Showing posts with label SOCIAL JUSTICE.. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SOCIAL JUSTICE.. Show all posts

Sunday, August 16, 2009

Sarah Palin = more Karl Rove's FEAR MONGERING...



http://web.mac.com/videopalitalia/iWeb/Site/Photos.html

NOW IS THE TIME FOR ALL GOOD PEOPLE TO COME TO THE AID OF THEIR COUNTRY!

Maureen Dowd writes an article in the New York Times called "The Ghoulish Carousel" as Rove pushed fear, again, into the hearts and minds of the American people through Sarah Palin's Facebook account.

I think that President Obama's so-called "Kennedy-like White House brain trust" has been co-opted by the sly Karl Rove to align our middle class against intelligent social reform, not socialism. Obama needs to grow some thick skin and get under the skin of conservative republicans with some American middle class punches to the middle of these republican lies and fear tactics...Wayne Dennis Kurtz.


OP-ED COLUMNIST

Sarah’s Ghoulish Carousel

Published: August 15, 2009

WASHINGTON

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Maureen Dowd

Related

Times Topics: Sarah Palin |Health Care Reform

Readers' Comments

Share your thoughts.

I’m not sure the man who popped off and tweeted that Sonia Sotomayor was a “Latina woman racist” is the best Henry Higgins for the Eliza Doolittle of Alaska.

But Newt Gingrich was a professor. And he does know something about pulling yourself up by dragging down others and imploding when you take center stage — both Palin specialties.

Besides, he agrees with Sarah — who fretted that her parents and son Trig might be in danger from Obama “death panels” — that we should be very wary about trusting government with end-of-life decisions.

So Newt took it upon himself to become Palin’s Pygmalion. He told Politico that the out-of-work pol should write a book; take a commentator gig on TV; get a condo in D.C. or New York to use as an East Coast base; and prepare three types of speeches — one “to make money,” another to “project her brand” before universities and interest groups, and a vivid campaign stump speech to use for Republican candidates in 2010.

Most important, he advised, the dizzy Palin has to be “clear in her own head what she wants to do.”

At the moment, what she wants to do is tap into her visceral talent for aerial-shooting her favorite human prey: cerebral Ivy League Democrats.

Just as she was able to stir up the mob against Barack Obama on the trail, now she is fanning the flames against another Harvard smarty-pants — Dr. Zeke Emanuel, a White House health care adviser and the older brother of Rahmbo.

She took a forum, Facebook, more commonly used by kids hooking up and cyberstalking, and with one catchy phrase, several footnotes and a zesty disregard for facts, managed to hijack the health care debate from Mr. Obama.

Sarahcuda knows, from her brush with Barry on the campaign trail, that he is vulnerable on matters that demand a visceral and muscular response rather than a logical and book-learned one. Mr. Obama was charming and informed at his town hall in Montana on Friday, but he’s going to need some sustained passion, a clear plan and a narrative as gripping as Palin’s I-see-dead-people scenario.

She has successfully caricatured the White House health care effort, making it sound like the plot of the 1976 sci-fi movie “Logan’s Run,” about a post-apocalyptic society with limited resources where you can live only until age 30, when you must take part in an extermination ceremony called “Carousel” or flee the city.

Painting the Giacometti-esque Emanuel as a creepy Dr. Death, Palin attacked him on her Facebook page a week ago, complaining that his “Orwellian thinking” could lead to a “death panel” with bureaucrats deciding whether to pull the plug on less hardy Americans.

Never mind that Palin herself had endorsed some of the same end-of-life counseling she now depicts as putting Grandma down.

As the Democratic National Committee pointed out, Palin put out a 2008 proclamation for Healthcare Decisions Day “to raise public awareness of the need to plan ahead for healthcare decisions, related to end of life care ... and to encourage the specific use of advance directives to communicate these important healthcare decisions.”

Consistency was long ago sent to a death panel in Palin world.

Sensing traction, she took more shots against Dr. Emanuel, quoting the bioethicist’s past writing that some medical services might not be guaranteed to those “who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens. ... An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.”

“Dr. Emanuel,” she wrote ominously, “has also advocated basing medical decisions on a system which ‘produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated.’ ”

She crowed that she had him on the run, and the White House felt that the doctor, who was being portrayed as a proponent of euthanasia, needed to get out there and explain his opposition to euthanasia. So he interrupted his hiking vacation in the Italian Alps to give a raft of phone interviews saying he was taken out of context and calling Palin’s charges “completely off the wall.”

But, much to Sarah’s delight, he also conceded to The Washington Times that his “thinking has evolved” on the “very vexing” issue of deciding who gets treatment and who doesn’t.

“When I began working in the health policy area about 20 years ago ... I thought we would definitely have to ration care, that there was a need to make a decision and deny people care,” he told the paper, adding that he now feels that if we get rid of expensive “unnecessary care” that “we would have absolutely no reason to even consider rationing except in a few cases.”

A few cases? Sounds like another Facebook entry for Sarah.



Thursday, July 30, 2009

WE MUST SUE IN COURT THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA FOR FRAUD, CORRUPTION AND "MISAPPROPRIATION OF PUBLIC FUNDS."

