Bits & Pieces #58

 

 

Robert Iger was out celebrating the 60th anniversary of Disney Land recently. Iger is the CEO of the Disney empire, but though he may be celebrating an anniversary, he has nothing to celebrate when it comes to labor relations. This millionaire CEO recently brought in hundreds of foreign workers under the H1-B visa program which was set up to allow foreign workers to enter the country to do jobs for which there were no available American workers.

That’s not what happened with Disney. They brought in these foreign workers, had the American workers who had been doing the jobs, train them and then fired the American workers, thereby saving Disney a ton of money on the foreigners cheaper paychecks. This is not only contrary to the intent of the H1-B visa it is a direct affront to every American worker. Don’t take your kids to Disney Land, World or whatever.

Iger is scum, a millionaire who isn’t satisfied to just be rich, but is willing to fire American workers so he can be just a little richer. Walt Disney must be spinning in his grave. Iger is a moral disgrace to the business community. The whole episode should be investigated by the INS and the National Labor Relations Bureau. All the foreign workers should be sent back to wherever they came from with Iger footing the bill. He has deliberately contravened the law. That must be a felony and this scum would look great behind bars.

 

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Watched Rick Perry being interviewed and although he still hasn’t abandoned his proclivity to twist the truth when making an invalid point, he seems to have gained a little intelligence with the new glasses. He made a half dozen valid points, showed some knowledge of what border control really means, beat the Texas employment history to death and showed a remarkable, for him, knowledge and understanding of the problems in the Middle East. It’s clear that if he can keep it together he could be a significant presence in the Republican field of candidates; if he can keep from going bankrupt. This column has attacked Perry viscously in the past, with good reason. He still backs policies that are anathema to any thinking human. That said, while he’s still no John Kasich, he’s way ahead of any number of posers that lead him in the polls, including his fellow Texan.

 

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Tom Cotton, Republican from Arkansas was being interviewed recently, just as we successfully put the talks with Iran to bed. Cotton seems to be without a concept of how negotiations work. He doesn’t get that Iran doesn’t really want a bomb because that would force the Sunni governments of the region to get their own bombs and would initiate attacks from Israel or the U.S. It’s a shame that we give a platform to clowns like Cotton, who speaks, almost universally without knowledge.

We all knew what had to be in the treaty. People like Cotton and many others on the Right, kept telling us what should have been there, more as a way to get face time on the tube than in any way that would have been helpful to the process.

Bob Corker, Chairman of the Senate Committee on the Negotiations, also had little to offer. He admitted that there are some good aspects to the Treaty but was still worried about inspections. Of course he was completely ignorant of the technical aspects of the Treaty that would negate his fears about those inspections if he had understood them. But then who is he, to quibble over details.

Congress complained and whined about the fact that they only had thirty days to investigate the Treaty before voting on it but of course most of the Republicans had already made up their minds against it even before they’d read it.

These are supposed to be grown men; men we have elected to run our country. What kind of illiterate imbeciles are they that they don’t think they can do a reasonably simple but very important job in thirty days? Maybe the real problem is that it might interfere with golf dates or airport restroom assignations with their boyfriends. No wonder the American public hates congress. These fat, overpaid leeches have been sucking the blood out of the country for too long. It’s time to get rid of them all.

 

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On Face the Nation, they decided to interview straight talking candidates for president. That in itself is a joke, especially since they chose Rick Santorum instead of Bernie Sanders. They asked Santorum about the Supreme Court decision on same sex marriage and he went off like an M80. His biggest objections were about the nuclear family, its sanctity and religious freedom.

I hate to clue Santorum in but with a 50% divorce rate, the nuclear family no longer has any sanctity and as far as religious freedom goes, the freedom Rick wants, is to be able to keep other people from doing what they want. That isn’t religious freedom, that’s religious oppression, which is exactly what the founding fathers went after when they made this a secular society. America is not a Christian country. It is a secular country that allows all religions to practice freely as long as they don’t intrude on the rights of others. Santorum doesn’t seem to see that, which is why he isn’t fit to be anything but what he is, an out of work, nut case.

In his discussion of the nuclear family, Santorum speaks to the concept that, the reason for the family is the propagation of children. Maybe that was true once when we needed kids to work on the farm but in today’s overcrowded world and with a fifty percent divorce rate, children are now the victims of the nuclear family concept.

We see tens of thousands of children born into poverty and abandoned by mothers who either don’t want them or can’t care for them because of religiously motivated laws that prevent abortion and religiously generated strictures that deny contraception and force women t have unwanted children.

How many marriages today are the result of a pregnancy that couldn’t be terminated because of civil or religious pressures? Most of those marriages are helping to raise the divorce rate and the rate of children that are becoming wards of the state. Gay marriage should have been sanctioned decades ago, if for no other reason than it helps take these abandoned children into loving, caring homes.

