green blog of revolution

I Think You Get the Drift

2009-11-30T08:09:00.001-08:00

Can't imagine why you'd care.

I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

2009-11-28T10:22:00.001-08:00

As always, I started the paper off with the letters to the editor. What do my fellow citizens have on their minds that they have to share with others? Oh, hey, look a letter that seems to imply that graduate students teaching classes at the UO necessarily means a poor educational experience:

The UO can’t compete

In the Nov. 25 Register Guard, Anne Williams does a fine job of reporting the facts. One item she missed, however, relates to University of Oregon professor John Nicols’ “concerns” about the quality of education in the program. At the UO, these classes are typically taught by graduate students, not professors, and in halls with 200 to 300 students, not the 30 to 40 in a typical College Now class.

As such, these classes are a profit center for UO, which calls into question the UO’s “objectivity” in evaluating the quality of education. College Now fills a need for students who want high-quality instruction, smaller class sizes and lower cost. The UO can’t compete with those benefits.

Who wrote this letter? Hey, it's our good friend and fellow AFT unionist Bob Baldwin! Thanks a lot Bob.

Two things for Bob, real quick.

One, we prefer to be called "graduate employees" because, and why would you have cause to know this, we actually have to fight the federal government and various state governments just to have the right to have unions, so the word "employee" is quite important to us.

Two, go fuck yourself. It's great that you're proud of Lane Community College and its programs, but do you really need to take a swipe at your union brothers and sisters while doing your bragging? You don't see us writing letters about how much public employees cost and how lazy they are, now do you?

After the letters it's on to the front pages. The R-G just recently started running "corrections" on page two and I love them. Today's paper featured three corrections to a story the R-G ran yesterday about how economists are split over whether Measures 66 & 67 are really "job-killing taxes" which just happens to be what the business-backed people are calling their campaign.

Guess what the three things the story got wrong all had in common. Guess:

A story on the cover of Friday’s newspaper about economists’ views on two upcoming tax measures contained several errors:

The Eugene economics firm ECONorthwest has not taken a position on measures 66 and 67, but its managing director, Randall Pozdena, has. The story incorrectly stated that ECONorthwest contends the tax measures are job killers.

A letter supporting passage of measures 66 and 67 has been signed by 36 Oregon economists. The story incorrectly stated that 16 economists signed the letter.

By 2013, the corporate income tax rate under Measure 67 would be restored to the current level for businesses whose taxable income falls below $10 million a year. The story incorrectly stated that the tax rate would be restored to the current level for businesses whose in-state sales fall below $10 million a year.

If you guessed all three errors hurt the "Yes for Oregon!" side, you win.

Lastly, the Business section. A story about how tariffs on Chinese tires are going to hurt the little guy where it hurts the most. No, not there, in the pocketbook. The article is a beaut, from "President Obama recently slapped a 35 percent tariff on tires after a U.S. union claimed that an influx of Chinese imports has cost more than 5,000 U.S. tire workers their jobs since 2004." to "Matt Edmonds, vice president of the online retailer Tire Rack, says the tariff punishes buyers who want cheaper tires. 'It’s going to impact those who really can afford it the least.'"

My favorite part of the article is where even good American tire companies are going to be forced to raise the price of their tires, partly because these "American" tire companies get some of their tires from China, but, as the tire companies are saying themselves, raw material costs are going up. In fact, even though Goodyear has said its cost increases are from raw materials, article author Dee-Ann Durbin goes ahead and doubts that and asserts that the increase could be to off-set the tariffs.

Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. will raise the price on all consumer replacement tires sold in North America by 6 percent starting Tuesday. The manufacturer, based in Akron, Ohio, cited raw material costs. Goodyear imports about 2 percent of its tires from China, so the increase also could offset tariffs.

And, no, not one person or organization who supports this crazy, (Chinese) job-killing tariff is quoted or cited in the story. Why would they be? They're crazy.

Conversation Piece

2009-11-27T09:37:00.000-08:00

I thought this was too awesome not to share. From the R-G:

Sources of U.S. accomplishment

I am pretending that I am a person from another country who will do about anything to be able to live in the United States of America and become a citizen. I have studied the history of the U.S. and have learned of her greatness and progress despite things that at times were not done justly.

One thing that really stood out in my studies was that the U.S. accomplished its greatness under the influence of Christianity. If I ever get to the U.S. I am not going to try to change that influence. I will practice my religion and not make a wave and hang on for the ride.

One thing that influenced my conclusion that Christianity was a great positive influence in the progress and greatness of the U.S. is the acres and acres and acres and acres and acres and rows and rows and rows and rows and rows of crosses, and many Stars of David, in cemeteries in the U.S. and in several countries throughout the world.

Charles E. Sullivan Springfield

Mind blown?

