Remember the stories just a few months ago about Walmart executives sitting all their employees down and sternly warning them to vote Republican? Because if they didn't, the evil unions would take over the world, and then there would be no jobs?
Earlier this month the Wall Street Journal reported that Wal-Mart, fearful of mandatory labor laws, is politically bullying its employees to vote Republican in this year's election.
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Wal-Mart strongly opposes the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which supports unionization and seeks to establish higher penalties for violations of employee rights. The EFCA would likely be passed under a democratic leadership, so Wal-Mart educates its employees about its strong rejection of the bill, but doesn't tell them how to vote, according to David Tovar, Wal-Mart's spokesman. With the EFCA still dormant, the company's managers are told to call a special hotline prepared to swiftly diffuse any type of situation that may involve potential employee organization.
Well... Walmart's now flexing its muscles to indicate its preparedness to back up its ugly threats. Details below the fold.
An amusing article written today by Ventura County Star’s Timm Herdt on Republican candidate Tony Strickland (running vs. Hannah-Beth Jackson) on Strickland’s ballot designation as an ‘Alternative Energy Executive.’ Turns out he’s the President of GreenWave Energy Solutions, a newly-created company that is designed to develop wave energy technology. The staff is basically made of Strickland’s Senate campaign workers, and his avowed interest and faith in alternative energy is belied by the fact that he hasn’t even put up the $5,000 investment that his four partners have. In fact Strickland, when he was a member of the Assembly, voted against legislation that would have required energy companies to supply more of their energy from renewable energy resources, which would have created a real market for GreenWave Energy (and many other green technology companies). Strickland’s opponent, Hannah-Beth Jackson, was a co-author of two bills in 2002 designed to expand markets for just such companies (SB 1038, SB 1078).
What’s really funny, though, is Strickland’s environmental pose. As a legislator he was a one-man wrecking crew on initiatives to protect our air and water, never missing an opportunity to side with polluters against the environment He voted against air quality standards, emissions caps, greenhouse gas standards, strengthening penalties for air quality violations, incentives for low-emission vehicles, environmental regulation of Mexican trucks, reduction in diesel and port pollution, a ban on oil tanking along the California coast. He voted to protect agricultural burning and offshore waste incineration. He opposed a ban on the sale and manufacture of items (including children’s toys!) that contained mercury. He even voted against a Jackson-authored measure to prevent pesticide spraying next door to schoolchildren.
Hannah-Beth has long been regarded as an environmental champion, receiving the endorsement of the California League of Conservation Voters and the Sierra Club in every election in which she’s run. In the Assembly she chaired the two key environmental committees, and authored over 30 pieces of legislation designed to promote alternative energy sources, protect air and water quality, reduce coastal pollution, preserve open space, protect against pesticides and toxics in our daily lives, and protect the Coastal Commission and the California coast against overdevelopment and pollution. To find out more about Hannah-Beth Jackson’s campaign for State Senate, or join this important push to turn a historically red district blue, please visit our website.
Torres is speaking now, waxing poetic about the proper behavior for a spirited primary- no personal attacks, etc. etc. But in the process mentioned that Michigan and Florida delegates should be seated at the DNC convention. Not exactly sure where all this is coming from, but there it is.
And now we're on to McCain and the S&L scandal. (Update: As Dave mentioned next to me, Torres clearly has the full oppo research on McCain. It would be nice if this was the beginning of a larger movement to target McCain- anyone want to lay odds?)
Didn't anyone pass him the memo that this year's convention is ONLY about Leno/Midgen? :)
My name is Neil Pople, and I am running for Placer County Democratic Central Committee.
Placer County is renowned for its stunning physical beauty. Stretching from the suburbs of Northeastern Sacramento to the shores of Lake Tahoe, we enjoy a bounty of natural resource. But the leadership in this county is severely lacking, and we risk losing that bounty to over-development and suburban sprawl. With an increasing middle-class squeeze, an out-of-control housing crisis & the ever-looming threat of the Auburn Dam putting this region in real peril, it seems like now is the best time to step in and do my part to help keep Placer County the Jewel of California.
As a team that has spent a tremendous amount of time, especially over the last four years investigating and exposing these groups, here is a little history about where front froups came from.
