Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc), a tea party favorite, insulted minimum wage workers at a recent constituent event, saying that "when you’re a good worker you don’t stay at minimum wage for long."

Johnson has a strong record supporting the one percent and opposing jobs-creating programs. He voted against the American Jobs Act. He also proposed a moratorium on all federal regulations until unemployment dropped to 7.7 percent. Most importantly, he was a vocal supporter of Gov. Scott Walker's attack on collective bargaining rights:

Johnson replied that the union measures were actually part of the budget problem so it made sense to have the collective bargaining issue "tied together" with the budget issues. "The whole collective bargaining issue," he said, "was important in terms of bringing fiscal sanity to the state." He reminded us, of course, that it was the state's Democrats that forced the policies to be separated because they fled the state. Johnson said it was "pretty disconcerting" to have Democrats claiming that it was Wisconsin's Republicans that were thwarting democracy. "It's "pretty disconcerting the level of mob rule and thuggery that's occurring in Wisconsin. We're getting word from state senators saying 'this isn't what democracy looks like,' accusing he Republicans of not being democratic, but the fact of the matter is, what doesn't look democratic to me is the mob rule. And the fact that they simply weren't back in Madison doing their job."

The full transcript of Johnson's comments:

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Steven Perlstein's wonderful analysis in Friday's Washington Post of Herman Cain's business ideals and how they play into the larger economic landscape is not to be missed. Being from California, I'm unfamiliar with Godfather Pizza, but evidently I should learn more about his business model.

Perlstein writes:

'Don’t blame Wall Street. Don’t blame the big banks. If you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself.'

— Herman Cain, from an Oct. 5 video interview with the Wall Street Journal’s Alan Murray

What you have in this statement from the leading Republican candidate to be president of the United States is the purest distillation of the attitude of the New Republican Party toward rising poverty and inequality in the United States.

Normally, Republican politicians are politic enough to dance around questions about poverty and inequality, accusing anyone who brings them up as engaging in “class warfare” or blaming President Obama, conveniently forgetting that these were big problems when Republicans controlled the White House and Congress.

But not the Hermanator. Indeed, one of the things we love about Cain is that there is no filter between the brain and the mouth. He just tells you what he thinks, even if he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Yeah, there's what we need. A dispassionate, selfish CEO who doesn't know what he's talking about. Yay, us.

Here's one more snippet, but really, just go read the whole thing.

Through it all, his views on economic justice have been perfectly consistent: The only thing anyone deserves from society is the opportunity to work hard and succeed, just as he did, the African American son of a chauffeur growing up in the segregated South.

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These kids are probably somewhat privileged to begin with, but I'm happy to see them take on the industry. From the New York Times:

Two men who worked on the hit movie “Black Swan” have mounted an unusual challenge to the film industry’s widely accepted practice of unpaid internships by filing a lawsuit on Wednesday asserting that the production company had violated minimum wage and overtime laws by hiring dozens of such interns.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Manhattan, claims that Fox Searchlight Pictures, the producer of “Black Swan,” had the interns do menial work that should have been done by paid employees and did not provide them with the type of educational experience that labor rules require in order to exempt employers from paying interns.

“Fox Searchlight’s unpaid interns are a crucial labor force on its productions, functioning as production assistants and bookkeepers and performing secretarial and janitorial work,” the lawsuit says. “In misclassifying many of its workers as unpaid interns, Fox Searchlight has denied them the benefits that the law affords to employees.” Workplace experts say the number of unpaid internships has grown in recent years, in the movie business and many other industries. Some young people complain that these internships give an unfair edge to the affluent and well connected.

For whatever their motives may be, this is a good thing. When these entry-level, career-path creative jobs pay a decent wage, they will be an option for applicants of all backgrounds, not just the children of the rich and well-connected.

I have to say, I'm pleasantly surprised and fascinated by this trend. If it can happen in Hong Kong, bastion free market capitalism, it can happen anywhere -- except the U.S., of course. The "beacon of liberty" that is supposed to be America is now all about cutting what little workers get, while Hong Kong is actually trying to bridge the wealth divide -- because they think it's a bad thing! Imagine that:

Hong Kong has introduced a minimum wage that is expected to benefit 270,000 low-paid workers, or around 10% of the working population. Workers will now earn a minimum of HK$28 ($3.60; £2.18) per hour.

The legislation was passed in response to public pressure to narrow the territory's wealth gap.

But the minimum wage has been resisted by the business community, who say it is too costly. Business leaders say small businesses will be forced to lay off staff.

