Last Call

Looks like Gov. John Kasich's union-busting bill is about to go down in flames with just two weeks to go until the election.

The campaign to save Senate Bill 5 is taking on water, with a new poll showing voters favor a repeal of the collective bargaining crackdown on Ohio’s public workers by a 57-to-32 percent margin.

The findings in the Quinnipiac University poll also show Gov. John Kasich’s popularity is in the same neighborhood as the S.B. 5 measure he has been campaigning to save. The survey of 1,668 registered voters found them disapproving of the governor’s job performance by 52-36 percent, up from a 49-40 percent negative rating in late September.

Oops.  With the measure at -25% and falling (along with Kasich's approval ratings) it's hard to imagine the bill passing at this point.  Such a massive rebuke to Kasich would basically be the end of his relevance as Governor.

Oh, but look who picked today to jump on the pro-SB5 bandwagon?

Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s campaign Communications Director Ray Sullivan sends along the following statement on former Mass Gov. Mitt Romney’s failure to endorse conservative efforts to keep SB 5, Ohio’s new anti-union law.

“Mitt Romney’s finger-in-the-wind politics continued today when he refused to support right-to-work reforms signed by Ohio Governor John Kasich – reforms Romney supported in June. Americans are tired of politicians who change their beliefs to match public opinion polls. Mitt Romney has a long record of doing this on issues like government-mandated health care and the Obama stimulus. Mitt Romney needs to realize that when you try to stand on both sides of an issue, you stand for nothing.”

Hey Rick?  The measure you support is about to get trashed by the people of Ohio.  What does that say about Perry's judgement, to back a measure so universally reviled by "WE THE PEOPLE"? You might want to worry more about Texas than the Buckeye State, dig?

In fact, national Republicans are piling on Romney for not supporting a ballot measure that is most likely going to lose by 20 points or more.

But that's today's Republican Party for you.  In touch with the heartland!

Beating Three Nines With A Hand Full Of Jokers

Not to be outdone by Herman Cain's awful 9-9-9 plan, Rick Perry shuffles the deck and draws an even more regressive mess of a tax scheme to transfer wealth to the top.  K-Drum takes a look at Perry's cards.

The plan starts with giving Americans a choice between a new, flat tax rate of 20% or their current income tax rate. The new flat tax preserves mortgage interest, charitable and state and local tax exemptions for families earning less than $500,000 annually, and it increases the standard deduction to $12,500 for individuals and dependents....My plan also abolishes the death tax once and for all, providing needed certainty to American family farms and small businesses....To help older Americans, we will eliminate the tax on Social Security benefits....We will eliminate the tax on qualified dividends and long-term capital gains to free up the billions of dollars Americans are sitting on to avoid taxes on the gain.

It's a "flat tax" that keeps many of the same deductions that the flat tax is supposed to get rid of.  Perry can't even get that part right, it seems.  The choice of the old tax code or the new one is of course a terrible idea, assuring massive tax breaks for the rich and nothing for the poor.  It's a propaganda tool.

What can you even say about this? It sounds less like a tax plan than a big ol' stew pot of right-wing applause lines, all the way up to the inane insistence that eliminating the estate tax has nothing to do with rich people and is only designed to provide "needed certainty to American family farms and small businesses." Should we laugh or cry? Perry has actually managed to combine two separate conservative memes (the estate tax is all about family farms, uncertainty is hobbling the economy) into one single sentence that makes even less sense than either of them separately. It's hard not to be impressed.

Although the choice part will assure that if "you dumb broke liberals want to raise taxes dur hurr" why we can take Perry's Hobson's choice and pay more!  It gets Perry back in the game for a few more weeks heading into the end of the year and of course assures Romney will have his own awful "flat tax plan" soon, which is the real point of the measure.

Either way, the 1% wins by stacking the deck.

