Fiting RadRite Loons, Again. AOL News covered a minor scandal in Ohio:

A handful of McDonald's employees in northeastern Ohio received handbills in their most recent paychecks suggesting they vote for three Republican candidates.

"If the right people are elected we will be able to continue with raises and benefits at or above our present levels," the insert said. "If others are elected we will not." ... Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, the Democratic elections chief, said she was launching an investigation because the action appeared to violate Ohio election laws.

As could be expected, the Radical Right wingnuts who haunt AOL comments areas quickly defended an employer's implicitly telling his employees that their jobs depend on how they vote. Also as usual, they didn't stick to this story, but wandered all over the political landscape, dragging in crazy accusations against President Obama and falsifying all kinds of things. I was sufficiently ticked off to answer over 145 of these absurdities. My comments appear below, separated by *** at the margin. I do not include comments that repeat basic points or simply tell people to stop repeating their comments, which many Rightwingers do in order to fool readers into thinking there are far more Rightwingers than there are. Warning: there are 142 comments, totaling over 7,000 words, below. I include only my text; you can infer what I am answering. Liberals sometimes need help in answering the crazy things the Radical Right says. My remarks may assist, next time they encounter RadRite propaganda.

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What an outrageous lie! Bush MORE THAN DOUBLED the national debt, up by $6,102 trillion, from a SURPLUS under Clinton; up from $5,807 trillion at 9/30/2001 to $11,909 trillion at 9/30/2009, before Obama's first budget took effect. The national debt at 9/30/2010 (under Obama) stood at $13,561 trillion, up $1,652 trillion, which is between only 37% (little more than 1/3) of what Bush did. These figures are from the U.S. Treasury website: http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/histdebt/histdebt_histo5.htm. Why can't enemies of Obama ever tell the truth?
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Oops. The comma in my "trillions" figures should be a period. Figures are hundreds of millions.
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The stock market crash and housing bubble pop occurred under Bush. Don't lie about history, because the records are there for everyone to see.
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So it would be fine with you if the employer endorsed Democratic candidates and implied that if he finds out his employees voted Republican, they'd be fired?
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People who throw around the word "Socialism" NEVER know what it means. George Bush was in fact one of the worst Presidents ever, and virtually all historians are agreed on that. Obama has had less than half his term pass to date, and people who hate him (because he's black -- no other reason) "Rush" to judgment. Let's see, what had happened in George Bush's first year? Ah, right: 9/11.
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And Reagan TRIPLED the national debt; when Bush the Elder left office, the Republicans had QUADRUPLED the national debt. When Bush the Younger left office, he had further DOUBLED the national debt. So Republicans OCTUPLED the national debt. Check the U.S. Treasury website: http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/histdebt/histdebt.htm.
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All comments aside from the McDonald's story are OFF-TOPIC. But Radical Rightwingers cannot stay on topic, ever, but must always move every discussion on AOL News to anti-Obama b.s. Then honest people feel they have to answer, and the original topic gets lost, every time.
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So now a budget surplus of hundreds of billions of dollars from Clinton's last year just didn't happen? Radical Rightwingers just cannot ever tell the truth. I suppose Saddam really did have WMD too.
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The President, whoever he is, controls the budget. Did you ever hear the word "veto"?
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Kindly stop making things up. This is not a fiction-writing class.
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Obama's approval ratings are in the range of 46%-54%: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/president_obama_job_approval-1044.html. Stop lying.
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You plainly have no grasp on reality. Marxists and Socialist are NOT Liberals. As for voter fraud and intimidation, do you really want to go into the extreme pressure to conform in much of the Republican South, in which entire counties are dominated by one "boss" family?
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A very large proportion of all McDonald's outlets are franchises, owned and controlled by franchisees, not McDonald's corporation. The corporation cannot be blamed for the behavior of franchisees unless egregious violations of a franchise agreement are brought to the attention of the corporation, which then may warn the franchisee that it risk losing its franchise(s).
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Ah, your racist motivations finally come out in the open: "we will not be sitting in the back" -- of the bus, right? Yes, now we see. Obama is sitting in the front of the bus, where only white people belong. How dare he? Now we can all see why you hate Obama: because he's an uppity n*. And that is the be-all and end-all of the Radical Right's hatred of Obama.
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Saying something does not make it so. There is no such thing as a "self-fulfilling prophecy". So let's just wait four days to see what happens with Congress, and two more years to see what happens with the White House. If Republicans do gain control of one or both houses of Congress, and then ruin the Nation by fiting the President and shutting down the Government -- and what will our foreign enemies do while Republicans paralyze the Government? -- the people who put them in position to bring on such a disaster will turn them out, and install not just Obama in his second term but a BIGGER Democratic majority in both houses than they now have. So be careful what you wish for.
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McDonald's has many healthy choices, and people must not be permitted to blame others for their own gluttony. People can eat from McDonald's many choices, including red meat, and live fine, healthy lives. It's all a matter of moderation -- in all things.
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If Liberals make up only 20% of Americans, how come Obama won the Presidency and Democrats won both houses of Congress?
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The reality is that the school did not provide the sample ballot. An independent Democratic activist did. The school should have shown an actual sample ballot, but did not. Perhaps it never occurred to them to ask the board of elections for an actual sample ballot. Cincinnati is not exactly in a flaming-Liberal part of the country, so this was a meaningless failure of planning. And it did not involve actual voters, only schoolchildren, so is in no way comparable to an EMPLOYER telling his employers the "right" way to vote.
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MoM's antidemocratic statement as to who should be on the ballot and who should vote are indicative of a contempt for democracy typical of the Radical Right. I live in NJ and don't know what she's talking about as regards third parties. The reality is that the Florida candidate she mentions, Mr. Meek, is a DEMOCRAT, not a member of a third party, like the Greens. And it would be far healthier for this country is the major parties did not do everything in their power to keep third parties off the ballot. We wouldn't need to worry about term limits as a way of getting new people with new ideas into office if the laws wouldn't keep third-party candidates off the ballot. As for a candidate put on the ballot just to ensure another candidate's victory, look to the fraud carried off by South Carolina Republicans in an OPEN primary, electing an utter unknown, Alvin Greene, as the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate. Open primaries should be forbidden. Indeed, primaries should be forbidden, since almost nobody votes in them, and political parties are private organizations, not organs of government, so taxpayers should not have to pay for the decision-making process of private organizations.
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Everything that has ever been done to make this country better was done by Liberals -- indeed, creating the United States was a Liberal REVOLUTION against tradition.
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That BUSINESSES should endorse Republicans is NOT NEW but standard.
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You have the story backwards: REPUBLICANS are telling Mexican-American voters to stay home.
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Kindly stop wasting our time with arrant nonsense. Republicans are servants of the rich, only. Democrats care about PEOPLE, and about businesses only as they serve the interests of SOCIETY. Democrats are pro-responsible-business.
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Two things. First, the typical working FAMILY pays taxes and receives SERVICES. Why do Radical Rightists always forget that half of the equation? Taxes support public SCHOOLS, police, firefiters, garbage collection, and other indispensable services. Try providing those things for yourself and you will see you get very good value for money from government services. And what private entity is going to defend the Nation on the battlefield, or intercept bombs sent in airplanes from Yemen? Second, I don't know if MoM is referring to a specific incident, but the idea that COLLEGE kids are ignorant is absurd. They are in COLLEGE, so probably know more about the world than 90% of non-college-educated voters. As for "bribing" kids with free tuition, are we to believe it's a bad thing to educate kids?
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Most people are very busy nowadays -- esp. those scrambling to make a living and keep their job by working extra hours, on top of long commutes. They do NOT spend much time keeping themselves informed about how their representative at any level of government votes. If people talk politics with friends and family, they are getting information and, often, advice, as to how to vote. But being TOLD by an employer how to vote is quite different. Friends and family don't have the power to fire you if you vote "the wrong way".
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Don't blame McDonald's. This was ONE franchisee, not the McDonald's corporation, and not your local franchisees.
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MoM has got to let go of insane conspiracy theories about NONEXISTENT Black Panthers. Four black guys showed up at ONE polling place in one BLACK neighborhood out of the entire country. They did not intimidate anyone into doing, or not doing, ANYthing. They had no way of knowing how anyone was going to vote, and did not in any way interfere with anything. They did not follow anyone into the voting booth, nor would they have been allowed to. They did not even hand out materials to tell people which way to vote! It was an entirely ridiculous story blown way out of proportion by the Radical Right, who have never been able to explain how four black guys standing outside a black polling place was supposed to intimidate anyone to do anything.
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Unions can't fire anyone. And your husband has a union job? The SOCIALIST!
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The Supreme Court has no authority under the Constitution to void a law. Why aren't "strict constructionists" indignant about this "judicial activism"? If the Framers had intended the Supreme Court to have a veto over legislation, they would have GIVEN it a veto AND provided a means of override.
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You are confusing two entirely different issues. Unions have elections, and the members entrust the leadership to run the affairs of the union. They can oust union officials whose actions they disapprove of. Employees don't elect their bosses. Union officials cannot fire members who vote Republican; an employer who finds out (or just believes) that an employee has voted "the wrong way", CAN fire that employee. No one is talking about political endorsements here, but only voter intimidation. The boss is entitled to voice his opinions -- but not in an enclosure with paychecks that implies that anyone who votes Democratic risks his or her job.
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Teachers want to be paid well. They are college graduates, and do a difficult and INDISPENSABLE job. They are not garbage collectors who need only a strong back. It is NOT in the interest of the union to protect bad teachers. NJ Governor Christie has been a catastrophe for the state; my property taxes have gone up 17% because of Christie!
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MoM, wake up. The Radical Right attacks unions because union workers are 'overpaid'. So plainly the unions have increased workers' pay, for one thing. For another, the union does step in to protect their members from wrongful discharge, as aleighcat avers. Unions also fite against compulsory overtime, unpaid work, cuts in benefits (such as to health insurance, or increasing worker contributions to health insurance premiums), etc. You really think people pay union dues for NOTHING? Get real.
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Democrats tried, within the last few weeks, to end a tax loophole that benefits overseas outsourcing of American jobs. Republicans voted to keep that loophole and keep sending American jobs abroad. As for the people objecting that this wasn't the McDonald's corporation, that is true, but meaningless for the purposes of evaluating whether there was voter intimidation by SOMEONE. The BUSINESS implicitly threatened its employees. It doesn't matter whether the local owner was a corporation, proprietorship, LLC, or anything else. The people who have the power to fire, put a political endorsement in the envelope with paychecks. That does rise to voter intimidation.
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You are living in a fantasy world of paranoid delusion. The Democratic National Committee does NOT pay unions. Acorn no longer exists. NOTHING you say makes any sense.
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What "funding" does a union do for members? You're talking nonsense.
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COLA has nothing to do with any Presidential Administration. It is a formula that has been in place for a very long time. Plainly the formula is wrongly devised, since my costs of many kinds have indeed gone up, so we should indeed have gotten a Cost Of Living Allowance increase, this year and next. Obama did not do a thing to the law, and has absolutely no control over the COLA formula. The Great Recession caused deflation in segments of the economy that are included in the COLA formula, but shouldn't be. Congress needs to change the "basket" of goods used to figure COLA. Nancy Pelosi, whom the Radical Right despises, has said she will try to get a $250 check to Social Security recipients early next year to make up for the second year without COLA increases. Will Republicans vote for it? Hm.
