Grand Slam Ari

Ari Fleisher is exactly right, anyone on the left who questioned that Bush got the most votes in Florida and actually won the 2000 election is just as crazy as anyone on the right who questions whether Obama was born in the United States. The parallels are startling.

Moreover, Ari does the double when he rightfully points out that absolutely nobody ever criticized anyone who questioned the legitimacy of the Bush administration.

Ari is right again when he points out that it was the tactics of the left that divided the nation and frustrated Bush's desire to unite us under his kindly rule.

And has any man ever been more right than Ari when he points out the scientific fact that for every lulu on the right there are 1.8 lulus on the left?

Screw You Pegasus Pizza

Oregon's minimum wage won't be going up this year. Which is fine. We fine citizens of this great state passed a ballot measure (the horror!) that ties the minimum wage to the cost of living. If the cost of living goes up, so does the minimum wage. This year we had some deflation here in the state of Oregon, so the minimum wage is rocking steady.

All well and good. Except that the media (that's right, I am a wingnut railing about the media. yip. yip.) can't report on the goddamn minimum wage without digging up some business owner that is willing to advance, yet again, the thoroughly discredited idea that an increase in the minimum wage leads to a loss of jobs.

Tara Reader, a manager at Pegasus Pizza, near the University of Oregon campus, said she was glad that the minimum wage wouldn’t change next year, and she wishes it would stay put beyond that.

“The minimum wage increases should come to an end, and given Lane County’s unemployment rate, I think it’s even more important now,” she said.

“For companies like Wal-Mart, a yearly minimum wage increase doesn’t affect them,” Reader said. “But when you’re a small business, and the only costs you can control are labor costs, it ends up being significant. It can be a devastating blow to small business.”

Of course a small increase to the minimum wage can just destroy a small business. I believe this is why they are called "small" businesses. What really gets my goat is that Ms. Reader goes on to say that actually an increase to the minimum would have no effect at Pegasus, as all their workers are paid above the minimum because they are such valued employees. My God, if you think the minimum wage is crap, why are you decrying its potential increase? You run a small business, you have to know what crap this argument is.

Let's look at the numbers here.

Oregon's minimum wage is $8.40 an hour. Let's say the economy recovers and a pizza joint like Pegasus (well not Pegasus) is facing a 4% increase to the minimum wage. This means your dough slinger would be pulling down $8.74 an hour, or $.34 more than he's making now. Will Poor Man's Pie go under? Well, let's assume that PMP is open 12 hours a day and needs an average of 5 employees to keep the masses fed. That's 60 person hours a day. With that body-blow 4% increase to the minimum wage, that's $20.40 a day out of the till in labor costs. My God, PMP would have to sell one more large pepperoni with extra cheese per day just to cover that! Let's hope that newly recovered economy can cause such an increase in business.

But wait Dave3544, you're thinking, it's not just increased labor costs. What if PMP was thinking about adding crew, increasing employment in Lane County and providing a solid job for a teen who needs spending cash a struggling father who just wants to keep his youngins in Pampers-brand diapers?

Well, in the first place, pizza joints just don't add crew for the hell of it. It's not like the owner of PMP was sitting in his mansion surrounded by luxury goods thinking, "Well I've got everything I need, why don't I share the wealth by hiring a minimum wage employee I don't really need, this way everyone can slack off." No, he either has the business to necessitate hiring another employee or he's thinking about expanding. Either way, he's thinking that he can make more money than it costs by hiring a minimum wage worker - it's called capitalism (oh, and exploitation!)

If PMP pizza owner is thinking about adding an employee, one has to wonder if the increase in the minimum wage by $.34 an hour is really going to be what compels him to hold off on that decision. Is his margin really so narrow that $.34 an hour is the make-or-breaker here?

Now, I will acknowledge that there are probably businesses out there that can't readily expand to the equivalent of one pizza a day. They may have hundreds of person hours to worry about. Maybe they need to exploit their workers down to every last penny in order to just stay alive. Fine. But if that is the case, then the Register-Guard needs to go find one of those business owners and Tara Reader of the Pegasus Pizza should stop babbling bullshit talking points that have nothing to do with her business.

Stale Talking Points - 50% Off

Just think, not to long ago what follows passed for insightful political commentary. Look how flat it falls now:

Socialism doesn’t work

I would like to correct Dave Forstrom’s assertion that “some socialist things work” (letters, March 24).

Socialism in every part of the world has always and will always fail. It takes away a person’s motivation to better themselves and others. It takes away personal responsibility and accountability. It forces people to rely on the government to provide many of the services that private industry can efficiently provide.

Not only that, but government fails at almost everything they do barring national security against foreign and domestic enemies. That’s all our founding fathers wanted out of government and that’s how America became the empire that she is. Forstrom provides a few examples of government programs and claims that they work. I beg to differ.

