pretty much all dealerships work the same way... you are a salaried employee!... been that way for years! I did probably 15 years ago... and if you go into any dealership you will see it is pretty much the same way... the only time you don't have to stick around to deal with the customer is if it's warranty work... then you don't have to stay and talk to customer
Politics, Politics, Politics
- Thread starter falcondfw69
- Start date
yes I do know that... where my wife worked.... she worked 40 hours a week... paid by the hour... and yet she was expected to have her work area clean before she went home... and she sometimes would have to stay... maybe an hour... sometimes just 15 minutes... but there was no pay for that... I know of other similar deals but won't go into each one.... not sure how they get by with the "staying" but they do.... non union or anything like that so I suppose if you complained you were out the door
you want a job... you do it! I was fresh out of the Army and needed the job... it did pay pretty well at the time... but not if you looked at the actual hours worked.... let me tell you I have worked for several car dealerships... and all are the most crooked people you would ever want to meet!... I could go into a lot of detail on that but that is not what this board is about... but I will mention just one.... I was a service writer there on salary.... and if you wrote up a new car warranty ticket.... the factory only pays for the exact amount of time it takes to make the repair.... no diagnosis time!... if it took the mechanic 2 hours to find the problem and the factory only paid 20 minutes to fix it.... the dealership would bring us in on sat... you would go through the cars file and look at past repairs... if you needed 2 hours of something to cover the time he was on the car... you wrote another ticket on the car for a ... water leak or something like that... to cover his 2 hours... that dealership got caught on lost the dealership.... but I'm sure a lot of it still goes on... every dealership has a "warranty" man... but anyway that sat work was not paid for!
come to think of it.... even at the airlines the lower supervisors are 'salaried" and work a lot more than 40 hours!
Well not having worked in a lot of union shops maybe our union is just bad and it has soured me. The stuff i have seen these guys do would never be tolerated at a non union shop.
I WOULD BE WILLING TO BET HH VOTED FOR THIS GUY!
Kansas Is So F*cked That Healthcare Companies Are Moving to Missouri
Being our semi-regular weekly survey of what's going down in the several states where, as we know, the real work of governmentin' gets done and where you can leave the stepping stones behind because something calls for you.
We begin down deep in the heart of Texas, where the Houston Chronicle tells us about some civic-minded teenagers who're getting some good old-fashioned John Bell Hood cosplay.
Despite that, some Republicans at the Texas GOP convention in Dallas in early May tried unsuccessfully to get wording added to the state party's platform to allow for a statewide vote on secession in a move that made national headlines.
During Wednesday's debate in the Boys State House session, Speaker Ryan Williams said that with 1,035 members of Boys State present -- the largest Boys State ever in Texas -- he wanted history to be made. During speeches, he and other supporters urged delegates to approve the secession bill because the federal government does not "accurately represent the wishes of Texas."
There are days on which I think seriously of consulting with some experts in the field and re-animating William Tecumseh Sherman and telling him to turn right at Chattanooga this time and not stop until he gets to the Grand Canyon. There are some things that history tells you not the monkey around with. This is at the top of the list.
Sliding north, we find ourselves in the failed state of Kansas, now in the fifth year of the Brownbackian Dark Ages, as such things are reckoned. Somehow, the fact that Kansas' status as a supply-side lab rat has dropped the state down a political garbage chute the likes of which hasn't been seen since they shredded the Articles of Confederation is beginning to seep under the guardhouses of the gated communities. The head of a healthcare company is fleeing to the Missouri border and he's not shy about telling the world why.
From Pathfinder Health Innovations CEO Jeff Blackwood:
It wasn't just that Brownback was conservative; it was that he is seen as a tool of the Koch brothers and ALEC, a conservative think tank and lobbying organization. Brownback used his influence and funding to eliminate "moderate" republicans from the Kansas legislature and install his hand-picked conservative cronies. He couldn't do the same with the Kansas Supreme Court, which has ruled a number of the conservative legislature's laws as unconstitutional, so Brownback's administration decided to threaten to cut off funding to the court system and is actively pursuing legislation to impeach the Supreme Court.
Kansas has become a test center of "trickle down" economics, espoused by economist Arthur Laffer during the Reagan years. Nowhere has there been as thorough an implementation of Laffer's policy recommendations… and nowhere has there been as dramatic a failure of government. Under Brownback's direction, Kansas implemented an unprecedented tax cut in 2012, eliminating taxes for LLCs and professional firms (for full disclosure, PHI is a C Corporation) and making the largest cuts in the highest tax brackets. He shifted taxes to create a heavier burden on property and sales taxes, which typically represent a larger burden on lower income brackets. Brownback declared that this tax cut would be a "shot of adrenaline" for the Kansas economy, but the reality is that the tax cuts have had the opposite effect. Kansas lags neighboring states in job growth. For 11 of the last 12 months, Kansas has dramatically missed revenue targets, falling deeper in debt and facing another round of degraded bond ratings.
The worst part is that the burdens for the shortfalls rest on the shoulders of those who can least afford it – children and the developmentally disabled.
No kidding, tell us what you really feel.
The funding problems got so bad that Osawatomie State Hospital's mental health ward had to significantly cut staffing. Over 40% of their staff positions were dormant, leaving the remaining staff overworked and unprepared. This understaffing resulted in an improperly released patient murdering a 61-year-old man, and a hospital worker was raped, having to rely on other patients to save her. In January 2016, the Osawatomie State Hospital lost its certification to provide mental health services, cutting off federal funding that counted for roughly half of the hospital's revenue. It is unclear what will happen to the patients and staff at Osawatomie State Hospital, leaving the fates of the patients in limbo.
