Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I’m only here for the duck photos.

Naturally gregarious and alpha

The math demands it!

A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

Reality always wins in the end.

Too inconsequential to be sued

Something seems odd about that, but i have been drinking.

This blog will pay for itself.

This really is a full service blog.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn – Nancy Pelosi

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

All your base are belong to Tunch.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

There’s some extremely good trouble headed their way.

Fuck if i know. i just get yelled at when i try it.

Let there be snark.

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Kay

But the burgers are cheaper here, I bet, so there’s that

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This is the sort of stuff that gets out when workers come together. You find out what other people make:

I work for McDonald’s and I make $21 an hour.
No, that isn’t a typo. It’s really my salary.
You see, I work for McDonald’s in Denmark, where an agreement between our union and the company guarantees that workers older than 18 are paid at least $21 an hour. Employees younger than 18 make at least $15 — meaning teenagers working at McDonald’s in Denmark make more than two times what many adults in America earn working at the Golden Arches.
In New York last week, I met fast-food workers from around the world who aren’t as lucky as I am. We marched through Midtown Manhattan demanding a fair wage and respect at the workplace.
Many of the U.S. workers I met make less than $9 an hour. And unlike in Denmark, where most fast-food workers are young people looking to make extra money while in school, the vast majority of U.S. fast-food workers are adults trying to support their families. Roughly 70 percent are in their 20s or older,according to a recent study, and more than a quarter are raising kids.
I met Jessica Davis, for example, who works at a McDonald’s in Chicago and has two daughters— one 4 years old and the other 4 months old. After working four years at McDonald’s, she makes $8.98 an hour and has no stable work schedule.
McDonald’s didn’t give us our union. We had to fight for it. It was a five-year struggle that involved many demonstrations like the ones that will stretch across the globe on Thursday.
How can fast-food companies expect employees to work hard but not pay them enough to live on?

How indeed? Louise is just asking. No harm in asking.

My son went to Denmark with his then-girlfriend (now fiancée) two years ago for Christmas. He sent us a blurry photo of what looked like him holding hands with a group of tall, smiling people dancing in a circle around a Christmas tree. If you knew him you would know he’s not a dancing around a tree type person. He’s more of a “disappears immediately when any spontaneous dancing breaks out and he’s not coming back, either” type person. I was so glad he was enjoying himself with the happy people in that photo.

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Large Print

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You would think the license plate would give them pause, but you would be wrong:

A police traffic stop of Toledo Councilman Larry Sykes without any apparent probable cause has sparked an internal investigation, The Blade has learned.
Mr. Sykes, a former Toledo Board of Education member who was elected in November to city council, was pulled over at 9:25 p.m. April 24 after leaving the studios of WGTE-TV for a program on senior citizens and hunger.
Mr. Sykes, who is African-American, said the officer, who was white, likely racially profiled him.

Mr. Sykes said he has been racially profiled many times in the past by law enforcement officers, and that the license plate of the sport utility vehicle he was driving that night reads “4DRWBLK,” which stands for “4 driving while black.”

Mr. Sykes said he asked the officer, “What is the problem?” and his reply was, “It was difficult to read your tags,” according to his letter to Chief Moton.

“Chief Moton, as I drove away, I became very angry because he had no justification nor did he give me a decent reason for stopping me,” Mr. Sykes wrote in the letter. “Stating that he stopped me because he could not read my license plate, my license plate reads 4DRWBLK, which stands for “4 driving while black.”
Mr. Sykes said the incident angered him because he was not speeding, did not run a red light, and he was not driving his 2005 Chevrolet TrailBlazer erratically.
“I would like an explanation as to why this young officer would search for a reason to pull me over or look at my plate,” he wrote. “My license plates are big and bold, and it makes no sense why he would not be able to read it, I’ve had these license plates for the last 20 years and it is because I have been profiled so many times and stopped for driving while black.”

Board of Education, recently elected to City Council – at this point he’s a public figure. Doesn’t matter. They’re still pulling him over and questioning him.

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Not ready to move on just yet

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Blood brothers:

“This isn’t about some aging rockstar way past his prime that simply needs to go away,” Davis said during her remarks at the Texas Democratic Women Convention in Austin. “This is about Greg Abbott. It’s about his character, his judgment, his values when he stands on a stage next to someone like that and refers to him as his ‘blood brother.’”

Feel free to discuss whether this is about some aging rockstar, or something else entirely.

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Picking sides in the future

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I was reading about populists and the Democratic Party in The Washington Post and growing annoyed because we’re meandering around populism and liberalism and mixing up what I think are regional differences in one big stew of stern warnings not to go too far Left.

Like this:

But Stern cautioned that the bigger test of who holds power inside the party is proving those ideas can attract voters beyond staunchly liberal states or cities.
“It is fair to say that more liberal places find politicians first who are more willing to step out on these issues,” he said. “But it is not a shift until it’s seen to work in Minnesota or Wisconsin or New Mexico or Arizona.”

