Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Drawbacks exist to privatizing alcohol sales...



Virginians consume approximately the national average of beer and wine. Conversely, they consume approximately 20 percent less liquor per capita than the national average. That is due to less availability, no advertising, strict enforcement of ABC laws and aggressive promotion of moderation by Virginia ABC. Due in large part to this lower consumption, Virginians suffer less from alcoholism, DUI, sclerosis, fetal alcohol syndrome and underage consumption, among other health and public safety problems. In general, Virginia is in the lowest percentiles in the U.S. for these undesirable occurrences.


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Monday, August 9, 2010

What to do in Afghanistan?


What do you think the United States should do regarding Afghanistan?
Bring the troops home as quickly as is possible and cut our losses.
Stay on the offensive and defeat the Taliban.
Take the war to Pakistan if they don't cooperate.
Invade Iran.
Ask the United Nations to take over the situation.

  
Free polls from Pollhost.com
   

Friday, August 6, 2010

7 Ways Republicans Want to Alter the Constitution They Claim to Hold Sacred

Since President Obama took office, Republicans have shrouded their agenda of opposition by wrapping it in the flag and the Constitution. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) even went so far as to label her radical anti-government views “constitutional conservatism.” Yet, for all of their constitutional pablum, the GOP’s agenda is nothing less than a direct assault on America’s founding document. Time and time again, Republicans have called for basic constitutional freedoms and fundamental aspects of our constitutional government to be repealed either by amendment or by activist judges:

First Punish The Unemployed, Then Declare War On The Employed

Over the past few months, Congressional Republicans and skittish Democrats who've lingered too long at the Deficit Panic Kool-Aid Stand have made life extraordinarily difficult for the most vulnerable members of society -- the nation's unemployed.

Rather than extend unemployment benefits so that the millions of Americans who are out therebusting their humps to find the needle-in-a-haystack that is a job of any kind, they've demanded that those benefits be offset, essentially punishing the unemployed for the deficits they giddily ran up for years.


Story

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Why Do Red States Have the Worst "Family Values"?

The "red family system" preaches early marriage and traditional gender roles -- a model no longer suited to our post-industrial economy. No wonder "red families" are falling apart.

Why are conservative “values voters” who consider themselves “pro-family” more likely to divorce, and have higher teenage pregnancy rates, than their liberal counterparts?

Sunday, August 1, 2010

Republicans Have Crippled The Economy

Four Deformations of the Apocalypse

IF there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing. The nation’s public debt — if honestly reckoned to include municipal bonds and the $7 trillion of new deficits baked into the cake through 2015 — will soon reach $18 trillion. That’s a Greece-scale 120 percent of gross domestic product, and fairly screams out for austerity and sacrifice. It is therefore unseemly for the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to insist that the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers be spared even a three-percentage-point rate increase.

Five myths about the Bush tax cuts

The tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003, known as the Bush tax cuts, are set to expire Dec. 31, and the fight over what to do is increasingly heated. Should the tax cuts expire, as some Democrats have said? Should they be extended, as most Republicans maintain? Or does the answer lie somewhere in between, as the Obama administration, led by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, has argued in recent weeks?