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I am a Liberal. I do not use any drugs, not even so much as an aspirin once every two months. Nor do I attack happy meals. I concern myself with issues of social justice, not silliness like a toy in a happy meal.
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Who says he spoke "facts"? He issued his OPINION, in the same envelope as employees' PAYCHECKS. If you don't see that as pressuring employees to vote the boss's way, there's something wrong with you.
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May I remind you that Bill Clinton was FAMOUS for stopping at McDonald's?
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Mafia murders of union officials who wouldn't do their bidding have nothing to do with union standards and practices. And how many people have killed their business partners? Cut the crap. Stick to real issues.
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MoM, Democrats haven't lost a thing, yet. In fact, early voting indicates that Dems are AHEAD. Republicans have said that early voting from urban districts means nothing, so Dems are EXPECTED to be ahead in early voting. Why don't you just wait FOUR DAYS before gloating? If your choice, the Republican Right Wing, which favors exporting jobs to China and India, wins -- and the Nation loses -- there is time on Tuesday nite or Wednesday morning to gloat. Saying Democrats are "already losing their seats" is, as of now, a lie.
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WHAT has Obama done to divide the Nation? He tried to bring Republicans on board, and listened to everything they had to say, then weakened his healthcare legislation, and other types of legislation, to try to satisfy Republican objections, in trying to achieve bipartisanship. For that, he was kicked in the teeth.
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No, unions never fired anyone. Not in the old days, not now. As for our ancestors centuries ago, they worked 72-hour workweeks and died if they couldn't work. NO ONE would want to go back to those days, not even the most regressive Republican -- unless they could choose to be wealthy, which has never been anyone's choice.
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Unions can't fire anyone, and that makes all the difference in the world. But you don't care about logic or truth. Liberals did EVERYTHING of value in this society, from establishing the United States to begin with (the "conservatives" wanted to stay loyal to King George), to establishing wages-and-hours legislation, to creating worker-safety standards, protecting against hazardous substances, and on and on.
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aleighcat says "God forbid that your employer should ever find out that you dared to vote differently than what they believe." But she doesn't understand that that is why a piece of political endorsement from an employer in a pay envelope is qualitatively ENTIRELY DIFFERENT from union endorsements. Unions can fire anyone, and the Radical Right has got to stop pretending that employer and union endorsements are identical in nature. They are not, because UNIONS CAN'T FIRE ANYONE, but EMPLOYERS CAN.
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Oops. Left out word "not": "unions can NOT fire anyone". Fingers are cold.
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That is a complete misstatement of facts. Employers are PRESENTLY dropping health insurance for employees, but the Obama healthcare bill does not take effect until 2014! You can't blame actions NOW on a law that doesn't take effect until FOUR YEARS FROM NOW. The behavior of BANKS during the Bush Administration that produced the housing collapse is not attributable to Democrats. And "this batch of Dems" includes many people who had nothing whatsoever to do with the policies under Bush that produced the Great Recession. The economic collapse began under BUSH, and no rewriting of history will change that.
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What are you suggesting? That it was a put-up job, and DEMOCRATS planted bombs on airplanes just so they could intercept them? How, pray, could a U.S. Government, under anyone, have prevented bombs from being placed on airplanes in YEMEN? Seek professional help. And while you're talking to a shrink, talk about Bush knowing that Al-Qaeda planned to hijack airplanes and use them as flying bombs, but refused to TELL us so we could PREVENT such hijackings -- as the passengers on flite 93 tried to do but didn't know to do until the fanatics had already seized the cockpit.
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If you saw wrongdoing in YOUR union, YOU should have campaigned to stop it, even run for union office yourself.
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You are lying. Obama's "people" have NEVER said Obama's policies are going to bankrupt the country. Nor have Democrats tampered with voting machines. There are indeed problems with voting machines, but it is not Democrats' doing. Nor are you entitled to disparage people who take their UNPAID time to correct LIES on comments boards, as being on the dole. Liberals could as easily accuse YOU of being a paid agent provocateur or on the dole. But we don't. Because we have honor.
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A political endorsement in a PAY ENVELOPE from your employer is far more than a "suggestion". As for aleighcat's sentence, "You don't vote the Democratic way, and you'll end up paying for it in your paycheck, if nothing else," that makes no sense. Democrats don't control your paycheck. Employers do.
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This election is not about conservatism, preserving the good things in our traditions, but about radical REGRESSION to a society before the New Deal, when the rich ran roughshod over the poor and middle class.
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Radical-Right Republicans have spent $250 MILLION on campaign ads this election.
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Perhaps you are speaking in code, but no one outside your coterie has any idea of what you are supposed to be talking about when you say "57 states".
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NO ONE says that a school's giving Democrat-only ballots is OK, and in fact the school did NOT. A campaign worker at a polling place gave out the sample ballot. Besides, these were schoolkids, NOT voters.
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Schoolchildren do not vote. Perhaps you don't understand that. So whether Boxer did or did not do anything to win favor with NONVOTERS is aside from the point.
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Your post makes absolutely no sense. Unions don't fire people; employers do. Unions do not receive bailouts; businesses have. Education funds do NOT go to a political party; that's just a lie, or serious delusion. There is no God. You haven't any idea what Socialism and Communism are, so stop using the terms inappropriately.
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Unions are not in control of voting machines. The board of elections is: local GOVERNMENT.
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How, pray, did you hear of all these asserted matters if they are not covered in major media, and listed at AOL news? Any LEGITIMATE story of wide interest is shown on AOL. May I remind you that AOL is a BUSINESS? If anything, it is biased toward business, not government. Military ballots were NOT "withheld", but mailed a bit after the preposterous 45-day-in-advance standard. As for voting machines pre-loaded with Democratic votes, you, or some other paranoid Rightwing propagandist, is just making that up.
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It's called "voter intimidation" because it plays on people's fears that the way they vote will be discovered, and they will be punished for it. In her reply, MoM expressly STATES that fear, albeit on the side of fictional union intimidation. Her insane suggestion that people will be physically attacked for voting Republican is the kind of FEAR-mongering that voter intimidation is all about.
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So union organizers follow people into the voting booth and watch how they vote, do they? Stop talking nonsense. Unions get out the vote; they do not force people to vote one way or another, nor is there any mechanism by which they COULD force people to vote one way or another.
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No one here is able to check what you say. But you contradict yourself in saying at once that the NEW YORK POST and NATIONAL REVIEW covered this supposed story AND that the "media" ignored it.
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You are making it up. If YOU had to present ID, EVERYONE had to present ID to register to vote. Stop the NONSENSE. Perhaps you really are clinically paranoid, so need to see a mental-health professional. Voter fraud by Democrats is a very common Radical-Right, Republican accusation, but in fact it is unfounded. The Bush Administration found 57 case in the entire country during one national election, involving less than half that many false ballots, and we don't even know if the votes miscast were for Democrats or Republicans. Stop making up insane lies. See a shrink.
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You do not know what socialism means, so stop misusing the term. Historically, business does better under Democrats than under Republicans. Compare Clinton's record to Bush's and you will see that far more jobs were created -- in the U.S., not China -- under Clinton. But your post does make plain that unions do NOT intimidate members into voting for their choice. Nor could they.
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How many times do we have to tell you that unions cannot fire anybody but employers can? If you don't understand that difference, I suppose you can't tell the difference between nite and day either.
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Jan and her/his ilk just can't give up on the lie about Black Panthers intimidating people at a BLACK polling place. Let me explain something: black people standing in front of a polling place do not intimidate BLACK voters from entering that polling place, nor even the few white people who might live in a predominantly black neighborhood. We are accustomed to seeing black people everywhere. 4 guys standing outside 1 polling place and not even handing out flyers to indicate how they wanted people to vote does NOT remotely constitute voter intimidation. But that's all the Radical Right has: nonsense.
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Try to find a credible story of voter intimidation by Democrats. Drop the moronic lie about Black Panthers, who intimidated NOBODY out of voting in a BLACK neighborhood.
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Equating President Obama and Jeffrey Dahmer is insane. The Radical Right really will stop at nothing, including roughing up and handcuffing reporters. This is not the America decent people want.
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An employer who would tell employees how to vote is not beyond ASKING them after the fact how they voted.
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So an extra piece of paper in a pay envelope means nothing, does it? How about if it's a pink slip? What if the employer printed his political endorsement on pink paper? Government is not the enemy of business. If you are running your business right (if you even HAVE a business, which we are in no position to fact-check), you have nothing to fear from Government. But if you are dumping hazardous waste, underpaying employees, cheating them on hours, forcing them to work overtime without pay, or doing other things rightly forbidden by Government, then you do indeed have something to worry about.
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Black Panther voter intimidation = ridiculous BIG LIE. Nobody was intimidated by 4 black guys standing outside a polling place in a black neighborhood. But the frequent reference to this nonexistent intimidation of nonexistent white voters in a black neighborhood really does show the RACIST motivations and RACIAL FEARS of the Radical-Rightists posting to this comments area, doesn't it?
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jmm8254, how come everything that happens now is Obama's fault, but NOTHING that happened during Bush's years was his fault?
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SEIU doesn't own the McDonald's at issue, and cannot fire its employees. You're talking irrelevant nonsense.
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So you cannot conceive of that employer ASKING his employees how they voted, or listening in on their conversations? Not everyone has the courage to tell an employer who asks how they voted, "That's for me to know, not you", esp. if they feel that any such answer would be interpreted as saying "I voted Democratic, despite what you suggested." Moreover, even if an employee voted Democratic but told the boss s/he voted Republican, some people are very bad liars, and the boss will guess the truth. I have worked in a McDonald's, decades ago, and they are small workplaces where a manager can hear all kinds of things people say. Moreover, it is hardly unusual for bosses to have "spies" who report on what they hear. Don't be naive.
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Crazy lies fool only crazies. Obama is a CHRISTIAN; you have no idea what Socialism is; and Moslems are NOT excused from anything that anyone else is not excused from. You're just making things up, but no sane person believes you.
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Stop calling people names just because they disagree with you. And stop the nonsense about Black Panthers. The trivial incident you cite occurred during the BUSH Administration Nov. 2008), and there were POLICE on hand who did NOT arrest anyone or see any violation of law. NO level of government prosecuted ANYBODY because NOTHING happened. Obama is not racist. How could he be? He's half-white. You are PROJECTING onto the President your own racism, and everybody knows it. Your reference to "the back of the bus" shows again your deep racial animus and fear. You want to push black people to the back of the bus again, and EVERYBODY sees that.
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Equating two very different things is insane. Unions don't fire people; employers do. How stupid do you think readers here are, that they would somehow see unions as firing people?
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4 black guys stand outside 1 polling place in a BLACK neighborhood, and the Radical Right goes crazy talking about "Black Panthers" as tho there were an army of heavily-armed black militants embarking on gurerrilla war against white people, and you talk about Democrats blowing things out of proportion?
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Yes, you will be free [if you vote Republican] – free from your job, free from your house, free to enjoy the benefits of all that fresh air and sunshine on the sidewalk.
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Asserting that no one would have been concerned if the business owner had endorsed a Democrat with the same kind of message in a pay envelope is pure speculation. As far as we know, no such thing has happened. And if it had, the same kind of attention would be warranted. It would, however, hardly be necessary for a McDonald's franchisee to urge his low-paid employees to vote Democratic, because most people who are paid badly know better than to vote for the servants of the rich, the Republicans.
