MEMORIAL DAY 2011

Whatever the threat, be it real or a false flag operation, these brave men and women, answer the call to protect their homes, their families, their country. We will always be eternally grateful.

It is the
VETERAN,
not the preacher,
who has given us freedom of religion. It is the VETERAN,
not the reporter,
who has given us freedom of the press. It is the VETERAN,
not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech.
It is the VETERAN, not the campus organizer, who has given us freedom to assemble.
It is the VETERAN,
not the lawyer, who has given us the right to a fair trial.
It is the VETERAN,
not the politician, Who has given us the right to vote.


It is the
VETERAN who salutes the Flag,

It is the VETERAN who serves under the Flag,

ETERNAL REST GRANT THEM O LORD, AND LET PERPETUAL LIGHT SHINE UPON
THEM.

God
Bless them all!!!

SAY NO to Patriot EXTENSIONS!

 

Sign our petition

 

Protect Civil Liberties:

Let The PATRIOT Act Expire!

BREAKING, February 8th: It’s working! The House vote to extend the PATRIOT Act just failed. But they’re not going to give up — now, more than ever, we need people to keep the pressure on. Sign the petition and tell your friends to sign as well!

UPDATE, February 7th: The House is trying to ram through a sneaky renewal of the PATRIOT Act this week!  They’re doing it without debate, and without including any meaningful reforms.  Please sign the petition below, and use this page to call your lawmaker to urge him or her to vote no.

ORIGINAL: The PATRIOT Act is set to expire in just FOUR WEEKS, but Congress is trying to rush through a last minute extension!

Since it was passed almost a decade ago, some of the most noxious portions of the PATRIOT Act have burrowed their way deep into our legal system.  A year ago, President Obama signed a bill extending three provisions of the original PATRIOT Act; last week Congressman Mike Rogers (R-Michigan) introduced legislation to extend them again.

Together, these provisions make a mockery of our civil liberties: They let government officials spy on whomever they want, for any reason, without ever letting them know or giving them a chance to challenge the order in court.

Enough is enough: Will you join us in demanding that Congress finally let these provisions expire? Just add your name at right, and we’ll automatically send a message to your senator, representative, and President Obama:

TO MY ELECTED OFFICIALS:  After nearly ten years, it’s time to let the PATRIOT Act expire once and for all.  I urge you to oppose its re-authorization.

 

Add your name and we’ll deliver your message to Washington.

 

Here’s a more detailed article from the CATO Institute that explains some of the problems with the PATRIOT Act provisions that are up for extension.  And here’s an overview by the ACLU.

 

 

Help me out on this contest, please…

Rebekah Lloyd love for her father inspired this
entry. Even though she has to bend down to kiss her dad, Rebekah Lloyd said that in her eyes, he’s 8 feet tall. After an especially difficult two years for her father, David Gregory, the former Miss Teen Citrus and Miss Citrus wants to take this Father’s Day to honor the man she calls Daddy. “My dad is such an inspiration to me,” she said from her dad’s house in Homosassa. David came down to Florida from Vermont, with a B.A. in Sociology, in 1977 and adopted Rebekah and her two brothers, Zachary and James, when he met and married their mother. Rebekah was just a baby, and David is the only father she has ever known.

“It doesn’t take DNA to make a dad,” she said.

He was born with osteogenesis imperfecta, a brittle bone disease. He’s in an
electric wheelchair now, but he doesn’t let that stop him,” she said. “He has had over 100 broken bones and had to have steel rods put in his legs when he was a teenager; he has pain, and it hasn’t been easy for him. What’s most amazing is that the bone thing isn’t even an issue with him — he even walked me down the aisle at my wedding in 2004.”

Except for the joy of an only daughter’s wedding, 2004 was an especially
difficult year for David. A week after the wedding, his mother died, and then four months after that, his brother-in-law, who was his best friend, also died. Then his wife was diagnosed with heart disease and had two stints put in her heart.

Meanwhile, he was still walking, but started using a motorized scooter. However, he didn’t have a wheelchair-accessible van with a drive-up ramp like he has now.
So, to transfer the scooter onto the rack on the back of his car, he had to prop
himself against the car and “drive” the scooter using his hands onto the rack,
secure the gate behind it, then slowly make his way into the car. When he got to
work, he had to reverse the process, and then do it again when he got home.

