Norma White, a Texas Grandmother says "You want change? Try these ideas.....
Ms. Norma White is a grandmother and an Opinion Columnist for Amarillo.com. It just doesn't get any better than this. Ms. White wrote this column during the 2008 elections. Oh my, wouldn't it of been nice if more people had read it.
Here are a few that I believe all Americans want.
- Limit Congress from serving more than two terms. That is all that presidents are allowed.
- Stop Congress from voting for their own raises. How did that ever get started?
- Stop paying for lawmakers' high-priced insurance premiums. After all, they are only part-time employees. They might pass some law changes on the insurance companies, if they had to find one.
- Stop paying lawmakers their full salary after serving just one term, or at retirement. We need to get rid of that pension plan; they've let other companies get rid of theirs. You were lucky to get 40 to 50 percent of your salary after working somewhere for 35 years, but they get 100 percent.
- Make Congress pay into the Social Security system. They make laws for it. If they spent some of their own money, they might be interested in making it solvent.
- Stop handing out aid to illegal aliens. If we did, then Medicaid and the food stamp program would have enough money to aid the aged and the poor.
- Secure our borders.
- Stop allowing babies born to illegal aliens in the United States automatic U.S. citizenship.
- Stop the abuse of our benevolent welfare system. We feed children free meals three times a day until they are 17. Churches give away good, clean clothes. Companies buy and donate school supplies. Emergency rooms provide health care at taxpayer expense and the food stamp program is buying food at home. What are parents doing for their children?
- Have a computer program that cross checks Social Security numbers with fingerprints to stop fraud on many fronts. Use it on voter registration, too.
- Stop bailing out mortgage companies and banks that give loans to people who cannot afford them.
- Stop companies from paying CEOs and other executives outrageous salaries and bonuses while doing away with workers' pensions.
- Stop all unnecessary spending so we will have the money for our nation's security, and to help needy and elderly Americans.
- Stop permitting anyone to have a photo with their face covered on driver's licenses.
3 comments:
50% of what the grandma says makes sense- The rest of her xenophobic rant against illegals is a sign that GOP-SENILITY has set in...someone should STOP Old Ladies from trying to dispense advice-INCLUDING YOU!
What? Sep? you skeeered of lil' old ladies?
LMAO
Porn in the USA: Conservatives are biggest consumers
Conservative states spend most on porn (Image: Raymond Gehmann/Corbis)
Americans may paint themselves in increasingly bright shades of red and blue, but new research finds one thing that varies little across the nation: the liking for online pornography.
A new nationwide study (pdf) of anonymised credit-card receipts from a major online adult entertainment provider finds little variation in consumption between states.
"When it comes to adult entertainment, it seems people are more the same than different," says Benjamin Edelman at Harvard Business School.
However, there are some trends to be seen in the data. Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds.
"Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things they claimed to be outraged by," Edelman says.
Political divide
Edelman spends part of his time helping companies such as Microsoft and AOL detect advertising fraud. Another consulting client runs dozens of adult websites, though he says he is not at liberty to identify the firm.
That company did, however, provide Edelman with roughly two years of credit card data from 2006 to 2008 that included a purchase date and each customer's postal code.
After controlling for differences in broadband internet access between states – online porn tends to be a bandwidth hog – and adjusting for population, he found a relatively small difference between states with the most adult purchases and those with the fewest.
The biggest consumer, Utah, averaged 5.47 adult content subscriptions per 1000 home broadband users; Montana bought the least with 1.92 per 1000. "The differences here are not so stark," Edelman says.
Number 10 on the list was West Virginia at 2.94 subscriptions per 1000, while number 41, Michigan, averaged 2.32.
Eight of the top 10 pornography consuming states gave their electoral votes to John McCain in last year's presidential election – Florida and Hawaii were the exceptions. While six out of the lowest 10 favoured Barack Obama.
Old-fashioned values
Church-goers bought less online porn on Sundays – a 1% increase in a postal code's religious attendance was associated with a 0.1% drop in subscriptions that day. However, expenditures on other days of the week brought them in line with the rest of the country, Edelman finds.
Residents of 27 states that passed laws banning gay marriages boasted 11% more porn subscribers than states that don't explicitly restrict gay marriage.
To get a better handle on other associations between social attitudes and pornography consumption, Edelman melded his data with a previous study on public attitudes toward religion.
States where a majority of residents agreed with the statement "I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage," bought 3.6 more subscriptions per thousand people than states where a majority disagreed. A similar difference emerged for the statement "AIDS might be God's punishment for immoral sexual behaviour."
"One natural hypothesis is something like repression: if you're told you can't have this, then you want it more," Edelman says.
Journal reference: Journal of Economic Perspectives vol 23, p 209 (pdf)
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