On the News With Thom Hartmann: Republican Jobs Bill Puts Forward More Tax Cuts for Millionaires, and More

Friday 16 September 2011
by: Thom Hartmann, Thom Hartmann Program



In today's On the News Segment: House Republicans continue to slam Obama's jobs bill while offering a "poor substitute" in its place, the Supreme Court denied another one of Rick Perry's executions, 50 economists say our economy has a good chance of slipping back into a recession, foreclosures jumped 33 percent in August, the IRS collected more than $2 billion after forcing people to disclose their offshore bank accounts, Palin says she didn't use cocaine, groin checks may be coming to a NFL stadium near you, and more.

Throw the Bums Out

Grover Norquist, president of a taxpayer advocacy group, Americans for Tax Reform, speaking at CPAC 2011 in Washington, DC. (Photo: Gage Skidmore)

Saturday 17 September 2011

by: William B. Daniels, Truthout



With recent polls announcing the approval rating of Congress as a whole is below 20 percent, the implication is that the voters from each district and state should throw their bums out. It is the 276 members of the Norquist faction in the House and Senate who are committed by a private pledge to Grover Norquist to kill the president's American Jobs Act that should be shown to the door first.
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FOCUS: Matt Taibbi | 'Rogue Trader' My Ass

Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone Taibbi writes: "In fact, investment bankers by nature have huge appetites for risk, and most of them take pride in being able to sleep at night even when their bets are going the wrong way. If you're not a person who can doze through a two-hour foot massage while your client (which might be your own bank) is losing ten thousand dollars a minute on some exotic trade you've cooked up, then you won't make it on today's Wall Street." READ MORE

The War Industry: Bad Job Creators, Bad Bosses, Bad Stewards of Tax Dollars

On Tuesday, the military contractors behind the “Second To None” campaign plead “no comment” to our War Costs campaign’s full-page Politico ad exposing the economic damage caused by massive war budgets. The same day, they announced a press conference and the upcoming launch of a national campaign to scare people about job losses if we cut the war budget. It seems like they had a comment or two after all. But as these companies gather at the National Press Club on Wednesday morning to frighten you into funding their trust funds, remember: military spending costs us jobs compared to other ways of spending the money. READ MORE

Outrage: Woman Fired After Taking Time Off to Give Her Son a Kidney

In late June, Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter vetoed a bill that would’ve guaranteed paid sick days to employees of many small businesses within the City of Brotherly Love. Nutter justified his action by saying that the bill would have been be too burdensome on businesses. Now, a Philadelphia woman has lost her job for taking time off to undergo a medical operation that helped save her son’s life. Mother Claudia Rendon had already used up her vacation days for the year after the death of both her mother and uncle and finding out her father had leukemia. But when doctors told her that her son needed a kidney for a life-saving operation, she didn’t hesitate to take some time off from her job at the Aviation Institute of Maintenance for the procedure. READ MORE

Mom Loses Job After Kidney Donation: MyFoxPHILLY.com

Zakaria destroys Rumsfeld’s Iraq war talking points

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld isn't letting go of his talking points that support the U.S. invasion of Iraq following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Exactly 10 years after those attacks, Rumsfeld suggested to CNN's Fareed Zakaria Sunday that Iraq had been "hospitable" to al Qaeda before the U.S. invaded the country.

"There's no question that al Qaeda and Zarqawi and people were in Iraq," Rumsfeld argued. "They aggregated there."

"If we hadn't invaded, they wouldn't have been there," Zakaria pointed out.

"We don't know that," Rumsfeld insisted. "You don't know that. I don't know that."

"But they went in to fight us. So since we weren't there, why would they have gone into Iraq?" Zakaria countered.

"Why have they gone into Yemen and Somalia?" Rumsfeld asked. "Why do al Qaeda go anywhere? They go where it's hospitable."

"Right, and Iraq hadn't been hospitable," Zakaria said. READ MORE

Watch this video from CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS, broadcast Sept. 11, 2011.

Astronomers discover more than 50 new planets

PARIS — Astronomers on Tuesday unveiled a haul of more than 50 planets orbiting other stars, including a "super-Earth" which inhabits a zone where, providing conditions are right, water could exist in liquid form. It is the biggest single tally in the history of exoplanet hunting since the very first world beyond the Solar System was spotted in 1995, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) said in a press release. The planets were detected using a light analyser, or spectrograph, on a 3.6-metre (11.7-feet) telescope at La Silla Observatory in the ultra-dry conditions of Chile's Atacama desert. The findings were presented at a conference on Extreme Solar Systems in Moran, Wyoming, attended by 350 exoplanet specialists. Sixteen of the planets have been designated "super-Earths", a term meaning that they are exceptionally small for exoplanets that have been spotted so far. A super-Earth is between one and 10 times the mass of the Earth. It does not necessarily mean that the world is rocky -- as opposed to gassy -- or that the conditions for life exist. READ MORE