You can tell a lot about the people in the boardroom by how well they treat the workers who are the public face of their business. I think I just learned today everything I need to know about Starbucks: they steal tip money from their servers.
Thousands of Starbucks employees got a personal message from their upset boss, who said the company was being “grossly mischaracterized” in the media over a recent tip pool controversy that could cost the company more than $100 million.
Chairman and Chief Executive Howard Schultz, in a voice-mail message to employees Wednesday night, called last week’s ruling by a California judge "extremely unfair and beyond reason" and said he wanted employees to know the truth.
"I want to personally let you know that we would never condone any type of behavior that would lead anyone to conclude that we would take money from our people," he said.
In a separate statement, the company also said, "Contrary to some reports, Starbucks has not taken money from any of its partners, and nor is there money to be refunded or returned from Starbucks." A spokeswoman said Thursday that Starbucks Corp. has no intention of ending the practice of sharing tips among baristas and shift supervisors in California while it seeks an injunction.
San Diego Superior Court Judge Patricia Cowett, in her ruling last week, said there was "uncontroverted testimony that Starbucks continues to utilize the distribution of tips from the tip pool to compensate shift supervisors as well as baristas." Cowett ordered Starbucks to pay thousands of California baristas $86.7 million plus interest for breaking the law.
Now…read that again, particularly that second to last paragraph. Starbucks is saying that "contrary to some reports" they don’t take money from their "partners"…and then in the next breath they insist they’ll keep on doing it. The weasel word there is "partners". Starbucks doesn’t take any money from its "partners". But "partners" isn’t the issue, however Starbucks chooses to define who is and who is not a "partner". The issue is, are they taking tip money from their servers. And…yes as a matter of fact, they are. That’s what, specifically, they were found guilty of doing, and that’s what, specifically, they’re insisting they’ll keep right on doing.
The tips belong to the servers. Customers aren’t tipping the business, they’re tipping their servers. In most cases, the tips are what the servers depend on for a decent income. Taking their tip money is not only immoral, it also happens to be illegal in many states, including California. Now…it’s one thing to insist you weren’t breaking the law. It’s another to insist that the law is unconstitutional and you’ll fight it all the way to the supreme court. And it’s another still to insist that you didn’t do it, in the same breath as you assert that you’re going to keep right on doing it. Starbucks isn’t just giving the finger to it’s servers and customers here, it’s laughing in the face of anyone who can read plan English.
A dear friend of mine works as a waiter, but that’s not the only reason this behavior makes me angry. I never worked for tips in my life…I’m just not outgoing enough to make a go of that kind of work. You have to have a bit of the stage in you I think to be good at that and I am more stage crew then stage. But I know very well what it’s like to work in the service sector and it’s many hours of of hard, thankless work for mostly uncaring, rude and overbearing bosses, usually for not enough money to make ends meet. From what I hear, most folks who work service sector jobs these days need two jobs to earn a bare bones living. And a lot of those businesses nowadays do their damndest to avoid having to pay their service people a decent wage…from limiting their hours so they don’t qualify for full time benefits (and federal protections), to creatively placing them into pseudo-management positions so they don’t have to pay them overtime.
I guess stealing your employee’s tip money is just another way of lining your pockets being a successful businessman in Republican Party Of Moral Values America. How Howard Schultz can live as well as he does and take his servers’ tip money and still look at himself in a mirror every morning and think he sees a decent man looking back at him and not a slimeball is beyond me. Thankfully.
Tuesday afternoon. I am attending a conference on open source software in government being held at George Washington University. I am here because my project manager is investigating the possibility of moving the system I’ve been working on for the past several years to open source software. Work on the Hubble Space Telescope will go into maintenance mode shortly, and the thinking is that the Institute doesn’t want to spend a lot of money it won’t have on software upgrades, simply because a certain vendor has a business cycle that requires you to do that. At least with open source we would have the option of making any small fixes we absolutely needed to have before the end of the mission ourselves, without breaking our systems that depend on it. The alternative is to stick to the vendor’s upgrade cycle, and pray the new versions don’t break anything in our software, or introduce new bugs and security holes.