Sherrod Brown is quoted in the piece and I think he nails the whole liberal populist definition in one paragraph. They should have just led with this:

“Fundamentally, there’s two things that elections and governing are all about — the future and whose side are you on,” he said. “Democrats win elections and govern well when we keep that front and center. . . . It’s always important to put some new face on this, and it matters how you dress it up, but fundamentally it’s the historic difference between the parties.”

In Brown’s formulation there are two parts to being a Democrat- “the future” and “whose side are you on”. He has both of those components- he’s a progressive and he’s an economic populist and he wins in a 50/50 state. Not by a lot, but no one wins in Ohio by a lot. He’s a liberal populist.

Here’s a politician in Kentucky who is focusing mostly on the second part of Brown’s recipe, “whose side are you on”. She isn’t in a 50/50 state and if she wins no one will ever mistake her for a “liberal firebrand” but this is classic populism:

For now, Ms. Grimes benefits from not being Mr. McConnell. She is pitching herself to the conservative Kentucky electorate as a pro-coal, pro-labor Democrat and portrays the leader as a symbol of an out-of-touch Washington. “If the doctors told Senator McConnell he had a kidney stone,” she likes to say, “he would refuse to pass it.”
On a frigid February afternoon, hundreds of cheering union members and party activists turned out to hear Ms. Grimes. She cast herself as an advocate for women and the middle class, called for raising the minimum wage and issued a spirited defense of collective bargaining rights.
But it was her repeated assault on the senator as a man who “doesn’t get it” that really fired up the crowd.

She’s for working people (men and women) while Mitch McConnell is a wealthy, corrupt, out of touch DC pol who doesn’t get it. In so many words. If I may paraphrase. To use Brown’s definition again, she’s mostly “whose side are you on” with just a little nod to “the future.” It’s possible to put together different combinations of those two elements and win in Ohio and maybe even Kentucky. In fact, I don’t know how Democrats stand a chance in some of these places without economic populism. As far as I can tell, it’s the only reason Brown is competitive in the more conservative areas of this state. We probably don’t need populism to win in Massachusetts and New York, but we absolutely do need it to win in Ohio and Kentucky.

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They’ve blurred the line so far it’s gone

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Governor Kasich’s administration met with the Ohio regulatory agency that is paid to regulate oil and gas to outline how to promote an industry plan to drill in state parks and also target critics of their plan to drill in state parks.

Then they all lied about it:

On Friday, Gov. John Kasich’s spokesman said the governor’s office knew nothing about an August 2012 state marketing plan for fracking in state parks and forests.
But after an email about the plan involving most of Kasich’s top officials was disclosed yesterday, spokesman Rob Nichols said: “Of course, the administration is going to coordinate and plan ahead on an important issue like gas production on state land.”
The turnaround came after an email became public. It was from Kasich senior adviser Wayne Struble, who sought a meeting about the public-relations campaign with top Kasich officials. Those invited included Beth Hansen, the governor’s chief of staff; Scott Milburn, top communications manager; Matt Carle, his legislative liaison (who is now his re-election campaign manager); Jai Chabria, a senior adviser; Tracy Intihar, who was cabinet secretary at the time; Craig Butler, a policy adviser who is now head of the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency; and leaders of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.
Nichols told The Dispatch on Friday night that the governor’s office had no knowledge of the marketing plan because it had never left the Natural Resources department.
“Clearly, that’s not the case,” Brian Rothenberg, head of the liberal nonprofit organization ProgressOhio, said in a news conference yesterday in which the email was divulged. “The fact that people at the highest level of the governor’s office were involved in this is pretty unsavory.”
Brian Kunkemoeller, conservation-program coordinator with the Sierra Club’s Ohio chapter — which obtained the material through a public-records request — said, “This is not only a sad day for our parks and forests, it’s also a sad day for our democracy.”
Rothenberg and Kunkemoeller expressed outrage that a state agency given the statutory duty to regulate the oil and gas industry actually was partnering with the industry to promote it.

We’re paying every single person who was sitting at that meeting. Industry interests don’t even bother hiring lobbyists anymore. It’s much cheaper to just buy the governor and the regulators outright, and have the public pick up the tab for their continued employment.

The memo itself recognized that the public-relations initiative “could blur public perception of ODNR’s regulatory role in oil and gas.”

“Blur”? The regulator is completely captured by the industry they’re supposed to be regulating. That’s what the memo shows, and that’s why they all lied about who was at the meeting.

Watching how West Virginia water was poisoned the last couple of weeks, it occurred to me that our elected leaders are so captured, so completely corrupt and compromised, that they cannot even protect basic public health. They can’t fulfill even that bedrock governmental duty. The best they can do is advise pregnant women not to drink the water. Let the buyer beware on drinking water. That’s their role, I guess. They’re advisors to us, the consumers.

