Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America and many other good books, has a Facebook account. And she posts regularly.
Yesterday:
Yesterday at a labor event I gave a brief talk on workers’ rights. Very brief: American workers have no rights.
Economic lesson No. 1: The reason business is in business is to make as much money as possible. Businesses are not social welfare experiments whose primary responsibility is to provide jobs and meet the demands of ever-shrinking labor unions …
There is good news. In the private sector, labor unions are quickly becoming extinct …
The evidence is clear: Labor unions have a history of destroying companies and jobs, and have done much to kill the economies of states like Michigan, Ohio and Illinois — all states that supported Mr. Obama.
Good news, lads! Good news! When we’re fighting the scrabbling crowds on Friday, no union workers in most places!
Trivia notice: The paperback edition of Kipper’s Game, Ehrenreich’s lone novel (science fiction, it did not sell), features a blurb taken from the old Crypt Newsletter on its back cover!
Mitt Romney said Wednesday that his loss to President Obama was due in large part to his rival’s strategy of giving “gifts” during his first term to three groups that were pivotal in the results of last week’s election: African Americans, Latinos and young voters.
“The Obama campaign was following the old playbook of giving a lot of stuff to groups that they hoped they could get to vote for them and be motivated to go out to the polls, specifically the African American community, the Hispanic community and young people,” Romney told hundreds of donors during a telephone town hall Wednesday …
The Los Angeles Times listened in to the Wednesday call, but Romney did not appear to be aware of the presence of reporters.
Oops.
It was the gifts — free stuff they did not deserve — to those 47 percent in the national moochers club, apparently:
“With regards to African American voters, ‘Obamacare’ was a huge plus — and was highly motivational to African American voters. You can imagine for somebody making $25—, or $30—, or $35,000 a year, being told you’re now going to get free healthcare — particularly if you don’t have it, getting free healthcare worth, what, $10,000 a family, in perpetuity, I mean this is huge. Likewise with Hispanic voters, free healthcare was a big plus.”
A leading Republican governor sharply rebuked Mitt Romney for his view that President Obama owed his reelection to “gifts??? his administration gave to various demographic groups, saying the sentiment was not representative of what the Republican Party believes.
At a post-election gathering of the Republican Governors Assn., Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said Romney’s comments just hours earlier in a conference call with top donors were “absolutely wrong.???
“We have got to stop dividing the American voters …”
Can’t we all get away from The Stench? Not so fast, it would seem.
Lee Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.??? By 1968 you can’t say “nigger???—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.…
What Mitt Romney is now complaining about is the horrifying reality that many people who aren’t black see themselves as victims of those “economic things??? — and as a result anti-government rhetoric is turning into a way to lose elections rather than win them.
And I don’t think the Republican party as currently constituted can change this: after 45 years of the Southern strategy, this stuff is what defines the party’s soul.
A few years ago Atwater was the subject of a documentary called Boogie Man.
It was a comprehensive dissection, exposing the famous dead man’s tactics during the elder Bush’s first campaign.
Wholly bizarre and sickening, Lee Atwater was a bigot like Ted Nugent in that he and his pals insisted he wasn’t one while simultaneously exploiting race division.
He also played guitar and chummed around with old black blues artists who seemed to tolerate him even though they knew what he was about. Atwater apparently felt that such associations, like many so afflicted, proved he couldn’t possibly be a racist.
Then Atwater came down with an aggressive brain tumor. In a losing struggle for life portrayed in Boogie Man, he goes on a piteous self-examination trip, coming to the agonized conclusion that he was a horrible human being, one of the real bad men.
Atwater begs and talks as if he’s afraid of what’s in store. When I was watching it I was glad he perished. That seemed fair.
Atwater made a mockery of decency. From the venomous political propaganda that was his invention and the antic little white man clown guitar playing routines at GOP victory parties to the leeching on to famous blues musicians by offering them opportunity to rub elbows with famous politicians, Boogie Man continually makes you vaguely nauseous. It is the biography of slime. And the cruel animal atavism shown in it is the backbone of the crazy Republican Party.
“People work their asses off to get where they are, and they get punished,??? [a hedge fund manager] said. “I wanted to fly my friend to Davos this year, and people were like, you’re not going to fly the jet to Davos, are you? How will that look to the Occupy people? I’m like, what the fuck are you talking about? I worked hard for this!???
