Not a chance! In the time Perry has been Governor of Texas our school systems have degraded to the point of embarrassment and our economy is in the toilet.
Here in Texas we can’t seem to manage to pay for our schools yet we pay plenty of taxes and we are 44th in money spent on our schools to begin with and now they are cutting even more.
We are producing a generation of partially illiterate children and in fact we have at least one high school were 30% of the seniors did not graduate this year. That is disgusting!
Perry has done nothing for this state except cause a massive divide down party lines, run the school systems into the ground, take rights away from women with his sonogram law and cause our state’s economy to have BILLIONS in the way of a deficit.
Perry is also as two faced as they get. He tries to pretend he is for smaller government but acts the opposite. In fact it was his idea to force all little girls to get a HPV immunization shot. This may sound good on face value but it was to be forced on your kids whether you wanted it or not and that is not my America.
BTW. The reason he was pushing this vaccination was not for the good of the kids but for the good of one of his big money campaign contributors who happened to be the manufacturer or the drug. Perry does nothing that is not good for Perry.
If you want to know how he has been in office so long it is easy. Many of my fellow Texans are easily mislead sheep that believe what their preachers say over what common sense states.
So if that all sounds good for the rest of the country as well then yes, Perry for President other than that, hell no! It is bad enough we are stuck with him!
I awoke to the news that the animal named Osama Bin Laden had finally paid the price for his crimes against all of humanity. Here is hoping there is a hell and he is under it.
Well done and thank you to any and all who took part in this effort to eliminate this lowlife. A special well done to the service person that actually double tapped numb-nuts in the skull!
Now after a little more celebration we need to fade this creep into obscurity. As long as we talk about we give him unwarranted power.
Well the short answer is hell no! But we sure do need to revamp the entire system in order to ensure only those truly in need utilize the services as well as keeping it from becoming overly costly to all of us.
I don’t know the actual numbers or even if our government actually knows how much we are being ripped off by crooks each year through the misuse of social services but I have seen numbers in the hundreds of millions and some even billions lost each year as per various watchdog sites.
Here in Texas, the republican state government which it really is now since they have a super majority, is doing all that it can to cut social services and right now seem to be doing all they can to make an already mediocre educational system even worse by cutting deep into the school systems causing them to dump huge numbers of teachers and increase classroom sizes. But I digress.
My point is simple. Social services are needed to keep people from suffering when they can be helped and this holds true especially for the children, the elderly and the mentally and physically disabled. We have to do this, it is what makes us human beings and not animals.
The problem is that there will always be scumbags that try to beat the system and this is where some changes could stop that from occurring as much.
Take the welfare system for example. This alone is nothing but a money sinkhole as it currently stands. There is little enforcement and tons of abuse. That system is broken but can be easily fixed.
Each state should create a “job bank”. Yes I know that this will compete with temp agencies but they can work deals to get staff from the job bank as well or something or go out of business. It would be a small price to pay to drop our tax bills by billions without screwing over our fellow human beings.
When you go on welfare you would HAVE to go to training in some field so that you can be either temp’d out to some company, used in service of the state or hired off. In my welfare system … everyone works, no free rides!
As for the training, we could work deals with various companies in each state to offer training to the job bank workers in various occupations. This benefits the companies by giving them a free look at potential employees and helps us get people working.
Also there is no having children while on welfare. You have to either agree to birth control and not having kids until you can afford them or go it on your own without welfare!
You may be saying but what if they have kids already when they go on welfare, how can they work and train? Easy state run daycare’s staffed by job bank trained employees or third party companies that hire from the job bank that offers childcare at a reasonable rate for job bank workers until they leave the bank.
Even with the daycare and training costs it would keep people from being on welfare for years if they have to work anyway they might as well go find a better paying job instead of leeching off of us and in the long run save tons of money.
Welfare should be a hand up not a hand out!
I got rambling so long here I’ll have to come back to rant about the other social services later in another part of this series which will now be at least 2 parts .
You know it is sad that we have let things get so out of control in our country. Under the guise of free market capitalism, unscrupulous people driven by nothing but greed have polluted our food supply in order to line their pockets with boatloads of money.
