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Why do commentators assume that people care
about what disgraced former House of Representatives Leader Tom DeLay has to say anymore????????
He says that up until September he believes that Bush was a very good
and successful president. Say what?!?!?!?! If you want to see someone espousing tired, old, misdirected and unintelligent
party rhetoric, then look no further than DeLay. I need to go take a few aspirin after listening to him for
three minutes tonight. Earth to these types of Republicans, we ain't in 1994 anymore!!
Are Republicans Suddenly Suicidal
or Crazy like a Fox?
Earlier this week I commented on some Republican governors stating that they
might refuse to accept stimulus funds. Today, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said that he might refuse a portion of
the stimulus funds when released.
Okay, there could be my politician that may be willing to say no, but what
portion of monies will Jindal be saying no to exactly? No, it isn't the money to help create those BADLY needed 50,000
jobs in a state that doesn't have that happen every day.
What Jindal has a problem with are the funds to assist extending unemployment
payments to people who cannot find a job. Jindal said today, “The
federal money in this bill will run out in less than three years for this benefit and our businesses would then be stuck paying
the bill,” Jindal said. “We must be careful and thoughtful as we examine all the strings attached to the funding
in this package. We cannot grow government in an unsustainable way.”
What a load of crap, Mister possible leader of the GOP in 2012!! This
is completely a move by a politician hoping to conceal the fact that he has no need for such outrage. That, and leaving
it to the legislature to do his dirty work while he raises his "clean hands" come the next important political cycle
and talk about what a good little Republican he is. Louisiana doesn't currently meet the requirement for the added two-thirds
of funds because their requirements for unemployment eligibility are too narrow. So the legislature and the governor
would have to change state laws to acquire these funds. I am checking, but I think that after the 45 days that these
funds are distributed the state legislature can still get those funds if the changes to eligibility are made without Jindal's
help.
Proponents of the legislation
point out that states can restrict benefits if the new eligibility requirements become burdensome. Representative Jim
McDermott effectively pointed out the flaw in Jindal's reasoning.
“Nobody has any doubt they’ll be back in there when the recession
is over to try to crank benefits down again,” said McDermott, a Democratic from Washington State who sponsored the original
legislation upon which the unemployment provisions were based.
In January, Baton Rouge had an unemployment rate of 5.3% (the state's rate
for December '08 was 5.9%). Now Jindal has been joined in this stand by Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour. I am just
assuming that to be so cavalier about people only having 26 weeks of unemployment in an economy where employers aren't
hiring and people have already fallen off of the rolls completely they must be pretty financially secure. That and as incredibly
out of touch and wandering around in the wilderness as the rest of the Republican Party apparently still is. I mean,
come on, Michael Steele. You think that the reason black and Latino youth don't flock to your party is simply because
you still come across as a bunch of uptight, uncool white people? Perhaps it is those very values and your stand
on issues you plan on bringing a hip-hop makeover to that's your problem.
But I digress. Many part-time, low-income and female workers who
have lost their jobs stand to benefit from the federal stimulus bill. Once you start delving into the politicians that oppose
it and their motives, you see helping or not helping people survive has nothing to do with their thought process.
It simply comes down to party politics.
Curt Eysink with the Louisiana Workforce
Commission says the numbers show Louisiana is no longer immune to the recession. He also points out that Louisiana is still
not nearly as affected as other states in country, at least not yet.
For decades labor has fought with states to expand their unemployment
benefits. Everyone should know now if that didn't before - see the auto bailout debates-that Republicans see labor as
the big, bad boogey man. After all, it was Ronald Reagan who helped demonize unemployment benefits in the 1980's when
he said that it was " a prepaid vacation for freeloaders." While the vast majority of workers contribute
directly or indirectly to the unemployment insurance pot, just 36 percent of people who are out of work actually collect
such benefits, according to the Department of Labor.