The supposed victimization of America’s financial elite in the last few years has been almost entirely self-imagined … —NY Mag
“We must contest every single inch of ground and delay the baby-murdering, tax-raising socialists at every opportunity,??? Peter Morrison, a Republican Party of Hardin County (Texas) treasurer, wrote. “But in due time, the maggots will have eaten every morsel of flesh off of the rotting corpse of the Republic, and therein lies our opportunity.??? –TPM
“Dear Lord:
“The American people have made their choice. They have decided that America must change its course, away from the principals [sic] of our Founders. And, away from the idea of individual freedom and individual responsibility. Away from capitalism, economic responsibility, and personal acceptance.
“We are a Country in favor of redistribution, national weakness and reduced standard of living and lower and lower levels of personal freedom.
“My regret, Lord, is that our young people, including those in my own family, never will know what America was like or might have been. They will pay the price in their reduced standard of living and, most especially, reduced freedom.
“The takers outvoted the producers. In response to this, I have turned to my Bible and in II Peter, Chapter 1, verses 4-9 it says, “To faith we are to add goodness; to goodness, knowledge; to knowledge, self control; to self control, perseverance; to perseverance, godliness; to godliness, kindness; to brotherly kindness, love.???
“Lord, please forgive me and anyone with me in Murray Energy Corp. for the decisions that we are now forced to make to preserve the very existence of any of the enterprises that you have helped us build. We ask for your guidance in this drastic time with the drastic decisions that will be made to have any hope of our survival as an American business enterprise.
A snapshot, today, of a sampling of news stories and letters using the takers and makers shtick, most from the right:
A month or so ago I broke out an old copy of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.
Struggling, I made it through to about 750 pages, around the time where Dagny Taggart is stranded in Galt’s Gulch and being shown the marvelous perpetual electricity machine that extracts power from thin air. She cannot get into the room housing it, John Galt tells her, because she is not yet ready. The machine’s room is guarded by a special, almost mystical lock, that will only open when the person trying to get in is of the right Objectivist mind and can utter the appropriate incantation. Any attempt by infidels to force entry will result in the destruction of the building.
Right then I quit.
For hundreds of pages, Rand’s characters do not converse. They exist as props to make the woman’s speeches and rants about the virtues of selfishness and the perfidy of government parasites sucking off the talents of a handful of gifted industrialists.
To be fair, the characters are not as cartoon awful as anyone now on public display in the Republican Party. Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden are occasionally even likable. And there is no blowtorch hatred aimed at non-white people.
All the good characters are stern, tall, and strong Teutonic hero types. All the bad are ugly weasels. The portrayals often seem unintentionally laughable.
Atlas Shrugged is so screwed up, so turgid, it’s difficult to imagine many of the denizens of WhiteManistan getting through it. The Tea Partiers, for instance, have never struck me as readers with the necessary determination to crawl through interminable books not written by Stephen King or Tom Clancy.
I suspect Rand has been the beneficiary of a cultural abridgment in story-telling. That is, a condensed version of Atlas Shrugged has been communicated verbally to the many in WhiteManistan.
And in so doing it has become a corrupted lore, all twisted up into whatever they have wanted to make of it, a rationale for being a gold bug (gold only shows up a few times in the thousands of pages, once as a solid bar and as the only accepted currency in Galt’s Gulch), a resonance with the paranoid feeling that your precious cash money and economic purity of essence are being siphoned away by moocher-takers, and the childish belief that the world is so dependent on the genius of American business and industry that the withdrawal of 50 engineers, tycoons and some of their assistants will bring on world collapse.
Even a bum portrayed in Rand’s book becomes a convert to the cause.
The bum has lost his job because he joined a parasitic union, which caused the company he worked for to go under. And in his bumming around the country, he has come to see the error of his ways. When he finally meets Dagny Taggart on a train, the repentant bum recites a long denunciation of the bloodsucker class and his lapses in judgment. In reward, he is redeemed and Taggart makes him a conductor on her train.
Everything the followers of Galt produce is superior, even the cigarettes. Marked by a silver dollar sign, they are the most exquisite smokes in the world.
Anyway, if you hacked 750 or so pages out of Atlas Shrugged it could probably be made into a decent piece of accidental satire.
