Protest is in the air…as is the stench of anti-labor, union busting, troglodytes. This calls for violent revolution drawing upon the blood of patriots to strike mortal blows to the breasts of the oppressors conversations with beer. So please join us tonight for an evening of politics under the influence at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. We meet at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E.. We start at 8:00 pm, but feel free to show up even earlier for dinner.
Not in Seattle? There is a good chance you live near one of the 211 other chapters of Drinking Liberally.
How late does DL last? I’ve got a business dinner in Seattle tonight, maybe I can drop in afterwards if the dinner concludes early enough. But I wouldn’t want to show up only to find that everyone has already departed.
Well Walker is starting to be thrown under the bus..
Mitch Daniels wants to sacrifice the right to work atrocity in Indiana
Criminal Rick Scott of Florida says that State Workers shouldn’t be deprived of collective bargaining – that’s a surprise..
Like ArtFart said smelly compromises that sell off state assets for cheap could be the price for Republicans backing down.
A quick scan of some tea bagger oriented sites shows some pissed off wingnuts..
They never cease to amaze me with their insanity.
Sound Politics heroine Shawna Forde has just been sentenced to death by a Pima County, Arizona jury for murdering a nine year old girl and her father in a home invasion robbery in May 2009. Forde planned the robbery in order to finance her vigilante border watch group.
rhp6033, DL is variable, occasionally going almost up to closing time but generally ending earlier than that. However, even if some disappear early, it rarely breaks up completely before 10:00.
Even in the Snowpocalypse?
Blue John,
Snowpocalypse seems to be Rainnotsopocalypse right now. But yeah, if it gets snowy some of us leave earlier.
This one, or should I say win, ought to drive the wingers even more bat-shit.
Hey wingnutz, oil’s up to $95-106 a barrel, have driving to work in your monster truck.
One of this days I need to figure out how much the 80-100 calories I burn while biking to work cost me. I think, that’s about 5¢ worth of old fashioned oatmeal from Costco.
watching a bunch of obama-stickered Prius’s getting stuck in the snow would be fun to watch.
I can pull you all out of the ditch….at $50 a pop…..free enterprise you know.
@4 And that’s in Arizona, where they actually execute people for killing innocent kids.
Forde is reminiscent of Lynda Lyon Block, another crazy-right anti-government nutjob who was executed by Alabama for killing a cop.
@9 How the fuck am I supposed to get rich off my oil stocks from people like you????
@10 “I can pull you all out of the ditch….at $50 a pop…..free enterprise you know.”
Isn’t that just like a greedy Republican! I owned a GMC Jimmy for over 20 years and I always did it for free.
Jesus wasn’t a Republican.
Not to worry, the way things are going in Libya, most of that 50 bucks you pay to swinging Max will be a straight pass-through at the pump to Roger Rabbit’s dividend statement.
A few weeks ago the president of Shell predicted $5 gas by 2012. Looks like he was off by a year. Five buck gas will be here in three weeks.
@10
Maybe that’s what the guys in 4FWD trucks in this video thought.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v.....7CB17A7BDF
@14
My relatives outside Colville fire up their tractor and pull all sorts of people out of ditches when the snow starts falling. They’ve never charged a dime. They’ve also had plenty of half froze complete strangers warming up next to their wood stove and before cell phone had people making long distance calls on their phone. They’re Democrats.
Back in the day anyone would have done the above. Nowadays, not so much.
Quote of the Day
“the evidence is that government just doesn’t listen to poor people”
http://www.economist.com/blogs.....2/unionism
Thought For The Day
“Over the past week I’ve been researching the issue of migrant Eastern European labourers in the Netherlands, who are getting routinely stomped by the employment agencies that recruit them in Poland and Bulgaria, in ways reminiscent of Mexican migrant workers in the United States. The agencies tell them they’re coming to Holland to work in retail, or hotels; they deliver them by bus to a meat-packing plant. They’re housed in huge camps in empty vacation trailer parks, or filthy broken-down apartments, four to a room, and paid €250 a week; the companies deduct €60 per week in rent, and periodically company inspectors come around, announce the apartment is too dirty, and fine the workers €50 each. Unable to speak a word of Dutch, the workers can’t understand the monthly invoices explaining the multiple charges that have been deducted from their salaries. There are people in Holland who are reaching out to these Polish and Bulgarian workers, finding out what their problems are, helping them access lawyers and go after employment companies that cheat them. Those people are labour-union organisers. Labour-union organisers care about these abuses partly out of the self-interest of their members: if scammy employers can stomp the Poles, it won’t be long before they can stomp the locals too. But that doesn’t capture it. There’s also something basically spiritual about what they’re doing. They’re essentially motivated by solidarity. While other working-class Dutch are letting their resentment at economic uncertainty drive them into racism and xenophobia, solidarity gives labour-union organisers a paradigm that lets them reach across boundaries and see how workers of different ethnicities and nationalities are fundamentally in the same boat. Solidarity is a word you almost never see in American political discussions, since the decline of unionism in the 1970s. But those Polish migrant workers may be more familiar with it, as I believe it played an important role in Polish history at one point. At the time, I think both right- and left-wing Americans embraced the slogan, and maybe even the idea behind it, too.”
http://www.economist.com/blogs.....2/unionism
Roger Rabbit Commentary: It’s been my observation that the business-class types who most assiduously mouth Christian platitudes usually are the least Christian among us.
