Saturday, July 26th, 2014
SAM STEIN, - The Huffington Post
Stephan: Speaking as a vet I feel so very sorry for all those families who answered their country's call this time and signed up for military service. They were told they would be taken care of, and now crippled, mentally disabled, or suffering from PTSD they have discovered that like everything else about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan it was all a scam and a lie. A few people like Senator Bernie Sanders are trying to keep the commitment, but I wouldn't hold your breath. The Republicans don't want to spend the money to honor the national commitment, and I suspect the Congress will go into recess for another vacation doing nothing.
WASHINGTON — Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), during an interview Wednesday night, criticized President Barack Obama for naiveté in congressional relations. The White House, the senator told Larry King, routinely underestimates Republican opposition, often spinning its wheels in a fruitless effort to craft a legislative compromise.
On Thursday, Sanders told reporters he may have been similarly victimized by that opposition.
Sanders, chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, announced that after weeks of trying, negotiations between him and House Veterans Affairs Committee Chair Jeff Miller (R-Fla.) over legislation to reform the Department of Veterans Affairs had ground to a halt.
The disagreement wasn’t only substantive — though major details still needed to be hammered out. Rather, Sanders accused his Republican counterparts of not being honest brokers. He chastised them for valuing political theater over actual negotiation, and insisted they were demanding votes only on their proposals.
Miller’s “idea of negotiation is: “We have a proposal. Take it or leave it,’” Sanders said on the Senate floor. ‘Any sixth-grader in a school of the United States understands, this is not negotiation.”
The disintegration of VA reform negotiations, bursting into public view on Thursday, has been abrupt and dramatic. With just days remaining before Congress adjourns for August […]
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Saturday, July 26th, 2014
ALEX DEMAS and KATHY KUIVILA, - U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Survey
Stephan: Here is the latest on neonicitinoids and, like everything else about this awful toxin it is not good news. What I find particularly interesting is that this report is coming from a government oversight agency. I don't expect much to happen, corporations like Monsanto have bought the whores of Congress, and there aren't enough honorable men and women left in those corrupted bodies to create a critical mass, and Obama seems to have also been compromised. I guess it will take something like the thalidomide catastrophe before anything happens. The death of the bees doesn't seem to have done the job.
Insecticides similar to nicotine, known as neonicotinoids, were found commonly in streams throughout the Midwest, according to a new USGS study. This is the first broad-scale investigation of neonicotinoid insecticides in the Midwestern United States and one of the first conducted within the United States.
Effective in killing a broad range of insect pests, use of neonicotinoid insecticides has dramatically increased over the last decade across the United States, particularly in the Midwest. The use of clothianidin, one of the chemicals studied, on corn in Iowa alone has almost doubled between 2011 and 2013.
‘Neonicotinoid insecticides are receiving increased attention by scientists as we explore the possible links between pesticides, nutrition, infectious disease, and other stress factors in the environment possibly associated with honeybee dieoffs.” said USGS scientist Kathryn Kuivila, the research team leader.
Neonicotinoid insecticides dissolve easily in water, but do not break down quickly in the environment. This means they are likely to be transported away in runoff from the fields where they were first applied to nearby surface water and groundwater bodies.
In all, nine rivers and streams, including the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, were included in the study. The rivers studied drain most of Iowa, and parts of […]
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Saturday, July 26th, 2014
PAUL KRUGMAN, Nobel Laureate - Op-Ed Columnist - Thew New York Times
Stephan: Two days ago I posted a series of reports comparing California with Mississippi and Kansas with California to show the abject failure of Red value state policies, and the success of Blue value California. Apparently I wasn't the only person thinking along those lines. Here is Paul Krugman's version of the same observation. He reaches the same conclusions.
The states, Justice Brandeis famously pointed out, are the laboratories of democracy. And it’s still true. For example, one reason we knew or should have known that Obamacare was workable was the post-2006 success of Romneycare in Massachusetts. More recently, Kansas went all-in on supply-side economics, slashing taxes on the affluent in the belief that this would spark a huge boom; the boom didn’t happen, but the budget deficit exploded, offering an object lesson to those willing to learn from experience.
And there’s an even bigger if less drastic experiment under way in the opposite direction. California has long suffered from political paralysis, with budget rules that allowed an increasingly extreme Republican minority to hamstring a Democratic majority; when the state’s housing bubble burst, it plunged into fiscal crisis. In 2012, however, Democratic dominance finally became strong enough to overcome the paralysis, and Gov. Jerry Brown was able to push through a modestly liberal agenda of higher taxes, spending increases and a rise in the minimum wage. California also moved enthusiastically to implement Obamacare.
I guess we’re not in Kansas anymore. (Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.)
Needless to say, conservatives predicted doom. A representative reaction: Daniel J. Mitchell of the Cato Institute declared […]
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Saturday, July 26th, 2014
Stephan: We have a virtually complete breakdown of the Congressional system. The current Congress is the most dysfunctional and non-productive in modern history, and part of the reason this is true is that Americans vote drooling morons and ideologues to serve in the Senate and House. Consider this exhibit A. What do you think the voters in the 10th District of Georgia have in mind?
Tuesday brought the news that yes indeed, Georgia Republican House candidate, tea partier and general crazy person Jody Hice did indeed win his primary and will be headed to the general election and, most probably, into Congress. Ladies and gentlememz, presenting the next Michele Bachmann.
Jody Hice, a conservative pastor who believes First Amendment protections do not apply to Muslims and warned of a homosexual plot to sodomize children may soon be going to Congress. […]
Hice would replace Republican Congressman Paul Broun, who is currently one of the most socially conservative members of Congress.
Yes, he’s GA-10’s Republican replacement for the lies from the pit of hell guy. No, apparently they can’t find anyone better. Yes, it’s a district so conservative that they’d elect a roundworm in a suit, so long as the roundworm promised to keep the Muslims and other uppity folks in their place. (He’ll be challenged in the general by Democratic civil rights lawyer Ken Dious, but it’s a hard-right district.)
We’ve mentioned Hice before, because it’s been almost impossible not to. He indeed argued that Muslims have no protections under the First Amendment, thus demonstrating he never quite figured out what […]
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Saturday, July 26th, 2014
TARA MACISAAC, - Epoch Times
Stephan: Here is some insight into the fact that all life is inter-connected and interdependent, and that sometimes it produces experiences such as those detailed here. Note the references to SR reader and best selling author, Larry Dossey, whose work I have featured on many occasions.
The universe is full of mysteries that challenge our current knowledge. In “Beyond Science” Epoch Times collects stories about these strange phenomena to stimulate the imagination and open up previously undreamed of possibilities. Are they true? You decide.
A mother was writing a letter to her daughter when her right hand began burning intensely and she dropped the pen. Less than an hour later she got a phone call telling her that her daughter’s right hand was severely burned by acid in a laboratory accident.
A family living on a farm in upstate New York began their day’s work, but all returned to the house later in the morning after experiencing a strange feeling. All eight family members felt an intense foreboding, each without being aware the others felt the same. That day, in Michigan, a son in the family died in an accident.
A woman felt a pain in her chest and said her sister had been hurt. The woman later found out that her sister was in a fatal car accident at the same time; her chest had been crushed by the steering wheel.
These stories go well beyond empathy. They are about feeling the pain of a loved one at a […]
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