Dennis Rehberg is a man of principle,
target="_blank">especially when it comes to votes about
agriculture. Yesterday, Rehberg issued a statement critical of
the farm bill. He said:
“Speaker Pelosi’s new version of the farm bill thumbs
its nose at the real needs of rural America and it’s time to stand
up and say ‘no.”
Time to stand up and say no! What bold political leadership,
taking on the Speaker of the House. Dennis is one tough-talking
dude. Where I get confused is what happened next. After speaking
out against the bill, Rehberg meekly voted for it.
On Friday, he said he decided to vote for the bill to “continue to
move the process forward.”
Rehberg, however, did not support the bill until he
knew his vote would not make a difference. Along with some other
Republicans from farm states, Rehberg waited to cast his vote until
Democrats had reached the threshold for passage.
Maybe politics is a little too complicated for me, but it seems
like Rehberg should explain why he voted for a bill that “thumbs
its nose at the real needs of rural America.” Maybe he can also
explain why his vote was dictated by the Republican leadership:
After the vote, Rehberg said he waited at the behest of
his party’s leadership to force Democrats to find the votes needed
to pass the bill.
Maybe it’s time for Montana to have a representative who acts on
his principles and protects the interests of Montana farmers.
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On the flip side of the lack of local responsiveness in unions is the lack of local responsiveness in corporations, which is all the more pathetic because corporations actually try.
Today in Safway I heard a radio ad for Safeway's "local" cherries. It encouraged me to show my Washington pride and ended reminding me that Safeway not only sells local produce, they promote it.
To understand why this happened, you have to realize that Montana is in the "Seattle District" of Safeway corporation. So we listen to the same ads they do in Seattle. But the irony was painful when this centralization so effectively thwarted the feigned support of local products. If Safeway was actually managed locally and had local responsiveness, they would be advertising cherries from Kalispell, not Yakima. It's like selling Yankees tickets in Boston because the two are in the same general area: in demonstrates an extreme lack of local understanding.
To top it all off, I'm fairly certain that this 'emphasis' on'promoting' local goods means that if the Helena Safeway wanted to promote Flathead cherries, they would be in violation of corporate rules. For that matter, I don't think there is anyway to stop recieving the awkward ad about our 'local' Washington cherries.
(And yes, I know that Montana cherries and Washington cherries are on different schedules. But I've worked through cherry season and there's been no mention of Montana cherries. Moreover, if there was, they woudl be being advertised in Yakima as 'local' cherries, with the same absurdity.)
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So I got a letter from my Union today (The illustrious United Food & Commercial Workers). I owe them 91 dollars, and if I don't pay it I will lose my job (they underlined that for me). The letter consists of probably thirty complete lines, and within those there are three typographical errors, one of them being a pathetic slaughter of my last name. Not that they care; they have my Social Security number, which is enough to get me fired.
And while I'm paying this, they are doing what? Well, for one thing just watching my holiday pay go from double time to time and a half. By my calculations, this has to have cost the employees at my work a sum total in the thousands of dollars for the fourth of July alone. Given that unemployment in Helena is at 1.9%, there is no way we should be accepting essentially a pay cut when all of us belong to a union. But apparently this particular union has better things to do that look out for the interests of its members in Helena. All the more reason to act local.
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I was going to write this letter to the IR editor. But then I decided not to feed the "Damn Liberals readin' their books" stereotype. For those of you who don't know, Steve Lodahl is published basically every other day fighting off an imaginary push to impeach Bush by declaring that Clinton is also a liar.
"While I for one wouldn’t defend Clinton as an honest man, his biggest decisions, like ending an ethnic cleansing in Kosovo or crippling Saddam’s WMD capability in Iraq, didn’t cost American lives. To equate his lies to those of president Bush, as Mr. Steve Lodahl does every couple days, requires a peculiarly neo-con fusing of Augustinian Puritanism and a Realpolitik worthy of Otto von Bismarck. When ‘conservatives’ of this stripe, not to be confused with those that actually care about values or small government, read the Bible, they read a special edition released by Rupert Murdoch, with Machievelli’s The Prince spliced in. Morals, to these folk, are all well and good for other people, those who don’t have a dynasty to defend. However, if they had read a little further into Machievelli’s discourses on Livy, they would have found that even the master of amorality believed that three separate branches of government were required to prevent a society from falling into anarchy, oligarchy, or tyranny. And recent elections suggest the truth of another Machiavellian revelation: that the masses, though they can be fooled or led astray, are in the long term more constant and dependable than any one leader or cabal. "
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Great stuff.
But now I am feeling guilty. After receiving as many as
five concerned emails from your dozens of adoring fans, I have come
to a heartfelt conclusion — I must sell my cherished Peabody
Peabody, and use the proceeds to help your fans buy themselves some
lowercase letters. Seeing an entire class of individuals so cruelly
afflicted, having to make do with uppercase letters and exclamation
points when there is a whole world of glyphs and punctuations
waiting nearly at their doorsteps, cold and trembling and nuanced
– it is too much.
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Dave Zirin, writing for the Nation is concerned about the
media's treatment of Michael Vick in the wake of allegations about
dog fighting. While Zirin correctly notes that there is an element
of racism is some of the online commentary about the story, he
completely misses the boat at end of his piece:
American culture celebrates violent sports–especially
football–and is insensitive to the consequences that the weekly
scrum has on the bodies and minds of its players. We love a sport
where any given play can be a player's last. We accept that after
44-year-old former Philadelphia Eagle Andre Waters committed
suicide, the autopsy revealed that his brain resembled someone with
early-stage Alzheimer's due to repeated concussions. We ignore
that a Hall of Fame running back, the once-unstoppable Earl
Campbell, can barely get out of a car without assistance. We forget
that Johnny Unitas, the greatest quarterback to play the game,
couldn't grip a football by the time of his death.
But in Vick's case, when this
media-massaged package of NFL fury fails to remain safely contained
on the field, the sports establishment throws up its hands in
horror.
There's simply no relationship between dog fighting and the
injuries suffered by football players. As tragic as the lives of
many former players have been, they had the capacity to choose
their careers, with awareness of the risks and rewards. Dogs
trained to fight or executed for lacking the will to do so don't
have that choice. Equating the experience of football players and
these animals actually seems to be a kind of benevolent racism. In
attempting to draw attention to the violence of American football,
Zirin seems to be suggesting that African Americans are incapable
of making good choices, or at the least, that they are little more
than the product of their environment.
Sometimes the story is just straightfoward. Involvement in
dogfighting or any form of cruelty to animals is abhorrent. If
Michael Vick is convicted, he should suffer serious consequences.
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