StupidiNews! A Swing And A Miss Edition

So we can all agree to go home and say a quick thanks that we aren't this guy:

A Vallejo man was found in a child's swing Saturday morning after reportedly being stuck for about nine hours, police said.

At about 6 a.m., a groundskeeper of Blue Rock Springs Park heard a man screaming when he arrived at work. He then called the police to investigate.

Upon arrival, police found a 21-year-old man stuck in a child's swing, which has two leg holes.

The man told police that he had been stuck in the swing since 9 p.m. Friday after he allegedly made a $100 bet with his friends. He proceeded to lube himself with laundry detergent to get into the swing, police said.

The friends then reportedly left him swinging through the night. 

I don't know which is worse, being found or having to admit how much effort went into this craptastic tale of stupidity.  Stupid or not, I bet it hurt like hell and I feel a little sorry for the guy.  I at least hope his friends paid up.

And for our "miss" portion of the news:

A liquor store in Sheboygan, Wisconsin got a little too tipsy recently. A 31-year-old shelving unit crashed to the ground resulting in the loss of a staggering 6,810 bottles of wine.

"I heard a little shift and all of the sudden I looked up and just saw bottles start coming, and so I turned around and booked it as fast as I could," salesman Nick Haen told the Sheboygan Press. The lost bottles varied in price from $3.99 to $149.99.

First, Sheboygan only makes the news every 20 years or so, thus making this automatically noteworthy. Second, the thousands of bottles of wine will surely be missed. Though the employees do not seem to be suffering from a case of sour grapes, they remain in good spirits.

In Which Bon Respectfully Disagrees With 94-Year-Old Woman

VERO BEACH, Fla. - Don't let Rose Swiszowski's 4-foot, 7-inch stature fool you -- she is one brave lady.

The 94-year-old Vero Beach resident is being credited for putting out a fire in St. Francis Manor, a retirement community in Vero Beach located in the 1700 block of 20th Avenue.

The fire could have caused extensive damage to its recreation center.

She was walking to her apartment when she noticed flames in front of the community building on Sunday night.

"I came around the corner and I saw what looked like a bonfire," said Swiszowski.

Rose states that she is not a hero.  I say, hell yes she is.  At her age, and considering the age and condition of the people likely to be found in a retirement community she is a hero over and again.  In contrast to the little girl who died because nobody would help, this goes a long way towards making me feel better about the world.

Kudos, Rose.

Oops! Stupid Cops Edition

Atlanta (CNN) -- When Teresa Culpepper called Atlanta police to report her car stolen, the last thing she expected was to land behind bars for 53 days in a case of mistaken identity.

Mistaken for a woman of the same first name who was wanted on a battery charge, Culpepper is now trying to return her life to normal after the ordeal cost her home and her car. Her attorney said none of it would have happened if police had followed basic procedures.

Their reason for arresting her?  Her name was Teresa, and a call had just gone out about a different Teresa (different last name, birth date and other basic information).  This woman spent nearly two months in jail and a single phone call could have cleared everything up and set her free.  I hope she wins and takes their asses to the bank.  Overnight would have been bad enough.  A week would have been freakish.  Fifty-three days is inexcusable.  Losing her home and car, and surely her job to boot would set a life back for many months.

Release The Hounds

Hacker group Anonymous has announced its latest corporate web target:  the FOX News website.  But I'm not convinced they've thought this through politically.

In a video statement carried recently by several official channels maintained by members of the hacker activist group “Anonymous,” a digitally generated voice explains that the online collective has decided to take down the Fox News website on Nov. 5th of this year.

The date, Nov. 5, is significant for its dramatic placement in the film and comic book “V for Vendetta,” about a freedom-loving terrorist who destroys an authoritarian government that’s come to power in the U.K. “Remember, remember the 5th of November,” is his saying, hearkening back to the “Gunpowder plot” of 1604, in which the terrorist Guy Fawkes was captured and executed for his attempt to blow up Parliament.

