Crossposted from The People's View.
Conservative talk show host and un-American hack Neal Boortz said in twitter feeds today that Obama voters should be fired from their jobs because they "contributed to the problem." Media Matters picked this up today. I'll let you read the twit's tweets first...
As Think Progress points out, this is utterly stupid and actually doing this is criminal:
Steve Benen writes, “Obviously, as a substantive matter, this doesn’t make any sense. As a legal matter, it’s a crime to fire an employee based on how he or she voted.” Discriminating against Obama voters seems to be a new trend for the right wing. In Florida recently, a doctor posted a sign reading, “If you voted for Obama…seek urologic care elsewhere.”
So, Neal Boortz is urging employers to commit crimes. This might be a good time to turn him off, if you are a business owner.
The hatred on right wing talk is palpable. Neal Boortz is an un-American thug who doesn't give a hoot about working people, small businesses, or this country, for that matter. Of course it doesn't make any substantive sense. The economic decline started long before President Obama took office, and since he has taken office, the economy's freefall has stopped and the key economic indicators have gotten consistently better, as I wrote the other day. The stock market is up, we have gone from losing 800,000 jobs a month when Obama took office to adding 162,000 jobs last month, initial unemployment claims are down, and consumer confidence is inching up. George W. Bush and the Republicans in Congress were responsible for pushing our economy off a cliff. Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress had to break that fall, and keep a second Great Depression from taking hold.
As for businesses themselves, President Obama's policies have helped small business a great deal. First of all, he cut taxes for small business.
The 2009 stimulus package offers several tax breaks for small businesses, including:
- Extends a provision allowing businesses to expense up to $250,000 of new capital equipment immediately.
- Extends through the end of 2009 a 50 percent bonus depreciation on some capital expenses.
- Allows some businesses to take their 2008 losses and carry them back over a period of five years.
- Reduces estimated tax bills for small business owners.
And much more. The Recovery Act also shored up small business loan programs and eliminated fees.
The bill provides $730 million to SBA and makes changes to the agency’s lending and investment programs so that they can reach more small businesses that need help. The funding includes:
$375 million for temporarily eliminating fees on SBA-backed loans and raising SBA's guarantee percentage on some loans to 90 percent. [...]
$255 million for a new loan program to help small businesses meet existing debt payments
$30 million for expanding SBA’s Microloan program, enough to finance up to $50 million in new lending and $24 million in technical assistance grants to microlenders [...]
If you are a small business owner, the SBA provides a whole FAQ for you to take advantage of the Recovery Act. And guess what the Recovery Act dollars have been spent through? Who do you think are repairing the roads and bridges with Recovery Act funding? Oh, yeah, that's right. Contractors, i.e. businesses. Thanks to this President's policies, unemployment insurance for millions of Americans without a job has been extended. People who receive unemployment spend money buying things from, umm, businesses. In fact, every dollar of unemployment benefits generates $1.63 in economic activity (second only to food stamps, for which every dollar spent generates $1.73 of economic activity). Who found this? Some lefty professor? Nope. The numbers come from Mark Zandi of Moody's Economy and an advisor to John McCain's presidential campaign in 2008.
Small businesses have been the focus of health reform, too. Small business tax credits of up to 35% for health insurance start now, this calendar year. Even Goldman Sachs says the new health care law will help grow small business jobs. Tax breaks for small businesses were also a centerpiece of the recent $38 billion jobs bill that the President signed into law.
So if anything, Obama is helping businesses, not hurting them. So by Neal Boortz's logic, businesses should hire more Obama voters.
But I digress. I understand that it's pointless trying to talk sense into nonsensical right wing radio talk show hosts. But I'm not really trying to talk to him. He's an un-American unpatriotic hack. I'm trying to talk to people who listen to people like Boortz. He's a lunatic that people have got to stop listening to. Right wing hate radio never ceases to come up with more and more hate mongering, and there is nothing there to stop them other than listeners tuning out.
Update (h/t to DJShay in comments): Apparently, Neal Boortz didn't start this right wing thuggery idea. Right wing whack jobs have already been doing this. CBS reports:
Last Friday, someone going by the name "dermdoc" posted a thread on a message board for Texas A&M students and alumni with this topic: "Laid off my first Obama voting employee today."
Let's hope they find out who "dermdoc" is and slap him/her with some criminal charges. This cannot go on.
An unrelated thing: I have been trying to get in touch with Rachel Maddow's office for something completely unrelated. It's for a fundraiser for an HIV research organization. Does anyone know how I can do this? Please let me know. Feel free to email me if you like.
Self-plug: You can read this and other thoughts of mine on my blog, The People's View. You can also follow me on Twitter @thepeoplesview.