Jack Clarke promoted to senior role in Sharon Graham’s team without usual exec approval, despite final warning from union after complaints of bullying and threatening behaviour The husband of Unite general secretary Sharon Graham – now a senior member of her team after a promotion said to have bypassed the usual process of approval by […]
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Last year, I wrote a couple of posts defending historical presentism, that is, the view that we should examine events and actors in history (at least in modern history) in the light of our current concerns, rather than treating them as exempt from any standards except those that prevailed (in the dominant class) at the […]
GOP wants to “fix” Social Security Republicans are still fuming at President Biden’s calling them out in his State of the Union Address for wanting to unravel Social Security and Medicare. They insist he stop spreading lies about what they clearly want to do. Social Security privatization is another “zombie idea” that should have died long ago, yet continues shambling along, New York Times economist Paul Krugman told Ari Berman Monday on his MSNBC show, “The Beat.” Yet there is former Vice President Mike Pence resurrecting an idea floated in 2005 by then-President George Bush (and soundly defeated in the court of public opinion). Bush meant to turn a portion of people’s Social Security over to Wall Street (and more of it later). “You have to be really naive not to know that what [President Joe] Biden said is true,” Krugman said. “Rick Scott, former chair of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee was foolish enough to actually put it on paper that we’re [the GOP] going to sunset Social Security and Medicare within five years.
High on pentane Seems I remember a “60 Minutes”(?) story sometime in the wake of Se[tember 11 on the vulnerability of U.S. chemical plants to terrorist attacks. Critics branded Bush Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff’s proposed security upgrades “toothless.” “There are a lot of ways to skin a cat, and we’re going to let chemical operators figure out the right way, as long as the cat gets skinned,” Chertoff said. So. Whatever happened with that? Meantime, hazardous chemicals transported by rail seem to be having a bad 2023 so far (Newsweek): On February 3, a tanker train derailed in the Ohio town of East Palestine, near the state border with Pennsylvania. The crash led to multiple explosions and chemical leaks, prompting the governors of both states to issue evacuation notices for the town and its surrounding areas. Controlled burns of the vinyl chloride from the train’s tanks were initiated, with residents warned that the air could be flooded with dangerous gases like phosgene and hydrogen chloride. The fiery crash was one of more than a dozen train derailments reported in the U.S. this year, only 1 1/2 months in.
Steve Scalise: “The president, for a few weeks now, has been falsely saying that there are people that want to get rid of Social Security and Medicare. And it’s been inaccurate for a long time — and you saw last night when he tried to pin it on us,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., told NBC News one day after Biden’s speech to Congress. “I just hope he stops going around the country telling that falsehood because there’s no truth to it. “We want to strengthen Social Security by ending a lot of those government checks to people staying at home rather than going to work,” Scalise said, endorsing work requirements for benefits. Right. All those disabled cancer patients and old people need to get a job, amirite???
But you don’t blow anyone’s mind JV Last at the Triad (subsc. only —) says that Nikki Haley would be “fine” as president and I’m not going to argue because I don’t think she would be fine at all. She’s a creature of the Republican party and it is a toxic, neo-fascist institution that taints anyone who seeks to represent it. Sorry, that’s just how it is. And Last makes that case for me when he discusses why Haley has no chance in hell: I think the jury is still out on DeSantis. He’s just a name to a lot of Republicans. In fact, there are a good number who can’t tell the difference between him and George Santos.
In a 2016 piece about the mass shooting at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub, I wrote: But there is something about [Orlando] that screams “Last call for sane discourse and positive action!” on multiple fronts. This incident is akin to a perfect Hollywood pitch, writ large by fate and circumstance; incorporating nearly every sociopolitical causality that has been quantified and/or debated over by criminologists, psychologists, legal analysts, legislators, anti-gun activists, pro-gun activists, left-wingers, right-wingers, centrists, clerics, journalists and pundits in the wake of every such incident since Charles Whitman perched atop the clock tower at the University of Texas and picked off nearly 50 victims (14 dead and 32 wounded) over a 90-minute period. That incident occurred in 1966; 50 years ago this August. Not an auspicious golden anniversary for our country. 50 years of this madness. And it’s still not the appropriate time to discuss? What…too soon? All I can say is, if this “worst mass shooting in U.S.
This should be lit: House Republicans have asked former White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony to testify before Congress as they launch a new investigation into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic. The GOP leaders of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic and Committee on Oversight and Accountability sent a letter to Fauci on Monday requesting a transcribed interview. Fauci said in November that he would cooperate with any oversight hearing in the Republican-led House. “If there are oversight hearings I absolutely will cooperate fully and testify before the Congress,” Fauci told reporters during his final briefing at the White House. “I have no trouble testifying — we can defend and explain everything that we’ve said.” Fauci, one of the nation’s top infectious disease experts, was the public face of the U.S. pandemic response during the Trump and Biden administration. He stepped down from his posts at the White House and at the helm of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in December. House Republicans also sent letters requesting testimony from EcoHealth Alliance President Dr.
They always are Krugman reminds us of the history: But, of course, many Republicans do want to eviscerate these programs. To believe otherwise requires both willful naïveté and amnesia about 40 years of political history. First of all, if Republicans had absolutely no desire to make major cuts to America’s main social insurance programs, why would they sunset them — and thus create the risk that they wouldn’t be renewed? As Biden might say, c’mon, man. And then there’s that historical record. Two things have been true ever since 1980. First, Republicans have tried to make deep cuts to Social Security and Medicare every time they thought there might be a political window of opportunity. Second, on each occasion they’ve done exactly what they’re doing now: claiming that Democrats are engaged in smear tactics when they describe G.O.P. plans using exactly the same words Republicans themselves used. So, about that history. It has been widely forgotten, but soon after taking office Ronald Reagan proposed major cuts to Social Security.
Trump and Kushner’s cozy relationship with the Saudis is the real corruption scandal Last week featured the first of what promises to be many public hearings about President Biden’s son Hunter, whom the new GOP House majority vows to investigate for the next two years. Going after what they all now casually call “The Biden Crime Family” is their number one priority. That first hearing was about a now infamous New York Post story about the exceedingly weird “discovery” of Hunter Biden’s laptop that Twitter initially suppressed only to allow back on the website just 24 hours later. This incident has become evidence, if you want to call it that, that proves Twitter was working on behalf of the Biden campaign and its alleged allies in the woke FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) to cover up the Bidens’ corruption. That hearing fizzled out, however, when it was pointed out that virtually everyone in politics, most especially Trump and his administration, were constantly asking Twitter to remove tweets they didn’t want widely seen. In the case of Hunter Biden’s laptop, Twitter made the decision itself.