Human Trafficking.

There's a disgusting news story in the Washington Post about how KBR is apparently essentially guilty of slavery (referred to in the article as "human trafficking").
Essentially, it is alleged, they hired (through a partner company) 13 men in Nepal ostensibly to work in Jordan, but when they arrived in Jordan their passports were seized and they were instead shipped to Iraq. As they were being driven to Iraq, they were abducted by insurgents, and all but one where executed.

And to me, this adds one more reason why it is important to elect Democrats in this election. I've spoken before of the importance of the pendulum of politics swinging back and forth, thus keeping the country on an essentially centrist path (veering in a sine-wave around the center, but always trending back towards it), but the other reason why it is important is that with our two-party system, both parties are easily subject to becoming corrupt, and every so often each needs to be removed from power, to give them time to reflect on how corruption engendered bad behavior, and for the rank and file to consider whether the people who are currently controlling the party really speak for them.

For this seems to me to be emblematic of many of the current crop of neo-conservatives who have hijacked the Republican Party, willing to ignore even basic human rights if it helps pad the profit margins.

Does that tar all Republicans? Of course not. Nor all conservatives. But it feels fairly typical of the rot at the top of their current food chain, and so a little bit of humility time for the party would be good, if only so the good and decent and moral members of that party can have a moment to reflect on the ways in which their party has gone awry and rededicate themselves to the party they WANT to belong to.
And fortunately, the way things work, they'll be about ready to be the reasonable alternative just about the same time power begins to corrupt the Democrats, and we'll sine wave back the other way.

Liam.

Symbolism

It has been mentioned that due to the impending landfall of hurricane Gustav, the Republican Party briefly considered postponing their convention, if only to avoid a resurgence of the images of John McCain having birthday cake with President Bush while New Orleans was flooding under Katrina.

But the interesting thing is that several prominent members of the Religious Right famously prayed for rain during Obama's open air acceptance of the Democratic nomination. It does not say much for them that they would stoop that low, and it does not say much for their relationship with their God that it did not happen, but symbolically even worse, how does it look that after that praying, it was the Republicans who had to consider whether rain was going to force an alteration of their plans.

Now, I am a firm believer that Jesus does not aid in touchdowns at clutch moments in football games, and I am equally certain that God has more important things to worry about than whether John McCain or Barack Obama leads the United States for the next four years.

Still, when you famously and publically call for rain to ruin your opponent's plans (and would almost certainly have pointed to any actual storm as proof that God was on your side), you have to think it only hurts their credibility when that rain comes on YOUR picnic.

Just a thought (and a more politically correct one than the one a friend of mine had, which I am tempted to omit because it's not politically correct, but it made me laugh, so I will anyway): He suggested that if nothing else, the selection of Sarah Palin will help McCain's offshore drilling strategy, for how many men can look at a former beauty queen and NOT think "drill now, drill here".

Liam.

Huckabee E-mail

The Republicans are starting to pull out all the stops, and I guess it's clear by now that I think right now we need a break from Republicans, so I wanted to take a shot at this e-mail from Huckabee, exhorting people to come out and vote in Republicans. He gives a list of the things "Republicans believe in". Let's take them one by one, shall we?

We believe in less government not more.

...unless you're talking about regulating behaviors (such as gay marriage) or military spending. Republicans believe in less social spending for those less fortunate, that's true, but when was the last time Republicans actually cut the size of government at all? In this, at least, I agree with Ron Paul.

We believe in cutting taxes.

True, but I believe in being fiscally conservative. That is NOT, in spite of what we've been led to believe, synonymous. I believe in cutting SPENDING, and then if you have a surplus, cutting taxes to give back the surplus. I believe only an idiot believes that cutting taxes raises revenues when taxes are at the rates they're at now, especially when the only example of anything like a balanced budget during the last 30 years was under a Democratic President.

We believe in a constitutional amendment to protect the right to life.

...and here we are back to that "less government" thing. They're not about less government, they're about more micro-control over behavior. Look, I don't like abortions, and I'd like to see them minimized as much as possible. And I'm even reasonably convinced that Roe v. Wade should be overturned, this feels like a states issue anyway. But I do not believe that making abortion illegal will significantly cut down on the number of abortions, it'll just drive them back underground, so that the abortions which do happen will be done without counseling, without guidance, and in a significant number of cases will result in the death of both fetus AND mother.

