Election

Nate Silver: GOP Has 60 Percent Chance Of Winning The Senate (BARF)

Don’t let it happen. VOTE. Get excited, get out and VOTE. Shut the fools down.

Nate Silver: GOP Has 60 Percent Chance Of Winning The Senate

“Summing the probabilities of each race yields an estimate of 51 seats for Republicans. That makes them very slight favorites — perhaps somewhere in the neighborhood of 60-40 — to take control of the Senate, but also doesn’t leave them much room for error,” Silver wrote at FiveThirtyEight on Monday.

Nate Silver: GOP Has 60 Percent Chance Of Winning The Senate

Election

An upending of reason in the House – The Washington Post

An upending of reason in the House – The Washington Post By Dana Milbank Opinion writer

Just the day before, House Republicans had voted to sue Obama for using his executive authority. They called him lawless, a usurper, a monarch, a tyrant — all for postponing deadlines in the implementation of Obamacare. Now they were begging him to take executive action to compensate for their own inability to act — even though, in this case, accelerating the deportation of thousands of unaccompanied children coming from Central America would likely require Obama to ignore a 2008 law.

This was not a momentary lapse, but a wholesale upending of reason.

An upending of reason in the House – The Washington Post

Damn if he does, damned if he doesn’t. Obama can do nothing to satisfy these jerks.

47, Election

47 years later, “Everyone Should Be Entitled to Medicare”

Bill Moyers Essay: Everyone Should Be Entitled to Medicare | Moyers & Company | BillMoyers.com

In his 1948 State of the Union message, President Harry Truman said:

HARRY TRUMAN: This great Nation cannot afford to allow its citizens to suffer needlessly from the lack of proper medical care. Our ultimate aim must be a comprehensive insurance system to protect all our people equally against insecurity and ill health.

BILL MOYERS: But every time Harry Truman proposed legislation to do just that, Congress refused to budge. In the 1960s, John F. Kennedy took up the cause:

JOHN F. KENNEDY: Our working men and women, instead of being forced to ask for help from public charity, once they are old and ill, should start contributing now to their own retirement health program through the Social Security System…

BILL MOYERS: But his proposal failed in the Senate by just two votes.

On the other side, actor Ronald Reagan, still in private life, had signed on as the American Medical Association’s hired spokesman in their campaign against Medicare. Doctors’ wives organized thousands of small meetings in homes around the country, where guests listened to a phonograph record of Reagan deploring the evils of “socialized medicine”:

RONALD REAGAN: Behind it will come other Federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country […] until one day, as Norman Thomas said […] you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.

BILL MOYERS: But now, it was Lyndon Johnson’s turn. Tragically thrust into the White House by Kennedy’s assassination, LBJ, the son of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Harry Truman’s Fair Deal, vowed to finish what they had started. He pushed us relentlessly to get it done. … LBJ kept that promise. He pushed and drove and cajoled and traded, until Congress finally said yes. And so it was that 47 years ago, we traveled to Independence, Missouri, the hometown of Harry Truman, and there with the former president at his side, LBJ signed Medicare into law. Turning to Truman, whom he called “the real daddy of Medicare, ” Johnson signed him up as its first beneficiary. Harry Truman was 81.

Bill Moyers Essay: Everyone Should Be Entitled to Medicare | Moyers & Company | BillMoyers.com

The Atheist's Pulpit

War solves nothing

All wars are madness. That people would chose war is insane. Don’t respond by listing “reasons” for war, because there is no shortage of such justifications. It is not reasonable to prepare for or engage in war.

All around the globe, people are killing each other and destroying each other’s homes. I see one thing in common in all of these conflicts. Each side believes they worship a loving and just god. I’m sick of it. To hell with god.

If your god cannot end war, he is impotent, evil, or a delusion. If your religious leaders preach anything but peace, they are charlatans who will mutter pieties at your funeral. If your government cannot end war, it is incompetent or serves only the profiteers. If your people cannot end war, they do not deserve you. To hell with tribes.

Make peace. If you cannot make peace where you live, then leave that terrible, hopeless place. Does it make more sense to leave one’s home for a job than for peace? How is a place worth your life? Be one less victim, one more to escape the madness of war in the name of god and tribe. Perhaps when the only ones left in that terrible place are madmen and profiteers, they will simply kill each other and there will be no innocent victims in the way. To hell with warmongers.

Election, NADA - New American Dark Ages, WTF?!

Republican-controlled Senate? BARF

I look forward to Senate investigations into the Scopes trial and bills requiring prayer in public schools — and hand guns for all! Let the lunatics rule the asylum. That would guarantee impeachment for Obama, which would likely raise his standing with everyone else and assure another Democratic president in 2016. Bring it on, fools.

Republicans narrowly favored to capture Senate in November – CBS News

A new CBS News/New York Times Battleground Tracker estimate finds the Republicans positioned to take the Senate this year, with a likely 51-49 seat edge if the November election were held right now. The margin of error on that current seat estimate, at plus or minus 2 seats, means Democrats still have a real possibility to keep the chamber and that we head into campaign season with control up for grabs — with a closely-divided Senate surely coming in 2015 in either case.

Republicans narrowly favored to capture Senate in November – CBS News

Election, NADA - New American Dark Ages

“Conservatives and Republicans have constructed a separate and impenetrable ‘reality’”

The right’s anti-healthcare jubilee! Why they can’t quit the Obamacare obsession – Salon.com by Simon Maloy

Conservatives’ gloating over Halbig reveals why the right’s insular, fact-resistant world is so dangerous

The unseemly side to all this celebrating is the fact that these conservatives are, in effect, throwing a party over a judicial ruling that would strip millions of people of their health coverage. “The next time Republicans are wondering why so many people think their party is cruel and uncaring and will gladly crush the lives of ordinary people if it means gaining some momentary partisan advantage, they might think back to this case,” wrote Paul Waldman in the American Prospect.

Conservatives, obviously, wouldn’t see it that way, even though the policy ramifications are clear. In that way, Halbig has offered a stark reminder of just how vast the differences between the two sides in the Obamacare fight are. It’s not just a simple matter of policy disagreement – conservatives and Republicans have constructed a separate and impenetrable reality in which the Affordable Care Act is a catastrophic failure that has not provided a single measurable benefit.

The right’s anti-healthcare jubilee! Why they can’t quit the Obamacare obsession – Salon.com

"It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds." — Sam Adams