– As a liberal guy, I’ll say, this is fucked up (Also, wow) .
– The Abacus sign and a sign from Occupy Olympia.
– Handbills and posters for the weekend events at Occupy Seattle.
– During the 2008 Democratic primary, I was always quick to point out that it wasn’t particularly nasty as primary fights go. Certainly nobody was grabbing anybody.
– It won’t get anywhere for now, but the GOP effort to ban discussion of abortion over the Internet is brazen even for Jim DeMint.
– When the machines take over, they won’t kill us outright. They’ll just program our GPS’s to make us drive around in circles.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/....._blog.html
Cain is pro-choice??? Who’d thunk it? He’s done… Won’t get anywhere in Iowa or South Carolina.
Obama is claiming credit for more new jobs.
But look at in which states about 1/2 of those jobs were created–
That’s 53,000 of the 103,000.
The other thing that is missing is how many more unemployeds have stopped looking.
You need to get below the surface.
What are these states doing to be more business-friendly?
@2 Many of Texas’ “new” jobs are government jobs created by a burst of stimulus spending, and many of those workers will be laid off next year. So much for “GOP job creation.”
Here’s an idea for you.
Herman Cain, the Koch-embedded candidate, has responded to criticism that his “999” tax plan would slam poor people by proposing “Opportunity Zones” in poverty-stricken inner cities where employers will be encouraged to hire poor people by eliminating the federal minimum wage in those areas.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44.....sion_2012/
Roger Rabbit Commentary: Every time he opens his mouth, Cain proves he doesn’t know how to think. Let’s skip over the sheer brutality of eliminating minimum wage law protection for the working poor and get right to the technical details. There are two major points to make here.
First, the federal minimum wage is a default minimum wage; where state minimum wages exist, they’re usually higher than the federal minimum wage. So, if you eliminate the federal minimum wage in Cain’s “Opportunity Zones” with the intent of encouraging employers to hire more people, you still have the state minimum wage law in effect. How does Cain propose to deal with that? By preempting state minimum wage laws with federal edicts? I’m under the impression conservatives oppose that sort of thing. Of course, if I were a ruthless cheap labor conservative determined to slash the wages paid to the working poor throughout the United States, that’s exactly what I’d try to do. As a lawyer, though, I’m not sure it works legally or would hold up in the courts.
Second, the reality is that laws allowing employers to pay below-subsistence wages are taxpayer-funded business subsidies. I’ve explained this before in HA comment threads, so this commentary will be familiar to long-time HA readers. Labor, like material, plant and equipment, and other necessary components of production, is an input cost. And over the long term, input costs cannot exceed the selling price, if the firm is to stay in business. If Company XYZ sells widgets for $2.50 that cost $5.00 to make, it will go broke. This is true of workers, too. Like businesses, workers have input costs. They cannot furnish their labor to a business enterprise unless the wages they earn are at least sufficient to cover the costs of sustenance plus work expenses (such as commuting costs). Even under the minimum wage laws we have now, the bottom tier of wage rates in the U.S. economy do not cover basic costs of living. A typical minimum-wage worker is either being supported by his/her parents or by the government through such programs as food and housing assistance, Medicaid, tax credits, and Earned Income Credit. Because the wages paid by minimum-wage employers are less than the worker’s input costs, those employers are being subsidized by either the workers’ parents or by taxpayers.
Cain’s proposal would increase this employer subsidy by shifting additional labor input costs from employers to taxpayers. This would, of course, necessitate increased spending on the government programs that subsidize low-wage employers by providing workers with a portion of their own input costs. To support this increased spending, you either have to raise taxes on people who can afford to pay higher taxes (read: employers and/or better-paid workers) or borrow the money somewhere (China?) and incur higher deficits.
I’m sure Herman Cain hasn’t considered any of this. He’s too superficial to drill any deeper than how his tax and wage schemes would improve the bottom lines of the wealthy corporatists he shills for.
What good is a job that pays next-to-nothing wages? The poorer you are, the less utility such a job has. Working for nothing is a luxury of the well-to-do. Many churches and charities are staffed by volunteers from the upper class and upper middle class sectors of society. People who have to work for a living can’t afford to work for free. Cain somehow doesn’t grasp that.
Republican/right wing degenerates are trying with every fiber of their collective being to thwart job creation.. The more discontent they can manufacture, the more power they believe they can attain.
As Mrs. Rabbit just pointed out to me, Cain doesn’t have any original ideas; everything he says comes from a script written by behind-the-scenes operatives in some rightwing think tank. He’s nothing but a front man for the tycoons who bankroll the vast propaganda machine that sponsors him.
@6 What history would teach them, if they ever read any history, is that manufacturing discontent usually leads to the status quo being overthrown. That’s why professional revolutionaries work so hard to manufacture discontent. Why people interested in preserving the status quo would do it is utterly inexplicable.
A successful oligarch is someone who knows how exactly much bread you have to give the masses to dissuade them from killing you. With America now on the precipice of riots in the streets (like they’re already having in Europe), Cain’s idea is to confiscate more crumbs from the starving. The best thing you can say about him is that he’s too stupid to be deemed vicious — sort of analogous to the idea that a person who’s too stupid to form a criminal intent can’t be guilty of a crime.
Roger Rabbit have you ever considered that folks without a job might be wise to take something less than they desire and work their way up? I have met so many unemployed people with very limited, marketable skills. I don’t consider some of the Liberal Arts degrees very marketable except perhaps with high tech companies where they actually welcome people with little technical training because often their skill set is soon outdated & superceded anyway. I think too many people were spoiled by the good times and unwilling to consider working their way up. They want immediate satisfaction for their outmoded education. They have not come to grips with the new reality.
We need a renewed entrepreneurial mindset with less focus on government and fear-mongering about cutting compensation to government employees…ala Joe Biden.