We believe marriage needs to be defended from activist judges and a Democrat Congressional Majority.

...of course, they don't seem to have any problems what so ever with the over 50% divorce rate in this country. Perhaps not Huckabee, but how a man who has two or three divorces under his belt can say with a straight face that marriage is sacred and must be defended when two other people wish to make a solemn commitment to each other I just don't understand.

The gay marriage hysteria is no different than the miscegenation hysteria of fifty years ago. I truly believe that in another 50 years, our grandchildren will look back on the homophobia of today with the same lack of understanding that most of us have for the interracial prohibitions back then.

By the way, Republicans also have nothing against activist judges, they merely want activist judges who will change the laws in directions they wish, including the mythical "original intent" we've heard so much about, but which has no actual basis in historical fact. I firmly believe that if we have judges and Justices who follow the ACTUAL original intent of our founding fathers, they would be labeled by the current Republican party as "activist".

We believe in drilling today, tomorrow and thereafter. We believe in alternative sources of energy.

No, actually it seems as though for the most part Republicans believe in drilling IN LIEU OF alternative sources of energy. And by the way, if the Republicans believed so strongly in more drilling, why didn't they do anything to open up the banned areas when they were in charge? They had control of both houses of Congress and the Executive Branch for quite a few years there, but only in the last two years since losing control of Congress is this suddenly a huge issue.

We need to begin looking at alternative, renewable and clean sources of energy, and we need to do it before we pass any irreversible turning points, whether that's the eventual end to the supply of oil (sooner or later we will run out, even if that's not for another 100 years or more) or the warming effect of the pollutants of the petroleum based economy.

I've said this before, there simply is no credible reason to think that more local drilling solves any problem. It doesn't break our addiction to oil, it doesn't lower the price of oil by any appreciable amount, and by the way it doesn't even produce any additional oil at all, so long as there already exist millions of acres of leased land that are not being tapped. If you have low water pressure in your house due to small pipes, the solution is not to build a second reservoir, at least until you've figured out how to effectively use the reservoir you already have.

The only time a Republican is in favor of an alternative source of energy is when, like T. Boone Pickens, they have found a way to make money off of it and so have invested in it. Which is not an evil motive, but it certainly isn't the same as believing in research and development into new sources.

We believe that education is a key to America's future security and competitiveness.

There are four words which give lie to this: No Child Left Behind. Filled with unfunded mandates and teaching to the test, we have an nearly eight years of this abomination and we are in fact leaving children behind, and our children are getting ever further behind in education. Republicans, as near as I can tell, believe in talking about education, as long as it doesn't involve any spending.



Republicans are out in force right now, telling us what they believe in. But just remember, this is a desperate bid to hold on to some power, after having failed to move significantly on virtually any of the things they "believe in" during their years of power.

Liam.

Clinton & McCain

This post is going to reverse a couple of things I've said before. Which in current neocon parlance makes me a "flip flopper", but to me makes me "willing to change my opinion when new facts come to light".

First, from a while back... I've criticized Hillary Clinton since she gave up her campaign for the Presidency for what I viewed as a tepid level of support for her party's nominee. Many of her appearances seemed calculated to appear wholeheartedly supportive while still saying just the right things to nurture the continued feeling of disaffected alienation in her most ardent supporters.

Well, having criticized before, I need to now give her credit, her speech at the Democratic Convention undid all of that. She could not have been more clear nor more forceful in her support of Mr. Obama, and so while it is late in coming, it is definitely not TOO late, and if it signals the new message she's going to be giving, I give her kudos for getting on board.



Second, John McCain. In a recent piece about him, I repeated the line that he "doesn't know how many houses he owns." It's true, but it's irrelevant except in one regard. The point I had intended to make was to point out how it's hard to buy the McCain portrait of Obama as the elitist when McCain has multiple houses (more on that in a minute).

But let me be clear: I'm not offended that he doesn't actually know the count, and my point in this has been proven over the last few days as everyone else debates the count as well. One of the McCain family properties is a compound which includes a main house, a guest house and a "servants quarters" house. Do you count this as one "home" or three "houses"? Do apartments count? Condos? Investment properties in which he and his wife never reside?

My wife and I own either one house, three or ten, depending on how you count them. I would tell people I have ONE house, because I do not live in the others. But in terms of actual ownership, we own two other buildings as investment properties, which would make for three, even though we live in neither. And there are a total of 9 apartments in those three buildings, which one might argue make for 10 residences.

