The GOP Keeps Unemployment High

We hear so much about jobs being outsourced.  But the job losses that are really dragging down our economy right now are public sector jobs (teacher, firefighters, police officers, etc.) that can’t be outsourced.  We’ve lost more than 600,000 of these jobs in the last three years, mostly in states controlled by Republicans.  If these jobs still existed, unemployment would be about 7%.

If you have a problem with your credit card bill, you can get help from a guy in India.  If your house is burning down, not so much.

The GOP is attacking President Obama for not reducing unemployment enough, but we’ve gained back all the private sector jobs that were lost in the Great Recession.  It’s the GOP, using their power at the state and local levels to fire people, and using their power at the federal level to block more stimulus in the form of direct aid to states to retain those teachers and firefighters, that is keeping unemployment high.

 

What Part of “E Pluribus Unum” Doesn’t Mitt Understand?

As you’ve probably noticed by now, I find Mitt annoying, very annoying.

He’s done it again, telling a radio interviewer in Alabama that the South “is a bit of an away game.”

How can someone with this attitude be running for president of all the United States?  You can’t consider parts of the country “away,” we’re all one people.  They’re all home games.  If spending some time in Alabama and Mississippi is so alien to him, what’s a summit with Putin going to be like? 

There’s something too constricted and limited about his comfort zone that I believe disqualifies him from leading us.  He can’t identify with vast swathes of Americans based on how much they earn or where they live.  He doesn’t move easily in the wider world.

On December 7, 1941, no American thought Pearl Harbor was a bit of an away game.  It was felt as an attack on Boston, Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles, every city and town in America.

Ok, Mitt doesn’t remember Pearl Harbor.  But he remembers 9/11 and Katrina.  After 9/11 the school children of Louisiana raised money for a new fire truck for New York City.  That truck, the Spirit of Louisiana, escorted by fire trucks in each state it passed through, at one point 100 trucks in Mississippi, arrived in New York in December 2001, after a stop at the White House.

In 2005, after Katrina, the Spirit of Louisiana went back to New Orleans, leading a convoy of 15 NYFD trucks and 400 firefighters.

Somehow, Mitt doesn’t get this, what school children get, what firefighters who don’t have law and business degrees from Harvard get.

And his use of “a bit of” reminded me so much of Poppy Bush asking for “just a splash” more coffee in a diner.  It didn’t go well for Poppy in ’92.