What Mitt Really Thinks About Americans

The rich really aren't like you and me, frankly.  And when you're talking about Mitt Romney at a private fundraiser with a bunch of other rich folks, well, the truth about what they think of American voters comes out.  David Corn:

During a private fundraiser earlier this year, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney told a small group of wealthy contributors what he truly thinks of all the voters who support President Barack Obama. He dismissed these Americans as freeloaders who pay no taxes, who don't assume responsibility for their lives, and who think government should take care of them. Fielding a question from a donor about how he could triumph in November, Romney replied:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax.

Romney went on: "[M]y job is is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."

So as far as Mitt's concerned, anyone who votes for Obama is a shiftless, lazy welfare moocher who doesn't pay income taxes and demands free health care, food, and housing from the government.  Every.  Single.  Obama supporter.

We're nothing but welfare queens and strapping young bucks on the stoop drinking 40's to Mitt.  We're parasites.  We're nothing.  And Mitt doesn't even care, doesn't even "worry about those people", because he'll get the 53% of right thinking Americans to vote for him, and then they can collectively punish the other 47%.

We're not voters to Mitt.  We're not worth worrying about.  Our concerns, our hope and dreams, our struggles and our ideas to help the country?  Doesn't matter.  We're just those people to him.  Some what, 150 million of us are just faceless drains on the economy, and Mitt Romney is just going to cut us off and give more money to the top 1%.  Charles Pierce nails Mitt to the wall:

To this moment, I guarantee you, Romney is probably astonished at what all the fuss is about. This is simply the way the world is. There is himself, Willard Romney, and his perfect family, and his perfect life, and there is The Help, and The Help gets drunk on the job, and prunes the shrubbery badly, and pockets the silverware, and makes off with the odd can of salmon out of the pantry. He is who he is today because his breeding and his genes and his god have arranged him to be through a serious of immutable laws against which only a fool or The Help would presume to argue. He is what his golden life has made him to be, and his golden life was only the bare minimum of that to which god and nature entitled him. To ask him to doubt any of this is to ask him to doubt gravity or the movement of the tides.

And it's okay, because Mitt's already justified doing this to tens of millions of Americans, because we're just those people to him. We don't matter.  Mitt will simply give the other 53% what they want and he wins.

We are coming rapidly toward a devastating confluence of two colliding panics. The Romney campaign is panicking about itself, and the Republicans are panicking about the Romney campaign. He cannot come back from this, honestly. This is who he is. This is what he believes the world to be. Half the electorate already thinks he's a fake, which means he's not a very good one. There's really only one campaign left to him now.

Unfortunately for American politics, that means only one thing. It's going to get extraordinarily dirty extraordinarily fast. There is going to be pale birtherism and barely covert racism. The body of Ambassador Christopher Stevens is going to be exhumed and used as a bludgeon. There is going to be poor-baiting, and gay-baiting, and ladyparts-baiting, and probably baiting of things I haven't thought of yet. The polite part of the campaign is going to be Romney's effort to convince You that he was really talking about Them when he was calling people moochers and sneak thieves. He wasn't talking about Your Medicare or Your Social Security. Naw, he was talking about Their greed for what You have. That's going to be the polite part of the rest of the campaign, reinforced in the lower registers by a few million in ads to make sure You remember who They are.

Now here's the question, folks.  If you're not in the top 1%, and you're not in the bottom 47%, do you think Mitt still gives a good goddamn about you?  Of course not.  But the only way his wins now is otherism on an unprecedented scale.  And it will come in a fecal landslide that only billions can buy.

StupidiNews!

• Syria's continuing civil war is now expanding to the capital Damascus as the city is coming under violent attack from both the al-Asaad regime and by rebel forces.
• Occupy Wall Street's one-year anniversary was marked by protests, arrests, and gatherings across New York City.
• After an accident damaged the company's oil containment dome, Royal Dutch Shell has abandoned its plans to drill for oil in the Alaskan Arctic until 2013.
• A brewing incident in Paris pits former Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi versus Prince William and Princess Kate over topless photos and French privacy laws.
• Google continues its rivalry with Facebook by countering the social network's purchase of Instagram with its own purchase of Snapseed.

Last Call

Apparently Mitt Romney getting statistically zero percent of the African-American vote is too much to prevent the issue of gay marriage from permanently dooming the Obama campaign, as the Associated Press has found a couple of black pastors willing to tell their congregations to stay home over the President's support for same-sex matrimony.

