State Governments

The Insanity And Closed Mind Of Trump Supporters! Time To Wake Up To Reality!

Ronald 16 Comments

Donald Trump supporters are insane, and have a closed mind!

They want a person who is a bully, a narcissist, born to fortune and inheritance, who has failed in marriage and in business so many times, but knows how to use the bankruptcy laws and take advantage of average Americans in the process.

These people complain about the national government not working, but fail to realize it is not the fault of Barack Obama, but rather Congressional Republicans who refuse to do their job, and are only out to obstruct!

And the truth is that it is the STATE and LOCAL governments, most of them now Republican, which are not doing the job their constituents have a right to expect.

Just look at the horrendous list of Republican Governors, and just how bad they are in dealing with public issues, and the outrageous incompetency of Republican controlled state legislatures, which work against the interests of the people of their state!  And the horrible county governments, mostly Republicans, who are as corrupt and full of conflicts of interest that far outweigh even the Republican controlled Congress!

The old saying is that the people get the kind of government that they deserve, and that is certainly true of those who have put the GOP in national, state and local government positions of authority!

So, Trump supporters, wake up and smell the flowers, that Donald Trump is no better than the corrupt party which is trying to prevent his nomination for the Presidency.

In fact, he is, if anything more of a used car salesman, a loose cannon, who promises the world, and yet is totally unpredictable, and highly dangerous!

One can be absolutely certain that he would disappoint and disillusion millions of gullible voters, who would not quickly realize that he is a total phony, but when they did, the reaction of hate would be massive, and further undermine trust in ANY government level in the United States!

Meanwhile, we would have massive damage to the American economy, and likely be in several foreign wars, and enrich the billionaire class even more than  it is right now!

So, those who support Trump, WAKE UP to reality!

Outrageous Arrogance And Corruption By Many Governors In America, Including Sam Brownback, Andrew Cuomo, Chris Christie!

Ronald Leave a comment

We often hear about accusations that Barack Obama has abused his powers, which is far from reality!

Meanwhile, we have outrageous, arrogant, and corrupt governors of many states who do not care about their poorer and disabled citizens, and are willing to deny Medicaid expansion or accept ObamaCare, with the most despicable of all being Kansas Governor Sam Brownback, a supposedly very “religious” man, and a “good Christian”, who has privatized Medicaid, and is now, after bankrupting the state budget by giving the wealthy and corporations massive tax cuts, forcing disabled people off Medicaid, which will cause the death of many of them over time!

This is a man who professes to be “pro life”, while willing to deny poor children and the disabled of all ages basic medical care! How is that being “pro life”, or is that just insuring every fetus is born, and then to hell with what happens after birth?

At the same time, it is shocking to see New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie join together and defy the unanimous vote of both state legislatures, to bring about reform of the Port Authority, which has been subject to politics and corruption for years, but with both governors vetoing legislation to promote reform, and their veto cannot be overridden, as a President’s veto can be by Congress!

What are Cuomo and Christie, both interested in running for President, thinking? They are coming across as totally corrupt and arrogant, which was already the image of Christie, but now Cuomo has also come across as no different than Christie! He is not the match of his dad, former New York Governor Mario Cuomo!

These are two powerful men, who won easy reelection, as Sam Brownback did in Kansas! What were their constituents thinking? Are the people of Kansas, New York, and New Jersey, and many other states with corrupt, arrogant, uncaring Governors, that ignorant, that stupid, that unconcerned, that they manage to encourage continued abuse of power by Governors, who want us to think that state governments are better than the national government?

It is Sam Brownback, Andrew Cuomo, Chris Christie, and numerous other Governors who are truly abusing power, not our principled President, who has accomplished so much in his first six years in office, which this author will delineate tomorrow, the last day of 2014!

Republican Governors And Potential Presidential Candidates Falling Like Flies In Political Corruption Indictments

Ronald 1 Comment

It is amazing to watch as Republican Governors, interested in running for President in 2016, are falling like flies in political corruption indictments!

First, we had former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell.

Then, we had New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.

Next, we had Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.

