Author Archives: editor

May 21

QUICK IMPORTANT TWEETS FOR U 12noon…..

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CONGRESS: MAJORITY THAT PROLONGS LITTLE THINGS TO DELAY BIG THINGS SO THEY CAN LOBBY, ACT IMPORTANT TO THE PEOPLE WHO VOTED THEM IN, TRY TO DESTROY THE OPPOSITION SO THEY CAN BE REELECTED, AND IGNORE THE 99%!!!  We are watching You!!!

 ”End This Depression Now”: Paul Krugman: Public Spnding, Not Deficit Hype. Save 99% NOW http://bit.ly/LdcDAh CRISIS: SIMPLE-QUICK-WORKS! DrB

 

It’s Hepatitis Awareness Month. What do you know about #hepatitis? Get expert guidance & show support here: http://bit.ly/JryLcM #HepC
There are two main ways to define fairness: fairness in terms of opportunity, and fairness in terms of outcomes http://ow.ly/b2RRT
Retweeted by AEI
Cost of three wars to be calculated under House-passed defense bill http://bit.ly/Kev73a #war
Less invasive scope exam can cut the risk of developing or dying of colon cancer, study finds: http://apne.ws/JgTUSk -CJ
How to pass an anti-Citizens United amendment, in 1 flowchart: http://mojo.ly/JmkOwF
Republicans gain procedural advantage on Violence Against Women Act, may engage in hostage-taking http://bit.ly/Mb9GzP
New At C&L: Is the End of Afghanistan Near? http://gocl.me/Jz13Bb
Cheney to host Romney fundraiser http://njour.nl/KD9NSQ
Why great ideas come when you aren’t trying http://bit.ly/KeF5S5
POLL: Will new HIV prevention measures lead to reckless behavior? http://huff.to/LaSNmt
more later.  txs for your support.
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       Want to change your city, state, country and world? Following is your best way:   CALL YOUR CONGRESSPERSONS: http://www.contactingthecongress.org/ Even if you get a voice mail, leave a message for they count the “For/Against.” Vote for the candidate who WILL BE FAIR TO ALL, OK?
HELPING OTHERS HELP THEMSELVES HELPS YOU!
May 21

“ARE YE TRYING OR DYING?”

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 STARTING YOUR DAY RIGHT?  Here are 5 passionate Tips for your own Self Care: 1-Fuel Your Body, 2-Take a Nap, 3-Turn Off Alarm, 4-Do Nothing, or 5-Have a little Fun.  TAKING CARE OF YOUR SELF 1st helps you take care of others later.  U can do at least 1 a day, OK…..”YE HAVE NOT CAUSE YE TRY NOT”.-mackie
Fuel your body Rather than sliding your meals between meetings, eat when your body signals hunger. You’ll need to be prepared for this. You can pack some snacks like fruit, nuts, or those nifty Kind bars.
Take a nap No, not at your desk:-) Try taking a nap on Saturday and Sunday, or after work. You can set a timer or just allow yourself to sleep until you wake up.
Turn off your alarm Do you wake up to buzzing or the sound of news on the radio? Do you slap it several times to snooze? Are you annoyed with your alarm? Try un-setting your alarm this week. I know it’s scary. I’m going to try it myself. If not un-setting the alarm, try changing the wake up sound to something pleasant like a chime or a “good morning” ringtone from your kids.
Do nothing I got this idea from Christine Kane. I’ve always thrived on meditation. Doing nothing takes it a step further. I don’t even have to concentrate on my breath. For 15 minutes, I just sit, and do absolutely nothing. I can let my mind drift if it wants to. It churns and churns. I don’t coax it to come back to center. I just sit. In silence. Doing nothing.
Read something for fun As consultants, we’re always reading industry publications, journals, or news. When was the last time you read something for fun – chick lit, erotica, spy novels, comic books? Try reading something that you would have read as a teenager. Laugh a little. Become engrossed in a story that’s pure reverie!
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       Want to change your city, state, country and world? Following is your best way:   CALL YOUR CONGRESSPERSONS: http://www.contactingthecongress.org/ Even if you get a voice mail, leave a message for they count the “For/Against.” Vote for the candidate who WILL BE FAIR TO ALL, OK?
HELPING OTHERS HELP THEMSELVES HELPS YOU!
May 20

WE CAN “END THIS DEPRESSION NOW”!!! Call Congressmen…..

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Public spending is under assault from the United States to Europe in the name of fighting deficits. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman argues in his new book, “End This Depression Now!“, that the hysteria over the deficit will constrain an economic recovery in a time of high unemployment and stagnating wages.
“The economics is really easy,” says Krugman, “If we were to spend more money at the government level and … rehire the schoolteachers, firefighters, police officers who have been laid off in the last several years because of cutbacks at the state and local level, we would be a long way back towards full employment. …
Right now, there just is not enough spending, and we need the government, which can do it, to step in and provide the demand we need. … We’ve had austerity in the face of a recession, in a way that we have never had before since the 1930s. … And the results are clear: it’s disastrous.”
Krugman writes about the economy as a columnist for the New York Times and is a professor of economics at Princeton University.
May 20

THE LIBERATING EMBRACE OF UNCERTAINTY?

