Category Archives: Current Affairs

Post-Confirmation: Our World Won’t End Right Now. (But you can see the clouds gathering.)

I don’t mean to diminish for a minute the magnitude of the institutional violence done to women this week, especially survivors of direct assault and abuse. Yet the list of legal catastrophes whose likelihood would climb with Kavanaugh’s ascension had already gotten long, and portends massive negative impact on many other segments of the population.

Further, there was an excellent, but now forgotten overview of this in the opening session of Kavanaugh hearings, presented by Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse.

I don’t know why Whitehouse isn’t  better known.  Maybe it’s Rhode Island’s mini-size (at barely 1200 square miles, it makes Vermont — 8 times as large– look huge; or maybe its due to the state’s mostly Democratic voting record.) Perhaps it’s because he is not running for president.

Whatever; Whitehouse was a prosecutor and state attorney general before he came to Washington. He knows how to make a case succinctly and trenchantly. And he made this detailed pre-rapist case against Kavanaugh in the first round of opening statements on September 4.

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Notes on a Terrible Day In Our History

So when the committee reconvened to hear Kavanaugh, the tactical plan had changed markedly. I don’t know if they consciously thought of it this way, but they clearly decided to do a remake of the Clarence Thomas triumph.

Kavanaugh insisted that no one but a few clerks had seen his opening statement before he made it. Perhaps so, but he had spent much time consulting at the White House and with others in prepping for the appearance. As he is known for his studies of precedents, my guess is he went over the Thomas hearings in the process.

The Thomas scenario is built on flipping the abuse script and making the wannabe rapist into the victim.

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Carolina farmworkers win a round in labor union struggle

For agriculture, the additional restrictions in the 2017 law meant that farms couldn’t directly help workers pay their union dues, even if both the farmer and the worker wanted to. It also meant that if a farm was accused of mistreating its workers and the owners wanted to avoid a lawsuit by settling with the union to enter into a union contract, they also wouldn’t be able to do that.

In 2017, Union County Republican Rep. Jimmy Dixon, who is a farmer himself, added the anti-union language to that year’s wider-ranging Farm Bill. But at the time Dixon told The N&O the intent was not to target FLOC specifically, but rather to help individual farmers who felt pressured by the union.

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Blue Wave? Red Wave? How about the Carolina Brown Wave (aka Big Poop)??

The hog industry’s PR agencies cultivate a wholesome, (white) family-friendly image. But most of the hogs and the farms are really owned by giant international corporations; and the biggest is Chinese. (That ginormous Smithfield plant? Chinese-owned.)
And Big Poop can also play hardball, in that vast battleground, the front lawn. The Republican NC legislature is comfortably stashed in the pocket of their newest jeans.

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Kavanaugh Wrap-Up: The Wheat from the Chaff

Too many media people around this past week’s supreme Court hearings wasted their energy doing horse race and atmosphere coverage. Political sportscasters, I call them; and pretty bush league at that.

Their frame was: the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh (hereafter “K”) is a done deal, so all that matters is the hullabaloo, that and the shadow horse race rehearsal for the 2020 presidential contest. Which meant excessive attention to whether aspirants Kamala Harris or Cory Booker managed to draw some blood and get a boost from a bombshell revelation.
But the pair didn’t really have any real ordnance, it was reported, and neither came out with a 2020 home run. That’s true enough, and for the media political sportscasters, this was all that mattered. And that’s utterly mistaken.

The New York Times’s Saturday postmortem reflected this outlook:

“Boorish. Rude. Disrespectful. Insulting. Grandstanding. Hyperventilating. Deranged. Ridiculous. Drivel.

Those were among the words angry Senate Republicans used this week to assail the conduct of Democrats at a Supreme Court hearing that was often tense and sometimes toxic. . . .

With little power to stop a nominee they saw as a conservative partisan, a Republican-imposed process they considered grossly unfair and a demanding political base spoiling for a fight, they decided it was time to sow disorder over the court.”
For me such reportage was mainly stale baloney. Its superficiality is a disgrace to their profession. It only reports one superficial level of the debate that went on there.

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