Monday, February 08, 2016

Happy Year of the Monkey 2016~!


39 comments:

  1. We have the power!

    What I like about Bernie — and my recommendation [Click] By Laura Wells, Green Party 2014 nominee for California Controller. Giving me permission to do what I was planning to do…

    --Alan

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  2. Come all of you good workers
    Good news to you I'll tell
    Of how the good old union
    Has come in here to dwell

    Which side are you on,
    Which side are you on.

    My daddy was a miner,
    He's now in the air and sun;
    Stick with him brother miners,
    Until this battle's done.

    Which side are you on,
    Which side are you on.

    They say in Harlan County,
    There are no neutrals there;
    You'll either be a union man,
    Or a thug for J. H. Blair.

    Which side are you on,
    Which side are you on.

    Oh, workers can you stand it?
    Oh, tell me how you can
    Will you be a lousy scab
    Or will you be a man?

    Which side are you on,
    Which side are you on.

    Don't scab for the bosses,
    Don't listen to their lies;
    Us poor folk haven't got a chance
    Unless we unionize.

    Which side are you on,
    Which side are you on.



    --Alan

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    1. Just remembered one more verse:

      The bosses have divided us,
      Lied to us all along;
      The only thing will save us,
      Is one big union strong.

      Which side are you on,
      Which side are you on.

      --Alan

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    2. Wow! Powerful stuff. I love it. May I borrow to post on my Facebook page?

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    3. "One big union." So that's a Wobbly song. I'm ambivalent about the Wobblies. The Brotherhood of Railway Clerks* and other members of the American Federation of Labor took a different tack.
      *Officially, in my day, the Brotherhood of Railway, Steamship, and Airline Clerks, Freight Handlers, Station and Express Employees. I've heard that at union conventions the ability to correctly enunciate the full name was a common test of sobriety.

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  3. Joe Hill by Joan Baez

    I dreamed, I saw Joe Hill last night
    Alive as you and me
    Says I "But Joe, you're ten years dead"
    "I never died" says he
    "I never died" says he

    "The copper bosses killed you, Joe"
    "They shot you Joe" says I
    "Takes more than guns to kill a man"
    Says Joe "I didn't die"
    Says Joe "I didn't die"

    And standing there, as big as life
    And smiling with his eyes
    Says Joe "What they can never kill
    Went on to organize
    Went on to organize"

    From San Diego up to Maine
    In every mine and mill
    Where working folks defend their rights
    It's there you find Joe Hill
    It's there you find Joe Hill

    ~ via MetroLyrics

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    1. Listener, I need your eagle eye. At the very end of the video linked above one sees an American flag with the skull and crossbones in front of it. Is there some writing or something? I do not like the idea of equating the Stars and Stripes with the skull and crossbones. So I'm not gonna post that video until I understand what's going on with that.

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    2. Here it is by Pete with a couple more verses and slightly different words.

      https://youtu.be/f_yC4ffyGiw

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    3. You're the one with the eagle eye, Cat. I never even noticed it! Ha!

      It's not a skull and cross bones, it's a skull and crossed swords, which is apparently the logo of the entity that put it up on Youtube: Modern Day Pirate Productions.

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    4. Ah. Thanks, Listener. That makes me feel much better.

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  4. Thanks for the corrected link, Alan. A fine editorial.

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    1. Yes--a better (IMO) editorial than what one can expect in the New York Times, for example.

      Something funny with the WiFi here--my answer to your question above didn't work. Go ahead, the lyrics are public domain. But check them--I wrote them from memory, and that is quite likely imperfect, particularly with respect to the order of the verses.

      --Alan

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  5. Via politicalwire.com; deja vu, isn't it?

    Clinton Mulls Staff Shake Up
    February 8, 2016

    “Hillary and Bill Clinton are so dissatisfied with their campaign’s messaging and digital operations they are considering staffing and strategy changes after what’s expected to be a loss in Tuesday’s primary here,” Politico reports.

    “The Clintons — stung by her narrow victory in Iowa — had been planning to reassess staffing at the campaign’s Brooklyn headquarters after the first four primaries, but the Clintons have become increasingly caustic in their criticism of aides and demanded the reassessment soon.”

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  6. Thanks for the jog about "I Saw Joe Hill The Other Night," listener. That's one I have memorized neither the lyrics nor the tune for, although I have thought of it from time to time over the years. Now I will. (Easy to made a CD to play and sing along with on the way to work.)

    --Alan

    P.S.: The HRC staff shakeup story above is from me. WiFi still wonky here.

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    1. You're welcome, Alan! Hoping your wifi rights itself soon!

      Apparently, Hillary and Bill have not yet grasped that the problem isn't her staff.

      Also, the related article I read today quoted an unnamed Democrat who spoke directly with Bill Clinton as saying that Bill is privately unhappy that Hillary's staff did not foresee Bernie's popularity, but publicly they are saying the staff is great, they might just add more staff. It really alarms me that Bill's opinion would weigh in so strongly like this. What happens if she's President and he doesn't like her staff?

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  7. Not only did I hear the Albright sound bite on the evening news, but also the one from Gloria Steinem saying that girls only care where the boys are, and the boys are in the Sanders campaign. Holy shit! That really turned me off. And if I were a girl in my teens or twenties it would totally infuriate me. Where does she get off, washed up old broad!

