nancynall.com » Solidarity eventually.
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Solidarity eventually.

I’m not from a union fam­ily. My mother reluc­tantly paid dues to the Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Work­ers of Amer­ica out of a sense of oblig­a­tion — “they get me my raises” — but never joined. My dad was a sales­man. Labor Day was just a long week­end with a cook­out.

My first real con­tact with orga­nized labor was the print­ers’ union at The Colum­bus Dis­patch, which even then was defanged, the lino­type machines hav­ing been set aside some years ear­lier for elec­tronic type­set­ters. I recall being baf­fled by their rules (non-union mem­bers were not to touch the columns of type being spit from the com­puter), their peck­ing order (shop stew­ard? is this a shop?) and their rit­u­als (the coffee-pot thing; some sort of Fri­day lucky-number draw­ing), and a lit­tle touched by their dig­nity. Even I, stu­pid as I was then, could tell that these guys’ time was over, that all their tetch­i­ness about rules was a ver­sion of some dotty old lady putting on her white gloves for tea when the only one stop­ping by is her imag­i­nary friend. Lit­tle by lit­tle they retired or moved to other jobs, and I imag­ine that entire shop doesn’t even exist any­more.

Orga­nized labor has been in eclipse for some time now, and the forces of man­age­ment have done an excel­lent job brief­ing the gen­eral pub­lic on all their sins — the feath­erbed­ding, the abuses, the cor­rup­tion by orga­nized crime, etc. More to the point, in a global mar­ket, it’s easy to find oth­ers will­ing to do a job for far less than your con­tract stip­u­lates, and to find some apol­o­gist who will explain, “But $5 a day is good money in (fill in name of Third World coun­try).”

Last year one of the TV sta­tions sent its hand­some anchor to China, to show the dinosaurs back home how they do it in the ascen­dant world power. To any­one with a lick of sense, it looked like a hor­ror show: Work­ers who leave their homes and fam­i­lies for months at a time to relo­cate to their fac­to­ries, where they’re housed in dorms and work the sort of hours that would appall even the cru­elest rob­ber baron. This was all reported enthu­si­as­ti­cally, enough so that the hand­some anchor’s pretty part­ner, in mak­ing chit-chat after the seg­ment, had this to say of the Amer­i­can worker: “I don’t want to say lazy, but…”

I was tak­ing a writ­ing work­shop a few months after this, and one of the other par­tic­i­pants was a grad­u­at­ing law stu­dent prepar­ing for the bar and a career in labor law. He said he and his friends were plan­ning an expe­di­tion to a con­cert where the hand­some anchor (he’s a musi­cian, too) was per­form­ing, “to call him out.” That’s Detroit for ya. I don’t know if they ever did, but at Labor Day, it’s some­thing to think about: That cor­rupt, lazy, feath­erbed­ding union force had its time in the sun, and that was in improv­ing fac­tory con­di­tions, rais­ing the hourly wage and gen­er­ally mak­ing this coun­try a place where you don’t have to live in a dor­mi­tory next to the fac­tory to make a liv­ing. This is a good thing. Let’s not for­get it.

We went to the Detroit Labor Day parade yes­ter­day, hop­ing to catch a glimpse of Obama. That was a long-odds hope and it was borne out when we arrived to find Hart Plaza full and the crowd spilling out in three direc­tions. But we got near a Jum­botron, only to dis­cover there was no sound, and by then it felt like it was 99 degrees, so we booked. Turned out Obama declined to cam­paign and instead sang a few bars of “Chain of Fools” any­way, so there you are. My own video note­book is here, and shitty enough I decline to embed it.

I did get a T-shirt, though.

Blog­gage:

I took Richard Cohen off my book­marks months ago, but every so often his bro­ken clock tells the cor­rect time. Like today.

I didn’t go to Slow Food Nation. Sounds like I missed some good meals, but some fairly awful pub­lic events.

Finally, I really don’t want this blog to become a gos­sip site regard­ing the GOP’s vice-presidential nom­i­nee. For one thing, every­thing we post here becomes stale in, like, 25 sec­onds; I fully expect the next bomb­shell to come out of St. Paul will be that some mem­ber of her fam­ily is run­ning a medical-marijuana grow house dur­ing the 20-hour days, and fur­ther, that this is evi­dence of her strong fam­ily val­ues. For another, to me, the only thing we really have a right to dis­cuss as vot­ers and decent peo­ple is the so-called vet­ting issue. How McCain man­aged to pick this crazy lady, with her pos­si­ble back­ground as a seces­sion­ist, never mind her col­or­ful fam­ily, is the real issue here. All the rest is noise. I’m not going to police com­ments on this, but why don’t you read John Scalzi’s take on things, which basi­cally tracks mine about 99.9 per­cent.

‘kay? ‘Kay. Have a good day.

Posted on Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008 at 10:51 am in Current events, Detroit life. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.


52 responses to
“Solidarity eventually.”

  1. coozledad said on September 2nd, 2008 at 10:57 am

    Yeah. It’s the Chris­t­ian Iden­tity Move­ment cozi­ness that ought sim­ply to ter­rify peo­ple.

  2. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on September 2nd, 2008 at 11:06 am

    Is NAFTA killing unions? That’s what i heard at the parade here’bouts yes­ter­day, but with one part of NAFTA being the “North Amer­i­can Agree­ment on Labor Coop­er­a­tion,” i think the sal­va­tion of the Union Move­ment is through, not away from par­tic­i­pat­ing in agree­ments like that one. Only help­ing grow unions in over­seas trad­ing part­ner nations (and requir­ing per­mis­sion to orga­nize as a pre­con­di­tion to such treaties) is going to keep the glob­al­iza­tion teeter-totter from rock­ing wildly.

