Monday afternoon toons: “The end of labor is to gain leisure.”

Aristotle. Can't go wrong with Aristotle. Know what I'm saying?

Just a reminder: Oregon was the first state in the union to make Labor Day a state holiday, in 1887. (Take that, former Oregonian publisher N. Christian Anderson III! I haven't looked at the print Oregonian in a long while, but I imagine the strongest sign in the Big O that it's Labor Day will be the matress and car ads rather than the reporting on unions and Oregon's workers.)

And "taco truck on every corner" is a threat? Pal, you lost that argument over twenty years ago.

Gene Wilder's gone. Not much to be done about it, apparently, but crank out some Wonka-at-the-Pearly-Gates panels, which didn't make the cut today – not even the ones where he was in the steampunk glass elevator car.

If Colin Kaepernick had asked me for advice beforehand, I'd probably have said, "Lose the pig socks; it distracts from the central issue." But otherwise, I frankly can't find much to fault about his use of his First Amendment freedom to call attention to the increasing militarization of the police. He's been far more patient and on-message than I'd be – and he's doing it in the most jingoistic of the major professional sports leagues. Good on him.

Today's toons were selected from the week's offerings at McClatchy DC, Cartoon Movement, Go Comics, Politico's Cartoon Gallery, Daryl Cagle's Political Cartoons, About.com, The Nib, and other fine sources of cartoon goodness.

p3 Picks of the week: Mike Luckovich, Joel Pett, SigneWilkinson, Steve Benson, Matt Weurker, and Monte Wolverton.

p3 Best of Show: Clay Jones.

p3 Legion of Merit: Gary Varvel.

Ann Telnaes worries that the only part we'll enjoy is whacking him with a big stick.

Mark Fiore wonders about a presidential campaign whose slogan amounts to saying, "How can things possibly get worse for you?"

Tom Tomorrow covers The Twilight Zone election.

Keith Knight Kaptures (see what I did there?) the reactions to the Great Sit-Down of the 2016 NFL season.

Reuben Bolling points you toward what you fear most: when instinct takes over a hominid from the Pliocene Eoch – in a Western-theme barbecue restaurant. Not pretty.

Carol Lay presents The Story Minute, in which Mr. Know-It-All finds Ms. Right. It's actually pretty charming.

You probably know where this week's Red Meat, featuring Bug-Eyed Earl, is headed, but I bet you won't be able to look away in time.

Comic Strip of the Day reviews the concept of "an old man's argument" and reminds us of the extraordinarily talented, but now silenced, singer – a favorite here at p3 - who liked smart guys who cared about things that matter. (Bonus challenge: In addition to name-checking Cat Stevens and Linda Ronstadt, CSotD also works in a nod to James Taylor, if you can find it.)

"The Champ's a bum!" "Rabbit Punch," directed by Chuck Jones in 1948 from a story co-written by heavyweights Tedd Pierce and Michael Maltese, pits Bugs in the boxing ring against Battling McGook, when the original challenger, Dyspeptic McBlaster, fails to go the distance. Uncredited: Billy Blechter (McGook). McGook would return as the The Crusher in a 1951 wrestling remake of "Rabbit Hugged," also directed by Jones. (We'll  probably feature that next week.) For those who need to know, the "1043" on the steam engine in Round 110 (you'll see) is the production number for that cartoon. The WB animators knew how to keep themselves amused. Watch "Rabbit Punch" at VideoMotion.

The Completely Dignified Oregon Toon Block:

Ex-Oregonian Jack Ohman wonders about takin' care of business all these years later..

Documented Ex-Oregonian Jen Sorensen mocks the U of Chicago president's eminently mock-worthy message to the incoming class of 2020.

Matt Bors discovers the mother lode of all further election coverage this cycle.

Jesse Springer still doesn't like any tax plans coming out of the legislature these days (this time it's a gross receipts tax, which obviously the Oregonian doesn't like either).

Test your toon-captioning powers at The New Yorker's weekly caption-the-cartoon contest. (Rules here.) And you can browse The New Yorker's cartoon gallery here.

