Opponents of Michigan's emergency manager law who had gathered more than enough petitions to put the law on the November ballot were told yesterday that it wouldn't happen because the petitions had used the wrong font size.
Organizers had hoped to suspend Public Act 4, the Local Government and School District Fiscal Accountability Act, also known as the “emergency financial manager law” signed by Gov. Snyder last year. The Center for Public Integrity explained that with the law, "appointed managers can nullify labor contracts, sell public utilities and dismiss elected officials." Greatly contested was the ability of emergency managers under this law to nullify collective bargaining agreements.
Even though organizers had gathered 203,000 petition signatures, about 40,000 more than necessary to put a repeal on the ballot, the Board of State Canvassers was unable to accept the petitions due to a deadlock 2-2 vote with the two Republican members of the board ruling out the petitions, saying the size of the font on the heading was incorrect.
The Detroit Free Press reports that Canvassers board member James Waters who agreed to certify the petitions said, "I believe there was more than substantial compliance, there was total compliance," while Republican Norm Shinkle, who voted against them said, "I think there is a legitimate question as to size."
The Detroit News reports that opponents of the “emergency financial manager law” are furious at the results. "The Constitution was not judged on the basis of font size," said Anthony, president of the Detroit NAACP and pastor of Detroit's Fellowship Chapel church. Rashid Baydoun, executive director of the Arab-American Civil Rights League, said, "The will of the people was denied. All we ask is for Michigan people to be able to decide."
If the petitions had been certified, the emergency manager law would have been immediately suspended.
Stand Up for Democracy, the group that organized the petitions, has vowed to file an appeal.
Yet another in the long list of reasons that I absolutely despise thrice damned Republicans. They are YET AGAIN blocking the will of the people of Michigan with this travesty! Don't get me wrong, I don't care for the Democrats all that much either, but no party has done more to fuck up my state or my life than the GOP. Literally. Hate 'em! Assholes!
30 April 2012
Wasting Our Minds - NYTimes.com
....College graduates, then, are taking it on the chin thanks to the weak economy. And research tells us that the price isn’t temporary: students who graduate into a bad economy never recover the lost ground. Instead, their earnings are depressed for life.
What the young need most of all, then, is a better job market. People like Mr. Romney claim that they have the recipe for job creation: slash taxes on corporations and the rich, slash spending on public services and the poor. But we now have plenty of evidence on how these policies actually work in a depressed economy — and they clearly destroy jobs rather than create them.
For as you look at the economic devastation in Europe, you should bear in mind that some of the countries experiencing the worst devastation have been doing everything American conservatives say we should do here. Not long ago, conservatives gushed over Ireland’s economic policies, especially its low corporate tax rate; the Heritage Foundation used to give it higher marks for “economic freedom” than any other Western nation. When things went bad, Ireland once again received lavish praise, this time for its harsh spending cuts, which were supposed to inspire confidence and lead to quick recovery.
And now, as I said, almost a third of Ireland’s young can’t find jobs.
What should we do to help America’s young? Basically, the opposite of what Mr. Romney and his friends want. We should be expanding student aid, not slashing it. And we should reverse the de facto austerity policies that are holding back the U.S. economy — the unprecedented cutbacks at the state and local level, which have been hitting education especially hard.
Yes, such a policy reversal would cost money. But refusing to spend that money is foolish and shortsighted even in purely fiscal terms. Remember, the young aren’t just America’s future; they’re the future of the tax base, too....
click link for full article
29 April 2012
Why Is It Necessary For The Federal Government To Turn The United States Into A Prison Camp? | ZeroHedge
The federal government could turn the entire country into one giant prison camp, but that would still not keep us safe. It is inevitable that bad stuff will happen in life. But we have a choice. We can choose to live in fear or we can choose to live as free men and women. Our forefathers intended to establish a nation where liberty and freedom would be maximized.
But today we are told that we have to give up our liberties and our freedoms and our privacy for increased security. But is such a trade really worth it? Just think of the various totalitarian societies that we have seen down throughout history. Have any of them ever really thrived? Have their people been happy? Unfortunately, the U.S. federal government has decided that the entire country needs to be put on lock down. Nearly everything that we do today is watched and tracked, and personal privacy is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Many of the things that George Orwell wrote about in 1984 are becoming a reality, and that is a very frightening thing. The United States is supposed to be the land of the free and the home of the brave. Sadly, we are rapidly becoming the exact opposite of that.
I don't know about you, but I never signed up to live in North Korea. When I was growing up I was taught that repressive regimes such as North Korea are "the bad guys" and that America is where "the good guys" live.
So why do we want to be just like North Korea?
When they put in the naked body scanners at U.S. airports and started having TSA agents conduct "enhanced pat-downs" of travelers, I decided that I was not going to fly anymore unless absolutely necessary.
Then I heard about how "random bag checks" were being conducted at Metro train stations in the Washington D.C. area, and I was glad that I was no longer taking the train into D.C. anymore.