So the answer to the question is not necessarily straightforward, even at the modest income level my wife and I are at, and clearly any of the three answers I might give could be spun by someone as being "untruthful" if the accuser decided to choose a different counting strategy.

I also read an interesting take on the charge of "elitism" which I'm still mulling over: According to the opiner, the world "elitism" means different things to those on the left and the right. To me, the elite are those whose incomes are in the top few percentage points. Those who have sufficient resources to own multiple residences for their own personal use and who own their own jets, and who (and I have at least one member of my family (mine, not Janet's) who feels this way) have odd notions about what the average person can live on (*).

But apparently to many on the right, "elitism" isn't a state of having, it's a state of mind, and so when the charge comes up, it's leveled at those who have completed college and shown a certain level of intellectual ability.

Now, we can argue all night long as to whether either of these necessarily is a BAD thing in a President. I would say that the financial elitists might have a leg up on experience with high finance (part of the President's job) but lose touch with average American citizens. I have yet to figure out why anyone thinks it's somehow a negative to have a smart President(**).

But it's interesting that we might be using the same term and arriving at entirely different meanings.

Liam.

(*) This particular member of my family once mentioned off hand to me that their own salary was "ok as a second income" (their spouse works) but wasn't something "anyone could live on" (this was several years ago, the quotes are approximate). I didn't bother to mention to this family member that the amount they were quoting was about 20% higher than my own salary at the time, a salary on which I manage to feed, house and clothe two adults and five children in relative comfort.

(**) In fairness, this isn't entirely true. I had one friend argue somewhat persuasively that part of why Carter was somewhat ineffective was that he was intelligent enough to see the gray in situations others might see only in black and white, and thus had a harder time making definitive choices than someone who sees the world in more binary terms. I'm not sure whether I fully agree with it, but it was interesting and it was at least one attempt to explain to me the argument I said I "have yet to figure out".

Gay Rights vs. Business Rights

Janet has been having a debate with someone recently (I believe she said her sister, but I focused more on the topic than the person, so I could be wrong) and as often happens in marriages, when she’s having an interesting discussion or point of debate, she’ll bring it up with me.

I believe she and I disagree on this one, but it made me want to sit down and write out my position, just for the heck of it.

At issue is the recent ruling (or were there several?) in which a wedding photographer was held liable for refusing to photograph a gay wedding in a state in which gay marriage is legal. It’s been a few weeks, I don’t recall the specifics, but that’s enough to have the general philosophical debate.

Essentially, the question is whether a business should be allowed to choose its clientele or whether a public business has a responsibility not to discriminate, and I fall into the latter category while firmly understanding and sympathizing with the former argument.

The thing is, to me it’s a matter of slippery slope. If I open up a little Mom & Pop style restaurant and decide that I don’t want to cater to red haired people, that should be my right, right? I can do business with whomever I choose to do business with, and it’s no one else’s business. If I don’t want to work with someone, they can go to someone else!

But… suppose there’s a general bias against carrot tops in my area, and so it’s not just a matter of one person’s personal bias but an institutionalized problem. Suppose every other restaurant in the area decided to follow suit? Now it’s not a matter of the redheads avoiding one bigoted restaurant, it’s a matter of them being systematically discriminated against in most restaurants, and as a class feeling like second class citizens because every individual restaurant sticks to their right not to serve them.

I use restaurants, of course, because if you substitute “black skin” for “red hair” you have a situation which is no longer hypothetical but which actually happened in our history. Restaurants, schools, bathrooms, theaters, you name it. Individually, at each establishment, it would seem to be the right of the proprietor to serve only those he or she chose to serve. But when it rises to the level of a significant fraction of the similar businesses in an area, that’s when the discriminated-against group’s rights begin to be infringed upon to the extent that their protection trumps the rights of the business owner.

So, too, is the case (in my opinion) with homosexuals. The couple in question was not engaging in illegal activity, they were having a perfectly lawful marriage by the laws of their state, and were simply trying to hire a wedding photographer. And I don’t recall where they lived, but I can easily imagine areas of this country where, left free to “choose their own clientele”, a gay couple could get married but be unable to have a professionally produced photographic record of their joyous day. Since we still have a significant amount of institutionalized homophobia in this country, the discrimination laws have to kick into effect.

