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My Comments (91 so far…)

Dear Margo: This Is Not 'The One'

I have fibro and lupus as well so wanted to give you a virtual (hug) :) I’m fat now thanks to prednisone! And yes, men now forget to help me with my groceries…

My Funeral Oration for the Late Writer Dominick Dunne, by Liz Smith

I really enjoyed his writings, particularly his observations of criminal trials. I was very sorry to hear of his passing.

Liz Smith: Texas Today – Gone With the Wing-Nuts

Oh yes; I receive so much love here. Sigh. I do think that is what USED to make America so special. However, although I’ve never spent much time Texas and wouldn’t be able to praise or criticize it, I lived in New England and loved it :)

Liz Smith: Texas Today – Gone With the Wing-Nuts

I am in a lot of physical pain, have a lot of severe fatigue, am always coping with how to find enough money to eat, and sometimes have bouts of really dangerous major depression. I sometimes have to withdraw when I feel like I’ve got a posse after me. If this were a nurturing or even fair-minded place, someone would have come to my defense when I was told "save it for the cinema" when I shared some personal things about my own life. Yes, boring to those who have heard it before, but not everyone here is someone I recognize as having posted to before. Anyway, I feel this site is a bit out of balance, with the right wing predominating, and I have to be feeling strong to post here. I’m not always up to it. I don’t see why the right wing doesn’t even respect my struggles for the right to work.

Liz Smith: Texas Today – Gone With the Wing-Nuts

I see you are able to get away with strong words and yet not be hated to the point I am on this board. I’m not sure why that is but I applaud you and hope you can stick around here informing people that there isn’t just one side to every story and that this country doesn’t benefit from hearing only one point of view via most of the media outlets :) But I suffer from clinical depression and when I’m feeling suicidal I can’t hang out in a place where I don’t seem to be looked upon as a fellow human being who could use a hug now and then just like anyone else of any political persuasion…I admire those of you who have been able to disagree with the right-wingers here without being hated by them.

Liz Smith: Texas Today – Gone With the Wing-Nuts

The only one of your list which has regular liberal commentators is MSNBC.

Liz Smith: Texas Today – Gone With the Wing-Nuts

Please show me where I said it was ever ok for Dems to boo the President. Thanks.

Liz Smith: Texas Today – Gone With the Wing-Nuts

Of course, those who disagreed with anything President GW Bush did were told that we must "respect the President". It sometimes seems like today’s Republicans truly want one-party rule—like the Soviet system they accuse the hated liberals of promoting. http://thinkprogress.org/2009/09/09/obama-joint-address/

Liz Smith: Texas Today – Gone With the Wing-Nuts

How foolish people like me were to ever hope that we might have campaign finance reform which would *reduce* the power of corporate lobbyists… http://rawstory.com/08/news/2009/09/09/supreme-court-on-verge-of-overtur… .

Brainstorm Your Own Health-Care Reform Plan

I don’t think blaming the patient is the answer, since all of us are imperfect in the way we care for our health. The obese in particular have been vilified to the point where they are so stressed that the stress alone might be making it harder for them to lose weight. Stress increases cortisol production. I myself am obese now, although I certainly did not start out that way, due to years of cortisone-like drugs being needed to save my life. But someone just looking at me cannot distinguish between me, someone who is very careful about diet and really tries to find ways to exercise despite disability, and a couch potato who lives on Doritos and Coke. Basically what I’m worried about is that by the time we exclude everyone who has a bad health habit (and please include the idiots who don’t wear helmets but ride their motorcycles at high speeds in traffic) there won’t be anyone left ;)

Brainstorm Your Own Health-Care Reform Plan

Report fraud to the proper authorities. You have to be disabled to continue to receive SSI. If not, that is fraud. Welfare fraud is often heavily punished. There ARE investigators; I am often investigated because I have many past work attempts. They all failed, but I was in there trying. What I want to try now is part-time work at home but the system won’t let me and the people opposing the changes have all been Republicans. That is a change; years ago Republican politicians were much more interested in disabled people who wanted to work.