    I’m no Wob­blie, but SE Asia needs a few Joe Hills and Big Bill Hay­wards (and even a few John Reeds and Mother Jone­ses). We can use trade to enforce pro­tec­tions for that kind of work within those nations, maybe mak­ing up for how we muffed the job here in the 1910′s and 20′s.

  3. LAMary said on September 2nd, 2008 at 11:08 am

    I’m with Scalzi com­pletely on this.

    This morn­ing I heard the com­ment on NPR that I had been wait­ing for. Rick San­to­rum speaks! He said he had not been enthu­si­as­tic about the McCain can­di­dacy, but now that Sarah Palin is on the ticket, “there’s a lilt in my step.”
    He bet­ter watch that lilt. Peo­ple might think he’s a lit­tle light in the loafers, if you know what I mean.

  4. John said on September 2nd, 2008 at 11:15 am

    Been to the Heart­land of Amer­ica (St. Louis) for the week­end so I missed out on the coal deliv­ery.

    Gas­man, your com­ment That Palin gem ques­tion­naire answer regard­ing the Pledge of Alle­giance reminds me of an oft told tale in Texas. In the early 1920s, Gov. Ma Fer­gu­son… reminded me that the daugh­ter of Gov. James E. Fer­gu­son and Gov. Miriam Amanda Wal­lace Fer­gu­son of Texas, Ouida Wal­lace Fer­gu­son, was mar­ried to our host­ess’ fourth cousin, twice removed.

  5. James said on September 2nd, 2008 at 11:17 am

    I hadn’t had a chance to blovi­ate about Sarah Palin, yet, so let me share the car­toon I did over the week­end about her. I resisted the easy cheap shots (her kid’s preg­nancy) and just went with the sur­face crazi­ness of the pick.

  6. brian stouder said on September 2nd, 2008 at 11:31 am

    James – great comic!

    The cat­ti­est thing I’ll say is – the resume’ of the Gov­er­nor of Alaska can­not help but Pale-In com­par­i­son to the Sen­a­tor from Delaware

  7. Connie said on September 2nd, 2008 at 11:43 am

    My hus­band spent a few months long ago at the Chevy Truck engine plant in Flint, and while he hated the job and the crazy nasty co-workers he’s a union sup­porter all the way. My brother in law has been in the UAW for many years, and to lis­ten to him talk about GM you would think there are strange con­spir­a­cies all over, and man­age­ment is always evil. Doesn’t seem to be me to be a way to get things done at work. OTOH, when his unit shut down a few years ago he had enough senior­ity to pick his next job, and since then has been a test dri­ver at the Mil­ford Prov­ing Grounds, a job he loves.

  8. caliban said on September 2nd, 2008 at 11:59 am

    Nancy. Noth­ing would appall the cru­elest rob­ber baron, although that’s a nice turn of a phrase. They are a class sim­ply inca­pable of being appalled by their own porcine behav­ior. Death to the labor move­ment in Amer­ica was more about the UAW’ part­ner­ship with Big Auto and the Part­ner­ship of the Trav­el­ing Annual Strike Threats than any­thing else. This year it’s Chrysler, and we’re all agreed on the terms, so where’s that Cana­dian Club? Then Dwight Eisen­hower cre­ated the Team­sters Golem, but Jimmy Hoffa wasn’t Wal­ter Reuther.

    The prob­lem is that some­how cor­rupt Detroit auto work­ers unions became the face of labor. Maybe I’m naive, but I thought it was Bobby Kennedy and Cesar Chavez. Or try­ing to force man­age­ment not to lock fire doors in chicken fac­to­ries that go up in smoke with work­ers as tin­der. Or Wal­mart threat­en­ing a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of Amer­i­cans with loss of their soul-killing jobs if they vote incor­rectly.

    Back in the day, I made a chunk of cash thread­ing nuts onto trans­mis­sions in Ann Arbor. And I still have my lapsed UAW card, parked next to my 1969 draft card. I’d say the best ques­tion to ask about the labor move­ment is: Why does the US have a min­i­mum wage that guar­an­tees liv­ing in poverty with­out recourse to med­ical care? Well, and how much profit is obscene? And why should nitwits that lunch with Cheney make 350 times as much as the peo­ple that buy their golden para­chutes when they run com­pa­nies into the ground and invari­ably start with rap­ing pen­sion plans?

    Last thing I’ll ever have to say about Sarah Palin: Her dad is famously an ex high school Sci­ence teacher. Was that Cre­ation Sci­ence or does the old man believe in car­bon dat­ing? Plumb­ing the depths of Repub­li­can hypocrisy is like drop­ping a rapa­cious and toothy old fool off the edge of the Flat World.

    Coo­zledad: My ever­last­ing prob­lem with groups that iden­tify them­selves as Chris­t­ian is that they invari­ably define Catholics as unChris­t­ian. Even if it’s just an intel­lec­tual quib­ble, I can’t fig­ure out how we’re the cult when we were there first. Then, there is the fact that for the most part, the Chris­t­ian Iden­tity Move­ment is some bad-mullet, trucker-hat attempt to san­i­tize the Klan.

    Tell you what, any­body that would con­sider vot­ing for any­body with even the remotest aroma of wackos like that, they need to be dis­en­fran­chised imme­di­ately, and prob­a­bly chem­i­cally cas­trated. And if this is all about post-denominational Chris­tian­ity, that’s all fine but she couldn’t explain Teill­hard and these peo­ple are more con­cerned with han­dling rat­tlers and which pigs are really more equal.