It is trash and it’s hard to imagine anyone not thinking so, even when it was published in 1957. Alan Greenspan was apparently one person who thought it was fabulous. Matt Taibbi, much more recently, called Greenspan “The Biggest Asshole in the Universe” in his book, Griftopia. So there’s that.
The ROTFLMAO nature of Atlas Shrugged is best represented by a short speech given by Ragnar Danneskjöld, a pirate who robs from the poor to give to the rich:
Ragnar Danneskjold: But I’ve chosen a special mission of my own. I’m after a man whom I want to destroy. He died many centuries ago, but until the last trace of him is wiped out of men’s minds, we will not have a decent world to live in.
Hank Rearden: What man?
Danneskjold: Robin Hood …. he is not remembered as a champion of property, but as a champion of need, not as a defender of the robbed, but as a provider of the poor. He is held to be the first man who assumed a halo of virtue by practicing charity with wealth which he did not own, by giving away goods which he had not produced, by making others pay for the luxury of his pity. He is the man who became a symbol of the idea that need, not achievement, is the source of rights, that we don’t have to produce, only to want, that the earned does not belong to us, but the unearned does. He became a justification for every mediocrity who, unable to make his own living, had demanded the power to dispose of the property of his betters, by proclaiming his willingness to devote his life to his inferiors at the price of robbing his superiors. It is this foulest of creatures – the double-parasite who lives on the sores of the poor and the blood of the rich – whom men have come to regard as the moral idea … Do you wonder why the world is collapsing around us? That is what I am fighting, Mr. Rearden. Until men learn that of all human symbols, Robin Hood is the most immoral and the most contemptible, there will be no justice on earth and no way for mankind to survive.
Danneskjold then gives Rearden, who is already fabulously wealthy, a gold bar.
“I have always lived by the philosophy I present in my books …” Rand writes in one of two end notes to the reader.
“If you are the kind of reader who knows that for 1084 pages he has lived in the atmosphere of John Galt’s world — if you now feel regret at the necessity of returning to the gray hopelessness of a culture that is truly bankrupt …” she continues in end note #2.
Here in the heart of Red America, Beth Cox [of Hendersonville, TN] and many others spent last week grieving not only for themselves and their candidate but also for a country they now believe has gone wildly off track. The days after Barack Obama’s reelection gave birth to a saying in Central Tennessee: Once was a slip, but twice is a sign …
Now, in a single election night, parts of her country had legalized marijuana, approved gay marriage and resoundingly reelected a president who she worried would “accelerate our decline??? …
Nashville itself had gone for Obama, and 400,000 more people in Tennessee had signed up for food stamps in the last five years to further a culture of dependency. The ACLU had sued her school board for allowing youth pastors to visit middle school cafeterias during lunch. Some of her friends had begun to wonder if the country was lost, and if only God could save it.
From the social conservative point of view, the election results were bad. Really bad. That does not mean bad for social conservatives, though. It means bad for the country …
By far the most problematic result of the election for social conservatives was two states’ legalization of homosexual “marriage??? by popular vote for the first time in our nation’s history. But once again, that is not problematic because of some perceived loss of power or influence with the electorate. The other side’s victories are minute compared to our record on the issue. The problem comes from the pain that inevitably will follow from those states’ decisions.
Forty years ago, from Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, after Richard Nixon stomped the South Dakota Democratic senator, George McGovern at the height of the Vietnam War:
Senator McGovern had hoped too that Americans would share his concerns that the Nixon administration was ignoring the interests of the people and consorting only with industrial giants, the special interests of the super rich and generally sacrificing the welfare of the country at large.
Nothing that Mr. McGovern had to say on these questions got through to the people sufficiently to persuade them to vote for him …
[McGovern campaign manager] Frank Mankiewicz and I spent about three hours in a roadside hamburger stand talking about the campaign. Three weeks earlier, just after the election, he had said that three people were responsible for McGovern’s defeat: Tom Eagleton, Hubert Humphrey and Arthur Bremer — but now he seemed more inclined to go along with the New York Times Yankelovich poll, which attributed Nixon’s lopsided victory to a rising tide of right-bent, non-verbalized racism in the American electorate.
Forty years later verbalization of “right-bent racism” became one of the motivational tools in the Romney bid for the White House. More than half turned away.
