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By almost any measure that you can think of, the U.S. economy has gotten worse since Barack Obama became president. Unemployment is higher, the cost of food and gas are skyrocketing, the number of Americans living in poverty has spiked dramatically, the housing market is in nightmarish shape and our national debt has absolutely exploded.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama continues to prance around the country declaring that "we can live out the American dream again" and that what we are experiencing right now are simply "bumps on the road to recovery". But such mindless platitudes are of little comfort to the millions of American families that are slowly descending into poverty or the tens of millions of American families that are already there. If this is the "change" that Barack Obama was promising then he can just keep the change.

Barack Obama is proving to be one of the worst presidents in all of U.S. history.

The American Federation of Government Employees on April 5 announced that it has filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking details from the administration on agencies’ plans in the event of a government shutdown. AFGE said it filed the lawsuit March 30.

The union’s national president, John Gage, said AFGE brought the lawsuit after the Office of Management and Budget failed to respond to the union’s Freedom of Information Act request of March 2 seeking agencies’ contingency plans for continuing operations during a shutdown.

“It’s not something that should be cavalierly handled,” Gage said. “If a shutdown goes on, there will be federal employees who are going to be hurt financially. They should know before the eve of a shutdown what is happening, and it should be done orderly and not in a last-minute rush.”

AFGE said Gage also sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder on March 28 outlining AFGE’s position that requiring federal employees to work without getting paid violates the 13th Amendment prohibition against involuntary servitude.

According to the union, Gage also wrote Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry on March 28 to find out how long essential employees can be required to work during a shutdown without pay.

mikeh4101 wrote:

I'm to the point that I hope they do shut us down. Is it a coincidence that it's occurring at the end of a pay period? It will be just like last time, we'll be sent home wondering when it will be settled. The peacocks will prance around for about a week and finally pass some half-assed budget that will be worse than the CRs. They'll spend the next week talking about how bi-partisan they were while each side tries to take credit for being more flexible. Finally, someone will write a bill giving the fed workers back pay and the president will sign it saying it’s a shame that the real victims of all this were the fed workers.

As soon as they tell us we're laid off, I'll file for unemployment and head to Florida for a week or two. It's going to be rainy up here so I'm going to go sit by the pool. The boss will call me when it's time to come back so I won't even have to watch the news.

My only concern is that my next step increase might be put off a week or two as well.
4/6/2011 2:59:20 AM

John Gage, Union Thug

U.S. consumers face "serious" inflation in the months ahead for clothing, food and other products, the head of Wal-Mart's U.S. operations warned Wednesday.

The world's largest retailer is working with suppliers to minimize the effect of cost increases and believes its low-cost business model will position it better than its competitors.

Still, inflation is "going to be serious," Wal-Mart U.S. CEO Bill Simon said during a meeting with USA TODAY's editorial board. "We're seeing cost increases starting to come through at a pretty rapid rate."

Along with steep increases in raw material costs, John Long, a retail strategist at Kurt Salmon, says labor costs in China and fuel costs for transportation are weighing heavily on retailers. He predicts prices will start increasing at all retailers in June.

"Every single retailer has and is paying more for the items they sell, and retailers will be passing some of these costs along," Long says. "Except for fuel costs, U.S. consumers haven't seen much in the way of inflation for almost a decade, so a broad-based increase in prices will be unprecedented in recent memory."

Mary Mancini

Gov. Bill Haslam’s “Tennessee Civil Justice Act of 2011” should be renamed the “Miscarriage of Justice Act of 2011.” Since 1977, the Tennessee Consumer Protection Act has protected Tennesseans and their families from fraudulent and abusive business practices. But now, because the country has entered into an era of blaming the hardworking people of Main Street for the economic fiasco caused by the fraudulent business practices of the large corporations and unregulated traders of Wall Street, dismantling it seems to have become a priority. Tennessee Citizen Action maintains that depleting the strength of the Tennessee Consumer Protection Act is yet one more way of placing undeserved blame for our state’s economic stagnation on hardworking Tennesseans.

State investigates Metro voter fraud

By Craig Boerner, cboerner@nashvillecitypaper.com
September 28, 2004

About 200 "citizens" who don't exist registered to vote in Davidson County for the Nov. 2 presidential election and now the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation is investigating the person who submitted those forms on behalf of Tennessee Citizen Action (TCA).

The false cards are believed to be the work of a temporary employee hired by Tennessee Citizen Action, a consumer advocacy group working to push voter registration. Voter registration fraud is a felony.

TBI spokesperson Jennifer Johnson confirmed Monday that District Attorney General Torry Johnson asked her department last week to investigate the incident and that investigation is ongoing.

"Believe it or not, we work [voter fraud] cases all of the time," Johnson said. "Every single one is different but even since I have been here, in the last month and a half, we have worked other voter fraud cases in other towns.

"Sometimes it is as simple as somebody thinking that a ballot box has been contaminated to something more elaborate."

The TCA employee in question, whose name has not been released, was fired immediately after Metro Election Commission staff members discovered the false cards. The person was being paid by the hour and not per registration.

The Kochs’ critics, it turned out, had no interest in the truth about them. What made the Kochs interesting was their usefulness as symbolic enemies: objects of the progressives’ latest two minutes’ hate.