  9. Danny said on September 2nd, 2008 at 12:59 pm

    As a post-denominational Chris­t­ian, I have very lit­tle prob­lem Pierre Teil­hard. My pass­ing acquain­tance with his work is that the thrust was more philo­soph­i­cal mus­ing than the putting forth of new doc­trines which the Church was sup­posed to adopt and cling to dog­mat­i­cally.

    That said, his writ­ings on man reach­ing the “Omega Point” are under­stand­ably crit­i­cized. Though he employs the­is­tic evo­lu­tion as the vehi­cle, the the­is­tic part suf­fers from de-emphasis to the point that it seems a mere hat-tip included so as not to get him excom­mu­ni­cated. And should it not be trou­bling to other Chris­tians for some­one who is sup­pos­edly Chris­t­ian (and of some author­ity) to be writ­ing about Man reach­ing some grand evo­lu­tion­ary goal of demi-godhood almost by Him­self.

    ‘Nuff said. Dis­cus­sions of Pete Chardin are best left for over cof­fee or a beer. And as a post-denominational Chris­t­ian of fairly fun­da­men­tal pedi­gree, I find snake-handling, prosperity-gospel, word-faith, Christian-identity and other splinter-cult move­ments to be much more odi­ous and blas­phe­mous. I con­sider Catholics to be brethren of mine because we have unity in the essen­tials.

  10. beb said on September 2nd, 2008 at 1:09 pm

    Crooks and Liars dot com is report­ing that Keith Olber­man has been reas­signed from the Repub­li­can con­ven­tion to the New York head­quar­ters to report on Hur­ri­cane Gus­tav. This is strange news because Olberman’s meat and blood is pol­i­tics. Why that away their star attac­tion for yesterday’s news. And if he’s going to be cov­er­ing a Hur­ri­cane shouldn’t he be – like – in the mid­dle of it, like Ander­son Cooper was? Sounds like some­one didn’t want a “Spe­cial Com­ment” about the judge­ment of some­one run­ning as the only expe­ri­ence can­di­date around.

    On my bed­stand is James Galbreith’s The Preda­tor State which is about how Repub­li­can rule has twisted laws so that cor­po­ra­tions are bet­ter able to fleece the rest of the nation. Some­thing peo­ple should read before vot­ing.

  11. caliban said on September 2nd, 2008 at 1:52 pm

    Jeff: NAFTA is a puz­zle. Every­thing that so-called pro­gres­sives hate about it, and blame Bill Clin­ton for, has to do with issues that were addressed in the inaptly named Side Agree­ments, which actu­ally made up the beef of NAFTA and were the heart of Clinton”s inter­na­tional trade agenda. But you won’t hear about this from ide­o­logue nitwits like David Sirota, whose obses­sion with this sub­ject is almost as unhealthy as Pat Oliphant’s insane insis­tence that Bill and Hill are racists out to get Obama. (That guy needs a vaca­tion and a sana­to­rium.)

    The Side Agree­ments imposed labor, envi­ron­men­tal, wage, insur­ance and other require­ments, with means and meth­ods to enforce them. Of course, W shit­canned the Side Agree­ments within about a week of his ille­gal investi­ture, and set across-the-border cor­po­ra­tions loose to plun­der at will. Which, of course, they did. Unions sort of made an unholy alliance with Moloch when they could have used the terms of the agree­ments to mod­ify cor­po­rate preda­tor behav­ior. Seems like a gross mis­cal­cu­la­tion, but maybe. like Pee­Wee, they meant to do that.

  12. Dwight said on September 2nd, 2008 at 2:39 pm

    “in a global mar­ket, it’s easy to find oth­ers will­ing to do a job for far less than your con­tract stip­u­lates, and to find some apol­o­gist who will explain, “But $5 a day is good money in (fill in name of Third World coun­try).” “

    Okey dokey. I will.

    China
    Mex­ico
    South Korea
    Indone­sia
    Poland
    Spain
    Italy
    Hun­gary
    Czech Repub­lic
    Slo­va­kia
    Slove­nia
    Brazil
    Peru

    Did I for­get any­thing? Oh yes. The apol­ogy. “Sorry.”

    Labor has a global value in a global mar­ket. It’s tough for peo­ple to admit they are over­paid. Sorry.

    I can buy a bicy­cle man­u­fac­tured in China and shipped half way around the world to my local Tar­get cheaper than I can buy an Amer­i­can built bike — Oh wait. I can’t buy an Amer­i­can made bike. There are none. Sorry.

    Unions have two pur­poses:

    1. Arti­fi­cially inflate the value of labor
    2. Pro­tect work­ers from idiot man­age­ment

    We all under­stand the desire to be pro­tected from idiot man­age­ment.

    But you can’t make bad edu­ca­tional deci­sions, sleep through high school, eschew col­lege, and expect to make as much as a doc­tor by ratch­et­ing the man­i­fold on top of 4-cylinder engine for 20 years.

    Sorry. I apol­o­gize.

    But then again, I apol­o­gize for grav­ity too.

  13. caliban said on September 2nd, 2008 at 2:50 pm

    Danny: If you think Teill­hard was wor­ried about being excom­mu­ni­cated, well he was a Jesuit and they weren’t going to kick any­body out for untra­di­tional opin­ions. Shoot, Jesuits invented, and were killed by Repub­li­can lack­eys for, lib­er­a­tion the­ol­ogy. Noo­ge­n­e­sis makes more sense than Cre­ation Sci­ence, and is a use­ful way to under­stand ‘evo­lu­tion’. It’s pretty igno­rant of his work to dis­count Teillhard’s use of the term Chris­to­ge­n­e­sis, and assert­ing he was a ‘the­ist’ is just say­ing he believed in a God that breathes soul into cre­ation. Maybe you meant deist, because he did seem at times to think dol­phins were get­ting to Omega faster.