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Unless you live near that offending franchisee, you have no reason to avoid McDonald's. Corporate disowned that guy's action. As for the aprtly named "Mad Dog!", the accusation that Liberals disapprove of freedom of speech is insane, RIDICULOUS slander.
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No Liberal is going to boycott McDonald's generally, but only, at most, that one franchisee's restaurant/s.
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Are you threatening violence if you are defeated at the polls? You fit right in with the RadRite BROWNSHIRTS who rough up and handcuff reporters. Liberals are not helpless to defend themselves from Brownshirts.
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Radical Rightists just can't accept that they lost legitimately. Democrats have lost many elections without ANY "riots in the streets". This is evil, RIDICULOUS propaganda. Republicans have NEVER proved any significant voter fraud. Do you REALLY think that Democrats in urban areas need to cheat to win elections?
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There is NOTHING "Marxist" about the Democratic Party. You have absolutely no conception of what Marxism really is. And Liberals are far more dedicated to freedom of speech than are the Radical Right.
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Newspapers can't fire readers who don't accept their advice.
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Oh, I see, "blacks can do whatever the heck they want" -- your racism and racial anxiety are showing. There are no "Blackpanthers" for white people to worry about, just 4 guys standing outside 1 polling place in a BLACK neighborhood where NO ONE was intimidated out of anything. Seek professional help.
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I don't see any corporate endorsements under any corporate name.
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Rightwing groups are spending $250 million on this election. Nobody has been silenced.
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Rightwing groups are spending $250 million on this election. Nobody has been silenced. Don't worry about the 'poor', 'downtrodden' corporations.
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It's NOT McDonald's, only one franchisee. And the math is entirely wrong. Republicans are always bad for the economy.
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You completely falsify the issue. Employers are to be given TAX BENEFITS for extending health insurance to their employees. So, you would cut employees' wages to minimum wage -- because you are a vile, antihuman monster. Fortunately, you are not the employer; people with your attitudes NEVER run businesses -- except into the ground.
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Let me explain yet another thing "Mad Dog!" does not understand. The news report said, "Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, the Democratic elections chief, said she was launching an investigation because the action appeared to violate Ohio election laws." Fair-minded people have to investigate an accusation to find out what really happened, BEFORE they make a statement that the law has been violated. I am very certain that the Secretary of State of Ohio knows a great deal more about election law than does "Mad Dog!" Moreover, the fact that the news story mentioned that that Secretary of State is a Democrat shows that the article is NOT biased.
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No one would be complaining if the franchisee put up a campaign sign on his McDonald's property (unless his franchise agreement with McDonald's forbids such a thing) -- but he would risk adverse reaction from customers. No, he put a notice in the same envelope with the paycheck, which is qualitatively enormously different.
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Unions cannot fire anyone; ergo union political endorsement does NOT constitute "the exact same fear tactics".
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dumpdemliars keeps talking nonsense. Nevada's state government is controlled by REPUBLICANS, and any problem with voting machines was found WEEKS before the elections. He's just making it all up. There is NOTHING Marxist about Democrats, but dumpdemliars doesn't know what Marxism is. To him, it's just a name, like -- exactly like -- n* or f*ggot. As for kshoe007, it's good that we see his antigay bigotry out in the open. It tells decent people who to think of everything he says.
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The education union implicitly tells workers it will fire them if they vote for someone they do not endorse? How would it fire anyone?
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Acorn did not implictly threaten to fire anyone if they didn't vote as recommended. Acorn no longer exists, anyway. As for "amoral Liberals", 'dump' (appropriate, as in "No. 2" in children's parlance) is practicing the Big Lie technique again. Liberals are PURELY moral. They care about people, esp. people who are helpless if Government doesn't act. It is the Radical Right that is amoral / immoral, concerned only with their most narrow self-interest -- which often ends up to be their own harm, when they produce a Great Recession or even Depression thru mindless selfishness.
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Stop the "Black Panthers" nonsense. It has been PROVED to have been b.s. RACIST b.s.
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No one is trying to destroy McDonald's. That is Radical-Right b.s. People want McD's and other employers to pay people a living wage, and provide humane benefits. The Democrats did not put us into any mess. It was all the Republicans' doing. How long does it take to clean up the sh* that hit the fan? That depends on how long the fan was running. In this case, it was running for YEARS.
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Do you imagine that that BLACK neighborhood had WHITE voters who would be scared of a black man? There were POLICE at that scene, who made NO arrests. NO ONE was intimidated in any way. Stop the simpleminded propaganda about 4 black men standing outside 1 polling place where only BLACK people voted.
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artorius317, very few people at the lowest incomes itemize, so tax breaks mean NOTHING to them. Most don't event relate to things that the poor do or buy.
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I think it's enuf that McDonald's warn him that a repetition of such conduct will result in the termination of his franchise. The man has apologized. He probably didn't even realize that what he did was probably illegal. Let people learn from their mistakes. Certainly his mistake has instructed many other employers across the Nation, thanks to this news story.
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Find an actual case of Democratic voter fraud, and the media will cover it. Democratic voter fraud is a Republican urban myth.
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It that is "how most of us feel", how come the electorate put Democrats in the White House and in control of both Houses of Congress?
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Actually, the Arkansas bigot did NOT apologize at first, but defended his remarks until the public outcry against him mounted higher and threatened to get even higher.
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If your bald, unsupported assertions are correct, why not post a link to a reputable graph of unemployment and per capita income over the past 20 years so we can all see if you are right -- or wrong? And while you're at it, point us to a graph of the national debt over the past 30 years so we can see what Republicans have done to us?
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Pay attention: u(1) Unions can't FIRE anybody. (2) The franchisee ADMITTED to distributing the endorsements in pay envelopes. (3) The free-beer incident involved people who had already voted; there was no requirement they vote for one party of another; and yet it was still illegal, and the organizers were told it was. Further, NOBODY showed up to claim the free beer: http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/1010/Beer_for_votes.html. Urging people to vote -- for somebody or anybody -- is NOT the same as telling them to vote for Republicans (if they want to keep their job).
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Schoolchildren don't vote. It was a demonstration of how voting works. No one was voted for in actuality. Find something serious to talk about. NO CHILD VOTED for anyone in a real election!
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It was MOCK vote, not real. It didn't matter who was on the ballot, because NO ONE WAS ACTUALLY VOTED FOR. It was a demonstration of how voting works. And you RadRite loons talk about this as voter fraud! Get a life.
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rayatalalawn would have you believe that all corporations are enlitened, and do only what is good and wise for their employees. No corporation would ever move jobs overseas, because that would put people here out of work, who could then not afford to buy their products or services. No corporation would cut wages, hours, or benefits, because that would make employees unhappy. Yet corporations DO move jobs overseas and DO cut wages, hours, and benefits. Real wages (adjusted for inflation) have DROPPED over the past 10 years, but corporate profits have soared. rayatalalawn is living in a dreamworld. Voters must live in the real world.
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rayatalalawn posts what he pretends is a reply to your correct assertion about the democratic nature of unions as against corporations, but he doesn't answer it at all. Rather, he goes off on a tangent, because he CAN'T argue that employees do have a say in the management of a company. They don't, here. They do in Germany, and Germany is doing very well compared to us.
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McDonald's and other companies that pay low wages are not for stupid people but people just entering the job market, or who need a part-time job while they go to college, or whatever. Don't insult poor people because they have to work at low wages.
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I assume the REPEAT of your comment is an error. If you click on "Post Comment" and it does not appear, do NOT click again. That will post the comment more than once. Rather, block-copy the text into a word-processor, copy the path in the window above, then exit this area by clicking on the red X at top right; call up the URL in the fill-in box again, and hit Enter to get back to this page, and your comment should be there. If not, click on "Reply", call up your text from your word-processor, and click "Post Comment" again. We don't need to see repeats because AOL stops working after a while and you have to exit and go back into the same page to continue to work.
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Yes, people have no political rights, tomkoz. They should have to give up their job if they resent their employer's telling them how to vote. That's American, alrite. Oops. No, that's AmeriKan.
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Your attitudes are precisely FASCIST. The boss is not just the boss on the job, but in all of life. You are an ENEMY of liberty.
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That is slanderous, but what can we expect of Radical Rightists? No, Liberals don't work, only Radical Rightists work -- at crappy jobs for crappy pay, because that's all they qualify for. Liberals not only DO work, but they get most of the really good jobs, because they go to college and LEARN about the world, not just about a particular job.
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Yes, blame the victim. Greedy managers of corporations send jobs abroad so they can maximize profits for shareholders and show how 'smart' they are. It has NOTHING to do with regulations or any other excuse dishonestly put out by corporate public-relations departments, but only to do with GREED. Radical Rightists are perfectly willing to make excuses for the TRAITORS who send American jobs to COMMUNIST China.
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Stop posting the same nonsense that has been answered dozens of times in these comments. Unions can't FIRE anybody because they vote the "wrong" way. If you're not going to read what has already been said, DON'T POST.
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People talk about their lives while on the job. The boss hears, either directly or via his "spies". Don't be naive.
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Accept the man's apology. He made a mistake. He has learned from it. He apologized for it. Move on.
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You're "sure" it wouldn't have been reported if a Democrat was endorsed. That is a bald and absolutely worthless assertion speculating about something that did not happen.
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Republicans OCTUPLED THE NATIONAL DEBT, exported 14M to 20M jobs, and caused a stock market crash and housing crash. And you're blaming Democrats. You have no honor.
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There is no God, but if there were a God, he would be a Liberal, and you would be headed to Hell for your evil feelings toward the meek and economically defenseless.
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This appears to be a repeat of another post. STOP repeating posts. You're not fooling anybody into thinking the Radical Right is more popular than they are.
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The Radical Right has no arguments, only slanders. They answer charges of corporate greed with accusations that Obama is a Moslem Marxist. Oh, that's great debating, isn't it? Don't ever address the real problems, just cast attention elsewhere, and lie about it while you're at it.
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Yes, putting a political endorsement in a PAY ENVELOPE did imply that the employees jobs were at risk. To deny that is dishonest.
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OFF-TOPIC. If you can't stick to the McDonald's story, don't comment. That only forces decent people to answer your nonsense.
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The question of whether a flyer enclosed in a pay envelope fulfills the definition of banned practices is why an investigation is required. As to whether "information that if any particular candidate is elected or defeated work in the establishment will cease in whole or in part" was conveyed in the employer's message, that seems closer to what is banned: >>"If the right people are elected we will be able to continue with raises and benefits at or above our present levels," the insert said. "If others are elected we will not."<<>>The court said the NVRA has basic protections built into it. One of those protections is a felony charge for perjury against fraudulent registrants and criminal charges against organizations which seek to illegally register unqualified voters. According to an October 23rd press release, the FBI is vigilant against voter fraud with it's Public Integrity Section
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Read more: http://technorati.com/politics/article/arizona-voter-registration-law-illegal-pierce/#ixzz13u3qYl00<<>
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
O'Reilly's 'Muslim Problem' Idiocy. Fox News pundit Bill O'Reilly asserted on Don Imus's Fox radio show Tuesday that the problem with Islam is not extremists but Moslems generally:

So you assume the good Muslims outnumber the bad Muslims 10:1. That's usually the ratio on any group. Well, 10:1 overwhelms. So if the good Muslims in Pakistan and Afghanistan would join with NATO and the U.S.A., there would be no Taliban insurrection. There would be no Al-Qaeda cave-dwellers. They'd be gone. So we have a Muslim problem, not a Muslim extremist problem.

Let's apply this 'reasoning' to other groups. 28,000 Mexicans have died from drug-cartel violence in recent years, and the Mexican government has been unable to suppress the drug gangs. Ergo, Mexicans generally must be in favor of the drug cartels and their actions. The United States has a street-gang problem. Ergo, Americans must support the Bloods and Crips because otherwise "they'd be gone". Ditto Mafia, tax cheats, drug addicts stealing to support their drug habit — and on and on. Bill O'Reilly is either (1) a fool or (2) a manipulative S.O.B. who knows that what he is saying is pure NONSENSE but says it anyway to drum up anti-Moslem sentiment. For whatever reason.
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Happily, Imus rejected O'Reilly's idiocy and called him that morning's "pinhead". Thank you, Imus.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:01 AM

 
Brownshirt Party. It has happened again. Staffers of a Tea Party candidate for U.S. Senate have attacked someone physically. The first time, thuggish security guards, including two active-service military who did not have permission to take any such job, roughed up and handcuffed a reporter in a public school in Alaska at which Tea Party loon Joe Miller was speaking. Now, crowd-control security for Tea Party candidate Rand Paul pushed a young WOMAN to the ground and stomped on her shoulder, pushing her head into the pavement, in Kentucky. Why aren't Democrats attacking the Tea Party as Brownshirts?
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:00 AM

 
Crushing Tea-Party Republicanism. Democrats have done an astoundingly inept job of alarming the electorate about the insane regression the Republicans are trying to carry off this year. It's not about "fiscal responsibility" or "restoring democracy" or any other legitimate idea they hide behind. It's about undoing the 20th Century and returning us to "the good old days" of robber barons, 72-hour workweeks, and $10 a week payrates, with no Social Security, no Medicare, no OSHA worker-safety protections, no food inspections, no regulations of any kind on businesses, which are to be free to stomp on working people to build mega-mansions for the super-rich in gated communities protected by private armies of security guards to keep the starving at bay.
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The Tea-Party Republicans want to set class against class, race against race, sexual orientation against sexual orientation, and ethnic group against ethnic group so they are so busy fiting among themselves that they cannot unite to crush the rich and put an end, once and for all, to Monster Capitalism.
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They pretend that laissez-faire capitalism is the best of all possible worlds, and that it is Nature in economics, in which the fittest survive, the rest die — and that is supposed to be good! Mind you, the same people who refuse to embrace the "theory" of evolution worship at the altar of the mechanism of evolution, "survival of the fittest". If people cannot pull their own weight, they should die. No one else has any obligation to help anyone, ever, unless they choose to do so as an act of charity, and the recipient of such assistance is never to think such assistance a "right" but always to know that it is charity that the rich have absolutely no obligation to give and for which the recipient of charity is to bow down and kiss the feet of the rich, chanting "thank you, thank you, thank you" endlessly.
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The Tea Party wingnuts want to destroy the social compact and replace it with the Law of the Jungle. That is their idea of "conservatism". But since we do not now have, nor have in the past century operated under, the Law of the Jungle, they are not preserving or conserving a thing, but regressing to a pre-civilized state that they pretend was better than the "socialist" "aberration" that was the last century. Now the electorate is presented with a stark choice: progressive or regressive, and the progressives are actually the conservatives because they wish to retain all the hard-won gains of 120 years of American history.
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This is, alas, not in the slitest overstated. Let us examine the radical Tea Party program publicly embraced by the Radical Right.

• Abolish the minimum wage, so malevolent corporations can reduce workers to slavery;
  
• Repeal antitrust legislation, or block enforcement of existing legislation, so corporations can grow as large and anticompetitive as they want, raising prices in collusion with each other and becoming "too big to fail", so Government will have no choice but to bail them out every time they make a catastrophic mistake; (I bet the Tea Party naifs don't realize that allowing corporations to escape antitrust "regulation" would practically ensure future bailouts!)
  
