Drunk Sailors In A Syphlitic Whorehouse

Matt has been contemplating a kos diary about the Republican's spending problem. Overspending is not a good thing, but when it happens it should be for things that increase the health, safety and opportunities for the country.

The issue is that they used our money and our kids college fund and our retirement fund and mortgaged the house and wrote bad checks and maxed out the credit cards.

They did all those things like drunken sailors in a syphlitic whorehouse.

The question is what are we getting for that money?

Halliburton and the Pharmaceuticals (good name for a band) got risk free, no bid cost plus guaranteed profits.

What could be more important than that?

Jobs-NO
Education-NO
Healthcare-NO
Infrastructure-NO
Safety-NO
Security-NO
Technology-NO

Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your government on steroids

"My brilliant, witty and unbearably sexy friend …"

Reason Gone Mad understands that the 'nuclear option' will not be enough to satisfy the Congressional Republicans, so he drafted are 14 new rules to make them feel a little less victimized, I am sharing the first two:

To: All Senators
From: Republican Leadership
Re: New Senate Rules

1. When Senate Democrats arrive for work, they must first gather outside the Republican cloakroom, arrange themselves in height order, and allow arriving GOP senators to smack them in the back of the head.

2. Prior to the start of the Senate's morning business, Democratic senators shall provide bagels, coffee and doughnut holes for their Republican colleagues.

I'm not so sure the new rules alone would help the Republicans cope with the pressures of ruling the world with a one party state, so I have decided to be helpful and offer some additional rules they would like to have:

• Any Rebublican Contributor may parade any Senate Democrat around naked on a leash after Church on Sundays.
• Any right wing talk show host may dissolve any marriage of any person on the continent anytime they want.
• House Republicans are allowed to kidnap and humiliate any minor children of any Democratic Housemember until they sing 'Kumbya' forwards and backwards in perfect tune while blindfolded.
• Any citizen of America who does not sufficiently praise the environmental policies of George W. Bush must eat mercury filled glass thermometers while vicious Rottweilers are poised to attack.
• Brown people who are caught attempting to vote will have their neighborhoods bombed and razed to the ground.
• All medical decisions for the Proles will henceforth be made by gun wielding anti abortionists.

I confess to being a disorganized and undisciplined Democrat cum blogger who did not read everything Dave told me to read until today. That explains why I didn't know about Important Changes to Your Citizenship Agreement No hard feelings, okay?

Bush Polling

43% I cannot understand why it is so high.

Live Cam Inactivity

Shocking

Step Away From The Camera

What do you think about a family that spends all their time railing about their dying daughter? Do you think they could pass up a single press conference or photo op to spend some time with her?

Yes I hear the blips about visited with Terri yadda yadda yadda. If that was somebody I loved going off to into the next dimension, I would spend almost every minute with them.

Mr. and Mrs. Schindler, your daughter's time is finite. Go sit with her. You don't all have to be in court or in front of the camera all the time. There are four of you, why would you leave her alone for a minute?

Sudden Campaign Syndrome

Denny Rehberg is getting plenty of ink and air on his latest bring home the bacon campaign. He hasn't kissed this many local butts since right before the election.

Why now?

Does anybody else have a story about their Representative's comming down with sudden campaing syndrome?

Why now?

The War Is Wearing Thin

Official death toll stands at 1525.

Two years in and all the soldiers still don't have body armour and 60% of the returning injured have Traumatic Brain Injuries, but the money for that was cut. The wunderkids swear that we need more patriotic images to increase enrollment in the armed services.

Medical care for the injured is not the best, Jason Wittling is planning to spend a lot of his own money in another country to try to regain some of his own mobility.

Investigations of people being beaten to death in American custody keep piling up

Jeremy Hinzman was denied refugee status in Canada.
This call up is one of the last steps before a draft.

If you came here liiking for good news, this story is pretty sweet.

Priorities

Cutting food and heat assistance out of the budget while funnelling more cash to the wealthiest people in America hurts children in Montana.

Don't give me that crap about working for a living. Most people do, but they don't make a living wage so their kids can go hungry while we shovel five billion bucks a month into the destruction of Iraq and the men and women we sent there?

Leverage

"Until companies understand that it costs money to be bad actors, they will continue to be bad actors".