The state's public education system, once considered one of the best in the nation, hasn't been spared, either. You'll hear claims from Kansas officials that funding to education is at an all time high, but it's just an accounting trick – they chose to shuffle money for special education and retirement funds through the schools so it could appear as an increase on the books. Salary freezes, underfunding to the point of being ruled unconstitutional, laws allowing teachers to be imprisoned for introducing potentially "offensive" content, cuts and delays in $100 million in payments to the state-run retirement fund, and legislation specifically targeted to cripple the Kansas teacher's union are all part of an ongoing effort to undermine the public education system in Kansas. Instead, the Brownback administration plans to offer vouchers to encourage families to send their children to private and religious schools.
To double down on these policies, Brownback is now ignoring the $250 million shortfall predicted for 2016, instead opting for headlines about closing Kansas to refugees and blaming the "liberal media" for the state's economic woes.
In the end, I believe the goals of the Brownback administration are going exactly to plan – starve the state of resources to the point where it just makes sense to turn over critical government functions to for-profit entities. I can't, in good conscience, continue to give our tax money to a government that actively works against the needs of its citizens; a state that is systematically targeting the citizens in most need, denying them critical care and reducing their cost of life as if they're simply a tax burden that should be ignored. It's because of these moves that I have decided to deny Kansas revenue from Pathfinder's taxes by moving our company to Missouri.
This guy says it flat out–Brownback has engineered the failure of government in Kansas to prove to himself and to the world that government inevitably fails. It's not often that you see it made that plain, and now it's time to point out that enough voters in Kansas showed up and re-elected this cluck in what only can be seen now as a suicide pact.
Of course, that election fell well within the margin of chicanery due to the efforts of Kris Kobach, one of the Founding Fathers of modern Jim Crow election law. This week, having had his head handed to him by a federal court, Kobach graciously declined to be cited for contempt. Per The Kansas City Star:
Just weeks ago, U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson pointed out that only three noncitizens had voted in a federal election in Kansas between 1995 and 2013. She included that fact as she ruled against one of Kobach's attempts to disenfranchise thousands of voters.
And after the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals refused to stop that ruling from taking effect, Kobach caved in Tuesday to meet a court order.
The Republican official finally provided instructions to election officials across Kansas on their duty to register at least 18,000 people whose eligibility for federal elections had been in limbo.
Many more could be registered before the November elections, which could mean up to 50,000 people could be helped by the judicial actions.
Kobach had pushed through a Kansas law that insisted people provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote, including when they get their driver's licenses. Robinson said that likely violated laws designed to make it easier to vote in federal elections.
Please, Kansas. Wise up. Take a tip from the government of Alabama, which is presently going to the zoo with remarkable speed. Per Al.com:
The impeachment hearings will be treated as quasi-judicial under rules the committee adopted today during a meeting that lasted about two and a half hours.
Bentley did not attend, but three lawyers representing him were there.
The impeachment articles, signed by 23 House members in April, accuse the governor of willful neglect of duty and of corruption in office but provide no specifics on those allegations. Bentley attorney Joe Espy said the governor's legal team has asked for specifics. "That's the only way we can address them, and respectfully, that's the only way the committee can address them," Espy said.
They haven't done this for a while so, according to MSNBC, the Alabama legislature is going back to the classics.
"We're having to create this as we go because we haven't impeached anybody since 1915," committee spokesman Clay Redden told NBC News. "They left no documentation behind. So the committee is using the Blagojevich rules Illinois used."
Blagojevich was impeached in 2009 for abuse of power and corruption and ousted from office. He is now serving a 14-year sentence in federal prison for, among other things, trying to sell the Senate seat vacated by then President-elect Obama.
Bentley should be proud. There has been no more hilariously venal scandal in the past 10 years than Blagojevich's peddling that "fcking golden" Senate seat. It's like getting Capone's cell or something.
And we conclude, as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, where Official Blog Black Angus Valet Parking Attendant Friedman of the Plains brings us the Tulsa World's account of how Kansas is creeping south.
The Common Education Technology Revolving Fund, one of six revenue sources used to fund the state aid funding formula in Oklahoma, came up $16.3 million short. That means local schools will see their June payments from the state — their final of the fiscal year — shorted once more.
Matt Holder, chief operations officer at the State Department of Education, said the agency warned local districts about the likelihood of this shortfall a little over a month ago. "The biggest effect on the districts is on fiscal year 2017. It's going to reduce their cash fund balances moving into the next year because it's impossible to make any cuts at this late date."
Like almost anything else in Oklahoma, this all has to do with the fact that the world decided not to be such gluttons about oil any more. Being a petro-state isn't what it's cracked up to be any more.
This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.
Kansas Is So F*cked That Healthcare Companies Are Moving to Missouri
Being our semi-regular weekly survey of what's going down in the several states where, as we know, the real work of governmentin' gets done and where you can leave the stepping stones behind because something calls for you.
We begin down deep in the heart of Texas, where the Houston Chronicle tells us about some civic-minded teenagers who're getting some good old-fashioned John Bell Hood cosplay.
Despite that, some Republicans at the Texas GOP convention in Dallas in early May tried unsuccessfully to get wording added to the state party's platform to allow for a statewide vote on secession in a move that made national headlines.
During Wednesday's debate in the Boys State House session, Speaker Ryan Williams said that with 1,035 members of Boys State present -- the largest Boys State ever in Texas -- he wanted history to be made. During speeches, he and other supporters urged delegates to approve the secession bill because the federal government does not "accurately represent the wishes of Texas."
