Class War?

Who is fighting in Iraq?

Music - Black 47 & UFO

Black 47 - (here for MySpace) joins other Irish acts on UFO - check out the next album coming:

The band will be releasing its twelfth album (and first for UFO) titled Iraq on March 4, 2008. Inspired by friends and fans of the band that have served in Iraq and shared their thoughts and experiences, the album includes a batch of new songs along with several composed by Larry Kirwan over the course of the war. The album overall strives to capture the war through the eyes of the U.S. soldiers serving in it.

Also:

NEW YORK CITY, NY – Steadfast in its opposition to the war since before the invasion, Black 47 presents a dry-eyed view of life in combat on IRAQ its debut for new model indie, United For Opportunity (release date: March 4, 2008). The band hits the campaign trail in February performing across the U.S. and culminating with a St. Patrick's Day release party on their home turf, New York City, at BB Kings.

Recorded at Coney Island's Cyclone Sound in July 2007, IRAQ includes a batch of new songs along with several composed by Larry Kirwan over the course of the war. Inspiration for the characters and stories are very personal, many coming from the point-of-view of fans that served in Iraq and shared their experiences with the band.

Black 47 rarely plays to the converted and their shows have often seethed over the last five years. “Because of our background, we've always had as strong a fan base of right wing cops, firemen and conservatives, as of left wing students, radicals, and the working disaffected; neither side has been afraid to vent its views,” Kirwan dryly notes. “We also take pride in keeping in touch with our fans, many of whom traditionally join the Service as a way to fund their college education or mortgage. Add to that the many who enlisted in response to 9/11, and it's easy to see why we have had no shortage of information from those actually doing the fighting in Iraq.”

Great Romney Double-Talk

Romney, in a FL add:

"My plan will make our economy strong," he continues. "We need to invest in people and businesses with tax cuts that will get us moving again. Washington is broken, but we can fix it with real conservative change."

(emphasis mine)

According to Miriam-Webster:

conservative: "tending or disposed to maintain existing views, conditions, or institutions "

conservatism: "disposition in politics to preserve what is established" or "the tendency to prefer an existing or traditional situation to change"

Giuliani, at campaign stop, refuses to sign Packers hat

It is all here:

At a campaign stop in this southwest Florida town on Monday, the Republican presidential candidate refused to autograph a white Green Bay Packers cap. The New York Giants face the Packers in the NFC championship game this weekend.

"No, I won't sign that," the former New York City mayor says as he scribbles his name on a series of placards and papers. He has been spending almost every day here before Florida's Jan. 29 primary as it's his best chance to win a state before the Feb. 5 Super Tuesday contests.

Quote of the Day: “It’s tough for people who don’t know their frogs"

It's here, another namesake...

“It’s tough for people who don’t know their frogs,” Commission herpetologist Jeff Hall says.

So Hall and his fellow herpetologists are conducting free frog-call identification workshops to train volunteers, a sort of amphibian prep course.

American Healthcare System Kills 100,000 People Yearly

EDITORIAL: Lack of health plan kills 100,000 a year

A report released last week on the quality of health care in the industrialized world attached numbers to a problem we already recognized.

America's health care system is killing us -- at least 100,000 of us every year.

Researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine reviewed records on preventable deaths from 19 industrial nations and found our health care system to be the worst of the bunch -- well behind countries such as France, Japan and Australia that have universal health care policies.

It's not the quality of American care itself that causes 100,000 unnecessary deaths every year, researcher Ellen Nolte said. It's the inability of patients to get that care.

"I wouldn't say it (the last-place ranking handed to the United States) is a condemnation because I think health care in the U.S. is pretty good if you have access," she said. "But if you don't, I think that's the main problem, isn't it?"

Read the rest here.

Huckabee Quote - Change the Constitution to Add More God:

It's here:

"I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution," Huckabee told a Michigan audience on Monday. "But I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living god. And that's what we need to do -- to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards so it lines up with some contemporary view."

Owens Leaves Assembly...

From the MJS:

Rep. Carol Owens (R-Oshkosh) announced today on the floor of the Assembly she won't seek re-election.
...
"If I hurt your feelings, I apologize, even if you had it coming," Owens said before reciting lines from "My Way," the song popularized by Frank Sinatra.

Question: Did she do the Frank Sinatra or the Sid Vicious version?



