A Peek at the Democratic Process

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Follow this link, and you’ll find a video of firefighters marching into the capital in Madison, complete with bagpipes and full regalia. (The video quality is not the best, but then it’s not ours.) The second video on that page has much better quality, and it’s a great summary of what the area around the capital looks like this week. There are also several cool pictures.

We also recommend this video (scroll down the page and watch part 4), provided by Wisconsin Eye (our state’s equivalent of CSPAN). Like many videos of government proceedings, it’s punctuated with long boring parts. It’s from yesterday afternoon’s session of the state Assembly, which was scheduled to begin at 5 o’clock. While the Democrats were in caucus, the Republicans started taking votes at 4:57. At about 3 minutes into the video, the fun starts as the Democrats show up while voting is already underway.

Angry words are spoken about rules being broken and – amazingly – the Republican leader finally says to his colleagues across the aisle, “you’re right”. The earlier votes are annulled, and battles are rescheduled for next week.

Third World Wisconsin

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Politicians like to drop bad news bombs on Friday afternoons, and last Friday Wisconsin’s Governor Walker dropped a big one: abolishment of collective bargaining rights for all state, county and local government workers. He claims it’s to save money in the budget, but to most of us it’s obviously the fulfillment of a right-wing wet-dream and payback to the corporatists that funded his campaign.

Oddly, this bit of union-busting wouldn’t apply to police, firefighters, or the State Patrol, whose unions were coincidentally Walker supporters. To their credit, the leaders of these unions are standing in solidarity with the teachers and other school staff, road maintenance crews, university workers, building and facility staff, social workers, prison guards, administrative teams, and all the other unionized staff that make our state function. A group of current and former Green Bay Packers players (all union members) also issued a statement of support for public employee unions.

(Disclosure: One of my family members was once a unionized public employee, and a couple of others still are.)

Under Walker’s plan, unions would no longer be allowed to negotiate for anything other than wages, and wage increases would be limited to the official cost of living index. So no negotiation over hours or working conditions, pensions, health care, sick leave or vacation days. Workers would be immediately required to contribute more to their pension plans and health care, effectively cutting their take-home pay by 8%.

As an upwelling of public anger developed over the weekend, Walker turned it into an eruption by playing the “National Guard card.” He said that he briefed the Wisconsin National Guard “in preparation for any problems…”

The area around the state capital in Madison is starting to look like Egypt right now, as angry citizens converge by the tens of thousands – numbers that have grown every day this week. But Walker is dismissing the concerns of “a handful of protesters” while doing the bidding of the monied elites that elected him. He intends to railroad this proposal thru the right-wing legislature (strange behavior for someone who despises railroads) by the end of this week.

This proposal dismantles contracts that have been negotiated in good faith by public workers, who sacrificed wages in order to preserve the benefits that Walker now intends to take away.

I have never met a “rich” union worker (some exist, but I haven’t met any Packers players 🙂 ). Contrary to mythology, most union workers do not make exorbitant salaries, but they do make enough to live comfortably, take care of their health, and save for retirement. I keep hearing right-wing pundits howling about “greedy union workers” and how they make so much more than the rest of us. They should be screaming about how the rest of us aren’t making enough.

Scott Walker now wants to crush the one group of workers that hasn’t already been crushed: public employee unions. After years of starving the treasury through tax cuts, our new right-wing dictator claims the state is too broke to provide a dignified pay and benefits package to the people who make the state function.

For a generation, the wages and benefits of the average worker have been stagnant while the expansion of wealth has been hoarded by those at the top. This latest proposal accelerates that process, which can only lead to a state where a handful of the wealthy elite luxuriate in their lush gated communities, and rule over the rest of us who are left to live in destitution with a toxic and crumbling infrastructure.

That is the vision of right wing Repugnantans like Scott Walker and his rich corporate backers. It is mean-spirited and un-American, and it will condemn the forward-looking people of Wisconsin to live in a third world state.

The Green Bay Packers Are Good For America

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There’s a viral email going around (at least around Wisconsin) with the same title as this post. It says that the Packers are great because they beat the Bears, so now President Obama won’t be going to the Super Bowl to root for the Bears, thereby saving taxpayers millions of dollars in presidential travel expenses, yadda yadda yadda.

Why is it that, when the president is a Democrat, it’s a big deal whenever he decides to go (or not to go) someplace?

Funny thing, when Bush was emperor, we didn’t see any viral emails rejoicing that the Cowboys weren’t in the Super Bowl (though many of us WOULD find that to be something worthy of rejoicing), and how we’d save millions of dollars by not bringing Bush and his entourage to the Big Game.

That said, here’s the REAL reason the Green Bay Packers Are Good For America:

NO CORPORATE OWNERSHIP

They are owned by the community as a non-profit. Any money they make goes back to building the team, NOT to stockholders nor to a greedy billionaire owner. They are the only major sports franchise in the country that’s like that.

