Tag: sarah huckabee sanders
Sarah Huckabee Sanders

Republican 'Mom' Protects Kids, Unless They're Poor Enough For Factory Work

To hear her tell it, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders is among the world’s biggest Christians, although her definition might differ from yours or mine. Also, a world-class “mom,” to use the word she employs almost as frequently to describe herself.

“Just folks,” as we say down South.

So recently, Ma Sanders signed a law voiding restrictions on factory jobs for 14- and 15-year-old children. “The Youth Hiring Act of 2023,” they called it. No longer do ninth-graders need a certificate from the Division of Labor to work in paper mills, slaughterhouses or chicken-processing plants. Indeed, the state no longer has to verify the ages of job applicants at all.

“The governor believes protecting kids is most important,” Sanders’ office told NPR, “but this permit was an arbitrary burden on parents to get permission from the government for their child to get a job.”

What palpable nonsense. Needless to say, none of the three children residing in the Arkansas governor’s mansion will be working the night shift at your friendly neighborhood abattoir and coming home missing fingers or with animal blood in their hair.

This isn’t about the white, suburban kids Sanders gathers around her for photo ops. She recently signed a bill funneling state money to private school vouchers, surrounded by a crowd of children without a single Black or brown face in evidence, lest anybody fail to get the message.

Local enthusiasm for the youth hiring bill has been muted. An official with the Diocese of Little Rock told the Arkansas Catholic that the old law had been anything but onerous; it was a simple one-page application filed by employers and signed by parents or guardians.“

The work certificate,” he explained, “provided some safeguards for these minors by requiring proof of age, a description of the work and work schedule, and written consent of the parent or guardian.”

The Catholic Church is concerned partly because of Pope Francis’ oft-stated concern for the exploitation of children, and because those most affected by the new law will be immigrants from Central America — and mostly Catholics. Many have migrated north on their own and are sending money home to El Salvador and Honduras.

Even local business organizations displayed little interest in repealing worker protections. “A solution looking for a problem,” is how the president of the Arkansas Chamber of Commerce described it.

Indeed, the law’s sponsor told Arkansas Business that its impetus came not from local businesses but from an outfit called the Foundation for Government Accountability, a “think tank” located — naturally enough — in Florida. Nor is Arkansas leading the pack in rolling back child labor laws to the New Deal era. Republican-led legislatures across the Midwest are dialing back workplace regulations even as the Biden administration seeks to enforce federal standards.

Minnesota would let 16-year-olds work in the construction trades. Iowa would not only let 14-year-olds work in meat-packing plants, but would shield employers from responsibility if they got hurt or even died on the job.

It’s not just southern and midwestern red states, either. An extensive, eye-opening report by Hannah Dreier of The New York Times documented what she called “a new economy of exploitation.”

“Migrant children, who have been coming into the United States without their parents in record numbers,” Dreier writes, “are ending up in some of the most punishing jobs in the country ... This shadow work force extends across industries in every state, flouting child labor laws that have been in place for nearly a century. Twelve-year-old roofers in Florida and Tennessee. Underage slaughterhouse workers in Delaware, Mississippi and North Carolina. Children sawing planks of wood on overnight shifts in South Dakota.”

Nor are these violations occurring only in remote, rural places: “The Times found child labor in the American supply chains of many major brands and retailers ... including Ford, General Motors, J. Crew and Walmart, as well as their suppliers.”

Teenagers may not work as efficiently as adults, and they get injured at much higher rates. But non-English speakers desperate to make their way will work for next to nothing. Easily bullied and sexually exploited, they won’t be joining labor unions, either, which contributes to keeping wages down and working conditions poor for adult employees, too.

Don’t like it here? You can be replaced by somebody who’s 14.

So, we regress, as the Sarah Huckabee Sanderses of the world “protect” children from drag queens, critical race theory and other largely chimerical threats in the name of “liberty.”

In his Esquire blog, Charles Pierce summed it all up in the words of Nebraska social worker Grace Abbott, testifying in 1938:

“Child labor and poverty are inevitably bound together, and if you continue to use the labor of children as the treatment for the social disease of poverty, you will have both poverty and child labor to the end of time.”