Between conference sessions, I wander around the Foggy Bottom area, and back and forth to my hotel, which I paid for out of my own pocket, rather then hassle with Washington traffic, which is a nightmare. The hotel has a nice little kitchenette, which allows me to eat reasonably well without further damaging my budget for the month. Around noon I begin the walk back to my hotel for lunch, stopping to examine a decrepit building right next to the conference hall, that I assume is one of the student dorms. It is, and I see by the bronze plaque by the door that this one is named Lafayette Hall. I read the inscription, which briefly describes the history of Marquis de Lafayette, who fought beside George Washington, taking a bullet in the process, for the freedom of a nation that was not his own, and who later attended the first commencement ceremonies of the university that bore his friend’s name, shaking the hand of each of those first graduates. While I am reading, a snarky voice in the back of my mind is saying Freedom Fries…Freedom Toast… An old friend of mine I’d had breakfast with that morning, told me a joke he’d heard about a man who, while visiting France recently, asked a random Frenchman, "Sir, can you speak German?" When the Frenchman replied that he couldn’t, the American said, "You’re welcome." I told my friend the Frenchman could just as easily have asked the American, "Sir, do you have a king?"
My hotel is somewhat oldish. My room is on the sixth floor and the elevators are small and slow. I press the button and when one finally appears, I see that there are already two businessmen inside. It’s a tight fit for three. As we go up I feel the hair on the back of my neck rise. There are some who you would never know from the look of them, to be of the right wing thuggish persuasion, and there are others who hit you with it in waves, in the cut of the clothes, the bullying posture that is as second nature as breathing, and the coldness of the face, particularly when smiling at nothing in particular. I tune them both out, pulling out from a space within me I’d almost forgotten about, a "Yes I’m a longhair, yes I know you hate my guts, and no mister establishment person sir, I really don’t give a flying fuck" attitude, close my eyes, and listen to the elevator floor counter click off the floors to mine. I toy briefly about writing a book, "Everything I know about living under Bush II, I learned from Nixon". The old elevator rises slowly. I hear one of my companions say, "I hope they don’t cancel our flight out Thursday." The other chuckles and says, "The war will be over by then."
Atrios has a point…all we ever see in the round table discussions about the war in the News Media are people who supported it. The only other side to the discussions we’re even getting now are from the ones now admitting they were wrong about the war, and terribly, profoundly wrong about president Nice Job Brownie. What we still don’t hear, the people who are still not part of the News Media conversation about the war, are the ones who had it right from the beginning. Doesn’t it make sense to start inviting the people who were right all along into this conversation now?
No. It doesn’t. Because the next step after that, is the News Media facing up to their responsibility for cheering this war on, and hyping up a drunken, spoiled, self-absorbed, bullying, petulant rich man’s brat into the image of a towering world leader. The man who failed at everything he ever put his hand to in his life, but always managed to avoid responsibility for it. The man who treated the presidency of the United States as if it was all just one big happy frat house game with him in charge. This guy:
Our news media dragged this country to war with that guy in the white house. And now they’d rather drink poison then own up to it. That’s why you will never see any war critics on network news. That’s why the only liberals you’ll ever see are the ones who, like them, were all gung ho about having a splendid little war in Iraq. It was supposed to be all over the following Thursday. This country will be generations coping with the consequences. And that’s not so much Bush’s fault, as our news media’s. They failed America. Profoundly. Unforgivably. They took liberties and freedoms that journalists in other nations have sacrificed their lives for and played petty schoolyard games with them and now there are four-thousand dead U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis and our moral capital is gone, gone, pissed away in the whirlwind of images of dead, bloody victims of U.S. torture, the Geneva War Conventions are in tatters, we are less secure, our military forces are weaker, We Have Lost A City and the economy is teetering on the brink of the worst disaster since the Great Depression. Nice work if you can get it. Mission Accomplished people.