    You know, there's this myth, this narrative that women support Hillary. Women of Hillary's age cohort and maybe immediately adjacent ones support Hillary, by no means *all* women. I wish to Heaven the media would grasp that!

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    1. It's as bad as the presumption that Baby Boomers all support HRC. There are a good many who have had to wait for two generations for the young 'uns to come around to seeing things [ahem] right.

      --Alan

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    2. Gloria Steinem has apparently recanted her statement, calling it a mis-statement.

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    3. Uhuh. I saw that. Really lame.

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  8. Clinton staff shakeup—the original story at politico.com [Click] It seems far worse than I had suspected…

    —Alan

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    1. My favourite line from the article:

      "Ultimately, the disorganization is a result of the candidate’s own decision-making, which lurches from hands-off delegation in times of success to hands-around-the-throat micromanagement when things go south."

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    2. Reading...

      "At the heart of problem this time, staffers, donors and Clinton-allied operatives say, was Clinton’s decision not to appoint a single empowered chief strategist — a role the forceful but controversial Mark Penn played in 2008 — and disperse decision-making responsibility to a sprawling team with fuzzy lines of authority."

      If she can't even run a campaign, how does anyone expect her to run the country?

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    3. If HRC were running a business the way she's running her campaign, she'd be out of business PDQ. And this is the person I'd told to presume will be my next president? Hell, no!

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  9. "'There’s nobody sitting in the middle of this empowered to create a message and implement it,' said a 2008 Barack Obama aide. 'They are kind of rudderless … occasionally Hillary grabs the rudder, but until recently she was not that interested in [working on messaging]. … Look, she’s going to be the nominee, but she’s not going to get any style points, and if she isn’t careful she is going to be a wounded nominee. And they better worked this sh-- out fast because whoever the Republicans pick is going to be 29 times tougher than Bernie.'"

    Look, she’s going to be the nominee. Excuse me? She is? Well, thanks so much for telling me that. :P

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    1. The most recent such insurrection in the Democratic Party was in 1988, when 30% of the delegates at the nominating convention were for Jesse Jackson. The establishment pulled together and got Michael Dukakis nominated...and we know how that worked out. (I have visions of a photoshopped version of that infamous photo of Dukaksis' head sticking out the hatch of an armored personnel carrier, but with Hillary's head in his place. I can't be the only one to think of it.)

      --Alan

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  10. “Apparently, Hillary and Bill have not yet grasped that the problem isn't her staff.”

    Ya think?

    “Gloria Steinem has apparently recanted her statement, calling it a mis-statement”

    Not a Miss-statement?
    =========================
    Pardon my cattiness. But it certainly is remarkable how HRC is bringing out all these out-of-touch surrogates. Taken together with other behaviours and the description of dysfunction in the Clinton operation recited in Politico.com, it sure does seem that Bernie and his folks have penetrated her OODA loop and are playing upon her cultural conditioning as well as elephantine decision making process to induce responses to imagined external conditions that are more and more unrealistic. I am probably being premature with such speculation, but the opportunity to judge it is coming. We might be seeing the wheels starting to come loose… If they do come completely off, it will be interesting to see how many of the Clintons’ folks get on board, how many get out of the way, and how many resort to sabotage.

    —Alan

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  11. Speaking of disconnects: Isn't Howard out of step? I mean, Didn't DFA endorse Bernie? I realize Howard and DFA are no longer synonymous, but it still seems strange.

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  12. From politico.com:

    David Axelrod took to Twitter on Monday to criticize Hillary Clinton's political strategy in New Hampshire, following news that her campaign is considering shaking up its staffing after an expected loss there.
    "When the exact same problems crop up in separate campaigns, with different staff, at what point do the principals say, 'Hey, maybe it's US?'," the former top aide to President Barack Obama tweeted.

    --Alan

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    1. It's called head Up Arss Syndrome. I am related to someone who has it. Whatever goes wrong, whatever unpleasant thing happens, it's always the fault of everyone else, never her. It would be laughable if it wasn't a form of delusion and self-destructiveness. And it's absolutely impenetrable. Nothing can make her see that she might, maybe, have some teensy weensy faults or ever makes teensy weensy mistakes. It's always that someone else is unkind or unbalanced.

      It's pretty stressful to live with. And she doesn't have delusions of presidential grandeur! I think Hillary ought to go put her feet up and learn how to knit. If she put half as much effort into making socks and sweaters for her local homeless shelter, or poured all the money she spends on her campaigns into the Clinton Initiative, she'd actually do some good in this world.

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  13. I'm not seeing (yet) that Bernie has staffing or planning that intends to make him president. Howard was guessing that he's running (like he did) to make a statement.

    I'm not seeing that Hill has staff that's *able* to make her president.

    In a year when the publicans are running the exhibits from Madam Toussoud's, that seems unfortunate.

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    1. Unfortunate, indeed.

      Thanks, Puddle, for giving me a smile at a moment when I was feeling rather fraught.

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    2. Well, a while back I was reading about that, and it seems much of Bernie's operation is under the radar of the conventional news media (not that that would take much effort). In several states Bernie is working with political activists beneath the level of the officials HRC is delegating to, and building state-level organizations where HRC has none. She might well have a Potemkin Firewall.

      --Alan

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  14. Replies
    1. Gee--one doesn't get a ticket to the ICU for something that isn't extremely serious. He still has some good stuff to do for the world.

      --Alan

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