The pastors say their congregants are asking how a true Christian could back same-sex marriage, as President Barack Obama did in May. As for Republican Mitt Romney, the first Mormon nominee from a major party, congregants are questioning the theology of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its former ban on men of African descent in the priesthood.

In 2008, Obama won 95 percent of black voters and is likely to get an overwhelming majority again. But any loss of votes would sting.

“When President Obama made the public statement on gay marriage, I think it put a question in our minds as to what direction he’s taking the nation,” said the Rev. A.R. Bernard, founder of the predominantly African-American Christian Cultural Center in New York. Bernard, whose endorsement is much sought-after in New York and beyond, voted for Obama in 2008. He said he’s unsure how he’ll vote this year.

Luckily, not even the AP is able to completely escape the very real specter of GOP voter discrimination and suppression efforts and the new Jim Crow voter ID laws.

It’s unclear just how widespread the sentiment is that African-American Christians would be better off not voting at all. Many pastors have said that despite their misgivings about the candidates, blacks have fought too hard for the vote to ever stay away from the polls.

Black church leaders have begun get-out-the-vote efforts on a wide range of issues, including the proliferation of state voter identification laws, which critics say discriminate against minorities. Last Easter Sunday, a month before Obama’s gay marriage announcement, the Rev. Jamal-Harrison Bryant of Baltimore formed the Empowerment Network, a national coalition of about 30 denominations working to register congregants and provide them with background on health care, the economy, education and other policy issues.

Now anyone who has remotely been paying attention to my loud, snark-filled diatribes on Why The Hell You Should Vote knows that I agree with this latter position, especially when it comes to the African-American vote.  It stuns me that black pastors, themselves the key engines of the civil rights movement 50 years ago and organized into a real power as Dr. King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (an organization still run by his son today) would ever, under any circumstances, actively tell their congregations to abstain from voting.

It's the most asinine, insulting, thick-headed, addle-brained non-solution to the problem I can possibly think of.  What the hell was the civil rights movement for if not to secure the right of all to vote, the single most powerful action you can take in a representative democracy?  If there's any group that should understand that without the right to vote that you have no power whatsoever, it should be black pastors.

But no.  Apparently even with the Republican party actively trying to disenfranchise millions of black voters nationally here in 2012, it's okay to say "Hey why should black folks vote?  TEH MORMONS AND THE GHEY just stay home."

You could slap magnets on Dr. King's grave and a have a large coil of copper wire and power half of the eastern seaboard from the spinning.  The fight is still going on, and we're disarming because of the gall of one candidate wanting to expand civil rights to include another disenfranchised minority?  No, I'm going to need for these pastors to have all the seats in Great American Ballpark AND Paul Brown Stadium and sit the hell down for a second.

This is the AP looking for a story that doesn't exist, and a scapegoat that won't be needed.  Sick and tired of blah people getting the blame for LGBT problems in the country when the real bad guys vote and are Republicans.

Eyes on the prize.

University of California Will Pay Damages To Students Pepper Sprayed

SAN FRANCISCO — The University of California will pay damages to the UC Davis students and alumni who were pepper sprayed by campus police during an otherwise peaceful protest 10 months ago, officials said Thursday.

The UC regents, in a closed-door meeting, approved the proposed settlement payment to 21 UC Davis students and alumni who sued the university and contended their civil rights were violated in the widely criticized pepper spray incident.

However, both UC officials and the ACLU of Northern California, which is representing the students in the lawsuit, refused to divulge settlement details, saying the rules of the agreement talks require a federal judge to review the matter before it can be made public. That may happen within a few days, they said.

Jonathan Stein, the UC student regent, said the settlement was warranted. "We did an injustice to our students that day at Davis, and some amount of recompense is appropriate. More importantly, it's time for us as an institution to publicly acknowledge that's not the way we should treat our students; we were wrong, and we are moving forward," he said.

We covered this when it happened.  This was an absolutely disgusting abuse of power during a peaceful protest.  The public was surprised and angry about how kids are treated when obeying the law.

We teach our children that they should stand up for what is right.  That's a good thing.  What is unfortunate is when they stand up against bullies that are meant to help our young find their way in this world.

They deserve every penny.

Oregon Cops Used Unnecessary Force On Mentally Ill

(CNN) -- Federal civil rights investigators have found "reasonable cause" to believe that police in Portland, Oregon, use "unnecessary or unreasonable force" with persons who have mental illness, the U.S. Justice Department said.