Now go home. Please. But before you do, I want you to get up out of your chairs and go to the window, open it up and shout as loud as you can: I FUCKED UP AND I’M SORRY. Then…jump.
But Then Again, Just Putting Gasoline In It Might Cost You More Then Having Bodywork Done Someday…
Today I just paid nearly seventy bucks for gasoline. And that was at the Costco gas station where the price is about 25 cents a gallon less then it is most other places. That amounted to just a tad under twenty-one gallons: About sixteen gallons for the car, and another five in the spare gas container I bring along so I don’t have to make the drive to Costco as often.
According to the owner’s manual, Traveler has a 17.43 gallon tank with a 2.11 gallon reserve (that probably works out to some nice round figure in metric…), and I’d run Traveler’s tank down to the last 1/8th. The fuel reserve warning came on around the 1/8th mark, but as I only had to put a bit less then 17 gallons in I’m not sure where they’re drawing the line at the reserve, unless there’s almost a half gallon of it that doesn’t get filled when the gas pump clicks off, which is possible. Anyway, figure since it’s a Mercedes when the gauge reads empty it probably means it.
The rising cost of gasoline is of course, why this all matters to me. The more gas I buy in one go at the Costco, the more I save because I have to figure in the gas I use getting there and back. It’s about eleven miles, so figure about four-tenths of a gallon spent, in order to buy gas at twenty-five cents a gallon less then the local stations charge. At 3.26 a gallon, which is what the Costco gas cost me, let’s say that’s a buck-thirty I spend going to and from Costco. I paid sixty-eight dollars for twenty-one gallons. Around here that would have been about 3.50. So my bill would have been 73.50. I saved five and a half dollars. Subtracting the buck-thirty it was only 4.20 I saved. But that’s another gallon and four-tenths if I use the local price per gallon. Or another way of looking at it, is I get about an extra forty miles. In a year’s worth of local driving, I reckon looking at an extra two-thousand miles roughly, but depending on all the slop in my figures it might be closer to fifteen-hundred. But I have to practically empty my tank before I refuel, to see that kind of savings. If I don’t do that, and I can’t always it just worked out that I could this time, I don’t see nearly that much savings. If I refuel at the half tank mark, the drive to Costco and back eats up the amount of money I saved buying it there.
I’m going to keep on doing this for a while, and watch the numbers, but you know…it might not be worth my doing this, even at twenty-five cents a gallon less.
Because They All Played Their Part In It, That’s Why…
Via Talking Points Memo… We’re on the brink of the worse recession in decades, if not since the great depression, and none of the presidential candidates are talking about how we got here. Not the republicans, for obvious reason, but also not the democrats. And even more disgustingly, not the news media. They seem strikingly…uncurious…about what caused the financial crisis the United States has blithly plunged the rest of the world into. Oh…the candidates are busy making the usual promises to help mortgage holders (read:voters) weather the storm. But what they’re not talking about, for pretty damn obvious reasons, is what they’ll do to correct the problem that made it possible in the first place. And that’s because, as this commenter on TPM points out, they’re all part of that problem…
I am appalled, though not surprised, at the complete silence by the candidates on the last few days’ events on Wall Street and the world’s stock, bond and currency markets. This has far more effect on all of our futures than racist comments by the oxygen deprived brains of some old political or spiritual leaders. I know why Clinton and McCain are not talking about it: too many of their biggest supporters had too much to do with what happened, and benefited from the deregulation of the past twenty years for which both (and their allies) had a great deal of responsibility. (Remember that Hillary stood by while her colleague Chick Schumer killed the bill to tax hedge fund managers, who ear scores of millions every year, at income, rather than capital gains, rates.) What about Obama? Is he not up to the task of educating people about what the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act did to the markets many Americans poured their retirement and college savings into? Does he know that the Federal Reserve is about to bail out bankers, investors, and outright thieves who helped drive down the dollar, and brought the credit markets to a near standstill? Does he understand the problem? I wouldn’t know.
