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ugh - 1 Update
This story is from the November 24, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone. - 2 Updates
heyrobby - 1 Update
Number One, Dr. Philip Boyce, and Captain Christopher Pike were three of the original bridge crewmen of the USS Enterprise - 2 Updates
does robby know the exciting tale of titus welliver and the ouija del muertos? - 1 Update
Kansas GOP Jealous Of The GOP Congress Hogging All The Ways To Shame Poor Hungry People - 1 Update
NASA's Orion Safely Lands - 1 Update
16 Reasons 2014 Was A Terrible Year For WWE - 2 Updates
Thanks to the "Only Christiananity" movement, you'll be seeing a lot more of Satan this season - 1 Update
HOW DOES FARVA DEAL WITH - 1 Update
ROBBY DRIVING - 1 Update
Rupert Murdoch Defends White 'Exodus' Cast & Stirs Racial Backlash On Twitter - 1 Update
Today 63 years ago Tony's father was killed by the Japs at Pearl Harbor - 1 Update
whatchu doing up so early sqviggles?w - 1 Update
RED STATE Justice...Oklahoma Will Charge Customers Who Install Their Own Solar Panels - 1 Update
RSPW: You are not alone. - 1 Update
American who helped craft Uganda's 'Kill the Gays' bill to be tried for crimes against humanity - 1 Update
The Christian Right does not want you to know about this day... - 1 Update
Hey Christian ICON Santorum, tell Jefferson and the founding fathers they're communists - 2 Updates
I AM THE REAL - 1 Update
Christian ICON Mike Huckabee: Obama invited "thugs and mob members to the White House." - 1 Update
ugh
The Brunei Bindlestiff <unifarva@gmail.com>: Dec 07 05:30PM -0800
robby yuck
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This story is from the November 24, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone.
"Karolina Dean...Where the HELL is my monkey?" <platniumtangent@gmail.com>: Dec 07 05:27PM -0800
Today's Republican Party may revere Reagan as the patron saint of low taxation. But the party of Reagan - which understood that higher taxes on the rich are sometimes required to cure ruinous deficits - is dead and gone. Instead, the modern GOP has undergone a radical transformation, reorganizing itself around a grotesque proposition: that the wealthy should grow wealthier still, whatever the consequences for the rest of us.
Modern-day Republicans have become, quite simply, the Party of the One Percent - the Party of the Rich.
"The Republican Party has totally abdicated its job in our democracy, which is to act as the guardian of fiscal discipline and responsibility," says David Stockman, who served as budget director under Reagan. "They're on an anti-tax jihad - one that benefits the prosperous classes."
The staggering economic inequality that has led Americans across the country to take to the streets in protest is no accident. It has been fueled to a large extent by the GOP's all-out war on behalf of the rich. Since Republicans rededicated themselves to slashing taxes for the wealthy in 1997, the average annual income of the 400 richest Americans has more than tripled, to $345 million - while their share of the tax burden has plunged by 40 percent. Today, a billionaire in the top 400 pays less than 17 percent of his income in taxes - five percentage points less than a bus driver earning $26,000 a year. "Most Americans got none of the growth of the preceding dozen years," says Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist. "All the gains went to the top percentage points."
The GOP campaign to aid the wealthy has left America unable to raise the money needed to pay its bills. "The Republican Party went on a tax-cutting rampage and a spending spree," says Rhode Island governor and former GOP senator Lincoln Chafee, pointing to two deficit-financed wars and an unpaid-for prescription-drug entitlement. "It tanked the economy." Tax receipts as a percent of the total economy have fallen to levels not seen since before the Korean War - nearly 20 percent below the historical average. "Taxes are ridiculously low!" says Bruce Bartlett, an architect of Reagan's 1981 tax cut. "And yet the mantra of the Republican Party is 'Tax cuts raise growth.' So - where's the fucking growth?"
