Posts Tagged ‘about Paul Evans’

Compassionate Conservatives – Mitt Romney: ‘I’m Not Concerned About The Very Poor’

Feb 2nd, 12 / 0 Comments

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With One Liberal Christian’s
Story of Poverty

Compassionate Conservatives – Mitt Romney:
‘I’m Not Concerned About The Very Poor’

Mitt Romney: ‘I’m Not Concerned About The Very Poor’, The Huffiington Post, February 1, 2012, by Luke Johnson, excerpts quoted verbatim, with essay on poverty by Logos57 owner Paul Evans:

Note by Paul Evans: I cannot republish this entire article because of copyright, however, I just want to re-emphasize that these Republicans truly do not care about us, the very poor, for I belong to that category. I will have more to say about this later.

Huffington Post: Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney said on Wednesday that he’s “not concerned about the very poor,” citing the social safety net in place for that segment of the populace and adding that he’s focused on the middle class.

*Midnight Oil*
Under the Overpass

“I’m in this race because I care about Americans. I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it,” the Republican front-runner said Wednesday on CNN, following his victory in the Florida primary. “I’m not concerned about the very rich, they’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of the America, the 90 percent, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.”

CNN’s Soledad O’Brien pressed him on his comments, adding that they may sound odd for Americans who are very poor.

“Well you had to finish the sentence, Soledad,” he replied. “I said ‘I’m not concerned about the very poor that have a safety net but if it has holes in it, I will repair them.’ The challenge right now — we will hear from the Democrat party the plight of the poor. And there’s no question it’s not good being poor and we have a safety net to help those that are very poor. But my campaign is focused on middle-income Americans.”

“We have a very ample safety net,” said Romney. “And we can talk about whether it needs to be strengthened or whether there are holes in it. But we have food stamps, we have Medicaid, we have housing vouchers, we have programs to help the poor.”

Programs in the “safety net” are also suffering during the economic recession. Medicaid, for example faces cuts as states attempt to balance budgets at a time when more people are using the program. GOP lawmakers have also eyed cuts in food stamps as food prices rise, even though more Americans are using the the program as a consequence of the economic recession.

Romney’s policies call for cutting federal spending and reconfiguring the social safety net. He calls for an immediate five-percent cut to non-discretionary spending, which would hit the safety net hard. He proposes turning Medicaid into a block grant program and undertaking a “fundamental restructuring of government programs and services.” He also calls for capping spending at 20 percent of GDP — a significant cut — and adds that he “will pursue further cuts” as spending comes “under control.” ….

Read the full article here.

See Mitt Romney Praises Safety Net He Wants To Shred.

UPDATE: See Romney: I ‘misspoke’ about the poor, The Raw Story, February 3, 2012, by David Edwards.

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My Own Story
of Poverty and Faith

Commentary by Paul Evans: I happen to be one of the “very poor.” There are two people living with me I rescued from homelessness. I did not know them at first, but took a chance because I thought it was the right and Christian thing to do at that time. I never looked back. For almost two years now, the three of us have struggled with my own disability for mental illness, while attempting to live in my father’s house.

We are trying to pay for repairs to the home, such as replacement of a hot water heater, and also we are somehow responsible for paying the property taxes, even though my Dad owns the house. I am in severe danger of losing the home because of non-payment of these taxes. I make $8,400 as our total income. (Parenthetically, did you know that as of last February, the rate of unemployment for those making $20,000 a year or less was 31 percent?)

I actually GOT a job this last spring designing websites for a software firm in Wooster, and doing cold call telemarketing to get more work. Immediately, Social Security deducted an amount almost equal to half of what I receive from them, my food stamps were almost cut in half, and I had a new “medical spenddown” so that I was making about as much NOT working as I did with my 20 hour a week job. Is THIS how the government encourages people to get off of disability???

To just about finish our chances at survival here, six miles out in the country, we have been without a car for the last six months. (There is a chance I might actually buy a pickup this Friday. HEY!)

Do you know what it is like to go to a gas station and beg for someone to please give you a few dollars so you can drive home? Do you know what it is like to be out of money halfway through the month, for two years? Do you know actual hunger… and not being able to buy the three of you McDonald’s 99 cent double cheeseburgers? Do you know what it is like when your friends first avoid you, then drop you as friends? Well, I guess “liberal” “charity” has its limits.

I truly think that all these “moderate” or “compassionate” conservatives should have to spend six months of their lives in some kind of situation like ours, manditorily, doing some kind of service. Then we would see what kind of legislation they would come up with. For years now, we have seen exactly how little Republicans care about the little guy. People, Wake Up!!!

Most people in the United States of America will never understand this kind of poverty. But when a candidate for President of the United States says and then confirms that he is “not concerned about the very poor” in this country, it upsets me terribly, even though I totally expect that, and worse, from them. Of course it upsets me! Enough to write this post, when I have never described my poverty on this website before. For shame, Mitt Romney!

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A Message for Patriotic Americans, Republicans, and Tea Party types: I imagine conservative Christians or conservatives in general may think that figuratively I am the “devil” or in some way dangerous. I want to briefly set the record straight. My Dad was a Marine in World War II. His father was a career Marine officer who finished his career in command of the Marine battalion guarding Washington, D.C. in that same war. It was the last time (so far) that we have had troops stationed in Washington. Before that “Skipper,” as we called Dad’s Dad, chased the original Sandino (think Sandinistas) around the Nicaraguan countryside, and then was in command of the Marines guarding the gunboats which patrolled the Yangtze river in China. So Dad spent three years of his childhood in (Nationalist) Shanghai.

Continuing on with my Dad’s story, after World War II, with a masters from Georgetown in Russian history, he worked for 13 years for ASA, NSA and CIA. In 1971 he received his doctorate in Russian language and literature from Yale University. I am 55 and have lived with my father my entire adult life except when I was in college. He translated eleven books that I was the editor for. He taught me. He is 86, and is in a local nursing home, with senile dementia. Please say a prayer for him if you would.

Mom had a bachelor’s degree in botany and her father, with whom we all lived eight years of my childhood, was Curator of the Smithsonian Division of Cultural Anthropology for decades. My sister, who died tragically in 2004, was a veterinarian, and well-known in dog showing circles. Yes, things might have been very different for me, had not mental illness intervened: I will note that currently I have no symptoms. As for my own credentials, although I have a bachelor’s from Miami University (of Ohio), and an “all-but-thesis” of a masters, I am about the least of my family in credentials. But I am a patriotic American, as was my Dad and his Dad before him, thank you very much. Just to set the record straight.

