The Voters In Colorado were screwed by the NRA

Sen. Angela Giron & John Morse

Before I start to write this post, I want to say today is the 12th anniversary of the September 11th 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, The Pentagon, and the plane that crashed in Shanksville PA. I will take the time and write two post to my blog today and I will be talking about 9/11 and my thoughts in my details in my next post coming later today. Now moving on to why I'm writing this post. Yesterday was the recall elections in the state of Colorado of two Democratic State Senators named John Morse and Angela Giron and I was on Twitter last night and I was shocked when I found out that these two brave Senators lost the election. At first I was mad because I thought that these voters just were against these gun restriction laws and just voted these Senators out of office, I even thought that these people are morons. Then I wake up this morning and I was reading the Huffington Post and read that piece and it changed my mind on what happened in the recall election in Colorado. I will be providing a link to the piece at the end of this post.

Now in my personal opinion I think that the NRA and the Koch Brothers stole this election and then they had the nerve to say that freedom won. I will provide quotes from the piece to show why I formed this opinion. Some background information first "Morse and Giron both voted in favor of the legislation, signed into law by Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) in March, which requires background checks for all firearm purchases and bans ammunition magazines over 15 rounds." I'm honestly not surprised when I read that all of the outrage is because of background checks. All this law says if you buy guns you need a background check that's it, I personally would have gone much further then that, what are these gun lover so afraid of? I don't get it, what are they so scared of? Are all gun owners criminals? That's what is seems like to me, because they are afraid of some background checks.By the way I don't think all gun owners are criminals I was just trying to make a point. The problem is that most sensible gun owners are not against background checks most of the polls show that. However the problem is that NRA and the Koch Brothers are against anything that may hurt the profits of the gun manufacturers. This is another reason why we need to regulate how Political Action Committee or PAC's spend their money because the piece also said that "The NRA spent heavily on the recall effort, reporting at least $360,000 and funneling unspecified dollars through its nonprofit arm. The billionaire conservative Koch brothers also entered the fray, using their advocacy group Americans For Prosperity to target Morse and Giron. Due to the organization's nonprofit status, AFP also did not have to report its spending to the Federal Elections Commission." Our Politics is run by money and in my opinion that's the reason why we are losing our democracy to these billionaires and corporations and my fear is that politicians will learn the wrong lessons from this elections and not fight for sensible gun regulations because they are afraid of the NRA. Most politicans are all cowards so they will not fight for sensible guns regulations.

The piece lists another example that the NRA and the Koch's stole this election from the people "A get-out-the-vote canvasser for Giron, who requested anonymity out of safety concerns, said gun rights activists also engaged in "extreme voter intimidation" at polling centers in Pueblo on Tuesday."We had to call the police on a van of four huge guys staking out our staging location, the canvasser told HuffPost. "Volunteers are being followed, threatened, having their pictures taken and yelled at. We're now being told that it's bad enough to call 911 immediately." This is according to someone that was there at the time and I'm not saying that the NRA or the Koch Bothers sent these nut jobs out there in order to intimidate potential voters, these people could have done this on there own but these people that did this are anti American and they missed the whole point of our great nation. "A Quinnipiac poll released last month found that 82 percent of Colorado voters supported expanded background checks for gun sales. But respondents were split down the middle on the 15-round magazine limit." Most people in a favor of background checks and gun manufacturers oops I meant the NRA don't give a damn what the people say about that.

What made me mad was the NRA then released a condescending statement about their "victory" and it said that "The people of Colorado Springs sent a clear message to the Senate leader that his primary job was to defend their rights and freedoms and that he is ultimately accountable to them -- his constituents, and not to the dollars or social engineering agendas of anti-gun billionaires" the anti-gun billionaires is in reference to Michael Bloomberg the mayor of NYC and I don't agree with Bloomberg on everything but I do agree with him on this issue. So what do we progressives do about this issue? Do we give up? Or do we keep on fight the NRA and the Koch bothers? If you've been reading my blog for a while then you already know the answer to these questions. We need to keep fighting in NRA if we don't then the whole country loses because we will be flooded with more and more guns and more and more Americans will die because of gun violence. Come on progressives keep up the good fight, we need to win this fight!

