Liberal radio host Mike Malloy has made some truly asinine comments in his career, but what he said on the twelfth anniversary of 9/11 Wednesday truly takes the cake.
Discussing the tragic events of twelve years ago, Malloy said United Airlines Flight 93 was shot down over Pennsylvania with “orders from a bloodthirsty son of a bitch named Dick Cheney” (video follows with transcript and commentary):
MIKE MALLOY (11 September 2013): And that disappearing jetliner and all the disappearing bodies at the Pentagon, right? I'm sorry, I'm just no - and - in Pennsylvania? The conventional wisdom being that oh yeah, well the passengers tried to overtake or overcome the hijackers and everything crashed, when in fact I think even a cursory examination of that crash site, as spread out as it was, would indicate that that plane was shot down by a bloodthirsty, orders from a bloodthirsty son of a bitch named Dick Cheney!
So all of those phone calls from Flight 93 passengers to loved-ones - including from Todd Beamer! - were made up? They never happened?
Vice president Joe Biden called House Republicans Neanderthals for not initially supporting the Violence Against Women Act’s reauthorization, a bill that he originally introduced in 1993.
Biden admonished “this sort of Neanderthal crowd” of House Republicans who opposed the version of the VAWA passed by the Senate. He said that he thinks he “understand[s] the Senate better than any man or woman who’s ever served in there” but couldn’t wrap his head around “the idea we still had to fight” for its reauthorization in Congress.
Republicans eventually voted to reauthorize it in February of this year after taking issue with a handful of provisions in the Senate’s version.
Remember when President Obama promised that under his healthcare reform plan, you'd be able to keep your doctor if you wanted to?
At Wednesday's AFL-CIO meeting, IBEW President Edwin D. Hill said Obama broke this promise, and that ObamaCare "will devastate a successful part of healthcare."
EDWIN D. HILL, PRESIDENT OF THE INTERNATIONAL BROTHERHOOD OF ELECTRICAL WORKERS: What I want to say is on July 16, 2009, President Obama clearly stated the following, and I quote: “No matter how we reform healthcare, we will keep this promise: If you like your doctor, you’ll be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your healthcare plan, you’ll be able to keep your healthcare plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what. My view is that healthcare reform should be guided by simply one principle: fix the broken and build on what works.” End of the quote.
We supported the President then. We support the President now. But it’s clear that the ACA (Affordable Care Act) as it currently stands is not meeting his promise. The sad fact is the law will divest, will devastate, I’m sorry, a similar part of healthcare, a successful part. Healthcare coverage for some 20 million workers, retirees, family members, provided through collective bargaining that we all stand here to do.
The Resolution spells out the damage that will be done to multi-employer plans in construction and several other industries. There are nonprofit plans jointly administered by equal numbers of trustees from labor and management. Mr. Chairman, we’ve worked 65 years to build up these plans, but because the ACA doesn’t recognize their unique nature, we could lose it all. And we’re not alone. And we’re not about to let that happen.
Pretty powerful and important statement about this legislation, wouldn't you agree?
Yet according to Google News and LexisNexis, other than The Hill Wednesday, not one single news organization in this country thought Hill's words were newsworthy.
Not one.
Journalism really HAS died, hasn't it?
As an aside, Hill supported Obama's reelection last year:
Given what he knew about ObamaCare's impact on his members, how could Hill - or any other union leader - have supported the President's reelection?
As my good friend at Weasel Zippers observed, "I have zero sympathy for them, the unions were Obamacare’s biggest backers when it was being rammed down our throats."
The news that Time magazine editor Richard Stengel is leaving his post to become the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs prompted Atlantic Wire reporterElspeth Reeve to examine how many reporters had left their jobs for positions in PresidentBarack Obama’s administration. It turns out that quite a few journalists have found second careers working for the president.
“But it is the latest example in a growing trend of the White House reaching out to hire journalists. According to one count, at least 15 journalists have joined the Obama administration since 2009.,” writesThe Daily Beast’s Ben Jacobs.
RELATED: Obama Addresses DOJ Leak Investigations: ‘Journalists Should Not Be At Legal Risk For Doing Their Jobs’
Stengel joins high-profile figures in the Obama administration who once served as reporters like White House Press Sec. Jay Carney and former senior advisor to Obama, David Axelrod. But lesser-known figures in the administration like former Washington Post reporters Douglas Frantz and Shailagh Murray, former CBS and ABC News reporter Linda Douglass, and former Associated Press andBoston Globe reporter Glen Johnson also once reported on their current employer.
“Yet hiring journalists isn’t an Obama innovation,” Jacobs concludes. He notes that Abraham Lincolnand George W. Bush also plucked promising reporters from their careers for positions in their administrations.
As the U.S. draws closer to hitting its borrowing limit, polls released this week show that many Americans oppose raising the debt ceiling, despite worries about the consequences of failing to do so.
In an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released Friday, 44 percent of respondents said they are against raising the debt ceiling, while 22 percent said it should be raised so the U.S. avoids "going into bankruptcy and defaulting on its obligations." The remaining third said they are unsure.
“People’s first instinct is how fed up they are with Washington and spending,” Republican pollster Bill McInturff told NBC. “This is a very difficult issue in terms of public opinion.”
A Reason-Rupe poll released Thursday by the libertarian Reason Foundation and Arthur N. Rupe Foundation found even wider opposition, with 70 percent against raising the debt ceiling and 24 percent in favor of it. The poll, unlike the one from NBC/WSJ, didn't explicitly give respondents the option to say they didn't know enough to form an opinion.
While Americans are eager to tell pollsters they support cuts, however, they often hold conflicting opinions on budget issues, and public opinion is far from set. In the summer of 2011, NBC/WSJ polling showed that support for raising the debt ceiling rose by 10 points between June and July as the issue received more attention.