The mask used by the Guy Fawkes character in “V for Vendetta” has also become a ubiquitous symbol for “Anonymous.”

To mark this 5th of November, the latest “Anonymous” video points to the network’s “continued propaganda against the occupations” as reason for vowing to “destroy the Fox News website.”

“Since they will not stop ridiculing the occupiers, we will simply shut them down,” the digitized voice explains, adding that an Anonymous-driven “propaganda campaign” against Fox News would follow.

“Fox News, your time has come,” it concludes. “Operation Fox Hunt. November 5th. May the hunt begin.”

I'm not sure how good of an idea this is considering A) how good FOX is at playing the victim card and B) given the fact they have a number of cable networks at their disposal.  They're going to enjoy this as much as Anonymous, I should imagine.  Anything substantial of course will instantly get them inducted into membership of "Obama's army of digital thugs" with cries that Eric Holder should be fired for not stopping the group before.

Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if they took down their own website and blamed the President.  I certainly don't mind seeing FOX get smacked around, but I completely see Murdoch's network using this as a distraction from their own major problems.

We'll see if anything happens.  Either way, I suspect FOX is eagerly looking forward to the date.

Self-Service With A Smile

Pat Buchanan is still a colossal racist asshole, but Joan Walsh's review of Buchanan's new book is almost as bad as she spends nearly every word lashing together a raft to float on the sea of Uncle Pat's haterade just to show how morally superior she is when it comes to the really, terribly high bar of calling him out on his rampant racism.  It's not like that's difficult to do, you merely have to possess a working soul and some basic self-awareness, but Walsh strays dangerously close to using Buchanan's odious tract to play the "earth may be flat, views differ" game, almost as if she has a need to do so....and then does a terrible job of it.  This is evident in the last third of the piece, especially these two paragraphs.  First:

The end of the book contains Buchanan’s template for success in 2012, which consists of restricting trade, halting immigration, slashing federal spending and — one point many progressives will agree with – “dismantling the empire,” and dramatically cutting military spending. (There’s a reason why when I first started out doing MSNBC’s “Scarborough Country,” I frequently agreed with Buchanan, as long as we discussed the Iraq war.)

Now, let's understand the context here:  Walsh has just spent about 2000 words up until this point saying that at best Buchanan is Gollum, a creature driven by his most base desires that should be pitied and viewed as an instructional relic, a walking warning label who serves best as a cautionary tale...and then on arguably the most important single American policy decision in the last ten years, she says she "frequently agreed" with Buchanan.  I'm a little confused by that, it certainly seems Walsh more than pities the man if she can see eye to eye on him on Iraq.  She's saying he has his good points too, after spending so much time portraying him as without redemption.

Then a couple paragraphs down comes this:

But it’s also as if he’s decided to lose the larger war. I can’t imagine giving up on my country, my party and even my religion, just because the people who had come to share it didn’t quite look like me. I take this book seriously because I owe a certain debt to Pat Buchanan. Doing television with this infamous Irish Catholic conservative, I began to reflect seriously for the first time on the vision of America I grew up with. It was handed to me by my parents, working-class Irish Catholics who believed in e pluribus unum – that those words made their inclusion possible, and they would stretch forward to make sure the civil rights movement accomplished its goals, too.

The bolded sentences need to be considered individually.  First, she can't imagine "giving up" on her country, party and religion, which is a reasonable statement in and of itself but missing one phrase that most of us would have included:  "my president".  It's a curious omission given Walsh's recent history...or perhaps it's completely explained by that history.  She notes that Buchanan had given up on a number of Republican politicians, but she leaves out her "support" of President Obama and he's only mentioned by name in the paragraph directly above the this one, in reference to Buchanan's plan to defeat him.

