Well…while everyone has been talking about the affirmative action non-decision that came out of the supreme court today, the real eye opener was the win by the chamber of commerce who got a decision that basically immunizes all employers from charges of sexual harassment. Essentially, what the court has ruled is that harassment by anyone other than a supervisor or manager is just peachy even if the company knows about it…so, in real world terms that means that women in the workplace, or gays or lesbians, or anyone else that is subject to this nonsense just has to sit back and take it…the company has no responsibility or legal liability unless it is done by someone in a supervisory role…I just can’t believe how wrong these guys are on every issue…and I use the term guys here because it is always the conservative “guys” on the court that believe companies should be protected but individuals are on their own…just more of the Ayn Rand nonsense that has filtered into the right these days…whatever happened to the court just ruling on the law, not ideology? Not with these folks…geez…
Category Archives: Politics
House idiots…
Well…I was going to call this one “snakes on the trail” since I did see 5 of them today….or “snakes in the house” for the nonsense that is going on there, but “House idiots” seem to fit better with the fiasco that was the farm bill that didn’t pass this week. The funniest part was ole Beohner and Cantor trying to blame the dems for it…saying that “the dems don’t know how to govern”….no, that’s not the case…the reason the dems voted against this ugly bill is the 20 billion dollars in cuts to food stamps an other onerous requirement that were put on the people that have the need for assistance. These ugly repub idiots wanted to use this bill to punish people for losing their jobs and needing temporary assistance…going so far as to mandate drug tests before any benefits are offered. I guess the repubs don’t know how to read since the same ALEC fueled nonsense was struck down by the courts in Florida last year and the same thing would have happened if this law was passed. What the hell did they expect when the dems said no? There is still one party that cares about people, not just corporations and the rich and it isn’t the repubs…..
Walmart…part two…
Well…have been thinking about this more this aft and have come up with an even simpler solution…every company in the US that pays wages so low that their employees have to have government assistance of any kind should be required to pay the assistance back as a sort of tax to take away the incentive to cheat their employees out of a living wage while enriching the owners. This would be classic economics at work and since the repubs are so hot about eliminating government assistance for anyone, how could they disagree? It’s all a a matter of eliminating the distortions in markets that are cause by a big company like Walmart and it’s political power…Walmart is essentially stealing from you and me and so the Waltons can get richer and richer…it would at least claw back the 3.5 billion dollars in silent subsidies that come from their employees being eligible for Medicaid and food stamps and stop the greedy Waltons from pushing these costs onto you and me…geez…
Here’s how to solve the Walmart problem…
Well….have been thinking about this for a while now…how do we solve the problem of each every Walmart store’s low wages being subsidized to the tune of almost a million dollars a year in Medicaid and food stamps? I know that people say that if the employees don’t want to work there, they should go find better jobs…but that is a just nonsense, many of the employees at Walmart have no other choices for work since Walmart drove the businesses they used to work for into the ground. So, let’s just get past that…and you know that every dime of the Walmart tax, as I call it, is going into the pockets of the Walton family and the upper management of the company; the worst kind of corporate welfare. So my idea is to make companies like Walmart and many in the restaurant industry pay their fair share is to fine them the difference between what they pay their employees and the amount that makes them eligible for benefits….if they want to pay someone 10 dollars an hour and the poverty wage calculates to at least 15…then we fine them 5 dollars for every hour that they force people to work for less…we need to take the incentive away for Walmart to leech off the rest of the country and make them pay the real cost of their labor…after all you and I subsidize each and every store to the tune of almost a million dollars a year…take that away and we take away the power these thugs have to suppress wages across the US…and I’m sure we never agreed to pay this “Walmart tax”…geez…
Still trying to write…
Well…have been trying to figure out what to write about today and I have been having little luck….I am just so burned out writing about the crazy on the right….the legislator in New England that thinks his “man’s brain” is the only way to understand healthcare…saying that women are too emotional to think straight….and then the craziest thing I have ever heard from another repub saying that we should ban abortion since fetuses masturbate…yeah, not making this up but the daily toxicity of this nonsense is taking a toll on me….how are people so stupid? What do we do? Just hang on until we can vote some of these idiots out of office…it used to be that if any congressman said any of this stuff, his own party would put an end to it and marginalize them until they were gone..but, it seems to me that the entire purpose of the right and conservatives these days is the grift, the payoff that comes from being crazy…and you just have to look at people like Palin, Bachmann, Gohmert and Cruz who are out to make their bones so they can then leach off the stupid on the right for the rest of their lives while the people that voted for them eat catfood to survive as the safety net is cut….it’s not going to be th UN that is the end of the US…it is going to be the stupid….geez…
A little on the supremes…
Well…it is decision time at the supreme court and there have been a couple of notable ones that came out today…and they even decided them the right way….first, they struck down the law that the righties passed in Arizona that forced people to prove their citizenship before they could register to vote…one aimed at ensuring that the poor and those that normally vote for dems would be disproportionately affected and the court said no to this blatant voter suppression…good for them…second, they ruled that the practice where big pharma companies pay generic manufacturers to NOT make generic versions of their cash cow drugs when the patents expire…ensuring that the prices stay high are illegal….well, duh….I just don’t get why it takes the supremes so long to come to the obvious….well, at least they finally get some right…geez…
Why do we have to continue?