Despite the lack of support for increasing the debt limit, a CNN/ORC poll released earlier this week found that 62 percent of Americans said failing to do so would cause a "crisis" or "major problems." A 54 percent majority said they would blame Republicans in Congress for such a failure, while 25 percent said they'd blame President Barack Obama. Both figures are roughly the same as they were in CNN/ORC's 2011 polling.
Last night the Newark Star-Ledgerreported that Obamacare is causing one large New Jersey hospital to lay off workers:
Barnabas Health, the second-largest private employer in the state, said today it was forced to lay off employees because of pressures brought about by healthcare reform….“Healthcare reform, in combination with Medicare cuts, more patients seeking outpatient care and decreasing patient volumes,” a spokeswoman for Barnabas said in a statement. “As a result, we have made the difficult decision to reduce our workforce.”
This move was both predictable and predicted. Even though hospital industry lobbyists supported Obamacare three years ago, the law contains Medicare provisions that will decimate the industry over the long term. As Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint wrote earlier this week:
ObamaCare’s reductions in Medicare spending could undermine the health system for millions of seniors. According to the non-partisan Medicare actuary, the law’s arbitrary spending reductions could cause 15% of hospitals to become unprofitable by 2019, and as many as 40% of hospitals to become unprofitable in the long term. These hospitals could face the choice between shutting out seniors or shutting their doors for good.
Nancy Pelosi famously said we had to pass the bill to find out what’s in it. Hospitals, whose Washington lobbyists endorsed the law, are now finding out that Obamacare will harm them significantly—and hospital workers are finding out Obamacare could cost them their jobs.
A secretive Syrian military unit has been moving stocks of poison gases and munitions to as many as 50 sites to make them harder for the U.S. to track, American and Middle Eastern officials said on Thursday.
The movements of chemical weapons by Syria's elite Unit 450 could complicate any U.S. bombing campaign in Syria over its chemical attacks, the officials told The Wall Street Journal .
Further, the activity raises questions about the implementation of a Russian proposal that calls for the regime to surrender control of its stockpiles, they said.
The U.S. estimates Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime has 1,000 metric tons of chemical and biological agents.
"That is what we know about," a senior U.S. official told the Journal. "There might be more."
U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies said they still believe they know where most of the chemical weapons are located, but with less confidence than six months ago.
Secretary of State John Kerry met on Thursday in Geneva with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to discuss a proposal by President Vladimir Putin to turn over the weapons to international control.
Kerry bluntly rejected a Syrian pledge to begin a "standard process" by turning over information rather than weapons — and nothing immediately.
A business’ attempt to collaborate with workers may provide an auto union a long-sought foothold in right-to-work Tennessee, which experts suggested could end up hurting employees.
United Auto Worker Region 8 director Gary Casteel claimed that a majority of the 2,500 workers at Volkswagen’s Chattanooga manufacturing facility had signed card check forms, which would grant the union exclusive representationrights at the facility.
This wasn’t a typical example of a union organizing: It was the company, not the union, that raised the issue of giving workers a voice in the plant’s operations.
VW, a German company, approached the Tennessee manufacturing plant earlier this month, hinting that it would not receive additional investments if it did not establish an European-model works council to represent employee interests.
“When I toured the Chattanooga plant and spoke with workers, I found little evidence of any job dissatisfaction … all anyone could talk about was the number of applicants and how lucky they felt to have such a good job,” one auto analyst told theWashington Free Beacon on condition of anonymity.
Works councils provide employees with direct representation to management in worker safety and plant operations. They differ from American unions in one respect, according to Lipscomb University economics professor Richard Grant.
Thursday We are back in Beverly Hills. We left one week ago. My last day there, I spoke to the entire student body of Bonners Ferry High School. Bonners (as we call it) is about fifty miles north of Sandpoint. The students and faculty were cheerful, well dressed, and alert. After my speech, one student asked my religion. Another asked how much money I had. Another asked if I could afford to buy a Lamborghini. They may need a little work there.
These are not the questions to ask a guest speaker who has done them the free gift of a speech.
They did cheer when one of their number made a sneering comment about Obamacare. I am not sure where that came from. But more power to them on that one.
However, as we left the school, we pulled into a gas station very close to the school. A mother and her daughter, both Mennonites, were selling ears of corn from the back of a truck. The mother went into the gas station for some reason. I approached the daughter as she was taking corn out of a bag. She was impossibly beautiful. Blond, clear skinned, blue eyed, hair in a small bun, print dress, no makeup, slender. She was a vision of perfect youthful femininity..
Today, teachers in Kenosha, Wis., voted to decertify their union, the Kenosha Education Association, by a margin of nearly two to one. Only 37 percent of the teachers opted to retain the union in an election made possible by the labor reforms enacted under Gov. Scott Walker (R). The result goes to show that when workers have a choice on whether to join a union instead of being forced into one by law, they often choose to vote down the union.
Under Act 10, public employee unions must be recertified every year by an affirmative vote of at least 50 percent of the employees. The Kenosha vote means the union is not legally authorized to represent Kenosha teachers on any matter, including bargaining for wages.
Teachers can still voluntarily make contributions to the decertified union and it can represent individual teachers if they wish. The union, however, no longer has any official status in Kenosha schools. It is the largest teachers union in Wisconsin to go under since Act 10 became law.
Christina Brey, speaking for the Wisconsin Education Association Council, downplayed recertification, calling it just another hoop for local unions to jump through.
“It seems like the majority of our affiliates in the state aren’t seeking re-certification, so I don’t think the KEA is an outlier or unique in this,” she said.
Brey said the union still exists with or without the recertification vote.
“They just can’t negotiate over a small portion of what they want a voice in,” she said.