There are days on which I think seriously of consulting with some experts in the field and re-animating William Tecumseh Sherman and telling him to turn right at Chattanooga this time and not stop until he gets to the Grand Canyon. There are some things that history tells you not the monkey around with. This is at the top of the list.
Sliding north, we find ourselves in the failed state of Kansas, now in the fifth year of the Brownbackian Dark Ages, as such things are reckoned. Somehow, the fact that Kansas' status as a supply-side lab rat has dropped the state down a political garbage chute the likes of which hasn't been seen since they shredded the Articles of Confederation is beginning to seep under the guardhouses of the gated communities. The head of a healthcare company is fleeing to the Missouri border and he's not shy about telling the world why.
From Pathfinder Health Innovations CEO Jeff Blackwood:
It wasn't just that Brownback was conservative; it was that he is seen as a tool of the Koch brothers and ALEC, a conservative think tank and lobbying organization. Brownback used his influence and funding to eliminate "moderate" republicans from the Kansas legislature and install his hand-picked conservative cronies. He couldn't do the same with the Kansas Supreme Court, which has ruled a number of the conservative legislature's laws as unconstitutional, so Brownback's administration decided to threaten to cut off funding to the court system and is actively pursuing legislation to impeach the Supreme Court.
Kansas has become a test center of "trickle down" economics, espoused by economist Arthur Laffer during the Reagan years. Nowhere has there been as thorough an implementation of Laffer's policy recommendations… and nowhere has there been as dramatic a failure of government. Under Brownback's direction, Kansas implemented an unprecedented tax cut in 2012, eliminating taxes for LLCs and professional firms (for full disclosure, PHI is a C Corporation) and making the largest cuts in the highest tax brackets. He shifted taxes to create a heavier burden on property and sales taxes, which typically represent a larger burden on lower income brackets. Brownback declared that this tax cut would be a "shot of adrenaline" for the Kansas economy, but the reality is that the tax cuts have had the opposite effect. Kansas lags neighboring states in job growth. For 11 of the last 12 months, Kansas has dramatically missed revenue targets, falling deeper in debt and facing another round of degraded bond ratings.
The worst part is that the burdens for the shortfalls rest on the shoulders of those who can least afford it – children and the developmentally disabled.
No kidding, tell us what you really feel.
The funding problems got so bad that Osawatomie State Hospital's mental health ward had to significantly cut staffing. Over 40% of their staff positions were dormant, leaving the remaining staff overworked and unprepared. This understaffing resulted in an improperly released patient murdering a 61-year-old man, and a hospital worker was raped, having to rely on other patients to save her. In January 2016, the Osawatomie State Hospital lost its certification to provide mental health services, cutting off federal funding that counted for roughly half of the hospital's revenue. It is unclear what will happen to the patients and staff at Osawatomie State Hospital, leaving the fates of the patients in limbo.
The state's public education system, once considered one of the best in the nation, hasn't been spared, either. You'll hear claims from Kansas officials that funding to education is at an all time high, but it's just an accounting trick – they chose to shuffle money for special education and retirement funds through the schools so it could appear as an increase on the books. Salary freezes, underfunding to the point of being ruled unconstitutional, laws allowing teachers to be imprisoned for introducing potentially "offensive" content, cuts and delays in $100 million in payments to the state-run retirement fund, and legislation specifically targeted to cripple the Kansas teacher's union are all part of an ongoing effort to undermine the public education system in Kansas. Instead, the Brownback administration plans to offer vouchers to encourage families to send their children to private and religious schools.
To double down on these policies, Brownback is now ignoring the $250 million shortfall predicted for 2016, instead opting for headlines about closing Kansas to refugees and blaming the "liberal media" for the state's economic woes.
In the end, I believe the goals of the Brownback administration are going exactly to plan – starve the state of resources to the point where it just makes sense to turn over critical government functions to for-profit entities. I can't, in good conscience, continue to give our tax money to a government that actively works against the needs of its citizens; a state that is systematically targeting the citizens in most need, denying them critical care and reducing their cost of life as if they're simply a tax burden that should be ignored. It's because of these moves that I have decided to deny Kansas revenue from Pathfinder's taxes by moving our company to Missouri.
This guy says it flat out–Brownback has engineered the failure of government in Kansas to prove to himself and to the world that government inevitably fails. It's not often that you see it made that plain, and now it's time to point out that enough voters in Kansas showed up and re-elected this cluck in what only can be seen now as a suicide pact.
Of course, that election fell well within the margin of chicanery due to the efforts of Kris Kobach, one of the Founding Fathers of modern Jim Crow election law. This week, having had his head handed to him by a federal court, Kobach graciously declined to be cited for contempt. Per The Kansas City Star:
Just weeks ago, U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson pointed out that only three noncitizens had voted in a federal election in Kansas between 1995 and 2013. She included that fact as she ruled against one of Kobach's attempts to disenfranchise thousands of voters.
And after the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals refused to stop that ruling from taking effect, Kobach caved in Tuesday to meet a court order.
The Republican official finally provided instructions to election officials across Kansas on their duty to register at least 18,000 people whose eligibility for federal elections had been in limbo.
Many more could be registered before the November elections, which could mean up to 50,000 people could be helped by the judicial actions.
Kobach had pushed through a Kansas law that insisted people provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote, including when they get their driver's licenses. Robinson said that likely violated laws designed to make it easier to vote in federal elections.
Please, Kansas. Wise up. Take a tip from the government of Alabama, which is presently going to the zoo with remarkable speed. Per Al.com:
The impeachment hearings will be treated as quasi-judicial under rules the committee adopted today during a meeting that lasted about two and a half hours.
Bentley did not attend, but three lawyers representing him were there.