But here’s the key: I firmly believe that the photographers in question could have accomplished the same thing without causing themselves a legal hassle, in one of several ways.

First, if they had chosen to specialize in one religion. “We’re Roman Catholic and we are most familiar with and work best with weddings of that religion. If you’re of another religion, you’ll probably want to find someone else.” That would seem to me to be a reasonable specialization and one which probably would not engender any lawsuits, and it avoids the whole “We don’t approve of gay marriage” issue, because if you only do Roman Catholic weddings and the Roman Catholic church won’t perform a gay marriage, then the answer is “I’m sorry, but unless you’re married in the Catholic church, we really aren’t the people for you” and avoiding the whole issue of sexual orientation entirely.

Second, though, I’d bet that they were not polite in their refusal. The average person doesn’t go out looking to sue someone for relatively minor infractions, and because there was only one suit, it does appear as though the couple in question was able to come up with another solution. And so I’d bet that if the photographers in question had said “y’know, I’m happy for you, and I’m not telling you how to live your lives, but as a photographer I have to tell you that I’m not sure I would be able to do my best work for you. I’ll take the job if you really want me to, but I’m afraid my personal feelings on the subject matter might get in the way of my doing a professional job, so you might want to find someone else”.

Of course, if you go that route you have to be willing to follow through and do the job if the people still want to hire you, but I don’t believe you’ve done anything actionable at that point, and I find it unlikely that too many people would still want to hire someone under those circumstances. If I were to get married again and be looking for a photographer and the one I went to said “Y’know, I’ve never quite been able to make bald men look good. I’ll take the job if you really want to hire me, but I think you’d probably be better off asking someone else, because my pictures of bald men always come out making them look bad”, I think I’d probably go find someone who didn’t have that objection.

But ultimately, the problem comes down to the likelihood of institutionalized bias. Back to my redhead example, I’d probably be the only restaurant you could find in the nation refusing to cater to them, and so it would hardly be a systemic problem, and thus there is no need for hair color to be listed as a feature protected from discrimination.

But when you still hear, far too often, about some teenager being severely beaten or murdered or in other ways badly harmed because of their nascent homosexuality, it is clear that, in some areas of this country at least, discrimination against homosexuals is very much a systemic problem.

And thus, sexual orientation joins gender and race and physical handicap on the short list of personal features which are protected. Because it’s not about my rights vs. yours; it’s about your right to be treated as an equal citizen of this country overriding my right to feel personally distasteful over your choices.

Liam.

McCain Defense

Now, after all of that in the previous post, I want to point out one story that the popular buzz has all wrong: The idea that McCain said he "didn't disagree" with reinstating the draft.

On a complete technicality, he did say that, but he was responding to a very long question by an audience member. Now, it's fairly easy to, on reading the transcript, say "Uh, but, the last thing she said just before he said 'I don't disagree' was about reinstating the draft!", but think about how Q&A sessions work. Maybe you've never been a part of one. I have.

What happens, at least in my mind, is that I listen to the question until I have a sense of what the person is asking, and then I start formulating my answer. I try to keep half an ear on the person who is talking, in case they take the question in a different direction or throw some other curve ball, but as long as they don't, I'm not really listening to the specifics at the tail end.

And so, faced with this transcript:

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Senator McCain I truly hope you get the opportunity to chase Bin Laden right to the gates of hell and push him in as you stated on your forum. I do have a question though. Disabled veterans, especially in this state, have horrible conditions, their medical is substandard. They drive four hours one way to Albuquerque for a simple doctors appointment which is often canceled. Our VA hospital is dirty it is understaffed, it is running on maximum overload. The prescription medicines are ten years behind standard medical care we have seven hundred claims stacked up at the VA office in Albuquerque some of them are ten and seven years old waiting to be processed in the mean time these people are homeless. My son is an officer in the Air Force, and I am a vet and I was raised in a military family. I think it is a sad state of affairs when we have illegal aliens having a Medicaid card that can access specialist top physicians, the best of medical and our vets can’t even get to a doctor. These are the people that we tied yellow ribbons for and Bush patted on the back. If we don’t reenact the draft I don’t think we will have anyone to chase Bin Laden to the gates of hell.

MCCAIN: Ma’am let me say that I don’t disagree with anything you said and thank you and I am grateful for your support of all of our veterans.