ONE of the memes being thrown around over the past few years by advocates of reducing the power of public-sector unions has been the claim that public-sector workers are overpaid in comparison to their private-sector counterparts. I’ve always considered this an odd claim to hear, as … [I] can’t recall ever hearing anyone say they were going to work for a government bureaucracy because they wanted to make a lot of money. At crucial career-making junctures in life, people who want to get rich tend to enter corporate law rather than join the District Attorney’s office, to work for internet companies rather than teach math in public high schools, and so forth.
“All of this is coming up now because Wisconsin has become the showdown state for the public-sector union controversy, and Scott Walker, the governor, is claiming he needs to destroy the state’s public-sector unions’ ability to negotiate in order to deal with its budget shortfall. State workers, he says, are paid too much. But the Economic Policy Institute tells us that, in Wisconsin, public-sector workers are not in fact paid more than their private-sector counterparts. They’re paid less. You can only make it appear that public-sector workers earn more by ignoring the fact that “both nationally and within Wisconsin, public sector workers are significantly more educated than their private sector counterparts.”
http://www.economist.com/blogs.....lic_unions
Roger Rabbit Commentary: Scott Walker is a liar. This is news? The guy is a Republican. All Republicans are liars.
Next up on the wingnut agenda: Republicans in Congress are talking about passing legislation that would allow state to declare bankruptcy in order to break their union contracts and get out of their pension obligations.
http://www.reuters.com/article.....5X20110214
Frivolous Lawsuits Dep’t
“WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Tuesday threw out a lawsuit claiming that President Barack Obama’s requirement that all Americans have health insurance violates the religious freedom of those who rely on God to protect them.
“U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler in Washington dismissed a lawsuit filed by the American Center for Law and Justice, a Christian legal group founded by evangelist Pat Robertson, on behalf of five Americans who can afford health insurance but have chosen for years not to buy it.”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41725747/ns/us_news/
@23
There’s a religious exemption, just like there is for SSI. Hell, with SSI you don’t even need to get religion to get the exemption, you can just say no thanks.
@ 19
One of the great ironies of the present age is, the economy that most closely resembles free market ideals right now is China. Free market capitalism and democratic rights are fundamentally incompatible with each other, and the precise reason for that is the plight of the poor. For free market capitalism to succeed, the voice of the poor must be suppressed.
In this country, this suppression is primarily accomplished through vilification. The poor are accused of sloth and suckling at the government tit. But what the poor have only asked for is a decent job at a decent wage.
something to pass on
Unions call for boycott of Columbian newspaper
http://www.nwlaborpress.org/20.....1Vanc.html
It’s the Children! What we really need is more MONEY for these school districts!
Financial scandal hits Seattle Public Schools
http://seattletimes.nwsource.c.....it23m.html
$1.8 Million DOWN THE DRAIN…SWOOOOOSH
My business dinner didn’t break up until after 10:30 p.m., so headed straight home rather than try to catch the remnants of D.L. Maybe next time.
Richard @ 4
Yuck.
I didn’t connect the dots. That Forde was both a victim and an aggressor. The whole business just makes me sad.
Last time I visited SP was to verify that one of the front pagers thought it’d be funny to boil a US Senator for the offense of helping people. It’s a joke, get it?
For the viewing audience, per Orcinus:
Hate speech is advocating violence against your political opponents.
How you talk changes how you think. Jokingly or not, hate speech coarsens discourse and desensitizes people, dragging the Overton Window to the fringe right.
There is a line. Calling someone an asshole is merely ad hominen. Rude and probably counter productive, but I don’t have a problem with it.
Any way.
Reading the pro comments at that Shawna Forde thread, which I recommend against, is depressing. Pro militia, anti free speech, an eye for an eye, etc. But it’s a good reminder of how our opponents see the world.
N in Seattle,
I’m free March 1st. Let’s meet at DL?
If you’re free, let’s play around with the redistricting stuff. (I’ll follow up in email.)
Cheers, Jason
Don Joe @ 25
I agree with your thesis. In both China and the USA, the fight is between corporatists and the people.
I avoid using the right’s “free market” meme. There is no such thing. Only open markets (regulated, efficient), black markets (unregulated, inefficient), and gray markets (somewhere in between).
When a trog says “free market”, they mean no regulation, no oversight, no accountability, no transparency, no legal recourse. Laissez-faire. Where might makes right.
China executes people “convicted” of corruption. Pretty extreme. And an admission that there is no legal way to seek recourse through a fair and impartial judiciary. I hope our country doesn’t regress that far.