The department's civil rights division and U.S. Attorney's Office in Oregon issued a letter to Portland Mayor Sam Adams stating that local and federal authorities will "continue our collaborative relationship to craft sustainable remedies."

In the 42-page letter, federal officials outline remedies that include training and new policies to investigate alleged police misconduct.

Investigators found cause to believe that the Portland Police Bureau engages in "a pattern or practice of using excessive force in encounters involving people with actual or perceived mental illness."

"We found instances that support a pattern of dangerous uses of force against persons who posed little or no threat and who could not, as a result of their mental illness, comply with officers' commands," said the letter, which was signed by Assistant Attorney General Thomas E. Perez and U.S. Attorney Amanda Marshall.

"We also found that PPB employs practices that escalate the use of force where there were clear earlier junctures when the force could have been avoided or minimized."

One incident in December 2010 involved several officers who used "repeated closed-fist punches and repeated shocking of a subject who was to be placed on a mental health hold," the letter said.

Adams, in a posting on his web page, vowed that the city and its Police Bureau would improve quickly, and listed a series of changes.

Changes? Great.  But are we supposed to believe that because of improper training, bullying and abusing people with "real or perceived" mental illness was ever considered okay?  Does being an ass to a person, setting them off so you can use the power you want to use a valid strategy for dealing with anyone?

Promise of change is better than nothing.  However, I refuse to believe that training or policy did not allow officers to use common sense.  We've covered this month an old woman pulled from her car, a petite nurse body slammed into the ground, and learned that police set up the Occupy movement and enticed them to turn criminal so they could be busted.

We need cops to be the good guys.  It's not easy, but if it was easy everyone would do it.

Cold-Hearted Mother

FAIRBANKS, Alaska — An Alaska woman accused of leaving her two young children in a car when it was at nearly 30 degrees below zero has been given jail time.

The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner reports (http://is.gd/LGKFNd) 26-year-old Kristin Smith of Fairbanks was sentenced Wednesday to three months in jail after pleading guilty to misdemeanor reckless endangerment.

Alaska State Troopers say it was 28 degrees below zero when Smith left her two children — ages 3 and 4 — in a car one January morning after the vehicle slid off the road and got stuck in a ditch.

Authorities say the children were in the car for about 20 minutes before a passer-by found them sitting by themselves wearing little clothing.

Troopers interviewed Smith later in the day. She told them she left the children in the car and walked a quarter-mile to her husband's house, where she took a prescription medication and fell asleep.

I was actually feeling bad for her, having to choose between leaving kids in a (somewhat) safe car or move them outside in that kind of weather.  Then I got to the part about her falling asleep and was ready to throw her in an ice pond to see how it felt.

While she'll never qualify for mother of the year, I have to ask... how is this different than the people who leave kids in hot cars to die?

Boy Arrested For Beating Disabled Mother

ELK GROVE, Calif. — An 11-year-old boy was charged with assault with a deadly weapon and elder abuse after his disabled mother was beaten so severely with an extension cord that she was hospitalized, authorities said.

Prosecutors said the boy appeared to be the primary caregiver of his 51-year-old mother and prepared meals and did laundry in the home they shared.

He was in custody at Juvenile Hall, with a hearing set Thursday. His name has not been released.

The boy was arrested Monday after officers visited his mother and talked to him at school. Details about the mother's disability have not been released.

Taking care of a parent is one of the hardest things someone can do.  What this boy did was terrible, but so is putting the care of another human being on a child too young to take care of himself.  There are two victims here, not one.

This is what will happen if Romney and  Zombie-Eyed Granny Starver Paul Ryan get their hands on the budget.  People like this woman and her son will become collateral damage, meaningless pawns cut off to suffer so big business and the rich can prosper.

 

Iran So Far Away From The Truth

The notion that Iran is in any way an existential threat to any other country, especially the United States or Israel, is flay out ridiculous.  But Israeli PM Bibi Netanyahu wants his war, and he showed up on a couple of Sunday shows here in the US ahead of this week's UN meetings on Syria and the Middle East to try to make the case that we need to attack Iran now.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned on Sunday that Iran was just six to seven months away from the brink of being able to build a nuclear bomb, adding urgency to his demand that President Barack Obama set a "red line" for Tehran in what could deepen the worst U.S.-Israeli rift in decades.

