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This Wal-Mart story speaks for itself. Wal-Mart represents all that is wrong with American business. The company isolates and destroys its competition. And individuals who shop at Wal-Mart are part of the “I got mine, you worry about you” mentality that prevents national health care and is now trying to destroy Social Security. Tire
shop workers at a Colorado supercenter operated by
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. WMT Friday voted "No" to union
representation, dealing another blow to efforts to unionize employees at the
world's largest retailer. Wal-Mart -- which recently shut down a
Canadian store that voted in favor of a union -- said tire and lube express
associates at its The union has been spearheading the
Wal-Mart unionization drive for more than a decade, with very little success. The vote at the Loveland tire center
coincided with growing criticism that Wal-Mart mistreats its workers, and a
UFCW spokesman said the outcome showed just how well Wal-Mart's fear tactics
work. "Wal-Mart did what it does best. It
scares people. They are very good at putting the fear of God in their
employees," said Dave Minshall of the UFCW. He said the union would file several
charges with the National Labor Relations Board, officials of which oversaw the
balloting. Minshall said the
UFCW would wanted to charge Wal-Mart with interfering
with the balloting. He said the retailer had barred the union from sending its
own representative to observe the vote. But Terry Srsen,
vice president of labor relations for Wal-Mart, said in a statement: "Many
of our associates are former union members -- they know better than anyone that
the only guarantee a union can make is that it will cost the members money --
and that is why they continue to reject the UFCW." at the
UFCW vowed that there would be no let-up in the push for unionization at
Wal-Mart. "As long as Wal-Mart treats its people
the way it does, there's going to be lots of organizational efforts. Sooner or later
there's going to be a group of people that are going to stand up to Wal-Mart's
fear tactics," he told Reuters. Another UFCW official said before the
results were made public that the balloting had been itself a big victory
because the company had resisted previous attempts by the tire workers to vote. The vote came after a ruling by the
National Labor Relations Board. The outcome of the voting in Loveland was closely
watched as Wal-Mart recently said it would shut down a store in Jonquiere, Quebec, which had won union certification last
year but had failed to reach a labor agreement with the discounter. Meat cutters had voted to unionize at a In addition to union pressure, the
discounter is grappling with growing opposition from some communities where it
is trying to set up shop. Just this week, Wal-Mart's push for the
first Wal-Mart store in New York City hit a snag as a large real estate developer
ditched plans to include the discounter's outlet in a Queens shopping
complex, according to news reports. Maureen Dowd takes on
the Gannnon/Guckert White House fiasco at
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/17/opinion/17dowd.html
Our posts are going
to be intermittent as Kathy is on and off vacation for the next month. This gives us less
time to read our liberal websites since we have to try and solve the problems
Kathy deals with daily. For those folks who
like inside the Beltway stuff the Gannon/Guckert story is their cup of tea. Two
takes on the story: From: http://www.observer.com/pages/conason.asp
‘Liberal’ Media Silent About Guckert Saga by Joe
Conason Proof that "the liberal media" is but a figment of right-wing
mythology has now arrived in the
person of one James Guckert, formerly known as Jeff Gannon. Were the American
media truly liberal—or merely unafraid to be called liberal—the saga of Mr. Guckert’s short, strange, quasi-journalistic career would
be resounding across the airwaves. The intrinsic media interest of the Guckert/Gannon story should be obvious
to anyone who has followed his tale, which touches on hot topics from the
homosexual underground and the investigation into the outing of C.I.A. agent
Valerie Plame to the political power of the Internet.
But our supposedly liberal media becomes quite squeamish when reporting
anything that might humiliate the Bush White House and the Republican Party. Until very recently, Mr. Guckert served as the White House correspondent for
Talon News, a Web site owned and operated by a group of Texas Republican
activists who also run a highly partisan site called GOPUSA.com. Mr. Guckert
resigned from his Talon job after liberal bloggers exposed his ties to
Web sites promoting homosexual prostitution. On Valentine’s Day,
AmericaBlog.org posted new evidence indicating that Mr. Guckert not only
constructed those gay-play-for-pay sites, but worked as a male escort
himself—and continued to do so until he got his first White House press pass in
2003. Using his "Jeff Gannon" alias, Mr. Guckert soon became a familiar
face in the briefing room, where White House press secretary Scott McClellan
would call on him as "Jeff." No doubt Mr. McClellan welcomed his
mushy-soft, Democrat-baiting questions. George W. Bush called on him during his most recent press conference—a
signal honor for a reporter from an obscure Internet publication, and quite a
surprise to the dozens of actual reporters bypassed by Mr. Bush on Jan. 26. Mr. Guckert’s archived writings suddenly
disappeared from the Talon News Web site, but several of his greatest
works have been preserved by the watchdogs at MediaMatters.org. They show that
he had no journalistic purpose, let alone experience. His copy featured long
passages lifted directly from White House press releases. Last year, during the
Internet frenzy over Senator John Kerry’s "intern girlfriend," he
falsely wrote that the young woman had "taped an interview with one of the
major television networks at Christmas substantiating the alleged affair."
