Political News & Info

Domenick Scudera: The Ombudsman Of My Dreams

2010electionyear — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 21:09:00 +0000

I am a gay man, and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is making my dreams come true. You see, I am not one of those sentimental homosexuals who dream of splashy, tacky, gay weddings. As if he could read my mind, Governor Christie vetoed same-sex marriage this past week and offered up the idea of creating an ombudsman for gay people instead. That is exactly what I have always wanted: my very own ombudsman! I do not want a groom; I want an ombudsman! If the legal system will not treat me equally, it would be nice to have someone who will fight for me to be equal anyway. Governor Christie seems to understand that I would never want to walk down the aisle and profess my love to some homosexual in front of friends and family. Who needs that? Why parade my same-sex perversion for everyone to see? Better to keep it illegal. We should not offend the sanctity of heterosexual coupling. Those straights obviously have a divine right to legal recognition in the United States, not I and my gay homosexual lover. When I was a boy, I always hoped that one day I would meet an ombudsman, someone who would stand up for me against all the bullies. I would daydream in school, drawing hearts and scribbling “Dom & Om 4EVA” in pink ink inside my notebooks. I fantasized that he would have a name that oozed with fairness and impartiality, something like Jack or Dennis or Chad. My pet name for him would be Buddy. He wouldn’t have to love me, and he wouldn’t necessarily have to be handsome (although that would be a plus); he would just have to see me as an equal under the law and be ready to fight for me when things got tough. I do not live in New Jersey, but I know that Governor Christie’s leadership on this issue is going to spread. I live in a state that borders New Jersey and already bars me from getting married, so, luckily, we will not have to deal with the hassle of taking away my rights. Maybe my Pennsylvania governor will be inspired by this daring New Jersey governor and will create an ombudsman position right here in my state! (By the way, I am also hopeful that Governor Corbett will follow Governor Christie’s lead and will have flags lowered for Whitney Houston in Pennsylvania, too. I am pretty sure that she stopped at a rest stop here once, so it is justifiable.) Thank you, Chris Christie. You are a true leader who sees a new, shining future for America’s homosexuals. Despite all the hoopla about same-sex marriage, the truth is that we gays really do not care about all that. The real reason that we have been complaining about getting equal treatment under the law is that we wanted our very own ombudsman. Hooray! Someone is finally listening and responding to our needs!

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Domenick Scudera: The Ombudsman Of My Dreams

These Seniors Are Twice As Likely To Be In Poverty In Retirement

2010electionyear — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 21:03:25 +0000

Black and Latino seniors in the U.S. are facing a tougher time in retirement: Elder poverty rates are twice as high among these groups compared to the U.S. population as a whole, according to a new study by the University of California, Berkeley. Some 19.4 percent of black and 19.0 percent of Latino seniors have incomes below the federal poverty line, compared to 9.4 percent for the senior population overall, according to the analysis, which is based on data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Current Population Survey and U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey. âRecent household surveys show that retirees of color, especially blacks and Latinos, rely more heavily on Social Security and have less access to other types of retirement income than their white counterparts,â researcher Nari Rhee of UC Berkeleyâs Center for Labor Research and Education, said in a statement. Less than one-third of employed Latinos and less than half of black workers are covered by an employer-sponsored retirement plan, a key resource in ensuring adequate retirement income. As a result, they are disproportionately reliant on the limited income provided by Social Security, the report found. Among retirees age 60 and older, people of color are disproportionately likely to be low income: For 2007-2009, 31.6 percent of blacks and 46.5 percent of Latinos were in the bottom 25 percent income group. The âotherâ race category of the Census, which includes Asian/Pacific Islander and Native American populations, is also more likely to be low-income (38 percent), the report noted. âIt is critical to improve both job access and job quality — in terms of wages and benefits, including pension benefits — to improve retirement prospects for current workers,â Rhee stated.

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These Seniors Are Twice As Likely To Be In Poverty In Retirement

Santorum Up 4 in Michigan on Strength of Tea Party Support

2010electionyear — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 21:01:00 +0000

Rick Santorum The latest Rasmussen poll of likely voters shows Rick Santorum leading Mitt Romney by 4 percentage points in Romney’s home state of Michigan.

Virginia legislature signs off on bill to let agencies deny adoptions to gay parents

2010electionyear — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 20:49:35 +0000

The “conscience clause” legislation that allows private agencies to reject placements of children on moral and religious grounds heads to Gov. Bob McDonnell, who says he will sign it.

