Thoughts After Last Night

So a fine friend of mine has adopted the stance that anyone to the left of Joe Lieberman needs to STFU and let the Senate force a shitty, shitty health care bill down the throat of the House and the country.

He does so under the banner of "GOVERN" which seem to be shorthand for "liberals will never get what they want because Democrats will always have to make compromises to get votes enough to pass actual legislation." Fair enough. But on this particular bill, it seems that a healthy majority of the vote-giving public really, really, really doesn't want this bill.

And make no mistake, this is a crappy piece of legislation. The basic deal seems to be that, in exchange for dropping pre-existing conditions requirements and the ability to deny care, health insurance companies get a provision that requires every citizen in the US to buy health insurance. Now, poor people won't be able to afford it, so the government will help them out. The government will get this money by taxing the health care benefits of people who have decent insurance now. So there will be a massive shift of dollars from the working middle class and the rich to insurance companies, hospitals, and doctors. Joy. Oh, and people with decent health coverage now will see it get worse. Double joy.

I'd also like to point out that we liberals are making nary a peep about our party passing really crappy legislation that will almost certainly come back to haunt us at the polls, the anti-abortion Dems will certainly be making hay and getting all kinds of goodies from the leadership. I'm sure our subservience will be rewarded in Heaven.

Now that we have 59 seats in the Senate and our year of a "filibuster-proof majority" has been revealed to be the joke that it is, can we please, please, please not keep the dream alive by shopping around for Republican votes to try to buy? It's over. How about we write bills that actually reflect Democratic values and have the Republicans (and Lieberman) vote "No" to every single bill? Let's schedule a vote-a-day and have them vote "No" on these things. Then we can go to the American people and say "This is what we stand for. This is what the Republicans stand against." Instead, we stand for compromise above else. We specialize in the art of the (unsuccessful) deal. We will sell out anything for a vote. We stand in the middle of the road and wonder why we keep getting run over.

The Democratic leadership sold out most of everything the liberal base believes in to get a deal and it didn't work. Now we have to go out and run on the "we tried to pass a muddled piece of shit that would likely have been a colossal failure, but we tried!" platform.

Lieberman needs to lose his chairmanships now. Reid is obviously incompetent as Senate President. We still have a large majority of the House and Senate and we can build on that, but we need to build from a solid base that reflects the parties values, not from a place where we will compromise on everything to win a few votes.

If it is our duty to govern, then we need to govern from our principles. We need to show the American people that we have ideas that appeal to them. We need show them that it is the Republicans that block good things from happening. We are going to lose the mid-term elections in a big way unless we give the American people something to vote for that they actually want. They do not want this health care bill. We will not lose the mid-term because we failed to pass an unpopular health care bill, we will lose the mid-terms if we make it the only thing that the Democrats stand for.

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.

Our team

I love it when we're the ones who can speculate about our Dream Team Cabinet. As for who will run the show at Labor...

• Former Rep. Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.)
• Andrew Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union
• Kay Hagan of North Carolina
• Jeanne Shaheen, former New Hampshire governor

As of right now, I see one and only one politically acceptable name for this post. Et tu?

Makes Me Proud

Avi Zenilman and Ben Smith give credit where credit is due, to the "older, industrial unions" that have, in their opinions, actually answered Obama's call for dialogue about race in the USA. I've over-ranted about this aspect of "Labor 2008" already, but the fact is that it's a welcome galldarned thing.

Grandma

for km

I miss the Oregon Fourth

I suppose that I should feel lucky to receive all the largesse that comes from living in the home district of the House Majority Leader, but he's nothing compared to the man whose name's on the bike bridge:

Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore. [...] advocated a new government fee of .25 percent of every stock transaction to ensure that the government can recoup funds to pay for the aid that it provides to lenders. “If this is truly such a catastrophe, I don’t see how anybody can object to a one-quarter of one percent fee,” DeFazio said. Others who attended the session said that proposal seemed to be gaining little traction.

I'll be casting my ballot elsewhere this year, but my vote is with the Faz.

Analogalicious

bumped, because there's absolutely no reason you should have to read my lame joke before this masterpiece - wobs

I had a wonderful working weekend at the Oregon Coast last weekend. I would gladly put AFT 3544 up for "Most Kick-Ass Union: All-Around" if such a competition existed. 16 people working together in harmony and good spirit, willing to do whatever is necessary to make the union better. Love.

The point of this post, however, is to recount two very special people who went above and beyond the call of union brotherhood and entered themselves into a a more special category which has no name. Okay the name is "men," but it would be sexist if I said so.

Our little retreat faced one crisis, namely that there was an Oregon Duck football game happening in the middle of the retreat. It was originally supposed that the game could easily be recorded and viewed when the business portion of the retreat had ended and the more important socializing began. What better way to socialize than over some good clean college football? Kidding, of course. It might surprise you to learn that, in the general, graduate employees are not big fans of the college athletics, believing, instead, that scarce resources might be better used to pay them.

