To the RNC and all those who call themselves Republicans.
Am I my brother’s keeper? Genesis 4:9. Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is Abel your brother?” He said, “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?” 1 Thessalonians 5:14 And we urge you, […]
Some of my favorite quotes
“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than a sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”: Martin Luther King, Jr.
Jefferson and the “Living” Constitution
The biggest difference between conservatives and liberals over filling the current vacancy on the supreme court is perhaps the question of interpretation of the Constitution. Conservatives insist that the Constitution […]
The Constitution of the Five Nations
The Constitution of the Five Nations – or – The Iroquois Book of the Great law … survives after some 500 or 600 years, and was originated by people that […]
Another Sept update
I’m still working on the site but the Genealogy information is available. The Genealogy site is perryfamilyroots.com. (This redirects to russperry.com/WP/genealogy and if your browser blocks the redirection you can just go […]
Status as of Sept, 2015
Since this latest update there’s a bug (at least it bugs me) that puts 2 (sometimes 3) separate scroll bars on some pages and sometimes requires you to move the […]
Fun with Blogging!
Still a lot of kinks to work out but things are coming along nicely. Have changed the index file in the main directory to show the site as offline.
Redesigned
Have been totally redesigning the site and have most things organized. Still a few things missing so you may see what looks like garbage to you instead of what you expected to see when you click on a few things. I’m getting to them. Right now I’m trying to decide the best way to incorporate over 2500 individuals and all their source and documentation information without slowing the site down more than can be tolerated.
Right and Wrong
What is right? What is wrong? It is a societal problem because individuals in a society will see things differently. If there existed a universally shared bases for distinguishing between the two, there would be no problem but there doesn’t
Rand Paul for president:?
Why the libertarian candidate doesn’t stand a chance in today’s GOP
You don’t own me
No matter how strong your personal faith, your employees and customers are not obligated to live according to those beliefs, and have just as much right to their own beliefs as you do to yours
Rand Paul: seniors should turn to charity
by 2020, the annual cost of medical care for seniors who fall is expected to reach $54.9 billion. Paul touted the “nobility of private charity” that’s the kind of philosophy that results in us spending about twice as much per person on health care as any other country on earth.
Tax Cuts and Supply Side Economics
It is economic incentive that drives enterprise, not the supposed nobility of spirit of the wealthy. That idea is aristocracy. Our nation is founded on the self-evident truth that aristocracy is a lie, and that powerful elites do not share their money, power, and privilege with the people. We now have a new aristocracy, created by transferring literally trillions of dollars in wealth to the wealthiest people in our society
Robert Mercer -Backer of Cruz
an example of how wealthy donors have been empowered by the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in the landmark Citizens United case, which paved the way for super PACs. Unlike candidates, super PACs can accept unlimited amounts of money from individuals and corporations to support a candidate so long as they do not officially “coordinate” with the campaign.
GE Capital Retreat – NYTimes.com
“wholesale funding.” is industry parlance for borrowing in the markets, Lenders take the cheap, short-term money and lend it for higher rates to companies and individuals. in 2008 investors who lent in that short-term market fled, leaving the financial firms that borrowed there without funding. It was a Wall Street version of an old-fashioned bank run
The Middle Class Under Pressure
The problem in defining the middle class with an income or wealth ranking is its ambiguity. if we define the middle class as families between the 25th and 75th percentiles, how different are families at the 24th than those at the 25th or the 76th from those at the 75th percentiles? How different are those at the 25th than those at the 75th?
Middle Class, Economically Insecure
The study, conducted by William R. Emmons and Bryan J. Noeth, found that one reason many Americans viewed themselves as struggling was that their real incomes had not advanced significantly beyond their parents’ even when they reached higher educational levels, while those who matched their parents’ achievements were actually worse off.The typical American family makes slightly less than a typical family did 15 years ago.
You Can Get Away With Cheating The IRS
“If you owe $1 million, I’m going to knock on your door,” he told the paper. “If you just owe $700,000, we’ll hope you get a job sometime so we can levy.”
