![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Suddenly caught up? - 29-30 March 2011
Mar. 30th, 2011 10:23 amMorning, everyone. Today we begin with an explanation as to whay an author removed herself from an anthology - her love story was deemed unacceptable and would have to have its pairing changed to something heteronormative, a decision made entirely by the editor for the anthology. After a non-apology from the editor to the author about the situation, the publishers stood behind the editor while trying to make it look like they washed their hands of the issue. Suffice to say, a lot of other authors dropped the anthology in protest, considering the editor continued to be employed and working on anthologies without any apparent discipline over this matter.
Japan's business lobby has indicated it would not fight the government if the government chose to scrap a planned reduction in the corporate tax rate. Elsewhere, the United States Environmental Protection Agency notes the increase in radioactivity on the west coast of the country, says it's to be expected. Those with paanaoia about such things will probably watch their panic rise with the isotopes.
President Obama took to the national airwaves to defend his choice to send US troops into Libya, after some juggling with the networks occurred to make sure the President didn't interrupt Prime Time with his talking. Even though he now gave the speech everyone was clamoring for, the conservative columnists are not satisfied and calaimed that this was the speech he should have given a week ago or claiming the Administration is running mostly on luck without any sort of cohoerent strategy or policy or otherise insist that necessary questions remain unanswered.
A worker for the TSA was fired during her probationary period after a large amount of small complaints appeared in her personnel file, all starting after a different co-worker alleged that the probationary worker's religious practices had caused her harm. From the evidence and testimony provided, it looks like the religion, as well as the refusal of the practitioner to do 101 work with the complaining co-worker, had a lot to do with the swift deterioration of the workplace environment that followed as well as the increase in complaints. And that's in New York, a supposedly liberal place regarding religion.
In Wisconsin, Judge Maryann Sumi says "Did you not understand the words coming out of my mouth?" and re-orders a stoppage of implementation of the still-likely-in-violation-of-Open-Meetings-law bill the Republicans passed in the middle of the night after supposedly making it non-fiscal. In response, the Dane County Republicans said what the conservative movement has been thinking for a very long time - they accused the judge of being an activist liberal more interested in keeping her liberal friends in her liberal county, who use tactics like keying cars instead of logic to get their way, than in actually enforcing the law and the Constitution, and that she has no business at all injecting herself into this process, because Republicans consulted with the nonpartisan office and made sure it was legal, and so it must be legal. Well, at least they're finally being honest about what they think. It's better than the lies and deceptions used as the smokescreen behind and in front of many of these laws. And the current administration seems to believe that even this reiterated order won't stop them at all from implementing the law. I suspect the next thing out of the judge's mouth, should this administration continue on their current path, will be the equivalent of "English, motherfucker! Do you speak it?" and a bench warrant for contempt of the court. (I can hope there's an arrest warrant for the breaking of the law, too, but that's dreaming.)
Florida Governor Rick Scott just ordered at-least-quarterly drug testing of all state employees...and his wife conveniently owns lots of shares in a drug-testing company. How...convenient, as well as possibly being a severe violation of the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches.
And in Michigan, emboldened by their friends in Wisconsin, the conservative think tank The Mackinac Center (pronounced mack-in-AAAAACK for what they're doing, not mack-in-aw, which would be the correct pronunciation were they not trying something so specatacular) for Public Policy has requested, through the equivalent of FOIA, any e-mails sent by labor studies professors employed at the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, and Wayne State University hat contain discussion of Wisconsin, Governor Walker, or... Rachel Maddow, whose coverage of the issues in Wisconsin and elsewhere has been both stellar and dogged. Because one is not supposed to use Company resources to advocate for political things (at least, not those things the Company doesn't want you to advocate for), they want to see if they can't say, "See! See! Liberal professors using school resources improperly! They're biased! Burn them! Burn THEEEEEEEEEM!" Or a similar complaint. I guess I need to brush up on where the divide between "protected speech" and "company can control your speech" really is.
