newsrackblog.com

Via docudharma. (h/t Priscilla L.)

UPDATE, 10/30: Another version. Why? Because you can’t stop me:

And such a nice young couple, too. Sigh.

Make no mistake — whatever the header to this e-mail may imply, I’m writing to *support* the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), better known as “Card Check” legislation. Please vote “YES” on this sensible, well designed legislation.

Workers deserve a fair workplace, which includes the right to vote “yes” or “no” on unionization by secret ballot — or the right to organize by other means when corporate anti-union policies make it necessary. Card Check legislation *enhances* worker’s rights by giving them another way to organize.  Opponents cite potential fears of workers under card check, but studies show workers actually feel less coerced by co-workers in “majority signup” situations than in secret ballot ones.

Americans cherish the secret ballot in *fair* elections. But as you know, all too often elections deciding unionization are anything but fair; companies can propagandize their employees at will, and often threaten them with workplace shutdowns or other punitive measures. Imagine if a mayor could really threaten moving the city if he lost the election!  Would that be a fair election?  Of course not!

As EFCA opponents like to say, the secret ballot is a cornerstone of our democracy. But what they *don’t* like to say is that card check does nothing to change that, since at any time, if 30 percent of the workers want an election, they can have one. (And once they have a union, workers also vote to elect their union representatives.)

I urge you to *support Card Check legislation*, which will even the playing field between unorganized workers and their company bosses.  And more unionized workers means a more prosperous America. I look forward to hearing where you stand on this important matter. Thank you!  God bless America!

Substitute this message to your Senators and Representative for the anti-EFCA boilerplate text here — pass it on!

For more information about EFCA, click here (my blog post), here (AFL-CIO) or here (Americans Rights at Work).

# BushCo Speech Leaked (eRobin, “Fact-esque”) — THE PRESIDENT: My fellow citizens, at this hour, American taxpayers are in the early stages of an financial investment plan to aid the billionaires of Wall St., to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.

# The Bush-Paulson Bailout Plan (The Editors, Poor Man Institute) —

SUBJECT: REQUEST FOR URGENT BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP

DEAR AMERICAN: I NEED TO ASK YOU TO SUPPORT AN URGENT SECRET BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP WITH A TRANSFER OF FUNDS OF GREAT MAGNITUDE. I AM MINISTRY OF THE TREASURY OF THE REPUBLIC OF AMERICA. MY COUNTRY HAS HAD CRISIS THAT HAS CAUSED THE NEED FOR LARGE TRANSFER OF FUNDS OF 800 BILLION DOLLARS US. IF YOU WOULD ASSIST ME IN THIS TRANSFER, IT WOULD BE MOST PROFITABLE TO YOU.

# buymyshitpile.com — With our economy in crisis, the US Government is scrambling to rescue our banks by purchasing their “distressed assets”, i.e., assets that no one else wants to buy from them. We figured that instead of protesting this plan, we’d give regular Americans the same opportunity to sell their bad assets to the government. We need your help and you need the Government’s help!

# I’ve been honored with a link by Fast Paydya Loans Now! (Tagline: “Payday Loans Quick Reply No Faxing Bad Credit Ok): Random Feed wrote an interesting post today on [blank] Here’s a quick excerpt

# http://www.nounverbpow.com/

# Jonathan Schwarz (”A Tiny Revolution”) — “Almost all political conflict, especially in the US, boils down to a fight between the Sane Billionaires and the Insane Billionaires. It generally follows this template:

INSANE BILLIONAIRES: Let’s kill everyone and take their money!
SANE BILLIONAIRES: I like the way you think. I really do. But if we keep everyone alive, and working for us, we’ll make even more money, in the long term.
INSANE BILLIONAIRES: You communist!!!

Works in China, too.

# http://barneysmith2008.com — because we don’t just need a president who puts Barney Smith before Smith Barney, we need a president who IS Barney Smith.

# YouTube Comment Snob “is a Firefox extension that filters out undesirable comments from YouTube comment threads. You can choose to have any of the following rules mark a comment for removal: * More than # spelling mistakes: The number of mistakes is customizable, and the extension uses Firefox’s built-in spell checker. * etc. etc. # All capital letters# No capital letters # Excessive punctuation (!!!! ????)…” etcetera etcetera. Patrick Nielsen Hayden asks the right question: “Can we have this for the entire Internet?”

# Take A Load Off Fannie at “CalculatedRisk”: “The story of Fannie Mae, as narrated by The Band.”

# The Guardian: the whole world’s only source for backup Fafblog. It’s true.

=====
HAT TIPS: Aviva Othirtytwo (Barney), Andrew H. (Fannie)

Dear Senator Obama, I realize we Internet folks have been asking you NOT to do a lot of stuff. Please don’t vote for telecom immunity. Please don’t make Evan Bayh your VP. Nag, nag, nag… right?

Well, this time we’d like to ask you TO do something. There’s a great independent ad up on youtube, you can see it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBfngOsvmA0

We think your campaign should get behind it, and buy it some air time on TV! Its a great ad on its own merits, and it would show that you understand the power of user-created media.

So please, Senator, get behind this ad.

(Text and ad via the facebook group named, appropriately enough, “Hey Senator Obama! Why not buy some airtime for this great ad?”)

This image was acquired at the Phoenix landing site on day 5 of the mission on the surface of Mars, or Sol 4, after the May 25, 2008, landing. The optical microscope acquired this image at 12:34:19 local solar time. The camera pointing was elevation null degrees and azimuth null degrees.

