State supreme court judges are bad when they OK gay marriage, but good when they hand Presidential elections to the Republican party.

Sen. John McCain's campaign said the Arizona Republican "supports the right of the people of California to recognize marriage as a unique institution sanctioning the union between a man and a woman."

McCain, who last week decried judicial activism, "doesn't believe judges should be making these decisions," a spokesman added.

Someone should tell the Rethuglicans that the judicial system is there to interpret the law, and if the law runs counter to the Constitution, it's their job to right that wrong. That doesn't make them "activist judges", that makes them GOOD judges.

And another thing. Justice Marvin Baxter, in a dissenting opinion said:

The court "does not have the right to erase, then recast, the age-old definition of marriage, as virtually all societies have understood it, in order to satisfy its own contemporary notions of equality and justice."

Two things:
1) Marriage, as we define it currently, is NOT the age-old definition, nor necessarily the same as other societies have understood it, nor should it be. Marriage in the past was used to trade family wealth, produce offspring to carry on the family name and to keep women as penniless, property-less possessions.

Since I am now allowed to keep my own cows should I choose to hetero-marry, I would say the definition of marriage has changed continuously throughout human history.

2) California was also the first state to allow interracial marriages in 1948, but I suppose we should stick with anti-miscegenation as the law of the land too, since that's how it was done before, right? Those damn notions of equality and justice. They just fuck everything up, don't they?

Ah, how I long for the day when we could just be assholes and keep being assholes, for no other reason than because we had been assholes for years. Tradition is important, you know...

Labels: adam and steve go to las vegas, judges we don't need no stinkin judges, teh gay

So it seems cameras may not steal the soul, but their ability to save past moments to watch years later certainly seems to cause a lot of problems for Republicans these days. Countless times we have seen Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and just about everyone else forget that they have been recorded saying things that, several years later, they completely contradict seemingly without a second thought.

Add John McCain to the list of Rethuglicans with a memory leak. In one of NUMEROUS blunders McCain has made in the last few weeks, McCain has smeared Obama for his willingness to talk to Hamas (and like them or not, they were elected into power by the people of Palestine). Lo and behold, McCain said he would do JUST THAT, on camera two years ago.

Chalk it up to another long line of things that McCain was for, but now is against. Maybe he's only against talking to Hamas on Thursdays? Does that mean on Friday he will decide to pull out of Iraq? Ooops. Probably not.

Seriously. I considered asking the rhetorical question of whether these guys believe their own bullshit, but then I remembered: THEY DON'T CARE! They know the mainstream media will eat up their lies and never bother to dig any deeper to find out the truth. And they believe the American people have 30 second commercial break memories and don't care about anything except celebrity weddings and Miley Cyrus photoshoots. Oh wait. Awkward.

Labels: doh, election snafus, what was i doing

It's election time again, and once again, lily-livered Republican asswipes have decided to rile up Maw and Paw Bumfuck with the looming spectre of us fags and dykes taking the vows of matrimony.

You know what, assholes? FUCK YOU! Fuck you for once again putting all your hopes for re-election firmly on the backs of TAX PAYING GAY PEOPLE! You can't win an election based on doing anything even remotely useful, like making sure people have basic healthcare, or keeping our bridges from falling down. Nooooooo...you sniveling bastards have to raise the big fat fucking religious heterosexual flag to make sure that anyone who couples with someone having the same genitalia can't have any fucking rights.

Ya know, for a buncha fat fucks who talk ad infinitum (ad nauseum) about how fucking strong you are, I know a few limp-wristed, lovely faggots who could kick your asses around the block a time or two. You can't win with substance, so once again gay people become scarier than Osama Bin Laden ( that guy that Bush doesn't really worry about), so that you can continue your evil little power trip to the top of the political dung heap.

I think I am gonna take my little tax incentive you are giving us all, and buy heaps of gay pr0n.

Oh and did I mention: FUCK YOU?

Labels: adam and steve go to las vegas, dirty underhanded asshole tactics, teh gay

...no really.

Welcome to...wait for it...Christvertising.

What would Jesus buy?

Labels: capitalism, fun with wingnuts, religion

Kill em all, let the market sort em out.

Pfft.

*edit* AT&T rigs net neutrality study.

Surprise surprise.

Labels: all your internets are belong to us, FCC, internets, net neutrality

it's been a minute since i last posted. so much political chaos that i could barely take the time to delve into writing about any of it. but i have made a promise to myself that i will be more diligent about posting, for the random passerby who may happen to read this.

for now i will just offer a link to keith olbermann's brilliant timeline of the war on terrah (a war on fear itself, how fucking ironic).