Well…yeah, that title is a little misleading, but what I wanted to say would have been too long to be one…what I wanted to say was…why do we have to continue to reiterate the fourth amendment? Shouldn’t the fourth amendment itself be enough? I guess not, and some of the legislators in the US congress feel the same way with the revelations of the NSA spying on you me, and everyone in the country. In fact, Alan Grayson, a Florida congressman, has just introduced legislation basically saying again what the fourth amendment says…that you can’t gather info on anyone unless there is probable cause that a crime has been committed and the warrants are approved by a judge. No more of this “let’s just watch everybody” under the guise of protecting us…I, for one, don’t want to be protected if that means that the government watches everything that I do…every phone call, every internet search, every text, and even the location data from our phones…one of the things that always happens is that the government will find a use for this data and I have no faith this use will be limited to those uses that are constitutional so they must stop…geez…
What’s wrong with transparency?
Well…I have been following this whole NSA/spying flap over the past couple of days and the question that pops into my head is: “What’s wrong with transparency?” Why is it so terrible that we, as citizens, know what the hell our government is up to…especially when it directly affects us? It’s not like they’ve foiled hundreds of terrorist plots gathering all of this data…in fact, the head of the NSA has said that there may have been one plot foiled…and don’t give me that crap that it is worth it if one plot is foiled…since we don’t even know what the definition of “plot” is…is a full scale terrorist attack that was foiled or was it a couple of wannabes talking back and forth on facebook? Even with all of this money being spent…and there are over 400,000 people that are working on gathering and analyzing the data…they didn’t catch the Boston bombers and they are the sort of people that the NSA is supposed to be protecting us from….all the while we spend billions upon billions of dollars on this nonsense while bridges collapse and thousands of people die from gun violence every year…and thousands more from preventable diseases that could be cured if they had health insurance. I think we are at the point where we really do need to bring some light to these programs so we, as a people, can actually have a say in how we want to be kept safe and how much liberty we are prepared to cede to do it…geez…
What happened to the fourth amendment?
Well…for quite a while now, I have been concerned by the daily erosion of the protections of the fourth amendment both by the courts and by the legislature of the federal government. I don’t understand it, either…when there is so much outcry about any infringement of the 2nd amendment and the rabid howls from the right when even sensible laws controlling guns are proposed, and yet with the revelations that the NSA has been infringing on the 4th on a daily basis…only a few repubs have come forward to oppose this big brother dragnet. The most egregious justification for it is the general one of “safety” and that the government is “protecting” us from some amorphous threat that is out there but they won’t tell us what the threat is or what they are doing to protect us…this creates the next question which is why should we believe agencies that lie on a daily basis?”. This boils down to one quote that I use quite often that distills the balance between risk and freedom: “..those who give up essential liberty for temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety…” Ben Franklin…geez…
Heartless bastards….
Well…just a short one on a jaw-dropper that I read somewhere today…our buddy Eric Cantor, had a wonderful idea (yep, that’s snark) to eliminate government funding of elections that would do nothing but increase the influence of corporations and the rich, but he tried a little bit of misdirection to confuse people what the whole thing was about…including a clause that would take some of the money and put it towards funding medical care for sick kids…but the sick, heartless bastards of the hard right (yeah, you can read that tea partiers) came out in full howl that helping sick kids would create a “constituency” that would then have to be helped forever…just like people that get food stamps or unemployment insurance. I am at a loss how to respond to someone as heartless as this…of course you should help sick kids forever! Who is a government supposed to help forever? Oil companies? Oh…I forgot…that is exactly who these bastards want to help while kids die from lack of health care…geez…