Thursday, February 24, 2011

Budget Cutting Consequences

Essential services, or some extra cash for the rich folks......your choice!

Thom's blog
Two children died in a fire in Philadelphia on Tuesday - and budget cuts could be to blame
Two children died in a fire in Philadelphia on Tuesday - and budget cuts could be to blame. In an effort to cut spending - the city of Philadelphia "browned out" - or closed some of it's fire stations for a day. One of those fire stations that were closed was Engine 61 - and it just so happened to be the nearest company to the fire that killed those two children - and thus would have been first on the scene. As local firefighter Mike Cane said, "Whether...that company was in service, they would have made a difference?
Nobody can answer that...what we can say is, maybe if they were there...Maybe them kids would have had a shot." These are the real-life consequences of budget cutting.
It's time we roll back the Reagan tax cuts instead of rolling back critical funding for firefighters who keep our communities safe. The purpose of a budget is not to give tax breaks to the rich in order to screw over everyone else.
-Thom
(How far back would you roll taxes? Tell us here.)

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The Thom Hartmann Program
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Monday, February 21, 2011

Let us give thanks to the Wisconsin-14

Other legislators throughout the country should take note that it may be necessary for them to take the same steps in order to preserve democracy in this country. This is the first "shot across the bow" on the war between average hard-working Americans, and big business money interests that are represented by the U.S. Supreme Court in their recently destructive "Citizens United" give away. They want it all!.....and what better way than to destroy the unions and the protection of collective bargaining.

Amplify’d from thinkingblue.blogspot.com

We The People of the USA Need To Thank
The Wisconsin 14

IT'S NOT ABOUT THE WISCONSIN BUDGET!
IT ABOUT WAR ON DEMOCRACY!
You still can’t find a single Democratic state senator in
the entire state of Wisconsin. All 14 of them remain in
self-imposed exile in Illinois, and as long as they stay there,
they can continue to prevent passage of a highly controversial
bill that would sharply reduce benefits for teachers and other
government employees and, more importantly, gut public labor unions.
At the moment, only five states prohibit collective bargaining by
teachers and other public employees, as the map below
demonstrates. Georgia is one of the five. (Note: The right to
bargain collectively does not imply the legal right to strike in many states.)

As I've written in my last blog, What we are seeing here today is WAR. Not the blood and guts war that the Republicans would prefer but a war never-the-less on Democracy. And if We-The-People lose this war our America will never be the same.

Since SCOTUS (5/4) ruled blatantly in favor of Corporations (in the
Citizen United ruling on corporate campaign spending), by 5
conservative judges who followed their Republican political
ideologies in lockstep, against the people and for the
corporations, a plutocracy has taken shape. This ruling has
emboldened the GOP to openly oppose any democratic rules in which
we live under. If they succeed in destroying our Democracy
altogether we will find that life ruled by the wealthiest amongst
us to be much oppressed and not worth living. Think Slavery,
it’s not farfetched it’s REAL!
This is real (although it seems like it should be just a bad dream)
We-The-People are about to lose that status and become
We-The-Slaves to Corporate/Wealthy Interests. It is so obvious
but so many will deliberately refuse to see it just to prove a
point. It won't be the rich and powerful that takes us down it
will be the foolish. tb


"A fool contributes nothing worth hearing and takes offense at everything." Aristotle

Yes, there are two Americas’ Virginia, they exist as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist. One tolerant and broadminded, the other intolerant and narrow-minded!

Sincerely, thinkingblue, from the TOLERANT AND BROADMINDED USA

PS: Joe (You Lie) Wilson, et al reside in the other America!

Monday, February 21, 2011

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Saturday, February 19, 2011

Frank Sinatra's traumatic birth

Here's some biographical information about Frank Sinatra that few people are aware of. It was a surprise to me.

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In today's excerpt - Frank Sinatra carried the scars of his traumatic birth for the rest of his life:

"A raw December Sunday afternoon in 1915, a day more like the old century than the new among the wood-frame tenements and horse-shit-flecked cobblestones of Hoboken's Little Italy, a.k.a. Guinea Town. The air smells of coal smoke and imminent snow. The kitchen of the cold-water flat on Monroe Street is full of women, all gathered around a table, all shouting at once. On the table lies a copper-haired girl, just nineteen, hugely pregnant. She moans hoarsely: the labor has stalled. The midwife wipes the poor girl's brow and motions with her other hand. A doctor is sent for. Ten long minutes later he arrives, removes his overcoat, and with a stern look around the room - he is the lone male present - opens his black bag. From the shining metallic array inside he removes his dreaded obstetric forceps, a medieval-looking instrument, and grips the baby with it, pulling hard from the mother's womb, in the violent process fearfully tearing the left side of the child's face and neck, as well as its left ear.