For progressives confused at the heated opposition to their do-gooder agenda, the Kochs became convenient scapegoats. Invoking their name was a way to write off opposition to Obama as the false consciousness of racist rubes stoked by greedy businessmen. In the liberal imagination the Kochs ascended from obscurity to infamy in record time. Starting in the spring of 2009, whenever you turned on MSNBC or clicked on the Huffington Post you’d see the Kochs described in terms more applicable to Lex Luthor and General Zod.

Calling the Koch Brothers people who are "perhaps best known for (their) family’s contributions to conservative causes" is like calling Sauron a jewelry aficionado. And it's thanks to pseudo-liberal rags like the NY Times that the Koch brothers are best known for their largesse to conservative causes. Because if we had a real, non-corporately subsidized mainstream media, the Koch brothers would be called out as right wing, white collar terrorists that pollute the environment only slightly less than BP and are dedicated to smashing public unions and had financed smear campaigns against school teachers even in states in which they don't live.

And the reason why that Koch joke didn't get more play in the media and called out for what it is is because in today's day and age, a billionaire who'd pumped tens of thousands of petrodollars into an anti-progressive, anti-union candidate's campaign is supposed to get immediate access to their employees, don't you know.

The Kochs’ politics didn’t match traditional categories. Republicans, in their view, were just as implicated in big government as Democrats. To this day the Cato Institute calls for a much smaller defense budget, a noninterventionist foreign policy, and liberal positions on social issues. Some of these views have made movement conservatives uneasy. In June 1979 National Review went so far as to publish an essay critical of Cato Institute libertarians by Lawrence V. Cott. The title of the piece was “Cato Institute & the Invisible Finger.” The finger in question belonged to Charles Koch.

Charles and David sensed that Bush’s failure would drive Americans into the arms of Barack Obama. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the financial crisis of September 2008 made a toxic brew, and Americans turned to the young Democratic senator who promised hope and change. Change is what they got. Ask Charles Koch what he thinks about Obama and he looks like he’s just bit into a lemon.“He’s a dedicated egalitarian,” Charles said. “I’m not saying he’s a Marxist, but he’s internalized some Marxist models—that is, that business tends to be successful by exploiting its customers and workers.”

David agreed. “He’s the most radical president we’ve ever had as a nation,” he said, “and has done more damage to the free enterprise system and long-term prosperity than any president we’ve ever had.” David suggested the president’s radicalism was tied to his upbringing. “His father was a hard core economic socialist in Kenya,” he said. “Obama didn’t really interact with his father face-to-face very much, but was apparently from what I read a great admirer of his father’s points of view. So he had sort of antibusiness, anti-free enterprise influences affecting him almost all his life. It just shows you what a person with a silver tongue can achieve.”

Boehner Facing Tea-Party Pressure

Ohio conservatives say they are preparing to call 1,000 of Mr. Boehner's donors to complain that he isn't doing enough to block a debt-limit increase. On a new Facebook page, "Tea Partiers Against Boehner,'' they air complaints. The national group Tea Party Patriots, saying that Republicans are "timidly passing mediocre spending reforms,'' has called for a rally at the Capitol.

The calls to make big spending cuts come as Mr. Boehner works under deadline pressure with Democratic lawmakers and the White House on a plan to fund the government for the rest of the fiscal year to avoid a potential government shutdown after April 8.

Such negotiations tend to push lawmakers toward compromise. The tea-party activists want Mr. Boehner to stick to his guns on $61 billion in budget cuts that the House approved earlier this year. "You said you were going to cut X amount, and that's what we want to see happen,'' said Chris Littleton, co-founder of the Ohio Liberty Council, a coalition of tea-party groups. "Just take a stand. That's pretty cut and dried.'' ...

Many tea-party activists were already infuriated with the GOP when the House—including Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia—voted down a conservative-backed amendment for $20 billion more in cuts than were passed.

"We are extremely disappointed in Eric Cantor, but not surprised," said Mark Lloyd, chairman of the Virginia Tea Party Patriot Federation. "When you have the opportunity to cut, you cut."

Portugal braces for govt collapse amid debt crisis

LISBON, Portugal The leader of Portugal's main opposition party says the minority government's downfall is "inevitable" after it failed to win political support for its latest plan to cut the country's huge debt burden.

Portugal is trying to avoid becoming the latest of the 17 eurozone countries to need a bailout, following financial aid for Greece and Ireland last year.

But all opposition parties have balked at the Socialist government's new austerity measures, which are expected to be rejected by Parliament even though European leaders praised them.

Pedro Passos Coelho, leader of the main opposition Social Democratic Party, said late Monday that the political deadlock made an early election unavoidable.

OUSTED! Go home, take a bath, you dirty hippie.

Here’s a tip for you, fatsack: wearing the hat and the slovenly t-shirt and mouthing Marxist drivel doesn’t camouflage the fact that you’ve eaten far more than your fair share of the country’s pork.

And really, high school students calling for walkouts so that they can take a day off school? Not exactly the height of civic commitment.

Play actors. Frauds. Useful idiots. All carefully cultivated by years of media malpractice, leftist indoctrination, and the complacency of those who take freedom for granted — and who out of rote courtesy pretended out loud that our teachers are a precious commodity, even as they continued to fail our children. Honestly. These people have no idea how stupid they are — and if you tell them, that’s now “bullying” or “hate.” It’s a perfect storm of imbecility, fueled by unearned self-esteem.