    It would be a sim­ple intel­lec­tual exer­cise to attribute the ori­gin of any 20th Cen­tury idea about post-denominational Chris­tian­ity to Teillhard’s ‘mus­ings’. In this and the pre­vi­ous cen­turies, there hasn’t been a philoso­pher worth a pil­lar of salt that wasn’t a the­olo­gian. Shit, Niet­zsche was a the­olo­gian. It makes emi­nently good sense to approach cre­ation as process, if you give any­thing beyond rep­til­ian acqui­si­tion and self-protection a thought. If you don’t buy that, fine. What that leaves you with is Hobbes, Freud, soli­tary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, and a polit­i­cal party you can’t trust as far as you could throw all their fat asses at the same time.

    Of course, rea­son­able doubt is essen­tial to faith and the Con­sti­tu­tion, but unfor­tu­nately, it’s got no place in fun­da­men­tal­ism, most fla­vors of evan­gel­i­cal doc­trine, charis­matic or Pen­te­costal chris­tian­ity, or the Repub­li­can Party. So, who are the True Believ­ers? Doubt is the hope of cer­ti­tude (so I guess Rene the Dirty Old Fart was a the­olo­gian too–Cogito, um cog­ito pretty sure–ergo sum..) Cer­ti­tude with­out doubt, well that’s how ant colonies sur­vive, and if there’s hell below, the road’s paved with some sanc­tioned ver­sion of true belief.

  14. brian stouder said on September 2nd, 2008 at 2:51 pm

    Arti­fi­cially inflate the value of labor

    “Arti­fi­cially inflate”?

    How is it “arti­fi­cial”, if the Infal­li­ble Mar­kets (ie – man­age­ment) SIGNED the labor AGREEMENTS?

    Sounds like mar­ket forces at work, to me.

    Flip it around.

    Ain’t it “artif­i­cally inflated” when Nike (et al) price their shoes 40X higher than cost? Or 50X?

    If they’re so much cheaper to pro­duce, why don’t they sell them for lots less?

    “But – peo­ple are will­ing to pay that price, for those shoes, so it is The Mar­ket at Work”…..

    Pre­cisely.

    So, with apolo­gies, union agree­ments are just like “grav­ity”, too….and win­ning an increase in the value of labor ben­e­fits more peo­ple than win­ning a decrease in the value of labor.

  15. jcburns

    jcburns said on September 2nd, 2008 at 3:26 pm

    “It’s tough for peo­ple to admit they are over­paid. Sorry.”

    There’s no ‘Amer­ica First’ in that atti­tude. I rec­og­nize it as the clas­sic über-capitalist “me, me, me, and I don’t care what the mar­ket does to you.”

    Me, I care what the mar­ket has done to my neigh­bors, friends, and fel­low Amer­i­cans. And when the “mar­ket is at work” in this way, I think the force of col­lec­tive action is the only thing that restores a more nat­ural bal­ance. The arti­fi­cial­ity in the mar­ket I can point my fin­ger to is exec­u­tives and upper man­age­ment mak­ing many many mul­ti­ples of the salaries paid their base-level work­ers.

    That is just plain wrong, and to me part of being an Amer­i­can is hav­ing the smarts and the guts to say so.

  16. LAMary said on September 2nd, 2008 at 3:38 pm

    The nurses where I work are union­ized, as are all the patient care and ser­vice employ­ees. Because nurses used to be paid so badly, and were often per diem only, peo­ple stopped becom­ing nurses. Now there’s a huge short­age and a nurse with zero expe­ri­ence, right out of two years of com­mu­nity col­lege, makes 32 dol­lars per hour. I have no prob­lem with that at all. I see the Bent­leys in the doc­tors park­ing lot.

  17. harrison said on September 2nd, 2008 at 3:42 pm

    first com­ment:

    it’s not that i’m pro-union; i’m basi­cally anti-owner and its flunkies, mid­dle man­age­ment.

    about 30 years ago, i worked for a small news­pa­per in indi­ana where the gen­eral man­ager and edi­tor knocked unions, but i could tell that they were scared of the pub­lisher of the paper — the head of a small chain. he has this cult-of-personality atti­tude toward him­self which i despised.

    *

    sec­ond com­ment:

    this isn’t the first the gop picked a v.p. who was young, blonde, and pretty, but some­what lack­ing in what you could call qual­i­fi­ca­tions.

    i remind you that twenty years ago, bush the elder picked, as his choice for v.p., indiana’s pride and joy (and jr. sen­a­tor) dan quayle.

    you hoosiers of a cer­tain age ought to remem­ber that one.

  18. nancy said on September 2nd, 2008 at 3:44 pm

    It is hard for peo­ple to admit they’re over­paid. How­ever, it’s much eas­ier for man­age­ment to give them­selves another raise than it is for the rank and file.

    And then there’s this, which you don’t often see on the shop floor:

    Other very wealthy men in the new Gilded Age talk of them­selves as hav­ing a flair for busi­ness not unlike Derek Jeter’s “unique tal­ent” for base­ball, as Leo J. Hin­dery Jr. put it. “I think there are peo­ple, includ­ing myself at cer­tain times in my career,” Mr. Hin­dery said, “who because of their unique­ness war­rant what­ever the mar­ket will bear.”

    He counts him­self as a tal­ented entre­pre­neur, hav­ing assem­bled from scratch a cable tele­vi­sion sports net­work, the YES Net­work. “Jeter makes an unbe­liev­able amount of money,” said Mr. Hin­dery, who now man­ages a pri­vate equity fund, “but you look at him and you say, ‘Wow, I can­not find another ballplayer with that same set of skills.’”