Secondly, the notion that Walsh owes Buchanan a debt is just terribly creepy.  If Buchanan is as awful as Walsh says he is in the preceding piece, then what kind of history must they have had together that she feels she still owes the guy, as hate-filled and bigoted as he is?  You don't go out of your way to admit you owe someone like Buchanan a debt if you find him morally bankrupt.  It's not like Buchanan has been accidentally trapped by a bad hand in life or anything, his choices were repugnant, his reasoning flawed, and his rationale outright racist at times.  He's still employed at MSNBC and still writes books, so it's not like he's destitute.

She rightfully tears the guy a new asshole and then at the end says "Well you know, not only is he not terrible, but I owe him."  It's like Walsh is trying to have the benefit of attacking Buchanan while still showing she's even-handed and centrist by saying he's not that bad of a person.  I've got news for her:

He's that bad of a person.  Christ.  I knew I wasn't fond of Walsh but this piece is awful.

StupidiNews!

• Hurricane Rina is heading for Cancun, Mexico as a possible category 3 storm.
• President Obama is asking Egyptian Army chief Hussein Tantawi to lift the country's state of emergency and embrace "free and fair elections".
• House Republicans in the Pacific Northwest want to delay implementation of boiler pollution regulations by five years.
• With the death of Saudi heir Sultan al Saud, the country begins the process of choosing the next successor.
• Netflix admitted yesterday that it may spend all of 2012 in the red due to a number of strategic bungles with its DVD business.

Last Call

Seems McClatchy has finally figured out that Republicans not only don't have any real plan to improve the economy, but are actively working to sabotage what little progress we do have.  Witness Tea Party Republican Tom Rooney of Florida:

For months, the party has focused on shrinking the government, sparking ugly battles with Democrats over the budget and the debt ceiling. But with job growth back at the top of the congressional agenda, Republican lawmakers have found themselves without a clear strategy to reduce the 9.1 percent national unemployment rate.

To many Republicans, ignoring the issue likely to define the next election is a risky proposition. While political wisdom holds that voters typically unload economic frustration on the president, lawmakers like Rooney have reason to be restless: Congress' approval rating has been in the tank for months, and tied the all-time low of 13 percent last week, according to a Gallup poll.

"We get a lot of email saying, 'We want all incumbents out. That includes you. We put you in, we'll take you out,'" Rooney said.

And so Rooney, a sophomore congressman under no obligation to lead on economic policy, crafted his own jobs bill to tout to constituents. Senate Republicans did the same earlier this month, acknowledging it was needed to show Americans the proposals they support, rather than just what they oppose.

Republicans are in real trouble here.  More and more Americans are seeing the Republicans are for nothing more than whatever President Obama isn't, they overwhelmingly approve of the measures included in the now dead American Jobs Act, and are now seeing the GOP actively blocking common sense stuff they want to see passed.  

Republicans like Rooney are desperately trying to prove they are not a Do-Nothing Congress, but for three years now they have all but opposed everything the President has asked for.  Voters gave the House keys to the GOP and the economy hasn't improved...and the GOP doesn't care about jobs, they just care about winning in 2012.

The current crop of Clown Car Kids isn't exactly making things better for them, either.  You're going to see a lot more of this as November 2012 draws closer.

Super (Volunteer) Troopers

Yet another result of the financial crisis and the Republican austerity wave at the state level:  triple the number of volunteer cops and for the first time in 25 years, the number of actual cops is now decreasing in America.

Volunteer civilians are increasingly filling police roles and nearly 12,000 police officers and sheriff’s deputies will be laid off by the end of the year as local law enforcement agencies deal with budget cuts, according to a new report from DOJ’s Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program. The study also shows the first-ever national decrease in law enforcement positions in the 25 years they’ve been collecting data.

“Across the country, mayors, sheriffs, and chiefs have been asked - not only to do more with less - but also to make painful budgetary cuts,” Attorney General Eric Holder said in a speech on Monday. “According to a new economic outlook report that our COPS office released this week - we expect that, by the end of this year, nearly 12,000 police officers and sheriff’s deputies will have been laid off.”

