Monday, September 30th, 2013
LYDIA SAAD, - The Gallup Organization
Stephan: Those supporting Theocratic Rightist politics, which is not the entire Republican Party, are dwindling in number, just as people are leaving churches. It is becoming clear to all but the meanest intelligence that the policies of the Theocratic Right are a failure.
Yet, because of gerrymandering putting the most rabid Rightists together in districts they are going to remain a power. They have eaten out like zombies the body of the Republican Party. How else can one explain how a junior senator from Texas, in office mere months, has become the leading Republican voice.
We should also recognize there is the possibility of a Third Party forming as people, unwilling to be Democrats, but driven from the Republican Party coalesce. And all of it is feeding into the American Schism Trend.
Click through to see the helpful graphs and charts.
PRINCETON, NJ — As Washington braces for another budget showdown, this time with the threat of defunding the new healthcare law in the mix, the key political force pushing for conservative policies sees diminished popular support. Fewer Americans now describe themselves as supporters of the Tea Party movement than did at the height of the movement in 2010, or even at the start of 2012. Today’s 22% support nearly matches the record low found two years ago.
Americans’ tea Party affiliation
In November 2010, days after the Republicans recaptured the majority in the House of Representatives, 32% of Americans pledged support for the Tea Party, or 10 percentage points higher than in the latest survey, conducted Sept. 5-8.
Opponents of the Tea Party now outnumber supporters 27% to 22%, which is similar to their edge in 2012. However this differs from most of Gallup’s earlier measurements, in 2010 and 2011, when supporters and opponents were either equally matched, or Tea Party backers had the slight edge.
Fully half of Americans, 51%, currently say they are neither a supporter nor an opponent of the Tea Party, or they have no opinion about it.
Strong Tea Party Opponents Outnumber Strong Supporters
In addition to their overall advantage in […]
No Comments
Monday, September 30th, 2013
MICHAEL J. MISHAK, - The Associated Press
Stephan: Here is the sequence: As the Southern states follow Theocratic Rightist policies, they will fall further and further behind the the Northeast and the coastal West. This will just exacerbate the process, and the growing poverty will require a scapegoat, people of color. Voter suppression is a a tool of this kind of politics. Racism as a host of incidents has made clear is alive and well in the South.; there can be no question of that.
This is going to have two other effects, in my view. It will result in the migration of young people of color out of the South to the more welcoming areas of the country. They will leave behind their parents and grandparents all of whom are aging. The cost of their care will change the mind of Southern politicians who will suddenly want a more universal system. THe stresses this produces will ripple throughout the country strengthening the American Schism Trend. The Coastal West and the Northeast as it increases are going to baulk at underwriting the failure of the South.
MIAMI — Emboldened by the Supreme Court decision that struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act, a growing number of Republican-led states are moving aggressively to tighten voting rules. Lawsuits by the Obama administration and voting rights activists say those efforts disproportionately affect minorities.
At least five Southern states, no longer required to ask Washington’s permission before changing election procedures, are adopting strict voter identification laws or toughening existing requirements.
Texas officials are battling the U.S. Justice Department to put in place a voter ID law that a federal court has ruled was discriminatory. In North Carolina, the GOP-controlled Legislature scaled back early voting and ended a pre-registration program for high school students nearing voting age.
Nowhere is the debate more heated than in Florida, where the chaotic recount in the disputed 2000 presidential race took place.
Florida election officials are set to resume an effort to remove noncitizens from the state’s voting rolls. A purge last year ended in embarrassment after hundreds of American citizens, most of whom were black or Hispanic, were asked to prove their citizenship or risk losing their right to vote.
Republican leaders across the South say the new measures are needed to prevent voter fraud, even though […]
No Comments
Monday, September 30th, 2013
Stephan: A nurse who reads SR sent me this. It is an appalling commentary on American healthcare. Vanderbilt is the medical center of a major Southern university. This is what happens when a society allows everything to be calculated on profit, with no consideration for wellness. That's why we score so badly in all international surveys of medical care.
Where do you have to be in your mind when you think nurses cleaning toilets, instead of looking after patients -- nursing -- is a good idea?
Throughout the recession, workers have repeatedly been asked to take on increased hours and additional job duties, as employers try to squeeze as much productivity out of as small of a workforce as they possibly can. The health care industry is no different, especially in public hospitals and medical centers like those associated with colleges and universities. One Tennessee hospital believes it has found a new place to make a budget cut – make the nurses do patient room cleaning on top of their regular care rounds.
According to the Channel 4 I Team in Nashville, Vanderbilt University Medical Center has informed the nursing staff that they will be responsible for cleaning patient areas as well as their standard duties.
‘Cleaning the room after the case, including pulling your trash and mopping the floor, are all infection-prevention strategies. And it’s all nursing, and it’s all surgical tech. You may not believe that, but even Florence Nightingale knew that was true,
No Comments
Monday, September 30th, 2013
Stephan: Here is the latest on the American Police State trend, and it should be pointed out that we know all this because of Edward Snowden. The government would never have told us. What fascinates me is that this police state has developed with hardly a demur from the people under surveillance. It would seem that the critical mass of us are o.k. with this situation.
History, I think, is going to note Obama's presidency for two things, one is obvious, the other seems mostly unremarked. It has nothing to do with Obamacare which, afterall is just a more benign form of the illness profit system, because it is still basing healthcare on profit not wellness. No, this is what I think history will remember: 1) He was the first African-American President and, 2) He was the President who created the American police state, depriving citizens of their rights to privacy and subjecting them to 24/7 surveillance.
I find it very ironic that the best story I could find on this, is in a Russian news service.
The US National Security Agency has been exploiting US citizens’ personal information drawn from its large collection of metadata to create complex graphs of social connections for foreign intelligence purposes, the latest Snowden leaks have revealed.
Documents obtained by the New York Times from the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden say that the practice has been going on since November 2010, after restrictions prohibiting the agency from working with US citizens’ data were ‘lifted
No Comments
Sunday, September 29th, 2013
JOSH DZIEZA, - The Daily Beast
Stephan: Here is some more good news about California. Governor Jerry Brown and the Democratic controlled state legislature, have taken noncarbon energy very seriously. Here is the latest in this trend.
Click through to see the wonderful photos showing the facility, and a video tour, which will surprise you.
The massive solar plant nearing completion in the California’s Mojave desert doesn’t look like the solar plants you might be used to seeing. It has no solar panels, for one thing. Instead, it has mirrors-300,000 of them-all arrayed in rings around three giant towers. The mirrors reflect sunlight onto vats of water sitting on top of the towers, heating them to 500 degrees and powering a steam turbine, providing enough energy for 140,000 homes. When it goes online at the end of the year, it will be one of the biggest solar plants in the world. But the technology at its heart is relatively simple: mirrors, water boilers, and steam turbines.
The plant, called Ivanpah, is funded by Google, NRG, and BrightSource, a company that specializes in what’s called concentrated solar power, or CSP, a method of using focused sunlight to turn a steam generator. The technology isn’t new: a small test plant that uses mirrored troughs to heat oil-filled tubes has been running in California for 20 years. Going back further, you could point to the French inventor Agustin Mouchot, who experimented with solar powered steam engines in the 19th century, thinking we were about to run out of coal. […]
No Comments