The 99%ers may also want to get their asses over to the White House and ask WTF about Obama’s borrowing and squandering our funds to help create jobs in another country. Here is yet another example in a monstrous list of mistakes, foolish squandering and perhaps corruption–
WHY BARRACK? WHY??
http://www.dailykos.com/story/.....via=blog_1
This WILL make a peachy anti-republiklown campaign ad, don’tcha think???
Yay!!!
Hey assholes…keep giving us ammunition like this and there won’t even be rethugliklown DOG CATCHERS.
This fuck has absolutely NO CLUE.
I can’t tell if he’s deliberately disingenuous or mind-numbingly stupid…though I’m leaning toward the latter.
@2
Florida’s unemployment rate is round about 10.7% and has one of the highest mortgage default rates in the country, so what ever they’re doing there, its a good bet they’re doing it wrong.
Iowa on the other hand has an unemployment rate of 6.1% and a fairly low mortgage default rate (can’t find the current numbers). So, given the two options, I’d go with Iowa.
http://tinyurl.com/3tw8svc
‘Shut Up, Dog’
Requiem for a dictator.
“Video on Arab television stations showed a crowd of fighters shoving and pulling … Gadhafi … after he was dragged from … a drainage pipe, begging for his life. Gadhafi struggled … as the fighters pushed him onto the hood of a pickup truck. … Gadhafi yelled at the revolutionaries. ‘Shut up, dog,’ one of the former rebels responded.” Somewhere between the drainage pipe and the commercial freezer where he now reposes, he acquired a bullet hole in the head.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44....._n_africa/
‘You’re Next, Bashar’
“The killing of Libya’s Muammar Gadhafi fueled demonstrations across Syria … that called for the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad …. ‘Gadhafi is finished. It is your turn now Bashar!’ shouted demonstrators in the town of Maaret al-Numaan in the northwestern province of Idlib ….”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44....._n_africa/
Roger Rabbit Commentary: Like Gadhafi, Assad is clinging to power by trying to violently suppress the street protests against his dictatorial rule. Apparently, Assad has learned nothing from what has already happened in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. Autocrats in Tunisia and Egypt relinquished power relatively peacefully and survived. Gadhafi gunned down unarmed civilians and ended up dead. Assad has chosen Gadhafi’s path, and so, he too will wind up being dragged from some fetid hiding hole and clubbed, pummeled, or shot to death. And that’s exactly the kind of end that murderous tyrants deserve.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/.....via=blog_1
Just million and millions of lazy fucking Americans…living off the fat of the land, lalalalalalala….
Meanwhile…
http://thinkprogress.org/speci.....of-unions/
We ALL do better when we ALL do better.
THAT is the mesage of the 99%-er’s.
Roger Rabbit have you ever considered that folks without a job might be wise to take something less than they desire and work their way up?
You assume there is a way up from the bottom. That is getting less and less. What is the career path to the 1% is there for a migrant farm worker? Denny’s waitress? Convenience Clerk? Call Center Operator? Yada Yada Yada.
If someone is 55 and fired from their mid level manager job, what career should should they expect to work their way up from, in their part time night stocker job at k-mart, before they die?
The system is broken, and getting more broken all the time, and you low level conservatives don’t want to see that.
After all, cain says, “If you are not rich, it’s your fault. You are just lazy.” And you lap it up.
Breaking News: Pullout From Iraq By December 31
MSNBC posted a story 2 minutes ago that President Obama has declared the Iraq war over and said all U.S. troops in Iraq will come home by the end of this year.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44....._n_africa/
Wow.
If you think they can do that by moving up the ranks within the company (the old “started in the mail room” schtick), you are dreaming. Our job system in this country hasn’t allowed for that in several decades, if even then. Unless you are sleeping with your boss (or performing other similar favors), you usually have to go outside your company to get a significant promotion. The best someone who works on the production line can hope for is to eventually get promoted to a production lead or supervisor; the best someone who works in the mail room (if any still exist) is to get promoted to being head of the mail room. A promotion and a raise, to be sure, but hardly comparable to the tens of millions being brought home by the CEOS and Wall Street financiers.
What Cain’s proposal seeks to do is pretty much the creation of a permanant underclass which isn’t even able to advance to level of the existing minimum wage. Because workers at such wages would need two such jobs at full-time just to meet minimal survival, they would have no time or energy to either study for a new career or even look for another job.
Ironically, it’s the lowest-paid jobs which are the most demanding in terms of time and energy. An office worker making $20+ an hour can take some time to look for work, go to interviews, study for a new degree, etc. But at $10.00 per hour or below, managers use electronic means to measure the output of each worker minute-by-minute, firing any who’s output slacks off even for a few minutes. Some routinly pit workers against each other, firing the bottom 10% to 25% each year so that the rest feel the pressure to work harder – far harder than their managers work, to be sure.
So your comment is just a variation of the old theme that the minimum wage isn’t needed, or should be lowered considerably, because such jobs are held only by students or as “starting jobs” by older workers. Unfortunately, that’s not true – if the GOP keeps controlling the economic direction of the U.S., most of us will be working for minimum wage by the end of this decade.
More breaking news
California-Berkeley physicist Richard Muller, a long time darling of the climate warming deniers, does about face. In 2010 he started up the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project (BEST) to show the world how to do climate analysis right.
In the press release announcing the results, Muller said, “Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously by other teams in the US and the UK.” In other words, climate scientists know what they’re doing after all.
@18…
About fucking time.
Breaking News:
ButtPutty Announces Pullout From Goat’s Mouth
ButtPutty says the goat bites too hard.
…the REST of the stoty:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/.....log_799859
You can’t be accurate!!!
WHY ASSHOLE! WHHHHHYYYYYYYYYY???????????????