The impeachment articles, signed by 23 House members in April, accuse the governor of willful neglect of duty and of corruption in office but provide no specifics on those allegations. Bentley attorney Joe Espy said the governor's legal team has asked for specifics. "That's the only way we can address them, and respectfully, that's the only way the committee can address them," Espy said.
They haven't done this for a while so, according to MSNBC, the Alabama legislature is going back to the classics.
"We're having to create this as we go because we haven't impeached anybody since 1915," committee spokesman Clay Redden told NBC News. "They left no documentation behind. So the committee is using the Blagojevich rules Illinois used."
Blagojevich was impeached in 2009 for abuse of power and corruption and ousted from office. He is now serving a 14-year sentence in federal prison for, among other things, trying to sell the Senate seat vacated by then President-elect Obama.
Bentley should be proud. There has been no more hilariously venal scandal in the past 10 years than Blagojevich's peddling that "fcking golden" Senate seat. It's like getting Capone's cell or something.
And we conclude, as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, where Official Blog Black Angus Valet Parking Attendant Friedman of the Plains brings us the Tulsa World's account of how Kansas is creeping south.
The Common Education Technology Revolving Fund, one of six revenue sources used to fund the state aid funding formula in Oklahoma, came up $16.3 million short. That means local schools will see their June payments from the state — their final of the fiscal year — shorted once more.
Matt Holder, chief operations officer at the State Department of Education, said the agency warned local districts about the likelihood of this shortfall a little over a month ago. "The biggest effect on the districts is on fiscal year 2017. It's going to reduce their cash fund balances moving into the next year because it's impossible to make any cuts at this late date."
Like almost anything else in Oklahoma, this all has to do with the fact that the world decided not to be such gluttons about oil any more. Being a petro-state isn't what it's cracked up to be any more.
This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.
The interesting thing that happened when Kansas cut taxes and California hiked them
In 2012, voters in California approved a measure to raise taxes on millionaires, bringing their top state income tax rate to 13.3 percent, the highest in the nation. Conservative economists predicted calamity, or at least a big slowdown in growth. Also that year, the governor of Kansas signed a series of changes to the state's tax code, including reducing income and sales tax rates. Conservative economists predicted a boom.
Neither of those predictions came true. Not right away -- California grew just fine in the year the tax hikes took effect -- and especially not in the medium term, as new economic data showed this week.
Now, correlation does not, as they say, equal causation, and two examples are but a small sample. But the divergent experiences of California and Kansas run counter to a popular view, particularly among conservative economists, that tax cuts tend to supercharge growth and tax increases chill it.
California's economy grew by 4.1 percent in 2015, according to new numbers from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, tying it with Oregon for the fastest state growth of the year. That was up from 3.1 percent growth for the Golden State in 2014, which was near the top of the national pack.
The Kansas economy, on the other hand, grew 0.2 percent in 2015. That's down from 1.2 percent in 2014, and below neighboring states such as Nebraska (2.1 percent) and Missouri (1.2 percent). Kansas ended the year with two consecutive quarters of negative growth -- a shrinking economy. By a common definition of the term, the state entered 2016 in recession.
Other effects of the Kansas tax cuts, which were meant to spur entrepreneurship, are well-documented.
While state officials anticipated that the reductions would create a shortfall in the state budget, tax revenues have been consistently below even those expectations. Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s Investors Service have signaled that they could reduce Kansas’s credit rating, indicating there is a chance the state cannot pay its bills.
The shortfalls have ****** Gov. Sam Brownback (R) and lawmakers to make additional adjustments. The state canceled the initial reduction in sales taxes, then increased them again, while delaying additional scheduled reductions in the income tax.
On the whole, Brownback’s policies modestly increased taxes for the poor and working class, who pay more in sales taxes than income taxes, while reducing taxes drastically for the rich.
The poorest 20 percent of households -- those making less than $23,000 a year -- are paying about $200 more, on average, according to an analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy in Washington. For the middle class, the changes have been a wash, with less-affluent households paying somewhat more and more-affluent households giving up a little less.
Meanwhile, the wealthiest 1 percent of households, those making at least $493,000 a year, are saving an average of $25,000.
Kansas’s gross domestic product is still less than it was at the end of 2011, said Menzie Chinn, an economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who has been following Kansas’s economy. Meanwhile, the economy in the rest of the country continues to expand.
It’s remarkable,” Chinn said.
It is perhaps less remarkable -- or surprising -- that California has powered along. The recovery nationwide has favored massive metropolitan areas stocked with high-skilled workers, which is to say places such as Los Angeles, San Jose and San Francisco. The damage from California's deep housing crash has slowly healed in places such as the Central Valley.
Still, the noncoastal regions of California lag far behind Silicon Valley and Los Angeles in their job and growth recoveries. The state's median income remains below pre-recession levels after adjustment for inflation, although it still beats the national average.
Few, if any, economists would say today that the recovery has been sufficient for all Californians. But almost no one can say that raising taxes on the rich killed that recovery. Or that given a choice of the two states' economic performances over the past few years, you'd rather be Kansas.
In 2012, voters in California approved a measure to raise taxes on millionaires, bringing their top state income tax rate to 13.3 percent, the highest in the nation. Conservative economists predicted calamity, or at least a big slowdown in growth. Also that year, the governor of Kansas signed a series of changes to the state's tax code, including reducing income and sales tax rates. Conservative economists predicted a boom.
Neither of those predictions came true. Not right away -- California grew just fine in the year the tax hikes took effect -- and especially not in the medium term, as new economic data showed this week.