Unfortunately, VCRs have gone the way of American labor unions -- once ubiquitous and useful, but now largely seen as antiquated and annoyingly analog. (BOOM!) There was a VCR on site (we rent a large house), but the remote had long been replaced with a universal remote, which is fine, unless you have a standard video tape, which is good for 2 hours, unless you use the remote to adjust the recording setting from "Standard" to "Extended Long Play." So we were faced with a (potentially) four hour game and a two hour tape. Now, a lot of grad unions would have packed it in right there, devolving into an acrimonious debate about the futility of "taping" anything. Not the GTFF. It was calmly suggested that I purchase another tape when I drove into Waldport to to pick up more wine and beer. Brilliant.

Football watching crisis number two happened when the grocery store in Waldport didn't have blank tapes. And, when you think about it, why the hell would they? The 17 year-old who I asked practically laughed at me. Then he said the words that will haunt my sleep for some time, "I can't think of any place that would have them in this town." I should mention that the game had already started and I was under a tight deadline. But before I mention that, you might find it interesting to know that my sleep was actually haunted last night by a dream wherein I had to stop a suicidally depressed Keith Appleby (no relation) from shooting himself in the head. With a gun. It was pretty intense. Somehow this dream later morphed into me stopping Sarah Palin from shooting herself in the head. Less intense.

Anyway, I was on a deadline and beginning to start my mind whirring about alternatives, if I was unable to secure a second tape. I was driving a short distance down Highway 101 when I noticed a drug store. I hoped that mixed in with the notions and pills might be a dusty old video tape. I should stop here to mention that all of my interactions regarding the video tape were complicated by the fact that I now pronounce the word "video" as "vidja" after Hank Hill in a family-beloved episode of King of the Hill. The fine service industry employees from Waldport suffered repeated queries about the possibility of me purchasing a "vidja tape" from them. As I was walking into the drug store I had a stoke of genius. Failing to secure a regulation video tape, I could attempt to purchase an old video tape from one of the many, many junk antique stores that make their home on the Walport shopping strip and tape over the tabs and use it to record the game. For some reason I was picturing the movie being Curly Sue.

The drug store "used to have" video tapes, but I could tell by the woman's reaction to my question that the "used to" was sometime in the '90s. She did, however, suggest that I check out the Radio Shack. She asked me if I knew where it was, god bless her sweet little heart. After getting directions, I started out. On the the half-mile journey to the Shack, I passed a video store, a grocery store larger than the one I had patronized earlier, and an ACE-brand hardware store. All potential tape-purchasing resources. Lesson here? Do not trust 17-year-olds in Waldport to help you find technology that was being phased out when they were born.

The Shack had two options for me, the regular "6 hour" tape or the super "9 hour" tape. The "9 hour" tape -- really a three hour tape without the ELP -- would come in handy if the game went into OT, but it was $5.99 as opposed to $1.99 for the regular tape. I made the snap decision to save the four bucks and go standard.

All went smoothly as far as swapping the tapes out. It happened to be halftime when I went downstairs where the tv was playing the game -- I loudly sang the UO fight song in case the announcers were talking about how awesome Oregon was looking and kept my eyes lowered, unnecessarily as it turned out. Those paying attention might notice that having one tape completed at half time means that we are pushing it for getting the whole game in, but I wasn't worried as it was the end of the halftime break and I figured the game got a late start. Those really paying attention will note that I don't know if "half time" is one word or two.

Around 3:30 pm the retreat had concluded business for the day, but the tape still had an hour to run. No problem. We could just let the tape run until it was done and watch the game at 4:30 pm. Unless...unless the game went into overtime. Then we risked missing the crucial last plays of the game. Yes, we could catch the 11:00 pm replay of the game, or more to the point, wake ourselves up at approximately 3:30 am to catch the last few minutes, but this seemed extreme. I might mention here that by this point it had become pretty clear that only two people at the retreat actually cared about the game, myself and the aforementioned Appleby, who later that night would go on to become my "wine stain" buddy, as we managed to slob all over ourselves.

That is one Glenn "GMo" Morris stepped up to the plate, offering to check to see if the game was indeed going to finish before the tape did. His first report to us was that there would be no problem. This was a relief. Appleby and I even briefly contemplated a trip to the beach with the intention of watching the game whenever we got back. While we schemed, Glenn reported to me that he had earlier been mistaken and there were indeed thirteen minutes left in the game. We had approximately 20 minutes of tape. Given that all football games are legally required to stop the clock every forty-five seconds to give Americans a chance to weigh their purchasing options, we knew we were in trouble.

That is when a second "man" stepped up to the proverbial plate and offered to stop the tape during the commercial breaks, so that the tape didn't run out. Wes Shirley is his name, becoming my hero is his game. Not only did he perform this vital function, he also got up and pushed the fast forward button through all the commercials for us during the game.

Now, it may have a occurred to many of you that Glenn's earlier "mistake" about the time was an indication that the game went into overtime. You are better than me. Or more sober. And less likely to underestimate Glenn's knowledge of football.

In addition to these two awesome men, who never ever once let on that the game went into overtime, let alone who won, the entire house, save me and Appleby (and maybe Katie, I can't remember), knew who won the game and they never let on in the least, even as we were punching things, cursing the fates, and then running around the house in jubilation.

These truly are brothers and sisters. I love them. Again, I will put these people up against any union in the country. Bring them on. We'll tape it.

www.superheroticket.com

Three guesses which superheroes are running for president and vice president.

Did you get them? Be honest.