The reason for such a small percentage of participation
is because of the strict eligibility rules of most states. Many states have income requirements and will not cover part-time
workers. Under the American Financial Recovery Act, states are eligible for the first installment if the time period
they use to determine eligibility includes a worker’s recent earnings, which isn't most states. The change is
also expected to help more low-wage workers and women, who cycle in and out of the labor force more frequently than others.
The remaining incentives, two-thirds of the
stimulus money, go to states that broaden their eligibility requirements.
It is the broadening of the eligibility requirements that Gov. Barbour appears
to also object to the most. He, too, points to the financial burden on the businesses if Mississippi were
to change their eligibility requirements since the stimulus only provides federal aid to meet these requirements for
three years. What these two governors don't want to get, though, is that the nation's unemployment safety net needs
to be modernized by almost every state!
Currently, only four states will meet the additional requirements for those
funds. However, many states, including California, are already looking at overhauling their state's unemployment practices
to qualify for all of the funding.
While Jindal and Barbour and others continue posturing over
non-issues, McDermott places his finger on the heart of the situation.
“Right now we have a serious crisis in the country, and
to get states to modernize is in the workers’ best interest.”
Why is it that the workers best interest isn't what Jindal and Barbour have in mind?
Angry at the Republicans and their new party
of No? You aren't the only one
As I sat at my table and computer and figured up the bills and the possible shortfalls
of incoming funds to pay them, I REALLLY got mad at the politicalization of my family's financial suffering for the Republican
party's hope for 2010 gain!
As my home's bank account and that of my parent's steadily dwindled over the
last 8 years, it never seemed that the Republicans met a spending increase by their president that they didn't like.
So why now, as our country teeters on the verge of economic collapse, is it that being fiscally sound matters so much
more than the suffering of American families?
Boehner and Cantor and Shelby and on and on the list of Republicans squawking over
the size of the stimulus package went like a bunch of robots in differing ages, shapes and sizes. "This is bad policy,"
House Minority Leader Boehner said. A result of the lack of input from the Republican party by Democrats. Funny
how all of the funds put toward Iraq and the war - with $125 billion unaccounted for in Iraq, too - never received input from
the Democrats and the Republicans never questioned.
I don't call sending money to states to help them try and keep their
students in school, their teachers working and attempting to keep budgets a little closer
to being balanced wasteful spending. I think that middle and working class families - you know the ones that DIDN'T
receive tax cuts under former President Bush- who are going to receive some tax help as they continue to struggle would call
these cuts wasteful spending, either. But Republicans seem to think these and trying to keep unemployment benefits
available for people out of work through no fault of their own is wasteful spending.
Well, that would certainly explain much of the policy that went on for 8 years
now, wouldn't it? It seems that what the Republican party has successfully achieved, since their own convention
functioning with a chairman with intelligence seems to have failed, is that they don't care what happens to us!!!!!
It is just a shame that none of these blowhards who now suddenly care so much about
the burden on our grandchildren's financial back, the size of the country's deficit couldn't get the fact that the person
they needed to say no to, that they needed to rail against was their own president and themselves for 8 years!
They have a lot more in common with the financial brainiacs that led us down this path than they want to admit.
Republican Leadership Complains, but Lilly Ledbetter Fair
Pay Act Marks First Major Legislation for New Congress, President
As the political pundits talked about how
women voters had always been strong Democratic allies in past elections and questioned if that would prove true in 2008, what
hadn't been done for the fairer gender in America by the party became a big part of the conversation.
That changes today as President Obama signs into law the
first major piece of legislation of the new Congress, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.
For a while now, we have seen the distribution of pay per
hour for white men, women, blacks and other groups broken down to see that equal pay doesn't exist in this country even in
the 21st century, even more than four decades after Congress passed a law making that illegal. But a Republican
controlled Congress and White House cared little about working to correct the inequity. With a White House veto threatened
last April, all but six GOP senators voted against the bill.
And for Republicans who have made the issue of legislating from
the bench part of their campaign-trail rhetoric, the legislating from the Supreme Court's bench in 2007 was the catalyst
for the introduction of this bill.