Keith Olbermann pwns the Bush administration.

Labels: olbermann for president, shameless fearmongering, war on terrah

August 28, 2006
Real Wages Fail to Match a Rise in Productivity
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE and DAVID LEONHARDT

With the economy beginning to slow, the current expansion has a chance to become the first sustained period of economic growth since World War II that fails to offer a prolonged increase in real wages for most workers.

That situation is adding to fears among Republicans that the economy will hurt vulnerable incumbents in this year’s midterm elections even though overall growth has been healthy for much of the last five years.

The median hourly wage for American workers has declined 2 percent since 2003, after factoring in inflation. The drop has been especially notable, economists say, because productivity — the amount that an average worker produces in an hour and the basic wellspring of a nation’s living standards — has risen steadily over the same period.

As a result, wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of the nation’s gross domestic product since the government began recording the data in 1947, while corporate profits have climbed to their highest share since the 1960’s. UBS, the investment bank, recently described the current period as “the golden era of profitability.”

Until the last year, stagnating wages were somewhat offset by the rising value of benefits, especially health insurance, which caused overall compensation for most Americans to continue increasing. Since last summer, however, the value of workers’ benefits has also failed to keep pace with inflation, according to government data.

At the very top of the income spectrum, many workers have continued to receive raises that outpace inflation, and the gains have been large enough to keep average income and consumer spending rising.

In a speech on Friday, Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, did not specifically discuss wages, but he warned that the unequal distribution of the economy’s spoils could derail the trade liberalization of recent decades. Because recent economic changes “threaten the livelihoods of some workers and the profits of some firms,” Mr. Bernanke said, policy makers must try “to ensure that the benefits of global economic integration are sufficiently widely shared.”

Political analysts are divided over how much the wage trends will help Democrats this fall in their effort to take control of the House and, in a bigger stretch, the Senate. Some see parallels to watershed political years like 1980, 1992 and 1994, when wage growth fell behind inflation, party alignments shifted and dozens of incumbents were thrown out of office.

“It’s a dangerous time for any party to have control of the federal government — the presidency, the Senate and the House,” said Charles Cook, who publishes a nonpartisan political newsletter. “It all feeds into ‘it’s a time for a change’ sentiment. It’s a highly combustible mixture.”

But others say that war in Iraq and terrorism, not the economy, will dominate the campaign and that Democrats have yet to offer an economic vision that appeals to voters.

“National economic policies are more clearly in focus in presidential campaigns,” said Richard T. Curtin, director of the University of Michigan’s consumer surveys. “When you’re electing your local House members, you don’t debate that on those issues as much.”

Moreover, polls show that Americans are less dissatisfied with the economy than they were in the early 1980’s or early 90’s. Rising house and stock values have lifted the net worth of many families over the last few years, and interest rates remain fairly low.

But polls show that Americans disapprove of President Bush’s handling of the economy by wide margins and that anxiety about the future is growing. Earlier this month, the University of Michigan reported that consumer confidence had fallen sharply in recent months, with people’s expectations for the future now as downbeat as they were in 1992 and 1993, when the job market had not yet recovered from a recession.

“Some people who aren’t partisans say, ‘Yes, the economy’s pretty good, so why are people so agitated and anxious?’ ” said Frank Luntz, a Republican campaign consultant. “The answer is they don’t feel it in their weekly paychecks.”

But Mr. Luntz predicted that the economic mood would not do significant damage to Republicans this fall because voters blamed corporate America, not the government, for their problems.

Economists offer various reasons for the stagnation of wages. Although the economy continues to add jobs, global trade, immigration, layoffs and technology — as well as the insecurity caused by them — appear to have eroded workers’ bargaining power.

Trade unions are much weaker than they once were, while the buying power of the minimum wage is at a 50-year low. And health care is far more expensive than it was a decade ago, causing companies to spend more on benefits at the expense of wages.

Together, these forces have caused a growing share of the economy to go to companies instead of workers’ paychecks. In the first quarter of 2006, wages and salaries represented 45 percent of gross domestic product, down from almost 50 percent in the first quarter of 2001 and a record 53.6 percent in the first quarter of 1970, according to the Commerce Department. Each percentage point now equals about $132 billion.

Total employee compensation — wages plus benefits — has fared a little better. Its share was briefly lower than its current level of 56.1 percent in the mid-1990’s and otherwise has not been so low since 1966.

Over the last year, the value of employee benefits has risen only 3.4 percent, while inflation has exceeded 4 percent, according to the Labor Department.