... faced with that, I'd bet McCain didn't even hear the last sentence. She was winding down her question, the vast majority of which had been about the horrible conditions the "support our troops" administration allows our wounded vets to be subjected to, and in truth, until that last sentence, there's not terribly much there to disagree with.

So in my view, McCain wasn't "not disagreeing" with the draft portion, he was "not disagreeing" that the things our vets face one returning home are shameful and terrible.

We can argue at another time whether McCain has been the champion for veterans that he likes to pretend he is, I've seen some pretty good arguments that Obama has been far better on Veterans affairs than McCain has been, but in this particular exchange, at least, I think it's disingenuous of the left wing blogosphere(*) to only quote the last sentence and then McCain's response.

Liam.

(*) I still hate that term.

Another News Review

OK, so I got back from vacation and then had to spend the week catching back up at work. Always the way, which is why I haven't been here much since returning home.

But as always, there are a few issues worth commenting on.

First, I'm still trying to figure out why ANYONE likes John McCain or believes his spin that it is Obama who is the elitist, when he (McCain) wears $520 shoes (remember John Edwards' $400 haircut?), doesn't know how many houses he owns (according to one report, it's 10, worth about $14 million in total), and thinks that you aren't "rich" until you make at least $5 million per year.

I'm also more than a little frustrated that McCain keeps using phrases like "I'll chase bin Laden to the gates of hell" and gaining traction with the "Oooh, tough, Republican, shiny!" crowd, while not even being willing to follow him into Pakistan. Last I checked, Pakistan was a lot closer to us than the netherworld. But hey, in the long list of McCain flip flops, this one barely registers, I guess.

Oh, and there's the fact that the Russia/Georgia conflict is "the first probably serious crisis internationally since the end of the Cold War". (See the video at the link). So 9/11, the London Bombings, the Iraq War, none of these were serious international crises?

Getting away from McCain, there's this article from the New York Times, detailing the White House's new guidelines for the FBI. Read the article. It's chilling that this could happen in America. Every time I read another article that sounds like it might be describing events in the old Soviet Union and realize they're happening here at home, I just cry a little bit inside. How much more can we stand for? How much longer will it be before our own leaders accomplish what the 9/11 terrorists could not, destroying this country (or at least, all of its important freedoms and everything that makes it special and wonderful) from the inside out?

Liam.

Reviewing the Week

I'm up at 5am on vacation and unable to sleep, so I'm reviewing some of the week's news.

First up... From the AP (via Yahoo News), Atty General Michael Mukasey says that "not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime. In this instance, the two joint reports found only violations of civil service laws." in regards to the Justice dept hiring scandal.

In other words, the Justice Department, having been politicized by violations of the law, declines to punish those who politicized it.

I really don't see how any human group can be expected to police itself, at least not for major, systemic failings.

But worse, it scares the ever living daylights out of me that our Attorney General does not recognize the extreme harm in having a Justice Department slanted so that prosecutions may be done not on merit, but on party affiliation or philosophical difference. There are reasons for those "civil service laws", Mr. Mukasey, and they're not merely picayune trivialities to be so easily dismissed.




Also this week, John Edwards admitted to an affair (although he's still denying fathering the woman's child). I mention this so that I'm not accused of avoiding it, but the fact is, I'm just not that upset about this one, for several reasons. First, he's out of the race and isn't currently on the public payroll. This means that he's a private citizen, and thus, it's not really our business. However, that argument does ring hollow since he was so recently one of the "top three" in the Democratic primary.

The bigger reason is that for me, it's never been about the human failings (which, if we are honest about it, we all have in one area or another) but about the hypocrisy. The difference, to me, between John Edwards and others, such as Elliot Spitzer and Larry Craig is the lack of "do as I say, not as I do" pontificating. To my mind, Edwards has never made a career out of going after people who have affairs. Spitzer made a point, as a prosecutor, of going after patrons of prostitutes, and Larry Craig has gotten a lot of political mileage out of his public abhorrence of homosexuality.



Next up, from the NY Times (and others), the FBI has disclosed that it improperly used the Patriot Act's provision for warrantless "emergency" records demands to obtain the telephone records of reporters for the New York Times and the Washington Post. Now, all things considered, it doesn't sound like a major story, but to me it's emblematic of the problems that persist with the Patriot Act: Removing accountability as an impediment to terrorism investigations makes it too easy for such violations to occur. I am not comforted that the FBI has come clean about its "mistakes", because there do not appear to have been any repercussions for anyone involved. How nice it must be to have that much power in your hands, to use it as you see fit, and when that crosses a line to be able to get away with it entirely with a simple "whoops, sorry."



