– I’m all for Rand Paul’s talking on the Senate floor (and Wyden supporting it). I also still oppose Brennan’s nomination in general. But Paul is still an asshole.
– What to do with Hanford’s waste.
– Financial fitness day is Saturday in Seattle.
– The sequester is good news for coke heads (h/t).
But much worse, it haunts black people with a kind of invisible violence that is given tell only when the victim happens to be an Oscar winner.
Or a Democrat-turned-Republican.
http://horsesass.org/?p=47501#comment-1198028
Keeping New Mexicans from melting down about nuclear waste shipments passing along their highways might be an additional challenge for the governor of the Evergreen State.
New Mexico doesn’t have a Harry Reid. They’ll probably roll over.
Interesting that the piece doesn’t have one word about Yucca Mountain. Unfortunate, too, although for a media source carrying water for Democrats not really a surprise.
Democrats prepare to eat their own. ’bout time.
Democrats want the votes and the contributions of teacher unions, and they want the votes of the parents whose kids attend public schools. As long as the blue model worked, the contradictions could be managed.
Increasingly, however, the contradictions have come to the fore. Teacher unions want life employment for incompetent teachers; their representatives negotiate farcically unsound pension arrangements with complaisant politicians and want taxpayers to pony up when the huge bills come due. Other producers of government services also have their sweetheart deals.
The result is that the consumers of government services, many of whom of course are Democrats, are getting a raw deal.
http://blogs.the-american-inte.....alifornia/
I cannot imagine that rank and file teachers want to have life employment for incompetent teachers; but maybe union leaders are like politicians owned by the NRA who can keep blocking sensible things like universal background checks when 90% of their constitutions are for it.
but I expect this is mostly just Right Wing inflammatory BS speak. The blog didn’t bother to site links to facts backing up life employment for incompetent teachers, so I call BS until he does.
@ 4
That’s funny. A guy who rarely links to anything is unhappy because my link doesn’t contain as much information as he would like it to contain.
@ 4
Lemme guess, you’ll find fault with this Op-Ed piece because there’s no link to the study she cites:
But the system has forced many excellent teachers out of teaching and into more stable professions.
The annual madness is the result of LIFO, which stands for “last in, first out.” It is currently the law in California, and what it means is that school administrators must make teacher retention decisions based solely on seniority, without regard to a teacher’s effectiveness in the classroom. LIFO is the functional equivalent of an NBA team being forced to fire LeBron James because a bench warmer on the team has more years in the league. In the case of schools, it can mean that 30 or more children who have only one shot at, say, third grade, are being taught by an inferior teacher
LIFO’s tag-team partner in the substandard education derby is California’s antiquated tenure system. Under current law, teachers receive tenure after only 18 months of work and minimal administrative review; there is virtually no evaluation process to determine whether teachers are effective before receiving tenure, and after receiving it, tenured teachers are virtually impossible to fire.
The legal roadblocks to firing a tenured teacher are so formidable that even abject ineffectiveness is not considered a fireable offense. In a recent survey, 68% of teachers said they knew of at least one grossly incompetent teacher at their school who deserved to be fired but had not been.
http://articles.latimes.com/20.....g-20121216
I don’t think Bill O’Reilly has to fake followers on his Twitter feed like Rachel does, either.
You want to know why Fox is #1?
Let me answer a question with a question: Could you ever picture this scenario happening at MSNBC or CNN?
Let’s use MSNBC as an example since it’s more opinion-based (hell, it’s ALL opinion-based now):
Rachel Maddow invites Michael Steele (former head of the RNC and current MSNBC contributor) on her program. They get into an argument over whatever, things get heated. Maddow calls Steele a liar, saying his perspective is complete BS.
Could you ever, EVER, see O’Donnell calling out Maddow for her treatment of Steele? How about The Cycle? Would S.E. Cupp rush to Steele’s defense while Touré mocked him while defending Maddow?
Would, say, Steve Schmidt (MSNBC contributor, former McCain campaign manager) come on Maddow’s show the next night and say to her face that she was totally out of line?
The answer, from what we’ve seen, is no. Sure, there is disagreement between guests, small-time players on the network…but not to this degree, not to this level of candor.
