Monthly Archives: March 2009

Thursday Open Thread: The Anti-Bucket List

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Everyone knows what the Bucket List is: a list of things one wants to do before they die.  The latest trend is the Fu*k It list: a list of things you have no desire to do before you die.

My Fu*k It list?

  • Field dress a dead animal.  I read how to do it.  Nope.  Not for me.
  • Watch an entire episode of BillO, The Manatee, or Glenn Beck.  I value my brain cells and the screaming inside my head as each one died would be too much for me to deal with.
  • See Sarah Palin on the TeeVee box or hear her ignorant obnoxious arrogant folksy voice again. Ever.
  • Hit a moose. Two or three thousand pounds coming through the windshield?  I think I’ll pass.
  • Jump out of a perfectly good airplane.  I don’t want to be in the damned things to start with.  Jumping out of one? Not.  Gonna.  Happen.
  • Climb Mt. Everest.  Yeah, yeah, yeah…I know it’s there.  Seeing it is good enough.

Well, I am sure I have many more, but it’s your turn.  What is on YOUR Fu*k It list?

h/t: Yellow Dog at They Gave Us A Republic.

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Natasha Richardson passes away at age 45

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Natasha Richardson being interviewed by Charlie Rose about her role in Cabaret and her career.

Entertainment Weekly

She had suffered a traumatic brain injury in a skiing accident in Canada on Monday, March 16, and was later transported to New York, where she passed away at age 45. In a statement, Richardson’s husband, Liam Neeson, and their family said, “Liam Neeson, his sons, and the entire family are shocked and devastated by the tragic death of their beloved Natasha. They are profoundly grateful for the support, love and prayers of everyone, and ask for privacy during this very difficult time.”

Over the course of a renowned 25-year career that spanned every medium and every conceivable genre, Richardson proved her range time and again. She could acquit herself admirably in even the lightest fare, such as 1998′s family film The Parent Trap or the 2002 romantic comedy Maid in Manhattan, but as a member of the legendary Redgrave acting dynasty, which stretched back for generations, she always felt most at home tackling profound human dramas from the likes of Chekhov, Ibsen, Williams, and O’Neill. “I’m comfortable…where the most emotionally painful stuff is,” she told EW in 1998. “That’s where I feel a connection.”

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What Will Gov. Sanford (SC) Do Next?

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McClatchy reports:

WASHINGTON — A nonpartisan congressional report released Wednesday concludes that it likely would be unconstitutional for a legislature to supplant a governor in accepting and using economic stimulus money.

The Congressional Research Service analysis could imperil tens of millions of stimulus dollars reserved for South Carolina and Texas, whose governors have said they will reject some of their states’ shares of the money.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who requested the CRS study, wrote White House budget director Peter Orszag, asking him to clarify key provisions of the $787 billion stimulus bill that President Barack Obama signed into law last month.

“Right now there is ambiguity in the law,” Graham told reporters Wednesday. “Can the legislature require funds from the stimulus funds for education or does it have to be the governor?”
…
In Charleston last week, Graham said he doesn’t support Sanford’s rejection of the stimulus money for the state.

“If it comes down to South Carolina getting the money or some other state getting the money, I would urge the governor to take the money,” Graham said.

This makes me wonder what the next moves will be by the Republican Governor’s of Alaska (Sarah Palin), Louisiana (Bobby Jindal) and Texas (Rick Perry) will do if they don’t have the cover of their state’s Legislative Branch covering their behinds. If this turns out to be true, I wonder, further, if these governor’s will still reject billions of dollars offered to their states. (I also wonder if Sarah Palin will get her many earmarks from the omnibus spending bill without taking any stimulus money. Another Hmmm.)

Talk about a fascinating game of chess…with the lives and futures of millions of people on the line. Compassionate Conservatism, my a$$.