Republicans talk about job creation, about preserving family farms and defending small businesses, and reforming Medicare and Social Security. But almost without exception, every proposal put forth by GOP lawmakers and presidential candidates is intended to preserve or expand tax privileges for the wealthiest Americans. And most of their plans, which are presented as common-sense measures that will aid all Americans, would actually result in higher taxes for middle-class taxpayers and the poor. With 14 million Americans out of work, and with one in seven families turning to food stamps simply to feed their children, Republicans have responded to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression by slashing inheritance taxes, extending the Bush tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires, and endorsing a tax amnesty for big corporations that have hidden billions in profits in offshore tax havens. They also wrecked the nation's credit rating by rejecting a debt-ceiling deal that would have slashed future deficits by $4 trillion - simply because one-quarter of the money would have come from closing tax loopholes on the rich.
The intransigence over the debt ceiling enraged Republican stalwarts. George Voinovich, the former GOP senator from Ohio, likens his party's new guard to arsonists whose attitude is: "We're going to get what we want or the country can go to hell." Even an architect of the Bush tax cuts, economist Glenn Hubbard, tells Rolling Stone that there should have been a "revenue contribution" to the debt-ceiling deal, "structured to fall mainly on the well-to-do." Instead, the GOP strong-armed America into sacrificing $1 trillion in vital government services - including education, health care and defense - all to safeguard tax breaks for oil companies, yacht owners and hedge-fund managers. The party's leaders were triumphant: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell even bragged that America's creditworthiness had been a "hostage that's worth ransoming."
It's the kind of thinking that only money can buy. "It's a vicious circle," says Stiglitz. "The rich are using their money to secure tax provisions to let them get richer still. Rather than investing in new technology or R&D, the rich get a better return by investing in Washington."
It's difficult to imagine today, but taxing the rich wasn't always a major flash point of American political life. From the end of World War II to the eve of the Reagan administration, the parties fought over social spending - Democrats pushing for more, Republicans demanding less. But once the budget was fixed, both parties saw taxes as an otherwise uninteresting mechanism to raise the money required to pay the bills. Eisenhower, Nixon and Ford each fought for higher taxes, while the biggest tax cut was secured by John F. Kennedy, whose across-the-board tax reductions were actually opposed by the majority of Republicans in the House. The distribution of the tax burden wasn't really up for debate: Even after the Kennedy cuts, the top tax rate stood at 70 percent - double its current level. Steeply progressive taxation paid for the postwar investments in infrastructure, science and education that enabled the average American family to get ahead.
That only changed in the late 1970s, when high inflation drove up wages and pushed the middle class into higher tax brackets. Harnessing the widespread anger, Reagan put it to work on behalf of the rich. In a move that GOP Majority Leader Howard Baker called a "riverboat gamble," Reagan sold the country on an "across-the-board" tax cut that brought the top rate down to 50 percent. According to supply-side economists, the wealthy would use their tax break to spur investment, and the economy would boom. And if it didn't - well, to Reagan's cadre of small-government conservatives, the resulting red ink could be a win-win. "We started talking about just cutting taxes and saying, 'Screw the deficit,'" Bartlett recalls. "We had this idea that if you lowered revenues, the concern about the deficit would be channeled into spending cuts."
It was the birth of what is now known as "Starve the Beast" - a conscious strategy by conservatives to force cuts in federal spending by bankrupting the country. As conceived by the right-wing intellectual Irving Kristol in 1980, the plan called for Republicans to create a "fiscal problem" by slashing taxes - and then foist the pain of reimposing fiscal discipline onto future Democratic administrations who, in Kristol's words, would be forced to "tidy up afterward."
There was only one problem: The Reagan tax cuts spiked the federal deficit to a dangerous level, even as the country remained mired in a deep recession. Republican leaders in Congress immediately moved to reverse themselves and feed the beast. "It was not a Democrat who led the effort in 1982 to undo about a third of the Reagan tax cuts," recalls Robert Greenstein, president of the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. "It was Bob Dole." Even Reagan embraced the tax hike, Stockman says, "because he believed that, at some point, you have to pay the bills."
For the remainder of his time in office, Reagan repeatedly raised taxes to bring down unwieldy deficits. In 1983, he hiked gas and payroll taxes. In 1984, he raised revenue by closing tax loopholes for businesses. The tax reform of 1986 lowered the top rate for the wealthy to just 28 percent - but that cut for high earners was paid for by closing tax loopholes that resulted in the largest corporate tax hike in history. Reagan also raised revenues by abolishing special favors for the investor class: He boosted taxes on capital gains by 40 percent to align them with the taxes paid on wages. Today, Reagan may be lionized as a tax abolitionist, says Alan Simpson, a former Republican senator and friend of the president, but that's not true to his record. "Reagan raised taxes 11 times in eight years!"
