What is he thinking?

Good grief:

Here we are being safe and professional and earning a living, and he wants us to end it? ... This is what I choose to do, and there is nothing wrong with it.

-- Brooke Taylor, who works at a legal brothel in Nevada, taking issue with Senator Harry Reid's comment that "the time has come to outlaw prostitution"

Come on, Harry. Have we learned nothing about how prohibition tends to work out? You outlaw it and it will just go underground. And then there will be a lot more disease and violence and other criminal activity involved. I like you, Harry, but this is not smart.
~~~

Sunday art blogging

Artist: Marie-Claire Lefébure

Image from Wikimedia Commons

And now for something completely different

Just for the heck of it, I goodsearched "weird stuff" and came across the following rather intriguing information:

The Slave-Maker ant is so named because it raids the nest of other ants and steals their pupae. Once the pupae hatch, they are made to work as slaves.

Workers in an ant colony only live for about 45-60 days, but a colony's queen can live up to 20 years.

Ants make up 1/10 of the total world animal tissue. The total biomass of all the ants on Earth is about equal to the total biomass of all the people.

By combining force of numbers with organized aggression, ants have become the greatest insect killers on Earth -- even of their own kind.

Ants began farming about 50 million years before humans thought to raise their own crops.

The animal with the largest brain in proportion to its size is the ant. They are the smartest species of insects with about 250,000 brain cells.

Found on a site called Stunning Stuff.
~~~

Really serious stuff about Wisconsin

Oh, my. Please go over to Think Progress and read this:

REPORT: Top 10 Disastrous Policies From The Wisconsin GOP You Haven’t Heard About

Here's just the beginning:

...But Walker’s assault on public employees is only one part of a larger political program that aims to give corporations free reign in the state while dismantling the healthcare programs, environmental regulations, and good government laws that protect Wisconsin’s middle and working class. These lesser known proposals in the 144-page bill reveal how radical Walker’s plan actually is:

1. ELIMINATING MEDICAID: The Budget Repair Bill includes a little-known provision that would put complete control of the state’s Medicaid program, known as BadgerCare, in the hands of the state’s ultra-conservative Health and Human Services Secretary Dennis Smith. Smith would have the authority to "to override state Medicaid laws as [he] sees fit and institute sweeping changes” including reducing benefits and limiting eligibility. Ironically, during the 1990s it was Republicans, especially former Gov. and Bush HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson, who helped develop BadgerCare into one of the country’s most innovative and generous Medicaid programs. A decade later, a new generation of radical Republicans is hoping to destroy one of Wisconsin’s “success stories.”

2. POWER PLANT PRIVATIZATION AND ENVIRONMENTAL NEGLECT: The same budget bill calls for a rapid no-bid “firesale” of all state-owned power plants. One progressive blogger called the proposal “a highlight reel of all of the tomahawk dunks of neo-Gilded Age corporatism: privatization, no-bid contracts, deregulation, and naked cronyism” and suggested that the provision will open the way for large, politically connected corporations to buy up the state’s power plants on the cheap. While it’s unclear whether corporations would be interested in buying the plants, a similar proposal was vetoed six years ago by Gov. Jim Doyle (D), who called the plan fiscally and environmentally irresponsible. Many of Wisconsin’s power plants are in violation of federal clean air regulations and desperately need to be upgraded and cleaned up — not dumped into the private sector.

And those are just the first two of ten.

This is just horrible stuff. Really.
~~~

George Lakoff weighs in on Wisconsin

Here's the headline:

The Real Issues: A Wisconsin Update

And here's how it gets started:

The Wisconsin protests are about much more than budgets and unions. As I observed in What Conservatives Really Want, the conservative story about budget deficits is a ruse to turn the country conservative in every area. Karl Rove and Shep Smith have made it clear on Fox: If the Wisconsin plan to kill the public employees’ unions succeeds, then there will be little union money in the future to support democratic candidates. Conservatives will be effectively unopposed in raising campaign funding in most elections, including the presidential elections. This will mean a thoroughly conservative America in every issue area.

Gosh. It's so disheartening. We are definitely turning fascist.
~~~

Friday cat blogging!

