It’s because Nancy Pelosi is controlled by the American Samoan Socialist Political Action Committee (ASSPAC).

[I]t becomes a matter of prayer to assist me in stifiling the desire to go on a rant, and then find the first Congressional war critic I can and beat the heck out of him.

I realize that I haven’t been elected to anything, but I’d be more than happy to act as a representative of the liberal anti-war elite, and take Mr. Noonan on in a cage match.

C’mon Noonan, I’m just a ivory tower hippie girl – how much damage could I possibly do?

Anyone want to set this up for me?

This was covered extensively over at dKos.

Here’s the executive summary: It probably would be a good idea to have the minimum wage cover American Samoa (as you might imagine, the committee appointed by Bush’s Department of Labor is not exactly worker friendly). The NMI used to be similarly governed. But that territory became such a cesspool of unfair labor practices that the Dems decided to remove their exemption. They probably should have done it for other territories, too. However, American Samoa’s Democratic representative in Congress, Del. Eni F.H. Faleomavaega, is, apparently, in the pocket of the fish canneries in AS, and is very much opposed to extending the minimum wage to his territory. And apparently it’s his call. As for SF-based DelMonte food corporation, there seems to be no record whatsoever of major donations to Pelosi.

So, in short: the Democrats should extend the minimum wage to AS. The GOP, of course, has no interest whatsoever in doing so. And making hay over the corruption of the Delegate from American Samoa isn’t worth the effort. So they invent out of whole cloth a relationship between Pelosi and a company doing business in AS. Despite there being something of an issue here, it’s not at all what the nuts over at Blogs For Bush are stirring up.

Anyone who has any basic understanding of economics knows that raising the minimum wage results in higher prices and job losses…

Whereas lowering the minimum wage results in lower prices and increased employment! So if politicians were serious about tackling unemployment and inflation, they’d set a negative minimum wage, where people pay to work!

My basic understanding of economics — to motivate people to produce more, you increase their income and cut their taxes if they’re wealthy; decrease their income if they’re poor.

find the first Congressional war critic I can and beat the heck out of him.

Ok, first of all, when did being critical of WAR become a bad thing? Then there’s this idea that beating up a war critic will…Umm, what? Make them less critical of violence as a solution? Third, I’m with the thoroughly educated Ms Marita. I am pretty sick of these war mongering tough guys talking shit like this. Being against war, especially stupid, counterproductive war against civilians, does not make one a wimp, or even, by definition a pacifist. Over the course of more than forty years I have found I’m pretty good at violent conflict resolution. And coincidently, I find very few wingnuts who want to go down this path with me face to face, y’know? I’d like to see a moratorium on talking tough on the internet, fer crissakes…

mikey

And we’re the angry left? Mark, STFU. Thank you.

The whole minimum wage thing baffles me. Half of the right maintains that nobody gets paid minimum wage anyway except for the occasional high school student, so raising it helps no one. And yet raising it will cause devastation in the business community as they struggle to squeeze a profit out of whatever’s left after paying the occasional high school student an extra fifty cents an hour. One is inclined to demand a straight answer: Is it going to affect a lot of people, and therefore be a burden on business, or not?

And to those who argue that while no one really makes the minimum wage anyway but raising it would mean raising the wages of the people above them on the pay scale, my response is, “Good. That’s how you know it’s working.”

Meanwhile, there’s this equally absurd argument that businesses apparently have hordes of minimum wagers hanging around on staff as a sort of charitible impulse (towards high school students, one assumes), who they would immediately fire if they had to pay them fifty cents an hour more.

The vast majority of my career has been spent in minimum wage jobs. I can promise you that if the company that pays you minimum wage didn’t absolutely *need* you, they wouldn’t be paying you. If there was any way to get away with not having you doing your job, they already would have found it. They’re not going to fire anybody, unless they can find someone cheaper to hire, which is where law enforcement should come into play.

If the argument here is that raising the minimum wage forces companies into a life of crime, that’s not a good enough argument to not do it. It’s a good enough argument to take a look at the corporate structure as a whole and see if we can obligate them in any way to behave in the interests of anything other than the bottom line.