She did it her way!

More on Vegas - Worker's Paradise

I started a thought here. Some more below (hat tip to the Chief):

According to "The Coffee Pot Wars," an essay by Annette Bernhardt, Laura Dresser and Eric Hatton in the new Russell Sage Foundation study of low-wage work, the median hourly wage of the American hotel dishwasher in 2000 was $7.45 -- a little better than the housekeeper's $7.09. Even luxury hotels seldom pay their low-end employees much more than the minimum wage. And while wages have stagnated, hours have declined, from 40 a week for low-end hotel workers in 1960 to 31 in 2000. At one hotel they studied, the authors concluded that 60 percent of the kitchen staff held down two jobs.

Garcia holds just one, but his hourly wage at the Luxor is $11.86 -- $4 higher than the industry average. He is paid for 40 hours every week, even if the company actually needs him for fewer. He has family health insurance paid for entirely by his employer. He has a defined-benefit pension. He has three weeks of vacation every year, which he likes to spend hunting in Canada.

Far from a life of quiet desperation, Garcia's seems full of noisy exaltation. On the evening I visit him, three grandchildren are careening around his house, a six-bedroom home built in 1988. Garcia's next-door neighbors are an attorney, a minister and, over the back fence, an air-conditioning mechanic. A legion of his fellow hotel workers inhabits the surrounding blocks.

How did this happen?

Something is right with this picture, so right that in an America where Wal-Mart and a thousand other unnatural shocks drive working-class living standards downward, we can scarcely account for it. The picture is incomprehensible unless you understand the role that a union -- Culinary Workers Local 226, the Las Vegas local of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union (HERE) -- has played in the lives of its 48,000 members, their families and the city as a whole.

Local 226 is probably the largest -- and surely the most remarkable -- local union in the United States. While most unions have been shrinking or struggling to hold their own over the past several decades, and while hotel union membership has declined from 16 percent of the hotel workforce in 1983 to 12 percent in 2000, Local 226 has grown by 30,000 members since its low point in 1988. It has done that by organizing virtually every hotel on the Vegas Strip, so that roughly 90 percent of the jobs in the city's major hotels are unionized. Considering that Nevada is a right-to-work state where employees can work in unionized workplaces without joining the union, this is a breathtaking achievement.

The key is "union density" -- the unionized share of total jobs in a local occupation or industry. The authors of the Russell Sage study conclude that hourly wages in the hotel industry are $3 higher in cities with high union density than they are in ones where it's low. Even in unionized cities, however, the authors write that the union effect is minimal on work schedules or career ladders for such dead-end jobs as housekeeping. "This industry doesn't focus on mobility," one hotel executive told Bernhardt, Dresser and Hatton. "We've done a really poor job of recognizing talent and building our own."

Anyway, read it all.

UW Osh Economics Prof McGee: Universal Healthcare Needed

The entire column is here:

It's this simple – we need some system of universal, mandatory health coverage.

It could be a government run system like in Canada or England, or it could be a mandatory private insurance system like in Massachusetts or Switzerland. But staying with our current hodgepodge makes no sense at all.

Dingo Captured in Winnebago County?

What took much longer for the Jack Zeller family was getting close enough to capture the female Pekinese-Shih-Tzu dog they had fed countless times during much of 2007.

Yes, a wild Pekinese-Shih-Tzu was captured - here's the story.

Another Democratic Victory in New Hampshire?

from the NYTimes:

The four Democratic candidates last night drew about 270,000 votes among them, while the larger G.O.P. field drew about 210,000, or about 60,000 more votes for the Democrats than the Republicans. Maybe this sounds like a small difference to some, but given that fewer than 700,000 New Hampshirites voted in the last general election for president, a 60,000-vote differential in that small state is quite significant.

And even this relative measure fails to capture what a historic night it was for Democrats in New Hampshire.

In the three decades since 1980, there have been four primary years when both the G.O.P. and the Democratic nominations were contested – 1988, 1992, 2000 and 2008. In all three of the previous elections, there were more votes cast in the Republican primaries than in the Democratic primaries. The G.O.P. margin was almost 40,000 votes in 1988 and almost 80,000 votes in 2000. So to see more votes cast in New Hampshire’s Democratic primary last night than in the state’s Republican one — not to mention 60,000 more votes — is almost as historic as seeing a one-two finish by a woman and an African-American.

