The blimp which was up until this moment a fun toy here embarked on a career of evil.

Check it out: http://www.teemings.com/extras/truelife/scylla6.html

Liar - er, Labor Department

Here's something from www.dol.gov, the Labor Department's front page. As of April 29th, this is the very center of Labors home page, under the headline "Workers Win":

U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao announced the final rules governing overtime eligibility for "white-collar" workers under the Fair Labor Standards Act on April 20. The regulations had not been substantially updated for over 50 years, creating confusion for workers and employers, generating wasteful class action litigation, and failing to effectively protect workers' pay rights.

"Today, workers win. The department's new rules guarantee and strengthen overtime rights for more American workers than ever before," said Secretary Chao.

Wow! That sounds great! I'm sure our American journalists will have told us all about these great new rules! Let's check it out:

• The New York Times:"Karen D. Smith, a former Labor Department wage and hour investigator, said the new rule ``artfully weakens the current regulation in very subtle but significant ways that will surprise employers and employees.'' She said nurses, nursery school teachers, cooks, computer and financial industry workers and others making between $23,660 and $100,000 would be adversely affected. ... At the same time, the [AFL-CIO] made clear its continuing opposition, issuing a statement by its president, John Sweeney, that said Chao ``continued to tell half-truths about whether workers are at risk of losing overtime pay.''
• The Nation:"Nurses, tech workers, military reservists, cooks, fire fighters and dental hygienists are among millions of people who -- if the White House has its way -- could find themselves working overtime hours minus the overtime pay, as early as this September."
• The Economic Policy Institute:"On March 31, 2003, the Department of Labor (DOL) proposed regulatory changes, which if adopted, could make more than eight million white-collar employees ineligible for overtime pay. ... The DOL proposes a new exemption that will deny overtime pay to white-collar employees who earn $65,000 or more a year, even if they do not meet the definition of executive, administrative, or professional employees. This proposal will exempt an estimated 1.3 million employees who currently are entitled to overtime pay."

Not that I'm saying it would be inappropriate for the Bushies to use the official Labor Department home page for political propaganda. I just think they could be a bit more subtle about it.

Election (un)Reality

I've just read Daniel Drezner's piece for THE NEW REPUBLIC Online, and Drezner's blog. He informs us that we should "read the entire article," while posting large excerpts with the confience that come from knowing no one is going to read the entire article. I've linked to his blog at left. This is from his TNR piece:

...consider the Bush administration's situation. Ordinarily, presidents are rewarded for doing their jobs well. In Bush's case, however...

Bad Timing

The New Republic reports on the 9/11 Commission:

[Former Acting FBI Director Thomas] Pickard also said Ashcroft turned down his appeal for more FBI counterterrorism funding; Pickard received the formal rejection on September 12, 2001.

Casablanca III

The Nation has David Corn's piece on the Bushies new appointee to be our first post-Saddam Iraqi Ambassador: John Negroponte.

When Bush selected Negroponte to be his UN representative in 2001, Negroponte was one of several Iran/contra figures being resurrected by the Bush crowd. As Honduras ambassador in the early 1980s, Negroponte, a career diplomat, participated in a secret and possibly illegal quid pro quo in which the Reagan Administration bribed the Honduran government with economic and military assistance to support the contras fighting the socialist Sandinistas of Nicaragua. Perhaps more significant, while Negroponte served in Honduras, he denied or downplayed serious human rights abuses by government security forces.

Negroponte didn't have to deal with the Honduran question when appointed UN ambassador: he was confirmed by the senate shortly after 9/11. And much as it grates internationalists to see Reagan's Iran-Contra friends employed as anything other than middle school history teachers in Akron, there probably won't be much controversy this time around.

These days Negroponte's tenure in Honduras is old news. The Washington Post's front-page story on his nomination did not mention his stint there. Senate staffers say that his record in Honduras won't be a focus of the confirmation hearings.

Corn is outraged; he points out that Negroponte misled the State Department, congress and pretty much everyone by denying that CIA-trained Hounduran army units were committing human rights abuses left and right. But with Rove and the Plume affair, Cheney's various conflict-of-interest schemes, the Iraqi intelligence debacle and the 9/11 commission, the Bushies could be thinking that one more criminal in high places won't make much difference. Of course, that's a pretty cynical thing for me to say, isn't it?

Now: In The Tailor of Panama, said tailor remarks that Panama is "Casablanca without heroes." If Iraq were to resemble that type of corrupt, lawless nation similar to so many central American democracy-in-name-only states, we'd be ahead of the game. It would certainly be better than Vietnam or Iran. And John Negroponte is quite experienced with the sort of nations Graham Greene used to write about. If he can help turn Iraq into that, I'm not too upset at giving another felon a government job.