Link to the piece: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/10/colorado-recall-results_n_3903209.html?utm_hp_ref=politics 

The Right Wing/Republicans are trying to start another War in Syria because of religious prophecy

This is why President Bush went into Iraq for Moron!

I know that some progressives in this country are religious, so before I start to write today's blog post, I want to say that my intent is not to offend anyone, I just want to write my honest opinion. I want to preface this post by saying that I was raised a Christian and I still believe in Jesus' teachings and he had the ideal way to live life. The reason why I don't consider myself to be a Christian today is because there are certain Christians that will use the religion in order to do outrageous things like hating homosexuals, starting wars in the middle east just because they think that the end times prophecies will come true, example is when President Bush invaded Iraq. In 2003 Bush told the French President at the time Jacques Chirac that "“Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East…. The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled…. This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.” (http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=haught_29_5) Whatever we do as a country can't allow these fundamentalist Christians to take the power in order to invade another country that did nothing to us in this case Syria.

Now after one long paragraph, what was my motivation for writing this post today is I saw a article on the web site therawstory.com "Fox anchor asks viewers to consider if bombing Syria is a harbinger of the Second Coming of Christ" Honestly I assumed that the "Fox anchor" would be Sean Hannity, because for one Glenn Beck is not at Fox anymore and Hannity is so into the Christianity I thought that it made sense to assume that it was Hannity. I read a little bit of the piece and I found out that the anchor was Neil Cavuto, I'm not saying that I'm surprised because all of Fox News is a propaganda outlet for the Republican party and for the Christian/Catholic Church. In my opinion Fox News is dangerous for the country because a portion of the American population takes them seriously and those people think that they are real news. They disguise their propaganda under the guise of real news and that's what makes them really dangerous. The story that I started to talk about in the beginning of this paragraph is another example of how dangerous Fox News is for the country.

Now after two paragraphs I'm finally going to talk about the article I started to talk about in the second paragraph. The article is accompanied by a video, which I will post at the end of this post, so you can check it out for yourselves. Cavuto said that "This Syria stuff is way old, I mean Old Testament old. That’s how old I’m talking about. Don’t laugh. Some biblical scholars say it’s all there in black and white." To be fair to Cavuto the Bible does talk about prophecy regarding Damascus, “This message came to me concerning Damascus: ‘Look, Damascus will disappear! It will become a heap of ruins. The cities of Aroer will be deserted. Sheep will graze in the streets and lie down unafraid. There will be no one to chase them away. The fortified cities of Israel will also be destroyed, and the power of Damascus will end. The few left in Aram will share the fate of Israel’s departed glory,’ says the Lord Almighty.” Isaiah 17:1-3 as an example, my problem with this is that these prophecies are not real, they are just stories that were told thousands of years ago just to entertain people. Then Joel Rosenberg said that "“These are prophecies more than 2,700 years old, some of them, but they have not actually been fulfilled,” Rosenberg said. “But this prophecy, as you just pointed out, talks about the complete and utter destruction of Damascus. That’s an End Times or eschatological prophecy. It’s a very sobering thought to think that a judgment of a city or a country could happen in which an entire city could be wiped out, but that is, in fact, what the Bible is predicting,” he added. “I think it’s wrong for people who teach Bible prophecies to guess — I mean, in a sense try to say for certain it’s going to happen now.”

This Joel Rosenberg guy is a fraud, because not many people would take these prophecies seriously because they were spoken 2000 years ago and it was for entertainment purposes only, and to people that take these prophecies seriously my question is why do you take these prophecies seriously? I don't get it, like I said at the beginning of this post, I was raised a Christian but I never took any of those prophecies seriously. However that's just my opinion, but I'm serious but Fox News being dangerous for this country as long as they are treated like serious news, if one day most people realize that Fox News is right wing propaganda, then I will have no problem with them because in America there are free speech rights and they have to right to say whatever they want and I as an American will defend their rights. However I'm glad that President Obama is in office now and not President Bush or else we would be going to war with Syria and we as a country can't afford that.

