Does anybody seriously believe that New Haven's mayor, or the CSB he appointed, would have taken a stand against certifying the firefighter exam results if minorities had performed disproportionately well on it? That New Haven politicians would have argued, for example, that oral examination boards constituted so as ensure that minorities made up 2/3 of each board created a disparate impact against white applicants?
The judgment handed down today by SCOTUS' conservative bloc in Ricci v. DeStefano actually was a remarkably liberal ruling. It's altogether too rare for the Scalia wing to stand up for the common man who's been kicked in the teeth arbitrarily by the powerful.
If you are like me, you are probably feeling nostalgic for the good ol’ days when private was private and public was public. But those two are now getting all mixed together in places like Texas, where you would have thought they knew the difference between the two - and that mixing the two up is to bad effect. I guess it's now the Lame Star State.
I have heard rumors that a federal district court chief judge had so much trouble with the General Services Administration (GSA) - essentially the federal government’s landlord - that he used to issue show cause orders to GSA just to make certain that basic functions, like heat and air conditioning were functioning.
A bit extreme, you may say, but I bet GAO would just love to be able to issue show cause orders to get GSA to stop wasting government money and obey basic contracting rules. A new report - just one of so many GAO reports - gives us the low down on why GSA is just plain lucky that the only power GAO has is to study and report . . . and hope Congress takes real action.
The Post publishes a typically silly look at Democratic activists who are pushing their party's conservative Senators to stop undermining the 'public option' (the very mildest reform proposal that has any chance of substantially improving America's health-care disaster). But in the Post's view, the Democratic obstructionists are 'centrists' and the liberal activists are, well, pointy-headed fools of course.
Neocon Gary Schmitt is in a snit over the US soccer team's unprecedented victory in the FIFA Confederations Cup semifinals against Spain. His rant at the American Enterprise blog perfectly embodies the neoconservative philosophy that knowledge is an impediment to understanding.
Guest commentary by Michael Winship, senior writer for Bill Moyers Journal, crossposted with permission.
Being a total history geek, I confess that there's almost nothing as entertaining to me as a good historic house tour. It's a great way to get a feel for how someone from the past lived his or her life. I realize that this nerdish interest would seem to indicate that conversely, I have no life of my own, but bear with me.
by Dr.SteveB crossposted from Daily Kos with permission.
The answer is less than any other health reform.
Below is a review of excerpts from National and State-based single payer cost studies done from 1991 to 2007. Although compiled by PNHP which advocates for single payer, the actual studies were mostly done by non-partisan independent non-advocates -- by the GAO and the CBO for Congress back in the 1990s, and by independent analytic firms (e.g., The Lewin Group, Mathematica Policy Research Group) for State legislatures in the 2000s.
It may not be politically feasible in 2009 inside the beltway, but it is important to still remember the inconvenient truth that as a matter of economic and health policy, we already know that single payer is best.
Odd country. We keep people we know to be innocent in Guantanamo. Yet, according to a new report by the Government Accountability Office, we let 90% of people on terrorist watch lists buy guns. I assume that’s to let them play a role in constructing a well regulated militia in their neighborhoods.
Last September, during the debate over the federal bailout of Wall Street, politicians that supported the bailout used a certain phrase.
"Our time has run out," said Rep. Spencer Bachus, R-Ala., the ranking Republican on the House Financial Services Committee. "We're going make a decision. There are no other choices, no other alternatives."
Recently I saw the same argument made on DKos concerning the deficit spending and bailouts. It seems like common knowledge at this point. If we hadn't bailed out Wall Street then we would headed into a Depression.
The fact of the matter is that this idea, that we had no choice, is wrong on three different levels.
Almost everything that neocon Fouad Ajami writes is good for a laugh. Typically he serves up a preposterously incoherent mix of half-digested stray facts, heavily larded with a peculiar kind of incomprehension and preening about his own brilliance. His op-ed today in the Wall Street Journal is no exception. Perhaps I've already said too much about this once influential ninny, but it's hard to resist taking a stick to Ajami's latest excretion.