I also believe that I have described a very plausible situation where someone of good education could be in danger of homelessness, but I ask: Does Mitt Romney or any of that 90 percent of the middle class care?

By the way, Republicans and rich folk everywhere, what part of that thing Jesus said about a camel, the eye of a needle, and the kingdom of heaven don’t you get?

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Why I Had to Quit Blogging Politics (Updated)

Aug 31st, 10 / 74 Comments

Evans Liberal Politics
Time Frame: Forever

 

Why I Had to Quit Blogging Politics (Updated)

Advice and Warning For New Bloggers

Don’t Let This Happen to You!

Evans Liberal Politics, August 31, 2010, by Paul Evans:

I want to do a creditable job with this blog post because it might be the last you see from me for a while. Certainly you won’t see anything else from me today, and I want to let you know that I will no longer be blogging “the news” on a regular basis. I can’t. I am going to have a life now. Blogging liberal news and politics ruined my life. And it could very easily happen to you. It’s a sucker’s game, and you’re not going to win, and you’re not going to make a fortune. I just wanted to recount here what happened to me by way of an explanation, just in case there might be one or two people who read this who might care, either because they are my friends or because you might have picked this up on Google, and you might actually want to know, so you can avoid what happened to me.

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It started with a genuine and worthwhile interest in the political process. I have some liberal friends. One of them volunteers for the Democratic Party and another is the Wayne County Democratic Party official secretary and also belongs to the Wayne County Progressive Network. Another friend, a church pastor, is active in charity and liberal political causes. So it was natural that in about 2005, I started to get involved a little as an activist. If I hadn’t had problems most of my life with mental illness, I probably would have got involved a lot earlier in my life than that.

In late 2005, I became friends with the owner of a computer repair shop. A guy working out of his office in downtown Wooster and I became friends a few years later, and that guy was a website designer. Well, you can put two and two together. The bug bit and I started taking courses in website design from him, and learned how to program in HTML, XHTML and CSS. Meanwhile, Obama burst onto the national political scene. It was July, 2008, and I started campaigning for Obama, mainly over in Canton, Ohio. I had campaigned some in the fall of 2005, also. Then Obama got the nomination and I started putting liberal news and politics posts up on my brand new website design business website, Evans Web Design.

But I got to thinking, I was alienating half of my potential business clientele, since any conservatives — and Wayne County is 62 percent Republican — sure wouldn’t very likely want to do business with a website designer who had all this liberal news and politics all over his business website. So, I guess it must have been in about March of 2009, I bought the domain http://www.evans-politics.com/ and moved all of my music, my music videos, my nature images, and every last drop of the liberal news and politics material over onto the new Evans Liberal Politics. And so it began.

At that time I was seriously dating a lady from Cleveland, and some time was occupied editing and in fact rewriting her book on spiritualist Christianity, If You Plant Roses You Don’t Get Carnations: An Introduction to Spiritualism (Amazon book description and purchase page). My mother Eleanor had also recently died (February 8, 2007) and I was completely responsible for the care of my elderly father, Jack.

Well Evans Liberal Politics went from being a hobby to become what I have realized has been a nightmare in my life. It started with a sincere belief, arising out of my participation in the Obama campaign, that ordinary people might have a hand in changing the world, and was also very much my own means of self expression and I enjoyed it. But then I started to get ambitious for my website.

Let me add parenthetically that it sure feels odd writing this particular article, since it’s just more of the same. It’s doing what I’ve “always done,” putting up more content on my website. But it’s the last time for a while. Not only has Evans Liberal Politics brought you a minimum of two, and usually three to six or more blog posts every single day since November of 2008, but the process itself has exhausted me, ennervated me, and ruined me financially and as an individual human being. During that period, I wrote a more personal news column (like this one) about once a week or more. I don’t know, but I think writing a column when you are trying hard to use good English, connect with readers, give out some good news or political content, and somehow express yourself as though you are an experienced professional writer, is not so easy. I tried so hard that the effort actually had me on the edge of a physical breakdown for exhaustion for maybe a year, now. And really, it brought me nothing but heartache, no wide readership, no web popularity, just false hopes that extended on far too long. They only could have extended on this long if, as has been the case, I was basically obsessed with “becoming somebody” on the web. No reasonable person would have kept at it this long, making essentially zero money, and with no audience. But here’s what happened.

I was spending hours every day putting up the news for my website. My best friend and his wife started commenting that I was spending all my time with Evans Liberal Politics, and that it didn’t seem very healthy to them. And I started staying up late at night, getting the news ready for the next day’s audience. (Every night about 11 p.m. or midnight began the daily struggle to get some new material up so that there would be at least a little traffic, a few people who would want to come to my website. If you don’t put out new material for Google’s and Yahoo’s search engines, you don’t get found in searches and you don’t get visitors.) My website designer friend gave me advice on how to make the site better and how to popularize it, but it never got very popular, despite my efforts. I just tried harder.

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Soon I was putting up four or five — or seven or eight – articles a day. For several days, a few months ago, I was putting up ten articles per day, but the traffic never increased above 100 to 200 — on a good day — page views per day. My parents had benefited from my poor deceased sister’s IRA, and also had inherited some money from Dad’s mother Mae, my grandmother, so there was some extra money and I started to advertise with Google and then also Facebook and Microsoft AdCenter. This was pay-per-click advertising, where the website ad gets featured with the results of relevant searches, and you end up paying about 75 cents to even a dollar or more each time somebody clicks an ad and comes to your website. It added up, too. Fast.

One Blog Owner’s Story


I kept trying, but still, the traffic didn’t increase much. If I had fifty thousand dollars to put into advertising, then maybe I would have gotten somewhere, but I just ended up spending about three or four thousand dollars and got nowhere. I was still trying, though, and I still had a lot of ambition for my liberal news and politics website. In about September of 2009, I got really ambitious. I started looking around for a high powered marketer with a national reputation. Well I didn’t know how to find just the right marketer, and I’m sure I went way too much overboard, but I found Website Consultants out of Miami and New York state, and they advised me that if I hired them, they would change the website over from one using Adobe Dreamweaver CS3, and later Dreamweaver CS4, which is a website creation program, to a WordPress installation. WordPress had a lot of great plugins and has become all the rage in blogging circles. It’s free, too. (For those with some technical knowledge, WordPress is a PHP based, MySQL datbase that needs a Linux server to work. PHP is the programming language WordPress operates with, although it is easy to find a free plugin that allows you to make posts in the much simpler programming language HTML or XHTML, which has to some extent superceded the older HTML.)

