"Some Evangelicals in Republican Party Are Feeling Left Out," the Washington Post reports. Do they mean the whiners, the ones who think anything less than everything is nothing? Who cares what whiners think? Regardless of Americans' slow embrace of gay marriage or some sham "libertarian" movement within the GOP, the whiners will one day defend President Scott Walker to the death just like they did President George W. Bush, and they won't hesitate to smear reasonable folk as traitors again.
Get your surprised face ready: a U.S. Conference of Mayors report suggests that though the jobs have come back, the wages haven't. Specifically, the Conference found that jobs recovered specifically in the areas hardest hit by the 2008 recession -- manufacturing and construction -- now pay, on average, about 23% less than they did before. I guess more Free Market Fairy Dust will solve that problem -- after all, how could giving big corporations even more room to outsource manufacturing jobs, for example, possibly go wrong?
Don't put your surprised face away yet: the Environmental Integrity Project found that over 30 gas drilling corporations had illegally used diesel fuel in fracking operations, and had falsified documents relating to that use. The EIP combed through FracFocus, a database of chemicals used in fracking, and if they found 30 corporations breaking the law merely by looking through an industry-supported database with mere voluntary reporting requirements, then you could be excused for thinking the problem's actually much worse.
Remember that $276 billion (over 10 years) "bonus depreciation" corporate tax break the House passed last month? A Bloomberg BNA survey of 100 corporate leaders finds that the vast majority of them don't think the bonus depreciation tax break actually does what supporters say it does -- which is spur short- or long-term investments in machinery and other infrastructure. You probably agree, if you've noticed that giving corporations more money mostly leads to corporations hoarding more money.
Another day, another ad blaming the Affordable Care Act for for something it didn't actually do. The Crossroads GPS ad depicts a woman claiming she had to get a job to get health care because of "Obamacare," but who has since admitted she chose to get another job three years before the Affordable Care Act health care exchanges even came online -- though she still insists that the ad "captured the heart of my message," which was, apparently, MAKINGZ TEH PEEPULZ BUY TEH HEALTH INSURANCEZ IZ BAD FER TEH SMALL BIZNIZZEZ!!!!!, even though the ACA's employer mandate -- still not in effect, I feel compelled to add -- actually excludes 96 percent of all businesses. One more question for Crossroads GPS: why criticize a law for inducing someone to get a job, after criticizing that same law for being a "job-killer"?
Finally, PR Watch informs us that while over 70 corporations have ended their association with ALEC -- the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization that churns out right-wing legislative initiatives mostly at the state level -- but many corporations remain, namely big pharmaceutical corporations, big tobacco corporations, and, well, Big Koch. The Koch Brothers are a lost cause, but surely big tobacco and big pharma are always in need of a PR boost -- or, more precisely, should always live in mortal fear of a PR disaster. Perhaps that should be the next frontier in anti-ALEC activism.
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