Wage garnishment is normally the IRS’ most effective tool for securing repayment, but that tactic is useless against most of the people who are skating away with government money at this point. Most of them are wealthy enough not to work a steady job, so there are no checks to garnish.
Ted Cruz recuses self on anything before 1970
[Q]: A third Texas president, L.B.J., created Medicare in the mid-’60s. Your hero Ronald Reagan campaigned vigorously against that, saying it would lead to socialized medicine, would end liberty in the United States. Who was right: L.B.J. or Reagan?
[Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz]: It’s not worth tilting at windmills. I don’t know. I wasn’t alive then.
Who was right? Who’s to say? That was in the before-times. I have no opinions on the before-times.
Republican field; sob, stop quoting me!
Rand Paul spent the first day of his official candidacy testily explaining to reporters that nothing he said before about 2009, when he began running for office, is in any way relevant to his presidential run now and so it’s all off limits. In one case, he even claimed that something he said in 2009 was said in 2007, pushing it back out of the acceptable-to-ask category, per his rules.
The party of Jefferson Davis, not of Lincoln
one of America’s most fundamental problems is that the alliance between the current form of Southern labor and the current form of New York finance is with us still. The Southernization of the Republican Party and the increasing domination of Wall Street’s over the nation’s economic life have combined to erode both the income and the power of U.S. workers. Unions are anathema to Wall Street and the GOP.
Worker loses her job
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/03/30/after-a-story-is-published-a-minimum-wage-worker-loses-her-job/?tid=hybrid_experimentrandom_3_naShanna Tippen was another hourly worker at the bottom of the nation’s economy, looking forward to a 25-cent bump in the Arkansas minimum wage that would make it easier for her to buy diapers for her grandson. When I wrote about her in The Post last month, she said the minimum wage hike would bring her a bit of financial relief. (she’d need to earn nearly $12 an hour to live above the poverty line.)http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/02/17/the-25-cent-raise-what-life-is-like-after-a-minimum-wage-increase/In 1968, somebody could live above the poverty line with a family of three on a full-time minimum wage job.
Government Handouts The Rich Get
In case you are still skeptical the rich receive benefits from government (for which we don’t make them pee in a cup or promise not to buy luxuries),
1. The mortgage interest deduction for big houses and second homes. Thanks to this tax break, the 5 million households in America making more than $200,000 a year get a lot more housing aid than the 20 million households living on less than $20,000. Deductions for mortgage interest incentivize people already capable of buying big homes to buy even bigger ones.
Making the poor prove they’re worthy
We don’t drug-test farmers who receive agriculture subsidies (lest they think about plowing while high!). We don’t require Pell Grant recipients to prove that they’re pursuing a degree that will get them a real job one day (sorry, no poetry!). We don’t require wealthy families who cash in on the home mortgage interest deduction to prove that they don’t use their homes as brothels (because surely someone out there does this).
Arthur Laffer – supply-side plans for GOP
Laffer’s theories are so far detached from mainstream economics that “there is no point of contact,” said Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist … “This is not a wing of professional economic thought, … This is not at all the same kind of enterprise as what even conservative economics professors do.”
Republicans love Laffer, Krugman said, not because his message is simple but because it conforms perfectly to a preexisting limit-the-government worldview: “The point is, he’s telling them what they want to hear.”via
Arthur Laffer has a never-ending supply of supply-side plans for GOP – The Washington Post.
A major party gone mad?
There was never any evidence to support strong supply-side claims about the marvels of tax cuts and the horrors of tax increases; even freshwater macroeconomists, despite their willingness to believe foolish things, never went down that road.
Since the 1970s there have been four big changes in the effective tax rate on the top 1 percent: the Reagan cut, the Clinton hike, the Bush cut, and the Obama hike. they predicted dire effects from the Clinton hike; instead we had a boom that eclipsed Reagan’s.
“… we cannot escape history.”
what unites the Republican Party, on this 150th anniversary of the murder of Lincoln, is that they are against the type of progressive legislation that gave rise to their party. Lincoln is an oil painting in the parlor, to be dusted off while Republican leaders plot new ways to kill things that he would have approved of.