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“The only constant is change. It’s the most basic fact of human existence. Nothing lasts, nothing stays the same.
We feel it with each breath. From birth to the unknown moment of our passing, we ride a river of change. And yet, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, we exhaust ourselves in an endless search for solidity. We hunger for something that lasts, some idea or principle that rises above time and change. We hunger for certainty. That is a big problem.
It might even be THE problem.
Religions are often built around this heartache for certainty. In the face of sickness, loss and grief, a thousand dogmas with a thousand names have risen. Many profess that if only the faithful hold fast to the “rules,” the “precepts” or the “doctrine” then certainty can be obtained.
Fate and future can be fixed through promises of freedom from immediate suffering, divine favor or everlasting salvation. Scriptures are transformed into unwavering blueprints for an unchanging order. These documents must live beyond question lest the certainty they provide crumble. When human spiritual endeavor devolves into these white-knuckle forms of clinging they become monuments to the fear of change and uncertainty.
It would be symmetrical if I could point to science as the pure antidote to the rigid rejection of uncertainty. Science, in the purest forms of its expression as a practice, holds to no doctrine other than that the world might be known. In the ceaseless pursuit of its own questioning path, science asks us to allow for ceaseless change in our ideas, beliefs and opinions. It’s this aspect of science that I value more than any other.
But science does not exist alone as practice. It’s also a constellation of ideas that exist within culture and those ideas can gain value, in and of themselves, without connection to actual practice. In this way science becomes something more and less. For some people the idea of Science offers a trumped up certainty that yields its own false defense against the rootlessness that roots of our existence.
My co-blogger Marcelo Gleiser put it beautifully two weeks ago when he wrote, “what is pompous is to think that we can know all the answers. Or that it’s the job of science to find them.” When science as an idea is used to push away the tremulous reality of our lived existential uncertainty then it, too, is degraded. It becomes just another imaginary fixed point in a life without fixed points.
Of course it doesn’t have to be this way. The world’s history of spiritual endeavor contains many beautiful descriptions of authentic encounters with uncertainty. Ironically these often serve as gateways to the most compassionate experience of what can be called sacred in human life.
Buddhism‘s First Noble Truth, which focuses specifically on the reality of change and suffering, serves as one example. In the Christian tradition works like the “Cloud of Unknowing,” a 14th century paean to the importance of experience over doctrine or dogma, serves as another. Dig around in most of the world’s great religious traditions and you find people finding their sense of grace by embracing uncertainty rather than trying to bury it in codified dogmas.”
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       Want to change your city, state, country and world? Following is your best way:   CALL YOUR CONGRESSPERSONS: http://www.contactingthecongress.org/ Even if you get a voice mail, leave a message for they count the “For/Against.” Vote for the candidate who WILL BE FAIR TO ALL, OK?
HELPING OTHERS HELP THEMSELVES HELPS YOU!
May 20

Southern Baptist Convention to vote on 1st Black President…

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The Rev. Fred Luter II of the Franklin Avenue Baptist Church in New Orleans, La., is set to become the first ever African-American president of the Nashville-based Southern Baptist Convention, as he is so far the only candidate for the election in June.

The Southern Baptist Convention, which has long dealt with issues of race since splitting in 1845 with Northern Baptists over the right to hold slaves, has grown to accept a diverse array of cultures within its congregation. Once an all-white membership, nearly 20 percent of its current congregation nationwide now is composed of minorities. Until now, however, it has never had an African-American president – Luter himself was the first ever African-American first vice-president of the denomination, appointed in June 2011.

Luter has had a long and turbulent road to rise in the ranks, The Tennessean reported, revealing that when Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, his church was destroyed and lost its entire 7,000-member congregation, most of whom fled the city. Three years later, however, the Franklin Avenue Baptist church reopened its doors after help from the entire neighborhood, and now draws 5,000 people for church services. The report goes into detail about Luter’s background and upbringing, sharing how a near-fatal motorcycle accident when he was 21 guided him in the right direction toward God.

For more click on: http://www.christianpost.com/news/southern-baptist-convention-set-to-elect-first-black-president-70673/

May 16

Mr. Boehner and the Debt…

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No, Mr. Boehner wants to do it all over again: he announced on Tuesday that the House will not agree to raise the debt ceiling when it is reached later this year or early next, unless the increase is matched by equal spending cuts. “We shouldn’t dread the debt limit,” he said, instantly forcing the country to do just that. “As a matter of fact, I think we should welcome it. It’s an action-forcing event in a town that has become infamous for inaction.”

An official who actually wanted to help the country rather than appeasing the Tea Party might have remembered what happened a year ago, after Mr. Boehner first made that extortionate demand. The bond rating agencies said the country’s credit and reputation had been seriously damaged, and the government lost its AAA credit rating. (Mr. Boehner shamelessly blamed Mr. Obama for that on Tuesday.) The Federal Reserve warned of “catastrophic” and “calamitous” effects if Republicans carried through on their threat to default. The stock market sank, and Congress’s approval rating has never recovered.

