china

Maybe it would be better to call this "welcome to a Mitt Romney's America":

The shock of losing a precious job in a town afflicted by high unemployment is always hard. A foundation for a stable family life and secure home instantly disappears, replaced with a future filled with fears over health insurance, missed mortgage payments and the potential for a slip below the breadline.

But for Bonnie Borman – and 170 other men and women in Freeport,Illinois – there is a brutal twist to the torture. Borman, 52, and the other workers of a soon-to-be-shuttered car parts plant are personally training the Chinese workers who will replace them.

It’s a surreal experience, they say. For months they have watched their plant being dismantled and shipped to China, piece by piece, as they show teams of Chinese workers how to do the jobs they have dedicated their lives to.

So much attention has been placed on when Romney left Bain, but to me that doesn't matter. Romney started Bain and he is using it as his number one qualification on his resume to be President. This company has absolutley no disregard for the American economy or worker. They might as well wipe their asses with the American Flag, while pissing on the Constitution. Anyone who votes for this America hating, job killing, Scrooge, might as well flip the American worker and family the bird.

There's an emerging new message coming from the GOP and that message is that the United States should give up and just become China. This is coming from the field of Republican Presidential contenders.

Michele Bachmann seems to have started this, when she proclaimed our country should be more like China on social-economical issues. Now we have Newt Gingrich saying that our child labor laws are "stupid". He seems more intent on us having the child labor laws of China, which is to say none.

It's really amazing to see America's right embrace the type of governance we see in one of the few remaining communist countries on the planet. Could you imagine this embrace during the Reagan years, not to mention the time of Joe McCarthy?

I am just waiting now for someone in the media to actually call these Republicans out for their new found love of communism. If this was a Democratic candidate saying this stuff, the "liberal media" would instantly label them as commies. Perhaps it's time they show the same for the right?

According to Mike Stark the National Enquirer is set to release a story tomorrow about John Boehner and an affair he has been having with a lobbyist. The National Enquirer contacted Mike about reporting he did on the story last year.

This story will really hit home:

I wonder how well Boehner's zero-tolerance pledge regarding corruption will hold up when it comes out that several hundred paper-making jobs were lost in his district and he refused to do anything about it at the same time he was sleeping with a lobbyist for the printing industry that was very happy to get their cheap paper from China.

I live in the town that lost all those paper-making jobs. It has been devastating on this area and John Boehner didn’t do a thing to try and stop it. Now when it comes out that Boehner’s inaction might have been due to his action in bed, well that could cause serious problems.

Of course the biggest question will be how much merit this article gets. The right and the media only seem to believe the National Enquirer when it comes to stories about Democrats. When a story exposes the wrong doings of someone from the GOP, well then the Enquirer is just a tabloid again.

This is why I always say we need two parties in government – it helps level things out. Now that the Democrats are in charge, they are going overboard on regulation:

The panics over salmonella, E. Coli and unsafe foodstuffs from China have heightened the prospects that Congress will enact a measure known as H.R. 875, the “Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009?.  Should the measure in its current form become law, “food establishments”, which to quote Patrick at Popehat “means anyone selling or storing food of any type for transmission to third parties via the act of commerce”*, will have to register with a new federal regulatory agency, submit to federal inspections, and, perhaps most significant, keep “copious records of sales and shipment by lot and label”. Penalties for infractions will be very, very steep.

I live in farm land. One of the things I love about it is being able to go down to the local farmers markets on the weekend and get fresh produce. This bill could put an end to all that.

What has happened during the Bush years in regards to regulation was sickening, but the Democrats answer is to do the complete opposite – over regulate. It’s not the small farmers causing the problems – it’s the large scale, corporate farms. Why not take us back to the same kind of regulation we had prior to Bush? We didn’t suffer the recalls then like we do now. This “panic legislation” is not the answer at all and it needs to be stopped.

"Buy American, Vote Obama" is the new theme that the Obama campaign is rolling out in Pennsylvania this weekend. I am glad to see the return of "Buy American" in our political discussion. I remember back in the 80's people around here drove about an hour over to Indiana to buy American at a store that prided itself on selling American only products. That store? Wal-mart - the poster child of imported products.

It seems that we have really lost the pride we once had in American craftsmenship. It also seems like the Republicans love to promote this turn away from products made at home in their endless push in increase the global economy. Yeah we might save a few cents at the store, but the products aren't as good and we have become number 2 in the world when it comes to manufacturing, falling to China.

The people in Georgia wonder why the U.S. and NATO isn't there helping them fight Russia:

As a Russian jet bombed fields around his village, Djimali Avago, a Georgian farmer, asked me: “Why won’t America and Nato help us? If they won’t help us now, why did we help them in Iraq?”

A similar sense of betrayal coursed through the conversations of many Georgians here yesterday as their troops retreated under shellfire and the Russian Army pressed forward to take full control of South Ossetia.

If the U.S. gets involved militarily in this conflict, it means we are at war with Russia. If we go to war with Russia, we can expect that war to include us against China. Is this something our stretched out military can really handle now?

The U.S. decides not to join in the international ban of cluster bombs:

More than 100 countries reached agreement Wednesday to ban cluster bombs, controversial weapons that human rights groups deplore but that the United States, which did not join the ban, calls an integral, legitimate part of its arsenal.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, whose personal intervention Wednesday led to final agreement among representatives of 111 countries gathered in Dublin, called the ban a "big step forward to make the world a safer place."

So what other countries joined us in not signing onto this ban? We got some nice company here:

In addition to the United States, Russia, China, Israel, India and Pakistan -- all of them major producers or users of the weapons -- did not sign the agreement or participate in the talks.

Of course when you have a President that is too fucking chicken to actually fight in a war, then you have a President that doesn't know the costs of war and what weapons like this actually do.

I posted about a judge ordering Wikileaks offline a couple weeks ago. It was certainly a move that seemed to align us with China, Iran and numerous other nations we claim to dislike. Now news has emerged that the same judge may be planning to reopen the case and re-examine his decision.