It’s nice to be rich
There’s a word for a government whose policies pump up the incomes of top earners and cut their tax rates while suppressing what the vast majority earn. That term is “oligarchy.”
Gun Control at NRA Convention?
I applaud the NRA for recognizing that guns can be dangerous.
But you have to wonder, if gun control is right for an NRA convention, maybe gun control is right for your community, too
via Gun Control at NRA Convention?.
Tom Cotton: Bombing Iran would take just days
In short, Tom Cotton, 2015: “Several days air and naval bombing … “
Donald Rumsfeld, 2003, on the prospect of war with Iraq: “It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.”
Uh-huh. About that …
If the war in Iraq had ended after the six months that Rumsfeld thought was so unlikely, maybe Cotton could fool Americans into thinking that bombing Iran now wouldn’t have broader implications.
Obama Denounces Homophobic RFRA Laws
Scott Walker is a joke and this time everyone is noticing. It’s been one fuck up after another since he started running for President. He compared union nurses and teachers to ISIS. He stated he’s qualified to command the military because he served in the boy scouts.
He told bizarre lies and fetishized Ronald Reagan’s bible.
Gerrymandering congressional districts: North Carolina Republicans
It’s such a radical plan even some Republicans are opposed to it. Gov. Pat McCrory blasted it. “If someone wants to change the form of government in one of your cities, then go run for city council, for mayor,” he told Raleigh’s News & Observer. Jerry Daniels, a Republican Trinity City Council member is appalled. One bill would shrink his council from nine members to six. “She’s trying to get Republicans on the board and Democrats off.
Enjoying the Low Life?
The United States is the most powerful colossus in the history of the world: Our nuclear warheads could wipe out the globe, our enemies tweet on iPhones, and kids worldwide bop to Beyoncé.
Yet let’s get real. All this hasn’t benefited all Americans. A newly released global index finds that America falls short, along with other powerful countries, on what matters most: assuring a high quality of life for ordinary citizens.
The Social Progress Index for 2015 ranks the United States 16th in the world. We may thump our chests and boast that we’re No.
Missouri Voters Repeal Anti-Discrimination Law
Missouri Voters Repeal LGBT Anti-Discrimination Law | ThinkProgress.From comments on the article.The law now gives Christians the right to treat people as second class citizens just as Nazi Germany did with the Jews. Germany was a supposedly Christian nationa nd most of the churches went along with the Nazi’s.
The “Special Snowflake”
It’s the religious far-right’s “special snowflake” syndrome: conservative Christians thinking that because they believe God sanctions their particular brand of bigotry, they’re special snowflakes who shouldn’t be restrained by human decency, much less the pesky laws that the rest of us are obliged to follow. If you hate hard enough, the rules don’t apply to you because you are a special snowflake, who really, really believes in what you’re doing.
GOP A-hole charged with domestic violence
Former executive director of the South Carolina Republican Party, Todd Kincannon arrested for criminal domestic violence. You might remember his thoughts on ebola. (He wanted ebola victims executed.) Or his thoughts on transgender people. (He thought they should be put in “camps.”) Or his strangely racist and homophobic and drunken tweets during the superbowl. (WARNING: a lot of triggers) Something is very wrong and angry and mean deep down inside of Mr. Kincannon.
Officer Is Charged With Murder
Something — it is not clear whether it is the stun gun — is either tossed or knocked to the ground behind the two men, and Officer Slager draws his gun, the video shows. When the officer fires, Mr. Scott appears to be 15 to 20 feet away and fleeing. He falls after the last of eight shots.
The officer then runs back toward where the initial scuffle occurred and picks something up off the ground. Moments later, he drops an object near Mr.
Viva Jeb Bush
Viva Jeb Bush – NYTimes.com.
the fine print on Florida’s voter forms warns applicants that giving false information is a felony.
Tom Cotton : He’d prefer war.
Tom Cotton will try to block Iran deal at any cost. He’d prefer war..
what does Cotton want? Not war, he insisted. But military action that is not war … that he’d be good with. Calling it war is a false choice, according to Cotton, but bombing Iran could be in a separate category.
