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Tag Archives: republicans
towrah Tuesday &some News
just another rant … revived
Failed Promises
Like what we are experiencing under the Republican controlled House of Representatives versus change to or a redirection of promises that President Obama has had to make on numerous occasions. It is obvious the two situations are quite different. The first two years of the Obama Admin the Republican Tea Party spent most of their time on the floor of Congress saying no, blocking, making the Democratic Party scale back or run away from legitimate bills that party of NO attached felonious amendments to that no member of Congress could in good conscious vote for. In the weeks and months following these just say no votes, Americans in Public Service began losing jobs and the unemployment rate increased and will continue; Republicans without remorse started calling the unemployed lazy, unmotivated and if all else failed they should ask for charity. We have 2012 candidates running for President that are even less compassionate for those who are unemployed underemployed or in that 99%. Corporations are people too and if you are not rich? Well, that is on you.
The ultimate show of privileged behavior is when Republicans decided to hold the middle class hostage while demanding the bush bonus dollars be made permanent, under the guise of that top 2% being the job creators. The campaign for the midterm elections considered an off year usually gets few voters out to vote though in what definitely is a first of many firsts in the Obama’s Presidency, the midterms were important to all Americans looking back. Yet, folks did the same ole same, some opted out on purpose and even more voted right of center on purpose. That is beyond my understanding but the whole notion of teaching a President a lesson is the one of the worse reasons to vote against your best interest. While most know the outcome of the midterm elections, I think that many people do not understand what truly happened. President Obama said he got shellacked and would try to make a move to be more bipartisan, though senator McConnell said if he wants us to consider compromise he would have to do, say and act like we want him to and on conservative airwaves McConnell said his job was to make Obama a one term President. The midterm elections were bad for everyone and as the months moved along buyer’s remorse set in though it took way too long for me. For the last three years, Americans have been hearing Republicans say that we need to create jobs. Mr. Boehner and his comrades definitely used the jobs, jobs, jobs slogan to win the House of Representatives in 2010. Sadly, these carpetbaggers have been waving one hand in the air while using the other to attack, slash, cut, and burn every effort to get our economy back on track.
Yes, President Obama did promise change and he has kept over half of them, he also stated that he could not make changes alone … we all would have to participate. That comment is a hard reality given the crap that the Republican Tea Party keeps pulling out of somewhere disguised with them saying they are listening to what Americans want. That claim is a proven falsehood, the promises the Republican Tea Party has made repeatedly has or …could put us at risk.
I certainly feel our country is at risk with failed promises, reckless and or provocative rhetoric but contrary to what we hear in the news … it is definitely coming from Teapublican members of Congress and Governors.
I still have the Audacity of hope and change …
Other News …
C-SPAN’s Coverage of Iowa Caucuses Begins at 7pm ET
Rick Perry Ends Campaign Day in Perry, Iowa
Rick Santorum Ends Day Before Caucuses in Altoona, Iowa
Mitt Romney Holds Final Rally on Day Before Caucuses
Ron Paul Tours 5 Cities on Last Day of Iowa Campaign
Newt Gingrich Works for Final Votes in Iowa
Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Talks About Military Cuts
DHS Secretary Napolitano Discusses International Partnerships
Mitt Romney Interviewed by Iowa Newspaper
Rick Perry Interviewed by Iowa Newspaper
White House Briefing with Jay Carney
Panel on Obama Is a “Teflon President”
Rep. Nancy Pelosi News Conference
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Repost :: Right to Work for Less :: Repost
Sneak Attack on Unions All About Politics, Not Economics
As we discussed last week, Republicans in Michigan are ramming through so-called “right to work” legislation (along with several other highly controversial bills) during the final days of lame duck session.
A new report out today from our colleagues at the Center for American Progress underscores why right to work for less isn’t just bad for unions, it’s bad for everyone:
- The average worker—unionized or not—working in a right-to-work state earns approximately $1,500 less per year than a similar worker in a state without such a law.
- Workers in right-to-work states are also significantly less likely to receive employer-provided health insurance and pensions. If benefits coverage in non-right-to-work states were lowered to the levels of states with these laws, 2 million fewer workers would receive health insurance and 3.8 million fewer workers would receive pensions nationwide.
- All of the states with the lowest percentage of workers in unions—Mississippi, Arkansas, South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Virginia, Tennessee, Texas, South Dakota, and Oklahoma—are right-to-work states. They all have a relatively weak middle class, as the share of total state income going to the middle 60 percent of the population is below the national average.
