Playinghardball

Playinghardball's Journal

July 23, 2015

It's about time this meme showed up...

YOU are the people that will power this REVOLUTION...

People For Bernie

July 22, 2015

Arizona drug-tested 87,000 welfare recipients and found they are flushing taxpayer dollars

From Gregory Krieg at Mic:

The results are thin: According to USA Today, three years after the program began Arizona had tested more than 87,000 welfare recipients. The total number of drug cheats caught was exactly one — a single positive result, which saved the state precisely $560.
Checking in again in March, the Arizona Sonora News Service cited state Department of Economic Security figures which found that over the course of more than five years, "42 people have been asked to take a follow-up drug test and 19 actually took the test, 16 of whom passed. The other 23 were stripped of their benefits for failing to take the drug test."

That adds up to a grand total of three failed tests from 2009-2014. The net savings reaped from withholding benefits for those who either tested positive or failed to complete a drug test was around $3,500, once the $500 cost of testing the 19 is factored in, according to one state agency report. The haul is shockingly unimpressive when you consider the $1.7 million in savings state officials promised when they began the program.

Three. Three failed tests in 5 years of testing. The program needlessly embarrasses people who need public assistance and the cost-ratio benefit just isn't there for taxpayers. It's time to end these programs, not expand them. It's the moral and fiscally-conservative thing to do. .

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/07/22/1404639/-Arizona-drug-tested-87-000-welfare-recipients-and-found-they-are-flushing-taxpayer-dollars

July 22, 2015

I'm Becoming a Democrat Today

By Huffa

I have lurked for so long, but decided to open a Daily Kos account this morning. My political journey has a been a long one. I have been a Republican, then a Libertarian, then I joined the Green party. Today, I am changing my voter registration to Democrat for the first time ever in my life. Why? Because of Bernie Sanders.

Bernie Sanders is the kind of candidate that does not come along too very often. I really hope the Democratic party will choose him as their candidate in the election. I have followed his campaign since he announced that he was running. His economic platform speaks to me.

I grew up in a middle class family, went to college and got a great job right out of school. I worked hard and made decent money. I bought a house I probably couldn't afford. When I lost my job during the recession, I lost my house. For the first time in my life I was poor. I had nowhere to go. I stayed in a hotel room that cost me $39 a night for a while until I couldn't afford that anymore. I went hungry many nights. I ended up sleeping in my car for a few months until I lost that too.

I slept outside at a park on a bench for a few weeks. Finally, as it began to get cold, I went to a shelter. They were able to feed me, give me a warm place to stay and help me find a job. Now, I have my own modest apartment, and a 15 year old car. I feel the most successful I have ever felt in my life. Thanks to a helping hand, I was able to get back on my feet. I make $9.50 an hour at one job, and $8.75 at my second job. I work very hard at both of these jobs and between the two, I often work 50-60 hours a week.

Bernie Sanders is the only candidate advocating for a $15 minimum wage. For this reason, he gets my support. He's the only candidate that is talking about helping the poor. He understands the plight of so many.

I like Hillary Clinton. I just feel that she doesn't understand me. She is so close to many large corporations and I worry that she has their best interest at heart instead of mine. I don't think she understands how a middle class person can become homeless in a matter of months. Many of us are one or two paychecks away from disaster. It wouldn't take much for me to become homeless again.

One of my jobs is talking about cutting back my hours after the summer. I won't starve if they do, but I won't be comfortable either. I'll do what I've had to do all summer. Eat cheaply. Keep the lights off as much as possible. Open the windows to cool off. If Bernie Sanders is elected and passes the $15 minimum wage, I would be able to afford to save some money possibly. I would be able to put a few dollars away in case I have an emergency.

I plan to hit the streets for Bernie Sanders to help him win. I've told all my co-workers about him already and several of them are excited for him too. When you vote in the election, please do remember the working poor and the middle class. Many middle class people are on the brink of becoming poor and are one problem away from it.

Please vote Bernie Sanders.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/07/22/1404556/-I-m-Becoming-a-Democrat-Today

July 22, 2015

Cops Pull Over a Confederate "Sovereign Citizen" and His Six Loaded Weapons. Not dead.

via rawstory

Sheriff’s deputies arrested a Georgia “sovereign citizen” who twice attempted to pull one of the half-dozen guns he had within reach inside his car decorated with a hand-painted Confederate flag.
A Towns County sheriff’s deputy and an agent from the Appalachian Regional Drug Enforcement Office stopped 30-year-old Dustin Lee Gunnells, of Hiawassee, for an unspecified misdemeanor traffic offense Wednesday, reported WKRK-AM.