@10
Sure, if they could move somewhere where there’s actually jobs, but right now people are stuck where they’re at. Plus, if they do get to where there are jobs they’re flat broke and can’t afford the training they need to get that job.
Things change over time and unfortunately our schools didn’t change to keep up with what’s going on, so they’re graduating people without the skills they need to get jobs. Since people can’t afford to enroll in the classes that will give them skills to get jobs, you don’t have “the market” pushing community colleges and universities towards degrees where people can get jobs.
There’s no way of getting around the fact that we need more funding.
# 16: Also note this, from the Wall Street Journal:
Of course, Rolls-Royce doesn’t just make luxory automobiles. It is one of the “big three” jet engine manufacturers (the other ones are GE/CFM in Cincinnati, and Pratt & Whitney in Connecticut). Recently Rolls Royce has had it’s Trent 900 engines powering the giant Airbus A380, and it’s Trent 1000’s being one of two approved manufacturers for the Boeing 787.
Rolls Royce has been an aircraft engine manufacturer for a long time, and it wasn’t until a Rolls Royce Merlin engine was substituted into the P-51 (previously powered by the Allison F3R) that the P-51 came to dominate the skies over Germany.
Simply put, the management at Rolls-Royce has recently found that you need skilled workers earning high wages to ensure quality. And quality is something you have to insist on when several hundred passenger and crew’s lives are dependent upon what is usually only two engines. Their recent problems with the Trent 900 were traced back to outsourced componants bult in low-wage countries, a mistake which Rolls-Royce vows not to be repeated.
Enough of the goat already. It won’t change puddy and it grosses me out.
@10 “Roger Rabbit have you ever considered that folks without a job might be wise to take something less than they desire and work their way up?”
Yes. As a matter of fact, that’s an exact description of how I’ve lived my life.
Want to read my biography?
I left home as a teenager, on a freight train, with the shirt on my back and less than $10 in my pocket. I put myself through college without any parental support by working at minimum wage and sub-minimum wage jobs. I worked the graveyard shift in a newspaper printing plant, proofreading classified ads for the Sunday edition — eye straining and mind numbing work. I worked in a post office sorting mail and throwing mail sacks onto trucks. I worked the night shift in a nursing home wiping shit off the asses of old people who couldn’t do it for themselves. I worked in fast food joints and pizza parlors wiping tables and carrying out garbage cans weighing 200 lbs. I washed dishes in the cafeteria of an exclusive private girls’ college where we weren’t paid at all but worked for meals — they fed us leftovers scraped off the girls’ plates.
After graduating from college, I enlisted in the Army, failed the entrance physical, and glib-talked an Army doctor into signing my enlistment papers. This was in 1968, when people like Dick Cheney and Karl Rove were skating on serial deferments and people like George W. Bush and Dan Quayle were using family pull to get cushy billets in National Guard units to avoid Vietnam. They were drafting fathers then, and because I volunteered and went to Vietnam, some dad got to stay home and raise his kids.
After Vietnam, I spent three years attending law school on a G.I. Bill much less generous than what World War 2 and Korean War veterans got. The government gave me $175 a month for rent and food. I had to borrow money for tuition and books. I would have worked while in law school, but no one would hire Vietnam vets.
A lot people in my generation didn’t pay back their student loans. I repaid every cent. I also repaid the relatives and friends who loaned me money when I had nothing left. I never got a tax credit for buying a home or car, somehow the special tax breaks hatched by politicians to please various constituencies over the years always bypassed me, but I paid off my mortgage and car loans and credit cards. Every cent I ever owed anyone has been paid in full and today I have no debts. As I said, I didn’t benefit from any of the special tax breaks created over the years; I’ve paid retail taxes all my life. I’ve never filed for bankruptcy, but I bought a small business from the bankruptcy court, which today pays me five times what I paid for the entire business every year. I own everything — home, cars, stock portfolio, business — free and clear. I didn’t get rich by marrying for money, like a girl I used to know did. I’ve paid full freight all the way.
But nobody ever asked me to work for less than legal minimum wage — with one exception, the contractor who ran the cafeteria at the private girls’ college. I took that job because it was the only way I could eat, and I was hungry enough to eat other people’s garbage.
I grew up a in a Republican community and started out in life as a Goldwater conservative. These experiences turned me into a liberal. I’m a liberal so other people will never have to live the way I did. I’m sick and tired of a system that creates artificial social and economic barriers that serve to allow some people, by accident of birth, to skate through life on the backs of other people.
I don’t hate anyone (except Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot and a bunch of other dead killers, plus some live ones), but I have no respect for selfish people who take from their fellow human beings without conscience or compassion — and fall back on some crackpot ideology to justify it.
My response to your comment consists of three words: Fuck you, asshole.
You haven’t earned the right to talk to me like that. Until you’ve done what I’ve done, and lived the way I’ve lived, you haven’t earned the right to talk like that to anyone. I’ve earned the right to talk that way to other people, but I choose not to. I’ll never be a Republican again, no matter how bad the Democrats are.
Not all rich people are assholes.
“The ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protesters — also known as the ’99 percent’ — have struck a chord with at least a few members of an unexpected audience: America’s rich and privileged.
“United under the banner ‘We are the 1 percent: We stand with the 99 percent,’ a band of entrepreneurs, trust fund babies, professionals and inheritors has taken to the web to share their abhorrence of corporate greed and support for tax code changes that would see them pay a higher share of their considerable wealth.
” … [T]hey’re posting their stories on a Tumblr page created by Wealth for the Common Good and Resource Generation, two groups dedicated to working for ‘fair taxation and just wealth distribution.'”