Hardball has its share of yelling (mainly from the host) but does that disagreement carry into other shows? Not on your life.
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/o%E.....yone-else/
I’m not sure I understand all the specific talk about drones in the USA… if it is legal for the military or the CIA or the police for that matter to use a drone on American soil to kill someone (American or otherwise), then surely it is legal for that same agency to use a sniper or a tank or a ninja to kill that same person, right? Are drones just poster-bots here for the larger legal issue of who can be killed by the government and under what circumstances?
– MM
@ 8
Actually, no one around here really cares if the president is ordering assassinations of American citizens if that president is Barack Obama.
This concern over rights is so Bush-league.
That’s great that Seattle is going to have a “financial fitness” event. So many people think the government is going to take care of them, when, in fact, the government simply cannot do that. There simply is not enough financial sense in government, plus the politicos have been too busy making promises that the government can’t keep.
Social Security is a nice supplement for retirement, but it isn’t sufficient for a person to retire on. I’m sorry that so many people don’t realize that.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,171230,00.html
http://www.americanprogress.or.....comitatus/
@5. The way I see it, the blogger tried to establish that he was authoritative in the beginning of his piece with plenty of links, but when he gets to to the part where he slips in his unfounded inflammatory right wing talking points about teachers unions (that Serial “Doesn’t pay his debts” Conn lapped up), that section is absent of links and facts.
So I call BS.
Serial “Doesn’t pay his debts” Conn can’t admit he’s been fooled by, or willing accepts, the right wing talking points so he whines about the BS call instead.
Serial’s arguments over teacher retention begs the question: exactly who, decides, and how, which teachers are incompetent, and which ones are not? It’s not nearly as simple as Serial and other Cons think it is.
* Do we judge by test scores or grades? If so, how do we account for teachers who volunteer to work with the most challenging students, verus those teaching AP honors classes?
* Do we trust student evaluations, where students see a perfect chance to “get even” with a teacher who punished them?
* How about peer-to-peer evaluations, where other teachers have an opportunity to settle petty disputes over who gets to be department head by organizing a “negative evaluation” campaign against their prospective competitor?
* Do we trust a “panel” of evaluators from other schools who come in and sit for one hour in a classroom?
* How about the principal – who may see this as an opportunity to get rid of “troublemakers” (i.e., anyone who requests too much or recognizes the principle’s own shortcomings), and replace the teacher with their own loyal ass kissers?
Remember also that whole reason why Unions have traditionally insisted on “no firing without cause” and a seniority system is that it protects active union members from being targeted by the company in order to rid of the “troublemakers”, and sending a message to the rest of the staff not to engage in union activity. Without these clauses in their contract, a Union would, over the course of a few years, be powerless.
But that’s exactly how the Republican/Cons want it. They like to find themsleves in a position where they can exercise arbitrary authority with the lives and careers of others. The most recent Republican presidential candidate said that he “likes to fire people”. The founder of the local rightwing blog didn’t think anything about getting a waitress fired for asking him to control his noisy child.
If you get a chance, please send Senator Patrick Leahy an email to let him know we in WA don’t think that he has any right to demand the Feds crack down on our democratically-chosen I-502. He’s got a stick up his butt about us in WA and CO deciding drug policy for ourselves.
@ 13
They like to find themsleves (sic, again) in a position where they can exercise arbitrary authority with the lives and careers of others.
No, we want our children to achieve more in school. You’re excessively conflating this one.
I don’t like Rand Paul, but I give him credit for standing up for 13 hours instead of just fillibustering without the speech.
From 16,
Agreed! Rand Paul needs to be more like his dad, Ron Paul. Rand is too Republican for me: I would never vote for him.
No, we want our children to achieve more in school.
Republicans continually vilify teachers as the problem, and won’t fund schools to do things that are proven to work, like smaller class sizes.
Serial “Won’t pay his debts” Conn, you want better schools? Stop attacking teachers and fund them.
@ 18
Don’t you mean “Fund them and don’t ask any questions.”?
I think you do.
From 18 and 19,
I would be happy if the kids came out of the educational system knowing how to read, write, communicate and be able to do the basic math functions accurately and consistently. We’re cranking-out an inferior product currently, and the rest of the world is eating our lunch!!