  19. beb said on September 2nd, 2008 at 3:55 pm

    Attempted Book Ban­ning. Another gift from the Repub­li­can vice pres­i­den­tal nom­i­nee
    http://​www​.escha​ton​blog​.com/​2​0​0​8​_​0​8​_​3​1​_​a​r​c​h​i​v​e​.​h​t​m​l​#​6​3​8​5​1​9​6​8​5​7​5​6​2​773813

    She is the gift that keeps on giv­ing.

  20. garmoore said on September 2nd, 2008 at 4:29 pm

    With respect to Gov. Palin, is any­one tak­ing any bets on when or if she’ll bow out of the race? It looks like we’re going to have one “OMG, she didn’t!” story after another. At some point, she’s going to decide that run­ning for such a high-level posi­tion is not worth the trou­ble you get from the scrutiny of the national press, espe­cially with the kind of record she’s appar­ently made for her­self. I’m guess­ing less than two weeks before she needs to spend more time with her fam­ily, or what­ever euphemism she decides on. Being con­ser­v­a­tive is one thing; threat­en­ing to fire librar­i­ans who won’t help her ban books is quite another.

  21. Suzi said on September 2nd, 2008 at 4:34 pm

    What the hell? Book ban­ning, OMG, this is too much! You know some slob­ber­ing repub­li­cans say she does the naughty librar­ian look very con­vinc­ingly.

    I fear she’s too much like Dubya — stub­born, cocky, vain and shal­low, to cave in to the loss of pres­tige and power.

  22. moe99 said on September 2nd, 2008 at 4:37 pm

    Take your bets on Palin’s chance to http://​www​.Intrade​.com

    I ran into a for­mer coworker on the bus last week. She’s an attor­ney in a pri­vate plaintiff’s firm and they are han­dling an antitrust law­suit on behalf of nurses in the Detroit area, who allege were the vic­tims of a con­spir­acy among the hos­pi­tals to keep their wage arti­fi­cially low.

    She vis­its your fair city quite a bit.

  23. brian stouder said on September 2nd, 2008 at 4:40 pm

    is any­one tak­ing any bets on when or if she’ll bow out of the race?

    Nope, she’s on the ticket to stay, bar­ring some expo­nen­tially more dam­ag­ing revelation…Dan Quayle (as men­tioned ear­lier) taught us that.

    McCain’s snap deci­sion, or ‘roll of the dice’, has done dam­age to him – which he can only com­pound by impal­ing Gov. Palin.

    Look­ing ahead, Biden has to be care­fully polite with her in the debates

  24. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on September 2nd, 2008 at 4:50 pm

    And the claim of attempted book ban­ning, unsup­ported by the librar­ian, is made by the guy Palin beat to become mayor, the incum­bent. I’d like to see some con­fir­ma­tion before i’d run with a defeated opponent’s word as anchor for a major claim in a story, but i guess that’s just small town news­pa­per­ing.

  25. brian stouder said on September 2nd, 2008 at 5:08 pm

    Jerry Reed, RIP

    http://​www​.msnbc​.msn​.com/​i​d​/​2​6​5​11875/

    As a singer in the 1970s and early 1980s, he had a string of hits that included “Amos Moses,” “When You’re Hot, You’re Hot,” “East Bound and Down” and “The Bird.” In the mid-1970s, he began act­ing in movies such as “Smokey and the Ban­dit” with Burt Reynolds, usu­ally as a good ol’ boy. But he was an ornery heavy in “Gator,” directed by Reynolds, and a hate­ful coach in 1998’s “The Water­boy,” star­ring Adam San­dler

    (I always liked Hot Rod Lin­coln, myself)

    In a 1998 inter­view with The Ten­nessean, he admit­ted that his act­ing abil­ity was questionable.“I used to watch peo­ple like Richard Bur­ton and Mel Gib­son and think, ‘I could never do that.’ “When peo­ple ask me what my moti­va­tion is, I have a sim­ple answer: Money.”

  26. moe99 said on September 2nd, 2008 at 5:20 pm

    Jeff: here’s cor­rob­o­ra­tion of the book ban­ning from a Wasilla native brave enough to pro­vide name and email address:

    http://​www​.wash​ing​tonin​de​pen​dent​.com/​3​6​7​1​/​t​h​e​-​r​e​f​o​r​m​-​c​a​n​d​i​d​a​t​e​#​c​o​m​m​e​n​t​-​1​994895

  27. coozledad said on September 2nd, 2008 at 5:41 pm

    I have noth­ing but the sin­cer­est admi­ra­tion for The Edi­tors, and not a lit­tle awe, but he failed to men­tion that when the rats do start fuck­ing them­selves, they fuck like, er…rats.
    Putin/Palin: Alaska First!

  28. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on September 2nd, 2008 at 5:54 pm

    I may be wrong, but watch­ing that darn movie twelve times in col­lege i coulda sworn i had the cho­rus firmly fixed in mem­ory:

    West bound and down, eigh­teen wheels rollin’,
    we’re gonna do what they say can’t be done –
    We’ve got a long way to go and a short time to get there,
    Oh I’m west bound, just watch old “Ban­dit” run.

    East­bound woulda taken Ban­dit to Jack­sonville, and no Coors dis­trib­u­tor. Or did Jerry sing it both ways for each half of the movie? That i don’t recall . . . ah, 1977: Ban­dit and Han Solo the role mod­els for 1,600 men in Cary Quad­ran­gle, with Bluto our week­end exam­ple.

    I, per­son­ally, would hate to be vet­ted. It sounds painful.

  29. Pam said on September 2nd, 2008 at 5:57 pm

    Yes, but dur­ing her run for Miss Alaska, didn’t Sarah Palin express her desire to improve the world? Doesn’t that count for some­thing? I remem­ber her com­ments…

    “Harsher pun­ish­ment for parole vio­la­tors ….. oh, and WORLD PEACE!”

