I just saw this important news story on the lo-cal news, and thought I’d pass it along as kind of a public service. Turns out, if you’re not careful when carving your pumpkin (as the kids call it these days), you can cut yourself. A pediatrician interviewed for the story said that he sees as many as “one or two” kids a year with jack-o-lantern wounds. My god! With carnage like this, you’d think there’d be a law. They didn’t say, but I’m guessing most adult pumpkin-carving injuries are alcohol and/or drug related. To quote an “expert” from the story, “pumpkins are slippery, and knives are sharp.” I’m thinking of getting that printed on a t-shirt, along with a picture of a severed hand or something. Might also make a good epitaph for your tombstone (people will wonder what the story behind that one is). So, y’all be careful out there when handling your pumpkins.
Although I suppose Rick Perry would pretty much have to have a wife, I never saw her before this morning, when I caught a clip of her attempting to diss Herman Cain. Turns out, she’s exactly what you’d expect – a bubbleheaded bleach blond who appears to equal (if not surpass) her husband in the area of stupidity.
When eye he-uh nine, nine, nine, eye want to call nine, wun, wun
Pause for laughter…. No laughter.
Becawze it will rayuze the taxes.
Yeah. OK.
In other news, not only is it Friday, but it’s the official start of basketball season with Midnight Madness (which starts at 7:00 – go figure) at the Carrier Dome here in Syracuse (and other places that, let’s face it, nobody gives a shit about). Good news for sports fans like Sue and my wife, as, if you can’t make it to the festivities in person, you can watch MM coverage from around the nation (including here in The ‘Cuse) on ESPNU. SU’s will be the best, of course, in part because, thanks to the NBA lockout, the main event will be an alumni game with former SU “legends,” including current NBA players like Carmelo Anthony (I’d keep on naming them, but I realize nobody else cares).
Must be Dave Bing is too busy being mayor of Detroit to come (or Jim Brown, who of course was also a very good basketball player, ‘cuz there’s nothing he wasn’t good at – with the possible exception of relationships with women, but, hey, nobody’s perfect).
As if all that wasn’t enough, it’s a huge day for the iLemmings out there, as the Steve Jobs Memorial iPhone will be released in record-breaking numbers. Turns out that dead Steve Jobs is an even bigger marketing genius than living Steve Jobs, and if Apple can find a way to trot him out at every new product release, they’ll kick some major ass for centuries to come (I’m thinking a holographic appearance – kind of like after a Seldon Crisis; you probably have no idea who I’m talking about, so I guess you’ll just have to get on the Google).
Word has it that Woz is first in line at the Apple Store in LA. I hope he’s got cash (‘cuz, as they say in Cupertino, “In Jobs We Trust – All Others Cash”).
Speaking of cash, time to go make some.
I know everyone has 15 minutes to burn.
:omg:
It is seldom that I get to correct someone’s geographic description being a geographically impaired person myself. However, the Manhattan skyline is miles long and the twin towers were at the very tip. She was looking at the buildings around midtown where the twin towers would have been missing no matter when she started to look for them. I think a little more Jesus and perhaps a side dish of capitalism will solve her problem.
The official cleanup of a New York plaza where protesters have camped out for a month was postponed early Friday, sending up cheers from demonstrators who feared the effort was merely a pretext to evict them and said the victory emboldened their movement.
Protesters had already been scrambling to clean up the park on their own in hopes of staving off eviction when Deputy Mayor Cas Holloway announced that the owner of the private park, Brookfield Office Properties, had put off the cleaning.
“My understanding is that Brookfield got lots of calls from many elected officials threatening them and saying … ‘We’re going to make your life more difficult,'” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said on his weekly radio show.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/10/14/us/AP-US-Wall-Street-Protest.html
Bloomie’s complaint makes me think that this was really an effort to dislodge the protestors and had nothing to do with park cleaning. Unfortunately I am not surprised.
This is more from the Times op ed section:
Labor Rights, Under Republican Attack
By MARK BARENBERG, JAMES BRUDNEY and KARL KLARE
Published: October 13, 2011
In the past month, the National Labor Relations Board has come under furious attack from Republicans in Congress, and decades-old workers’ rights are at risk. Backed by a well-financed lobbying and publicity offensive, Republicans are using a recent labor-law complaint against Boeing to achieve a radical goal that goes far beyond the legal issues in the case: unraveling workers’ rights that have been part of the fabric of our social contract since the Great Depression.
In April, the labor board’s acting general counsel filed a complaint against Boeing, alleging that the company retaliated against unionized workers by opening a nonunion aircraft facility in South Carolina, instead of using a facility in its home state of Washington. Citing multiple public statements by Boeing executives, the general counsel contended that the company decided to locate the plant in South Carolina in significant part to punish its Washington workers for having exercised their right to strike, enshrined in the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.
