I am so tired of these horrible situations that are holding back our economy and treating poor people like pit bulls in an animal shelter. I'm retired and between small pension and social security I am able to keep up. The good thing is I never tried to live like I was rich and always try and not spend too more than I can afford. But, my daughter with a 9 year old girl is on food stamps, which pretty much limits their grocery list. I help them, but I'm not rich either. She's 52 years old and doing yard work. Every job she applies for has way too many other people applying she never gets anywhere. My 24 year old grandson was able to be put back on my son's health insurance policy and he had a life threatening infection last year and spent 4 days in the hospital. If there wasn't Obama Cares, he would have walked out of the hospital owing $170,000! Try and pay that off on a minimum wage! My neighbors are on food stamps. She had a good job locally assembling medical equipment. About two years ago they moved the operation to Costa Rica, so now she's working at a clothing store for minimum wage. I see so many people needing a hand and to think the republicans want to take even the little help they get from the government, I think they are stingy, greedy, selfish people! Peace Out!

You can bet that they will shut down every government function except spying on us!

Quote paper:

...Stellar Wind which involved placing fibre-optic cable “splitters” in major Internet switching centres, and triaging the enormous volumes of traffic in real-time with a small high-performance scanning computer (known as a deep-packet inspection box), which would send data filtered by this means back to the NSA. An AT&T technical supervisor in the San Francisco office was asked to assist in constructing such a facility (“Room 641A”) and was concerned that this activity manifestly broke US Constitutional protections, because the cable carried domestic as well as international traffic.

Quote paper:
...two newspapers revealed the existence of an NSA programme codenamed PRISM, which accessed data from leading brands of US Internet companies. By the end of the day a statement from Adm.Clapper (Director of NSA) officially acknowledged the PRISM programme...

1.5.1
“Upstream”
The slides published from the Snowden material feature references to “Upstream” collection programmes by the NSA adumbrated by various codewords. Data is copied from both public and private networks to the NSA from international fibre-optic cables at landing points, and from central exchanges which switch Internet traffic between the major carriers...

1.5.2
XKeyscore
The XKeyscore system was described in slides (dated 2008) published by The Guardian on the 31st of July. It is an “exploitation system/analytic framework. It is an “exploitation system/analytic framework”, which enables searching a “3 day rolling buffer” of “full take” data stored at 150 global sites on 700 database servers. The system integrates data collected from US embassy sites, foreign satellite and microwave transmissions (i.e. the system formerly known as ECHELON), and the “upstream” sources above.

The system indexes e-mail addresses, file names, IP addresses and port numbers, cookies, webmail and chat usernames and buddylists, phone numbers, and metadata from web browsing sessions (including words typed into search engines and locations visited on Google Maps). The distinctive advantage of the system is that it enables an analyst to discover “strong selectors” (search parameters which identify or can be used to extract data precisely about a target), and to look for “anomalous events” such as someone “using encryption” or “searching for suspicious stuff”.

Quote paper:
1.5.3
BULLRUN is the codename for a NSA programme for the last decade for an “aggressive multi-pronged effort to break into widely used encryption technologies”...

... backdoor mechanisms previously only known by the NSA....

...collaboration with vendors of IT security products and software, mathematical cryptanalysis and “side-channel” attacks, forging of public-key certificates, infiltrating and influencing technical bodies towards adopting insecure standards, and likely use of coercive legal orders to compel introduction of “backdoors”. It is important to stress that no evidence has emerged (yet) that the fundamental cipher algorithms in common use have been broken mathematically, however over the past few years doubts have grown about vulnerabilities in the complex “protocols” used to set -up and ensure compatibility amongst the software in common use....

...could compel disclosure of cryptographic keys, including the SSL keys used to secure data-in-transit by major search engines, social networks, webmail portals, and Cloud services in general...

http://cryptome.org/2013/09/europarl-nsa.pdf

That's about $126.00 per person in the food stamp program. I wonder how much it costs to print up food stamp credit cards...and then the cost of administering them? 10% of our population are on food stamps.

Republican logic is "fickle." They say social spending is out of control, so rather than weed out the cheats, we should take away from everyone. Apply that same logic to out of control gun violence, and their solution should be to take guns away from everyone. Must be political contributions from the poor are down.

The Republican logic is slowly becoming very clear to me. Could the following statement be true?

“Since we Repubs cannot state ‘look what we’ve done for you citizens’ come next election,’ we need to starve them out and lay to rest the sick and dying of as many as we can. This is a numbers game, boys.”

Who knows, maybe it’ll work? Didn’t the Nazi’s try something similar with the “Jewish Problem”?

Matthew 25:

44 Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?

45 Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.

46 And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.

Now then, the question is: can a Republican be a Christian or a Righteous Person?

