No limit on stupid

[quickcat]

The SCOTUS Citizens decision included unions too ... no outrage about that?

Wisconsin has already executed those.

I know this is meant to be humorous, but I expect more than a typical libtard response from Steve Lee. Selective outrage?

Perhaps he was just laying some bait, lurking in the shadows for predictable bites.

[MakeIt-TakeIt Cat]

The SCOTUS Citizens decision included unions too ... no outrage about that?

Wisconsin has already executed those.

I know this is meant to be humorous, but I expect more than a typical libtard response from Steve Lee. Selective outrage?

Perhaps he was just laying some bait, lurking in the shadows for predictable bites.

Fine with me ... now he's got a whopper on the hook! Steve and I have enjoyed discussions for many years. I suspect he won't mind another.

I'm interested in your opinion too.

[mccabemi]

The SCOTUS Citizens decision included unions too ... no outrage about that?

The teacher's union I was a part of in MD sucked (technical term). Tons of resources went into protecting the bottom 5% of workers. This incidentally, is why we have all this testing craze- because we do not allow the labor markets to function properly and then try to find a fix on the other end. All we really want to do is get bad teachers out of the classroom. Because we can't, we spend tons of resources in order to do it. I have little patience for the unions of today- just wait until the public pension bubble hits. States will bend. #predictionssuretogowrong


To think that the 14th Amendment, designed to incorporate slaves into society, was used to grant corporate personhood, is perhaps the biggest head scratcher in American history. Strict constructionists have to squint real hard to see the intent to create corporate persons. But I don't think the right to an abortion is in the Constitution either ( I just want to make sure everyone here hates my politics).

Can we talk about gerrymandering next?

[quickcat]

The SCOTUS Citizens decision included unions too ... no outrage about that?

Wisconsin has already executed those.

I know this is meant to be humorous, but I expect more than a typical libtard response from Steve Lee. Selective outrage?

Perhaps he was just laying some bait, lurking in the shadows for predictable bites.

Fine with me ... now he's got a whopper on the hook! Steve and I have enjoyed discussions for many years. I suspect he won't mind another.

I'm interested in your opinion too.

I have no informed opinion at all. Seems like a fairly technical question to me, and CAs response indicated that he thinks so, which is good enough for me. I can believe corporations should have free speech rights. Seems like a leap to freedom of religion that allows avoidance of laws though.

My uninformed opinion, though, is that what is good for the goose is good for the gander. Unions should get the same benefits as corporations, and the same opprobrium. As far as I can tell, they push the limits at least as much as corporations.

[stevelee]

I know this is meant to be humorous,

I thought it was fairly clever given the greater context of the thread, and the fact that it was all I had time to say while getting ready for church.

[stevelee]

Perhaps he was just laying some bait, lurking in the shadows for predictable bites.

I think I'm the one being baited, but the could be some level of mutuality.

To save you guys some grief, he and I would discuss political issues on an internet board of a younger Jewish woman who lives in Spanish Harlem. By the time MITI got there, it was funded by a right-wing guy in Reno, and the board sort of fizzled out eventually. Most of us were online acquaintances from the '80s on CompuServe's Apple forums. I'm still Facebook friends with a couple of the folks, and encounter the good doctor here.

[stevelee]

Fine with me ... now he's got a whopper on the hook! Steve and I have enjoyed discussions for many years. I suspect he won't mind another.

Well, assuming that the discussion would be tolerated in the No Limit thread, we'd need to figure out what we are disagreeing about.

I grew up in a Southern textile-mill culture. I probably start from the strongest bias one could have against unions without ever having any real contact or connection with one. I'm living off investments at this stage of my life. I don't consider myself anti-business.

I don't really know enough about the law to discuss matters intelligently with CA. I did help grade the final exams of first-year law students of a California school some years back, and I have stayed at a Holiday Inn Express.

As you know, I'm bothered by corporate welfare. I think most of it should be illegal. I have this odd notion that if we have welfare, maybe it should go to poor people. While I don't always agree with him, I enjoy the insights of John Hood of the John Locke Foundation. When the legislature passed a bill to require welfare recipients to have drug tests, Hood said he didn't know how well that would go over with the Met Life executives who were moving to Charlotte.

I believe there is a legal term "person" that can be an individual or a corporation or whatever for some purposes. I don't see how that gives companies or unions the constitutional rights given to individuals. I don't really follow the verbal slight of hand that makes money to be speech. I don't see giving local governments the right to condemn someone's property for the purpose of enriching a private business. It all gives a through-the-looking-glass aura to the Supreme Court. And I would prefer they just sin boldly, to misapply Luther a bit. I liked the near honesty of saying we're going to rule this way this time 'cause it gives the election to our guy. Next time we can rule the other way if our guy needs us to.

Which gets me to transparency. I think campaign messages should end with "I'm candidate X, and rich guy Y approves of this message." When corporations give donations to the Clinton Foundation and when people and businesses with concerns coming before the Supreme Court become clients of Mrs. Thomas, it's pretty much out there. When companies make gifts to phony baloney charities that are really PACs, that's something else. The scandal wasn't that the IRS delayed approval for right-wing and a few left-wing political groups. The scandal was that their policy was to approve them at all, contrary to the law as written.