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Virginia legislature signs off on bill to let agencies deny adoptions to gay parents

Community Colleges To Manufacturing’s Rescue

2010electionyear — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 20:47:57 +0000

STERLING HEIGHTS, Mich. — Fitzpatrick Manufacturing Co. is a high-tech job shop, crafting super-precise parts for machines used in everything from robotics to aerospace to oil exploration. Macomb Community College lies a few miles down the road in this Detroit suburb. Sometimes it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Fitzpatrick’s 93 employees are constantly in and out of Macomb, taking classes with a tuition reimbursement from the company. And so frequently are Macomb instructors at Fitzpatrick’s plant to offer lessons on the esoteric technology used there that the company built a classroom, now lined with about 250 diplomas and certificates employees have earned. Company president Kevin LaComb describes the school as concierge-style job training – exactly what his workers need to keep a quality advantage over lower-cost competitors overseas. “You tell them what you need, pretty much in a couple days, they have an instructor,” he said. “Other people say, `This is what we’re offering, but we can’t deviate from what we do.’ Macomb customizes just what we need.” Community colleges, long the under-loved stepchildren of American higher education, still don’t get the dollars of their four-year counterparts, but they’re standing very much in the spotlight these days. President Barack Obama made them the focus last week when he unveiled his proposed budget, which took place at a Northern Virginia community college he’s now visited four times. The president joked he’d been to campus so often that he’s only three credits shy of graduating. Why all the attention? One reason is that so-called “middle skill” jobs at places like Fitzpatrick – requiring more than high school but less than a full college degree_ look like the most promising source of fuel for quickly revving up an economic recovery. Federal data show they account for roughly half of all jobs, and even when unemployment was over 10 percent nationally last year, a survey conducted by the Manufacturing Institute found that two-thirds of manufacturing companies reported moderate-to-severe shortages of qualified workers to hire. That kind of training is the sweet spot for the country’s 1,167 community colleges. But the other big reason is speed and agility. Compared to more slow-to-respond sectors of higher education, community colleges have become more entrepreneurial, flexible and responsive. Here in the Detroit area and around the country, many have mastered the art of staying on top of rapidly churning technologies and quickly piecing together curricula in fields just being born. Most teachers aren’t tenured professors but professionals plucked from changing fields. If community colleges don’t have someone on staff to teach a class, they hire an adjunct. And they can move in weeks or sometimes days, earning a reputation as the only corner of higher education that really operates at private sector speeds. In Michigan, where unemployment peaked at 14.1 percent in 2009 but has since fallen to 9.3 percent, leaders hope the agility of community colleges will accelerate a manufacturing rebound. Money is tight, but one program offers free training for companies filling newly created jobs. In return, state income taxes generated by the new positions kick back to the school for two years, and then to the state. Organizers of the program, modeled on something similar in Iowa, say it’s supported 8,000 new jobs and easily pays for itself. They’re trying to get a $50 million cap lifted so they can move down the waiting list of companies that want to participate. Many Michigan students moving through such programs used to work at companies most Americans have heard of: Electrolux, Alcoa, Whirlpool, and of course the Big Three automakers and the companies that supported them. The companies where they’re now training for jobs are less well-known: BioDri (alternative energy), Trans-Matic (metal stampings), Oxus America (oxygen concentrators). Typically, such companies are younger and smaller and need tightly tailored training that applies only to themselves or a very narrow industry sector. “For small- and mid-size employers who actually generate a lot of the jobs in this economy, developing that kind of training for 5 or 10 employees that they’re going to hire, it’s not economically feasible,” said Rachel Unruh, associate director of the National Skills Coalition, a foundation-supported workforce development coalition. That’s where community colleges come in. On the factory floor at Fitzpatrick Manufacturing, $100,000 machines do work that used to be cranked by hand – but somebody has to know how to run the machines. Software evolves constantly, as do the machines customers are building with these parts. For some parts, the margin of error can be no more than .0004 inches – roughly one-tenth the width of a human hair. One typical “middle skill” is called “geometric dimensioning and tolerancing,” or GDT. Basically, it’s a language of symbols used in engineering blueprints. Customers used to give companies like Fitzpatrick blueprints with written words, but that left too much room for error. Now the field has shifted to GDT as a kind of lingua franca. On two recent Saturdays, Macomb instructors came by to help employees brush up on GDT. “To learn calculus that you would learn in an engineering curriculum is all well and good,” said Mike Fitzpatrick, whose family founded the company in 1952 and who sold it to LaComb and a partner last year but remains on staff. “But it has nothing to do with us.” Large companies are no less appreciative of rapid response times. When the big Dow Chemical plant in Midland, about two hours north of here, is ready to ramp up production in its chemical processing unit, it calls Patricia Graves at nearby Delta College, who in turn starts calling a list of interested students to ask, “When can you start?” Soon, another “Fast Start” customized training program in chemical process operations is up and running at Delta. Sixteen weeks later, virtually all graduates move on to work for Dow Chemical or one of the other major plants in the region. Some return to Delta after they start work for even more customized training. Delta has trained and placed eight such groups of roughly 20 people each. Now it offers versions serving other Dow operations in the area, including a six-week program for solar manufacturing and a 10-week program in batteries. When the call comes “we’d like six weeks” lead time to get a new class running, said Graves, Delta’s executive director of corporate services. “We can do it in four. We’ve actually done it in two.” Certainly community colleges have shortcomings and challenges, namely high failure rates for students who intend eventually to earn a degree. Community colleges say that’s to be expected given the wide mission they’re asked to perform, and the fact that they receive just 27 percent of total public dollars spent on public higher education but serve 43 percent of students, according to the American Association of Community Colleges. Enrollments have risen more than a quarter over the last decade, yet tuition has held relatively steady even as costs have soared at four-year colleges. For the average enrolled student, community college is basically free when you factor in grants and aid, according to the College Board. But criticisms about bureaucracy and lack of success in community colleges are usually directed at for-credit programs and degrees. Non-credit programs, which serve an estimated 5 million out of 13 million community college students nationally, often have a very different, more entrepreneurial feel. Such instruction doesn’t have to please curriculum committees and state boards, just local employers and employees. And often what they want is speed. “On the non-credit side, there’s much more flexibility,” said Mike Hansen, president of the Michigan Community College Association. “There’s much less of an approval process, and the structures of the colleges tend to be me much leaner.” In his budget unveiled last week, Obama asked Congress to create an $8 billion fund to help community colleges train up to 2 million workers for jobs in high-growth fields, and to award financial incentives to make sure trainees find permanent work. There were few other details about how the proposal might work, and it faces long odds in Congress. Thomas Bailey, director of the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University, said he believes such targeted workforce programs can be successful if well-focused, but there’s been little hard research. One concern: If training is too narrowly tailored to particular companies, and doesn’t award credit, workers may be stuck with non-transferable skills if the employer goes under. Brian Gasiewski, a division leader on the factory floor at Fitzpatrick, doesn’t worry much about that. Skills like GDT, he said, are important across the industry. Gasiewski was previously enrolled in a degree program at Macomb but isn’t at the moment due to family and time constraints. He may return someday, but for now says focusing on training targeted to precisely what Fitzpatrick does is the best way to advance his career here. That looks like a better bet than it might have two years ago, when the company’s sales fell by half. In 2011, however, they rebounded to their second highest level ever. ____

