I think today’s strip is particularly funny because “storming the shores” of Finland would require the U.S. to sail through a very tight cluster of islands between Denmark and Sweden and into the Baltic Sea. The truth is it would be much easier for the United States to first take Norway and Sweden or to recruit them as allies. Then again, well-laid plans is not the Pentagon’s strongest attribute. (That would be the guns. The BIG BIG guns.)
I thought Walden wasn’t a good school anymore? Where’s the shift to the service sector? Or the declining job market?
The Senate race in Connecticut has been heating up lately, and it looks like Joe Lieberman may be about to lose the Democratic primary. More progressive Democrats have long thought that Lieberman was little more than a Republican in Democrats’ clothes, particularly after his support for the ill-conceived Iraq war and also evidenced by his continued complaining about the music, film and video game industry. Yes.. Joe Lieberman knows the real problems with violence in the world the.. uh… fake violence.
So now as challenger Ned Lamont seems to be in striking distance of Lieberman in the primary, Lieberman has publicly considered running as an independent. As it turns out, Lieberman performs better with Republicans and unaffilliated voters than with Democrats. Surprise, surprise.
Now, via DailyKos, Senator Chuck Schumer, head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said that the DSCC will not rule out supporting Lieberman if he runs as an independent, despite what the Democrats in Connecticut voted for.
Howard Dean’s brother, Jim Dean, head of Democracy for America, had this to say:
“Joe hasn’t confirmed that he’s planning to run as an Independent. But his campaign seems to be laying the groundwork, courting important Beltway insiders from both sides of the aisle. Amazingly, Senator Chuck Schumer, Chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), has said that the DSCC will not rule out supporting Lieberman if he runs as an Independent. The DSCC’s mission is to elect Democrats to the Senate. Yet in this case, they would prefer to back an incumbent who leaves the party instead of a principled progressive who’s proud to be a Democrat.”
It’s worse. Schumer’s comments show contempt for democracy and a fundamental disregard for the will of the people. He’s just trying to keep his little club together.
And seriously, can we really have a Democratic Sentator running around that was seen like this???
Prisons are one of the most despicable endeavors in human history. Their continued existence adds corruption to our society. Imagine my surprise when I found out that in my new home of California, there’s no way to vote against the expansion of prisons.
An article in today’s Washington Post cites California’s bloated and overcrowded prison system as a warning for the rest of the country to place a continued emphasis on rehabilitation and not on punishment. 173,000 people are in jail in California, and to keep them there it costs the state $8 Billion a year.
The article tracks the history of California’s prison system: in the sixties and early seventies it was lauded for reforming prisoners, most notably by developing a system of indeterminate sentencing, to be judged by a parole board based on merit. All this changed in 1977.
In 1977, then-Gov. Jerry Brown (D), responding to a worries about rising crime, did away with indeterminate sentencing. Three years later, state lawmakers enacted legislation that said the purpose of incarceration was punishment alone, formally writing rehabilitation and treatment out of the penal code. (Brown is today running for state attorney general on a platform that calls for sentencing procedures that would lower prison population.)
Over the next decade, California’s legislature, dominated by Democrats, passed more than 1,000 laws increasing mandatory prison sentences. The climax came in 1994 with the enactment of the “three strikes” law mandating 25-years-to-life sentences for most offenders with two previous serious convictions. “People have this image of California beach politics and the left coast,” said state Sen. Gloria Romero, a Democrat from Los Angeles. “The truth is California is a law-and-order state.”
So where is a liberal Californian to turn if the Democrats are the ones sending everybody to jail? The Post places the blame for much of the current situation on the power of the correctional officer’s union:
“We sit down to the negotiating table, and we use our laptops. We all have one program,” said Joe Bauman, a correctional officer in Norco and a union negotiator. “Meanwhile, they’re using a calculator that you get free with a carton of cigarettes.”
Ironically it was the Republican Arnold Schwarzeneggar who ran a campaign promising to return rehabilitation to California’s prisons:
When he came into office on the back of an unprecedented recall of Davis in 2003, Schwarzenegger vowed to take on the union and bring California’s prison system into the modern world. On his second day in office, he appointed Ronald Hickman, a barrel-chested former prison guard with a reputation as a reformer, to lead the department. “Corrections,” Schwarzenegger said, “should correct.”
Last year, Hickman reorganized the state’s prison network and returned the word “rehabilitation” to the title of his agency for the first time since 1980. Schwarzenegger and Hickman subsequently announced a new parole program that they said would cut the prison population by an estimated 15,000 and vowed more changes.
But the parole plan bombed because it was poorly planned and badly executed and the prison officers unions fought it all the way, Hickman said in a recent interview. “We really didn’t do a very good job on implementation.”
For his part, Hickman quit in February after discovering that Schwarzenegger’s top aides had been meeting with union representatives behind his back.
And just so no one gets the idea that I’m soft on Republicans, insight into the effect of completely lawless prisons in a DailyKos post about three suicides in Guantanamo Bay. They come amid hunger strikes and hundreds of attempted suicides, a gerneral feeling of a hopelessness, an indefinite incarceration with no guaranteed rights at all.
So I percieve my present political choices thus: either a party of blind and fanatical devotion to law and order with little concern for the causes of crime, or a party that has lost respect for the law and instead places an emphasis on holding remarkable power against its enemies.
We would be well advised to remember the disaster of California’s own Stanford Prison Experiment.
