But then how will we kill all the lawyers?
The old-fashioned ways; you know, pointed sticks, bananas. . .
Brilliant! If they don’t have guns, they’ll have no way to defend against the bananas!
It’s okay to deny them a job if the employer judges that the person is too dangerous or dishonest to work for them.
However, when it comes to occupational licensing, the government should loosen their requirements, especially since most occupational licensing regimes are just meant to insure a cartel and keeping felons out is simply another way to reduce the supply of a particular professional.
Oh, I fully agree!
If an employer interviews a prospective employee, and after doing so, wants to access their full legal history before making a hiring decision, then by all means, I’m all for it.
What we’re talking about here is whether employers should be able to screen people out from the opportunity to have a job interview simply on the basis of the existence of a past conviction of indeterminate nature, end of sentence, without any knowledge of the nature of the offense, or whether it was recent or in the distant past, or whatever.
You apparently agree that this pre-screening should remain legal. I am proud to oppose it. Outlawing this sort of arbitrary, across-the-board screening out of anyone who’s ever had a criminal conviction from even the opportunity of an interview would do far more to aid the employment prospects of ex-cons who deserve a shot than all the letters that the Rubios of the world might write to prospective employers or licensing boards.
I agree with you there too! But this has nothing to do with Rubio, the election, or partisan politics.
The right-wing philosophy is about empowerment of the rich. Wasn’t it Donald Trump himself who thought Mike Tyson should be released from prison because his economic value was too great to waste in prison? To a right-winger, a major drug smuggler is an important job-creating person of substance, in stark contrast with a kid slinging dime bags of crack on the corner.
Thus adaher’s defense of a family embracing their successful relative in the import-export business is fully consistent.
However …
now we’re getting silly. Most felons have trouble even getting janitorial jobs, but jobs like real estate brokering, where opportunity for fraud is one reason for licensing requirement, should be open to major criminals(*)? :smack:
(* - I almost wrote the more accurate “ex-criminal” but the right-wing morons are first to insist “once a criminal, always so” when they’re bad-mouthing the kids selling dime bags. Wouldn’t it be consistent to apply the same “reasoning” to a real big-time criminal?)
The best way of getting to that result is to prevent special-privilege cases (i.e. you’re the brother-in-law of an influential politician) from slipping through, thus forcing the influential politicians to repeal the rule for everybody if they want to help their relatives.
Depends on the job. Barbers, maybe. Doctors, not so much.
From BG’s quote:
“Help me, Granite State! You’re my only hope.”
Actually, his strategy has shifted. He’s spending more time in Iowa so that he’ll be seen as having exceeded expectations there, which will give him a boost in New Hampshire where Cruz is not likely to be a major competitor.
It’s a good plan. Take fourth in Iowa, then win New hampshire. If trump falters, Christie expects he can gain a lot of Trump’s support. I’ve actually long felt that a lot of Trump’s voters would be Christie voters if he wasn’t in the race. They like the personality more than any of his specific positions, and Christie comes the closest to his style.
Of course, it might not work, but with no one looking like an obvious winner, Christie’s got as good a chance as anyone at this point. Finish at least fourth in Iowa is step one. If he beats Bush in Iowa and Trump loses, then he probably gets a bounce in New Hampshire.
Marco Rubio’s PAC takes aim at Chris Christie with a searing negative ad:
Liberal energy loving? Energy is partisan?
It is if you want Coal Country to stay red.
Besides Global Warming is Al Gore and therefore Liberal Claptrap. Don’t question it: Science is done by making personal attacks and Al Gore is a dirty Commie, which disproves all of the evidence.
You’re parsing it wrong: it’s not ‘liberal energy-loving’ (because you know us libruls don’t love energy, broadly speaking - we want to reduce everyone’s power use to what they normally use in 3 hours each day, don’t you know), but rather ‘liberal energy’-loving, that is, lovers of solar and wind and geothermal power.
And while energy itself isn’t partisan, its sources are, of course: Real True Patriotic Americans love petroleum and coal, and can tolerate natural gas. Solar and wind power are hippie stuff.
The problem with this approach is, if he spends nontrivial time campaigning in Iowa, guess what? People’s expectations for him there will go up!
And fourth in Iowa…well, the only way it’ll be in reach is if Carson crashes even further than he has, and nobody’s gonna be impressed if he takes 4th in Iowa with 5% of the vote.
And Christie’s such a bad fit for Iowa that it’s really one hell of a gamble. Right now he’s more or less in a dead heat for 2nd in the NH polls (way behind Trump), and he’s probably a better fit for NH than Rubio and Cruz, his main rivals for 2nd. Is he really going to gain in NH by losing convincingly to them both in Iowa - which is almost surely what will happen? If I were advising him, I’d tell him: fuck Iowa, stay the course in NH.
I recently saw a billboard on the Interstate protesting that a certain number of birds every year are killed by power-windmills. I assumed it was paid for by animal-rights activists, but now I wonder . . .
Yeah, IIRC, that argument has been used by some conservative media folks to attack wind power. “You think wind power is better for the environment? What about all the birds it kills, you big liberal hypocrite poopy head!”
George Will brought it up in a conversation about the Gulf Oil spill in 2010.
All we need to do is to make the turbines nastier to the birds, such that they’re auto-spatchcocked and ready for the grill. Automatic fast food. What GOPper could disagree with that?
It suddenly occurred to me that the only GOP Presidential candidates in all of history that could really be called right-wing are Goldwater (1964) and Reagan (1980 and 1984). All the others (Dewey, Ike, Nixon, Ford, Bush-41, Dole, McCain, Romney, etc.) were moderates. (Cheney and Rove could be called right-wing but their puppet GWB was almost too addle-brained to have identifiable idealogy.)
Kasich and Jeb! are at least as right-wing as Reagan, so this election is likely to produce the fourth right-wing GOP nominee in all of history. The only moderates in contention are Christie and, arguably, Trump.
McCain was actually as right-wing as Reagan, but moderate in temperament, so if you allow McCain as a moderate, Kasich is also a moderate, as is Jeb.