Paul Ryan Booed at AARP Speech

Yesterday afternoon, Paul Ryan addressed the AARP’s National Annual Conference in New Orleans. The GOP vice presidential candidate attacked Obamacare for taking $716 billion out of Medicare — the very same cuts he included in his budget by the way — and made the case for transforming seniors’ health care from a guaranteed benefit into a premium support “voucher” program.

So what do you think the response was? Well, it didn’t go over with the audience. Take a look at this clip:

As you heard, audience members called Ryan a “liar,” told him to “go home” and repeatedly booed his critique of President Obama and health reform.

It’s a good thing senior citizens are part of the 47% and Ryan and Romney don’t have to worry about them.

Related articles

• Paul Ryan to Defend Medicare Plan at AARP (abcnews.go.com)
• Paul Ryan to seniors: Obamacare threatens Medicare (politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com)
• Barack Obama: Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan “could raise future retirees’ costs more than $6,000.” (politifact.com)
• Obama jabs Romney at AARP: ‘Medicare and Social Security are not handouts’ (leanforward.msnbc.com)

Obama calls for legislation to limit sales of guns, especially AK-47s…

 

In a speech before the National Urban League convention in New Orleans yesterday, the president tied Aurora shooting and other high-profile mass shootings in recent years to continuing urban gun violence. He said it was time to take greater legislative steps to curb the problem:

“I, like most Americans, believe that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual the right to bear arms. But I also believe that a lot of gun owners would agree that AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers, not in the hands of criminals — that they belong on the battlefields of war and not on the streets of our cities.

“I believe the majority of gun owners would agree that we should do everything possible to prevent criminals and fugitives from purchasing weapons. We should check someone’s criminal record before they can check out a gun seller. Many mentally unbalanced individuals should not be able to get their hands on a gun so easily. These steps shouldn’t be controversial they should be common sense.”

You can read Obama’s full remarks here.

Related articles

• Video: President Obama Says “AK-47s Belong in the Hands of Soldiers, not Criminals” (opposingviews.com)
• Obama: AK-47s belong on battlefield, not streets (politico.com)
• Automatic weapons assault ban here we go: Obama: AK-47s belong on battlefield, not streets (investmentwatchblog.com)
• Aurora shootings: Obama calls for ‘common sense’ over guns – BBC News (bbc.co.uk)
• Obama calls for gun control deal in wake of Aurora theatre shootings (guardian.co.uk)

 

Here’s a Film Notice from Sustainable Shepherdstown

Sustainable Shepherdstown to show “Age of Stupid”

“The Age of Stupid,” a British environmental film made in 2009, will be presented by local environmental group Sustainable Shepherdstown on Friday, September 10 at 7 p.m. at the Byrd Center Auditorium at Shepherd University. The film runs 89 minutes and is free of charge.
Oscar-winning actor Pete Postlethwaite (In The Name of the Father, Brassed Off, The Usual Suspects) stars as an old man living in the devastated world of 2055 who asks: Why didn’t we stop climate change when we had the chance?

Runaway climate change has ravaged the planet by 2055. Pete plays the founder of The Global Archive, a storage facility located in the (now melted) Arctic, preserving all of humanity’s achievements in the hope that the planet might one day be habitable again. He pulls together clips of “archive” news and documentary from 1950-2008 to build a message showing what went wrong and why. He focuses on six human stories: Alvin DuVernay, is a paleontogolist helping Shell find more oil off the coast of New Orleans. He also rescued more than 100 people after Hurricane Katrina, which, by 2055, is well known as one of the first “major climate change events”. Jeh Wadia in Mumbai aims to start-up a new low-cost airline and gets a million Indians flying. Layefa Malemi lives in absolute poverty in a small village in Nigeria from which Shell extracts tens of millions of dollars worth of oil every week. She dreams of becoming a doctor, but must fish in the oil-infested waters for four years to raise the funds. Jamila Bayyoud, aged 8, is an Iraqi refugee living on the streets of Jordan after her home was destroyed – and father killed – during the US-led invasion of 2003. Piers Guy is a windfarm developer from Cornwall fighting the NIMBYs of Middle England. 82-year-old French mountain guide Fernand Pareau has witnessed his beloved Alpine glaciers melt by 150 metres.

“This is a signally important film–a very clever and very powerful reminder of exactly where we stand on this fragile, lovely planet.”
Bill McKibben, Author, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

“Think An Inconvenient Truth but with a personality.”
Gary Goldstein, Los Angeles Times

A remarkable essay on our current National Panic…

There is a remarkable essay over at Brilliant At Breakfast which sums up the current brouhaha over the “Mosque” at Ground Zero, Obama’s secret Muslim faith, the preying of the Right on American Stupidity and more. Below are the first 5 1/2 paragraphs… I urge you to go in and read the rest (as well as the comments).