My New Cynicism

Here's Noam Scheiber, on why Bush is showing good polling numbers despite bad news from, well, everywhere:

Dana Milbank hinted at an explanation in yesterday's Washington Post, in a piece about how Bush relies on "skillful use of languages and images" to keep the public behind the war effort. Reading the piece, you realize pretty quickly that what Milbank means by "skillful use" is really "dishonest use"--he lists several examples of the Bush administration shading the truth on Iraq, including the claim that the uprising there is the work of a "violent few," that a broad coalition of "other nations" are committed to our mission there, and that Saddam had ties to Al Qaeda. Milbank concludes with a quote from Duke University political scientist (and former Clinton NSC official) Peter Feaver, who argues that, "The rhetoric has to match the reality in Iraq, and if the situation on the ground deteriorates, then the administration will face an increasingly Herculean task keeping public support strong."

I think this is exactly right. The reason we're likely to get this critical-mass effect is that Americans tend to accept the claims of an administration at face value for a while. It's only after a military situation deteriorates to the point where the optimistic claims are so obviously out of line with what's happening on the ground--and we still haven't reached that point--that people are likely to reject the administration's line.

I don't share Scheiber's optimism. My own hunch is that a lot of American's harbored doubts about 'nam from day one, but only made a firm decision that the war was a mistake after the Tet offensive. While it is certainly possible that a lot of people harbor doubts about Iraq, I don't think any amount of news will change the minds of the people who supported this from the beginning: we're a very stubborn people. And there are a lot of people who ardently support the president in this misguided endeavor. I don't see Bush being hit by the drop in the polls Scheiber predicts. This election will be very, very, very close, and having to chose between Bush and Kerry is very, very, very sad.

Hickville Dispatch©

This is the latest e-mail from my father:

Tomorrow I will be at the Democratic Party County Convention as a precinct delegate. I was elected by myself and [jmylethinks' little sister] who were the only two Democrats from our precinct who showed up at the caucus (perhaps we are the only two in the precinct).

Just a quick note on the state of democracy in the state of Utah which is a state of disarray and leaves many liberals in a state of denial.

For those of you who are missing jmylethinks' particular brand of insight and wit, I'm afraid the immediate prospects don't look good. I'm settling in at my new dorm, and have limited access to the internet. There are a couple of computer labs on campus, but it will take me a couple of weeks to get my schedule arranged so I have enough time to keep up to date. In the meantime, while I am gone temporarily, Easterblogg is signing off for good. Check out the last entry while you can. I will miss the most intelligent and sophisticated link on the left hand side of my blog.

Signs of the Times

My boss reads the NYTimes and usually leaves it lying around the kitchen where I can get at it. Here's a couple of stories from the April 7th issue and my thoughts on same.

Rice Testimony p.A13:

Ms. Rice has ruled out issuing the kind of apology made by her former counterterrorism chief, Richard A. Clarke, who said in testimony two weeks ago that he and the government had failed the country. That statement was immediately denounced as grandstanding by the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, and one administration official said, "Condi's not going there."

The decision not to make a similar apology, one longtime colleague of Ms. Rice's said, came after a discussion of the risks of appearing to appease the administration's critics. An apology "promotes the notion that we were at fault," [the official said].

Is it just me, or am I the only one bothered by the fact that no official in the Bush or Clinton administration has taken any responsibility for 9/11 except for Richard Clarke? No sane person can blame the Bushies for 9/11; criticizing their response to the event does not make it any less unpredictable. But blame is different from responsibility. And there is enough responsibility for everyone. Bush could say, "I accept responsibility for the deaths that happened on my watch and I will always regret the things I could have done to prevent this." If he said that, I would vote for him.

The Abortion Question p.A19:

Seven women were tried this year in the northern Portuguese fishing community of Aveiro for getting abortions. They were prosecuted — facing three-year prison sentences — along with 10 "accomplices," including husbands, boyfriends, parents and a taxi driver who had taken a pregnant woman to a clinic.

Portugal offers a couple of sobering lessons for Americans who, like Mr. Bush, aim to overturn Roe v. Wade. ... If [America] did criminalize abortion, they would face a backlash as the public focus shifted from the fetus to the woman. "The fundamentalists have lost the debate" in Portugal, said Helena Pinto, president of UMAR, a Portuguese abortion rights group. "Now the debate has shifted to the rights of women. Do we want to live in a country where women can be in jail for abortion?"

I've heard it argued that overturning Roe v. Wade would be good for the pro-choice movement for precisely this reason. And as Kristof writes, "an overturn of Roe v. Wade would probably mean bans on abortion only in a patchwork of Bible Belt states, pregnant women would travel to places like New York, California and Illinois for their abortions."

