No Love for Dino: Sen. Maria Cantwell doesn’t have much money in the bank, but still looks to face an easy reelection in 2012. Sad: Dino Rossi is not mentioned as one of the GOP contenders. Happy: Dave “Man with the Screaming Brain” Reichert is!

Unsurprised: Steroid use is increasing in the macho culture that is the U.S. military. Joint Base Lewis-McChord witnessed a major bust in 2009. The thought of roided-out guys with guns and tanks makes roided-out baseball players seem so quaint.

Fund for the Needy Launches: The Seattle Times kicked off their 32nd annual charity fundraiser today. They raised over $800,000 last year.

Black Friday Now an International Holiday: Bellingham is expecting so many Canadian shoppers that hotels are offering special discounts to get them to stay over night. Note to British Columbia: this is why governments in border areas shouldn’t deceptively pass an unpopular new tax…and also because said tax makes my restaurant bills in Vancouver higher.

How to Not Accomplish Your Goal: If you want state prison funding boosted, then going after helping inmates with life sentences get high school diplomas is not going to endear me to your cause.

The Tax Man: The IRS still owes 851 people in King County roughly $1 million in refunds from 2009. Don’t let them have undeserved money. Please check and see if you are on the list.

Making Me Puke: Humanist-in-chief Obama says the TSA’s new scanners and pat-downs are “necessary.” Then how about you get a scan before every flight on Air Force One, pal? Somewhere, Michael Chertoff is laughing maniacally and counting the millions of dollars he made because one fool with a bomb in his underwear managed to get on a plane.

Terrorists Win: The recently foiled cargo plane bomb plot cost just $4,200. If you were an economically-minded jihadi, wouldn’t spending that amount of money just to watch the world’s debt-ridden superpower strangle its economy more and overreact with billions in anti-terror spending make sense to you?

Labour Fesses Up: The tastefully-named Ed Balls, a top official in Britain’s Labour Party, admitted they pushed too far on civil liberties when they were in power. Part of me likes his honesty. But another part of me just gets angrier since the guy simultaneously defended supposedly anti-crime CCTV cameras because they are “popular.”

Not Again: The Irish government admitted that they will seek a bailout later today. Potato famines, civil wars, economic collapses—maybe it’s time to reevaluate the phrase “luck of the Irish.”

46 replies on “The Morning News”

  1. Note to British Columbia: this is why governments in border areas shouldn’t deceptively pass an unpopular new tax…and also because said tax makes my restaurant bills in Vancouver higher.

    Yea, I’m sure it’s all about the tax, and not because the Canadian Dollar is pretty much equal to the U.S. Dollar at the moment.

  2. RE: The Tax Man,
    So, not only are there a bunch of people in King County who are having far too much tax withheld on their income, they’re also not using electronic deposits and not keeping their addressess current with the IRS.

    wtf?

    Seriously people, if you’d like to make a donation to the IRS, please do so on your own time, don’t make them spend countless hours (billable to the rest of us) trying to track your lazy ass down.

  7. @7, talk to any correctional worker and they will tell you without TV for inmates their jobs would be way more violent and difficult.

    Also research shows the more education people get while locked up leads to lower recidivism rates.

    You’ll find evidence for both in Robert Ellis Gordon’s The Funhouse Mirror: Reflections on Prison.

  8. I feel like only a total moron would argue against educating criminals. It takes a few seconds of critical thinking to come up with several good reasons such programs.

  10. I need my scab away. Apply directly to the scab. Scab disappears for days. Tubby matt Lubys brain is so ruddy maybe somebody should fire the fuddy.

  12. Oh, and the MLS championship game is today at 5:30 PST. Or do you soccer nuts only care about the game when your team is playing?

    Go Colorado Rapids!

  14. Svensken @12… you have a big honkin’ dildo in your fridge next to the milk?

    We all like a cold one every now and then, but that’s not exactly the first thing I think of.