• Repeal Government regulations that keep food supplies safe, protect water and air from being polluted, protect worker's rights to a good day's pay for a good day's work, keep consumer products (like cribs, cars, and baby strollers) safe; protect workers from unsafe working conditions and hazardous materials);
  
• Privatize Social Security, so that if the stock market crashes, everybody loses everything, or a person who puts all of his or her money in one stock or one market segment and that company or the few companies they are invested in fail, they lose every cent of their life savings and their earnings from Social Security and become homeless and helpless public charges — except there won't be any social safety net to take care of them, so they will have to beg for charity from the rich;
  
• On healthcare: restore to health insurers the right to refuse coverage to people with pre-existing conditions — Mike Huckabee, who has actually dared to run for President, compares people with pre-existing conditions to cars that have been totaled in accidents, and compared healthcare to automobile insurance, assigning to people no more dignity nor rights than a hunk of metal; allow insurers to force 18- or 21-year-old children off their parents' insurance policy, leaving them with no insurance whatsoever; allow insurers to reimpose lifetime coverage limits, so people who need expensive procedures simply die;
  
• Abolish Medicare;
  
• Close all public schools;
  
• Destroy PBS (public television, including Sesame Street and all the children's programming that gives kids a head start on reading and math);
  
• Repeal the progressive income tax, so that the super-rich pay almost nothing, and all the expenses of Government fall on the poor and middle class;
  
• Inflict religion upon everyone, in schools and everywhere in government, and thus give us a future of endless religious war — what a good idea, to replace peaceful relations between religions, and between the religious and the antireligious, with strife that can create the United States into a SUPER-Lebanon, or Northern Ireland, or Germany during the Wars of the Reformation;
  
• Roll back civil-rights legislation to permit resegregation of public accommodations;
  
• Impose poll taxes to stop poor people from voting;
  
• Allow foreigners and foreign corporations to interfere in U.S. elections by attempting to buy votes with scores of millions of dollars of campaign ads whose sources of funding are secret;
  
• Prevent any campaign-finance legislation from being re-passed (to override the Supreme Court's illegal voiding of the McCain-Feingold law to limit campaign spending, or even just require entities that put out political ads to identify who gave them the money for those ads). Money in campaigns has become an obscenity that permits foreigners and the rich to try to buy elections. And there is no check on lies in such ads. No one is held to account for the most scurrilous and dishonest assertions, but any advertiser can commit systematic libel and slander with impunity. That's not free speech; that is a course of conduct punishable by law — if the slanderers can be identified. Nor is flooding the airwaves with lies bought by secret donors democracy, one person one ad, but oligarchy and plutocracy, in which the super-rich can create fake organizations to camouflage the fact that one person is pouring millions of dollars into a campaign of lies.

But the Tea Party has no use for democracy if it works against the interests of the rich. The individuals who think the Tea Party is for the little guy have been fooled by their betters — who pretend to be their friends but are actually their deadly enemies. Legitimate frustration and anger have been manipulated by people who regard the tricorner-hatted ordinary citizens at Tea Party rallies as morons who can be used, and those richly-funded manipulators have indeed played those "little people" for the fools they have let themselves become.
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People who try to tell them "You're being used" aren't heeded. We who share their frustration want to wake them up to the fact that they are being used to do exactly the opposite of what they think they're doing. They don't want to hear it. They believe words rather than deeds, so when Ronald Reagan said he was for smaller government and fiscal responsibility, they believed that actor playing President, even as his Administration TRIPLED the national debt.
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The Tea Party and Radical-Right Republican Party candidates will not confess to backing every single one of the insane proposals listed above to undo all the progress of the past 80, 100, or even, in the case of antitrust legislation, 120 years, but if they accept the backing of, and name of "Tea Party", then they must ALL be assumed to favor the most extreme Tea Party program, which includes all the items above.
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Democrats must forthrightly tell voters,

If you want to see a Nation in which the poor and middle class are made even poorer, and in which people of different races and religions are set at each other's throats so they don't unite to destroy the exploitative rich who advocate unfettered Monster Capitalism, vote Republican. If you would HATE to see the United States become the most heartless monster in the industrialized world (tho how long the U.S. could remain sufficiently advanced to remain part of the industrialized world if the Tea Party has its way, is hard to predict), you MUST vote Democratic, and urge everyone you know to vote Democratic. Don't throw up your hands in disgust. Don't opt out and stay home. If the good people stay home, the monsters win the election and start dismantling every institution that has made us a powerful and prosperous Nation.
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"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good people do nothing."

Voting is a tiny exertion, but it makes all the difference in the world. If the people cannot achieve justice by ballots, they will attempt to seize it by bullets. A word to the wise would be sufficient, but the rich are stupid. Time after time, in society after society, on continent after continent, the rich push their luck until people start shooting them or chopping their heads off. As Spanish/American philosopher George Santayana observed, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." The rich don't believe that for a second.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,427 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:26 PM

 
Immigration Control Is Not (Necessarily) Racist. Again, I am irritated that fellow Liberal Keith Olbermann of MSNBC's news/analysis program Countdown, is just plain wrong about something. This time he is asserting that Rightwing nutjob Sharron Angle's most recent campaign ad (for U.S. Senator from Nevada) is racist. He then showed that ad in its entirety so we might judge for ourselves. Alrite. I've judged. It's not racist.
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Olbermann asserted that it suggested that Mexican illegals are coming across the border to attack white children. Olbermann said the ad shows "squinty-eyed, brown-skinned young men coming for Nevada's schoolchildren — not the black ones, nor the Latino ones, nor the Asian ones; the white ones". Has he lost his mind?
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For one thing, the fotos in the ad are in black-and-white, not color.
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The ad refers to illegals crossing the border and joining gangs. Most viewers would assume that those are Latino gangs, not interested in recruiting Anglo white kids. The only reference to schoolchildren was visual, showing kids in class in the segment of the ad that said that Harry Reid twice voted against making English the official language of the United States (as well he should have; such a measure is a preposterously unnecessary provocation; English is exterminating all other languages, including Spanish, at a very fast pace).
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It is a huge leap of irration to say that any of the Angle ads, separately or put together, constitutes an assertion that Latino illegals are "coming for Nevada's schoolchildren"! It is this kind of extreme misstatement of the case that subverts the appeal of Liberal candidates with white voters, and of Liberal commentators with white viewers. What next? Sharron "Angle" chose her name — or her backers chose her because of her name — to suggest "Anglo", and thus not just English-speaking, but also white? Get a grip, KO.
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This is what the Angle ad actually says.

Waves of illegal aliens streaming across our border, joining violent gangs, forcing families to live in fear. And what's Harry Reid doing about it? Voting to give illegal aliens Social Security benefits, tax breaks and college tuition. Voting against declaring English our national language. Twice. And even siding with Obama and the President of Mexico to block Arizona's tough new immigration law. Harry Reid: It's clear whose side he's on, and it's NOT YOURS.

Factually, that is mostly correct. The language could be criticized for vagueness as to how many illegals join violent gangs — all? most? some? almost none? But both Harry Reid and Keith Olbermann do back the so-called "DREAM Act", which is described thus in Wikipedia:

This bill would provide certain inadmissible or deportable alien students who graduate from US high schools, who are of good moral character, arrived in the U.S. as minors, and have been in the country continuously for at least five years prior to the bill's enactment, the opportunity to earn conditional permanent residency if they complete two years in the military or two years at a four year institution of higher learning. The alien students would obtain temporary residency for a six year period. Within the six year period, a qualified student must have "acquired a degree from an institution of higher education in the United States or [have] completed at least 2 years, in good standing, in a program for a bachelor's degree or higher degree in the United States," or have "served in the uniformed services for at least 2 years and, if discharged, [have] received an honorable discharge." Military Enlistment contracts require an eight year commitment. "Any alien whose permanent resident status is terminated [according to the terms of the Act] shall return to the immigration status the alien had immediately prior to receiving conditional permanent resident status under this Act."

