Tag Archives: labor secretary

Puzder pulls out, thanks to ex-wife’s interview

Andrew Puzder shouldn’t have been nominated as labor secretary in the first place.

He favors automation; he opposes the minimum wage; he is no friend of the working man and woman.

None of that doomed his nomination. Oh, no! The death knell was rung when a decades-old videotape surfaced that shows Puzder’s former wife telling Oprah Winfrey that Puzder abused her. He threatened her, bullied her.

Puzder — a fast-food restaurant mogul — then pulled out.

Vetting, anyone?

I have blogged already about Donald Trump’s lack of vetting as he has looked for Cabinet officers. I thought the worry was overblown.

But here we are. A labor secretary who apparently hadn’t been vetted properly being done in by an old videotaped interview.

It appears that a lot more careful vetting of Puzder’s history could have prevented the president from suffering this embarrassing end to one of his Cabinet selections.

That presumes, of course, that Donald Trump would be embarrassed.

Terrorists, union protesters: all the same?

Robert Reich is a former labor secretary during the Clinton administration.

He posted this message on Facebook today in response to a patently absurd statement made at the Conservative Political Action Conference by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. Reich wrote this:

“Can it get any lower? Last night, at CPAC’s ‘beauty pageant’ for right-wing presidential hopefuls, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was asked how he would fight ISIS if elected president. Walker referred to his political fights with teachers and labor union members in his home state: ‘If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the world.’ I doubt Walker really believes Americans who peacefully protest for a decent wages are analogous to foreign barbarians who saw off peoples’ heads. But to him and the other right wing-nuts of the Republican party, political opponents are enemies rather than fellow citizens, to be ‘taken on’ mercilessly. This is why they can’t (and mustn’t) govern America.”

There you have it.

A governor who has all but declared war on the union movement in his home state equates facing down peaceful protesters in the streets with the monsters who are terrorizing innocent people on the other side of the world.

This is the kind of rhetoric that CPAC has been hearing from its dog-and-pony show of candidates strutting across the stage to fire up their followers.

The serious thinkers of the Republican Party need to be heard above the demagoguery that’s getting all the attention.

I share Reich’s belief that Walker really equates the protesters with terrorists. Then again, why does he spew such garbage? Oh, I almost forgot. He’s appealing to his party’s “base.”