WCGreen
WCGreen's JournalWhat's your favorite thing about the internet now that most of us have had it for 10 or more years..
To me it is watching the weather radar in real time dropped over a map so you can literally see where around you the weather is happening and can track it to see if you are in the thick of things...
That's cool.
So what everyday thing changed for you since you first heard that modem connect you to AOL...
I have never heard so many words uttered that meant absolutely nothing at all...
Poof, and it's all gone, a puff of smoke...
And Romeny is no more...
I don't know about you, but I have a very personal stake in this election...
You see I have a preexisting condition that is going to ultimately end with a lung transplant.
Now if Governor Romney were to win, he would let the preexisting out for insurance companies to expire, evaporate, go the way of the dinosaur, which ever way you want to say GONE would be all right. That's right, this situation would turn back the touchy feely way of living that hard nosed conservatives don't believe is the American way. These captains of capitalism are double downers on the laws of the jungle.
Now they also want to get rid of my other out, medicare.
So for me, at least, it is personal.
Now I'm no Johnny come lately to the Democratic Party, I've been there since I played HHH in the sixth grade election. Out of all the people I have voted for over the years, there must be thousand, there was only two times I voted for the GOP candidate. Once for a family friend and once because the democrat who was running was a sniveling weasel of a man who made the worst republican look like Gandhi.
So I am Blue through and through.
I am asking people that I know who might be thinking about voting republican think about what would happen to people like me, people who life has dealt a bad hand, people who through no fault of their own, can't fight back. Not all of us can be masters of the universe and let only the fittest survive, most of us just want to get along with a little help now and then from our government.
I ask you this, what's so wrong about that....
Posting on Facebook.....
I'm watching this movie from the 50's called the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit...
It stars Gregory Peck, which should give all sorts of stature to this movie, at least in my book.
What is so interesting about this movie is the amount of stuff that piles on top of the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.
It's that time for Beck's character in his life where you realize that this could go either way, It's that time when you stand up for something or just slip into the slipstream of time and let it all flow.
This is one of those 50's movies that reaches out and grabs you while entertaining you in a good way. No heavy messages just taking responsibility. And I guess that is why I love this movie and watch it every time if comes on TMC, which is about once a year.
I suggest anyone to watch this movie who wants to get a real feel about the 50's.
Show Boat...
there is a series on PBS about the birth and growth of Broadway as we know it now.
One of the turning points was the Ziegfeld presentation of Show Boat. The combination of Kern and Hammerstein music and Edna Ferber's epic novel captured the growth spurts of the US as our country came to deal with slavery and redemption and sin and sinners.
It was an overtly political story that disguised itself as a floating follies.
Why I bring it up tonight is I am thinking about how far our country has come. I can think of no other country in the world that took in anyone from anywhere and threw it all together and came up with a mess of this from Europe, some of that from Africa, a lot from the orient but most of all, it came from people who have defined who we are.
There is a lot to hate but there is so much more to love. On our worst days we are still a shining hope to people who are stuck in societies that are stratified and closed for the most part.
Our traditions are made as we go
And yet, we have come to this turning point for our country. It really is that important. Do we want to follow a path set out for the future or do we want to turn our back on what happened just four years ago? This is what I would call a defining moment for our nation.
The fact that the polls are so close tells me a lot of people are scared out there, scared that the only way to maintain their grip on their position on the totem pole is to look back and try to put some of this change that is coming at them fast and furiously and damp it down.
The problem with all this is the people who are calling to retrace our tracks are willing to push a whole bunch of people under the bus just so they can hold onto their little corner of our country.
On this show about Broadway, they commented that there was only polite applause from the audience on the opening night of Show Boat, they thought they had guessed wrong about the willingness of America to accept change. Well, I think there are a lot of people out there who embraced the change that happened in 2008 and don't know how to deal with it.
Which brings me to my point, thanks for making it this far...
The point is President Obama and the Democrats have to sell this message of hope and change for the future because change can be frightening to some who are scared of what could happen. What we have to do is convince people that staying where we are is not the way to embrace the 21st century. If we don't lead, the worst of the worst can come at us and I for one do not want to see those forces unleashed again. They almost destroyed the 20th century, we need not live that over again.
Vote for the future and not the past, vote for Obama and Biden in 2012...
The debate last night brought to mind an old joke my dad told me after I "came of Age"....
There were two Bulls, one older and one just now realizing his maleness, standing on a bluff overlooking the grazing land which was chuck full of cows...
