Republican Anh 'Joseph' Cao waves as he holds his daughter Betsy Cao, 4, with his wife Kate Hieu Hoang, right, at his victory party after defeating Rep. William Jefferson, D-La. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
After losing his re-election bid in Louisiana’s 2nd district with a 50-47 percent result, indicted Democrat William (dollar bill) Jefferson did not concede his loss to the Republican challenger Anh “Joseph” Cao, the first Vietnamese-American in Congress. Instead, he blamed the voters for not turning out.
‘I think people just ran out of gas a bit,’ he said. ‘People today flat didn’t come out in large numbers.’
Speaking to Jefferson’s bribery and racketeering charges, one Democrat voter who voted for Jefferson highlighted one of our key principles of the justice system afforded to Democrats who get into trouble with the law.
‘People are innocent until proven guilty,’ said Faye Leggins, 54, an educator and Democrat who moved back to the city six months ago.
The voters of Louisiana let Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) off the hook by doing what she should have done years ago. Of course, if Jefferson were a Republican, we wouldn’t be talking about this 552 days after an indictment.
Most pundits on the far left, like self-described journalist Mike Papantonio, are really stretching the facts (like a slip and fall lawyer would) when he tries to whitewash the UAW’s role and its impact on the Big 3 automakers by saying that the GOP has always hated unions and that’s why, he asserts, they don’t want to bail out the Big 3. And he does this by saying that AIG, Freddy Mac, Fannie Mae are not unionized and they’re getting bailed out. Actually, none of them should be bailed out with taxpayer money. It was government intervention that put them in that position. The best thing the government can do now is to quit meddling with the free-market economy and let the market determine who wins and who loses.
So here’s my response to Mike Papantonio. AIG and the rest of Wall Street, they’re not unionized and they are failing. You say the Big 3 are failing too, but it’s not because of unions because Wall Street isn’t unionized? Nice try Mike.
I’ll tell you, Mike the journalist, what ALL of these failures have in common, in just two words. Government intervention. Intervention in a free-market economy. And there is one more commonality among all of them Mike, they are joined at the hip with Democrat lawmakers from the CRA to the UAW. That’s what they all have in common. That’s why all of them are in trouble. The Big 3 are unique however because they are unionized. For them, their problem is compounded because of the UAW and the agreements that the incompetent CEO’s signed on to. Granted it isn’t the only reason, the Big 3 have other problems as well, but it is the difference from operating in the red, or the black.
Their incompetence is echoed in their ‘plan’ before congress right now. Their plan includes the same cash-draining contracts that keep them from being competitive with the non-union automakers in the South. Because of that, they deserve and have earned the right to go bankrupt.
Reorganize, unload the union weight, be competitive, and prosper. And if it means going from Big 3 to Big 2, so be it. In a free market environment, the fittest will survive without putting taxpayers trillions and trillions of dollars into debt.
Bio: Mike Papantonio hosts a nationally syndicated radio show, the Ring of Fire, on Air America Radio and is the founder of GoLeft.tv. He is a partner in the Levin Papantonio law firm in Pensacola.
Executives from the Big 3 automakers are in Washington making their case for $34 billion dollars (up from $25 billion a week ago) to ‘bail’ them out.
Their plan amounts to things they should have done years ago, but still amount to nothing more than duct tape over a gaping hole in the hull of their ship. Not one of them mentioned bankruptcy or getting out from under their current union contracts. That’s where the hole is and that’s why any amount of money now is just duct tape. It will also be nationalizing an industry doomed to failure if it doesn’t cleanse itself of the unnecessary union overhead that a bankruptcy affords them. All for the express purpose of propping up a labor union. I’m sorry, I believe our economy comes before a labor union.
GM’s COO Fritz Henderson is only fooling himself when he says that there is no Plan B. Of course there is. In this case, when you have an operation that ‘can’t fund’ itself, bankruptcy is always an option.
“There isn’t a Plan B,” said GM Chief Operating Officer Fritz Henderson. “Absent support, frankly, the company just can’t fund its operations.”
These auto execs seem unwilling to cut the umbilical cord to the UAW. That leaves the only other option, doing nothing. Why? Because Nancy Pelosi will get them the money they want one way or the other, making the automakers’ appearance this week before congress the obligatory dog and pony show. Pelosi is out to protect and preserve the UAW, not the company that employs them, and these execs know it.