- Over the past several decades, unions in Michigan have weakened and the middle class has been hollowed out—a trend that would significantly worsen if right-to-work became law. As Figure 1 shows, Michigan’s middle class earned 53.6 percent of the state’s income in 1979, a year when over 37 percent of the state’s workers were in unions. Today less than 18 percent of Michigan’s workers are unionized, and the middle class receives only 47 percent of the state’s income.
- Moreover, right-to-work does not reduce unemployment. Indeed, right-to-work states such as Nevada—which has the nation’s highest unemployment rate—and North Carolina both have higher unemployment rates than Michigan. Not surprisingly, researchers find that right-to-work has “no significant positive impact whatsoever on employment.”
As it happens, President Obama was in Michigan today to celebrate new jobs and investments in a Daimler diesel engine plant. The president came out swinging against this latest right-wing attack on unions and working people. He also explained that middle class consumers are the real engine of economic growth:
Watch it:
President Obama: And by the way, what we shouldn’t do — I just got to say this — what we shouldn’t be doing is trying to take away your rights to bargain for better wages and working conditions. (Applause.) We shouldn’t be doing that. (Applause.) These so-called “right to work” laws, they don’t have to do with economics; they have everything to do with politics. (Applause.) What they’re really talking about is giving you the right to work for less money. (Applause.)
You only have to look to Michigan — where workers were instrumental in reviving the auto industry — to see how unions have helped build not just a stronger middle class but a stronger America. (Applause.) So folks from our state’s capital, all the way to the nation’s capital, they should be focused on the same thing. They should be working to make sure companies like this manufacturer is able to make more great products. That’s what they should be focused on. (Applause.) We don’t want a race to the bottom. We want a race to the top. (Applause.)
America is not going to compete based on low-skill, low-wage, no workers’ rights. That’s not our competitive advantage. There’s always going to be some other country that can treat its workers even worse. Right?
Audience: Right!
The President: What’s going to make us succeed is we got the best workers — well trained, reliable, productive, low turnover, healthy. That’s what makes us strong. And it also is what allows our workers then to buy the products that we make because they got enough money in their pockets. (Applause.)
BOTTOM LINE: Instead of a race to the bottom pushed by right-wing billionaires, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) should focus on building an economy that works for everyone, including workers.
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The worst of 2011 Top 10 TV Shows Movies and Songs … Pop Culture
AlterNet / ByJulianne Escobedo Shepherd
10 Pop Monstrosities That Almost Destroyed Our Culture in 2011
Here are the worst TV shows, movies, and songs of 2011.
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Every year, things go down in pop culture that seem to signal the coming armageddon — like offensive and popular reality shows, for instance — and we wonder, could it possibly get worse? And every year, it does. We could list 2011 terrible things in American culture this year and not even come close to completing the list, so for brevity’s sake, here are the top 10 worst things that happened in pop culture this year. May 2012 have fewer of them.
1. Movie: Atlas Shrugged, Part 1
Even if this movie wasn’t predicated on dismal Rand-worship and probably the most tedious/annoying book of her career, it’s bad based on sheer artistry. Set in the dystopian near-future of 2016, it bumps up against every dramatic action film cliche imaginable, a Tea Party fingerpainting of corporate greed. That said, this movie is AMAZING in its hilarity, possibly the best unintentionally humorous American film since National Treasure, with all the requisite deep melodrama and overacting that is somehow also stiff. It’s terrible but a pleasure to watch, particularly when you consider that with all the rich libertarians in the world, no one could pool their money for better talent! Haha.
2. Documentary: The Undefeated
If Sarah Palin’s fawning, lionizing documentary weren’t crafted for the sole purpose of revising her career and casting her in a noble light, the tale of how it came to be might have been funny: gleaming fanboy Stephen K. Bannon piles compliments on his feckless heroine, his love blinding him to her mishaps. It almost deserves a Mel Brooks script—only it’s real, and the Palin faithful brought in around $75k the first week in only 10 theaters. The Palin hustle has quieted down a bit, but expect this to be trotted out as evidence of her wondrousness closer to the election (and as absurd GOP candidates mention her as a potential running mate). It’s just depressing that it requires actual political propaganda to get her there.
3. TV Miniseries: “The Kennedys”
What was up with propagandist revisionism this year? The intensely reviled recasting of the Camelot era was so full of historical inaccuracies that Brave New Films launched a successful effort to keep the History Channel from airing it. With Greg Kinnear as JFK and Katie Holmes as Jackie, the whole piece was criticized as wholesale character assassination, hand in hand with the strange conservative impulse to cast JFK as somehow evil. And they didn’t even use the incriminating Jackie tapes!
