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Marriage not for procreation? Gay couples could get married in order to adopt children together.
Catholics restrict how paycheck spent?
The Catholic church's restrictions on contraception has been viewed as women's rights, health, or religious issues; but there might be another way of looking at it. I don't know all the particulars and whether this applies; but employer-provided health care is an employee benefit, it's part of an employee's compensation. So, in a way isn't the Catholic church ---based on religious beliefs--- trying to restrict what women can use their compensation/paychecks for?
Dan From Mira Mesa (San Diego)
But there's also good news in education. Colorado just opted out of No Child Left Behind.
The focus of the bill is to open the airspace to remote control flight. Within the next ten to fifteen years there will be remote control passenger and freight flight over America. New pilot-less planes are being design now.
ugh, keep the concentration of wealth at all costs.
who specifically is behind this FAA Bill and how did Obama see fit to sign it?!
The more I see, the more uneasy I become. There is such unbridled corruption everywhere I look. I watched a movie from 1992 starring Eddie Murphy called The Distinguished Gentleman. Eddie is a con man who after over hearing some politicians talking about all the money they make, decided to run for Congress since he has the same name as a popular politician who just died and wins based on name recognition. What goes on in this movie, which is a comedy, is pretty much what's going on right now and this was made 20 years ago. Seems nothing has changed, except that now corporations are people and money is speech and the super pacs.
A humorous look at what politicians say in private and how Eddie exposes them in public. If only we could get that ending now.
Actually it’s obsolete to talk about jobs these days, because these guys will take almost all the work away from us:
http://world.honda.com/ASIMO/
http://www.retrevo.com/content/blog/2012/01/most-realistic-android-human-robots-we-seen
Looks like humanity will have to organize societies in a totally different way.
As John Rambo said: "They drew first blood..."
As Jim Morrison wrote in a song: "They've got the guns, but we got the people..."
We've BEEN living 1984 since 9/11!!
George Orwell was only 17 years off...not bad for a book written 50+ years earlier...
You know, I'd like to down one of those drones like the Iranians did...I wonder how much I can get for it on Ebay...."slightly used"...
You Mean You FINALLY Noticed?
I bet not one of the unemployed young persons is a Republican. I hope they will understand that the problem is being exacerbated by a do nothing Congress led by the Republicans and that President Obama and the Democrats are doing everything they can to get America back to work.
Well, that would work if you didn't lose HALF of your retirement in the crash of '08.....
THANKS GEORGE "DUMBA$$" BUSH!!!
I'm 50 and I'm taking to the streets!!! START THE SOCIALIST REVOLUTION NOW!!!
"They've got the guns, but we got the people..."
Jim Morrison
Miss J.R. Rothschild,
I was around in 1968, and my war was the one going on then. Every Republican President, except Nixon, has invaded another country. During that war the rich escaped the war by going to college, running to Canada, or having a parent in the Congress, because there was a draft. Seperate rules applied at that time also. War wasn't glorified then, as it is now. There was no ceremony for us. War meant killing in the name of someone else, the one that started it. President so-and-so.
But it seems that we weren't heard, then either, until blood was spilled. The Kent State affair was the start of being heard. I am afaird that, until blood is spilled again, and until it is someone more important than you or I , nothing will be done.But you must continue, consistant, in their face, protest, and that is really all you can do. Now that the President has approved of the use of drones over His country, and over His people, can only serve one purpose. There is a greater fear among the 1% because of all the guns we now have. This acts as a deterent, and thus the need for peeking into our homes, tracking us as we live our lives. Even with the military being bought by the Corporations. As seen by foreign Army's deserting and helping the citizens of their country, our soldiers may desert and help us. This scares them.
The legislatiion to arrest groups of people, gathered to participate, in their right to stop the way our government is ignoring us had to be done by law. The rich can hide behind laws when it soots them. If the English citizens had to right to posses weapons, the Gillitine wouldn't have made history. But for the reason America was discovered and settled, we are heading right back to that time, of no voice, just do as I say, or else. The Gillitine was a deterent to keep the citizens under the thumb of the rich and powerful then. Now by law, the Congress has answered the call of the 1% employers to hush the people.
As our generation stopped the Vietnam War, by protest and blood, Martin Luther King stopped the treatment of blacks, by protest and blood, don't your generation give up. I am so proud to see the younger people stand up. The U.S. may gain it's respect yet. And it will be because of YOU!!!
That's great...you are lucky enough to live in a prosperous neighborhood where the other residents can afford to pay someone else to do their gardening. Unfortuately, that is the exception rather than the rule.
