Well happy Labor Day weekend!! I hope you’re enjoying it, since it will probably be one of the last Labor Days we ever have in the US if the Republicans get their way. Though to be fair, none of us will be laboring anyway, if the GOP gets their way.
Thom Hartmann was talking with Brian Hughes** the other day, and he pointed out that the Republican Governors have uniformly engaged in massive layoffs in the public sector. If they had not reduced the public workforce like that, unemployment would be 7.7%. However since the Republican’s primary goal is to eliminate President Obama (and eliminate non-republicans in general), they are intentionally keeping unemployment above 8% because they believe it will result in the election of Rick Perry. (Or whatever GOP buffoon gets the nomination). I am just sickened by these people. I used to have some respect for the GOP in general, because I believed that GOP & Dems were basically the same party except with a different approach for doing things. That is, we both believed in a fair economy, we both believed in public education, etc. Now the GOP is so extreme that the political party itself is treasonous to the United States. Trying to destroy our economy to further their own social and economic agenda? Isn’t that treason? Isn’t that what Bin Laden did? And don’t bother to tell me there’s a difference between Bin Laden’s terrorism and the GOP. The GOP embraces the people who further right-wing violence, and they have said they want our elected President to fail. That’s terrorism. I’m calling them terrorists for the rest of this post.
Have you guys been following the “Right on Crime” thing the terrorists are doing now? They say their “reforms” have been enacted in 10 states …
… These reforms include:
* Juvenile justice overhauls in Florida and Texas;
* Closure of no-longer-needed prisons in Colorado and Texas;
* Evidence-based diversion programs that will offset the need for new prisons in Arkansas and Ohio; and
* Parole reforms in Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and North Carolina.
(Press release here – http://media.prnewswire.com/en/jsp/latest.jsp?resourceid=4721257&access=EH – but you have to have to be signed in with a (free) membership to read it)
They put out a statement of values on crime that redefines victims as consumers of the criminal justice system and states that the criminal justice system should not be used to undermine economic freedom. (Translation: No more jail time for large-scale financial fraud.) It’s right here. Take your barf bag, you’ll need it.
There’s a good article over at the Big Think that discusses the terrorists’ war on teachers. It starts like this,
If families who make $250,000 a year are not considered to be rich, then how the hell can a teacher who makes less than $60,000 a year to educate our nation’s children be overpaid?
It’s such a simple and truthful statement. I’m not sure why people get caught up in the flood of ignorance that drives this whole Henry Payne-esque “public workers are sooo overpaid” BS. Right out the other side of their mouths they try to tell us that competition in the free market will make public education better. If they wanted to apply free market principals, why would they artificially cap salaries on teachers and support staff? It’s difficult to have policy conversations with people who are so dishonest, hypocritical, and mean-spirited terrorists.
Sigh.
Well, enough with the terrorists. How about a little fun?
That’s right. Pat Boone does heavy metal. I just discovered this so I’m having fun with it. You should hear him do Ozzy’s Crazy Train. Oh my heavens.
Anywaaaayyyy … a little housekeeping to tie things up for today…
I’ve been working with blogads to fix that issue we’re having with the right side of our ads being cut off. So far their people haven’t been able to figure it out. I’m going to contact them again and maybe let them dig a little further into our code. If we get it figured out I’ll publish it as part of the ‘Soap to WP conversion’ series that I’m trying to finish up.
I appreciate the feedback last week on the load times and the mobile theme. I will be working more on it in the future but probably not for another week or so.
I also wanted to welcome our new medical marijuana bloggers and thank them for the recent participation. I hope they plan to become regulars. My post on Bill Schuette was picked up by some medical marijuana blogs and that was when I realized that this issue was a hot topic that didn’t seem to get much traction in mainstream conversation. Maybe we can help with that by giving it more exposure here.
(Aside: Peter Werbe spent quite a bit of time on the medical marijuana issue during the August 28 Nightcall. You can download the podcast here.)
I have a couple of personal projects I’d like to mention too. First, I’m dusting off CBDC so I can do some work in my own personal space. I have about a half-dozen other niche blog projects going right now, and they are all suffering from neglect. So I’m putting it all of my non-BFM stuff on CBDC and people will either like it that way or they won’t. I think it will be more successful just because I’ll be simplifying my life and I’ll have more creative energy for content. That said, I can’t decide on a design. I do have a bad habit of playing with design and coding when I should be creating content, but this time I think it’s important that I get it right. Previously my sites have all been focused on categories and tags. I think I’d like to create navigation and design that gets away from that. I’m thinking of something like paulymath. Any design suggestions?
Second, damned if I can get Bob Alexander’s old site online. It is a WordPress blog but there is something going on with it that keeps it from working. It’s not just the errors you see if you follow the link, those errors are usually pretty simple to fix. This is a bigger software problem, and I’m not sure what to do with it at this point. If I can’t get it fixed then I’m going to pull the data out of the db and rebuild the site using the raw data. Seriously, that would bite the big one. So if anyone is interested in taking a look at it with me please let me know. Maybe I just need another set of eyes.
And that’s it. Thanks for stopping by. We’ll be here all week so tell your friends. 
** It was the August 29th show of the Thom Hartmann Show
