Categories
Category: The Current Situation
When I read that Twitter and Facebook were attacked for the sake of targeting one guy, my first thought was “Who is this guy, Jason Bourne?”
Over at my Coffee and Code blog, I write about a topic close to home for me: cafe owners in New York, fed up with laptops users lingering but not buying anything, are shooing them away.
The Toronto Garbage Strike of 2009 may be over (as might be David Miller’s reign come election time next year) and garbage collection is resuming today, but that’s no reason not have a song about it. The Toronto Star posted a story today about The Toronto Garbage Song (a.k.a. Flush Your Garbage), which was written and posted to YouTube by Ian Kelk.
This isn’t the first strike song to gain exposure through the internet. London Underground is still my favourite. It’s a reworking of The Jam’s Going Underground by British comedy singing duo Amateur Transplants (Adam Kay and Suman Biswas).
Here’s a homemade video that someone made for the song – be warned, it’s a little sweary:
In a comment to an earlier article of mine showing FOX News’ tendency to mislabel badly-behaving Republicans as Democrats, “RODAN” pointed me to this map of the middle east shown on FOX News in segment where Neil Cavuto interviewed John Bolton on Monday – note the country marked “Egypt”:
The problem is: that’s not Egypt, that’s Iraq! Here’s a real map of the middle east:
You’d think that with their obsessions with terror, Muslims and safeguarding the nation, not to mention the presence of a former representative to the U.N. present, they’d know where Iraq was.
…which means that if it’s ratified on Wednesday, the strike will well and truly be over. If that happens, garbage collection and other services provided by the people represented by CUPE Locals 416 and 79 could theoretically be back by Thursday. For reasons unknown and unfathomable to me, it has been said that services could take days or weeks to resume.
Michael Tomasky nails the real issue of the Sotomayor confirmation hearings perfectly:
Greg Sargent makes a great point about Jeff Sessions getting his knickers all in a twist about the "wise Latina" comment. Sessions said to Sotomayor this morning:
You have evidenced, I think it’s quite clear, a philosophy of the law that suggests that the judge’s background and experiences can and should and naturally will impact their decision — what I think goes against the American ideal…
Now read what Samuel Alito said at his confirmation hearing in 2006:
[W]hen a case comes before me involving, let’s say, someone who is an immigrant — and we get an awful lot of immigration cases and naturalization cases — I can’t help but think of my own ancestors.…
When I get a case about discrimination, I have to think about people in my own family who suffered discrimination because of their ethnic background or because of religion or because of gender. And I do take that into account.
Sessions voted for Alito of course. So it’s all right if you’re a white man, because as we all know, white men don’t have prejudices. Just amazing
Barbara O’Brien does a good job summarizing things in her article Senate Republicans, Sonia Sotomayor and the Default Norm, reminding us:
However, we can see plainly from the hearings yesterday that they can put on public displays of flaming racism and still hang on to their jobs. And, anyway, they don’t have to explicitly proclaim their superior virtues as white men, because it is implicitly assumed. As Mo Dowd said, “After all, these guys have never needed to speak inspirational words to others like them, as Sotomayor has done. They’ve had codes, handshakes and clubs to do that.”