Now, send THIS to everybody in your address book. 🙂

One Geek’s Dream Library

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I’ve had a lot of exposure to different computer programming books, and I’ve learned to really like those published by O’Reilly Books. Their information is clear and concise without being loaded down with the useless fluff found in other publishers’ products. A majority of what I know about programming languages came from O’Reilly books.

As a matter of disclosure, I must admit that this glowing endorsement is not entirely unsolicited. O’Reilly just started a new “Win your wish list” promotion, where they ask book-starved geeks like me how we would spend $500 on their site. The rule is that to qualify, I have to post my wish list for the world to see.

So this post is my entry into the vast pool of geeks who’d each like $500 worth of computer books. I know that I become part of a viral promotion that will only cost them a few bucks, but I wouldn’t put out this effort if I didn’t genuinely feel their books are worthwhile.

My “wish list” is after the jump. In the likely event that my entry doesn’t get picked in the random drawing: If you have any of these books and you don’t need it any more, I’ll be glad to take it off your hands. 🙂 Read on →

Crazy People with Guns

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The United States has no shortage of crazy people. It also has a lot of people fanatically obsessed with firearms. The part of the Venn diagram where “gun nuts” overlaps with “crazy people” is a very scary place, as recent events in Arizona have demonstrated.

When these things happen, we always try to make sense of the senseless. Read on →

Why Are Dead Birds Falling Like Rain?

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There has been a disturbing wave of mass killings of birds lately. First in Arkansas, then in Louisiana, and again in Sweden. Every time reporters consult scientists or local authorities, the pundits write it off to birds “getting stressed” (i.e. freaking out) during the New Year’s fireworks, and either running into things or each other… or dropping dead from exhaustion.

Frankly, I don’t buy it. If thousands of birds (oh, and don’t forget the fish) died from fireworks on New Years Eve, why is this the first time it happened? After all, this isn’t the first time there were fireworks on New Years Eve. If the birds died from fireworks this year, why didn’t they die from fireworks last year? Or any of the previous… oh, maybe fifty years?

Something Else is going on. Most of us can do little more than speculate on what it is. But something new and very unusual happened to these birds that didn’t happen before. Fireworks – however bad for the birds they might be – are not new or unusual

The Dog Days of Winter

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The video that follows is NOT one of ours, but it’s one that we deemed worthy of putting in one of our youtube playlists.

After the snowstorm we had last week, this is kind of what getting around felt like…

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sUL0KCIc48

… except that our snow was much more dense than that. When sidewalks become canyons, that’s a lot of snow.

The Shoddy Stadium Rant

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For the second time in its brief history, the roof of the Metrodome collapsed last weekend. Fortunately, no one was hurt.

When designing an indoor football stadium for Minneapolis, one would think the roof should be designed to withstand the weight of a whole bunch of snow. After all, this part of the world is no stranger to big snowstorms, so it’s not hard to anticipate a really huge snowstorm sometime during the life of such an expensive building.

Yes, 16-20 inches (40-50 cm) is a lot of snow, but this is Minneapolis for crying out loud. Whose the engineer that thought it was OK to build a roof in Minneapolis that can’t handle 20 inches of snow? Did they really think it would never happen in the next 50 years? In MINNEAPOLIS?

That’s like assuming it’ll never get to 120 degrees in Phoenix, or that there’ll never be a big hurricane in Miami, or that there’ll never be a tornado in Topeka, or that you can skip the earthquake-proofing in San Francisco. Somebody wasn’t thinking ahead. Or somebody wasn’t thinking, period.

I heard somebody on the radio today call the stadium “old.” I’m sorry, Wrigley Field and Fenway Park are “old”. A stadium that was built 30 years ago is relatively new. There’s something wrong with having kids grow up watching games in a new stadium and not be able to bring their kids to watch games in the same stadium. There is no history or heritage in a crappy stadium built to last only 30 years.

If there is a God, I think It’s telling the Minnesota Vikings that they should play their games outside… y’know, like Real Men. In Wisconsin, we play football outdoors in January, and there’s not a single empty seat at Lambeau Field even though it might be cold enough to freeze hard liquor. Are Minnesota people really a bunch of softies that can’t watch a football game outside if it gets a little cold?

A couple of years ago, we were hanging out with some friends in Minneapolis, having drinks at a bar looking out at the Metrodome. I asked them if  Viking fans hold the same kind of reverence for the Metrodome that we Packer fans hold for Lambeau Field. The emphatic “no” came with no hesitation whatsoever.

Ironically, it’s now called “Mall of America” stadium. It’s named after the monstrosity that now stands on the site of the stadium this one replaced. The “old” stadium, built in the late 50’s.

Am I the only one who thinks it’s insane to build a new stadium every thirty years?