Seventy years ago Franklin Roosevelt was able to explain this country’s and the world’s financial crises to a far less educated, and less accessible, American public. That today’s candidates are unwiling, or unable to do so, is alarming. Maybe if the media first tried to understand the problems, then asked the proper questions until answers were forthcoming or it was clear the candidates are afraid to ask them, political coverage would be more than the extreme sports coverage it has turned into.
Via Atrios… From Bill Bennett’s Book Of Virtue…Chapter 88, How Do We Protect Multi-Billion Dollar Oil Companies From Responsibility For Their Own Jackass Behavior…?
Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on how much money ExxonMobil should be forced to pay as damages for its Exxon Valdez oil spill 19 years ago. The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank notes that Chief Justice John Roberts appeared “bothered” that Exxon might have to pay for its destruction:
What bothered the chief justice was that Exxon was being ordered to pay $2.5 billion — roughly three weeks’ worth of profits — for destroying a long swath of the Alaska coastline in the largest oil spill in American history.
“So what can a corporation do to protect itself against punitive-damages awards such as this?” Roberts asked in court.
The lawyer arguing for the Alaska fishermen affected by the spill, Jeffrey Fisher, had an idea. “Well,” he said, “it can hire fit and competent people.”
The rare sound of laughter rippled through the august chamber. The chief justice did not look amused.
As Atrios said…"The real question is "how can coastal Alaska protect itself from being covered in oil by companies like Exxon." Apparently they shouldn’t be able to. I imagine if, say, a tractor-trailer careens into Justice Roberts’ home, his first thought won’t be about how to protect the company from punitive damages."
Three weeks worth of profits. Exxon just posted something like 40 billion dollars in profits for the last fiscal year. And Roberts thinks that they need to be protected from a 2.5 billion dollar judgment that holds them accountable for what they did to Alaska. Those coastlines Still aren’t restored. When republicans talk about the liberal nanny state, verses self reliance and personal responsibility, they’re talking about us peons. If you’re a multi-billion dollar a year corporation, you’re entitled to all the government largess you want.
An evangelical chaplain who leads Bible studies for California lawmakers says God is disgusted with a rival fellowship group that includes people of all faiths.
"Although they are pleasant men in their personal demeanor, their group is more than disgusting to our Lord and Savior," Drollinger wrote on the Capitol Ministries’ Web site.
The comments drew immediate fire from others in the capital, including the Republican lawmaker who sponsors Drollinger’s Bible study group.
Drollinger said "progressive religious tolerance" is an offense against God and causes harm to its practitioners.
He said the other Bible study group was perpetrating a "deadly lie" by presenting Jesus as "a good moral teacher who loves everyone without distinction."
Assembly Republican leader Mike Villines, who sponsors Drollinger’s Bible study group, said the differing approach between the two groups should not be a cause of conflict between them.
Capitol Ministries aims to "reach every elected official in every nation of the world at every level of government with the uncompromised, saving message of Jesus Christ," according to its website. So far, the California-based group has, again according to its website, "singularly focused on establishing biblical ministries in State Capitols throughout our nation … in order to make disciples of Jesus Christ within the political arena, at every level."
…
The growing roster of states is worth noting because of Capitol Ministries’ extremism.
The group’s leader, Ralph Drollinger, is so extreme that the Los Angeles Daily News reported this month without qualification that he "has a long record of bashing Catholics, gays and mothers of young children who serve in the state Legislature."
…
In his keynote address to the May 8th Harrisburg "Commonwealth Prayer Breakfast," Drollinger said it was important to challenge legislators to make decisions to "submit to Christ as Lord," according to Rabbi Paula Reimers of Congregation Beth Israel in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, who attended.
She also noted Drollinger’s remark that it isn’t necessary "to coerce one who has come to Christ as to how to vote."
…
In 2004 he [Drollinger] offended many in the California legislature when he called Catholicism "the world’s largest false religion."