Actually, I am concerned about any US president ordering any assassinations regardless of country. But then I’m also concerned about water boarding which was once considered a capital offense.
I don’t like Rand Paul, but I give him credit for standing up for 13 hours instead of just filibustering without the speech.
Ditto…
@20, I couldn’t agree more.
@19. There are proven things that we can do, that boost education. THEY TAKE MONEY. If they were cheep and easy, schools are doing them already.
Were you NOT able to read and comprehend what I wrote? I guess you went to one of the republican funded child housing schools.
I’m still wondering what the difference would be if the White House killed an American if the person was a threat to National Security versus the police killing an American for abducting a kid and holding him hostage or someone like the cop killer in California. Why do police have the authority to kill without giving a criminal the right to due process but it is such a big deal if Washington kills an American Terroist who is plotting to do harm to this Country?
And shouldn’t people be speaking more about the collateral damage of the innocent than the death of the “Guilty”.
@3 Nice…uh, “fair and balanced” source you linked to there, Bob. Contrasts so perfectly with your reference to the PI in @2. (Heck, whatever they’re carrying they probably can’t handle more than a thimbleful at a time.)
@10 Forgive me for responding to triteness in-kind, but about 95% of the time I see or hear this kind of rhetoric, it’s a lead-up to proposing that since Social Security by itself can’t support retiring* baby boomers we might as well just do away with the whole damn thing. Usually after that comes a snide remark or two about how my generation are a bunch of “useless eaters”.
(* “Retiring”…often meaning laid off for the last time.)
Social Security is a nice supplement for retirement, but it isn’t sufficient for a person to retire on. I’m sorry that so many people don’t realize that.
On the other hand for many Americans who have contributed to SS over the years it can and does make the difference between living poorly and starving to death. Old folks starving to death was very common in this country prior to SS being enacted.
It’s kind of like saying that since police and firemen don’t solve all crimes or put out all fires we might as well get rid of them too.
It use to be we could put a man on the moon. Not any more. Now we can’t even put a man on the space station without help from Russia. And now China and Europe are talking about building a new space station without us. One that is actually useful.
Our “International” space station was actually the second one placed in orbit. Since we no longer have a usable shuttle it won’t be completed, whatever that means.
The first station, Skylab 1, went up on top of a single Saturn V back in 1973.
@24 cheep = cheap. Dang. I am my own point, a product of the underfunded rural Oregon School System in a very republican county. We had huge classes, old books, spent huge amounts on a horrible football team, and forced away the science teacher who taught AP chem. It was so conservative that I grew up with the Alan Stang report on the radio and the John Birch Society at the county fair. We didn’t have time to do no gud studifyun, we had to maintain a guard against the invasion from the Communists, Trilateralist and the Illuminati.
“we had to maintain a guard against the invasion from the Communists, Trilateralist and the Illuminati”
Bad planning, obviously. The invasion came from illegal Mexican-jihadists supported by the true enemy from within, the treasonous progressive-commie-fascists.
From 28,
I don’t recall making any suggestions about ending Social Security in my previous comments.
From 29,
I can’t find any information about mass starvation of older people in America prior to the enactment of Social Security. I can’t recall any of my grandparents or parents talking about mass starvations of older folks during the Depression. Do you have a link with any credibility on the subject?
The worst, absolutely worst thing you can do to a right winger is seize his coin. There’s almost nothing else the batshit insane right wing values more. Alan West never forgave the Army for fining him $5,000 and this guy will never forgive either:
http://www.salon.com/2013/03/0.....orn_sting/
Look for this creep to run for office in some bagger heavy place.
The one right wing black woman Puddymoron will never EVER talk about:
http://thephoenix.com/Boston/n.....dia-naffe/
From 37,
O’Keefe won’t pay any of the settlement with his own funds: his Neo-con cronies will pay the $100K. As for the apology, well…they cost nothing and are really only words. As they say on “Game of Thrones,” words are wind.
In short, this guy O’Keefe will be back, YLB.
There’s a story on KIRO now about some evil woman who stole some poor old guy’s entire retirement and other assets. In cases like this, I’d like to see severe punishment. I think even some physical punishment, such as 20 lashes, ought to be imposed at the start of the punishment. Hopefully, that will be at least 30 years as “guest” of the DOC!