[MakeIt-TakeIt Cat]

My dad was in the Bricklayers/Masons Union Local 8 in Atlanta in the days when US citizens were brickmasons. I was a member of the UAW in the summer of 1974 as the price to pay for a summer job at the GM plant in Doraville, Ga. Unions have done great things in America and they helped me get a great summer job after I graduated from Davidson. I'm wondering as I write this if I might be the only Davidson grad to work on an auto assembly line? I found it to be quite an experience.

All I really wanted to know is whether there was equal outrage for the treatment of unions and corporations in Citizens ... since all we seem to hear from opponents of the decision are negative remarks about corporations.

[stevelee]

This incidentally, is why we have all this testing craze- because we do not allow the labor markets to function properly and then try to find a fix on the other end.

No Child Left Behind and the testing mania come from even more complex confluences. I facilely see it as a left-wing and right-wing conspiracy, but I realize that is over-simplification.

I will interject that I'm skeptical of the view that the main thing wrong with our schools is that we have all these bad teachers. I'm sure there must be some, maybe a lot. I come with the bias of having grown up in a Southern mill town of 16,000 people and encountering at worst one mediocre teacher in my twelve years of school there. A lot of the teachers were outstanding, and several were amazing. They influence my life to this day.

In terms of testing, I think the cure is worse than the disease. So much time is spent teaching to the test that it is a wonder that subject matter gets covered at all. I realize that some of the content will accidentally seep through the teaching to the test process, but hardly as much as if they could just deal with the purported subject matter.

The education-industrial complex certainly has their lobbyists, so the situation is unlikely to change much. Companies that make the tests sell books and software for teachers to use to teach the test. Etc.

A buddy in Pensacola called me the other day. He was on his commute home from his last day at school. He is now retired, and glad of it. He has directed bands at the middle and high schools and taught math and history among other things. The mix varied from year to year as needed, since he could do all those things well, and more, as you'd probably expect of a friend of mine.

We had talked at length in April as we often do, since he somehow manages to screw up his installation of TurboTax most years in ways that I have trouble imagining. This year he had downloaded the program to his wife's computer and couldn't transfer it to his somehow and couldn't find the password to download it to his computer, or maybe he'd have to pay for it again, or something. He also had it on an optical disc which his computer couldn't read somehow. OK, so there are things he's not super competent at, like remembering where he left a certain cable.

As I'm trying to get my mind around all the Murphy's Law corollaries we were encountering, he went off on a tirade on school testing and the state legislature. Five weeks before the end of the semester his students were being tested on material to be covered in the rest of the semester.

So if there are bad teachers, even worse teachers are the legislators who set educational policies they don't understand.

When I was a kid, teachers were given respect and a good degree of autonomy in their classroom. If a kid acted up, it was the kid's fault. Now it's an occasion for the parents to complain about the teacher. If the state bureaucrats and legislators make dopey educational policy, it's the fault of the teachers, and they just need more micromanagement and busy work.

The real wonder is that we have so many good teachers left. I don't know how long that can last.

[stevelee]

All I really wanted to know is whether there was equal outrage for the treatment of unions and corporations in Citizens ... since all we seem to hear from opponents of the decision are negative remarks about corporations.

I think maybe as a practical matter, there were not so many restraints on union contributions before the decision, and people knew where their contributions were going. So there would be more outrage over the new rules for corporate giving. Also I don't think foreign unions are so likely to give to US candidates as foreign corporations (if that is still a meaningful term) through the back doors.

While both corporations and unions have people in them, they are not themselves people. Soylent Green is people. Girl Scout Cookies do not in fact contain any actual Girl Scouts.

[Waitress]

I'm wondering as I write this if I might be the only Davidson grad to work on an auto assembly line? I found it to be quite an experience.

Brother Take-It, I was a UAW member for a while, through my membership in the National Writers Union.

[MakeIt-TakeIt Cat]

I'm wondering as I write this if I might be the only Davidson grad to work on an auto assembly line? I found it to be quite an experience.

Brother Take-It, I was a UAW member for a while, through my membership in the National Writers Union.

Brother Waitress, I can assure you that none of the UAW members with whom I worked on that assembly line could have brought literary skills to your Writer's Union!

[MrMac]

My dad was in the Bricklayers/Masons Union Local 8 in Atlanta in the days when US citizens were brickmasons. I was a member of the UAW in the summer of 1974 as the price to pay for a summer job at the GM plant in Doraville, Ga. Unions have done great things in America and they helped me get a great summer job after I graduated from Davidson. I'm wondering as I write this if I might be the only Davidson grad to work on an auto assembly line?

You didn't have anything to do with making my first car--a 1974 Vega--did you?

[MrMac]

...at the GM plant in Doraville, Ga.

"Doraville,
Touch of country in the city...."

[WildCock]

I graduated on June 7, 1969 and got my ROTC commission the next day. In those days there was a war on, which meant that there were a lot of people is a similar situation. In order not to overwhelm the training facilities with a horde of young officers coming on active duty all at once, the army spread them out over the upcoming year. As a courtesy, we were asked if we had a preferred date to begin our service. I asked for, and to my great surprise, got June 8, 1970.

As I had a college loan to pay off, I had to look for work. I was upfront with potential employers that I had a two-year obligation to the army that would begin in a year. They would then ask, "Is there any guarantee that you won't be called up sooner?" I gave them an honest answer, that it was unlikely, but that there was no guarantee. This didn't do a lot to improve my job prospects. I ended up spending nearly a year as a shipping clerk in a pantyhose factory. It was not a union job. It was better than working in the dyehouse.