“I believe that an intervention will happen,” Pelosi said at a briefing in Washington. “Everybody is disadvantaged by bankruptcy, including our economy, so that’s not an option.”
Pelosi said Congress will either approve new loans for the auto industry or the Bush administration will provide funding through the $700 billion financial-markets rescue plan approved by Congress last month.
Unfortunately for us taxpayers, and fortunately for the UAW, they will get their (your) money. Don’t you just love it when free enterprise capitalism is interfered with by the government? What makes it worse in this case is that the motivation is only to help big labor, Democrats’ special interest group.
Here are two visions of presidential leadership. One is a top-down approach. The other is more of a collaborative approach. Let’s play pin the leadership on the candidate.
But I understand where the — the vision for change comes from first and foremost. It comes from ME. That’s my job, is to provide a vision in terms of where we are going and to make sure then that my team is implementing it.
I am going to surround myself with the brightest and the best advisers from all over the country. With competing ideas on how to solve our nations problems. And together we will come up with solutions to our nations problems.
Enter Number
1
2
Barack Obama
John McCain
It would seem that a number 1 man would not need advisers, but yes-men and/or pit bulls around him. A man that knows where he’s going and how to get there. Quite a contrast with a number 2 man, who would more or less govern by committee. That’s why you might be surprised to learn that one of these two men are actually both. Hint: If you are not surprised then you probably voted for President-elect Barack Obama.
Type 1 Obama was borne out of criticism that he has surrounded himself with Clinton administration operatives and what we have is a Clinton third term, only without the sex. Apparently not worried that he totally dissed democrats outside of the Clinton administration by wrongly assuming that there isn’t any talent out there. Just one way that inexperience on the national stage manifests itself. And type 2 Obama was borne out of what he ran his campaign on, CHANGE. He was the one that would bring in disparate groups of advisers and wise men, to get all sides of an issue, then give an informed decision.
If we’ve learned nothing else about Barack Obama, it is that he is an expert at being able to be on all sides of every issue and get away with it.
Black activist Bishop Council Nedd II, a member of Project 21’s national advisory council, is calling for Rep. Rangel (D-NY) to step down from his position as Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee until the House Ethics committee completes its investigation. Nedd said . . .
It’s galling that the head of the committee in charge of levying taxes has either a profound ignorance of tax law or a disinterest in adhering to the laws he wants others to follow.
In your wildest imagination, do you think that if Rangel was a Republican that he would still be Chairman, if not still in the House itself? It isn’t going to happen, but wouldn’t it be cute to see a reporter ask Rangel how many homes he has? Oh, and whether he is paying the proper taxes on them? The double standard is more than a little obvious.
The FairTax plan is a comprehensive proposal that replaces all federal income and payroll based taxes with an integrated approach including a progressive national retail sales tax, a prebate to ensure no American pays federal taxes on spending up to the poverty level, dollar-for-dollar federal revenue neutrality, and, through companion legislation, the repeal of the 16th Amendment.
Do yourself a favor and get educated on The Fair Tax. The Fair Tax is the result of $22 million worth of research by credible economists from around the country whose task was to come up with another way to fund the operations of the country. The task was qualified to the extent that the result would be ‘revenue neutral.’ That is to say the system must be able to generate as much money as the government is currently generating with the current system through federal withholding and payroll taxes, self-employment taxes, alternative minimum tax, estate and gift tax, and capital gains tax, all of which would be replaced by the Fair Tax. And from that point as the economy grows, so grows the treasury. It is a pro-growth, as opposed to punitive growth, taxing system.
Consequences paramount to converting to the Fair Tax system are three-fold.
First, your individual take-home pay increases dramatically. Without the federal withholding and payroll taxes being deducted from your pay, you get all your pay in every paycheck. This alone is the biggest stimulus to your personal economy as well as our national economy. And it doesn’t put the nation further into debt in the process. Because the taxing revenue is generated by consumption, the tax base includes everyone who buys anything new, not just the working people in America. ‘Everyone’ includes citizens and non-citizens including illegals, foreign diplomats and tourists. And because it is a sales tax, the so-called underground economies are no longer exempt from contributing. Everyone will contribute to funding the government and our Social Security, Medicare and other entitlement programs.