The phrase “working poor” is completely offensive. The fact that we allow people working forty hours a week to be poor is something we all should be ashamed of. Even if you want to discount the “dignity of life” arguments, it’s something we pay for every day with emergency health care, with food stamps, with decreased tax revenue.

Pay people a living wage, in Kansas, in NYC, in Samoa, in Mexico, in Europe, in China. Nobody who works forty hours a week should be struggling to survive.

You rightwing pricks who think you’re for working people and demand everybody get a job and work hard to succeed, put up or shut up. People who make minimum wage work harder than you ever will, and they need and deserve your support. If the simple basic humanity of this doesn’t persuade you, consider how much it’ll cut your hated welfare tax burden.

Mikey, I’m fascinated by people who declare themselves “pro war” too. The ones who think “anti war” is bad, even moreso. What’s going on, apparently, is that they assume you know they mean “Iraq War” or “GWOT”, rather than just “war in general”. I can understand being “anti war in general”, I pretty much am. I suspect most of the “anti war” people around me, though, are “anti-this-stupid-war-we-started” and accept that some wars may be necessary.

But “pro war” is like “pro abortion”, it implies someone for whom that’s their best and first choice. And considering how careful the pro choicers are to make that distinction and to correct the notion that they’re “pro abortion” in the face of a hostile opposition who insists on plastering that label across them, it astounds me to see a group of people applying “pro war” to *themselves*.

I’d like to say it’s a failure of framing, but looking at the wingnut blogs, I have to say in some cases, it’s probably a completely accurate description.

The “anit-war”, peeps in Greece fired a rocket at our consulate in Athens.

They sure do hate violence.

Mikey: Being against war, especially stupid, counterproductive war against civilians, does not make one a wimp, or even, by definition a pacifist.

Annie: The “anit-war� [sic], peeps in Greece fired a rocket at our consulate in Athens. They sure do hate violence.

Were the people in Greece anit this war, or all war?

No, they hate pie. That could be a problem…

mike

The show trial of the Dangeral One has begun. On his own defunct blogue, no less.

Feel free to drop by (dressed appropriately, of course…I’d suggest something Althaus).

It’s because Nancy Pelosi is controlled by the American Samoan Socialist Political Action Committee (ASSPAC).

All these politicians are the same. San Francisco’s Pelosi is just in the pocket of Big Canned Fruit.

when did being critical of WAR become a bad thing?

As best I recall, it was September 12, 2001. It became treasonous during the first three months of 2003.

And I think the entire right-wing argument against the minimum wage is summarized well by Matty (slight editing mine):

Democrats know raising the minimum wage hurts businesses, but they don’t care. People support it, and Democrats want to [look] out for the “working class.�

Yeah, asshole. Except for that whole “know it hurts business” thing, which is a crock, you’ve nailed it: if given a choice between the profit margins of corporations and a decent standard of living for people, we’ll pick people every time. Go figure.

San Francisco’s Pelosi is just in the pocket of Big Canned Fruit.

. . . and my first sip of my first cocktail on this fine Saturday goes wafting in a fine spray all over my monitor. Nice work.

f given a choice between the profit margins of corporations and a decent standard of living for people, we’ll pick people every time. Go figure.

Y’know, Mortician, you’re on to something important here. Compassion, empathy, community, inclusiveness – these are concepts that are alien to the wingnut thought process. They would steal their mother’s jewelry to improve their chances of succeeding, and just maybe, like the grinch, they are not capable of grasping an altruistic motive. It would explain a great deal…

mikey

“The “anit-warâ€?, peeps in Greece fired a rocket at our consulate in Athens.

They sure do hate violence. ”
But… but… but lefties are supposed to be weak little wimpy girlie men!

Don’t fuck with The Left. You won’t like us when we’re angry.