MONTPELIER — The Vermont State Teachers' Retirement System on Tuesday became the first public pension board in the country to take formal action against President Bush's Social Security reforms.

The trustees of the largest of Vermont's three public pension boards voted 4-2 to make it harder for investment firms that support those reforms to manage the $1.2 billion in assets in the teachers fund.

This lesson about not allowing companies to use your money against you came from my favorite newlywed. Thanks Josh, and congratulations!

Alice has been hopping up and down trying to get us to do the same thing with our 401K's for a long time now.

Just The Cost Of Doing Business

At least 14 dead and 100 injured people are enjoying the benefits of Tort Reform today. It's no small coincidence that this was the third major incident at this Texas refinery in the past year.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined the refinery after two employees were burned to death by superheated water in September.

Another explosion forced the evacuation of the plant for several hours last March. Afterward, OSHA fined the refinery $63,000 for safety violations, including problems with its emergency shutdown system and employee training.

Texas City is the site of the worst industrial accident in U.S. history. In 1947, a fire aboard a ship at the Texas City docks triggered a massive explosion that killed 576 people and left fires burning in the city for days.

"Welcome to life in Texas City," Marion Taylor, 55, said Wednesday as she entered a convenience store shortly after the explosion.

That's what happens when the price of a life is less than the cost of a safety measure or of a lawyer.

On June 23, 1999, 24-year-old Juan Martinez and his uncle Jose Inez
Rangel were hydro-testing a pipe at the Phillips Chemical plant in
Pasadena, Texas. The pipe was about 10 feet from a reactor that
manufactured plastic used in drinking cups, food containers, and medical
equipment. At a crucial moment, plant operators opened the valves in the
reactor out of sequence, sending an excess of a volatile chemical into
the reactor, where it mixed with a catalyst to create a vapor cloud-and
a fiery explosion. The blast coated Martinez and Rangel with 500-degree
molten plastic. They were burned alive.

Martinez and Rangel were not the first workers to die at the Phillips
plant. All told, 30 workers had been killed and hundreds severely
wounded at the plant in the previous 11 years. The worst of the
accidents happened in 1989, when an explosion killed 23 people at the
plant. The chemical company paid out $40 million to compensate for the
death of one of the victims.

In the lawsuit filed a decade later by Martinez's widow, attorney John
Eddie Williams would write, "No other serial killer in this state has
been allowed to go unpunished and virtually unbridled for so long."
A few months after he wrote that line, Williams was downtown taking the
deposition of a worker from the plant. Williams looked out the window,
he says, and saw smoke. Another explosion at the plant. And another
worker dead-a man who had survived the 1989 blast. Seventy others were
hurt, including four men who suffered third-degree burns over half their
bodies. The explosion set off car alarms a mile away and closed nearby
schools. "The guy being deposed would have been there," says Williams.

All the pieces were in place for a big verdict-a statement from a jury
of average citizens who would punish the company for its long record of
death and indifference. After he presented the case to a mock jury,
Williams says, the mock jurors were so horrified by the facts some of
them began boycotting Phillips products.

But Phillips had little reason to worry. The company didn't even bother
to make a settlement offer to Martinez's family. It knew it could come
into court cushioned by a series of "tort-reform" measures championed by
George W. Bush during his first term as governor of Texas. Among them
was a cap on punitive damages, signed into law by Bush in 1995, which
limited such awards to the greater of $200,000 or twice the economic
damages, plus up to $750,000 for non-economic damages such as pain and
suffering. 

The concept of "Pinto math"

For Texas trial lawyers, awards of that size give mega-corporations like
Phillips the green light to make business and safety decision based on
life-versus-profit calculations they term "Pinto math." That's the crude
calculation used by the Ford Motor Company in the late 1960s and early
1970s when it decided it was cheaper to let hundreds of people die each
year than to spend about $5 per vehicle to prevent Pintos' gas tanks
from exploding in rear-end accidents. Without the threat of high
punitive damages in wrongful death lawsuits, Texas oil and chemical
companies like Phillips have little incentive to spend money to improve
unsafe plants and pipelines. Certainly the government isn't going to
make an impact: Federal officials cited Phillips for serious safety
violations in the 1999 explosion that killed Martinez and Rangel, but
fined the company just $140,000. Steven Daniels, a researcher with the
American Bar Foundation, says "Workers are just at the mercy now of
their employers and the insurance companies."