American Telephone and Telegraph is engaging in active censorship of messages linking to websites against their planned capping of bandwidth usage on all of their customers that demonstrate AT&T do not actually have the bandwidth problems they're claiming.
Syria's cabinet resigned under pressure from protesters, even as counter-protests appeared to support them. That doesn't necessarily change things all that much, as the person who holds most of the power is still in place.
Growing pressure over the incompetence in an attempted gun-trafficking sting may have several members of BATF called to the carpet to explain themselves.
The State of Mississippi is perhaps one of the more egregiously hostile, but they're certainly not alone in the way they treat HIV as a stigma rather than as a treatable condition. Representative Stearns would like to make it easier for places that want to give you religious or misleading information about pregnancy and abortion easier to purchase ultrasound machines, and to make it so that anyone buying machines under such grant money must give out his preferred message on abortion as well.
Finally, wonder why several of the United States are facing budget deficits? Perhaps its because the people in charge in boom times decided to pass giant tax cuts, especially for corporations, and then followed through with them when the economy tanked, leaving themselves short important revenues for several years. It's not that they spent too much, it's that they didn't course-correct on tax breaks when they needed to.
In opinions, Ms. Charen finds a way to blame the tax code for the fact that GE and several other highly-profitable companies are able to avoid paying taxing while reporting record amounts of profits. Some of her suggestions, such as reforming the code and making it more simple, actually do make sense and would eb good to implement. But some blame should also be placed on GE for their continued willingness to lie to the government about their profits while telling the truth to their shareholders.
Ms. Dale says the Chinese people rely on broadcasts such as Voice of America and the BBC for accurate news and information in their highly restricted company, and thus a budget designed to cut their broadcasting is a bad idea. Wait, so now conservatives are supporting public broadcasting when it suits their purposes?
Mr. Hansen calls everyone agitating over the anti-union legislation in the various states the equivalent of spoiled children throwing temper tantrums over entitlements, who just need tough discipline and someone who won't back down to show them where their place really is and put them there. He also asserts that most people find this childish tantrum appalling. We suggest he checks the polls again on that matter. Also, collective bargaining does not equal extortion, unless you're in some sort of fantasy world. I find it very interesting that the attitude of the conservative movement towards unions has consistently been one of "Shut up. You already have it too good and deserve to be taken down a peg so that you're more on par with the private sector" instead of "People! Our conditions suck fantastic! We should be trying to get things as good as those people have. Why don't we demand more of our company?" The comment section focuses on how spoiled children are these days, and nobody disciplines them, and not on the actual point being made, which should clue Mr. Hansen in that he's not making his point properly, since it's able to be derailed so easily, with an unspoken assumption at the end that B follows A.
Staying on the "nanny state" idea, Mr. Williams says teh Census proves that people don't like nanny states, because they're moving from places like Massachusettes, California, and Michigan, Ohio, and Illinois all Nanny States, to places like Nevada, which are more business-friendly. For one thing, Mr. Williams only includes places like Michigan because they've been places with historically strong union presence, which is not at all any sort of social democratic indicator, just that they're People He Doesn't Like, so they must be Nanny Statists. Not one word of the fact that corporations are relocating to places they find more friendly, and dragging what little jobs there are with them, which means that people who want to stay emplyoed have to follow those jobs. Furthermore, he says that the riots were the reason for Detroit being abandoned...by black people, and the liberal policies fo Detroit continue to drive away the smart black people the city needs to revitalize itself. No mention at all of the White Flight from Detroit, or incidents like how the suburbs wanted to vote against letting the bus services run to them from Detroit because they were certain black men from Detroit would hop the bus, rob the suburbanites blind, and then jump back on the bus to take their ill-gotten gains back to Detroit. No, to him it's clear that black people are running away from Detroit because it has too generous of welfare policies and too liberal of a political view. We wonder how much time he's actually spent in Michigan before coming to such a conclusion.
