Thats called a polite political SLAP in the FACE Mr Edwards!

Go Hillary44 08! http://hillaryis44.org/

I busted my butt to get to where I am today, and they're going to make my hard-earned wages worth even less by mandating that grocery baggers and janitors get paid nearly as much as newly-graduated baccalaureate college students, who meanwhile struggle to find well-paying work in their fields because all of their jobs are shipped off to the third world because of these "free trade" NWO types??

I never thought we'd have to go though the trouble of defeating communism again, much less in our home country!!!!

What a waste of my money and to make my education, experience, and motivation to work hard worth less.

Our state already has a minimum wage law that keeps it 1.75 higher than Federal. So now they are going to make over $11 p/hr for minimum effort? Why?

When our state raised the minimum wage. Just to put things in prospective for people and give an easy example.. when my state raised the minimum wage to $1.75 an hour higher than federal everything on a $1 menu went to $1.39 or 1.50; all the $1 stores became 1.50 stores. A simple example but the costs went up across the board, as well as cost people jobs.

Increasing Minimum wage only lowers the value of money (inflation) and increases the overall cost for everyone but those that put in minimal effort with minimal skill. The minimum wage should not be a form of social welfare; which is exactly what Edwards and Clinton are proposing.

More wages across the board means more disposable income which leads to booming business. Looks at the states that have had higher wages than nationally – not doing too badly, are they?

If you're going to diss the idea, please back it up with facts, instead of lies.

Posted By Mario Uy Streamwood IL : December 20, 2007 8:39 pm

That would be so, if any American had any part of making it – but thanks to Clinton and Bush free trade agreements, that plasma TV's made in a country with no minimum wage, and no OHSA.

If you are going to hike minimum wage figure out how to offset the inflation that will come with then, I would call her brilliant.

Though people think increasing minumum wage helps the low income families it merely is going to drive them into unemployment.

It doesn't hurt the upper class at all but it will devestate the middle class due to the eventual inflation.

Edwards has been leading on all the issues. Shoot, even AFSCME used Edwards healthcare plan to attack Obama...not Clinton's (whom they endorsed.)

Vote Edwards, he is the real change candidate.

That's great, Hillary. I'm sure that'll be passed next week– oh, that's right. This is Congress we're talking about. That bill won't be railroaded through. It'll be put into committee in the Senate, then stalled there. Once the committee has its say and the Senate votes on it, it'll go to the House to stall out there. We'll probably get that $9.50 minimum wage by the next presidential election. And, like always, you introduce the bill or act only after an opponent challenges you on it.

There's your self-anoited frontrunner/leader, ladies and gentlemen– only acting when someone else tells her to do something, not on her own accord. This is someone that's not fit for the White House.

Ending poverty has been the cause of my life, he says, then why John, did you work for a company which not only engaged in predatory lending, but also took full advantage of tax havens?

Obviously she has no clue about the impact this will have throughout the economy. If you have to pay your local high-schooler 9.50 for his job at McDonald's, be prepared for $8.00 Big Macs. If a landscaper has to pay $9.50@hr for his "undocumented workers", your ficus tree just went up to $300 and your mowing will cost $40 each time they come out.

Maybe we'll see now if she's a "strong and capable leader with the experience to be an agent of change" when this ludicrous proposal gets stomped.

I can see a lot of corporations deciding to send their 'help desk' operations to India or the Philippines to $2.25 and hour instead of paying $9.50 per hour here.

She wants to run the country, please, I wouldn't trust her running the local pee-wee football league.

Have a great weekend and a Merry Christmas!

December 20, 2007
Oprah might just as well have stayed home and hung out with her gal pal Gayle.

It was hoped her recent appearances on the campaign trail to promote the presidential aspirations of her friend Barack Obama would have dazzled women voters. But noooo . . .

Or so says a new poll released Wednesday by Lifetime Networks and Zogby International. The pollsters interviewed 500 New Hampshire women - to look at the views in this early primary state - and 1,000 other women across the nation to determine their perspectives on the upcoming presidential election.

And what the pollsters found was that Oprah made little difference in the way women are looking at the candidates.

In fact, with some groups of women, Oprah's efforts actually backfired.

In New Hampshire, pollsters found one-third of the women under 30 said Oprah "stumping actually made them less likely to support Obama." Seventy-three percent of the other women said it made no difference to their campaign choices at all.

Voters don't want "to have their entertainment figures involved in political support," explained Fritz Wenzel, director of communications at Zogby International.

The poll was taken during the Dec. 8 weekend when Oprah was on the stump for Obama in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

In New Hampshire, pollsters found Clinton leading Obama by 14 points - 39 percent to 25 percent, although 40 percent of the respondents said they still had not made up their minds.

More women head to polls than men
The point is the effort by Clinton's campaign to make her seem warm and cuddly may not even be necessary.

Women say they don't feel obliged to support Clinton because she is a woman; they support her because she is a strong, smart woman and a role model, according to the poll.

