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Missy

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I'll freely admit it's not helping. But when you have eighteen people undoing fifty years plus of civil rights and deciding to say that they don't need to follow laws that are in place to ensure bipartisanship, all that matters is that they get their way, people tend to get just a little angry.

Federal workers don't have collective bargaining rights. Are they denied civil rights?

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Yes, they are.

Go back prior to the 1940s/50s, and look at basic labor conditions without the right to collective bargaining. Hell, look at conditions in China and India, were they don't have that whole union thing. Not exactly the greatest thing in the world. Management always goes for the bottom line, and has a tendency to not really care about that whole safety thing.

What this comes down to, is do I trust the Republicans/corporations to do the right thing and not reduce wages/conditions/things like health care? Hell no.

Funny enough, the NFL explains it pretty damn well.

And I'm not saying that there aren't cases in which labor unions aren't corrupt. I'll freely admit that that may be the case at times. But how the hell is a teacher making 50k a year making too much?

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Yes, they are.

Go back prior to the 1940s/50s, and look at basic labor conditions without the right to collective bargaining. Hell, look at conditions in China and India, were they don't have that whole union thing. Not exactly the greatest thing in the world. Management always goes for the bottom line, and has a tendency to not really care about that whole safety thing.

What this comes down to, is do I trust the Republicans/corporations to do the right thing and not reduce wages/conditions/things like health care? Hell no.

Funny enough, the NFL explains it pretty damn well.

And I'm not saying that there aren't cases in which labor unions aren't corrupt. I'll freely admit that that may be the case at times. But how the hell is a teacher making 50k a year making too much?

First of all, we aren't China. Second of all, federal workers get better pensions than any privte union worker could ever dream of. Unions are not a civil right, I'm sorry to say. That is a bit much. Since the unions universally support the Democrats, there's no way I'd trust them be objective on the matter.

A teacher who makes 50K a year who is very bad at their job is making too much. They shouldn't be teachers. The problem is, teachers unions make it nearly impossible to fire the bad ones. My mother was a teacher for years, and for a state that didn't have collective bargaining, and it has not harmed her. She has a rediculously nice pension, and hates the effect those unions have had on the bad teachers she worked with. She's a Democrat, by the way.

Sorry, but this is not a civil rights matter. It is a union matter. It's bad enough that people compared this bill to Pearl Harbor. Let's not get more hyperbolic than has already been done.

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Yes, they are.

Go back prior to the 1940s/50s, and look at basic labor conditions without the right to collective bargaining. Hell, look at conditions in China and India, were they don't have that whole union thing. Not exactly the greatest thing in the world. Management always goes for the bottom line, and has a tendency to not really care about that whole safety thing.

What this comes down to, is do I trust the Republicans/corporations to do the right thing and not reduce wages/conditions/things like health care? Hell no.

Funny enough, the NFL explains it pretty damn well.

And I'm not saying that there aren't cases in which labor unions aren't corrupt. I'll freely admit that that may be the case at times. But how the hell is a teacher making 50k a year making too much?

First of all, we aren't China. Second of all, federal workers get better pensions than any privte union worker could ever dream of. Unions are not a civil right, I'm sorry to say. That is a bit much. Since the unions universally support the Democrats, there's no way I'd trust them be objective on the matter.

A teacher who makes 50K a year who is very bad at their job is making too much. They shouldn't be teachers. The problem is, teachers unions make it nearly impossible to fire the bad ones. My mother was a teacher for years, and for a state that didn't have collective bargaining, and it has not harmed her. She has a rediculously nice pension, and hates the effect those unions have had on the bad teachers she worked with. She's a Democrat, by the way.

Sorry, but this is not a civil rights matter. It is a union matter. It's bad enough that people compared this bill to Pearl Harbor. Let's not get more hyperbolic than has already been done.

Who decides if a teacher is good at their job since 95% of kids move on to the next grade regardless?

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Regardless of what they did, how they did it is more important. If it's decided they broke the law, then none of this matters because it didn't happen.

I think that's the real issue here. I've heard decent arguments from both sides about the union issue, but it never should have been pushed through the way it was. Now, I don't exactly think the Dems fleeing the state and refusing to vote was really a responsible thing to do either, but that's the lesser of the two evils.

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Stay safe, people.

In other, more terrifying news, one of hte nuclear reactors has lost water and is potentially failing in Fukushima, which could cause a breach and a radiation leak. If that happens, it's going to be Chernobyl all over again, but even worse.

Most of mine are confirmed alive, though there's one couple we're waiting to hear from...

And the thing that's awful is that Japan has fucking AWFUL building codes/engineering, so the damage is only going to get worse. And the government assistance is kind of made of fail.

(I did a whole research paper including a part on how and why the last earthquake was so awful. Fuuuuck.)

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This is seriously messed up.

To sum up: The prosecutors who didn't turn over evidence (eyewitness reports, blood samples, and the fact that the person who turned the guy in got a reward from the victim's family) that should have exonerated a man that was wrongly jailed for almost twenty years and was almost executed, according to the majority (whose opinions were written by Justices Scalia and Thomas), are not guilty of any crime, nor are they responsible for those 20 years that the man spent on death row.

That's pretty fucked, right there.

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Apparently, if your daddy contributed big to Walker's campaign, and you're a college dropout who's never held a job with two drunk driving convictions, Walker can get you an 80k a year job with the State.

Not that is hypocritical at all, mind you. Or an example of croneyism. No, no, state workers need to take cuts like the rest of them. Except for the ones I like.

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On Friday, the FBI shut down three of the world's most popular online poker sites, replacing their home pages with the message: "This domain name has been seized by the F.B.I. pursuant to an Arrest Warrant."

Former Boing Boing guest-blogger Joe Menn at the Financial Times nails the story first and best, and describes it as "the largest crackdown since Congress banned electronic gambling transactions in 2006." More:

In an indictment unsealed on Friday, the government accused the creators of Full Tilt Poker, PokerStars and Absolute Poker of illegal gambling, money laundering and bank fraud.

The government also filed a $3bn civil suit seeking to recover profit at the companies, which are based in other countries but have the three largest shares of the US market. They seized bank accounts and the website addresses used by all three, replacing the latter with warnings that managing or owning a gambling business is a crime.

None of companies could be reached for comment. The disruption of their sites and the seizure of funds could make it hard for them to do business and might dissuade some people from playing cards online.

Source

I don't understand why the US government passed that law in the first place when they can make money on taxing the casinos and winnings.

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