Link to the article: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/09/10/fox-anchor-asks-viewers-to-consider-if-bombing-syria-is-a-harbinger-of-the-second-coming-of-christ/

My Thoughts on Syria's President Bashar Al-Assad interview with Charlie Rose

President Assad of Syria

First of all I hope that everyone has a good week, and last night I had started to write a post for today. However I went on the Huffington Post website and I saw that Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad gave a interview to Charlie Rose, I had to put my original post for today on hold and I had to give my thoughts on the clips of the interview that I saw on Huffington Post. I've been on record on this blog and on my twitter account that unless Syria is a direct threat to the United States, that the United States should not involve ourselves in the Syrian Civil War, as we all know Syria is not a threat to the United States, the obvious reason is because Assad is fighting a Civil War for the last two years. Before I give my opinion on what Assad said on this interview with Charlie Rose, I would like to say that, I know that Assad is a brutal dictator and this civil war has killed over 100,000 people so far and I know that Assad will do almost anything to maintain his power in Syria. Now I think that Assad made some decent points in the interview that I would like to discuss.

First off Assad said that "We have the precedent of Colin Powell ten years ago when he showed the evidence [that Iraq had WMDs], it was false and it was forged." and that the "United States credibility was at an all-time low." In my opinion Assad is totally right, the reason why I say that is
because the United States did lie about Weapons of Mass-Destruction (WMDs) in Iraq, even though was during the Bush years and the credibility of the US government is at an all time low, thanks to President Bush and Obama is not helping matters now. Assad also made another good point when he said "Americans don't want a war anywhere, not only against Syria." I personally think that the reason why Assad said this is because he cares what the American people think, but he's using this fact in order to try and stop the US government from attacking his country. Which I think was his main motivation for wanting to do an interview with Charlie Rose. He wanted to directly appeal to the American people in order to stop the US from attacking his country.

What I thought was the most interesting comments that Assad made during this interview was the threats that Assad made against the United States if they went through with the bombings against his country. Assad said that "You should expect everything... expect every action," and he also said "Not necessarily from the government." I'm pretty sure that the Republicans and Conservative pundits will try to use this as a excuse in order to justify a long drawn out invasion of Syria and they
will want to use the Bush Doctrine of preemptive strike. However let's say that Syria came out and said that they wanted to bomb the United States because we had used Chemical Weapons, our government for sure would consider it an act of war and we will retaliate if Syria did attack us. Then if the United States would retaliate if Syria bombed us in my hypothetical, then what do you expect Assad to do when he threatened to retaliate against the United States. Anybody in Assad's position would make the same decision. I don't want to hear from conservatives and war hawks that we have to attack Assad just because he said that.    

Update: I had just finished my blog post for today when I saw a interesting story from the Huffington Post once again, and I saw people tweeting about it as well. Now in order to avoid an attack from the United States, Russia is now pushing Syria to give up it's Chemical Weapons to international control and then those weapons will be destroyed, and that way the United States will not attack Syria. This development is a good because as I said many times I'm against any action in Syria and if there is someway that the crisis can be ended with out the US bombing Syria and I'm totally in favor of it.    
Link to Huffington Post peice: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/09/russia-syria-chemical-weapons-international-control_n_3893951.html?utm_hp_ref=world

Our Government is owned by Corporations we need Campaign Finance Reform!

Constitutional Convention 1787

One of the very few points that both conservatives and progressives can agree upon is that there is way too much corporate money in our politics and lobbyists that represent the corporate interests have bought our government. The government does not represent the American people's interest anymore instead they represent the corporations interest. I'm not just referring to just the banks, I'm referring to all corporations private health insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, the private military contractors (PMCs) and I'm sure I could name more corporations who own a share of our government but I think that my readers get the point. I personally think that the only way that we can try and fix this major problem is to have a Constitutional amendment in order to ban corporate money in our politics. I know that it would next to impossible for congress to ever propose this Constitutional Amendment because they are the ones that are bought by the corporations, but we have another option which is a Constitutional Convention which is in Article V of the United States Constitution, the exact language is;

"The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate."  

(http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/constitution/article-v.html)

See, all we would need to 34 states and we can get a Constitutional Convention

To simplify it we would need two-thirds or 34 states to ask for a Constitutional Convention in order to get one and that way we can change the Constitution in order get the amendment to finally get corporate money out of our politics and get our country back from these corporations. As everyone knows the reason why we have unlimited corporate money in our politics is because of the Citizen's United ruling. To me the Citizen's United ruling is one of the worst that the Supreme Court has handed down since the Dred Scott case. If you know your history you will know what the Dred Scott case held, I'm not getting into it in this entry, just Google Dred Scott. Anyway if you don't know the Citizen's United case, this is the infamous case that held that "that corporations and unions can not constitutionally be prohibited from promoting the election of one candidate over another candidate." (http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-205.pdf) In other words as Mitt Romney once infamously said "Corporations are people my friend" This Supreme Court ruling has destroyed our country and allowed corporations to completely take over our government.



