A letter to Senator Collins and Snowe. Will they pay attention? No, they never do. Join me and send your letter off too.
NO ! NO! NO!
We do not need a super congress. We just need the rest of you to do your job. How can you be supporting this extreme measure when you have voted to raise the debt ceiling 7 times under Bush! You helped create the deficit and now you are willing to make cuts that will hurt the very people you represent.
I don't trust you or any one else in Washington. You are all corrupt and just trying to hang onto your jobs. Go ahead and cut medicare and see how many Mainers will end up selling their homes and going bankrupt. you are all set because we are paying your salaries, your pensions, your healthcare, supporting your gym and dining room yet you refuse to do the same for us.
I could get down on my knees and beg and you would just turn around and kick me again. I have never in all of my 75 years seen people so unwilling to govern and to represent the people.
You are all beholden to the big corporations and Wall Street. Am I angry? You bet I am and further more I am totally disgusted and frankly hopeless.
Priscilla Payne
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Monday, July 18, 2011
When Will They Grow Up????
After reading the news this morning on Huffington Post, I wonder when the politicians will come to their senses and act like adults. Now the Republicans in the House are letting the Tea Party reps take over the debt ceiling negotiations. This is surely going backwards. Their proposals are even more extreme than those of John Boehner and Eric Cantor.
I think we should just have an up or down vote on raising the debt ceiling and forget about extreme cuts to valuable programs. If they want to cut then cut the earmarks which still exist and Mitch McConnell is one of the worst offenders.
Both parties in Washington are acting in their own best interest and not thinking about the people who will get hurt by the cuts being proposed. When will they realize that getting out of Afghanistan and Iraq will save billions of dollars? But no, they will allow people to be thrown out on the streets and out of their homes before they will cut the war machine. They will take away food from children and mothers and close planned parenthood centers before they will raise taxes on the richest 2% of Americans.
I haven't heard of them cutting their salaries or benefits and closing their gym and giving up their classy dining hall. Let them suffer along with the rest of us. This situation is totally disgusting and appalling. Let's raise our voices and make them be heard. Call the White House and your senators and representatives today and tell them enough is enough!
I think we should just have an up or down vote on raising the debt ceiling and forget about extreme cuts to valuable programs. If they want to cut then cut the earmarks which still exist and Mitch McConnell is one of the worst offenders.
Both parties in Washington are acting in their own best interest and not thinking about the people who will get hurt by the cuts being proposed. When will they realize that getting out of Afghanistan and Iraq will save billions of dollars? But no, they will allow people to be thrown out on the streets and out of their homes before they will cut the war machine. They will take away food from children and mothers and close planned parenthood centers before they will raise taxes on the richest 2% of Americans.
I haven't heard of them cutting their salaries or benefits and closing their gym and giving up their classy dining hall. Let them suffer along with the rest of us. This situation is totally disgusting and appalling. Let's raise our voices and make them be heard. Call the White House and your senators and representatives today and tell them enough is enough!
Monday, July 4, 2011
To Maintain a Republic by David Bromwich
David Bromwich is a Professor of Literature at Yale University. His article posted on Huffington Post today, which is below, touched me and made me realize that even 150 years ago Abraham Lincoln saw the problems of unnecessary wars and also the "policies of aggrandizement and intemperate self-interest" that certainly exist today. The question for me is how do we change the course we are on?
"July 4, 1861 -- exactly a hundred and fifty years ago -- witnessed the reading aloud, on the floor of Congress, of Abraham Lincoln's Message to Congress in Special Session.
The circumstantial appeal of Lincoln's message turned on his defense of the Union against the threat posed by secession, and that is the part most people have in mind when they recall the most famous words of the address: "This is essentially a People's contest." Lincoln was speaking for democracy. He was also speaking for a Union, popular in character and progressive in direction, as the heart of all future hopes for democracy.
Another part of the Special Message matters more to us today. For Lincoln saw
an unresolvable tension between the constitution of a democratic republic and
the policies of aggrandizement and intemperate self-interest that lead from the
manners of freedom to the slavish love of power. He spoke of the difference
between the work of establishing a constitutional republic and the longer task
of maintaining it. But maintaining it against what? Lincoln's answer was always
the same: against the internal pressure of greed, and the external pressure of
war. The predicament of the country in 1861, he said, "forces us to ask: 'Is
there, in all republics, this inherent, and fatal weakness? Must a government,
of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to
maintain its own existence?'"
