Happy Fuckin' Labor Day! I read this week that — according to a new book by Steven Rattner, your administration's former "Car Czar" — during White House meetings about how to save the tens of thousands of jobs that would be lost if GM and Chrysler collapsed, your response was, "Fuck the UAW!"
Now, I can't believe you actually said that. Maybe Rattner got confused because you drop a lot of F-bombs, or maybe your assistant was trying to order lunch and you said (to Rattner) "Fuck you" and then to your assistant "A&W, no fries."
Or maybe you did mean Fuck the UAW. If so, let me give you a little fucking lesson (a lesson I happen to know because my fucking uncle was in the sit-down strike that founded the fucking UAW).
Before there were unions, there was no middle class. Working people didn't get to send their kids to college, few were able to own their own fucking home, nobody could take a fucking day off for a funeral or a sick day or they might lose their fucking job.
Then working people organized themselves into unions. The bosses and the companies fucking hated that. In fact, they were often overheard to say, "Fuck the UAW!!!" That's because the UAW had beaten one of the world's biggest industrial corporations when they won their battle on February 11, 1937, 44 days after they'd taken over the GM factories in Flint. Inspired by their victory, workers struck almost every other fucking industry, and union after union was born. Had World War II not begun and had FDR not died, there would have been an economic revolution that would have given everyone — everyone — a fucking decent life.
Nonetheless labor unions did create a middle class for the majority (even companies that didn't have unions were forced to pay at or near union wages in order to attract a workforce) and that middle class built a great country and a good life. You see, Rahm, when people earn a fucking good wage, they spend it on stuff, which then creates more good paying jobs, and then the middle class grows fucking big. Did you know that back when I was a kid if you had a parent making a union wage, only one parent had to work?! And they were home by 3 or 4pm, 5:30 at the latest! We had dinner together! Dad had four weeks paid vacation. We all had free health and dental care. And anyone with decent grades went to college and it didn't fucking bankrupt them. (And if you ever used the F-word, the nuns would straighten you out in ways that even you couldn't bear to hear about).
Then a Republican fired all the air traffic controllers, a Democrat gave us NAFTA and millions of jobs were moved overseas (hey, didn't you work in that White House, too? "Fuck the UAW, baby!"). Unions got scared and beaten down, a frat boy became president and, like a drunk out of control, spent all our fucking money and our children's money, too. Fuck.
And now your assistant's grandma has to work at fucking McDonald's. Ask her for pictures of what the middle class life used to look like. It was effing cool! I'll bet grandma doesn't say "Fuck the UAW!"
Hey, don't get me wrong, Rahm. I fucking like you. You single-handedly got the House returned to the Dems in 2006. But you and your boss better do something fucking quick to put people back to work. How 'bout making it a crime to take an American job and move it out of the country? In other words, treat it as if It were a fucking national treasure like you would if someone stole the Declaration of Independence out of the National Archives or some poacher stole eggs out of the nest of an America bald eagle.
Or how 'bout arresting some of those Wall Street guys who fucking stole our money, the money that ran the American economy. Now that would take some fucking guts.
And maybe, just maybe, that one act of real guts might save your ass come November 2nd.
Oh, I can just hear you now: "Fuck Michael Moore!" No problem. But Fuck the UAW? How 'bout if I just leave off the ‘A’ and the ‘W’?
Senator Huckleberry Twangs Out the Big Lie on The Stimulus.
My sneaky, conniving, snake handling evangelist, country hick of a United States Senator, Lindsey Graham makes me cringe every time he takes to the air. I guess the whole country thinks we South Carolinians slaughter the King’s English and speak with that irritating, nasal, mountaineer mule trader twang. Our other Senator, Little Jimmy DeMint isn’t quite as bad in that department, but he’s no better for our image-- or what we have left of it after Mark “Appalachian Trail” Sanford. DeMint is a laughing stock to most normal Americans. Tea Party leader indeed! Ha!.
But leave it to that dancing tool, David Gregory to bring Senator Huckleberry front and center on Meet the Press this morning to assess President Obama’s economic policies. Needless to say, he trotted out the Republican Party line about the importance of keeping the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy right up front. OF COURSE he doesn’t want them to expire. That would be an affront to the Koch brothers and other filthy rich Republican donors who wish to continue to profit substantially* from the most unlevel of playing fields.*
*Two-thirds of the nation’s total income gains from 2002 to 2007 flowed to the top 1 percent of U.S. households, and that top 1 percent held a larger share of income in 2007 than at any time since 1928, according to an analysis of newly released IRS data by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez.[1]
During those years, the Piketty-Saez data also show, the inflation-adjusted income of the top 1 percent of households grew more than ten times faster than the income of the bottom 90 percent of households.
But then Huck trots out the big lie of the month on Obama’s stimulus package: It was a complete disaster, sez he. The truth is that without the stimulus bill, the nation’s unemployment rate would have been in the upper teens (depression levels to be sure,) according to Obama adviser David Plough, who followed Senator Huckleberry on MTP. But let’s not take his word for it.
The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office’s mandatory audit and report** on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) says the opposite of what Graham says. Read this:
**Estimating the law’s overall effects on employment requires a more comprehensive analysis than can be achieved by using the recipients’ reports. Therefore, looking at recorded spending to date along with estimates of the other effects of ARRA on spending and revenues, CBO has estimated the law’s impact on employment and economic output using evidence about the effects of previous similar policies and drawing on various mathematical models that represent the workings of the economy. On that basis, CBO estimates that ARRA’s policies had the following effects in the second quarter of calendar year 2010:
1. They raised real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) by between 1.7 percent and 4.5 percent,
2. Lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.7 percentage points and 1.8 percentage points,
3. Increased the number of people employed by between 1.4 million and 3.3 million, and
4. Increased the number of full-time-equivalent jobs by 2.0 million to 4.8 million compared with what would have occurred otherwise (see Table 1). (Increases in FTE jobs include shifts from part-time to full-time work or overtime and are thus generally larger than increases in the number of employed workers).
These Republicans apparently don't care how big the lie is; they are sure that the American public is foolhardy enough to swallow it, hook line and sinker. I guess a lot of them are pretty damn dumb(41% believe in ESP, 32% believe in ghosts and only 39% believe in Darwin's Theory of Evolution. Are we a nation of gullible, illiterate hicks? Damn, I hope not. But Senator Huckleberry and Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh are counting on it for sure.
Stephen Hawking's "Blasphemy": The Forces of Nature Created the Universe from Nothing and There Was Nothing Miraculous About It.
"Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."
Professor Hawking has a new book coming out this week: The Grand Design -- can’t wait. So smart. Of course the godbag-wingnuts are calling him a "cripple brain" after these comments. Yeah right, they WISH they had half the brain power of Stephen Hawking!
Arizona Governor Jan Brewer is Dumber Than A Bag of Rocks.
UPDATE: Tea Party Nutbag, Jan Brewer says she won't participate in any more debates after her disastrous performance in the first one. She has also admitted (finally) that she was wrong about the beheadings in the Arizona desert. Why?? Because there weren't any!
Terry Goddard might pull this out after all. Does anybody in their right mind believe that this woman has anything between her ears. Watch this stellar performance in last night’s debate with Democratic gubernatorial nominee, Terry Goddard (Arizona’s Attorney General.)
.“We have, uh (pregnant pause) DID -- what was right for Arizona...”
Gary Bauer is a bible thumping, anti-choice zealot who sympathizes with killers of abortion providers and the bombing of abortion clinics. Most of these right wingers have the same godawful agenda. Not very many of them will condemn the cold blooded killing of Dr. George Tiller.Bauer's latest screed is directed at efforts to stop bullies from beating up on our most vulnerable kids, because he reasons (?) that "anti-bullying policies in our public schools are feminizing little boys and causing an increase in homosexuality." He’s anti-gay, pro-bullying and proud of it! (Thanks, Rusty Reed.)
Well it just so happens that your humble Hog correspondent was a big, chubby kid when I was starting Jr. High School. A bunch of bullies used to knock me down, take my books, my drum sticks, my baseball glove and hat, my bicycle and whatever else I had with me. Then they would surround me and taunt me for being a "fatso." But I didn't want to fight because I had four little brothers and I had had my butt beat many times for fighting with them; so I thought it better just not to fight... and of course I was afraid. Anyway, I suffered the abuse and let them taunt me for a long time.
That changed, though, after my folks sent me to Mr. Burke Watson's Sertoma Boxing Club at the old YMCA. Then I did learn to fight. I had to, because more times than not, those old red neck boys (many of whom are my friends to this day) pretty much beat me to pieces until I learned how to protect myself. So one night, after about six months of boxing lessons, I knocked one of those bullies into the next week at a party and brought a towel full of blood from his nose. I surprised myself-- didn't know my own strength. The boy fell down and didn’t get up for a long time. In any case, nobody bothered me after that.
I think for most big kids like me, it was just a matter of getting over the fear of being beat up, and then exercising a little skill and power to ward off the bullies. But there are lots of frail children out there who can't do what I did. They are small and, yes maybe even what you might call ..."soft." These are the children that need to be protected from bully terror. But nutbag asshats like Gary Bauer don't believe these kids deserve protection. Why? Because there's a pretty good chance that some or a majority of those kids being targeted are gay. And if you start protecting gays in elementary school... well just think about what that could lead to.
Born on This Day in 1928: Horace Ward Martin Tavares Silva
The great Horace Silver is one of those unique talents, whose work found a plaace in music history and touched all the bases-- blues, funk, jazz, cool, latin. Herte is Senor Blues circa 1959.
Evangelist Glenn Beck Caught in a Great Big Whopper at His "Restoring Honor" Rally.
It seems that "Father Cough-Glenn" as Keith Olbermann calls him, claimed to have held the first inaugural address by George Washington in his hands (presumably giving him a bit of Father George's spirit or some such nonsense.) Keith has the real story:
