Why would I put up footage of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, which was a world’s fair held in San Francisco, celebrating both the rebirth of the city after the earthquake and the opening of the Panama Canal the year before? The real question is why wouldn’t I? Plus it features a rarity here at LGM–footage of living horses.
Discuss.
Last Friday, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) issued long-awaited new rules to modernize and streamline union certification elections and to eliminate the worst cases of pre-election delay. The board is mandated to protect the rights of employees to form unions and bargain collectively, but numerous academic studies have demonstrated that the current NLRB election process fails to protect workers’ free choice.
One major problem under the current system is that unscrupulous employers use delaying tactics to undermine employee choice. Thus, the NLRB’s new rules seek to reduce unnecessary litigation and delay in the union certification process; to ensure that workers, employers and unions receive timely information; and to provide for the electronic filing of election petitions and other documents. The rules were published in the Federal Register on Dec. 15 and will take effect on April 14, 2015.
Predictably, anti-union groups and their Republican allies have claimed that the rules will deprive employers of sufficient time to campaign against the unions. One prominent anti-union law firm complained that the rules would “minimize” an employer’s time to “run an anti-union campaign,” while the International Franchise Association apparently believes they will enable unions to “silence” employers like McDonald’s. The National Retail Federation, which represents Wal-Mart and other billion-dollar retailers, described the NLRB’s modest reforms as “devastating,” and Republicans, who say that the current broken system has “worked well for decades,” have proposed legislation that would mandate even longer pre-election delay (H.R. 4320). In short, representatives of big business and right-wing lobbying organizations oppose any attempt to promote basic fairness in the union certification process.
Employers hate this because they rely on a long period of time to engage in a coordinated campaign of intimidation against employees that includes sophisticated anti-union firms. A quick election means that workers will be able to express their voice without this intimidation.
Of course both parties are the same and therefore Rand Paul is the only progressive alternative in 2016.
Conversations…
SEK’S LESBIAN FRIEND: Crap — just realized I won’t be able to make your birthday party.
SEK: That’s fine. I didn’t want to play any Indigo Girls songs anyway.
SEK’S LESBIAN FRIEND: You were the one who introduced me to the Indigo Girls! Just play your favorite so I can attend in spirit.
SEK: Fine — I’ll play “The Wood Song.”
SEK’S LESBIAN FRIEND: Your favorite Indigo Girl’s song is “The Wood Song”?
SEK: Yes.
SEK’S LESBIAN FRIEND: “THE WOOD SONG”?
SEK: What? It’s gorgeous.
SEK’S LESBIAN FRIEND: “THE WOOD SONG”?
SEK: Fine — “Romeo and Juliet” then.
SEK’S LESBIAN FRIEND: WRITTEN BY A MAN!
SEK: How am I losing this argument?
SEK’S LESBIAN FRIEND: God damn straight people.
Bob McCulloch is the master.
Shorter Fred Hiatt: “China and Vietnam prove that normalization of relations does not necessarily guarantee freedom. Therefore, we should maintain the embargo of Cuba, which has a superb 50-year track record of promoting freedom, with plenty of unnecessary impoverishment as a side benefit.”
Ygelsias is correct here:
On November 26, the Obama administration put forward new anti-smog regulations that should prevent thousands of premature deaths and heart attacks every year. About two weeks later, Obama’s appointees at the Federal Reserve implemented new rules curbing reckless borrowing by giant banks that will reduce profits and shareholder earnings but increase the safety of the financial system. Yet both of these were minor stories compared to normalizing relations with Cuba after decades and his sweeping plan to protect millions of unauthorized immigrants from deportation. Somewhere in the meantime, Democrats broke the congressional logjam and got a whole boatload of nominees confirmed.
It has been, in short, a very busy and extremely consequential lame-duck session. One whose significance is made all the more striking by the fact that it follows an electoral catastrophe for Obama’s party. And that is the Obama era in a microcosm. Democrats’ overwhelming electoral win in 2008 did not prove to be a “realigning” election that handed the party enduring political dominance. Quite the opposite. But it did touch off a wave of domestic policymaking whose scale makes Obama a major historical figure in the way his two predecessors won’t be.
[…]
In an excellent November 26 article, Coral Davenport observed that Obama will likely “leave office with the most aggressive, far-reaching environmental legacy of any occupant of the White House” even though “it is very possible that not a single major environmental law will have passed during his two terms in Washington.” The Clean Air Act of 1970 simply turns out to be a very powerful tool crafted by very ambitious legislators, who wanted to make sure future administrations would be able to address not-yet-foreseen environmental problems. He’s used that law to issue a “series of landmark regulations on air pollution, from soot to smog, to mercury and planet-warming carbon dioxide.”
In his second term, Obama has also managed to get a record number of judges confirmed thanks to Democrats’ use of the nuclear option to reduce filibustering. When Obama took office, 10 of the 13 appeals courts had Republican majorities — today only four do
As I’ve said before, the only two presidents who can even arguably been said to have presided over a more substantial body of progressive policy-making in the last century are FDR and LBJ, and both did so in significantly more favorable contexts.
If North Korea hacking Sony e-mails actually leads to Idris Elba playing James Bond, it will be that country’s greatest gift to humanity.