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

Labor in the United States

From the Rachel Maddow show:

You want to talk about red meat for the base? Listen to some of the language the president used. "Workers have a right to organize into unions and to bargain collectively with their employers. And a strong, free labor movement is an invigorating and necessary part of our industrial society." Wow.

How about this one? "Only a fool would try to deprive working men and women of their right to join the union of their choice."

Listen to the way he goes after the right here. "Should any political party attempt to abolish Social Security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things, but their number is negligible and"--and the president says--"their number is negligible and they are stupid."

That is not what Barack Obama said last night. That is way to the left of any national Democrat at this point. That was all Republican President Dwight David Eisenhower. That was all the stuff he said when he was president.

Found it on this thread over at Democratic Underground.
~~~

Truly the quote of the day

This one:

What a terrible, terrible day for Wisconsin, I am incensed. I am shocked.

-- Jon Richards, a democrat representative for Milwaukee, responding to news that the bill to limit Union Rights passed the Wisconsin Assembly vote early Friday following days of debate and protests
~~~

One important point about equality

You know, it's bothered me for some time when conservatives assert that because some people "game the system" regarding certain programs we should then eliminate the entire program in question. I refer, of course, to programs that help the poor. They never look at how rich people game the system themselves.

The only difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the Democrats allow the poor to be corrupt, too.

-- Oscar Levant

An idea...

I'm not surprised that I'm not the only one who immediately thought of the following quotation with regard to all the protests in North Africa:

"Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come."

-- attributed to Victor Hugo

Take a look at this:

“Victor Hugo once wrote: ‘No one can resist an idea whose time has come’...The times when Arab rulers could treat their people like naughty children are over.”

-- Ismail Serageldin, director of The Library of Alexandria in Egypt and one of the country’s leading intellectuals

This one, too:

“In Egypt we are witnessing the 24/7 validation of Victor Hugo's observation in the 1800s that ‘more powerful than the March of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.’ More importantly, we are witnessing the universal power of the legacies of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. – their commitment to non-violent civil disobedience as an instrument to successfully effect fundamental political change to peacefully achieve participatory democracy.”

-- Clarence B. Jones, scholar-in-residence, Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University

I found them right here.
~~~

Hmmm. Let's give it some thought:

(You can click on the cartoon for a larger view.)

~~~

A tweet from Michael Moore

Pathetic:

From what I can tell, not a single elected national Democrat has come to Madison to support the workers. And Obama nearly silent.

I simply do not understand the cowardice of Democrats. Really.
~~~

Short, moving, and to the point

And good for them, too

Here's one of the quotes of the day from the Time magazine website:

We'll be here Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday — as long as it takes.

-- GARY LONZO, a union organizer, speaking in the Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin on Sunday. Protesters are rallying against Government plans to cut state workers' benefits and bargaining powers
~~~

"Journalism" today

Sadly, this is the case:

Many journalists now are no more than channelers and echoers of what George Orwell called the 'official truth'. They simply cipher and transmit lies. It really grieves me that so many of my fellow journalists can be so manipulated that they become really what the French describe as 'functionaires', functionaries, not journalists. Many journalists become very defensive when you suggest to them that they are anything but impartial and objective. The problem with those words 'impartiality' and 'objectivity' is that they have lost their dictionary meaning. They've been taken over... [they] now mean the establishment point of view... Journalists don't sit down and think, 'I'm now going to speak for the establishment.' Of course not. But they internalise a whole set of assumptions, and one of the most potent assumptions is that the world should be seen in terms of its usefulness to the West, not humanity.

-- John Pilger

Friday cat blogging!

Photo from Wikimedia Commons