Thank You, Mr. President

"We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office."
Aesop

Thank you Mr. Change...
All I see everyday from your Change is people worried about what's happening next....not because we fear Change, but because we fear the direction this country is headed as we have seen the effects of your "change". People are rising up for the first time in a long time (1770's-ish maybe?) to speak out, but is it doing anything? I hope so. Universal this and that seems to be driving the other way. You take away, for instance, the independent health care companies (those capitalist pigs, right?) you are taking MORE jobs from the people. Because it's not just hitting the corporate big wigs, it's those people that do the small stuff. The people that have no say in your premiums or your coverage, but are just like you, trying to pay their mortgage, put their kids thru school, live the "American Dream". As depressing as this is,there is a new change...a new hope. I see it more and more, with the meetups, with the Project 912 supporters, #tcot and Tea Parties, American's are getting sick and tired. You take away everything from us, we have nothing to lose. I had a lot more I wanted to express, but have you ever been so frustrated you can't? My eyeballs are burning my body is shaking and I can't believe that we have been so blind to what's happening, and, possibly in my own personal world, these "changes" are coming down hard and fast, and not in a good way. So, rather than confuse my words and tangle myself up while I'm still seething, I'll let others speak for me till I can control the words.


"You may fool all the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all the time."
Abraham Lincoln
“The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.”
James Arthur Baldwin

“Never contend with a man who has nothing to lose”
Baltasar Gracian quotes

“We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.”
George Orwell

“The Christian has greatly the advantage of the unbeliever, having everything to gain and nothing to lose”
Lord Byron

"Too bad that all the people who really know how to run the country are busy driving taxi cabs and cutting hair."
George Burns

"Put not your trust in princes."
Psalm 146. 3

The War Against Bloggers

"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech" Benjamin Franklin

Forget the war on drugs. The new administration has a new target. I bet 95% of you reading it fall into this category. Yup. The danger lies not in dealing crack cocaine in seedy back alleys, or worrying that little Bobby is smoking the Mary-Jane before Junior High. It's those awful, awful social networkers. And at the heart of it? Bloggers. Uh-oh. The NY Post's Kyle Smith reports that the new OIRA Czar, Cass Sunstein seems to think "that the bloggers have been rampaging out of control and that new laws need to be written to corral them." He goes on to quote Sunstein, "people's beliefs are a product of social networks working as echo chambers in which false rumors spread like wildfire." and "We hardly need to imagine a world, however, in which people and institutions are being harmed by the rapid spread of damaging falsehoods via the Internet....We live in that world. What might be done to reduce the harm?" This is from his book, On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done. Basically, what I'm getting out of this is not that he's trying to alleviate rumors, but to control what information we can read.
What is Fox News without CNN? It's like White without Black. We have to be held accountable enough to reach our own Gray. Holding bloggers, newsreporters, social networkers (twitter, anyone?) responsible for rumors is like holding a grudge against the bully in high school that started a rumor about you. Or someone you know. Or whatever situation you've had to deal with in life that someone said something you didn't believe or knew wasn't true. Did you sue them for libel? Sunstein thinks we should:

"Sunstein questions the current libel standard - which requires proving "actual malice" against those who write about public figures, including celebrities. Mere "negligence" isn't libelous, but Sunstein wonders, 'Is it so important to provide breathing space for damaging falsehoods about entertainers?' Celeb rags, get ready to hire more lawyers."

One of my most fav books ever is Tom Brokaw's Greatest Generation. The reason it's one of my favs is this idea of personal responsibility. I don't know about Obama's Dreams from my Father but I know my father was raised by a father from this Greatest Generation. He took personal responsibility, from the job he did (Welfare? Government assistance? Pell Grants? Who ever heard of such a thing?) to the family he raised to the actions he took. And I believe there are still many Americans out there like that, that have this trait of personal responsibility. Why, then, do we need someone out there regulating what we can or can't read about? I go to work everyday, pay my taxes, consider myself somewhat intelligent, and can make my own informed decisions and opinions. I don't need a filter. I don't need a babysitter. If these people that are being written about are the one's with the problem, I go back to my oldest theory: If you are paranoid that people are talking about you, you probably did something to encourage it. Guilty Conscious.