Tea Party Calling The Tea Kettle Black
It pays to throw a Tea Party: Business, politics merge for leaders
Mon Apr 26, 5:05 pm ET
Whatever ultimate political effect that Tea Party conservatism has on the country, one thing is increasingly clear: Being a high-profile leader of the small-government movement is very big business.
The movement’s popular appeal stems from grass-roots outrage over the bailout of America’s financial system, the expanded role of government, and the growing deficits. But the Tea Party has also been aggressively promoted by conservative media, political leaders and advocacy groups — and its broad appeal has blurred the distinctions among the three.
A year into this fledgling political movement’s life, reports are emerging of the huge money being made by Tea Party leaders. Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck are in front of the pack, but a few new faces and a few old faces are also getting into the game.
MORE HERE
THE POT CALLING THE KETTLE BLACK – is that the pot is sooty (being placed on a fire), while the kettle is clean and shiny (being placed on coals only), and hence when the pot accuses the kettle of being black, it’s the pot’s own sooty reflection that it sees: the pot {Tea Party} accuses the kettle {Obama Admin.} of a fault that only the pot has, From: wikipedia
Hypocrisy to the highest degree, the teabaggers are jumping up and down, faces red with rage and raising clenched fists at governmental spending. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, they rush to donate money to this, their darling movement (cult) and buy up Tea Party goodies, as quickly as they hit the retail shelves just to hear their leaders Palin, Beck, et al, spew forth hyperbolic propaganda and lies (misleading or outright mendacity). Their motto TAKE AMERICA BACK… Yeah, back to the way it was before the Civil War. Wake up teabaggers you’re not Southern, you’re AMERICAN and the only thing the leaders of your movement are looking for is their bottom-line! thinkingblue
PS: Below, Thom Hartmann weighs in on a berserk Tea Party, Teabagger:
Tea Bagger says all Socialists are nuts except his socialism
Why Is Hemp Illegal?
I just joined a facebook group called Political Junkies… (which I certainly believe I am) It’s a group that is suppose to include all persuasions of the political spectrum, Liberal, Moderate, Conservative, Libertarian and so on. I blog mostly in the Liberal/Progressive arena, which needless to say, gives rise to the old cliché PREACHING TO THE CHOIR. (trying to make believers out of people who already believe) sometimes, I do ask myself… “What’s the point?” But actually, I don’t blog to make believers out of anyone (not entirely anyway)… I blog to get things off my chest… I know I don’t have a very big following… A few friends and family may read my stuff and I’m happy with that. But I digress…
Political Junkies http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=377643615572&ref=ts has a question of the week: This week’s question was: “Should the voluntary sale, purchase and usage of controlled substances be legalized and taxed within the United States?” Below was my response: thinkingblue
One illegal substance that should be legalized is Medical Marijuana, why it is not makes no sense at all. Actually, I believe all cannabis should be legal especially hemp.
Industrial Hemp or “hemp”, can provide many of the raw materials we need as a society to function. Hemp food, HEMP OIL, hemp plastics, hemp insulation, hemp concrete, hemp paper, and other hemp composites all available today! And yes, the list goes on and on. Plus, Hemp is both Eco-friendly and Renewable. Hemp is one of the fastest growing plants in the world producing about 10 tons of dry product per acre per year. Hemp was one of the first plants to be processed and used by humans making the history of hemp over 12000 years long! More Info at http://www.hemp.com/
Why everyone doesn’t question this is beyond reason…
There hundreds of alcohol overdose deaths each year, yet there has never been a marijuana overdose death in history. The consumption of alcohol is also the direct cause of tens of thousands of deaths in the U.S. each year. (And Marijuana is far less addictive than alcohol.)
There has never been a documented case of lung cancer in a marijuana-only smoker, and recent studies find that marijuana use is not associated with any type of cancer. The same cannot be said for alcohol, which has been found to contribute to a variety of long-term negative health effects, including cancers and cirrhosis of the liver.
Still, I repeat… STILL the US Government outlaws Marijuana while keeping Alcohol Legal… It’s time everyone start raising questions and stop following like sheep, those who tell us that the legalization of marijuana would be bad for the country while not mentioning the ill effects from alcohol use.