The Washington Post has a report on the official Iranian media's demonization of Mousavi and its allegations that the protesters are "terrorists". Buried deep in the article are a few details about the terrorism allegation. These are curiously circumscribed, however. The Post evidently didn't think it worthwhile to tell its readers that the Iranians were in effect accusing the US of orchestrating the street protests.
Two graduate students at Columbia University, Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco, have published a compelling statistical demonstration that the disputed Iranian vote counts are fraudulent. For example, focusing on the final digits in the vote tallies reported province by province for each of the four presidential candidates, they point out that some numerals are significantly over- or under-represented. The numeral 7 appears 17% of the time as the final digit, whereas the numeral 5 appears only 4% of the time (when on average a numeral should appear 10% of the time). Since the final digit in a large vote tally can be treated as a random occurrence, it's possible to calculate the probability that such large divergences in final-digit frequencies would arise in authentic vote tallies. The authors put that probability at just under 4%. A professional statistician once remarked to me that when an occurrence has a calculated probability of no more than 3 to 4%, it's pretty safe to conclude that the event in question was not random.
There are those that honestly think you can make a sustainable economy based on people buying things they don't need with money they don't have. Then there are those who just want to sucker in the sheeple so they can fleece them one more time.
Finally, there are the sheeple themselves - so scared that they will buy into any feel-good message about Green Shoots that the politicians and media sells them, and even defend it.
What none of these three groups want is for the general public to know what the actual numbers really are.
They don't want me to show you what I am about to show you.
As I've noted from time to time here and elsewhere during the last few years, under George Bush the US began torturing prisoners almost immediately after September 11, 2001. Although the history of this early period in the Bush torture regime remains largely shrouded in secrecy, several clear bits of evidence have been made public. Today's Guardian newspaper adds another piece of evidence – a British government document from January 2002 that discusses what to do about US torture.
This information matters because the early descent into barbarity occurred before the earliest torture memos were produced by the Bush administration. By arguing, preposterously, that international conventions are not binding on the US and that common forms of torture are not indeed torture, these 'legal' opinions were supposed to protect from prosecution anyone who ordered, facilitated, or inflicted torture under Bush. But even the most absurd legal opinion cannot inoculate you retroactively for practices you've already implemented.
The second bill amending the National Labor Relations Act that we’re looking in on is S.1227 / HR 2808 A bill to amend the National Labor Relations Act to protect employer rights.
Thank goodness someone is worried about employers in these trying economic times. Really. I mean that. They have a lot on their plates what with banks folding and not lending money. And what with orders tanking. And what with having to tell employees the bad news, that they have no jobs.
So I am so happy that Senator DeMint of South Carolina and Representative Steve King from Iowa’s 5th District are taking action to protect employers. After all, if they can help pull employers out of their doldrums, then employees can be back at work, making money, and supporting their families and themselves.
One of the issues presented by the RAISE Bill is exclusive representation. That is, under the NLRA, the union chosen by the employees by majority vote or recognized by the employer as the majority representative of the workers, is the exclusive representative of all the employees in the bargaining unit.
Although employees are allowed to discuss problems and even reach resolutions of them with the employer, those resolutions cannot trump the terms of the collective bargaining agreement.
Nothing was more predictable than that the Right would respond to an effort to amend the National Labor Relations Act by offering their own amendments - either to kill the bill or for horse trading.
Here is the first of those bills I will examine - the RAISE Act, introduced by Senator David Vitter (R-LA) and Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA), the Rewarding Achievement and Incentivizing Successful Employees Act AKA the “RAISE Act” H.R. 2732/ S. 1184.
First: Do you have a pulse? You are reading this, so I will assume the answer is "Yes". If so, then you have probably heard about the Employee Free Choice Act even though you may not know what all its provisions are, particularly any of its provisions beyond representation based on signing cards in addition to representation based on a secret ballot election.
