Tag: shame

We have been following the story of Betsie Gallardo lately, she being the woman that, due to a medical decision, was being starved to death in a Florida prison.

She has inoperable cancer, her death is imminent, and her mother was working hard to make it possible for Betsie to die at home with some dignity.

As we reported just a couple days ago, half the battle was already won, as the Florida Department of Corrections had agreed to place her in a hospital so that she could again go back on nutritional support.

On January 5th, the Florida Parole Commission voted to allow her to end her life at home-and that means you spoke out, made a difference, and achieved a complete victory for the effort.

But even as we celebrate that victory, I think we should take a moment to realize that there is a bigger lesson here: the lesson that the fights over “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT), benefits for 9/11 first responders (the Zadroga Bill), and Betsie Gallardo’s imminent release are all actually pointing us to a political strategy that works, over and over, if we are willing to understand the wisdom that’s been laid before us.

We often think people are motivated to do something solely by facts alone.  Instead, they are spurred to action by the feeling these facts produce.  People make choices and decisions based to some extent on figures and concrete details, but it is the emotional impact these soberly presented bits of information create that really matters.  It has been noted many times before that polls and other human-made means of discernment have limits because no one can truly understand what lies inside a voter’s heart.  This, in part, is what I mean.  Unlike the typical columnist, I do not intend to use this introduction as a segue-way to rip into President Obama and the ineffectiveness of the (for now) Democratic-controlled Congress.  Rather, I’d like to go well beyond.

Crossposted at Daily Kos

    They don’t just hope HE (President Obama) FAILS, they hope America fails, and they (The Republican party) are helping it happen by obstructing reform and fighting job growing legislation that will help America recover.

    They hope you lose your job and go broke so that you are pissed off and miserable, and they hope this lasts until 2010 and 2012 so you can take it out on the incumbents who are in office, and when we “throw the bums out” Republicans will finally get back the political power that they crave so much.

    The Republican party is sabotaging America’s recovery for political gain.

    This is the new meme that we as Democrats should push in order to expose the elected Republicans for what they are, fake patriots who put politics above the best interests of their own nation.

    More below the fold.

I still have my NYPD/FDNY NY Yankees hat.

I grew up in the state of New York. On 9/11/01 I was in New Jersey, and I could see the smoke from there.

    On that tragic day more brave Police Officers and Fire Fighters lost their lives trying to help and save others then I care to count, though each life lost that day should never be forgotten. The war that was launched in Afghanistan to bring justice to al Qaeda and the Taliban, and the false war based on lies in Iraq that prevented the job of catching Osama bin Laden from being brought to justice has claimed thousands of more lives. All of these men and women are heroes. This is true not only of the innocent victims of 9/11, but also of those who ran into those buildings in order to save the lives of their fellow citizens. The brave fallen soldiers of those wars and the emergency workers of NYC were and are true heroes.

   And today, the Corporate media, the Republican party and their Right Wing base, in order to remember that day and recall the national unity we Americans felt afterwards, are going to protest that same Government who employed, fed and buried the heroes who gave their lives on 9/11 and the wars that were launched in the days and years after..

    And that is truly pathetic.

Crossposted at Daily Kos

  Overlooked in the coverage of the passing of the great Senator Ted Kennedy is this ground shaking news out of France.

    France’s leading banks agreed Tuesday to curbs on the way they award bonuses, including penalties for traders who lose money for their companies, as part of a push by President Nicolas Sarkozy for worldwide limits on bonus payouts.

~snip~

    He stressed, though, that international rules are needed to keep French banks competitive, and Sarkozy promised to push the G20 meeting next month in the United States to adopt such measures.

    “While the first signs of stabilization of the economy are here, we are seeing bad habits coming back. I can’t accept that,” Sarkozy told the bankers.

    “No one has forgotten that the financial sector is at the origin of this crisis.”

sympatico.msn.ca

    Expect more below the fold.

Must be a sign of the apocalypse.  The MSM catches up to Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, a former senior official in the US Department of Commerce, who wrote The Three Trillion Dollar War.