We need to stop ignoring common sense statistics and begin to realize that the legalization of cannabis would be good for the country (revenue and I believe controlled marijuana would be less likely to fall into youngsters hands) and bad for crime (putting the drug cartels out of business). More facts at this site: http://www.saferchoice.org/content/view/24/53/
Also: Top Five Marijuana Myths – http://www.drugpolicy.org/marijuana/factsmyths/#tobacco
Another good read: The Real Reason Hemp is Illegal – http://www.venusproject.com/ethics_in_action/Real_Reason_Hemp_Illegal.html
HEMP CAN SAVE THE EARTH! Why is this HUGELY environmentally friendly plant illegal?!
RNC Document Mocks Donors, Plays on ‘Fear’
Watch Thom Hartmann on Freespeech TV
Please sign this very important petition “demand question time”
(of our political leaders) HERE...
We really need more dialog from those at the top… The Republicans have got to be made to realize they can’t hide behind “NO” any longer! thinkingblue
Let’s keep our heads, while we continue to watch THE
THEATER OF THE ABSURD!!!
“A SEARCH FOR TRUTH WILL FIND INJUSTICE.”
thinkingblue
CFL’s and Dirty Electricity
CFL and Dirty Electricity
CFL’S and Dirty Electricity
A friend of mine sent me the below video, containing so called facts about compact fluorescent lamps and Dirty Electricity… I didn’t think much of it because this friend is somewhat of a conspiracy theorist and has sent me over the years many “theories” that have surfaced on the Internet with only one aim and that is to inform us of the harm that awaits us in any which way imaginable. But I did research it in an effort to debunk the terrifying and alarming fundamental message, so I could send it back with a “SNARK YOU’RE WRONG”, to my conspiracy theorist buddy.
Regrettably, I couldn’t find even one source that would tell me this is a load of crap. Then, I thought, Holy Moly can this information be true? I shifted my search to finding out what exactly is DIRTY ELECTRICITY… cause I’ll be damned, if I ever heard of it before… Lo and behold, I came upon this site Four Components that Comprise Dirty Electricity and other EMFs in a Home. which explains that dirty electricity is all around us in our modern world…
Excerpt: (Most of the dirty electricity is created by electrical devices in our own homes. Computers, TVs, florescent tube, CFL and low-voltage halogen lighting and virtually all of today’s energy-efficient electronic devices induce high levels of high frequency harmonics and electrical “noise” back onto circuits and then into a building’s electrical system creating an invisible, powerful, high frequency EMF called “dirty Electricity”)
Although the site’s objective, I believe, is to sell you an EMF meter:
(Visit our on-line store and see our complete line of EMF meters, detectors, Graham-Stetzer filters and other proven EMF protection solutions)
I still think it informational. Our world (life itself) is so full of dangers that to go through life fearful of every move you make, is nonsensical and pathetic. FDR’s poignant statement “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” is just as accurate in today’s microcosm as it was in the dark days leading up to World War II.
Instead of dreading “Dirty Electricity” maybe we should all exercise our Fight, Flight or Freeze responses on a real honest-to-goodness threat like what Ron Paul,Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck’s delusional teabaggers are pushing for without their knowledge: FASCISM
Another Franklin Delano Roosevelt quote:
“Unhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people. The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is fascism— ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any other controlling private power.
The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living. Both lessons hit home. Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing.”
Do You Want Your Identity Compromised? Use Internet Coupons.
Do You Want Your Identity Compromised? Use Internet Coupons.
Who would have thought? An innocent tool that we’ve used for years to save a dime or two has turned into something that should be avoided at all “COSTS”! In this age of technology, anything goes! The corporate world who is crackerjack at knowing how to part you from your money, is now using all the latest technical devices it can get its hands on to know exactly what YOU need or desire. Just imagine a benign little bar-code on a printed page containing volumes of information about YOU. It’s chilling! Now that the Supreme Court has deemed Corporations, flesh and blood, there will be no limits, on what your friendly neighborhood corporate busybody will tell the world about YOU! thinkingblue
Web Coupons Know Lots About You, and They Tell
For decades, shoppers have taken advantage of coupons. Now, the coupons are taking advantage of the shoppers.
A new breed of coupon, printed from the Internet or sent to mobile phones, is packed with information about the customer who uses it. While the coupons look standard, their bar codes can be loaded with a startling amount of data, including identification about the customer, Internet address, Facebook page information and even the search terms the customer used to find the coupon in the first place.
And all that information follows that customer into the mall. For example, if a man walks into a Filene’s Basement to buy a suit for his wedding and shows a coupon he retrieved online, the company’s marketing agency can figure out whether he used the search terms “Hugo Boss suit” or “discount wedding clothes” to research his purchase (just don’t tell his fiancée).