Secondly, it takes the ‘tax hammer’ away from politicians who use it to control every aspect of our lives and business and industry in the United States. It transfers the power from Washington politicians directly back to you. It is this stripping of power from the political class that generates the most objection from the political class, and the most outrageous criticism and unfair demagoguery, of the Fair Tax. Under the Fair Tax, our politicians will be left with nothing to do except their job of governing and living within their means, just like you and I have to do. And since filing of your personal income taxes will cease, April 15th becomes just another day to enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
While it is still fresh in your memory, take a look back at the presidential campaign and the amount of press and attention that was given to taxation by both candidates. Besides energy, the other topic was ‘my tax plan is better than your tax plan.’ And polarizing political tactics like class envy and class warfare became all too prominent. Absent tax laws to talk about, the voters would have learned more about the candidates and ‘the real issues.’
Third, but certainly not last, the change to the Fair Tax alone would bring back foreign-held capital, estimated at between $10 to $15 trillion, that economists predict will flow into the US economy with enactment of the FairTax. That is trillions of dollars of business that has fled this country because of its taxing system, the second highest in the world. As an added bonus, companies looking to do business in the United States that have not yet come here, would have the incentive to come here. The job creation and wealth creation associated with it will spur the economy more than any tax-and-spending Democrat or Republican in Washington could dream of.
Does his victory mean that America is now officially beyond racism? Does it finally complete the work of the civil rights movement so that racism is at last dismissible as an explanation of black difficulty? Can the good Revs. Jackson and Sharpton now safely retire to the seashore? Will the Obama victory dispel the twin stigmas that have tormented black and white Americans for so long — that blacks are inherently inferior and whites inherently racist? Doesn’t a black in the Oval Office put the lie to both black inferiority and white racism? Doesn’t it imply a “post-racial” America? And shouldn’t those of us — white and black — who did not vote for Mr. Obama take pride in what his victory says about our culture even as we mourn our political loss?
White Guilt Emancipation Declaration
We, black American citizens of the United States of America and of the National Black Republican Association, do hereby declare that our fellow white American citizens are now, henceforth and forever more free of White Guilt.
This freedom from White Guilt was duly earned by the election of Barack Hussein Obama, a black man, to be our president by a majority of white Americans based solely on the color of his skin.
Freedom is not free, and we trust that the price paid for this freedom from White Guilt is worth the sacrifice, since Obama is a socialist who does not share the values of average Americans and will use the office of the presidency to turn America into a failed socialist nation.
Granted this November 4, 2008 – the day Barack Hussein Obama was elected as the first black president and the first socialist president of the United States of America.
Where the Left and the so-called ‘gay rights’ movement is concerned, it appears that the only kind of elections they accept are the ones that go ‘their way.’ There have been ballot initiatives in 30 states so far that felt compelled to legislate the definition of marriage as a union between members of the opposite sex, and those measures passed in all of them. Given the opportunity to vote on it, it passes every time. Most recently in California and Florida.
Yesterday, we got a chance to see just how tolerant proponents of ‘gay marriage’ can be by staging protests, some not so peaceful, all around the country.
At Mount Hope Church in Michigan, a radical homosexual group disrupted an evangelical church service last Sunday. The activists rushed the pulpit, throwing condoms and buckets of glitter, using noisemakers and megaphones to scream at churchgoers and frighten children. Women ran to the pulpit and began to kiss; others shouted, “Jesus was gay!” Protests erupted outside Mormon temples in Utah and Seattle to protest the church’s support for the California marriage amendment.
Their strategy to link their cause to ‘civil rights’ simply does not fly with Americans, and certainly not with Black Americans. There is no right that straight Americans have that gay Americans do not have when it comes to marriage.
A gay man is just as free to marry a woman as I am. Similarly, a gay woman is free to marry a man. No problem. No one is preventing gays from getting married. Gays need to get a grip on the fact that they are not the mainstream of general society and learn to live with that fact, rather than trying to turn society upside down to suit their purpose, using judges that should be disbarred and politicians that should be arrested for blatantly violating the law.
I don’t believe ‘marriage’ has anything to do with rights. If it’s rights they’re after, then legislate some rights, call it a civil union, or even ‘gay married,’ but not simply ‘married.’ The latter being reserved for respect and preservation of traditional family values. Marriage is something that happens between members of the opposite sex. A judge can’t change the definition of marriage. Society via legislatures can, and I hope I’m not around if/when that ever happens.