@40 Is it your impression that America is a much more dishonest and corrupt society than it was in the 50s and 60s? If so, I think Baby Boomers are primarily to blame. Too many members of my generation grew up so fixated on material value that everything else fell by the wayside. I often think of mansions as lovely houses with ugly people inside. Nowadays status symbols often signify bad character. Look at all the scandals we have in the private business sector, for example, we’re now experiencing another go-round of food aduleration and food mislabeling. When even Maker’s Mark waters down their product, you know things have really gone to hell in a handbasket. “Profit at any price” isn’t working.
We learned this afternoon that well-known Seattle attorney Paul Hanson is the grieving father of Dianna Hanson, 24, who was killed instantly yesterday at a private California zoo when a 550-lb. lion escaped from a holding cage and leaped on her, breaking her neck, while she was cleaning its enclosure. Ms. Hanson was an animal lover whose dream was to work with the great cats. There doesn’t appear to have been any carelessness on anyone’s part; this was a tragic accident. We are reminded that these animals, even in zoos and circuses, are wild beasts and not pets; and they are always potentially dangerous and must be professionally handled with proper procedures so they don’t have the opportunity to injure workers, visitors, or rabbits. Dogs are another matter entirely. Dogs don’t belong in zoos or circuses. Dogs have no educational or entertainment value whatsoever, and they’re lousy pets! Dogs that run loose in parks and chase rabbits should be summarily shot! Kill them all! Better yet, blow them to bits with a rocket launcher, so bunnies can enjoy watching their pieces slowly settle to earth. Bring popcorn.
From 41,
No, I don’t have any belief that we’re some how more evil or dishonest than, say, 50 or 60 years ago. I was simply interested in the story of an evil peron taking advantage of an old person whose mental facilities may be diminished. The people who do this kind of thing are just reprehensible, and hopefully, this person will go to jail for a long time…and make restitution!
From 42,
Maybe we could use drones to call-in artillery fire on those evil canines!!!
@37 O’Keefe isn’t a legitimate muckraker or whistleblower. He fabricates situations to entrap people and, in this case, edited his (illegal) tape to remove exculpatory information:
“Vera has agreed to drop the case against O’Keefe in exchange for $100,000 and acknowledgment from O’Keefe that the video did not include the fact that Vera had called the police during the sting.”
O’Keefe isn’t a crusader protecting the public interest. He’s a dishonest political operative committing crimes to promote a cynical partisan agenda:
“It’s not the first time O’Keefe has run into legal trouble. He had felony charges against him dropped in relation to a sting targeting Louisiana Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu. He pleaded guilty to a lesser crime and was sentenced to three years probation.”
Kinda like the Nazis did in another era.
@44 And SAMs to take out the peregrine falcons!
@43 According to the KIRO story, this 40-year-old woman is married to an 83-year-old man and scammed an 86-year-old man out of $652,000. Elderly men are especially vulnerable to younger women who are only interested in relieving them of their assets and savings.
@39 “this guy O’Keefe will be back”
But he’ll eventually be discredited to the point where he loses all his effectiveness. And he obviously doesn’t know much about law, so there’s a good chance one of his “mistakes” will land him behind bars, and that chance grows every time his rap sheet gets a little longer.
This Google search might be sufficient for your needs.
https://www.google.com/search?q=starvation+during+great+depression
Not sure if there is any good references online. Seems our government didn’t want to document how bad it was and most people were busy with trying to survive. The books I read on the subject were from my Jr. High’s American History classes. Sorry I do not remember the names of the books.
If you are really interested, best bet would be either the Seattle or UW libraries. Then ask the librarian for help.
If you don’t mind a fiction book from that period to give you a feel of what it was like back then try The Grapes of Wrath. The movie is also pretty good though of course leaves out a lot of detail.
From 49,
Guess my family was lucky – poor white Southern trash and poor immigrants from the Midwest. No starvations recorded on either side.
@50
City folk tended to fare worse than country.
Country folk, being “closer to the earth”, tended to have gardens and raise their own food. It was one of my mother’s jobs to take care of the chickens, including killing and cleaning. She still hates chickens.