And the reason why is that Bush bailed the banks out before he left office, broke the economy, and Republicans are blocking any and all efforts to make either the banks or the super rich help the rest of us out.   They scream "WE'RE BROKE!"  Raise taxes then.  Reagan did it.  Twice.  So did Bush 41.  So did Clinton.  We balanced the budget as a result.  Then Bush 43 came along.

Now he and his buddies wrecked the economy and we can't even afford cops.  The GOP plan?  Lay off these "evil government parasites" and then blame Occupy Wall Street for crime (which is complete horsecrap by the way.)

Welcome to GOP corporate America.  Hope you can afford your own public safety services.

Breaking News: Girl Shot In Neck In High School Shooting

Two schools in Fayetteville, N.C., are on lockdown after a shooting at Cape Fear High School this afternoon, NBC 17 is reporting.

A 17-year-old girl was shot in the neck at the school and has survived, although her condition is not known, the television station and the Fayetteville Observer are reporting. The girl's parents have been notified, the newspaper reports.

Parents are being asked to stay away from the Cape Fear campus, the Observer reports.

That school as well as Mac Williams Middle School have been locked down, nbc17 reports.

More details to come as the news develops. I will add any updates below.

Facepalm: Voter Registration Edition

Stop me if you're heard the one about the 91-year-old woman who couldn't stand in line long enough to register to vote.

MURFREESBORO, Tenn. (AP) — Ninety-one-year-old Virginia Lasater says she was unable to obtain a voter ID because she was physically unable to stand in a long line at a driver testing center.

Lasater told The Daily News Journal that she has voted and worked in campaigns for 70 years (http://bit.ly/pQiphH). She recently moved to Murfreesboro and on Wednesday registered to vote at the local election commission.

This is someone who takes her responsibility seriously, someone who knows the value of her actions.  But really, nobody let her go to the front of the line?  Couldn't someone have brought her the paperwork to fill out or given her a hand?  That's low.  I can't imagine anyone begrudging a woman that age some special attention from workers, but it looks like "tough luck baby" was the overall response.

This Jackass Of The Week brought to you by the Volunteer State.

A Remake Of The Stand? Oh Hell Yes.

Ben Affleck’s transition from an actor-who-directs to a director-who-acts just took another interesting step today. With Oscar-bait The Town and Gone Baby Gone under his belt — and the period thriller Argo currently underway — Deadline is reporting that Warner Bros. is keen on hiring Affleck to direct its feature film adaptation of Stephen King’s epic tome The Stand.

That's a long way from confirmed, but it's enough to give me hope.  I love The Stand, and the original didn't do a bad job.  They were limited with effects at the time, and what few were required were demanding (Hand of God, anyone?).  I'm a real fan, so I overlooked the shortcomings and cheered for my heroes.  A remake could be fun, especially with the diseased apocalypse that has become popular right now in horror films.   A fresh take could have something new to offer.

Now that I've said that, let me tell you what I'm really hoping for. A tie to The Gunslinger, to bring fresh interest to the project.  I admire not wanting to start the series without commitment, but right now my favorite books of all time are growing stale while I wait patiently.  I want to see Roland and his pale blue eyes, and Oy.  Tell me Christian Slater wasn't born to play Eddie.  Give me that or give me The Talisman, but give me something.  This could all grow from a successful Stand remake, so my best wishes are with them.  There is a certain snickering snobbery that some hold against Stephen King movies, and fair enough.  The man was so vivid in his storytelling that you could see it, but special effects of the day were nowhere near sufficient.

Lining Up The Wheels

Over the weekend, CNN's Fareed Zakaria talked to Iranian President Ahmadinejad, who claimed that the United States was hated around the world for President Obama's foreign policy.

“The United States has become weaker and weaker,” Ahmadinejad sniped. “And now, they are hated in the region. They are hated in the whole world. Anywhere in the world, if you go, you see that the U.S. government is hated.”