Las Vegas - Worker's Paradise?

In case you were wondering why there is so much to-do about the Las Vegas Culinary Workers endorsement, the NYTimes cover it here:

My sister was a waitress back east, with two kids and no insurance,? said D. Taylor, a leader of the culinary union. ?She came out here and not only earned a living wage, but got a good health care package for her family."

At the Culinary Training Academy, people learn how to cook, how to make beds, how to speak the language and understand American civics. They also learn how to made a vodka martini and how to cook a white wine reduction sauce ? courtesy of Sterling Burpee, the charismatic chef lured away from one of the Strip?s newest casinos, Wynn Las Vegas. There?s a private chartered school on site, a day care center, and a classroom that processed 25 percent of the new citizens in Nevada last year. It's a sort of Ellis Island for the new service economy.
...
The culinary union long ago made its peace with most of the casinos. And now the casinos work with the union to train all the bartenders, cooks and porters they need to keep the illusion machine running in palaces without daylight or clocks.

The Chief Is Right On

Oshkosh's best blogger tackles the smoking ban. Read it here.

The question is, who is the Chief?

Tomah Journal on VA Clinics

Even more fundamental is whether privatization, and the inevitable profit/loss calculations that come with it, is in the best interests of veterans or taxpayers. Treating veterans is an inherently unprofitable enterprise. Nearly all wounded veterans have complex medical traumas that far exceed their ability to pay. VA hospitals and clinics don’t exist to turn a profit; they exist to provide the best medical care possible for those who risked their lives in defense of their country. Their treatment is a public, not a private, function.

Quad Graphics Goes Green

Here.

Quad/Graphics, the hemisphere's largest privately held commercial printer, has registered all 10 of its core U.S. printing plants for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification from the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). The accomplishment puts Quad/Graphics on target to be the first printer of its kind to have all its major manufacturing sites designated as green buildings.

Tomah Journal Nails Healthcare

Opponents of policies designed to achieve universal health care coverage inevitably raise the bogeyman of “socialized medicine.” They peddle stories of patients in Canada, Western Europe or Japan who are denied critical care by government-run systems, even as these countries produce better health care outcomes (life expectancy, infant mortality rates, etc.) than the United States.

Well, here’s news: The United States is hardly innocent when it comes to denying life-saving care.

Researchers from the American Cancer Society discovered that uninsured cancer patients are nearly twice as likely to die within five years as those with private coverage. Thirty-five percent of uninsured cancer victims died within five years, compared to 23 percent of privately insured patients.
...
Much of the health care debate is technical and complicated, but the moral issue is not -- it all comes down to whether everyone should have access to quality health care regardless of ability to pay. In the United States, millions don’t get the health care they need because of a privately delivered system that lets them fall through the cracks. To those who oppose plans for universal coverage, the question is simple: Do you even care?

(emphasis mine)

Read it all here.

Here is the MSNBC coverage of the cancer numbers:

Uninsured cancer patients are nearly twice as likely to die within five years as those with private coverage, according to the first national study of its kind and one that sheds light on troubling health care obstacles.
...
The new research is being published in Cancer, the cancer society’s medical journal. In an accompanying editorial, the society’s president repeated the organization’s call for action to fix holes in the health care safety net.

“The truth is that our national reluctance to face these facts is condemning thousands of people to die from cancer each year,” Dr. Elmer Huerta wrote.
...
They found those who were uninsured were 1.6 times more likely to die in five years than those with private insurance.

More specifically, 35 percent of uninsured patients had died at the end of five years, compared with 23 percent of privately insured patients.

Online Travel Booking Companies Do Not Pay Full Tax Responsibility...

Here is the full story...

The city of Madison is suing Expedia, Priceline.com and four other online hotel booking companies to make them start paying city hotel room taxes. The industry maintains it's not subject to the tax.

Ald. Zach Brandon, 7th District, began pushing for recovery of the room taxes nearly two years ago.

Online companies collect and pay taxes on bulk-rate, wholesale room rates, but not the higher rates they charge customers, Brandon has said.

Ron Paul: Where's the Love?

How many people want a refund now?