Critics also say the legislation is a departure from Hong Kong's free-market roots.

With the exception of Singapore, most Asian countries now have a minimum wage or are considering one.

The move is expected to boost the pay of Hong Kong's legions of street sweepers, security guards and restaurant workers.

"The employers now cannot squeeze the lowest paid sectors of society," said Lee Cheuk-yan, head of the Hong Kong Federation of Trade Unions and a legislator.

Unions had campaigned for a minimum wage of HK$33 an hour and many workers say the wage increase will not cover rising living costs.

The government said it was forced to introduce the legislation after a voluntary minimum wage scheme in 2006 met with a tepid response from businesses.

What, you mean a rising tide didn't lift all boats? Entrepreneurs didn't want to share the wealth? Fancy that. At least in Singapore, they admit it.

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Credit: Lake Oswego Fire Dept/Oregonian

It's awfully tough to present your party as the champion of populist fury when the centerpiece of your 2010 campaign is another $700 billion tax cut windfall for the wealthiest two percent of Americans. Which is why, as the AP reported Wednesday, GOP consultants are working overtime to recast Linda McMahon, Rick Scott, Meg Whitman and other very rich Republican candidates as regular folk. But with the wolves’ in sheep’s clothing showing their true colors over the minimum wage, unemployment benefits and retirement security, those carefully manufactured images may yet go down in flames.

Or in the case of Oregon Republican Chris Dudley, up in flames.

The son of a well-to-do family who converted his professional basketball career into providing financial advice to the gilded class, Dudley has called for slashing the state's capital gains tax rate in a move that would drain $800 million from Salem's already broken budget. Like billionaire Meg Whitman in California, Dudley would be reap a big payday from the tax cuts he proposes. Then again, Dudley was even better at gaming the tax system than playing basketball.

As the Willamette Week and later the Oregonian detailed, in 2004 Chris Dudley claimed a $350,00 tax deduction for letting the Lake Owego fire department burn down house his house in a training exercise. In a nutshell, Dudley got U.S. taxpayers to help pay for the new home he built there.

The Willamette Week described the Dudley's 2004 "Burn to Learn" gambit, the same one which got ESPN announcer Kirk Herbstreit in hot water with the Internal Revenue Service in Ohio:

In December 2002, during the last of his 16 NBA seasons, then-Portland Trail Blazer Dudley bought a 1.81-acre property in Lake Oswego for $1.15 million. The property included a 4,900-square-foot home with four bedrooms, four bathrooms and a four-car garage...

Dudley claimed a $350,000 deduction for the house on his 2004 federal tax return. He based the value on an appraisal he supplied to WW, which says its purpose was to "establish both the overall market value of the property, and the market value of the site."

Given Dudley's career NBA earnings of more than $30 million, he probably faced a combined federal and state income tax bill of 40 percent in 2004. That means the $350,000 deduction saved him about $140,000.

And while Americans debate the morality of Tennessee firefighters watching a man's home consumed by flames over an unpaid $75 fee, Dudley's burning-down-the-house scheme has gone unnoticed.

Chris Dudley, it turns out, is the poster child for President George W. Bush’s claim that “the really rich people figure out how to dodge taxes anyway.”

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As tax cut-receiving Tea Baggers and town hall hecklers continue their tirades over health care reform, their kin in the Obama birth certificate denial crowd perpetuate their mass delusion. But lost in the fury is what might be deemed the Iron Law of Birtherism. That is, the birther movement is strongest in precisely those states where Republicans poll best and health care is worst. And as it turns out, there is a Birther Corollary: education, working conditions and myriad other indicators of social failure are generally most dismal in the most red of states.

In the staggering DailyKos/Research 2000 poll released 10 days ago, a stunning 58% of Republicans did not believe (28%) or were unsure (30%) that President Barack Obama was in fact born in the United States. (Nationally, only 11% of Americans denied Obama's natural citizenship, with another 12% in doubt.) This is a uniquely Southern pathology, a region home to 69% of all birthers and the only part of the country to increase its Republican presidential vote in 2008. And to be sure, the old times there are not forgotten. As Dave Weigel of the Washington Independent concluded, "as many as three-quarters of Southern whites told pollsters that they didn't know where Obama was born."