But Reagan wound up sowing the seed of our current gridlock when he gave his blessing to what Simpson calls a "nefarious organization" - Americans for Tax Reform. Headed by Grover Norquist, a man Stockman blasts as a "fiscal terrorist," the group originally set out to prevent Congress from backsliding on the 1986 tax reforms. But Norquist's instrument for enforcement - an anti-tax pledge signed by GOP lawmakers - quickly evolved into a powerful weapon designed to shift the tax burden away from the rich. George H.W. Bush won the GOP presidential nomination in 1988 in large part because he signed Norquist's "no taxes" pledge. Once in office, however, Bush moved to bring down the soaring federal deficit by hiking the top tax rate to 31 percent and adding surtaxes for yachts, jets and luxury sedans. "He had courage to take action when we needed it," says Paul O'Neill, who served as Treasury secretary under George W. Bush.
The tax hike helped the economy - and many credit it with setting up the great economic expansion of the 1990s. But it cost Bush his job in the 1992 election - a defeat that only served to strengthen Norquist's standing among GOP insurgents. "The story of Bush losing," Norquist says now, "is a reminder to politicians that this is a pledge you don't break." What was once just another campaign promise, rejected by a fiscal conservative like Bob Dole, was transformed into a political blood oath - a litmus test of true Republicanism that few candidates dare refuse.
After taking office, Clinton immediately seized the mantle of fiscal discipline from Republicans. Rather than simply trimming the federal deficit, as his GOP predecessors had done, he set out to balance the budget and begin paying down the national debt. To do so, he hiked the top tax bracket to nearly 40 percent and boosted the corporate tax rate to 35 percent. "It cost him both houses of Congress in the 1994 midterm elections," says Chafee, the former GOP senator. "But taming the deficit led to the best economy America's ever had." Following the tax hikes of 1993, the economy grew at a brisk clip of 3.2 percent, creating more than 11 million jobs. Average wages ticked up, and stocks soared by 78 percent. By the spring of 1997, the federal budget was headed into the black.
But Newt Gingrich and the anti-tax revolutionaries who seized control of Congress in 1994 responded by going for the Full Norquist. In a stunning departure from America's long-standing tax policy, Republicans moved to eliminate taxes on investment income and to abolish the inheritance tax. Under the final plan they enacted, capital gains taxes were sliced to 20 percent. Far from creating an across-the-board benefit, 62 cents of every tax dollar cut went directly to the top one percent of income earners. "The capital gains cut alone gave the top 400 taxpayers a bigger tax cut than all the Bush tax cuts combined," says David Cay Johnston, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich - and Cheat Everybody Else.
The cuts also juiced irrational exuberance on Wall Street. Giving a huge tax advantage to investment income inflated the dot-com bubble, observed Stiglitz, "by making speculation more attractive." And by eliminating capital gains taxes on home sales, the cuts fueled the housing bubble: A study by the Federal Reserve estimated that the tax giveaways boosted housing transactions by 17 percent through 2007.
The most revealing aspect of the tax cuts, however, came from a simple mistake. In a major blow to the inheritance tax - America's most progressive form of taxation - the GOP cuts nearly doubled the amount that the rich could pass on to their heirs tax-free. From now on, the first $1 million would be exempt from federal taxes - unless your estate was worth more than $17 million. In those rare cases, the superwealthy would have to pay taxes on their entire inheritance.
Then something strange happened. Due to a "drafting error," the final bill failed to include the exception for the superwealthy. Everyone in both parties agreed that it had been a mistake. But instead of fixing the error, Republicans blocked a pro forma correction to the law - meaning that even the wealthiest estates would pay no taxes on the first $1 million. The move effectively secured an $880 million tax cut for the rich - one that Congress never intended, and never voted for. Ari Fleischer, the then-spokesman for Rep. Bill Archer of the House Ways and Means Committee, exulted over the undemocratic tax cut for the wealthy. "When a mistake works against the government and for the taxpayers," he explained, "we're in no rush to correct it."