See, Conservatives and Progressives can agree on something.

So what can we as progressives do? Well my answer is to go to the states where progressives and conservatives can agree and we as a country can fight for this amendment in order to finally rid ourselves of the blight of the Citizen's United ruling and make our politicians work for us the people again, like it was always meant to be. One final point that I would like to make for this post is to the conservative politicians that think that Corporations are people as Mitt Romney said, do you men really think that the founding fathers really wanted corporations to run our government? There is no way that you so called men can really believe that, you republican politicians are just corporate robots that take the corporate money and crush your political opponents, and which is regular people like myself who have ideas for our great country can't run for office because we don't have the money for a political campaign and that is the saddest part of this. 

Progressives need to stop cheerleading for President Obama and the Democrats

President Barack Obama

I know that this blog post will be controversial to some of my progressive friends some may agree and some may not agree at all, however I have to get this off my chest. The way how I evaluate a decision that President Obama makes is if I agree with the President I will defend what the President wants to do as a example of the is the Affordable Care Act or better known as "Obamacare" however if I disagree with the President, I will not cheer lead his decision, instead I will talk about why I think his decision is wrong for the nation. I think as a American that I am that is the fundamental that we not agree with everything that the President does or says. The President of the United States is not the Emperor of the King of the country. In my opinion it seems like most progressives will just agree with President Obama just because he's a Democrat or because he calls himself a progressive, and to me that is not the right thing to do, because it's time to admit to ourselves that Obama is not a progressive instead in my opinion he's a moderate republican.

The reason why I think that is because through out his entire presidency it seems that Obama is always trying to agree with the republicans on almost every issue. Even though I liked the Affordable Care Act some of the provisions are great for normal everyday Americans. However the mandate was originally an idea from the right wing think tank the heritage foundation and it was almost the exact proposal Mitt Romney passed in Massachusetts when he was the governor. Yesterday I commented on a story on the Huffington post website and I called President Obama a war monger. Maybe that statement went too far, however the point that I was trying to make is that part of the reason that Obama was elected is to end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, however as soon as those wars are over he's now talking about bombing Syria, regardless what the administration says bombing another country is an act of war and can cause massive trouble for the country's image abroad (thanks to President George W. Bush our image has been destroyed with the rest of the world and Obama has not helped that image at all) Simply put President Obama has not helped the progressive cause at all instead he's taken the Republican ideas and turned them into progressive ideas which drives the Republican party farther and farther to the right and into oblivion (And that's a good thing in my opinion), and what bothers me is that most progressives not all though will cheer lead the president instead of standing out to him and saying no that's not what we voted for. Again this is just my opinion and the progressive movement needs to regain it's backbone once again and not cheer lead that does not help the country or help our cause.

"Stand Your Ground" Laws have basically legalized Murder

Trayvon Martin & George Zimmerman

In the last few months we've heard more and more about people just shooting other human beings in cold blood and then using the "Stand your ground" law as a defense. This is especially true in the state of Florida the most infamous case being the Trayvon Martin killing. If you are reading this entry and you've not been living under a rock over the last year then you know the details of the horrible injustice of this case. This case is relevant to this entry because the man that committed and got away with the murder George Zimmerman used the "Stand your ground" law in Florida as a defense in his trial and he was found not guilty. If I was on that jury no matter what the law is in the state of Florida, I could not bring myself knowing the facts of the case to find Zimmerman not guilty, because no matter the laws all of the proof points to Zimmerman being guilty of at least manslaughter.

The relevant statue is 776.013 (3) which says that "A person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked in any other place where he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony." (http://www.leg.state.fl.us/statutes//index.cfm?App_mode=Display_Statute&Search_String=&URL=0700-0799/0776/Sections/0776.013.html)
 In my opinion this statue has legalized murder because that statue says that "including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony." In other words that means that if I had a gun and I shot someone, all I have to say is that I thought my life was in danger and I can get away with murder. I don't think that's right and in my opinion these stand your ground laws have just legalized murder.