Find Facing South's PDF file on tort reform here, and read it for even more outrageous examples of the indifference to human suffering that blooms under the cover of really bad law.

The Pledge of Allegiance

I pledge allegiance to this flag
Made in the Peoples Republic of China
And to Halliburton for which it stands
Fast food Nation, force procreation
Brings Mercury and indignity
To All.

Buh Bye

Nothing, nobody to see here.

God's Earth Is Sacred

What do you know, the " central, moral imperative of our time" has absolutely nothing to do with the exploitation of the Schiavo/Schindler families pain.

We are urged to reject the "false gospel" mindset of the live for today because God will take us away movement. The NCCUSA has pais attention to the problems we face and the responsibilities that Christians and all people of good will owe to each other, to future generations, and to all God's creatures.

God’s creation delivers unsettling news. Earth’s climate is warming to dangerous levels; 90 percent of the world’s fisheries have been depleted; coastal development and pollution are causing a sharp decline in ocean health; shrinking habitat threatens to extinguish thousands of species; over 95 percent of the contiguous United States forests have been lost; and almost half of the population in the United States lives in areas that do not meet national air quality standards. In recent years, ">the profound danger has grown, requiring us as theologians, pastors, and religious leaders to speak out and act with new urgency.

A Call to Action: Healing the Earth and Providing a Just and Sustainable Society


Our current cycle of government and business as usual is not acceptable, and we are called to demand greater accountability of our government, our corporations and our selves. We must live conciously with these values in mind:

• Justice
• Sustainability
• Bioresponsibility
• Humility
• Generosity
• Frugality
• Solidarity
• Compassion

Read this, talk about it, write about it. Compare it to the current policy of wrecking and reaping instant gratification we have allowed our fellow Christians and others of good will to forgive and fall behind.

True Christians will recognize the scriptural message here; others will continue to pollute and profit, but we must not lose heart.

William Rivers Pitt compares the fruit of the word alone with the fruit of the spirit and the rest of us need to do that until the only people who choose to continue living empty lives of overconsumption and greed do it honestly.

Social Security 4 Sale

Those madcap patriots, Billionaires For Bush, would do anything to give their guy a hand:

Due to the surprising failure of carefully staged "conversations" across America to convince the American Public that Privatizing Social Security is a good thing, we have decided to take matters into our own hands.

As a favor to President Bush and offered exclusively here to the winning bidder who meets our reserve, (must be a private Brokerage Firm, see details below) Billionaires For Bush can't wait to pull the switch on retirement security by circumventing Congress, the Will of the People, and good sense. Why not cut right to the chase?

Concurrent with White House Goals and the Cato Institute, we're

AUCTIONING OFF SOCIAL SECURITY!

$ Right now the system pays benefits to retirees, widoweds, disabled people, and orphans.

$ It is also one of the cheapest and most cost efficient government-run systems.

$ BUT, there is a major flaw in all of this; Wall St. isn’t cut into the deal!

$ Bid today and put Social Security on the market! It may be a gamble for the many, but it’s a sure thing for the lucky few here on Wall St – we make our commissions whether the market goes up or down!

via the Daou Report

Another Thought On The Schiavo Scharade

Was this really done by the same people who tell us that homosexuality undermines marriage?

Did Congress get in the middle of this family dispute because some gay people want to commit their lives to each other?

Suggestion #2

If suggestion #1 fails, always go to suggestion #2

Become depressed. Have the rest of the staff become morbid and depressed. See if your boss notices. Create quiet, sullen workgroups and discuss topics like - the end of the world, morgue-life, and terminal diseases. Any interaction with the boss should have a dismal deathly overcast to it.

I think this is the only one that Whiner hasn't tried to get his way about dismantling Social Security.

Thank-You Tom DeLay

I know that you are a corrupt and mean spirited politician, the last person I would have ever expected to guarantee universal health coverage to everybody, but Thank-you! Thank-you! Thank-you!

Should we throw you a parade
Or will you admit your game
In this Schiavo Schrade?

I think it's a great idea
to spend on healthcare
not bombs.

If you thought of it sooner, this little boy would still be alive.

Don't Look Now

1522 and no end in sight.