All of the candidates have well-polished websites with opportunities to take part in or contribute to the respective campaigns. They all have things they call blogs except for grumpy old Dennis Kucinich, but it's John Edwards who takes the prize for most networked presidential hopeful...the list of social websites he's established profiles on is staggering.
I just hope that these campaigns realize that this stuff doesn't equal votes. It takes no effort to join some social networking group for a candidate you support, but not all of the people that do are going to actually go out and vote, and even fewer are going to go out and knock on doors to turn other voters. I'd also like to see a higher level of integration between all these disparate sites.
Campaigns need to find a way to connect the blog commenter's with the Second Life players with the MySpace friends and have set goals to accomplish. 1,000,000 friends on MySpace is cool, but not if they aren't doing anything. You need to get them to spread the message and get other people into the movement, otherwise it's all for naught.
More morons out there are trying to warp the Senators statement on Middle East tensions regarding Iran's nuclear weapons development into an anti-religious attack on Jews. I just don't see how people can be any more obtuse unless they are doing it on purpose. Israel has threatened more than once to attack Iran if their nuclear weapons program isn't halted, and that could bring the entire region into a state of chaos.
How is that anti-Semitic? I mean honestly, I think the term has been so abused over time that some people think any statement they can link to Israel that isn't proactively supportive must then be negative, derogatory, and apparently anti-Semitic since Israeli's have no other facets than their faith.
They have a term for that, it's called a victims mentality.
Iran has threatened to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth, and Israel has threatened to destroy Iran's nuclear capability. These two are itching for a fight and if nukes are involved -- and by the way Israel does possess tactical nuclear weapons -- then all hell is going to break loose over there. That's not anti-Semitic, it's reality.
Nuclear armed countries that hate each other, I'm sorry to say, present an infinitely greater threat to the region than terrorists and an unstable Iraq do. Even if a terrorist cell managed to acquire and detonate a bomb, that's *1* bomb. Israel is estimated to have nearly 100 warheads with sea-launch capability, Iran aims to be able to produce as many as 20 warheads per year by the end of the decade. Pakistan has a nuclear arsenal and is known to have contributed technical support to Libya and Iran. India is armed and doesn't exactly have the best relations with Pakistan right now. None of these countries have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty, and China has a dog in the game as well as the Russians.
The most immediate threat is Iran's accelerated program encouraging Israel to destroy said program, end of story.
counterpunch.org has a piece on the various Presidential candidates health care plans, which is kind of funny since I'm not sure any of then have actually put a plan on paper other than John Edwards.
"Romney's bill was written by Blue Cross," Woolhandler said. "Romney was saying he was going to offer health insurance starting at $200 a month. And of course, that was a hoax. No insurance policy in Massachusetts comes in at $200 a month. When Blue Cross was asked to produce the policy, it turned out the policy was going to cost $380 a month for a policy that had a $2000 deductible. So, you are going to tell this poor bloke who is earning $29,400 a year that he has to go out and spend $4,000 a year on an insurance policy. And if he gets sick, he doesn't even have any coverage until he has spent $2,000. And that's not family coverage. That's individual coverage."
Wow, I'm not sure I even have to say anything about that. Romney's plan pretty much destroys itself without anyone else's help. Good job Mitt! Unfortunately, it's not very high on the Senators plan either.
"Edwards plan is not going to work," Woolhandler says flatly. "We know there is not going to be fair competition between Medicare and the private plans. You have to take on the private health insurance industry and tell them you are out of here. This is an entitlement program like traditional Medicare or Social Security. We are going to get the administrative efficiencies you get from running it as a single program and use that to expand coverage."
It may not work in the end, but any improvement is better than what we have going on right now, and it's a heck of a lotter better than the pro-business plans that Republicans are touting which do nothing but make the big private providers more profit, and life for poor even more impossible. That is going backwards, not forwards.
Edwards is meeting with unions today in Tennessee to talk fair living wages.
Vanderbilt workers, many of them members of Laborers Local 386, have been attempting to persuade the university since last year to pay a living wage of $10.18 an hour. Currently, the lowest paid workers earn $7.55 an hour, well below the poverty level. Vanderbilt - whose chancellor is paid $1.3 million a year - continues to refuse to grant a living wage for employees.
It's funny when you think about it, how the rich are always the most greedy. You'd think someone who needs every dime that they earn just to pay the bills and put food on the table would be the most desperate to protect the money that they have, and fight hard to get even more of it, but you'd be mistaken. The rich hoard their fortunes like you're trying to rip their arm off. They want more of it and few have any intention of sharing. There is no excuse for people to be working for the University below the poverty level while the chancellor is pulling over a million per year.
Think about this for a minute, $10.18 an hour at 8.5 hours per day is only $20,767 per year. The chancellor is making enough money to give 62 people a raise to $10.18 per hour, all by himself. Unbelievable.
