Health Care Plus

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It's a little blustery in Prairie Country these days. A lot of hot air coming out of the special interests on the right, and the RPMs [Republican Propaganda Machine], as they try to enshrine their candidate in North Dakota's only seat in the House side of Congress.

Rick Berg's been as elusive as Sharron Angle, and that Nazi dresser in Ohio that John Boehner's meeting up with at country Republican headquarters in Ohio to promote. Funny, he sneaked in and out of Fargo for Berg. Is this the best we can do?

One of the biggest lies has been about health care reform. So it's refreshing to see plainspoken North Dakotans who are our caregivers and healers speaking with gentle grace against the screaming hordes of Republican distortion.

Give a listen. And then, vote Dem. Because elections have consequences.



And you can judge a man by the company he keeps.
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Mean Girls League New Plebe

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Obviously since that lawyer apologized to Chee-knee for getting in the way of his "pepper" spray the rightwing thinks they can always demand victims apologize.

Anita Hill's dignity and grace in handling this once-again sexual harrassment tactic perpetrated by the pathetic Virginia Thomas trying to pass muster with the Mean Girls League shows the difference between the women and the girls.

This is only the latest variation on the "man up" theme, this time taunted by Clarence Thomas' teabaggin' wife.

There's only one response for the mean girls' "man up" in all its forms. That's "grow up."

Anita Hill has shown how a grown-up acts all the way through this sorry episode. While the Republican males hide behind their teabaggin' mean girls. And the bichacuda tactics are oh, so jr. high.
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crossposted at firedoglake/ The Seminal

Learning from the Protests of France

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There's a bit of an uproar in Paris these days. What with the flying rumors of threats from Al Qaeda in Yemen. And then there's that second-volcano-in-Iceland that was supposed to happen following past models, spewing ash hither and yon for weeks.

But what poked through my hectic, multi-layered life these days is the protests against raising the retirement age from 60 to 62. The shallow thinker might say, hey, what are they whining about? We're going from 65 to 67 to .......

It took the students to get me to thinking.

The more countries raise retirement age, the more they strangle the job prospects of students entering the work force.

Because big corporations have already outsourced a ginormous share of the job market. And the struggling economy and reduced buying power of middle class incomes have forced some seniors to work long beyond retirement age to pay their rising costs that don't show up in the COLA stats, while workers are downsized, laid off, early-retired, half-timed, part-timed, two-timed out of their previous standard of living.

And banksters on Wall Street have cynically, criminally, corruptly enriched themselves at the private trough while calling themselves masters of the universe.

So the current generation of American students and recent grads are already facing the fate the French students protest.

Unless we make election day our firewall — because as frustrating as the pace of change is for some of us, the alternative is more of the de-peopleing of democracy, the Constitution, and this country.

But rather than take to the streets, I hope America's students and all the rest of us* will take to the ballot box. I'm counting on you. And so are my grandkids comin' up behind....
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* Yes, I have voted already.
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crossposted at firedoglake's The Seminal

Extremis

'cause the autumn colors are quickly fading and the election's looming... and just for today I'm going out to the garden and kick up some leaves....

Totally snipped from ThinkProgress—snip for yourself and carry along for any Fox RPM'd TEA-sheep you may run into between now and Election Day:

"Lest there be any confusion about what positions GOP candidates are allowed to embrace, ThinkProgress is happy to provide this handy chart explaining which stances the GOP does and does not view as too extreme:

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Interesting, that is, If you're a competent journal

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So the foreign money into the Chamber coffers story is "out there" but neither the Post nor the Times gets it right, says Think Progress.

At this point, we take a brief timeout for the timeworn aphorism about the person whose paycheck depends on his ignorance....

To which we add,willful ignorance is bliss until your deniability is so pathetically laughable that it strains what little credulity ye olde trad med crumbling pillars have left.
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Oh, and, thanks oodles, Justice Kennedy.
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Foreign Interesting

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Questions have arisen.

Is Osama bin Laden trying to blow a smokescreen, change the subject, by ratcheting up terrorism gossip?

Is he reeeeeeaaaaalllly, secretly funding the US Chamber of Commerce's campaign against Democratic candidates?

It's "out there." Right, Cokie?
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crossposted at firedoglake/The Seminal

We Know Earl

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North Dakota has only one Congressional District and our population's pretty small, so 'most all of us know our Congressman, Earl Pomeroy. And he's under assault this election season, by the Republican Party and the Big Oil special interests out of Texas who are the deep pockets on the Republican side this year.

But his opponent has a 26-year state legislative record of his own. And it's not pretty.

The supporters of Pomeroy are determined to do everything possible to get out the vote for Earl. After all, as my daughter says, in this op-ed in the Grand Forks Herald, we've all known Earl and his love of his state and people. It's what drives him.

And the feeling's mutual.
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New York Times article on the fluid House races, including ND