The New Republic has an article on Ron Paul's racist (or race-baiting) past. In it the analyze the newsletters that he funded and put his name on. They included:

Paul's newsletters have carried different titles over the years--Ron Paul's Freedom Report, Ron Paul Political Report, The Ron Paul Survival Report--but they generally seem to have been published on a monthly basis since at least 1978. (Paul, an OB-GYN and former U.S. Air Force surgeon, was first elected to Congress in 1976.) During some periods, the newsletters were published by the Foundation for Rational Economics and Education, a nonprofit Paul founded in 1976; at other times, they were published by Ron Paul & Associates, a now-defunct entity in which Paul owned a minority stake, according to his campaign spokesman. The Freedom Report claimed to have over 100,000 readers in 1984. At one point, Ron Paul & Associates also put out a monthly publication called The Ron Paul Investment Letter.
...
But, whoever actually wrote them, the newsletters I saw all had one thing in common: They were published under a banner containing Paul's name, and the articles (except for one special edition of a newsletter that contained the byline of another writer) seem designed to create the impression that they were written by him--and reflected his views. What they reveal are decades worth of obsession with conspiracies, sympathy for the right-wing militia movement, and deeply held bigotry against blacks, Jews, and gays. In short, they suggest that Ron Paul is not the plain-speaking antiwar activist his supporters believe they are backing--but rather a member in good standing of some of the oldest and ugliest traditions in American politics.
...
Paul's alliance with neo-Confederates helps explain the views his newsletters have long espoused on race. Take, for instance, a special issue of the Ron Paul Political Report, published in June 1992, dedicated to explaining the Los Angeles riots of that year. "Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks three days after rioting began," read one typical passage. According to the newsletter, the looting was a natural byproduct of government indulging the black community with "'civil rights,' quotas, mandated hiring preferences, set-asides for government contracts, gerrymandered voting districts, black bureaucracies, black mayors, black curricula in schools, black tv shows, black tv anchors, hate crime laws, and public humiliation for anyone who dares question the black agenda."

You can read the article here. Select quotes from the newsletters are here (with links to the actual content).

Buried in the story is this gem, something we should be proud of:

Finding the pre-1999 newsletters was no easy task, but I was able to track many of them down at the libraries of the University of Kansas and the Wisconsin Historical Society.

A Can't Miss - The ABC's of the Right Wing

The Brew City Brawler has a great post on the GOP A to Z.

Read it all!

What's Up with WOSH Lately?

I need to confess to something. I'm not proud, but if I find myself in my car over lunch, I listen to Rush Limbaugh.

I do it as opposition research, I promise.

Locally, WOSH 1490 is the station that plays the show. Has anyone else noticed their problems with production? Almost every commercial is played over another on. They seem to be playing two newscasts at the same time, dead air and one time they even played 10 minutes of Dennis Miller out of nowhere.

WOSH is a Cumulus station. According to their website:

Including all pending acquisitions announced through March 31, 2005, we will own and operate a total of 310 stations in 61 U.S. markets upon FCC approval and consummation of all of our pending acquisitions.

Therefore they are no small puppy.

What's the deal. Is it the only way they can make sure the breaks are less listenable than Rush?

Campaign Game

Click here for a little distraction.

New Years Resolutions

1. Practice Guitar Every Day
2. Blog More
3. Blood Sugar Under 100
4. Elect a Ton of Democrats

IA Starts...

Here is the order I sent a buddy earlier today, we'll see if I was right in a little bit...

1. Edwards

2. Obama

3. Clinton

4. Dodd

5. Biden

6. Richardson

7. Kucinich

(Note: my prediction, not the order I am supporting them)

Stew's right!

Credit where credit is due, great post Stew (responding to an anonymous forum basher of a signed letter to the editor):

Dear Keen,

At least she had the courage of her conviction to put her name on her opinion...hint, hint.
_________________
Stew Rieckman, ee

Winnebago County Board Election Signature Recap

Here are the papers that have been turned in as of the deadline of 5:00PM tonight:

Contested Districts:
District 1 -
Jackie Miller
Thomas Konetzke

District 4 -
Paul Eisen
Joe Hotynski

District 6 -
Joseph N Maehl
Bill Roh
* Note - Roh has challenged some of Maehl's signatures and Maehl may have not qualified for the ballot