Republicans, abetted by conservative Democrats, passed the tax cuts with a veto-proof majority, and Clinton signed them into law. But for the remainder of his term, Clinton repeatedly blocked Republican demands for further cuts. "He vetoed one tax cut after another," says Robert McIntyre, director of Citizens for Tax Justice. In 1999, in a triumph for fiscal sanity, Clinton rejected a massive $792 billion cut to inheritance and investment taxes. The mood during the veto ceremony in the Rose Garden was festive. A five-piece band played "Summertime," and the living was easy. Unemployment stood at 4.2 percent, and stocks were booming. "Our hard-won prosperity gives us the chance to invest our surplus to meet the long-term challenges of America," Clinton declared. The Republican tax cuts, he warned with eerie prescience, would return America to a period of "deficit upon deficit" that culminated in "the worst recession since the Great Depression."
Then came the election of George W. Bush, the first president of the Party of the Rich.
Within months of taking office, Bush delivered a tax break to the rich that trumps anything he accomplished through the actual tax code. "The most important thing the Bush administration did in the whole area of taxes," says Johnston, "was to kill tax harmonization."
"Tax harmonization" was economic jargon for a joint project by the world's developed countries to shut down offshore tax havens in places like the Cayman Islands. At the time, such illicit havens were costing U.S. taxpayers $70 billion a year. For Republicans, going after big-time tax evaders should have been as American as apple pie. As Reagan once said of such cheats: "When they do not pay their taxes, someone else does - you and me."
But for Bush and other leaders of the Party of the Rich, blocking corporations from hiding their money overseas wasn't an act of patriotism - it was tyranny. Rep. Dick Armey, the GOP majority leader, railed against tax harmonization as an effort to create a "global network of tax police." One of Bush's biggest donors, Enron, was using a network of nearly 900 offshore tax hideaways to pay no corporate taxes - while reporting massive profits that later turned out to be fraudulent. In one of his first acts as president, Bush "basically vetoed the initiative," says Stiglitz.
The veto spurred a cavalcade of corporations - including stalwart American firms like Stanley Works - to pursue phony "headquarters" in Bermuda and other lax-tax nations. The move not only encouraged some of the world's richest companies to avoid paying any U.S. taxes, it let them book overseas-"expenses" that qualified them for lucrative tax deductions. In one of the most notorious cases, GE filed for a $3 billion tax rebate in 2009, despite boasting profits of more than $14 billion.
But Bush wasn't content to simply make the world safe for corporate tax evaders: He also pushed to deliver $1.6 trillion in tax
The Brunei Bindlestiff <unifarva@gmail.com>: Dec 07 05:30PM -0800
you have to a three year old rolling stones article to get this obvious bit of common knowledge across?
you are slipping mightily deal
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heyrobby
The Brunei Bindlestiff <unifarva@gmail.com>: Dec 07 05:27PM -0800
On Sunday, December 7, 2014 6:36:33 PM UTC-5, robert stickler wrote:
> > who cares!
> > its BRAND N4EW!!
> he should have just bought a car.
the hell?
new cars suck!
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Number One, Dr. Philip Boyce, and Captain Christopher Pike were three of the original bridge crewmen of the USS Enterprise
"Karolina Dean...Where the HELL is my monkey?" <platniumtangent@gmail.com>: Dec 07 05:12PM -0800
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/star-trek-unexpected-afterlife-doomed-754166
The Brunei Bindlestiff <unifarva@gmail.com>: Dec 07 05:25PM -0800
On Sunday, December 7, 2014 8:12:08 PM UTC-5, Karolina Dean...Where the HELL is my monkey? wrote:
> http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/star-trek-unexpected-afterlife-doomed-754166
well duh liberal cum lastly.
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does robby know the exciting tale of titus welliver and the ouija del muertos?