And now, news comes of the indictment of Texas Governor Rick Perry.

These Governors and one former Governor are all despicable in their public records, and it could not happen to a better group of politicians, than to see these Governors destroyed by the political scandals and corruption surrounding them.

These Governors prove that the concept that state government, and being Governors, makes them better qualified for national office, is a myth.

The more one studies state governments across the nation, including the state legislatures, the more one realized that no matter how much we complain about national government, overall, it does a far better job with far less corruption than state governments!

Conservatives and Republicans love to promote the idea of state and local governments as being “better” and more representative of the population they serve, but the truth shows, both historically and in the present, that national government is far better in results and ethics, even though there is plenty of room for improvement!

California Political Leaders Need To Open Up To Future Generation Of Leadership!

Ronald 9 Comments

A major problem in American politics is the refusal of political leaders of both parties to recognize when it is time to retire from the scene, and allow a new generation of leadership.

Too many US Senators and Congressmen stay on until their late 70s and early 80s, and this includes Governors and other state officials as well.

While there can be no official retirement age mandated, it seems appropriate that these political leaders accept reality, and allow for a generational change.

A great example is California, heavily Democratic, but led by people who should make clear that they will NOT run again past 2014.

This includes:

Governor Jerry Brown 76 (nearing 81 at end of next term in 2018); Senator Diane Feinstein 81 (with her term ending in 2018 at age 86 plus); Senator Barbara Boxer 73 (76 when she finishes her present Senate term at the end of 2016); and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi 74 (past 76 at the end of the next Congressional term in 2016).

Is it too much to expect that people in public office who are nearing age 81; age 86; age 76; and past 76 at the end of their present or future terms recognize it is time to leave, no matter how good a record they have in office?

Ego and power is what keeps these and other people in public office, but it is time for change and new faces in Congress and the state governments!

60 Years Since Brown V. Board Of Education: Segregation Still Reality In Many Areas!

Ronald Leave a comment

Sixty years ago, the Supreme Court, headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren, unanimously ruled segregation in public schools unconstitutional.

The reaction was massive resistance, both in the South and also in many Northern communities.

Later Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s gave the government the ability to enforce the end of segregation in all areas of public life, but in schools, the movement toward integration succeeded in some ways, but failed in the sense of promoting equal educational opportunity.

Many state governments continued to promote unequal spending and facilities provided to urban schools, as compared to suburban schools, and this continues today.

Young people have learned to accept each other, despite racial differences, and society has become much more integrated, but still a tone of racism, and a desire to revive the old segregation through new, devious methods still prevails.

And of course, despite having an African American President in Barack Obama, there is still great division and controversy over everything racial. We are not in a post racial America!

So while some progress has been made, there is still a great sense of disappointment in the reality of much segregation that still exists today, and is still encouraged in many political circles!

The Republican Party: The Party Against Life! Pro-Gun, Anti Medicaid, Pro Death Penalty!

Ronald 2 Comments

The Republican Party and conservatives love to say they are the Pro Life Party, as they oppose abortion rights for any reason, including rape, incest, and life of the mother (for the most so called “religious”).

But at the same time, they are against any gun regulations to prevent future Sandy Hook Massacres or the reality that 12,000 people a year are killed by lack of regulation of firearms. So many cases of children killing siblings because of reckless parents who leave loaded firearms around, or killing of partners by wives, husbands, girlfriends, boyfriends, abound.

Also, about half of the states have refused to expand Medicaid, and are therefore responsible for the death of people within their states who cannot gain health care.

And for those states which have the death penalty, and allow the idea that a mix of drugs used to execute prisoners, without awareness of what they are, and their effect on the victim, can lead to the botched execution in Oklahoma last night, is an atrocity only fit for the Middle East or Russia or China, not the United States.

These Republican and conservative and “religious” promoters of death should be condemned, and it is clear that the states have run amuck in regards to basic human rights, including the right to live, free from gun violence, with access to health care, and the abolition of the death penalty, as it has not led to lower crime rates, but simply as a method to kill more people of minority status. The vast number who face execution in states that have a record of racial discrimination over the long period of years is testimony enough to this truth!

