The Boeing Company Message Board

"In an op-ed for USA Today, Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) says that a $9 per hour minimum wage is not enough. He says, “While I was heartened to hear President Obama make the minimum wage a centerpiece of his State of the Union Address, I believe that his proposal of $9 per hour does not go far enough to ensure that working families can make ends meet.”

At least he's on the right track......if $9 will help the poor out a little bit.....the question remains why stop at $9. Why not $50 an hour or at least equal to the highest paid union wage. That would save money in the sense that there would no longer be any need to pay union dues.

Does the White House ever have a clue of what's happening on its watch?

The White House and the Department of Homeland Security were unaware of Immigration Customs and Enforcement's decision to release detainees until the agency announced it, administration officials said Wednesday.

"This was a decision made by a career officials at ICE without any input from the White House, as a result of fiscal uncertainty over the continuing resolution, as well as possible sequestration," White House press secretary Jay Carney said Wednesday.

Personnel at Department of Homeland Security headquarters in Washington were also unaware of the decision until the announcement was made, a department official told POLITICO.

(Also on POLITICO: Blogs decry illegal immigrant release)

ICE announced Tuesday that it has released several hundred undocumented immigrants in recent weeks as funding cuts loom. The detainees will instead be monitored in less expensive ways, the agency said.

Carney described those released as "low-risk, non-criminal detainees," but several Republican members of Congress have spoken out against the releases.

“It’s very hard for me to believe that they can’t find cuts elsewhere in their agency,” House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) told CBS News on Tuesday. “I frankly think this is outrageous…I can’t believe that they can’t find the kind of savings they need out of that department short of letting criminals go free.”

Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, on Wednesday asked ICE for details of the agency's decision. "This decision reflects the lack of resource prioritization," he wrote to ICE Director John Morton, "and is indicative of the Department [of Homeland Security]’s weak stance on national security."

Obama's hypocrisy reel on the subjects of transparency and money in politics is long and sordid, but BuzzFeed's Andrew Kaczynski isolates an especially revealing illustration of The One's abject shamelessness (click through for video). Here's candidate Obama announcing his candidacy for President of the United States in 2007:


As people have looked away in disillusionment and frustration, we know what's filled the void. The cynics, and the lobbyists, and the special interests who've turned our government into a game only they can afford to play. They write the checks and you get stuck with the bills, they get the access while you get to write a letter, they think they own this government, but we're here today to take it back. The time for that politics is over. It's time to turn the page.

Now this man's former campaign organization is basically selling tickets to special presidential summits at the White House for five hundred grand a pop. Before you go on, read the transcript of the Springfield speech for a very special bonus passage about the perils of mounting debts (cough -- ahem -- cough). As Chuck Todd's segment revealed on Monday, Obama exploited the issue of high-dollar influencers and access-peddling as a major point of departure between himself and Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary. Indeed, he once called it "the difference" between them. Another big one, by the way, was their divergence of opinion on the individual mandate to purchase healthcare, which Obama strongly opposed (cough). To their credit, some lefty good government groups are getting on Obama's case about his latest means-to-an-end betrayal:

.....by the end of his first term? Now he's whining like a stuck pig after running up a $trillion deficit every year of his presidency and being forced to cut his rampant spending by 2 1/2 %.......even if it was his own idea.

...jut more lies from the Obama administration.

The descriptions of the post-sequester landscape that have been coming out of the Obama Administration have been alarming, specific--and, in at least some cases, hyped.

“There are literally teachers now who are getting pink slips, who are getting notices that they can’t come back this fall,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

When he was pressed in a White House briefing Wednesday to come up with an example, Duncan named a single county in West Virginia and acknowledged, “whether it’s all sequester-related, I don’t know.”

And, as it turns out, it isn’t.

Officials in Kanawha County, West Virginia say that the “transfer notices” sent to at least 104 educators had more to do with a separate matter that involves a change in the way West Virginia allocates federal dollars designated for poor children.

(Reuters) - The head of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration said on Wednesday the agency would have to begin furloughing air traffic controllers in early April because of a looming $627 million in automatic spending cuts, while Republican lawmakers argued there were other ways to handle the budget crunch.

"We're looking at all options to reduce costs. We're looking at a hiring freeze, at cutting contracts and travel and other items not related to day-to-day operations," FAA administrator Michael Huerta told the U.S. House of Representatives Transportation Committee.

"But to reach the large figure we need to cut, we have little choice but to make up the rest through furloughing employees," Huerta said, referring to the automatic federal spending cuts known as "sequestration" due to take effect on Friday.

Bob Woodward blasted President Obama on Wednesday morning for deciding to recall an aircraft carrier from the Persian Gulf because of impending budget cuts, calling the decision "a kind of madness."

