This is for my friends in the Occupy movement who say they might support Mitt Romney for president. Are you nuts? This guy is in the 1% of the 1%.
So you don’t think President Barack Obama has done everything right, everything you want. At least he’s trying. This guy would take us back to more tax cuts for the rich and deregulation of the oil industry and the big Wall Street banks.
According to some analysts, Romney’s opponents have been able to weaken his support by touting the fact that he is part of the greedy 1%. Romney has faced multiple charges of being a lackey for corporations and the wealthy, who only seeks to help them gain even more wealth. Romney personified that image on TeeVee for everyone to see in the video above.
ANNISTON, Ala. — Several hundred union workers showed up at a “Save Our Jobs” rally here Monday night in the face of a threat by Republicans in Congress to claim reductions in the federal deficit by slashing up to 1,000 civilian jobs at the Anniston Army Depot. The American Federation of Government Employees and the Alabama AFL-CIO led the rally and are launching a campaign to get the public involved to try to save the jobs.
The Republican plan, which goes far beyond the deficit reduction proposal and military spending cuts put on the table by the Obama administration, could also result in a hiring freeze, furloughs for workers, pay freezes, a drop in the pay of the remainder of the depot’s 4,000 workers and an increase in employee contributions to their pension funds.
Everett Kelley, vice president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said the union leadership are trying to figure out how to combat the “travesty” and the “disaster” such drastic layoffs would have on the community.
Disgraced former U.S. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who managed to get enough dingbat evangelical Christian Republicans to vote for him to win the South Carolina Primary, went down to Florida and launched the biggest moonbat idea of the 2012 presidential race so far: A Lunar colony that could petition to be the 51st state in the United States when it reaches 13,000 residents.
Don’t believe it? What planet have you been living on lately? It’s all over every news channel. Here are a couple of sample videos (science analysis below).
Mitt Romney has climbed to a commanding 23-point lead over his nearest competitor among Republican registered voters nationally, according to the latest Gallup poll on the subject.
Romney now has the support of 37 percent of Republicans nationwide, while Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich each have 14 percent and Ron Paul has 12 percent.
“History suggests that Romney is now the probable favorite to win the Republican nomination,” Gallup concludes. “Romney’s current 37 percent support is tied for the highest enjoyed by any Republican candidate in Gallup Daily tracking of Republican preferences so far this election cycle, and marks a 13-percentage-point increase in support from his five-day average that ended Jan. 2, just before the Iowa caucuses.”
As Romney’s support has increased, support for his primary competitors has dropped, according to Gallup.
Alabama House Speaker Mike Hubbard showed up to speak to firefighters and police officers in Huntsville on Friday and to launch a trial balloon about a new Republican plan to raid the state retirement system, which most people learned about on Facebook because the people of Alabama love to share the links to the near-monopoly Newhouse news Website al.com.
Of course even though this mega news organization that owns the three largest newspapers in the state in Huntsville, Birmingham and Mobile, not to mention television stations and other media properties, readers really didn’t learn much of anything about the plan from the report.
It took two bloggers to report and write this story, and this is about all we know.
Hubbard said “changes must be made” to the current Retirement Systems of Alabama, which includes more than 300,000 active and retired members. (As an ethical disclaimer, that includes my 85-year-old mother : ) About 100,000 people receive checks from the retirement fund, while 170,000 active members contribute to the system, but of course the Republicans would not only like to rob the fund. The party members would also love to shrink the size of government and get rid of some of those state employees, especially those who vote for Democrats, making the fund even more insoluble.
More Americans trust President Barack Obama to influence the direction of the country than the Republicans in Congress. According to the latest Gallup poll on the subject, 46 percent of Americans say they want the president to have more influence over the direction the nation takes in the next year, while 42 percent said they would rather have the Republicans in Congress calling the shots.
U.S. preferences have been closely divided on this question since early 2011 after Republicans won a majority in the House of Representatives. But President Obama has consistently had a slim advantage, suggesting a real lead for him, according to Gallup.
In general, Democrats want Obama to have more influence and Republicans want the Republicans in Congress to have more influence. Independents are more likely to prefer Obama.
Two steelworkers tell their story about how they lost their jobs when Mitt Romney and Bain Capital took over the steel plant in Kansas City and eventually shut the place down.
Female Air Force Colonel to Challenge as a Democrat
by Glynn Wilson
The race for Alabama’s Sixth District Congressional seat is about to get interesting enough to draw attention from around the country now that one tea party Republican has decided to challenge another in the primary, and an interesting new female candidate has decided to jump in as a Democrat.
State Sen. Scott Beason of Gardendale, one of the chief sponsors of Alabama’s draconian immigration law which has drawn scorn from around the country and hampered industry recruitment efforts, announced Thursday that he would challenge Rep. Spencer Bachus in the Republican primary to be held this year on March 13.
Designed as a Republican district to sit alongside the minority Democratic Seventh District, the Sixth District runs from Tuscaloosa north of Interstate 59 up through Hueytown and Gardendale all the way to Warrior in Blount County, then curves east toward Springville and runs all the way to Ashville in St. Clair County. It runs from there south to Pell City, Childersburg and all the way past Clanton. (See map).
Bachus was first elected to Congress in 1992, but he came under scrutiny and national criticism in recent months, landing on the CBS investigative magazine show “60 Minutes” in a segment on Congressional insider trading, an unethical but not illegal practice where members of Congress profit from knowledge they gain due to their seats on key committees. Even the tea party and right-wing talk radio shock jocks in conservative Alabama are now calling for Bachus’s head, so many encouraged Beason to challenge him this year.
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.