Now, correlation does not, as they say, equal causation, and two examples are but a small sample. But the divergent experiences of California and Kansas run counter to a popular view, particularly among conservative economists, that tax cuts tend to supercharge growth and tax increases chill it.
California's economy grew by 4.1 percent in 2015, according to new numbers from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, tying it with Oregon for the fastest state growth of the year. That was up from 3.1 percent growth for the Golden State in 2014, which was near the top of the national pack.
The Kansas economy, on the other hand, grew 0.2 percent in 2015. That's down from 1.2 percent in 2014, and below neighboring states such as Nebraska (2.1 percent) and Missouri (1.2 percent). Kansas ended the year with two consecutive quarters of negative growth -- a shrinking economy. By a common definition of the term, the state entered 2016 in recession.
Other effects of the Kansas tax cuts, which were meant to spur entrepreneurship, are well-documented.
While state officials anticipated that the reductions would create a shortfall in the state budget, tax revenues have been consistently below even those expectations. Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s Investors Service have signaled that they could reduce Kansas’s credit rating, indicating there is a chance the state cannot pay its bills.
The shortfalls have ****** Gov. Sam Brownback (R) and lawmakers to make additional adjustments. The state canceled the initial reduction in sales taxes, then increased them again, while delaying additional scheduled reductions in the income tax.
On the whole, Brownback’s policies modestly increased taxes for the poor and working class, who pay more in sales taxes than income taxes, while reducing taxes drastically for the rich.
The poorest 20 percent of households -- those making less than $23,000 a year -- are paying about $200 more, on average, according to an analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy in Washington. For the middle class, the changes have been a wash, with less-affluent households paying somewhat more and more-affluent households giving up a little less.
Meanwhile, the wealthiest 1 percent of households, those making at least $493,000 a year, are saving an average of $25,000.
Kansas’s gross domestic product is still less than it was at the end of 2011, said Menzie Chinn, an economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who has been following Kansas’s economy. Meanwhile, the economy in the rest of the country continues to expand.
It’s remarkable,” Chinn said.
It is perhaps less remarkable -- or surprising -- that California has powered along. The recovery nationwide has favored massive metropolitan areas stocked with high-skilled workers, which is to say places such as Los Angeles, San Jose and San Francisco. The damage from California's deep housing crash has slowly healed in places such as the Central Valley.
Still, the noncoastal regions of California lag far behind Silicon Valley and Los Angeles in their job and growth recoveries. The state's median income remains below pre-recession levels after adjustment for inflation, although it still beats the national average.
Few, if any, economists would say today that the recovery has been sufficient for all Californians. But almost no one can say that raising taxes on the rich killed that recovery. Or that given a choice of the two states' economic performances over the past few years, you'd rather be Kansas.
twobi that could cover fox news reeeeal well!
That could cover just about all of them. You have to see both sides first before you can draw a line to stand on. Neither side is 100% correct but if you listen to both you can make a better educated choice from what Peanut butter to use to who to vote for the next POTUS. If you only listen to one side, and always condemn the other - then you have swallowed the poison.
I'll agree to that
The power that gerrymandering has brought to Republicans
The inside track on Washington politics.
Julian E. Zelizer is a political historian at Princeton University and a Fellow at New America. His most recent book is “The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society.”
The House of Representatives has been a bulwark for conservatism in the age of Obama. Even though Democrats hoped that the 2008 election marked a new era in progressive politics, the predictions were wrong. Just as Southern Democrats and Midwestern Republicans in Congress teamed up against Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, since the 2010 midterm elections rightward House Republicans, secure in their seats, have blocked President Obama on almost all of his legislative agenda. The GOP has turned congressional obstructionism into an art form.
During Obama’s presidency, Republicans retook control of the House in 2010 and increased the size of their majority from 242 to 247. Even if Republicans suffer a landslide defeat in 2016 with Donald Trump at the top of their ticket, most experts predict that they will retain control of the House. Whatever national polls say about Obama or the GOP, Republican lawmakers are relatively safe in their seats. And as long as Republicans have a lock on the House, party polarization will continue in the years to come, since House Republicans will have no reason to compromise with a Democratic president or even more moderate voices within their own party.
How do conservative Republicans maintain so much power in the House, even though Americans reelected a liberal president and polls show that the GOP suffers from high disapproval ratings?
Salon editor David Daley’s punchy, though overstated, new book lays the blame for Republican power in the House on partisan gerrymandering, the byzantine process through which state legislatures draw district lines to favor incumbents from one party. Challenging the claim that increased partisan polarization is a result of voters naturally sorting themselves into red and blue states, Daley argues that a group of operatives in the Republican Party did the sorting for them. The GOP poured money into an unprecedented effort to control governorships and state legislative bodies in 2010 and to then redraw congressional districts so that the party could turn the House into a firewall against the Democrats.
While the term “gerrymander” has been around since the early years of the republic, computer technology and big money have allowed governors and legislatures to perfect the process in ways that have never before been imagined, according to Daley. The same technology that allows Amazon to figure out who buys what in any home on a given block now allows party officials to do the same with elections.
Although his argument might not be as sexy as talking about how money corrupts politics or how the 24-hour news media leaves us all screaming, the success of Republican legislatures and governors at redrawing congressional districts is the reason, he says, House Republican incumbents have increased their power and don’t have to worry about any “wave” election that would shift control to the other party. The result is that House Republicans have become more dug into their opposition to every presidential initiative, playing to their very red districts, and there is nothing but gridlock on Capitol Hill. Bipartisan deals are impossible, and the chances for good governance have disappeared. Indeed, Republicans have been so successful that they have created an unanticipated problem: GOP incumbents now have to worry about primary challenges from tea party Republicans who want to move even further to the right.