I’m disappointed that just two state lawmakers were targeted by the oil and gas industry representatives currently working for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. That’s two that aren’t captured, I guess.

Rep. Robert Hagan
Rep. Nickie Antonio

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A Sympathetic Critic

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This In These Times piece on the UAW vote in Tennessee by Mike Elk is getting a lot of attention.

Here’s the short story:

Workers and organizers cite outside interference, management collusion, union missteps, two-tier agreements and Neil Young

It’s very good work. Elk was there and he’s a labor writer who understands the issues, but the part of the piece that is getting the most attention is where he analyzes the union’s role- what they could have done differently. The piece is quite tough on the UAW:

Criticisms of the UAW
The No 2 UAW campaign used the very neutrality agreement that the UAW signed to argue that the union was making corrupt deals with management without worker input.
“We got people to realize they had already negotiated a deal behind their backs—[workers] didn’t get to have a say-so,” hourly plant worker Mike Jarvis of No 2 UAW told reporters outside of the plant last night.
“What the UAW is offering, we can already do without them,” says hourly worker Mike Burton, who created the website for the No 2 UAW campaign. “We were only given one choice [of a union]. When you are only given one choice, it’s BS. It would be nice if we had a union that came in here and forthright said, “Here is what we can offer.”
“I am not anti-union, I am anti-UAW,” Burton continues. “There are great unions out there, and we just weren’t offered any of them.”
Some labor observers have questioned whether provisions in the neutrality agreement may have also hampered the UAW’s ability to make its case. “Though neutrality agreements often help avoid vociferous employer opposition, unions also have to give up powerful organizing or negotiating tools,” says Moshe Marvit, a labor lawyer and fellow at the Century Foundation.
Also, pro-union community activists, who spoke with In These Times on condition of anonymity out of fear of hurting their relationships with the UAW, spoke about difficulties in getting the UAW to help them engage the broader Chattanooga community. Many activists I spoke with during my two trips to Chattanooga said that when they saw the UAW being continually blasted on local talk radio, newspapers and billboards, they wanted to get involved to help build community support.
However, they say that the UAW was lukewarm in partnering with them.
“There’s no way to win in the South without everyone that supports you fighting with you,” said one Chattanooga community organizer, who preferred to remain anonymous. “Because the South is one giant anti-union campaign.”

It’s probably really worthwhile to look at the UAW’s role in the loss if for no other reason than because the union’s actions are the only part of this that labor and labor supporters have any control over.

Elk concludes with this:

Still, at the end of the day, unions make missteps in union elections all the time and often face opposition from management, and the workers still sometimes win. Indeed, the NLRB reports that unions won 60 percent of elections conducted in fiscal year 2013.

To find out what the “Neil Young Factor” is all about, you’ll have to go over and read the piece.

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Moral March on Raleigh

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I got an email from commenter phoebesmother:

My sister, who lives near Chapel Hill, is involved in this movement big time (she’s been arrested and charged, but for some reason the prosecutors dropped all the charges on anyone arrested the day she was arrested, one of the early days). She called me just now to convey HOW EXCITED she is about the march this Saturday, which is a permitted march, not civil disobedience in the manner of the ongoing Moral Monday protests.

You’ve covered this movement earlier and it would be great if BJ (my constant companion) would talk it up before Saturday. She says folks are coming to Raleigh from all 50 counties and from many other states, even a busload of folks from a UU congregation in California. We know that voter suppression laws are this century’s civil rights issue and are hard to fight against. But in NC it’s every bad impulse of the Republicans, from cutting unemployment benefits and Medicaid to real aggression against teachers. She tells me the legislature has passed a “signing bonus” bribery offer to teachers, asking them to sign away their labor rights and return to “firing at will” with no recourse. She says that teachers are wearing stickers and buttons saying “decline to sign.”

HKonJ-FB-banner

Here’s more march info, and here’s why the public school teachers who are part of Reverend Barber’s coalition will be wearing those “decline to sign” buttons mentioned in the email.

On February 8, 2014, tens of thousands of people will gather at Shaw University on Wilmington St. between South St. and MLK Jr. Blvd. at 9:00 a.m. in downtown Raleigh. We will march around 10:30 a.m. after which we will begin the mass people’s assembly on the doorstep of the State Capitol.

For the past seven years, a fusion movement has been growing in North Carolina. In 2006, the Historic Thousands on Jones St. (HKonJ) People’s Assembly Coalition was formed under the leadership of Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II and the North Carolina NAACP. It has grown to include over 150 coalition partners.

If you go to the march (and if you’re in North Carolina I hope you do go) remember to “wear red for public ed”.

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