Revoke Westboro Baptist's Tax-Exempt Status

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Sunday December 16, 2012 · 3:01 AM PST

2012/12/16 · 03:01

Tax exempt why?

Of everything our tax money goes to, this ought to be the least popular. We pay for their protests, we pay for their website, we pay for their hate, in the form of their tax exemption.

Unlike most churches, they are little more than their family. Unlike most churches, they take no positive role in their community, or towards any charity of note. Unlike most churches, they have one message - denigration and vitriol.

So can we kick them out of the tax exempt club, already? (Whitehouse.gov Petition Link)

Please?

Also up on Reddit, for more attention.

How Not to Get 'Punked' (Weiner) or: Verify your work

Xeriar

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Monday June 06, 2011 · 6:49 PM PDT

2011/06/06 · 18:49

Like a number of others, I could not care less about the scandal itself. If you want your leaders to be perfect, you are going to have to do without leaders.

This is a response to labradog's diary: How about some explanation from tech expert Weiner apologists?. What I'm going to propose is a rather simple policy that anyone can implement - for themselves or as a site-wide rule - to avoid this sort of embarrassment in the future.

In the digital age, there is no real excuse for not verifying your work.

The simplest method by which to do this is, to follow the claimed series of events, and check your investigative process each step of the way.

But all digital forensics does is catch people who are sloppy. That's it.

It is not a magic bullet. At the end of the day, the best evidence throughout this entire scenario was Anthony Weiner's own words.

Xeriar

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Sunday May 23, 2010 · 9:46 PM PDT

2010/05/23 · 21:46

In a couple of days, it will be approximately two weeks since Fishgrease made his colorful oil booming diary.

I read this place almost daily. I never saw it. I got linked instead to a video reenactment from Slashdot comments, yesterday. I found out the original was from Daily Kos here oh, about an hour ago.

In the midst of that, there's been nonsense about using seagoing centrifuges, using supertankers to gather the oil for later separation - citing a similar recovery operation where the surface spill was measured in meters of thickness rather than microns, and no human being could possibly catalog every bit of nonsense thrown forth regarding this spill.

Not even Obama.

Xeriar

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Friday December 11, 2009 · 9:11 AM PST

2009/12/11 · 09:11

Of a hundred and thirty million homes, nineteen million stand empty.

It's a bit disingenuous - there is no specific, de facto reason why every family in the United States cannot own a home. There would still be a few million left over. Enough few millions that we could do some quality control.

With over one million homeless children, defending the status quo for material reasons is simply absurd - there is plenty.

Xeriar

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Thursday October 29, 2009 · 7:27 AM PDT

2009/10/29 · 07:27

We needed something like them six years ago.

We continue to import more that thirty billion a month. At six thousand dollars a month per person on average, that is five million jobs.

The other alternatives are heavy, flat and across-the-board tariffs, and making American workers more efficient. Health care reform is a big part of the latter, and the former may certainly happen, but either way, we are short millions of jobs.

In 2006, senators Russ Feingold and Byron Dorgan introduced the Balanced Trade Restoration Act. It was referred to committee where it died.

We need this, nearly as badly as we need health care and banking reform. How can this get started again?

Cast away all who are imperfect and you will be left with a dead world

Xeriar

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Monday October 26, 2009 · 5:06 AM PDT

2009/10/26 · 05:06

One of the most vivid hypocrisies I have ever encountered is the division between 'true' and 'false' Christians. As if the accuser, in their lifetime, never held any wrong or hurtful beliefs in the name of their god.

We are all fighting for our future - for ourselves or others. Some of us are fighting for everyone, even for the spiteful, the hateful and their children.

Many who stand against us truly believe what they say. They may be misguided, they may be misinformed. Even when they do not - especially when they do not - the motivator is often fear.

This does not change the fundamental problem - people can be very firm about their misconceptions. We fight to improve their education, their health, their rights and their wealth. It is far too easy to get angry when they ignore facts, or endlessly repeat what matches their flawed vision of the world.

The moment you tell someone who sincerely believes that they adhere to a group, that they do not belong, you have lost them. I know this from personal experience, being raised catholic and dealing with evangelical Christians.

Xeriar

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Tuesday October 13, 2009 · 5:19 PM PDT

2009/10/13 · 17:19

This is the sort of idea that can only start as a whisper - I am just looking for comments.