To read some of their personal stories, go to:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44.....news-life/
Roger Rabbit Commentary: When even rich people think the deck is unfairly stacked in their favor, does that tell you something? Why do Republicans still defend this system? More to the point, why does anyone still vote Republican?
Gee, the fun’s really starting in the GOP primaries. Both Perry and Romney are airing ads slinging dirt at each other. And there’s another article saying that these guys have a personal dislike of one another that goes back a long ways – Perry considers Romney an arrogant elitist, and Romney considers Perry an ignorant hick.
It sure doesn’t sound like either of them would consider the other as a running mate to re-unite the party.
If McCain’s anti-American, anti-US military poo-tossing about Libya proves anything, it’s that the conventional wisdom about Democrats not being tough enough is all smoke/politics:
http://thehill.com/video/senat.....or-gadhafi
Another Republican Is Caught Lying About His Biography
“Freshman GOP Sen. Marco Rubio — a rising star in the Republican Party — has often invoked the story about his parents fleeing the Castro regime in Cuba.
“But an investigative piece in the Washington Post [says] Rubio’s parents came to the United States (and gained residency here) more than 2 1/2 years before Castro came to power in Cuba.”
Rubio’s office issued a response blaming this fib on his parents’ faulty memory.
http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com.....al-blemish
Roger Rabbit Commentary: Next thing you know Rubio will claim to be a Vietnam veteran.
And another potential running-mate for either candidate, Sen. Mark Rubio (R-FLA), is being caught in a web of innacuracies over his family history. It turns out his family didn’t flee Castro’s communist takeover in 1959, they had immigrated to the U.S. two years earlier for economic reasons.
But I’d give him a pass on this. Many people like to recount their family histories as they understood them. Rubio’s parents may have embellished the story in telling it to Rubio and others, and he had no reason to question them, much less examine their passports and immigration papers to check for dates. That’s a mistake many of us make. As I found doing research on my own family history, it’s best to take oral history with a grain of salt.
Besides, we have so many other reasons why he would be a poor vice-Presidential candidate – starting with the fact that he’s a Republican.
@ 28. Yes. As a matter of fact, that’s an exact description of how I’ve lived my life.
Nice post. Totally lost on the conservatives, but nice post.
#33
As I found doing research on my own family history, it’s best to take oral history with a grain of salt.
i know what you mean. Depending on what family elder I talk to, some of my heirloom furniture has been in the family for generations since the 1700s, or we bought them in a garage sale in Oregon in the 40s.
“Dan Quayle supported the Vietnam War that he avoided when his family pulled strings to get him into the Indiana National Guard. Yet he called himself a ‘Vietnam-era veteran’ in campaign literature when he ran for the Senate in 1980.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05.....3dowd.html
Roger Rabbit Commentary: At least Quayle served in the NG, even if only to avoid being drafted for Vietnam combat duty. Rubio never served in the military at all. Hey, I’m not saying Rubio has ever claimed to be a Vietnam veteran; to the best of my knowledge, he’s never made such a claim. All I’m saying is Rubio, like Quayle, makes up shit and who knows what shit he’ll make up next.
I’ve claimed to be a Vietnam veteran, but I’m allowed to do that, because I am one. And few rabbits ever worked harder to avoid getting out of military service than I did, although I remember reading a story about someone who tried even harder than I did to get into the military: A 15-year-old black kid who lied about his age to get into the Marines. He was the youngest American soldier to die in Vietnam. His name was Dan Bullock, and here’s his biography:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Bullock
After I came home from Vietnam, I read stories in the rightwing-biased news media that said “America doesn’t have heroes anymore.”
That was bullshit. We had 3 1/2 million of them, including a few truly extraordinary ones.
(I served with one of them; at age 20, he deliberately sacrificed his own life to save four others, for which he was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.)
Now look at the ranks of Republican politicians, political operatives, and loudmouths — the people who pollute airwaves, print media, and internet blogs with wingnut bullshit. It’s damned hard to find a single one who ever served in the military. A large number of the older ones sat out Vietnam by getting serial deferments, or getting off on some bullshit medical claim (see, e.g., the pimple on Limbaugh’s ass), or using family connections to get a safe and comfy National Guard slot (at a time when ordinary mortals couldn’t buy their way into the National Guard).
Few people on earth disgust me more than cowards who want to send other people’s children to die in their bullshit wars.
I have no respect for these Republicans. None whatsoever. Because they deserve none. And when they lie about their past to embellish credentials they don’t have, I respect them even less.
Fuck you, Quayle. You’re no more a Vietnam veteran than I’m King Arthur or Jesus Christ. Fuck you, Rubio. You’re no more a Cuban refugee, run out of your home by Castro, than Dan Quayle is a Vietnam veteran. You’re both fucking liars. Why anyone would ever vote for either one of you is something I can only chalk up to ignorance or gullibility or stupidity or some combination of all three of the above.
Republican Crook # 011-73854099-01
“A political operative who worked on the election bids of prominent New York Republicans has been convicted of cheating Mayor Michael Bloomberg out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“Jurors found John Haggerty guilty Friday of grand larceny and money laundering …. Haggerty was accused of promising the mayor’s 2009 campaign an elaborate poll-watching operation, then spending just $32,000 on the effort and pocketing most of the rest to buy a house. …
“In the end, jurors were unconvinced by defense lawyers who often tried to turn their attention to the mayor’s wealth, arguing that Bloomberg’s staff didn’t care how Haggerty spent the money as long as they won.”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44....._politics/
Roger Rabbit Commentary: Even when Republicans steal from each other, it’s not really all that amusing.
Let’s face it, politics isn’t reasonable people engaging in fact-based rational debate. Republicans consider politics civil war, which in their minds justifies lying, dirty tricks, and election-rigging. It’s time we liberals and Democrats realized that Republicans see politics as war, not political competition, and dealt with them accordingly. We’ve been way the hell too kind to these motherfuckers. They’ve been talking about killing liberals for many years now. We’d better take that seriously, because it’s just possible they really mean it.
