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Credit: h/t Sandy

Mother Nature wins again.

Open thread below....

Although Slade was more of an influence to other musicians than a huge success here in the U.S., they sold more singles than anyone in the UK during the Seventies. Here's a favorite from the glam heroes.

Get Yer Boots On: The Best of Slade
	Artist: Slade Price: $7.57 (As of 09/14/11 04:41 pm details)

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There you go. Orrin Hatch has sent the signal: If we want a jobs plan, we'll have to give up any right to access our current health care system.

Of course, he buries the threat inside a rant about the individual mandate, because that's unpopular with many, not just those on the right. So now we have Republicans saying "Want a job? Die."

These people make me sick. Oops. Guess that's their goal.

Update: Eric Cantor has taken up the hostage-taking on behalf of the House. Washington Post:

But by putting the disaster aid funding on a separate piece of legislation that’s required to keep the government running, House leaders seem to be calculating that the Senate will have no choice but to go along or risk a partial government shutdown.

Oh, and this:

Besides being about half the overall size of the Senate’s disaster aid measure, the House bill ties cuts to an Obama-backed loan program to encourage the production of fuel efficient vehicles to pay for the $1 billion in immediate aid for 2011. Typically disaster aid is added to the budget as an emergency expense, and the insistence by Republicans on so-called offsets has Democrats fuming.

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Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul explained Wednesday that famines in Africa were a result of a lack of a "free market systems."

"All I know is if you look at history and if you compare good medical care and you compare famine, the countries that are more socialistic have more famines," Paul told CNN's T.J. Holmes. "If you look at Africa, they don't have any free market systems and property rights and they have famines and no medical care. So the freer the system, the better the health care."

Writing for the World Bank in 1996, Australian economist Martin Ravallion noted the importance of a social safety net for preventing famines.

"The literature on famines reviewed here has suggested that failures of both market and nonmarket institutions lie at the heart of famine causation; so it can be argued that famines can be ameliorated by longer-term development policies which strengthen the social and economic institutions (both governmental and non-governmental) which help protect poor people from economy-wide shocks," he wrote.

"Evidence in the famines literature and elsewhere also suggests that an effective social safety net for protecting poor households from severe shocks is consistent with longer-term goals of economic growth and environmental protection."

Holmes also gave Paul a chance to respond to a controversy that ensued after the tea party audience at Monday night's Republican presidential debate cheered the notion that an uninsured man in a coma would be left to die.

"This whole idea that they world will not provide for people if you don't depend on government -- freedom provides more prosperity and better health care than all the socialism and welfarism in the world," Paul said. "Nobody can compete with me about compassion because I know and understand how free markets and sound money and a sensible foreign policy is the most compassionate system ever known to mankind. So if you care about people you have to look to the freedom philosophy and limited government."

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Via Fox News:

A Philadelphia mother was left jobless Tuesday after she took time off work to donate a kidney to her dying son and was fired during her absence.

Claudia Rendon did not hesitate when doctors delivered the news that her son Alex was in desperate need of a life-saving kidney transplant and offered him her kidney, myFOXphilly.com reported.

But she had already used up her vacation time at the Aviation Institute of Maintenance, in northeast Philadelphia, earlier in the year following the death of her mother and uncle and her father's diagnosis with leukemia.

Randon said, "Everything was coming down all at once. I felt like the best thing that happened to me this whole entire year was that God gave me the blessing of being able to give my son my kidney."

Through it all, Rendon showed up to work but needed a leave of absence to donate her kidney to her son.

Before Rendon left, she said her boss made her sign a paper, saying her job would not be guaranteed, and late last week -- just as she was preparing to return to work -- her employers told her they had hired someone else.

Rendon's former boss refused to comment and a company representative said it was in its legal rights to let Rendon go as the Family Medical Leave Act, which covers an employee for 12 weeks leave, does not apply to companies with under 50 employees.

Since this story aired a couple of days ago there's been international outrage, with stories in the UK's Daily Mail, the Associated Press, ABC and others. The ensuing horrible publicity has forced her former employer to make an offer only a lawyer could write:

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Stephen Colbert took a shot at the Republican debates after watching them cheering for allowing the uninsured to drop dead and Rick Perry's record number of executions:

Nation these debates are supposed to help us find the Republican presidential candidate, but they have already helped them find his running mate: the Grim Reaper. That's right, the Angel of Death. Clearly he is popular with the GOP base this year. He's got all the qualifications they're looking for. He's old and bone white, he's packing a weapon, he's got an incredible war record, and believe me, no one wants to get rid of Obama-care more than this guy. Plus, he is a close second to Rick Perry in executions.

Oddly enough, this isn't one of the pieces of legislation pushed by our friendly corporate interests at ALEC - in fact, they're on the record opposing elections by popular vote. But it's not outside the realm of possibility that they dreamed up this twisted variation on what they oppose, since they do get control of redistricting. This would be a serious problem for Democrats:

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that Gov. Tom Corbett and state Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi are proposing that the state divide up its Electoral College votes according to which candidates carried each Congressional district, plus two votes for the statewide winner. The system is used by Maine — which, despite the system, has never actually split its four electoral votes — and by Nebraska, which gave one of its five votes to Barack Obama in 2008.

Pennsylvania, however, will have 20 electoral votes in the 2012 election. What’s more, the measure would give even greater meaning to the state’s redistricting for the House of Representatives, giving it a powerful effect over the presidency in addition to the House.