Daley takes us through the story of how this all happened. Once Obama was in the White House, a group of wily Republicans doubled down on state and local politics. Chris Jankowski, a tactician for the Republican State Leadership Committee, and his allies came up with an audacious plan to target campaign money toward gaining control of state governments, where reapportionment would take place. The operation, called REDMAP (Redistricting Majority Project), was never a secret. Karl Rove outlined what they planned to do in the Wall Street Journal.
In a local race in Pennsylvania in 2010, Democrat David Levdansky, a 13-term state representative, found himself under assault. He faced a barrage of advertising, financed by national Republican organizations, claiming in misleading television spots and mailers that he had voted to spend $600 million on a library in honor of Arlen Specter, the controversial U.S. senator who had left the Republicans to join the Democrats. This didn’t sit well with constituents in a recession. He paid the price: Republican Rick Saccone narrowly defeated him. “The f---ing Arlen Specter library,” Levdansky recalled after he lost. Once national Republicans flipped his seat, they gained control of the state’s lower chamber.
The first stage of the plan worked beautifully. Republicans won majorities in 10 out of the 15 states that would be redrawing their districts.
With control of many state governments in place, Republicans launched the second phase. Using sophisticated software such as Maptitude, GOP operatives crafted favorable districts filled with conservative white voters, based on the kind of data available to corporations. The book is brimming with fascinating portraits of wunderkinds who integrated micro-targeting, computer mapmaking and gerrymandering. Democrats were clustered into a handful of districts while the rest were packed with conservative voters.
Daley shows how, even when reforms promised to make the redistricting process more public, behind the scenes, crafty operatives did what they wanted.
Titled “Ratf**ked,” a term that came out of the Richard Nixon administration to refer to “a dirty deed done dirt cheap,” Daley’s book provides a blow-by-blow account of how this happened. He draws on investigative reports, interviews and court documents to give readers an eye-opening tour of a process that many Americans never see. Not unlike the legislative process, which is often compared to the ugliness of making sausage, redistricting is an element of democracy that many readers won’t find comforting.
Much of Daley’s book will not come as a surprise. Journalists and scholars have written about this state-based mobilization by the Republican Party since it started.
Nor is Daley the first liberal commentator to point to the political process as the reason conservatism succeeded in a given period. During the 1950s and 1960s, a generation of liberals argued that the seniority-based congressional committee system propped up a coalition of Southern Democrats and Republicans that prevented liberal Democratic presidents from moving their legislation through Congress. Back then, the problem was gerrymandered districts that privileged rural voters over urban voters, a situation that ended with the Supreme Court’s one-man-one-vote decisions between 1962 and 1964. Liberal Sen. Joseph Clark of Pennsylvania blasted his colleagues as the “Sapless Branch” of government.
But was the partisan gerrymandering as powerful as Daley claims?
Sometimes reformers have overestimated the impact that changes in the political process can have. This is a particularly important reminder in the current campaign season, when the demand for reform looms large in the electorate. For example, there is substantial evidence showing that, contrary to conventional wisdom, gerrymandering is not a main source of partisan polarization. This is evident from the fact that the Senate — where districting is irrelevant — has also become more partisan, while in one-district states such as Wyoming and Vermont, we have seen a similar shift to the extremes.
Nor does a focus on how Republicans dominated through gerrymandering explain why Democrats were not able to fight back. This seems to be the pivotal question, especially in recent years when Democrats experienced dramatic victories in the presidential elections. It is not as if Democrats don’t know how to slice and dice the electorate. The most legendary practitioner of the gerrymander in modern times was California Democrat Phillip Burton, who worked with legislators to redraw the districts in his state to solidify the control of his party. “My contribution to modern art,” Burton half-joked.
Daley presents this failure of Democrats to stop the Republican campaign to take control of state legislatures and draw districts that would protect their incumbents as a product of strategic blunders and miscalculations by Democratic leaders. But the problems created by gerrymandering are symptomatic of larger challenges facing the parties. Daley should have looked more deeply into what’s going on with the Democrats as a national organization that caused them to allow Republicans to gain so much power in state politics. Why did Republican ideas gain a stronger hold in the electorates of the states that flipped to the GOP? What did the reconfiguration of campaign finance in the 1970s and 1980s, with business increasingly mobilizing behind the GOP, have to do with the party’s ability to influence races? Why do more voters seem to prefer Republicans in House races, an advantage the GOP has enjoyed since the early 1990s?
History shows that grass-roots partisan mobilization can overcome gerrymandering. In 2006, when gerrymandering was pretty strong, Democrats enjoyed a watershed in the midterm elections. And in 2010, the districts were pretty locked in when Republicans retook control of Congress, as they did in 1994.
Predicting the political impact of reform is also a tricky business. During the 1970s, liberal Democrats blew open the congressional committee system that had been in place for much of the 20th century, only to later see conservative Republicans such as Newt Gingrich thrive.
What Daley makes clear is that ruthless partisan gerrymandering is not good for democracy and makes it that much more difficult to wrestle control of the House away from the GOP.
Democrats should read this book. Political parties still have to build their national power from the bottom up. Without the Democrats investing resources in the nitty-gritty of state politics, if Hillary Clinton is able to win the presidency in November, she will probably face a Republican House that is hell-bent on stopping her and unlikely to give her any significant domestic victories.
The inside track on Washington politics.
Julian E. Zelizer is a political historian at Princeton University and a Fellow at New America. His most recent book is “The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society.”