At the heart is Lilly Ledbetter, a woman in Gadsden, AL who for 19
years was the sole female supervisor employed at Goodyear's tire plant located there. A few months before
her retirement in 1998, Ledbetter discovered that her male counterparts were earning thousands of dollars more in salary and
overtime pay that she wasn't receiving for the same work. The information came to her from an anonymous note revealing
three of her fellow male supervisor's salaries just months before her retirement. She filed suit and was awarded more
than $3 million dollars plus back pay by a jury in Alabama.
In May 2007, the Supreme Court upheld the ruling made by the
Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals overturning the jury's verdict. The decision, authored by Justice Alito, ruled
5 to 4 that Ledbetter had waited too long to file her case. The court said she should have complained within 180 days of a
specific discriminatory event. Sound logic if you forget that she didn't know that it was happening then!
The ruling stunned civil rights activists across the nation,
who said federal courts in nine of the nation's 12 circuits had for decades judged that the 180-day statute of limitations
began running afresh with each discriminatory paycheck. Their congressional supporters went to work
quickly, drafting legislation making the 180-day window renewing every time a new paycheck was issued law. The bill
also gave a new clock for the 180-day time period to file suit every time a discriminatory decision was adopted, when
a person became subject to that decision or when a person was affected by that decision.
No new bill was created for the new Congress as Democrats simply re-introduced
the 2008 bill. The senate passed the bill 61-36, with Republican dissent based on concern that
this legislation makes it easier to challenge pay discrimination by employees, therefore leading to more lawsuits.
With that reasoning, I ask: what country do we live in again?
Isn't this something that we WANT our workers to be able to correct? I see Republicans talking about what a wonderful
beacon of democracy our nation is all of the time, so doesn't this law fall into WHY that is the case? Shouldn't employers,
as many do, WANT to provide fair and equal pay to their employees? If all employers did so, doesn't it only stand
to reason there would be FEWER lawsuits?
Lost in all of the politics being played by Republicans on this bill
(all of the Republican women voted yes on Ledbetter in the Senate) and the bemoaning by Republicans on the
Hill about the Paycheck Fairness Act that Senate Republicans pealed away from introduction along with the Ledbetter Act, are
the circumstances lived by Mrs. Ledbetter.
For almost two decades, Ledbetter worked at the Goodyear Tire
and Rubber Plant in East Gadsden. She faced sexual harassment at the plant and was told
by her boss that he didn’t think a woman should be working there. I was raised in Gadsden, and I know that for all
of the time she worked there Ledbetter had one of the best paying jobs in the county if she could survive the lay-offs.
Etowah County, at the time, didn't have a lot of jobs where you could have earned more than $6 per hour. Reason
enough to not leave a job no matter how stressful the situation may have been. Things really haven't improved much as
far as employment opportunities are concerned, either. Goodyear and the now long since closed steel mill were
the few businesses in the area that had strong unions if a company had a union at all. And so that was the
mentality of the manager's of the plant - we can pay her less than the men, fulfill an EEOC requirement by
having a female supervisor ( I am not saying she wasn't deserving of the promotion by the way) and we are still doing
her a favor as far as her pay is concerned.
I was interviewed for the Goodyear plant's public
relations position in 2002. Other than seeing just how hard hit our manufacturing industry is by the lack of utilization
of once used space, I can say that as I walked the lines during my tour I saw perhaps 10 or 12 women manning stations
on first shift. I realize that working at a tire plant isn't exactly like working at the electronics plant where
my mom works a little ways down the road in Glencoe, but it is still a
testosterone
dominated world you walk into.
But what is so ridiculous, aside from the fact that Ledbetter's retirement
benefits were affected by the potentially sexist motivations for not paying her the same wage as her male counterparts and
she gets no means to address that again, is that Republicans wonder why they keep losing ground in our country today?
What a shame Republicans do not understand that most Americans, many of whom are not white males, do value civil liberties
regardless of the fact that they apparently don't.
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