He also made a curious cameo appearance in the Valerie Plame
controversy. In late 2003, Mr. Guckert called former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.
During that interview, the Talon correspondent mentioned a C.I.A.
document that supposedly showed Ms. Plame had dispatched
Mr. Wilson, her husband, on a government mission to What Mr. Guckert seems to have been is not a journalist but a Republican
dirty trickster. He was schooled at the Leadership
Institute—an outfit run by veteran right-wing operative and Republican National
Committee member Morton Blackwell. (It was Mr. Blackwell who distributed those
cute "purple heart" Band-aids mocking Mr. Kerry’s war wounds at the
Republican convention last summer.) His former employers at Talon News
include leading Republican fund-raisers and former officials of the Texas
Republican Party who have been active in partisan affairs for the past two
decades. How did this character obtain a coveted place in the White House? What did
the White House press staff know about him? How does his story fit within the
larger scandal of payola punditry, with federal funds subsidizing Republican
propagandists in the press corps? Did someone in the Bush administration give
him a classified document? Such questions are evidently of little concern to our liberal media outlets,
whose leading lights prefer to deliver prim lectures about the unwarranted
invasion of Mr. Guckert’s private affairs and his
victimization for his conservative views. In fact, everything known about him
comes from material he posted on public Web sites, but that’s beside the point.
Imagine the media explosion if a male escort had been discovered operating
as a correspondent in the Clinton White House. Imagine that he was paid by an
outfit owned by Arkansas Democrats and had been trained in journalism by James
Carville. Imagine that this gentleman had been cultivated and called upon by
Mike McCurry or Joe Lockhart—or by President Clinton
himself. Imagine that this "journalist" had smeared a Republican
Presidential candidate and had previously claimed access to classified
documents in a national-security scandal. Then imagine the constant screaming on radio, on television, on Capitol
Hill, in the You may reach Joe Conason via email at: jconason@observer.com And another: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27730-2005Feb15.html
Online Nude Photos Are Latest Chapter In Jeff Gannon Saga
By Howard Kurtz
The Jeff Gannon story is still bouncing around the Internet, and now there are pictures. The kind you shouldn't open up in the office. The X-rated twist has made for a lot of clandestine clicking in a town where Deep Throat conjures images not of a porn star but of a man in a parking garage. But it has also deepened the debate over blogging and the tactics used to drive a conservative reporter from his job as White House correspondent for two Web sites owned by a Republican activist. In most Beltway melodramas, the resignation ends the story. The problem for
Gannon, whose real name is James Dale Guckert, is that he told The Washington
Post and CNN's Wolf Blitzer last week that he never launched the Web sites
whose provocative names he had registered, such as hotmilitarystud.com. But a
Web designer in The latest developments were first reported by John Aravosis, a liberal political consultant and gay activist who has a Web site called americablog.org. "What struck me initially was the hypocrisy angle," Aravosis said. He said he was offended by what he called Gannon's "antigay" writing. Gannon became a target of liberal bloggers after he asked President Bush at a news conference last month a loaded and inaccurate question about how he could deal with Senate Democrats "who seem to have divorced themselves from reality." They pointed to articles such as one last year in which Gannon wrote that John Kerry "might someday be known as 'the first gay president' " because he "has enjoyed a 100 percent rating from the homosexual advocacy group, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), since 1995 in recognition of his support for the pro-gay agenda." Saying his family was being harassed, the reporter quit last week after online critics began digging into his background. Gannon, who worked for Talon News and GOPUSA, denied any antigay writing last week, but did not return calls for comment yesterday and has told other journalists he will not comment on the racy Web sites. The contretemps sparked questions about why the White House had regularly cleared him for briefings, especially since he had been denied a press pass on Capitol Hill, where reporters control the credentialing process. Ana Marie Cox, who has been joking about the Gannon photos on her satirical site, wonkette.com, said they are creating a buzz because "obviously pictures of naked people are titillating." But, she added, "bloggers are wrong to bring that into the mix of things of why he shouldn't be a White House correspondent. Aren't we bloggers in favor of a lower bar of access, not a higher one? "I'd like to be able to go to the White House briefing room, and I haven't even posed naked -- just been asked." Paul Leddy, the Web designer, said Gannon contacted him in an America Online chat room in 1999 and wound up paying him $200, plus $50 in monthly maintenance, into the following year to create a gay escort site. He said the checks came from Bedrock Corp., which Gannon has confirmed that he worked for at the time. Leddy, who has helped design a variety of Web sites, including porn sites, provided Microsoft Word files of several of his invoices to Bedrock, a Delaware-based company. At first, Leddy said, Gannon sent him nude pictures with the heads cropped out, or asked him not to post the faces. He said he had no doubt, after seeing Gannon in the news recently, that the