The House of Representatives has been a bulwark for conservatism in the age of Obama. Even though Democrats hoped that the 2008 election marked a new era in progressive politics, the predictions were wrong. Just as Southern Democrats and Midwestern Republicans in Congress teamed up against Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, since the 2010 midterm elections rightward House Republicans, secure in their seats, have blocked President Obama on almost all of his legislative agenda. The GOP has turned congressional obstructionism into an art form.
During Obama’s presidency, Republicans retook control of the House in 2010 and increased the size of their majority from 242 to 247. Even if Republicans suffer a landslide defeat in 2016 with Donald Trump at the top of their ticket, most experts predict that they will retain control of the House. Whatever national polls say about Obama or the GOP, Republican lawmakers are relatively safe in their seats. And as long as Republicans have a lock on the House, party polarization will continue in the years to come, since House Republicans will have no reason to compromise with a Democratic president or even more moderate voices within their own party.
How do conservative Republicans maintain so much power in the House, even though Americans reelected a liberal president and polls show that the GOP suffers from high disapproval ratings?
Salon editor David Daley’s punchy, though overstated, new book lays the blame for Republican power in the House on partisan gerrymandering, the byzantine process through which state legislatures draw district lines to favor incumbents from one party. Challenging the claim that increased partisan polarization is a result of voters naturally sorting themselves into red and blue states, Daley argues that a group of operatives in the Republican Party did the sorting for them. The GOP poured money into an unprecedented effort to control governorships and state legislative bodies in 2010 and to then redraw congressional districts so that the party could turn the House into a firewall against the Democrats.
While the term “gerrymander” has been around since the early years of the republic, computer technology and big money have allowed governors and legislatures to perfect the process in ways that have never before been imagined, according to Daley. The same technology that allows Amazon to figure out who buys what in any home on a given block now allows party officials to do the same with elections.
Although his argument might not be as sexy as talking about how money corrupts politics or how the 24-hour news media leaves us all screaming, the success of Republican legislatures and governors at redrawing congressional districts is the reason, he says, House Republican incumbents have increased their power and don’t have to worry about any “wave” election that would shift control to the other party. The result is that House Republicans have become more dug into their opposition to every presidential initiative, playing to their very red districts, and there is nothing but gridlock on Capitol Hill. Bipartisan deals are impossible, and the chances for good governance have disappeared. Indeed, Republicans have been so successful that they have created an unanticipated problem: GOP incumbents now have to worry about primary challenges from tea party Republicans who want to move even further to the right.
Daley takes us through the story of how this all happened. Once Obama was in the White House, a group of wily Republicans doubled down on state and local politics. Chris Jankowski, a tactician for the Republican State Leadership Committee, and his allies came up with an audacious plan to target campaign money toward gaining control of state governments, where reapportionment would take place. The operation, called REDMAP (Redistricting Majority Project), was never a secret. Karl Rove outlined what they planned to do in the Wall Street Journal.
In a local race in Pennsylvania in 2010, Democrat David Levdansky, a 13-term state representative, found himself under assault. He faced a barrage of advertising, financed by national Republican organizations, claiming in misleading television spots and mailers that he had voted to spend $600 million on a library in honor of Arlen Specter, the controversial U.S. senator who had left the Republicans to join the Democrats. This didn’t sit well with constituents in a recession. He paid the price: Republican Rick Saccone narrowly defeated him. “The f---ing Arlen Specter library,” Levdansky recalled after he lost. Once national Republicans flipped his seat, they gained control of the state’s lower chamber.
The first stage of the plan worked beautifully. Republicans won majorities in 10 out of the 15 states that would be redrawing their districts.
With control of many state governments in place, Republicans launched the second phase. Using sophisticated software such as Maptitude, GOP operatives crafted favorable districts filled with conservative white voters, based on the kind of data available to corporations. The book is brimming with fascinating portraits of wunderkinds who integrated micro-targeting, computer mapmaking and gerrymandering. Democrats were clustered into a handful of districts while the rest were packed with conservative voters.
Daley shows how, even when reforms promised to make the redistricting process more public, behind the scenes, crafty operatives did what they wanted.
Titled “Ratf**ked,” a term that came out of the Richard Nixon administration to refer to “a dirty deed done dirt cheap,” Daley’s book provides a blow-by-blow account of how this happened. He draws on investigative reports, interviews and court documents to give readers an eye-opening tour of a process that many Americans never see. Not unlike the legislative process, which is often compared to the ugliness of making sausage, redistricting is an element of democracy that many readers won’t find comforting.
Much of Daley’s book will not come as a surprise. Journalists and scholars have written about this state-based mobilization by the Republican Party since it started.
Nor is Daley the first liberal commentator to point to the political process as the reason conservatism succeeded in a given period. During the 1950s and 1960s, a generation of liberals argued that the seniority-based congressional committee system propped up a coalition of Southern Democrats and Republicans that prevented liberal Democratic presidents from moving their legislation through Congress. Back then, the problem was gerrymandered districts that privileged rural voters over urban voters, a situation that ended with the Supreme Court’s one-man-one-vote decisions between 1962 and 1964. Liberal Sen. Joseph Clark of Pennsylvania blasted his colleagues as the “Sapless Branch” of government.
But was the partisan gerrymandering as powerful as Daley claims?
Sometimes reformers have overestimated the impact that changes in the political process can have. This is a particularly important reminder in the current campaign season, when the demand for reform looms large in the electorate. For example, there is substantial evidence showing that, contrary to conventional wisdom, gerrymandering is not a main source of partisan polarization. This is evident from the fact that the Senate — where districting is irrelevant — has also become more partisan, while in one-district states such as Wyoming and Vermont, we have seen a similar shift to the extremes.
