Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

Washington Post’s Catch and Kill, not noticeably better than the Enquirer’s.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

Can we lighten up on the doomsday scenarios?

Don’t expect peaches from an apple tree.

Quote tweet friends, screenshot enemies.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

Let’s show the world that autocracy can be defeated.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

“The defense has a certain level of trust in defendant that the government does not.”

“Let’s not pretend [Trump] wants to engage in high-minded discourse.”

You can’t love your country only when you win.

If ‘weird’ was the finish line, they ran through the tape and kept running.

Consistently wrong since 2002

The gop couldn’t organize an orgy in a whorehouse with a fist full of 50s.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

Everyone is in a bubble, but some bubbles model reality far better than others!

Accountability, motherfuckers.

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

SCOTUS: It’s not “bribery” unless it comes from the Bribery region of France. Otherwise, it’s merely “sparkling malfeasance”.

You are here: Home / Archives for Ever Get The Feeling You've Been Cheated?

‘Nuclear Samurai’

by | 44 Comments

This post is in: , ,

Poetic name, which I don’t think I’ve seen referenced by the American media. Suzanne Goldenberg at the Guardian on “The truth about the ‘Nuclear Samurai’“:

To a world that doesn’t know him, Shingo Kanno is one of the “nuclear samurai” – a selfless hero trying to save his country from a holocaust; to his family, Kanno is a new father whose life is in peril just because he wanted to earn some money on the side doing menial labour at the Fukushima nuclear plant. A tobacco farmer, Kanno had no business being anywhere near a nuclear reactor – let alone in a situation as serious as the one that has unfolded after the 11 March earthquake and tsunami in Japan…
__
Shingo Kanno, who had been hired to do construction work, was released from his duties at Fukushima soon after the declaration of a nuclear emergency. As the crisis at the plant worsened, and the Japanese government widened the evacuation zone, he moved his wife and his infant daughter to his in-laws, where they would be safer.
__
He also helped evacuate his extended family from their home town of Minamisoma, which is within the 30km exclusion zone, to the sports centre and other shelters. Then, his relatives say, Kanno got a call from the plant asking him to go back to work.
__
His whole family took turns getting on the phone to tell him not to go. They reminded him that he was a farmer, not a nuclear engineer, that he did not have the skills for such a sophisticated crisis. They said he should think of his responsibilities to his parents and his baby daughter…
__
But on Friday Shingo Kanno went back anyway. The family have not heard from him since.

And here’s another, contemporaneous story from Justin McCurry at the Guardian:

According to documents from Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), the company repeatedly missed safety checks over a 10-year period up to two weeks before the 11 March disaster, and allowed uranium fuel rods to pile up inside the 40-year-old facility.
__
When the plant was struck by a huge earthquake and tsunami, its reactors, designed by US scientists 50 years ago, contained the equivalent of almost six years of highly radioactive uranium fuel produced by the facility, according to a presentation Tepco gave to the International Atomic Energy Agency and later posted on the company’s website.
__
The revelations will add to pressure on Tepco to explain why, under its cost-cutting chief executive Masataka Shimizu, it opted to save money by storing the spent fuel on site rather than invest in safer storage options.

‘Nuclear Samurai’Post + Comments (44)

We Are All Eric Cantor Now

by | 101 Comments

This post is in: , , , , ,

I attended media training offered by the Ohio Democratic Party last night. We are still opposing SB 5 in Ohio (the union-busting bill), and the idea was that they’d train those of us who might possibly be interviewed on our opposition to the bill.

As most of you are by now aware, it unlikely any of us will be interviewed because the protests in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and Michigan are not covered by commercial media. However. If some blogger with a cell phone camera wanders by and wants an interview, I’m ready to go.

The trainees were union activists, candidates for local office, and Democratic county chairs. The instructors were a retired state house reporter and a retired television person. They taped our fake interviews, we all watched, and the professionals offered advice.

We all yell a lot here about how Democrats and liberals can’t stay “on message”, but it is harder than it looks. We were told again and again to stick to SB 5, but I immediately forgot the instructions. When I was asked a “trick” question on the budget at the end of the interview, I launched right into my budget rant. Very bad. I was supposed to “pivot” and return to union busting. I also tend to “wonk it up”, as the pros say. Very, very bad. No words with more than one syllable, please.

I don’t know what to think about this. On the one hand, I know that endlessly repeated conservative bullet points dominate media and political debate. There has to be some way to counteract that or we’re doomed. On the other hand, I have real concerns about joining a race to the bottom discourse where everyone has to speak in slogans to be heard.

We Are All Eric Cantor NowPost + Comments (101)

Halfway there

by | 68 Comments

This post is in: ,

Greg Sargent reports that the Democratic party in Wisconsin has almost half the signatures needed to force recall elections for eight Wisconsin State Senators:

In another sign that the Wisconsin GOP’s quick passage of the bill to roll back bargaining rights is only causing the fight to escalate, Dems have now collected over 45 percent of the signatures necessary to hold recall elections for eight GOP state senators, the Wisconsin Democratic Party tells me.

Dems have now collected over 56,000 signatures supporting the recall drives, according to party spokesman Graeme Zielinski, after another surge in organizing activity over the weekend. That’s up from rougly 14,000 after last weekend. This means Dems are well ahead of schedule: In each targeted district, Dems need to amass the required signatures — 25 percent of the number who voted in the last gubernatorial election — by a deadline of 60 days after first filing for recalls, which happened nearly two weeks ago.