Backward into the future we go.

Reprinted with permission from Suntimes.

Translating Gov. Sanders' Bizarre Fox News Diatribe Into American English

Translating Gov. Sanders' Bizarre Fox News Diatribe Into American English

LITTLE ROCK -- If history is any guide, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ bizarre “rebuttal” to a presidential speech she hadn’t heard will be the high point of her political career. (Her own address was pre-recorded.) Contrary to many, including Sanders herself, voters in this state have little enthusiasm for living in a fundamentalist theocracy. They know these Bible-beaters all too well.

Unfashionably clad in what looked rather like a white bathrobe — to emphasize her purity, I suppose — Sanders came off as a self-intoxicated fanatic, the second-string preacher at the kind of suburban fundamentalist church with auditorium seating and multiple video screens. Her eyes had that familiar gleam; everybody who disagrees with her is “of the Devil.”

For as long as I’ve lived in Arkansas—that is, since Gov. Dale Bumpers liberated the state from the segregationist Orval Faubus in the early Seventies—right-wing theocrats have made most of the noise in statewide politics but lost most of the elections. That would include Sanders’ father, Mike Huckabee, the kind of affable Baptist preacher who plays bass guitar in a band that performs Rolling Stones covers.

The elder Huckabee campaigned and governed as a relative moderate. His 1997 speech commemorating the 40th anniversary of Little Rock Central High School’s integration through the good offices of the 101st Airborne put even President Bill Clinton in the shade. He became a TV miracle cure peddler and hard-core Trumper later on, after learning where the money is.

Oddly, Sarah Sanders’ rebuttal to Biden’s State of the Union, never mentioned her personal benefactor, Donald Trump. Instead, as Trump supporters bitterly observed, it was all Ron DeSantis-style culture war pronouncements.

So what did they expect? As White House press secretary, Sanders told the national press that she’d gotten scores of congratulatory calls from FBI agents celebrating President Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey. Asked under oath by Independent Counsel Robert Mueller, she admitted those calls were imaginary. “A slip of the tongue,” she called it.

You can’t count on loyalty from a person like that.

Rebutting Biden, who spoke mostly about jobs, economic growth, Social Security and Medicare, Sanders accused him of surrendering his presidency to a “woke mob that can’t even tell you what a woman is.”

Do what?

“Most Americans simply want to live their lives in freedom and peace," Sanders said, “but we are under attack in a left-wing culture war we didn’t start and never wanted to fight. Every day, we are told that we must partake in their rituals, salute their flags, and worship their false idols, all while big government colludes with Big Tech to strip away the most American thing there is—your freedom of speech. That’s not normal. It’s crazy, and it’s wrong.”

Which flags and false idols would those be? I wonder. She never did say. Preaching to the converted, she apparently didn’t think she needed to.

Flags with big red Razorback Hogs are popular here on game days, along with bronze statues of rampant swine. How about them Hogs? as we say.

Otherwise, I have no earthly idea. You?

In almost the next breath, our champion of free speech boasted about issuing executive orders forbidding the teaching of “CRT” in the state of Arkansas, and banning the word “Latinx” from public documents. For the initiated—that is, dedicated Fox News fans—the acronym refers to “critical race theory,” a professorial approach to understanding slavery and racial segregation.

Most Americans likely had no idea what she was on about.

Never mind that there’s no evidence of “CRT” being taught in Arkansas schools. How banning it comports with protecting First Amendment freedoms, Sanders didn’t say. As I have commented previously, she’s the kind of ideologue who invokes the word "freedom" to mean people who disagree with her need to shut up, or else.

How, then, to deal with Arkansas’ complicated racial history: slavery, Civil War, Jim Crow, lynchings and massacres? Would it be permissible for a teacher to explain the complex legacy of Sanders’ own alma mater, Little Rock Central High, by playing a video of her father’s excellent speech? President Clinton’s?

Or would those constitute “CRT”?

How about Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, a masterpiece of American oratory as significant as Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address”?