The p3 Sunday Comics Read-Along: Pearls Before Swine, Doonesbury, Rhymes with Orange, Zits, Adam @ Home, Mutts, Over the Hedge, Get Fuzzy, Prince Valiant, Blondie, Bizarro, Mother Goose & Grimm, Rose is Rose, Luann, Hagar the Horrible, Pickles, Rubes, Grand Avenue, Freshly Squeezed, The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee, and Jumble.

Saturday late afternoon tunes: Honoring the people who struggled and died for this three-day weekend

Ten songs celebrating -- and memorializing -- the sacrifices, the rights, and the dignity of labor in America and around the world.

Who's responsible for the Germanwings crash? You'll be surprised.

James Fallows of The Atlantic quotes "Adam Shaw, who has had a varied and interesting career as a writer and flyer and now leads an aerobatics team in Europe," on the causes of the Germanwings suicide/mass murder/crash last week. It includes this line:

And when people start looking for whom to blame, the answer is simple: Joe-six-pack who wanted a $99 flight from New York to L.A, or Pierre Baguette who wanted a 65-euro Paris-Casablanca … and the cynical bean counters who make this possible

"Joe Six-Pack's" fault? It is to laugh. Unless Joe's carrying on a six-pack of medium-priced Burgundy.

What about the expense-account business-class travelers (with six- or seven-figure frequent flyer mile totals) the airlines depend on for their bread and butter?

Or several generations of corporate union-busting directed against the people on the front lines of airline safety?

Or the next-quarter's-profits-obsessed, bonus-driven CEOs (who wouldn't dream of flying  commercial anyway)?

Yes, although the lowest-bidder fixation is a safety (and service) problem in the airline industry (just as it is throughout America's transportation infrastructure, public education, the food industry, etc.; but let's press ahead), to blame the problem on the customers who fly a couple of times a year and understandably don't want to pay a month's rent to do so is silly.

In fairness, Shaw's reply, which apparently came to Fallows as comment on an earlier post by the latter rather than as a publication in its own right, seems primarily focused on the pressures faced by commercial pilots to get flight hours and certification. So perhaps the culprit here is the copy editor for The Atlantic's web page, who skimmed over the bulk of Shaw's message to seize upon the thoughtless and proportionless -- but very click-baity -- "Joe Six-Pack" line, elevating it to the tag line for the entire Fallows post.

A legal strike? How unfair!

Perhaps you have to feel a little sorry for the administrators at the University of Oregon. For at least a generation, it's generally been a good career move to show trustees that you can bust faculty and student chops at will; Miles Brand parlayed his pre-Shock Doctrine wet work as president of UO in the early 1990s into getting hired for more money than God by Indiana University to kneecap the previously untouchable Bobby Knight. And, not surprisingly, he went from there to being Executive Director of the NCAA.

And yet, the UO faculty finally unionized a couple of years ago after decades of watching as their employee rights and powers of self-governance got trampled.

And now – is there really no limit? – from Corey Robin at Crooked Timber comes word that U of O grad students are on the edge of going out on strike. Just in time to throw all the end-of-term grading into a cocked hat. That means that, for every grad teaching assistant with grading responsibilities (and unless things have changed drastically since I was in the business, that's most of them), there are somewhere between, say, 20 and a couple hundred students who may or may not get their final grades on time. That's what we call a force multiplier

The issue at stake is unpaid leave for illness or childbirth. The city of Eugene guarantees it for all city employees, but the employees at UO have no such arrangement. The grad students opened and reopened negotiations with a university whose bargaining position fell just shy of running to the dictionary to refresh their memory of the term "bad faith" before each go-round.

Pity the administrators. Where do the rabble think they are? Don't they understand that the University of Oregon is a multi-platform entertainment provider operating as a nonprofit corporation that, for historical reasons, is also empowered by the state to award college credits?

