The War On Teachers

The Daily Show was ubelievable last night.

The interview with Diane Ravitch is great, and she is also awesome in general, so follow her on twitter if you do that sort of thing.

The Daily Show - Crisis in the Dairyland - For Richer and Poorer
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

It's 100% Owner Greed

Big Daddy Drew's column on the NFL lockout is the one I've been hoping with a big megaphone would would step up and write:

You only need to see the topline of U.S District Judge David Doty's TV ruling to know the owners are the vile pieces of shit responsible for this work stoppage. Or, better yet, read it straight from Roger Goodell's desk. Witness just how poor of a job Goodell does trying to convince you the players are to blame for this potential disaster.

Staying with the status quo is not an option.

You had record ratings, made billions of dollars, and established yourself as the dominant force in televised entertainment. So you're going to have to do better than, "Well, it's the same shit!" to convince me this deal currently puts you in dire straits.

The union has repeatedly said that it hasn't asked for anything more and literally wants to continue playing under the existing agreement. That clearly indicates the deal has moved too far in favor of one side.

That's a fucking pathetic argument. "Hey, one side is happy with the deal. IT MUST BE UNFAIR!"

You can read the rest of Goodell's letter for yourself. He also says that the league "needs" new stadiums in Minneapolis, San Diego, Buffalo, and L.A. That's a bald-faced lie. The NFL doesn't NEED new stadiums at all. It won't become financially unviable just because the Bills are still eating ass in Orchard Park a decade from now. It WANTS new stadiums, and it wants the players to help pay for them. And while I'm all for making as much money as you can, I'm not all for it if it means dicking everyone out of football for two years just because you can get away with it.

Regardless of how this shit plays out, starting tonight, this is all 100 percent the owners' fault. Maybe you'll grow tempted to start blaming the players equally as this thing drags out, but you shouldn't. This isn't like 1994, when baseball shut down because it had both asshole owners and a players union that didn't even want drug testing and initiated the labor conflict by putting down their bats and striking in the middle of the season. This is different. This was premeditated and instigated by the NFL owners. And while Goodell may continually try and spin it otherwise as we go on (no doubt with help from his accordion monkey Peter King), and while some people might start buying into joint blame, I won't. And neither should you. The players are cool. The owners are worthless titblisters. There's no need for even-handedness here.

Read the whole thing and spread the word.

If we're going to lose a fucking NFL season over this, and millions of people will lose their jobs because of it, the least we can do is make sure the blame goes to the right place.

The Train of Thought Lounge : Miles Davis “Stella by Starlight”

A return to the master, enjoy:

Live Recording from Carnegie Hall 1964

The British WERE a Bunch of Imperialists!

While most people picked up on Mike Huckabee's idiotic "Obama growing up in Kenya" crap for the birther flirting... to me there's a far crazier element to it. Let's look at the quote:

Mike Huckabee seemed to suggest that Barack Obama grew up in Kenya, even though he indicated that the president's birth certificate is real. [...]

"One thing that I do know is his having grown up in Kenya, his view of the Brits, for example, very different than the average American," Huckabee said in response.

"If you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather," Huckabee added.

Like Newt Gingrich criticizing Obama for his "anti-colonial" views, Huckabee seems to imply that the British rule of Kenya was a myth or something.

"He probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather"

Errrr... how about this: THE BRITISH WERE A BUNCH OF IMPERIALISTS THAT PERSECUTED HIS GRANDFATHER!!!

Someone might want to explain the history of our own fucking country to these morons.

SCOTUS Docketwatch–Court sides with Westboro Baptist Church

Around 10 AM today, the Supreme Court, in an 8-1 decision, ruled that the First Amendment protects fundamentalists of the Westboro Baptist Church, known for their anti-homosexual protests outside of military funerals.  The immediate consequence is that the decision upholds the Court of Appeals ruling that threw out a $ 5 million judgment that was awarded to a father of a slain marine.

When we last covered the arguments, it was clear that this would be an interesting choice by the justices, who really strained to find some sort of argument to rule against the Church group.  But, it seems that the Church’s argument of their right to promote “ a broad-based message on public matters” is embedded within the constitution’s first amendments protection of speech.

Chief Justice Robert wrote the majority opinion for Snyder v. Phelps, with Justice Alito as the sole dissenter. 

UPDATE: Here is a breakdown of the Majority Opinion, which can be found at : http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/10pdf/09-751.pdf

Roberts framed the issue around whether the Speech of the Westboro Church members was a ‘matter of public concern’, which The Court has ruled is at the very heart of the First Amendment’s Protection.  The key distinction between Private and Public speech is that “There is no threat to the free and robust debate of public issues; [and] no potential interference with a meaningful dialogue of ideas” in regard to censoring private speech. See Dun & Bradstreet, Inc. v. Greenmoss Builders, Inc., 472 U.S. 749 (1985).  To determine whether speech is a public or private concern, Roberts noted that The Court must look to the “content, form and context” of the speech in question, in order to make an independent decision so as not to intrude on free expression. 