According to a 2005 report in the Sacramento News & Review, the previous year Drollinger "had to move the Bible study from the governor’s suites after he labeled Catholicism, the religion of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a ‘false religion.’" Thanks to the sponsorship of three Republican legislators, Drollinger moved the study to a legislative suite, according to the paper, where its attendance was around a dozen Republican lawmakers. There is a separate study group for staffers.
In 2004 Drollinger wrote a Bible study stating that women legislators were sinning by leaving their children to go to Sacramento. "It is one thing for a mother to work out of her home while her children are in school," he wrote. "It is quite another matter to have children in the home and live away in Sacramento for four days a week. Whereas the former could be in keeping with the spirit of Proverbs 31, the latter is sinful."
Drollinger amplified with a patriarchal assertion about the roles of men and women. "Man’s is, primarily, to be a breadwinner, and women’s is to be at home nurturing their children," according to contemporaneous news reports.
Some members of the state Senate responded by wearing aprons to a legislative session.
In the interview with the Sacramento News & Review, Drollinger differentiated his operation from religious right organizations. They, he said, lobby on bills, whereas Capitol Ministries works to win souls (the same distinction he made at the Harrisburg breakfast)..
He also insisted that he supports the separation of church and state, because the two insititutions are biblically ordained to serve different purposes, according to the SNR.
The group’s own descriptions of its activities suggests quite the opposite. A 2002 "Bible study lesson series" aimed at Tennessee government workers was titled "Decision-Making and God’s Will," according to the Nashville Business Journal.
…
In 2005, in a retort to the speaker of the California Assembly’s statement that all are "children of God," Capitol Ministries’ national "expansion" director, Sean Wallentine, said: "While it is nice to believe that God is everyone’s Father, it is not true." Only those who are "born again" become God’s "adopted children," Wallentine said in a written statement quoted by the California Observer blog.
The Daily News report on the prayer breakfast in Santa Clarita quoted Wallentine disparaging an alternative Interfaith event. "I would just say they’re allowed to have their meeting," he said, "but we wouldn’t be supportive of a meeting that taught that there are many ways to heaven. There are not."
Freedom of religion? You’re very much mistaken citizen…sin has no rights that men of god are bound to respect…
Fittingly, the first person to detect a faint signal in all the noise was the interpreter.
The 33-year-old woman who worked for eight years working with Spanish-speaking patients at a medical clinic in southern Minnesota noticed something familiar as she translated the story of a young meatpacker last September.
Earlier last summer, she had heard a version of it from two other workers at the same slaughterhouse, and had told it to their doctors, who were different from her current patient’s. When the consultation was over, she pointed this out.
The interpreter’s insight set in motion a story, still unfolding, that may be making envious the ghost of Berton Roueche, the legendary chronicler of medical mysteries at the New Yorker magazine. A new disease has surfaced in 12 people among the 1,300 employees at the factory run by Quality Pork Processors about 100 miles south of Minneapolis.
The ailment is characterized by sensations of burning, numbness and weakness in the arms and legs. For most, this is unpleasant but not disabling. For a few, however, the ailment has made walking difficult and work impossible. The symptoms have slowly lessened in severity, but in none of the sufferers has it disappeared completely.
While the illness is similar to some known conditions, it does not match any exactly. Nor is the leading theory of its cause something medical researchers have studied. That is because the illness appears to be caused by inhaling microscopic flecks of pig brain.
Now…why would workers at a meat processing plant be inhaling pig brains…you ask? And why hasn’t something like this turned up before among meat factory workers? Something must have changed.
And indeed it has…
The 12 sufferers of the neurological illness — most are Hispanic immigrants — all work at or near the "head table" where the animals’ severed heads are processed.
One of the steps in that part of the operation involves removing the pigs’ brains with compressed air forced into the skull through the hole where the spinal cord enters. The brains are then packed and sent to markets in Korea and China as food.
