Tidbits – Sept. 08, 2022 – Reader Comments: Capitol Coup Insurrectionist Removed From Office; What Mar-a-Lago Documents Show; Mikhail Gorbachev; Gdr – Victor Grossman Responds; Rings of Power; Union Approval Highest Since 1965; Cartoons; More…
Re: Judge Removes New Mexico Official From Office (Norm Littlejohn; Deborah R Kingery)
Trump’s ‘F____ YOUR FEELINGS’ faction gets the sads -- cartoon by Lalo Alcaraz
Re: A Justice Department Show of Force in the Mar-a-Lago Case (Peter M. Filardo; Jennifer Nouri)
Crime in the Cities -- cartoon by Nick Anderson
Re: Mississippi’s Dry Run for Eco-Apartheid (Dave Lott)
Dr. Oz -- cartoon by Rob Rogers
Re: Colombia’s Leftwing Government Unveils Tax-the-Rich Plan To Tackle Poverty (David Berger)
Re: Gorbachev Couldn’t Reform the Soviet System (Charles)
Re: My Seventy Years and the Departed GDR (Victor Grossman)
That speech by Biden was so damaging to the democratic fabric of our society -- cartoon by Dr. James MacLeod
Re: In the Rings of Power, It’s Not Horrifying To Be a Woman (Jack Radey)
Resources:
Union approval hits highest point since 1965 (Economic Policy Institute)
Re: Judge Removes New Mexico Official From Office
“[New Mexico’s] First Judicial District Court ruled that the January 6 attack and the ‘surrounding planning, mobilization, and incitement constituted an “insurrection”’ in accordance with the 14th Amendment and that under Section 3 of that amendment, [Otero County Commissioner Couy] Griffin is ‘constitutionally disqualified’ from serving in public office.”
Today: The first disqualification of a public official for participating in the January 6 attack
Norm Littlejohn
Posted on Portside's Facebook page
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Next remove the Congress people involved!
Deborah R Kingery
Posted on Portside's Facebook page
Trump’s ‘F____ YOUR FEELINGS’ faction gets the sads -- cartoon by Lalo Alcaraz
Lalo Alcaraz
Re: A Justice Department Show of Force in the Mar-a-Lago Case
There is an odd lacunae in the discussion of the some forty empty folders labeled "classified." As a retired archivist, I can state with confidence that each folder label also contains a complex alpha-numeric code, so that
(1). It is possible to know where to file the folder.
(2). As a corollary to number '1" these codes must tell something about the subject of the file. Otherwise, there would be thousands of boxes of undifferentiated folders that could not be retrieved.
(3). An empty folder, in my experience, is a folder whose contents have most likely have been destroyed - a serious crime and one that usurps the province of the National Archives to make this determination.
(4). It is likely that the search warrant included any paper shredders that were to be found on the premises [it can safely be assumed that there were several]. These shredders could provide crucial DNA information as to which persons used the shredders.
Peter M. Filardo
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Don't underestimate DOJ attorneys. But you can see the trump appointed judge is a loyalist.
Jennifer Nouri
Posted on Portside's Facebook page
Crime in the Cities -- cartoon by Nick Anderson
Nick Anderson
August 31, 2022
Reform Austin
Re: Mississippi’s Dry Run for Eco-Apartheid
Following torrential downpours last week, Jackson, Mississippi—the state’s capital and largest city—is still without safe water for drinking, bathing, or brushing teeth. The city is home to 180,000 people, more than 80 percent of whom are Black and a quarter of whom fall below the poverty line. The immediate crisis was triggered by flooding in the Pearl River and Ross R. Barnett Reservoir that overwhelmed the city’s long-neglected water treatment infrastructure.
Jackson’s water issues, though, are long-running and well known to residents; they were first told to boil their water in July. Many haven’t sipped tap water for years. This isn’t the first time Jackson has gone without clean water, either. The city suffered through a similar ordeal last winter, when cold weather froze the pipes and residents were told to boil their water for a month.
It’s hard to imagine that a similarly sized, richer, and less Black city—say Fort Lauderdale, Florida, or Providence, Rhode Island—facing a crisis of this magnitude would have received this little national attention for so long
Dave Lott
Posted on Portside's Facebook page
Dr. Oz -- cartoon by Rob Rogers
Rob Rogers
September 7, 2022
robrogers.com
Re: Colombia’s Leftwing Government Unveils Tax-the-Rich Plan To Tackle Poverty
One more attempt to "reform" capitalism. IT WON'T WORK. These folks haven't absorbed the lessons of Allende.
David Berger
Posted on Portside's Facebook page
Re: Gorbachev Couldn’t Reform the Soviet System
Tragically, Boris Yeltsin actually told Bill Clinton (shortly before Yeltsin passed away) that he may have made a mistake selecting Putin as his successor. His main motivation for doing so was that Putin (while mayor of St Petersburg) had been principally involved with getting western businesses from Europe and the US to invest in Russian partnerships and development, which Yeltsin was understandably eager to see take place. However, he vastly underestimated Putin's fanatical nationalism, the artifacts of which we are seeing up to this very moment.
This latest invasion of Ukraine is only the tip of a long ongoing iceberg of such fanatical nationalistic policies and fantasies, the exact opposite of what Yeltsin had tried to envision, and what Gorbachev was hoping to facilitate as he dismembered the former Soviet Union.
Charles
Sebastopol CA
Re: My Seventy Years and the Departed GDR
I thank “Tidbits” for printing reactions to my article. I think Paul Leavin was a bit unfair, writing that I neither “listed nor explained” GDR blunders or nasty habits. In one essay I could do no listing or long explaining (which I do attempt in my book “A Socialist Defector: From Harvard to Karl Marx Allee”). But I mention some indeed – and feel that since US media has done nothing but list, detail, exaggerate and distort GDR sins since its birth (as in clever films like “The Lives of Others”) it was proper to offer something on the positive side. Mr.Leavin does not know what can be learnt from it: How about free abortions, maternal leave, free education from cradle to post grad level, evictions prohibited, medical and dental care, medicine and health aids all covered by one uniform tax, subsidized low-cost housing, guaranteed low-cost vacations, even, for every ex-con on release, an apartment and a job? And no billionaires thriving from the muscles and brains of others? And can no lessons be learned even today from the sins: distorted elections, senile leaders, wide-spread snooping into personal lives, unjust sentences? Plus and minus!
Victor Grossman
Dr. James MacLeod
September 2, 2022
DrMacLeodCartoons
Re: In the Rings of Power, It’s Not Horrifying To Be a Woman
(posting on Portside Culture)
Tolkien on Television. I mean, why not? Donald Trump has been in the White House, BoJo in 10 Downing, what's next? The Grand Canyon and Yosemite turned into theme parks? A Sunday morning cartoon show based on Birth of a Nation? I mean, they already made movies of Tolkien. And there was Ralph Bakshee, goddess help us. How about a series on the Civil Rights Movement, made as a sitcom? How about Professional Wrestling becoming our national sport?
After all, Game of Thrones, the books the work of a talented hack, rather than a real literary star like JRR, made lotsabucks, and seeing gold in them thar fantasy stories, it was hardly a surprise that this would follow.
Do you remember, any of you, when literature, you know, books, well written books, fired our imaginations? By which I mean conjured images in our heads? Not on a screen, not designed by an artist, not vetted by a focus group, or selected by a director or dictated by a producer. Inside our imaginations. The word become image, a more vivid and real image, to each of us, than anyone could put on a screen. Assuming our brains still worked. They would take our imaginations, and replace it with products they can sell us.
Get your Gladrial lunch box here, Action Figures over on aisle 3, t-shirts on the 4th floor, get your Middle Earth burger from McHobbits.
Fuck this.
Jack Radey
Posted on Portside's Facebook page
Union approval hits highest point since 1965 (Economic Policy Institute)
A Gallup poll released last week showed that nearly 70% of Americans approve of unions, an approval rate not seen since 1965.
For too long, workers have faced inequality and anti-worker dynamics on the job, which were exacerbated by the pandemic. As a result, workers see “unions as critical to fixing our nation’s broken workplace—where most workers have little power or agency at work.”
Americans' approval rate of unions highest in nearly 60 years
More than 70% of Americans now approve of labor unions. Those are the findings of a Gallup poll released this morning, and they shouldn’t be surprising.
Why? U.S. workers see unions as critical to fixing our nation’s broken workplace—where most workers have little power or agency at work.
The pandemic revealed much about work in this country. We saw countless examples of workers performing essential jobs—such as health care and food service. They were forced to work without appropriate health and safety gear and certainly without pay commensurate with the critical nature of the work they were doing.
Those conditions, however, pre-dated the pandemic. The pandemic merely exposed these decades old anti-worker dynamics. Clearly, as the new poll and recent data on strikes and union organizing shows, workers today are rejecting these dynamics and awakening to the benefits of unions.
Nonunion workers are forced to take their jobs—accept their employer’s terms as is—or leave them. Unions enable workers to have a voice in those terms and set them through collective bargaining.
We know the powerful impact unions have on workers’ lives, and broader effects on communities and on our democracy.
Here’s a run-down based on the Economic Policy Institute’s extensive research on unions:
1225 Eye St. NW, Suite 600
Washington, DC 20005
Phone: 202-775-8810 • epi@epi.org