The Brunei Bindlestiff <unifarva@gmail.com>: Dec 07 05:24PM -0800
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gNB-6WNk7E&feature=player_detailpage
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Kansas GOP Jealous Of The GOP Congress Hogging All The Ways To Shame Poor Hungry People
"Karolina Dean...Where the HELL is my monkey?" <platniumtangent@gmail.com>: Dec 07 05:21PM -0800
It's good to be bulletproof...
http://wonkette.com/527579/kansas-gop-jealous-of-congress-hogging-all-the-ways-to-shame-poor-hungry-people
You know what's bringing this country down? Not big money in politics, not gerrymandering Congressional districts to create 832 safe seats, and not even bakeries shutting down because they can't be bigots. No, those are all peripheral issues -- the real problem in America is the poors. Seriously, it's sickening how poor people are just so... poor. They live in ramshackle houses, drive old cars, and don't even have the decency to wear tailored suits! Seriously, just get some money and stop whining about being poor already, k? Such downers.
If there is anything the GOP has taught us, its that the best way to deal with poors is the same way you deal with uppity womyn who want nonsense like equality and non-rapey militaries: shame the lot of them until they go away or die. Well, Kansas is stepping up to the (empty) plate, per HuffPo:
Thousands of Kansans could lose food stamps under a new state policy that congressional Republicans hope to implement nationwide.
Oh, joy. A pilot project!
While House Republicans are looking to slash food stamps by some $40 billion, states are totally jealous and want to dick over the poors IN ADDITION to the feds. It's just like the Biggest Loser, except instead of fat people on national teevee losing weight through exercise and diet, its poor children going hungry out of sight of any cameras or news media, so we don't have to see it. Freedom rocks, y'all.
Under federal law, able-bodied food stamp recipients can only get help not-starving for 3 months, then they have to either get a jerb or do job training. However, in tough economic times, states can seek waivers, because, you know, lack of jobs. Well, Kansas is figuratively sick and tired of the poor (who, not ironically, are also more likely to be literally sick and tired) mooching off the taxpayers. Everyone in Kansas knows that the only people allowed to mooch off the government are farmers who grow excess food that the government buys at inflated prices, food that we will not let poors buy because the poors are the wrong kind of moochers.
Read more at http://wonkette.com/527579/kansas-gop-jealous-of-congress-hogging-all-the-ways-to-shame-poor-hungry-people#4SV1SZCrYKchzFU7.99
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NASA's Orion Safely Lands
"Karolina Dean...Where the HELL is my monkey?" <platniumtangent@gmail.com>: Dec 07 05:18PM -0800
Now watch as the bulletproof GOP continue to put the screws to NASA in exchange for more the 1% tax cuts
http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/photo-galleries/2014/12/06/nasas-orion-safely-lands/
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16 Reasons 2014 Was A Terrible Year For WWE
"Jason Todd!!!" <janklowicz24@yahoo.com>: Dec 07 05:09PM -0800
^
But on the other hand: Stephanie's Tits.
I believe everything evened out.
Jason (am still 11 years old)
"Karolina Dean...Where the HELL is my monkey?" <platniumtangent@gmail.com>: Dec 07 05:15PM -0800
> However, fast forward one year and things are much worse. 2014 has been, by comparison, a terrible year for the WWE. Numerous injuries, backstage problems, and financial woes have spelled disaster for Vince's company this year.
> Compared to 2013, 2014 was clearly inferior; John Cena and Randy Orton feuded yet again, despite promises that their feud would end at the Royal Rumble. The Authority became the centerpiece of the entire WWE, and last year's best stables, the Shield and the Wyatt Family, were both split up. It is clear that many of the decisions that influenced WWE programming this year left a lot to be desired.
> This article will look at 16 events and issues that made things bad for WWE during the 2014 calendar year. Some of these things were one time occurrences, such as single matches or events, while others will be recurring problems. What all of these reasons have in common is that when combined, they created a troubling environment for the WWE, one that can hopefully be remedied once 2015 arrives.
Exactly, the heatless Bellas feud and the reunion while burying Aj..
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Thanks to the "Only Christiananity" movement, you'll be seeing a lot more of Satan this season
"Karolina Dean...Where the HELL is my monkey?" <platniumtangent@gmail.com>: Dec 07 05:10PM -0800
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/07/in-florida-tis-the-season-for-satan.html
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HOW DOES FARVA DEAL WITH
"%" <.com>: Dec 07 06:12PM -0700
robert wrote:
>> .
