The Problem With Republicans

  You will not find any links in this post dealing with this subject as this comes straight from my own experiences with working for a few Republican business owners, both large and small.

  I work ( part-time ) for a die-hard Bush/GOP supporter who thinks that the Republicans can do no wrong. We do have some very intense discussions on politics at times. One thing that I have noticed during these talks is that my boss will throw out some fact or poll showing that the general population supports the conservative party and that the Democrats are going to lose not only the Presidential election in November, but also the House and the Senate. Talk about being in the state of denial! This man watches the evening FoxNews line-up every night and he just thinks that Mr. Bill and Hannity are the greatest folks on television, so you and I both know that he has to be pretty ignorant on the issues of the day and on were his beloved GOP is going.

  He'll spout off about some poll or another and when I look the poll up, as is usual, he only got part of it right. This man is a perfect " talking points memo " for the GOP. If he'd get past this Republican/conservative bullshit, he'd be a really smart man. In fact, he is very smart when it comes to most things, but he goes downhill when it come to reality and his Republican party. I do make it a point to tell him that he's living in the 51st state, the state of denial. As are most Republican supporters.

  My employers take on Universal health insurance

   Companies should not have to provide insurance for their workers. It should be the employees responsibility  to get their own coverage.

   Now, that would be fine with me if the employers would pay their hourly workers enough to be able to afford the high price premiums that the insurers charge these days. So we get past that, but, what about those employees with pre-existing conditions, of which I am one?  I am a 46 year old diabetic and have had the illness for 36 years and let me tell you that my premiums are through the roof. I put out over a grand a month for my coverage and the coverage is next to nothing. My employer pays me $10 an hour when I work for him. I couldn't afford the premiums if I worked for him full-time. much less anything else!

My employers take on workplace regulation

   Employers are over-regulated and those same employers should be left to regulate themselves. The government makes to many rules for business to follow. Unions have no place in the workplace

   Once again, it is not in those employees best interest if business is left to its own devices. We've seen more than enough examples during the Bush years to know that left alone, business will fuck anyone that they can,especially their own workers. I'm thinking of the mining industry, as one example.

   On the union subject. If it wasn't for the unions, most workers would have even less rights than they now have. Where the unions got off track was in demanding high pay for tasks that didn't warrant such pay and in paying union leadership more than they were worth. If it wasn't for OSHA and the Wage and Hour Division, many workers would be getting a royal fucking, not that they aren't already.

   I'll continue this in a later post, but right now I have to go and make my hourly wage for a few hours.

Technorati Tags: Republicans,Universal Health,OSHA,Wage and Hour Division

America's Oil Craving

  We all know that this country just loves its gas-guzzling SUV's and our other gas-hog toys and that we really do not want to have to give them up just because of a hike in the price of our gasoline.

  Here's a look at our situation from over-seas and what got the United States into this mess in the first place.

  TimesOnline  ( Edited )

The President and most of his dwindling band of Republican brothers (though not, it should be said, the party's presidential candidate John McCain) pursue a similarly silly tack.

They'd have us believe that if only the United States would open up the Arctic to more oil exploration, prices would drop like a stone. In an election, this is all very well. But time is getting on and it is becoming ever more urgent that whoever wins in November drops the populist rhetoric and gets to grips with a couple of basic realities.

The first is that higher energy costs are here to stay. You don't have to buy Goldman Sachs's headline-grabbing forecast this month that crude will reach $200 a barrel.

Oil is up by almost 30 per cent this year alone. That's not the fault of greedy energy companies, or that other current favourite, unscrupulous speculators. It is a simple fact of economic life in a world economy that is, in effect, experiencing a new industrial revolution among half its population.

It is a staple of all political debate in the US now that the American dependence on oil has led to staggeringly bad policy for decades towards the big oil producers. It has forced the US into bed with some unsavoury characters and has been the constant factor behind repeated and often baleful US interventions in the Middle East.

Now, in addition to the threats posed by an even more complicated Middle East, the US has to address the challenge of a rapidly enriching Russia, a country that shows every intention of rolling back democratic progress and using its energy wealth to create trouble for America and Western Europe wherever it can.

In the very near future, real, ingenious American leadership will be needed not to make pointless gestures towards the newly powerful energy producers but to ensure we don't turn our dependence on a scarce resource into political capitulation.

Technorati Tags: America.oil,Russia,Middle East,politics