Now whether they actually even consider our health is beyond me but I do know that they seem to ignore it if they do. The only way to really limit the amount of poisons we take into our body is by growing our own food without any chemicals at all.
You see, pesticides that are on our food wind up inside of us. Recently, researchers have found: “Kids with higher-than-average levels of one pesticide marker were nearly twice as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD as children who showed no traces of the poison.”
This may explain why the number of kids diagnosed with ADHD is on the rise and it wouldn’t surprise me if they found out next that this is also why we have the increase in Autism.
These poisons work by messing with the nervous system of bugs but it has similar effects on humans and they are absorbed by the plants through runoff and penetration. This means we are ingesting this stuff!
We have to stop this “it’s all about the money” mentality. If it screws up the free market then so be it. It is better than the alternative of killing us all off. It is hard to make money on dead people!
Read the news story here – http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37156010/ns/health-kids_and_parenting
It appears Texas is about to attempt to follow Arizona’s lead by reforming their current immigration laws.
What confuses me the most is that it isn’t already against state law to be an ILLEGAL immigrant since it is against federal immigration laws.
But everyone now is freaking out stating “there will be racial profiling” but there is such an easy fix that should have been in place all along.
EVERYONE should have to carry proof of citizenship and EVERYONE gets checked when they have police contact, period!
It is just that easy. That way there is no profiling because EVERYONE regardless of race, color, creed or religion will be getting checked. How hard is that? Not hard at all!
The fact that this is an issue amazes me. How dare we try and secure our borders and determine who is here criminally, hence the ILLEGAL immigrant moniker, right? I mean it isn’t like terrorists would ever use our wide open borders to sneak in and attack us, not on our soil right?
Living in Texas I can completely relate with Arizona’s desire to do something to fix this giant issue of illegal immigration. It is such a mess in these border states that unless you live here you may not realize.
I have nothing against anyone wanting to make a better life for themselves, that is what we all want for ourselves. What issue I have is with how they are going about it.
Entering our country illegally, no matter the reasoning behind it, is a crime plain and simple. Saying it is ok to do that is no different then telling someone it is ok to rob someone or sell drugs or steal to make a better life for their family.
Committing a crime is not an acceptable way to make a better life for you or your loved ones. It really is that simple.
I have said it before and will again, if you jumped the border and got caught in Mexico illegally it comes with a 2 year prison term followed by immediate and PERMANENT deportation for the first offense!!
Illegal immigrants are a drain on our economy and are a danger. Do you really believe that terrorists don’t realize they can just jump the border from Mexico to the US and get right by all of our precautions set up to keep them out? Our borders are wide open and we will pay for it in the long run.
As for the Mexican President’s remarks in regards to Arizona’s law changes he may want to keep him mind on his own issues. Mexico is a giant toilet and the Mexican President should be more concerned with getting his country back from the criminals and making it a place that it citizens don’t abandon like rats on a sinking ship.
He is spent more energy on making his country a better place we may not have such an issue with his people here to deal with.
Let me state this one more time though. ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS = CRIMINALS hence the illegal in front of the immigrants! Their reasons do not matter at all as mine wouldn’t should I get caught jumping the border into Mexico or if I committed a crime to feed my family. Crime is crime.
This guy cracks me up. Talk about a true politician. He is grinding hard against the healthcare reform bill Obama passed and says “it is not partisan” driven.
Does he really think we are all that stupid? Some of us are but most of us are not. One of his motives I will bet is that he is planning on a run for the White house in 2012.
The other of course feeds off his big malpractice suit reforms. I wonder who is giving his new little Revere whatever group all the money to show commercials all day and night. I have seen the commercial at least a dozen times if not more.
Anyone else think it is the Insurance industry paying for and guiding this guy? It would explain his malpractice reform stance as well as his stance on the health-care reform bill.
I mean why should doctors be held accountable for hurting someone through their own negligence, right? If doctors were more concerned with taking care of patients instead of running them through as fast as they can for the cash then they might not slip up so much.