But now the TSA is showing up everywhere. Down in Houston, undercover TSA agents and police officers will now "ride buses, perform random bag checks, and conduct K-9 sweeps, as well as place uniformed and plainclothes officers at Transit Centers and rail platforms to detect, prevent and address latent criminal activity or behavior."
So now I have another thing to add to my list of things that I can't do anymore.
No more riding buses for me.
But the truth is that you can't escape this expanding security grid no matter how hard you try.
In fact, TSA "VIPR teams" conduct approximately 8,000 "unannounced security screenings" every year at bus terminals, train stations, ports and highway rest stops throughout the United States.
Look, every society needs some level of security. There are always bad guys out there that want to harm innocent people.
But in the United States we must demand that those in charge of our security do their jobs in a way that does not compromise our dignity, our liberties or our freedoms.
Does having TSA thugs touch the private parts of old women and young children before they get on their flights keep us any safer?
Of course not.
But it does move our country in a very dangerous direction.
The reality is that this "Big Brother control grid" that is being constructed all around us is expanding in a thousand different ways.
For example, a new bill before the U.S. Congress would require black box data recorders to be installed in all new vehicles starting in 2015. These black box data recorders will be able to constantly transmit data about everything that your car is doing to the government and to the insurance companies. The following is from a recent article by Eric Peters....
Click link to read full article
But today we are told that we have to give up our liberties and our freedoms and our privacy for increased security. But is such a trade really worth it? Just think of the various totalitarian societies that we have seen down throughout history. Have any of them ever really thrived? Have their people been happy? Unfortunately, the U.S. federal government has decided that the entire country needs to be put on lock down. Nearly everything that we do today is watched and tracked, and personal privacy is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Many of the things that George Orwell wrote about in 1984 are becoming a reality, and that is a very frightening thing. The United States is supposed to be the land of the free and the home of the brave. Sadly, we are rapidly becoming the exact opposite of that.
I don't know about you, but I never signed up to live in North Korea. When I was growing up I was taught that repressive regimes such as North Korea are "the bad guys" and that America is where "the good guys" live.
So why do we want to be just like North Korea?
When they put in the naked body scanners at U.S. airports and started having TSA agents conduct "enhanced pat-downs" of travelers, I decided that I was not going to fly anymore unless absolutely necessary.
Then I heard about how "random bag checks" were being conducted at Metro train stations in the Washington D.C. area, and I was glad that I was no longer taking the train into D.C. anymore.
But now the TSA is showing up everywhere. Down in Houston, undercover TSA agents and police officers will now "ride buses, perform random bag checks, and conduct K-9 sweeps, as well as place uniformed and plainclothes officers at Transit Centers and rail platforms to detect, prevent and address latent criminal activity or behavior."
So now I have another thing to add to my list of things that I can't do anymore.
No more riding buses for me.
But the truth is that you can't escape this expanding security grid no matter how hard you try.
In fact, TSA "VIPR teams" conduct approximately 8,000 "unannounced security screenings" every year at bus terminals, train stations, ports and highway rest stops throughout the United States.
Look, every society needs some level of security. There are always bad guys out there that want to harm innocent people.
But in the United States we must demand that those in charge of our security do their jobs in a way that does not compromise our dignity, our liberties or our freedoms.
Does having TSA thugs touch the private parts of old women and young children before they get on their flights keep us any safer?
Of course not.
But it does move our country in a very dangerous direction.
The reality is that this "Big Brother control grid" that is being constructed all around us is expanding in a thousand different ways.
For example, a new bill before the U.S. Congress would require black box data recorders to be installed in all new vehicles starting in 2015. These black box data recorders will be able to constantly transmit data about everything that your car is doing to the government and to the insurance companies. The following is from a recent article by Eric Peters....
Click link to read full article
28 April 2012
Study: Obama's Media Coverage More Negative Than Romney's - Chuck McCutcheon - NationalJournal.com
Mitt Romney has publicly griped about the way the news media have covered him, but the presumptive GOP nominee has gotten better press in 2012 than President Obama, according to a study by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.
The study found that Obama’s negative coverage exceeded positive coverage in 14 of 15 weeks examined, while positive coverage outweighed negative for Romney in six of the 15 weeks and was fairly evenly divided in four more.
Since November, nearly two-thirds--63 percent--of the coverage about Obama were framed around political strategy and momentum. In comparison, 21 percent primarily connected the president with foreign- or domestic-policy issues.
Researchers said the result "suggests the media have been treating [Obama] more as a presidential candidate than a chief executive for months."
In a speech earlier this month to the Newspaper Association of America, Romney lamented how much the political press has changed in recent years, citing its increasing fascination with what he regards as trivia. “In 2008, the coverage was about what I said in my speech,” he said. “These days, it’s about what brand of jeans I am wearing and what I ate for lunch.”
He cited online news in particular, saying that it too often values speed over accuracy: “I find myself missing the presence of editors to exercise quality control. I miss the days of two or more sources for a story--when at least one source was actually named.”
