The American Federation of Government Employees Local 1945 in the Anniston-Jacksonville area of Alabama says about 1,000 U.S. government workers are about to be laid off and their work assigned to contractors in other locations. So they are planning a “Save Our Jobs” rally for Monday, Jan. 30, at the Anniston Meeting Center Monday beginning at 5:30 p.m.
“Union member or not, we are in this fight together,” the union says in a press release announcing the event. “When one employee is cut the entire community is affected. With everyone’s help we can stop this attack on federal employees. We need to fight back and this meeting is the first step.”
Occupy Birmingham held a candle light vigil on Saturday, Jan. 7 at the Ward’s home in Center Point and about 50 people turned out (see video above). The city of Center Point is now reeling from the devastating affects of an F3 tornado that hit on the morning of Monday, Jan. 23, but the Ward home, just a couple of hundred feet from where the storm hit, was spared. Shortly after the vigil, Bank of America agreed to change the foreclosure sale date from the Jan. 26 to the March 29 and to consider a proposal for the Ward’s to obtain a new mortgage, according to Occupy Birmingham. If you want to help, you can sign an online petition here.
Massachusetts Mormon Mitt Romney released his tax returns on Monday, finally, showing he is a billionaire who only paid 13.9 percent in taxes on $42.5 million in income last year, all of it earned not from labor but from paper, interest on investments. At the same time, he was campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination in Florida making crazy, false statements to get media attention, saying America is in decline and blaming it on President Barack Obama, because he is “a failure.”
A look at the facts below shows otherwise.
Meanwhile, President Obama went on national television to make his annual State of the Union Address before Congress, and made a number of factual statements about the situation and his record. Here is our analysis of some key points.
The key quote?
“Anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn’t know what they’re talking about,” the president said, and the facts show he is right on this, not the Republicans.
Consumer confidence is on the rise in the United States, according to the latest Gallup poll on the subject, as President Barack Obama will deliver his State of the Union address to the nation on Tuesday night to deliver a strong economic message sympathetic to a middle class that feels squeezed by stagnant wages at a time of record corporate profits.
The President is expected to make the argument for higher taxes on the wealthy, to propose ways to make college more affordable, to offer new steps on tackling the housing crisis and outline ways to help bring back domestic manufacturing and expand hiring.
With unemployment on the way down and good news from the U.S. automobile industry and the retail sector after a successful holiday season, the general public perception is that the overall U.S. economy is getting better, according to Gallup.
“This seems like good news for the nation’s businesses as well as for U.S. economic confidence in the week ending Jan. 22, improved from the prior week and the best since the week ending May 22, 2011,” Gallup concludes in its analysis.
CLAY, Ala. – This lone portrait of Tinkerbell was about the only thing that survived from one demolished home in the Pilgrim’s Rest subdivision off Deerfoot Parkway in Clay after a series of freakish winter tornadoes ripped through the heart of Alabama early on the morning of Monday, January 23, killing at least two and injuring more than 100, according to official estimates. More than 200 homes were totally destroyed, according to the American Red Cross, while many more were heavily damaged from Oak Grove to Center Point, Clay and points east all the way to Springville.
There’s a conspiracy afoot, and the good tea party folks and great commentators at Fox News are not going to like it.
No one in the Obama administration will send out a press release to announce it either. Oh, they are such behind the scenes manipulators like the American people have never seen before.
Yes, it is such a dramatic and diabolical conspiracy that if he were alive today, Mark Twain would break out the aged whiskey and the good cigars and call a conference in Concord to discuss it at great length.
It is not such a quick and easy point that you can bring it down on people like an anvil shot from a cannon onto their heads. It is not something you can get across in a Facebook comment or a Twitter tweet. No, this is such an awful and compelling tale that you have to spend the time to construct an entire blog post to get the point across.
As you may know, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has decided not to bring the PROTECT IP Act (the Senate’s version of SOPA) up for a vote next week. And since I’ve heard from many of you about this issue, I wanted to take a moment to share why I support copyright protection legislation – as well as why I believe holding off on this bill is the right thing to do.
As someone who has worked hard to protect net neutrality, I understand as well as anyone the importance of keeping the Internet free from undue corporate influence. There are millions of Americans who rely on a free and open Internet to learn, communicate with friends and family, and do business.
At the same time, there are millions of Americans whose livelihoods rely on strong protections for intellectual property: middle-class workers – most of them union workers – in all 50 states, thousands of them here in Minnesota, working in a variety of industries from film production to publishing to software development.
If we don’t protect our intellectual property, international criminals – as well as legitimate businesses like payment processors and ad networks – will continue to profit dishonestly from the work these Americans are doing every day. And that puts these millions of jobs at serious risk.
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.
