WHAT'S FAIR: Minimum Skills Earning Minimum Wages

Are you worth $30,000 a year?

For those fast food employees, and their nannies in public office, thinking they deserve $15 an hour, or more, let's do some math.

> At $15 an hour, someone slinging burgers would make $31,200 annually.
> An E1 (Private) in the military makes $18,378.
> An E5 (Sergeant) with 8 years of service only makes $35,067 annually.

So you're telling me, Woody Likefrieswithat , that you deserve as much as those kids getting shot at, deploying for months in hostile environments, and putting their collective asses on the line every day protecting the rights of YOUR unskilled butt!?

Here's the deal, Frank Andbeans: you are working in a job designed for a teenager in high school or working his way through trade school or college. It's a job for someone who is learning how to work. Have you thoroughly learned how to work? These jobs are designed for those looking to earn enough for shared rent, beer, and some food and gas, and hanging out with their equally goofy young pals.

If you have CHOSEN this basic means of making a living as your lifelong profession, you have not planned very well. Time to accept the consequences or to firm up, work your way out of the lower rungs, and rely on yourself, not count on foul promises of a few rise from low wages to high with little or no stops to learn skills that deserve a higher wage. It is a tough lesson, but you either learn it, or you stay where you are. The ones misleading you into believing you deserve higher pay for the same minimum role in life might sound like your hero, but they are only your big talking "better." They are fooling you. Wake up!

Here's what is fair to everyone: If you don't want minimum wage, don't settle on your minimum skills,  don't put forward minimum effort, be the example of a great employee that can move past the minimum job. And please don't expect someone else to pave your way, without you advancing your skills, for a smooth ride to $30k and better in earnings. That's how it might work in your dreams, but in real life, a solid person seeks rewards for effort, not for whining.

I revised this considerably. A version of this, no doubt a chain email, was sent to me by a retired person. He understands what working means. No one promised him a cake walk to a better life.

- J Ruse

So-called progressives' cry against AM radio: anti-free market rules are pro-free speech

The recent assault on talk radio by progressives (so-called) has also produced comments that moderate reporting, or non-biased to non-media people, is boring. That's just one of the little offshoots of this odd agenda being taken up right now.

I have a serious problem with this. This is the worst of what liberalism, or progressivism, or whatever you call it, has to offer. It shows the broader goal they look toward: to run things without a care of free markets or consumer and market guided business. It's called overregulating. They are for it. I am against underregulating, but this is no better. Nooo better!

The playground rules of equal time at bat is now being pushed for radio. Have you ever listened to AirAmerica? I once listened to a ten-minute assault on Barbara Bush, back in January 2009, calling her mean and vicious and alleging all sorts of profane things about her. I think they actually referred to her as fat at one point. I mean, it was foul and just mean. Why? How appealing is it that these "radio personalities" go after the MOTHER of the current president! Little wonder this stuff dies in the free market! Crude, and more ironically juvenile than Pee Wee's Playhouse (or, for that matter, more juvenile than Glenn Beck's radio show some days, when he does the cynical, half-funny "America's favorite game show" segments)!

Since the free market does not exist for these pro-overregulation clowns, there's ongoing debate of 'conservative' radio vs. fairness doctrine for radio. Not papers & TV, but just radio! Would force far left liberal - oh wait, 'progressive' - radio on radio stations. For what? Their future economic success?!!

They call it a 'system' of companies. Bull. Air America not a company, then? It ignores the biz law of what sells ads, which certainly TRUMPS any 'BALANCE' LAW. Ask any struggling paper just how much ads determine their life or death! Or, any radio station! This smacks of collectivism, where the media would be controlled by the all-knowing, all-controlling hand of government. Period.

I would welcome more successful liberal radio, because the so-called progressives are being so oddly anti-business, anti-free market, and inferring communist ideals in their hassling of radio stations and their owners that it smacks of outright shameless envy and jealousy. They will apparently stop only short of cutting power sources to radio stations with this assault on AM radio. (I should avoid mentioning that some areas, such as Nashville, Tenn., have excellent FM talk stations.)

Think Progress » Dear Rush Limbaugh, Why Are You Hell-Bent On Protecting A Radio Market That Limits Free Speech?
(First of all, HAAA! What a headline! Can you guess where that's going? Duh!)