Boeing has an opportunity at trial and in administrative and court appeals to disprove these allegations. It also may avoid the general counsel’s proposed remedy — an order restoring the aircraft production in question to Washington — if it can show that the order would be unduly burdensome.
But for Republicans, the legal process is beside the point. Representative Darrell Issa of California has disparaged the labor board as a “rogue agency,†and the presidential candidate Mitt Romney has called the general counsel’s complaint a “job killer†— even though the outcome of the case will determine only the location, not the number, of jobs. Last month, in an ambush against a federal agency’s powers in a pending case, the Republican-controlled House, voting almost entirely along party lines, approved a bill that would eliminate one of the paramount federal rights afforded workers for decades by prohibiting the labor board from ever ordering any employer to restore jobs illegally outsourced or relocated.
The attack against the Boeing complaint rests on three myths.
Myth No. 1: The general counsel has invoked an unprecedented legal rule. Apart from its unusually large scale (the location of an estimated 1,800 jobs is at stake), the Boeing case involves nothing legally new. The general counsel’s complaint is based on principles accepted by the labor board and the courts over many decades. In 1967, the future Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger (then a federal appellate judge) wrote a decision holding that an employer may not transfer work to punish employees for exercising National Labor Relations Act rights (like the right to strike). Likewise, the labor board has long had the authority to order restoration of work relocated as part of an unfair labor practice, and the appellate courts have approved such orders. In the absence of work restoration, any alternative remedy available to the labor board — like an order that Boeing post a bulletin-board notice promising to obey the law from now on — would be cosmetic.
Myth No. 2: The Boeing complaint means that the government can dictate the location of businesses. Everyone agrees that a company may legally locate its production anywhere it wishes and for any reason — except retaliatory ones. Imagine if Boeing had deliberately located a new plant in an area with a predominantly white labor force and then publicly stated that it did so because it was tired of listening to discrimination complaints made by African-American employees at its home plant. If the general counsel’s allegations are true, Boeing did something legally indistinguishable — unless labor rights no longer count as “real†rights.
Myth No. 3: The general counsel has discretion to drop the case in the name of economic policy. The general counsel is not a policy maker authorized to base decisions on what is good for employment in a particular region of the country. His discretion is confined to enforcing the policy already chosen by Congress in the National Labor Relations Act. If his investigation yields reasonable cause to believe that a violation occurred, his only legally proper course is to bring a case to be decided through the ordinary process. If the Internal Revenue Service determines that a South Carolina employer owes millions in unpaid taxes, should it drop the case if it believes doing so would help the local economy?
The Boeing case is not about jobs. Selecting one place rather than another to build planes creates no additional jobs. The general counsel did his job as the law requires. It would be tragic if his dutiful efforts provided an occasion for Republicans to extinguish decades-old workers’ rights.
Mark Barenberg, James Brudney and Karl Klare are professors of labor law at Columbia, Fordham and Northeastern University, respectively
Teachers in the San Francisco Bay area picketed Thursday outside an education conference that features News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch as a keynote speaker, saying they believe he and other business leaders want to profit from reforms discussed at the summit.
More than 100 demonstrators marched outside the Palace Hotel, which was hosting the two-day National Summit on Education Reform. The protesters, joined by activists from the Occupy Wall Street movement, chanted, banged drums and held signs with pictures of Murdoch and slogans such as “Hey Murdoch! Our Schools are Not For Profit.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/14/teachers-protest-rupert-m_0_n_1010516.html
Repent. The end is nigh (again).
n an recent audio message, Family Radio’s Harold Camping told his followers that the end of the world will “probably†happen on Oct. 21.
Camping has wrongly predicted the Rapture on at least three occasions, in 1992, 1994 and on May 21 of this year.
“I do believe we are getting very near the very end,†Camping said in audio posted on his website. “We’ve learned that there is a lot of things we didn’t have quite right and that’s God’s good provision. If he had not kept us from knowing everything that we didn’t know, we would not have been able to be used of him to bring about the tremendous event that occurred on May 21 of this year which will probably be finished out on Oct. 21. That’s coming very shortly. That looks like at this point, it looks like it will be the final end of everything.â€
But the preacher also had some good news: “There will be no pain suffered by anyone because of their rebellion against God… We can become more and more sure that they will quietly die and that will be the end of their story. Whereas, the true believers will quietly receive the new heaven and the new Earth.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/10/14/rapture-preacher-makes-fourth-end-of-the-world-forecast/
Cool. That has to mean SU will beat West Virginia that night.