Investigators say there is no reason to suspect that either the brains or the pork cuts were contaminated. Their working hypothesis is that the harvesting technique — known as "blowing brains" on the floor — produces aerosols of brain matter. Once inhaled, the material prompts the immune system to produce antibodies that attack the pig brain compounds, but apparently also attack the body’s own nerve tissue because it is so similar.
Black lung disease. Flock worker’s lung. All the various aliments that arise from inhaling solvents. Christ…second hand smoke for God’s sake! It’s not as though businesses aren’t well aware by now that when the workplace generates a lot of crap in the air, workers get sick unless they’re wearing some kind of protection. But no. Here’s a brand new Cost Effective way of quickly getting the brains out of pigs so they can be sold at market, and no one apparently wondered what spewing atomized brain tissue from hundreds of pigs every day into the factory air might do to the workers.
This is why there need to be unions. And governmental oversight of the workplace. Because somebody needs to think about this. The boys in the front office sure as hell won’t. Safety measures cost money after all.
Via Pam’s House Blend… This from The Opine Editorials…which bills itself as "Defending marriage on the firm ground of reason and respect for human dignity".
I was reading an article on National Review Online recently and ran across an inspirational passage that made me realize the tremendous contributions of so many of our fellow defenders of the institution of marriage.
The article’s author is David French, a soldier in America’s Army Reserve fighting in Iraq, as well as a soldier in the war to protect traditional marriage!
“As a bit of background, I’m a mobilized reservist (in my civilian life, I’m a senior counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund and regularly contribute to NRO’s “Phi Beta Cons” blog) supporting 2nd (Sabre) Squadron, 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment, one of the Army’s most storied units. I serve as the squadron’s judge advocate (lawyer), and I’ve been pushed forward as part of “Operation Raider Harvest.””
Alliance Defense Fund is on the forefront of the battle against same-sex “marriage”.
I found the specter of a man who spends half his time fighting America’s enemies within & the other half fighting Americas enemies abroad to be truly inspirational!
"Freedom of Speech" carries the obligation to speak THE Truth, with the implication that righteous Americans also have a right to freedom from from untruths.
There are no such words in the constitution as "Freedom of Thought". Righteous Americans, however, do have the right to be free from having untruths shoved in their face and down their throats, and they do have the right to protect innocents’ freedom from exposure to these untruths.
"Making a case for change" is not the same thing as petitioning for a redress of grievances. "Grievances" connotes that there is something that is immoral that must be corrected in order to bring this country closer to the ideal of the moral straight, true and narrow. "Change" can be whatever you like even if it is immoral. There is no ‘freedom’ to make a case for allowing paedophelia, but a freedom FROM such immorality.
America is built on the metaphor of ‘Family’. Thus, that which mocks the moral wholesomeness of the family which is the bedrock of America’s moral superiority is an EMEMY of America.
Dig it. According to this true blue American patriot, there is no such thing as freedom of thought, let alone freedom of speech. And he was promptly followed up by this…
Anyone pushing such an agenda acts against the family and the dignity of the human being, and as such is not merely an enemy of America but an enemy of humanity itself, because the acts that he/she wants society to affirm and condone are clearly “acts of grave depravity.”
Human dignity anyone? There is no freedom of thought. Homosexuals are the enemy within. Homosexuals are the enemies of America. Homosexuals are the enemies of humanity. Some days I wonder if this was how it felt to be a Jew in Europe during the late 1920s. Oh…don’t worry about them…they’re just a bunch of fringe lunatics. Crazies. Nobody takes them seriously…
[Update…] Another commenter adds:
It appears to me that the vast majority of LGBT folks have a selfish and single-minded "what’s in it for me" attitude towards the +/- 5% of LGBT folks who are actiist and actively working to undermine the family, religion, and the institution of marriage.
So long as they are promised their "special rights", the vast majority is perfectly willing to let the nihilists run the larger agenda of evil.
…so in addition to all of the above, homosexuals are also part of a larger agenda of evil.
Microsoft is developing Big Brother-style software capable of remotely monitoring a worker’s productivity, physical wellbeing and competence.