You can't serve in the military without a Social Security card, and participation in the military would entail pay that is subject to Social Security taxes and, thus, entitlement to Social Security benefits down the road.
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How would DREAM Act kids be able to stay here if their parents are deported? Not everyone has an aunt or uncle they can stay with for the six-year conditional-residency period during which they are supposed to go to college or serve in the military. So how are they to stay in the U.S. if the parents who support them are deported? If they are to support themselves by working legally in the U.S. economy, they will need a Social Security card, and their wages will be subject to SocSec taxes, so they will be entitled to SocSec benefits once they accrue enuf quarter-years of SS tax payments upon achieving permanent residence.
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So the Angle ad's "Social Security benefits" claim appears to be largely if not even wholly true, as regards high-schoolers. I can't fact-check the ad's "tax breaks and college tuition" claims without knowing what specific legislation Reid voted for that the Angle campaign means. The DREAM Act as it now stands does not provide any tuition to students who participate in the program.
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"YOURS" in the ad refers to voters — U.S. citizens of any race — not white people. Legal Latino immigrants and U.S.-born Hispanics (U.S. citizens, not just residents) are endangered by floods of illegals, some of whom are indeed in gangs that victimize Latinos before they get to anybody else, because they are based in Latino neighborhoods, and Latino-on-Latino crime is presumably as common as black-on-black crime (which is all-too common). Even without crime (other than the crime of violating our borders), illegal workers undercut Hispanics who are legally entitled to be in the U.S., by working cheap at jobs legal immigrants might otherwise get.
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The foto of schoolchildren was used with the text "REID voted against declaring English our national language. TWICE." I assume that is also factually correct. So why does KO insist on seeing that foto as implying that Latino illegals are somehow "coming for ... white [kids]"?
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(Note: Many years ago I did a one-minute "editorial reply" on WNBC-TV (flagship station of the NBC Television Network, in NYC) to oppose as unnecessary and provocative a proposal to declare English our national language (even if it did not ban services or ballots in other languages). I stated the obvious, that such a measure was needlessly provocative, because English is not endangered in the United States but, quite the contrary, Spanish is. Around that time, Hispanic Magazine had a cover story about the future of Spanish in the United States that included a statement from Congressman José Serrano, who is of Puerto Rican descent, that many Latinos are afraid that their children or, at latest, grandchildren will not speak Spanish. That fear is well founded, in that modern instructional technologies (such as DVD's with video and bilingual scripts; microfones so students with a computer can compare their pronunciation to a video teacher's) greatly ease the task of trying to learn English.)
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There is no 'comprehensive immigration reform' proposal now under consideration for us to evaluate, but most of the noise from the Left indicates that they are proposing some form of amnesty. The last time amnesty was passed, the rate of illegal immigration JUMPED; it did not decline.
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My stance on U.S.-Mexican relations, if not also Central American immigration, is clear: it is long since time for us to admit that the borders from the Rio Grande to the easternmost part of Panama are dysfunctional and should be erased, replaced with state boundaries of a bunch of Sunbelt states to be created from Meso-America. Free trade and free movement of people would benefit everyone in all the (present) countries involved. The resources of all new states would add to the resources, natural and human, of the Nation, and finance the development of areas that now send large numbers of immigrants to the United States. Such development would let most people now tempted to leave their homes for the U.S., instead stay home and find work in projects in their own village, where most would prefer to stay if only conditions were tolerable. That means that if we provide electrification, water and sewage treatment, good schools, good roads, cellfone service, high-speed Internet connections, and all the other infrastructure of modern life, the only immigrants — become in-migrants — who would pour over the erased borders would be people who want the freedom of a new place and new start. They would likely be "the best and the britest", people we should be very glad to have in the present U.S.
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There are very good reasons to oppose the incompetent loon Sharron Angle without exaggerating and misstating her anti-illegal-immigration ads as racist. I am hostile to illegal immigration, even from — indeed, especially from — Canada, another area that should long ago have joined the Union. It's not a racial thing. I am from one of the original Thirteen States, NJ. We gave up our sovereignty to a larger entity in which we came to share an overall sovereignty. We built the economy and institutions of the United States, then admitted so many new states that we all, in the original states, lost control of our country to the multitudinous voters in new states. But they didn't conspire against us. Rather, we all discussed our common interests, and enacted programs to address shared problems. What worked for 13 states works for 50, and can work for 75 or 100 — or more.
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But present arrangements have to change. They just plain don't work. Worse, they have produced a nitemare for Mexico that has killed 28,000 people, and counting. The border is the problem. Annexation, not immigration, is the solution.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,427 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
"Horserace" Horsesh*. The major television networks are, as usual, harassing the public with useless coverage of the "horserace" aspect of the midterm elections two weeks hence. Instead of focusing on the issues and the qualifications of candidates, pretty much everything is about polls and projections, speculation about turnout, and other useless and nearly worthless things. Why should we even go to the polls if it's just a popularity contest, and the issues don't matter?
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The horserace is NOT a legitimate matter save as regards getting people to understand that they have an obligation as citizens to get out and vote. And the media wouldn't even have to do that if the Government would do what it long ago should have done, and simply require everyone to vote, as some other democracies — better democracies, like Australia, Chile, Singapore, and even Venezuela — have done. Instead, each major party hopes to depress the vote of the other party (if not even their own) to gain advantage, the exact opposite of what little-d democrats do. Why should any election hinge on turnout? If the result would be different whether 30% of people vote or 98% of people vote, then we are giving ourselves a government selected by an unrepresentative MINORITY if we do not have universal voting. That's not democracy.
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So we should either institute compulsory voting or stop calling this country, and its various subdivisions, a "democracy".
+
Naturally, people who are compelled to vote must have a real choice, not just of the two candidates the major parties put forward, by their antidemocratic means — primaries that are even less representative of the people than are general elections. If third parties cannot, absent public financing of elections, afford to run candidates in the enormous districts (708,000 constituents in each Congressional district) that this country has developed since the idiots in Congress in 1912 froze the size of the House of Representatives at 435 members, then we must at very least provide a binding NONE OF THE ABOVE option to voters. If more people vote for None of the Above than for any named candidate, ALL named candidates would be defeated, and the parties would have to put forward all NEW candidates, or offer various write-in candidates — also new people, not people already rejected — in a second-round election. If the people again vote NONE OF THE ABOVE, same thing for a third round, or fourth, or fifth, until the major parties stop giving us crappy candidates we don't want. Sooner or later, the parties would get the message and present acceptable candidates to the electorate. It might take five months the first time, so that after January 6th, there would be in Congress only such members are were elected in preference to None of the Above — however many or few they might be.
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Since Congress operates by a quorum of all members, and only people actually elected could be regarded as members, there would be a powerful incentive to the major parties in the FIRST go-round after None of the Above wins, to put up candidates the electorate can stomach, because otherwise their district would have no Representative, and/or their state would have only one Senator to vote on legislation. The more arrogant major-party bosses might think that they can force voters to give in to their will by trying to scare them about letting Congress act without a representative from their district. But voters could easily afford to ignore such silliness, since they would know that one vote out of 435 doesn't amount to a hill of beans as regards getting Congress to do what their one district wants. Thus they could easily hold out as long as it takes to break the back of arrogant major parties.
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Unless primaries also entail compulsory voting, the primary system must be abolished, because it is why, above all else, politics in the United States today are so parochial and poisonous: small minorities determine who gets on the general-election ballot, because almost nobody votes in most primaries. If you have more than two candidates in a primary, as often happens, and only 15% of voters vote, a very small, rabidly extreme group can put a nut on the general-election ballot. Consider 3 candidates and a 15% turnout: the winner need draw only 6% of the electorate of that party. In a district with roughly equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans, that would be 6% of 50% of the electorate, or 3% of the total. Many crazy ideas can inspire 3% of the electorate to get out of their homes to vote.
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So we have developed an electoral system in which highly unrepresentative minorities control who gets on the general-election ballot. Why are we surprised that there are so many crazy candidates all over the Nation this year?
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Compulsory voting in closed primaries could solve the problem of hijacked general-election ballots. Compulsory voting in the general election, with a binding NONE OF THE ABOVE option, would solve the problem of a House of Unrepresentatives and an equally unrepresentative Senate.
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But even having bad choices on the ballot could be partly self-correcting if media were doing their job of covering the issues, character, and stances of the candidates. Instead, the media are fascinated by the horserace. I don't give a sh* about the horserace. Tell me, tell the voters, the stance of the candidates, on all major issues, over and over again.
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Is the Tea Party a coherent entity, united as to program? If so, the most extreme stances of the most bizarre candidates are representative of the party overall, and everyone running with Tea Party backing must be held to account for those crazy stances: ending public education, teaching creationism (where?, in the few schools that people of modest means could afford?), abolishing Medicare and Medicaid, privatizing Social Security — on and on thru the fantasmagoria of magical solutions to the problems of society that the Tea Party is pushing. People on Social Security and Medicare should be scared sh*less. Will that get them to the polls? Not if they don't believe the Tea Party's 138 Republican candidates are dead serious about destroying the social safety net we all rely upon.
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But media won't focus on the catastrophe we face if the extreme Tea Party-mandated Republican program wins a majority in Congress. So will a large and representative portion of the electorate turn out? If not, then an antidemocratic electoral process will give us an absolutely unrepresentative Congress filled to overflowing with crazy people devoted to destroying the very government they take over.
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These are the kinds of things the major media should be telling us about. That's not what I'm seeing on the evening news.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,426 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 9:09 PM

 
More Colorful Billboards or Mailers for Democrats (with .PDF). My colleague in northern England thought these would have more impact. I initially thought, when he proposed coloring the graffics red for Republicans and blue for Democrats, that he meant only a thicker, more prominent outline map. Here's what he actually meant, and supplied for use here.

Being poor, on Social Security, I always think about costs, and ink is expensive. But I completely agree that these britely colored graffics would make a much stronger impression. They bring a whole new meaning to Red States and Blue States, don't they?
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By the way, I don't generally like the use of a 48-state U.S. outline to represent the 50-state Union, but it works better graffically than would a map that includes Alaska and Hawaii. If we annex Canada (as several States of the Union), we can use that outline instead, dropping only Hawaii from the symbolic outline.

Looks natural, doesn't it?
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While we're talking about graffics, I don't think I have shown the Expansionist Party's logo here.

Nor the version with the flag superimposed.

But the most important visuals to consider right now are the "GOP = Made in Communist China" and "DEMS = Made in USA" graffics. If you'd like to use the China/U.S. graffics yourself, simply right-click and Save them to your own computer. Print them out for your own flyers. Mail them to candidates and the DNC, county and state committees, newspapers, whatever. Shake things up your own self.
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P.S. It occurred to me after I had posted this, that some people might not know how to create their own flyer from the graffics above, so I created a printable .PDF version of a flyer with the two graffics and some text. If you like the text, you can simply print that .PDF, then put it up on bulletin boards and in other (lawful) locations, send it out to key people, etc., as suggested above.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,425 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:06 PM

 
Billboards for Democrats.


Use the two together, side-by-side or GOP on top, Dems on the bottom, or just the GOP-China graffic by itself. The two could be amplified by "GOP = Made in China" (or "Communist China") and "Democrats = Made in USA".
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Billboards are a very good way to go, where they are allowed, since they are seen by many people and stay in place for a long time. A simple graffic message such as I propose will make a lasting impression in itself, in any medium, but is ideal for billboards, where you can't say a lot because people are passing too fast (usually; tho billboards in places where traffic tie-ups are frequent would be seen better, and the brief captions, not just the graffic message, could be read and absorbed better). But any form of advertising could use these simple, clear graffics. So Dems, please use them. Not for your party's sake, but for the Nation's sake.
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P.S. A colleague from Northern England (which does not, alas, yet vote in U.S. elections) had a further suggestion:

Howzabout making China red and the USA blue? That would also make the
link "Red Republicans, Red China".

