Fact-esque

Norwood Nurses Join SEIU: Michelle Malkin Falls Down Backwards and Foams at the Mouth

Well, not yet. Maybe tomorrow when she finally hears about it.

Nearly 600 workers at Norwood Hospital, ranging from respiratory therapists to housekeepers, will join the Service Employees International Union as the result of an election yesterday.

***

Norwood became the third hospital in the Caritas Christi Health Care system, based in Boston, to unionize this year. More than 800 employees at St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center, the flagship of the six-hospital Catholic chain, in April affiliated with the same labor union, Local 1199 of the SEIU United Healthcare Workers East.

Malkin hates that. In fact, she hates unions, apparently because they promise better working conditions and pay to workers. Well, that's what she said. Calling SEIU's organization of home health care workers a "home invasion" - a term which used to be applied to criminals who broke into your house and robbed you with AK-47s or whatever but which Malkin now feels free to apply to people who ask you to let them help you live better - here's what she thought was so terrible:

Over the last month, home-based providers started have been receiving unexpected visits from out-of-state union lackeys trying to recruit them with the promise of health care benefits and more money.

(emphasis added)

Monstrous! Oh, and she doesn't like any of that voting business, either.

Say What? Dept: Jonah's Whale & Teh Stoopid

You know, if it wasn't just a minority of pants-wetting, nose-picking, pearl-clutching, batshit-insane, Beckian conservatives, I'd think maybe there was something in the water or swirling around in the air that's eating people's brains. What does one do with, oh, say, something like this?

There is, of course, an important principle here, and if all of Montana's residents were black, it would be easier for everyone to see it. Montanans' votes don't count as much as Rhode Islanders' -- in fact, a Montanan's vote only counts for nearly three-fifths of a Rhode Islander's. That America's slave population was counted by the same ratio under the original Constitution is usually cited, rightly, as one of the document's greatest sins. A lawsuit filed in federal court in Mississippi last month hopes to force Congress to remedy the status quo's assault on the one-person, one-vote principle by increasing Congress to as many as a paltry 1,761 members.

Beyond principle, there are practical reasons to expand Congress. For decades, presidential candidates have promised to change the "way Washington works." But once elected, they're soon captured by their own congressional parties, which are in turn beholden to the "old bulls" and constituencies rooted in interests outside their districts.

A Congress of, say, 5,000 citizen-legislators would change that overnight. Would it cost more money? Yes. But today's huge staffs could be cut, and perks and pork might even be curtailed by using the old chewing gum rule: If there's not enough for everyone, nobody can have any.

(emphasis added)

That, b's & g's, is Jonah Goldberg in today's LAT. Bear in Mind that they fired Richard Scheer to make room for Jonah's considerable...um...non-intilekshual bulk.

A Bad Day at Black Rock, Iraq

WARNING: Probably not work-safe language but no violence.

What you're about to watch is at best frustrating and at worst tragic. It is a US soldier taking out his frustrations with the Middle East: indirection, multiple loyalties, and a reluctance to fight for a foreign aggressor. It is more or less what a lot of us said was going to happen before the illegal invasion of Iraq, so it's not a surprise. But that sargeant doesn't know it and it's driving him crazy. It ain't gonna do you much good, either. (Via Thomas at newsrack)

This is not the only model, of course. Thomas Ricks at Foreign Policy points to a completely different way of motivating troops.

The problem is, of course, that there's a lot more of the first than there is of the second. US troops' frustration level is no doubt extremely high, as the first vid shows, but they are in an impossible situation, clearing the same roads, the same areas, every single day, fighting the same insurgents, some of whom probably were standing in front of him. It is a No-Win Situation of the deadliest.

The answer is obvious. We never should have been there in the first place. It's way past time to get out.

A Not Insignificant Bit of Trivia: The top vid has been on YouTube, Thomas says, since January. Are you wondering why you haven't seen it before now?

The Right-Wing Media Conspiracy Continues

It's not a new thought but it's worth saying - and repeating so we aren't taken by surprise - that while Barack Obama's election is (hopefully) going to mean major changes (like undoing the Bush Regression to the Robber Baron Era of the late 19th century) in a lot of areas, the major media doesn't have much intention of doing likewise. Glenn Greenwald pointed out this week that despite all the mea culpas over the lousy job they did covering the Bush Regime, NBC (owned by General Electric) has just replaced Tim "Government Stenographers R Us" Russert with David "Government Stenographers R Us" Gregory.