Taking to the television airwaves to make his case directly to the American public, Netanyahu said that by mid-2013 Iran would be "90 percent of the way" toward enough enriched uranium for a weapon. He again urged the United States to spell out limits that Tehran must not cross if it is to avoid military action - something Obama has refused to do.

"You have to place that red line before them now, before it's too late," Netanyahu said on NBC's "Meet the Press" program, adding that such a U.S. move could reduce the chances of having to attack Iran's nuclear sites.

Iran has been six months away from a nuclear weapon for what, decades now?

ABC News correspondent Brian Ross went one step further, with the even more ridiculous claim that Iran was only weeks away from a nuke, one that was immediately challenged by his ABC colleague Christiane Amanpour.

ABC News global affairs anchor Christine Amanpour on Sunday threw cold water on one of her colleagues, Brian Ross, who had reported that Iran could have a functional nuclear weapon in as little as four weeks.

During a panel discussion on ABC, host Jake Tapper asked Ross how quickly Iran could build a nuclear device.

“Four to six weeks away, if they made the decision to do it,” Ross claimed. “That’s some of the intelligence. They haven’t made that decision, that’s the key.”

“That is so vastly disparate,” Amanpour pointed out. “Others say it could be a year. So, this is a guessing game that’s gone on for years.”

“It could be two years,” ABC Senior Foreign Affairs correspondent Martha Raddatz agreed.

“That’s the latest claim,” Ross argued. 

That's baloney, Brian.  It's nonsense.  Iran is only a threat to its own citizens, and frankly here in America we have our own insane religious fundamentalists repressing women, looting the treasury, and controlling the media, and we've got enough nukes to kill everyone on the planet dozens of times over.

I'd be far more worried about what the US would do to Iran than what Iran could possibly do to the US.  The question is will Israel force President Obama's hand and attack Iran as the ultimate October surprise?

I don't know.  Bibi doesn't exactly strike me as a stable guy.

The Right Has Lost It

Glenn "Instadipstick" Reynolds is calling on President Obama to resign over Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, aka Sam Bacile, the man behind the ridiculous film that purportedly set off the embassy attacks, a man who is a convicted felon, by the way, and most likely violated the terms of his probation in the course of making the film.  Reynolds accuses the President of violating his oath to protect the Constitution because somehow, California cops knocking on the guy's door means Obama broke the First Amendment.

What I want to know is how Self-Appointed Prosecutor Reynolds, ostensibly a law professor, would set up his case against the President if he were a Senator charged with trying the President in an impeachment trial.  His answer:

By sending — literally — brownshirted enforcers to engage in — literally — a midnight knock at the door of a man for the non-crime of embarrassing the President of the United States and his administration, President Obama violated that oath. You can try to pretty this up (It’s just about possible probation violations! Sure.), or make excuses or draw distinctions, but that’s what’s happened. It is a betrayal of his duties as President, and a disgrace.

He won’t resign, of course. First, the President has the appreciation of free speech that one would expect from a Chicago Machine politician, which is to say, none. Second, he’s not getting any pressure. Indeed, the very press that went crazy over Ari Fleischer’s misrepresented remarks seems far less interested in the actions of an administration that I repeat, literally sent brown-shirted enforcers to launch a midnight knock on a filmmaker’s door.

But Obama’s behavior — and that of his enablers in the press — has laid down a marker for those who are paying attention. By these actions he is, I repeat, unfit to hold office. I hope and expect that the voters will agree in November.

Reynolds of course has no credibility on the subject of "actions that a President should resign over" given his relentless cheering of Bush the war criminal and destroyer of the US economy for 8 years.  And as I said, the idea that a teaching law professor who has no effing clue how the Constitution actually works is just pathetic.  The guy violated his probation.  The cops want to talk to him, since the evidence of that is ALL OVER THE GORRAM NEWS.  Janet Shan at The Moderate Voice reminds us of those probation terms:

Let me underscore the fact that Nakoula Basseley Nakoula pleaded no contest to bank fraud charges in 2010 and was banned from using computers or the Internet or using false identities as part of his sentence, according to the LA Times. So, what of the alias, Sam Bacile? How did he get the money to pay the crew, actors and actresses for the movie? This just plays into the narrative that the right wing will do anything to put an idiot in the White House at all costs, oblivious to facts and the truth.