Currently, Gregory works at the Property Appraiser’s office in Crystal River.
Prior to that he had various jobs: he operated Liberty Stagecoach delivery
service, managed a Wilson’s Leather store in a mall in New Port Richey, operated
boats at the Marine Science Center, worked at a bank, taught school as a substitute
and was a garage mechanic.

Also in 2004, Gregory developed chest pains and discovered that he needed heart
bypass and valve replacement surgery, which is serious enough for someone with
normal bones. For him, the risks were multiplied.

On the morning of his surgery, Gregory’s children, his wife and her family and
his dad all came to the hospital. “We all kissed him as he went into surgery; it
was that risky,” Lloyd said.

He recovered and returned to work 10 weeks later and is still there today, going to work every day in his electric wheelchair.

Please click on the pictures below to rate his story.

Missing Richard Nixon

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Many of the retrospectives on Ted Kennedy’s life mention his regret that he didn’t accept Richard Nixon’s offer of a bipartisan health care deal. The moral some commentators take from that regret is that today’s health care reformers should do what Mr. Kennedy balked at doing back then, and reach out to the other side.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Paul Krugman

 But it’s a bad analogy, because today’s political scene is nothing like that of the early 1970s. In fact, surveying current politics, I find myself missing Richard Nixon.

No, I haven’t lost my mind. Nixon was surely the worst person other than Dick Cheney ever to control the executive branch.

But the Nixon era was a time in which leading figures in both parties were capable of speaking rationally about policy, and in which policy decisions weren’t as warped by corporate cash as they are now. America is a better country in many ways than it was 35 years ago, but our political system’s ability to deal with real problems has been degraded to such an extent that I sometimes wonder whether the country is still governable.

As many people have pointed out, Nixon’s proposal for health care reform looks a lot like Democratic proposals today. In fact, in some ways it was stronger. Right now, Republicans are balking at the idea of requiring that large employers offer health insurance to their workers; Nixon proposed requiring that all employers, not just large companies, offer insurance.

Nixon also embraced tighter regulation of insurers, calling on states to “approve specific plans, oversee rates, ensure adequate disclosure, require an annual audit and take other appropriate measures.” No illusions there about how the magic of the marketplace solves all problems.

So what happened to the days when a Republican president could sound so nonideological, and offer such a reasonable proposal?

Part of the answer is that the right-wing fringe, which has always been around — as an article by the historian Rick Perlstein puts it, “crazy is a pre-existing condition” — has now, in effect, taken over one of our two major parties. Moderate Republicans, the sort of people with whom one might have been able to negotiate a health care deal, have either been driven out of the party or intimidated into silence. Whom are Democrats supposed to reach out to, when Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who was supposed to be the linchpin of any deal, helped feed the “death panel” lies?

But there’s another reason health care reform is much harder now than it would have been under Nixon: the vast expansion of corporate influence.

We tend to think of the way things are now, with a huge army of lobbyists permanently camped in the corridors of power, with corporations prepared to unleash misleading ads and organize fake grass-roots protests against any legislation that threatens their bottom line, as the way it always was. But our corporate-cash-dominated system is a relatively recent creation, dating mainly from the late 1970s.

And now that this system exists, reform of any kind has become extremely difficult. That’s especially true for health care, where growing spending has made the vested interests far more powerful than they were in Nixon’s day. The health insurance industry, in particular, saw its premiums go from 1.5 percent of G.D.P. in 1970 to 5.5 percent in 2007, so that a once minor player has become a political behemoth, one that is currently spending $1.4 million a day lobbying Congress.

That spending fuels debates that otherwise seem incomprehensible. Why are “centrist” Democrats like Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota so opposed to letting a public plan, in which Americans can buy their insurance directly from the government, compete with private insurers? Never mind their often incoherent arguments; what it comes down to is the money.

Given the combination of G.O.P. extremism and corporate power, it’s now doubtful whether health reform, even if we get it — which is by no means certain — will be anywhere near as good as Nixon’s proposal, even though Democrats control the White House and have a large Congressional majority.

And what about other challenges? Every desperately needed reform I can think of, from controlling greenhouse gases to restoring fiscal balance, will have to run the same gantlet of lobbying and lies.