More than a bit smugly, Gov. Sanders added that “the dividing line in America is no longer between right and left—it’s between normal or crazy.”

Within 24 hours of Biden’s State of the Union and Sanders’ pre-fabricated rejoinder, the Arkansas legislature got busy passing legislation to free up $60 million in federal American Rescue Plan funds as a lifeline to struggling rural hospitals in jeopardy of closure. Almost needless to say, it was a Biden White House initiative. The Arkansas statehouse vote was 95-1.

I’m confident of two things: Gov. Sanders will sign the bill, and she won’t thank President Biden. Normal politics, Arkansas style.

Huckabee Sanders Offers Only 33 Words For Arkansas Mass Shooting

Huckabee Sanders Offers Only 33 Words For Arkansas Mass Shooting

On Saturday night what the State Police described as a “gunfight” broke out at a car show in Dumas, Arkansas, leaving a 23-year old victim dead and 27 others injured – including six children, 19 months and older. It is the largest mass shooting of the year. Republican gubernatorial candidate Sarah Huckabee Sanders had just 33 words to say about the devastating shootout in her state.

Arkansas’s current governor, Republican Asa Hutchinson, issued this statement on Sunday, calling the mass shooting “a total disregard of the value of life.”

The car show is part of an event that “provides family-friendly entertainment and raises money for scholarships and school supplies for underprivileged youths.”

Sarah Huckabee Sanders also issued a statement, on Twitter only, not on any other of the social media accounts listed on her campaign website. “Prayers,” she offered, calling it “senseless and tragic,” and thanking law enforcement. It was just 33 words.

The Gun Violence Archive reports two of the children injured were one-year-olds, one was 8 years old, one 9, and one 11.

Huckabee Sanders just three days earlier, as veteran political commentator Charles Pierce has expertly noted, praised Arkansas as “God’s Country” because “you can get a 12 pack and a 12 gauge shotgun at your neighborhood Edward’s Food Giant!”

The photo she tweeted includes her, her husband, a Huckabee Sanders campaign bus, and signs advertising guns and ammo.

“God’s Country is apparently located somewhere between Deadwood and Tombstone. God should move to a better neighborhood. She’s not safe where She is,” observed Pierce.

Huckabee Sanders has said nothing more about the horrific gun violence, at least nothing on her social media accounts or published in news online.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

Sarah Huckabee Sanders

Huckabee Sanders Tries To Blame Biden For Anti-Vax Persistence

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

GOP candidate for Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Friday offered a list of promises of what she would not do to help end the coronavirus pandemic if elected. She did criticize President Joe Biden, saying he should praise his predecessor for "helping get this vaccine created safely, quickly and effectively."

Sanders, who served as President Donald Trump's White House press secretary, told Fox News, "If I'm elected governor here in Arkansas, we will not have mask mandates, we will not have mandates on the vaccine, we will not shut down churches and schools and other large gatherings because we believe in personal freedom and responsibility. It's one of the key cornerstones frankly of our country."

She did not offer any examples of what she would do to combat the deadly virus that is once again spiking across the country.

Arkansas is the country's eighth-worst state in getting its population vaccinated. Just 44.7 percent of adults 18 and over have been fully inoculated.

Sanders then questioned President Biden's and Vice President Kamala Harris' level of seriousness "about helping save lives through the vaccine," insisting "they should admit they were wrong when they cast doubt on Operation Warp Speed at the very beginning, and give President Trump and his administration the credit they are due for helping get this vaccine created safely, quickly and effectively, and into the hands of Americans."

Many Americans believed President Trump would force the FDA to certify any vaccine to push it out too quickly in a desperate attempt to get re-elected. He repeatedly claimed the vaccine was coming far sooner than it did, and his own Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, in September claimed the coronavirus vaccine would be available by the end of that month.

"I think that would make a huge difference," Sanders claimed, "and I think they should really take some responsibility and step up and fix the mistake that they made by casting so much doubt at the very beginning of this process."

She also appeared to blame, falsely, the Biden administration for "politicization" of the vaccine.

Watch the latest video at foxnews.com