Last for tonight, federal regulators are coming to collect samples of dead dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico, and meet the soldiers in Afghanistan who were behind the photos, and the grisly killing, of Afghan civilians - possibly for sport or some ritual dehumanization of the people of Afghanistan.
Japan's business lobby has indicated it would not fight the government if the government chose to scrap a planned reduction in the corporate tax rate. Elsewhere, the United States Environmental Protection Agency notes the increase in radioactivity on the west coast of the country, says it's to be expected. Those with paanaoia about such things will probably watch their panic rise with the isotopes.
President Obama took to the national airwaves to defend his choice to send US troops into Libya, after some juggling with the networks occurred to make sure the President didn't interrupt Prime Time with his talking. Even though he now gave the speech everyone was clamoring for, the conservative columnists are not satisfied and calaimed that this was the speech he should have given a week ago or claiming the Administration is running mostly on luck without any sort of cohoerent strategy or policy or otherise insist that necessary questions remain unanswered.
A worker for the TSA was fired during her probationary period after a large amount of small complaints appeared in her personnel file, all starting after a different co-worker alleged that the probationary worker's religious practices had caused her harm. From the evidence and testimony provided, it looks like the religion, as well as the refusal of the practitioner to do 101 work with the complaining co-worker, had a lot to do with the swift deterioration of the workplace environment that followed as well as the increase in complaints. And that's in New York, a supposedly liberal place regarding religion.
In Wisconsin, Judge Maryann Sumi says "Did you not understand the words coming out of my mouth?" and re-orders a stoppage of implementation of the still-likely-in-violation-of-Open-Meetings-law bill the Republicans passed in the middle of the night after supposedly making it non-fiscal. In response, the Dane County Republicans said what the conservative movement has been thinking for a very long time - they accused the judge of being an activist liberal more interested in keeping her liberal friends in her liberal county, who use tactics like keying cars instead of logic to get their way, than in actually enforcing the law and the Constitution, and that she has no business at all injecting herself into this process, because Republicans consulted with the nonpartisan office and made sure it was legal, and so it must be legal. Well, at least they're finally being honest about what they think. It's better than the lies and deceptions used as the smokescreen behind and in front of many of these laws. And the current administration seems to believe that even this reiterated order won't stop them at all from implementing the law. I suspect the next thing out of the judge's mouth, should this administration continue on their current path, will be the equivalent of "English, motherfucker! Do you speak it?" and a bench warrant for contempt of the court. (I can hope there's an arrest warrant for the breaking of the law, too, but that's dreaming.)
Florida Governor Rick Scott just ordered at-least-quarterly drug testing of all state employees...and his wife conveniently owns lots of shares in a drug-testing company. How...convenient, as well as possibly being a severe violation of the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches.
And in Michigan, emboldened by their friends in Wisconsin, the conservative think tank The Mackinac Center (pronounced mack-in-AAAAACK for what they're doing, not mack-in-aw, which would be the correct pronunciation were they not trying something so specatacular) for Public Policy has requested, through the equivalent of FOIA, any e-mails sent by labor studies professors employed at the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, and Wayne State University hat contain discussion of Wisconsin, Governor Walker, or... Rachel Maddow, whose coverage of the issues in Wisconsin and elsewhere has been both stellar and dogged. Because one is not supposed to use Company resources to advocate for political things (at least, not those things the Company doesn't want you to advocate for), they want to see if they can't say, "See! See! Liberal professors using school resources improperly! They're biased! Burn them! Burn THEEEEEEEEEM!" Or a similar complaint. I guess I need to brush up on where the divide between "protected speech" and "company can control your speech" really is.
American Telephone and Telegraph is engaging in active censorship of messages linking to websites against their planned capping of bandwidth usage on all of their customers that demonstrate AT&T do not actually have the bandwidth problems they're claiming.
