Keeping up the pressure ... or he who frames first
Submitted by persondem on Tue, 10/11/2011 - 9:48pm
... frames best. The following will be submitted tomorrow as an editorial in my local newspaper. I hope to write one a month until Nov. 2012. The next one is already blocked out.
Republicans constantly crow about shrinking “big” government, about getting government out of the business of regulating lives and corporations. Individuals should sink or swim on their own and corporations should be unhindered in their business practices.
Why then do Republicans support the billions of dollars government spends on subsidies for the Oil Industry? Seems like such an extraordinarily profitable industry should be able to exist just fine on their own. Corporations are allowed to move money around the world with relative impunity so they can avoid paying taxes on their earnings, and republicans are perfectly ok with this. One pharmaceutical company does 100% of its business in the US yet pays zero income taxes; that is what happens with republican style government.
Republicans, those champions of less intrusive government, want to be able to make reproductive decisions for women, as if women need governmental guidance on when it’s ok to have a baby or not. Likewise republicans even want to legislate who people can fall in love with. If government has no business, according to republicans, interfering in such general, impersonal things as clean air, clean water, and proper working conditions, how can governmental intrusion into such personal decisions as reproduction and romance be justified?
Many, not all, republicans are in favor of the death penalty, yet oppose a woman’s right to end a pregnancy in the first trimester. So does the biblical mandate “Thou shalt not kill” apply more so to a microscopic cluster of cells than to a fully grown human being?
In N.C., republicans wanted to spend millions of scarce dollars to set up a governmental watchdog agency to monitor elections while implementing tighter governmental restrictions on voter identification. In fixing a problem that doesn’t exist (20 or so possible cases of voting fraud out of over 2 million votes cast or about 0.0001%) they would hinder the voting rights of the poor and the elderly.
It would seem then that republicans only want small, nonintrusive government when it suits their purposes. If government gets in the way of corporate greed or corporate welfare, then government is bad. If government would restrict personal freedoms that republicans disagree with or would improve republican chances to win elections then Big Brother style government is perfectly ok.
Thank you for reading.
A lot of good points,
and many of them boil down to "situational ideology" (ie, Government is bad, except when it's doing what I want it to do).
On the plus side, those inconsistencies are usually easy to spot, and make for a shaky base of support.
how do they get so many intelligent people
to think that they are right? Their "Christianity" is questionable, their knowledge of the Constitution is shakey (to say the least) and their memory of the past is none existant.
Thank you for the positive comments!!
Some may be smart, but those folks are selling something. The others I see as sheep or suffering from some form of Stockholm syndrome.
Environmental Defense Fund
Cell phones will be to the 21st century what tobacco was to the 20th.
cell phones
I haven't noticed your signature until now - you think cell phone are a health hazard? Have you written on that?
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http://twitter.com/Jerimee
well, here's some links to check out on cell phones
This first is a link to the search results from a google scholar search on "cell phone radiation".
from that list a couple of the better research studies include this one that shows that cell phones affect EEG's.
This one that links cell phones and testicular and brain cancer.
and this one that looks into the ill effects of living near a cell tower.
I have not written about cell phones, but I do see concerns ahead that might mirror the track record of denial that tobacco had in the last century.
Environmental Defense Fund
Cell phones will be to the 21st century what tobacco was to the 20th.