Our Washington state legislator for our area has warned us that there is going to be a lot of violence this year. He is comparing what's going to happen with the riots and civil unrest of around 1968. I was ten but don't remember that. We are going to have to continue to GROW the occupy movement and make it stronger month by month, up to the election at least. Young people, with the highest unemployment rate, need to show up and stand up for their futures. I plan on getting down to Seattle and participating in whatever means I can with my disabilities. It really made me mad when I heard that govenors across the nation got together to squelch the voice of the occupiers. I plan on finding out how to get our Occupy Seattle movement back into the mainstream news so that more people become aware that it has NOT gone away and that they should join in, since they are also a part of the 99%. Wish me luck. :))) BTW, there are a lot, and I mean a lot, of middle aged fifty and sixty something's participating in Occupy Seattle! Yeah!!!!
My son is 16. He owns two businesses and is employed as a life guard. He has more work than he knows what to do with. His friends whine about not being able to find a job, nor do they want his excess work. Jobs might not be available, but work is still there. He started weeding and mowing lawns at 13, and now people give him tips earning more than $15/hour. On top of that, he owns another business selling a product he manufactures (where he makes much more than $15/hour). If he desires more $$, he can sell door-to-door or at more Farmer's markets.
I just think this generation will have to learn to find the work themselves (whether that is fair or not). The paradigm has shifted....
BTW I have no dog in this fight. I am already retired, collecting both Social Security and Medicare.
Early retirement for Boomers is the answer.
Many aging baby boomers have plenty of savings and would gladly retire early if they had access to reasonbly priced health insurance, so I suggest a temporary lowering of the minimum age for Medicare to encourage high-wage older people to leave the work force. Many would retire even if charged a higher Medicare premium than those age 65+. Perhaps one of the details could be a sliding scale based on number of years younger than 65.
Taking it a step further, the federal government could subsidize the retirement of anyone over a specific age by paying them some percentage of what they would collect from Social Security until they reach the Social Security retirement age.
These steps would help business by exchanging long-tenured, high-wage workers with younger people fresh out of school and would be cheaper on a per-job basis than almost any other jobs program I have ever heard of.
I'm not sure saying the millionaires and billionaires want Mitt is really good. Just think, Joe bought the office for JFK, and he is one of our heros.
The General Welfare clause was so important to the founding fathers that they put it into the Constituion twice.
It is in the preamble, and in Article 1 section 8 Congress is given the specifically enumerated power to pass legislation to provide for the general welfare.
It is an enumerated power.
Thom the definitions for General welfare all state health so the tool you just had on is a typical hard righty with his getting loud and yelling about it.
St. Joe's Hospital here in Phoenix did the unimaginable a while ago--they made a decision to allow a woman who was 11 weeks pregnant to have an abortion to SAVE HER LIFE. The local Catholic leaders were enraged, fired the nun in charge of the ethics committee and got a lot of bad press nationwide. How dare they save a woman by aborting her fetus (who would have died anyway). Turned out the Church wound up cutting off ties with the hospital--it's no longer a Catholic hospital--because they were so very immoral. Thom gives the Catholic Church way too much credit as a compassionate organization. (I'm a former Catholic, FYI.) No group that would deny a lifesaving procedure to a person who needs and wants it is compassionate. Are conservative Muslims compassionate for murdering girls who have sex or are raped to repair their family's honor? At some point you have to pull back and acknowledge that these religious organizations are kind of nuts, even if sometimes they help the poor.
In the article linked to below, in addition to briefly touching on the St. Joe's fiasco, it mentions the issues with Catholic Healthcare wanting to take over another health care system, which pulled out because of pressure from citizens who had very real concerns about the soon-to-be nonexistent reproductive care for rural women who would have no where else to go. Which is another issue with Catholics and their refusal to provide needed health care services.
http://www.azcentral.com/business/news/articles/2012/01/23/20120123st-jo...
The latest right wing pushback on the good jobs numbers in the January alleges chicanery in the totals that show unemployment dropping to 8.3%. In particular they are raising alarms over the 'unexplained' 3 million person decrease in the "raw numbers" of total employed from December to January, and the 2 million person increase in the total unemployed during the same period - far in excess of what can be explained by adjustments made for seasonal variations (i.e. Christmas).
The problem with their argument is that they are looking at the wrong January, they are basing their conspiracy theory on a mistaken substitution of January 2011 numbers for January 2012. Ooops!
below is a snip from the BLS report showing the numbers they mistakenly used and the right numbers:
http://oi44.tinypic.com/27ya5as.jpg
As I contemplate the many mind-boggling issues we are facing today, I keep coming back to one particular question...What will these issues look like and mean to us all when we are living (or at least well on our way to living) in a post-peak oil world? I keep trying to conjure up an image as to just what life will look like. Sometimes, I feel that we are arguing/fighting for liberties and rights that very soon will take on a whole new form...have entirely different meanings and/or levels of importance. For example, what would an ideal national healthcare system look like in our post peak oil world?