Bounty

2009-11-24T09:27:00.000-08:00

Two Fishermen - Max Pechstein, 1923

This print gets thrown up in the spirit of the Thanksgiving holiday we have coming up here. This print also reminds me of the halcyon days of my late adolescence when I hung out with an interesting cat who was apt to make woodcuts in a similar vein (in my dining room) and listened to the Primus (no Dr. Seuss hat though, sorry Lex).

Party at My House

2009-11-22T09:34:00.000-08:00

Hope you all saw that last night. Eleven days. Let's do this thing.

Neither One of Us Is Chinese

2009-11-20T09:56:00.000-08:00

If this were a just world, here's what would happen to a couple of letter to the editor writers:

They would be sleeping soundly in their homes after a stressful and trying day. Suddenly a large man wearing a blue outfit with a club and a gun would enter their room pointing and shouting in a foreign language while holding his hand on his gun. Almost immediately, this guy falls down to the ground. While getting up from the ground he continues shouting at them in a foreign language. As our letter to the editor friends start to sit up in bed, the man fires electrodes into their skin and shocks them with 50,000 volts of electricity.

In a just world this would happen to these people. Unfortunately, this is not a just world.

Apple-Bourbon Sourdough Stuffing

2009-11-19T16:53:00.000-08:00

2 sourdough baguettes cut into small pieces and toasted in a 250 oven for about .5 hours so. Well, until toasty.
On good sized red apple small cubed. I used a Fuji, but everybody's loving on the Honeycrisps these days.
1.5 to 2 cups of diced onions and celery
Minced fresh thyme and rosemary
two tablespoons butter
one tablespoon olive oil
2.5 cups apple cider
.5 cups bourbon
Large handful of fresh cut sage

Set your oven to 350. Oil and butter into a pan, followed by the apple, onion, celery and herbage. Salt, pepper. Let the veggies soften up while you get your bread in a large mixing bowl. When veggies are good to go, throw in the sage, and then pour the cider and bourbon into the pan. Let the whole thing get hot, then pour over the bread. Mix. Put into a casserole dish and bake 40 minutes or until the top is crispy.

It comes out pretty sweet, which I like with gravy, but the dish is like 90% the way to a dessert, so cranberries and nuts instead of the onion and celery? Maybe some orange rind and it would be cracking. I imagine you could up the bourbon and maybe even hit the dish with a bourbon spritz when it was done, light it up and serve it flaming.

Here's Your Beloved French

2009-11-19T09:33:00.000-08:00

You Frenchie lovers.

Homefront

2009-11-18T08:48:00.001-08:00

The Mothers - Kathe Kollwitz, 1921

Hey, welcome to a new series here at GBOR where I post the work of others because I am too lazy/busy to post anything original on my own. Kidding, of course, that's what I've been doing for years. In this case, I will be posting graphic work that it not my own. See the difference? I don't really have the language to talk about art and, as I have discovered when I foray into discussions of music, when I don't have the language it takes me about four seconds to say something stupid. On the other hand, if I stick to "I like this" or "For me, that it not what I like" people tend to respect that. I don't know why, maybe they just feel sorry for someone so completely defenseless. So that's pretty much what I'll be doing with these posts; just throwing up an image and saying "I like this."

As with music, my tastes in art tend to run to the dark and distorted, so we'll be seeing quite a bit of German Expressionism from the interwar period (is there any other kind?), but I imagine I'll mix in some other stuff that I like as well that it different. Maybe not the classics, but some lighter stuff. Like when I mix Mary McGregor in with my Tool.

This first image is probably my favorite art image of all time. It is so powerful, I cannot imagine anyone not being drawn to it. Why is it that I own a print of it that sits under my bed? I don't know. Maybe 'cause I'd have to look at it all the time.

I've Fallen and Can't Complete the Joke

2009-11-17T08:42:00.000-08:00

I give the Emerald a certain amount of grief, but this is pretty good. And, for a humor piece, pretty accurate.

Oh My Freakin' God, Yes!

2009-11-12T20:16:00.000-08:00

Awesome rant about freedom of speech on the college campuses. It's nothing you haven't read before, but it's done so well, you have to applaud. My favorite bit, set up with standard "UMass Amherst let a convicted terrorist speak on campus in the name of free speech, but me - me? - while the university also allowed me to speak, they also let me be openly heckled. That's right, the demon liberals violated my free speech rights by letting others also speak freely." You know the schitck. As I was saying, my favorite bit:

After the event, I asked several [hired security guards] why they stood by while my First Amendment rights were trampled. They smiled ruefully or shook their heads. It was plain they were ordered not to engage demonstrators.

It's possible these rental guards acted this way because they understood that they were only there to make sure no one killed any one else or did drugs, but I like to believe that they were actually just pitying Don Feder: American Thinker's very tenuous grasp of how the goddamn First Amendment works.

