For those of you who may be wondering how the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is wrong legally, here's the dissenting opinion, which lays it out in great detail, and which -- unlike the majority opinion -- accurately describes the law:
http://beckermanlegal.com/100122citizensunitedJusticeStevensDissent.pdf
The majority opinion is not law, it is a coup d'etat similar to the coup engineered by rightwing Justices in 2000, in Bush v. Gore.
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Talk tonight at 7PM in #NYC: Reviving the Strike: How Working People Can Regain Power and Transform America
Reviving the Strike: How Working People Can Regain Power and Transform America
by Joe Burns
First Tuesday Political Series, hosted by Mark Crispin Miller
McNally Jackson Bookstore
52 Prince St. (b/t Lafayette & Mulberry), NYC
June 7, 2011 — 7:00 p.m.
Danny Schechter hosts Joe Burns, author of Reviving the Strike: How Working People Can Regain Power and Transform America. Joe Burns is a veteran union negotiator, labor lawyer, and a former local union president. For the past decade, he has negotiated labor contracts in the airline and health care industries. He has a law degree from the New York University of Law.
Complete article
Monday, June 6, 2011
"Let them eat salmon" ... the January 2011 state of the union message
The President's State of the Union address was a well crafted speech.
Politically he scored points with it, and the dumbfounded Republicans were unable to mount any kind of attack against it.
That's because the speech could just as well have been delivered by a Republican as by a Democrat.
Basically what I heard was our President:
-mocking the agencies that protect fresh water fish, salt water fish, and the food we eat, from the corporations that would poison them,
-suggesting that the answer to our problems is to magically create more teachers, scientists, and mathematicians to assist those, and other, corporations make even more money,
-giving credence to the long-ago-discredited school of trickledown economics,
-giving credence to the voodoo economics theory that cutting federal expenditures during a financial crisis would somehow be stimulative, when there isn't a single economist in the country who believes that, and
-repeating the oft-mentioned theory that America is the "best" country in the world, because of the ideals upon which our nation was founded, regardless of how far we stray from those ideals in practice.
Ronald Reagan would have been proud, and Bill Clinton no doubt was proud.
Nothing was said about how to keep a roof over the head of the budding little mathematicians, or to feed the young people who would become our future teachers, or to see that they stay out of jail and get medical attention so that they even survive to adulthood, let alone get a "college" education.
Nothing was said about how the federal government -- which last I heard was the place where the President works -- was going to help create jobs.
Nothing was said about the mortgage foreclosure crisis, or homelessness, or unchecked mental illness.
Nothing was said about the fact that it costs money to educate children, and it costs money to keep them safe and healthy.
Nothing was even said about the fact that no amount of money will be able to make up for the loss of the salmon, and the other species which we are poisoning, genetically destroying, and killing.
Was there skill and craftiness in drafting this document? Certainly.
But as for logic, there was about as much as Marie Antoinette's apocryphal response to the problem of the French people not having bread to eat.... "Let them eat cake".
#p2012 -- Twitter hashtag for progressive candidates only. BlueDogs & "centrists" need not apply.
I'm going to use the hashtag #p2012 for progressive candidates running in the 2012 election or upcoming recall and special elections.
I.e., those candidates who deserve our ENTHUSIASTIC support -- financial contributions, knocking on doors, get-out-the-vote efforts, phone banks, rallies, etc.
I am not going to use it indiscriminately for Democrats running for office, just because they happen to be Democrats. If they are Democrats in name only, they will have to find their own hashtag.
And I'm not going to use it for general progressive issues unrelated to candidates running for office. For those tweets I will continue to use #progressive and/or #p2.
It's not always easy to distinguish progressives from the others. E.g., IMHO, Candidate Barack Obama was a progressive, while President Barack Obama is not. Mario Cuomo is a progressive; while the son he raised, Andrew Cuomo, is not.
If you see me use the hashtag for a candidate, and you have evidence that the candidate is not a progressive, please let me know.
Thanks.
(A shortened URL for this post: http://is.gd/k71iQM)
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