The Republican War On The IRS Is An Anarchistic, Extremist Attack!

Ronald 6 Comments

The Republican Party has declared war on the Internal Revenue Service, the basic backbone of how the federal government operates, how it protects the nation, and advances the domestic agenda of the United States, to make it the nation of freedom, justice, and equality that it was meant to be!

If you left it to the Republican Party, which operates as an anarchistic, extremist movement against the whole structure of our federal government, they would move to repeal the 16th Amendment to the Constitution, which Republican President William Howard Taft advocated.

The Republican Party calls for abolition of the IRS, without saying how they would replace the funding that it provides for our national defense; for our multitude of federal government agencies that give Americans all kinds of services; and for protection of our elderly, our children, our disabled, our poor!

It seems that the Republican Party wants to go back to America and what it was in 1789–a nation of four million people with state governments having all of the power, or lack of it, to help maintain the safety, security, and advancement of its citizens!

Anyone who has studied American history knows that state governments have always been incompetent, inept, and too corrupt to be in charge of all of the massive responsibilities that the federal government has had since the First World War, the Great Depression, and the Second World War!

If the Republican Party were, somehow, able to accomplish what they advocate, it would lead to total chaos, anarchy, disruption, and the dissolution of a stable government!

So the right wing of the GOP is a dangerous, anarchistic, extremist group! Let’s call the reality what it is, a danger to all of America’s citizens!

Paul Ryan Self Destructs Any Chance To Run For President!

Ronald 10 Comments

Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan, who this blogger spent a lot of time working to undermine his Vice Presidential candidacy in 2012, and got blasted for it by right wing websites and bloggers, has again shown further evidence of what a terrible choice Mitt Romney made in his Presidential race, in selecting Ryan to be a heartbeat away from the Presidency!

Ryan, who knows nothing about budgets, except that the poor, the elderly, the disabled, veterans, and the young should see cuts in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Food Stamps, and other social programs; and there should be no extension of unemployment compensation for desperately unemployed people; and there should be no rise in the minimum wage, now has gone off the “deep end” with his assertion that those who live in the “inner cities” have no sense of the importance of work, and have not worked for generations!

This is a direct and racist assault on African Americans in particular, but also on Hispanics and Latinos, who are a majority of the poor in the urban areas of our nation.

But Ryan acts as if it is only minorities who are poor, and are unemployed, and in some cases, have not worked in a long time. From this statement, one would think that whites are not poor, that they all work, that they all have a heritage of understanding the point of work, and nothing could be further from the truth!

It is a fact, and always has been, that the vast majority of the poor do not live in cities, and are not minorities, although one would think so from a stereotype!

The fact is that there are millions of whites who live in the rural and suburban areas of the nation, and many are them do not work, have no hope of work, and live in depressed conditions often worse than urban slums. Many of these people are living in “Red” states, where Republicans vote to hurt their own constituents, while making it seem as if only minorities do not work, or have no work ethic. They live in Appalachia, the Great Plains, the Rockies, in comparatively sparsely populated areas, as compared to the urban areas on the East and West Coasts.

More whites receive food stamps, and the level of poverty percentage wise is higher in such places as Kentucky, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, and Alaska.

It is the lack of education; the tendency to have large families which are also dysfunctional; the reality of drugs and alcohol; the refusal of these state governments to give a damn about their white poor, along with minority poor; and the tendency to turn poor whites against poor minorities so that the GOP can keep power in the House and in the state legislatures, which is destroying generation after generation of deprived people of all races!

Only when there is a REAL war on poverty, instead of exploiting the issue based upon race, as Paul Ryan has now done, will we ever be able to guarantee a good future for millions of whites, as well as African Americans and Latinos!

And Paul Ryan, your potential Presidential candidacy is dead in the water, and while you might run, you have forfeited any realistic chance to be President of the United States, but that was clear, anyway, in 2012!

