Day: 12/1/2011

Newt Gingrich Slams Poor Children – Again

Posted by on December 1, 2011 at 4:18 pm. 5 Comments :

Last week Newt Gingrich floated a ludicrous plan to fire union janitors at schools (putting them on the unemployment rolls and devastating their families) and replacing them with school children. The brilliance of this plan is that, while impoverishing the families of the once gainfully employed janitors, it would simultaneously burden kids with responsibilities that would distract them from their studies. And of course the children of folks in Gingrich’s class would have no such impediments to their education.

Not content with declaring child labor laws “truly stupid,” this week Gingrich compounded his absurdity and insensitivity by insulting the children that he hopes to put to work scrubbing toilets.

“Really poor children, in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works so they have no habit of showing up on Monday,” Gingrich claimed.

“They have no habit of staying all day, they have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash’ unless it is illegal,” he added.

This is the current front-runner for the Republican nomination for president saying that the children of the working poor have only lazy or criminal influences in their lives. Their parents are either bums or crooks.

Obviously Gingrich has never set foot in a poor neighborhood. Had he done so he would have met people who not only show up for work, they do it at multiple jobs. Gingrich has no concept of what it means to struggle to provide for his family. He makes $60,000 to give a half hour speech, yet he maligns poor people as having “no habit of staying all day.” And he spent decades in Congress where they almost never show up on Monday (or Friday either) and take several weeks off every year.

To insinuate that poor families who earn money do so only through illegal activities is not only wrong, it belies a measure of hypocrisy that is monumental. Remember, it was Gingrich who was cast out of Congress in disgrace after having been reprimanded for misusing tax-exempt funds and being fined $300,000. Someone as ethically challenged as Gingrich has no business maligning the integrity of others. Particularly those about whom he has absolutely no knowledge.

New Yorkers Paying $500,000 A Year To Protect Fox News

Posted by on December 1, 2011 at 3:30 pm. NO Comments :

In another example of the 1% bilking the general public out of money that ought to be used for the public’s benefit, the Daily Beast is reporting that Fox News gets special protection from the New York Police Department courtesy of New York taxpayers.

“[D]own at Rupert’s News Corp. headquarters on Sixth Ave.–which has never been a terrorist or protest target of any significance–the media empire is guarded by a 24-hour-a-day New York Police Department security detail seven days a week, a patrol that one security expert estimated costs the city at least half a million dollars a year. No other news network gets comparable NYPD protection.”

The article goes on to attribute the all-consuming paranoia of Fox CEO Roger Ailes as a possible explanation for the extraordinary security. But the optics of an enterprise owned by billionaire Rupert Murdoch billing a cash-strapped metropolis for security they ought to be paying for themselves is an embarrassment and an outrage. At a time when the NYPD is staffed at near record lows, somebody at the department, or in city government, has decided to redeploy officers from serving and protecting the people of New York to babysitting a wealthy corporation that can afford to take care of itself.

Is this really a wise use of scarce law enforcement resources? Does Fox News deserve protection that no other network receives? Is there an unhealthy relationship between Murdoch, the NYPD, and Michael Bloomberg? These are just a few of the questions that need to be asked at the next city council meeting. And while they are at it, somebody ought to ask why Fox News goes berserk over the cost of policing legal protests by Occupy Wall Street while they are draining public funds for no good reason.

Newt Gingrich Admits That Fox News Analysts Don’t Know What They’re Talking About

Posted by on December 1, 2011 at 1:23 am. 1 Comments :

If there is one thing that Newt Gingrich knows about, it is what Fox News analysts know. He was, after all, a Fox News analyst himself. So it is with direct personal experience that Gingrich reveals that…

“One of the real changes that comes when you start running for president – as opposed to being an analyst on Fox – is I have to actually know what I’m talking about.”

With that succinct comment Gingrich acknowledges that he didn’t know what he was talking about during his many appearances on Fox, and that there was no requirement for such knowledge to be an analyst on Fox. That explains why so much of the analysis on Fox is so wrong so often and why there are so many notably unknowledgeable people on the network.

However, in keeping with his history of ignorance, Gingrich clearly does not know what he is talking about when he says that presidential candidates have to know what they are talking about. Anyone who has seen any of the GOP primary debates know that that isn’t true.