Liberals must arm!
I agree.
You’re really quite a guy, Rog. It’s good to know you.
Wal-Mart Seeks More Taxpayer Subsidies
“Prices aren’t the only thing being slashed at Wal-Mart. Amid rising costs, Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world’s largest retailer and the nation’s largest private employer, said Friday that it is cutting health benefits for part-time workers and raising premiums for many of its full-time staff.”
http://bottomline.msnbc.msn.co.....e-benefits
Roger Rabbit Commentary: The late Sam Walton not only built the world’s largest retailer, he also built the world’s largest family fortune. Although it’s now divided among his several children, the Waltons together are worth over $100 billion, eclipsing the net worths of Carlos Slim, Bill Gates Jr., and Warren Buffet. They not only are the richest family in the world, they’re the richest family in all of human history.
The Waltons got rich by exploiting cheap Chinese labor and favorable currency exchange rates to sell Chinese-made goods at lower prices than traditional brick-and-mortar retailers could match — with devastating effect on countless Mom-and-Pop small businesses.
Now, with China’s prosperity driving up its wage rates and the global financial crisis driving up its currency, Chinese-made goods are losing much of their price advantage, which threatens Wal-Mart’s competitive advantage in the U.S. retail space. So, in a probably fruitless bid to cling to market share, Wal-Mart is driving the incomes of its own workers even lower.
For years now, the media have pointed out that Wal-Mart’s labor costs are already being subsidized by the government Medicaid program, which picks up billions of dollars of costs for the health care of Wal-Mart workers. Now, Wal-Mart thinks it can get away with shoving even more of those medical costs onto taxpayers to offset the rising cost of the cheap Chinese labor it has been exploiting on its way to retail dominance.
Why would any U.S. taxpayer shop at Wal-Mart?
If you stop buying U.S. taxpayer-subsidized Chinese-made goods at Wal-Mart, and start buying U.S.-made goods at local retail outlets, you’ll bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. and better-paying retail jobs to your own community.
You cannot buy “made in America” items, unless it’s craft items like on etsy.com.
@44 That’s changing. It’s small right now, but manufacturing jobs are starting to come back to the U.S.
And don’t overlook the crappy quality of Chinese merchandise. Even if you’re unpatriotic it’s in your own self-interest to avoid anything made in China. These shitty foreign goods were brought to you by overpaid CEOs who bankroll campaigns against American workers.
@28
Roger, thank you for that.
What you write of is compassion – acting not out of self-interest, but out of concern for your fellow people – what makes you a liberal. It’s a quality sorely lacking from the sociopaths who would rule our society.
I’ve never endured the hardships you describe, and as an adult I enjoy a comfortable life – certainly not the 1%, but up there. The only reason that that is so is because my parents worked very, very hard, and we had a society that allowed upward mobility.
My paternal grandparents were immigrants, grandpa coming over at about age 10 with his brother, in steerage. I cannot imagine that voyage. He and my dad were sheet metal workers, in the union. My other grandfather was a union teamster. Mine was the first generation to go to college.
I’ve led a privileged life, and I’ve broken nearly all the various rules that my strict, Midwestern parents set for their kids, at various times, all but two:
1. NEVER vote Republican.
2. NEVER, EVER, cross a picket line.
I cannot imagine breaking either one of them.
Exactly! All that needs to be said to the right wing degenerates who are doing everything they can to DESTROY this country.
The anti-abortion movement really took off in the U.S. when WASPS beban worrying about the fecund Irish and Italians outbreeding them and taking over the country.
If that had happened, you’d have a president who’s taking his marching orders from a Nazi Pope. Of course, the Mohammedan inspired president we have now is not much of an improvement!
42 – I heard something on the radio that was remarkable in that regard.. The typical Wal-Mart employee works maybe 27 hours/week and with their employment pack receives an application for food stamps.
So maybe that’s a rumor and not credible but then it makes a lot of sense.. Wal-Mart gets a lot of business from the 45 million people in this country receiving food stamps.
Why not maximize this income stream??? Incredible..
WRT Wal-Mart, these immortal words by Matt Taibbi about Goldman-Sachs are apt:
Wal-Mart is a parasite, maximizing profits for some of the vilest richest people in this country – the Waltons – through the exploitation of public assistance – we are all subsidizing their profits by allowing them to pay the inhumanly low wages that they do. That so many of them, and fellow working poor, spend their assistance $$$ there is a recycled, viciously profitable form of the company store.
@47 Unions have made good lives possible for millions of Americans. Why do Republicans so bitterly resent workers living well (but still not nearly so well as the employer class)?
@50 And those food stamps get spent in Wal-Mart checkout lines by Wal-Mart workers who can’t afford to shop anywhere else.
‘9-9-9’ Is Now ‘9-0-9’
Seeking to fend off a tidal wave of criticism, Koch-embedded candidate Herman Cain has rebranded his discredited scheme to tax the poor. But the only thing he changed was the logo; it’s still the same sack of shit.
http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com.....-americans
I’m coming to believe it’s simple cruelty, a form of violence, the desire to see someone harmed or hurt. Layered over with racism, and the resentment that someone of a different tribe is getting more. Adoration of wealth and the identification with ‘master’ despite the obvious fact that the great majority of Republican voters will never, ever be in the wealthy class.
If we don’t figure out how to marginalize the insane, defang the greedy, undermine the neofeudalists, heal the haters, we’re doomed.
Survey: Iraq Was A Mistake
An NBC/MSNBC online survey shows only 6% still support Bush’s Iraq war and 85% say it wasn’t worth it.
http://fieldnotes.msnbc.msn.co.....ncial-cost
@55 “I’m coming to believe it’s simple cruelty, a form of violence, the desire to see someone harmed or hurt. Layered over with racism, and the resentment that someone of a different tribe is getting more.”