The reality is that with Romney now clearly losing, the right is increasingly, shriekingly desperate to try to create a "scandal" that will somehow drive the President out of office.  The right is coming loose now that they sense Romney's blood in the water.  This has nothing to do with how the First Amendment really works, as Oliver Willis points out, but everything to do with trying to use magical thinking to save Romney's failed campaign:

These are the same people who insisted that protests against advertisers bankrolling Rush Limbaugh’s misogyny were somehow against free speech.

Except — we’ve got no government actions here to squelch speech. We don’t have a rehash of the Alien & Sedition Acts, or past U.S. government offenses that were in retrospect actual violations of the Constitution.

You have – to varying degrees – representatives of the government voicing their disagreement with some speech. But both President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton have made quite clear that in America we don’t have the power nor interest in using the government to censor speech.

It’s just not what we do.

So why the conservative freak out? In addition to America having a black, Democratic president, there’s a good chance now that America will re-elect that black, Democratic president. In large part this is thanks to the dud of a candidate the Republican party has selected yet again.

They think it's still 2010 when they can yell and scream about Obama the traitor and that the country will come and vote GOP.  Except for the fact that in the last 20 months, the voters have seen very clearly the awful bargain they got in state after state and in the House by putting the GOP back in charge.

They're sick of them.  And the wingers are terrified.  They see it slipping away just like it happened in 2008.  They will do anything to try to win now.  Including idiocy like Reynolds's call for the President's resignation.

I call on Glenn Reynolds to resign his college teaching job.  He clearly has no idea how American law or the Constitution works.  See how this goes, Glenn?

Scott Erik Kaufman at LGM and Steven Taylor at Outside the Beltway are equally brutal to Hehindeedy Glenn here.  Go read their takedowns of this blithering idiot as well.

The right has lost it completely at this point, and it shows.

StupidiNews!

• As the Chicago Teachers Union strike enters its second week, Mayor Rahm Emanuel is calling on the federal courts to break the strike.
• Occupy Wall Street's one-year anniversary means NYPD riot police are on full alert across the city this morning as disruptions and demonstrations are planned.
• As the dispute over three contested islands in the South China see heats up between Japan and China, anti-Japanese protests in a dozen Chinese cities turned violent over the weekend.
• The US is leading 29 other nations in a massive joint naval mine-sweeping exercise in the Straits of Hormuz near Iran, as a show of strength.
• Apple is once again dealing with all of its pre-orders for its new phone being sold out in an hour, and customers now face a 2-3 week wait.

Last Call

Obama campaign deputy manager Stephanie Cutter takes on the Romney campaign's latest ad blitz accusing President Obama being soft on China and bad for manufacturing jobs, and sets the record straight.

“Here’s the full story: Over the last two-and-a-half years we’ve added more than a half million manufacturing jobs. They’re actually the first manufacturing job gains since the 1990s,” says Cutter.
She also attacks Romney’s tax plans, saying that his proposals to give tax breaks to American companies overseas could send 800,000 jobs abroad, to “China, Mexico, and other countries.”

“His plan encourages companies to create jobs there instead of here at home,” she says, proceeding to hit Romney on his record at private-equity giant Bain Capital and for investing in Chinese companies.

Cutter dismisses Romney’s claims that the administration failed to be an effective advocate against unfair trade practices, accusing Romney of “actually attacking the president for being too tough on China when they were flooding the market with tires.”

“Seriously, when the president stepped up on behalf of American tire workers, saving more than a 1,000 jobs, Romney said it was ‘bad for the nation and our workers,’” she says, citing a passage from Romney’s 2010 book “No Apology.” Romney had criticized the president’s decision early in his administration to side with the United Steelworkers and impose a 35 percent tariff on Chinese tire makers.

Looks pretty bad for Romney, but remember, the facts simply don't apply to them anymore, by their own admission.  It's pretty one sided when you fact check him, because they simply don't care if they're caught lying.  It becomes "So what?"

So what, America?

So what are you going to do about it in November?

Podcast Versus The Stupid!

This weekend's episode: Romney Shambles, as Bon and I discuss the Romney campaign falling apart so badly that the winger blogs are calling on President Obama to resign, why you need to vote, and why down ticket Senate and House races are so important this year.  Do give a listen.

Listen to internet radio with Zandar Versus The Stupid on Blog Talk Radio

As always, you can download the episode in mp3 or Windows Media Player format, listen in iTunes, or check out the archived episodes of PVTS on the Archive page. And if you like what you hear, consider throwing in a couple of bucks via secure PayPal donation, eh?