Several months before he was named as moderator of Meet the Press, David Gregory went on MSNBC to categorically reject Scott McClellan's accusations that the American media failed to scrutinize the Bush administration's pre-war claims.  Gregory vigorously praised the job which he and his "journalistic" colleagues did in the run-up to the Iraq War -- the period which Salon's Gary Kamiya called "one of the greatest collapses in the history of the American media."  Proclaimed Gregory, with a straight face:  "Questions were asked. I think we pushed.  I think we prodded.  I think we challenged the President.  Not only those of us in the White House Press Corps did that, but others in the media landscape did that."  Most revealingly of all, Gregory said:

I think there are a lot of critics who think that . . . . if we did not stand up and say this is bogus, and you're a liar, and why are you doing this, that we didn't do our job.  I respectfully disagree.  It's not our role.

Indeed.  Perish the thought that a reporter should point out when government officials are making "bogus" claims and are lying a country into a war. 

(emphasis in the original)

The pendulum is swinging (has swung) back and investigative journalism is, sort of, in fashion once again but the Beltway pundits have signaled very clearly that the press had better not go too far with it because they, the self-appointed arbiters of what America thinks despite the glaringly obvious fact that they never listen to Anericans who don't live in Georgetown, have decreed that we're "tired of scandals" and don't want to know about any more of them. Unless, of course, they're Democratic scandals, in which case they deserve round-the-clock coverage and acres of speculation and innuendo based on ultraconservative wishful thinking and paranoia.

WaPo Notices a Fed Bank Regulator Was Too Busy Deregulating Banks to Notice Bank Failures Due to Bank Deregulation

A Federal agency that was supposed to function as a regulatory watchdog, didn't.

Not much news there, huh?

Well, maybe not for you but for the Washington Post and other until-lately-Bush-propaganda-outlets, this has come as profoundly unsettling information. Really.

Squealing Like Stuck Pigs: Bushies Respond to a Modicum of Truth

The Bushies are having a hysterical hissy-fit because the NYT, after giving Bush a free ride for 7 1/2 of his 8 years in the White House, finally decided to do some semi-legitimate reporting. I didn't have time to write about this yesterday but I intended to slap the reporters' wrists for going easy on him. For instance:

From his earliest days in office, Mr. Bush paired his belief that Americans do best when they own their own home with his conviction that markets do best when let alone.

He pushed hard to expand homeownership, especially among minorities, an initiative that dovetailed with his ambition to expand the Republican tent — and with the business interests of some of his biggest donors. But his housing policies and hands-off approach to regulation encouraged lax lending standards.

It's true as far as it goes but it also puts the absolute best spin possible on a total fiasco by claiming - inaccurately - that it was Our Corporate Poster Boy-in-Chief's determination to put people into homes who'd never had them before that caused the "lax lending standards". In order to accept that thesis, you'd have to come up with completely different explanations of why he let corporate swindlers alone, why he left corporations alone who continually ignored safety regulations, pollution regulations, and health regulations, why he let corporations alone when they dodged taxes, cheated and/or gouged consumers, and so on.

The only Bush "philosophy" (kind of a high-falutin' word to use when what we're talking about is corruption, greed and laissez-faire blindness to the point of self-immolation) that's relevant here is the one that says "any form of restriction on capitalism is socialism and a Very Bad Thing". The Ownership Society Scam, which is what Becker, Stolberg, and Labaton are referring to, was never anything but a Heritage Foundation-born PR ploy to justify privatizing (and thus killing) Social Security while opening up a whole new cadre of suckers for Wall Street to fleece. The idea that Bush, the compassionate conservative humanitarian *gag*, turned his back on mortgage manipulations and fraud out of his concern for the "little people" would be laughable if it wasn't so monstrously and demonstrably a self-serving LIE.

Like a Bullet "Strays" When It's Aimed at Your Head

The news media that David Sirota and Glenn Greenwald have caught pretending they had nothing to do with the Bush Propaganda Storm of 2001-03 are giving equally thoughtful passes to Elaine Chao's Labor Dept. The WaPo headline says "Labor Dept. Accused of Straying From Enforcement". "Straying"? Like they got pushed off course by the wind or something, nothing they could do about it?

