The Absurd GOP

[Fake Messiah]

Sarah Huckabee Sanders To Consider Relaxing Arkansas Child Labor Laws

A bill seeking to change child labor laws in Arkansas has reached Republican Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who will now decide on whether to remove the need for a work permit as a condition of employment for children under the age of 16. She has previously indicated that she would sign the legislation.

The proposed change to the existing child labor laws—House Bill (HB) 1410, also known as the Youth Hiring Act—would allow children as young as nine years old to be hired to work without a currently required employment certificate "accessible to the Division of Labor and the Division of Elementary and Secondary Education, or local school officials." The certificate contains proof of the child's age, a description of the work and work schedule, and the written consent of the parent or guardian.

https://www.newsweek.com/sarah-huckabee-...ws-1785683

[The Grand Nudger]

It's even worse than that alone would suggest. The shape that minor employment in the us is currently taking on is one of unpaid or reduced pay "internships" or "apprenticeships". All of this is actively pitched as being good for the youth, and for developing the skills required to avoid the looming brain drain of mass retirement (currently ongoing) and consistently low replacement rates.

Child labor, so the story goes, is good for children, good for business, and good for america. Ignore any ideological objections, ignore any objections to fact. Consider, if you have the stomach for it, that this claim might be true. That this...is where we're actually at..... I suppose this might lead a person to suggest (specifically with respect to ideological objections) that if this were true then we should allow it to fail. Economic shock doctrine. We've seen where that goes, though. Russia.

[arewethereyet]

At the age of 9, most kids are barely doing chores around the house, unless they are farm kids who come out of the womb working.

I was working in the kitchen at the country club at age 14. Slicers and knives and hot things be damned. Of course, dad was on the board so perhaps I got some special 'in' to work there that young.

Many of my friends were working in kitchens by the age of 16. We had real sit down restaurants in town, no fast food except for one mom and pop shop that had carhops on skates.

Methinks this drop in the age of child workers is a way to allow more migrant kids to pull their own weight...as it were. And who cares if some of them are maimed or killed...amirite?

I doubt little Becky or Jason are going to be doing manual labor at the age of 9, being driven to work from the 'burbs.

[HappySkeptic]

I had a job as a jewellery store engraver (and floor cleaner) at 14. It helped me buy my first computer (A Commodore PET with pixel-addressable graphics board) for $1300.

That was the minimum work age, and minimum wage was cheaper for kids under 16. The store owner, who owned his owned plane, liked not having to pay much (I got $2.15 per hour).

I liked having a job, but it didn't interfere with school, and it wasn't hazardous. I do think this law is about getting cheap labor out of immigrant kids in the South.

[The Grand Nudger]

That's already fine. It's for usamerican children (though I do realize that this category has broad overlap to some minds with immigrant children)..it probably helps to have the cover of casual racism, for sure. So long as The Whites can believe, for terrible reasons, that this legislation is aimed at The Other - then it won't trigger their weirdness about kids and they'll think it's a culture warrior doing battle for their interests. It happening all over the place, though. The current trend is to make it easier to employ children and harder to recover from negligent business practices that might, you know...kill a child. The method is enhancing perceptions of volunteerism. Of increasing the range of waivable risks. The kid wants to do it - maybe for a college application, maybe for experience, maybe..if they're lucky enough to find "good" employment to buy something they want. More often, though, kids go to work because they're hungry. Literally hungry. Volunteerism sounds less plausible in mere reality. The risks seem pretty well demonstrated. We've been here before.

[Mister Agenda]

South Carolina Republicans have introduced a bill that would allow women to be executed if they have an abortion. The bill is also vague enough to potentially include miscarriages.

https://wpde.com/news/local/abortion-sou...rs-2-22-23

One woman was already arrested there because she took pills to terminate.

I heard about that, it was in Greenville, I think. It was legal when she did it, but SC officials won't let a little detail like that get in the way of their pandering.

[Rev. Rye]

I think I’ve mentioned before that repealing Roe would likely make things even worse than before Roe. Before Roe, the women who actually got said abortions tended to be treated by the law as victims of those predatory abortionists. So the law was underpinned by some sort of “benevolent patriarchy.” In the intervening 50 years after Roe, the antis got more radicalized. Now, they’ve got laws targeting the women. Laws where women who underwent abortions were eligible for the death penalty? That simply didn’t exist before Roe. If one can find any evidence of an American woman being executed for having an abortion before January 22, 1973, I’d like to see it because I can’t find any evidence of it. Post-Roe, the antis have decided that a woman has just enough moral agency to be liable for the choices they make, but not enough to make it okay for her to make those choices. They saw the benevolent patriarchy of their forebears and decided the best thing to do was to drop any semblance of benevolence.

[Rev. Rye]

One woman was already arrested there because she took pills to terminate.

I heard about that, it was in Greenville, I think. It was legal when she did it, but SC officials won't let a little detail like that get in the way of their pandering.

I don’t know about that particular case, but I did find another separate case in Oklahoma. Brittney Poolaw took meth while pregnant, lost the pregnancy, and ended up sentenced to four years in prison for first-degree manslaughter. And it doesn’t even seem like she intended to end her pregnancy. It just happened that way.

[The Grand Nudger]

All of the criminal personhood laws were toeholds.

[Fake Messiah]

Republican Says U.S. Troops Should Enter Mexico—'Have a Military Presence'

Republican Representative James Comer has suggested the U.S. should set up troops in Mexico following a kidnapping that resulted in the deaths of two Americans.

South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham announced he would be introducing legislation allowing the U.S. to use military force against Mexico in order to crack down on the cartels.

Comer agreed with Graham's plan, and while speaking on Fox said a military presence is important to protecting Americans.

https://www.newsweek.com/republican-jame...ry-1786253