Photographs are courtesy of the Los Angeles Times.

DISABLED PEOPLE IN WHEELCHAIRS HAVE BEEN "Thrown under the bus" by Arnold the Grubenator in the illegal line item veto of our very own California State budget.

ARNOLD "BABY" SPORTS A NEW SUIT AS WELL AS A 28% APPROVAL RATING AND I CAN ONLY GUESS WHAT KNUCKLEDRAGGERS ARE THAT 28%."
http://web.mac.com/videopalitalia/iWeb/Site/Photos.html

NOW IS THE TIME FOR ALL GOOD PEOPLE TO COME TO THE AID OF THEIR COUNTRY!


THE 2009 DISAPPEARING ACT OF CALIFORNIA'S HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES FOR SCHOOL CHILDREN, LIBRARIES, DISABLED PEOPLES, UNIVERSITY STUDENTS, HUMAN BEINGS WHO ARE DYING FROM AIDS, COLLEGE PROFESSORS, SEIU STATE EMPLOYEES, MEDICAL PATIENTS, THE DISENFRANCHISED, THE ELDERLY, MORE MEDICAL PATIENTS WHO HAVE LOST EYE AND DENTAL CARE, AND ANYONE IN THIS STATE WHO PAYS SALES TAX, PROPERTY TAX, EXISE OR SALES/USE TAX.

In the vernacular, we all got royally screwed by a vicious and deliberate illegal act by this lowly so-called Grubenator as well as the yellow-backed, spineless Republican and Democrat punks in Sacratomato.

SHAME ON YOU, Sacratomato!

THEY COULD NOT LEGISLATE THEIR WAY OUT OF A WET PAPER BAG...Wayne Dennis Kutyz.








Information

* Schwarzenegger calls special legislative sesson on taxes
* Interactive: Budget crisis timeline

Popular Comment
"Once a budget is SIGNED BY THE GOV. can the State legally issue IOUs? This is what such a lawsuit would answer by the courts. The fact that the State keeps issuing IOUs after the budget is sign shows that there is a major problem with the State's revenue and hence a cash flow problem. If the State Controller can steal your "unclaimed property" I guess it can also issue illegal IOUs to its state taxpayers also. Welcome to the Golden State."

-- sac41088
Leave your comment
Related on sacbee.com
Schwarzenegger signs budget bills, cuts $489 million more...
Steve Wiegand, 1 day, 9 hours ago
Schwarzenegger signs budget with more welfare cuts
JUDY LIN, 1 day, 18 hours ago
Governor signs budget-balancing bills
Steve Wiegand, 1 day, 18 hours ago
Capitol and California - State Budget
Comments (2) | Recommend (0) | Print
Business owner sues over IOUs
ShareThis
Buzz up!
By Dale Kasler
dkasler@sacbee.com
Published: Thursday, Jul. 30, 2009 - 12:00 am | Page 3A

A California vendor sued state officials Wednesday for paying bills with IOUs, calling the notes an unconstitutional dead weight on small businesses everywhere.

The lawsuit, filed one day after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a new budget agreement, highlights California's continued cash problems.

Despite the budget deal, state Controller John Chiang will continue issuing IOUs to pay certain bills until he's convinced the state has sufficient cash, said his spokeswoman Hallye Jordan.

Since July 2, Chiang has disbursed more than 222,000 IOUs worth a combined $1.1 billion to vendors, taxpayers owed refunds and local governments that deliver social services with state dollars.

The lawsuit by Nancy Baird, who owns a small business in the San Luis Obispo area, seeks class-action status on behalf of all IOU recipients.

Baird received an IOU for $27,752.16 to pay for embroidered shirts she produced for a California National Guard youth camp. She is demanding that the state stop issuing IOUs and immediately redeem the notes issued so far.

The state has said it will redeem all IOUs by Oct. 2 at an annualized interest rate of 3.75 percent. Baird's suit, though, referred to her IOU as "a worthless piece of paper."

State officials shrugged off the suit, filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco against Chiang and state Treasurer Bill Lockyer.

Tom Dresslar, a spokesman for Lockyer, said the treasurer "feels bad about the hardship" but said the IOUs "meet all legal and constitutional requirements."

Baird said she tried to cash her IOU with two banks but was turned away. Most major banks refused to honor the notes beyond a self-imposed July 10 deadline, despite attempts by Lockyer's office to persuade them to extend the deadline.

A loose-knit market for IOUs has emerged on the Internet and elsewhere, giving holders a place to cash in their notes at a discount.

The city of Sacramento set aside $10 million to buy IOUs at face value from city residents and businesses. On Wednesday it announced it has purchased $2.5 million in IOUs so far.
ShareThis
Capitol Journal
Los Angeles Times
"I’m very disappointed. Let’s just put it that way. Now, when the state gets out of the red, we’ll just have to re-enact them somehow," said former state Sen. John Burton on the loss of annual cost-of-living adjustments to benefits.
George Skelton
Capitol Journal

Winners and losers in the budget battle

Keeping score requires specifying between short term and long term.
George Skelton, Capitol Journal
July 30, 2009
» Discuss Article From Sacramento -- Who are the winners of the California budget battle? Yes, there are some, even though there are many more losers.