Getting ‘rights’ for the gay lifestyle isn’t, on its face, a bad idea. Trying to equate it to normal heterosexual marriage however, is.
If gays were as proud of their situation as they seem to be, then one would think they would also be proud of that which defines them. Why not invent another hyphenated class to further delineate us? Along with ?-Americans (insert your word of choice), we’ll now have Gay-Americans. And Gay-Americans can be “gay married.” That seems to me to be a fair solution for gays that are tolerant of societal norms.
That would work, if only “tolerance” wasn’t missing from the lexicon of the gay “movement.”
Among the first items on President-elect Obama’s agenda will be to pay back labor unions for their generous campaign contributions in the name of the Employee Free Choice Act. As if government is not already involved in all kinds of things of a socialist nature that it should not be involved in, but is, Democrats in Washington, if not by executive order itself by our new President, will resume the effort to boost labor union membership by enacting new legislation. Since when does boosting labor unions membership become a responsibility of the government? The easy answer to that is to follow the money. If you do that then you’ll know why the bill was sponsored solely by Democrats including Barack Obama.
The bill was mis-named on purpose. Had it been named correctly, it would have been named the Employee Forced Choice Act. The meat of the bill will remove the private ballot in union organizing and replace it with a public one. It is more than a little ironic that Democrats would have such contempt for a private ballot when every other kind of vote Americans participate in is a private one.
And be prepared also for the Left to attach this bill to their favorite political tact, class warfare. Last year, Sen. Hillary Clinton was speaking for this bill and said that it is for ‘the middle class’ because, she asserts, labor union members are middle class. Although Democrats purport to support ‘the working people,’ what they really support are labor unions.
Didn’t we just learn that small businesses create something like 80 percent of jobs in this country, and that most of these small business owners and their employees are ‘middle class?’ And that’s why Obama wants a ‘middle class’ tax cut while raising taxes on ‘the rich.’
Let’s examine Barack Obama’s economic theory. He wants to increase minimum wage to over $9/hr. He wants to increase taxes on small businesses with incomes higher than $120,000. He wants to enable labor unions to unionize small businesses. Does this sound like a pro-growth economic policy to you? It sounds like disaster that will only worsen our economic woes.
In 1983, 20 percent of workers in the U.S. were union workers. In 2007 that percentage was 12.1 percent, up .1 percent from 2006.
Much of last year’s growth came in the West. California’s rate of union membership rose one percentage point, to 16.7 percent, an increase of more than 200,000 members. Nevada showed an increase of 15,000 union members, reflecting the organization of casino and construction workers.
As you might expect, union membership in the Midwest decreased.
In the Midwest, manufacturing job losses reduced union membership. Michigan lost 23,000 union members. The largest decrease came in Illinois, where union rolls dropped 89,000. Ben Zipperer, research associate at the Center for Economic Policy Research, said the manufacturing sector — long the stronghold of U.S. unions — is being supplanted by the construction and private health-care fields, where union membership is growing.
The reason union membership has declined over the years is that employers have negated the need for them by paying more and offering benefits that employees want, without them having to pay dues to a union. This so-called Card Check legislation is a mistake for a number of reasons. Not the least of which is that it is not the government’s job to increase labor union membership. The other reason is the negative impact on business that come with unions in vastly increased overhead and payroll expense.
Look what labor unions do the the auto industry. Did you know that . . .
At a time when the average American company requires workers to pay more than $2,000 a year toward family health insurance premiums, the auto industry is among the 4% of employers that offer free family health coverage.
And these figures are from 2005, it is only worse now . . .
The cost of providing health care adds from $1,100 to $1,500 to the cost of each of the 4.65 million vehicles GM sold last year, according to various calculations. GM expects to spend at least $5.6 billion on health care this year, more than it spent on advertising last year.
Granted that it was the management of these automakers that agreed to such extravagant benefits, at the threat of a strike, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see how labor unions can put not only the auto industry, but any industry at a competitive disadvantage, including small businesses that need all the help they can get. If unions go away, no one suffers. If small businesses go away, everyone suffers.
gay woman is free to marry a man. No problem. No one is preventing gays from getting married. Gays need to get a grip on the fact that they are not the mainstream of general society and learn to live with that fact, rather than trying to turn society upside down to suit their purpose, using judges that should be disbarred and politicians that should be arrested for blatantly violating the law.