>> shut your face
> lol you tell em best friend %!
you bet i will old buddy old pal greatest guy i ever knew
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ROBBY DRIVING
"%" <.com>: Dec 07 06:11PM -0700
robert stickler wrote:
>>> % is so damn awesome!
>> next time you come too
> i'll be there old friend!
we can take turns
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Rupert Murdoch Defends White 'Exodus' Cast & Stirs Racial Backlash On Twitter
"Herb \"Good Ol' Herb\" Knolan" <hgohk@nospam.com>: Dec 08 12:48AM
> The evidence illustrates quite clearly that he was no.
> I think you really want the guy to be white, though.
I'm not the one wanting things in this thread. Freezer and Karolina Dean
are deluding themselves and praying that Jesus wasn't white. I woud lump
you in with that group as well.
>> Says who? You?
> "For it is evident that our Lord sprang out of Juda..."
> -Hebrews 7:14.
Which has nothing to do with anything I said. The tribe of Judah used to
be white.
>>> Stop running your uneducated mouth.
>> I'm willing to bet I'm far more educated than you are.
> Doubt it.
Of course you do, chubby, of course you do.
>> I almost have a much better job than you do
> But not quite, apparently.
That was supposed to read "almost certainly". Even the best of us make
mistakes now and again.
>> you call center loser.
> I don't work for a call center, non-anonymous troll.
I'm not a troll, first off. And what makes you think I'm even trying to
be anonymous?
As for working at a call center, I'm sure you used to work at one. Oh
well, I guess you're unemployed now. Or are you counting being a backyard
wrestler as your job now?
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Today 63 years ago Tony's father was killed by the Japs at Pearl Harbor
robert <rjs2085@yahoo.com>: Dec 07 03:48PM -0800
On Sunday, December 7, 2014 11:01:20 AM UTC-5, Tony wrote:
> beyond the realm of understandability
> Regards Tony... Making usenet better for everyone everyday
> This sig file was compiled via my journeys through usenet
i love this!
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whatchu doing up so early sqviggles?w
robert <rjs2085@yahoo.com>: Dec 07 03:48PM -0800
On Sunday, December 7, 2014 11:00:19 AM UTC-5, Unifarva wrote:
> --
> Posted by Mimo Usenet Browser v0.2.5
> http://www.mimousenet.com/mimo/post
i was at work!
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RED STATE Justice...Oklahoma Will Charge Customers Who Install Their Own Solar Panels
"Karolina Dean...Where the HELL is my monkey?" <platniumtangent@gmail.com>: Dec 07 03:00PM -0800
Oklahoma residents who produce their own energy through solar panels or small wind turbines on their property will now be charged an additional fee, the result of a new bill passed by the state legislature and expected to be signed into law by Gov. Mary Fallin (R).
On Monday, S.B. 1456 passed the state House 83-5 after no debate. The measure creates a new class of customers: those who install distributed power generation systems like solar panels or small wind turbines on their property and sell the excess energy back to the grid. While those with systems already installed won't be affected, the new class of customers will now be charged a monthly fee -- a shift that happened quickly and caught many in the state off guard.
"We knew nothing about it and all of a sudden it's attached to some other bill," Ctaci Gary, owner of Sun City Oklahoma, told ThinkProgress. "It just appeared out of nowhere."
Because the surcharge amount has not been determined, Gary is cautious about predicting the impact it will have on her business. She has already received multiple calls from people asking questions about the bill and wanting to have solar systems installed before the new fee takes effect. "We're going to use it as a marketing tool," Gary said. "People deserve to have an opportunity [to install their own solar panels] and not be charged."
"It is unfortunate that some utilities that enthusiastically support wind power for their own use are promoting a regressive policy that will make it harder for their customers to use wind power on their own," said Mike Bergey, president & CEO of Bergey Windpower in Norman, Oklahoma, in a statement. "Oklahoma offers tax credits for large wind turbines which are built elsewhere, but wants to penalize small wind which we manufacture here in the state? That makes no sense to me."
The bill was staunchly opposed by renewable energy advocates, environmental groups and the conservative group TUSK, but had the support of Oklahoma's major utilities. "Representatives of Oklahoma Gas and Electric Co. and Public Service Co. of Oklahoma said the surcharge is needed to recover some of the infrastructure costs to send excess electricity safely from distributed generation back to the grid," the Oklahoman reported.