Maybe that also explains why they blow up frogs with firecrackers. (See, e.g., George W. Bush)
Full Disclosure: I once blew up a frog with a firecracker many many years ago, but I didn’t know any better because I was still a Republican then, and I never again did anything like that after becoming a liberal.
@54
Koch-Cain is going down, alas. First, he sounded like he was pro-choice (forgot libertarian small government dogma stops at the womb’s edge, apparently), now his cute 9-9-9 is a bit too easy to unravel as the latest flavor-of-the-week from the ‘tax the poor’ faction.
Couldn’t last – is there room for more than one black darling of the right? (Are Clarence/Ginny behind Herman’s demise?)
Much as they want to run away from that sorry-ass motherfucker, George W. Bush is the paragon of cruel, shallow, twisted, right-wing (read Republican) sociopathy.
I don’t know if any of you have heard about the new movie out this weekend, Margin Call. It’s all about the selling of worthless real estate investments by wall street and the collapse of the U.S. finance system as a result. It’s got some big names in it: Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany, Jeremy Irons, Zachary Quinto, and even Demi Moore. It’s getting good reviews all around. And with that kind of star power, it seems like a good bet to win a good market share of the audience, especially in the fall off-season (as compared to the summer “blockbuster” season).
Margin Call on IMDB.com
But you wouldn’t know it from it’s availability in movie theatres. So far, I’ve only been able to find a showing at one theatre in downtown Seattle, none north of Seattle (but I’m still looking).
You have to wonder – who didn’t want this movie to be more widely available?
# 52: One of the first things I noticed when I moved out to the Seattle area was that middle-class housing was pretty nice, and large numbers had boats or RVs in the driveways.
I had just moved out from Tennessee, and a middle-class, blue-collar worker could only dream of ever owning a boat or an RV. Back there, federal minimum wage was considered to be a good job, if you could get it. There was a definate class division between blue-collar and white-collar workers. A blue-collar worker might save up for a decade or more in the hopes of taking his family on a vacation to Disney World, even though it was only 12 hours or so by car from where I lived.
But ever since then, I’ve become aware of the constant and brutal attacks on the unions orchastrated by high-paid CEOs and their Republican minions. They are too week, too outnumbered, and too spoiled to actually do battle with them, so they depend upon setting one class of workers (non-union) on the other (unionized). That is the real class warfare that goes on in this country, and it’s been this way for most of the past hundred years of so.
Forbes.com took annual CEO salaries of publically-traded companies, then compared the CEO salaries with how well the company did during that CEO’s tenure. Some of those with short tenure weren’t included, Forbes required the CEO to be in charge for at least six years before he/she was eligible for the list.
So here is the slidshow, of the ten CEO’s which delivered the worst performance relative to their salaries. Note that for each of them, their salaries and benefits still gave them tens of millions of dollars a year, despite the company performing poorly.
Ten Worst CEOs in Pay vs Performance
Of course, the wingnuts like to complain that if the OWS protesters couldn’t find a job, it was because they weren’t employable. Yet any one of them probably wouldn’t perform any worse than those existing CEO’s.
I was at the Westlake fleabagger protest two weeks ago, and I just walked past it today.
Wow, the number of people there has really declined.
In other fleabagger news, a fleabagger in Toronto was arrested for sniffing the feet of a female fleabagger.
http://mrctv.org/videos/occupy.....s-feet”
@63 sniffing a toe is harmless, how about you heteros who like to kill and rape, now that is what I would worry about and be concerned with. You moron.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/l.....zsSgXDbViP
http://unicornbooty.com/blog/2.....-wife-gay/
Why kill the daughters too?
@66
“Why kill the daughters too?”
There’s supposed to be a comma after the word daughters.
re 67: “Well, twist my neck and call me, Screwy!!!”
Gee, Troll is concerned that the Occupy Seattle protesters might be declining in number – after what, two or three weeks of continuous occupation?
The Tea Partiers couldn’t even be bothered to attend their national convention in 2010, because it was too hot in the summer in Los Vegas. When they do show up for events, they complain about the federal government intruding into their lives, and then swap information about how they can get a new moterized scooter paid for by Medicaid. You were lucky if you could get them to stick around long enough for the TV cameras to record their presence, after which they departed.
“Nine percent corporate business flat tax, nine percent income flat tax and a nine percent national sales tax,” he said, explaining the plan once again during Tuesday night’s Republican presidential debate.
“If you are at or below the poverty level, your plan isn’t ‘9-9-9,’ it’s ‘9-0-9,'” Cain said.
So the poor, who already are not making any money, instead of paying 9% of nothing are paying 0% of nothing, are STILL having to play 9% for food, electricity, gas, clothing and medicine?
This is an improvement?
# 70: The plan is going to go over like a lead balloon in states like Washington, which already have a pretty high sales tax rate. Can you imagine the outrage at having to pay 18.75 percent total sales tax in the metropolan areas?
Although most of the Republican proposals aren’t serious anyway, this one looks like Republicans would like it for another reason: it would be such a hated tax it would be repealed or cut back susbstantially shortly thereafter. The resulting explosion of the federal deficit would result in spending cuts so dramatic that we might have to re-float “old ironsides”, because it would be the only ship left in the Navy.
@12
http://politics.nytimes.com/co.....nate/1/160
Hey, I know you think that Republicans rule your world….I mean they are the Majority in 1/2 of the Legislative branch…And this bill is such a rock star that all the Democrats voted for it. Oops guess not. Your own Senate Majority Leader couldn’t even vote yes…..The Leader of Democrats votes no and it’s the Republicans fault…
http://www.gallup.com/poll/113.....roval.aspx
I love the echo chamber here..