I said it before and I’ll say it again. As for politicians, Republicans are all scumbag crooks and the Democrats are all spineless crooks.
None of what happens in our government is for OUR good. Everything done, no matter how they spin it, is done for themselves and their friends who put them in office with boatloads of money.
If we want to get, it is hard to say it, decent politicians then we need to stop letting money dictate who gets in. Right now it all comes down to who can raise the most money, not who is best for the job.
The bad part about letting money dictate who gets into office is that there is only a tiny percentage of people controlling all that happens to us. That is never a good thing!
The “tea parties” happening right are a joke. They are nothing more than the republican party pushing for the upcoming elections. Nothing more.
Neither Newt or Sarah Palin said a word when Bush and Cheney trampled the Constitution with the patriot act not to mention lying to us to get us into a war in Iraq that should not have occurred.
No anyone who spoke out then were listed as anti-American and we know neither of those two puppets would ever do that.
This whole “tea party” B.S. is just that B.S. They speak of the free market which translates to their rich friends are paying them to campaign on their behalf because we all know the market can be trusted to run itself, right? Please!
Don’t get me wrong I think the Democrats are pathetic and some are crooks but the number of Republicans that are crooks is much higher. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if I found out that most of the people traveling with the “tea party” were being paid to do so. It is all just so shady!
What kills me the most is Sarah Palin. She was a lousy Governor, a lousy Fox correspondent and a lousy Presidential candidate and as such it leaves me asking, why does ANYONE listen to this idiot? It is amazing.
People need to use their heads for something other than just a hair holder and stop allowing these idiots to polarize the country into two sides. We are all SUPPOSED to be on the same side not that you can tell it.
The attorney’s general from Texas and 12 other states I believe, have filed suits fighting the health care bill supposedly on behalf of their state.
The sad part is that I believe most people don’t support the action. Right now we have trouble paying for our schools, our roads and bridges, our public assistance programs as well as a slew of other things. With all of that said Greg Abbott decides to spend God knows how many MILLIONS of OUR dollars on fighting a partisan battle.
To be honest, the money he will piss away trying to make himself look good to the GOP they could use to help many people in the state buy the insurance as required by 2014.
Not only that, he keeps saying that forcing people to buy insurance is unconstitutional as least as far as Texas’ constitution goes, yet the state forces ALL car owners to have insurance.
How is that any different? You force us to buy car insurance supposedly because it is meant to provide safety to others on the road who may be financially devastated by you crashing into them. Makes sense right? How is the healthcare bill any different?
People without health insurance are causing a huge financial burden on all of the states including Texas! Think about it.
Let’s call this whole uproar what it really is, partisan bullshit. I know republicans that will benefit from most of what Obama has done, yet they trash talk him all of the time.
Why? Because he is a “baby killing democrat” in their minds. Even when you explain to them that Obama happens to be against abortion. Not reverse the laws against it but he doesn’t support it which is close enough.
But even that does not matter. We as a country are far to divided along party lines because that is what the politicians want. That’s how they get elected and that is also how they make boat loads of money.
I guess the whole divided we fall thing doesn’t matter anymore. The sad part is that both parties are very fundamentally flawed and will be the death of our country one day.
It never ceases to amaze me. Ocean city Maryland was the newest mislead city to ban stun guns and tasers.
What kills be is that they do it under the guise of wanting to keep people safe when that isn’t it at all. They just want another way to get money from people and keep you scared and reliant on them to keep you safe. It is sad really. These people wouldn’t even have the right to concealed weapons if it wasn’t for the fact that the NRA has more money than Bill Gates, ok not really but they have a ton and can buy quite a few politicians’ support.
As you can see by the links ALL of these items and many other regular everyday items have all been used in crimes at one point or another.
Like I said it is silly. All they do is make it harder for the non gun toting people to protect themselves by using non lethal weapons like stun guns or tasers.
We need to get a leash on our politicians cause I think they have forgotten they work for us and they may need a reminder kick in the pants!
I have been a Bank of America account holder for many years. When I moved my money into their bank I went ahead and got their credit card since the rate was good at 6.24%. Over the last few years as times got tougher I carried a balance on the card of about 7k which is higher than ever before but at the rate I got it was fine.