As if.

Senator Chris Matthews of Pennsylvania?!

And as a Democrat, too. Oy.

The Northeast's dwindling cast of Senate Republicans has Democrats circling Arlen Specter's seat in Pennsylvania, convinced the party is well-positioned to make a competitive race out of the 2010 election.

Leading the pack of prospects -- at least in celebrity -- is Chris Matthews, the MSNBC "Hardball" host and a former Capitol Hill Democratic staffer. The Philadelphia native has been toying with a run for months, and this week he sat down with state Democrats to discuss the prospect of taking on the five-term GOP senator.

(emphasis added)

Rob?

The NYT Is Shocked the Bail-Out Isn't Working

No kidding.

As the government’s financial rescue enters a new phase, Wall Street and many ordinary Americans are wondering the same thing: Is any of this working?

The short answer is not nearly as much, or as fast, as many had hoped.

More than a month and nearly $300 billion into the initial effort, many of the nation’s financial arteries seem nearly as sclerotic as they were before. Some of them, in fact, appear to be hardening more.

Loans are scarce, and for many people, getting scarcer. Home mortgage rates have barely eased. While solid corporations can borrow money again in the market for commercial paper — those crucial short-term i.o.u.’s that companies rely on to pay day-to-day bills — trickier forms of financing remain elusive. Hard-pressed companies are still virtually shut out of the capital markets.

(emphasis added)

You may translate "solid corpo's" as those which have lots of cash-on-hand and don't actually need loans.

If you've been paying attention to the reports in the press of what the money has been used for or is planned to be used for, you will have noticed that what it was intended to have been used for - loosening credit and making more $$$ available for loans - isn't on Wall Street's list. At all. Instead the bail-out bread has bought expensive executive vacations, lucrative executive bonuses, pay-offs to investors, and an opportunity for the rescued banks to once again get lost in the easy money of mergers and acquisitions. They're expanding, iow, forcing growth where the conditions don't otherwise exist for growth.

Which is pretty much what we said would happen when Congressional Democrats were rushing the bail-out to Bush's desk without reading it or paying too much attention to what it said in the fine print, which TreasSec Henry Paulson had made sure carried virtually NO restrictions on the banks' use or his own ability to disseminte the funds. The money, therefore, was handed over as part of a law that said it was for lending but without restrictions so that that's all it would be used for. Without consequences to worry about or legal sanctions, Wall Street simply put the money in its pocket. It didn't even say thanks. Meanwhile the NYT, which supported the bail-out editorially and never so much as suggested the possibility of potential dirty work at the crossroads, is shocked, shocked to discover that the thieves who stripped the Treasury and perpetrated fraud on consumers and investors alike would resort to...stealing.

Can they really be as naive as all that?

David Brooks Admits His Conservatism on FTN

Avedon Carol directed us to this Steve Benen post responding to David Brooks' announcement on Face the Nation that conservatism is the bunk. Both Benen and Carol were struck by his "analysis", Benen because he thoyght it was accurate and Carol because she thought somebody should remind Brooks that he was part of what he was decrying.

I'm most interested in this sentence: "And, fundamentally, the conservative movement failed (and I've been in it my entire life) because it hasn't addressed the problems of today, the rise of China and Russia, the rise of inequality, energy, health care. It's great to worry about Reagan. I loved Reagan, but those days are over." It "hasn't addressed the problems of today," David, because it created them - and you helped. Which is precisely what it was supposed to do - make everyone so wretched that they would never again feel free to grow their hair too long and march in the streets.

She's right, of course, and I'd go even further: Brooks was a late-coming but major member of the Bush Apologists in Big Media Club who advocated, supported, and protected Bush's neoconservatism every chance it got.

But what I was most interested in was this single clause: "(and I've been in it my entire life)".

Wasn't the NYT pimping Brooks as a "liberal/centrist voice" when they hired him? Didn't he pretend to be a center-left liberal for months after he began writing his column? Did I just imagine all that? Or did Brooks just admit on national television that he lied/cheated/swindled his bosses and audience by pretending to be something he has never been?