Now, this is where the decision gets particularly interesting, on pages 8-9:

The “content” of Westboro’s signs plainly relates to broad issues of interest to society at large, rather than matters of “purely private concern.”  The placards read “God Hates the USA/Thank God for 9/11,” “America is Doomed,” “Don’t Pray for the USA,” “Thank God for IEDs,” “Fag Troops,” “Semper Fi Fags,” “God Hates Fags,” “Maryland Taliban,”“Fags Doom Nations,” “Not Blessed Just Cursed,” “Thank God for Dead Soldiers,” “Pope in Hell,” “Priests Rape Boys,” “You’re Going to Hell,” and “God Hates You.” While these messages may fall short of refined social or political commentary, the issues they highlight—the political and moral conduct of the United States and its citizens, the fate of our Nation, homosexuality in the military, and scandals involving the Catholic clergy—are matters of public import. The signs certainly convey Westboro’s position on those issues, in a manner designed, unlike the private speech in Dun & Bradstreet, to reach as broad a public audience as possible. And even if a few of the signs—such as “You’re Going to Hell” and “God Hates You”—were viewed as containing messages related to Matthew Snyder or the Snyders specifically, that would not change the fact that the overall thrust and dominant theme of Westboro’s demonstration spoke to broader public issues.

At the end of the opinion, Roberts concludes by writing:

Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and—as it did here—inflict great pain. On the facts before us, we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker. As a Nation we have chosen a different course—to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate. That choice requires that we shield Westboro from tort liability for its picketing in this case.

I’ll have more later as I dissect the opinion in full, along with Justice Alito’s dissent.

Nobody Goes To Jail

As usual, a really great piece by Matt Tiabbi:

Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world's wealth — and nobody went to jail. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and famous people.

The rest of them, all of them, got off. Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted. Their names by now are familiar to even the most casual Middle American news consumer: companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft. Lehman Brothers hid billions in loans from its investors. Bank of America lied about billions in bonuses. Goldman Sachs failed to tell clients how it put together the born-to-lose toxic mortgage deals it was selling. What's more, many of these companies had corporate chieftains whose actions cost investors billions — from AIG derivatives chief Joe Cassano, who assured investors they would not lose even "one dollar" just months before his unit imploded, to the $263 million in compensation that former Lehman chief Dick "The Gorilla" Fuld conveniently failed to disclose. Yet not one of them has faced time behind bars.

Instead, federal regulators and prosecutors have let the banks and finance companies that tried to burn the world economy to the ground get off with carefully orchestrated settlements — whitewash jobs that involve the firms paying pathetically small fines without even being required to admit wrongdoing. To add insult to injury, the people who actually committed the crimes almost never pay the fines themselves; banks caught defrauding their shareholders often use shareholder money to foot the tab of justice. "If the allegations in these settlements are true," says Jed Rakoff, a federal judge in the Southern District of New York, "it's management buying its way off cheap, from the pockets of their victims."

It's long, but it's really worth reading the whole thing.

So People Don't Hate Public Workers?

I was hoping that some data would come out and test the right's fantasy of private sector members of the middle class hating public sector members of the middle class. I never thought it would be this overwhelming or conclusive:

Three national polls show scapegoating of public employees is a bust: We now have three big national polls showing that Americans back public employees in their standoffs with governors who would roll back bargaining rights -- clear evidence that the public has not been as quick to scapegoat them for our economic doldrums as many expected.

The new Pew poll asks people about the Wisconsin standoff in particular, finding that more (42 percent) side with the unions than stand with Governor Scott Walker (31 percent). Last night's New York Times/CBS poll asks the question more generally, finding strong support for the right of unions to collectively bargain, 60-33.

These come after last week's Gallup poll finding that 61 percent favor the public unions against Walker. Tellingly, all three polls show support for the unions among independents, and all three show that only higher income folks lean towards opposing them. Whatever hostility exists towards public employees, it seems fair to speculate that proposals to roll back long-accepted fundamental rights represent an over-reading of public sentiment -- and may even be stirring some public sympathy for these workers and their right to organize.

Conservatives may retain the upper hand in the broader war over the fate of organized labor -- polls show the public continues to have mixed feelings about unions in general. But for all the distortions and faux populism the right has thrown at public employee unions, Americans just don't seem willing to be manipulated into questioning their basic right to exist.

I may be overly optimistic, but I think if there is a revival of union membership, then people's overall view of unions will become more positive again. Most people who have real world contact with a friend or family member who is in a union discover that they aren't the anti-christ, and people tend to like the things that organized labor fights for, even if they may be worried the word "union".

The momentum from Wisconsin keeps rolling on...