MUCH MORE: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/16/opinion/mr-boehner-and-the-debt.html?_r=1&src=recg

May 16

ONLY 1 OTHER COUNTRY HAS DEBT CEILING…..

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A February 2011 Government Accountability Office report said experts believe there is a “weakness in the U.S. budgetary framework” because Congress can approve spending without approving the borrowing necessary to fund that spending. This can cause uneasiness in the market. RESULT: MIDDLE CLASS AND POOR LOSE JOBS, BENEFITS, etc. YOU KNOW WHO’S CAUSING IT?  CALL THEM AND VOTE THEM OUT.

abcnews.go.com

ABC News‘ Amy Bingham reports:

It’s 14 days and counting until financial apocalypse descends upon U.S. markets, yet lawmakers are still seemingly eons away from striking a deal to reduce the deficit and raise the debt limit. The ferocity of the debate coupled with the warnings of impending doom begs the question, why does America have a debt ceiling in the first place?

A report released Monday by Moody’s analyst Steven Hess points out that the United States’ debt limit “is an uncommon attribute not shared by most” countries. The U.S. is the only democratic country, besides Denmark, in which Congress has to approve borrowing separately from spending. In most other countries the authority to borrow money is inextricably tied to the authority to spend money.

For example, in Canada the executive branch can borrow as much money approved to spend in the yearly budget.  In Sweden, borrowing is also linked to the budget, although the legislature does not decide how much money the Finance Minister can borrow but instead decides how many programs it can fund.

And in the United Kingdom and New Zealand, the Treasury department has the authority to borrow as much as they need to fund congressionally approved spending.

Much more: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/07/only-one-democratic-country-besides-america-has-a-debt-ceiling/

May 15

IS MITT ROMNEY REALLY A JOB CREATOR?

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Before Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital bought the rambling SCM factory in Marion, Ind., it was running three shifts a day, making hanging file folders and other office supplies. But on July 5, 1994, everything changed.
The former SCM/AmPad plant in Marion, Ind., which Bain Capital closed back in 1994, is now occupied by another company called Novapak.
The new owner, American Pad & Paper, owned in turn by Bain Capital, told all 258 union workers they were fired, in a cost-cutting move.
Security guards hustled them out of the building. They would be able to reapply for their jobs, at lesser wages and benefits, but not all would be rehired.
“We were told they bought the assets, not the union or the [labor] contract,” recalls Randy Johnson, who at the time worked as a machine operator and was a union shop steward. The workers – some the third generation in their families to have jobs there – eventually went on strike, and Bain closed the factory 5-1/2 months after acquiring it.
Not far from the former plant is a Staples office supply company – the typical store employs 20 to 30 people – and a Domino’s Pizza franchise, which typically has about 15 workers. Both outlets can point to contributions from Bain Capital, which provided seed money for the parent company to grow, eventually adding thousands of jobs across the US.
For much more click on:
May 13

SWEET TWEETS TO ALL MOTHERS AND OTHER CAREGIVERS!

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HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY TO ALL THE MOMS IN ALL THE WORLDS & HEAVENS+++++++
I KNOW YOU DID THE BEST WITH WHAT YOU HAVE!!!!!!!
‘Thank you, mom’: What I’ve realized in my 20s http://huff.to/IzdwAH
Midday open thread http://bit.ly/JHVzzo
On Inside #Syria: Who is behind the recent bomb attacks, as the Syrian government & the opposition blame each other? | http://aje.me/KWUnxG
Bloomberg Defends Gay Marriage http://thebea.st/IOK4a2 #cheatsheet
It’s official: This surfer caught the largest wave ever | http://ti.me/IQhvrB (via @TIMENewsFeed)
Sandy Leon gets the call to replace Wilson Ramos on the #Nats‘ roster http://wapo.st/IOrxL4
INFOGRAPHIC: Hollywood‘s favorite mom is … http://huff.to/J4sgMR
more later….
May 13

CEOs: INSTEAD OF BUYING BACK SHARES, INVEST IN FACTORY>JOBS>X JOBS…

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FINK STATES THAT CEOs SHOULDN’T BE BUYING BACK SHARES, BUT BE COMFORTABLE INVESTING IN THEIR FACTORY WHICH CREATES JOBS THAT CREATES MORE JOBS, etc.
Much more. Check it out. -mackie
BlackRock Inc.’s Chief Executive Officer Laurence D. Fink said he supports the re-election of Barack Obama because the president needs more than four years to help the country recover from the global financial crisis………
“On the other hand, I would say very clearly, you need to… create that engine of growth,” Fink said. “We need to make sure that those CEOs feel comfortable, not to buy back their shares, but to invest in that factory and create those jobs and those jobs create other jobs and we have the multiplier effect for new jobs……………..”