Another example of this is the man by the name of William T. Woodward he's 44 years old and he's from the state of Florida of course he had shot three of his neighbors and killed two of them the details of the case are"Police had responded to the neighborhood multiple times in the past, reportedly because of an ongoing feud between the two parties. Officials say they previously offered to mediate the dispute, but when officers arrived at the scene on Tuesday they found that Gary Lee Hembree, Roger Picior, and Bruce Timothy Blake had all been shot. Hembree and Picior were mortally wounded, but Blake survived despite being shot at least 11 times. Blake later told Wesh.com that he needed to call the police dozens of times on Woodward, who is a combat veteran." (http://rt.com/usa/bush-stand-ground-florida-homicide-433/) In my opinion the Stand your ground laws encourage people to shoot and kill each other because now Woodward is using the stand your ground law and the "Bush Doctrine" for some reason which I don't understand because the "Bush Doctrine" was used in order to provide legal justification for the war in Iraq in order to defend himself from murder and attempted murder charges. The bottom line is that these laws have legalized murder and in my opinion makes people in Florida even more afraid and makes them but more and more guns which makes the gun manufacturers more and more money, maybe that was real intention of these laws...just a thought.

There is no good reason for the United States to intervene in Syria

Syrian President Bashar Assad

Before I start this blog entry I want to say that I know that it's been a long time since I posted on this blog, but I've been busy and looking for a new job because I can't stand my current job. Other than that everything is going well for me. Now I'm going to write about why the United States should not go into Syria. The Syrian civil war has been going on for two years now and according to the United Nations over 100,000 people died in this conflict and more and more people are going to die every day, unless something is done. However I do not think that it's the United States government's responsibility to send our military to drop bombs on Syria because on the possibility that the Assad regime used chemical weapons. The reason why I use the word possibility is because not even the White House is sure that the Assad government even used the chemical weapons. According to an ABC article which was written on August 29th 2013 and the piece was called "AP Sources: Intelligence on Weapons No 'Slam Dunk'" The piece said that "The intelligence linking Syrian President Bashar Assad or his inner circle to an alleged chemical weapons attack is no "slam dunk," with questions remaining about who actually controls some of Syria's chemical weapons stores and doubts about whether Assad himself ordered the strike, U.S. intelligence officials say." and the piece also says  "However, multiple U.S. officials used the phrase "not a slam dunk" to describe the intelligence picture — a reference to then-CIA Director George Tenet's insistence in 2002 that U.S. intelligence showing Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was a "slam dunk" — intelligence that turned out to be wrong." "A report by the Office of the Director for National Intelligence outlining that evidence against Syria includes a few key caveats — including acknowledging that the U.S. intelligence community no longer has the certainty it did six months ago of where the regime's chemical weapons are stored, nor does it have proof Assad ordered chemical weapons use, according to two intelligence officials and two more U.S. officials." (http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/ap-sources-intelligence-weapons-slam-dunk-20102965)

So the question is why is the Obama administration is trying to go into Syria without having any proof? The reason seems to be obvious to me but not to most people that may read this. The reason why is because the military industrial complex runs our government and the United States government's answer to any problem internationally is military force and that's not always the best way to fix the problems that the rest of the world is facing right now. Anyway in my opinion I don't think that it's the United States job to fix the problems that the rest of the world are facing. The bottom line is that we don't have the money to start to drop bombs on Syria and what is our end game in Syria? Are we going to just drop a few bombs on them and then leave? If that's the plan then it makes no sense because if Assad did release chemical weapons on his own people (There is no real
proof that he did) then he is not going to be deterred just because we drop a few bombs or missiles on Damascus for example.  

So what else can the United States do in Syria? Honestly all we can do is to try and set up a conference between the two sides and hope that they can work something out, we can't keep send our military every time there is a problem in the world, force does not work every time in fact almost never. Look at the disaster that the Iraq invasion has become. I understand that we are not invading Syria but my fear is that if we are going to bomb Syria now, then that could lead to an full ground invasion of Syria and that would be a disaster for the country and for the Obama administration. Congress should not approve any action in Syria!