That's only part of the news from last week, but I'm going to make another attempt at sleep, so that'll do it for today's post.

Liam

Still Don't Think McCain Has Lost It?

I'm on vacation this week, so I haven't been doing too much blogging or keeping up with the news, but I saw one headline I had to chase down, and it's a doozy.

Asked about the situation between Russia and Georgia, he announced "in the 21st century, nations don't invade other nations."

This from a guy running to lead our nation on his supposed agreement with the current President's tactics in the war on terror that has involved invasions of not one but TWO countries since the start of the 21st century, and seems perpetually on the verge of a third.

Late yesterday there was video of the event, but it doesn't seem to be available right now. If it is later I'll come back and add it.

Liam.

More "Do As I Say, Not As I Do"

Yesterday, I complained about John McCain making political hay out of chastising Congress taking their scheduled vacation while himself not having shown up for a single vote in four months.

Today it's John Boehner, House Minority Leader. You probably heard about how last weekend, when the House went on it's scheduled vacation, a few Republicans remained in the chamber with the lights out, vowing to remain there until Speaker Nancy Pelosi reconvenes the House and calls a vote on offshore drilling (a plan which virtually no one thinks has any serious merit or benefit, at least so long as most of our domestic oil is sold on the international market, and as long as there are large areas of area allowed for domestic drilling that are not even being tested yet). Boehner issued several publicity stunt statements talking about how Congress "does not deserve a break" and rallying Republicans to stay.

Well, Boehner is at home. On vacation. He's been spotted at at least two different golf courses playing rounds this past week.

So once again, hypocritical political theater wins out, as yet ANOTHER Republican makes moralistic statements they themselves cannot live up to.

Liam.

McCain Makes Me Angry

On my drive home, I was listening to NPR, and they had a clip of a John McCain event that made me want to reach through the radio, grab him by the neck and bank his head against a wall to try to bang some sense in to him.

The question that was asked was "Knowing what we know today, would you still vote to authorize the war in Iraq?" and he said (approximately) "Y'know, a world without Saddam Hussein is safer. What do you think Saddam Hussein would be doing with $130/barrel oil? He'd be making good on his stated intentions to develop nuclear and biological weapons."

Which is wrong on SO many fronts.

First, who says oil would be at $130/barrel if we hadn't gone to war in Iraq? If we'd actually stayed full force in Afghanistan, gotten bin Laden, stabilized the country and gotten the heck out, would oil today still be $130/barrel?

Second, THERE WERE NO WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION FOUND! He was obeying the U.N. mandate, there's no reason to think he was planning on stopping any time soon. The "stated goal" was from much earlier, it's kind of like suggesting that if I won the lottery, I'd be "training for his stated goal to be a fireman" because when I was a child I said "I wanna be a fireman when I grow up".

Ludicrousy. Absolute ludicrousy. Is this ALL he has?

(Yes, I believe I may have made up the term "ludicrousy", but I don't care).

Quickie...

I'm at work, so can't take much time here, but compare and contrast:

McCain put out a statement condemning the Democrats in the Senate for going on a scheduled break instead of staying around to work on energy legislation (when in fact the Republicans have been blocking everything in the Senate with fillibusters until they get their way anyway).

Meanwhile, McCain last showed up to cast a vote in the Senate on April 8th. Since that time, he's missed 108 consecutive floor votes including several on energy related issues, making it now four months since he did any work at all. He's also missed more votes than any other currently serving Senator.

Of course, we're still PAYING him to be a Senator. So it's a little bit disingenuous for him to be castigating ANYONE in the Senate for not doing their job.

Wal-Mart Politics

My sister-in-law sent me this link. Essentially, Wal-Mart is exhorting its supervisors to tell their staffs of the dangers of a Democratic win in November. She asked for my opinion, so I wrote it up, and because it made some sense to, I thought I'd post a version of it here... You should read the article (or at least skim it) first, for the response to make sense.

------------------------

As with any human endeavor, unions can become corrupt and run contrary to the goals that they originally set out to provide. Take a look at either political party for a great example, the Democrats aren't particularly good at helping the poor and middle class and the Republicans aren't particularly good at making government smaller or controlling spending.