Anyways, given the insane ratio of wage increase of CEO v. Grunt, they can suck it and take a pay slash. The only way this will hurt large business is if the managers whine and bitch and moan about how there’s no money in the budget for all this new payroll, then turn around and sign a new $4 million dollar bonus for getting fired.
I remember after 9/11, when the airlines went crying to Daddy Government for a handout to stay in business, then spent it all on bonuses for the board team and cut pilot salary by 40%.
Now, as for SMALL business, we’ll see. However, if you can’t afford the extra ~$100 a day to pay your employees, you’re probably fucked anyhow. And won’t destroying small business be good for large business, anyways? So why are the Republicans bitching?

So Pelosi is really controlled by Big Tuna? Does this mean we can expect the new Dem majority to emphasize aggressive special teams play and a ball-control offense?

But hey, I thought the economy was smokin’! I thought business was hitting heights of success and prosperity, thanks to all those tax cuts! The Republicans said it was, so it must be true! So how could raising the minimum wage “destroy” and “hurt” business when it’s riding so high?

Oh right … if poor people have a few extra bucks at the end of their work week, that’s a clear and present danger to civilization! I forgot! Forgive me, o Repulsican masters!

So Pelosi is really controlled by Big Tuna? Does this mean we can expect the new Dem majority to emphasize aggressive special teams play and a ball-control offense?

Possibly, but Pelosi will never be the same once Belichick leaves to coach the Senate.

Then there’s this idea that beating up a war critic will…Umm, what? Make them less critical of violence as a solution?

For a while, these pasty little pencil-necked blowhards considered themselves the Flavor of the Month, and they felt sooo good going around in public making threats against all the smart, good-looking people whose inexplicable success maddened the Reichtard blowhards. Now that the majority of Americans have come to their senses and stop hooting like chimps every time the C-Plus Augustus waves his branch, the big talkers have been forced to retreat to the damp, mildew-scented safety of blogs like this before puffing out their chests and letting their mouths write checks they KNOW their feets can’t cash. And, boy, does the perceived loss of power (not to mention the dampness in those basements) chafe their underoos!

If given a choice between the profit margins of corporations and a decent standard of living for people, we’ll pick people every time. Go figure.

Y’know, Mortician, you’re on to something important here. Compassion, empathy, community, inclusiveness – these are concepts that are alien to the wingnut thought process. They would steal their mother’s jewelry to improve their chances of succeeding, and just maybe, like the grinch, they are not capable of grasping an altruistic motive. It would explain a great deal…

Heck, they would happily steal their mothers’ kidneys, if they weren’t so scared of the old bats (not without reason in some case, and I’m looking at *you* Lucianne). Matt Taibbi had the best shorthand for this in Spanking the Donkey:

“Democrats care about people. Republicans care about things.”

The “anit-war�, peeps in Greece fired a rocket at our consulate in Athens.

So now even yellow marshmallow chicks are taking shots at us?

Damn – when the contents of your Easter basket turn on you, you are officially doing something wrong.

I blame society.

Please, Sir, may I have Samoa?

The B4B boys are really taking the GOP loss of Congress hard. Margolis in particular is having a really tough go of it these days. He used to be a standard-issue right-wing drone. In fact, he couldn’t even be bothered to write real posts–he’d just slap up a quote from someplace else and consider it a job well done (the really good stuff is when he would complain about how the “liberal media” wasn’t covering a certain story and would cover that story himself by…posting a quote from an AP article).

But Margolis did better as a cut-and-paste machine. When he tries to actually make some sort of point, it is, as we see, incredibly ugly. I mean, look at this: “the ridiculous insinuation that support for the Iraq war is the conservative position, while opposing it is the liberal position.” Is he really so appallingly stupid that he does not realize that’s been his own blog’s position for years? By jove, I think he is!

As for Noonan’s tempter tantrum…first of all, it’s quite funny that such a thing is something he considers wholly the behavior of “the unhinged, radical left.” I mean, cursing and threats of violence? No self-respecting conservative would ever do that! Actually, I just showed the flaw in my own argument: Noonan’s doesn’t have any self-respect.