The WhiteManistan roflbot art is viewable and freely usable in much larger form. It is here.
We have decayed into a nation of gluttonous, soulless pigs who feast on whatever Fedzilla provides by taking from one group of Americans (the producers) and giving to others (the takers) who haven’t earned it and don’t deserve it …
The pigs have come home to wallow in the mud of the Washington swamp … And you thought “Planet of the Apes??? was a movie …
The stealth white bigot’s riff on the Obamaphone.
Free cellphones aren’t free. Food stamps have become vote-getting extortion vouchers …
If you voted for Mr. Obama, you are thunderously dumb and incredibly naive … Thanks for nothing, numbskulls.
Twenty years ago, the results would have been different. America wasn’t nearly as stupid back then as we are today.
Bush the Elder lost to Bill Clinton in November 1992. But, yes, the angry white guy had a much stronger proportionate grip on rule then.
Krugman, on the Ted Nugents, the Psychopath Vote:
[What] we’ve just seen is a peek into the modern right-wing psyche, which is obsessed — more than anything else — with power. Policy is one thing; but equally or even more important is the sense of being with the winners, of being part of the team that will stamp its boots on the faces of the other guys.
Fresh from decisive losses in seven of Maryland’s eight congressional districts and its worst performance ever in a U.S. Senate race, the Maryland Republican Party is searching for answers to stop its slide into irrelevance in the increasingly deep-blue state.
The party lost one of its two congressional incumbents Tuesday when Rep. Roscoe G. Bartlett was defeated in a heavily gerrymandered district, leaving incumbent Rep. Andy Harris as the party’s sole representative in Congress.
Also Tuesday, voters approved ballot initiatives to legalize same-sex marriage and give in-state tuition to some illegal immigrants, despite heavy opposition from conservatives.
Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy grandfather Roscoe Bartlett, who has been in Congress for 20 years, got about 38 percent of the vote in his failed re-election bid. That’s the same as Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern did nationally in the disastrous 1972 campaign against Richard Nixon.
“Party electorate a paltry 26 percent,” reads the WaTimes piece.
He won because he gave the parasites Obamaphones — a white man’s racist group psychosis.
Morning after snapshot of country vote analysis by the Los Angeles Times.
Mitt Romney and the Republican Party bet on the New Confederacy and lost in an electoral college landslide.
In the process, they played on the basest feeling, loathing, rallying the middle-aged white voter against everyone else. The result is that everyone in the world can’t help but see the US as two countries, one that’s old fearful, motivated only by lies and anger, and one ready to try to deal with the present.
Your country has been polarized and an incredible amount of arms [are] in private hands.
These two facts alone are enough to do everything one can to deescalate.
In my opinion the quote “elections don’t change anything, otherwise they’d be forbidden??? holds true.
The US is reigned by capitalism and Obama’s reelection doesn’t change that.
You yourself have on this blog never even mentioned, that other parties exist in your country, probably for fear that democrat voters are more likely to think about their choice and thus would weaken Obama’s chances.
But a two party system imho doesn’t offer a real choice if it exists for a longer period of time. Even less so if it gets trampled on:
I think Taibbi is right, when he thinks about conciliation rather than fighting it to the grave. Especially when you remind yourself, that you would have to fight against intellectually challenged white supremacists who live in selfmade bunkers.
Indeed, Christopher Hechl has a point. I never mentioned any third party runs. Roseanne Barr, the famous tv sitcom actress, was on the ballot in Pasadena. And so was Jill Stein of the Green Party.
And much earlier in the year an organization funded by centrist hedge fund managers called Americans Elect tried to mount a third party campaign. Americans Elect was ignored, I believe rightly so, being more of the same rich man’s business. And Jill Stein of the Green Party had a hard time getting the mainstream media to cover her even when she was getting arrested as a publicity stunt.
The truth is third party runs have been rendered impossible. And it’s because of money.
Everyone has noticed the plutocrats funneled hundreds of millions into the extreme right’s campaign in an attempt to remove Barack Obama. They didn’t choose to start a new party. They bought one off the shelf, the Tea Party, in a concerted campaign that started prior to the 2010 election.
There are many lists now circulating of the biggest winners and losers from the election; oddly, however, none of the lists I’ve seen mentions just how bad this result is for Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe.