That the birther movement would take hold in the states of the old Confederacy should come as little surprise. While Americans rejected George W. Bush's Republican Party on Election Day in November, in counties across much of the South voters actually increased their support for the GOP candidate John McCain over Bush four years earlier. The interactive New York Times map above tells the tale of November's losers still fighting their failed 2008 campaign by other means:

That helps explains why when it comes to the delusion over Obama's citizenship, as Steve Benen observed, one of these things is not like the other:

"Outside the South, this madness is gaining very little traction, and remains a fringe conspiracy theory. Within the South, it's practically mainstream."

But that brand of racial flat-earthism is not all that's practically mainstream in the South.

Consider, for example, abysmal health care.

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(full disclosure: I work for the Courage Campaign)

I wanted to report back on my post from Friday, warning that Gov. Schwarzengger was about to cut over 200,000 state worker's salaries down to the federal minimum wage of $6.55 -- a ploy in a political game being played by the Governor. He's trying to hold state workers hostage to try and place pressure on the Democrats instead of the Republicans who are holding up the budget.

Today, I have good news and bad news. It's Arnold's birthday. No, that's not the good news.

The good news is that over 28,000 of you stepped up and signed the petition to Schwarzenegger. The same day, he delayed signing the executive order that would have put the policy into effect.

The bad news is that he only delayed it to Thursday.

We delivered your petitions to the Governor on Monday and created a funny, snarky video you can see above, about our adventure trying to get someone to accept the darn petitions. It helped to have an Assemblymember along with us and a bunch of cameras and reporters, or else we would have been sent straight to the mailroom.

We have about 24 hours until the Governor signs the executive order. Which means we still have time today to pressure Arnold to stop holding state workers hostage to his political budget negotiation games.

On behalf of hundreds of thousands of state workers, please pick up your phone right now and call Arnold. Click here for the phone number and a form to report back your call.

UPDATE: We've already received some interesting call reports, like this one from Gary:

Staff member tried to convince me that things will be alright with our finances because my partner, who is a teacher, can get a zero-interest loan since the banks know that the employees will be getting the money eventually. I told her that we didn't want to be pawns in their political games and that the governor & legislature need to work it out. She said she would pass it along.

CNN:

Sen. Edward Kennedy was rushed to Cape Cod Hospital in Massachusetts Saturday morning, a well-informed, prominent Democratic source in that state told CNN.

The source said the 76-year-old senator had "symptoms of a stroke."

Kennedy was taken to the hospital around 8 or 9 a.m. from the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis, according to the source. The source said the senator would be transferred to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

That hospital said it had no information on Kennedy.

Kennedy has represented Massachusetts in the Senate since 1962. He is one of only six senators in U.S. history to serve more than 40 years. He is known as a liberal champion of social issues such as health care, family leave, and the minimum wage. Read on...

Please send your prayers and thoughts to Senator Kennedy and his family. We'll bring you more updates as they become available.

UPDATE: It now appears that doctors believe Senator Kennedy had a seizure, not a stroke as was previously suspected.

AFL-CIO NOW Blog, (h/t Norwegianity):

Looks like literally nothing is sacred. A new report by the National Labor Committee reveals that crucifixes for sale at major religious institutions such as St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Trinity Church in New York City were made in Chinese sweatshops.

Distributed by the Association for Christian Retail, the items are not labeled “Made in China.” In fact, they sometimes seems to be labeled “Made in Italy,” according to National Labor Committee Director Charles Kernaghan. Following a National Labor Committee press conference yesterday outside St. Patrick’s announcing the report, Kernaghan said both St. Patrick’s and Trinity pulled the items from their store shelves...

The report, “Today Workers Bear the Cross: Crucifixes Made Under Horrific Sweatshop Conditions in China,” notes that the workers who make the crucifixes are paid just 26½ cents an hour, less than half China’s legal minimum wage of 55 cents, which is itself set at below subsistence levels. read more...

There's a certain amount of "outrage fatigue" you experience when blogging about the state of our union. The amount of bad news that I recount here makes it harder and harder for me to stay positive.

So thank heavens for Katrina vanden Heuvel for focusing on positive changes we could make to benefit us all. How does this list look to you? What would you add, subtract, or expand upon?

Alternet:

...House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will begin to answer that call (of the November 2006 elections) by pushing a "100 Hours" agenda -- including common-sense legislation to increase the minimum wage, cut interest on student loans and open the way for Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices.

That's a good beginning, but it's only a down payment on a broader agenda. Progressives now have the opportunity to develop a new vision that returns power to the American people for the first time in generations. But to-do lists don't add up to a vision. But Democrats must show they are serious by passing bold measures that define a new "people's agenda." With that in mind, here are ten existing pieces of legislation that deserve to be passed by our new Congress.

Read Katrina's list here