Cultural Differences

I'm glad that the devastating tornado that hit Moore; Oklahoma was revised down to 24 dead with nine of them being children.  It was surprising to hear that one of the reasons for not having a storm shelter was that the residents did not want the government telling them what to do.  Now, I can understand that being hit by a tornado in that area is about 2% likely, and I can even understand weighing  the extra $2000 but not wanting the government to tell them what to do, surprised me.  It was great to hear a representative from Oklahoma say that the newer schools will pay the $1.5 million extra for a storm shelter despite it being a 50/50 proposition in Oklahoma.

Culture difference  is the 500-pound  gorilla in the room.  The anti- government types  will try to use every  government controversy to their advantage by saying, “ see what happens when you have a nanny state!" Quite the contrary, we may have too many government employees in one division and not enough in another division, but the goal should be effective government ,not large or small government.

I think the fact that Apple gets away with paying hardly any taxes is a great conversation starter for tax reform. Senator Rand Paul was appalled at some of his colleagues who were grilling Tom Cook, CEO of Apple, about his questionable practices to avoid paying United States income tax.  It reminded me of Representative Barton from, Texas apologizing to the CEO of BP because he was being badgered by the congressional members of the investigative committee.  Joe Scarborough was bragging about Tom Cook looking good at the Senate hearing.  Conservatives are not in favor of big business paying high taxes  because they think that low taxes  will somehow trickle down to the consuming public.  I love my Apple products but I’d be willing to pay $50.00 more if it cut down on outsourcing and the company  paying its fair share of taxes. After all, the iPhone and iPad are luxury items.

Pig-headed  Joe Scarborough does not understand how targeting of conservatives by the IRS is not necessarily politically motivated.  That's because he refuses to acknowledge that 85% of those applying for a 501 (c ) (4) statuses were indeed conservatives.  There were profiled and that's wrong but the code section is vague.  Using this issue to leap to government cannot handle your taxes, the portion of health care they will be involved in or a comprehensive immigration policy is absurd.

Meanwhile the portion of the government that was working on legislation,the Senate Judiciary Committee, finally passed a bill 13-5, largely intact, and now it goes to the floor for the Senate to vote on. There's talk that it will take 70 yes votes before the House will even consider taking up the issue. What kind a democracy is that?  

Those on right chastised the Senate because they didn't produce a budget for several years. Today, the  Tea Party coalition  with the likes of  Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, will not allow in the senate's budget to go to the House for reconciliation unless it's tied  to the debt ceiling. Senators McCain and Collins rightly called them out saying it was “budget hypocrisy.”

Cultural differences certainly exist in Victoria, Texas. We had a local election where some people were fixated on the city policy where withdrawal was not addressed, so the prudent thing to do in that situation was to rely on the state election code.  No,all they saw was the 51% that was not met and so anything else was immaterial to them. The third-place finisher insisted in a run-off between the two top vote getters. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out how that would turn out, especially if the second-place finisher did not want to run. The pressure from those who did not like the results from the election made this issue harder than it needed to be.