The Times has seen a patent application filed by the company for a computer system that links workers to their computers via wireless sensors that measure their metabolism. The system would allow managers to monitor employees’ performance by measuring their heart rate, body temperature, movement, facial expression and blood pressure. Unions said they fear that employees could be dismissed on the basis of a computer’s assessment of their physiological state.
Technology allowing constant monitoring of workers was previously limited to pilots, firefighters and Nasa astronauts. This is believed to be the first time a company has proposed developing such software for mainstream workplaces.
Microsoft submitted a patent application in the US for a “unique monitoring system” that could link workers to their computers. Wireless sensors could read “heart rate, galvanic skin response, EMG, brain signals, respiration rate, body temperature, movement facial movements, facial expressions and blood pressure”, the application states.
The system could also “automatically detect frustration or stress in the user” and “offer and provide assistance accordingly”. Physical changes to an employee would be matched to an individual psychological profile based on a worker’s weight, age and health. If the system picked up an increase in heart rate or facial expressions suggestive of stress or frustration, it would tell management that he needed help.
Can’t you just see how Microsoft is going to market this? Oh…we’re just trying to Help make your office experience more enjoyable…
The saving grace of it is that any technology capable of producing tiny devices to monitor your every breath with is also capable of producing tiny devices to fuck with the monitoring devices. But still…this is beyond sad. It’s disgusting. Next time Bill, or anyone in the Microsoft boardroom is testifying before congress about something, someone should ask them if they plan to sell this technology to totalitarian states. Because of course, if a U.S. company doesn’t sell police state technology to police states, someone else will and that’s money out of our pockets isn’t it?
I sure hope nobody asks me to work on the software for crap like this. I’ll work on it alright…
Matthew Yglesias points out that Mitt Romney is ahead in delegates:
I saw some sentiment on TV last night that Michigan is must win for Romney, but I don’t really see it that way. Second place finishes are survivable for Romney as long as different people are beating him in different places and as long as he keeps picking up delegates. The GOP side has more winner-take-all primaries than does the Democratic side and, clearly, you can’t lose all of those. But basically while Romney’s not in good shape, he’s in at least okay shape.
I strongly doubt it’s going to be McCain. It’s either Romney or Huckabee. My guess is that Huckabee will take it. They won’t trust Romney as much as they’ll trust Huckabee. All those church buses full of primary voters the movement conservatives have been using to keep the moderate wing of the GOP on the outside looking in…? They’re going to run their own damn candidate this year, and to hell with what the establishment wants them to do. After all…it’s their party now…
[Update…] Looks like this was yet another Milt Romney ad-hoc rewrite of the facts…
Explains Berman, "the way they are doing this is by simply not counting Iowa. They say that Iowa’s delegates are not technically committed through the caucus process, and so, instead of extrapolating how the delegates would be apportioned (which is what media, such as ABC News and the Associated Press, do) they just pretend like Iowa did not happen."
Right. Like he’s pretending all those nice things he said about gay equality while he was governor of Massachusetts didn’t happen…
Most of the Western press had evacuated, but a small contingent remained to report on the crumbling Iraqi regime. In the New York offices of NBC News, one of my video stories was being screened. If it made it through the screening, it would be available for broadcast later that evening. Producer Geoff Stephens and I had done a phone interview with a reporter in Baghdad who was experiencing the bombing firsthand. We also had a series of still photos of life in the city. The only communication with Baghdad in those early days was by satellite phone. Still pictures were sent back over the few operating data links.
Our story arranged pictures of people coping with the bombing into a slide show, accompanied by the voice of Melinda Liu, a Newsweek reporter describing, over the phone, the harrowing experience of remaining in Baghdad. The outcome of the invasion was still in doubt. There was fear in the reporter’s voice and on the faces of the people in the pictures. The four-minute piece was meant to be the kind of package that would run at the end of an hour of war coverage. Such montages were often used as "enders," to break up the segments of anchors talking live to field reporters at the White House or the Pentagon, or retired generals who were paid to stand on in-studio maps and provide analysis of what was happening. It was also understood that without commercials there would need to be taped pieces on standby in case an anchor needed to use the bathroom. Four minutes was just about right.
