Senator Mark Pryor wants our ideas on how to cut federal spending. Take a look at this video clip below:
Senator Pryor has asked us to send our ideas to him at cutspending@pryor.senate.gov and I have done so in the past and will continue to do so in the future. Here are a few more I just emailed to him myself at 8:24 am CST.
I just read Paul Greenberg’s article “The dance of politics,” Arkansas Democrat Gazette, April 17, 2011 and in it he stated:
.
Campaigning isn’t separate from the political process but part of it. No doubt Mark Pryor will recognize as much when he himself comes up for reelection in 2014. Some of us can hardly wait. When he holds his first press conference of that campaign, it would be good to remember—and quote—his attack this past week on politicians who hold press conferences to blame others when they themselves are more to blame for today’s problems.
Senator, in a democracy, appealing to the Demos is a way to resolve issues. Through open, public, robust debate. You might want to try it instead of damning both sides with fine impartiality.
Partisanship gets a bad rap. This republic had parties—they were called factions then—even before it had a Constitution. Indeed, it might be said that the Constitution, and whether it should be ratified, was the reason the first, inchoate American parties were formed.
Those old Federalists and Anti-Federalists, through a series of shifting alliances and metamorphoses, would become the ancestors of today’s Republicans and Democrats, Lord bless ’em both. Because they give the American people a well-organized choice instead of just having a blob of names out there to blame or credit. Parties give politics structure. They can be held accountable, and even negotiate reasonable compromises with each other.
Our two major, much criticized parties give American politics discipline, traction and responsibility. Don’t like what the Democrats are doing? Then vote Republican. Or vice-versa, mutatis mutandis, change places, and dosiedo. It’s the dance of politics. And it’s the dance that’s the important thing, not the dancers. No matter who winds up at the head of the line this go-’round. Factions are not just inevitable in the politics of a republic, they are useful. Even those who say both parties are worthless find they need a party of their own to say so, like the Tea Party.
Here endeth the (civics) lesson.
Paul Greenberg is editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Political views are worth standing up for and that is why we have more than one party. Hopefully, Senator Pryor can look pass the fact that I am a Republican and can take the suggestions I have put below.
In my past posts I could have been accused of giving just general ideas of where to cut. Now I am starting in with specifics that are taken from the article “How to cut $343 Billion from the federal budget,” by Brian Riedl, Heritage Foundation, October 28, 2010(Spending cuts in millions of dollars:
$26,646
Eliminate the additional child refundable credit.
$103
Eliminate the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund.
Veterans
$2,500
Cap increases in Department of Veterans Affairs health care spending.
$1,930
Reduce Veterans’ Disability Compensation to account for Social Security Disability Insurance payments.
____________________________________
Related
The Conspirator is the first in a roster of historically based films to be produced by The American Film Company, launched by Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts, whose family owns the Chicago Cubs. Redford insists that his first objective as an actor and filmmaker is to entertain. Yet his works have compelled audiences, sometimes uncomfortably, to examine the American experience — personally and politically. In films such as The Naturaland The Horse Whisperer he explored the complexity of relationships; inThe Milagro Beanfield War and Quiz Show he tackled inequality and injustice. The stories he tells have roots in his own experience.
Charles Robert Redford Jr., of English, Scottish, and Irish ancestry, grew up as an only child in a mostly Hispanic neighborhood in Santa Monica, where his father, Charles Sr., worked as a milkman. One of his earliest memories is from third grade, at the end of World War II. “This dark current started running through our school about Jews,” Redford recalls. “I didn’t know what a Jew was. But suddenly people were whispering about who was a Jew and who wasn’t. One day, Lois Levinson — she was a pal, really smart — stands up in class and says, ‘My name is Lois Levinson. I am a Jew, and I’m very proud of it.’ The class gasped.”
That night at dinner, Redford told his father about Lois and asked: “What am I? If she’s a Jew, what am I?”
“You’re a Jew — and be proud of it,” Redford Sr. said.
“I was never a good student … It was hard to sit and listen to somebody talk. I wanted to be out, educated by experience and adventure, and I didn’t know how to express that.” — Robert Redford
The boy ran to his room, bawling. “I thought, ‘I’m screwed,’ ” Redford laughs. “I heard my mom say, ‘Charlie, go explain.’ My dad came in and gave me a lecture about how what happened was unfair. He said, ‘We’re all alike.’ ”
It was an early turning point. “Any time I saw people treated unfairly because of race, creed, whatever — it struck a nerve,” Redford says. A natural athlete, he often captained his school football and baseball squads. “The look on the face of the kid who was uncoordinated broke my heart,” he says. “I would choose him. ” He was empathetic but also driven, sometimes to a fault. “Then I’d get angry when he couldn’t perform,” he ruefully admits.
Redford was guided as much by frustration as compassion. “I was never a good student,” he says. “I had to be dragged into kindergarten. It was hard to sit and listen to somebody talk. I wanted to be out, educated by experience and adventure, and I didn’t know how to express that.”
He finished high school but flirted with trouble. “Messing around with friends, pushing the envelope, stealing Cadillac hubcaps for $16, was a release,” Redford says. “I was seen in earlier years by family members and people of authority as somebody wasting his time. I had trouble with the restrictions of conformity. It made me edgy.”
Redford won a baseball scholarship to the University of Colorado but soon lost it, reportedly due to drinking. “There was a lot of that,” he concedes. After a year the school asked him not to return. About the same time, Redford’s mother, Martha, died at age 40. “She had a hemorrhage tied to a blood disorder she got after losing twin girls at birth 10 years after I was born,” he says quietly. His own birth was difficult, and doctors had advised his mother to stop having children. “She wanted a family so badly she got pregnant again,” Redford says. Her death was a shock. “It seemed so unfair. But, in an odd way, it freed me to go off on my own, which I’d wanted to do for a long time.”
By then Redford’s father had landed a job in the accounting department at the Standard Oil refinery in El Segundo. Redford went to work there in the shipping yard, driving a forklift and cleaning tanks. The experience planted the seeds for his environmental activism years later. “I saw the oil seeping into the sand dunes. Now all that [oil] sits underneath the big buildings they’ve built there.”
Clip of the new movie of Robert Redford.
Starring: James McAvoy, Robin Wright, Kevin Kline, Evan Rachel Wood, Justin Long, Alexis Bledel, Tom Wilkinson, Danny Huston, Toby Kebbel
The Daily Hatch 