ManquemanMar 1911 min read
Out of My Mind
The man who wants to be president
Mick Huckabee: Liar, thief, bullshit artist:
“I’m Mike Huckabee,” he says with all the folksy charm that propelled a career as a preacher, politician and broadcaster.
But this is no campaign ad. It is an Internet infomercial for a dubious diabetes treatment, in which Mr. Huckabee, who is contemplating a run for the Republican nomination in 2016, tells viewers to ignore “Big Pharma” and instead points them to a “weird spice, kitchen-cabinet cure,” consisting of dietary supplements.
“Let me tell you, diabetes can be reversed,” Mr. Huckabee says. “I should know because I did it. Today you can, too.”
Except he didn’t do it via the cinnamon-based dietary supplement, but by losing weight. He himself never tried the “dietary supplement,” possibly because the American Diabetes Association considers it bunk.
In a better world this is the sort of thing that would get a fellow invited to a congressional hearing, but in this world this is just the most prominent of Huckabee’s many links to dubious and/or outright creepy product peddlers. Members of his mailing list may look forward to all sorts of (literal) miracle cures and whatnot….
They laughed at the idea of President Ronald Reagan. Till he got elected. And you can see how well that worked out.
When labor loses, we lose
Until recently, the Laundry Workers Center United’s claim to fame was a rabble-rousing protest encampment on Times Square, a self-fashioned “Worker Justice Café” erected by workers as part of a unionization campaign at a Hot and Crusty bakery. Back in 2012, their foolishly brave, Occupy-inspired tactics proved successful in challenging their employer’s power. Now the LWC is facing its own challenge in court, accused of illegally “conspiring” to protest against a boss.
According to a complaint brought by the LWC’s latest campaign target, the Liberato restaurant in the Bronx, the LWC isn’t a humble worker center, agitating on behalf of low-wage immigrant workers, but a racketeering enterprise, waging class warfare against a local business.
The allegations of gangsterism stem from a basic labor dispute: a group of current and former workers have partnered with the LWC to campaign against the restaurant over alleged labor violations and mistreatment. After the conflict escalated and the LWC took legal action last year — with a class action lawsuit and National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) complaint now pending — the restaurant responded with a classic New York tactic: the countersuit. Liberato has variously charged the LWC with slander and harassment, as well as violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). This federal law, a curious hybrid of reactionary politics and organized-crime fighting, has historically been used to nab both mob bosses and union organizers. The suit seems to follow a rich tradition of corporations seeking to criminalize collective action as labor’s “extortion” of capital.
(Link.)
About Social Security
Me, I’m counting down the days till I collect.
In 1973, Mr. Cohen sat down to a debate with the economist Milton Friedman, hero to the free-marketeers of the Chicago School of Economics. Mr. Friedman wanted to privatize Social Security, and he criticized the program as being regressive. The poor, he noted, paid taxes to cover their benefits. In fact, they worked longer and collected fewer benefits than the rich.
“You are right,” conceded Mr. Cohen, the champion of the New Deal. “However, a program for poor people will be a poor program.”
(Link.)
Given both the fine job the private sector’s done with pensions — understandably, in part — a universal Social Security is essential. (Yeah, yeah, I can squint and see issues with a public pension. Then again, this is the era of debt taking the place of fair pay, so where would the money come from to save for retirement?)
In other words, Cohen was right. Still is. And if anything, more right than he was then.
A report from the from line of one of the last lines of defense of the powerless
It’s my son’s 5th birthday. We did the airport FaceTime birthday cake thing. My wife put the kids to bed. We talked a little more than usual about the week that transpired.
After hanging up the phone, she sent me the last obligatory “good night, safe travels, be careful” text before she went to bed. The last line of her text simply read:
“Your job is really messed up.”
* *
I met with the parents of a young boy that was electrocuted. I tried to say something comforting. The words came out all jumbled up. Since that conversation I’ve come up with at least a dozen more comforting things I could have said. Hopefully I’ll remember them next time.
We started evaluating a fire case. People died. Children included. A family is devastated.
A lawyer called about co-counseling on a case involving a car accident that resulted in one death and multiple others being severely injured.
I’ve begun prepping for a catastrophic injury trial. There is no escape from the array of depressing facts that must be consumed and organized for presentation to a jury.
These stories are not unique. The American Association for Justice (formerly the American Trial Lawyers’ Association) boasts a membership of 56,000 plaintiffs’ lawyers and legal professionals. Each one of these plaintiffs’ lawyers could offer you at least one story a day on the depths of darkness in which they navigate on behalf of their clients.
