Will labor be the wrench?

Anybody heard about this?

Two of the country's largest labor groups, the SEIU and the AFL-CIO, are each holding emergency executive meetings today to discuss whether they should support the latest round of health care compromises made by Senate Democrats.

Though there's no official word yet, early indications based on talks with various officials are that the groups will either formally oppose the legislation or, less dramatically, just not fight very hard to ensure its passage.

I would like them to push against the "watered down" bill...

I wish we had gone the 51-vote route, but I am notoriously confrontational for no reason...

Because no one has accused the labor movement of being communist in the last week, we'll do this

Lex asks some important questions that no one responded to, so I will take a shot at getting some laboring questions answered.

First, let me say that a labor merger under the terms being discussed horrifies me. Let me grab a coupla quotes from that article:

There was general agreement that any future federation should focus on political and legislative matters, while also serving to encourage individual unions to do more to organize workers.

and

But many officials oppose a rotating presidency, saying the parent federation needs a strong, visible president who, by dint of serving for several years, is recognized by Congress and the news media as the undisputed voice for labor.

Several presidents have also called for creating a strong executive director’s position, partly in the hope that the parent federation would have two strong voices rather than one.

In other words, the AFL-CIO would become strictly a lobbying organization. Yay! I've always wanted to belong to a lobbying organization! Let the motherfucking revolution begin.

I do think we need a strong, strong president. Someone who can speak for "labor." Someone who is independent, answerable to no one. Someone who can demand unwavering support from everyone around him. Someone who can act decisively. Someone who has a lifetime position. Preferably someone willing to eliminate all enemies to labor, even those within the movement. I cannot see any problem with this at all.

But for fuck's sake, lets make sure this powerful man has a woman/minority assistant so that the workers can have someone to adore. Someone who looks like them. Some one who cares. Bam! Look out 21st century, here we come.

"The Leopards" is the most brilliant thing to come 0ut of Lex's mouth in some time.

Crap.

Merry Xmas, it's a distasteful collaboration

Okay, so Dave already beat me to name-checking the Onion's very funny list of obscene, absurd albs ("least essentials") from 2008. But I'm left with a question from the otherwise-semi-all-knowing women and men in the a/v control room: how in the motherfudge did Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis' Two Men with the Blues get omitted?

Listen. I am not wet behind the ears when it comes to the business of Willie albs. I know this guy'll pretty much roll tape with whoever the bleep can put together a few thousand clams and a session band [ed. note - wait, it's a live collection! live from the ever-bluesy Lincoln Center, baby!]. But nonetheless... this is the sort of thing that deserves at least some perfunctory remarks from the peanut gallery, non? Did everybody else decide just to bow their heads and zip their lips about it while I was out getting a Sun Drop?

See, here's an example of the New Me I was talking about previously. Old Me would say, "who knows what the future holds?" But New Me is not afraid to see the future, to know the future. There are three things I know for sure about 2009:

1. This alb cannot not be terrible, but will enjoy strong sales in Lane County, OR .
   
2. I will have to hear it at some point(s). I will eventually seek it out. In particular I will eventually need to know what "My Bucket's Got a Hole in It" sounds like avec trumpet (blues trumpet!)
   
3. Only the recession conditions will keep me from buying it for our friend Robes. (That and the fact that I still feel kinda bad about a live Bobby McFerrin slab I bought for him. If yr ever over at Robes' house, please ask him to play said slab for you.)

Oh, and if the prospects for this alb excite you, be sure to check out the Amazon customer reviews (here.) Hell, I think I'll chuck a few choice quotations in the damned comments section. It's Christmas, you know? Blues Christmas.

Enter the Strawman

Anyone else notice how McLame/PaLIEn aren't campaigning against any known arguments?

McLame/PaLIEn: My opponent wants to teach babys sex ed... we oppose.
McLame/PaLIEn: My opponent wants to raise everyone's taxes...we think that is unwise.
McLame/PaLIEn: My opponent doesn't even want us to drill for water...we like very much.
McLame/PaLIEn: My opponent thinks we should coddle all terrarists...we would liquify them, my friends
McLame/PaLIEn: My opponent supports all earmarks (even Alaska's)....we have always opposed all thing earmarkish.
McLame/PaLIEn: My opponent wants to put lipstick on all pigs....we are against it.

Is there a trend? How does one combat such tactics?

