ek hornbeck – Page 672

I could say, “When you’ve lost Scarecrow…” but I haven’t particularly noted him as a proud Obamabot unlike some I could name. Still, I thought this piece worthy of your notice. That clunking sound you hear is Cenk Uygur’s jaw hitting the floor.

Sherrod Brown on Cenk: President Obama Has a Loud Microphone

By: Scarecrow, Thursday March 10, 2011 5:27 pm

Expecting the same Obama who sold out on tax cuts for the rich, the Public Option, Gitmo, torture investigations/prosecutions, and coddling TBTF banksters, etc, to rein in the Tea-GOP is, uh, not reassuring.

In just the last three months, Obama undercut Schumer on limiting the tax breaks to those over a million in income. He undercut Schumer again today by making sure that when the White House’s corporate staff sits at the table with the crazies who would destroy the economy and 70 years of progressive governance, the Tea-GOP will not even be asked to consider raising revenues, let alone taking back the recent gift tax breaks for scofflaw corporations or wealthy Americans.

…

There are simply too many White House betrayals, broken promises, secret deals, dashed hopes, disingenuous dodges, stupid blunders (or were they deliberate?), insults to supporters and every element of the Democratic coalition, including America’s working class, to list here. FDL writes about them every day.

So is Senator Brown honestly expecting this President to lead us? Not a chance. Only Pod People still think America’s working class has a President on their side.

Mar 11 2011

Today on The Stars Hollow Gazette

By ek hornbeck

Our regular featured content-

Six In The Morning by mishima
On This Day In History by TheMomCat
Punting the Pundits by TheMomCat
Evening Edition by ek hornbeck
Prime Time by ek hornbeck

And these articles-

Taking Back America: Shock Doctrine by TheMomCat
Class War Coup d’ Etat: Un-Nation of Laws by Diane Gee
Still a "Fierce Advocate" by ek hornbeck

As well as Translator’s weekly feature- Popular Culture.

The Stars Hollow Gazette

Mar 11 2011

BREAKING: South Carolina Secedes from Union!

By ek hornbeck

I notice in TheMomCat’s This Day In History that today marks the 150th anniversary of the adoption of the Constitution of the Confederate States of America.

Here’s something I wrote a while back on The Stars Hollow Gazette. Something I’ve learned recently is that while the average price of a slave in 1861 was a little more than $40,000 (in inflation adjusted dollars), it’s just $90 today.

(T)his has basically turned a human being into a cheap commodity – Bales says like a Styrofoam cup that’s cheaply replaceable if damaged, “If they get sick, what’s the point of paying for medicine – it’s cheaper to let them die and acquire a new one than it is to help the ones you’ve got.”

BREAKING: South Carolina Secedes from Union!

by: ek hornbeck, Sun Dec 19, 2010 at 14:44:01 PM EST

The New York Times was, typically, wrong.

FROM SOUTH CAROLINA.; PUBLIC FEELING IN CHARLESTON

THE LEADING MEN IN THE SECESSION MOVEMENT

MISGIVINGS ABOUT THE ISSUE.

Published: December 15, 1860

Emphasis in the original.

I think what’s important to remember as we celebrate the sesquicentennial is the root cause of the Rebellion.

A group of wealthy men thought it was ok to work, breed, and sell human beings like animals based on the color of their skin.

More than that, they were upset that certain Northern States were insufficiently zealous about finding their property for them when it got ‘lost’, causing significant impact to the bottom line.

And also their honor was offended that anyone could think this behavior morally wrong. It hurt their sensitive feelings.

Mar 10 2011

Today on The Stars Hollow Gazette

By ek hornbeck

Our regular featured content-

Six In The Morning by mishima
On This Day In History by TheMomCat
Punting the Pundits by TheMomCat
Evening Edition by ek hornbeck
Prime Time by ek hornbeck

And these articles-

On Wisconsin! by davidseth
Wisconsin: Taking Back America by TheMomCat
Walking Away from Omelas by Casual Wednesday
My Little Town 20010309: Dee Kirkendall by Translator

The Stars Hollow Gazette

Mar 10 2011

Barack Hussein Obama Shuts Down National Labor Relations Board

By ek hornbeck

And censors them.

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

A fierce advocate indeed-

“The House of Representatives is expected to soon vote on a funding proposal that contains drastic cuts to several federal agencies, including the National Labor Relations Board. The proposal would eliminate $50 million from this small administrative agency, or 18% of its total annual budget. Because the reduction would be squeezed into the final 7 months of the fiscal year, the cuts would be felt even more deeply – representing the equivalent of one-third of remaining 2011 funding.

Nearly all of the agency’s budget is spent on salaries and rents; there are no programs to eliminate or postpone. The only way to meet this extreme and immediate reduction would be to furlough all of the NLRB’s 1,665 employees for 55 workdays, or nearly three months, between now and the end of September. The great majority of these employees work far from Washington D.C., in 51 local offices, where every NLRB case begins. The economic impact of this cut would be felt by families and communities in 33 states.