"We're not anti-solar or anti-wind or trying to slow this down, we're just trying to keep it fair," Oklahoma Gas and Electric Co. spokeswoman Kathleen O'Shea told the Oklahoman. "We've been studying this trend. We know it's coming, and we want to get ahead of it."
But distributed energy sources also provide a clear value to utility companies. Solar generates during peak hours, when a utility has to provide electricity to more people than at other times during the day and energy costs are at their highest. Solar panels actually feed excess energy back to the grid, helping to alleviate the pressure during peak demand. In addition, because less electricity is being transmitted to customers through transmission lines, it saves utilities on the wear and tear to the lines and cost of replacing them with new ones.
As the use of solar power skyrockets across the U.S., fights have sprung up in several states over how much customers should be compensated for excess power produced by their solar panels and sold back to the grid -- a policy known as net metering. Net metering laws have come under fire from the secretive American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a group backed by fossil fuel corporations, utility companies, and the ultra-conservative Koch brothers. Forty-three states and the District of Columbia currently have net metering policies in place and ALEC has set its sights on repealing them, referring to homeowners with their own solar panels as "freeriders on the system." ALEC presented Gov. Fallin the Thomas Jefferson Freedom award last year for her "record of advancing the fundamental Jeffersonian principles of free markets, limited government, federalism and individual liberty as a nationally recognized leader."
Oklahoma "could be the first complete defeat for solar advocates in their fight against utility efforts to recover costs lost to DG [distributed generation] use," writes Utility Dive. Net metering survived attacks in Colorado and Kansas and Vermont recently increased its policy in a bipartisan effort. Last year, Arizona added what amounts to a $5 per month surcharge for solar customers, a move that was widely seen as a compromise, particularly after ALEC and other Koch-backed groups got involved.
While any extra charge placed on potential customers is a concern, Gary hopes that like Arizona, Oklahoma's fee is modest enough to protect her business from serious damage.
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RSPW: You are not alone.
syvyn11 <robhorine711@yahoo.com>: Dec 07 02:55PM -0800
On Sunday, December 7, 2014 5:18:38 PM UTC-5, Jason Todd!!! wrote:
> Brietbart's JUST NOW noticing this?
> Shit, we've been AHEAD of the curve by a decade minimum!!
> Jason
And I've been ahead of the curve since 1968!
And let me tell you... IT SUCKS!
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American who helped craft Uganda's 'Kill the Gays' bill to be tried for crimes against humanity
"Karolina Dean...Where the HELL is my monkey?" <platniumtangent@gmail.com>: Dec 07 02:44PM -0800
The First Circuit Court of Appeals has denied Pastor Scott Lively's petition to have a crimes against humanity lawsuit against him dropped.
The anti-gay pastor will stand trial in a federal court in Massachusetts for his part in crafting Uganda's notorious Anti-Homosexuality Act, popularly known as the "Kill the Gays" bill. The bill was largely the product of a workshop held in Uganda by Lively and two other american anti-gay activists, focused on "how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how 'the gay movement is an evil institution' whose goal is 'to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity."
In spite of the pending suit and national condemnation for his actions, Lively has not backed down. Earlier this week, during an appearance on "Trunews," he stated that homosexuality was worse than mass murder, because it was to blame for Noah's flood.
http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/232101/american-who-helped-craft-ugandas-kill-the-gays-bill-to-be-tried-for-crimes-against-humanity/
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The Christian Right does not want you to know about this day...
"Karolina Dean...Where the HELL is my monkey?" <platniumtangent@gmail.com>: Dec 07 02:42PM -0800
In the heat of our political moment, we sometimes don't see how our future connects deeply to our past. But the Christian Right does -- and they do not like what they see.
The Christian Right has made religious freedom the ideological phalanx of its current campaigns in the culture wars. Religious freedom is now invoked as a way of seeking to derail access to reproductive health services as well as equality for LGBTQ people, most prominently regarding marriage equality.
But history provides little comfort for the theocratic visions of the Christian Right. And that is where our story begins.