Then I get the letter. The we’re gonna bend you over letter, from Bank of America, which states that no my credit rating didn’t drop, no I was NEVER late on a payment even one day one time but they were going to jack my rate to 12.99% anyway.
I called and asked why and they said they were doing it across the board. So in other words not just screwing me but screwing all of their customers (but that isn’t true either I would lay money the wealthy card holders will not get messed with at all).
I called today and spoke to a smart ass little punk in their retention department. I ask “why are you screwing over a loyal customer with multiple bank account types in your bank whose has never been late even once on a payment?”. The answer I get is “we aren’t screwing you over” in a very smart assed tone. I responded “really so more than doubling my credit card rate for no reason isn’t screwing me over?”
He answers “We have a reason, BOA needs to be able to make money too!”
Well isn’t that lovely. Not only am I and every other American footing the bill to help bailout these lowlife banks but not they think we should pay outrageous rates which they change in the middle of a contract.
I borrowed the money at one rate and just cause they want to be greedy bastards they jack the rate and say “well if you don’t like pay it all off now and get rid of the card”.
This is the type of company Bank of America is these days. I hope they fold like the others.
They are greedy and just as poorly run as AIG or any of these other lowlife companies who have totally screwed us all!
First chance I get, all of my money comes out of Bank of America and I am shredding their cards. I will never do business with them again.
A big well done to Bank of America. They just chased away yet another customer. Hope I am not the last.
We all know crime is on the rise here in the US, that is why you came to our site to begin with but this isn’t confined just to the US.
Some of the world’s most popular tourist destinations have become crime ridden and down right dangerous as too many people are learning the hard way. We are talking places like St. Lucia, Antigua, Barbuda and many others. It is so bad the British and US Governments have warned travelers to St Lucia to beware of violent crime after several rapes and robberies by gun-men preying on tourists.
The kicker is the Antiguan Prime Minister says “Those criminal deportees with skills developed in the US and UK are impacting tremendously on our society” is the problem. You see immigrants from Antigua are coming to the UK and US and committing crimes. They then get deported back to their home countries with newly found crime skills.
Just one big mess. Another issue in the Caribbean now is that the drug trade has moved there to avoid our anti drug efforts elsewhere. Like I said one big mess.
Many of these small countries aren’t prepared for the increases in crime they are seeing and their police force is to put it nicely is inadequate. Ok pathetic actually
You can’t carry self defense weapons in most of these countries as a resident or as a tourist which means you need to rely on local authorities to keep you safe.
Problem, they aren’t doing the job. Just the other day a 50 year old couple from Briton was attacked in their villa in St. Lucia. The man was beaten almost to death and his wife raped.
Another couple, Catherine and Benjamin Mullany both 31, were asleep in a bungalow in Antigua this weekend and 2 men came in and shot both of them in the head. Catherine died, they believe right away since she was shot in the head point blank and her husband was hit in the neck but the bullet went into his brain. He is in England in a coma and is believed to be brain dead.
I don’t tell you this to sell products, you can’t them to these places. I tell you this in the chance that you or someone you know is planning a trip to the Caribbean. You need to take your safety smarts with you even on vacation.
Remember, most of these places have nothing but the hotels and resorts. Outside of there everyone lives in squaller in very high crime. Little if any, of the billions of dollars that roll into these resorts finds its way back to the poor people of these areas. I went to a wedding in Jamaica a few years ago and we wandered off the resort grounds and found ourselves in some places we were quick to leave from, crime is rampant in the poorest areas.
When “we” go to these places on vacation, to the locals we must be rich; richer than them for sure! That’s makes us all huge targets for crime.
My advice, stay in the US. We have tons of crime but at least here you can at least attempt to protect yourself!
Pass this on to anyone you know that might be considering a trip to the Caribbean.
I filed this entry as both for politics and crime. The reason for this being what they have done with gas prices is a crime.
Here is what I want you to wrap your noodle around. Does it seem strange to you that the price of gas keeps rising and rising and the energy department and oil industry start doing a full court press to start drilling more domestically?