ThinkProgress asked the authors of the original report to respond to Limbaugh. Two co-authors, CAP’s John Halpin and Free Press’s Josh Silver, gave us this response:

Dear Rush Limbaugh:

We have a straightforward question, which we hope you will answer in a straightforward way: When a handful of major media companies control who and what is allowed to be broadcast on the commercial dial, how is that not regulation of radio content? When these same companies then push out one-sided, right-wing information 90 percent of the time, how does that uphold freedom of expression?

Those of us at CAP, Free Press and other public interest organizations do not want to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine and we definitely do not want to limit free speech. We want more of it. You and other conservatives seem more interested in protecting a system that does the exact opposite.

If Limbaugh wants a debate, let’s have it.

Go ahead and call him, debate it! Please! There's only a few of you who could manage to handle it! But debate? Good luck with that. Rhetoric as what comes from ThinkProgess will not play for success on this issue. I think it would bore his listeners if he waited until these closeted big govt freaks had the nerve to call him and offer something remotely close to a civil, topical argument about this subject.

In the piece they at once call these "commercial stations", yet bluntly claim that they "push" an agenda? How is it that they are making any money, then? Somebody must be advertising on the stations! So all the advertisers are conservatives, too, and there's some secret handshake of advertisers and listeners who support those businesses?

Their presumption falls on its face, it seems, and they surely must know it. How can dashing free market ideals for their version of a "free" (wink) media possibly pass muster under authentic public debate? These pro-controlled airwaves (oh, but ONLY radio!) people are tossing rocks, and keeping their distance, they are not offering a debate.

Liberals have most of TV in their back pockets. Viewership of news on TV is lowering, for them. MSNBC is the laughed-at geek among all TV news entities, and steeply liberal. It is rising generally, we learned recently from viewership reports, but MSNBC is comparably rising far less than FOX News. Fox News is of course another media outlet despised by liberals. This one is disliked for simply not being liberal rather than for its being rampantly conservative -- but don't try to tell any of them that, they're too busy calling it racist, fascist and owned by "the Man". These same liberals pan PBS and NPR for being too moderate, too. Shame. I like both of those, and appreciate their reporting. Funny, I thought reporting was meant to be objective as possible, but plenty of progressives -- and a few blow-hard counterparts on the far right -- call objectivity boring. So much for news reporting and "boring" old journalism!

Liberals lay claim to the majority of large newspapers in the nation, and seem to be doing just fine with not forcing "balance" on those media. So, what gives? Not debate, that's for sure! Can you imagine if conservative talk radio hosts started insisting that such action be taken to level the playing field on television, or in major newspapers, what would happen? Can you imagine if someone allegedly legitimate tried -- seriously, not as a joke -- to petition HBO to have a counterbalance to the Bill Maher show?

How is it that AM radio, which is for some the mocked poster child for old technology, gets so much attention from these folks for abuse of free markets? Isn't this a bit like hilariously odd, like a liberal faction of our government demanding that we invade the Phillipines?

Perhaps they are doing this since they simply want to win the ubiquitous debate, not actually have one. You know, like Chavez holds elections, and supporters take control of gov't buildings while the election happens to show their support. They'll debate it, but only on their terms. "I'll debate you any time! Just submit the questions three days ahead of time, please!"

I really wish I could resist reacting to any particularly stupid fringe ideas for control, at either edge, but I cannot help it when they are conceptually bizarre and insincere as this is. Who'd have thought that AM radio was the chief threat to the First Amendment!


- jR

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(rev. Feb. 24, 2009)

Pelosi's 'bipartisanship': Excludes the minority party and new Congress members

Somebody needs to get House Leader Nancy Pelosi a dictionary, so she can look up a few words, like "bipartisanship," "merit," "liberty," and "democracy." I am amazed at how especially liberal politicians think they have the right to legislate out the gamut of influence, and legislate in the autocratic ideals of seniority over credibility, claiming that the closed-minded policies they are trying to set are to prevent their own superiorly "diverse" politics from being closed out by the other guys -- the evil, mean-spirited conservatives. Gag.

Here's what's so absurd about the things Pelosi is working toward (see article and all the links below): It's one thing, and hardly anyone is against, aid functions for those in need and the privilege challenged. This kind of "liberal" politics is an entirely different animal, and it is creepy. It is not liberal, not progessive, it is legislating one-party rule, and the Democrats actually think they have the right, since they are so much more "diverse" in their thinking. Please.

Pelosi is simply a simple-minded leader. Have a look at this offense.