 

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Homeland Security and the media carried on and on this weekend about the dangers of lone wolf attacks during 4th of July weekend. We put extra cops on duty all over the country and even after the celebration has passed uneventfully, the media still made a lot of noise about the threat. I’m not here to deny that there is some kind of threat. We have, after all, arrested over forty people this year on terrorist related charges, but good God, how does that relate to the thousands of gun related murders that happen in this country every year that have nothing to do with terrorism? More important, how does it relate to the real threat, cyber terrorism. Cyber terrorists can do so much more damage to this country than a couple of crazed Islamic militants that there is no reasonable comparison between the threats.

 

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In an interview on Meet the Press, Ted Cruz proves what a moral coward he really is. The guy’s a smooth talker but when pushed to the wall on immigration, he refuses to come up with any solution to the eleven million illegal immigrants who have been living here for years and are now part of the American landscape. On every question that Chuck Todd asked him about immigration, Cruz went back to his only answer; that we must secure the border and that nothing can be done until we do. This is pure bullshit. We are at a net zero point of immigration from south of the border. That means that as many people leave as come in each of the last couple of years. So what the hell Cruz wailing about? This is an absolutely cowardly evasion, because this guy with Hispanic blood doesn’t want anyone from Mexico to come to this country. He wants to be an Aryan when he grows up.

The border is secure, or at least as secure as cost effectiveness can make it. Everyone knows that the Mexican border isn’t the problem anyway. It just makes a good photo op. Most illegal immigration comes in through our airports on tourist visas and the people just stay. Cruz is a coward and a liar and the furthest thing from presidential material that can be envisioned.

 

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The five million plus award given by NYC to the Eric Garner estate is a disgrace. This is a guy who was too lazy or too dishonest to make a legitimate living and his family is being rewarded for it. No, he didn’t deserve to die for his shortcomings but no one deserves to be rewarded for the fact that when legitimately confronted by police, Garner refused to just stand still and take the justly earned, if petty bust like a man.

This is one of those people who drift through life, always doing the wrong thing, contributing nothing, always being part of the problem. We can’t have a civilized society if guys like Eric Garner are allowed to just run free. No, he wasn’t an evil criminal; he was just too lazy and stupid to do the right thing. He caused the accident that killed him by continuing to not do the right thing when stopped by police for an illegal activity. This is not to say that police were justified in killing him. No way, but he is definitely no martyr.

It’s a shame that Garner should become a symbol of bad police work, when there are so many justified examples of terrible police work, like the kid in Cleveland who was shot for carrying a toy. Our lazy media doesn’t seem to be able to tell the difference between innocent victims and punks who bring these problems on themselves. The demonstrators don’t get it either. There are plenty, too many, innocent victims to choose as martyrs. Why pick punks like Garner or Michael Brown? How can we expect the cops to get it, if the people who speak for the victims don’t. But in the end, that still doesn’t give bad cops the right to kill these guys for minor offenses, and it certainly doesn’t give them the right to kill the many innocent victims that they have gunned down.

 

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The Greeks whine about too much austerity demanded by the EU. Yes it will be a terrible imposition to not be able to retire at 45, it will be even worse to actually have to pay your taxes. Poor babies. Americans worry about too much money spent on welfare. The Right should have to live in Greece to see what socialism really means. The Greeks don’t have a concept of what austerity really is.

There is almost no entrepreneurial business in Greece. In that it is a lot like France. This is a combination of government laws and union power, but unions have no power when no one is working because of their demands.

 

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Mike McCaul the slowest brain in Washington was on the tube again, proselytizing for more invasion of privacy based on the terrorist threat in the country. Of curse McCaul doesn’t register on the fact that more American’s are killed by guns by other American’s than the terrorists ever dreamed of killing. The industry he is lobbying for, the gun industry, is responsible for more killings every year than terrorists have committed since the turn of the century.

McCaul doesn’t recognize that we knew about this guy in Tennessee just like we knew about the Boston bombers. We just didn’t do anything about them. It wasn’t because we weren’t able to get info on these guys, it was because our security operations were too incompetent to deal with the information they already had.

In another vein, it seems inconceivable that soldiers on federal bases aren’t armed. These are the men and women trained to use weapons, unlike the housewives who have carry permits and no training.

 

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There are eight states in this country that have laws prohibiting activists from gathering information about animal abuse, safety abuses in the production of food and various other things that big farming does to screw the people who eat their food or the animals that provide it. Now, for the first time a federal judge in Idaho, U. S. Chief Judge B. Lynn Winmill has struck down Idaho’s ban on the filming of agricultural abuses.

The law that Winmill struck down had been recently been signed by Idaho Governor C.L. “Butch” (You gotta be kidding me), Otter. In this case the Gov happens to also be a rancher, and you can bet those pesky filmmakers affect his operations.

The big farmers have come to refer to all the activists as terrorists but you can bet your last buck that the real terrorists are the corporate farmers who are screwing up our food and abusing the animals that eventually become our food. They are the terrorist scum who will take any shortcut to make that extra buck. This is a great first step on the path to eliminating all these laws in all the other states that have enacted them.