Right now, the United States - and many other nations - reimburses for treatments, rather than cures. Obviously, the treatment process is rather necessary, so removing it from the equation entirely is naive.

Rather than reimburse treatments directly, however, a price tag could be placed on providing a cure or prevention instead. Individual treatments that do not directly lead to a cure should be specifically underreimbursed instead. That is, remove the very financial incentive to treat instead of cure.

Xeriar

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Sunday October 11, 2009 · 10:14 AM PDT

2009/10/11 · 10:14

What if, through volunteer effort, every nurse, doctor and assistant working for free clinics was fed? Supplied? Housed?

There is a lot of untapped labor in America right now. Quite a lot of untapped skill. Recessions are a human failing, a breakdown of trust. That when someone pays me a dollar, they wonder harder, care harder, if they will get a dollar's worth of good for it.

The lack of promissory notes to exchange does not reduce the skills that Americans possess. Farmers can still grow food, electricians can still wire houses. I can still maintain servers and it is a rare American that has only one or even just a few skills.

And yet, health care presents a disturbingly troubling issue. I spend a fair portion of my own time doubled over in pain, because I make too much to get public care... but no where near enough to pay for treatment on my own. Every moment I am in agony is a moment I am not doing my best, or even much at all. This is a reality faced by not a few, but millions of Americans.

This has to be solved.

Xeriar

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Wednesday October 07, 2009 · 8:46 PM PDT

2009/10/07 · 20:46

There is no such thing. Many states are larger than many countries that currently have a single-payer option. There are serious political advantages to forcing the health insurance industry to fight state by state.

As one of the major elements destroying our national productivity, it is important that a public option or single payer go into effect next year. If some states choose to opt out, we can take the fight to those states.

On the remote chance that any congresspeople might read this, here's a 'compromise'. Demand single payer, or a public option that is difficult to distinguish from it. Demand it begin in 2010. As in January 2010. Let state legislative bodies opt out.

What you don't win in 2010 you will win in 2011.

Xeriar

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Monday October 05, 2009 · 12:43 PM PDT

2009/10/05 · 12:43

It saddens me to see how poorly-framed the current health care debate is. I have my own suggestions for catch-phrases, but ultimately, I think we need to change the misconception that it is the unemployed who are suffering.

The health insurance industry is slaughtering the backbone of the American economy. The self employed, small businesses and the working poor. One person dies every fifteen minutes, but that is far from the entire story.

It boggles. I talk with any bank, even when I am having difficulty with payments, I get red-carpet treatment compared to my more secure time as an employee. I am not sure if there is any segment of American society, save perhaps for health insurers themselves, that actively discriminates against the self employed. They are doing their damnedest to destroy the American economy, and it's working.

Xeriar

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Friday September 18, 2009 · 10:49 PM PDT

2009/09/18 · 22:49

Much more does not - and should not - have to be said. In a media cycle that demands compressing complex issues into trite phrases, capturing the issue is critical.

We work, where's our health care!

There is not a question mark at the end of the sentence. This is a demand, not a query. The teabaggers are angry.

So am I.

I hope you are too.

Congress needs to know that, in volumes that make the opposition seem as infantile as it is.

Xeriar

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Saturday January 17, 2009 · 7:23 PM PST

2009/01/17 · 19:23

I recently submitted an idea to change.gov and while it was apparently well-liked - scoring six other votes before it got pushed off the front page despite being submitted to only one category - that's about the end of it.

Unless I try to promote it somehow, no more votes. Someone else thinks it brilliant, of course, perhaps others will too...

But if the best ideas are really going to go to the President, is his team really going to look ten thousand ideas down? A hundred thousand? I wonder, despite the flood of ideas, if we can create a 'rescue program' of sorts for certain ideas submitted to change.gov.

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Revoke Westboro Baptist's Tax-Exempt Status

How Not to Get 'Punked' (Weiner) or: Verify your work

On blaming Obama over improper oil booming

Nineteen million empty homes

Trade Certificates - where are they?

Cast away all who are imperfect and you will be left with a dead world

Pay Per Cure

An open letter to Keith Olbermann and anyone who would reform health care.

Change is not a Magic Word

The War on the Self Employed

There needs to be a "We work, where's our health care!" march

Citizen's Briefing Book Idea Rescue?