John Fund Blasts Speaker Pelosi on 'Reforms' - Newsmax.com

The rule changes Speaker Nancy Pelosi is steamrolling through the House of Representatives contradict President-elect Barack Obama’s bipartisan promises, and also fly in the face of Pelosi’s own pledge to “insure the rights” of the minority party.

That’s the view of Wall Street Journal columnist and author John Fund, who documented Friday how Pelosi’s tune has changed in a bid to drown out the voices of Republican minority opposition in Congress.

Fund points out that Pelosi’s new rules sharply contradict positions she took before Democrats came to power. In 2004, Fund says, Pelosi rolled out a "Bill of Rights" to protect the interests of the party not in power.

"When we [Democrats] are shut out, they are shutting out the great diversity of America," Pelosi warned at the time. “We want a higher standard."

One of the ironies of Pelosi’s power grab, Fund points out, is that conservative “Blue Dog” Democrats are among the losers under the new rules because they often lack seniority.

Here's a link and some quotes from the John Fund opinion piece:

John Fund: Pelosi Turns Back the Clock on House Reform - WSJ.com

Every two years the leadership of the U.S. House of Representatives introduces a new set of rules to govern the body. Normally, this event passes with barely a yawn from the public. But the changes pushed through on Tuesday by Democrats will have real-world consequences for fiscal conservatives of both parties.

Gone are term limits for committee chairmen, a big comeback for seniority over merit. Cost containment measures on Medicare, one of the fastest growing programs, are simply suspended for this Congress.

Mrs. Pelosi used to see things differently. Back in 2004, she unveiled a proposed "Bill of Rights" to protect House minority interests. It called on Republicans to allow more meaningful substitutes to bills, give members enough time to read bills before final votes, and stop holding roll-call votes past the normal 15 minutes. She had a point. In late 2003, Republican leaders held open a roll-call vote on the Medicare drug entitlement for three hours until they bullied enough wavering members into voting aye.

Mrs. Pelosi warned in 2004 that "When we [Democrats] are shut out, they are shutting out the great diversity of America." We want a higher standard." In 2006, just before becoming speaker, Mrs. Pelosi reiterated her plans to promote "bipartisanship" and "to ensure the rights of the minority."

That was then.

Smell that? It's called hypocrisy. Yeah, politicians wear it for pins, but damn, the House Speaker is a true champion of small-minded, narrow and self-assuring ideas.

I can only figure that Pelosi -- flakey Sen. Harry Reid in the other end of Congress, too, for that matter -- became the leader through exactly that kind of thinking on her part and the part of her longtime, long-complacent colleagues, I can only presume. What do I mean? She has no leadership skills beyond talking until her thick lipstick starts to dry, crack and fall off.

She'll have two grand accomplishments thus far as leader if she succeeds with the above: First, she let the deep financial crisis of 2008-09 hit without seeming to grasp any of the long, government-driven, regulation-poor (that's the duty of the legislature, not the White House, folks), developments that led up to it. These issues were as obvious as her mascara, but her eyes were famously those of a deer in headlights at those first press conferences during the insane and latent TARP bill negotiations action. Second, this, the cutting the GOP out of future failures in the House. It's good for the GOP, I guess, so keep it up, Nancy!

Dear California: Would someone in the great state please find some leadership-worthy person who doesn't remind us of the stereotypically arrogant, curt and unfathomably self-assured working mom in the neighborhood who terrorizes the other parents' children with her queer ideas about fairness (her kids get it, no one else)? Please?!!


- jR

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Consumers Union: Tell the new prez we need smart health biz

"If you know of friends and family who have put off their dreams for fear of losing their health insurance, or got sicker because they couldn't afford health care, please forward this message on to them. The big banks, insurance companies and automakers are lining up at the new President's door; let's make sure Americans' need for quality, affordable health care is heard, too."

This is what it's all about, to me. I am a living example, and there are many many many out there, of someone the business side of the health care system has failed, simply because it has maintains the agenda of profits over care. Insurance and health coverage companies, legislators, and perhaps even drug companies (as C.U. maintains) are screwing us over for massive profits. When a person cannot afford to see a doctor, that person will get more sickly.