Great job with the minimum-wage shootdown, Gavin.

No, they hate pie. That could be a problem…

Mikey – my post was too brief – I meant to say that you had a good point that people who are against this insane Iraq/Iran/Syria adventure are not necessarily pacifists. As if on cue, Annie seemed to be impugning anyone who was against this war because some people opposed to this war used means repugnant to people who are against all war. Sorry for any confusion.

Even you know what? The Christian Science Monitor supported the minimum wage hike. I guess these are terrorist-loving America hating Christians.

…a study by the Fiscal Policy Institute (FPI), a liberal New York think tank, finds that states with minimum wages above the federal level have had faster small-business and retail job growth. When business faces a higher minimum wage it uses labor more efficiently, worker morale improves, labor turnover falls, recruitment costs drop, and productivity increases, says James Parrott, an economist and an author of the FPI study. “The net result could be beneficial to business,” he says.

Canada’s economy is doing extremely well in spite of the US slowdown, and it has high taxes, and higher minimum wages. It also has an extremely good unemployment insurance program. Even when a person’s benefits run out they may still be eligible for funding to go to school for up to years (and have virtually all of their expenses paid – tuition, mortgage, food, rent, daycare, etc.) Unemployment rates are at 30-year lows across the country and many employers are having to pay more (in wages, benefits, and bonuses) to attract local workers; and labour shortfalls are forcing employers to import skilled and unskilled workers across industries. It’s a worker’s market right now.

“go to school for up to two years” I meant to say.

Stop picking on annie. You know she’s right, and you are wrong. You are leftists, and therefore terrorists. We will put you in jail and kick your heads until you shut up and acknowledge that America is the best. That is how we deal with fascists.

“[I]t becomes a matter of prayer to assist me in stifiling the desire to go on a rant, and then find the first Congressional war critic I can and beat the heck out of him. “

Oh, please by all means Mark, why not just step up to the plate and find the first civilian war critic and demonstrate how well the American healthcare system treats your beaten down ass?

Here’s a book that deserves to be made a best seller.

DUMBASS by Jules Carlysle

Book Description
ATTENTION REPUBLICANS! Please use this book to beat yourselves about the head until November 2008! DUMBASS is the complete collection of outrageous quotes from President George W Bush, the world’s most powerful moron. Both hysterically funny and utterly infuriating, DUMBASS escorts readers humorously through years of George’s verbal carnage and leaves us wondering HOW and WHY someone so stupid was permitted to usurp America and orchestrate the greatest foreign relations disaster in history. Not your average quote book, DUMBASS reflects W’s own words through the unforgiving lens of popular culture and history as Carlysle utilizes clever quips, quotes, jokes and essays to draw greater (albeit disturbing) insight into the mind of this spectacularly and uniquely inept man. A scathing combination of humor and serious commentary, DUMBASS is a book you will read, re-read and share with your friends for years to come. (Or until the end of the world…whichever comes first)

Yes, yes… putting a few more dollars in the hands of those who work paycheck-to-paycheck (who, by definition, put the money right back into the local economy) will clearly topple the American system.

Sorry, wingnuts, you really are going to have to try harder to make your greed, lack of empathy, and disdain for the poor seem like sensible policy. Tell you what, we’ll be magnanimous and give you 40 years or so out of power to think up some new shit.

Has anyone ever actually seen any real-world statistics that support the idea that raising the minimum wage causes unemployment etcetera? It’s been a commonplace of right-wing discourse since Enkidu asked Gilgamesh for danger pay, but I’ve never seen any actual evidence brought forth.

It almost makes you doubt the good faith of people who propose arguments for giving more money to rich people and taking more money from poor people.

Please, someone restore my faith in humanity!

I’m sorry about all the namestealing going on around here. I’ve banned the IP of the Shoelimpy namestealer.

I’ve also banned myself.