The young one was obviously antsy as he looked down on all those potential sexual conquest and said to the older Bull, "Old man, let's run down there and fuck one of those cows down there..."
The older, wiser bull replied, "Go ahead, you run right down there and waste all that energy so you can F***only one of those cows before you get all tired out. Me. well, I'm gonna walk down and F*** as many as I like..."
Ryan is a young man in a hurry and far to enamored with himself to be trusted to be anywhere near the power of the American Presidency.
So, in the long run, the VP debate won't change the dynamics of the race because people ultimately vote for the president and not the VP. What the exchanges between the VP and the congressman revealed was Ryan has a shallow understanding of how government and the private sector should mesh. His insistence that trickle down theory is still the way to go even though it has proved disastrous for the US economy time and time again is, to me at least, a definition of insanity.
Vice President Biden laid out the Obama economic plan in an easy to understand way by just saying the role of government is to smooth the way for those who, through no fault of their own, have been traumatized by economic change that has swept away the nest eggs they thought were safe.
There is very a stark difference between the GOP government is always wrong and the the private sector is always right and the Democrats approach that government should be a player not in hindering capitalism but by trying to humanize what often turns into a brutal assault on the lives of those who got in the way.
My problem tonight was how Ryan claims he came from a humble background...
Comparing his being raised in a fairly affluent small town,Janesville, WI, within 50 or so miles from Madison, Milwaukee and Chicago with being born in what can only be called hardscrabble Scranton, PA is just ludicrous.
Joe is the son of a Blue collar family while Ryan's dad was a successful attorney.
Ryan as born and raised deep in the bosom of suburbia while Joe B. was born into a fading blue collar small town just northwest enough to not be in Philly or NYC's SMA. He did come of age in Allentown, the place Billy Joel wrote a song about how hard it was to live there when all the mills and shops disappeared.
Maybe someone could write a little ditty about the trails and tribulation of walking the mean streets of Janesville.
Cause I'm living here Janesville, WI
And all I do is watch the world go by.
Hunkering down In a nice colonial
Live is so hard I just don't know where to go
To the Tasty Freeze or Hardies, Hardies, Hardies...
Well they opened up a big new Wall mart
And I saluted them for being so smart
Cause I can see all the parents of the poor kids in town
As they greet me at the door with nary a frown.
After 4 years of Teabaggery rife with racism from before Obama even took the oath...
With not a peep of condemnation from the GOP.
How dare Ryan say they bent over backward to give president Obama a chance...
Thank God I am 55 so I make the cut with Romney's death date for SSI and Medicare...
Seriously, vouchers are not worth the paper they are written on.
Where would we be if we depended on the free market...
Please take a few minutes, or bookmark for when you have some time....
This thought provoking piece a freind of mine posted on a Cleveland, Ohio blog.
Mansfield Frazier is a prison activist who spent time in prison a few decades ago. I met Mansfield when we both worked for An Alternative Local Magazines back in the 90's.
He opened my eyes to stuff that this lilly white boy from deep in the bossum of suburbia never would have seen. He was responable for my going into neighborhoods to speak about the democratic party where a white guy was way out of his stomping ground.
Anyway, enough about me. The first few paragraphs are about a local prosecutor and how he came to feed the need of an increasingly hungry prison industrial complex.
Please read it. It brings together a lot of what we progressives don't often get a chance to see.
http://www.coolcleveland.com/blog/2012/09/mansfield-the-end-of-an-era-perhaps/
Thus the prison/industrial complex grew by leaps and bounds… to the extent that in the last decade California has built seven new prisons but not one new university — which is the perfect way to insure some other nation will soon supplant as the world’s educational leader. But once private prison corporations started trading in the New York Stock Exchange (funded by outfits like Bain Capital), there was no turning back; the headlong race was on. And to this day no one asks this question: If Corrections Corporation of America’s only “product” is the people it houses in its prisons nationwide, when their stock is traded are they in essence trafficking in human beings? There’s a term for that: slavery.
But a more sophisticated and elaborate “feeder system” was necessary to fuel the prison boom — to feed people into the maw of the criminal justice complex — and that system is comprised of three parts: police who often violate the law by stopping people on the flimsiest of pretexts; prosecutors who are willing to move forward with these “cheap” cases; and the judges who are so afraid of their own reelections they’re willing to send virtually everyone who comes in front of them to prison.
This is important stuff. Please read this.
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Gender: MaleCurrent location: Cleveland Ohio
Member since: 2003 before July 6th
Number of posts: 45,558