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Obama Administration To Sign UN Gay Rights Declaration

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In December, Bush was getting push-back for being the only western government that refused to endorse worldwide decriminalization of homosexuality.  George Bush sided with the Vatican, which was against the declaration as well.

U.S. officials said Tuesday they had notified the declaration’s French sponsors that the administration wants to be added as a supporter.

The move was made after an interagency review of the Bush administration’s position on the nonbinding document, which was signed by all 27 European Union members as well as Japan, Australia, Mexico and three dozen other countries, the officials said.

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Cafferty: “When it comes to fund-raising, is Gov. Sarah Palin the best the Republicans can do?”

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Jack Cafferty’s viewers e-mail:

Tony writes:

Pretty much.  Gov. Palin is to the GOP is what Lindsay Lohan is to Hollywood: disastrously newsworthy.  She is their star.  And, like Hollywood celebrities, bad publicity is publicity nonetheless.

Larry from Belton, Texas writes:

Yes, since Anna Nicole died.  And sweet Sarah won’t be the first woman to talk a bunch of old white men out of copious piles of money.

In all likelihood…Your tomatoes are picked by slaves

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Yes, I’m talking about the United States.  In Florida, since 1997, there have been seven slavery rings that have been prosecuted by the Department of Justice, freeing over 1,000 workers.  These employers are guilty of beating their workers, chaining them, keeping them in debt and imprisoning workers in U-Hauls for being sick or unable to work.

We still have a ways to go, in Immokalee, Florida, the tomato capital, between December and May, as much as 90 percent of the fresh domestic tomatoes we eat come from south Florida.

According to Douglas Molloy, the chief assistant U.S. attorney based in Fort Myers, Immokalee has another claim to fame: It is “ground zero for modern slavery.”

The beige stucco house at 209 South Seventh Street is remarkable only because it is in better repair than most Immokalee dwellings.  For two and a half years, beginning in April 2005, Mariano Lucas Domingo, along with several other men, was held as a slave at that address. At first, the deal must have seemed reasonable. Lucas, a Guatemalan in his thirties, had slipped across the border to make money to send home for the care of an ailing parent. He expected to earn about $200 a week in the fields. Cesar Navarrete, then a 23-year-old illegal immigrant from Mexico, agreed to provide room and board at his family’s home on South Seventh Street and extend credit to cover the periods when there were no tomatoes to pick.

Lucas’s “room” turned out to be the back of a box truck in the junk-strewn yard, shared with two or three other workers. It lacked running water and a toilet, so occupants urinated and defecated in a corner. For that, Navarrete docked Lucas’s pay by $20 a week. According to court papers, he also charged Lucas for two meager meals a day: eggs, beans, rice, tortillas, and, occasionally, some sort of meat. Cold showers from a garden hose in the backyard were $5 each. Everything had a price. Lucas was soon $300 in debt. After a month of ten-hour workdays, he figured he should have paid that debt off.

But when Lucas-slightly built and standing less than five and a half feet tall-inquired about the balance, Navarrete threatened to beat him should he ever try to leave. Instead of providing an accounting, Navarrete took Lucas’s paychecks, cashed them, and randomly doled out pocket money, $20 some weeks, other weeks $50. Over the years, Navarrete and members of his extended family deprived Lucas of $55,000.

To put their back-breaking labor into prospective, for every 32 pound basket of tomatoes workers get approximately 40 to 50 cents, this rate has not risen much from what workers were paid 30 years ago. On a good day you could possibly make $50 if you picked a ton of tomatoes, that’s only if you work very fast.  But there are many pitfalls in achieving that goal.

If it rains, you can’t pick. If the dew is heavy, you sit and wait until it evaporates. If trucks aren’t available to transport the harvest, you’re out of luck. You receive neither overtime nor benefits. If you are injured (a common occurrence, given the pace of the job), you have to pay for your own medical care.

The fast food industry contributed greatly to the poor wages paid to workers for the tomatoes that were bought by Burger King & McDonald’s to name a few.  It wasn’t til last year that Burger King finally caved to a salary increase.

