Ocassional Thoughts of an Independent Progressive Atheistic Humanist
Ohio’s 4th Congressional District representative Jim Jordan (R-Urbana) held a town hall meeting at the University of Findlay on Monday September 19th. In the reddest of red areas of Ohio he still had to spar with some unhappy constituents. They peppered him with questions about the failed Republican economic agenda and the continued outsourcing of jobs. Jordan’s unsupported tired GOP talking points didn’t seem to help.
The stagnant economy is like a stalled car. You sit there and keep turning the key in hopes that it will luckily turn over but you know you’ll have to call the tow truck. House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) doesn’t want to call the tow truck in issuing his jobs plan called “The House Republican Plan For American’s Job Creators”. The “plan” just offers the same tax cuts, budget cuts, and regulation cuts that have failed yet to create the jobs we need.
In what seems as an effort to pre-empt the President’s jobs speech on Thursday, Speaker Boehner released his jobs plan. It has nothing new and nothing that hasn’t already been tried in the past ten years. It contains nothing for the middle class and those actually out of work.
Just hearing the talking points makes me angry so forgive me if I sound angry. Someone will make a comment or bitch about “welfare queens” and about how these lazy poor people have wide-screen TVs and microwaves. If these comments come from friends and family, who should know better, it really drives me insane. Finally my hometown newspaper did me a solid and now I have some facts and figures to fight those biased FOX “news” talking points about poor people.
On Monday, August 22nd, the Findlay Ohio Courier had an article talking about the recent retirement of Judy Wauford, as director of the Hancock County Department of Job and Family Services (ODJFS). In Ohio, ODJFS handles the state and federal social safety net programs like unemployment, Medicaid, food stamps, and child support enforcement. The piece included some actual facts and data about the poor in Hancock county.
Represenative Jim Jordan (OH-4), a cheap labor conservative and chair of the stealth Republican Study Committee, introduced “H.R. 1167, the Welfare Reform Act of 2011” to do to food stamp recipients what the GOP did to people on welfare back in the 1990’s – kick them to the curb if they don’t go to work. Too bad the program already has such a requirement. I can only think that Jordan and the rest of his Star Chamber want to have children go hungry and make family poverty worse.
In case people don’t understand why a lot of progressives like myself are upset with the proposed tax cut deal brokered by President Obama and the TP/GOP I wrote an analogy:
Look at it this way. I am the Democrats and I have a large pizza cut in 8 slices. You are the GOP and have a six pack of beer. I don’t need the beer because I have soda pop but you really want some pizza since there is no other food in the house. You also have a trigger to a bomb that will blow up the house next door killing the family that lives there.
A rational person in that position would offer a slice for 3 bottles of beer and the family’s freedom but since I am the Democrats I instead open the negotiation by offering 5 slices for one bottle and your promise to think about not blowing up the house next door. You accept and say we compromised and had bipartisanship and in the words of an old cellphone commercial “Daddy got hosed…”
Here’s the old cellphone commercial
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wmfqpl4-Go8