Good thought. Conservatives might be very surprised to realize they are supporting Communism in exporting American jobs to China. "Repent, ye sinners, and be saved!"
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,425 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:49 PM

 
Democratic Disaster? or Democratic Sweep? I've been puzzled by a contradiction between what was being said a few months ago, and what is being said now. Not long ago, Liberal pundits were declaiming that Republicans have been so intent on pandering to their racist and reactionary base that they have antagonized every other part of the electorate, and thus risked total annihilation at the polls, as even conservative Democrats and independents turned away in revulsion. Then, starting several weeks ago with the victory of Tea Party candidates in Republican primaries, everyone started talking about the dangers Democrats face of annihilation at the polls. What gives?
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The racist, reactionary Tea Party has somehow made the racist, reactionary Republican Party more palatable to Democrats and independents? I don't think so. Quite the contrary, it seems likely to me that the first analysis, that only the 25% to 35% of the electorate, mostly in the South and the more regressive parts of the Midwest, that constitute the Republican base, will vote Republican, and Democrats will be swept back into majorities in both houses of Congress unless an unprecedented proportion (say, half) of the people who voted Democratic in 2008 stay home. How likely is that?
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Democrats need merely land hard on a few key issues, and they will obliterate the Tea Party and its captive, the Republican Party, at the polls.

1. Republicans want to repeal "Obamacare". So far, only a few, popular pieces of that healthcare legislation have gone into effect, so Republicans appear to be saying that they want to undo those parts, not just the individual mandate. That means that Republicans will be seen as wanting to restore the right of health insurers to bar health coverage to people with pre-existing conditions; throw offspring of covered adults off their parent's healthcare policy at age 18; and impose lifetime limits on care, so that if covering a procedure would exceed those limits, the insurer can cut a patient off and let him or her DIE. That is not what Americans want. So why aren't the Democrats eager to confront this "repeal Obamacare" crap head-on? (Once re-elected, with a bulletproof majority in both houses, Democrats can themselves get rid of the unconstitutional individual mandate, and pass what we really want, single-payer.)
   
2. Democrats can run clips of Republicans simply saying NO to everything, while offering no alternative programs. They can also say, or plainly imply, that Republicans are not the only people who can say NO, and if being The Party of NO worked for Republicans, such that Democrats are reduced to a minority, Democrats will become the Party of HELL No!, and the Government will come grinding to a halt, and no one will get anything they want.
3. Democrats can point out that Republicans have blocked renewal of tax cuts for the middle class and poor because they insist that billionaires must also have tax cuts, and if megamillionaires don't get tax cuts, nobody gets tax cuts, but everybody will have to pay higher taxes under Republicans. The middle class and poor want low taxes for themselves, not for the super-rich.
   
4. Republicans were opposed to restrictions on bank abuses. Tell American consumers that restrictions on bank-fee abuses were enacted by Democrats but opposed by Republicans. And that the fees the Democrats ended will come back under Republicans.
   
5. Republicans are using foreign money to buy American elections, so that even more American jobs will be sent overseas, to the countries that foreign money comes from, including COMMUNIST China.
   
6. Republicans have refused to do ANYTHING to save American jobs. They actively blocked a measure to bring jobs home from foreign countries. So Democrats should plaster, all over TV, billboards, and the Internet, "Democrats= Made in USA; Republicans = Made in China".
   

Just these few points, hammered home again and again, should assure a HUGE Democratic victory on November 2. And just for good measure, Democrats should suggest very pointedly that the Republican Party and its Tea Party faction are both almost openly RACIST. Show video of the crowds at Republican and Tea Party events and ask, "Where are the minorities? Whose America do they care about? Everybody's? Or only racist white people's?" If half of white people are Liberals or moderates, and between 75% and 95% of minorities are Democratically disposed, how can Republicans win control of either house of Congress, much less both, unless Democrats are completely incompetent in showing how ruinous Republican control would assuredly be?
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:57 AM

 
Jews Against Gays — Who Wins? Who Loses? MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann last nite showed extended video clips, first of New York Tea Party-Republican Candidate for Governor Carl Paladino (an adulterer) blasting homosexuals in the presence of monstrously hideous, inbred (who else would have them?), Hassidic Jews, with silly hats on their heads, ringlets down around their faces, long beards, and long black coats; and then (a clip) of one such Hassid, Rabbi Yehuda Levin, praising Paladino for fomenting hatred. Hitler would be proud. They have learned their lesson well: teach hatred. Hm. What ever happened to Hitler? Ah, yes. He was forced to commit suicide as the forces of a huge international alliance bore down on his bunker.
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Hassids seem to think they are so well loved that they can attack other people and not suffer any adverse consequences. Think again.
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In the United States, not even Orthodox Jews care for extreme-Orthodox Hassids, and the bulk of American Jews, who are not even Orthodox, much less ultra-Orthodox, but Conservative and Reform or, frankly, secular (Jewish in name and culture only) are embarrassed by them. The idea that Hassids are still preaching the vile garbage of Leviticus's condemnation of homosexuality is a profound embarrassment to most American Jews. If gay men, lesbians, and their families and friends decide to condemn Hassidism and promote hatred of everyone who teaches hatred of homosexuals, who will win?
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Hideous, Hassidic extremists cleave to antiquated, idiotic teachings from Leviticus such as that God forbids people from eating pork (including exquisite bacon) and shellfish in all forms, and especially severely condemns eating a bacon cheeseburger with a glass of milk — as a deep and unforgivable offense to God! By far most Jews in the United States today understand that the dietary laws of the ancient world had nothing to do with godliness but only with sanitation — that they were essentially health regulations in a time when pigs carried things like trichinosis and parasites from a diet heavy in things that people regarded as unhealthy, and that there was no refrigeration for shellfish, in a hot area of the world. They also may realize that the prohibition on homosexuality was an attempt to boost the numbers of Hebrews in their endless conflicts with other tribal peoples around them, by forcibly channeling all sexual energy into procreation rather than recreation, or loving intimacy that did not produce children for the armies of Israel or Judah.
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It's time for the modern world to destroy all the idiocy of the ancient Jewish scriptures, from the nonsense about Adam and Eve being the only people on Earth at the beginning of the world, but their children not having sex with each other (as would mean that all of humanity is the product of repeated and endemic incest!); to the odious notion that they should praise a God that drowned the world, including kittens and puppies, for the sins of one species; to the ridiculous idea that a great being concerned with ethicality would care if a person wore a hat or ate a clam or oyster.
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The violence-and-madness filled Old Testament should be torn out of all Christian Bibles, and burned in every copy, that paper biomass used to generate electricity to produce lite rather than darkness.
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Christian Americans should accept the obvious, that the Jewish God of Wrath is NOT the Christian God of Love. That the God of the Christians would NEVER have drowned the world (including puppies and kittens) to punish misbehaving people, and doesn't care if a person wants to drink milk with a serving of meat. Christians need to realize that a very large portion of the Jewish Book of Leviticus that is dredged up to condemn homosexuality, concerns ANIMAL SACRIFICE — which not even Jews still practice — and dietary laws, not just homosexuality in particular or sexual morality more generally. Christians also need to know that Looniticus mandates death to children who disrespect their parents. Why don't we hear politicians demanding the death penalty for kids who tell their parents to go f*k themselves, using Leviticus 20:9 as moral authority?: "For every one that curseth his father or his mother shall be surely put to death: he hath cursed his father or his mother; his blood shall be upon him." That language is absolutely parallel to the antihomosexual provision that Hassids and narrowminded heterosexual "Christians" keep using to condemn homosexuality, a mere four verses later: "If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them."
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Why do "Christians" pick and choose which parts of Leviticus they will heed, and which ignore, or even ridicule? Why don't they obey Leviticus 12:3, and circumcise baby boys as a religious obligation? How can they eat pork or shrimp, or drink a milkshake with a hamburger? Why are ALL the requirements of Leviticus EXCEPT the prohibition on homosexuality IGNORED by so-called "Christians"?
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And what about adultery and Leviticus, Mr. Carl Adulterer Paladino?: "And the man that committeth adultery with another man's wife, even he that committeth adultery with his neighbor's wife, the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death." (Lev. 20:10) How DARE Carl Paladino, who has admitted to committing adultery, go to a Hassidic Jewish group and pose as a great defender of the values of Leviticus? The word "chutzpah" was invented for this kind of thing, and goes back thru Yiddish to Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke.
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Chris Rovzar of New York Magazine was quick to pick up on Paladino's gall, under the heading, "Wouldn’t Carl Paladino’s Remarks Yesterday Have Made More Sense If Someone Had Said It This Way?":

"I just think my children and your children would be much better off and much more successful getting married and raising one family, and I don’t want them brainwashed into thinking that committing adultery and raising two separate secret families is an equally valid and successful option — it isn’t … That’s not the example we should be showing our children".