After Romney’s narrow victory in the Feb. 28 Michigan primary, the study said, news coverage about his candidacy became measurably more favorable. At the same time, the portrayal of his rivals—particularly Rick Santorum—began to become more negative as well as to shrink in volume.
The Pew study said that the former senator from Pennsylvania "never enjoyed a sustained period of positive press." Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich "had only one week during the primary season in which he enjoyed significantly more positive press coverage than negative—the week of his victory in South Carolina on Jan. 21." And it found that Rep. Ron Paul had 11 weeks out of 15 in which the media attention paid to him was clearly more positive than negative. But Paul received about one-eighth as much coverage as Romney and about one-quarter as much as Santorum and Gingrich.
"Ron Paul enjoyed the most consistently positive portrayal of any candidate in the race. But that was offset by the fact that the media virtually ignored him," the study said.
The analysis was produced through two forms of coding of media content. One involved computer-assisted analysis of more than 11,000 news outlets. The second involved human coding of a sample of 52 key news outlets covering print, broadcast, cable, audio, and online means of distribution.
The computer technology from the firm Crimson Hexagon was used to examine the tone of each candidate’s coverage, how positive or negative or neutral. The human coding was used to analyze the amount of coverage each candidate received and the framing of that coverage—whether it involved strategy, issues, or personal matters. The examination of the tone and volume of coverage focused on the period from Jan. 2 to April 15, while the coverage of frame reached back to November.
The study found that Obama’s negative coverage exceeded positive coverage in 14 of 15 weeks examined, while positive coverage outweighed negative for Romney in six of the 15 weeks and was fairly evenly divided in four more.
Since November, nearly two-thirds--63 percent--of the coverage about Obama were framed around political strategy and momentum. In comparison, 21 percent primarily connected the president with foreign- or domestic-policy issues.
Researchers said the result "suggests the media have been treating [Obama] more as a presidential candidate than a chief executive for months."
In a speech earlier this month to the Newspaper Association of America, Romney lamented how much the political press has changed in recent years, citing its increasing fascination with what he regards as trivia. “In 2008, the coverage was about what I said in my speech,” he said. “These days, it’s about what brand of jeans I am wearing and what I ate for lunch.”
He cited online news in particular, saying that it too often values speed over accuracy: “I find myself missing the presence of editors to exercise quality control. I miss the days of two or more sources for a story--when at least one source was actually named.”
After Romney’s narrow victory in the Feb. 28 Michigan primary, the study said, news coverage about his candidacy became measurably more favorable. At the same time, the portrayal of his rivals—particularly Rick Santorum—began to become more negative as well as to shrink in volume.
The Pew study said that the former senator from Pennsylvania "never enjoyed a sustained period of positive press." Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich "had only one week during the primary season in which he enjoyed significantly more positive press coverage than negative—the week of his victory in South Carolina on Jan. 21." And it found that Rep. Ron Paul had 11 weeks out of 15 in which the media attention paid to him was clearly more positive than negative. But Paul received about one-eighth as much coverage as Romney and about one-quarter as much as Santorum and Gingrich.
"Ron Paul enjoyed the most consistently positive portrayal of any candidate in the race. But that was offset by the fact that the media virtually ignored him," the study said.
The analysis was produced through two forms of coding of media content. One involved computer-assisted analysis of more than 11,000 news outlets. The second involved human coding of a sample of 52 key news outlets covering print, broadcast, cable, audio, and online means of distribution.
The computer technology from the firm Crimson Hexagon was used to examine the tone of each candidate’s coverage, how positive or negative or neutral. The human coding was used to analyze the amount of coverage each candidate received and the framing of that coverage—whether it involved strategy, issues, or personal matters. The examination of the tone and volume of coverage focused on the period from Jan. 2 to April 15, while the coverage of frame reached back to November.
Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem. - The Washington Post
Rep. Allen West, a Florida Republican, was recently captured on video asserting that there are “78 to 81” Democrats in Congress who are members of the Communist Party. Of course, it’s not unusual for some renegade lawmaker from either side of the aisle to say something outrageous. What made West’s comment — right out of the McCarthyite playbook of the 1950s — so striking was the almost complete lack of condemnation from Republican congressional leaders or other major party figures, including the remaining presidential candidates.
It’s not that the GOP leadership agrees with West; it is that such extreme remarks and views are now taken for granted.
We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.
The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition....
It’s not that the GOP leadership agrees with West; it is that such extreme remarks and views are now taken for granted.
We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.
The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition....
27 April 2012
Romney: ‘Borrow Money From Your Parents’ - The Daily Beast
“Take a shot, go for it, take a risk, get the education, borrow money if you have to from your parents, start a business.”
| — | Mitt (I inherited all my dad’s riches!) Romney’s latest business advice might not be the most effective way to win over young voters. At a talk Friday at Ohio’s Otterbein University, the presidential candidate offered his expertise to a room of students, telling them that if they want to start a business or pay for their education, they should just borrow from mom and dad. Romney cited a friend of his who took out a $20,000 loan from his parents. |
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