Syria's cabinet resigned under pressure from protesters, even as counter-protests appeared to support them. That doesn't necessarily change things all that much, as the person who holds most of the power is still in place.
Growing pressure over the incompetence in an attempted gun-trafficking sting may have several members of BATF called to the carpet to explain themselves.
The State of Mississippi is perhaps one of the more egregiously hostile, but they're certainly not alone in the way they treat HIV as a stigma rather than as a treatable condition. Representative Stearns would like to make it easier for places that want to give you religious or misleading information about pregnancy and abortion easier to purchase ultrasound machines, and to make it so that anyone buying machines under such grant money must give out his preferred message on abortion as well.
Finally, wonder why several of the United States are facing budget deficits? Perhaps its because the people in charge in boom times decided to pass giant tax cuts, especially for corporations, and then followed through with them when the economy tanked, leaving themselves short important revenues for several years. It's not that they spent too much, it's that they didn't course-correct on tax breaks when they needed to.
In opinions, Ms. Charen finds a way to blame the tax code for the fact that GE and several other highly-profitable companies are able to avoid paying taxing while reporting record amounts of profits. Some of her suggestions, such as reforming the code and making it more simple, actually do make sense and would eb good to implement. But some blame should also be placed on GE for their continued willingness to lie to the government about their profits while telling the truth to their shareholders.
Ms. Dale says the Chinese people rely on broadcasts such as Voice of America and the BBC for accurate news and information in their highly restricted company, and thus a budget designed to cut their broadcasting is a bad idea. Wait, so now conservatives are supporting public broadcasting when it suits their purposes?
Mr. Hansen calls everyone agitating over the anti-union legislation in the various states the equivalent of spoiled children throwing temper tantrums over entitlements, who just need tough discipline and someone who won't back down to show them where their place really is and put them there. He also asserts that most people find this childish tantrum appalling. We suggest he checks the polls again on that matter. Also, collective bargaining does not equal extortion, unless you're in some sort of fantasy world. I find it very interesting that the attitude of the conservative movement towards unions has consistently been one of "Shut up. You already have it too good and deserve to be taken down a peg so that you're more on par with the private sector" instead of "People! Our conditions suck fantastic! We should be trying to get things as good as those people have. Why don't we demand more of our company?" The comment section focuses on how spoiled children are these days, and nobody disciplines them, and not on the actual point being made, which should clue Mr. Hansen in that he's not making his point properly, since it's able to be derailed so easily, with an unspoken assumption at the end that B follows A.
Staying on the "nanny state" idea, Mr. Williams says teh Census proves that people don't like nanny states, because they're moving from places like Massachusettes, California, and Michigan, Ohio, and Illinois all Nanny States, to places like Nevada, which are more business-friendly. For one thing, Mr. Williams only includes places like Michigan because they've been places with historically strong union presence, which is not at all any sort of social democratic indicator, just that they're People He Doesn't Like, so they must be Nanny Statists. Not one word of the fact that corporations are relocating to places they find more friendly, and dragging what little jobs there are with them, which means that people who want to stay emplyoed have to follow those jobs. Furthermore, he says that the riots were the reason for Detroit being abandoned...by black people, and the liberal policies fo Detroit continue to drive away the smart black people the city needs to revitalize itself. No mention at all of the White Flight from Detroit, or incidents like how the suburbs wanted to vote against letting the bus services run to them from Detroit because they were certain black men from Detroit would hop the bus, rob the suburbanites blind, and then jump back on the bus to take their ill-gotten gains back to Detroit. No, to him it's clear that black people are running away from Detroit because it has too generous of welfare policies and too liberal of a political view. We wonder how much time he's actually spent in Michigan before coming to such a conclusion.
Last for tonight, federal regulators are coming to collect samples of dead dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico, and meet the soldiers in Afghanistan who were behind the photos, and the grisly killing, of Afghan civilians - possibly for sport or some ritual dehumanization of the people of Afghanistan.