By the way, I wanted to take this opportunity to say that as a website designer, I have learned a lot in these few years. I can now easily design a WordPress site myself, and optimize it so that IF you can yourself come up with content that will draw in traffic, I’d be happy to design your site. With the internet the way it is, that’s a big IF. It’s darned hard to get popular on the web. I believe I now have some proof of that fact. But please feel encouraged to either email me or phone 330-202-7661, and we can talk. But I really think that my own limitations are not much in the area of website design any longer: I’ve gotten quite good through my experience with Evans Liberal Politics, and would be happy to design your website or blog. Please contact me if you are interested.

It’s easy to see what happened here. I became obsessed with Evans Liberal Politics. National high powered marketers are NOT cheap, and it cost me $700 for a three month trial and then I went all out and spent $5,200 to hire them on a long term contract. Evans Liberal Politics became a WordPress site and the domain (website address) changed from http://www.evans-politics.com/ to the simpler http://evans-politics.com/. Websites Consultants fixed it so that typing in the www address redirected a web browser to the new address without any www’s and I thought I was going to become somebody.

The funny thing was, even though I spent thousands on a national level consultant and several thousand on advertising, my traffic never picked up that much. I kept trying, and refused to consider getting discouraged. I was on the first page of ten results from a Google search for the search term, “liberal politics”! To me, that meant I JUST HAD to start getting a lot of traffic soon. I started putting advertising on both my website design site and Evans Liberal Politics. Now, if you BUY advertising, you’re going to run up a fortune in costs in no time. But the funny thing is with all the advertising companies I tried, it doesn’t matter how many times somebody loads a page with your ads, you don’t get paid a cent, then. AND you don’t even get paid anything if people click on your ads and are taken to a web page where they might buy something. NO the way all this advertising works is, to get paid, the ads have to appear one heck of a lot of times, and a lot of people have to click on them, and then they have to actually buy something. Then, and only then, do you get paid anything.

I have even wondered if Google, Yahoo, Bing and the rest of them have the search engines totally rigged so that only the “big boys” get the traffic. But I guess mainly the limitations are my own, and mainly there the fact that, while I am pretty good at programming web pages, writing, editing and finding authors for the site, I just have never had that certain “magic” that it takes to find a topic, a video, or somehow make your site into something that becomes very popular. And I no longer mind that, at all.

So You Want to Write A Blog?


As you can see, unless you’re really, really popular with many thousands of page views, you’re not going to essentially make anything. On my best day, I had about 1,100 page views and made almost six dollars off of the ads. But that was a huge exception, and other than that, the most page views I get is a little over 200 views. And perhaps about 100 or 120 unique visitors. So I might make 50 or 60 cents off of the ads if I’m lucky, that is, IF one person goes so far as to buy something. The main reason I was encouraged to keep trying was that in terms of my Google rankings, thanks to a few WordPress plugins and great search engine optimization by Website Consultants, I kept getting high rankings for broad, widely searched phrases on Google Search, which about 60 or 70 percent of what people use for searches for content they are interested in. I never could understand how, with a billion personal computer users worldwide, I could be featured often as the top result for the search term “liberal politics,” or at least be on the first page of results, and for example be number two for the search term “liberal Christian news,” and number five for “rock and pop playlist,” and still not get the traffic I needed to either make a little money or at least have the satisfaction of knowing I was reaching a wide audience.

I suppose I could also have been luckier, and someone who really knew what they were doing about making a website popular might have decided to partner with me, or help me. Maybe then things might have worked out. I didn’t have the money to continue to employ Website Consultants and no one ever volunteered to help me at all with Evans Liberal Politics. I only have a certain level of knowledge as a website designer. I know one thing that would have helped is if I knew the programming language Flash, or was good with PHP, I could have made the blog posts expandable, so that only the first paragraph or two was showing, and then the pages wouldn’t have been so terribly long. I think a lot of people may have objected to having to scroll down real long pages, and that may have hurt the popularity or the site. Daily Kos has expandable posts and I always wished I could have programmed that into my home page.

Another money drain was because my intense love of music caused me to start buying royalty rights to stream music for the site. I thought that having some really good music on my Paul’s Playlist of Rock and Pop Hits would get me the traffic I wanted. At the time, most songs from artists you have mainly never heard of cost about $30 each to buy the royalty rights to stream one song. That cost me a lot, too. But I was still trying. (Later I learned how to find really good music to stream for you over on Paul’s Playlist of Rock and Pop Hits for nothing, and I know we have a really good product for you there. 183 rock, pop and electronic rock hits, most by well-known, commercial artists. But it just never took off.) Sigh.

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Go Fuck Yourself up your ass with something huge and painful

Well it got so that I didn’t do anything else in my life but work on Evans Liberal Politics. I’m sure my friendships suffered because of this, and I know my dating life suffered, and I became basically obsessed to get Evans Liberal Politics popular and find a widespread audience. I am very sad to admit to you that, due to my stupidity and obsession, I am in fact guilty of having neglected the proper care of my elderly father when he was at home with me. Not a lot, but a little. Jack is a very wonderful man, and has been a wonderful father to me, and to think I could have been spending many hours with him doing stuff together and was just glued to the old computer instead… And I will never live that down. I will always know that I put my ambition for this website ahead of being my father’s proper caregiver and companion in the last years of his life. That’s really sad. I even neglected my own personal hygiene. And also my addiction to cigarettes got worse as I just sat hour after hour, blogging away.

It’s a sucker’s game folks. Don’t get sucked in. I know for certain that I provided a quality product, that I have always been high in the Google search rankings, and that I never stopped for a single day when I had it within the realm of human possibility, to always put up fairly interesting, and relevant content. Moreover I kept up with the news, and I rarely let a good topic that was in that day’s news slip buy without putting up an article about it. I managed to get really well thought of authors for Evans Liberal Politics, like Clinton’s Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich. Back before he died, the wonderful progressive writer Howard Zinn used to let me post his stuff, too. I got several featured writers from Daily Kos and also Campaign from America’s Future, too. And I found out that the AlterNet and Truthout original articles, and those from Common Dreams.org, have no copyright and can be easily republished at no risk. I was always careful to put a link with description to the original with any article I ever republished. And I spent hours and hours slaving away myself, trying to write an original article every other day or so, if for no other reason than to lend my website some additional credibility, so I thought.