  17. Matt Luby, you filthy, disgusting scab, when does your unpaid internship end?

    Get your pasty Randian ass back to Wyoming or where ever people like you go. If you don’t like taxes, you shouldn’t be living somewhere with a relatively robust infrastructure paid for with taxes. Was there no unpaid internship at the Podunk Express?

    Also, I hope someone kicks you in the balls. Scab.

  21. Too true, @20. Almost half of the comments on this post are about Matt Luby. As long as he’s keeping pageviews and comments high, I don’t know why the Stranger wouldn’t be thrilled to have him.

  22. Dear Stranger staff:

    It’s time to get rid of the anti-union scab, Matt Luby.

    And, even if you don’t get rid of him, you need to have somebody else write articles about the grocery store workers’ labor disputes.

    To not do so would mean that we should not take your publication seriously.

    The UFCW has done a lot of hard work on the issues that the Stranger and it’s readers supposedly care about.

    Take marriage equality for gays and lesbians, for instance.

    The UFCW has consistently been one of the most pro equality unions around. Their support (along with other unions) of Approve Referendum 71 was instrumental in its passage.

    Not only did they endorse Referendum 71, they voted to utilize their phone banks to help with its passage.

    http://www.sgn.org/sgnnews37_40/page3.cf…

    Many unions helped Referendum 71 pass.

    http://approvereferendum71.org/08/organi…

    Check out #144.

    Just a reminder, in the next few years (as early as 2012 perhaps?) there will be an effort placed before the voters legalizing marriage equality in WA state.

    It’s going to be a very tough fight. And the outcome is going to be very close.

    Your going to need all of the help you can get. You’d be better off with a strong UFCW on your side.

    If you want to win in the future, you are going to need to support the people now who have supported your issues in the past.

    Just a friendly reminder.

    Politics is all about coalition building.

    Don’t fuck over the folks that have gone to bat for you in the past.

  23. @23, temper your hopes on that, though. Between Brendan’s longstanding meme that Boeing was brought low by the machinists’ union, and the Stranger’s hiring a labor-issues writer awhile back but then disappearing him without a word a couple months later, my favorite local paper’s never been super duper strong on this kind of coverage.

    Maybe it’ll be as with their recent push to assume deep concern about homelessness – if the mayor suddenly decides to curry favor with labor, the Stranger will realize how profoundly they’ve always cared about unions too.

  24. As #3 Mr. Solomon noted, the ‘luck’ of the Irish is meant to be taken as a negative- bad luck, not lucky. No reevaluation needed.
    Although buying junk bonds like everyone else in this case is a choice, not luck

  26. Vince @ #7 –
    As a condition of keeping their monopolies, most cable-TV companies are required to provide a free TV connection for government-owned facilities in their service area. That includes prisons.

  27. Is it me, or does scab for brains seem to be amping up the stupid now that he knows he’s getting arise. So he’s a scab and a troll? Fuck you very much Luby.

  28. After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad and the vampire, he had some awful stuff left with which he made a SCAB.

    A SCAB is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul, a waterlogged brain, and a combination backbone made of jelly and glue. Where others have hearts he carries a tumor of rotten principles.

    When a SCAB comes down the street men turn their backs and angels weep in heaven, and the devil shuts the gates of hell to keep hime out. No man has a right to SCAB as there is a pool of water deep enough to drown his body in, or a rope long enough to hang his carcass with. Judas Iscariot was a gentleman compared to a SCAB. For betraying his master he had the character to hang himself. A SCAB hasn’t.

    Esau sold his birthright for a mess of pottage. Judas Iscariot sold his Savior for thirty pieces of silver. Benedict Arnold sold his country for a promise of a commission in the British Army. The modern strike breaker sells his birthright, his country, his wife, his children and his fellow-men for an unfulfilled promise from his employer, trust or corporation.

    Esau was a traitor to himself, Judas Iscariot was a traitor to his Lord, Benedict Arnold was a traitor to his country.