City folk were not anywhere near that lucky. I don’t think there is anything as depressive as the breadlines back then. Bonus points if you look at the “Images for breadlines great depression” link.
https://www.google.com/search?q=breadlines+great+depression
@49 I’d recommend he read Timothy Egan’s “The Worst Hard Time.”
This is why Obama’s having dinner with Republicans
It was serious. It was respectful. And it was informative. (In fact, one senator told us that he learned, for the first time, the actual cuts that the president has put on the table. Leadership hadn’t shared that list with them before).
http://www.washingtonpost.com/.....publicans/
Surprise, surprise. The Republican leadership lies to its own. Who would have thought?
More bad news for Republicans: 71% of Americans favor raising the minimum wage to $9 an hour.
http://firstread.nbcnews.com/_.....-wage?lite
Roger Rabbit Commentary: You’d think high-bracket taxpayers would support this, because a low minimum wage is, in fact, a taxpayer subsidy to cheapskate employers.
If you think of labor as an economic input, then you should also think of workers’ cost of providing their labor. After all, when a fast food manager calculates his costs, he doesn’t expect to get hamburger or coffee cups free. They cost something to produce. Well, so does labor. A worker can’t provide his labor unless he covers his costs of food, clothing, shelter, transportation, and medical care. A business owner doesn’t expect to get hamburger or coffee cups from suppliers at less than cost, so why should be expect workers to provide their labor at below cost? If you’re an eastern Washington grower, where there’s no worker housing within 50 miles and gas costs $4 a gallon, and you offer $3 an hour for orchard labor, don’t be shocked if no one shows up to pick your apples.
Currently, about half the cost of minimum-wage labor is subsidized by taxpayers through programs like food assistance, Medicaid, housing vouchers, earned income credits, and so on. Therefore, raising the minimum wage is actually a taxpayer relief act. Republicans pols aren’t smart enough to figure this out. But I’ll bet their millionaire backers understand it.
From ekim’s article… This is the WA Post
Yep, the sky is falling… Well not really!
It’s because DUMMOCRAPTS and their MSM lap dogs never talk about the unintended consequences… projected layoffs after this becomes law DUMB Wabbit.
Projected layoffs? Yep, the sky is falling… Well not really!
In other news
Yet mayor nanny Bloomberg worries about soda bottles bigger than 16 ounces. When confronted about his gun loving ways he shuts down reporters. Yes this moron is a leftist.
Read it here… http://newyork.cbslocal.com/20.....nnot-read/ … CBS you can trust CBS (not always)
REPUGNANTs like our pet troll keep giving DIRE WARNINGS about, you guessed it, unintended consequences like “projected layoffs”. (Oh, my!)
Please Chicken Little, explain to us the “unintended consequences” for paying an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work.
REPUGNANTs think we cannot afford paying a living wage to our own people.
Spending a trillion or three blowing the hell out of Iraq, yeah, that’s OK.
Why do REPUGNANTs hate America and love the Merchants of Death?
And speaking of the Merchants of Death and Iraq…
Iraq has somewhere around a million widows, most with children. Impressive for a country of only had 20 million at the start of the Bush occupation. Their government is encouraging the surviving men to marry second and third wives as a means to support these unfortunate widows. This is one of those “unintended consequences” ButtBanger was talking about.
Who won?
The Merchants of Death made a fortune.
The international oil companies got their oil.
We got high prices for gas from the oil companies.
We got to pay for the guns and bullets that killed Iraqis.
Makes you feel warm and fuzzy, doesn’t it?
Working for Wal-Mart
Forbes magazine, polling business executives (not employees) has ranked Wal-Mart among the best 100 corporations to work for.
Yet the employees on average take home pay of under $250 a week. The salary for full-time employees (called “associates”) is $6 to $7.50 an hour for 28-40 hours a week, which is typical in the discount retail industry. This pay scale places employees with families below the poverty line, with the majority of employees’ children qualifying for free lunch at school. When closely examined, this amounts to a form of corporate welfare, as the taxpayer subsidizes the low salaries. One-third are part-time employees – limited to less than 28 hours of work per week – and are not eligible for benefits.
http://www.pbs.org/itvs/storewars/stores3.html
If we can’t afford to pay our fellow Americans a living wage, we certainly cannot afford to subsidize highly profitable corporations like Wal-Mart.