One officer mistook Sullivan’s eyeglasses case for a weapon and opened fire, grazing his partner’s head with a bullet and causing her to believe they were under fire. She also began firing, Fong said.
Will someone please take these people’s guns away? And get some training for the ones who are left?
For everyone that’s been thinking politics in the United states has been lacking hyperbole lately, Samuel Huntington has weighed in with an opinion on the national debate surrounding immigration (don’t forget to visit bugmenot.com first so you don’t have to register):
The persistent inflow of Hispanic immigrants threatens to divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages. Unlike past immigrant groups, Mexicans and other Latinos have not assimilated into mainstream U.S. culture, forming instead their own political and linguistic enclaves—from Los Angeles to Miami—and rejecting the Anglo-Protestant values that built the American dream. The United States ignores this challenge at its peril.
Huntington, whose “Clash of Civilizations” essay has helped shape U.S. foreign policy since its introduction in 1993, is apparently in favor of a rigid conformity to “Anglo-Protestant values” in order to be considered American. His inclusive and tolerant worldview is indeed enlightening.
On the other side of that coin, the most vocal waiter on the Internet reminds us to remember the costs of what you’re served as he tells us the story of the master ravioli chef at his restaurant, a man living a humble life thousands of miles from his wife and family:
I consider how this business has costs customer’s never see on the bill. People get squeezed between those margins. But then again, who wants to know about the loneliness and sweat that goes into the food they eat? The customers here rave about Felipe’s pasta – but they’d probably feel nervous if they were alone with him on an elevator.
All the degrees and credentials in the world doesn’t mean that you know truth.
There were huge marches supporting immigration throughout the United States yesterday including 400,000 in Chicago, 300,000 in L.A., New York, Dallas, Oakland, San Francisco, and many other cities across the country amid a boycott of work designed to prove the enormous dependence the United States has on immigrant labor:
Lettuce, tomatoes and grapes went unpicked in fields in California and Arizona, which contribute more than half the nation’s produce, as scores of growers let workers take the day off. Truckers who move 70 percent of the goods in ports in Los Angeles and Long Beach, Calif., did not work.
Meatpacking companies, including Tyson Foods and Cargill, closed plants in the Midwest and the West employing more than 20,000 people, while the flower and produce markets in downtown Los Angeles stood largely and eerily empty.
The management in the restaurant I work at must have been worried when they called me a half hour before my shift yesterday. It was clear in the preceding days that few of their staff would be attending work that day. They left me a second message to let me know that even though I missed a lunch shift that day, I could still work dinner if I wanted to.
What follows is photos from the march and rally in San Francisco. Sorry about the big pictures, especially if you have dialup. This will probably work better as an archive piece. To compensate I’m going to limit the main page to two blog posts at a time for now.
This man is not a worker.
The police had a surprisingly low presence at this protest. Perhaps they’re afraid of clowns.
UN Plaza
Outside City Hall
Reconvergence at the Federal Building
Keepin it real
(BTW – our banner is made from my old work aprons)
As most of you probably know, during the last few weeks the United States has seen a growing furor over immigration sparked by a bill that passed the House in December. If passed, all undocumented residents in the United States would be considered felons, a move that would break up families and unnecessarily punish many hardworking people.
No one but the people seem willing to take a clear stand on this issue. The Republican Party is fractured and bickering among themselves, but this unethical legislation is slowly moving forward through the legal process. Too many politicians seem terribly afraid of being seen as soft on immigration. Others use immigration as a political talking point for campaigning but take little action. They are not to be trusted.
In recent weeks the bill has led to widespread protests in support of immigration throughout the United States. And today, May 1, organizers are calling for widespread boycotts and marches, just like you’d find in most any other country in the world where worker’s holidays are not shunned. It seems that it will be a day to remember.
Lastly, I’d just like to point out that some of the media attention given to this issue is appalling. Just an example, the New York Times’ first quote in their article anticipating today’s boycott is from a casino owner in Las Vegas, the conveniently named Alberto Lopez:
“A walkout really isn’t the constructive way — it’s the opposite of what should be happening,” said Alberto Lopez, a spokesman for Harrah’s Entertainment, the casino company, where prominent banners and petitions calling for immigration reform (to be delivered, ultimately, to members of Congress) have been placed in employee dining halls. But, in the end, no one was certain what workers would choose to do.
Thanks, Times for that tremendous insight into this complicated issue. Casino owners think boycotts aren’t constructive. Right, noted.
So consider calling in sick to work today. And don’t take that trip to the supermarket or the department store you were planning. Anybody can participate so long as you work. It’s an International movement — at its best it always has been. Show you care about the ones that do the worst jobs in our country. The ones that hope to prove tomorrow, we can’t get by without them.
…I hate computers. But the weekend is upon me so I must go to serve brunch to people who celebrate the ressurection of Christ by poisoning their own bodies with vodka and champagne.
Meanwhile, there’s been an interesting wrinkle in the Muhammad cartoon controversy as South Park attempted to use the Prophet Muhammad in its latest episode, Cartoon Wars Part II. Unfortunately, (well maybe fortunately since nothing’s blowing up this way) Comedy Central “pussed out” and censored the image of Muhammad in the episode.
The really interesting thing to me, however, is that Muhammad was already depicted on South Park several years ago. I had forgotten about this but instantly remembered the episode upon reading this article. It kind of lends credibility to my theory that it’s not that Muhammad was depicted in cartoon, it’s how he was depicted.