The Republicans have a replacement for Obamacare because we shouldn’t have access to affordable healthcare coverage
So their health-care plan is to repeal all of Obamacare, replace its savings with $1 trillion in magic money, and then spend zero on subsidizing health insurance for the millions of Americans who would become uninsured. If Republicans wanted to spend something on an Obamacare replacement — tax credits, high risk pools, whatever — they would need to set aside money for it. They chose not to. As hard as it is to design a health-care plan, designing one that cuts $1 trillion and spends nothing is really hard.
When monsters design policies….
Or the tl;dr version:
No, Mr. and Mrs. Newly Insured, I Expect You to Suffer (And Possibly Die)!
My governor is a monster
It’s always been a bit of a mystery, even to Governor Andrew Cuomo’s allies: What is his real goal in picking a fight with the state’s teachers’ unions? “I don’t get it,” a Cuomo adviser told me last fall, not long after the governor declared he wanted to “break what is in essence one of the only remaining public monopolies.”
“Sure, everyone wants incompetent teachers, or teachers who have sex with their students, removed from the classroom,” the Cuomo ally said. “But I don’t understand how he gets those things or better public education with this strategy.”
The governor’s adversaries in the unions think that the motivation is pretty simple, and highly cynical: That Cuomo, by talking tough, is trying to ingratiate himself with the hedge-fund backers of charter schools, like Ken Langone, who have also been generous donors to Cuomo’s campaigns. In this view, Cuomo will cave on most of his other proposals — like merit pay and stiffer teacher evaluation standards — as long as he gets a higher cap on the number of charter schools in the state.
Maybe that’s true. But call me naïve — I think Cuomo sincerely wants to find ways to better educate the state’s students, which is why his confrontational approach has always seemed weirdly miscalculated.
(Link.)
No, I think it’s all about the money. Because Andy really thinks he can be president. And that’s what Mario raised: not the great liberal hope, just a monster who only cares about personal success.
And speaking about charters, apparently their primary goal really is to be profitable:
The “charitable” foundation of the Walmart heirs got together with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation last week to help hedge funds figure out how to profit off of charter schools.
This is how America is a shining beacon to the world
The state of Missouri executed its oldest death row inmate on Tuesday — a man who was mentally impaired from a work accident that removed a large portion of his brain — after his final appeals failed at the US supreme court.
Of course, really, forget the jingoistic horseshit. What kind of progressive principles could you expect from a nation created from little more than greed, selfishness and, yes, racism and tolerance of same (all men created equal except those who aren’t)?
And another success:
ISIL is direct outgrowth of Al-Qaida in Iraq which grew out of our invasion which is an example of unintended consequences which is why we should generally aim before we shoot. — Barack Obama
Yeah, yeah, I know; high hypocrisy content here. But a fact is a fact.
Inside he sausage factory
Looks like some average reporter, um, lacked an incentive to bother with facts:
Anthony Anton, president of the Washington Restaurant Association (WRA) — an industry lobbying organization among the most vocal campaigners against Seattle’s $15 minimum wage — told Seattle Magazine: “Every operator I’m talking to is in panic mode, trying to figure out what the new world will look like.”
No wage increases have occurred yet in Seattle; they begin, incrementally over seven years, in April. The Seattle Magazine article itself notes that “none of our local departing/transitioning restaurateurs who announced their plans last month have elaborated on the issue.”
* *
Renee Erickson is closing Boat Street Cafe, her first restaurant, but she runs three others and is in the process of opening two more. Asked in an email about the closure being associated with $15, she replied: “That’s weird, ha. No, that’s not why I’m closing Boat Street. Would have said so.”
Erickson continued, “I’m totally on board with the $15 min. It’s the right thing to do … Opening more businesses would not be smart if I felt it was going to hinder my success.”
Little Uncle proprietors Poncharee Kounpungchart (who goes by PK) and Wiley Frank are closing one location, having found the space unsuitable after two years, while remaining open on Capitol Hill and considering new opportunities.
“We were never interviewed for these articles and we did not close our … location due to the new minimum wage,” Kounpungchart and Frank said in an email. “We do not know what our colleagues are doing to prepare themselves for the onset of the new law, but pre-emptively closing a restaurant seven years before the full effect of the law takes place seems preposterous to us.”
Frank went so far as to send a note to the author of the Washington Policy Center post saying: “Our business model is conducive to the changing times and we would appreciate it if you did not make assumptions about our business to promote your political values.”
(Link.)
When Mammon started his takeover
You think I joke about this. Read this and we’ll see.
