Sixty percent of Americans say they are all in favor of Congress passing the so-called “Buffett Rule,” proposed by President Barack Obama, to mandate a minimum 30 percent tax rate for Americans with an annual household income of $1 million or more.
Majorities of both Democrats and independents favor the policy, while a majority of Republicans oppose it, according to the latest Gallup poll on the subject.
President Obama has suggested this tax policy in recent public appearances. The U.S. Senate may vote on it next week.
Few political insiders think it has a chance of passing the Republican-controlled House to become law before the end of the year, but there is building public pressure in key swing states.
Bill Moyers talks with community organizer George Goehl about how — and even if — average people can fight back against self-rewarding actions of banks and corporations.
“If we want to shift our politics,” Goehl tells Moyers, “we have to make politicians who side with the big banks and the larger corporations pay a price for not siding with everyday people.”
Goehl is a co-organizer of The 99% Spring, a national effort to train 100,000 Americans to teach the country about income inequality in homes, places of worship, campuses and the streets. Goehl is also executive director of National People’s Action, a network of grassroots organizations using direct action to battle economic and racial injustice.
The President Now Leads Among Independents and in Key Swing States
by Glynn Wilson
President Barack Obama now holds the biggest lead polls have shown so far over Republicans in the presidential race. He now also leads with independents and in 12 key swing states, making the incumbent president the odds on favorite to win handily in November, barring unforeseen intervening issues.
If asked to choose between them today, 49 percent of U.S. registered voters say they would vote for Barack Obama for president, while 45 percent would choose likely Republican opponent Mitt Romney. While Obama’s advantage is not statistically significant, it is the largest he has had over Romney in Gallup polling to date.
Obama has a larger, significant lead, 51 percent to 43 percent, over Rick Santorum, Romney’s chief rival for the Republican nomination, according to a March 25-26 USA Today/Gallup poll.
In mid-February, when Santorum led as national Republicans’ choice for the nomination, he and Obama were tied, showing a clear slide in support for the Christian Republican former Senator from Pennsylvania.
MARGARETVILLE, Ala. — It is a lovely Sunday morning and amazingly quiet in the suburbs on this April Fool’s Day. The Carolina Wren’s are feeding new young in the hand-crafted birdhouse attached to the screened-in porch. They stop only occasionally between feedings to sing, and they sound about as happy as I feel with my new dog and best friend Jefferson laying at my feet.
If I didn’t know better, I would finish by saying “all’s right with the world.”
But you and I both know better.
As I peruse the headlines from my hand-made html news page, which may go the way of the Dodo bird soon and be replaced by a Word Press front page, and as I look through the Google alerts and other e-mails, I run across an interesting column from Phil Rockstroh, who calls himself a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City but who is from the South. He laments the fact that his white male Southern buddies cling to the Republican fantasy of “free-market capitalism,” while their jobs disappear and their lives diminish into a political bitterness they cannot seem to escape.
The AFL-CIO and other labor unions joined the Selma-to-Montgomery Civil Rights March this year on the 47 anniversary of Bloody Sunday. Alabama AFL-CIO Al Henley addressed a night rally in White Hall on Wednesday night. Watch the video to see what he had to say. To see our full coverage of the events, check out this story and links.
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — The dogwoods, azaleas and cherry blossoms are in full bloom a full three weeks before Easter here, but of course that’s no sign of global warming and climate change, according to the Republicans and the media in Alabamaland.
The so-called Christians could care less. It must all be part of god’s plan. Right.
Nevermind that if there was a god, even the people who know a little about science yet believe say he gave the human species free will, which has led him to greedy pursuits that in fact do impact the climate.
Now if I was a Christian and I was searching for an answer to this riddle, I would conclude that if there were any such thing as a plan based on a “creation” event, if there was a god he would hold man in contempt for screwing up that creation.
Ten Commandments Judge Roy Moore could be returning to power to lead the Alabama Supreme Court as chief justice again if the unofficial results from Tuesday’s primary hold up and there’s no runoff.
You may recall that Alabama was the laughing stock of the nation back in 2003 when Moore was removed from that position for refusing to remove a hand-carved granite monument to the Ten Commandments from the state judicial building after a federal jury found it violated the separation of church and state and a federal judge ordered it removed.
According to the unofficial results, Moore received 50.37 percent of the vote on Tuesday, more than enough to hold off challenges from the sitting Chief Justice, Chuck Malone, who was appointed by Governor Robert Bentley after a Democrat resigned from the seat, and former state Attorney General Charlie Graddick, who was trying to return to statewide politics after a hiatus of 25 years. He play a particularly embarrassing role in state politics back in 1986 when he won the Democratic primary for governor with crossover votes, but was blocked from taking office when those votes were ruled illegal.
Moore will now go up against Pelham attorney Harry Lyon, a Democrat, in the general election in the November. If Moore wins, the nine-member Supreme Court will remain all Republican and continue to side with big business over average working people on case after case and run roughshod over the Constitutional rights of juries for another four years.
While President Obama has placed his faith in America’s working men and women to lead our country to economic recovery, Republican presidential candidates have pledged their loyalty to Wall Street and the 1%. So the AFL-CIO General Board “voted proudly and enthusiastically” to endorse Mr. Obama for a second term, according to a statement issued on the union’s Website.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says the union movement agrees with the Republican hopefuls who say this election is about “values” — but there is quite a contrast between Mr. Obama’s values and those of his challengers.
“With our endorsement today, we affirm our faith in him — and pledge to work with him through the election and his second term to restore fairness, security and shared prosperity,” Trumka said in a statement. “President Obama honors the values of hard work, of mutual respect and of solving problems together — not every person for himself or herself. He believes that together we will get through the most challenging economic crisis in memory and restore opportunity for all.
“Each of the Republican presidential candidates, on the other hand, has pledged to uphold the special privileges of Wall Street and the 1%,” Trumka said, “privileges that have produced historic economic inequality and drowned out the voices of working people in America.”
Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich address a sympathetic crowd at the Alabama Theater (click here to see more photos)
by Glynn Wilson
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Georgia Republican Newt Gingrich came out swinging against President Obama on energy policy at the Alabama Theater Monday night, the day before the primary election in the state, due to comments by the president’s press secretary responding to Gingrich’s provocative statement on the campaign trail: “I’ve been talking about the need for an American energy policy, and the idea that we should develop our capacity for oil to the point where no American president would ever again bow to a Saudi King.”
That’s a great applause line for the Republican base, like those gathered at the theater in downtown Birmingham, but it also suffers the same problem with most of Rick Santorum’s rhetoric and that of Mitt Romney as well. Those kinds of oil reserves do not exist on American soil even if we sent drillers in places even they do not want to go and to depths that cannot be reached. New Gingrich knows this, or he should.
He also knows this: The only way we are ever going to get past our dependence on oil from the Middle East is to develop alternative energy sources. That strategy also just happens to be in our national interest to reduce air pollution to improve our health, and to reduce our dependence on burning fossil fuels for energy that leads to global warming and climate change.
But the Republican base believes in God and in bringin’ on the “End Times,” so not only do they not “believe” in global warming, they are not interested in saving the planet. According to their book, the earth is going to be destroyed anyway so why worry?
During the Bush years, we specialized in covering the politicization of the U.S. justice system as much as any news organization. Our archives are about the most comprehensive for anyone researching the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, and the original case against Richard Scrushy, which Glynn Wilson covered for The New York Times.