Thanks!

Dina Lohan - Acting Fail

Dina Lohan tells TMZ ... she had NOT BEEN DRINKING before her interview with Dr. Phil ... and blames the editing for making her appear intoxicated. 

The interview -- set to air on Monday -- was taped several months ago ... and a new promo for the episode features a seemingly confused Dina acting bizarre .. and many people suspect she was blitzed. 

In fact, the promo features a clip in which Dina's ex-hubby Michael Lohan asks Phil if Dina had been drinking before the interview. 

But Dina is adamant she was sober ... telling TMZ, "I don’t care what it looks like. I’m fine and I don’t care what anyone says."

She continues, "All people saw was two minutes edited of an hour long interview. Of course they cut it to make it interesting. That’s their job . I don’t blame them for doing that. Some of the comments were taken out of context but I’m fine. I’m fine.”
 

Sounds  a bit like denial.  Which makes sense, as it's the same lines Lindsay said over and over, while she lost weight, looked haggard, went to jail and stayed in trouble for years.  She learned from the best liar there is... her mother.

There is no Jedi editing trick to make this woman look bad.  She did it herself.  I cannot imagine what the full hour would be like, I'll pass.

Blind Affection

Stolen shamelessly from cheezburger.com.  The generosity of a stranger.  The love of a lifetime.  I bawled for a several minutes, and then cheered up when I realized we live in a great world where someone can care so much, and a blind cat can still find your laptop and decide to place themselves right on the keyboard.  All is right with the world.

4 years ago while I was on holiday in the south of Italy (was living in the north) I found a tiny kitten desperately crying with the power of a thousands suns. I decided to take care of her during my holiday, so that she would be stronger and more capable to survive when I would leave back home. At the time she was obviously too young to survive alone under a 43 degrees Celsius (109 F) sun. 

Her legs were clearly not okay, the mouth was also asymmetrical and impossible to close, probably because of a trauma, but the worst news still had to come. The following day I brought her to the vet who said that her eyes were closed not only because she was still too young but also because an infection ate both eyeballs. The vet also said that she was too weak, and that he thought that she could not survive. 

In the following days my brother and I started to take care of her eyes infection, ears infection, intestine worms and fever, while keeping her warm, feeding her with warm powder milk every 4 hours and teaching her to follow the noise of our steps and clapping hands. After 15 days Skunky was still weak but alive, but I had to leave. So I changed my plane reservation to include a pet, and long story short, Skunky is now sleeping in my bed, with the body under my covers and her head on my pillow. 

…what Skunky gives to me everyday is worth 10 times more what I might do for her.

 

Your Sunday Morning Read

I'm going to try to give you folks an in-depth piece to read on Sunday mornings from here on out, and you're going to want to start with MoJo's brilliant Mac McClelland as she goes back to her working-class roots and meets her old college roommate Erin and her husband Anthony and family in suburban Ohio and asks "whither the middle?"  If you want to know why the GOP is losing in the Buckeye State after 2010 swept in the GOP, you don't have to go too far past "Ohio's War On The Middle Class."

We've been roommates before. But that was back when we went to Ohio State, from which we graduated almost 10 years ago. Now Erin has a grown-up job as a public school teacher and a husband who's a public information specialist for the Ohio agency that keeps tabs on local utilities and makes sure they don't go all Enron on consumers. They have a baby, Jocelyn, who is extremely cute and well behaved, as well as a gray cat named Princess Vespa and a black cat named Barack Obama. For a long time, my contact with Erin has been limited mostly to occasional phone check-ins during which we brief each other on, like, how adulthood is going. Now I'm taking up temporary residence here not as a fun former roomie but as a reporter. I write Erin a rent check for a third of the mortgage—$430. She says she's really happy to see me, even though she knows the grown-up reporter reason I'm here is that she and her husband are state employees, so something bad is bound to happen to them in the next month. That $430, she tells me, might make an important difference in their finances soon.

It's people like Anthony and Erin who are suffering when the battle cry in states like Ohio turns to "government employees are parasites."  But it's not just Ohio that has declared war on their own citizens.  Plenty of other red state governors have gone after state employees, not just John Kasich in Ohio.  When you slash budgets to give tax cuts to the rich, and cut jobs in the process, people suffer.  And guess what?  These people have friends, they have families, they affect people's lives, and when they say "Well, one of us just got laid off due to government cuts" people start thinking "Hey, these are good people, their kids play with my kids.  They're not parasites."