For all of the shouting about religious liberty -- from the landmark Hobby Lobby Supreme Court case, to the passage of the anti-gay Religious Freedom Restoration Act in Mississippi, and more -- there is barely any mention, let alone any observance, of the official national Religious Freedom Day, enacted by Congress in 1992 and recognized every January 16 by an annual presidential proclamation.
The day commemorates the enactment of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom in 1786.
Why is this seemingly obscure piece of Revolutionary-era legislation so vital? And why doesn't the Christian Right want you to know anything about it?
The bill, authored by Thomas Jefferson and later pushed through the state legislature by then member of the House of Delegates, James Madison, is regarded as the root of how the framers of the Constitution approached matters of religion and government, and it was as revolutionary as the era in which it was written.
It not only disestablished the Anglican Church as the official state church, but it provided that no one can be compelled to attend any religious institution or to underwrite it with taxes; that individuals are free to believe as they will and that this "shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities."
As a practical matter, this meant that what we believe or don't believe is not the concern of government and that we are all equal as citizens.
Following the dramatic passage of the Statute in 1786, Madison traveled to Philadelphia, where he served as a principal author of the Constitution in 1787. As a Member of Congress in 1789 he was also a principal author of the First Amendment, which passed in 1791.
Thomas Jefferson was well aware that many did not like the Statute, just as they did not like the Constitution and the First Amendment, both of which sought to expand the rights of citizens and deflect claims of churches seeking special consideration.
So before his death, Jefferson sought to get the last word on what it meant. The Statute, he wrote, contained "within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mohametan, the Hindoo and Infidel of every denomination."
That is a powerful and clear statement. Jefferson, almost 200 years ago, refuted the contemporary claims of Christian Right leaders, many of whom not only insist that America was founded as a Christian nation, but that the framers really meant their particular interpretation of Christianity.
Jefferson further explained that the legislature had specifically rejected proposed language that would have described "Jesus Christ" as "the holy author of our religion." This was rejected, he reported, "by the great majority."
No wonder the Christian Right does not want us to remember the original Statute for Religious Freedom -- it doesn't fit their narrative of history! Nor does it justify their vision of the struggles of the political present, or the shining theocratic future they envision.
Religious Freedom Day is nothing but bad news for the likes of Religious Right leaders like Tony Perkins, who argue that Christians who favor marriage equality are not really Christians. They can believe that if they want, but it can make no difference in the eyes of the law. That is probably why on Religious Freedom Day 2014, Perkins made no mention of what Religious Freedom Day is really about -- instead using the occasion to denounce president Obama's approach to religious liberty abroad.
This barely commemorated day provides an opportunity for LGBTQ people, and progressives generally, to reclaim a philosophical, legal and constitutional legacy that the Christian Right is busy trying to redefine for their own purposes.
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Hey Christian ICON Santorum, tell Jefferson and the founding fathers they're communists
"Karolina Dean...Where the HELL is my monkey?" <platniumtangent@gmail.com>: Dec 07 02:40PM -0800
Rick Santorum: Separation of Church and State is a Communist Idea.
Sure hope Rick Santorum runs for president again. This theocracy booster told listeners that the words separation of church and state do not appear anywhere in the U.S. Constitution. You know where they appear? "It was in the constitution of the former Soviet Union," Santorum said in a conference call with members of right-wing pastor E.W. Jackson's STAND America.
Whoa!
Someone needs to do some time-traveling quick to inform Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and other Founding Fathers that the amendment they drafted into the Constitution is a commie plot to separate us from Jesus!
"Karolina Dean...Where the HELL is my monkey?" <platniumtangent@gmail.com>: Dec 07 02:40PM -0800
Rick Santorum: Separation of Church and State is a Communist Idea.
Sure hope Rick Santorum runs for president again. This theocracy booster told listeners that the words separation of church and state do not appear anywhere in the U.S. Constitution. You know where they appear? "It was in the constitution of the former Soviet Union," Santorum said in a conference call with members of right-wing pastor E.W. Jackson's STAND America.
Whoa!
Someone needs to do some time-traveling quick to inform Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and other Founding Fathers that the amendment they drafted into the Constitution is a commie plot to separate us from Jesus!<br