Back in the 1930s, business leaders found themselves on the defensive. Their public prestige had plummeted with the Great Crash; their private businesses were under attack by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal from above and labor from below. To regain the upper hand, corporate leaders fought back on all fronts. They waged a figurative war in statehouses and, occasionally, a literal one in the streets; their campaigns extended from courts of law to the court of public opinion. But nothing worked particularly well until they began an inspired public relations offensive that cast capitalism as the handmaiden of Christianity.
The two had been described as soul mates before, but in this campaign they were wedded in pointed opposition to the “creeping socialism” of the New Deal. The federal government had never really factored into Americans’ thinking about the relationship between faith and free enterprise, mostly because it had never loomed that large over business interests. But now it cast a long and ominous shadow.
Accordingly, throughout the 1930s and ’40s, corporate leaders marketed a new ideology that combined elements of Christianity with an anti-federal libertarianism. Powerful business lobbies like the United States Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers led the way, promoting this ideology’s appeal in conferences and P.R. campaigns. Generous funding came from prominent businessmen, from household names like Harvey Firestone, Conrad Hilton, E. F. Hutton, Fred Maytag and Henry R. Luce to lesser-known leaders at U.S. Steel, General Motors and DuPont.
In a shrewd decision, these executives made clergymen their spokesmen. As Sun Oil’s J. Howard Pew noted, polls proved that ministers could mold public opinion more than any other profession. And so these businessmen worked to recruit clergy through private meetings and public appeals. Many answered the call, but three deserve special attention.
(Link.)
Life in these here United (or Confederate) States
An 11-year-old boy was caught with a lighter and a leaf in his school backpack. Three separate tests on the leaf have come back negative for marijuana, so the school did the sensible thing and suspended the boy for a year.
Just a tip for Campbell Brown: Maybe the real problem’s administrators, not teachers. (Kidding: Monsters don’t need tips.)
Besides, it’s all good: These days, never too young to learn what awful things idiots with power or authority are able to do.
Besides the point
There are fault lines in the conservative movement that are very interesting watch.
These fault lines are real.
And irrelevant.
Those on both sides of the line vote for the same bullshitters who, when elected, serve only corporatist interests.
So what matter which sick fucks are on which side of the line? Both for for the same awful people.
So focusing on these kind of disputes are no more important than the feeling of warmth of schadenfreude.
Justice, as our god, Mammon, brings
The filmmakers appear to have conducted two separate sets of interviews with Mr. Durst. The first was in December 2010 in Los Angeles, the second in April 2012 in New York. They did not notify law enforcement officials of their meetings with him until several months later, in October 2012.
From the No Shit Dept.
Last week, Republican Gov. Chris Christie’s administration settled New Jersey’s long-standing environmental lawsuit against Exxon Mobil Corp. for pennies on the dollar. For a decade, the state had been seeking $8.9 billion in damages for pollution at two refineries in the northern part of the state, and yet Christie’s top officials abruptly proposed closing the case for just $225 million.
In the aftermath, as environmentalists express outrage and legislators move to block the settlement, the question on many observers’ minds has been simple: Why did Christie settle?
Sirota goes on to hypothesize that maybe campaign $$$ was the reason.
Chris Christie? Psychopathic pig? Is it possible he’d do anything harmful to the idiots who vote for him for money??
Pro-Life
In 1996, roughly 24 years after his original accident, Clayton shot and killed police officer Christopher Casetter, who had been called to a domestic dispute. A Missouri jury found Clayton guilty and sentenced him to death. On Saturday, a sharply divided Missouri Supreme Court ruled 4–3 against his procedural request for a mental competency hearing before his execution. Unless the U.S. Supreme Court or Governor Jay Nixon intervenes, the state of Missouri will execute the 74-year-old Clayton on Tuesday afternoon.
The Missouri Supreme Court ruling raises serious questions about the constitutionality of Clayton’s execution. The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that the Eighth Amendment forbids the execution of persons whose mental illness or intellectual disability prevent them from understanding the consequences of their actions or why they are being put to death. The Court’s rationale for this prohibition was that ending a person’s life for reasons they cannot understand serves “no legitimate penological purpose,” and is therefore cruel and unusual.
After Missouri set his March 17 execution date in January, Clayton’s attorneys petitioned the courts for a competency hearing, hoping to establish his intellectual disability and prevent his execution. The Supreme Court has ruled that inmates have a due-process right to a mental competency hearing once their execution date is set. At these hearings, inmates can present evidence and testimony to demonstrate their incapacity for execution to a neutral fact-finder.
(Link.)
Actually, I’m with Mario Cuomo: What better punishment for a killer than taking his life away figuratively, not literally — the rest of his life incarcerated without parole.
Given that, I can almost see this execution as a mercy.
But I guess it’s really just abuse.