Astonishingly, Burger King, until May 29, 2008, refused to go along with a deal that will cost them less than $300,000 annually; last year, the corporation raked in $2.23 billion in revenues.

The Campaign for Fair Food, has put pressure for the past four years on YUM! Brands, owner of Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, KFC, Long John Silver’s, and A&W. Yum! agreed to the one-cent raise in 2005 and, importantly, pledged to make sure that no worker who picked its tomatoes was being exploited.

But the program faces a major obstacle. Claiming that the farmers are not party to the arrangement, the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, an agricultural cooperative that represents some 90 percent of the state’s producers, has refused to be a conduit for the raise, citing legal concerns.

The only way to ensure you are buying slave-free tomatoes is to buy them locally or from Whole Foods, which is the only grocery chain that has signed on to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) Campaign for Fair Food, which means that it has promised not to deal with growers who tolerate serious worker abuses and, when buying tomatoes, to a pay a price that supports a living wage.  The tomatoes picked in Mexico, laborers have even worse conditions than our workers face here in the US.

It’s hard to believe in this day and age we are still prosecuting people for slavery.

ABC News: AIG Under Criminal Investigation

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Truthout

Investigations

The statement called for an “investigation of the validity of A.I.G.’s past accounting and securities disclosures and its executive compensation program by the Office of Thrift Supervision, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the FBI.”

“I think that A.I.G. is simply one of the most obvious examples where their accounting was false. Fraudulent accounting at a publicly traded company is securities fraud and that’s a felony,” Professor Black told Truthout.

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Hmmm. I wonder…

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I wonder if this YouTube video (watch the whole thing. The end is soooo worth it!) of Jon Stewart taking on Tucker Carlson on Crossfire…

…had anything to do with Tucker Carlson taking on Jon Stewart calling Stewart a “sanctimonious, partisan hack”  (but not to Jon’s face, of course).

Nah, no relation at all.

I also wonder if Carlson is still trying to remove Stewart’s foot from his butt.  Or perhaps Carlson is still trying to remove his very foot from his very own mouth.  Not much difference there.

Open Thread: Astounding, Amazing and Totally Cool

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h/t: AMERICAblog

The dolphins at Sea World have taught themselves a new behavior.  The females started blowing rings (bubbles) out of their blowholes and then jiggle and play with those bubbles until they get small – and then they pop them.  It started with one dolphin and then that behavior was learned by many of the others.  Check it out.  This is totally cool!

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On Trip to Gaza, Rachel Corrie’s Parents Remember Their Daughter

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Yesterday, March 16th, marked the 6th anniversary of the death of Rachel Corrie, a peace activist and international observer from Olympia Washington, who was crushed to death in Rafah by an Israeli (IDF) bulldozer, (made in the USA by Caterpillar), while trying to prevent the home of a Palestinian physician and his family from being demolished.

This story is near and dear to my heart. Rachel’s mother was my friend through the years as Rachel was growing up. The Corries are the most kind, intelligent, informed, compassionate, honest, peaceful, loving people you would ever have the privilege of knowing.

Rachel’s life ended violently, tragically, at the age of 23, and yet through the pain and loss of their youngest daughter, Craig and Cindy Corrie have worked diligently since Rachel’s death to shine a light on the situation in Gaza, working to educate others on the plight of the Palestinian people living there.

This is a very good interview with the parents of Rachel Corrie – in two parts (below the fold):
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Grassley’s Comment On AIG Execs: Resign Or Commit Suicide

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Politico

Sen. Charles Grassley is so angry over AIG bonuses that he says the executives should resign or kill themselves.

In a comment aired this afternoon on WMT, an Iowa radio station, Grassley (R-Iowa) said: “The first thing that would make me feel a little bit better towards them if they’d follow the Japanese model and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say I’m sorry, and then either do one of two things – resign, or go commit suicide.”