Call me a conspiracy nut or whatever you want to call me but it seems all to convenient to me. They have tried since I believe it was the 80′s when we started stopping new drilling off shore for environmental reasons to get that reversed.
What better way to do that? Drive the price of gas to a point that people are really struggling and then dangle a carrot in our faces saying “just let us drill off shore and prices will go down”!
The oil producing nations are saying they will increase production even more but since they never lowered it to start with they don’t believe it will lower prices because they say “we aren’t the ones driving the prices up”!
I actually believe them. I believe there are certain individuals with much more power and money than they should have that purposely driving up prices.
Here is another point to ponder. If it is sooo easy to get more oil off shore, then why don’t they open up the strategic oil reserve right now and flood the domestic market with oil. Why don’t they? Cause they know it will take a decade or more to ever see a drop of that oil.
At this point I don’t even care who is to blame. I have made drastic changes in my old bad habits and only drive when necessary. I practice hyper mileage techniques and do my best to burn as little gas as possible.
Soon I will get an all electric vehicle and say goodbye forever to the outdated, inefficient combustion engine technology. Why you ask?
Even if they drill domestically it will never lower pries back down to were they belong. Besides that, even if they could I don’t want to be part of the problem but part of the solution.
Spending half of my income on fuel is ridiculous and I personally, have had enough. I refuse to make just a handful of people rich beyond imagination while destroying the Earth.
Our fresh waters are polluted, our oceans are disgusting as well already, drilling off shore will only make things worse and if by some chance it does lower prices it will be a short lived farce so they can say “see we told you prices would drop right away if you let us drill off shore”. The farce part being the price could be lower right now without drilling off shore and will probably go back up after we can do nothing about it!
Don’t let these lowlife’s fool you! Use your head and think about this. We can place robots on Mars that operate for years but we can’t make a decent vehicle that doesn’t use oil/gas? Of course we can!
You know for quite a while now America has gotten a bad wrap around the world because we are finally getting smart enough to find out who is in our country and those here illegally removed.
People say we are being racist, we are picking on poor people just trying to make a better life for themselves, they say we need illegal immigrants because of their contributions. But people are confused or crazy I am not sure.
LEGAL immigrants are what make the US the best country in the world, they come here and adopt our culture but add their own culture to the mix as well. They work hard, carve out a life for themselves, open businesses and go through all work needed to gain their citizenship and are very proud to be fellow Americans.
Those people I applaud and welcome with open arms!
My issue is strictly with people who, for whatever reason I don’t care, decide to break the law and enter the country illegally. The only way they can work any kind of legal job is to commit identity theft to get a bogus social security card.
Now I don’t want to single out one group of peoples but since illegal immigrants are so vocal with their protests I figure they went there first. Let’s look a bit a Mexico’s immigration laws.
You see if you or I slipped across the border into Mexico illegally and get caught it is a felony which is punishable with up to 2 years in a MEXICAN prison followed by immediate deportation.
Not only that if you do become a legal resident the government can revoke your citizenship and throw you out of the country for any or no reason at all PLUS you are not allowed to serve in the military, be a police officer, hold any kind of political office or even become a clergymen!!!
Mexico deports 250K+ illegal immigrants from poorer central American countries like Honduras etc.. every year and those illegals tell stories of being beaten, starved, raped etc..
Mexican police are REQUIRED to enforce immigration laws unlike here in the US. SO I ask you how is what we are trying to do by securing our borders and removing criminals any different that what Mexico themselves do? Besides we don’t mistreat our illegals.
We need to back our government on this. We are not doing anything that every other country in the world doesn’t do to try and secure their borders so why are we expected to be different? Do we need another attack, this time from people who hate us and sneak across the border from Mexico?
We are not trying to persecute anyone, not telling good people who want to come here and make a better life to go away, not at all we want those kind of people. No, we just want to keep track of who enters the country for security reasons and because it makes sense.