Set aside individuals for a moment and assess victory and defeat by political ideology. Distinguish between short term and long term.

And include the entire multi-round fight over the newly balanced budget -- balanced for the moment on paper anyway -- starting with its unprecedented early enactment in February, its torpedoing by voters in May and recent painful repair.

Anti-tax conservatives clearly are winners because, in the May election, they scuttled two additional years of tax increases that would have raised $16 billion for the deficit-plagued general fund. But that's only a short-term win. In 2011, the next governor -- especially if that person's a Democrat -- can team up with a Democratic Legislature and perhaps reimpose those taxes.

Meanwhile, by fretting over the temporary tax increases, conservatives blew an opportunity to cement some long-sought spending controls into the state Constitution. The spending cap would have triggered the dreaded tax-hike extension.

Under Proposition 1A, spending growth would have been capped based on the previous 10 years' revenue trend. That could have been a fiscal conservative's dream because state revenue has been plummeting, down 13% in the last two years even with February's tax increases.

The liberal spending lobby -- labor unions, welfare activists -- feared the spending cap and fiercely fought it in an abnormal alliance with anti-tax conservatives. Since it's highly unlikely there'll ever again be as good a chance to enact state spending controls, this wound up a long-term win for the libs.

But liberals and their causes -- public employees, poor people, the disabled, schools -- now are taking a short-term pounding, not only because of the recession, but because the voters' rejection of three other ballot measures left the state $6-billion deeper in the hole.

That forced Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature to cut even more aggressively to resolve what ultimately became a $26-billion deficit.

Using the threat of still further draconian cuts as leverage, Schwarzenegger muscled in some controls on safety-net spending that no Democratic-dominated Legislature would ever have passed previously.

Politically, Schwarzenegger is a budget loser, based on a poll released Wednesday by the Public Policy Institute of California. It shows only 29% of voters approving of his job performance, with 61% disapproving. A California governor's job rating hasn't been that low since Gray Davis was fighting his recall, says the pollster, Mark Baldassare.

The poll was taken before the governor and Legislature announced their tortured budget agreement.

Based on public policy, however, Schwarzenegger is a budget winner.

In a major blow to "auto-pilot" spending, he managed to permanently eliminate all automatic annual cost-of-living adjustments, except for education. Repealed were yearly 5% funding increases for state universities and inflationary hikes for welfare families and the aged, blind and disabled. That's projected to save $300 million this fiscal year and $4.2 billion through mid-2013.

Moreover, it represents a power shift from the Legislature to the governor because lawmakers in the future will have to pass a bill to grant a cost-of-living increase. Until now, a bill was needed to deny one.

I called former state Senate leader John Burton (D-San Francisco), the father of California's automatic safety-net adjustments. He finessed Gov. Ronald Reagan into enacting them nearly 40 years ago. Burton now is chairman of the state Democratic Party. I asked how he felt about Democratic legislators surrendering to the Republican governor and repealing the yearly benefit boosts.

"I'm very disappointed. Let's just put it that way," Burton said. "Now, when the state gets out of the red, we'll just have to reenact them somehow."

Any of the spending "reforms" Schwarzenegger won for Medi-Cal, CalWorks, In-Home Supportive Services -- programs for the poor and disabled -- could prove to be only short-term victories, depending on the next governor. Same for the boards and commissions he consolidated in an attack on "waste and redundancies." But for this governor, they achieved a long-time goal.

"I mean, this is huge," he told me after signing the budget fix Tuesday. "We used this crisis as a great opportunity."

But there also were the "bad and the ugly" cuts he had to make, especially in children's healthcare.

One loser, at least within the governor's office, was new Assembly Republican leader Sam Blakeslee of San Luis Obispo. Blakeslee and other legislative leaders agreed with Schwarzenegger to seize $1 billion in gas tax money from local governments. But then Blakeslee failed to deliver the Assembly Republican votes.

The gas tax bill was dropped, forcing the governor to make an additional $489 million in "ugly" cuts himself before signing the revised budget. "A terrible situation," Schwarzenegger said. "I had sleepless nights over that."

So is anyone scared yet?

Schwarzenegger and the Legislature were widely accused of scare tactics -- crying wolf -- when they warned about the consequences of voters rejecting the May ballot measures. The wolf just broke down the door.

"It'll be interesting to see how people react to the budget and its pain," says Senate leader Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento). "Are people going to say, 'Enough. We've got to find another way?' "

If they do, some winners could become losers.

george.skelton@latimes.com

Post Comment

Name
Enter your comments and post to forum
By participating you agree to our Terms of Service and represent that you are not under the age of 13.
Discussion

Discuss this column.

The menu includes rich noodle soups, crispy, juice-filled beef pancakes and more Beijing specialties.
France's Vaux le Vicomte vs. Italy's Villa Farnese.Photos
The $520 karma-enhancing cashmere baby blanket?
"Orphan" joins the list of Hollywood's greatest head scratchers. Photos