And speaking of Wal-Mart…
I wonder what kind of person is willing to work as an executive at Wal-Mart when they know full well they are making the big bucks by screwing those at the bottom that, you know, do the actual work.
I would guess that ButtPutty for one would have no problems with it. Can’t say for sure. I don’t personally know the troll.
Or so the ButtBanger would have you believe. If you actually look at his link you see:
Not quite the same thing.
A friend of mine (ex teacher with a Masters no less) works for a garbage company these days. He makes better money, works fewer hours, gets more respect, gets more real vacation time every year, and best of all, sleeps better at night. Can’t say I blame him.
Older people, pre-Social Security, often survived only by moving in with extended family, or children would stay hom to work to take care of them. Others, like their younger folks similarly situated, relied upon charity (soup kitchens, etc.). In short, they gave up their independence so they could eat.
Living off home gardens helps a little, but as others have pointed out most modern urban/suburban Americans don’t have the space or skills to pull it off. And what happens when they lost their home, have no land in which to raise a garden, or are physically unable to do the labor?
The biggest danger is a persistant drought or pestulance, which can wipe out entire mutli-state regions, wreck the economy, and make everybody poor – except those rich enough so that their wealth isn’t tied to a specific location.
Then, also, there is the issue of real deadly famine (Sudan, Haiti) vs. constant hunger. My mother, growing up on a farm in Alabama in the Great Depression, was never hungry – they had no money, but they always had food. My father, though, came froma different circumstance – his father (my grandfather) was a carpenter and took whatever work he could find during those years. When the song “Polk Salad Annie” came on the radio, he would scowl – he and his brothers would prowl the riverbanks for the (barely) edible weed, and that would be their meals for weeks at a time. Without the pay my grandfather got from odd jobs, the elderly would be restricted to such meals.
I remember a documentary on PBS about the Great Depression, and how a former teacher recounted the day when she saw a little girl sitting alone on the playground during recess. “Aren’t you going to each lunch with the others?” she asked? The littl girl replied: “Yesterday was my turn to eat. Today it’s my sister’s turn.”
ekim, still the biggest jackASS here. CBS story ya moron. CBS headline ya moron!
BTW that WA Post article where you touted the Republican leadership keeping the rank and file in the dark…
Chained-CPI was mentioned. Nancy Pelosi said it was dead as minority leader. So if Obummer’s own proposals are dead to Congressional DUMMOCRAPTS, why bring up dead issues to senators when it won’t leave the house to be voted on or negoitated by the senate?
You are a two-bit loser who can’t figger out your own DUMMOCRAPT playbook.
What an ID10T.
Why Dianne Feinstein should be pasturized…
“When even Maker’s Mark waters down their product”
Sonofagun…I didn’t know about that one. (I’m primarily a Scotch and Canadian drinker myself.) Maybe that explains why their head distiller left a few years ago and set up shop on his own in Woodinville.
From 70′
Bowing to pressure, the distillers of Maker’s Mark have dropped their plans to dilute their product. Good idea!
Retailers have been trying every trick in the book to charge more money for less product. Notice the size of the ice cream cartons recently? Then there’s the really deceptive practices, such as such as the “indention” at the bottom of the bottle getting bigger and bigger – you don’t see it on the shelf, but there’s definately less product.
And the pricing strategy has been to raise the retail price but offer sales and coupons which bring it back down to the original price – but then gradually reduce the value and frequency of the sales and coupons.
But actually watering down a product like whiskey – that’s pretty low.
By the way, if you order cold sake (available in authentic Japanese restaurants in the summertime), it’s served in a square ceramic bowl, of specific standard dimensions. The server keeps pouring until the bowl runs over. That’s because at one time in Japan, under-serving was considered theft, resulting in an immediate death sentence. The practice of making sure they serve more than enough has continued.
@68,
Spuddy says: “ekim, still the biggest jackASS here.”
Well, spuddy must know a lot about asses, given that he sucks shit out of them.
Speaking of, hey spuddy how much shit did you suck out of Rmoney’s ass?
No more accusing your accusers, just come clean (HA!).