That is especially true for minority women who say they are more interested in supporting Clinton because she is a woman than they are in voting for Obama because he is a minority candidate.

And because more women head to the polls than men, the voting gender gap may also help Clinton outpace her rivals.

The gap was greater than ever before during the 2004 presidential election, with 67.3 million women voting compared with 58.5 million men, said Debbie Walsh, Director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.

"There is great potential for women to play a major role in seeing who will become the next president of the United States," Walsh told reporters during a phone conference Wednesday about the Lifetime/Zogby poll.

Pollsters found 89 percent of New Hampshire women say they are likely to vote in their state's primary on Jan. 8.

Iraq isn't top concern for women
Sixty percent of all the women interviewed say this presidential election is more important than any other one in their lifetimes. They are concerned more about education, jobs and the economy and health care than the war in Iraq. (Although for New Hampshire women, the war was still the No. 1 concern.)

Other interesting data also emerged from the poll. For Republican women living in New Hampshire, there is a so-called Iowa effect - pollsters found women there are more likely to switch candidates if the one they support does not do well in Iowa.

For Democrats it's a different story. The majority of New Hampshire Democrats will stay with the candidate they originally choose, despite his or her showing in Iowa.

Voters were asked which presidential candidates they trusted the most. For Republican women, Mike Huckabee came in first with 18 percent. Mitt Romney and John McCain were tied at 16 percent.

About 32 percent of Democratic women trusted Clinton, followed by Obama at 19 percent. Obama was seen by 25 percent as the candidate who most represents change. But Clinton was seen by 23 percent as a candidate of change.

The revelation of the Lifetime/Zogby poll is that women are going to be a huge factor not only for the caucuses and primaries but in the general election. Which is why Michelle Obama - mother, career woman and keeper of Obama's socks - is out on the trail so frequently pitching to women and why Clinton and Obama have formed women's groups.

Now we just have to get more women elected at all levels of government if we really want to make a difference. You go girls!

CS

CS

Those who have swallowed the Alice-in-Libertarian-Lane "free market" fairy tale are again reviving the argument that raising wages is really lowering wages and that the best thing we can do for the poor is to pay them less so that they will be happier. None of them have read the history of the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier, and the Great Society, which built a middle class in America, raised real wages, sent us to college, financed our houses, established equal rights for women and minorities, and re-built America as a middle-class country. That work, unfortunately, has been largely undone by Reaganomics (enrich the rich) and Bushruptcy (bankrupt the nation).

So here's a compromise that even a Conservative could support.

1. Do NOT raise the minimum wage for small businesses employing a small number of people (take your pick: 50, 100, 500). People who need a job badly or need training and experience can get starter-jobs there.

2. Raise the minimum wage for employees of large corporations. If they can pay millions for a CEO, they can pay the janitor ten bucks an hour.

3. Establish a MAXIMUM wage at, say, 50 or 100 times the annual wage of the lowest paid employee of that corporation. That way, the CEOs and the VPs will have real motivation to pay their employees more.

I think she's vying to be his vice president!

Don't buy it. I'm still for John Edwards. At this point I believe you would say nearly anything to get back into the White House–and like your spouse–accomplish little to help the average American you're suddenly so interested in.

CNN, I know for a fact you will not post this, but I wanted to voice my opinion anyway.......

Slavery is illegal. If you don't want to work for a wage you find too low and your employer won't give you a raise, quit.

The reason, of course, is that raising the minimum wage does nothing to increase productivity – it only raises prices (businesses will pass on the cost of the wages) and causes unemployment (if I have to give my three janitors a big raise, I´ll fire one of them and have the other two work harder to justify their higher cost).

This is basic economics everyone should have learned in school. But because teachers are more likely to be socialists than capitalists these days, it´s no wonder most Americans are ignorant about economics.

Of course, most politicians don´t care a whit about the plight of the poor or screwing up the economy. They just want to get elected. Luckily, the idiots who vote for the democrats are the most likely to suffer from their stupid actions. Those of us who understand basic economics can see what´s coming if Hillary gets elected, and we´ll do what we can to protect ourselves. But it´s an educational shame that those who will suffer most will blame "evil capitalism," when, in fact, it is politicians thwarting capitalism who screw things up.

Need a graphic example?

Currently the minimum wage is $5.85 / hour.

When I had my first job, the minimum wage was $3.35 / hour.

Currently the cost of a can of soda is $.85.

In days of yore, it was $.35.

The price of a can of soda has risen 143% while minimum wage has risen 75%.

Try it with anything that existed 20 years ago, rent, cars, etc. What is happening is not the increasing value of products, but the lowering of value of labor along with lowering the value of the dollar. You can try to claim they are not connected, but the Dims have already insisted that they are over and over again, but as usual they got everything backward.

John Edwrads demands for change.

Obama brings hope to change.

Hillary WORKS to change.

That is why Mr. Obama gets my support. He may not win, but at least I can wake up every day, look at myself in the mirror and knowing I'm doing the right thing.