As Erik Loomis at LGM points out, the administration is handling this in just about the most ham-fisted manner imaginable, featuring a leaked memo to deans and department heads outlining strategy in the event of a strike. Spoilers: It includes discussion of bringing in scab workers, plus heavy reliance upon Scantron final exams and indefinitely-delayed grade reporting. Again, I haven't been in the biz for a good while, but I do wonder somewhat if the UO admin feels embarrassment, as Loomis predicts. I would predict it's more like mystification.

To their everlasting credit, a dozen UO department heads and program directors have signed an open letter promising that, while it's not their preferred outcome, they will resign rather than implement any strikebreaking activities the university might be contemplating.

Unless something surprising happens during the holiday week, the strike begins on December 2.

What a lot of people are still getting wrong about the Romney “let Detroit go bankrupt” story

(And why it's worse than most people think. Updated at the bottom of the post.)

Mitt doesn't say he was “wrong on Detroit,” because he doesn't think he was. And the folks on my Facebook and Twitter feeds have been have a whooping old time with that.

If your browser won't display the embedded version, click here.

Letting Detroit go bankrupt! Detroit! The erstwhile symbol of American economic leadership (”What's good for GM is good for the world.”). Ground Zero of an American middle class that was once the envy of the world. The city where, in Mitt's childhood, his father was a merchant-prince.

And although that clip only catches a moment of it, he's been saying all along why he thought it was a good idea to let GM and Chrysler tank. In fact, in that clip, he said it twice. He's been as clear as a buttonhook in the well water about it for four years. It's one of his rare instances of non-self contradiction. But almost no one's really listening all the way through, because “Look! He wanted to let Detroit go bankrupt!” is the easier way to score points.

It's not that Romney's delusional (at least not any more so than usual). Or dishonest (at least not any more so than usual). It's just that no one's asked him precisely the right question in exactly the right way. And no one listens very closely to his answer. And most of the Democrats howling with glee about his bankruptcy “gaffe” don't appreciate how dangerous that oversight is.

Because what Romney wanted -- what he would have brought about had he been in the driver's seat -- was even worse. He wanted to see the auto companies go through bankruptcy and the resulting reorganization “to shed costs.” What “costs” are those?

Labor costs. Union contracts. Worker health care. Pensions. Step One of the Romney plan was to use bankruptcy to bust the unions connected with the automotive industry and break the fundamental promise embodied in their pension plans. And yes, as the governor took care to point out in the third presidential debate, some companies -- like Macy's and 7-Eleven -- do come through bankruptcy and survive. Others aren't so fortunate, though, especially if they have the bad luck to fall into the hands of chop shops like Bain Capital LLC. Romney's upset because, following the bankruptcy move, the Obama administration stepped in with bailout money which allowed the unions to keep a toe-hold in Detroit.

But, delightful as union-busting would no doubt to seem to the governor simply on its own merits, that's just Step One. Remember that part of the Obama administration's rationale for the bailout was that, even if the auto companies had gone through bankruptcy, no banks were then willing or able to step up with the money to help them rebuild. So even with court-enforced restructuring (and “shedding of costs”), where would the money come from?

I'm glad you asked. That's Step Two of the Romney plan. If the banks can't help and the federal government is prevented from helping, that just leaves the paper-manipulators (like Romney's own Bain Capital) to buy GM and Chrysler for pennies on the dollar, then strip 'em and flip em. In the third presidential debate, Romney denied his intention was to enable his vulture-capitalist cronies to gut GM and Chrysler, pay themselves off, and sell off the remaining assets. You've seen the short half-life of his stand on any issue. Do you believe him this time?

Laura Clawson at DailyKos Labor writes:

Romney may not have understood himself to be arguing for liquidation back in 2008. But it would have been the effect if his advice had carried the day. And to this day, regardless of how often and by whom the situation is explained to him, he cannot accept that he was wrong. His certainty that Mitt Romney, Businessman, is always right is too strong to allow for that possibility. And admitting he was wrong would drive home that if he had been president, the American auto industry would have gone under. Michigan and Ohio's economies would have been destroyed. A million jobs would have gone up in flames.