The single most popular liberal blog, Daily Kos, is reputed to get between 2 and 4 million unique viewers per day. If I had even got to the point where I was regularly getting ten thousand, I would not be writing this particular article, and I would have kept trying. But I think that for ordinary people, trying to get popular on the web today is a sucker’s game.

Well, I want my life back. I stopped enjoying using my own computer a year or so ago. All my time was spent blogging or arranging details like marketing, advertising and authors for Evans Liberal Politics. And do you think a page or blog post just APPEARS on the web??? You have to get the author’s permission, and then you have to code, or program, the blog post. You end up typing and cutting and pasting hour after hour. And to do this since November of 2008 and average perhaps 170 page views per day, just isn’t worth it. I neglected my father, I became obsessed, and I made my own life a kind of living hell, not to mention squandering a few tens of thousands of dollars I would dearly love to have back.

Tomorrow (which is today, since it is almost 3 o’clock in the morning), I am not going to be adding more to the site than is here with this article, and in fact, the regular, exhausting process of putting out the daily news is over for me. I want to live again. I don’t want to be a typing automaton. What does it matter at all to me if I get ten viewers a day or 150? What difference could that possibly make to a sane person? I want to take the time to watch some movies on my computer, and surf the web. Moreover, I want a life away from the computer. I want to shower and shave every day, visit my Dad at the nursing home every day, and begin anew the learning process of being a human being.

So that’s it from Evans Liberal Politics. I Quit. Not one person ever emailed me from this site and then befriended me. People just aren’t that friendly, I guess. Have a wonderful day, everyone! It’s been real. I might put up something I’m especially interested in once in a while. But I won’t be doing it to try to attract an audience. I’ve learned my lesson there. I am going to take my dog for a walk today. Watch a movie and play in the sunshine. Not only that, but I’ve been interviewing for a real job, and yesterday I just may have been hired at not one, but two, part time jobs. Real work. That pays money. I do believe that I am going to “get a life.” I want to thank Bert Bishop, Kay Bowen, Linda King, and especially Shannon Hedrick and Wesley Wright for helping me get to the point to where I could see that I had to “stop the madness” and begin living my life again. May God Bless you all, each and every one of you. ~ Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans

UPDATE: September 3, 2010, from Paul: I was just hired to do telemarketing from home here in Wooster by a Cleveland based marketing firm. You make calls using your computer and one of three programs they supply you with. Yesterday I spent six or seven hours studying their materials and filling out all the paperwork required for the job and mailed it out Priority Mail. The job is 15 to 30 hours a week and has a flexible schedule, which will in fact leave me with quite a bit of free time, especially since I don’t require a whole lot of sleep.

The fact is, blogging is at this point pretty much “in my blood,” and I actually enjoy typing and am a really good typist. So expect continued blog posts from me, even though the audience is quite small, just as a means of self expression. I know that some few people really do enjoy Evans Liberal Politics, and I enjoy putting out the blog posts. Maybe that makes me unusual or even weird, but I don’t agree with the weird part. Just a different sort of animal. A blogger. Evans Liberal Politics will therefore live on! However I am really going to try to take better care of myself. Also, having made many of the mistakes a new blogger can make, I find myself more experienced and wiser, I hope, about the whole blogging scene. I am going to really try to get enough sleep, too. Thanks to anyone who read this far and might be concerned. Love and Peace, Paul

"Old bloggers never die, they just become part of the internet legacy."

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the Evans Liberal Politics logo button serves as a link to Queen's monster hit Another One Bites the Dust "Another One Bites The Dust:" Sigh. This is Queen, of course. Blogs Come and Blogs Go. Only the Internet Goes On Forever. — 3:25

custom cover art for the Swiss AC-DC tribute band Live Wire performing It's A Long Way to the Top If You Wanna Rock and Roll "It’s A Long Way to The Top If You Wanna Rock & Roll," by the AC/DC Swiss tribute band Live/Wire (sorry, no bagpipes!) This is my unofficial theme song for Evans Liberal Politics. — 5:34

thumbnail of a person offering their heart from the palm of their hand “Come Save Me”, a meticulously produced, downtempo, smooth R&B / Pop track, by Dan Gatreau. I keep wondering where the woman who will save me from all this is, and why she hasn’t come into my life yet. — 3:07

a haunting image of twighlight and subdued sunshine in a wilderness setting “Blue Shiva,” a really cool and hip sort of long electronic piece by Massimo Migliosi, obtained from download.com (when they were still offering free music). — 11.09

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On Quitting Smoking

Aug 19th, 10 / 7 Comments

Evans Liberal Politics
August 19, 2010

 

a happy bright yellow smiley because Jesus loves me and today I am saveda happy bright yellow smiley because Jesus loves me and today I am saved

Smile, Jesus Loves You

 

On Quitting Smoking

 

Putting the “men” in menstruation

 

Plus Tips On Internet Dating and Quitting Smoking

 

Putting the “men” in menstruation, Salon, August 12, 2010, by Tracy Clark-Flory, quoted verbatim, with essay by Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans:

Comment by Paul: If this article is at all disjointed, YOU try withdrawing from cigarettes and see how coherent you are!

OK, so this article is a little strange, what with the bizzare ‘menstruation machine’ and leading with that. If you’ve seen it before I invite you to look at it anew with the addition at the bottom below the music. But it’s really an article about my personal odyssey in internet dating and quitting smoking. Particularly the quitting smoking. I’ve never done anything so hard for me in my life. I can’t really believe how hard it is for me. But I’ve never been more determined, and I pray to Jesus and I know that with God’s help I will get through this. This is day three without cigarettes, about 44 hours so far. My stomach and torso feels like it’s trying to pull itself inside out, but I may even be a little “together” today. If anybody wants to lend a few words of encouragement, please leave a comment or email me.

I wanted to add some material that might express my empathy to the several girls I have dated, so I found this Salon.com article about how they’ve now invented a machine that simulates for a man what the experience of menstruating is like for a woman. In other words, I have found the whole internet dating thing rather painful and even something I don’t spend much time at any more. Therefore I simply wanted to find some piece about men expressing their empathy to women by experiencing their pain. I know I have been hurt more than I have hurt women that I dated. But still, I just wanted to express my empathy as well as say “I’m sorry” to anyone I might have hurt. Particularly to one lady. The one that should have worked out.

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Salon: Good news, boys: You finally get to feel what it’s like to menstruate! Now you too can experience the sensation of being repeatedly punched in your abdomen — from the inside out — and having to deal with an inconvenient flow of blood between your legs. You have the Menstruation Machine to thank for this brave new world of period by proxy. Consider it the prequel to the Empathy Belly; it’ll be a blockbuster, I’m sure.