But they see the people who are parasites:  the ultra-rich, profiting off these tax cuts, and then they remember they can vote in November.

Erin and Jocelyn have been going to these protests in Columbus. Neither one of us was really an activist or even especially politically minded in college, but lately, a phone conversation that starts about these amazing ice cream bars ends with news about what Kasich is doing or some kind of fretting, like she's doing right now. With the news that Anthony will likely lose his job, she's panicked that she missed the open enrollment period for her health insurance plan because she assumed, with the faith that professionals tend to default to when they're employed, that no one in her family was about to be jobless. All three Rodriguezes are currently on Anthony's insurance, because it's much better, and cheaper. Luckily, it's not too late to switch. By the end of the week, she'll drive to the appropriate office to drop off the paperwork. And then she'll cry in the car for an hour while Jocelyn's asleep in the backseat, which she'll confess to me when I tell her she's handling her "freaking out" well.

Erin recognizes that she could do a lot worse; if her nightmare of losing her house ever did come close to a reality, her parents would likely rescue her, she knows, as much as she would hate to have to take their money. But her friend, for example, who had a baby at the same time, has been surviving with her husband on his teaching-assistant salary only because they fell into a situation with free rent. Now they have to move, and they have no idea what they're going to do. And a parent of several of Erin's former students had to choose between sending his kid to college and working, since the only job he could get didn't pay enough to cover tuition—and financial aid would be available only if he were unemployed. Erin acknowledges that having to downgrade to a less-great health insurance plan is the sort of thing the upwardly mobile liberals of our generation like to refer to on the internet as "white people problems." A layoff might knock her back an income class or two. But not everyone she knows has a spare income class to fall.

Now, Erin eyes her 11-month-old when she says, "Thank God I have a job. And a job with insurance. Anthony's applying for jobs like crazy, but he's not getting any bites."

But gosh, I thought the tax cuts for the rich was supposed to free up capital so that private sector jobs would be created to keep the people laid off from government work employed.  Surprise!  Not happening.  Ohio's unemployment rate is 8.6%, higher than the national average.  Mac goes on to talk about some of those private sector jobs she's seen that replace these higher-paying "government parasite" jobs:  $9 a hour shifts in a warehouse with no AC in summer or heat in the winter, and where you get fired for not being on the floor 98% of your day.

These workers are all hired as temps by Susie's company. If they make it 90 days, they have the opportunity, in theory, if there's an opening, to become full employees of the logistics company, which means better benefits and about an extra dollar an hour. It has been six months since the logistics company graduated someone here from temp to employee status. At one of the other locations Susie manages, no one has been hired as a real employee for two years. One of the workers in this warehouse has been a temp for a year and a half.

After we walk past workers stuffing inflated plastic air pockets in boxes and a guy continuously taping shut the bottoms of just-made cartons, we go to Susie's office. "Hold on, I gotta fire somebody real quick," she says, picking up the phone. She calls a man who's been working for her for two months. She's sorry, she tells him, but she has to let him go because one of the supervisors caught him talking on the floor. The man, who she thinks is in his late 40s or early 50s, protests that he only asked a new guy where he was from. That's just not the culture, Susie tells him. You know the rules. The logistics company sets them, and she has no choice but to enforce them.

It does say in the new-employee handout that there are no personal conversations allowed on the warehouse floor. Also, no cell phones are permitted. Like a high school teacher, Susie has a pile of phones she's confiscated in a plastic bowl on her desk. Two sick days are allotted per year, and workers must be excused to take them without penalty; after that, the temp is terminated, doctor's note or no. Every temp is allowed one 30-minute break per day, and it must be taken on company premises. Every temp is required to have an ID badge. The cost of this badge, more than an hour's worth of wages, is deducted from the temp's first paycheck.

These are the jobs that globalization creates.  These are the companies that spring up when unions are destroyed and benefits are destroyed, where you lose your job if you talk at work.  This is what the "middle class" looks like now in Ohio.  This is the GOP path to "prosperity", a $9 an hour job that might mean $10 an hour someday in the future.  Maybe.  No guarantees.

But we have to get rid of teachers and state workers and unions and collective bargaining because they make too much money and we're TAXED ENOUGH ALREADY.  

"We" of course being the one percent.  This is what they bring to the table.

Go read the whole thing.