Quote Loren Bliss: The killings begin with the approximately 44,000 persons who are murdered each year by denial of health care that -- in civilized nations -- is considered a human right.

Loren Bliss ~ When such a number of fatalities as of the result of lack of health care is stated it is helpful to cite a source. Not wishing to burden Mr. Bliss with this question I did my own research and concluded that Loren was off by 1,000 uninsured deaths.

http://prescriptions.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/17/harvard-medical-study-links-lack-of-insurance-to-45000-us-deaths-a-year/

45,000 is a more realistic estimate. Therefore, as Mr. Bliss contends that the number is more likely hundreds of thousands, I am very reluctant to question.

May God help us all.

FACE WALL STREET and say this prayer at the opening and closing of the NEW YORK STOCK EXCHANGE:

THE REPUBLICAN CREED

REPUBLICANS believe the government should help the rich live long and prosper.

REPUBLICANS believe the government should let the rich exploit the working classes until they die from hard work and exhaustion.

REPUBLICANS believe the government should just let the poor die off from disease and starvation because they never will amount to anything anyway and are just a drain on the rich.

Reprinted from yesterdays blog. (This one deserves repeating)

Flopot ~ Wow! Thanks for that link to what can only be described as a mind boggling article. What an education! I had no idea they turned a charity into a racket.

For the benefit of anyone who missed it here are a couple of quick clips from Flopots reference:

The Roosevelt Institute

Quote Article: Food Stamps: JPMorgan and Banking Industry Profit From Misery:These are boom times for such services — a new report from the US Department of Agriculture reports that 43.6 million Americans are now using food stamps, nearly 14% of the population, which is a record number. Paton notes this trend himself: “Volumes have gone through the roof in the last couple of years,” he says. “This business is a very important business to JPMorgan in terms of its size and scale.” And the numbers bear him out. According to the company’s most recent quarterly filing with the SEC, the Treasury & Securities Services segment, which is the division that includes the food stamp business, was up 2% in the last three months of last quarter and brought in $5.47 billion in net revenue for most of 2010.

That means that $5.47 Billion in our tax money earmarked for hungry people are going into the hands of Bankers. But wait, there's more.

Quote Article: Food Stamps: JPMorgan and Banking Industry Profit From Misery:Paton’s quick to point out that this isn’t just about profit at JPMorgan — it’s also serving a “useful social function.” And department execs don’t have to sit around hoping for unemployment to skyrocket so they can make a buck — more than 40% of food stamp recipients have a job, as Paton notes. Even if you get a job, you still have an almost one in two chance of still not being able to buy groceries, so JPMorgan can continue to make its profits as unemployment falls (someday).

http://rooseveltinstitute.org/new-roosevelt/food-stamps-jpmorgan-banking-industry-profit-misery

Isn't that just peachy? Almost half of food stamp recipients work; yet work such crappy paying jobs that they can't afford both a roof and food. And if we force those who don't work into the crappy job market at their disposal it is a 50/50 chance that they still won't be able to afford food. To add insult to injury this article goes on to say that JPMorgan also outsourced all the food stamp debit card support jobs to India. Why do Bankers hate American citizens and their own country so much? These parasites are profiting off of this horrible situation!

No wonder so many people don't even bother looking for work. Who can blame them? It is a crime that our government has allowed this program to be privatized. They have committed embezzlement. They are costing the taxpayer over $5 billion annually by skimming it off the top for their Banker cronies.

This is a problem that can ONLY be resolved with the repeal of free trade. If one out of two available jobs do not pay a living wage we need to vote out of office everyone who does not strongly advocate the repeal of free trade, campaign finance reform, and move to amend. These shills are literally getting away with murder.

Fiscal conservatism is not on the Republican's agenda. Should they ever get into power again (highly unlikely) they will spend more in one year than Obama spent in 8 years. The real conservative agenda is that the rich, successful, and powerful need to run the show - the poor, the workers, the under achievers are not smart enough to have a voice in government. Thus, food stamps are not necessary as the ruling class does not need them. Corporate welfare, defense spending, tax breaks for millionaires are the necessary agenda items. The rest of us can "eat cake". The sooner people realize this, the sooner things can turn around.

These mass shootings/atrocities might just slow down (unfortunately,they will never stop) if the NRA would let the sane people decide what the majorty wants and not dump their million$ into lying distored political campaigns. The insanity that the NRA pushes will only lead to more of the same.

Some how this organazation must be shown for exactly what they are, a Republican backed group that make these insane gun laws in back room deals with the far-right gready GOP members that only think about the money not the mounting body count. This trend can be changed with a lot of hard work!

I missed most of a segment, but heard right at the end Thom say something about how the U.S. deals with trash. That very minute, I was watching a promo for a movie called "Midway", about the Pacific Gyre trash that ends up inside shore birds (among other animals, I'm sure).