Crap/Not Crap - Craft Union Voluntarism

The Federation adopted an equally interesting political strategy, for Gompers sought to make voluntarism and the craft unions' nonpartisan civic education a source of political strength rather than weakness. Trade unionists would debate and deliberate political issues within their own councils, formulating a cohesive set of policy demands. They would then present labor's agenda to each of the political parties, and educate their members on the parties' response. The AFL, as in the past, would not affiliate with a political party; in fact, the strategy would only work if they did not. Gompers itended to forge unions into a highly knowledgeable, independent bloc of swing voters, so that all parties seriously contesting elections would have to address labor's needs. Organized labor would not be apolitical or partisan but would pursue "aggressive nonpartisan political action." As he explained it, "labor does not become partisan to a polititcal party, but partisan to a principle." - Schools of democracy : a political history of the American labor movement by Clayton Sinyai

Yikes!!!! Disturbing Developments

Glenn Greenwald and Jane from FDL report about preemptive raids of protest organizer homes. These are clear violations of the Constitutional rights of these people, and apparently the police are much more aggressive than what was seen in Denver.

Some excerpts:

those inside described how a team of roughly 25 officers had barged into their homes with masks and black swat gear, holding large semi-automatic rifles, and ordered them to lie on the floor, where they were handcuffed and ordered not to move. The officers refused to state why they were there and, until the very end, refused to show whether they had a search warrant. They were forced to remain on the floor for 45 minutes while the officers took away the laptops, computers, individual journals, and political materials kept in the house...Nestor indicated that only 2 or 3 of the 50 individuals who were handcuffed this morning at the 2 houses were actually arrested and charged with a crime, and the crime they were charged with is "conspiracy to commit riot." Nestor, who has practiced law in Minnesota for many years, said that he had never before heard of that statute being used for anything, and that its parameters are so self-evidently vague, designed to allow pre-emeptive arrests of those who are peacefully protesting, that it is almost certainly unconstitutional, though because it had never been invoked (until now), its constitutionality had not been tested.

There is clearly an intent on the part of law enforcement authorities here to engage in extreme and highly intimidating raids against those who are planning to protest the Convention. The DNC in Denver was the site of several quite ugly incidents where law enforcement acted on behalf of Democratic Party officials and the corporate elite that funded the Convention to keep the media and protesters from doing anything remotely off-script. But the massive and plainly excessive preemptive police raids in Minnesota are of a different order altogether. Targeting people with automatic-weapons-carrying SWAT teams and mass raids in their homes, who are suspected of nothing more than planning dissident political protests at a political convention and who have engaged in no illegal activity whatsoever, is about as redolent of the worst tactics of a police state as can be imagined.

He's got video at his site

What a scary country this has become...

Crap/Not Crap

McCain's pick of Palin make concerns about his age and health legitimate talking points and lines of attack for the Dems.

I say "not crap."

Never Thought of It That Way

Chris Matthews just asserted that JFK was "Killed by a communist."

I'm not a Oswald expert, but I've never heard it put this way. What do you think, fair to say JFK "killed by a communist"?

EZ Polling

New poll up on the right.
Same rules: vote early, vote often!
All findings will be over-extrapolated
and will include incoherent graphics.

crap/not crap: Reading the Bible from a Literary Point of View

Either the authorial fallacy, as in "did you know that the Evangelist Mark was actually three men in Galilee, born some some seventy years after His Majesty?"

or a 'new criticism' approach a la "maybe it's just the blank verse translation of Psalms hitting me here, but I feel as though a certain leitmotif of shadow and light, sort of, i dunno, undergirds this section of scripture. subsequent authors pick up on it, and gain moral (read: rhetorical) authority merely by maintaining a thematic consistency."

or, "careful study of competing Messianic texts made available after the publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls allows us to understand perfectly the ellipsis between early tales of Christ as a child and his subsequence emergence as a thirtysomething."

that sort of thing. is it "crap"?

Crap or Not Crap

The French

In a thread down below, I already came out firmly on the side of "crap."

I realized, however, that my pronouncement may have just been my Anglophila talking, so I gave it a day and I tried to think of things that the French have given the world that could change my mind. What have the French given the world that is unique or valuable or worthy?

I came up with one thing: ennui.

No one does ennui like the French. That's it. Wine? Italians do it better (so do Spaniards and Americans). Cheese? Again, Italy and England. Art? Stealing art maybe, but the best impressionist in the world was Dutch. Colonialism? I think we can all acknowledge that England rules the waves. Love? Come on, no one does love like the Canadians.

There you have it, the French are crap.

I expect to see everyone who reads this blog pipe up in the comments. Everyone has an opinion on the French. Take the 20 seconds necessary to give us yours.

Serious thinking, for once

I don't know enough about what's going on in Venezuela to have an informed opinion about Chavèz and the Bolivarian Revolution. But a few things jumped out at me in this piece:

Critics fumed that Chavez did not consult with major business groups before approving the decrees, and some warned the laws would scare off private investment and further weaken private enterprise.