Yikes, Paul Berman writes terrible porn:
I think that anyone who sits down to read the Wieseltier decades of critical reviews in The New Republic will notice that at some mysterious philosophical level a great many of those hundreds of essays seem to cohere. It is not because they display a particular ideological bent or follow a political line. Something deeper is at work, which I do not know how to describe. (It is a task for a philosopher-historian.) I note a nearly uniform predisposition against the doctrines of determinism, whether they be scientific or economic or identity-political. There has always been, in any case, an intellectual ardor, as if the entire “back of the book” were asmolder with passion—a passion for the creative labors of certain species of writers and artists and thinkers. For the uncorruptible ones, for the ones-of-a-kind, for the people who are allergic to fads and factions and the stratagems of self-advancement. Perhaps the entire section has been animated by the belief, keen and insistent and unstated, that humanity’s fate lies in the hands of those people. This is not the sort of belief that researchers will declare one day to be scientifically confirmed. But it has the advantage of generating a hot-blooded criticism—occasionally cruel or trigger-happy, but always intense, which means thrilling.
Look, I think the New Republic circa 2014 was a very fine magazine, and I’ve also said many times that Wieseltier’s back-of-the-book was generally good and useful even when the political content of the magazine was dubious-to-actively-pernicious. But this kind of purple-prosed overselling of its virtues tempts me to join with the critics happy to celebrate at the funeral. It was a well-edited book review section that good work out of a lot of good writers and critics, as well as its share of misfires (it was TNR that briefly loosed Lee Siegel on to the wider world, let us remember.) That’s far from a negligible virtue, but let’s calm down with the “asmolder with passion” and “intellectual ardor” and “ones-of-a-kind,” shall we?
Or perhaps I should have started with “humanity’s fate lies in the hands of those people” instead, because it reminds us how and why Berman permanently destroyed his reputation by falling for one of the most transparent and destructive cons in known human history. For public intellectuals like Berman and Hitchens and Ignatieff support for the Iraq catastrophe was above all a form of self-aggrandizement; as FDR and Churchill Bush and Blair were saving us from the new Nazis overruling Europe, the hacks that supported them believed themselves to be the new Orwells. As it turns out, a strong belief that the fate of the world rests in your hands tends to be highly inconsistent with clear thinking, with ghastly results.
And then there’s this:
There is also the fact that, if you were to print out a roster of critics who contributed notable essays over the years to The New Republic’s back of the book, the roster would differ significantly from what you may have been led to expect by the accusations of racial or male exclusivity that have just now been tossed at the magazine. But discoveries and diversities do not sum up the achievement.
The first thing you’ll note is that this rebuttal to serious charges about a lack of diversity remains at the level of a bare assertion; he can’t even be bothered to rustle up some random examples. (In terms of brilliant stuff TNR’s culture section has published by women, I can give him a head start: try Adelle Waldman on Revolutionary Road, Ruth Franklin on Freedom, Martha Nussbaum on Harvey Mansfield, Deborah Friedell on Neal Stephenson.) But this is an empirical question, and as it happens in 2013 4 out of 59 bylines in the book review were female, in 2012 it was 9 out of 88, and in 2011 it was 11 out 82. This stands out even among the dismal standards of the industry — the gender diversity of the TNR back-of-the-book was terrible and actually getting worse, although Franklin has been one of the writers most responsible for bringing attention to the problem. And if the book review has a better record than the front-of-the-book in terms of racial diversity, that would be because it would be nearly impossible to be worse. Berman’s casual hand-waving away of the problem illustrates why it persists.
Super cool online archive of historical gay themed t-shirts from Indiana. Well worth exploring, even if it is overwhelmingly male.
Norfolk residents are trying to adapt to climate change by raising their houses to protect them from increasingly frequent floods. The problem is that it’s really expensive to do this, a lot of people in Norfolk are poor, and they can’t afford it. Meanwhile, because people buying homes and especially insurance agencies have to make real world decisions and thus aren’t going to be persuaded by James Inhofe spewing climate denialism, these low-lying homes are really hard to sell and insurance rates on them are skyrocketing. This is what substitutes for real climate change planning from government.
This is why unionizing Walmart is so important and why just ballot measures for the minimum wage isn’t enough to improve the lives of workers. Unions are about dignity and power on the job, which is why companies hate them. Because those companies want to make pregnant women work with chemicals and then fire them when they complain:
Candis Riggins says that she isn’t the only pregnant worker who was discriminated against by Wal-Mart. And despite having a policy stating it will make “reasonable accommodations” for pregnant workers, Riggins alleges that Wal-Mart made it virtually impossible for her to safely work through her pregnancy.
“I made it clear to my supervisors that I wanted to keep working and that I could do several other jobs well,” Riggins said this week in a statement. “I just needed to keep away from the chemicals, but Wal-Mart said, ‘No,’ even though I know they gave light duty to a coworker of mine when he hurt his back. Finally, I was forced to choose between a healthy pregnancy and my paycheck. No pregnant worker should have to make that decision.”
In the claim, Riggins states that the chemicals she was forced to work with while cleaning bathrooms at the store made her ill, and that bending over for hours at a time caused her severe back pain. The pain became so intolerable that she went to see a doctor, who recommended lighter duty during the rest of her pregnancy. When she went to her supervisor with this information, she was moved to mopping and sweeping the store, work she said still exacerbated her back pain and involved chemicals that made her ill.
Finally, she was moved to be a greeter at the door. But the time on her feet, at least 8 hours, according to the claim, was still hard on her, so she asked if she could sit on a stool. She was told she could not sit, despite other workers with injuries being allowed to sit while greeting customers. According to the claim, “Wal-Mart has engaged in a pattern or practice of gender discrimination against female sales associates and in policies or practices that have a disparate impact against women.”
Paul Campos, Above the Law 2011 Lawyer of the Year
Erik Loomis, HNN Cliopatria 2011 Best Series of Posts