“We must be very much happy if their policies fail everywhere in the world and we should encourage them, ‘OK, go on, go on.’ And if we were not since, we should encourage the United States to remain in Iraq and in Afghanistan because they have already been mired in those two countries.”

Which is funny, because if you listen carefully to the President's domestic critics, they're lining up their arguments with Ahmadinejad.  Take GOP "presidential hopeful" Rick Santorum on Sunday...

“We have a president that was not able to set conditions and actually have the kind of influence over the Iraqi government,” Santorum complained. “Now, three years the president has had to work with the Iraq government, to try to mold and shape that relationship. And to be in a position where really the Iranians now have more sway over the Iraqi government then the United States just shows the weakness of our diplomatic effort, the weakness of this president.”

...or Sen. Lindsey Graham...

“I want our presidential candidates to talk about foreign policy. What would you do with Gitmo, would you use it, would you let the CIA interrogate prisoners, what would you do in Afghanistan?” Graham said. “At the end of the day these decisions that President Obama is making, I think, are strategically unsound, and our people need to step up and challenge him. We’ve got a jobs problem, we’ve got a national security problem that’s growing by the day.” 

Or the rest of the Clown Car Kids.

It was an “astonishing failure” that risked all the gains made “through the blood and sacrifice” of thousands of Americans, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney said.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry said he was “deeply concerned” that Obama had put “political expediency ahead of sound military and security judgment.” Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) cited it as another example of the president’s foreign policy weakness, and Jon Huntsman, Obama’s former ambassador to China, called it a “mistake.”

Herman Cain let stand his assessment of last weekend, in which he announced that withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan were “a dumb thing to do.”

Let's point out here that both Iran's President and all the Republicans who want President Obama's job are all saying the same thing: President Obama's foreign policy is a failure, that because of it America is weak, and our citizens are in danger.  And nobody seems to have noticed both Iran and the GOP are publicly making the same arguments against the President.

Funny how that works, eh?  What happens when your desire to defeat a man politically trumps the idea of country?  Why, you're a Republican.

Jobs Are Not My Job, Says Mitch

Ah, my senator Mitch McConnell once again showed a keen grasp on Sunday of what his constituents want from a Washington politician.

CNN’s Candy Crowley reminded the Kentucky Republican that a recent Gallup/USA Today poll found that 75 percent of Americans supported President Barack Obama’s plan to provide additional money for teachers, police and firefighters.

“Republicans helped not break a filibuster, if you will, in a procedural vote,” Crowley explained. “You basically got rid of that jobs bill which would have given money to the states, designed to hire or retain fireman, policeman and teachers. When we look at the polling, 75 percent of Americans supported that and yet, the Republicans were against it. So, how do you justify that in your mind?”

“Well, Candy, I’m sure that Americans do,” McConnell remarked. “I certainly do approve of firefighters and police. The question is whether the federal government ought to be raising taxes on 300,000 small businesses in order to send money down to bail out states for whom firefighters and police work. They’re local and state employees.”

“The question is whether the federal government can afford to be bailing out states. I think the answer is no.”

Sorry unemployed Kentuckians, your senator says we can't afford to lift a finger to rehire teachers and firefighters, or to in fact do ANYTHING.  But we sure could afford a war in Iraq and to give the banks trillions, yes?  Unemployed here in the Bluegrass State?  Sorry, we're broke.  Jobs are not Mitch McConnell's job, you see.

And we're broke because we can never, ever raise taxes on our precious job creators...only that's not what the bill would have done, anyway.

"Yeah, these bills are designed on purpose not to pass,” McConnell asserted. “I mean, the president is deliberately trying to create an issue here. Look, the American people don’t think, I’m sure, that it’s a good idea. Four out of five of the so-called millionaires are business owners, over 300,000 small businesses in our country that hire people. I don’t think the American people think that raising taxes on business, small business in the middle of this economic situation we find ourselves in is a particularly good idea."

On the contrary Mitch, they think it's a great idea.