The Black Out

I just heard on the news that the Prez is going to be in Militigan today talking about, "keeping college affordable." Yeah, like that's gonna happen. Damn, its absolutely the first interesting Superbowl game in years, and looks to be going down the crapper this year as a sitting Governor, one Mitch Daniels has gone into full "deer in headlights" mode after using his free buttle to the SOTA to further bamboozle the heathen Indians. Frankly, it looks to me like Mitchy, and Scooter Walker are using the same anti-depressants.

Hope he doesn't try any Lambeau leaps on those!

The so-called right to work is as ugly a little sophistry as any that its been my experience to decode, therefore, so I'll not be at home for the extravagant flat screen spectacle. Things could change, its really up to the players now. Are they going to sit up and bark, or go slinking into Indianapolis with their act upstaged by the clowns. All unions, all locals are different. The NFL broke the strike with scab ballplayers the last time, it took fifteen years before they were all out of the league, but today presents another challenge. I wonder if Ford Field could be made available in time? "Cars on Ice?" Damn.

Sixty-five years of drunken, purblind, McCarthyism by the Federal Government has really taken its tolls upon the organized labor movement, especially as its applied to public servants. They, the other side, refuse to see as implicit the inseparability of the right to strike, within the right to organize itself. Its not much good without it, its not a trinket to dangle in front of savages.

I'd like to remind the President why Dr. King went down to Memphis in 1968, and what he did when he got there, but I shouldn't think I'd need to. Jimmy Carter fired the wildcatting Post Office workers in 1978, and Ronald Reagan fired the striking federal air-traffic controllers under the same rubric in 1983. Hence the notion that its somehow illegal for cops, teachers, and garbage workers to withhold their labor, and presuming then, the right of the current executive to summarily fire them, without due process, purely as an example to deter others from engaging in similar legal activity, as implicit as well, and thereby constitutes a form of forced human labor, involuntary servitude, or slavery.

And so far President Obama's  education program has skirted dangerously off in that direction, that's hard a starboard, there Skipper. Mike Klonsky observed yesterday that Daniels had actually complimented the President's on his awful domestic education policies. "Null, set, and match, Barry."

But if Hoops Duncan is still around when the schools reopen in the fall, if any are left, we could see some massive dislocations, particularly whereas we seem to be running out of steam in the economic recovery, as billions of badly needed dollars are being funneled away down the rat hole, and into specious political advertisements. The Chicago Teachers Union contract is out this year, and they'll come to the table mad as hell at the impolitic antics of his honor:

Rejoice, Recall, Rahmmanuel and ransom captive City Hall which long in Daley's shadow dwelt in fear until the corporate hand-outs disappeared....

Here's a fact I got off the Dylan Ratigan show; that 94% of the time, the candidate who spends the most money in a political campaign wins the election. That's been translated in the common parlance as the sack who blows himself up the biggest on T.V. always wins. Doesn't really say much about any residual survival skill of Americans outside the wealthiest one percent, of us, but may also be myopic in the extreme. I suspect that when their right to vote is the last really free thing they've got, they'll begin to use it with far more discretion, and even an overt discrimination toward the common weal.