Coupons from the Internet are the fastest-growing part of the coupon world — their redemption increased 263 percent to about 50 million coupons in 2009, according to the coupon-processing company Inmar. Using coupons to link Internet behavior with in-store shopping lets retailers figure out which ad slogans or online product promotions work best, how long someone waits between searching and shopping, even what offers a shopper will respond to or ignore.
The coupons can, in some cases, be tracked not just to an anonymous shopper but to an identifiable person: a retailer could know that Amy Smith printed a 15 percent-off coupon after searching for appliance discounts at Ebates.com on Friday at 1:30 p.m. and redeemed it later that afternoon at the store. MORE HERE
A PICTURE WORTH A BILLION WORDS – Party of NO is at it again!
A PICTURE WORTH A BILLION WORDS
This says it all folks! The Party of NO is at it again. There’s no time for rest when you’re out to destroy America!
President Obama Criticizes Mitch McConnell in Finance Reform Push
President Calls Kentucky Senator’s Statement on Proposal ‘Cynical, Deceptive”
By RACHEL MARTIN
President Obama used his weekly address today to remind Americans of all the damage left in the wake of the financial crisis and the need to pass financial reform.
In his weekly address, the president discusses financial accountability.”Eight million jobs lost, trillions in savings erased, countless dreams diminished or denied,” Obama said. “I believe we have to do everything we can to ensure that no crisis like this ever happens again.”
But the president also got personal today, directly attacking Senator Minority Leader Mitch McConnell for leading the charge against the Democrats’ financial reform billnow making its way through Congress.
In his address, the president cited a meeting the Kentucky Republican had weeks ago with Wall Street Executives.
“Lo and behold, when he returned to Washington, the Senate Republican Leader came out against the common-sense reforms we’ve proposed,” the president said. “In doing so, he made the cynical and deceptive assertion that reform would somehow enable future bailouts — when he knows that it would do just the opposite.”
Administration officials say the current reform bill has two primary objectives: to protect taxpayers from bearing the risk of future bank failure and to bring the derivatives market out of the “shadow market” so it can be better regulated.
Republicans have been railing against the bill, in particular a $50 billion fund — paid for by the banks — intended to pay for possible bank failures in the future.
The White House doesn’t support the idea of such a fund, either, but Republicans are using it as an opportunity to ink the entire bill with the poisonous “bailout” moniker.
On the Senate floor earlier this week, McConnell said: “In fact, if you look at it carefully, it will lead to endless taxpayer bailouts of Wall Street banks.”
All 41 Senate Republicans signed a letter Friday saying they will block the current reform bill if and when it is brought to the floor next week. The bill, they say, “establishes new and unlimited regulatory powers that will stifle small businesses and community banks.”
Punctuating the political battle over financial reform is the latest revelation linking Wall Street greed to the disastrous U.S. housing crisis.
On Friday, the Securities and Exchange Commission slapped Goldman Sachs with a civil suit, alleging widespread investor fraud.
“The civil suit raises the level of awareness of deceit on Wall Street, the selfishness and self-serving behavior that needs to be regulated,” University of Maryland economist Peter Morici said. “We might have gotten financial services reform without it, but this makes it more likely.”
But when it will happen is unclear.
Republicans say they want to go back to the drawing board in hopes of getting a true bi-partisan bill.
But earlier this week White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said the administration would not support bad policy just for the sake of bi-partisanship. He used a rather obscure analogy to suggest that when it comes to bi-partisanship, Republicans are afraid of commitment.
“A lot of Republicans get to church,” he said, “but very few of them have made it to the altar.”
Sparing The Rod Helps Make A Normal Child
Sparing The Rod Helps Make A Normal Child
I’ve always thought spanking or slapping kids was WRONG. For some parents beating a child or as the Religious Southerners would say, giving kids a whooping is good for them. I live in a rural community in the middle of the Bible belt and I‘ve seen this aggressive display upon children countless times. In Wal-Mart I heard a mom tell her toddlers, they were bad and “WAS A GONNA GIT A WHOPPEN!” … (They were in the back of the store behind some tall shelves so no one could see this monster mom in action) I couldn’t see the little kids but I heard them plead for mercy… “No, please mommy don’t do it, we’ll be good… We promise! Next sounds were whacking and screaming. How I wished I would have encountered the tyrant and taken her belt and WHOPPED her instead but since I wasn’t raised in a house of brutality I didn’t try to confront the bitch. What is wrong with these people? Why don’t they realize they’re teaching their kids to become bullies? Ignorance is not bliss, it’s brutal! Please read the article below: SPANKING KIDS LEADS TO AGGRESSIVE BEHAVIOR thinkingblue
PS: Want to see something really startling, click this link from a facebook group:
My parents didn’t put me in time-out, they whooped my ass!