  30. Dexter said on September 2nd, 2008 at 5:58 pm

    I worked union and non, and of course union is bet­ter, at least in fac­tory work, which was my career. I am in the UAW (retired) now. It’s point­less to argue with folks about rules of demar­ca­tion regard­ing skilled labor and non-skilled clas­si­fi­ca­tions until you see some­one nearly killed by elec­tric­ity who had no busi­ness even try­ing to be an electrician-for-a-job, or some­one, untrained, kill a machin­ist by knock­ing over a high stack of parts with fork­lift , as the dri­ver had no train­ing.
    The bid­ding of jobs works well, with senior­ity rul­ing, for unskilled jobs which require a cou­ple weeks of train­ing.
    I was in Union Sta­tion, Chicago a few years ago; a mas­sive project was going on. Men wore hel­mets of many col­ors, and vests , color-coded also. This was done so bosses and union stew­ards could mon­i­tor the work being done , done within the skill lev­els and clas­si­fi­ca­tions they had attained. I was impressed.
    I have hor­ror sto­ries of week­end unskilled guys fir­ing up the welder machin­ery when no reg­u­lar skilled welder clas­si­fi­ca­tion holder was present and set­ting fire to a huge area con­tain­ing card­board pack­ag­ing. This is just one example…you get the pic­ture.

  31. Dexter said on September 2nd, 2008 at 6:04 pm

    In case any­body cares, Gov. Jen­nifer Granholm ran across the Mack­inac Bridge yes­ter­day in her per­sonal best time, a lit­tle over 35 min­utes. That’s excel­lent time! My best was a walk­ing time, 66 min­utes. Granholm was the leader of the walk, and she chooses to run it instead of walk­ing, with a group of peo­ple who win a spe­cial lot­tery for the priv­i­lege.

  32. Jolene said on September 2nd, 2008 at 6:52 pm

    Among the things that kill me about the Palin selec­tion is see­ing real Repub­li­can politicians–people who have long years of expe­ri­ence, knowl­edge of the world, knowl­edge of gov­ern­ment, knowl­edge of a wide range of issues–having to defend her. They are clearly mak­ing it up. If I were one of them, I’d be really pissed about being put in that posi­tion. It seems well beyond the usual spin.

    On another topic, here’s Obama’s Labor Day speech in Mil­wau­kee. Very rel­e­vant to jc’s point re car­ing what is going on w/ our neigh­bors. Shorter clips are avail­able on YouTube, but I haven’t sorted through them. This is the whole speech.

  33. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on September 2nd, 2008 at 6:56 pm

    Live blog­ging the Ron Paul do across the river from the RNC — http://​the​cau​cus​.blogs​.nytimes​.com/​2​0​0​8​/​0​9​/​0​2​/​t​h​e​-​r​o​n​-​p​a​u​l​-​s​h​o​w​-​l​i​v​e​-​f​r​o​m​-​m​i​n​n​e​a​polis/

    This is get­ting reg­u­lar updates, which i haven’t seen the NYT doing much of until recently: inter­est­ing read­ing.

  34. alex said on September 2nd, 2008 at 8:08 pm

    Some old GOP soci­ety matron just referred in a speech to the veep nom­i­nee as Sarah Paw­lenty. Won­der what Freud would say about that?

  35. basset said on September 2nd, 2008 at 8:57 pm

    “Hot Rod Lin­coln,” at least the ver­sion we know, wasn’t Jerry Reed… it was by Com­man­der Cody & the Lost Planet Air­men, Com­man­der Cody being a sculp­tor from Ann Arbor named George Frayne.

    some­one else did it first back in the rock­a­billy days, don’t remem­ber who though.

    and “East­bound & Down” was indeed cor­rect… the whole point of the movie was tak­ing Coors to where there was none.

    Jeff, we were in col­lege at about the same time… I remem­ber one of my two room­mates, the one from Iowa, walk­ing in on the other two of us, south­ern Indi­ana hill­bil­lies both, watch­ing a Burt Reynolds movie through a ditch­weed haze in our apart­ment on East 8th in Bloom­ing­ton, yelling “Shit! I’m room­ing with a cou­ple of SOUTHERNERS!” and stomp­ing out.

    he got over it.

  36. Linda said on September 2nd, 2008 at 9:10 pm

    Jolene, not every­body is drink­ing down the Kool Aid. Richard Brookhiser has had to field all sorts of indig­nant email about his oppo­si­tion, and so has David Frum.

    I won­der if this will open up some hon­est talk from social con­ser­v­a­tives about teen sex and preg­nancy. I remem­ber read­ing freere­pub­lic threads in which the cer­vi­cal can­cer vac­cine was called a “tramp shot” or a “slut shot,” that good daugh­ters would never need. More than one poster said that their daugh­ter would be a vir­gin when she mar­ried, and she would marry a vir­gin, too, so why would they need that? Now that “it” hap­pened to the daugh­ter of a con­ser­v­a­tive bigshot, I’m amused to see con­ser­v­a­tives observe that such a thing “hap­pens to every­body.”

  37. alex said on September 2nd, 2008 at 9:10 pm

    The stiffs at this con­ven­tion sure come across as a lot more, er, stiff. Guess they weren’t very well vet­ted either.

  38. Linda said on September 2nd, 2008 at 9:20 pm

    But you can’t make bad edu­ca­tional deci­sions, sleep through high school, eschew col­lege, and expect to make as much as a doc­tor by ratch­et­ing the man­i­fold on top of 4-cylinder engine for 20 years.

    Sorry. I apol­o­gize.

    But then again, I apol­o­gize for grav­ity too.