Think 2012 was dramatic for Democrats losing seats? President Obama is a guaranteed one timer.
I’m beginning to think more and more that this is all a big charade to keep us occupied, with our eyes off the main target.
Assuming Romney was always supposed to be the nominee – in part because he “looks presidential” and plays well to the cameras – then the other candidates are a distraction to the media and the voters. Trump’s Birther nonsense, Palin and Bachman’s crazy comments on a wide variety of subjects, Cain’s wierd 9-9-9 plan, Perry’s ignorance, the “will-he-or-won’t-he” speculation around the N.J. governor, etc., all have taken the media and blogger’s attention away from Romney. In the meantime, with the exception of his one off-script insistence that “Corporations are people too, my friend”, he has generally avoided controversey and quietly amassed a ton of cash which he can use in the general election. And by the time the media has finished broadcasting the views of the various Republican crazies, then the media will call him “moderate” by comparison.
Hey, I’m tired of us finding out the dirt on Republican candidates AFTER they win an election. It’s time to give Romney the attention he really deserves.
Wrong Stuff @ # 79 spews: “President Obama is a guaranteed one timer.”
A guarantee? Does that mean that when the President is re-elected in 2012, you will depart from this board, never to be heard from again? (And that includes under any other screen name).
@74
Hey, the admins of this site could ban my IP right now… why wait? Does diverse opinion threaten those on HA?
Right Stuff is my screen name. That’s it.
Um… Not with the guys the right has going up against him he’s not.
@44
Ruger’s are made in America. Go out and stock up on Mini-14’s!
@30
Hey, they’re both right!
@74
Please don’t try and run off the one guy on the right around here that isn’t a sucky troll.
@26
Rolls-Royce doesn’t just make luxury automobiles
Rolls-Royce plc gave up on automobiles years ago. Rolls-Royce Motor Cars is a wholly owned subsidiary of BMW. A new plant was built by BMW in England in 2003, since VW got the original plant and the Bentley name.
What’s that commercial again?
9.99??? Are you out of your mind????
Can’t remember right now.. I don’t watch that much tv..
Rolls-Royce is also know for its excellent apprentice training program.
# 75: Hey, I’m not trying to ban anybody. I’m just wondering how much your “guarantee” is worth.
I guarantee it
RHP
Hey it’s worth as much as anyone else’s opinion..
Nothing.
The arschloch already posting while others are working!
Did some cretinous zombie leave an insufferable stench in this thread???
Right Stuff, your name calling opponent is Cass Sunstein’s malleable Homer Simpson idiot!
Ohhh no…. the poor HA arschloch is identified as a non-working moron posting on blogs while others are working hard!
Very sad those sorry Koch-Cain head zombies…
she don’t lie, she don’t lie, she don’t lie…
(yeah right).. Koch-Cain…
Looks like ThE CraZy LaDeE will be done before Thanksgivings.
Uh-oh, P-dud’s back.
So Puddy, what do you think of Herman KochCain’s position on personal freedom?
Let me remind you:
Toure, author of Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?, is on Maher right now, savaging Herman Kochcain.
The panelist from Bloomberg stated that Herman is still giving paid motivational speeches – and has no staff on the ground in Iowa or New Hampshire.
He’s a clown, and taking the Republican rubes for the ride of their lives.
@91
Crazy Lady and her what what are headed back to Minnesota any day now.
I love bad lip reading.
It just keeps getting better.
Hey CraZy LaDeE, pays the billz.
Sounds similar to what Puddy has said about abortion about rape and incest. I also love how liberal peeps try to twist things he said. So we’ll see when the dust clears what will be the final outcome. The Iowa Republican NEVER like Herman Cain.
I support liberal abortions. ONLY liberal abortions. I support y’all culling da herd.
So let Puddy ask Lib Scientist a question.
What do you think about what Steve Jobs said about Barack ObamAA+? Let me remind you what he said:
So what say you Lib Scientist…? Link previously posted from HuffPo!
You can always ask the HA arschloch to deliver the link from his crazed databaze!
Take This Job and Shove It Dep’t
Working conditions on this job were so bad a worker brought a brass band to his exit interview.
http://www.krdo.com/video/2953.....ce=CNN_VID
CNN says the Saudi Crown Prince has died. I’m not sure what the significance is. Although nominally the first deputy prime minister and minister of defense, he was in his 80s, had Alzheimer’s, and was considered incapacitated by U.S. diplomats.
A murdering sshole like this only get 90 days? Glad I don’t live in the south.
http://davesbikeblog.squarespa.....stice.html
http://www.seattlepi.com/local.....230980.php
102 – That’s a shocker. Kind of at a loss for words…
So, P-dud has this to say about Herman Cain and abortion:
P-dud is again giving us the right wing line – that we evil libruls are twisting poor Herman’s words. However, the man manifestly cannot put together a coherent position. This from yesterday on Fox (via HuffPo):
Here he is with Piers Morgan, saying this (at about 2:53) when asked whether one of his family members, should they have been raped and made pregnant:
This of course comes right after *WHIPLASH* he said this:
Here’s a link to the National Review online – watch the clip at the bottom, where on Fox, Cain appears on the execrable John Stossel’s show, where Cain’s stated positions are so palpably contradictory, that the guest next to Cain (don’t know his name) has to pick his chin up off the floor.
Stossel, understandably, cannot figure out Cain’s position – he’s “pro-life, period” and “abortion should not be legal” – but then says, “that’s her choice, that is not government’s choice”
Once again we come to, as we always do with right wingers, the question, “Stupid, or lying?” Is Herman so dumb, as to not understand that government makes laws that define illegality? Or is this guy cagily playing the wingnuts like P-dud?