It has been reported that 30 to 50 cents of every dollar Medicare receives goes to waste. Social Security is going bankrupt, the post office is losing billions of dollars a year, Amtrak is bailed out year after year with taxpayer dollars, OLCC costs more to run than it earns, public schools are failing to educate and are controlled by teachers unions and it takes four public works employees to do the job of one.

All of the above can be run by private institutions more efficiently and more effectively.

Yes, government can provide services but, outside of a very few, limited areas, they just cannot compete against private companies. As the great Ronald Reagan once said, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is our problem.”

Mike Hoselton

Eugene

On Ladders and Wells and Morals and Values

Gob bless Jonah Goldberg.* He really does think that there's an equivalent between Bush using the crisis of 9-11 to invade Iraq, devastate the American military, kill 750,000 Iraqi citizens, destroy US credibility around the world, increase terrorism and hatred against the US and Obama's using the economic crisis to give people health care, provide them education, and help them clean up their environment. In fact, he seems to believe that Bush is morally superior because he lied about using the opportunity of crisis he was presented.

Remember, it is the Republican party that is the party of morals and values and Goldberg is one of their leading thinkers.

*Goldberg's opening analogy is, of course, flawed. He posits that a child has fallen down a well and Obama is refusing to lower a rescue ladder until the child's parents agree to paint Obama's house. A much, much, much better analogy is that Obama is lowering a rescue ladder, but also suggesting that while the child is climbing out, everyone help build a fence around the well to prevent this from happening again. I know that Goldberg can't begin to see what health care, education, and the environment have to do with the economy, but then that's why he and his party's ideas have failed so spectacularly.

I Wasn't Going to Say Anything, But...

We all struggled with the Obama birth certificate story. There was just so much to trouble us there. But I didn't say anything, mostly, I think, because I was blinded by his celebrity and my hatred of George W. Bush. Now we have the flub of the constitutionally-mandated oath of office. He didn't say the right words. He didn't say them! He's not president. At the very least, he violated the Constitution, which I believe is an impeachable offense. I find I have to say it, IMPEACH OBAMA!

I'm kidding, of course. Fox News anchor Chris Wallace is not.

As long as we're here, despite assertions otherwise, nobody on the left has said that Obama's election signals the end of racism in America. Saying such a thing is silly and is an automatic disqualifier for "lefty" status. This is a fantasy invented by the wingnuts so they can cry about it every time Obama does or says anything that has anything to do with race. C&L nails Beck and Malkin on it, I will add Goldberg. Obama's election did not end racism or demonstrate that ameliorative action is no longer needed or any such thing. It is an amazing symbol of the progress that has been made since darker days, but that it is still "amazing" just means we have a long way to go.

It All Circles Around to Vietnam

I was listening to the Oregon Public Broadcasting program "Think Out Loud" the other day and they had on two McCain representatives who are veterans to talk about McCain's military experience and his current war policies. Unfortunately, neither was a very solid speaker, jumping from talking point to talking point, including dissing on Obama for refusing to say the pledge of allegiance (sigh).

The bit I caught involved talking about how McCain's Vietnam experience have prepared him to take over the War in Iraq.

There was the interesting assertion that those who have seen combat from ground level have some innate sense of war that allows them to make more correct decisions about war later on. This comment, unfortunately, went unchallenged, but I'd love to hear the rationale.

Then there was the assertion that men who have seen combat are more likely to know the horror of war and be more reticent to get involved in war. The host asked how this assertion squared with McCain's pledge to increase troop levels in Iraq verses Obama and Clinton's intentions to begin withdrawal of troops. The responder started rambling about how Iraq and Vietnam are two completely different wars, incomparable in his mind, because, you see Johnson was trying to appeal to the hawks and the doves at the same time, so he was...at this point the host cut him off and repeated her question about the apparent contradiction. The guest responded with, and I am not making this up, that the way he saw it was that all the talk of withdrawal would embolden the terrorists, just like it did the North Vietnamese.

At that point, I switched the channel.

But I expect we're going to hear a lot more about how John knows war! meaning both that he is the most likely to win the war and the most likely to withdraw the troops as soon as possible.

Racism and the Democratic Party

It is obvious to me that the main hurdle to Obama winning the presidency is that he is black. This is in no way a shocking statement. Despite desperate attempts by the right (and the Clinton camp) to argue that Obama's race is somehow an advantage, it is not. There are still a healthy number of racists in this country.

While the GOP has made some incredible efforts to capture the racist vote in the last few decades, it is a sad fact that some of these people still reside in the Democratic party. I find it appalling and deeply depressing that there are people in the Democratic party that are taking the racist Democratic vote into account when considering this presidential election. I find it depressing that something like 70% of the people in Ohio who identified race as an issue important to them voted for Clinton. That the Clinton campaign did not immediately repudiate these voters further depresses me.