At the conclusion of the screening, there were a few suggestions for tightening here and clarification there. Finally, an NBC/GE executive responsible for "standards" shook his head and wondered about the tone in the reporter’s voice. "Doesn’t it seem like she has a point of view here?" he asked.
There was silence in the screening room. It made me want to twitch, until I spoke up. I was on to something but uncertain I wasn’t about to be handed my own head. "Point of view? What exactly do you mean by point of view?" I asked. "That war is bad? Is that the point of view that you are detecting here?"
The story never aired. Maybe it was overtaken by breaking news, or maybe some pundit-general went long, or maybe an anchor was able to control his or her bladder. On the other hand, perhaps it was never aired because it contradicted the story NBC was telling. At NBC that night, war was, in fact, not bad. My remark actually seemed to have made the point for the "standards" person. Empathy for the civilians did not fit into the narrative of shock and awe.
The facts didn’t fit the narrative…so the facts were jettisoned. This is how the corporate news media operates. I’ve asked this before…let me ask it again: what is more degenerate…a the puppet news media of a totalitarian state, or a news media in a democracy that sells out?
ARCHBISHOP Desmond Tutu has accused the United States and Britain of pursuing policies like those of South Africa’s apartheid-era government by detaining terrorism suspects without trial.
At an event to commemorate the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UNDR) today, the Nobel laureate said the detention of suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban members at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was a "huge blot on a democracy".
"Whoever imagined that you would hear from the United States and from Britain the same arguments for detention without trial that were used by the apartheid government," Archbishop Tutu said.
I take it you haven’t noticed yet that the Bush base here in America are the same folks who wholeheartedly supported Apartheid. And not just abroad…
Paul Krugman – Op-Ed Columnist – New York Times Blog: So, people ask why, in The Conscience of a Liberal, I downplay the role of issues other than race in swinging the political balance in favor of the GOP. The answer, basically, is the math: once you take the great southern switch into account, there isn’t much left to explain.
In some correspondence with Larry Bartels, whose “What’s the matter with “What’s the matter with Kansas?”" is must reading for anyone trying to understand modern American political, economy, the issue of how the Democrats lost white males came up. Larry points out that you really need to separate out the South. Here’s what he had to say:
Unless you have a peculiar nostalgia for the racially coercive Democratic monopoly of the Jim Crow era, it makes sense to focus on the rest of the country. There, the Democratic share of the two-party presidential vote among white men was 40% in 1952 and 39% in 2004.
White men didn’t turn against the Democrats; Southern white men turned against the Democrats. End of story.
Who would have imagined the the United States of America would one day piss on the Geneva conventions and laugh? The republican base…that’s who. The American gutter that came charging into politics after the hated Warren court told them to desegregate their schools, and allow their negros to vote. They’ve dreamed of it for decades. Reagan delivered that gutter into power. Bush told them they didn’t have to give a shit.
Bush and Cheney have broken the law consistently throughout their reign, often openly, and to the great detriment of our own country and others; when they obey it, they do so more as a matter of convenience than from any fealty to it or any fear of retribution. They’re pleased to use the legislature to achieve their ends when they can – as when Congress obligingly immunized administration personnel from prosecution under the War Crimes Act – and to ignore it when they can’t. Former Justice Department official Jack Goldsmith explains the dynamic as described to him by Dick Cheney’s current number two, torture maven David Addington: "We’re going to push and push and push until some larger force makes us stop." They have, and that larger force has not materialized – and the administration have been at pains to ensure that the force, if it ever arrives, won’t do so in the person of the courts – and the result is a constitutional republic with its framework intact and its guts eviscerated. There is only one remedy, and that’s impeachment.
(Emphasis mine)
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
-George Washington
Washington was probably thinking about the democrats when he said that…
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