Florida governor kicks 800,000 people to the curb
When he was running for re-election in 2014, Gov. Rick Scott (R-FL) cared deeply about the “poorest and weakest” Floridians, and bucked the tea party by supporting Medicaid expansion under Obamacare.
Teacher to students: aren’t Christians
the teacher told her students President Obama is not a Christian and “any parent who supports him is not a Christian.” She also challenged her students to “prove their Christianity.”
via Georgia teacher to students: If your parents voted for President Obama, they aren’t Christians.
Another red state lying to the Supreme Court
Another red state caught lying to the Supreme Court about health insurance exchanges.
The Supreme Court might have already held its vote on King v. Burwell, the case challenging federal tax credits to people buying Obamacare health insurance on the federal exchange because they live in states which did not create their own exchanges. The challengers posit that Congress intended it this way—that they wrote the law to explicitly exclude these millions of people from subsidies as incentive to states to create their own exchanges.
Lawmaker Discloses She Was Raped
I dare any one of you to judge me,” she added. “I dare you to walk in my shoes.”
Fedor’s disclosure is just the latest personal admission from a female lawmaker who has determined she cannot remain silent about her own experience while her colleagues debate issues of reproductive rights on the floor.
Earlier this month, Arizona State Rep. Victoria Steele (D) made a similar speech during a legislative debate over a measure that would make it harder for women to get insurance coverage for abortion services.
“This is health care.
Effort To Defund Family Planning Clinics Backfires
Thibodeau told ThinkProgress that, since Tipping’s and Savage’s blog posts were published, the organization has received a lot of positive notes from religious people expressing their support for the work of Maine Family Planning. “Thank you for the work you do and please pay no attention to the ‘Maine Christian Civic League.’ They know very little about God,” one message read.
“The sentiment that people aren’t interested in anti-women rhetoric and discrimination in the name of religion — that definitely came across here,” Thibodeau said.
Republicans Prepare Attack On Labor
“What you really lose, when you get rid of the prevailing wage, is a skilled, productive worker,” he said. “Our roads, bridges, and buildings should be built by the safest, best trained, qualified people, and those people need to be paid fairly for their skills.
California Groundwater Crisis Grows
Beneath California Crops, Groundwater Crisis Grows – NYTimes.com.
Farmers are drilling wells at a feverish pace and pumping billions of gallons of water from the ground, depleting a resource that was critically endangered even before the drought, now in its fourth year
College Tuition Costs So Much
The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much – NYTimes.com.
Salaries of full-time faculty members are, on average, barely higher than they were in 1970. Moreover, while 45 years ago 78 percent of college and university professors were full time, today half of postsecondary faculty members are lower-paid part-time employees, meaning that the average salaries of the people who do the teaching in American higher education are actually quite a bit lower than they were in 1970.
By contrast, a major factor driving increasing costs is the constant expansion of university administration.
Subsidized By The Federal Government?
The dollar amount is the amount the State received from the Federal Government for every dollar the state sent to the Federal government.
Ted Cruz Isn’t an Idiot
Extracts from Ted Cruz Isn’t an Idiot — He’s Delusional and That’s Far More Dangerous By Sophia A. McClennen / AlterNet April 1, 2015
for those who think like Cruz, there is virtually no amount of data, reality checks or facts that can persuade the deluded citizen to give up their false ideas. This is the mindset of the Tea Party, the Koch brothers, and many on the far right. Nyhan and Reifler refer to this as “motivated reasoning.” What they find is that people who are attached to falsehoods perceive any correcting information as partisan and flawed. So conservatives don’t perceive science as information.
You Cannot Be A Republican And A Christian
Republicans used to be moderate, business-minded civic boosters and unapologetic patriots who were the linchpins and bulwarks of small towns across the Midwest, the enthusiastic backers of projects for the civic good, usually in partnership with the town liberals (the librarian, the bar owner, a lawyer or two, the Methodist minister, the banker’s wife). These Republicans were uniters and diehard optimists and persons of compassionate conscience, inveterate doers of good deeds.Even today, there are probably some Republicans who still fit that description.