Yes, but that's a feature, not a bug. It's not that Romney wanted to save Detroit, but mistakenly advocated a plan that would inevitably have failed, and is now too vain to admit it. Romney never really wanted to save Detroit.^* Which is why he sees no point in backing down or changing his story.  The mistake is to think he's kidding.

^*(Update:) At least no more than he would presumably be interested in saving the East Coast this afternoon. As everyone is being reminded, and appropriately so, Romney's on record as saying that it would be "immoral" for the government to be involved in disaster relief, that this is more appropriately a state-level (or, ideally, a private-enterprise) function. Ironically, it's one of the rare moments in his political life where he's told the straight truth from the start and stuck to it without variation -- and no one seems to believe him.

Via ovicipitum dura es*

^*”The way of the egghead is hard,” a retort by Adlai Stephenson after Richard Nixon referred to him as an “egghead” during the 1952 presidential campaign. No word on who, if anyone, translated the joke for Nixon.

In 2009, p3 was pleased to note that the long-suffering faculty at the University of Oregon were finally showing signs of having had enough, opening talks aimed at gaining union representation and collective bargaining rights, like their colleagues at Portland State, Eastern Oregon, Western Oregon, and Southern Oregon.

Winning union representation is no easy trick in 2012:

More than 1,800 University of Oregon (UO) faculty members now have a voice at work after they chose to join United Academics, an affiliate of AFT Oregon and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). The Oregon Employment Relations Board Friday certified the professors’ choice after the university dropped its objections.

The new union includes tenure- and non-tenure-track faculty, adjunct instructors, research associates and assistants and post-doctoral scholars. Scott Pratt, professor of philosophy, says the composition of the bargaining unit

paves the way for UO tenure-related and non-tenure-track faculty—working together—to have a more substantive voice in refocusing our university on the core mission of teaching and research.

In March, a majority of faculty members signed union authorization cards and the university initially filed objections.

A tip of the mortarboard to my former colleagues on the U of O faculty.

The unforgiving minute: You and I just disagree

Crooks and Liars caught this moment:

A man who spent part of his childhood working as a janitor told Newt Gingrich on Wednesday that he was offended by the Republican presidential candidate's plan to put kids to work.

During an event at Georgetown University, Hector Cendejas called out the former House Speaker for his initiative to replace unionized janitors with children workers.

"Back in high school, I was a janitor in my own high school, which was a private school," Cendejas explained. "For me, it was embarrassing to be a janitor at my own high school because I was with the rich kids. I was poor. My mom was working super hard. I did not feel empowered by serving my classmates. Why not invest on these kids to work for law firms, hospitals and get paid to develop better skills?"

"Did you find it useful financially to earn the money?" Gingrich asked the man.

"I mean, I need to help my mom," Cendejas replied, adding that his parents were undocumented. "Thank God I had Georgetown to save my butt, you know? ... All my friends, they’re pregnant, they’re in gangs, in jail, and we did the same job, working as janitors. So for me, your remark was a little offensive towards me."

"I'm sorry if you were offended," Gingrich quipped. "Both of my daughters worked as janitors at the local Baptist Church and they earned the money and they didn't think it was demeaning, and they actually liked the idea that they earned their own money as kids, and they kept their own money because they thought work had inherent dignity."

"But they come from a wealthy family," Cendejas pointed out.

"That's not the point," the candidate shrugged. "You and I just disagree."

It's possible that, at some point, the disgraced former Speaker, current vanity-campaign presidential candidate, and moral autistic read 19th Century satirist Anatole France, but if he did, it's for certain he didn't understand him:

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

But I think, on the other hand, that France would have understood Gingrich almost immediately.

Minute's up.

Saturday morning tunes: Saint Peter, don'tcha call me, 'cause I cain't go

The authorship of "Sixteen Tons" is subject to some dispute; but it was written in the 1930s or 1940s about life in the Appalachian coal mines of the 19th and early 20th century.

