Poverty article in NYT

Obviously, we needed a new President in 2012 because the current one has failed us.  And now we're stuck with the one we have who is stuck in the 1930's.  This story illustrates that perfectly.  His solution will be to raise the minimum wage to what $15, $20?

Romney Revival

I need to look back on U.S. history to find a better example of our nation choosing the wrong candidate and having it be as glaringly obvious so soon after the election.  The economy, Obamacare, and foreign policy are all clearly Obama failures for which Romney had decidedly different approaches.

Nixon was despised in 1974, but that didn't mean people wished that McGovern had won.  Maybe the 1948 election was similar -- before my time but getting into the Korean War just five years after the end of WWII couldn't have made Truman very popular. But I've never heard of a lot of nostalgia for Thomas Dewey.

On Matt

Matt practices the Cold War policy of Massive Retaliation. A commenter must be prepared for the nearly unending barrage of links, quotes, and comments that will buttress his argument. And Matt will never surrender but may instead use the opponents' own arguments AGAINST him.

College Professor Carl Hart

I read Matt's linked Carl Hart interview and the view that drugs are unfairly scapegoated.  "Dr. Hart uses his life and work to reveal that drugs are not nearly as harmful as many think. " Amazing.  Columbia University.  "If you don't fully appreciate the context, and you think that drug users are awful, then you don't think about how a person takes care of their kid, takes care of their family, goes to work, but they also use drugs." Wow.  An AFDC-loving, pot-smoking, coke-snorting professor who makes excuses for drug-using parents.

(And did you see the UCSB "Feminist Studies" Professor -- look up her specialties --  assault a pro-life teen girl the other day?  These are the elite colleges my daughter has to choose from?)

Drug use sucks and anyone who has had to deal with drug users in their lives knows that. A waste of a life. A waste of money. Hart's closing advice is that you shouldn't mix heroin with other sedatives.  The "Just Say No" campaign caused high school pot use to drop by half from '79 to '93.  Clinton turned that around and now Obama's weak leadership is having the same effect as Carter's and Clinton's did.

Overtime Rules for Salaried Employees

Barack Obama has asked/ruled/regulated/required a change in the rule that exempts salaried employees making more than $25,000 a year from being paid overtime for hours in excess of 40 a week.  Frankly, that being just a but more than $10 an hour, I kind of agree that the rules need to be updated.  But is thus something done by executive fiat?  Do we not have laws that are passed by majority vote to make such changes.

Two Kennedy Cousins against marijuana legalization

Bill O'Reilly had Christopher Lawford and Patrick Kennedy on the O'Reilly Factor on March 12th to talk about addiction and their thoughts on the campaign to legalize marijuana.  I would really like it if all of those who have given up on the fight against drug abuse would watch this interview.  Here is some of what Kennedy said:  "And with another drug being commercialized, one that actually has the for-profit motive of hooking new consumers. They are going to target teenagers. They are going to make their money off of people like myself who are addicts and I just don't think this is the kind of thing that makes our country stronger, families stronger and of course jeopardizes the public health at large."

Here's a link to the interview transcript and video:  http://www.foxnews.com/on-air/oreilly/2014/03/13/consequences-marijuana-legalization

Tobacco Bad . . . but

I just saw one of those anti-tobacco Public Service Announcement ads mixed in with one of the previews for a DVD I rented. It followed the path of a cigarette butt as it was disposed into a toilet and went into the sea or some other body of water. The announcer grimly told us that the butt was toxic.  I skipped to the movie then.

Which got me to thinking.  As the marijuana cigarette is being welcomed into our society I wonder when the PSAs will be ordered and the Class Action Settlements be reached with the various state attorneys general in our country?  And before that, when will the commercials begin?  And will not the proponents of legalization finally admit that legalization will lead to an effort to market marijuana to new users?  It was recently revealed or learned that high school aged kids today are twice as likely as teens of two decades ago to have used marijuana.  (Here's a link to a site - www.drugabuse.gov - on that topic.)

How did that happen?  Medical marijuana laws perhaps?  Do the leaders of today want to return to the days of Barack Obama's high school graduation year of 1979 when nearly 40 percent of 12th Graders had used marijuana in the past month?

Everyone is afraid to be called square so we're all just letting it happen under our eyes.  Nancy Reagan was more courageous than we ever realized when she advised "Just Say No." The results of her leadership are as plain as day in the graph above.

Individual Examples of Our Welfare Society

Am I being hard-hearted for noticing these two stories? . . .

I saw a friend comment about a Facebook post where the poster had observed an attempt to use an EBT card to purchase alcohol and cigarettes.  Actually, the first step was to use the EBT card in an ATM to change into cash. The liquor store owner refused to sell the alcohol to the person, but it seems like an easy loophole to bring cash obtained from some other EBT ATM transaction to purchase such items.

The same day, The Washington Post published an article about a blind woman who uses something called Metro Access to get to her job.  It was a fairly long article with a lot of background on this woman, who seems like a good person.  Metro Access is a taxi service subsidized by public transportation monies for the disabled.  The article stated that it is required due to the ADA law.  One of the reasons for the article was to highlight the fact that potential new Metro fare hikes will hit the disabled hard.  They are asked to pay 200% of the equivalent Metro fare for the use of the Metro Access taxi ride.  Currently, that works out to be a maximum of $7 a ride.  Such personalized service obviously costs far more than $7.00 though.  In fact, the total spent by Metro Access is $114 Million for 2 Million rides.  Which works out to a cost of $57 a ride.  Total revenue is $8 Million, an average of $4.00 a ride.  (One thing that bothered me about the blind woman is that she now lives with a man who is perfectly capable of driving her to an from work.  But she doesn't want to out him out. She'd rather have society pay her way, I guess.)

Medicine choices

 Medicine choices have to be guided by reasonableness and cost.  Paying for optional/non-health related costs should be something that is done out of pocket.  Last week it was revealed that testing is being done to create a three-parent baby using genetic modification technologies.  The current purposes are to eliminate diseases passed on through genes.  That's such a waste of resources.  We already offer donor eggs, donor sperm and even donor uteri.  How essential is it that the mother or father pass on their genes to their baby when other options, including regular adoption, exist.

Of course, don't even get me started on the craziness of spending millions on this research when we have sanctioned the elimination of millions of unborn children since Roe v. Wade.