Wright is Right

Anyone who bitches about Jeremiah Wright after hearing his very name for the first time a grand total of two or three months ago:

shut the fuck up.

How about listen to what he actually says instead of what Fox and NBC say he says? Context. Reality. Stop freaking out after every fucking sound bite you hear on the news, it's DESIGNED to stimulate. Try thinking.

And what the hell does it really have to do with Obama?

Obama was baptized in Wright's church in 1988, after being a religious skeptic for some years. I think it's pretty obvious that he's still a religious skeptic, he just joined a church so he would eventually have a chance at politics, because no president has ever been an atheist or agnostic, and no politician has ever won office with a lot of people knowing they weren't a good, married, Christian straight guy. That's why he joined a church. Hell, if you're going to sit in church every Sunday to make yourself look like a decent guy, you might as well go to a church with an entertaining preacher.

But get this: Reverend Wright isn't crazy. Like, at all, actually. I think about 98% of what he preaches is fricken genius, based on what I've actually heard HIM say.

Weird, weird union stuff

From nader.org:

Andy Stern, the president of the 1.9 million member Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is embroiled in the politics of accepting sweetheart union contract deals that and, ironically is being condemned by the Wall Street Journal. What gives here?

It seems that Stern wants to put heat on the private equity funds that have bought hospitals, nursing home chains and other firms whose employees he wants to organize.

[...]

The California Nurses Association (CNA) is a fast growing union that fights for patient rights, for adequate nurse-patient ratios and bargains for strong contracts with hospital chains.

[...]

In Ohio, the CNA exposed a SEIU deal with nine hospitals owned by
Catholic Healthcare Partners. SEIU let the employer pick SEIU as its chosen union without a single signed union card. The company-union collaboration scheduled elections.

CNA sent representatives to Ohio and sounded the alarm about a
top-down agreement sealed by a mutually imposed code of silence.

CNA’s actions threw SEIU into a rage. Buses of SEIU people from Ohio were sent by Mr. Stern to break up an annual meeting of 1000 labor activists sponsored by the magazine, Labor Notes, in Dearborn, Michigan. CNA’s Executive Director, RoseAnn DeMoro was scheduled to speak to the assemblage.

Shouting, scuffling, overturned chairs and the arrival of the Dearborn Police to impose order led A.F.L.-C.I.O. president John J. Sweeney, to denounce what he called “a violent attack” orchestrated by SEIU.

click here for the whole thing

I had no idea what the dynamics of American labour were like, with the whole SEIU vs. AFL-CIO partition. I thought those people only existed in Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" ....

Restaurants, Mayors Toast Earth Day with Tap Water

From Corporate Accountability International:

BOSTON – Prominent restaurants and mayors kicked Earth
Day off early this year by cancelling bottled water contracts and instead
promoting local tap water. The move has been part of a nationwide effort, dubbed “Think Outside the Bottle,” that exposes the social and environmental impacts of bottled water.

“Restaurants have always showcased the highest standards of cuisine and new culinary innovations,” said Henry Patterson, owner of The Other Side Café in Boston. “Now we are reducing waste and encouraging more sustainable eating practices when we serve safe, clean and reliable water from the tap instead of its higher priced, bottled alternative .”

click here for the whole thing

Once in a while it's good to think society is actually making some sort of environmental progress.

That's about all I can say.

Matt Gonzales on Democrat complicity in the war

Eight Reasons Our Changing World Will Turn You Into an Environmentalist, Like It or Not

From Alternet.org:

AlterNet picked eight topics -- water, global warming, food, health, energy, pollution, consumption and corporations -- that pose real dangers to the future of human life and selected a series of recent essays that illustrate these problems, along with links to organizations and further resources that address these issues.

click here for the whole thing

I haven't read all of this yet but I think it serves as a decent Earth Day oriented post.

I don't know how much the people of Alternet really know about this but they've certainly done their research in finding people who do. It's awesome how passionate they seem to be about getting the word out about environmental crises.

To toot my own horn, I'll share what's been on my mind recently. I've come to a certain conclusion that wind and solar power are the way to go as far as energy, both for lighting our homes and for powering our cars (solar). Well upon reading some of this Alternet article, I'm probably right. Biofuels not only use up essential resources for human life, they might not be as eco-friendly as some would have you believe. When burned they emit carbon dioxide, which is the same compound that humans exhale, BUT according to my biology professor at UNO (Dr. James Grady) there's already an excess of CO2 in our atmosphere. I don't believe we're going to be helping anything by switching to biofuels to run our internal combustion engines. I honestly think that electronic (battery) and solar powered cars are the only way to help the environment, BUT that's only if we also switch to solar and wind power energy generation.