I]t becomes a matter of prayer to assist me in stifiling the desire to go on a rant
Did his prayer succeed? If it failed, and he was drawn irresistibly into several paragraphs of mock Shakespearean invective — Whoreson! Thou rank brazen-faced baggage! Urchin-snouted hugger-mugger! — then I could almost be tempted to follow the link and read a Noonan column in its entirety. Otherwise, not.

Unless he slipped into 3Bulls mode and filled his column with Emus and muffinwads and whatever. That would be an acceptable substitute.

nostalgic4millardfillmore asked:

“Has anyone ever actually seen any real-world statistics that support the idea that raising the minimum wage causes unemployment etcetera”

Countless papers have explored the issue. The conclusion is constant: There is no evidence that a change in macroeconomic policy – such as raising the minimum wage – has any *predictable* affect on microeconomic activity – such as unemployment.

By saying that Pelosi is in the pocket of Big Canned Fruit are you alluding to the rumor that she’s being blackmailed by Mark Foley?

Yes, yes… putting a few more dollars in the hands of those who work paycheck-to-paycheck (who, by definition, put the money right back into the local economy) will clearly topple the American system.

Local economy be damned. If that money isn’t going into an overseas tax shelter, then the American economy will surely collapse. Because…erm…look, a brown person!

Half of the right maintains that nobody gets paid minimum wage anyway except for the occasional high school student, so raising it helps no one. And yet raising it will cause devastation in the business community as they struggle to squeeze a profit out of whatever’s left after paying the occasional high school student an extra fifty cents an hour.

It makes perfect sense. If you tell the companies that are currently paying $7.25/hour that they have to pay $7.25/hour, they will stop hiring people at $7.25/hour, because they couldn’t possibly afford to pay all those people $7.25/hour.

The Girl Scouts came to my house yesterday and I ordered two boxes of Samoas. Thin Mints too. Does that help sort any of this out?

Cue dumbass troll to screech “If the minimum wage is soooo good why don’t we just make it $100 an hour!!1”

So, raising the minimum age results in job losses and price rises?

OK, let’s follow this thought to its logical conclusion. If raising wages leads to lower employment, then lowering wages must lead to higher employment – businesses can employ more people, since it’s cheaper to do so. And because this implied relationship is linear, every wage drop leads to a similar increase in employment. So, logically, we are best off, employment-wise, if we lower wages to the lowest possible point – nothing. Once we’re all slaves, we’ll all have jobs! Our masters will certainly find something for us to do, if it costs them nothing to put us to work!

Of course, if nobody gets paid, then nobody gets to eat, which results in a huge decrease in the employable, which severely afffects our economy, and not in a good way. So, the actual level of wages is important too! Gasp! Sometimes I wonder if these oh-so-edumacated conservatives have ever actually read Adam Smith, on whom they base what they laughably call their economic ‘thought.’

ATinNM said:
Countless papers have explored the issue. The conclusion is constant: There is no evidence that a change in macroeconomic policy – such as raising the minimum wage – has any *predictable* affect on microeconomic activity – such as unemployment.

Thank your for your reply. My definition of a well-functioning social structure is one in which other people besides myself actually read countless papers in economics while I, like a bloated parasite, feed off their intellectual efforts.

You’ll have to excuse me. It’s time for me to bow and prostrate to Allah with the other Keynsians.

…find the first Congressional war critic I can and beat the heck out of him. And I’m talking about stringing together paragraphs of obscenities, and then finding such an elected critic of the war and sending him to the hospital…for a month.

As others have pointed out, this sort of pseudo-macho crap is pretty common from the right, but am I the only one who notices that he’s not just spouting hatred and wishing to beat the hell out of war critics? He’s specifically singling out a particular group: war critics in the United States Congress. He’s advocating violence against elected officials for having a different view on a political issue.

No, nothing fascist about that.

It seems to be more common lately; not just the violent rhetoric, but advocacy of violence against elected officials. It’s particularly low, imo.

D.Sidhe (how do you pronounce that?)- simple basic humanity/right wing pricks= simple basic ammonia/bacteria: neither of these pairings can coexist.

The Silliness at Blogs for Bush begins every day with the title