Day: February 21, 2014

When It Rains It Pours On The GOP!

The GOP is having a wealth of problems these days……it all started about 2 years ago….there were a couple of high ups in the party that were caught doing what they accuse others of doing….voter fraud.  Then there was the Virginian (I believe) head of the state GOP that said emphatically that the voter issues in the state legislature were there to prevent some people (mostly democrats) from having a easy time to vote….and then the BIG shoe fell….Christie and his bridge debacle….and that one is still playing out…but so far it is looking more bleak for the governor.

Many 2016 GOP hopefuls are finding it difficult to keep a straight line to the primaries……the newest report that may play out similar to the Christie thingy is one of the GOPs fave governors…..Scott Walker of Wisconsin………another bright GOP star looking at 2016 as their time…….but……..

Another huge setback for a Republican governor with ambitions for 2016: Some 27,000 emails were released yesterday relating to a probe that led to the arrest and conviction of former aides to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, and some of them could prove highly damaging. Some key facts, as per the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, the Washington Post, and the Huffington Post:

  • The emails link Walker, then county executive to a secret email system used by his taxpayer-funded staff to break campaign law communicating directly with his 2010 campaign for governor during business hours. “Consider youself now in the ‘inner circle,'” his administration director another county employee. “I use this private account quite a bit to communicate with SKW and Nardelli,” she wrote, referring to Walker by his initials.
  • The emails show the Walker appears to have been “aware that laptops were being used in the county executive’s office for accessing things on non-county networks,” the chief investigator says, a sign that use of the private email system was widespread.
  • Several highly racist emails were forwarded among Walker’s staff, including one recounting a “nightmare” of waking up “black, Jewish, disabled, gay with a Mexican boyfriend.”
  • Walker ordered staff to get rid of a doctor the county’s Behavioral Health Division who had worked a thong model. “Get rid of the MD asap,” Walker wrote after being told the modeling wasn’t “pornographic, but is quite suggestive.”

The Walker affair hasn’t received as much attention as Chris Christie’s traffic jam scandal, though both feature GOP governors with “national profiles and national ambitions, allegedly using their public office to boost their political standing, all the while distancing themselves from the work their staffs sullied themselves with,” writes Emma Roller at Slate, predicting the emails will haunt him through next year’s re-election fight.

Just when the media pick up on this juicy piece?

These are actual ‘scandals’…there is no need to make it into one….the misdeeds are there for all to see.  Now the question is….how will these types of things effect who becomes the bright star for 2016?

Can Obama Find A Cure For The Common Core? | ThinkProgress

Recently I did a day on American education……I am not at all comfortable with the plans, both Dem or Repub, to ‘fix’ our ailing system……the prez idea Common Core is just another plan that is setting up for failure……education is way too important for band-aid solutions……so far neither partyhas a good idea….they only propose a band-aid for a sucking chest wound…….

A great piece written for Think Progress……….

Can Obama Find A Cure For The Common Core? | ThinkProgress.

It’s A FAKE!

I realize that there are many that absolutely hate Muslims……for whatever reason, my guess is 9/11 but I could be mistaken……the other day while I was surfing some sites I ran across the story of the Syria girl that was stoned to death for using Facebook…….it was a horrible story so I Googled the subject and here is what I found…..iCNN, The Daily Mail, Breitbart, Tundra Tabloids, Examiner, India Today, Global Times, Israel Hayom, Daily Bashkar, FrontPageRag and numerous other news sites and blogs reported the story.

Syria-Girl-Stoning-for-facebook-account

I received the following from a friend that I contacted to see how accurate the story had been…..

It is ironic because the still that was used to claim that Syrian rebels were stoning a woman for having a Facebook account was originally about a supposed “true-story” recounting of the stoning of “Soraya M.” in an Iranian village in the 80s.

Iran’s government castigated the movie as false and Orientalist but apparently years later their news agency has no quibbles in pushing their own Orientalist style fear-mongering that eventually played into essentialized characterizations of Islam and Muslims.

The story appears to have originally been reported in English by Iran’s Fars News Agency, which doesn’t always have the best track record for reliability. For example, it reported last month on the “alien/extraterrestrial intelligence agenda” driving U.S. policy, which bizarrely linked President Barack Obama, Adolf Hitler and space aliens.

Fars attributed its report on the alleged Syrian stoning incident to the Arabic-language Al-Rai Al-Youm.

The story is a HOAX and too many people will believe a lie without verifying the information….and that is the tragedy…people too willing to believe a lie to feed their hate…..truly sad.

Labor For Life

In my younger more impetuous days I was a labor organizer and since then I am always reading about the movement and trying to decide where it is going in this country…….

In modern politics the word labor and unions are dirty words in conservative circles……..this institution has been blamed for all sorts of woes…it has been blamed for a wide array of situations from the high cost of cars to poor educational performance to the unwanted outcome of elections…..in short…..unions are the anti-Christ in some corners.

The perfectly executed character assassination of unions has, in my opinion, has lead to a weakening of labor’s position in the workplace which in turn has slowly fueled the demise of the middle class….

Fast forward to this week……the ‘big story’ has been the union vote in a VW plant in Tennessee on whether to unionize or not….BTW the union lost out in that vote…..they voted to NOT unionize…….

The obvious loser in last week’s failed bid to unionize the Volkswagen auto plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., was the United Auto Workers. The union was counting on a victory at the German-owned plant, which stayed officially neutral in the unionizing effort but hinted it welcomed a platform for organizing other plants in the South.

But the vote — and the forces that had arrayed themselves against the UAW — could also represent a setback for the economy and blue- and white-collar employees, a number of auto-industry and economic experts suggested.

U.S. management and labor organizations have battled each other —with both sides wasting resources in the process — ever since Frederick Winslow Taylor used his “scientific” methods a century ago to de-skill and control production workers, explained James P. Womack, founder of the Lean Enterprise Institute in Cambridge, Mass., and a co-author of “The Machine That Changed The World.” For Womack, the acrimonious fight and vote in Chattanooga was part of a historical continuum that has often hobbled U.S. industry, especially in the face of international competitors who embraced much more collaborative approaches to management.

My personal opinion was that it would not succeed in unionizing the plant….after all it is in the South and Right To Work is strong in the region…….so was the vote a big win for VW?  I thought so until I read another article shortly after the vote…….

The head of Volkswagen’s General Works Councils in Germany is threatening to block any further investment in the southern United States, Reuters reports, after workers at VW’s Chattanooga plant voted against union representation. “I can imagine fairly well that another VW factory in the United States, provided that one more should still be set up there, does not necessarily have to be assigned to the South again,’ Bernd Osterloh said. “We as workers will hardly be able to vote in favor” of one. Osterloh blames US conservatives for stirring up “massive anti-union sentiments.” He serves on a 20-member supervisory board split evenly between workers and management that could block future investments unless Chattanooga gets a German-style workers’ council. VW would still like to create a council without the United Auto Workers union, the New York Times reports, but legal experts say that might violate federal laws against company-controlled worker groups. Some anti-UAW workers have offered to set up an alternative union to get around the problem.

An interesting turn of the screw, right?  With all that info in hgand, who would you say was the big winner in this situation?

Please throwing your hat into this conversation.  I would like to have as many thoughts as possible……