That is, if it ever leaves the realm of high-concept art and enters the commercial market. (Chances of that happening: slim to none.) The machine, designed by Japanese artist Hiromi Ozaki, wraps around your waist and is “fitted with a blood dispensing mechanism and lower-abdomen-stimulating electrodes” to simulate “the pain and bleeding of an average 5 day menstruation process of a human.” As far as I can tell, it doesn’t actually alter your hormonal state to such a degree that you tear up at the mere sight of a puppy (which is what happens to me every month-slash-day).

It isn’t just designed for men, according to Ozaki, and could be used by women “when menstruation may become obsolete in future and the biological process has become a mere ritual of identity.” For the time being, though, its main aim is to allow men to walk a couple miles in women’s shoes. The music video below tells the story of Takashi, a boy who sets out to understand, Via Carnal Nation.)

Menstruation Machine Invites You to “Feel the Pain:”


"This creation reminds me of an example from one of Midori’s Japanese fetish shopping trip articles, but instead it is a disturbingly brilliant invention created by an artist named Hiromi Ozaki and is part of the Design Interactions exhibit at the Royal College of Art in London."

If you’re adventurous, see The Kinky Shopaholic’s Guide to Japan, Carnal Nation, January 8, 2010, by Midon.

(A menstruation machine is also about all I could find appropriate to what it feels like for ME to have to go through quitting smoking.)

Essay by Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans
on What I Can Guess About What It’s Like to be a Girl
and a Few Internet Dating Tips As Well As
Tips on Quitting Smoking:


Paul: I’ve been doing the internet dating thing for almost six years now. I find many of the same people year after year on the same free websites like Plentyoffish and OkCupid. (These are two of the largest and best absolutely free dating websites, for those of us not made of money. These are the two free dating websites that I would recommend to you.)

Here’s a hint guys and gals about what you’re going to find on these sites. There are some people who are there year after year and most of these are just after sex or else there is something really wrong with them. Now for myself, I feel like I just had to quit smoking mainly, and God would take care of the rest. I quit yesterday at 6:32 p.m. and I’m doing OK. I feel like that’s the one thing I’d been getting really wrong in my life and that God was calling upon me to do, and now I know I CAN DO IT and that everything is going to be OK.

Right now, I want to apologize to a dozen or so women I disappointed on these sites by not being true in the beginning stages of communication, or else not following through when I had started something with them. All I can say is, eventually on these sites, everyone gets to the point where when you know it’s not going to be a good relationship for you, and then the general rule is that you just cease communication and that has to be considered fair, when there are simply a lot of people you have to decide pretty fast that you don’t want to talk to (for whatever reason, sometimes just a question of personal preference). I do try to explain myself, but sometimes you just can’t be honest, as feelings would be hurt worse if you were. Sometimes it is just a question of bad timing. Anyway I’m sorry if I hurt anyone. But I haven’t done anything I’m ashamed about and I haven’t done anything that hasn’t been “done to me” five times over. The internet dating world can get pretty unappealing, and there’s a lot of dross you have to sift through before you find that one “gem”.

All I ever wanted to do is find just the right girl and settle down with her in a loving and caring relationship. I’ve found sometimes it isn’t so easy, maybe really more because I am a computer geek and spend all this time with computers instead of it being a question of the smoking. But I do feel that God has been calling on me to quit smoking. (Believe me, ladies, if you give me a chance at a relationship, my focus will be fully on you!)

I think back to one lady I loved very much from Yahoo Personals, which is a subscription site I was on back in 2007. I met a woman there at that time and fell very much in love with her. The only reason, (ironically now that I have stopped smoking) that it didn’t work out was that both she and her autistic (and quite wonderful) daughter were very much intolerant, both spiritually and morally, of cigarette smoking. And her daughter was allergic to cigarette smoke. Her husband had died from it a few years before I met her, and, quite naturally, she wasn’t going to go through that with me. And I would have died from smoking cigarettes, it was obvious that it was killing me through COPD and emphysema. I know. It killed my mother that way in front of my eyes. I was her caregiver at the end of her life, and I found her body the morning she died. So the day before yesterday I quit. I had tried the patch, the gum, the lozenges, and Chantix (which is a non-nicotine, feel-good medicine that claims it works with 44 percent of the people who have tried it), but there was just no way I could quit, until God gave me the grace to do so.

Facts About Smoking and Your Health and Quitting Successfully:


photo of a stained hand holding a smoking cigarette and omitting noxious smoke, on a green background

The fact is, 90 percent of the people who have successfully quit smoking cigarettes, (and there are one billion of us in the world who have successfully quit), quit successfully by just stopping cold turkey. (Listen only if you want to be successful in quitting; ignore this otherwise.) There is one website I would highly recommend to help with quitting cold turkey, and that is WhyQuit.com. It will help you with motivation and facts and techniques. Another good website is SilkQuit. There you will find, among other aids, the Silk Meter. It is a little program that starts up with Windows and monitors a.) how many cigarettes you have “not smoked” (since you quit), b.) how much money you have saved (it really adds up!) and c.) statistically, on average, how many months (or years) and days and hours you have added to your life by having quit for however long. This is a really neat motivational tool. They ask you to donate $4.95 but you can download it for free if you are poor (like me).

Another thing is, cigarettes have 454 carcinogenic additives in them, and most of those are addictive. The exceptions are Winston and Natural American Spirit cigarettes, which claim to be pure tobacco without additives. Don’t be fooled. Additives or no additives, NICOTINE KILLS. Cigarettes are designed to be the most pleasurable and addictive possible nicotine delivery vehicle that science can devise. This horrible addictiveness is what we’re up against. Smoking causes 30 percent of all cancer deaths and 87 percent of all deaths from lung cancer. It also kills slowly, sucking the vibrancy and vitality from your body and leaving you out of breath, and full of a drug (nicotine) which causes an addiction described by WikiAnswers as “more addictive than heroin”. For those of us who have suffered from mental illness, such as myself, particularly schizophrenia, “data from the National Comorbidity Survey revealed that whereas the population prevalence of current smoking among those with no mental illness was 22.5%, some 41% of those reporting a mental illness were current smokers.” (Medscape) The National Alliance on Mental Illness reports that “nearly 45 percent of all smokers in the United States are people with a ‘mental disorder.’” And Medscape adds that “those with a diagnosable psychiatric disorder consume an estimated 34% to 44% of all cigarettes smoked in the United States.”