The Most Significant Long Range Events Of 2013

Ronald 1 Comment

Now that we are in the last day of 2013, it is time to reflect on what the most significant long range events of 2013 are, events that will affect us in the future, and are signs of progress, which can never be reversed.

They include in no special order:

The accomplishment of national health care, a dream since Theodore Roosevelt first mentioned the concept in his Progressive Party campaign in 1912, later suggested by Harry Truman, partially enacted by Lyndon B. Johnson, attempted by Bill and Hillary Clinton unsuccessfully, promoted by Senator Ted Kennedy, and finally becoming law under Barack Obama. Even with all of the kinks and quirks now and in the future, national health care is here to stay, finally making America reach the stage of all other democracies in the world, but as usual the last to adopt social and economic reform, as compared to Europe, Canada, and Australia.

The acceptance by the Supreme Court of the concept of gay marriage, and the expansion from nine to eighteen states of acceptance of same sex marriage, and nothing will ever reverse what has happened, and eventually, the Supreme Court will mandate its legality throughout America, just as they did for interracial marriage in 1967. Many may not like it, but just as with interracial marriage, one does not have to engage in either interracial or same sex marriage, but it is nobody’s business to tell someone else who he or she is to love and to have the benefits of marriage, and no religious institution needs to accept it, as civil marriage will always be available.

The civil war raging in the Republican Party, which will determine if the party of Lincoln, TR, and Ike will survive or go into the dustbin of history, which Is certain, if the right wing Tea Party Movement is allowed to take over the party apparatus, and control the House and Senate Republican caucuses, and control major state governments around the nation. An extreme right wing Republican Party will not survive, and will give the Democrats such dominance that a moderate centrist party, maybe on the pattern of the Whig Party of Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, John Quincy Adams and Abraham Lincoln in the 19th century, will then emerge as a valid alternative to the more leftist Democratic Party by comparison.

The rise of a permanent Democratic majority in the Electoral College, as Georgia, Texas, Arizona and North Carolina will turn “blue” over the rest of the second decade of the 21st century, due to the growth in the Hispanic-Latino population, and the alienation of women from the Republican Party, which is working to control the reproductive lives of women. Both groups will swing these Sun Belt States to the Democrats, and with the Atlantic Coast from New England down to Virginia, and the Pacific Coast and the Upper Midwest more “blue” all of the time, there will be no way that Democrats will lose the White House over the next couple of decades, whether they nominate Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden, or someone else, for the Presidency in 2016 and beyond.

The Supreme Court will turn more liberal, as over the remaining years of this decade, the likelihood of new Supreme Court appointments, as well as circuit and district courts, will fall to Democratic Presidents, who no longer have to worry about a filibuster proof majority of 60 votes. The need for only 51 votes or 50 with the Vice President breaking the tie, insures that the courts, and eventually the high Court, will take a different view over time on same sex marriage, abortion rights, civil rights, and civil liberties, reminding one over the next two decades (due to lifetime appointments) of the history of the Warren Court.

A happy 2014 to all my readers and contributors!

Virginia Unlikely To See Democratic Agenda Accomplished With Heavily Republican Legislature, And Florida Could Have Same Scenario A Year From Now!

Ronald 16 Comments

It is great news for Democrats that Terry McAuliffe has been elected Governor of Virginia over right wing extremist Ken Cuccinelli, but sadly, with the legislature being heavily Republican, the prediction is that little of the new Governor’s agenda for reform is likely to be adopted.

And after the election for Governor in Florida in 2014, even if former Republican Governor Charlie Crist, turned Independent in 2010 for the Senate race, and now Democratic for the gubernatorial race, succeeds in defeating highly unpopular Governor Rick Scott, the GOP hold on the legislature is still likely to be very powerful, and prevent Crist from accomplishing much of what his agenda might be.

So two key states, and possibly more, with decisions of voters to split power, will be just as paralyzed in the ability to have progress, and be as stymied to a great extent, as in Washington, DC, with a Republican House of Representatives and a Democratic Senate.

The argument that divided government is better government has been shown over and over again to be totally lacking in validity, as all it produces most of the time is stalemate and gridlock!