But did you know that this year we have a bumper crop of other bills to amend the NLRA, including proposals by Republicans eager to amend this country's fundamental law on employee rights to support one another, union organization, and collective bargaining?
As you might expect, the bills introduced by the Republicans are not friendly amendments, nor are they friendly to worker rights, unions, or collective bargaining.
A commentary by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship. Reprinted with permission.
You know by now that in Washington, DC, on Wednesday, an elderly white supremacist and anti-Semite named James W. von Brunn allegedly walked into the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum with a .22-caliber rifle and killed a security guard before being brought down himself. He's 88 years old, with a long record of hatred and paranoid fantasies about the Illuminati and a Global Zionist state. How bitter the bile that has curdled for so many decades.
Rev. Bob Enyart, a pastor at Denver Bible Church who proudly refers to himself as “America’s most popular self-proclaimed right-wing, religious fanatic, homophobic, anti-choice talk show host” was sentenced to nine days in the city pokey after refusing to pay a $400 fine for trespassing on the Focus campus.
Once upon a time, when Colorado GOP kingpin Dick Wadhams was referred to as “Rove 2.0”, the Las Animas political operative was on a fast track to manage a presidential campaign.
U.S. Sen. George Allen's racist "macaca" gaffe uttered at a Virginia re-election campaign stop may have derailed then-campaign manager Wadham's direct trajectory toward the Big Kahuna. But long ties to a darkhorse 2012 Republican presidential candidate may give him another shot at a run at the White House.
The contentious transfer of two Colorado-based Exempla hospitals to a Catholic health care network is likely to further shrink comprehensive health care services for Denver-area patients because they violate church doctrine.
Local patients seeking reproductive health care or termination of invasive life support could soon face health care professionals invoking conscience clauses, should the transfer of Exempla Lutheran Hospital in Wheat Ridge and Exempla Good Samaritan Hospital in Lafayette to the Kansas-based Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth Health System be approved.
A guest commentary by Michael Winship of PBS' "Bill Moyers Journal" posted by permission for your reading pleasure:
The sudden reappearance of former Vice President Dick Cheney over the last few months — seeming to emerge from his famous undisclosed location more frequently now than he ever did when he was in office — does not mean six more weeks of winter. But it does bring to mind that classic country and western song, "How Can I Miss You When You Won't Go Away?" Or, maybe, "If You Won't Leave Me, I'll Find Someone Who Will."
In his self-appointed role as voice of the opposition, Mr. Cheney has been playing Nostradamus, gloomily predicting doom if the Obama White House continues to set aside Bush administration policy, setting the
stage for recrimination and finger-pointing should there be another terrorist attack on America.
The national antiabortion group, Susan B. Anthony List, is the recipient of a cool 50 grand courtesy of defeated U.S. Rep. Marilyn Musgrave's campaign fund. The Fort Morgan conservative, who now works for the List's Votes Have Consequences outreach effort, will fund the "Young Leaders" training program, an initiative of the group's separate tax-exempt charitable education foundation.
That organizational do-si-do may allow Musgrave to effectively skirt a federal campaign finance rule that prohibits candidates from donating unused war chests to their employers.
The risk of long-delayed health insurance reform collapsing under its own weight could come from an unlikely faction — the political Left.
That sinking reality was in full voice Wednesday at a Denver town hall forum featuring Howard Dean, the former Democratic National Committee chairman, ex-Vermont governor and a physician.
The May 31 murder of Wichita physician George Tiller may hold a creepy significance for militant antiabortion protesters in the same manner that Adolph Hitler's birthday has been exploited by white supremacists to wreak racist mayhem.
Thanks to bigchin on Daily Kos for this video - well worth the 4 minutes it takes to listen to it. I wish I had a congressional representative as bright as Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fl)'s big toe.
Unbossed was founded in 1897 by poor, but honest, immigrants. It flourished during the turn of the century -- marching with the suffragists and helping organize labor unions -- only to wither during the Great Depression.