The story, as you may recall, is that the financial industry — having brought both itself and the rest of the world to the edge of disaster — was bailed out by taxpayers. Yet far from being grateful, top financial types were furious at Obama for occasionally hinting that some of them might have misbehaved a bit. And investment bankers — who normally lean Democratic — went overwhelmingly to the other side, pouring cash into Mitt Romney’s coffers in the no doubt correct expectation that a Romney administration would dismantle financial reform and treat their wealth with the adulation they believe to be their birthright.
But Romney lost and Obama won. The limits of their power have been cruelly exposed, and the reelected president now owes them nothing.
There was also a lot of air time wasted last night on how the country must be stitched back together.
It can’t. Those who call for it, like Tom Brokaw, seemingly whenever he was on camera on NBC last night, have brains not fit for cheap canned dog food. The map at the LA Times shows it very plainly.
The New Confederacy bet won all the votes in the south and in the big wasteland states with very small populations. That’s the angry white man, what this blog calls the Psychopath Vote. And it lost everywhere else, in the cities where polyglot America lives.
One sees it in California. It looks like two states. One that doesn’t count, in the interior. And the other California, the one Republicans like to mock, where most of us live, near and on the coast.
Even San Diego county went for the president. The military, it looks to me, trusted him more to steer the country right than the always war drum beating xenophobe anti-Muslim hawks.
Look close along the mighty river bordered by the bright red states — Mississippi. Arkansas and Louisiana. It’s all blue. That’s where the Americans the bigots hate live.
They live in the big blue strip along the southern border of Texas and it shows everybody that eventually, sometime in the future — maybe not anytime soon, the Republicans — even in Texas — will be finished.
That’s the present and the future coming.
Oysters take an irritant, sand, and turn it into something wonderful — pearls. That won’t happen in the United States. There won’t be anything good that transforms out of the vast expanse of irritant fighting mad red. It will just get less so. The inexorable long march of time will dispose of the modern GOP.
The election won’t correct anything. The Republicans will persist in going after all their imagined enemies, denying science, trying to impose control on the reproductive rights of women, jamming up everything where they can, damning gay people and loudly proclaiming how they are the makers and everyone else, swine. Many of them have already proclaimed the election an historic world tragedy.
The parasites won! The election result only confirms this ugly paranoid belief — the Democratic strategy is to make as many people as possible a government dependent, a moocher, and in so doing cultivate a voting base that outnumbers the “producers.”
It’s a horrible slur to regard over half the country as nothing. But it’s their encapsulated delusion and nothing can change it.
Expect more of the same from the Republicans. Love is transitory. Hate is forever.
“For a long time, right-wingers — and some pundits — have peddled the notion that the ‘real America,’ all that really counted, was the land of non-urban white people … Gods, guns, and gays didn’t swing voters into supporting corporate interests; instead, human dignity for women swung votes the other way,” wrote Krugman in a similar vein.
I called it Guns, Booze & Jesus. And it’s a nasty, mean hard rock tune, unlikely to get that generous spirit of Norman Vincent Peale-ism swelling in the breast of the listener. But that’s exactly how what lost last night is.
The New Confederacy was stillborn. Not for lack of trying, though. Mitt Romney and the billionaires made the cynical and loathsome decision to polish white animosity to the sharpest serrated edge that could be managed in a long presidential campaign. Sure, that animus was always there. However, they made it everything, turning it into the biggest, baddest, most damaging brand they could. And they came up short.
Even at the bitter end, Mitt Romney still wasn’t able to be magnanimous in defeat. He emphasized he and his wife would pray for the Obama administration and the country. They would pray for all of us. In the extremist Republican lexicon, you are prayed for because you are thought flawed, unclean, a sinner who may fall. The quality of faith is most insincere.
Decency and the forward look was triumphant. However, the rancid toothpaste won’t be going back in the tube. It’s what we have now.
I would have paid a movie fare to see the blood squirt from the corners of Ted Nugent’s eyes like a Texas horned toad before the man collapsed in a heap on the floor in Waco. I have heard Nugent is on an obscure Turkish painkiller called Wallot to control the agony of exploding kidney stones from decades of over-consumption of fatty hog meat and diet soda. Wallot can loosen inhibitions leading to crazy outbursts of reptile-like hissing and subsequent unconsciousness.
And, yes, he did manage to call everyone who voted for Obama a subhuman varmint. The hate is still strong within him.