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Study: Spanking Kids Leads to More Aggressive BehaviorBy ALICE PARK
Disciplining young children is one of the key jobs of any parent – most people would have no trouble agreeing with that. But whether or not that discipline should include spanking or other forms of corporal punishment is a far trickier issue.
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) does not endorse spanking for any reason, citing its lack of long-term effectiveness as a behavior-changing tactic. Instead the AAP supports strategies such as “time-outs” when children misbehave, which focus on getting kids to reflect on their behavior and the consequences of their actions. Still, as many parents can attest, few responses bring about the immediate interruption of a full-blown tantrum like a swift whack to the bottom.
Now researchers at Tulane University provide the strongest evidence yet against the use of spanking: of the nearly 2,500 youngsters in the study, those who were spanked more frequently at age 3 were more likely to be aggressive by age 5. The research supports earlier work on the pitfalls of corporal punishment, including a study by Duke University researchers that revealed that infants who were spanked at 12 months scored lower on cognitive tests at age 3.
“I’m excited by the idea that there is now some nice hard data that can back up clinicians when they share their caution with parents against using corporal punishment,” says Dr. Jayne Singer, clinical director of the child and parent program at Children’s Hospital Boston, who was not involved in the study.
Led by Catherine Taylor, the Tulane study was the first to control simultaneously for variables that are most likely to confound the association between spanking and later aggressive behavior. The researchers accounted for factors such as acts of neglect by the mother, violence or aggression between the parents, maternal stress and depression, the mother’s use of alcohol and drugs, and even whether the mother considered abortion while pregnant with the child.
Each of these factors contributed to children’s aggressive behavior at age 5, but they could not explain all of the violent tendencies at that age. Further, the positive connection between spanking and aggression remained strong, even after these factors had been accounted for.
“The odds of a child being more aggressive at age 5 if he had been spanked more than twice in the month before the study began increased by 50%,” says Taylor. And because her group also accounted for varying levels of natural aggression in children, the researchers are confident that “it’s not just that children who are more aggressive are more likely to be spanked.”
What the study, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, shows is that outside of the most obvious factors that may influence violent behavior in children, spanking remains a strong predictor. “This study controls for the most common risk factors that people tend to think of as being associated with aggression,” says Singer. “This adds more credence, more data and more strength to the argument against using corporal punishment.”
Among the mothers who were studied, nearly half (45.6%) reported no spanking in the previous month; 27.9% reported spanking once or twice; and 26.5% reported spanking more than twice. Compared with children who were not hit, those who were spanked were more likely to be defiant, demand immediate satisfaction of their wants and needs, get frustrated easily, have temper tantrums and lash out physically against others.
The reason for that, says Singer, may be that spanking instills fear rather than understanding. Even if a child were to stop his screaming tantrum when spanked, that doesn’t mean he understands why he shouldn’t be acting out in the first place. What’s more, spanking models aggressive behavior as a solution to problems.
For children to understand what and why they have done something wrong, it may take repeated efforts on the parent’s part, using time-outs – a strategy that typically involves denying the child any attention, praise or interaction with parents for a specified period of time (that is, the parents ignore the child). These quiet times force children to calm down and learn to think about their emotions, rather than acting out on them blindly.
Spanking may stop a child from misbehaving in the short term, but it becomes less and less effective with repeated use, according to the AAP; it also makes discipline more difficult as the child gets older and outgrows spanking. As the latest study shows, investing the time early on to teach a child why his behavior is wrong may translate to a more self-aware and in-control youngster in the long run.
RNC Document Mocks Donors, Plays on ‘Fear’
Watch Thom Hartmann on Freespeech TV
Please sign this very important petition “demand question time”
(of our political leaders) HERE...
We really need more dialog from those at the top…
The Republicans have got to be made to realize they can’t hide behind “NO”
any longer! thinkingblue
Let’s keep our heads, while we continue to watch THE
THEATER OF THE ABSURD!!!
“A SEARCH FOR TRUTH WILL FIND INJUSTICE.”
thinkingblue