We are now ten years into a policy shared by two successive administrations
to plant a new understanding of the spirit of the laws in America. That policy
has pretended there is a "trade-off" between liberty and security, and that in
a time of crisis, security ought to have the upper hand. The Cheney-Bush and
Obama administrations have accustomed us to laws and language concerned
above all with the "protection" of citizens -- as if there were something higher
or more worth protecting than the liberty that is guaranteed by our laws and
the framework of laws, the Constitution.
Today, as in Lincoln's day, we are involved in "a struggle for maintaining
...that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate
the condition of men -- to lift artificial weights from all shoulders -- to clear
the paths of laudable pursuit for all -- to afford all, an unfettered start, and
a fair chance, in the race of life." Yet the main peril in that struggle today
comes not from any foreign power capable of destroying us from without, but the
lapse of thought and faith that threatens us now from within. We are divided
between two parties: one that thinks government should be used for nothing but
wars, another that thinks government should be used for wars (whether justified
or not) in order to prove the value of government for other purposes as well.
Over the past decade we have taken many long steps across the divide that
separates a republic from an empire. The recovery of our proper ground depends
on our seeing again the rightness of Lincoln's recoil from wars that are not
wars of necessity. The words of his Special Message leave an incitement, too,
by listing the goods he valued above the new forms of power and luxury that war
can add to life. Elevating the condition of men. Lifting artificial weights from
all shoulders. Clearing the paths of laudable pursuit for all. By doing this at
home, we offer an example to those who would try it abroad. As Lincoln said in
other words in other places, that is the only honest way for a democracy to
advance the cause of democracy."
"July 4, 1861 -- exactly a hundred and fifty years ago -- witnessed the reading aloud, on the floor of Congress, of Abraham Lincoln's Message to Congress in Special Session.
The circumstantial appeal of Lincoln's message turned on his defense of the Union against the threat posed by secession, and that is the part most people have in mind when they recall the most famous words of the address: "This is essentially a People's contest." Lincoln was speaking for democracy. He was also speaking for a Union, popular in character and progressive in direction, as the heart of all future hopes for democracy.
Another part of the Special Message matters more to us today. For Lincoln saw
an unresolvable tension between the constitution of a democratic republic and
the policies of aggrandizement and intemperate self-interest that lead from the
manners of freedom to the slavish love of power. He spoke of the difference
between the work of establishing a constitutional republic and the longer task
of maintaining it. But maintaining it against what? Lincoln's answer was always
the same: against the internal pressure of greed, and the external pressure of
war. The predicament of the country in 1861, he said, "forces us to ask: 'Is
there, in all republics, this inherent, and fatal weakness? Must a government,
of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to
maintain its own existence?'"
We are now ten years into a policy shared by two successive administrations
to plant a new understanding of the spirit of the laws in America. That policy
has pretended there is a "trade-off" between liberty and security, and that in
a time of crisis, security ought to have the upper hand. The Cheney-Bush and
Obama administrations have accustomed us to laws and language concerned
above all with the "protection" of citizens -- as if there were something higher
or more worth protecting than the liberty that is guaranteed by our laws and
the framework of laws, the Constitution.
Today, as in Lincoln's day, we are involved in "a struggle for maintaining
...that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate
the condition of men -- to lift artificial weights from all shoulders -- to clear
the paths of laudable pursuit for all -- to afford all, an unfettered start, and
a fair chance, in the race of life." Yet the main peril in that struggle today
comes not from any foreign power capable of destroying us from without, but the
lapse of thought and faith that threatens us now from within. We are divided
between two parties: one that thinks government should be used for nothing but
wars, another that thinks government should be used for wars (whether justified
or not) in order to prove the value of government for other purposes as well.
Over the past decade we have taken many long steps across the divide that
separates a republic from an empire. The recovery of our proper ground depends
on our seeing again the rightness of Lincoln's recoil from wars that are not
wars of necessity. The words of his Special Message leave an incitement, too,
by listing the goods he valued above the new forms of power and luxury that war
can add to life. Elevating the condition of men. Lifting artificial weights from
all shoulders. Clearing the paths of laudable pursuit for all. By doing this at
home, we offer an example to those who would try it abroad. As Lincoln said in
other words in other places, that is the only honest way for a democracy to
advance the cause of democracy."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