Today Washington Times serves up a real Halloween treat: A Q&A with Ted Nugent, living symbol of the Psychopath Vote. So I’ve used the scariest Ted photo I have, one where he’s in his best Deliverance-style pose, a dangerous scowl just before beating a houseful of blood-sucking Democrats to death with his acoustic guitar in Haddonfield, Illinois.
Enter the liberal death wish of Mayor Coleman Young and a tsunami of negative, anti-productivity policies by liberal Democrats that put a voodoo curse on our beloved Motor City. When you train and reward people to scam, cheat and refuse to be productive, there is only one direction that society can go: straight down the toilet. It is truly a heartbreaker. Some wonderful people are still to be found back home, but they are outnumbered by the pimps, whores and welfare brats that have made bloodsucking a lifestyle. And now we have a president who is doing everything he can to take the whole country down that same path.
On going after all the parasites, or as the newspaper puts it, “What needs to be done to put the cycle of dependency in reverse?”
he Last Best Place has dwindled considerably since the big lies of The New Deal and The Great Society succeeded in brainwashing a segment of our country to believe Fedzilla would provide for anyone who decided, for whatever reason, to not be productive. In Mao Tse Tung’s Communism, the term “leaning on the hoe??? came about as more and more people learned that laziness would be rewarded and blood could be sucked …
President Obama fanned the flames of this brainwashing, but thankfully a brilliant businessman like Mitt Romney has all the right ideas …
Sage Keffer is a young man with huge ambition. He is a country kid who grew up fishing and camping and always wanted to be a country music star.
So, he thought it was a perfect fit to compete on an outdoor survival show hosted by Nugent.
Keffer said his time with the CMT show Runnin’ Wild…From Ted Nugent, in which contestants display survival skills, was a nightmare and in some ways totally unexpected …
“I said, ‘what’s the prize?’ They said, ‘well, CMT has not told us yet, but you’re going to be blown away,'” Keffer said.
Then, about one year later, the show still had not aired, and Keffer’s emails about the prize had gone unanswered, when one night he received a Facebook message from a fan who said they had just seen Keffer competing on CMT.
What his fans did not know was that all Keffer got for his victory was a set of bleached antlers.
“I didn’t go down to Waco, TX, just to be tortured,” said the contestant. Well, yes, yes, he did.
Sunday was a fine day in Pasadena, warm but not incinerating like most of late summer. You could feel the fall coming on as the sun set, the heat from the afternoon leaving for the sky. And so the closest thing I still have to a family member and I took one last year’s opportunity to grill chicken in the driveway, something we hadn’t done much since the death of a close friend over a year ago.
And while enjoying the day we spent a lot of time talking about what had happened to the country. How had our demographic, the white American, become so rancid and bad? And we had no answers. How could anyone be so driven mad by hate as the current standard of the Republican Party?
In Pasadena, there are stark examples of what the last four years of austerity have wrought. California has been a smaller version, ahead of things in the rest of the country. Before the presidency of Barack Obama, it had a Republican minority that made governance impossible.
Because of the legislative rule that all law having to do with taxes and the budget requires a two-thirds majority, the unimportant party paralyzed California. It ruined the political career of one its own, the celebrity governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was torn to shreds on the horns of its extremism.
And in Pasadena, something I see every day, PCC — the city college, is now virtually undone. Sure, it still has students and the buildings are there. But because of austerity and the Great Recession, there isn’t the money to teach anyone. There’s no money to pay instructors, no money for anything. One of the jewels of the California city college network, long a way for the disadvantaged to at least get some manner of education that might help in the American labor force, sits idle. You can maybe take one course a semester.
“They come in, they’re admitted, but there are no classes. They want that basic English, basic math, all that, chemistry, history courses. And it’s full,” Scott said.
Last year the system as a whole turned away 137,000 students who could not get into a single course.
“It’s sad to think that we’re looking at a group of students who are thirsty for higher education, all of which would enrich their life and enrich the economy of California, and because of a lack of state resources, we’re having to limit it,” Scott said.
Gen said those numbers don’t even include the number of students who may get one or two courses but will take much longer to reach their goals.
He said this is especially problematic when the community colleges are often relied upon for retraining and updating skills during an economic downturn.