explicit pictures were of the same man. Leddy said Gannon's postings later moved to another gay escort site, which Aravosis says remained active until March 2003, or shortly before Gannon began covering the White House. In one of the Web sites found by Aravosis, a man who Leddy said is Gannon was offering his escort services for $200 an hour, or $1,200 a weekend. Another describes him as "military, muscular, masculine and discrete [sic]" and provides an America Online e-mail address that matches the initials on a logo used by Gannon on several of the sites, including the one Leddy said he designed. Bedrock, Gannon's company, is listed as the owner of JeffGannon.com, as well as three sites with such names as hotmilitarystud.com. Aravosis posted the pictures with strategically placed gray boxes, although he provided links to the unexpurgated versions. Gannon is also embroiled in the Valerie Plame story. In 2003 he interviewed Plame's husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson, after unnamed administration officials leaked her role as a CIA operative to columnist Robert Novak. According to his Talon News story, Gannon asked Wilson about "an internal government memo prepared by U.S. intelligence personnel [detailing] a meeting in early 2002 where your wife, a member of the agency for clandestine service working on Iraqi weapons issues, suggested that you could be sent to investigate the reports." House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) this week questioned how Gannon got access to the documents and asked the special prosecutor investigating the Plame leak to include Gannon in his probe. To top things off, the Wilmington News-Journal, citing court records,
reported Saturday that Gannon -- or Guckert actually -- failed to pay More than anything, though, it is Gannon's personal online activities that has kept the story churning. Cliff Kincaid, editor of the Accuracy in Media report, wrote on the conservative group's Web site: "The Gannon 'scandal' would be laughable, were it not for the fact that Gannon's personal privacy has been invaded and his mother, in her 70s, had to endure harassing telephone calls from those on the political left trying to dig up dirt. The campaign against Gannon demonstrates the paranoid mentality and mean-spirited nature of the political left." But Aravosis said: "If you were just looking at this as a matter of his hypocrisy, the story's over now that he's gone. The larger issue is how did someone like this get access to the White House." White House spokesman Scott McClellan told the trade
publication Editor & Publisher that he didn't know
Gannon was using a pseudonym until recent weeks and that he was cleared into
the White House on a daily basis using his real name. "People use aliases
all the time in life, from journalists to actors," McClellan said. He said
he has discussed the Gannon matter only "briefly" with the president.
Journalists left and
left are falling by the wayside as the Bushies use their hold on government
to intimidate the media. A top CNN executive resigned for remarks in which he
implied that But that role has
already been diminished by the use of the media by the Bushies to create
favorable impressions of proposed programs. It began back in the 1993 health
care debate when media refused to run ads supporting the Clinton Health Plan.
The ads were a response to the untrue ads being run by the health care
industry. Media outlets refused to run the pro Clinton Health Care ads because
they wanted indemnification from lawsuits if the ads were false and the cost of
indemnification insurance was prohibitive for the folks who wanted to run the
ads.
The elections were
held in Talk is cheap: from http://corrente.blogspot.com/ Let's watch Bush's
Enabler-in-Chief, Condi-lie-zza Rice, talk the talk:
If a person cannot walk
into the middle of the town square and express his or her views without fear of
arrest, imprisonment or physical harm, then that person is living in a fear
society, not a free society.
We cannot rest until every person living in a fear society has finally won
their freedom." Set the Way-back machine to October 2004, at a Party rally in
Friday Night Massacres
continue: from http://www.theleftcoaster.com/
President Bush's
budget plan calls for elimination or drastic reduction 68 federal programs that
he has never targeted before, including vocational-education grants, emergency
medical services for children and assistance to local law enforcement agencies,
according to a list the White House released yesterday. The 68 programs are
among 154 the Bush administration singled out for termination or major
reduction to help restrain spending in the $2.57 trillion budget for fiscal
2006 he sent to Congress on Monday. Many of the 154 were recycled from previous
budgets that Congress rejected before and they are unlikely to be accepted this
year either. But Bush went beyond
the perennial cuts to take aim at a range of other federal services that for
the first time he deemed ineffective or inessential, focusing mainly on
education, health, social services and law enforcement. The 68 new targets will
help shape the contours of the budget battle set to begin on Capitol Hill as
lawmakers from both parties prepare to pick apart the Bush plan and rally
behind favored programs. The White House
released the list of program cuts in response to congressional requests,
sending it to lawmakers late on a Friday afternoon, when it would receive
relatively little attention heading into the weekend. "Given the impact
of these cuts on average American working families, it is no surprise that the
administration would want to hide them in the dark by slipping them under the
door after the sun has gone down," said Rep. David R. Obey (Wis.), the
ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.
