:18-21. He thinks that such a law would make kids respect their parents more. I guess he’s never heard of setting a good example.

 

It seems that Charlie used to be a lawyer for the Arkansas Dept. of Human Services. It seems, that Charlie is bankrolled by the House Republican leadership PAC.  According to his book, Charlie is also against the minimum wage, money for public education and the “Muslim Problem.” He thinks Muslims are linked with liberals in a pact with the anti-Christ to take over the world through bloody revolution. One would almost think that Charlie is a born again evangelical Christian. Any bets? I both got elected.

Ain‘t Arkansas a great place?

 

You can’t make this stuff up.

 

 

 

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Are taking stupid pills now part of the Republican initiation ceremony? It looks like Todd Akin has a fan. Wisconsin  ® representative Roger Rivard, endorsed by Paul Ryan actually said out loud about girls that, “they rape so easy.” Who votes for these assholes? This moron actually repeated this in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel after first saying it to the Chetek Alert newspaper.  It’s like he wanted to make sure that everyone read it, just so there could be no mistake that he is mentally unstable. Seems like there are no women voting in Wisconsin either.

 

As I said above, you just can’t make this stuff up.

 

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There has been a great deal of talk lately about immigration and our country’s lack of a coherent policy to deal with it. One of the first things everyone should know about immigration is that of the Fortune 500 companies, 200 were founded by immigrants, or the children of immigrants. Of course if you want to go all the way back, they were all founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants because we are all, even those who call themselves Native Americans, immigrants.

 

H1-B visas are the ones our government issues to high skilled foreign workers. There were 195,000 of them issued in 2003. There were 85,000 of them issued this year, a time when we need to attract high skilled workers more than ever before. Those 85,000 visas were gobbled up in one day. So the demand for them is as high or higher than it ever was.  The people who run our immigration policies are too stupid to realize that we need these people. These are the people who start new businesses, who fill high skill jobs that lead to innovation. These jobs are currently unfilled, because of our faulty educational system and our incredibly inept immigration system.

 

We let people come here from all over the world to study at our colleges, often at our expense, and once they have taken advantage of this superior education, we refuse them a green card, which they need to work here, and send them back to their own countries to start new business and employ other foreigners, who have used our colleges to developer the skills they need for new technology. Foreign students at American universities received more than half of all Doctorates in engineering, math, computer science and economics last year. These are all skills that we need here, but because of our draconian immigration laws these are all skills that went overseas.

 

New York City Mayor, Michael Bloomberg would attach a green card to any diploma awarded in the above sciences and also to anyone who could show that he or she was coming here to start a business. He would also let in immigrants who would be farm workers, because, in his words, it is better to have someone to pick the crops than to let them rot and have the farmers move to another country from which we would then have to import our food.

 

One of the biggest arguments against illegal immigrants is that they are criminals who have entered the country illegally and therefore will commit more crimes when they are here. That is pure bullshit. In truth, illegal immigrants have a very low crime rate, much lower than the general population and far lower than our own low-income groups. This is because they’re afraid that if they get arrested they will get deported.

 

NYC has half a million illegal immigrants. They have jobs and they pay taxes. They don’t use public schools much, because many have left their kids in their native countries until they can get settled and legal and they don’t use a lot of public health care because for the most part they are young and healthy. Bloomberg also notes that about 75% pay taxes and what’s even better for the city is that when the city wants to make a tax refund they find that most of the addresses are phony so the checks are returned and added to the city’s coffers.

 

We will have about 2.8 million jobs in math, engineering, science and physics by 2018.  800,000 will require a Masters degree but only 550,000 American citizens will have the degree necessary to fill them. Without an amended immigration policy we will fall further behind other countries and our ability to innovate and compete will further erode. Restricted immigration is stupidity. Must we continue to prove that we are a nation led by retarded bigots?

 

 

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And now there’s another Bush coming out of the woodwork. George P. Bush, son of former Florida Governor, Jeb Bush has filed in Texas. Let’s hope he takes after his father and hasn’t gotten any genes from his Uncle and namesake.

 

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At least one good thing came out of these elections. We showed that money doesn’t always buy them. We watched Sheldon Adelson throw away $60 million bucks and lose on every one of the eight candidates he backed.

 

The Koch brothers raised $400 million but Obama is still in the White House. Karl Rove dropped $127 million into the presidential race and cringed as, down the ballot, 10 of 12 Senate candidates and 4 of 9 House candidates lost too

 

None of these guys backed Romney in the primaries and it was there that their money laid the groundwork for Romney’s eventual defeat. Adelson’s ads for the Gingrich were the basis of Obama’s later attack ads. Maybe next time they’ll just give the dough to Doctors Without Borders.

 

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This year seemed to be all about women being able to have it all and why they can and why they can’t. Actually the concept of anyone having it all is ludicrous. Nobody can have it all, mainly because the acquisition of one part of having it all, almost by its nature eliminates another part of having it all.

 

One of the big impetuses for this discussion was the revelation that a young attractive woman who heads up one of the Fortune 500 corporations was pregnant and looking forward to having her baby and keeping her high end job.

 

Wow! Big deal. How many women who don’t make her kind of money are doing the same thing, often because they need the job, not to create a personal challenge, but to feed the kid

 

 

Capitalism+ innovation+ entrepreneurialism = The American Dream. That’s as  close to having it all as we’re gonna get.

 

 

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Bush inherited about a $260 billion surplus. What did he do with it? He and his so called deficit hawks started two wars, which they didn’t pay for. They instituted tax cuts for the rich, which they didn’t pay for. The passed a bill that made the government responsible for payment of prescription drugs, just to gain an advantage in an election and guess what? They didn’t pay for that either. These are the same guys who are now shouting about how we have to cut the deficit that didn’t exist before they came into office, instead of building another stimulus that will create the jobs that their industries aren’t.  Maybe it’s time the deficit hawks get the facts straight. Yes we need to reduce it but not until we have created jobs for the unemployed. Their payroll taxes, and the sales taxes that they pay on goods that they would now be able to buy, will go a lot further to ending the deficit than any phony cuts the Right has come up with,

 

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