I understand that some people think politics is about winning at all costs. Maybe it seems overly silly to expect a candidate to repudiate supporters just because their views are vile. But it also seems to me that a politician who would accept that a certain percentage of support will come from racist hate is not the kind of politician I want to represent me.

Politics is not all about winning. Politics can, and should be, about morality. I identify with the left-wing of the Democratic party because the things they believe in are the same things I believe in. I believe that things like equal rights, solidarity, fighting poverty, the environment, etc. are deeply important. My belief in these things shapes how I live my life. It causes me pain to ignore these values when I vote on who my leaders will be. I don't want to ignore these things. So it is not about doing whatever it takes to win. I can bend, but only so far, before I break. We should not sacrifice fundamental principles in order to win any one election.

And when our party quietly ignores the racists among us, or courts them, we open the door to the kind of argument that we are seeing from the Republicans. Polls show that should Obama win the election, then Democrats from key areas of the nation plan to vote for McCain. These Democrats commonly called Reagan Democrats are white men, unionists, from the rust-belt. We all know why they will vote for McCain. They are, by and large, very narrow men who will not vote for a black man. Karl Rove, however, is advancing the idea that the will vote for McCain because of "patriotism." Apparently, it is not the color of Obama's skin that will doom him, but the content of his lapel.

Causing me even more pain is that these people are labor people. If the Democratic party has a shameful history on the race issue, one that has certainly not been absolved by the last 44 years, then Big Labor has even more to apologize for. We can try to pretend like the opportunistic organizing of public employees, which include women and minorities in high numbers, somehow makes up for past deficiencies, but it does not. Given these twin histories, Labor has to, has to go out of its way to reject the racists in our midst. Even if we desperately need them. Yes, it would be painful. But they is no way we can escape our legacy without pain. I cannot help but believe that the Democratic party and the labor movement would be stronger for it.

But, because our leaders have, apparently, decided that the racists within the party must be appeased at all costs, no one will call bullshit on arguments about patriotism or arrogance or service or experience. It appears that we are not going to have a national conversation on race, unless it involves condemning angry black men, as the chance of securing the White House is more important than the struggle for justice.

GOP Talking Points

On the GAO and "Patraeus" Reports, you are allowed to hold one of two positions.

1. The benchmarks are artificial and the product of yesterday's thinking. You always opposed these benchmarks. The benchmarks are "top down" and "centralized." You are not a pussy, so you are not actually allowed to use the phrases "from the ground up" or "organic," but you can certainly let your listener come to those words on his or her own. There is progress being made.

2. If your opponent should assert that there is no progress being made and for whatever reason you are not allowed to use talking point number one (perhaps you host some sort of media show that keeps transcripts), then accuse your opponent of not waiting for General Patraeus' Report. Accuse him or her of being a leftist who already has his or her mind made up. Keep asserting that progress is being made because General Patraeus says progress is being made.

Since both of these talking points ignore all facts and are inherently and internally contradictory, it is recommended that you team with a partner and deploy both tactics simultaneously and loudly.

REMEMBER! Democrats are scared of men in uniforms. When in doubt repeat "General Patraeus, General Patraeus, General Patraeus," at no time will any of them dare dispute anything we tell him to say.

Another GOP Talking Point

Here's why comparing the failure of the Iraqi parliament to get anything done and the failure of the Democratic Congress to get anything done is offensive: The United States is not paying billions of dollars and sacrificing the bodies and lives of men and women in order to create "political space" to get things done in Washington.

I've resisted the bullshit argument that the US won the war, but the Iraqis couldn't keep the peace. This is bullshit. But, also bullshit is that these motherfuckers plan on taking August off. So we're going to spend a month of treasure and lives creating safe space in Baghdad while these mofos will be on vacation.

This fact could be used be the Dems to argue that we already know what the September progress report will say, given that there will be very little political movement between now and then. Will they be able to pull this off, or will our 30 hours of debate be the Reps attacking the Dems for failing to accomplish anything either and the Dems weakly coming back at them?

And while I am ranting, I notice that the Generals have already pushed the date when we'll be able to know if the surge is working to next March. I remember watching the Sunday shows (something I rarely do, because I am not up that early on the West Coast) in early Feb. while I was helping out in Columbus. I was promised that we'd see immediate results with the surge and we'd know by March (2007) if it was working. Then it was early summer, maybe July, 2007. Then the big September report. We'll know in September. We'll see results by September alright. Now, of course, we've learned that September is just a check in. Will we be making progress by September (oh, let me guess "yes.")? Then, we heard that after the September check-in, we'll definitely see progress by December. The end of the year. Might even be able to think about drawing down the troops. Success by December. Now we have next March. Jesus "Fucking" Christ.

Jesus "Fucking" Christ.