To draw a parallel, the worst thing the Christian Right could do today in the marriage debate is to attempt to invalidate the marriag licenseses issued in San Fransisco. We immediately go from "protect a sacred institution" to "they took away my husband!" From human caution to inhuman cruelty.

I'm not ready to endorse overturning Roe - not by a long shot. But the Portugal trials are a good example of how important the context of a debate is on public opinion.

Witty & Insightful©

Today, political campaigns are the graveyard of real ideas and the birthplace of empty promises.

Teresa Heinz-Kerry
1993

The Nation has commentary on this subject:

In 2004, the election could be a testing ground in which to clarify the stark choices facing this country. But where is the millennial equivalent of Roosevelt's Four Freedoms, Truman's Fair Deal, and Johnson's Great Society? Don't these times cry out for an electoral system that nurtures big debates over large issues?

In a word, no.

These times cry out for new episodes of Queer Eye, for CNN/NYTimes InstaTrac™ Polls, for a major popolitical debate over the fact that 12-year-old boys find President Bush boring. We no longer look for stand-back-and-take-stock-of-things political books or even journals; we go for the substance-free quick-and-dirty world of the blogosphere. I wouldn't look for substantive thought in America ever again; the greatest philosophical minds come when a nation is young. Plato at the begining of the Greek/Roman states, before they were the Roman Empire. Hobbs and Voltaire before the British were an empire, and Jefferson and Robert Ingersoll were from the first centuries of America; today our political thinkers are Al Franken and Bill O'Riley.

BTW

Check this out!

Beltway Blindness©

Jason Zengerle over at TNR has come down with a case of beltway blindness. His article on Al Franken's new radio show notes that:

While Franken has had moments of extreme behavior--like when he tackled a heckler at a Howard Dean rally in New Hampshire or when he lit into Bill O'Reilly at the BookExpo America convention--he is not, generally speaking, a shouter. And as Russell Shorto noted in his very smart profile of Franken in The New York Times Magazine a few weeks ago, Franken is actually pretty moderate. Although he's obviously a very partisan Democrat, he's not, as Shorto writes, "an extreme lefty but rather a devout party man, one who says, for example, that the Democratic Leadership Council is a moral force for good."

All well in good, but Zengerle's very next sentence is "[b]oth of these traits, admirable in many respects, could pose a problem for Franken in the rough and tumble world of talk radio."

Wait, what? Admirable? Maybe being moderate is admirable, but I find a "devout party man" to be less than awe-inspiring. It can be necessary to be loyal to a political party, something the better episodes of The West Wing will show, but sacrificing your principals or reason for an organization should, at best, be a difficult choice. For example, in her book Nickel and Dimed, Barbra Ehrenreich writes:

I don't share the belief, held by many union staffers, that unionization would be a panacea. Sure, almost any old union would boost wages and straighten out some backbones here [at Wal-Mart], but I know that even the most energetic and democratic unions bear careful watching by their members.

In other words, blind loyalty to your union, party or candidate is never admirable. And if blind loyalty is what Al Franken's new show offers, it deserves to fail.

From the Hinterlands©

The Library in Fleishmanns is open three days a week, so I will have occasional chances to update my blog. Everybody cheer.

The daily newspaper here is called The Daily Freeman, a paper specializing in the news of the Hudson Valley since 1871. Not a lot of national news here, but it's revealing to examine what stories the editors pick up off the AP. Today, Friday 2 April, here's some of what we get:

• A process story regarding complaints the NYTimes and other major papers received for publishing this photo of the remains of the U.S. contractors killed in Iraq recently. What exactly would not publishing this photograph accomplish? In exchange for respecting the delicate sensibilities of a few of their readers, major newspapers would be failing to accurately inform all of their readers. Television networks avoided video of the bodies. This is bull. The issues raised include questions about why these men were killed, how to avoid this in the future, and other real-world concerns. But not exposing people to video of what actually happened?
• A whoopsie story about David Letterman and CNN miscommunication about a clip Letterman showed of the President boring a small child. This is world news?
• Here's one about the warning labels Bush wants put on condoms. Yeah, that's right, health warning labels on condoms, because they may not be 100% effective in preventing genital warts. So you shouldn't use them at all. Maybe it's only because this is New York, and people here are far more liberal than small town people in the Utah town that banned the U.N. But if this kind of nonsense from the administration is penetrating the American Collective Unconscious, maybe we have a chance in November.

More from Jmylethinks will be forthcoming, but at an abbreviated pace because up here I am cut off from the net four days a week and have, gasp, no cell phone service. At all.