Many states have dramatically curtailed their assistance to families based simply on the number of children that they have, or required that the parents train for and go to jobs when jobs are available, but perhaps your state has not yet done so. If that is the case of course you might want to get involved in calling for a restructure of your state programs. Oddly, it is a Republican governor who wanted to cut the CalWorks program. Why, I cannot tell you.

My life has been hard. I am not angry 24/7 but I am angry when people are unkind to me. Mostly I am just tired.

Anyway, there should be intervention to help "welfare families" find other ways to support themselves and to manage their family planning. And I’m actually not in favor of states going broke to provide benefits to families of illegal workers. Which has got me kicked off of at least one "liberal" mailing list. But there is no longer a place in public discourse for moderates or for people who are willing to compromise.

I do think Americans have to pay taxes so that our nation can remain a civilization. I also think tax money should be used carefully and wisely and not wasted in any way. I don’t think helping the sick is a waste. I do think able-bodied people should support themselves, and where they can’t or don’t, we have to find out why not and fix the problem. Now what I have been told is than many African American dads are actually in jail, which makes it tough for them to support their families. I’ve also been told that unemployment among those in our nation who were not blessed with a good education is high and getting higher. Those are problems to work on and solve and if Republicans and Democrats could stop spitting on each other long enough to get something done, maybe we would solve them. But I haven’t (yet) heard anything from a Dem that says a right-winger should die. Not even Rush Limbaugh! But from the right, I hear this all the time. Hatred and anger. Bitterness, ultimately over money.

Diminished Labor Unions Have a Friend in Obama, by Liz Peek

Another angry bitter rightie. They can go to tea parties and reinforce the hate. "I’ve got mine so screw everyone else." Carol, how well would you have done with a really nasty case of systemic lupus? Not the mild type; the vital-organ threatening type which is more common in African American women than in Caucasian women. The type I have. You would have been in bed gasping for breath due to lung involvement, shaking due to loss of 1/3 of your blood volume, and facing death at age 23. So our system cuts off your health coverage. I guess you somehow come out of that without any kind of financial assistance from anyone. Because your willingness to work hard and to be independent and self-supporting is so noble it can overcome ANYTHING. Well, that’s what I believed. At age 23. When that happened to me, and I was a Republican.

Diminished Labor Unions Have a Friend in Obama, by Liz Peek

Everyone with health care coverage problems getting emergency room care for everything is not the solution to the health care crisis. http://www.nupge.ca/node/2341

Diminished Labor Unions Have a Friend in Obama, by Liz Peek

All I can tell you is that I have not been welcome here, which is why I don’t show up very often any more. I can only come here when I’m feeling physically up to it, actually. I really am sick; I’m not a fraudulent "welfare queen", and two doctors recently told me my health is "frail" and to tell my family. So I can’t voluntarily expose myself to people who would happily see me die, along with the rest of the 18,000+ annually who already do die thanks to our health care "system", as much as I would do otherwise. But it is not easy to find that "kinder, gentler" nation. Guess who owns the media? People who have a financial interest in letting the tea partiers convince the entire country that we shouldn’t pay taxes, we should "let them eat cake", we should have survival of the richest and everyone else can just be fertilizer. And there are some really nasty people here who, if your politics happen to be liberal, will zoom in on you and attack you with everything they have in their poison pens because they think you threaten their world view, their justification for how they live, and most of all, their wallets.

Diminished Labor Unions Have a Friend in Obama, by Liz Peek

The really sad thing is, there is no room for a middle ground, or compromise, or just calm rational discourse once the bitter haters show up and piss in the pool. I actually was one of the people hoping for some union concessions in the recent California budget crisis, where it became clear that the best solution would have been for everyone to give up something (instead of the poor, the sick, the frail elderly and children getting the stab in the back as usual.) I stayed up all night once with a passionate Republican advocate hammering out an idea for a guest worker program, something CA probably should consider since it has so many citizens angry about the costs of illegal workers and their families while at the same time has Big Ag saying that without the low-wage workers they cannot produce food. Ted Kennedy (and I hated what happened at Chappaquiddick and had nightmares about it for years; I lived in the next state over when it happened) was someone who was able to reach across the aisle and for that reason he got an incredible amount of things accomplished. But when Obama tries it they spit at him. Somehow that’s ok.