Vicious Psedo-patriots - We Aren't the Only Country with These People: Japan

In covering the devastating events in the Pacific Rim, currently most of it in Japan, I was shocked momentarily to see these words here:

The outspoken governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, told reporters Monday that the disaster was "punishment from heaven" because Japanese have become greedy.

Previously, I had thought the not really a church Westboro Phelps family had found the lowest level to which human beings could sink in the name of spirituality.  No. The governor of Tokyo seems to be in competition, and maybe to have exceeded their ugliness and lack of human decency.

Attention Wisconsin! Tax Cuts to Corporations Don't Produce Jobs; the Comparison between Ohio, Wisconsin, and Minnesota

Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder.
- George Washington
courtesy of quote of the day, dictionary.com

Ohio is attempting to enact the same kinds of union busting legislation as Wisconsin.

As Wisconsin intends to do, if Governor Walker gets his way, Ohio has already done away with corporate income taxes, and has lower taxes in other categories, like property taxes and sales tax, than the national average.  This presents the question, are the tax cuts really about job creation, or are they just continuing and expanding the income gap between the wealthiest 1%, and the other 99%, with a side-order of union busting to further increase that gap between the very few haves, and the increasingly have-nots and have-less?

Yet their unemployment is HIGHER than the national average, and has been in spite of all the give-aways and the freebies for corporations in Ohio. Low Corporate Taxes are a factor in business relocation, but not the only - or even the most important - factor in job creation. If this was a mechanism for producing jobs, Ohio wouldn't have these comparative statistics:

                                Unemployment Rates         

                                             Dec. '10 
Ohio                                          9.5%

Ohio not seasonally adjusted        9.2%

U.S.                                           9.4%

U.S. not seasonally adjusted         9.1%

While Wisconsin had an unemployment rate of 7.5%, and Minnesota 7.0% respectively for the same time period.

Walking Back the New York City Snow Plowing 'Union Slow Down' Conspiracy

This initial story was only circulated through the Murdoch propaganda machine; it doesn't deserve to be called news or journalism. The large mostly right-wing fawning followers of this pseudo-news do not check nor hold these sources accountable. This first emerged as a Murdoch owned New York Post exclusive, claiming a scoop that there was an organized union slow down in plowing streets, a slow down which resulted in at least two deaths, due to the inability of emergency vehicles to get through the streets.  The story was, of course, picked up in lockstep by the other Murdoch propagandists - Fox News, etc.  From there the right-wing blogosphere ran with it as fact, not fact checking.