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Community Colleges To Manufacturing’s Rescue

Santorum: Satan Bad, Vote For Me

2010electionyear — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 20:41:50 +0000

Matt Drudge has a new report out about Rick Santorum’s speech this morning at Ave Maria University. Here’s what the Republican frontrunner said: Satan has his sights on the United States of America! … Satan is attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity, and sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that has so deeply rooted in the American tradition …. This is a spiritual war. And the Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country – the United States of America. If you were Satan, who would you attack in this day and age? He attacks all of us and he attacks all of our institutions. File this one under WTF. Santorum’s attack on Satan is an ill-advised, horribly misguided attempt to play on his religiosity yet again – and yet again, he has painted himself into the “religious nut” corner. The vast majority of Americans are religious and believe in the evil of Satan, but they also find such talk alienating in a mainstream political campaign. Santorum may win the anti-Beelzebub vote, but he isn’t likely to influence Americans who are more concerned about the economy and foreign policy. Santorum’s peculiar language is also a major problem for him. Conservatives largely agree with him that American culture is oversexed. But his rhetorical flourish here, in which he suggests that Satan is using “sensuality” to attack America, comes off as fringe and, as Mitt Romney might put it, zany. Conservatives can win on social issues. The polls prove it. But they cannot win if they paint social issues as a battle between the forces of Satan and the forces of God, rather than as an attempt to create a better life for all Americans by following the lessons of traditional morality learned over the course of thousands of years of world history. Santorum is actually giving social conservatism a bad name with nonsense like this.

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Santorum: Satan Bad, Vote For Me

Chief Justice Roberts says Supreme Court will not adopt formal ethics rules

2010electionyear — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 20:40:58 +0000

Chief Justice John Roberts has told Congress again that the Supreme Court doesn’t plan to formally adopt rules that would bind it to the same code of conduct as other federal judges.