In Europe and Japan, the profit share of economic output is also at or near record levels, noted Larry Hatheway, chief economist for UBS Investment Bank, who said that this highlighted the pressures of globalization on wages. Many Americans, be they apparel workers or software programmers, are facing more comptition from China and India.

In another recent report on the boom in profits, economists at Goldman Sachs wrote, “The most important contributor to higher profit margins over the past five years has been a decline in labor’s share of national income.” Low interest rates and the moderate cost of capital goods, like computers, have also played a role, though economists note that an economic slowdown could hurt profits in coming months.

For most of the last century, wages and productivity — the key measure of the economy’s efficiency — have risen together, increasing rapidly through the 1950’s and 60’s and far more slowly in the 1970’s and 80’s.

But in recent years, the productivity gains have continued while the pay increases have not kept up. Worker productivity rose 16.6 percent from 2000 to 2005, while total compensation for the median worker rose 7.2 percent, according to Labor Department statistics analyzed by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research group. Benefits accounted for most of the increase.

“If I had to sum it up,” said Jared Bernstein, a senior economist at the institute, “it comes down to bargaining power and the lack of ability of many in the work force to claim their fair share of growth.”

Nominal wages have accelerated in the last year, but the spike in oil costs has eaten up the gains. Now the job market appears to be weakening, after a protracted series of interest-rate increases by the Federal Reserve.

Unless these trends reverse, the current expansion may lack even an extended period of modest wage growth like one that occurred in the mid-1980’s.

The most recent recession ended in late 2001. Hourly wages continued to rise in 2002 and peaked in early 2003, largely on the lingering strength of the 1990’s boom.

Average family income, adjusted for inflation, has continued to advance at a good clip, a fact Mr. Bush has cited when speaking about the economy. But these gains are a result mainly of increases at the top of the income spectrum that pull up the overall numbers. Even for workers at the 90th percentile of earners — making about $80,000 a year — inflation has outpaced their pay increases over the last three years, according to the Labor Department.

“There are two economies out there,” Mr. Cook, the political analyst, said. “One has been just white hot, going great guns. Those are the people who have benefited from globalization, technology, greater productivity and higher corporate earnings.

“And then there’s the working stiffs,’’ he added, “who just don’t feel like they’re getting ahead despite the fact that they’re working very hard. And there are a lot more people in that group than the other group.”

In 2004, the top 1 percent of earners — a group that includes many chief executives — received 11.2 percent of all wage income, up from 8.7 percent a decade earlier and less than 6 percent three decades ago, according to Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, economists who analyzed the tax data.

With the midterm campaign expected to heat up after Labor Day, Democrats are saying that they will help workers by making health care more affordable and lifting the minimum wage. Democrats have criticized Republicans for passing tax cuts mainly benefiting high-income families at a time when most families are failing to keep up.

Republicans counter that the tax cuts passed during Mr. Bush’s first term helped lifted the economy out of recession. Unless the cuts are extended, a move many Democrats oppose, the economy will suffer, and so will wages, Republicans say.

But in a sign that Republicans may be growing concerned about the public’s mood, the new Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., adopted a somewhat different tone from Mr. Bush in his first major speech, delivered early this month.

“Many aren’t seeing significant increases in their take-home pay,” Mr. Paulson said. “Their increases in wages are being eaten up by high energy prices and rising health care costs, among others.”

At the same time, he said that the Bush administration was not responsible for the situation, pointing out that inequality had been increasing for many years. “It is neither fair nor useful,” Mr. Paulson said, “to blame any political party.”

So I was right...it DOESN'T take an economist to know all this talk of "economic growth" has nothing to do with the majority of people. Hell, I have been saying this all along. All it took was a look at my paychecks and the grim faces of people filling their gas tanks or opening their heating bills.

Basically, what I have said all along was that "economic growth" was a term referring to the growing wealth of those with too much money in the first place. A "healthy economy" is a catchphrase for "the rich are getting richer". For the rest of it, it means absolutely NOTHING.

Welcome to the richest country in the world, where more and more people slip into desperation and poverty, where George W. Bush talks about Trent Lott's porch, while the majority work harder and harder for less and less.

Ugh.

Labels: economy, wages suck

...only it looks...errr...suspiciously dirty all the same.

An Iowa corn refinery, open since December, uses 300 tons of coal a day to make ethanol. So just how green can it be?

All those lovely commercials with people talking about how great ethanol is start to look decidedly like...bullshit.

When we can power our cars with that, we will have fuel forever...