“It’s not happening because we’re not willing, and not because there are too few students, but because we’re not able to get funding,” Gen said.
The Republican Party, which can’t get officials elected anywhere in the state that isn’t lily white in the hinterlands or near San Diego, have brought on the destruction of everything.
And this is what Mitt Romney will deliver to the rest of the nation of he inexplicably wins in the first week of November.
The party of nihilism and know-nothing will take over, people who believe in naught but maximizing theirs and squeezing and persecuting everyone else unlike them.
A party that disbelieves science.
A demographic in which reason and truth mean nothing.
And it’s frightening.
Because so many have bought into its toxic philosophies, repellent beliefs that 50 percent of the citizenry are parasites, that the Federal Reserve needs to be destroyed, that gays, women and non-white immigrants must be hounded. The astonishing burning animosity toward everyone not the same color. There is no bottom to the vat of poison it has tapped into.
[If] these people triumph, science — or any kind of scholarship — will become impossible. Everything must pass a political test; if it isn’t what the right wants to hear, the messenger is subjected to a smear campaign.
[It’s] their general hostility to anything that helps the 47 percent — those Americans whom they consider moochers who need to be taught self-reliance.
Before the weekend, the Associated Press ran another of those stories on the Heevahave Vote — the so-called “undecided voter,” and it’s lead subject, a white middle-aged man named Kelly Cox, was from California.
Who are these people who still can’t make up their minds? They’re undecided voters like Kelly Cox, who spends his days repairing the big rigs that haul central California’s walnuts, grapes, milk and more across America.
He doesn’t put much faith in either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. But he figures he’s got plenty of time – a little more than a week – to settle on one of them before Nov. 6. And he definitely does plan to vote.
“I’ll do some online research,” said Cox, co-owner of a Delhi, Calif., truck-repair shop. “I don’t have time to watch presidential debates because it’s a lot of garbage anyway. They’re not asking the questions that the people want to hear.”
On-line research. It’s to laugh, tossed-off horseshit.
First, the debate made [these undecided voters] want to do more research on the candidates. “I need to research some of these facts,??? one skeptical sounding woman said.
And they’ll research us into total failure, given their way.
Cox, said to be from Delhi, is from the other part of California, the great dusty wasteland, in this case somewhere between Modesto and Merced, that votes Republican but will have no impact due to the electoral college. (Don’t believe me? May you be stuck there some summer, driving the highway north and south.)
In this itself, the AP story was a joke. It’s banner undecided voter was someone whose vote is irrelevant next week.
Stay home, skip the on-line research, Mr. Kelly Cox.
Nationally, the state is going for Obama. His vote won’t matter at the national level. Neither candidate has bothered to campaign in the nation’s largest state.
However, at the local level it has been quite another thing. Because it’s the small extremist white minority in California that has managed to strangle the place, a lesson for the rest of the country.
Other pro-growth reforms would increase government tax revenues needed for these programs by stimulating the economy. One would be to adopt, yes, a flat tax. It would go a long way in achieving the prosperity that Mr. Obama never achieved with his monstrous spending. A flat tax would reduce taxes for many people …
Returning to a gold standard is another much-overlooked reform. Most people today, including most politicians, fail to appreciate how our current system of fluctuating currency values is a drag on the economy.
President Obama enters the final days of the campaign with a substantial lead among women — about 11 points, according to the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll — and enormous leads among Latinos and African Americans, the nation’s two largest minority groups. Mitt Romney leads among white voters, with an incredible 2-to-1 advantage among white men.
It is too simplistic to conclude that demography equals destiny. Both men are being sincere when they vow to serve the interests of all Americans. But it would be disingenuous to pretend not to notice the obvious cleavage between those who have long held power in this society and those who are beginning to attain it.
When Republicans vow to “take back our country,??? they never say from whom. But we can guess.
From Barbara Tuchman’s The March of Folly (1984), which had quite a lot to say about American failure in Vietnam, but which closes with something more universal:
While such virtues as [character] may in truth be in everyone’s power, they have less chance in our system than money and ruthless ambition to prevail at the ballot box. The problem may be not so much a matter of educating officials for government or educating the electorate to recognize and reward integrity … and to reject the ersatz. Perhaps better men flourish in better times, and wiser government requires the nourishment of a dynamic rather than a troubled and bewildered society.