Lastly, people talk about the children of illegals. This one is tough but let’s look around the world. Do other countries have the pop a baby out on our soil and it is a citizen whether you were there legally or not? I know for a fact in Germany doesn’t and am betting most other countries don’t either but it is hard info to find.
A friend of mine was born to an American father stationed in Germany and a German born and raised mother and my friend was considered an American not German even though he was born in a German Hospital.
This is an issue worldwide, if you do a search for: immigration issues (plug a country name here) you’ll see how much a mess this for most countries around the world.
What I understand the least are people flooding across borders illegally from countries where things are bad. Barring a hostile takeover or natural disaster things have been bad in those countries for many many years. So if they have hated living where they are since they were a poor kid why not have applied legally before it got to a point you had to start your “new life” off by committing a crime in your new “home”.
I know this make some people mad and quite frankly that is fine. I am not preaching hate or intolerance just common sense and the law. Legal immigrants = good while illegal immigrants = criminals hence the illegal part!
Write your legislators, back our government on this because if we don’t get control of this is will come back to bite us eventually.
John McCain or I what I saw people calling him, McBush, is getting too far along in years to be President. I say this because he seems to forget his lies too much.
He says he is different from Bush because he cares about the environment. YET, today I see him speaking in Texas about the fact we need to do more drilling here in the United States.
How is that good for the environment? It isn’t, he is just pathetic. He says, like his counterpart Bush, that our killing our environment here in the US will help lower gas prices.
This is B.S., it will take years for them to find, drill, build refineries and process this crap into gas to lower costs so it is just another lie and a way for McBush backers to make money while killing our environment.
IF, McBush really cared about the environment, NOW is the time to phase out the combustion engine all together and to spend whatever it costs to find an alternative to the way we have done things for over a 100 years.
For Pete’s sake it is 2008! The combustion engine is an outdated, inefficient piece of trash that needs to be viewed in museums not be our only real option for transportation.
McBush is also a Nuclear supporter which also is horrible for the environment. We can land robots on Mars and have them walk around doing things for years yet we have no efficient, environmentally safe ways of generating our energy here?
Don’t let McBush fool you! He cares nothing more about the environment then his moronic predecessor and his evil minions. The republicans have shown their true colors, it is all about big business, screw the little guy!
I am not saying the democrats are right on everything either cause they love to tax you to death. But if they will help to remove our dependence on oil, foreign or domestic, that I will back them until a good independent ever shows.
We need someone who isn’t going to tread party lines which does nothing but cause things to never really get done. Instead I would like to see someone who works for the American people, all of us!
We need to remove this religious stance from the republicans. Are Christians really that stupid? Stupid enough to believe that these people really believe in God and care about living the way God says? I hope not.
Just look at all of the republican politicians who have been arrested or outed after homosexual incidents and even pedophilia. Remember all of the congressional pages? 16 year old boys…yikes.
Then you have guys like Craig trying to have sex in public bathrooms with men and let’s not forget Cheney’s daughter is gay.
People need to realize they are politicians and will say whatever will get them elected. The republicans jumped on the Bible bandwagon because they wanted the numbers. All they have to do is say they are pro life and every bible thumper in the country swoons.
In the meantime, we have people who shake, starve, beat and throw away their babies. Thousands of babies die every year at the hands of their parents. Yup pro-life is helping the children alright…..not!
People need to rethink their priorities. People need to worry about their own “house” instead of putting their noses into everyone else’s. Remember God gave us free will to choose right or wrong.
If you believe abortion is wrong don’t have one but how dare you be arrogant enough to think you are smarter than God and that you need to force everyone else to live by your beliefs. If a woman has an abortion that is between her and God and NONE of your business!
You have the right and the duty, according to the Bible, to witness to people and tell them what God wants. But you have ZERO right to force anyone else to do anything they choose not to do.
Wow, got off on a rant there. Long, long story short. Don’t let McBush or any other politician pull the wool over your eyes! The time for free transportation has come.
I am talking about vehicles that require only renewable fuels without being tied to a pump somewhere like with hydrogen. The technology is coming and if we don’t take the lead it will hurt our economy bigtime down the line!
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but they have a ton and can buy quite a few politicians’ support.