World News Korner

Mom has quite a set of pipes, and the baby's roller coaster of emotions is somewhat amazing to watch.

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Courtesy of the YouTube page:


12-year-old Madison Kimrey of Burlington founded NC Youth Rocks after the North Carolina legislature passed voting restriction laws targeting young people, women, minorities, and the poor.

The law appears to be designed to create long lines at the polls — especially in more populous, urban areas — by cutting early voting and making the voting process more time consuming (this was the formula that created 8-hour waits in Florida for the 2012 election, as a FL election official testified to the House Elections Committee in March 2013). Also, the law requires voters to produce a photo ID, but student IDs are not accepted, even if issued by a state university.

The same law does away with disclosure requirements for political advertising and increases the limit on campaign contributions. Also, the law does away with same-day registration during early voting, which had been popular with African Americans and other groups who had previously not engaged in the democratic process at the same level as white voters had. The US Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit under the Voting Rights Act.

In this speech Kimrey takes exception to the end of a program by which 16 and 17-year-olds pre-registered to vote when getting their drivers license or through school programs.

Damn! That is one incredibly intelligent young lady.

Watch out North Carolina! Madison Kimrey is certainly going to be a force to be reckoned with!

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This is from the website of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders:

How did we go from healthy surpluses to terrible deficits? It's not that complicated. In 2001, President Clinton left office with a $236-billion surplus. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office foresaw a 10-year budget surplus of $5.6 trillion, enough to erase the national debt by 2011. It didn't work out that way.

Instead, under President George W. Bush, wars were launched in Afghanistan and Iraq without paying for them. The cost of those wars, estimated at up to $6 trillion, was tacked onto our national credit card. Then Congress passed and Bush signed an expensive prescription drug program. It also was not paid for. Then Bush and Congress handed out big tax breaks to the wealthy and large corporations. That drove down revenue. So did the recession in 2008, which was caused by a deregulated Wall Street. All that turned big surpluses into big deficits.

Interestingly, today's "deficit hawks" in Congress — Rep.Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) and other conservative Republicans — voted for those measures that drove up deficits. Now that they're worried about deficits again, they want to dismantle virtually every social program designed to protect working families, the elderly, children, the sick and the poor.

In other words, it's OK to spend trillions on a war we should never have waged in Iraq and to provide huge tax breaks for billionaires and multinational corporations. But in the midst of very difficult economic times, we just can't afford to protect the most vulnerable people in our country. That's their view. I disagree.

So where do we go from here? How do we draft a federal budget that creates jobs, makes our country more productive, protects working families and lowers the deficit?

For a start, we cannot impose more austerity on people who are already suffering. When 95% of all new income between 2009 and 2012 went to the top 1%, and while tens of millions of working Americans saw a decline in their income, we cannot cut programs that working families depend on.

Instead of talking about cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, we must end the absurdity of corporations not paying a nickel in federal income taxes. A 2008 report from the Government Accountability Office found that was the case with 1 in 4 large U.S. corporations. At a time when multinational corporations and the wealthy are avoiding an estimated $100 billion a year in taxes by stashing money in tax havens like the Cayman Islands, we need to make them pay taxes just as middle-class Americans do.

You know the thing that never stops irritating the crap out of me is that we always allow the Republicans to define the debate. Even when we stand up to them we are always in a position where we have already acquiesced to most of their demands. (See Sequestration.)

I think we need to stop playing defense and start taking the fight to them. In fact I think we have to!

I do realize that Bernie Sanders is in a VERY safe district in Vermont and therefore is allowed to speak his mind with impunity, but I also know that if we were able to effectively explain to the American people what is REALLY going on these days we would start to gain ground politically and over time hopefully change the discussion to make it more factually based.

I say that after Hillary gets elected she drafts her husband, Bill Clinton to a newly formed Cabinet position, the "Czar of explaining stuff to the American people."

"Put me in Hil, I got this."

Sound good?

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Currently Rand Paul consistently polls in the top two potential candidates for the GOP nomination in 2016, so the fact that he is this incredibly lazy. and disrespectful of intellectual property, is big news.

Is it wrong that I can hardly wait for 2016 to arrive?

Because I have a feeling that if you thought the GOP lineup in 2012 was ridiculous that you haven't seen ANYTHING yet.

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Courtesy of the Business Insider:

Among the first scientists to dig for the roots of political orientation were a couple of pioneering psychologists in California named Jack and Jeanne Block. Back in 1969, the Blocks asked two challenging questions: How deep do our political leanings run? And how early in life do these leanings begin to form within each of us?

In search of answers, they devised a very unusual study, and they began it with kids who were still in nursery school. On the face of it, the premise of the study seemed absurd: What did nursery school kids know about Democrats or Republicans, or about the complicated, hot-button issues of the day? Still, the Blocks were serious researchers from the University of California at Berkeley, and they were determined to break new ground.

For their experiment, the two professors placed a group of 128 nursery-school children under the close observation of several teachers for a period of seven months. Then the Blocks had each of these caretakers measure the three-year-olds' personalities and social interactions, using a single standardized test. The same children then underwent this process again at age four, with a different set of teachers at a second nursery school. The Blocks tabulated the scores for each child and then locked the numbers away in a vault.

The test scores then sat in the vault for the next two decades, while the children from the study went their separate ways in life. They grew up, completed their educations, and turned into young adults. After 20 years had passed, the Blocks succeeded in tracking down 95 of their original 128 subjects, in the hope of measuring how liberal or conservative each of them had become. This time they asked the young adults, now age 24, to situate themselves on a five-point political spectrum. They also asked them to express their opinions on a number of highly partisan, hot-button issues. In particular, several of these questions measured their tolerance of inequality between the genders and between different racial groups. In addition, they were asked to describe any political activism they might have participated in during the intervening years.

The results, published in 2006 by the Journal of Research in Personality, were astonishing. In analyzing their data, the Blocks found a clear set of childhood personality traits that accurately predicted conservatism in adulthood. For instance, at the ages of three and four, the "conservative" preschoolers had been described as "uncomfortable with uncertainty," as "rigidifying when experiencing duress," and as "relatively over-controlled." The girls were "quiet, neat, compliant, fearful and tearful, [and hoped] for help from the adults around."

Likewise, the Blocks pinpointed another set of childhood traits that were associated with people who became liberals in their mid-twenties. The "liberal" children were more "autonomous, expressive, energetic, and relatively under-controlled." Liberal girls had higher levels of "self-assertiveness, talkativeness, curiosity, [and] openness in expressing negative feelings."

Now as many of you here know, I love me some science. However I have some real questions about the veracity of this study since I think we all know of people who have once been conservative and who are much more liberal later in life, and vice versa.

However I do recognize, and have personally tracked, data from very young children which is a strong indicator for who they will be later in life.

So I will leave this as an open question, and encourage all of you to weigh in with your opinion.

I will offer my daughter's opinion from a conversation we had yesterday, and that is that it is all about education, and being exposed to different sources of information. For her the dumber you are, the more conservative you are, and the smarter you are, the more right you will be.

You know I kind of love that young woman.

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