Someone could lose a job because they cannot afford to care for themselves. It happens; it happened to me, not long ago. I worry today, without health insurance since I am currently between jobs, that something might ruin my day, big time. Nobody cares, and nobody can do anything about it, except if I demand that an ER give me basic care. That is the default answer in a broken system -- ERs are not meant for basic care! I don't want to subscribe to that, but I will probably need to at some point. There is NOTHING for unemployed people, even if they served in the military (the deal is a bit less brutal, then), and I didn't. I don't want to go down that road of visiting the ER for every little issue.

I will be on the road to the Capitol if it doesn't start getting on the right path with health care. I don't specifically want some universal health care program -- namely, if the government runs it, I don't want it! -- but I will be awfully loud and clear with my opinions if the system, private-run, lawfully fair to humans and not just investors, is not reinvented. It has been this poor an overall system for health care in the U.S., for at least a decade or more, based on my personal knowledge. If the system's failures mean I might die too soon, too needlessly, then I hope the Capitol has good security, because I will try to righteously take a few lame Congressmen with me. Ridding of a few large stains on our Democracy will at least be one thing I was able to do before I leave. OK, maybe that's a bit severe. Perhaps I'll just throw eggs at them, or golf balls. See http://middleclassparty.wordpress.com. The "Tee" Party for America -- yeah!

The big banks, insurance companies and automakers are lining up at the new President's door looking for help. Let's make sure that real people like us are heard too! I just sent an email to the President-elect urging him to make affordable, quality health care coverage a top priority along with the economy. Would you take a moment to do the same?

We can't expect our economy to recover unless we make sure families aren't going without needed health care or going bankrupt just to pay for it. We saw what happened when our leaders let Wall Street run amok. We can't afford to continue to let the big insurance and drug companies dictate our health care. Rising premiums and higher co-pays and deductibles are the result, and our care isn't getting any better.

The President-elect campaigned on improving our health care system along with our economy. Let's make sure he knows we want him to follow through on that promise.

You can join me and send an email at: http://www.prescriptionforchange.org/

Thank you!

- jR

The fall of rational liberalism, in 1968

What's wrong with liberal ideals? Part II

For American liberals, there seems to be selfish, ridiculous, outright ignorant, and spoiled-brat viewpoints on many issues that extend far beyond social fairness into a desire for the contortion or destruction of harmless traditions. Being assaulted are: the idea of marriage, First and Second Amendment rights, instilling a revamped "Fairness Doctrine" onto radio (but conveniently not on TV broadcasts or print media), and other such self-serving, limited sight, or non-issue issues. There are energetic evocations from the liberal end of politics that, like it or not, verge on Socialist ideals. And not positive ones, either. There's a running list of conservatives in Hollywood on the Internet, for instance. What, pray tell, for? Leftist Fascists can use it for reference? What?

Jeanne Kirkpatrick, who some on the left regard as a vicious Reagan Era ideological attack ogre, recorded her lack of taste for liberal ideas publicly - at a GOP convention during Reagan's leadership. Kirkpatrick was a Democrat, and at one time considered herself a liberal. The liberals went too far, from civil rights to running naked through the streets having sex rights. No, not literally, figuratively. They went a bit kooky, frankly, and somehow the rational liberals let to kooks and goof balls take center stage. Have a look at some reflections on her and that long ago time known as the early 1980s, in this posting and the links within it.

I took the following from a Time magazine article dated Nov. 13, 2008. It fairly well explains why I am freaked out by today's liberalism, though it loses some value in its desire to keep it short by bundling everything together with the Vietnam War protests. Perhaps there's something in this for you, too. Read this, read the whole piece since it goes somewhere with the liberalism definition. Then contrast that with Kirkpatrick, and you'll understand where I am coming from, almost. (Yes, the anonymous-author-of-this-blog me, "jR".)

Right up front I want to point out that I was not old enough to vote, not even old enough to wear underpants, in 1968. Second, I am white. My ideas, flatly, do not align with the comment on racial freedom (equaling riots and crime), but I suppose some folks saw it as such, in the racial sense, in some locations. I was not raised with any racial epithets passing the tongues of my parents. Never, ever. Perhaps some similar feelings are held today to some degree, by some far-flung whites, but not by me or the majority. If there's evidence I am wrong about the population at large, then feel free to pass it along.

Obama, if he is to personify the next wave of positive change, will be a sensible leader akin to FDR and Reagan, he will not be like clueless Carter or tread-too-lightly Clinton or, say, Abbie Hoffman as president. The parallels to JFK that Obama gets are missing the point: JFK stepped into office when the greatest social upheaval was television for the masses. Yes, there was civil rights activism, and we know how far things went after JFK was elected, racial and social equality became the great change of the 1960s, but this was after JFK was elected. We have more issues today - Obama must work at being FDR and Reagan.