It’s one hell of an addiction, particularly for the mentally ill, who usually can afford to buy cigarettes far less than the average person, too. Make no mistake about it, cigarette smoking is the leading preventable cause of death in the world today. But if you’re like me, you just can’t quit until the time is right, and then, through God’s grace, it just falls away. Not easily though. Not at all easily. The withdrawal is exquisite and lasts in the primary sense about three days of sheer hell (which I am going through now) and then about two weeks of discomfort. For me, it felt like my stomach was sucking itself inside out, and I trembled with nervousness and considered checking into a mental hospital yesterday at the time I quit. The worst statistic is that 50% of all regular smokers die as a result of smoking. And did you ever wonder why, when you smoke cigarettes, you don’t sleep so well and wake up after just a few hours? It’s true, read the MedScape article which proves that Cigarette Smoking Causes Sleep Disturbances. I think that accounts for my own history of insomnia.

Please Share this Article with Your Friends
Who Are Trying to Quit Smoking
or Doing the Internet Dating Thing

small photo of Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans from April, 2009

Remember back when you were a kid? How the hours went past pleasantly and you weren’t just dividing up the times between the times when you got to smoke a cigarette. The awful truth is that, when you smoke cigarettes, the only time when you are really content is when you are smoking a cigarette. That plus whatever. Wouldn’t you like to be really free of that? Free to spend your time whatever way you want to? Not simply thinking about the next time you get to smoke? And it’s even worse if you’re poor. I was at a local food bank (I’m not too proud to confess), and there was this nice English lady there who said her father always used to say, when he met a smoker: “Oh, you smoke. You’ll never be rich then….”

Sometimes, if you are going to, in the figurative sense, “withdraw from heroin”, you need to do a little methadone to ease the withdrawal. If you absolutely have to, I would recommend smoking a cigar. Do not EVER give in and smoke a cigarette. (This is my own personal technique and all the experts argue against this.) I still will smoke a cigar every now and then to make the suffering a little easier. Cigars are NO SAFER than cigarettes, and you get a LOT of nicotine, but somehow as a lifelong cigarette smoker I find they just don’t satisfy me like a good full flavor cigarette will, and they lessen the suffering of withdrawal. This is my own personal technique and all the experts are against this, so you may not want to try it. But it’s a lot easier to taper down and then quit smoking cigars than it is for cigarettes, believe me. This is absolutely true, I am certain of it. Hey comedian George Burns lived to be 90 and smoked about ten cigars a day. And you don’t have to keep on smoking them. It’s easier to quit cigars than cigarettes. I am certain in my own mind that there are lots of addictive chemicals in cigarettes that just aren’t in cigars. I know in some sense it’s a cop out, but not really. I personally find it a LOT easier to go a long time and not smoke a cigar than I do for a cigarette. The addiction just isn’t as bad for me. And now God is calling me to quit all cigars and/or pipes, too.

sign which says that Smoking Kills

Won’t you all please say a prayer for me in my own journey of quitting all smoking altogether, and not just for me, but for all the 5.4 million people who die in the world each year from smoking cigarettes? We don’t need your condemnation, or your condescension, or your shunning and judgment of us as smokers. We don’t need all the ways you make it difficult for us in this life, not just where we can smoke, and when we can smoke, but also the fact that many people in the world won’t have anything to do at all with a smoker. You won’t date us, you won’t front us a fiver for a badly needed pack of cigs, and basically, you shun us as if we were evil.

We need your love, and your compassion, and your caring encouragement and help to quit, NOT all the shunning and making our lives hell. I say that totally as one who has “been through the wars”. Just say a prayer for us, and maybe do something nice for one of us that you know, won’t you?

It’s not so easy for smokers in Ohio either, since one cannot legally smoke near a public building or business within 100 feet of the door. Have mercy on the poor smokers you know. I know from experience, I wanted to quit really badly for three years before I was at all successful. The song about that below is “Grace Tells Another Story” by Mercy Me. Pray to God, smokers, that somehow he might grant you the grace to stop smoking cigarettes. Remember that 90 percent of successful quitters do it cold turkey and that those nicotine patch’s are addictive, too. You all have my profound sympathy and love. God Bless a smoker.

Heck, 50 percent of the people who have suffered heart attacks due to smoking can’t stop smoking cigarettes. Must we judge them? Do we stop being compassionate to them because they cannot stop? Would we withhold our love or aid?

InformIT (Pearson Education)

Continuing on the subject of internet dating: I remember my time with “C,” the lady I met on Yahoo Personals, very well. She was a wonderful, special lady and I would have been very happy with her. I remember that when I met her in July of 2007, she had been in menopause for a year of so, and continuing through the two years of our relationship, she continued to have terrible hot flashes and other problems from the menopause. I mean, we were even engaged and I got to see first hand how badly menopause can get to a lady. I knew another younger lady who used to do drugs, she was not my girlfriend but we became close. This lady actually ceased having her period for several months and used to get bad headaches because of the drugs she did. Thank God, the lady quit drugs and is now reformed and living under God’s grace. Thank God.

There are some other bad problems women can have, cervical cancer, breast cancer, endometriosis (which affects 5 to 10 percent of women and can be very debilitating), and other conditions which affect women more frequently than men, like fibromyalgia. Not to mention the traditional “curse” of menstruation and the fact that Hebrew society felt that it was necessary to blame women for the downfall of man in the Garden of Eden. And life in a very sexist society.

The point is, we as men can never understand the difference between the sexes in terms of how women suffer just because they are women, anatomically. And then, historically, men have acted like women were the inferior sex. The Republican Party and bibilical conservatives still generally maintain that either “a woman’s place is in the home” or that she should be “subservient to the man” in marriage or that women are the “inferior sex”. Men growing up in society just can’t know what it’s like. Not at all.

But my heart goes out to the many ladies I have known as I dated, and most especially to “C”, with whom if luck had been at all good to us, I should have quit smoking for her at that time and then I’m sure we would have made it. God Bless you all, and may the Lord hold you in the palm of his hand as you make your way through this sexist, elitist, money-buys-happiness wrong-headed society that we live in. I would not have it so. Love, Paul

May God Bless each and every one of you, and may you somehow through prayer and love find the strength to make it in this world, and also to quit smoking or other “wrong” substances. I truly wish each of you well.

Email Paul and Say Hi!

See Portfolio.com’s article on sexism in the workplace and elsewhere.