Pennsylvania has voted Democratic in every presidential election since 1992, and voted for Barack Obama by 55%-44% in 2008. Indeed, over the past 50 years it has only voted Republican in presidential landslides for the GOP: 1972, 1980, 1984, and finally 1988. While the results have sometimes been narrow for the Dems, it is a state that can be expected to vote Democratic for president in the context of a close national campaign, such as its votes for Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004.

Had this proposed system been in place in 2008, when Obama won the state by a ten-point margin, he in fact would have only taken 11 out of the state’s 21 electoral votes at the time — due to a combination of past Republican-led redistricting efforts to maximize their district strength, and Obama’s votes being especially concentrated within urban areas.

As can be expected, the Post-Gazette reports that Democrats are attacking the proposal as a partisan power-grab, while Republicans are standing by it as a reform that would focus attention on districts throughout the state:

Blasting the idea as “a disturbing effort to put their self interests and party interests ahead of the people,” Senate Minority Leader Jay Costa, D-Forest Hills, said the plan would dangerously link the presidential vote to redistricting. In a written statement, Mr. Costa asked: “Will we now be looking at state gerrymandering that serves a larger, national agenda?”

Mr. Pileggi and others disagreed, saying congressional districts that are more competitive would receive more attention and would not be overshadowed when the state leans one way or another politically.

Let me tell you a little bit about state Sen. Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi: He's an important piece of the famously corrupt Republican machine in suburban Delaware County, part of their TV-friendly "new breed". He also served as mayor of Chester -- one of the poorest cities in America, a town that's been abused and sucked dry by the Republican powers that be for a very long time, especially its school district. He's not much better to Philadelphia, either. He says that before they come to him for money, Philadelphia should fix patronage in city government.

You'd have to know Delaware County to know how funny that is. One relevant example: Pileggi collected $35,000 as an assistant county solicitor to pad his $60,000 salary as a state senator. Funny, how that works.

This is just the long way of saying that if Dominic Pileggi's for it, I'm against it.

We'll call this "The Full Gingrich." Yes, love, honor, obey - and ditch when they get sick.

Finally Pat Robertson has come out on the side of the suffering - just like Christ. Those suffering with having a wife who's no longer up to snuff.

Asked what a man should do whose wife has Alzheimer's, an increasingly decrepit Pat Robertson says, "I know it sounds cruel but if he's going to do something, he should divorce her and start all over."

In a week of Republicans cheering for record executions and wooing for the uninsured to drop dead - does this even get a blip on our disgust radar?

In a word: YES. This dude is twisted. If a secular humanist went on national television telling people to divorce their sick spouses - it would be the Fourth Horseman of the Atheists Want to Drink White Babies' Blood and Make You Gay-calypse! Every traffic jam would be blamed on the statement. "That seven-minute increase to your commute is a sign from GOD that marriage is near extinction and GOD is angry!"

Haven't these bible-babblers been out allegedly "defending" marriage?! Hasn't the Religious Right for an entire seven or eight years now been on one long parade proclaiming the queers will destroy matrimony if they get to legally do it? And now there's this Crypt Keeper (too obscure? Gollum?) guy - arguably with the highest media profile in the Religious Right - saying that divorce is a way better option than being with a sick broad?

This is probably Obama's fault...

Hat tip Right Wing Watch

The campaign to repeal Ohio Governor John Kasich's anti-collective bargaining SB5 law released a new video Tuesday, called "Loophole." The video takes on Kasich and other Ohio Republicans for the hypocrisy they have shown by protecting themselves and their friends while attacking firefighters, police and other public servants:

Politicians didn’t have to attack Ohio workers like firefighters, police officers, teachers and nurses, they could have chosen a different path. To make matters worse at the same time they were asking hardworking Ohioans to make ‘shared sacrifices’ they were literally giving out huge pay raises and bonuses to their staff members.

Ohioans deserve to be treated fairly and won’t put up with double standards. Now is the time to volunteer to make sure Ohioans know the truth.

If you are in the Ohio area, you can volunteer to help the campaign or you can contribute to support it from anywhere.

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Credit: Census Bureau

Mean Household Income 1978-2010

The evil Census Bureau released some economic data which tells us that the rich keep getting richer, the middle class remains stagnant and the poor are even poorer.

So while the poorest Americans actually make less than they did in 1978, and the middle class has seen its income stagnate, the richest Americans have done far better. And the data in the Census report actually obscures the extent to which the wealthy have gained while everyone else has been stuck in neutral, because it doesn't break out the richest one percent, whose incomes have really soared. Unsurprisingly, the Census Bureau's Gini Index of Income Inequality shows a steady increase in income inequality over the past four decades.
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It's no coincidence that all of this has taken place while the nation's political and media elite favor policy changes that further rig the system against the poor and middle class and behave as though the only tax policy that matters is tax policy that affects the rich. Just as it's no coincidence that elites in both politics and media have financial incentives to favor policies that help the rich at the expense of the rest of the country.

But we need more tax cuts and austerity measures across the board based on what evidence? When I saw The Debate episode in the final season of West Wing back in 2005, it got a lot of attention because it was airing live. Much of Alan Alda's entire economic policy centered around tax cuts, tax cuts and tax cuts. It made me chuckle, but looking back on it now, Lawrence O'Donnell just nailed it. (I couldn't find a longer version of this portion of the episode)

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