With all the noise being made about Jeb Bush’s potential run for President in 2016. The big question is; who, in keeping with the family tradition will he invade? Maybe Iceland, they haven’t had a good war in quite a while and they must have something that we want.
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Unbelievably, Dick Cheney was on TV this weekend still lying about WMDs. This guy is the reincarnation of Joesph Stalin and given the opportunity he would certainly have been responsible for millions instead of just hundreds of thousands of deaths just like Big Joe, Pol Pot or Adolph. It’s really interesting to look into the face of a sociopath speaking in front of millions of people and wonder how many of them are buying his bullshit.
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A lot of talk, about the shenanigans in the House over the spending bill, which was just passed. The problem is that the debate is not about the parts of the bill that are destructive to the country but about Ted Cruz and Mike Lee who acted like recalcitrant children during the process. In doing that, they damaged their party’s programs, ignored the party leadership and sent Harry Reid home with a smile on his face.
Is this a forerunner of a Republican majority in both houses of congress that spends most of its time fighting among themselves instead of beating off the Democrats and does it men that once again we can expect nothing to get done in congress?
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Whence Healthcare. This is an open letter to those fortunate people who are able to participate in the ACA in states that currently do not have state exchanges. Congratulations, you are being helped by your federal government, which is paying your healthcare credits. If, however, you are not careful and active, your state government will pull the healthcare rug right out from under you. Let me explain,
There is a big case pending before the Supreme Court where the opponents of the ACA claim that the government can’t give tax credits to those that are insured under the law unless the state they live in has created an exchange, specifically for the residents of that state. What has happened is that 34 states have been guilty of not creating those exchanges, so the suit claims that their residents are not entitled to federal healthcare tax credits. The federal government claims that the small sentence claiming this, in the 2800 page document has been misinterpreted and that the meaning of that piece of the law has been laid out more clearly all over the document to mean that anyone, regardless of their states lack of interest in their medical future, can get the credits by joining the federal exchange.
It would be interesting to see the court rule that those in the states without exchanges couldn’t get the credits and see what those who would lose their insurance, simply because the GOP wants to make Obama look bad, had to say about the idiots who run their states, but didn’t create exchanges. I wonder how many Republican governors would be left after the next election.
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No one likes the kid who changes his allegiance from the local team to some other team just because they win more games. The new controversy over NJ, Governor Chris Christie brings new interest to the issue. Some think that Christie should be applauded for being a Cowboys fan and not changing just to suck up to Jets or Eagles fans, and that may be so, but there is another side to this issue and it has to do with why a Jersey kid would root for the Cowboys at all. He never lived in Texas and being a Cowboys fan that he spends games sucking up to Jerry Jones, one of the most distasteful owners in sport.
The most acceptable explanation of why Christie is a Dallas fan is that they were winning big when he was a kid. This of course makes him anathema to any real fan, like those who rooted for the Dodgers, the Mets or the Jets, because they were our team. Christie’s allegiance to a foreign team just because they won, labels him a phony front runner and the antithesis of everything he tries to promote with his image as a real guy, a Jersey kid. Bill parcels is a Jersey guy, Christie is just something that we hauled out of the Hackensack River.
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With Obama moving forward on a number of issues despite the losses in the elections there is a feeling hovering over the Republicans that they didn’t receive the fruits of their victory. This is legitimate, but they brought it on themselves, because of their obstinate refusal to meet Obama halfway on anything, and their stupid, futile attacks on the ACA despite it’s being both financially successful and good for the American people.
The GOP won an election, but despite that, Obama is forging ahead on immigration, Cuba and a host of other issues and getting all the acclaim for this that they had tried so hard to keep him from receiving. What to do? There are many other programs that he can jump into, the most important being the infrastructure, the environment, which he has already involved himself in with his agreement with China and education which needs mountains of work.
So what can the GOP move on? Well, with all the real problems out there the first thing they took up was the Keystone Pipeline, a project that will add all of 35 permanent jobs to the US economy, that will promote Canadian oil not US oil, that will be completely destructive to the environment and the national water supply, but which will enrich those Americans heavily invested in Canadian oil and will enlarge the supply of dirty oil that can be burned in China. These guys are completely brain dead. Can they possibly have made a worse choice? These clowns are supposed to represent us, not Canada, not big oil and certainly not China but their first piece of legislation with all the important stuff on the table is the Keystone Pipeline?
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Watched “The Game Changers of 2014,” on This Week, and there were some really significant and important people among them, people like the Pope and the guy who started the cold water dip to help cure ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease). But guess who Bill Kristol thinks is the game changer for the year; the people who voted Republican in the last election. Really Bill? That took a lot of imagination… and a low IQ.
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Mike Rogers was on TV talking about how the torture report will cause violence against American interests all over the world. Is he kidding? ISIS is beheading Americans in Syria, we are droning civilians all over the Middle East. What the hell more provocation do these people need than having their own families bombed? Does us torturing some guy they don’t even know make them madder than having their own kids blown to bits? What kind of moron is Mike Rogers? Thank God he’s on his way to talk radio with Limbaugh and the other lunatics.
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Lindsay Graham has stated that he will block funds to open an embassy in Cuba. He says that it is a bad idea at a bad time but like most Republican statements and ideas he has no backup that stands up, no better idea, no reason why it’s a bad idea and no ability to make any kind of logical statement on the subject
Then John Boehner comes along and says that we should not normalize relations with Castro until the Cuban people are free. Does he mean like the people of Saudi Arabia, or any number of Middle Eastern, South American, South East Asian or African countries with whom we have enjoyed relations over the past 50 years and where their people are nothing but slaves? Let’s face it. The only reason that clowns like Graham and Boehner are against resuming relations with Cuba is that it was Obama’s idea. If you really want to get the Republican’s on board with any idea, all you have to do is say that Obama hates it and they are 100% behind it, even if it entails closing all the oil companies and giving free rent to all illegal aliens.
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So I mentioned drugs the other day among a group of Christians and they got all bent out of shape about how the whole country is going to hell in a hand basket now that pot is legal in a couple of states. One of them even started quoting old presidents as if they were handing down stone tablets from God. Nixon called drugs, public enemy # 1. Really, I thought that old “I am not a thief,” Tricky Dick held that title. Ronny Reagan said that drugs were menacing our society when we were producing enough fossil fuels to choke out everyone on the planet and he was making deals with South American dictators to use the drugs they were producing to buy guns. Then there was GHW Bush who bragged about the drug enforcement budget being over nine billion bucks, like that was a good thing. Even little Georgie thought that too many people in this country used drugs. It never occurred to him that maybe a little pot would have been good for the bunch of warmongers that he brought to Washington. By the time Obama took office we were spending 15 billion bucks a year to not put a dent in the drug business.
Medical marijuana is now legal in 23 states. The recreational type is fully legal in 2 states and congress has started the big roll back through two spending bills that will defund the war on drugs.
Let’s look at Colorado where pot has now been legal for a year. One year in, violent crime rates are down, teen usage is down, highway fatalities are at record lows. Yes you can drive better when you’re high than when you’re drunk but neither is recommended. Oh yeah, Colorado has the fastest growing economy in the country. Money that was formerly being used to put guns in the hands of drug gangs is now going to pay for better schools and roads.