"The doctor cuts the cord and lays the infant - a boy, huge and blue and bleeding from his wounds, and apparently dead - by the kitchen sink, quickly shifting his efforts to saving the nearly unconscious mother's life. The women lean in, mopping the mother's pallid face, shouting advice in Italian. One at the back of the scrum - perhaps the mother's mother, perhaps someone else - looks at the inert baby and takes pity. She picks it up, runs some ice-cold water from the sink over it, and slaps its back. It starts, snuffles, and begins to howl.

"Mother and child both survived, but neither ever forgot the brutality of that December day. Frank Sinatra bore the scars of his birth, both physical and psychological, to the end of his years. A bear-rug-cherubic baby picture shot a few weeks after he was born was purposely taken from his right side, since the wounds on the left side of his face and neck were still angry-looking. Throughout Sinatra's vastly documented life, he would rarely - especially if he had anything to do with it - be photographed from his left. One scar, hard to disguise (though frequently airbrushed), ran diagonally from the lower-left corner of his mouth to his jawline. His ear on that side had a bifurcated lobe - the classic cauliflower - but that was the least of it: the delicate ridges and planes of his left outer ear were mashed, giving the appearance, in early pictures, of an apricot run over by a steamroller. The only connection between the sonic world and the external auditory meatus - the ear hole - was a vertical slit. Later plastic surgery would correct the problem to some extent.

"That wasn't all. In childhood, a mastoid operation would leave a thick ridge of scar tissue on his neck behind the ear's base. A severe case of cystic acne in adolescence compounded his sense of disfigurement: as an adult, he would apply Max Factor pancake makeup to his face and neck every morning and again after each of the several showers he took daily.

"Sinatra later told his daughter Nancy that when he was eleven, after some playmates began to call him 'Scarface,' he went to the house of the physician who had delivered him, determined to give the good doctor a good beating. Fortunately, the doctor wasn't home. Even when he was in his early forties, on top of the world and in the midst of an artistic outpouring unparalleled in the history of popular music, the birth trauma - and his mother - were very much on Sinatra's mind. Once, in a moment of extraordinary emotional nakedness, the singer opened up very briefly to a lover. 'They weren't thinking about me,' he said bitterly. 'They were just thinking about my mother. They just kind
of ripped me out and tossed me aside.' "

Author: James Kaplan  
Title: Frank
Publisher: Doubleday
Date: Copyright 2010 by James Kaplan
Pages: 3-5




Frank: The Voice
by James Kaplan by Doubleday

Hardcover ~ Release Date: 2010-11-02

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Friday, February 18, 2011

Wake Up Tea Party, We May Be On the Same Side In Wisconsin.

Once again Rachel Maddow clears up a mystery and brings up the magical word called TRUTH. You will not believe what the Republicans are trying to do to the WE THE PEOPLE. Wake up Tea Party, we may be on the SAME SIDE!

Amplify’d from www.thethinkingblue.com

The Rachel Maddow Show
of February 17, 2011, summed up what is really happening in
Wisconsin. It's not about BUDGET, it's not about UNIONS, it's not
even about Left and Right. It's about SURPRISE, SURPRISE... about
plutocracy! Oh, this sounds so REAL, you know Real as in reality.
Thanks Rachel once again you cleared up the confusion we all feel
about things that happen around us THAT MAKE NO SENSE AT ALL.
thinkingblue

PLUTOCRACY - a
government or state in which the wealthy class rules.

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Thursday, February 03, 2011

Unless You're Big Business, You

Wednesday banner
Thom's blog
Unless You're Big Business, You're Screwed!
Republican Chairman of the House Government Oversight Committee - and small-time criminal turned into the richest man in Congress - Darrell Issa is outsourcing his job to corporate CEOs. Back in December - Issa asked more than one hundred businesses to outline what federal regulations he should attempt to strike down with his new powers as Chairman. And though Issa intended to keep the responses from the corporate community to his inquiry private - unlike the personal information of people who've filed Freedom of Information Act requests - which he wants to make public - the organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington uncovered more than 30 of these responses. The wish-list of deregulation includes: dismantling the EPA - repealing lead-paint restrictions - ending coal tar and hydraulic fracking regulations - and ending required flammability tests for children's mattresses.
Basically - free reign to pollute the environment - contaminate our drinking war - poison our families with lead - and mass produce fire traps for children...that's what the business community wants Darrell Issa to let them get away with. Republicans are busy renaming House Committees - like removing the word "labor" from the Labor and Education Committee - and removing the words "civil rights" from the Civil Rights and Constitution Subcommittee. I suggest they go ahead and rename Issa's Government Oversight Committee too. Let's just call it the "Unless You're Big Business, You're Screwed" Committee.
-Thom
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