If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
The Senate bill already makes earning legal status extraordinarily difficult, lengthy, and expensive. What do we have to gain from adding unnecessary obstacles to legalization for families simply trying to come out of the shadows?
Canada gets it. They are recruiting the world’s brightest people who our crazy immigration laws repel.
Although the plots of many musicals have been built around love stories and comic devices, a growing number can be identified as "message" musicals.
Imagine how many more customers companies like Wal-Mart, McDonalds, General Motors, Amazon.com, Ford, Foot Locker, H & M, or Ben & Jerry's might have if the tens of millions of people with convictions could get jobs and not have to live on food stamps!
One of the biggest mistakes that advocates make is their failure to embrace and publicize success. After making the case for change and building the political will to pass legislation, advocates sometimes forget to circle back to celebrate wins and reinforce success.
The House of Representatives, where Congress gathers to hear the president, used to be known as "The People's House." But money power owns the lease now and runs the joint from hidden back rooms.
A funny thing happened at the Senate Armed Services Committee vote on Chuck Hagel, this week. Senator Ted Cruz, who is quickly making a name for himself as a modern-day Joe McCarthy, turned a normal committee vote into his own personal circus, making outlandish smear after outlandish smear against Chuck Hagel that earned the ire not just of senators in the room, but Capitol Hill newspapers, national media, and even his home state newspaper. Thing of it is, Cruz knows very well who his base is: The increasingly shrill far right, which want to see vicious opposition to anything President Obama says, does, or proposes. People have joked, with some degree of truth, that if President Obama came out against drinking Drano, Tea Party Congressmen and senators would immediately go out and chug gallons of it.
If you wonder why we spend more money on health care than any other country but have some of the worst health outcomes, you need look no further than the halls of Congress to figure it out.
The actions of Amgen and its cronies on Capitol Hill show who the real takers are -- not those who look to government for support in old age and hard times but the ones at the top whose avarice and lust for profit compel them to take as much as they can at the expense of everyone else.
These three calls should be made to conservative Republican senators who I know, from personal experience, care more about the best interests of the nation and who care more about solving problems than about winning ideological wars or passing someone else's litmus tests for purity.
Obama is under fire from his own supporters for failures and perceived betrayals linked in large part to his foreign policy, not health care or advocacy for it sex marriage or immigration reform.
When it comes to the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare, apparently there is no end to partisan political sniping in Washington even when the casualties include one's own voters beyond the Beltway. Last month, five senior Senate and House Republicans fired a broadside at a heretofore relatively noncontroversial provision of the Affordable Care Act, one that provides federal start-up loans to qualified organizations across the country to establish health insurance cooperatives. The co-ops could be an appealing nonprofit alternative for individuals and small businesses, many owned, it is reasonable to say, by Republican-leaning entrepreneurs. These small-business job creators, lacking the bargaining power of big companies, have been saddled with double-digit health- insurance rate increases in recent years by for-profit insurance companies.
President Obama thought compromise, conciliation and agreement with Republicans was the correct path in his first term. He was dead wrong. The correct course is to be as progressive as possible and argue strongly for your own principles. The country is on your side.
Now that everyone either favors the Dream Act, or critiques the president for not pushing it when it would have been demagogued to smithereens as it had been before, perhaps we can test whether the grand "Kumbaya" moment has arrived. Bring the Dream Act to a vote.
It's not uncommon in Utah to see Democratic candidates forego any indication that they're Democrats on campaign literature. It's a bold move, believe it or not, to put a donkey on yard signs here. The fear, or perhaps the well-documented fact, is that the biggest obstacle for a Democrat is the mere presence of a 'D' after his name.
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