How about that — a tiny, tiny newspaper clipping. And in English, too! I suppose it’s just possible they’d have put it aboard for calibration purposes, but … nah. Then again, “thanks bridge two planets”. MECA is the name of the microscope instrument package (Microscopy, Electrochemistry, and Conductivity Analyzer) …well, maybe this wasn’t hacker mischief.

Anyway, the Phoenix lander is busy scooping and photographing and measuring away, have a look at the other photos it’s sent from Mars.

Onion News Network report, that is:

Via Thoreau (”Unqualified Offerings”), where a commenter reminds us of the eerily prescient January 17, 2001 Onion item “Bush: ‘Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over’.”

# Liberal Pundits Offer Unprecedented Apology (Berube, TPM Cafe) —

The organization, “Repentant Villagers,” announced today that it would be issuing formal apologies to hundreds of liberal bloggers, including Duncan Black, Jane Hamsher, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, Glenn Greenwald, and “Digby,” acknowledging that the progressive blogosphere was right about Lieberman after all. “No one could have anticipated the breach of the party,” said Jonathan Chait, senior editor of the New Republic. “But Lieberman’s recent op-ed, calling the Democratic Party insufficiently pro-American, is just sheer barking lunacy. I could never have seen this coming two years ago when I was calling Lieberman’s critics ‘a pack of crazed, ignorant ideological cannibals,’ and I’m deeply sorry. It looks like I turned out to be the truly ignorant one in the end.”

# Fafblog Interviews: HILLARY CLINTON — Worth it for this part alone — “That’s that no-nonsense down-to-business style I like about you, Hillary Clinton! You don’t just talk about change. You talk about how much you don’t just talk about change!” — but there’s more….

CLINTON: I didn’t vote for the war, Fafnir. I voted to give the president the authority to go to war. What was he going to use that authority for? Maybe he’d just frame it and hang it in his office. Maybe he’d use it to prop up one of the legs on his desk. Maybe he’d use it to sing songs and dance jigs and lift weary spirits down at the old folks home! I honestly couldn’t say!

FB: If only you knew at the time that that devious George Bush would use a war authorization to authorize a war!

CLINTON: You know, I guess I’m just too giving. Maybe I just love my country too much to deny it the universal health care and endless wars it so desperately needs. Maybe some theoretical secret black Muslim who hates America wouldn’t have that problem.

FB: Maybe it didn’t have to be an actual war, though. Maybe you coulda just met the president halfway by settin a big pile a money on fire an shootin a buncha random people.

# The 3rd Annual Nigerian EMail Conference: “Write better emails. Make more moneys.” —

Like most Nigerians, you’re probably finding that it’s increasingly difficult to earn a decent living from email. That’s why you need to attend the 3rd Annual Nigerian EMail Conference.

“This conference is an investment in your future. Learn to take advantage of modern technology, and make a great deal of money with very little effort. If you have any question, please contact me and I will send you a proposal that may be of interest to you. I await your response by return while assuring you that the transaction is absolutely risk free.”
- Dr. Collins Mbadiwe

# Shroud Of Turin Accidentally Washed With Red Shirt (The Onion) —

The damage occurred when Pope Benedict XVI, whose turn it was to do the Vatican laundry, did not notice that a brand-new, bright-red Hanes Beefy-T belonging to Cardinal Angelo Sodano had been placed inside of the consecrated cleansing vessel, the Holy Whirlpool 24934 top-load washer.

# Huge, if belated applause for Roy Edroso (”alicublog”), whose “The Official Village Voice Election-Season Guide to the Right-Wing Blogosphere: A confederacy of dunces was last week’s cover story in the Village Voice! My favorite parts are the “stupid/evil ratio” factoids assigned to all –highest evil quotient: Glenn Reynolds (5:95); highest stupid quotient: Ace of Spades (99:1). Some might quibble that LGF’s Muslim-baiting Charles Johnson is more evil, but Roy’s retort, I imagine, is that he’s very stupid too. Fair enough — and Edroso’s archaeological work bringing Johnson’s pre 9/11 bike repair musings to light lend a kind of unexpected tragic pathos to the LGF story: in a better world, with a little luck, we’d never have heard of him. See also Tom Tomorrow’s timeless cartoon portraits of the denizens of the dextroblogosphere.

From the Glenn Reynolds blurb:

MODUS OPERANDI: Expresses overt support only rarely, mostly in reviews of cars and consumer goods. Otherwise cites other (mostly right-wing) writers, adding a few words—or one word (usually heh, indeed, or ouch)—to denote approval. This style is, probably purposely, hard to engage. For example, after a lengthy quote in defense of the 1980s Salvadoran death squads, Reynolds adds this: “makes me wonder if making comparisons to Central America will help the Left, or simply bring up a lot of things that a lot of people would rather gloss over today.” Inquiries as to meaning are likely to go unanswered, as Instapundit has no comments feature.

# Fafblog’s ‘Giblets’ on “bitter-Gate”:

Well Giblets knows the real Americans of the heartland, Barack Obama. He has flown over them and driven past them and grimaced amiably in their direction on the way to hotel rooms on numerous occasions, and in that time he has come to appreciate their primitive yet unique culture. These salt-of-the-earth folk don’t need your condescending liberal elitism to tell them how they feel! They need Giblets’s condescending conservative elitism to tell them how they feel! These people aren’t “bitter.” Far from it! America’s impoverished working class are a chipper and cheerful lot, prancing and scampering about their foreclosed homes and crumbling industrial sectors with a spirit of adorable pluckiness, smiling and laughing through their unemployment and their black lung disease like a pack of hardscrabble leprechauns!

# This, via NorthGare, had me laughing for a while:

Reminds me of a favourite joke, from Bob Monkhouse of all people: “They all laughed when I said I wanted to be a comedian. They’re not laughing now.”