Salute

2009-11-11T08:27:00.001-08:00

Virginia Slims

2009-11-09T14:08:00.000-08:00

I read and loved Dennis Lehane's The Given Day (I can't find a link to the paperback, but I got it a Costco.) I recommend it to you all. The book is about a Boston cop that is forced to go undercover to monitor subversives while finding himself drawn to the power of his own Boston police union. I loved this passage which we all might recognize in some way, but it made me think of Ash in particular:

Mondays and Wednesdays brought another meeting of the Roxbury Letts followed by a boozy gathering at the Sowbelly Saloon. He spent his nights with them and his mornings with a curl-up-and-cry-for-your-momma hangover, nothing about the Letts being frivolous, including their drinking. Bunch of Sergeis and Borises and Josefs, with the occasional Peter or Pytor thrown in, the Letts raged through the night with vodka and slogans and wooden buckets of warm beer. Slamming the steins on scarred tables and quoting Marx, quoting Engels, quoting Lenin and Emma Goldman and screeching about the rights of the working man, all he while treating the barmaid like shit.

Read it.

50 Days? That's Almost Half a Football Season!

2009-11-04T08:22:00.001-08:00

Dear Editor of the Register Guard,

I read in today's paper that James Matthew Dublin received a 50 day jail sentence for purchasing drugs, giving those drugs to a 15-year-old girl, raping a 15 year-old girl, and pledging to make that 15-year-old girl his regular "plaything" when he is in town. This is an outrage.

It appears that the normal sentence for these crimes would be a total of 62 months in jail, but District Attorney JoAnn Miller and Lane County Circuit Judge Doug Mitchell conspired to downgrade this sentence to a mere 50 days because Dublin, now a convicted sex offender, is a "responsible member of society" with a "clean record" who has never previously been caught drugging and sodomizing 15-year-old girls. Oh, and he's a military veteran with a Master's degree. I guess this makes it all right.

The Eugene police seem to think so, as Sgt. Kevin McCormick seems to say that the embarrassment of getting caught is punishment enough for Dublin and serves as a warning to other Johns. I have always been of the belief that grown men who would have sex with 15-year-old girls had long since abandoned their capacity for embarrassment.

The Register Guard itself completed the task of turning this tragedy into farce with the headline "Teen prostitution case ends." A 15-year-old girl was sexually assaulted, but let's definitely make the headline about her and her actions. After all, a great guy made a "huge mistake" and now he will sort of not really have to pay for it.

Unfortunately this story is indicative of a culture that is extremely permissive when it comes to sexual crimes against women, where the police, the courts, and the media all go out of their way to make the male perpetrator out to be the sympathetic figure.

Damn, So Close

2009-11-03T08:23:00.000-08:00

Listened to an NPR story this morning on the Catholic Church and health care reform.

Good news: The Catholic Church supports health care reform! Seems like they support a robust public option! The Catholic Church has been in favor of socialized medicine in the United States going back to Harry S. Truman. You know, with Catholic charities and Catholic hospitals, the Church provides around 1/6th of all the medical services in this country! And they would be totally on board with health care reform, but...

Bad news: Even though all the proposed health care bills strongly prohibit any federal funds being used for abortion, there is the remote possibility that one day, theoretically, after seismic shift in political belief on the issue, it's conceivably possible that maybe Congress could change the law, and so, the Catholic Church just cannot bring itself to support any law that might allow for the possibility that poor women might be able to exercise the same legal right that Catholic school girls enjoy every single day.

Let's let asshat Richard Doerflinger of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops sum it up it in the asshatiest way possible:

"We want health care reform very, very much, but we cannot do that over children's dead bodies, to put it most bluntly," he says. "There is a fundamental issue here about whether taking life should be treated the same way as supporting and healing life."

Indeed, as we all learned in catechism, Jesus prefers that thousands of people die today for lack of basic health care than to make it possible for even one fetus to be theoretically aborted maybe in the future.

Assume the Position

2009-11-02T14:08:00.000-08:00

This is the funniest thing I have read in a long time. I literally LOLed (LLOL) this morning.

Eugene should support police

The people of Eugene should be grateful to have a dedicated police officer such as Judd Warden. Officer Warden works hard and is committed to upholding the law and keeping citizens safe. Until you have been put into a situation, like law enforcement officers deal with day to day, don’t be so critical of their actions.

Eugene police officers are sent into unknown situations routinely with very limited information. They constantly must be aware and ready for a life or death situation. Until they can prove otherwise, a high risk police scene is considered dangerous until secured. If suspects are not cooperating with police officers, then they face being restrained with what force is necessary until they cooperate.