I don’t know anything about how hard it will be to get the remaining signatures needed, but let’s be clear, in layman’s terms, flipping the Senate in Wisconsin would be big news.

Republicans overreached badly in Wisconsin and still haven’t figure out how bad a position they’ve put themselves in. The opinion polls do not accurately measure how good an issue this is for Democrats, because this isn’t just about what a majority wants, it’s about millions of people who will become one issue voters if they feel their bargaining rights will be taken away.

If Wisconsin stays in the national spotlight for the next few months, it shifts the entire narrative, it moves it from angry Real Murkin teabaggers to angry middle-class workers. The media is slow to catch on, they still think the public hates unions. But that’s a good thing here, as long as Scott Walker and his idiot friends are reading Politico stories about strapping young bucks buying T-bone steaks with their union wages, they’ll keep heading over the cliff.

You can give to the recall effort here and, please, if you live in Wisconsin, even if you’ve never gotten involved with grassroots politics before, get involved now. Opportunities like this don’t come around very often.

Halfway therePost + Comments (68)

Thursday Morning Rallies in WI

by | 39 Comments

This post is in: ,

Just in case any readers see this in time, the SEIU (#workers-rights) will be rallying in Wisconsin tomorrow:

Tomorrow morning, the State Assembly will gather and 8:00 a.m. Central to vote and we’ll be coming together inside and outside the Capitol at that time. In fact, thousands of people are already there right now.
__
There are also a number of rallies taking place across the state at 9:00 a.m. (CT) and recall canvasses happening throughout the day…

List of rally sites here.

Anybody with information on rallies in support in other states, put a link in the comments.

***********

EDIT to add the first clip from Maddow’s show tonight:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Thursday Morning Rallies in WIPost + Comments (39)

Cooperation is overrated

by | 46 Comments

This post is in: , ,

I really recommend you read the Forbes blog piece ED wrote and linked to earlier. I don’t know enough to say much, pro or con, about Michelle Rhee or Joel Klein but I was struck by how much this quote from Rhee is just the kind of thing elites like to say to plebes:

“Cooperation, collaboration, and consensus-building are way overrated.”

Of course, when the consensus-building is taking place among powerful elites, it’s David Broder’s wet dream. But if the consensus-building involves any input from middle-class people — other than requests for more Jeebus and “belt-tightening” and the like — then it’s a bad idea. No one below the 90th percentile in income should ever be consulted about anything important. “School choice” will work brilliantly anyway, though, because the free market is so magical that it can overcome even the profound stupidity of middle-class Americans.

If we could only be more like China, where all the non-elites know their place.

Cooperation is overratedPost + Comments (46)

Rally pictures

by | 32 Comments

This post is in: , ,

The national media ignored the huge rally in Madison this weekend as well as the solidarity rallies that took place all over the country, but I suspect they got a lot of local coverage.

Here’s a picture a reader sent in from Madison.

And here’s one from St. Paul.

There’s a solidarity rally in Rochester on Wednesday that I hope to attend and I’ll have some pictures from that later this week.

Keep fighting.

Rally picturesPost + Comments (32)

Reality Has A Well-Known Liberal Bias, Wisconsin Edition

by | 50 Comments

This post is in: , , ,

I know that probably everything below is obvious to this audience and/or already presented better by someone else here, but anyway:  following up John’s post on the deliberate deception behind the “contribute more” demand of public service workers in Wisconsin, here’s some inconvenient data.

The shorter:  public service workers are not overpaid.  Not even a little bit.*

Let me turn it over to an MIT colleague (one vastly more accomplished than I), Thomas Kochan,

Kochan is a Wisconsin native and a University of Wisconsin graduate.  He’s recently been involved in some creative and effective labor negotiations in Massachusetts.  In his day job, he studies industrial relations and labor policy at MIT in both the Engineering Systems Division and the Sloan School of Management (i.e. not habitats exactly  overpopulated with DFH’s).

Here’s what he had to say to his home state:

It has to start by getting the facts right. Wisconsin’s public service employees are not overpaid relative to their private sector counterparts. Rutgers University professor Jeffrey Keefe has done the analysis. (See his complete study on our Employment Policy Research Network website: www.employmentpolicy.org.) Controlling for education and other standard human capital variables he found that Wisconsin’s public sector workers earn 8.2 percent less than their private sector counterparts in wages and salaries. Taking fringe benefits into account shrinks the difference to 4.2 percent. Thus, public sector workers have lower wages and higher fringe benefits (yes, pensions and health care benefits are the two standouts). But overall, they are not overpaid compared to the private sector. No easy scapegoat here.

That is:  Wisconsin state workers are living exactly the way their fellow citizens  should want them to:  they are deferring present consumption for  income security in retirement.  This is what every financial counselor begs their clients to do.  It is what as a society we want to happen — better by far that our citizens anticipate and prepare for life after work than to hit the bricks with a grin and a sawbuck in their pockets.

__

And  Wisconsin civil service is exercising such prudence at a cost to the taxpayer lower than that of private sector workers.  You can argue whether or not that 4% figure is a sufficient price to pay for the (at least partly) notional job security public employees possess, but the basic point is clear:  Wisconsin state workers are hardly bilking the tax payer to enjoy lives of sloth and opulence.

__

show full post on front page

Reality Has A Well-Known Liberal Bias, Wisconsin EditionPost + Comments (50)