Spiritual Cinema Circle

Songs About How It Must Be for a Woman,
and also a Couple About My Life:



custom cover art link to Madonna singing her hit What It Feels Like For A Girl "What It Feels Like For A Girl:" Bad Girl Madonna singing her hit. — 4:31

"With Or Without You:" U2′s Bono sings his heart out. Dedicated to my old love “C”. — 5:30

custom cover art link to Joan Jett and the Blackhearts singing Bad Reputation "Bad Reputation:" Joan Jett, another “bad girl” sings her rock and roll favorite (not that I have a bad reputation, I just like the song and identify with the “underdogs” in this life). — 2:42

custom cover art for John Lennon performing his outrageously right on hit Cold Turkey "Cold Turkey:" Beatles great John Lennon sings his outrageously right on hit live in New York City. — 5:44

thumbnail image link for a live performance of Early Morning Rain Live in Chicago in 1979 by Gordon Lightfoot "Early Morning Rain:" A live performance by Gordon Lightfoot in Chicago in 1979 of a song that Peter Paul and Mary made famous. — 3:24

The Biology, Morality and Politics
of Addiction

 

The FreeDomain Radio Interview:
Gabor Maté, M.D.
Visit Dr. Maté’s website

special caring interview about the biology, morality and politics of addiction by Dr Gabor Maté "The Biology, Morality and Politics of Addiction:" Dr Gabor Maté caringly explains the truth to us in this long, but worthwhile and rewarding interview for our understanding. — 48:53

This may well be a very special interview, since I strongly believe Jesus led me to it in terms of having something very on target to share with you. Just so we’re clear, I’ve been addicted to cigarettes. I never in my life ever tried anything that wasn’t prescribed for me except in the distant past I used to occasionally smoke marijuana, but no longer do so. ~ Paul Evans

custom cover art for Christian rockers Mercy Me singing their hit Grace Tells Another Story "Grace Tells Another Story:" Christian rockers Mercy Me sings their heart out in this heartwarming and uplifting track. — 3:34

U2 sings their heart out on Good Morning America with Beautiful Day Live from Fordham University "Beautiful Day:" U2 sings their heart out on ABC’s Good Morning America live from Fordham University. This is my very favorite song. — 4:14

One of the ideas I was trying to convey here with this article is that it is more important for me to be concerned with helping people than it is for me to be concerned about “how I look”. I mention directly my mental illness, which is looked on very negatively in our society, and there are a few negatives in my experience of internet dating, which at this point I pretty much think happens to anyone who tries this method of dating.

The fact is, if you want to conclude something negative about me because you are going to view me through a lens of “mental illness” or schizophrenia, I can’t stop you. But I do condemn you if you are apt to judge me that way. Mental illness is best viewed as a set of symptoms, and not a reflection on the decency, caring and soundness of a person’s thinking, am I not right? Sometimes, those symptoms can constitute a reason for holding a negative view on a given person’s soundness of thinking, and I KNOW from bitter experience that almost none of you are going to have read my internet dating or smoking cessation stories, without viewing them through a lens of “he’s mentally ill you know.”

You’d be wrong to so judge me, but judge me I knew you would (most of you). As I said, it is more important to me as a writer and as a caring person, to express hopeful and helpful ideas to people, and convey a message that I felt might help people, than were at all important to me any negative ideas you might have because I am honest and open and do not hide my illness. Look at my website. Conclude if you will: who is ill here, me, or the world?

I don’t feel like a “mentally ill” human being, I feel complete, well and without any symptoms, just so we’re clear. Mental illness in the majority of patients is like diabetes. If you “self-monitor” and take care of your “diet”, (get enough sleep, take your medicine, and the self-monitoring is important), the chances are most of the time the disease will be in remission and you will be without symptoms. Part of this whole experience is being monetarily poor and feeling powerless that way. If you actually care, feel free to donate a little cash via PayPal. If you care.

Incidentally I deliberately included some “punk” or morally negative songs on the short list above. That was sort of to dare you to think badly of me. Then you were supposed to come to the last song, Mercy Me’s wonderful and uplifting piece, and see that no man is beyond God’s redemption, that God’s love can heal and make right any “wrongness”. As he has for me.

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A Note About ‘The Time’ by Evans Liberal Politics Owner Paul Evans

Jul 8th, 10 / 9 Comments

Evans Liberal Politics
July 8, 2010

 

A Note About ‘The Time’
by Evans Liberal Politics Owner Paul Evans

 

A Rant

 

Evans Liberal Politics, Op-Ed, July 8, 2010, by Paul Evans

photo of Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans in January, 2009

A Note About the Time by Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans: My friends Shannon and Wes are always going on about something or other being “annoying” so I thought I deserved my own rant about what’s annoying to me. What bugs me is: my server at GoDaddy is over in Phoenix, Arizona…. well that is three time zones away from me here in Wooster, OH. (This is the physical location where Evans Liberal Politics is hosted on a dedicated, special kind of computer called a “server.”) So every day, about 11:30 p.m. I start to get the itchies about getting some new content up on Evans Liberal Politics for the next day’s news. People who have never run a news and politics website have never felt this particular kind of pressure (although anybody who ever worked for a business certainly understands all about deadlines, right)?

I mean, ever single stinkin’ day I have to get new news content, and not just one post either. That is, I’ve got to find it, make sure I can republish it, format it with the proper web programming using my WordPress site creation program, and get the next day’s news out. It’s a never ending battle, and I’ve been doing this since my first blog post on Evans Liberal Politics on November 23, 2008.

You ever have to do something like that seven days a week, no matter what, whatever else your day’s schedule holds in store for you??? (I’m just saying, we news and politics website owners are kind of a rare breed. Sleep?? What the hell is that? — it’s a 24 hour a day news cycle.)

I mean, it’s hard to go to sleep for me knowing there’s no content up for the next day’s news…. Could be I’m kind of “dedicated” to this site and to bringing my (pitifully small) number of readers the next day’s news. Not sure exactly why. Just how I am now. NOT terribly rational, considering how “much” money I am making from this site. (Insert maniacal laugh here.)

Does Anybody Really Know
What Time It Is?