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Chief Justice Roberts says Supreme Court will not adopt formal ethics rules

James P. Hoffa: Carnage and Crime in Mexico Offer More Reasons to Keep Unsafe Trucks Off U.S. Roads

2010electionyear — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 20:35:26 +0000

The State Department recently warned Americans against taking unnecessary trips to vast, dangerous sections of Mexico. Nearly all the states along the border are awash in violence, and there is no safe road to Mexico City. Mexico’s 5-year-old narco-war is only getting worse. More than 12,000 people were killed in drug-related violence last year, a 6 percent increase over the previous year. Reports of torture, beheadings and killing of women are up as well. Just two weeks ago, Mexican troops announced that they seized 15 tons of methamphetamine near Guadalajara – an amount equal to half the meth seized in 2009 in the entire world. That’s why U.S. truck drivers don’t haul freight south of the border. NAFTA was supposed to eliminate trade barriers among Canada, Mexico and the U.S. But Mexico has clearly failed to do what the deal requires it to – provide the same fair access to its markets that the U.S. offers to Mexico. If a violent drug war isn’t an impediment to trade, I don’t know what is. Mexico’s failure is especially egregious in the case of cross-border trucking. U.S. trucks and truckers have to meet much more rigorous safety standards than their Mexican counterparts. Carnage and crime prevent them from using Mexican highways. But Mexican trucks that don’t meet U.S. safety standards are allowed to drive on violence-free U.S. highways as part of the U.S. Transportation Department’s latest pilot program. That isn’t fair and it isn’t right. The Teamsters have long warned against opening the border to dangerous trucks. Last summer, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration allowed itself to be intimidated by Mexico into starting a pilot program to allow certain trucks to freely travel our highways. We predicted the program would fail, based on our experience with FMCSA’s previous pilot program. Six months after the program started, we believe we are right. FMCSA allowed a company with a terrible safety record, Grupo Behr, to be the first participant in the pilot program. We were incredulous that FMCSA could be so sloppy about something that’s been in the limelight for years – something the public strongly opposes and Congress has voted against. The Teamsters objected to Grupo Behr because it has a poor safety record – according to FMCSA’s own statistics. So FMCSA investigated and found the company had broken U.S. law by leasing trucks to companies allowed beyond the border zone. But rather than banning Grupo Behr from the pilot program, as the law says it must, FMCSA will reconsider Grupo Behr’s application in six months. Further proof that FMCSA is indifferent to highway safety came with the second company allowed into the pilot program. Transportes Olympic has one truck with a 33 percent out-of-service rate. There’s one other trucking company, Moises Alvarez Perez, that’s been allowed into the pilot program. It also has one truck. So after six months, the cross-border trucking pilot program has two trucks and three drivers who’ve made a total of nine trips beyond the border zone. Now the law requires FMCSA to include enough trucks and enough trips in its pilot program to draw statistically valid conclusions about the safety of Mexican trucks. But FMCSA has consistently turned a blind eye to safety issues. The Teamsters, however, have not. We challenged the legality of the pilot program in court. Our arguments are due in three weeks. We’re confident we’ll prevail. But it will take big changes at FMCSA to restore the American public’s faith in its ability to safeguard our highways.

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James P. Hoffa: Carnage and Crime in Mexico Offer More Reasons to Keep Unsafe Trucks Off U.S. Roads

Santorum Questioned Obama’s Faith in 2008

2010electionyear — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 20:35:08 +0000

In stark contrast to comments made earlier this week, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum addressed the issue of now-President Barack Obama’s Christian faith in a 2008 interview with the Oxford Centre for Religion and Public Life , Buzzfeed reported Tuesday. When asked if he believed Obama is a “sincere liberal Christian,” the former Pennsylvania senator said he didn’t believe that sort of ideology exists, and that Obama’s church, United Church of Christ in Chicago, had “abandoned Christendom” and used a non-literal interpretation of the Bible. “I don’t think there is such a thing,” he said of Obama as a liberal Christian. “To take what is plainly written and say that ‘I don’t agree with that, therefore I don’t have to pay attention to it,’ means you’re not what you say you are. You’re a liberal something, but you’re not a Christian.” Santorum made headlines last week after telling an Ohio crowd that Obama subscribes to “some phony theology, not a theology based on the Bible.” He defended his comments on Sunday during an interview with CBS News’ “Face the Nation.” “I’ve repeatedly said I don’t question the president’s faith,” he said . “I’ve repeatedly said that I believe the president’s Christian.” He further clarified, “I am talking about his worldview or the way he approaches problems in this country and I think they’re different than how most people do in America.” However, Santorum has continued to criticize Obama on matters of faith. On Monday, he told a Michigan audience that Obama was ” particularly weak ” in protecting religious liberty. “When you have the president of the United States referring to the freedom of religion and you have the Secretary of State referring to the freedom of religion, not as the freedom of religion but the freedom of worship, you should get very nervous, very nervous,” he said.

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Santorum Questioned Obama’s Faith in 2008

Obama administration opens door to aid for Syrian rebels

2010electionyear — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 20:33:27 +0000

Coordinated messages out of the State Department and White House suggest that a political solution may still be at hand to get rid of Syrian President Bashar Assad, but the forceful objections to arming rebels has been dropped.

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Obama administration opens door to aid for Syrian rebels