"We ask the president: Why does he fear democracy?" Fedecamaras business chamber leader Jose Manuel Gonzalez said at a news conference.

A very juvenile, very vulgar Marxist inside of me takes a great deal of smug satisfaction at this quote. How does it feel now that the shoe's on the other foot, motherfuckers! As I said, juvenile and vulgar.

Under one of the new laws, food retailers or distributors caught skirting government-imposed price controls or hoarding products will be punished with up to six years in prison.

Crap/not crap: Criminalizing, with prison terms in addition to civil fines, unethical business behavior (for our purposes we'll assume the process to arrive at this was democratic).

Enough. The big boys can play now.

Crap or Not Crap

The No-Strike Pledge American labor made during WWII.

While it might seem obvious that labor would agree to support the war effort and tone down worker militancy, others have argued that the roots of all (I exaggerate for effect) that ills American labor today can be traced back to this agreement. Ultimately, labor unions themselves became responsible for controlling worker militancy and striking became a rare and ritualized endeavor tied to the collective bargaining process, rather than a way for pissed-off workers to deal with grievances or shop-floor disputes in a timely manner. This responsibility for unions further lead labor leaders to view any membership radicalism with suspicion, as it might upset the productive tranquility guaranteed by the labor-management alliance.

What do you all think? Was it a mistake for labor to agree to the No-Strike Pledge during WWII?

Comic Book Life

I saw this at Froomkin's White House watch. Sure makes me wish I had time to peruse the WSJ more often. "Andrew Klavan writes in a Wall Street Journal op-ed: "There seems to me no question that the Batman film 'The Dark Knight,' currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.

"And like W, Batman understands that there is no moral equivalence between a free society -- in which people sometimes make the wrong choices -- and a criminal sect bent on destruction. The former must be cherished even in its moments of folly; the latter must be hounded to the gates of Hell."

I want to know..... exactly who is Robin in this analogy???

Crap or Not Crap

This is the cover for this week's The New Yorker. I'm not going to link to all the hubbub, because either you live on the net or you don't, but there's some disagreement about whether this is hilarious satire (not crap) or badly done satire (crap).

What say you?

So Very Dissappointing....

The senate passed a bill that I can only hope (though I am not holding my breath)the SCOTUS finds unconstitutional, immunizing the telecom cos and letting bush and co. off the hook for violating the 4th amendment and FISA.
While that was bad enough, it seems Obama felt the need to join in the madness. Especially disappointing considering he taught con law, and had promised to oppose it.
from (one of the best bloggers in existence) Glenn Greenwald:

The Senators then voted for "cloture" on the underlying FISA bill -- the procedure that allows the Senate to overcome any filibusters -- and it passed by a vote of 72-26. Obama voted along with all Republicans for cloture. Hillary Clinton voted with 25 other Democrats against cloture (strangely,Clinton originally voted AYE on cloture, and then changed her vote to NAY; I'm trying to find out what explains that).

With cloture approved, the bill itself then proceeded to pass by a vote of 69-28 (roll call vote here), thereby immunizing telecoms and legalizing warrantless eavesdropping. Again, while Obama voted with all Republicans to pass the bill, Sen. Clinton voted against it.

Obama's vote in favor of cloture, in particular, cemented the complete betrayal of the commitment he made back in October when seeking the Democratic nomination. Back then, Obama's spokesman -- in response to demands for a clear statement of Obama's views on the spying controversy after he had issued a vague and noncommittal statement -- issued this emphatic vow:

To be clear: Barack will support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies.

But the bill today does include retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies. Nonetheless, Obama voted for cloture on the bill -- the exact opposition of supporting a filibuster -- and then voted for the bill itself. A more complete abandonment of a clear campaign promise is difficult of imagine.

So very sad....

***UPDATE***
ACLU Announces Legal Challenge To Follow President’s Signature, link here

Today, in a blatant assault upon civil liberties and the right to privacy, the Senate passed an unconstitutional domestic spying bill that violates the Fourth Amendment and eliminates any meaningful role for judicial oversight of government surveillance. The FISA Amendments Act of 2008 was approved by a vote of 69 to 28 and is expected to be signed into law by President Bush shortly. This bill essentially legalizes the president’s unlawful warrantless wiretapping program revealed in December 2005 by the New York Times.

“Once again, Congress blinked and succumbed to the president’s fear-mongering. With today’s vote, the government has been given a green light to expand its power to spy on Americans and run roughshod over the Constitution,” said Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union. “This legislation will give the government unfettered and unchecked access to innocent Americans’ international communications without a warrant. This is not only unconstitutional, but absolutely un-American.”