My message to Mitch McConnell: Bring it, you dirty vulture.

Bring your mess of a bill to the Senate floor.

We will see your hypocrisy..........and so will all the world.

And we will also see that awful bill go down to flaming defeat.

Some macro shots I took today of my agapanthus in the garden...

I am my sister's and my brother's keeper. And this is why...

I am a Democrat.

I believe in helping my less fortunate brothers and sisters, unlike the Republicans, who only want to see them disappear, preferably quickly.

I believe that ALL of us deserve to live freely and without pain under the sun.

I believe that we have a RIGHT to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

As John Donne said it: "...I am involved in mankind. Every man's death diminishes me..."


What the Republicans are trying to do angers me, and causes me to rise up to stop them in any way possible.

Who's with me?

From today's LA Times: Kansas vs. CA on taxes.

This is a very well-written op-ed about the effects of taxation on Kansas and California.

"Republican legislators in Kansas did the unthinkable this month: They voted to raise income taxes, ending a painful five-year experiment with an extreme anti-tax agenda introduced by Republican Gov. Sam Brownback. The Republican-held Legislature had to override a veto by the governor to pass the emergency tax increase, now crucial to prevent deep budget cuts for schools and other essential public services.

Kansas embarked on its trickle-down experiment in 2012. Brownback slashed taxes across the board, calling his plan “a shot of adrenaline into the heart of the Kansas economy.” Five years later, the state’s economy is on life support, and government expenses are expected to outpace income by $1.1 billion through June 2019. Instead of a poster child for the small-government theories championed by economist Arthur Laffer, tax reform activist Grover Norquist and the rest of the Republican Party, Kansas has become a cautionary tale about what happens when you expose their economic ideas to sunlight.

Meanwhile, a state that Republicans love to mock – California – has done just the opposite. In November of 2012, the same year Kansas plunged into its tax-slashing experiment, more than 54% of California voters approved Proposition 30, a measure that temporarily raised income taxes for the state’s wealthiest residents and increased the sales tax in order to fund schools and pay down debt. The tax hikes helped California erase $27 billion in debt, and the state has since enjoyed some of the strongest economic growth in the country. (Of course that growth isn’t due to tax hikes alone; the state has a robust tech sector, among other factors.)

If states can indeed serve as laboratories of democracy, as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis suggested, there’s no question which state embarked on the more successful test.
Why do Republicans want to replicate Kansas’s failure on a national scale?"

All of it at the link: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-steyer-kansas-tax-cuts-brownback-california-20170622-story.html

From the Liberals Unite Facebook page:

I think that part of tRump's motivation is this:

Any attention is better than no attention.

Everything he does is to keep the spotlight on him. I don't think he cares if it's positive or negative, just as long as he gets it. Of course, positive attention is the BEST.

He's like a bad little kid in this. We've all known them. Some folks never grow up or out of this phase.

And we got stuck with him.