Welcome everyone to the newest installment of
Randall’s rant. This week is going to be two main topics that I want to touch
on. In this week’s edition, we are going to look at the issues with www.healthcare.gov website, and how the US
would benefit from less spending on defense, and more spending on education.
We are going to start off with the healthcare
website fiasco. Got to give the GOP credit for this one, they actually have a
section of voters convinced that websites never have tech issues. Granted, many
of these people are most likely over the age of 75, and maybe another portion
of them live off the grid. You know, they kind of people you see on those
reality shows about people who are survivalist, The ones that live where the
power lines don’t exactly reach. Now, most of us are aware that websites have
glitches. Look at Facebook for example, which seems to have weekly, if not
daily glitches. However, the GOP has managed to convince through fear that the
new Affordable Healthcare Act website doesn’t work, don’t bother logging on,
you’re just going to get booted, and so on. And that is what they’ve rolled out
each and every night, well, not when they are digging up Benghazi every five
minutes.
Now, I could join the whole conspiracy crowd, and
mention on how Verizon, which host the site, is a major contributor to GOP
campaigns, but I won’t. Fact is that websites are like roads. A road can only
handle so much traffic before other vehicles aren’t going to be able to get on.
And so many people wanted to sign up that it caused issues with the website that
caused it to crash. The other notion that has been ignored by media on both
signs of the coin is the one of systems. It could be that some people have an
outdated browser program, or lack the proper Java updates to be able to log on
to the website. This was an issue we had
at the Attorney General’s office until we were able to get newer computers that
were compatible with the newer browsers. Updated browsers, and all of those issues with
crashes and whatnot went away. To expect millions of people to log on to a
website without the site having issues is foolhardy.
Congrats to the federal appeals court that stepped
in and informed the state of Texas that the abortion law they were trying to
ramrod through was highly unconstitutional. It still find it amusing that the
people who want government out of their lives, don’t mind if that said same government sets up shop in a woman’s
uterus. The way the GOP is trying to take over a woman’s reproductive rights
reminds me a rather fitting quote from former President Woodrow Wilson. Wilson
was staunchly giving women the right to vote, once saying “I doubt highly the
intelligence of a woman to decide on such matters of government. Giving them the
ability to vote will only burden them to make decisions they are not properly
informed on.” I cannot figure out why conservatives are so worried about a
fetus. It’s not like they care about it once it becomes a born child. Food
stamps, money spent on education, funds for the free breakfast in the poorest
of districts, are always the first thing that they want to cut funding from.
They call these programs entitlements,
and they use fear to get the funding cut. But hey, go after some of the waste
that goes to defense spending, and all of a sudden, they are like Amanda Bynes after
you empty her liquor closet. The go insane, they pout, say that we’re leaving
this country to be over taken. Which is far from the truth, because we spent in
one month more on defense than some nations gross in an entire calendar year. Technology cannot be changing that quickly
that the billions we spent the year before all of a sudden went to outdated weapons.
However, defense spending has become a business more than anything else. Companies like Lockheed-Martin bid to build
fighter Jets, and they in turn, contribute large sums of PAC money to whatever
elected leader helped insure that more money went to defense spending. So of
course they are going to flip out when someone suggest cutting defense
spending. Ronald Reagan in his 8 years never once cut defense spending. He cut
education spending, he cut funding for health care agencies like the CDC, but
never once did he ever cut defense spending. In the 1980’s, it was becoming quite clear
that the USSR was about to collapse because they were being outspent on
defense. But what the American people were fed was the line that Russia was
stocking all of these arms and could attack us at any moment, which 30 years
later we’ve learned wasn’t really true. Who are we trying to outspend now,
North Korea? Who is are next opponent?
We don’t need to spend all of this money on fighter
jets. Let’s spend a little more on education, let’s catch up to the other
nations in intelligence first. The reason that all of these other nations are
able to “develop” nuclear warheads is because they stress education, with an
emphasis on math. In the states, you’re lucky if you can find someone who can
figure the answer to 5 x 5. That’s how
some of these nations to use the words of Republicans “Have passed us in
military power.” They didn’t create newer fighter jets, they just used the
resources of the heavy funding of education to get to achieving the weapons
they have now.
I’ll make it clear that I view any cuts to education
as a damaging blow to the nation, and anyone who even suggest cutting education
does not have the best interest of the nation at heart. Besides, imagine the
amount of money who could save if we could just force some of these elected
leaders to take a pay cut.
Okay, that is going to do it for this weeks’ edition
of Randall’s Rants.
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