Woodward: Can you imagine Ronald Reagan sitting there and saying ‘Oh, by the way, I can’t do this because of some budget document?’ Or George W. Bush saying, ‘You know, I’m not going to invade Iraq because I can’t get the aircraft carriers I need’ or even Bill Clinton saying, ‘You know, I’m not going to attack Saddam Hussein’s intelligence headquarters,’ as he did when Clinton was president because of some budget document? Under the Constitution, the president is commander-in-chief and employs the force. And so we now have the president going out because of this piece of paper and this agreement, I can’t do what I need to do to protect the country. That’s a kind of madness that I haven’t seen in a long time.

this whole sequestration argument is merely 0bama playing out his class warfare game; 0bama in full campaign mode. Why even Common Cause is asking 0bama to stop campaigning and to start leading. Fat chance.

What does 0bama want? Simple .. higher taxes on the rich. He already got a 4.6% increase in the tax rate on the rich in December. Then he added another 3.8% tax rate increase on many of the investments these evil rich people make. Then there’s a 0.9% Medicare tax increase on the rich, and more income tax surcharges coming up for rich people who don’t buy into his 0bamaCare health insurance plans. It seems rich people won’t be allowed to take care of their own health needs without paying a penalty. Now 0bama wants tax deductions removed so that the hideous rich will pay even more.

0bama truly despises the rich. He believes that the colonialization of his African homeland was driven by wealth, as was the colonialization of his birthplace, Hawaii. He believes that wealth is accumulated only by oppressing and victimizing others. And he KNOWS that political power can be gained and maintained by demonizing the rich and generating class envy and even hatred.

This has been one of 0bama’s primary goals since he came into power. Demonize the wealth. Create and encourage envy, then hatred. Since the day he took office he has pounded the rich on the taxes they pay. First he said they “needed” to pay their fair share. They he said they “were not” paying their fair share. Never did he acknowledge that the top one-percent of income earners were earning 17% of the income but paying about 38% of the income taxes. He knew that he had the media on his side on this … that those numbers would never appear prominently in the Washington Post or New York Times, or on any of the broadcast networks. He had his cover, his protection, and his list of lies he could spread without consequence. 0bama then spreads the lie that rich people pay lower tax rates than their secretaries. Does he mention that he’s comparing capital gains taxes to income taxes? No. Why not? He doesn’t have to. It would destroy his argument, and he knows damn well the media isn’t going to call him on it.

Now 0bama is using this sequester situation to once-again frighten the American people. He heads out to make campaign speeches telling people of the horrible consequences that will rain down on them if the horrible Republicans cause all of these disastrous spending cuts to take place because they’re protecting the rich from further tax increases.

Disastrous spending cuts? If these spending cuts went through it would be like taking $4.60 out of a weekly food budget of $200. That’s less than a pound of coffee. This is going to cause your economic world to come to an end? Really?

In December 0bama told the Republicans to give him his tax increases on the rich and he would talk spending cuts with them later. Now it’s later, and 0bama only wants to talk more taxes on the rich.

0bama and Harry Reid say we need some “revenue.” Remember --- the word “revenue,” to a Democrat, is code for “tax increase.” Democrats do not recognize that revenue increases can come from economic growth. To Democrats, revenue increases ONLY come from higher taxes.

Oh .. and these dire consequences Obama is preaching in his tax-the-rich campaign swing across the nation? Remember … he has direct control over just how the spending cuts for the Executive Department will be implemented .. and that’s pretty much everything except the congressional budgets and our federal courts. He can make them as painful or as benign as he wants. He can cut the money available for the WIC program that purportedly helps to feed the babies that mothers who can’t afford babies have, or he can work to reduce the fraud that is rampant in this program. His choice, and his choice is to make the cuts as painful as possible, and then blame the Republicans.

In the end, I full expect Boehner and McConnell to fold. That’s their history. The Republican party has NO leadership now. There is great potential in certain Senators from Florida and Kentucky … but the Democrats are, even as you read this, working on their plans to destroy these two people as quickly as possible.



Make your escape plans, folks.
NBN

President Barack Obama has been out on the campaign trail….uh, I mean, traveling the country discussing how the sequester from Congress (even though he signed off on it) will bring doom and gloom to America...unless of course we follow his plan and raise more revenues through taxes. The president has warned of the dire consequences of sequestration; cuts to education and health care, dramatic federal worker furloughs, dangerous borders and a loss of national security.

Enough fear to make your head spin.

It’s sounds very scary, almost like a horror movie… “The Sequestercist.”

...he knows if they don't get their pay-off, they could turn on him.

.....an he ain't got no mo money ta pay em.

Hope for: 73% of black children are born into single parent families.
Genna: You're racist for bringing that up.

Hope for: 90% of people in prison come from single parent homes.
Genna: You're a racist for bringing that up.

Hope for: I'm just citing facts.
Genna: That's why you're a racist. Facts don't mean squat to us Marxist....what matters is how we feel about things. That means your world is too small (obviously so is Genna's brain.)