Among the many tools that mine owners had to keep miners under their thumbs (not counting local police, union-busting goons, and Pinkerton men -- see here), there was the company store. Workers were paid in vouchers, not dollars, redeemable only at the store owned by -- surprise! -- the mine owners themselves. Not only were the store prices usually inflated, but the scrip was useless anywhere else, which meant miners couldn't accumulate savings and move in search of better work.

If you're reading this in FB Notes, you'll need to click View Original Post to see the video. 

 Labor Day is brought to you by the people who brought you the forty-hour week, child labor laws, retirement funds, and medical insurance.

Five years ago in p3: What's good for GM?

It starts out with one of the great half-understood quotes of the last century:

Not many people today could identify Charles E. Wilson, former CEO of General Motors and later Secretary of Defense under Eisenhower, but many would have no trouble recognizing the famous thing he didn't say:

What's good for General Motors is good for America.

What Wilson actually said, and the context in which he said it, is much more telling about the differences between Then and Now.

And it winds up with a note on the irony of "accelerated attrition." Go ahead: Take a stroll down memory lane.

Saturday morning tunes: "She never was afraid -- of goons and ginks and company finks and the deputy sheriffs who made the raid"

Well, wasn't this a noteworthy week in America?

Item: General Electric, which posted $14.2 billion in revenue worldwide ($5.1 billion in the US) in 2010, paid $0 in US corporate income tax for 2010. (In fact, it got a $3.2 billion refund. This was, of course, all perfectly legal* -- whose people helped design Administration policy for the last decade?)

Item: The Tea Party governors and Republican legislators of Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan continued their holy war against their state's workers -- unionized or non-unionized.

Item: And just to ice the let-them-eat-cake, five US House Republicans even went so far as to re-introduce a provision that would starve out uppity workers by denying food stamps to families with a member who's on strike (it's actually a long-time favorite of the corporate right).

Finally, yesterday was the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire -- or, if you prefer, The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Massacre:

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City on March 25, 1911, was the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of the city of New York and resulted in the fourth highest loss of life from an industrial accident in U.S. history. The fire caused the deaths of 146 garment workers, who either died from the fire or jumped to their deaths. Most of the victims were recent Jewish and Italian immigrant women; the youngest were two fourteen-year-old girls. Many of the workers could not escape the burning building because the managers had locked the doors to the stairwells and exits. People jumped from the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors. The fire led to legislation requiring improved factory safety standards and helped spur the growth of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, which fought for better working conditions for sweatshop workers.

In the memory of those women -- those who died and those after, who would not let those deaths be meaningless -- here's Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie singing "Union Maid" (written by Arlo's dad).

--------------
^*See Kinsley's Law.

Quote of the day: The new fifty percent

Steve at No More Mister Nice Blog isn't confident that Scott Walker, the Wisconsin Republicans, and the Koch brothers have awakened a sleeping giant:

Yeah, yeah, yeah -- Walker and the bill itself are well below 50% in the polls. But surely you've noticed: for Republicans, 40% is 50%. For Democrats most of the time, not even 60% is 50%.

Read the whole thing, and -- as he says -- prove him wrong. If you can.

Saturday morning toons: "Hiring man said, 'Son, if it was up to me . . . '"

Happy labor day weekend to everyone who labors.

Saturday morning tunes: "She never was afraid"

Here's a song to mark two events: First, I watched a Hulu program today that was sponsored by WalMart ads telling viewers how much they valued community. Second, this weekend that the Senate Democrats rolled over while a single Republican Senator blocked an extension on unemployment and COBRA benefits for people who weren't as rich and connected as he.

(H/T to Roger Ebert, who has a couple more tunes for you to see, plus a story to tell, featuring the never-should-be-forgotten Weavers.)

Quote of the day

Tim Fernholz at TAPPED, on conservatives' complaint that everything they don't like is "socialism:"

When unemployment eventually does lead to revolutionaries actually seizing the means of production, will the GOP be at a loss for words?

Eggheads of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your yolks!*

When I interviewed for a faculty position at the U of O, 'way back in the day, I pointed out that the salary was noticeably less than what I was making at the university where I was working (another public university of similar size), and noticeably less than the national average for the same rank at an equivalent institution. The fellow on the other side of the table just chuckled and said, Yeah, out here we call that the "Oregon Lifestyle Surcharge."

