Did Steinbrenner Do To Politics What He’s Done To Baseball?

Posted on February 21, 2004

Rick Heller reports, you decide.

Oh, No

Posted on February 20, 2004

This Sunday on “Meet the Press”:

“[T]urning to presidential politics, will the race for the White House get another candidate? Consumer advocate and 2000 Green Party Presidential Candidate Ralph Nader will join us exclusively to announce his decision on whether or not to run for the presidency in 2004.”

Oh, boy. Here we go…

A Thunderbird Thumbs Up From A Surprising Source

Posted on February 20, 2004

Here’s a nice endorsement of the Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail client:

Thunderbird is an almost perfect IMAP client for Windows. If you use IMAP, this is the product for you…
Thunderbird : B+

1. Fast
2. Supports the delete model I like
3. Junk Mail filter
4. Internet style attribution
5. Supports IDLE
6. Easy to find messages and supports server side IMAP search!!!!
7. Doesn’t support getting unread counts for all folders
8. Supports mailbox quota

What makes this surprising is that this evaluation comes from Omar Shahine, one of the lead engineers behind the Microsoft Entourage e-mail client for the Macintosh. The only product he rates more highly than Thunderbird in his roundup is (surprise!) Entourage — but since Entourage is only available for the Mac, while Thunderbird is cross-platform (Windows, Mac, and Linux), he encourages IMAP users on non-Mac platforms to use Thunderbird instead of Outlook (which he gives a D+ for IMAP support), Outlook Express for Windows (C), or Eudora (F).

Since reading IMAP mail is the primary task that a modern mail client should be doing these days, this is a nice plug from a good source. So, if you’re suffering with Outlook Express or Eudora for your mail, go get Thunderbird and see what Omar is so impressed with!

The Not-So-Porn Porn

Posted on February 20, 2004

I know that the article “Women Tailor Sex Industry to Their Eyes” on the front page of today’s New York Times isn’t supposed to be funny. So does it make me an Evil Male if I laughed while reading it?

Carlin Ross and Christina Head, a lawyer and a documentary filmmaker in New York, recently teamed up to plot new careers.
Among their first moves: Ms. Ross, 30, a general counsel to dot-coms, this month restarted an adult Web site that features “sex and love from a woman’s perspective.”…
“It’s all about empowering and educating women and, of course, I enjoy sex,” Ms. Head said. “We’re women. We enjoy sex.”

Wow. Women enjoy sex? Stop the presses! No wonder this made the front page of the Times!

Ms. Head and Ms. Ross are part of a growing cadre of women who are selling sex to other women, in this case what Ms. Ross calls “female empowered” adult entertainment — the kind with plots, foreplay and cuddling in the afterglow, the kind that is mindful of women’s tastes and suggests new possibilities for women’s pleasure.

Since Pepsi seems to be having success marketing Pepsi Vanilla as “the not-so-vanilla vanilla”, I have a suggestion for a slogan for Ms. Ross and Ms. Head’s new venture: “the not-so-porn porn”.

In all seriousness, these women are probably on to something, business-wise, but it’s just something about how this article is written that strikes my funny bone… oh, that was probably the wrong way of putting it. Never mind.

I Guess We Don’t Count Them If They’re Not Americans

Posted on February 19, 2004

One of the things that burns me up is when I hear people say that Iraq is “over”, that it’s “yesterday’s issue”, that people should “move on”. It’s bad enough that you can’t open the paper on any given day without the news of a new American casualty; what’s even worse is the way that we are completely blinkered to the casualties that are being inflicted on Iraqi civilians and Coalition forces, all of whom have even less desire to be there than we do.

The latest example of this is a twin car bomb attack by insurgents yesterday near the town of Hilla that left 11 Iraqis dead and 58 allied troops wounded. The wounded troops included “at least 12 Filipinos, 12 Poles, 10 Hungarians and two Americans”.

Filipinos? Poles? What the hell does the average Filipino care about Iraq? I’m sure they’re going to have an abiding love for the U.S. if they come home missing an arm after fighting our war for us.

What makes this all so tragic, of course, is that these Poles and Filipinos are getting shot up over there for us, and we’re not even hearing about it!

Don’t believe me? Go look at Google News’ roundup of stories on the subject. What publications do these stories come from? The Guardian UK; Reuters; BBC News; South Africa’s Independent Online; Pakistan’s Daily Times; and so on. The only American newspaper in the list is the San Diego Union Tribune! The only reason I even know about the story is because Juan Cole blogged about it.

Could there possibly be a better demonstration of how utterly disconnected we are from the rest of the world? Think about that the next time you wonder why so many people out there increasingly look on America less as a partner in global security, and more as a bull in their china shop.