District 7 -
James Koziczkowski
Kyle Reppert

District 9 -
William Pollnow, Jr
Tom Widener

District 14 -
Claud Thompson
Donna Lohry
Harold Steineke

District 15 -
Kathleen Lennon
Travis R Swanson

District 18 -
Bill Wingren
John Daggett

District 21 -
Robert Warnke
Christine Kutnink Richards

District 28 -
John A Schaidler
Jerold V Finch
Jay Schroeder

District 36 -
Patrick O'Brien
John L Reinert
Susan Rubick


Non-Contested, with an Incumbent
District 2 - Nancy L Barker
District 3 - Donald J Greisbach
District 5 - Shiloh Ramos
District 10 - Timothy Hamblin
District 11 - David Albrecht
District 12 - Kenneth C Anderson
District 17 - Jef Hall
District 19 - Alfred Jacobson
District 20 - Michael Norton
District 22 - Kenneth B Robl
District 24 - Arlene Schmuhl
District 25 - Stan Kline
District 26 - Susan Locke
District 29 - Joanne Sievert
District 30 - Chuck Farrey
District 31 - Jeanette V Diakoff
District 32 - Patrick J Brennand
District 34 - Thomas Ellis
District 35 - Harvey J Rengstorf


Non-contested, with a Non-Incumbent
District 13 - Tena Riste
District 23 - Christopher Wright
District 33 - Thomas J Egan


Vacant
District 8 - Vacant
District 16 – Vacant
* Note - The current incumbent did not fill out a declaration of non-candidacy, therefore the deadline for signatures is extended by 3 days
District 27 - Vacant

Tax Bill Mailings Remind Me of Local Issue

This story:

Tax bill messages probed - Endorsements are mailed to residents

A letter from Town Chairman Robert Hultquist mailed to all town residents with their tax bills in which he endorsed two candidates for the Town Board is under investigation by the district attorney as a possible campaign finance law violation.

"It does appear on its face to be a violation of campaign finance laws, although I have not made a final decision yet," Waukesha County District Attorney Brad Schimel said of the letter.
...
He said the town paid to print the newsletter for distribution, postage was paid by the town for the mailing and some staff time was involved in getting it ready.
...
But because the tax bills were being mailed anyway and inclusion of the newsletter in those envelopes did not require additional postage, "it didn't cost the town another cent," he said.

"This is a big deal over nothing," he said of Schimel's investigation.

"I'm not worried because I didn't do anything wrong."

Sounds a little like this.

NYTimes: Lottery No Good for Poor People

The Super Lottery Is No Prize

Lawmakers pretend that lotteries make new taxes unnecessary. But lotteries are a tax, an inefficient, badly targeted one that is having a devastating impact on poor communities and beyond.
...
These new super lotteries are especially dangerous. One study in Texas showed the more expensive tickets selling best in the most poverty-stricken ZIP codes, ones heavily populated with Hispanics and blacks. Money that should be used for food and housing goes up in a whiff of hope instead.
...
They can dress it up all they want in slogans about buying a ticket and a dream. But the states are encouraging behavior that is too often addictive and ruinous for people who can least handle the burden.

NYTimes Profiles Dirty GOP Election Tricks

The big quote:

Such excesses are often dismissed as the work of a few overeager campaign staff members. Mr. Raymond argues, however, that illegal tactics are often standard operating procedure. “In my business,” he writes, “communications devices were all lethal weapons — and every fight was dirty.”

Such as:

It was a world in which, he claims, dirty tricks were the norm. When Mr. Raymond opened a political telemarketing firm, he was hired by a Republican challenging a New Jersey Democratic congressman. Mr. Raymond’s company — in a plan he says he hatched with the challenger’s advisers — called liberal Democrats and urged them to vote for the Green Party candidate.

Those same advisers, he says, gave Mr. Raymond another assignment: to call white households asking them to vote for the Democrat, using the voice of, as he puts it, a “ghetto black guy.” He also called union households, using voices with thick Spanish accents.

Quote of the Day:

Arthur Schlesinger, in his biography of Kennedy, quotes Richard Harwood of The Washington Post:

“We discovered in 1968 this deep, almost mystical bond that existed between Robert Kennedy and the Other America. It was a disquieting experience for reporters. ... We were forced to recognize in Watts and Gary and Chimney Rock that the real stake in the American political process involves not the fate of speechwriters and fund-raisers, but the lives of millions of people seeking hope out of despair.”

Something to remember as we go into the IA Caucuses and the 2008 race.