I took the job anyway, for other reasons, and two months later Measure 5, which slashed and capped property taxes upon which Oregon public education depended, narrowly passed. Years before Naomi Klein eventually wrote The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, the UO administration intuitively understood that the panic immediately following on Measure 5 was the perfect opportunity to steamroll through changes that probably could never have happened where the faculty was unionized. In their defense, I suppose, at least the administrators were pretty candid about the fact that they were indeed running roughshod over the idea of faculty self-governance.

I left U of O not long after, and I was happy to read this week that the U of O faculty may finally have had enough. Talks are in process for the faculty to seek union representation, joining their counterparts at Portland State, Western Oregon, Eastern Oregon, and Southern Oregon.

According to the Register-Guard, faculty dissatisfaction has increased in the last couple of years, and low pay and the perception of administration high-handedness are the reasons most often pointed to.

The UO ranks last in average salary and in average total compensation — pay plus benefits — on a list of nine large public universities the state uses for comparing budgets. The average faculty salary is 80 percent of the average for the other eight universities, and total compensation is 84 percent of the average.

Also, the UO ranks last in pay among the 60 members of the Association of American Universities, an invitation-only group made up of many of the top public and private universities around the nation. In that comparison, the UO’s average faculty salary of $73,300 is 11.5 percent below that of the second-to-last school, the University of Missouri, which has an average faculty salary of $82,600.

(^*H/t to Adlai Stevenson. Cross-posted at Loaded Orygun.)

Dispatches: Accountability at the Fed, H1N1 virus, condors, mushrooms, and more

Items from the p3 inbox:

• CREDO, the progressive mobile network, is partnering with Living Liberally to get Anheuser-Busch to cut its ties with the US Chamber of Commerce, and will donate $1 to Living Liberally for every signature on the petition to A-B. (Living Liberally)



• In violation of its contract with the UFCW, the Hillsboro Fred Meyer had three union representatives arrested when they came to the store to talk to their members about current contract negotiations. (Oregon AFL-CIO)



• Senate Banking Committee members Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Bob Corker (R-TN) introduced legislation that will require the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to conduct an audit of the Fed’s emergency lending programs , and not a moment too soon. (Sen. Jeff Merkley)



• State Sen. Mark Hass and State Reps. Jeff Barker and Tobias Read will lead information clinic on the on the H1N1 virus, featuring Dr. Mel Kohn, Oregon’s acting Public Health Director and Kathleen O’Leary, Washington County HHS Director, Wednesday, October 21st, 7pm, at the Beaverton Public Library. (Sen. Mark Hass)



• Oregon Wild is sponsoring two Wild Wednesday events tomorrow night, Wednesday October 21st: Mushroom Madness, 6:00-7:30 pm at Davis' Restaurant, 94 W. Broadway, in Eugene, and Comeback for the Condors, 6:00-7:30pm at Roots Organic Brewery, 1520 SE 7th Avenue, in Portland. (Oregon Wild, via Facebook)

"Planned obsolescence" meets "Accelerated attrition" meets "Chapter 11"

Alas. Michael Moore can quit looking for Roger Smith.

It is with sad irony that the company which invented "planned obsolescence" - the decision to build cars that would fall apart after a few years so that the customer would then have to buy a new one - has now made itself obsolete. It refused to build automobiles that the public wanted, cars that got great gas mileage, were as safe as they could be, and were exceedingly comfortable to drive. Oh - and that wouldn't start falling apart after two years. GM stubbornly fought environmental and safety regulations. Its executives arrogantly ignored the "inferior" Japanese and German cars, cars which would become the gold standard for automobile buyers. And it was hell-bent on punishing its unionized workforce, lopping off thousands of workers for no good reason other than to "improve" the short-term bottom line of the corporation. Beginning in the 1980s, when GM was posting record profits, it moved countless jobs to Mexico and elsewhere, thus destroying the lives of tens of thousands of hard-working Americans. The glaring stupidity of this policy was that, when they eliminated the income of so many middle class families, who did they think was going to be able to afford to buy their cars?