    A STRIKE BREAKER IS A TRAITOR TO HIS GOD, HIS COUNTRY, HIS FAMILY

    AND THE WORKING CLASS
    –Jack London

  30. @ David

    First, Wikipedia is not a credible source.

    Second, only the first three sentences are borrowed from common folk music. Based on the article it’s hardly plagiarized and doesn’t change the context of the piece.

  31. “The Luck of the Irish” is neither positive nor negative in its connotation. It’s just what it is, what’s happened to them (centuries of colonialism and oppression) and what they’ve done to and with themselves (squandered an opportunity when buckets of money started pouring in in the 90s). Their “luck” has been both positive AND negative.

  32. Let’s face some reality on “news coverage” by anyone at The Stranger; since they lost Josh and Erica there isn’t anyone who I would consider a reliable source of reporting on any issues. Though Dan is great when talking about sex.

  34. I did debate the issue. When was the last time you’ve seen CNN or MSNBC quote Wikipedia? When I was in college it was an automatic F to include Wikipedia. The truth is that anyone can add true or false information into Wikipedia.

    And please don’t swear at me, it shows your age.

  35. @29, @30, @31, @34: Wikipedia is exactly as reputable as its sources, which are required to be given. Unfortunately, that section of the London article is identified as “original research” which doesn’t depend on cited sources and is thus not allowed on Wikipedia. The passage should be stricken, and the question of whether Jack London actually wrote the passage remains unknown, beyond the fact that it is “generally attributed” to him. Nobody knows. There is no creidible evidence presented either way.

  37. @35: Or my lack of maturity. They didn’t have wikipedia when I did my undergrad, so don’t start talking denigrating me for my age.

    Wikipedia is an amazing starting point for research. It provides an amazing number of references that can then be used as excellent primary sources for academic discourse.

    Slog is NOT academic discourse. Automatically discarding any wikipedia links instead of using those links to dig deep is at best laziness and at worst a convenient straw man.

  40. My copy of the Little Red Songbook attributes the the passage @29 to Jack London. The Little Red Songbook is published by the Industrial Workers of the World. They have many humorous songs about the Labor movement from around the world. Some people think the IWW died long ago, but they are around, although they are small. They were founded in 1905, and there was a big red scare after World War 1 that targeted the Wobblies. Their website is http://iww.org/. I’m not an IWW member, but I get a hoot out of them.

  42. While statements on Wikipedia certainly shouldn’t be taken on faith, reading what’s there and on other internet sites produces a pretty clear picture: Lots of union literature ascribes the poem to London. No London scholars do, and it does not appear in any of his collected works. There appears to be speculation by some London scholars that the false attribution began when the poem was printed on a handbill distributed at a pro-union assembly where London spoke.

    Requiring that someone cite a published sentence saying “this does not appear in London’s collected works” seems a wee bit over the top. On the one hand, if a thing did appear in an author’s collected works, it would be very easy for someone to prove it by citing the volume and page where it appears. On the other hand, one is not going to find published scholarly satements describing every single thing that does not appear in an author’s collected works.

  43. By the way, Intern, if you have money to go to Vancouver to eat at restaurants (and bitch about the price), how can you possibly need to scab?

    “A guy’s got to eat,” indeed. You spoiled baby.

  46. @46, on the wikipedia page regarding Jack London it says,”London regarded the Wobblies as a welcome addition to the Socialist cause, although he never joined them in going so far as to recommend sabotage.” That quote comes from Clarice Stasz, who wrote about Jack London. Wobblies are the people who are in the IWW. The wikipedia page also notes that Jack London met with Big Bill Haywood, who was a prominent Wobbly. For as biased as they are, the IWW has been around since 1905, although today they are small. Also, Jack London was a merchant seaman at the time the Wobblies were a significant force on the ships. The San Francisco Bay area was strong Wobbly territory at that time. I know of a few unions in the bay area that have roots from the IWW, and while they are not IWW unions today, they have carried on for generations much of the militant solidarity that the IWW gave birth to.

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