Nor does a focus on how Republicans dominated through gerrymandering explain why Democrats were not able to fight back. This seems to be the pivotal question, especially in recent years when Democrats experienced dramatic victories in the presidential elections. It is not as if Democrats don’t know how to slice and dice the electorate. The most legendary practitioner of the gerrymander in modern times was California Democrat Phillip Burton, who worked with legislators to redraw the districts in his state to solidify the control of his party. “My contribution to modern art,” Burton half-joked.
Daley presents this failure of Democrats to stop the Republican campaign to take control of state legislatures and draw districts that would protect their incumbents as a product of strategic blunders and miscalculations by Democratic leaders. But the problems created by gerrymandering are symptomatic of larger challenges facing the parties. Daley should have looked more deeply into what’s going on with the Democrats as a national organization that caused them to allow Republicans to gain so much power in state politics. Why did Republican ideas gain a stronger hold in the electorates of the states that flipped to the GOP? What did the reconfiguration of campaign finance in the 1970s and 1980s, with business increasingly mobilizing behind the GOP, have to do with the party’s ability to influence races? Why do more voters seem to prefer Republicans in House races, an advantage the GOP has enjoyed since the early 1990s?
History shows that grass-roots partisan mobilization can overcome gerrymandering. In 2006, when gerrymandering was pretty strong, Democrats enjoyed a watershed in the midterm elections. And in 2010, the districts were pretty locked in when Republicans retook control of Congress, as they did in 1994.
Predicting the political impact of reform is also a tricky business. During the 1970s, liberal Democrats blew open the congressional committee system that had been in place for much of the 20th century, only to later see conservative Republicans such as Newt Gingrich thrive.
What Daley makes clear is that ruthless partisan gerrymandering is not good for democracy and makes it that much more difficult to wrestle control of the House away from the GOP.
Democrats should read this book. Political parties still have to build their national power from the bottom up. Without the Democrats investing resources in the nitty-gritty of state politics, if Hillary Clinton is able to win the presidency in November, she will probably face a Republican House that is hell-bent on stopping her and unlikely to give her any significant domestic victories.
damn our republican party is getting famous world wide..... Putin in an interview just made a statement that our elections are not the people voting but controlled by a few to push the election in a direction they want... so the us has no right to interfere with other countries elections
every time I type in the Russian president this damn thing automatically changes it to putin
In many businesses like the fast food industry the biggest expense is labor. A large or a huge increase in salary of a few individuals isn't going to impact a multi billion dollars corporation very much. However McDonald's is the second largest employer in the world. I think they have around 1.7 million employees worldwide. Raising wages on just the U.S. workforce to $15.00 would cost the company about 8 billion dollars a year. Worldwide in 2015 McDonald's had gross sales of about 27.44 billion dollars and a net income of 4.76 billion dollars. The gross and net numbers are for worldwide sales. The 8 billion dollar increase is just if the wages were increased to $15.00 for U.S. employees. There would definitely have to be a substantial price increase to cover that. Giving the CEO a big pay increase was just a stupid arrogant move. In reality the increase has very little effect on the bottom line but it does provide fodder for cartoons like this one
Cute but not very accurate
So where do you suppose this money is going to come form?
http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/mark...zens-dollar1000-a-month/ar-AAhh5mM?li=BBnbfcL
Not to mention the guy can't multiply. At the beginning he states "1,000.00 a month, 24,000.00 a year"
I didn't know there was 24 months in a year. More liberal-Union BS that the hard working American tax payer is going to have to pay for.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/mark...zens-dollar1000-a-month/ar-AAhh5mM?li=BBnbfcL
Not to mention the guy can't multiply. At the beginning he states "1,000.00 a month, 24,000.00 a year"
I didn't know there was 24 months in a year. More liberal-Union BS that the hard working American tax payer is going to have to pay for.
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People don't get paid a living wage because employers don't have to. If you take at look at what happened in North Dakota. When the oil boom was on and real unemployment was less than 3% $13.00 to $15.00 was the cheapest anyone was getting paid and it was rising rapidly . Now that the oil boom has busted they are just as bad as the rest of the country. Simply the law of supply and demand. The minimum wage is a symptom of a failing or weak economy. Look at how long this debate about the minimum wage has been going on. Workers at the bottom have steadily lost ground since the last hike in the minimum wage. All that would happen with a $15.00 minimum wage is a temporary boost then another cycle of the lowest tier loosing ground.
What you need to understand is that neither the unions nor business wants full employment. The Democrats and the AFL-CIO are embracing and encouraging undocumented immigrants. What are the benefits to the citizens of this country? Organizing the immigrants is a revenue source for the unions. There is plenty of big corporate dollars on both sides of the fence. The Republicans seem to be garnering a bit corporate backing than the Democrats but the Democrats are a bit better organized.
One of the big factors that will come into play is AI and robotics in the work place. McDonald's or any other business will pay $15.00 an hour if they have to. Just supply and demand. However if someone comes along with a machine that can do the job some of these lower tier job may simply disappear. Businesses like fast food would be good candidates for robotics. They are cranking out a relatively uniform product without much variation. Holding the mayo, or adding bacon, or an extra tomato would be relatively simple options. Given the improvements in voice recognition humans could be taken entirely out of the transaction. Employees might be relegated to keeping the robots supplied with what it needs and maybe some cleanup work
Crony Capitalism is alive and well on both sides of the fence
Of course it's greed, the country was built on greed. The problem we have is that both sides are supported by greedy people have made their fortunes and want more. What we need to do is create an environment where a new crop of greedy people can make their fortunes. And give them some tax incentives to pay a good wage. A real economic recovery will come from a healthy small business climate not from large corporations.