“Today,” (whatever today means), we have an article by my favorite progressive economics writer, Bob Swern, for you. (Thanks, Bob, for your ongoing permission to republish your content.) Yes, OK, the article is from July 6th. Two days ago… but not really, because although it came out at 7:39 a.m. on the sixth, and at this moment it is 1:24 a.m. here in Wooster, Ohio, (and definitely therefore it is the 8th of June)…. Well, according to my damn server, which is what Google picks up on, it’s still the 7th of July there, (in Phoenix) and this article will be published as belonging to the 7th of July. I’m just sayin’. Bugs the crap outta me…. But at least that makes it so that, in a sense, I’m only giving you day old news, right?? Besides, this is more of a political story than it is a news story. Yeah, it has some small amount of time sensitive information in it, but basically the article is a (timeless) rant against corporate greed. OK? Well it damn well better be OK. ((Pretty please?)) I’m just saying, time starts to lose it’s meaning after a while when you run a news and politics website, but the darned three hour differential with my server can be a little “annoying.” It’s always now when you run a news website. Well, anyway, that’s my rant for the week.

Hey! It’s official. Apparently (and without notification to that effect), I’ve been banned from posting diaries at Daily Kos. At least that lifts me into a sphere of a certain degree of notoriety, right?

Now you know partly how I think. Guess I took the brain labeled “Abe E. Normal”. (Anyone here too young for that reference?)

You know what? Here’s an appeal to those of you who enjoy reading Evans Liberal Politics, even a little. Could you please share our site with your friends and contacts? It would be really, really appreciated.

Send check or money order to: Paul E. Evans, 5396 Overton Road, Wooster, OH  44691. Give generously. ((“Overton” which used to be a thriving grain transhipment point at the beginning of the 20th century, yet remains unincorporated and lacks a single store. Shares it’s name with the principle slum of Soweto, South Africa. Right.))

Some would say after reading this “he must be cracking up.” Sorry to disappoint all the true believers. And the Republican Party is the party of the ordinary, little guy in the U.S. Right.

p.s. I changed the publication time for this article to 12:01 a.m. on July 8th. Because it only made sense. It’s 3:20 a.m. here now. Does anybody really know what time it is?

See What the hell is the Obama White House doing?, Daily Kos, (well I used to like them) July 7, 2010, by iceberg slim, excerpt quoted verbatim:

Yes, what the hell are they doing?

This stance on cutting deficits will wipe us out, totally in November.

Why?

This country wants the government to SPEND MONEY FOR JOB CREATION, but the Obama White House is on the side of Republicans for cuts.

This is totally, f**king, STUPID amidst 9.5% unemployment and close to 20% underemployment. I mean f**king stupid.

Well, well, well. It’s getting noticed: See Serious People Notice Banks Are Gouging Consumers and Tanking the Economy, Ian Welsh, July 5, 2007, by Ian Welsh:

Quote from The Choices That Pay Us Back, The New York Times Business Day, July 4, 2010, by Robert H. Frank:

…rates on 10-year Treasury bonds are only about 3 percent, many consumers still carry tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt at 20 percent or more. This burden has been a continuing drag on spending. The federal government could reduce it by borrowing at 3 percent and lending to consumers at 8 percent under a one-time debt-restructuring plan.

With their debt service payments cut by more than half, consumers could increase spending immediately. And the five-percentage-point spread on money lent under the program would help cover its administrative costs, and maybe even relieve short-run government budget pressure.

Comment by Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans: This of course, makes exquisite, eminent sense. And it ain’t gonna happen. Congress, and, sadly, the White House, are owned by the investment banks. Even if they ARE no longer donating to Democrats:

More than 600 regular donors from the New York area — whose four- and five-figure checks added up to $10 million for the DSCC and DCCC in 2006 and 2008 — have so far abandoned their effort to retain the Democratic majorities.

Take Jamie Dimon, the head of J.P. Morgan Chase, who is known for his close relationship with President Obama.

In 2006 and 2008, he donated $65,000 to the Democratic committees. This election cycle, he has not contributed at all to the DSCC or DCCC. At the end of March, however, he gave $2,000 to the campaign of Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), who is seeking to claim Obama’s former Senate seat.

See Help If You Can Find It, MichaelMoore.com, July 7, 2010, by Glenn Miller / Fort Myers News-Press: Naples has southwest Florida’s only BP help center. It’s hidden in a strip mall with only a small, white, hand-lettered sign in front to distinguish it from the rest of the glorious scenery. It shares a building with Victoria’s Nail & Spa, Mangrove Outfitters and others. BP. Bad Petroleum.

See Why do Montana’s Republicans hate firefighters?, Daily Kos (it’s still a decent website), July 7, 2010, by Joan McCarter (a friend of mine over at Kossack City).

In the news: Ron Paul ponders politics, 2012 run, CNN Politics, July 8, 2010, by Mark Preston.

Counterterrorism news: US to access Europeans’ bank data in new deal, BBC News, July 8, 2010, by BBC News, excerpt quoted verbatim:

Euro MPs have approved a new deal to allow US anti-terror investigators to access Europeans’ bank data.

The vote followed tough negotiations with US authorities after a previous agreement was blocked by the European Parliament in February.

EU negotiators say the new deal gives EU officials authority to monitor the US investigators’ actions.

The deal gives the US access to bulk data from Swift, a firm that handles millions of bank transactions daily.

Washington says the Swift deal is crucial to fighting terrorism, as part of the US Terrorist Financing Tracking Programme (TFTP) set up after the September 2001 attacks on the US.

Top US officials, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, lobbied the EU over the data transfer deal.

Privacy concerns

The agreement was passed with 484 MEPs in favour and 109 against. There were 12 abstentions.

In February Euro MPs rejected an earlier draft agreement, saying the privacy safeguards were inadequate.

The fact that the US was secretly accessing Swift bank data did not come to light until 2006.

Under the new deal, the EU police agency Europol will assess whether specific data requests are necessary for the fight against terrorism before the data is sent to the US, the European Commission says.

You should read: Why is the Chamber of Commerce so popular?, Open Salon, Orbital Matters, July 7, 2010, by Saturn Smith. While all the while pandering to huge corporate interests, and also (I might add) trying to torpedo the Consumer Financial Protection Agency Act, the Chamber is one of the principle agents of small businessmen’s hostility to things Democratic.

You Really owe it to yourself: Alas, ignored like all the rest. But if you’re smart you’ll read the Wikipedia article on Ken Wilber. That’s Ken Wilber the Buddhist philosopher who has mainly figured out the way the universe works. “His work formulates what he calls Integral Theory.” Ignore it at your peril.

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If you are interested, please phone me at 330-202-7661 or email me. My cell phone is 330-317-9331. I just know we can work something out, and I know in my heart, before God, you’ll never find anyone else who will try as hard for you as I will. ~ Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans.

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