Slow work days are awesome

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Wednesday, April 26, 2006 4/26/2006 09:49:00 AM

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I love being the only person on my floor of the building. The rest of the place is dark, and I feel like I'm the night watchman at the Library of Congress or something.

Anyway, it's been a busy last few weeks, so sorry to whichever readers I have that I haven't posted much. I want to give you a few tidbits that have caught my interest lately.

1) The Stephanie Miller Show

I've been a fan of her show pretty much since I started listening to liberal radio here in Madison. Funny, topical, smart, and very listener-responsive, Stephanie is a really good alternative to Air America, which is either a little too center-left sometimes, or loudly conspiratorial (not a complaint, mind you) at other times. She's a hell of a lot better than Ed Schultz, who I usually cannot stand. I'm crabby that the local affiliate dropped Randi Rhodes back an hour to broadcast Ed Schultz live. Replacing the smartest person on liberal radio with the dumbest is no way to program, in my opinion.

Anyway, Stephanie earned some karmic points for coming back to the show on Tuesday, a few days after losing one of her dogs to sudden illness. Listeners will know what her dogs mean to her, and how they inform her on-air persona. She was understandably upset, and broke down on a number of occasions. But it was a brave thing to do, and I'm a bigger fan for having heard her deal with her grief in such an open way, and for allowing her listeners to help her in recovering. If you don't have a carrying affiliate in your area, she's available for download on iTunes.

2) Eating in Madison A to Z

For those of you who might be in the Madison area, or visiting, this is becoming an indispensable resource for how to cram stuff in your face. I don't know if it's true that Madison has more restaurants per capita than any other city in America, but it feels like it to me. I can only imagine what it must look like to stare down all those restaurants, alphabetically arranged, and be determined to visit all of them in that order. And yet, that's what JM and Nichole are doing at their site, as well as providing reviews and a handy letter grade. It's got franchise potential; I feel like I should ask them if I can do a similar site for my own hometown area (the Fox River Valley, Wisconsin). Anyway, even if you're not in the area, it's a fun read.

3) Freethinkers, by Susan Jacoby

I just started reading this book, released in 2004, so I can't tell you it's a great book from front to back, but just reading the Introduction got me all fired up.

"Secularism teaches us to be good here and now. I know of nothing better than goodness. Secularism teaches us to be just here and now. It is impossible to be juster than just. ... Secularism has no 'castles in Spain.' It has no glorified fog. It depends on realities, upon demonstrations; and its end and aim is to make this world better every day--to do away with poverty and crime, and to cover the world with happy and contented homes." --Robert Ingersoll, Works, vol. 8, pp. 393-94.

As we creep (lunge?) towards theocracy, I think this book will have continued and significant relevance. Give it a try.

That's what's keeping my attention right now. I'll see if I can't get back on track with the ol' blog. You readers can always inspire me to write more by, say, COMMENTING NOW AND THEN. Sheesh.

Immigrants kick ass!

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Friday, April 14, 2006 4/14/2006 03:07:00 PM

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**rescued from the rural countryside of IforgotIstartedthispostistan**

Milwaukee hosted a really spectacular demonstration recently , hailed as "A Day Without Latinos" by participants. People of mostly Spanish ancestry across the city left work, skipped school, and closed businesses to gather peacefully and show solidarity against some of the most racist, facist-German legislation ever proposed.

Sensenbrenner's proposal for making illegal entrants into the US immediate felons, and rounding them up, is just plain scary. It makes me wonder how "Ihre Papieren, bitte" sounds in Spanish (FYI, it's "su papeles, por favor").

I want to make an argument against immediate deportation by tying the immigration issue to the oil issue.

Let's pretend for a second that the increase in consumer gas prices was involuntary on the industry's part (of course, we all know that's not the case). We'll pretend that, rather than a massive spike in crude oil prices, substantial demand and market competition raised gas prices to $3 per gallon.

Exxon and Friends are now raking in huge profits. Are they reinvesting that profit into a new income stream like biodiesel or clean coal? Are they returning those profits to the people in the form of increased wages for employees? Nope. They're pocketing it and giving their retired chairman a $400 million benefit package.

Now we can relate this back to immigration. Let's pretend that all illegal entrants are somehow successfully rounded up and returned to their home countries (don't forget, it ain't just Mexico--that's just the easy devil to create, 'cause, you know, they're brown). Now, all those businesses that illegally hired undocumented workers have to fill those positions with (god forbid) American citizen workers.

The problem, though, is that now the businesses have to increase the wage they pay their employees by damn near a factor of ten. See, because, you can get away with paying an undocumented worker way under minimum or fair market wage.

So what do those businesses do? Do they swallow the costs? Do they take that capital out of their profits? Or are they more likely to raise the cost of the products or services they provide? Even worse, are they going to (in those industries where it's feasible) export every possible job they can to a foreign country where they won't have to raise wages one cent?

If you think American businesses are going to kindly comply with the yoke of best practices and employment law, then maybe you should look at how many of those businesses pay their fair share of taxes (and, incidentally, the fascinating effect this underpayment has on the national budget deficit).

Citizenship needs to be more transparent and attainable. There's no reason to keep people from becoming Americans--at least not when our country is well-run (AHEM2008). Our borders need to be enforced by the government, not fat angry white guys with guns who would otherwise be shooting stray dogs on their property. Our borders don't need to be militarized, we just need to enforce them like we mean it. And last, we need to support foreign policy that doesn't crush small countries under massive debt and deals with the devil. We drive people out of their own countries, and then jail them when they get here looking for a way out.

Apparently I have to be either super rich or a total dick

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Saturday, April 01, 2006 4/01/2006 07:16:00 PM

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Cargo Magazine is closing up shop as of next month's issue. There is, apparently, no room in the men's magazine market for a publication that neither features solely Armani and Tag Heuer, nor ignores content altogether and focuses on the curvier parts of the opposite sex.

There are some really sad comments about not just the mentality of men in America, but the assumptions about the mentality of men in America. They are found both in this article (linked above) and in the business decision itself.

We are not just about tits and ass. We do not choose our cell phone solely on whether it matches our shoes. We are not all afraid of embracing a defined sense of self and self-sustenance.

If this sounds like a gently modified mantra of the womens' liberation movement, then you're paying attention. The male gender is becoming as bogged down by ridiculous and insulting outside expectations and its own lowest common denominator as the female gender has been for years.
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