    I am a union mem­ber, and did NOT make bad edu­ca­tional deci­sions, etc. I am a librar­ian, and before we were union­ized (20 years ago), the wages for librar­i­ans were so bad here that a guy I work with was once on food stamps. Staffers who had fallen out of favor could be harassed till they nearly had a break­down, and were run off. The union has not only made wages bet­ter, but made work con­di­tions more attrac­tive and kept peo­ple in the library field. In the non-union place I worked down South, peo­ple would quit the library to work in insur­ance com­pa­nies, or any­where else, because they could not make a decent liv­ing as librar­i­ans.

  39. coozledad said on September 2nd, 2008 at 9:35 pm

    They’ll be stiff enough later Alex, when they lay into the hook­ers and blow. And I hear Bob Dole has nailed the Via­gra con­ces­sion.
    I’d hate to be on call with the defib­ril­la­tors in St. Paul tonight.

    The Repub­li­can Con­ven­tion has always struck me as a ter­ri­ble waste of mortician’s wax, any­way.

  40. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on September 2nd, 2008 at 10:15 pm

    Don’t for­get the Botox! (“waste of mortician’s wax” — now, that’s funny.)

    Bas­set, i grieve for your time spent on the banks of the Jor­dan while i learned along­side the Wabash in West Lay-flat. All the Chicagoans mocked South­ern­ers there too, but they meant “south of US 30.”

  41. alex said on September 2nd, 2008 at 10:26 pm

    Banks of the Jor­dan. Amen, hal­lelu­jah!

    At IU, the Chicagoans and other fur­riners always were astounded to learn peo­ple from north of U.S. 30 were from Indi­ana, Jeff. You were judged by your twang, not just your bling.

  42. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on September 2nd, 2008 at 10:28 pm

    Well, in Val­paraiso i was only blocks north of the Lin­coln High­way (it’s called Lin­col­nway in Valpo), but i was still a Hoosier (still am, even in Ahia).

  43. brian stouder said on September 2nd, 2008 at 11:09 pm

    I can­NOT see the Proprietress’s Video Note­book linked above, although I have tried and tried!! My con­clu­sion is, it is just a cruel, cruel tease!

    Say – here is a link to the rest of the pics I snapped at the Obama visit to Fort Wayne last May (Nancy very gra­ciously pub­lished sev­eral of them here­abouts back in May). It was a cook­out, and we have noticed that most week­ends the Obama cam­paign does one of these cook­outs at key places around the coun­try. If you get a chance to go to one, do so! I found the whole thing very com­pelling; it def­i­nitely strengthed my sense of con­nec­tion to the Obama cam­paign – despite that some folks try and say that Obama can only speak well when there is a teleprompter in front of him (a flat lie).

    Now seems a good time to glance at them again (they are not in chrono­log­i­cal order; Flicker befud­dles me)

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/30109017@N04/?find=beej2118%40yahoo.com

  44. Calliope said on September 2nd, 2008 at 11:36 pm

    Dwight says:

    “I can buy a bicy­cle man­u­fac­tured in China and shipped half way around the world to my local Tar­get cheaper than I can buy an Amer­i­can built bike — Oh wait. I can’t buy an Amer­i­can made bike. There are none. Sorry.”

    Not true. Here’s an incom­plete list: Bike Fri­day bikes are made in Eugene, Ore­gon. (I own a Tikit, myself). Water­ford, some of the finest steel frame bikes made, are made in Wis­con­sin. Cannondale’s low end bikes are for­eign, the high end bikes are made in the U.S. Gary Fisher’s full sus­pen­sion rigs are made here. Lite­speed bikes are made in Ten­nessee. Seven Cycles are hand­made in Water­town, MA. Trek’s Car­bon frame bikes are made in the U.S. I believe Surly bikes are also US made. Yes, most bikes are made in Asia now. But there are no Amer­i­can made bikes? Horsepucky.

    I really can’t dis­cuss the rest of Dwight’s post with­out the use of many pro­fan­i­ties. I will say, how­ever, that I am always awestruck and amazed at the dis­dain that so many mod­ern con­ser­v­a­tives have for the Amer­i­can worker. The stu­pid­ity is quite breath­tak­ing. Did they learn noth­ing from Henry Ford? The man was a right bas­tard, but he under­stood that, for his com­pany to pros­per, his employ­ees needed to be paid well enough to buy his prod­ucts.

    Well, the amer­i­can ‘con­sumer’ has run through his credit, and wages are falling. Who is going to buy all this asian made crap now? Good luck with that.

  45. Jolene said on September 2nd, 2008 at 11:51 pm

    Thanks for the cook­out pics, Brian. They reminded me of some­thing I’ve been notic­ing in other pic­tures of Barack, which is that he seems very nat­ural and warm when he is inter­act­ing with his chil­dren and even with other people’s chil­dren. There are other pic­tures that show this more clearly than these, but these are good too. It’s not so unusual, I guess, that inno­cence and sweet­ness over­come reserve, but it’s very appeal­ing. Sappy, per­haps, but I love the way he wraps them up in his long arms.

  46. Dexter said on September 3rd, 2008 at 1:22 am

    Cal­liope, very enlight­en­ing post, thanks.
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    Levi “Sex on Skates” John­son is in the clear, only because he lives in Alaska and not,say..oh, Ohio.
    Alaska’s age of con­sent is six­teen. He clears all legal hur­dles.
    In Ohio, all pro­fes­sional peo­ple who became aware of Bristol’s preg­nancy would have been required to report Levi John­son as a child rapist. She’s 17, he’s 18. Only if he was 17 at con­cep­tion could he be spared two years in the state pen­i­ten­tiary as a sex offender, and he would be in grave dan­ger there as a sex offender.
    He prob­a­bly would have served about 4 to 6 months lock-up time and the rest on pro­ba­tion.
    These cases are reported in detail in our local paper.
    Only if the pros­e­cu­tor has rea­son to not pros­e­cute will the perp be spared prison time.
    In Alaska, 16 year old girls are fair game if the male is 19 or younger.
    Dif­fer­ent strokes for dif­fer­ent folks.