Thus was Charles Wilson, former CEO of GM--and author of the oft-misquoted phrase I thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa--eventually proved right, at least in the negative: What could drive the country to its knees, economically, could lay GM out flat on the canvas.

Why would Democrats even consider trusting Specter?

As recently as the beginning of the month, Arlen Specter's name was being floated as a potential 60th vote to head off filibuster on Employee Free Choice Act.

There were even those--and this would be funny if it weren't so pathetic--who imagined the EFCA as the fulcrum that could lever Specter into the Democratic Party sometime between now and his re-election in 2010.

Anyone who believed that was a sap.

The outcome in Specter's latest to-be-or-not-to-be performance was as inevitable as in all his previous theatrical turns: Specter announced today that he will be joining the rest of the Civil War Re-Enactment Society Senate Republicans to filibuster the EFCA and will vote against it if it makes it to the floor.

Arlen Specter is a one-trick pony--before the vote he makes moderate-sounding rumblings, after which the extremist wing of the Republican party threatens him, after which Specter toes the GOP party line when the vote comes down. That's what he does. That's all he does.

Is it that he wants to do the moderate thing but he's too pusillanimous to stand up to the extremists in his party? Or is it that he simply loves to play Hamlet for the cameras before coming home to the extremists?

It doesn't matter. Any legislative strategy that hinges on Specter actually opposing the extremists in his own party is destined to fail.

What's your life worth?

There are various ways of calculating the answer, using such metrics as the retail cost of the chemicals that make up your body, the black-market price for your harvested organs, or the value of the life insurance policy your spouse forged your signature on after the economy soured.

Here's another one:

[I]n 2006, the average penalty assessed employers [by the Department of Labor] for violations that "pose a substantial probability of death or serious physical harm" was $881.

Put that another way: Under the anti-labor policies of Bush Department of Labor, your safety at work has, statistically speaking, come to be worth about the same as the cost of a new plasma TV for the executive lounge. Not much of an incentive to worry about keeping you in one piece.

That's something to keep in mind as you watch the Civil War Re-Enactment Society Senate Republicans fighting tooth and nail (or, if you prefer, musket and bayonet) to keep Hilda Solis' name from even being advanced as Obama's nominee for Secretary of Labor--on the grounds that she would do things that would, you know, be beneficial to workers in this country, in particular, by supporting the Employee Free Choice Act.

The fight to prevent collective bargaining isn't only about determining the price of your life--broadly speaking, the unprecedented growth of the American middle class that it's taken corporatist Republicans 40 years of constant work to grind down to the moribund condition we find it in today, hanging on by a thread, was the product of the wave of unionization after WWII--but that's a good place to start.

Elitism is as elitism does: McCain comes to Oregon

This will be interesting (from an Oregon AFL-CIO press release on Friday):

The Oregon AFL-CIO has extended an invitation to Senator John McCain to meet with Oregon working families for a round-table discussion on health care Monday evening, May 12 prior to McCain's scheduled $31 thousand-per-couple Portland fundraiser.

As of Friday, the McCain campaign had not responded to the invitation, but attendees and Oregon AFL-CIO President Tom Chamberlain will reiterate the invitation in person Monday evening when McCain arrives at the Airport Sheraton Hotel.

The event is part of a nationwide campaign by the AFL-CIO to expose McCain's anti-worker record and policy proposals (http://www.mccainrevealed.com/). It is the first event of its kind in the nation where union members and working families will be stationed and waiting in an adjacent conference room in the same venue McCain's scheduled event, making it possible for John McCain to walk only a few steps to meet with working folks.

Hard to predict what that maverick McCain will do: Face a room full of working families and union members asking tough questions while the press watches? Or go into a closed-to-the-media fundraising dinner where people paid the price of a Ford Explorer to attend?

It should give the local media some good footage of working families standing in a Sheraton conference room, waiting . . . waiting . . .

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