4. Reality Show: “Toddlers and Tiaras”
Hitfix called it “a clarion call for a Social Services intervention,” and was it ever. Eager and often deluded moms entering their mostly reluctant tiny, tiny daughters into beauty pageants and stage-momming them into internalizing the princess premium before they can really utter words with three syllables. If the ghost of JonBenet Ramsey doesn’t loom over this show for you in a disturbing way, perhaps some of the choice things moms say to their children will, such as one mom telling her eight-year-old to shake her butt around, but not too much “like a stripper.” Ugh.
5. Novel: Dead Reckoning by Charlaine Harris
It’s unfortunate that an author with the imagination of Charlaine Harris can apparently only make her work more interesting by adding an endless stream of fantastical characters, rather than making said characters do more interesting things. The creator of Sookie Stackhouse, upon which HBO’s popular “True Blood” is based, Harris is up to book 11 in the series, and it might be time to pack it in (or at least create a spin-off). Add this to tossed-off and confusing plot elements that mess around with continunity and logic (many longtime fans have accused Harris of not actually reading the books in her own series), and you have a beach read that’s more frustrating and convoluted than light and fun.
6. Song (and video!): Bruno Mars, “The Lazy Song”
Stumbling over himself to be viewed as America’s least threatening nice guy, Bruno Mars reached the point of pure banality with “The Lazy Song,” which sounds delivered straight from a can. An accomplishment, at least, in that he became the most innocuous person of the year, but even the tempo was boring with “The Lazy Song.” Add a cutesy and inexplicable band of monkeys wearing Wayfarers in the video and it’s like a pipe bomb that, upon explosion, politely delivers a full-scale affront to the senses.
7. Musical Group: Lady Antebellum
Aside from the obvious—that the group’s name fetishizes an era in which black people were enslaved—this year the Nashville trio released Own the Night, an album that was completely offensive in its non-offensiveness. Ciphoning any semblance of personality until it was an opaque wisp of music, it thrived on cliche lyrics, boring harmonies, terrible interludes and completely generic everything. The musical equivalent of being inside a shopping mall, the place that varies only slightly no matter where you are in the world, Own the Night is an attempt to whitewash its own world into empty vertigo. Horrifying.
8. Twilight Movie: Breaking Dawn, Part 1
Going into the movie adaptations of Stephenie Meyer’s ridiculously popular vampire love stories, we knew they were highly Christian, but Breaking Dawn is too much: an entire (pretty long!) treatise that basically says sex is 1) only for married people; and 2) for the sole purpose of procreation and abortion is never, ever an option, even if it means the mother is going to die. Pro-life to the point of squeamishness, and even the gorgeous visage of Rob Pattinson couldn’t take away the sting.
9. Non-Reality Television Show: “Last Man Standing” (ABC)
There was a lot of competition for this category in 2011: The short-lived, regressive Playboy Club; the incredibly racist and blogger-cutesy 2 Broke Girls; the ridiculous bro-show Man Up, which reached the infantilized nadir of the Peter Pan syndrome comedy wrought by Judd Apatow and his ilk. But nothing was more offensive, less funny, and more harmful to every gender and sexual orientation than Last Man Standing, the Tim Allen vehicle based on the premise that traditional masculinity is being bled out by independent women and femme-y men, whose proliferation is ripping apart the fabric of tradition and ruining a world where manly (white) men rule.
When he’s not trying to decipher the arcane and impenetrable language of women, he’s ascribing his masculinity to things that are frankly unisex (such as sports) and mocking as somehow emasculated men who prefer, for instance, Mel Gibson’s romantic movies over his violent ones. Aside from the feeling that the misogynists writing this show are of the he-man, woman-haters club variety, they also seem not funny at all.
10. Dramatic Moment of Outrage from Right-Wingers: Parents Television Council on Janet Jackson Nipplegate
The Parents Television Council is a source of endless, paranoid hilarity of handwringing over relatively minor infractions on TV, but one point was the funniest this year: when it responded in outrage over the accidental exposure of Janet Jackson’s breast on the 2004 Superbowl halftime. In November, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a fine was not necessary for the incident, which as anyone who’s seen it knows, was clearly an accident (unless Jackson and Justin Timberlake are such exceptional actors they can register pure horror before an entire stadium midway through a strenuous performance). But of course, the PTC called it a “striptease” (which is repulsive, sexualized and racialized) and called for an appeal to the appeal.
Let’s hope 2012 brings less of this stuff.
Be a Seed for Change 
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