  47. Dexter said on September 3rd, 2008 at 1:27 am

    …wasn’t that some­thing about Obama & Biden just infor­mally pop­ping in at Pier 32 Restau­rant in Hamil­ton, Indi­ana a cou­ple nights ago? My old co-worker Larry and his fam­ily and a friend’s wife were inter­viewed in the Auburn paper …can’t link it, it’s a pay to read deal.

  48. Gasman said on September 3rd, 2008 at 1:47 am

    Dwight,
    I did not “make bad edu­ca­tional deci­sions, sleep through high school, eschew col­lege, and expect to make as much as a doc­tor by ratch­et­ing the man­i­fold on top of 4-cylinder engine for 20 years.”

    I am a doc­tor, (D.M.A., doc­tor of musi­cal arts) and I have been a card car­ry­ing union mem­ber from the A.F.M., the Amer­i­can Fed­er­a­tion of Musi­cians. (At present my card has lapsed because of some injuries that have kept me from play­ing pro­fes­sion­ally for a cou­ple of years.)

    Your igno­rance regard­ing unions is rather pro­found. I have worked for the same com­pany in two dif­fer­ent capac­i­ties; one union and one non. In the non union posi­tion I was salaried and worked from 12-18 hours per day with no over­time. In the union posi­tion I had max­i­mum hours set, manda­tory break time, union ben­e­fits, and no over­time unless it was nego­ti­ated and then the rates were clearly spelled out. Guess which one was a bet­ter gig? I have seen the ben­e­fits of a union and there is no way in hell that I would go back to the non-union side of things.

    Have there been excesses? Sure there have. There have also been gross excesses in the “free mar­ket” but that hasn’t stopped you from extolling its virtue.

    By the way, the mar­ket is not free unless all par­ties at the bar­gain­ing table have posi­tions of rel­a­tively equal power. Not the case in third world coun­tries. Also, “free mar­ket” is sup­posed to mean com­pe­ti­tion, not a mar­ket that is “free” from risk for cronies of the Repub­li­cans in power. I’m all for free mar­kets if they are truly free and fair and if there is gen­uine com­pe­ti­tion, unlike the sweet­heart deals for Hal­ibur­ton.

  49. MarkH said on September 3rd, 2008 at 3:57 am

    Brian, also on the obit list this past week, Phil Hill. As a fel­low F1 afi­ciando, I’m sure you can appre­ci­ate:

    http://​www​.autoweek​.com/​a​p​p​s​/​p​b​c​s​.​d​l​l​/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​?​A​I​D​=​/​2​0​0​8​0​8​2​8​/​F​R​E​E​/​8​0​8​289987

    And, in the more obscure dept., “the voice”, Don LaFontaine.

    http://​www​.sfgate​.com/​c​g​i​-​b​i​n​/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​.​c​g​i​?​f​=​/​n​/​a​/​2​0​0​8​/​0​9​/​0​2​/​e​n​t​e​r​t​a​i​n​m​e​n​t​/​e​1​0​2​0​3​3​D​49.DTL

    And, bas­set, it was Johnny Bond’s ver­sion in 1960:

    http://​en​.wikipedia​.org/​w​i​k​i​/​H​o​t​_​R​o​d​_​L​incoln

    And (finally), moe99, many thanks for the link to Anne Kilkenny’s WI post about Palin. Please read it, all; it’s very well thought out and artic­u­late, giv­ing this McCain-leaning voter pause. Kilkenny doesn’t seem to have an axe to grind, other than she detests book-banning.

    Is it just me, or does her post make Palin look and sound like the Reese With­er­spoon char­ac­ter in “Elec­tion”?

  50. beb said on September 3rd, 2008 at 7:46 am

    Cal­liope writes: “Did they learn noth­ing from Henry Ford? The man was a right bas­tard, but he under­stood that, for his com­pany to pros­per, his employ­ees needed to be paid well enough to buy his prod­ucts.”

    I like to note that Ford was also expe­ri­enc­ing some­thing like 330% annual turnover of his work-force. He wasn’t just try­ing to get his work­ers to buy the cars they made, he was try­ing to buy some sta­bil­ity on his assem­bly lines.

  51. brian stouder said on September 3rd, 2008 at 9:01 am

    There are other pic­tures that show this more clearly than these

    Jolene, you got THAT right! (didja like the ones where I cut the heads off of the nom­i­nee and his wife, but got a fuzzy pic of Malia?)

    Actu­ally, the fol­low­ing pic­ture made me laugh out loud, later on.

    http://​www​.flickr​.com/​p​h​o​t​o​s​/​3​0​1​0​9​0​1​7​@​N​0​4​/​2​8​2​2​7​95997/

    (the Obama entourage is just arriv­ing, and all heads are turned toward their approach…..except for the kid in the fore­ground, who is pre­sume­ably win­ning a video game on his DS!)

    Mark – thanks for the heads-up on Phil Hill; I hadn’t heard the news

  52. Suzi said on September 3rd, 2008 at 9:49 am

    Moe, thanks for the Kilkenny tip, quite a story, just about how I pic­tured Palin. It’s on this site too:

    http://​my​.barack​obama​.com/​p​a​g​e​/​c​o​m​m​u​n​i​t​y​/​p​o​s​t​/​p​a​l​i​n​v​e​t​/​gG5XS5

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