Nevertheless, I have rarely seen companies that treat their workers fairly complain about the possibility of unionizing, and in truth if the companies treat their employees fairly, the employees themselves will realize that they don't have a lot to gain by forming a union and paying dues.

On the other hand, there have been all sorts of stories about how Wal*Mart mistreats its employees. Cases of forced unpaid overtime, cases of sex discrimination, cases of trying to keep the number of "full time" employees to a minimum and keeping employees paid work hours under 32, so they don't have to provide benefits. I haven't followed all of these cases, but there have been enough that the old "where there's smoke, there's probably fire" axiom leads me to figure there's probably something to it. I know Wal*Mart has lost at least a couple of those suits.

Wal*Mart has some pretty poor practices, according to the reports I've read, and so they'd be at great risk for unionization, and that WOULD raise their prices somewhat, but...

To claim that their employees wouldn't benefit is ludicrous. If there would be no benefit to the employees, Wal*Mart wouldn't be concerned about it. They're not doing all of this publicity and effort out of concern for the well being of their employees, they're concerned about having to pay a living wage, or provide health insurance, or pay overtime when employees are required to stay overtime.

Yes, unions have sometimes overreached, but I look back to the days before they existed, and the incredible gap in prosperity between the owners of the companies and the people who did all of the work, and I have to say that on the whole they've been a net positive in this nation.

The thing is, with rare exceptions, I do not believe that the CEOs and owners of large companies are really worth hundreds to thousands of times what the lower level workers are. They don't work thousands of times harder, they tend to have wonderful golden parachutes to insulate them from the results of their own bad decisions (while those same decisions result in people who make less and have less of a parachute being handed two weeks pay and a notice of termination).

I don't have a problem with people earning in reasonable relation to A) how hard they work, B) their level of risk (investment, etc), and C) their worth to the company. It's not wrong to me for a product designer to make more than the people on the factory floor, because of the educational investment and relative scarcity of the designer. It's not wrong for the person who started a company and put years of their blood, sweat and personal finances into it to reap huge rewards when it does well. And I have no problem what so ever with merit pay based on harder work, or at least, based on better results (such as commission pay for sales people).

But I simply don't see why a half-assed CEO should make a bonus of $50million for cutting $25million in costs but driving the company into the dirt...

And thus, I have a lot more sympathy for the people at the bottom, not very well educated (on average) and just struggling to earn enough to survive than I do for the corporate fat cats who want to squeeze another two percent onto their bottom line by minimizing what the people at the bottom get.

Put another way, the people at the bottom of the company are working. They're not lazy, they're not sitting at home collecting welfare checks. And they have very little power. Unions give them a little bit of power. If you were trying to get by on minimum wage, if Wal*Mart was the only employment you could qualify for, wouldn't you want just a little bit of power, just a little bit of feeling that someone might actually be standing up for you?

Liam.

Why I Like Barack Obama

Here's one reason, displayed quite clearly.

We've had eight years of vetted audiences as protesters being relegated to "Free Speech Zones" great distances from where the President is actually speaking. We've seen more of the same from the McCain campaign, having a librarian carrying a sign which says something like "McCain = Bush" removed from a McCain campaign event.

We've had years of partisan "I don't believe there's any opposition, because no one ever allows me to see it" politics.

And then Barack Obama not only allows the protesters into his town hall meeting, he talks with them, allows them to ask a question and does his best to answer their questions.

Like him or not, like his answer or not, you have to give him kudos for not shying away from dissenting opinion.

Video link below.

[NOTE: The video seems very popular, about 3 times out of 4 you try to play it, it says "Video is no longer available". If you get that and really want to see it, hit refresh on your browser and retry. It will come up eventually.

Support The Troops. Please.

The GOP minority in the Senate have taken partisanship over even the troops that they routinely accuse others of not supporting:

Having embarked upon a campaign of obstructing every piece of legislation until a pet bill of theirs is brought up, they have continued this even today, in a vote on troop funding.

This afternoon, the Republicans filibustered S. 3001, "the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2009", which would have provided for pay raises for troops, health care and additional armor to protect against IEDs.

Remember this, the next time anyone tries to tell you that only the Republicans support the troops. There's been no evidence for that statement since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began, and now there's clear evidence to the contrary.