Is there any hope of ever fixing this sorry-assed country?
Will the Democrats who control the Senate unlock whatever vault their cojones are locked up in, and reform the idiotic institution called the filibuster? It's their President who plays Charlie Brown to the Republicans' Lucy, and keeps trying to kick that football only to have it pulled away at the last second. When Obama's third well-qualified nominee for the federal district court in Washington was prevented from having a confirmation vote, somebody in Washington had the good sense to say, "Enough is enough." The same somebody ought to tell Harry Reid that LBJ would never have tolerated such excrement.
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Talk about cojones! The Walmart in Canton, O., is asking customers to donate to a holiday food drive -- for its own employees. “Please donate food items so associates in need can enjoy Thanksgiving dinner,” reads a sign accompanied by several plastic bins. Do you suppose the stores that made billionaires of a legion of Waltons might consider paying those associates a living wage? Nah.
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On a recent television appearance, criticizing the Affordable Care Act, Michelle Bachmann, whose retirement from Congress can't come soon enough, described herself as a "genius." Honest.
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In Seattle, Machinists District Lodge 751 rejected a take-it-or-leave-it contract with Boeing Aircraft that would have frozen or altogether taken away their pensions and increased their health insurance costs by 30 percent. These cutbacks in entitlements came from a company whose CEO is guaranteed a pension of $250,000 a month; a company that received $8.7 billion in subsidies from the state of Washington as a bribe to keep the manufacture of the new B777X in Seattle. Boeing is now threatening to take its B777X to Texas, where another "genius," Gov. Rick Parry, is ready with a ban on unions, historically low wages -- and a school system that teaches creationism as science.
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An imperfect health care law, most of whose imperfections were either demanded by Republicans or bought by powerful industries like Big Pharma, is now under brutal attack by Republicans and powerful indusrtries like Big Pharma. Not content with attacking their own bad provisions in the law, they're attacking with lies about the law. And the President, who used every trick in his political bag to get the thing passed, neglected to see to it that the computer system that operated it actually worked. It didn't. Reminds me of the bank robbers who thought of everything but forgot to put gas in the getaway car.
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And this is the government that had the high-tech savvy to put together the biggest, most sophisticated system of spying on everyone in the history of the planet. And to jail, kill or banish into exile the handful of brave patriots who told us that they were doing this.
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A murder trial jury in Florida bought into the idea that a black kid carrying candy in a white community at night deserved killing. Now the man they acquitted in the slaying of Trayvon Martin is flouting the law all over the place, having just been jailed on charges of threatening his girlfriend with a shotgun. Juries don't get second chances.
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Did you know that local police departments, some in towns as small as 20,000, are being supplied with drones, tanks, grenade launchers, tactical vests like those used by soldiers in Afghanistan, military-grade helicopters or heavily-armored vehicles intended to withstand IED blasts? All of this to lurk behind a culvert and nab speeders? And why is Homeland Security sitting on a stockpile of ammunition sufficient to fight a war in, say, Somalia? It's to use on us, dummy, if we get too uppity.
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Nope. No hope at all.