“Immediately the driver exhibited aggression towards the officers and began making statements consistent with ‘sovereign citizen type beliefs,” the sheriff’s office said in a statement. “Rather than comply with deputies, the driver reached for a gun.”

The deputies feared for their safety but did not shoot, and instead broke out a window in Gunnell’s car and physically removed him from the vehicle.

So this guy has loaded weapons in his confederate flag painted truck, refuses to comply, the cops tussle with him and he is not dead. See cops can get it right, if the color of skin and ideology is right.
If there are any nice white progressives out there who still do not believe, contrast that with this story

via nbcnews

Prosecutors are intensively reviewing the fatal shooting of an unarmed Cincinnati man by a University of Cincinnati police officer who had pulled the driver over for having a missing front license plate and fired on him after a brief struggle, authorities said Tuesday.
The man, Samuel Dubose, 43, who was African-American, was shot once in the head as he sat behind the wheel of his car Sunday night, university and city police said. The officer, Ray Tensing, who is white, was placed on administrative leave pending the investigation.

The deadly shooting occurred amid a national conversation of race and policing, with critics alleging that black suspects are more likely to have force used against them during encounters with police.

Confederate flag waving gun having sovereign citizen believing asshole has exactly zero holes in his head after his encounter with police. But this innocent black man who was unarmed, put up virtually no resistance and was accused of nothing but a missing front license plate is dead.
Again, cops got it right with the confederate asshole. Why is it they have so much darned trouble with unarmed black men?

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/07/22/1404515/-Cops-Pull-Over-a-Confederate-Sovereign-Citizen-and-His-Six-Loaded-Weapons-Not-dead

July 22, 2015

BNR - 'As Bernie Rises The Attacks Get Ugly' & 'Sanders Setting Example For U.K. Progressives'

Welcome to the Bernie News Roundup. The BNR is a voluntary, non-campaign associated roundup of news, media, & other information related to Bernie Sanders run for President. Visit the group page for past editions or send a message to be added.

Bernie's official page.

As Bernie Rises, The Attacks Get Ugly:

National Review, ostensibly one of the leading media outlets in U.S. conservatism, published this piece from Kevin Williiamson about Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) presidential campaign.
In the Bernieverse, there’s a whole lot of nationalism mixed up in the socialism. He is, in fact, leading a national-socialist movement, which is a queasy and uncomfortable thing to write about a man who is the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland and whose family was murdered in the Holocaust. But there is no other way to characterize his views and his politics.

Is that so. When describing the Vermont senator’s liberal approach to politics, Williiamson and National Review are effectively powerless – they must reference national socialism. There is, the author assures us, “no other way.”

Remember, unlike Pat Roberts, Williiamson isn’t just throwing the phrase around unknowingly. This is deliberate – the conservative is connecting the liberal candidate to the phrase most commonly associated with the Nazi’s political system.

That members of Sanders’ family were murdered during the Holocaust apparently didn’t stop Williiamson – or his editors, or the fact-checkers, or the publishers – from making the connection anyway.

It wasn’t long ago that the Republican establishment and conservative media were content to ignore Sanders and his ideas. If his name came up at all, it was used as a punch-line – Sanders was a liberal caricature, not to be taken seriously.

That’s obviously changed. As Sanders’ crowds grow and his poll standing improves, the Vermonter has positioned himself as worthy of National Review condemnation. To be sure, it’s unpersuasive, needlessly provocative condemnation, but it’s also evidence of a prominent national figure whom the right is no longer inclined to discount as irrelevant.

Jewish Business News:

There is something very unnerving, to say the least, about calling a Jewish politician who lost family members in the Holocaust a Nazi. But this is exactly what Kevin Williamson did while writing in the conservative journal “The National Review.” Yes, he called Bernie Sanders a National Socialist.
Williamson wrote about the Senator from Vermont and the current Presidential candidate in a piece titled “Bernie’s Strange Brew of Nationalism and Socialism.”

“In the Bernieverse, there’s a whole lot of nationalism mixed up in the socialism. He is, in fact, leading a national-socialist movement, which is a queasy and uncomfortable thing to write about a man who is the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland and whose family was murdered in the Holocaust. But there is no other way to characterize his views and his politics.”

OK, so he qualified these comments by comparing Sanders’ anti-free trade rhetoric with that made in Europe in the lead up to World War II. And yes he did acknowledge that it was unseemly to make such a statement about a Jew?

But that does not excuse this.

Any comparison of Jews to Nazis is inherently anti-semitic. It is the type of propaganda that the real Nazis of the world engage in order to wipe out the memory of the Holocaust.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/07/22/1404527/-BNR-As-Bernie-Rises-The-Attacks-Get-Ugly-Sanders-Setting-Example-For-U-K-Progressives

July 22, 2015