I know that if I were visiting another country and police officers were speaking with authority in a language I did not understand, I would immediately lie face down on the ground with my arms and legs spread wide until directed otherwise. That usually is a universal signal of surrender or complying with law enforcement.

For that matter, if I were protesting in Kesey square in downtown Eugene and police officers were attempting to arrest me, I would assume the same position.

Don’t scrutinize the Eugene police for their actions, when it’s the actions of the suspects that are out of line.

It’s time Eugene citizens starting showing more support for their police officers instead of being unsupportive.

Mike Montgomery

Noti

Angry Dad

2009-10-29T09:15:00.000-07:00

This is the kind of thing that gets me all fired up in the morning.

Exposed!

2009-10-28T08:32:00.000-07:00

We're fucked. I suppose that everyone who reads this blog (save for the random crazy) situates themselves on the left of the political spectrum. Whether you call yourself a liberal, progressive, Marxist, Trot, or Obamafascist, I think we should all be very concerned that the right has finally caught on to our Hexagon of Power aka The Leftist Plot to Take Down America from the Inside aka Operation Slowly and Peacefully Try to Make America a Better Place.

Now, I don't claim to the the sharpest candle in the box, and I know that most of my readers know more about our Masters than I do, so I am not at all surprised that, despite my firm lefty beliefs and career in America's labor movement, I have never heard of three of the seven links in the Hexagon of Power. Tides? What the hell is Tides?

I know the Working Families Party, of course. They have been much mocked by me. If not on the blog, then certainly in the friendly confines of my chats with friends. This is the party, at least in Oregon, that would like to be a sort of more moderate version of the Democrats. Or as they like to say, they want to focus on "our" issues, not God, gays, and guns (and abortion). Not that the fine people in the Working Families Party don't actually agree with me/us on the Triple G (plus A) issues, it's just that Oregon has a lot of rednecks that might vote for "our issues" if only we just didn't spend so much time standing up for the civil rights of queers, non-Christians, and women. You know?

Don't get me started on SEIU. Nothing is as progressive as dividing the labor movement because you don't want to pay your back dues to the AFL-CIO. The less said the better.

So, there it is. We progressives can no longer hide our hidden-even-from-ourselves Hexagon of Power, as we have been exposed. I guess we have to crawl back under the rocks from whence we came, never to disturb this great nation again. Damn.

h/t NW Wingnut

Let's Not Rush Into Anything

2009-10-28T08:25:00.000-07:00

University drafts first sustainable climate plan
By 2050, the University hopes to achieve climate neutrality, net zero emissions

Fair and Balanced

2009-10-26T09:37:00.000-07:00

There was an article in the Register Guard about the drive to organize the faculty here at the UO. It was pretty boring. The only excitement came in the UO administration's pledge to be neutral during the campaign. A pledge they immediately undercut:

Asked to comment on the union effort, the UO Provost Jim Bean said the university “supports the rights of faculty and staff” as they decide whether to unionize and will make relevant information available.

“The ultimate decision about whether to unionize is up to each individual faculty and staff member, and the university will remain neutral in that process,” he said. “Accordingly, the university’s goal on this issue will be to merely ensure that accurate and relevant information is available to everyone.“

To be fair, so far the UO hasn't put out anti-union propaganda. When they do, I will expect them to put out pro-union propaganda to remain neutral. I will be disappointed in this expectation.

Oh yeah, the GTFF can't get a mention.

Fell On

2009-10-23T08:26:00.000-07:00

Darkest days in Oregon football history.

Darkest days in Washington football history?

Huck the Fuskies

2009-10-22T08:33:00.001-07:00

I Blame Dan

2009-10-18T11:45:00.001-07:00

Sorry for the lack of posting. I got the H1N1.

I Was Standing, You Were There

2009-10-16T09:00:00.000-07:00

In a City/Region story about the wide disparity in fund raising between Peter DeFazio and Sid Leiken for the big 4th District race (DeFazio is out raising him 5 to 1), the R-G casually mentions that Leiken's biggest supporter (other than his mom, one would suspect) is none other than newly-appointed Board of Higher Education member Allyn Ford.

So, Leiken won't be able to go to Washington to be an insignificant member of a minoroity party, but his boy will have the power to mess up higher education here in Oregon. Peachy.

Why, Oh Why, Do We Keep Electing These People?

2009-10-12T08:48:00.000-07:00

Our so-called Democratic Governor Ted Kulongoski just appointed Allyn Ford, a Republican, to the Oregon Board of Higher Education. This is great, because if there's one thing the GOP knows, it's how to fix higher education.

For funsies, it also appears that Ford supports repealing the tax increases which are the only thing keeping higher ed from collapsing or raising tutition through the roof.

Oh, and also he runs one the great logging companies here in Oregon.