Well we are back to the days when the lawyers go to jail if the government decides the folks they represent are not likeable. From the NYT:
In a startlingly sweeping verdict, Ms.
Stewart was convicted on all five counts of providing material aid to terrorism
and of lying to the government when she pledged to obey federal rules that
barred her client, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, from communicating with his followers. Her
co-defendants, Ahmed Abdel Sattar
and Mohamed Yousry, were also convicted of all the charges
against them. The verdict was a major victory for
Justice Department prosecutors in one of the country's most important terror
cases since the Sept. 11 attacks. Most importantly, the
government never argued that any of Ms. Stewart’s or the other defendants’
actions led to violence in the Again from the NYT: The government
never showed that any violence resulted from the defendants' actions. The
defendants were not accused of aiding terrorism in the United States.
For a good article on
who Lynne Stewart is go to NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/11/nyregion/11history.html ***** And we are back in
the land of milk and honey from our sojourn to We heard yesterday about
the priest in Chicago who was the chaplain at the http://www.qctimes.com
Our concentration on gay folks among conservatives is not because we object to gays. Obviously we don’t since our business partner and many friends are gay. But we do object and reject the hypocrisy of the right when they know that many of the folks on the right are gay and yet use the anti-gay message as a wedge to garner votes and power. A fellow who was given a press pass to the White House has been exposed in more ways than one as a ringer who asked softball questions of the president. His press pass has been lifted as the White House has learned that he is gay and had a number of gay websites. The website http://americablog.blogspot.com/ has the following: NY Daily News: "Bush
press pal quits over gay prostie link"
By the way, most of
the websites that fellow Gannon or whomever put up have been scrubbed. And first Bernie Kerik
is offered as security czar until… and then Gannon with his alias name gets
White House clearance. Good to know the FBI is on the job.
Condi better get her
gun and combat boots ready. On to The NYT is reporting: In a surprising admission, It also said that it will boycott United States-sponsored regional talks designed to end its nuclear program, according to a North Korean Foreign Ministry statement transmitted today by the reclusive nation's wire service.
A mosque established and funded by
basketball star Hakeem Olajuwon gave more than $80,000 to charities the
government later determined to be fronts for the terror groups al-Qaida and
Hamas, according to financial records obtained by the Associated Press Now read the following: In an important decision on
Monday, a federal judge in The administration has
tried mightily to establish its right to treat anyone that it determines is an
“enemy combatant” any way it chooses. It has argued that it can hold such
detainees for a lifetime—without charging them, without giving them access to
lawyers, without showing them the evidence against them, and without allowing
them to challenge their detention. Administration officials
are adamant on this matter, and Thursday they were granted a stay of Green’s
decision, pending an appeal. The Supreme Court ruled
last June that the administration was acting illegally in depriving the
detainees of their liberty without allowing them to challenge the cases against
them. The administration responded bizarrely. Its lawyers argued, with ……..In one hearing that led
up to Monday’s decision, Green attempted to see how broadly the government
viewed its power to hold detainees. Administration lawyers told her, in
response to a hypothetical question, that they believed the president would
even have the right to lock up “a little old lady from Do you really think the
administration is going to lock up a basketball star? A little old lady from We always have time
to suggest that folks read Krugman on Social Security if they want to be informed:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/01/opinion/01krugman.html?oref=login&hp
We wish the Iraqis well on their road to democracy if that really is the case as we are being told by the same folks who lied about WMD, nuclear arms, Al Qeda, and are currently lying about the imminent demise of Social Security. ***** We will not be posting again until February 6th because of the peaceful death of Katie’s father, Dr. Andy Barone, on his 97th birthday last Saturday. We will be remembering him here in Soldiers Grove on February 1 and in Lima, Ohio next Monday where he will be buried. *****
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ynne F. Stewart, an outspoken lawyer known for representing a long list of unpopular defendants, was convicted
yesterday by a federal jury in Manhattan of aiding Islamic terrorism by
smuggling messages out of jail from a terrorist client. 