Month: April 2012

Coke cuts ties with ALEC

~ odd man out ~ 1 Comment

By Odd Man Out

Bad news for ALEC is good news for voters. You won’t hear anything about the sinister right-wing group in the mainstream press, but an encouraging story about it appeared yesterday in ThinkProgress:

Prompted by a petition campaign by the progressive advocacy group Color of Change, Coca-Cola has pulled its support from ALEC, a right-wing corporate-funded front group which has been pushing voter restriction efforts around the country…

Impressively, Coke’s retreat came just five hours after Color of Change announced its petition, which read: “ALEC has pushed voter ID laws which disenfranchise large numbers of Black voters. Along with the NRA, ALEC also pushed a bill based on Florida’s ‘shoot first’ law – which has shielded Trayvon Martin’s killer from justice – into two dozen states across the country.”

Less Trayvon, more Kim Kardashian!

~ odd man out

There’s a good reason why the media ought to keep shining a light on the Trayvon Martin story — the man who killed Trayvon still hasn’t been arrested, despite a busload of evidence that suggests he should be. But now we’ve reached the inevitable point where the usual suspects, as it were, are complaining they’ve heard enough and want the media to to drop the story:

According to a recently released poll, a majority of Republicans and many whites want the media to stop talking about Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Florida teen who was gunned down by neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman.

A Pew Research Center for the People & the Press survey found that 56 percent of Republicans and 43 percent of whites said that there had been “too much” coverage of Martin’s killing, compared with 25 percent of Democrats (including 33 percent of white Democrats) and 16 percent of African Americans who thought the media had gone too far.

The racial subtext of the story makes many people feel uncomfortable, as it should, given the fact that police in Sanford, FL, tried to close the book on the incident, as if they’d concluded the killer had acted within the law. As if they think police should handle this case they way they would have a half-century ago.

Oh dear

~ susie

We can’t have people saying subversive shit like that in Orange County!

FULLERTON – Students at Fullerton Union High School are protesting the action of an administrator who removed a classmate of theirs from a campus competition for his pro-gay comment.
He was removed from the school’s Mr. Fullerton competition Tuesday night for answering a question of where he saw himself in 10 years.

The student said he hoped to find the love of his life, marry him and hoped gay marriage would be legal.
After the answer, an assistant principal took the student from the Plummer Auditorium stage and disqualified him from the competition.

Housing wanted

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

My son’s getting pushed out of his slum housing apartment by a large rent increase. I have mixed feelings; it’s a real pit (I went out and bought smoke detectors for the place – the attorney/slumlord owner for some reason didn’t install them. He’s politically connected, so he doesn’t bother with things like meeting the city code) but it was cheap and close enough to work that he could walk.

Anyway, he and one of his roommates are looking for a 2BR apartment in Center City or South Philly under $900. If you have a lead on anything, please email me. Thanks!

Bankers SuperPAC

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

This is the problem with Citizens United: It basically puts elected officials in the position of delivering for the people with the cash, or else. Wonder if it will bother them enough to get them to pass legislation overturning the court decision? (Ha ha, just kidding!)

Frustrated by a lack of political power and fed up with blindly donating to politicians who consistently vote against the industry’s interests, a handful of leaders are determined to shake things up.

They have formed the industry’s first SuperPAC — dubbed Friends of Traditional Banking — that is designed to target the industry’s enemies and support its friends in Congress.

“It comes back to the old philosophy of walking softly and carrying a big stick,” says Howard Headlee, the president and chief executive officer of the Utah Bankers Association. “But we’ve got no big stick. And we should. We have the capacity to have one, we just aren’t organized.”

Think of it as an Emily’s List for bankers and their allies.

“Congress isn’t afraid of bankers,” adds Roger Beverage, the president and CEO of the Oklahoma Bankers Association. “They don’t think we’ll do anything to kick them out of office. We are trying to change that perception.”

Survival of the foulest

~ odd man out
Mutton-chop man Herbert Spencer, an ideological ancestor of clean-cut, cold-blooded Paul Ryan.

Obama finally states the obvious! Maybe someone in his inner circle forced him to read columns by Paul Krugman and Robert Reich that accused Republicans of practicing social Darwinism. More here.