I hope everyone here knows that Serial Killers like Jeffrey Dahmer and his like are just plain nuts and insane. And that the heteros that are killing and raping their own family members on a daily basis are supposedly sane, like yourselves. Keep up them Family Values – seems to be working for you.
AND, to all the wingnuts out there…if abortion is murder, if the precious life of a baby begins at conception, how is it OK to abort the fetus that results from rape or incest?
Isn’t that life sacred, too? Do two wrongs make a right?
Herman KochCain seems to think that in that case it’s up to the woman, and P-dud says he agrees with that. So, is a precious little blasocyst made by a rapist and his victim less holy than that made by some Quiverfull couple?
I stated my position on rape and incest long before anyone knew of Herman Cain. I stated it at a Tuesday DL in front of the leftists there.
Mittens doesn’t seem to understand lady-parts. And, of, course, holds multiple positions (kinda kinky) when asked.
His nattering about a constitutional amendment stating life begins at conception (sorta like the Indiana legislature declaring pi=3.2) has massive intended consequences – making contraception illegal.
Did you notice how Lib Scientist did not answer #98?
Typical leftist pinhead.
Crickets are indeed chirping this morning!
So as always having any conversation with Lib UNScientist is always one way!
@107
What do you think of Herman’s position(s) on personal freedom and a woman’s autonomy over her uterus?
Sorry Lib UnScientist… I don’t see you!
@109
I was pursuing my prior line of discussion about Herman Cain, front runner for the Republican nomination for President of the United States.
I was resisting your attempts to derail that discussion with tangential commentary by dead industrialists.
Steve Job’s opinions are interesting, but just that, the opinions of a dead guy not involved in politics.
I find it more interesting and topical to discuss the opinions of people who aspire to lead the nation, and for whom we have an obligation to understand, criticize, and potentially vote on.
Steve Jobs was one of Barack ObamAA+’s biggest 2008 jock straps. He said Barack ObamAA+ is destroying business in America and that’s the best you can do?
Laughable! See ya Lib UnScientist. I have things to do today!
@114
Chickenshit.
P-dud will not discuss his hero Herman Cain, and Herman’s inability to express a coherent opinion on abortion. A timely, topical issue regarding the person leading the polls for the Republican Presidential nomination.
I posed a question directly at P-dud up @92, asking him about his hero Herman KochCain. And he refuses to answer or engage in that discussion – instead reverting to form and trying to derail the conversation with distractions about now-dead Steve Jobs.
Crickets. and chickenshit.
Crickets. *cheep*cheep*cheep*
I do believe I’ve invented puddy repellent! Anybody around here know about patent law? Aerosol wingnut repellent could be HUGE!
Climate scientists reporting global warming were…..***RIGHT ALL ALONG***
BWHAHHAHAHA!
I love this from the comments:
Mittens:
More from TPM:
So, like, he want the Iraq war to last longer??? WTF? Like, as Rachel said, the 10th year is going to be sooooo much awesomer?
Where do they get these idiots?
I had to come back before I walked out the door to review the latest spew from Lib UnScientist.
Notice how he claims I
Butt Steve Jobs was talking about the failed policies supported by Barack ObamAA+
Also I posted this way before Lib Unscientist started his latest Herman Cain rant. Wait for Lib UnScientist’s chronological failure commentary on that sentence. Remember, this is the leftist tool who didn’t know conceptguerilla and how long has Roger DOPEY Rabbit posted that garbage here? YEARS!
When it gets tough Lib UnScientist leaves the room or writes deflection commentary to make himself look good.
I answered your Herman Cain rant. Sucks to be you sucka!
Steve Jobs?
Barack Obama?
conceptgorilla?
P-dud is in rare form – spin-spin-spin – never engage the topic at hand. All tangent, all the time
You most certainly did not.
This is what I got out of you:
and
Why won’t you discuss your hero Herman Cain? He’s leading the polls for the Republican nomination. His opinions and positions are important, no? Why the cryptic reference to a Drinking Liberally gathering at some unstated date in the past? Why won’t you talk about Herman?
Herman?
Herman!!
Go away, chickenshit. You have NOTHING to say.
OMG.
From the idiot who posted this just above:
Impotent. Frightened. Vapid.
That hissing sound you hear is my can of wingnut repellent.
From LibSci’s link above:
Watts is the tool of tools.. The goto guy for zombie deniers! Now he’s spinning like a top..
@123
Watts is a complete asshole. He’s complaining now that the Muller data is being used as PR and hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet – which is typical right-wing hypocrisy – as he has been attacking peer-reviewed data and the scientists generating it as being part of a big conspiracy. And nothing he has had to say has been anything but non-peer-reviewed sewage.
For the deluded cultists who believe that ‘god’ created the Earth 6000 years ago – tonight’s the night!
According to Ussher, ‘god’ got all creative on the evening before 23 October 4004 BC.
Happy Birthday Universe!
Richard Dawkins smacks down Bible-thumping imbecile.
Too, too funny.
Christian cultist, evolution denier and apologist for OT genocides, including the slaughter of children, is going to hector an empty chair, claiming that Dawkins is afraid to engage him.
Remind you of anyone?
For any fellow atheists, and anyone else with a sense of humor, go here.
Puddy is over at dailykos posting – he made the “Hate-Mail-Apalooza”:
At least it sounds like our P-dud – maybe he made the big time over at kos – or maybe they just all get their talking points from the same places.
Soros! Frances Fox Piven! Tides Foundation! Black Helicopters! Birth Certificate! Solyndra! Teleprompter! 9-9-9! There is no racism! Liberals are racists!
@108 That’s what’s known as a “legislative fact,” which has nothing to do with real facts, such as when a congressman wants to pass a law saying “2 + 2 = 6.”