It's time for Christians to repudiate Leviticus in its entirety, and warn people, be they Hassids or any other retrogressive and intolerant group trying to foist ancient stupidity and violent moralism — not morality, since people who practiced animal sacrifice are in no position to talk about morality — that if they try to push that crap onto the civilized people of the United States, they will face retribution. Hassidic Judaism could be declared a cult, put outside the protections of the First Amendment, prosecuted for promoting hate crimes, and eradicated from this country.
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Apparently Hassids never heard, or don't believe, the expression "People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones." Especially should not people who didn't like it when Germany broke Jewish glass in Kristallnacht, not so long ago in historical terms, think they can now throw stones at homosexuals. How many Christian Americans have Jewish relatives? How many have gay or lesbian relatives? Do the math, and shut the f*k up. Keep your hateful bullsh*t to yourselves.
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You want to believe in the vile and violent crap of Leviticus? Go right ahead. But when you intrude that crap into public policy debates, you are asking for more trouble than you can handle. And don't expect other Jews to defend you. They know better than to take Leviticus seriously when it says stupid, indeed insane, things about putting people to death for swearing at their parents, or a man's having sex with another man, or anyone's having sex outside marriage. Tiny minorities that exist only at the sufferance of society — which can be rescinded — really should not promote hatred of minorities.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,425 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:02 AM

 
Not Strong Enuf, Not Targeted Enuf — Not Patriotic / Xenophobic Enuf. Keith Olbermann on MSNBC's Countdown last nite pointed out a new, grave problem in American democracy: the influence of unregulated foreign money in trying to buy American elections. His guest, a union spokesman (Leo Gerard of the United Steelworkers of America — not of India, China, nor any other place), put the lie to the Chamber of Commerce's shameless, brazen lie that unions outspend businesses in U.S. campaigns — the actual figure, Gerard, said, is that corporations and the Chamber outspend unions 20:1! But neither K.O. nor his guest said what needed to be said: that this is an attack not just on our democracy but also on our SOVEREIGNTY.
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These corporations are violating our borders fully as much as, and with even more disregard for the interests of Americans than are, illegal aliens flooding across our borders. This is an invasion by illegal MONEY, foreign corporations, including corporations owned by the government of Communist China, designed to give foreigners VOTES in American elections. Even uneducated Southern rednecks should be able to see the impropriety of foreigners essentially voting in our elections. The same people who are indignant about illegal aliens taking American jobs at home, and who would be infuriated if the Government allowed noncitizens to vote, can be made LIVID by the thought of foreigners being given the equivalent of the vote in being permitted to brainwash voters thru hundreds of millions of dollars being infiltrated past out borders by foreign corporations and governments.
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Curiously, Mr. Gerard spoke with what sounded to me plainly like a Canadian accent. And I am quite familiar with Canadian speech. If there is one country that is specially privileged with regard to access to the U.S., but shouldn't be, it's Canada, which long ago should have joined the Union. Can anyone doubt that if Canada were part of the United States, the Republican Party would have to moderate hugely, or go out of existence as an electoral party of consequence in the expanded, "new and improved" United States?
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I looked up Leo Gerard on Wikipedia and found that he is indeed CANADIAN! Wikipedia says, "Gerard was still a Canadian citizen as of January 2009." This is yet another example of how foreigners are given the very best jobs in the United States!
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How on EARTH can Keith Olbermann put a CANADIAN on to speak about protecting the UNITED STATES? It's absurd, and outrageous. Deport the bastard back to his beloved Canada, and NEVER put him forward as a spokesman for U.S. interests again.
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Democrats should not remotely be on the defensive this Congressional-elections year. Dems should make very plain that Democrats = Made in America; Republicans = Made in China.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,425 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:25 PM

 
The Bigger They Are, the Harder They Fall? Jews in positions of power in the U.S. have taken another step toward what is either total takeover of the United States or a disastrous backlash, in firing Rick Sanchez of CNN for saying what everyone knows: that Jews dominate major media. In firing him, they proved his point beyond contention. Still, asskissers in media, including the usually honest Keith Olbermann, have chimed in to condemn not the Jews who fired Sanchez for speaking the truth, but Sanchez, as a supposed bigot — again, for saying what everybody knows beyond doubt to be God's honest truth: that Jews control media and that it is preposterous to speak of Jews as an "oppressed minority".
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Alas, the Big Lie that Jews do NOT control media continues to bounce around media (Jewish-owned media prominently among them) to deny this obvious fact. Never mind that, when it was published regularly, The Jewish Almanac BRAGGED about how many bigwigs in media were Jewish. No longer.
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Americans are not to realize that all of the Big Three networks were owned and/or controlled by Jews: William Paley controlled CBS; David Sarnoff, NBC; Leonard Goldenson, ABC.
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So well known is the fact of Jewish domination of the film industry that Neal Gabler wrote the definitive history of the subject, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. Tho Gabler seems to have suggested that Jewish control of Hollywood diminished after WWII, Jews still dominate, directly and indirectly, a fact that is casually acknowledged in, for instance, a blog entry on JewishJournal.com under the title "Yes, Virginia, there is a Jewish media conspiracy".
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Jewish overreaching is found in more than media. Humungous Jewish overrepresentation in Congress is documented by the Jewish Virtual Library:

The 110th U.S. Senate will have a record number of Jews — 13 — with the election of Benjamin L. Cardin (D-MD) and Bernard Sanders (I-VT), who both served as Representatives in the 109th Congress. All Jewish incumbents running in the 2006 election were elected for another term in the Senate. The 110th House of Representatives will have 30 Jewish representatives, raising the total number of Jews in the 110th Congress to 43.

The 110th Congress ended in January 2009, but Jewish overrepresentation did not. It got worse. According to Wikipedia, there are 13 Jewish Senators (13%) and 31 Jewish Representatives (7%) — for a minority of less than 2%. So Jews have over 6X their proportion in the Senate, and 3½ X in the House. Plainly, if some people are overrepresented, others are underrepresented. Hispanics have one Senator (1%) (he is, as it happens, one of my Senators, Robert Menendez of NJ; the other NJ Senator is a Jew, Frank Lautenberg). In the House, there are 27 Hispanics (6%). The Nation, however, is 16% Hispanic, so Hispanics are severely underrepresented.

• Blacks are represented by one Senator (1%) and 40 (voting) Representatives
  (just under 10%), for a Nation that is just under 13% black.
  
• Asians have one Senator (1%) and 6 Representatives (1%), for a Nation that
  is 4.6% Asian.
  
• The Senate contains no openly gay men (0%); the House of Representatives
  has two (less than ½ of 1%). No one knows the percentage of gay men
  in the general population, tho Americans polled by Gallup think at least 15% of the Nation is gay. The gay movement when I was active in the 1960s and 70s used a 10% estimate.

In the Executive Branch of the Federal Government, almost everyone at the top in President Obama's economic team, and his Chief of Staff, were Jewish. The resignation yesterday of Rahm Emanuel, the Jewish son of an Israeli national, the resignation of Larry Summers announced less than two weeks ago, and the resignation of Peter Orszag in June may reduce that preponderance of Jewish control in the White House's economic team. But the President's top adviser, David Axelrod, is Jewish. The heavy concentration of Jews in the Obama Administration may have been a defensive measure to neutralize the suspicion, promoted by Far Right Republicans, that Obama is a Moslem. Plainly, that didn't work. Will a change in personnel (and Axelrod may resign before the end of Obama's (first) term to organize his reelection campaign) that diminishes a Jewish omnipresence around the President produce a change in policy relative to, for instance, U.S. blind and slavish support for Radical Zionism? That remains to be seen.
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In the Judicial Branch, 33% of the Supreme Court is now Jewish, 16½ X their number in society, and 3/5 of a MAJORITY of the Court that arrogates to itself the right to void laws passed by Congress and the President.
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Jews have also become presidents of major universities that used to bar Jews from both the student body and faculty. Such academic executives have, naturally, the power to establish or at least influence what is taught about Jews, Israel, and U.S. policy in the Middle East.
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In print media, the Jewish Sulzberger family controls The New York Times and The Boston Globe, and "almost two dozen other regional newspapers in the United States (15 of which publish daily). In 2005, its Broadcast Media Group included 35 web sites, including NYTimes.com, Boston.com and About.com." The Washington Post, Newsweek magazine, and various broadcast stations were controlled for decades by the family of Katharine (née Meyer) Graham, who was Jewish. Whether it is still controlled by Jews is not easy to find out, because these things are not discussed (which is another way of saying that some Jews don't want non-Jewish Americans to know what media are and are not controlled by Jews). Sumner Redstone controls Viacom, which owns various cable TV and entertainment production companies. And on, and on. I believe The Jewish Almanac (1980) had extensive lists of media then owned/controlled by Jews, Jewish editors and producers, etc., but its open pride in such things is not matched by today's Jewish media. Jewish domination of media is hardly top-secret information, despite the reticence of many Jews in media to let Gentiles know how powerful Jews now are in the United States, presumably out of fear of backlash. You need merely read the names in the credits and editorial boards — and know typical Jewish names — to get a sense of how many Jews there are in control of what Americans see, hear, and read.
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Now and then Jews in media use / misuse their power to get Christians fired — for instance, Helen Thomas and Rick Sanchez, both within four months. Will all Christians and Moslems in media be intimidated by these brazen acts of Jewish bullying? Or will some be infuriated and mount a wide-ranging exposé of the extent of Jewish control of media and other organs of power?
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It puzzles me that so little Arab oil money has gone to taking over or creating pro-Arab media in the United States. One Arab internationalist does have a substantial interest in a major U.S.-based media empire. National Public Radio reports that, "The second-largest holder of voting stock in [Rupert Murdoch's] News Corp. is Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, a nephew of the Saudi king." The Prince is an unusual man, with a wider worldview and greater tolerance than we generally associate with Saudis. For instance, he used a Jewish law firm I used to work for in New York (as a word-processor) for some of his investment documents, and was cordial with the (Jewish) partner he dealt with.
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The Prince's substantial investment in News Corp. has not, alas, been used to give Fox News the "fair[ness] and balance[ ]" it claims, falsely, to have. The NPR story quotes him as saying, ""Look, I'm not there to direct the news policy, I'm there to invest in News Corp. — and hopefully they've got some sense to do news properly." News? Maybe. Opinion? Absolutely not. Perhaps the Prince should buy the New York Times Company or some other major media enterprise and use it to fite the anti-Arab, anti-Moslem bias abroad in this land, and get Americans to rethink Middle East policy and how our NATIONAL interests and moral standards require us to end support for Israel.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,424 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:37 PM