-Bill

The Republican Area 51

(By American Zen’s Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

“Nazis don’t have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust museum in Washington.” – Erstwhile alternate historian Newt Gingrich in opposing the Cordoba Community Center on Fox

In a paraphrase of the old bromide against the Irish, it can be said that God invented Koolaid to prevent Americans from running the world for too long.

When people of other countries put their lives on the line in the act of defending their democracies and addressing real life or death issues, about the most I can expect of my fellow Americans is to color their Twitter avatars green and change their time zone to Tehran’s. At the end of the day, however, we find ourselves on the couch with a Red Bull in one hand and the remote in the other and tuning in to Fox “News” and ensuring that Rupert’s funhouse mirror dimension remains the highest-rated cable channel. And people wonder why I criticize my country so much.

Let me impress upon you one inescapable, incontrovertible, ineluctable fact: We are simply the stupidest and most willfully ignorant nation on earth. We’re the world’s biggest racial, national and religious melting pot yet the most bigoted. As Maureen Dowd reminded us yesterday, we panic in herds yet come to our senses, if we ever do, one at a time. Our eyes snap open like a doll’s when we’re alarmed yet when we awake from one soporific or another, we need to rub those eyes for a few minutes. Stupidity and ignorance has a much longer half life than truth and the facts. If stupidity was made of hydrogen and oxygen, our country would look like New Orleans the day after Katrina. And if racial or religious bigotry was gold, there’d be a rush of grubby Republican prospectors every year or so.

And need we look any farther than the biggest news story of the day, the “controversial” “mosque” at “Ground Zero” for a glimpse of how stupid we are? If you throw enough money for ink and pixels to convince an entire nation of something, even one as rich in colleges and universities as ours, you will sway public opinion at least temporarily. When the media blitz subsides, people slowly, very slowly, come to their senses. We see it with every election cycle because we depend on people to tell us what to think and for whom to vote as well as what buy, eat, drink and even how to fornicate. It’s hard to believe but it seems almost as many Americans are as ignorant as to what’s going on at Park51 as they are of Area 51.

Frank Rich also reminded us yesterday of the wildly vacillating poll numbers regarding the very religion of our president. A recent Pew poll showed that 18% of us still persist in believing that President Obama is Muslim, a number that was as low as 11% at his inauguration (long after McCain and RNC money stopped telling us what to think). Barely over a third of us know that Obama is Christian, down from nearly half in March ’09. And the day after Pew published its results, Franklin Graham, who should never be put on television even to pitch juicers on QVC, told John King that Obama is both and “born a Muslim.”

(Go HERE to read the rest…)

What if BP knew what would happen with Deepwater Horizon well before it did?

Karen Dalton Beninato has written an amazing piece at NewOrleans.com backed up by an actual BP document. See if you can read this without wanting to put these guys away for a long time.

This is the starting clip… go in and read the whole thing:

clipped from www.neworleans.com BP’s Spill Plan: What they knew and when they knew it NEW ORLEANS | I have obtained a copy of the almost-600-page BP Regional Oil Spill Response Plan for the Gulf of Mexico as of June, 2009, thanks to an insider. The name of the well has been redacted, but if it’s not Deepwater Horizon, then there’s another rig still out there pumping oil and aimed at Plaquemines Parish. For crowdsourcing here’s the link, but it’s 29 mb so make sure you have the room to download: http://www.neworleans.com/images/media/BP_Regional_OSRP_Redactedv2.pdf 1) In the worst case discharge scenario (on chart below), an oil leak was expected to come ashore with highest probability in Plaquemines Parish within 30 days (see map above from the Advance Response Plan). This makes it clear that BP could have stored adequate boom there before a rig failure like the Deepwater Horizon, and workers could have been mobilized to apply the boom in the 30 days that the response plan predicted oil would hit our wetlands.

It’s 2009…the 21st Century…Right?

TPM ran this piece about a JP in Louisiana who won’t marry interracial couples. Isn’t this against the law by now? This is really disappointing.

Here’s a clip:

clipped from www.talkingpointsmemo.com A Louisiana justice of the peace said he refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple out of concern for any children the couple might have. Keith Bardwell, justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish, says it is his experience that most interracial marriages do not last long. Neither Bardwell nor the couple immediately returned phone calls from The Associated Press. But Bardwell told the Daily Star of Hammond that he was not a racist. “I do ceremonies for black couples right here in my house,” Bardwell said. “My main concern is for the children.” “I don’t do interracial marriages because I don’t want to put children in a situation they didn’t bring on themselves,” Bardwell said. “In my heart, I feel the children will later suffer.” If he does an interracial marriage for one couple, he must do the same for all, he said. “I try to treat everyone equally,” he said.

Maybe the children will later suffer by getting elected President of the United States. Hmmm?

And while we’re on the subject of Louisiana (and the President), Obama was in New Orleans today reviewing the reconstruction since Katrina, and, while speaking in front of an audience including Republican Governor Bobby Jindal, he noticed that the mention of the Governor’s name brought out “boos”. His comment shows why I like Obama so much, Here’s the video: