In Short: Hannity is a Rube

And I don't mean Rube Goldberg.

Today on Hannity's Radio Debacle, he interviewed Vox Day, author of The Return of the Great Depression, and through the process of the softball sales pitch for Vox's book Sean gets more and more "troubled." "Well, I don't know; it's a little apocalyptic," he said.

Sean: Vox Day is the "brilliant economist" that is the basis of the ads on your show with the website address TheEndOfAmerica.com. What the fuck did you think he was going to talk about?

I swear every day is more surreal than the last.

Ohio's Shady Abortion Tactics - Heartbeat Bill

It appears that the Republicans at the state level are following suit with those at the national level: no ideas, no job creation, but get on up in them lady parts and STOP abortion!



This is Ohio State Rep. Lynn R. Wachtmann (R), and tomorrow he's going to introduce the "Heartbeat Bill" which is aimed at banning any abortions at the point when a heartbeat becomes detectable. Sounds absurd, right? The bad news? "42 of the 99 representatives in the Ohio state House have signed on to the bill, which would make an exception to the heartbeat rule only in emergency medical situations."

But even the head of Ohio Right to Life doesn't support the bill:

Michael Gonidakis wants to ban all abortions, but the executive director of Ohio Right to Life knows it doesn't help his cause to fight for bills that he says have no chance of being upheld by the federal courts.

So we've got another example of politicians ignoring jobs and the economy and politically posturing themselves by passing legislation that will ONLY set an already ailing state up for a prolonged legal battle. Awesome. Maybe Rep. Wachtmann can dig deep and fund that process instead of us taxpayers.

You can reach Rep. Wachtmann to let him know (politely) that this legislation will do nothing but hurt Ohio here:

Address:
77 S. High St
13th Floor
Columbus, OH 43215-6111
Phone: (614) 466-3760
Fax: (614) 719-3975
Email: district75@ohr.state.oh.us

Please Vote. Please.

Us on the left may be unhappy with 100% of what's been done. We may be disillusioned with a cavalcade of promises that have yet to be fulfilled. But if we are silent, we let them win. We let Republicans take Congress.

And that is much, much worse than what we have now.



So vote. Tell your friends, warn your families: if Republicans win in November, we all lose.

McCain Don't Know Nothin' 'Bout No Economies

Brave New Films:



What an asshat.

Ohio, Cleveland Down the Tubes

Back in 2004, Cleveland was rated the poorest big city in the USA. It's not a big stretch. The Flats are a crime-ridden ghost town anymore and many an office building downtown is simply vacant, the owners unable to get businesses to HQ or even branch there. A friend of mine was violently mugged walking from his car to work, in the morning hours, in almost the center of downtown.

As a former resident of Greater Cleveland (Parma), it's hard to watch happen, especially since all of my and Mrs. Shambles family still call it home.

As a continuing resident of Ohio, it was even more of a bummer to see yesterday's report in Forbes:

Washington, D.C. -

The turmoil of the mortgage market granted a temporary reprieve from hearing about the woes of America's Rust Belt. That doesn't mean things are better. Despite a decade of national prosperity, the former manufacturing backbone of the U.S. is in rougher shape than ever, still searching for some way to replace its long-stilled smokestacks.

Where's it worst? Ohio, according to our analysis, which racked up four of the 10 cities on our list: Youngstown, Canton, Dayton and Cleveland. The runner-up is Michigan, with two cities--Detroit and Flint--making the ranking.

Yeah, just sad.

Limbaugh: Rich Fat Fuck Strikes Again

Rush Limbaugh, against whom I regularly rail, is at it again. Or was. Last Tuesday, I caught this little diatribe:

Senator Bob Casey from Pennsylvania, who I charitably will say is an order of fries short of a Happy Meal, is sitting there reading a letter from a constituent to Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, and anybody else watching on television in the room, and he summed it up here in one sentence. The letter was from Tammy May, not Fannie Mae, not Freddie Mac, Tammy May, a single mother of two living in Pennsylvania. This is what he read of her letter to him: "We have to reprioritize. House comes first, then day care, then gasoline, then food." This constituent of Bob Casey's put food last on her list of new priorities. Bob Casey reads this, and obviously what he's trying to do here is milk what's going on out there as a national disaster.

What does he fail to mention? She has a job. This is not an unemployed woman. This is a woman who has a job, but she can't figure out how to live her life on her own so she needs Senator Casey and the Democrats to figure it out for her. Well, she's figured it out, but she wants them to make her do it, which is even sadder, when you get right down to it. When you prioritize things, just think about this. If you were going to write Senator Bob Casey a letter and tell him that we need to reprioritize things in life, where would you put food?

Rush continued to laugh at a woman who's obviously not only poor but too stupid to know what order things come in.

But Rush Limbaugh, sweating about his gold-thread codpiece, is a bit blind to the way the world works. So here it is for you, Rush, you ignorant slut:

1. House - If you don't have a house, you don't have shelter, or an address. Without an address it is relatively difficult to get a job of any sort, which you so graciously point out as though it were a big deal that Tammy May is not unemployed.
2. Day care - Unlike the nanny that you have keeping an eye on the 11 year old male prostitute from the Dominican Republic, real people need to find real solutions to avoid negligence of children. If Tammy May wants to hold a 9-5 job, she needs to pay someone, probably a good piece of her income, to watch her children while she works.
3. Gas - Although it doesn't affect you, dick, gas is a very real issue for real people. If Tammy May can't afford or continue to afford to purchase gas, she cannot drive her kids to day care, cannot drive to her job, and will lose one, perhaps eventually both because she cannot afford...
4. Food - 1, 2, and 3 are necessities to keeping a roof over her head and a job. Without those things, food is moot.

Rush, you foul your mouth and get worked up about the welfare state and here we have a prime example of a woman, busting her ass, playing by the rules, stretched and writing a letter to her representative to say "hey, just so you're aware, it's fucking tough out here." And Rush laughs, because he's ignorant and he's an asshole. If there was one single example of the character he lacks, this is it.

Phone Sex Photo Essay

Mother Jones has an amazing photo essay on the phone sex trade.

The pictures are interesting, but the words are enlightening. Enjoy.

Recession

Here's a map from the AP:



Oh, hey, look: Ohio's brown-orange. No shit.

What any person living in any city in Ohio could tell you is that we were using the term "recession" five years ago, if not longer. And now that the retards in Washington finally walk on eggshells to touch the bum of The R Word with their twenty foot pole, people in Ohio are starting to use The D Word: Depression.

Americans and Learned Helplessness

Beginning in 1967, Martin Seligman began a series of studies that helped buck some of the generalized ideas of B.F. Skinner's behaviorism and gave rise to the phrase "learned helplessness." I'm not going to go into the details of the study; you can read it here.

Here's the basis of the experiment:

1. A dog given a periodic electrical shock and a lever to stop it can learn to use the lever and deal with it.
2. A dog given a periodic electrical shock and a lever that does nothing can learn to deal with it.
3. A dog given a random shock and no means to control that shock will fall into stressful depression which, for dogs, consists of curling up in the corner of the sometimes-electrified cage, shivering with stress, and wincing at the occasional shock. This "giving up" and "dealing with it miserably" is what is called Learned Helplessness

This I heard about back in my early college days, but not until I saw the gas prices do their magical dance over the past couple years did I bring it into relevancy.

We are the third dog. Americans. World citizens. Anyone who is not directly in power. Many of us have curled up in the corner of the cage, driving through our daily grind, making sure we have a job, not rocking the boat, just trying to stressfully survive and always, always, awaiting the next shock.

As I mentioned, this thought came to being because when I began driving, you could still find gas for under a buck a gallon. Typing it, it sounds like a fairy tale, sounds like I'm 100 years old, but it was in 1993. Fifteen years later, we're looking at gas quadrupling in price. But steady we could understand.

The gas does a dance, a random dance for those of us very normal Americans who do not have the mental window into futures trading. As it was rising, we'd see a peak of thirty cents in a week. All over the news. Then it would drop fifteen, maybe twenty. All over the news again. But the up and down introduces complacency: "Well, it's a little higher now, but at least it's not as high as it was." And we keep saying that and we keep saying that and it goes up 4 steps and down 2 and up an down. And before you know it, I'm driving to Cleveland two weeks ago and internally audibly said to myself "Wow, $3.19 isn't so bad." But six months ago people were talking gas boycott at $3.00.

Complacency.

This happens in government as well: slowly and slowly our civil liberties are evacuated and someone puts the breaks on the electrical current for a couple minutes and our tail's all wagging. Bush denies that global warming is real and suddenly says he's going to support legislation to aid global warming (details to come, of course). Our taxes go up, our insurance rates rise - but maybe not so much one year - and we're looking at a couple hundred dollars coming to us in May. This is worse than shock; it's shock and biscuits.

So what's the solution? To carry the analogy, one dog could break the leash, crash the door. But we have minders, and before a shit is taken on the floor, we're back in the cage awaiting our next shock.

No, all the dogs must break loose, surround the minders, and in one solid and strong barking voice shout "NO! No more!"

I know. Dogs can't talk. But we can.

We've been led to believe we are a government of the people, by the people, for the people, yada yada. I have yet to see that play out in truth in my lifetime. I'm guessing many of you haven't. And lest we sit around watching American Idol and the Superbowl, we never will.

Any suggestions?

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable."

-JFK

Bend the bars. Make the change.

Debbie Shank Vindicated, But Our Job Is Not Done

From the good folks at WakeUpWalMart.com:

Over the past few weeks, the Debbie Shank case gave us a tremendous opportunity to teach Wal-Mart a lesson about corporate responsibility.

Check out the Wal-Mart workers' petition to Lee Scott and Shank case overview

Today, the backlash against Wal-Mart's lawsuit finally drove the company to drop its claim on her settlement winnings. Consider this concrete proof that Wal-Mart must change when supporters like you take action.

After years of being dragged through the courts, the Shanks can finally begin to piece their lives back together. We couldn't be happier for Debbie and her family. But, we still can't forget the other Wal-Mart associates who have been treated unfairly by Wal-Mart.

Let's not forget Olga Sanchez, who lost her job because Wal-Mart wouldn't let her see her son before he was deployed to Iraq; or Sean Thornton, who lost his job while he was on active duty. We can't let Wal-Mart forget the 1.6 million women involved in the largest certified gender discrimination lawsuit in history.

We can change America's largest retailer just by raising our voices. That's an amazing thing. If we all remember this day, we'll see better things to come for Wal-Mart's associates.

Do not forget that Wal-Mart intakes 20% of China's GDP, that 80% of its products are from China (no workers' rights, lead, and all), and that it strongarms American companies to produce in China, manipulating the free market and killing American jobs. Oh, and don't forget the assassination of local businesses.

Our job, our duty, is far from over.

Debbie Shank: Yes, Wal-Mart is the Villain

I love getting comments for my posts; it's like getting a present in the mail every time my email tells me that I got a comment. And for the most part, I simply reply (because I pretty much reply to all comments).

However, this one stuck with me on the issue of Debbie Shank and Wal-Mart:

Why is Wal-mart the villian? Three months after their employee enrolled in the health insurance they provide a semi-truck hits her and when she recovers a million $ they ask to be repaid their expenses. Ms Shank's accident is unfortunate but not Wal-marts fault. I haven't read anywhere if she recovered funds from her auto insurance...only that she can no longer afford a full time nurse and may have to move to a semi-private room.

My Response:

anonymous-

Wal-Mart provided health care. That health care provided Debbie Shank with the care she needed to recover to the point that she was before the settlement.

The settlement - which, because of costs, she got less than half of - was a court's decision that she needed/deserved that money to maintain proper care of her because of the injuries she incurred.

Wal-Mart, because of their insurance small-print, was well within their rights to recoup expenses. But there is business and there is good business; there is small print and there is over-reaching past morality and humanity to make a buck. Corporation, business, or human: this is wrong.

For fucking Christ's Sake! The woman can't remember her son died in Iraq from day to day and weeps like it's the first time every time. Throw her a fucking bone by not raping her for the money that might take care of her that she won't even realize anyway! "Hallelujah. Holy shit. Where's the Tylenol? "

Wal-Mart will always be the villain because of how they strongarm producers to produce overseas (see: China) to increase their profit margin and kill American jobs in order to give us lower prices and lower standard-of-living jobs.

20% of China's product goes to Wal-Mart. 80% of what Wal-Mart purchases is from China, lead paint and all. Wal-Mart is the villain because it is hurting America and Americans. Nothing less.

Jobs Cut, Unemployment Drops?

Draft from a couple weeks back, but still relevant.



From the AP on Yahoo:

For the second straight month, nervous employers got rid of jobs nationwide. In February, they sliced payrolls by 63,000, even deeper than the 22,000 cut in January, the Labor Department reported Friday.
...
The unemployment rate actually dipped slightly from 4.9 percent to 4.8 percent, as 450,000 people left the labor force for any number of reasons. Economists thought many people probably gave up looking for work.

Granted, the unemployment numbers reported in America are about as valid as Nielson Ratings, but this odd, cold shift in statistics at least captures the level of despair in America over the economy and the state of lower employment and making less than our parents, etc.

They just gave up.

Subprime Tent Towns in LA - America's New Shantytowns

The dollar is in free-fall, the market is slipping, and foreclosures are hitting record numbers, to the extent that tent towns are now popping up in LA. So why am I hearing about this from BBC and not American Media? (via BoingBoing)

Stock Options and Terror Attacks: Coming this September?

Here's where the conspiracies begin, folks. Or, rather, some of the first information that'll be "we should have known" material should a major terrorist attack occur before September 21, 2007.

According to a Financial News article, someone has dumped a lot of money into what amounts to a market bet that Eurostoxx 50, Europe's top 50 stocks, will crash by 30%. Billions of dollars are at stake for this "investor."

Some further discussion leads us to believe that this is not the only instance of such trading and that whoever this mystery investor is will either be very rich or very SOL come September 21st.

Conspiracy theory? Take it with a grain of salt; remember that I also reported that we were going to start attacking Iran. Damn Russian reports.