The modern political front group actually got its start about 50 years ago in the tobacco industry. As the Surgeon General targeted cigarettes and scientific studies were being publicized about the dangers of cigarettes, the tobacco industry, quite simply, created their own front groups in order to counter the real groups.
They said, "Doubt is our product," and they used well-funded front groups to fool the public into believing there were "two sides" to the story that tobacco use cased cancer and other diseases.
What are the characteristics of those groups that help define a front group today?
Well, for one, the proponents are paid mercenaries, not concerned citizens.
The second characteristic of these groups is that they are launched fully-formed and well-funded, often directly from Washington, D.C. The funding comes from few sources, and the front group is designed to push yet mask the agenda of these few funders. The day that Freedom's Watch launched out of DC, it had $15 million in the bank and completed TV commercials.
Contrast this with say, MoveOn.org, which was launched from an online petition by Wes Boyd and Joan Blades in California and grew into an organization as thousands upon thousands of concerned regular citizens joined. Or VoteVets, launched by Jon Soltz living in his office in New York.
Movements come from outside in, ground up. Front groups are launched fully formed, top down.
One of the clearest ways to see this is to look at the traffic that two sites receive.
If you head on over to www.alexa.com and compare MoveOn with Freedom's Watch, you'll see a clear fact - Freedom's Watch doesn't get any traffic - there is no support from the ground up, there is only the front, from the top down.
Finally, while Joan and Wes have always been and always will be involved with MoveOn, just as VoteVets is always going to be Jon Soltz's group, the heads of front groups like Freedom's Watch will change.
It appears that Bradley Blakeman is now the President, former George Bush spokesperson. He wasn't the head of it when it launched. And six months from now, it will be someone else.
The donors and the missions of front groups remain, the employees change, a lot.
Back in August, Secretary of State Debra Bowen announced that she was disallowing the majority of DRE voting machines made by Diebold and Sequoia. Part of her move in August was to require that 10% of votes in a close election (less than one half of one percent) be counted by hand. As a result of the potential "logistical nightmare" of having to count so many votes by hand, San Diego County has been pushing hard for people to vote by mail. But apparently that wasn't going quite well enough. So now the Deborah Seiler, the San Diego County Registrar of Voters, is suing Debra Bowen over the issue.
The suit claims that counting 10% of votes by hand would create delays and extra work (boo hoo) and threaten the registrar's ability to complete the tabulation during the 28-day canvass period after the February 5 election. San Diego County asserts that Secretary Bowen lacks the authority to mandate such a change without providing the funds to pay for it, although Bowen spokesperson Nicole Winger says the law "clearly" gives Bowen that authority.
So what, you may wonder, makes this a particularly big issue in San Diego County? Well, it could be that Ms. Seiler is a former Diebold saleswoman who participated in the sale of Diebold machines to San Diego in 2003? Her deputy is confirmed election corrupter Michael Vu, who presided over illegal practices during the 2004 Ohio elections. On top of that, once you start having to verify all these darn votes, you might have problems with letting volunteers take voting machines home overnight. Even though having random people be granted unfettered access to voting machines seems safe.
It's really gotta be embarrassing for folks like Deborah Seiler to be complaining about votes being counted. Given that her job is to count votes. Wait, you want me to potentially count more than 1% of the votes? Who do you think I am? The Registar of Voters or something?
Most Americans woke up this morning ready to read the morning paper, listen to the news, and check their computer to see what the day would bring.
Jan and I woke up knowing that today our son deployed for his fourth rotation in Iraq. We woke up knowing that for the next several months, the last thing we do at night and the first thing we do in the morning will be checking the internet for news out of a war zone...for word from our son.
We are in the minority: parents, spouses, and friends with a loved one in Iraq. Knowing from experience about the true cost of war, we questioned the justification and execution of this policy before it was popular. We learned first hand about the lack of proper equipment before others read about it in the newspaper. We checked prices for top quality body armor to send our son while the GOP led Congress fiddled. And long before the Walter Reed scandal broke, we followed the aftercare problems facing our troops, their families, and surviving dependents as our son talked about the injured and dead his unit flies out of Iraq.