I’m not saying that reformers should give up. They do, however, have to realize what they’re up against. There was a lot of talk last year about how Barack Obama would be a “transformational” president — but true transformation, it turns out, requires a lot more than electing one telegenic leader. Actually turning this country around is going to take years of siege warfare against deeply entrenched interests, defending a deeply dysfunctional political system.

Charlie Crist appoints old Campaign Manager

by Eric Jotkoff
Today, Charlie Crist appointed his old campaign manager and political crony George LeMieux to the United States Senate. While the U.S. Senate is taking up important legislation focusing on our economy, global warming, and health insurance reform – Floridians needed Charlie Crist to appoint a Senator who would fight for us in Washington. Unfortunately, by appointing LeMieux, Crist once again put his own political ambition above doing what is right for Florida.
For the past several years, LeMieux has been a special interest lobbyist who has made millions of dollars selling access to Crist to the highest corporate bidders in Tallahassee. Because he has never been elected to any office, “Senator” LeMieux has only ever been beholden to Charlie Crist, Republican Party donors, and his special interest clients – not the people of Florida.
This is just one more example of the Republican leadership in Tallahassee putting cronyism and corruption above the people of our state. From Ray Sansom, to former lobbyist Bill McCollum, to George LeMieux, it is clear that we must stand together and pledge to end the Republican culture of cronyism and corruption in Tallahassee:

http://www.fladems.com/repubcronyism

In Tallahassee, the Republican culture of cronyism and corruption has run amuck.
Not only is Charlie Crist playing political games rather than working on behalf of the people of Florida, with the latest example
being his pick for U.S. Senate, but LeMieux’s appointment is just another in a long line of the cronyism and corruption from Republicans
in Tallahassee.
After Republican Speaker Ray Samson’s indictment and revelations about the Republican Party of Florida’s AmEx slush fund, now Charlie Crist taps his friend and campaign manager to go to the U.S. Senate. The shady, backroom dealings that have led to such a culture of corruption and cronyism have got to stop!
That’s why we need you to stand up against the culture of cronyism and corruption. Join me in standing against Charlie Crist’s appointment of
his crony, lobbyist George LeMieux and all the backroom deals that have become the status quo in Tallahassee.

9 TRILLION TO CORPORATE AMERICA

We need health care now, public health care, and no amount of crap from corporate America is going to change that, it always amazes me when the media can make you believe that the small amount of monies (comparatively speaking) that go to poor people is the root of all our problems! Why don’t you figure it out, really look at the figures, the war machine, Cheney and friends, total Cost of the Wars Since 2001 and that’s not even supplying our troops with adequate equipment, and supplying them with substandard healthcare when they return. Remember the Walter Reed debacle! Did you know that Bush wanted to eliminate combat pay for the military in Iraq! Combat pay, a paltry $75.00 extra a month, apparently he was fearful that the billions going to his pals might be affected.

$900,894,690,063 for war in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001, the war was not, I repeat, NOT NECESSARY, THE REASONS FOR US TO INVADE WERE FALSE, IT WAS STAGED, FOR THE CARYSLE GROUP, THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX. FURTHER, 9 TRILLION HAS BEEN LENT OUT BY THE FEDERAL RESERVE TO THE BEHOMOTHS OF CORPORATE AMERICA IN ONE YEAR!

Bush family has destroyed this country, when the old man was in office it was only the saving and loan that collapsed and the taxpayer had to bail it out, but you can certainly say the biggest was yet to come. Georgee Boy, collapsed the whole world economy, now that’s an achievement. But somehow it’s the people fault. In a way, I guess it is, when we silently stood by and let the criminals steal the election by fraud, and then start and continue an illegal war.

Since 911 was contrived and orchestrated to happen one would think that there would be an uprising over that, but it is much easier to blame a less powerful enemy, the people, for your problems. And if socialism means we get healthcare, that’s just fine with me. The best possible Democracy is a socialist Democracy. They don’t usually stay around too long because our CIA infiltrates and destroys. We are a socialist country now, the only problem being, is the only people who receive the benefits now, are the rich! It is nice to know your tax dollars benefit so many wealthy individuals. I guess it is because you believe you too might one day be wealthy, and then you woke up, unfortunately, it will be too late.