The New Liberal Order - TIME

By the beginning of the 1960s, though, liberalism was becoming a victim of its own success. The post-World War II economic boom flooded America's colleges with the children of a rising middle class, and it was those children, who had never experienced life on an economic knife-edge, who began to question the status quo, the tidy, orderly society F.D.R. had built. For blacks in the South, they noted, order meant racial apartheid. For many women, it meant confinement to the home. For everyone, it meant stifling conformity, a society suffocated by rules about how people should dress, pray, imbibe and love. In 1962, Students for a Democratic Society spoke for what would become a new, baby-boom generation "bred in at least modest comfort," which wanted less order and more freedom. And it was this movement for racial, sexual and cultural liberation that bled into the movement against Vietnam and assembled in August 1968 in Grant Park.

Traditional liberalism died there because Americans — who had once associated it with order — came to associate it with disorder instead. For a vast swath of the white working class, racial freedom came to mean riots and crime; sexual freedom came to mean divorce; and cultural freedom came to mean disrespect for family, church and flag. Richard Nixon and later Reagan won the presidency by promising a new order: not economic but cultural, not the taming of the market but the taming of the street.

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Missing Minds | Obama's Fannie Mae 'Connection' (Wash. Post - The Fact Checker)

Minds are missing, but no one at the Washington Post seems to notice.

This is from our "get over it, you silly PC dum-dum" file:

Washington Post's "The Fact Checker" cannot even get past pointing out skin color of people in an ad that regards economics by a presidential campaign. What is the point to giving credence to their fact checks, then? I put a comment under the piece at the site, but the idiocy of the piece goes beyond that one item. Going deeper into the uselessness of this fact check by the Post, says the super-brilliant Fact Checker: "The latest McCain attack is particularly dubious." Particularly dubious? How about the dubiousness of the fact check? Here's the first example from this Post "fact check" that makes my head ache:

The McCain video attempts to link Obama to Franklin Raines, the former CEO of ... Fannie Mae, who also happens to be African-American. It then shows a photograph of an elderly white woman taxpayer who has supposedly been 'stuck with the bill' as a result of the 'extensive financial fraud' at Fannie Mae."

My comment, taunting and crass, but not racist (except it would be, to irrational, knee-jerk PC liberals) seeing the context, was this:

Did you forget that Obama is half-white in his ethnic lineage? Or has he disavowed his, umm, whiteness? Curious that you point out the black and white skin color of the people in this video. Really, I suggest that the woman might be Hispanic. Oh, now that would be shocking! If you are so sure to offer the facts, try keeping to RELEVANT facts, too, Skippy.

This beautiful example of poor journalism only starts with pointing out the skin color of people, as if that is relevant. It then stumbles over its claim that McCain's camp is lying with a statement that shows Obama's troupe might be lying about the facts in the ad, and that Franklin Raines is definitely lying, within 100 words!

So what part is incorrect in the McCain camp's video? That they suggest Raines an adviser to the campaign? That's not accurate, but it is not an outright lie! The Post neglects to point out that the Obama campaign likely has -- and Raines definitely has -- lied in the matter, while the paper (seemingly by accident) actually demonstrates the lie:

Obama spokesman Bill Burton went a little further, telling me in an e-mail that the campaign had "neither sought nor received" advice from Raines "on any matter."

The piece then notes that Raines himself told a Post writer "that he had gotten a couple of calls from the Obama campaign. I asked him about what, and he said 'oh, general housing, economy issues.' "

So, how is it that Raines and the Obama camp are not lying, which is worse than stretching the truth, which is what McCain's ad does? Raines said that he got calls from the Obama team! Where is the "dubious" adjective attached to the Obama/Raines side? After the ad runs Raines says he is not an adviser, the BO club says the same thing, but Raines had said he did get calls for advice. OK, so Raines isn't flying to events with Obama, but the he did get calls. It's not an official role with the campaign, but it goes against the Obama campaign statement that "the campaign had 'neither sought nor received' advice from Raines 'on any matter.' " It would appear that they had.

Washinton Post, your bias is showing. Yet again! That, or you really need to start training your writers to see facts, and add them up.

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