It is no big secret that in the last several decades millions of women have been forced to enter the workforce. For the most part in working America due to stagnant wages and decreased opportunity households are forced to subsist on two incomes. Essentially gone are the days when the father worked to support the family and the mother stayed home to raise the children and tend the house. While there is absolutely nothing wrong with women wanting to work, what is really wrong is the fact that when they do work they have consistently been paid less than men on average.
Wow, it wasn't but a few short hours when I wrote this diary about how Mitch McConnell had told Rand Paul that he really just needs to shut the hell up. Well, the Senator from Communist China might have known what he was talking about in reigning in the mad doctor with the twisty curls. You see, every time Rand Paul opens his mouth a cherished Republican belief that they have worked so long and hard to disguise spews forth. Now, Rand Paul thinks we fat and sassy working folks just make to much money!!
I truly have no other explanation for this. To catch you up in case you don't feel like clicking the link, President Obama has been criticizing BP over their actions leading up to and during the economic disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. BP, in case you didn't know, stands for British Petroleum. And now Rand Paul is saying that President Barack Obama attacking a foreign company for despoiling domestic waters is, somehow, un-American.
I'm watching the Rachel Maddow Show right now and she has Rand Paul on talking about his candidacy. Rachel was asking him about his support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He said that he would have marched with Martin Luther King Jr. but doesn't agree with all aspects of the law. Specifically he said that there was a portion of the Civil Rights Act that he would have tried to change.
Let me start by apologizing for being gone so long. Combination of exhaustion, long hours, and catching a couple of horrible colds. But I'm back now!
We won the primary last night. This is worth celebrating. But now it's time to get back to work. And one of the best ways to do that is to join the Joe Sestak Action Network. The set up may look a little familiar as it appears to be based on the same sort of software as the Obama network from the 2008 election. I joined up and took my first action through it today: a letter to the editor.
As many know I stayed neutral in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate. Basically I like both guys in that race that have a real chance to win and I have been watching with amusement the drama on the Republican side as Conway and Mongiardo duke it out. I have no desire to attack either one. However, now that race is being sorted out as we speak, and Rand Paul seemingly will win on the Republican side in Kentucky. Now the amusement is over and I must look at Paul as a candidate I must say whomever between Conway and Mongiardo emerges we must work hard to elect them because Rand Paul represents an ideology that quite simply put is dangerous.
Last month much was made among the right-wing foghorns on the radio and elsewhere about the Republicans taking the lead in the generic Congressional ballot among the American people. Despite all the self-righteous celebrating one thing was lost on them that evidently has set in on the American electorate. Republicans have absolutely no vision, or solutions to fix the huge problems that still confront our country. They offer only the same failed ideas that have been disgraced and have failed time and again. The party of no, no ideas and nothing good may be finding out that it takes something besides a lot of hot air to win elections. It takes ideas.
Tuesday in Kentucky we will go to the polls and choose our Democratic nominee. While I will not endorse in that race on the same day up in Pennsylvania there is another Senate race that I really hope Joe Sestak wins. I think this would send a mini "tea-bag" message to the Democratic establishment that while not as rabid as the right-wingers our base is tired of being taken for granted too. We do not have to reach out to opportunists like Specter to win elections or enact agenda and it is time our leadership realized that and fought for real Democratic values, not only those that are "convienient".
In what has become a recurrent theme the big banking industry is setting it's site on fleecing yet another group of Americans. As if crashing our economy and being bailed out by the taxpayers for their own greed were not bad enough, banking institutions have set their sites on the fleecing of American students, and are attempting to keep them in recurrent debt for the rest of their natural lives, much less their careers. Well, now it is time to fight back against these crooks who care little for their country and the people within as long as the bottom line is preserved.
We have been pretty disappointed here for most of the heatlhcare debate. I mean, we lost single-payer before sitting down to bargain, and now barring a Christmas miracle from sixty or so House members we have lost the public option while being mandated to buy coverage. Folks like myself with a pre-existing condition in my case Type 1 Diabetes can still be discriminated against for five long years. Now in retrospect we lost another battle that shows nicely just how bought and paid for our Congress really is.
Let us make no mistake about it. The only good things in the healthcare bill have been viciously buried alive in a shallow grave. Single-Payer was the real solution that would have guaranteed fair, across the board coverage for all Americans. It met a slow, and tortured death buried alive. The Public Option was then our only hope to keep insurers honest, and it met with a long, torturous death buried alive with malice while the American people virtually begged for it. The employer mandate, like single-payer appears to have been buried alive. Yes, everything good that could have come from reform seems to be somewhere near Jimmy Hoffa, dead and buried never to be found.