So before we keep building hybrid cars, or any new cars at that, we need to generate clean energy first, so that when we charge our electric cars in the future, we're not relying on a dirty way of getting that electricity. Just manufacturing a new car, hybrid or not, is dirtier than driving that car for a year (no source, that's just what I've heard). All of the machinery that goes in to manufacturing EVERYTHING needs to be running on solar panels, in factories that are powered by solar and wind plants, NOT coal or nuclear facilities.

That's my two cents.

Bush is in town [here's a new Greg Palast article]

From Gregpalast.net

José Can You See? Bush’s Trojan Taco
By Greg Palast

While you Democrats are pounding each other to a pulp in Pennsylvania,
the President has snuck back down to New Orleans for a meeting of the NAFTA Three: the Prime Minister of Canada and the President of Mexico.

[...]

More important, the agenda-makers, the guys who called the meeting, must remain as far out of camera range as possible: The North American
Competitiveness Council.

Never heard of The Council? Well, maybe you’ve heard of the counselors: the chief executives of Wal-Mart, Chevron Oil, Lockheed-Martin and 27 other multinational masters of the corporate universe.

And why did the landlords of our continent order our presidents to a
three-nation pajama party? Their term is “harmonization.”

[...]
Harmonization means making rules and regulations the same in all three
countries. Or, more specifically, watering down rules – on health, safety, labor rights, oil drilling, polluting and so on - in other words, any regulations that get between The Council members and their profits.

click here for the whole thing

I left out a part of the article that says New Orleans still looks like Dresden 1946, which I don't entirely agree with because it's really the outskirts like Chalmette that are still pretty bad, not necessarily New Orleans itself.

Anyway, I overheard that Bush was going to be in town just this morning in the French Market where I work. A few minutes after I found out about this suprise visit, I saw a guy in a car with Ohio plates ride down the street with a bullhorn shouting "George Bush has betrayed the American people!" out the side of the window. Most onlookers thought it was comical, I thought it was awesome. Supposedly he almost hit someone but I didn't see it.

But about the article, it's awesome. Greg Palast is really smart, go read it.

"All done, go home." - IRAQ

Another one from Alternet, an interview with Jonathan Steele, author of Defeat: Why they Lost Iraq:

Also, people expected great things from Americans, things that were perhaps a bit unrealistic -- electricity and water and jobs immediately. But they had the idea, "It's a superpower; they toppled Saddam in three weeks, how come they can't get the electricity going?"

Encapsulating the mood, about three months after the invasion, a graffito appeared on the plinth of the famously toppled Saddam statue. The graffito said, "All done, go home." I think that summed it up. It's the same sentiment I remember hearing on great march of [Shia] pilgrims through Karbala within three or four weeks of the toppling of the statue -- "Thank you, and now goodbye."

click here for the whole thing

I think American discourse often overlooks the fact that a lot of Iraqis, a majority according to most polls I've seen, want the US troops out of their country, now. Most Americans are against the war now, but as far as I can tell there's not much support for a total withdrawal either. The fact that every reason the White House, CIA, and Pentagon gave us to justify the invasion turned out to be total crap should be reason enough to withdraw all troops yesterday. But let's also not forget what most Iraqis actually want.

"Turns out black people don't even want to be white!"

From Alternet:

Last month, it was revealed that the New York Times and Manhattan publishing world were deceived by Love and Consequences, a faked memoir by a white girl who claimed to live the life you only hear about in Dr. Dre songs.

click here for the whole thing nigga

This is an awesome, hilarious review of another phony memoir that earned some liar six figures.

Is there anyone still out there who hasn't seen my racism videos?

Union victory in Houston

From the Texas Observer:

The National Nurses Organizing Committee, née the California Nurses Association, broke through an important barrier last month. On March 28, a majority of participating nurses at the Cypress Fairbanks Medical Center voted to let the union negotiate a contract on their behalf, making the Houston facility the first privately owned hospital in the state to unionize.

click here for the whole thing (scroll down)

Cool. For those who don't know, Houston's no union town. At all. By any means. Whatsoever. So this is really surprising and uplifting.

All I gotta say is, nurses: rock on!

Latest YouTube vid: Affirmaive Action is not "reverse discrimination"

Damn, he didn't choose my melodies

I guess there's always next time.......yeah right.

Weezer fans dream comes true

fucking school

DAMN fucking son of a bitch there's too much shit to do.

Fucking taxes. Stupid fucking Turbo Tax, pieces of shit.

Stupid ass people.

fuck

New Nader article

I haven't read much of it but here is Ralph Nader's latest In the Public Interest column.


YEAH.

In other news, one of my combos at UNO is playing with Johnny Vidocovich next week. HOLY SHIT.