Month: June 2010

Take Our Jobs

Agriculture in the United States is dependent on an immigrant workforce. Three-quarters of all crop workers working in American agriculture were born outside the United States. According to government statistics, since the late 1990s, at least 50% of the crop workers have not been authorized to work legally in the United States.

We are a nation in denial about our food supply. As a result the UFW has initiated the “Take Our Jobs” campaign.

Farm workers are ready to train citizens and legal residents who wish to replace them in the field, we will use our knowledge and staff to help connect the unemployed with farm employers. Just fill out the form to the right and continue on to the request for job application.

There you go, Tea Klan. All yours, and training is included. We can also put you to work building Rand Paul’s underground electric fence.

Take Our Jobs

Now it can be told. The story about [McChrystal] voting for Obama is not contrived. He is a political liberal. He is a social liberal. He banned Fox News from the television sets in his headquarters. Yes, really.

Marc Ambinder. What?
Wait, WHAT?

Blather in the Wild

Bob Somerby notes it too:

Question: Have you seen any stories about the way the heat wave proves that global warming is happening? We ask because of the lunacy that occurred when it snowed in D.C. this year.

[…]

There has been no nonsense this week—and that, of course, is good. But in these well-twinned weather events, we can’t help seeing the shape of American politics over the past forty years. One tribe has broadcast well-known bits of nonsense: Socialized medicine has failed wherever it’s been tried! The Social Security trust fund has already been spent! If we lower tax rates, we get extra revenue! In the absence of active attempts at rebuttal, such nonsense has been quite effective. Claims of this type have driven American politics, as in the past year’s debate about the Obama health plan.

Many people believed what they heard about that unusual snow in D.C. This week, it’s been very hot in D.C. Thankfully, not a word has been said.

I tend to agree up to a point, in that it is intellectually comfortable to see a lack of foolishness in the discourse. But, by the same token, you cannot win a the larger game you refuse to play the smaller one. And, let’s face it, The Democrat categorically refuses to use a convenient heat wave (or, for that matter, any other politically useful event) to make the GOP an object of derision; the GOP and its media enablers have no such compunction about using a convenient snow storm, oil spill, natural disaster, and or terrorist attack. It’s all about messaging and inoculation. The first thing low information voters should think about when faced with some future snowstorm-related attacks on Democrats should be some Democrat pointing out the fact that it’s hot today in an amusing way that demeans and debases some particularly idiotic, utterly predictable GOP talking point.
Neither today’s heat or last winter’s freak snowstorms have much if anything to do with global warming per se; but you cannot simply grin and bear an attack, no matter how ridiculous, and hope that the truth will out because you have the facts on your side.

The facts do not matter.

I said: hot out there.

Average high for Boston today? 79°F.

Temperature right this very second? 88°F

The same can be said for most if not all of the eastern seaboard of Our Great Republic.

This must be extremely embarrassing for the global warming deniers. I’m already sick of the blanket coverage of this heat and how embarrassing it is for them. Such blather is sufficiently prevalent that probably one half of one degree of this heat is directly attributable to B-roll of eggs frying on pavement.

…military rules and traditions [allow] very little public criticism of civilian leadership in order to ensure that political and strategic disagreement doesn’t curdle into a culture of opposition among the people with all the weapons. McChrystal was clearly lax on policing criticism within his command, but when the system was made aware of that failure, the system worked. You did not see politically disgruntled generals rallying around McChrystal.
Instead, what you saw was David Petraeus taking a command that amounts to a demotion from his current post and could destroy his reputation as a miracle worker. Petraeus’s successes in Iraq gave him a tremendous reputation and credibility as a big, strategic thinker. He could rest on that, retire on that, run for office on that. Instead, Petraeus is going to put that reputation back on the line in service of a war effort that may well be doomed. Why? Well, the civilian who leads the military asked him to, and a soldier obeys.

Ezra Klein, nailing it.
Also interesting to me that the Petraeus move politically neutralizes any credible GOP opposition while also effectively neutralizing Petraeus relative to any vague 2012-based thinking that may have been going on while simultaneously giving the endlessly imbecilic chattering class a bone re: Presidential “toughness.” Masterful.

…now that the enviros have embraced a GHG tax or its cap-and-trade equivalent as the way to deal with global warming, conservative support is nowhere in sight. They’re all too afraid of Grover Norquist.
Remember this the next time a conservative explains how we ought to voucherize public education. The minute that happens, the conservatives will come back and decide that we need to means-test the vouchers. That done, they’ll attack the remaining program as “welfare.”
This is not a group of people it’s possible to do business with.

Mark Kleiman on the ever-moving goalposts that “sensible people” must forever be chasing after.

People who have swimming pools don’t need state parks. If you buy your books at Borders you don’t need libraries. If your kids are in private school, you don’t need K-12.

Unidentified Arizona government employee (as quoted here)

I’m relieved to see that [Bill] Kristol draws the line somewhere –I would have thought his line would be “leading an armed coup,” and even then I wouldn’t be totally confident Kristol would side with Obama over the offending general.

Jonathan Chait on the Stan McChrystal rhubarb.