If enacted, the House proposal could force the NLRB to curtail all agency operations, including investigating alleged illegal practices by private sector employers and unions, conducting workplace elections, and helping to settle election-related disputes. Regulation of a broad range of conduct, such as unlawful lockouts of workers, termination of union organizers, refusals to bargain with unions selected by workers, unilateral changes to contract provisions covering such things as health insurance and pensions, unlawful strikes, picket line violence, and secondary boycotts, would be stalled if this proposal were adopted.

NLRB: White House Muzzled Us In Budget Debate

Ryan Grimm, The Huffington Post

Posted: 03/ 9/11 11:08 AM

The White House demanded that the NLRB scrub the statement defending the agency from its website, an NLRB spokesperson told The Huffington Post.

…

The White House pushback against the NLRB would sound familiar to Wisconsin demonstrators. The Democratic National Committee’s Organizing for America, the group that is a remnant of Obama’s ’08 campaign operation, initially got strongly behind the pro-labor protests. But after the GOP criticized the White House for its involvement, an administration spokesman told The New York Times that “the White House had done nothing to encourage the demonstrations in Wisconsin,” as paraphrased by reporter Jackie Calmes.

Of course, this President is almost entirely absent from the Budget debate, except when it comes to throwing core Democratic Principles and Constituencies under the bus.

Obama Tries to Re-Engage on Budget with 9 Days Until Government Shutdown

By: David Dayen, Firedog Lake

Wednesday March 9, 2011 11:06 am

The President has been completely disengaged on the budget battle in Congress, preferring to let them battle it out while he jets around the country and says “win the future” a lot. And some members of Congress are sick of it. Now, part of this is Congress wanting to share the blame with the White House for whatever comes out. But the other part is a recognition that the caucus is rootless and without direction, and only a party leader can come in and impose that. The fact that Obama set Joe Biden to the task of working out a compromise, only to have Biden leave for Europe for a week, is testimony to the fact that there’s something wrong with this lack of engagement. When Joe Manchin, who I think got to the Senate three days ago, is calling you out for a failure of leadership, there’s a problem of engagement.

Why did we elect him again? Oh, he claims to be a Democrat.

Well, he’s not.

And he’s not even doing his job, he’s just an AWOL deserter.

Mar 09 2011

Today on The Stars Hollow Gazette

By ek hornbeck

Our regular featured content-

On This Day In History by TheMomCat
Punting the Pundits by TheMomCat
Evening Edition by ek hornbeck
Prime Time by ek hornbeck

And these articles-

Under The Radar: WTF by TheMomCat
Barack Hussein Obama Shuts Down National Labor Relations Board by ek hornbeck

The Stars Hollow Gazette

Mar 09 2011

How much is that Sheepskin worth?

By ek hornbeck

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Krugman points out today that Education is no substitute for a Job and as someone who has programmed I’ll tell you flat out there is no repetitive task I can’t automate (well, once I install my compliers and linkers and blow the dust off my language skills).

Sort of off topic, I’m looking for a script that will cycle through a Soapblox database (they’re sequentially ordered) and save the page with contents, links, and comments to a hard drive so I can burn offline archive CDs and DVDs for the authors on our sites.

Yes, I could do it myself, but it’s mind numbing grundge work of the type suitable only for interns and computers.

Degrees and Dollars

By PAUL KRUGMAN, The New York Times

Published: March 6, 2011

(T)he idea that modern technology eliminates only menial jobs, that well-educated workers are clear winners, may dominate popular discussion, but it’s actually decades out of date.

The fact is that since 1990 or so the U.S. job market has been characterized not by a general rise in the demand for skill, but by “hollowing out”: both high-wage and low-wage employment have grown rapidly, but medium-wage jobs – the kinds of jobs we count on to support a strong middle class – have lagged behind. And the hole in the middle has been getting wider: many of the high-wage occupations that grew rapidly in the 1990s have seen much slower growth recently, even as growth in low-wage employment has accelerated.

…

(A)ny routine task – a category that includes many white-collar, nonmanual jobs – is in the firing line. Conversely, jobs that can’t be carried out by following explicit rules – a category that includes many kinds of manual labor, from truck drivers to janitors – will tend to grow even in the face of technological progress.

And here’s the thing: Most of the manual labor still being done in our economy seems to be of the kind that’s hard to automate. Notably, with production workers in manufacturing down to about 6 percent of U.S. employment, there aren’t many assembly-line jobs left to lose. Meanwhile, quite a lot of white-collar work currently carried out by well-educated, relatively well-paid workers may soon be computerized. Roombas are cute, but robot janitors are a long way off; computerized legal research and computer-aided medical diagnosis are already here.

…

(T)here are things education can’t do. In particular, the notion that putting more kids through college can restore the middle-class society we used to have is wishful thinking. It’s no longer true that having a college degree guarantees that you’ll get a good job, and it’s becoming less true with each passing decade.

So if we want a society of broadly shared prosperity, education isn’t the answer – we’ll have to go about building that society directly. We need to restore the bargaining power that labor has lost over the last 30 years, so that ordinary workers as well as superstars have the power to bargain for good wages. We need to guarantee the essentials, above all health care, to every citizen.