Paranoia Returns!

Posted on February 19, 2004

All right! The only role-playing game I ever enjoyed, Paranoia, is coming back to life this year as Paranoia XP. If it’s anything like the original it should be a pretty twisted and funny vision of the future… here’s hoping 🙂

Who Says Tenured Professors Don’t Care What People Think?

Posted on February 19, 2004

Good story in today’s Washington Post about Larry Sechrest, a libertarian academic in West Texas’ Sul Ross State University, who is proving wrong the old stereotype of the crusty, impossible-to-please tenured prof:

Atomized, loosely knit and fiercely individualistic, citizens here are not much given to consensus. Or they weren’t until Larry Sechrest came along and called them all a bunch of morons.
Sechrest, 56, is a jowly, acid-tongued economics professor at Sul Ross State University, an institution best known for producing schoolteachers and rodeo performers. The chain hotel manager has lived in the little town of Alpine for 13 years, more or less without incident. But it is not a gross overstatement to say that if an unpopularity contest were held here these days, he might give Saddam Hussein a run for his money.
In January, Sechrest published a 7,000-word article in Liberty, a tiny libertarian journal, titled “A Strange Little Town in Texas.” After dispensing with the things he likes about Alpine — great climate, clean air, awesome scenery, low crime rate, friendly locals, frontier spirit, robust theater scene — Sechrest came to his main point.
“The secret problem is that the students at Sul Ross, and more generally the long-term residents of the entire area, are appallingly ignorant, irrational, anti-intellectual, and, well . . . just plain stupid,” he wrote.
Harsh, yes, but Sechrest, a libertarian himself who grew up near Dallas, was just warming up. He dissed his students and neighbors as “some of the dumbest clods on the planet,” and his fellow faculty members as “mostly a waste of space.” As for the local schoolkids, many “are only a notch above retardation,” he said…
As Sechrest’s article made the rounds, he received a torrent of e-mail, some of it merely irate, some aggressively obscene. The local newspaper and radio station denounced him. Vitriolic callers phoned late into the evening. One night, someone smashed the windows of a car parked outside his home. Another night, eggs were hurled at his house.
There were two death threats, Sechrest said, both phoned in to his campus office. The callers said they would “get” him and kill him.
“Not polysyllabic,” Sechrest said. “But, you know, effective.”

Talk about making friends and influencing people!

From Now On, It’s Not “Rhode Island”. It’s “The Fatherland”!

Posted on February 19, 2004

Wow — check out the cojones on Rhode Island governor Don Carcieri! He’s pushing a new homeland security bill for that state that makes the Patriot Act look like the Milk and Cookies Distribution Act of 2001:

Gov. Don Carcieri’s new homeland security law would create new felony charges, require annual safety audits of every public school and close some public records, including those that show whether businesses comply with state fire safety code requirements.
The bill, which Carcieri introduced last week, also resurrects World War I-era laws that make it illegal to “speak, utter, or print” statements in support of anarchy; speak in favor of overthrowing the government; or to display “any flag or emblem other than the flag of the United States” as symbolic of the U.S. government.

(There’s another good article in the Providence Journal on this too, but you’ll have to slog through a pretty serious registration process to get to it… consider yourself warned.)

You can read the text of the bill itself if you want to. It’s a hoot. I remember learning in history class that Sedition Acts went out of style two hundred years ago, but apparently word hasn’t reached Rhode Island yet…

(Thanks to Joe Dailey for sending this along!)

And So It Ends… And Begins

Posted on February 18, 2004

Gov. Howard Dean, M.D.: A Beginning not an End.

This Party and this country needs change, and you have already begun that process. I want you to think about how far we have come. The truth is: change is tough. There is enormous institutional pressure in our country against change. There is enormous institutional pressure in Washington against change, in the Democratic Party against change. Yet, you have already started to change the Party and together we have transformed this race. Along the way, we’ve engaged hundreds of thousands of new Americans in the political process, as witnessed by this year’s record participation in the primaries and caucuses.
The fight that we began can and must continue. Although my candidacy for president may end today, the most important goal remains defeating George W. Bush in November, and I hope that you will join me in doing everything we can to support the Democrats this fall. From the earliest days of our campaign, I have said that the power to change Washington rests not in my hands, but in yours. Always remember, you have the power to take our country back.

We will remember, Governor. We will remember.

Is Wisconsin Putting the Coronation on Hold?

Posted on February 17, 2004

Oh, man…

2% of precincts are reporting in the pivotal Wisconsin primary, and — wait for it — John Edwards is actually leading John Kerry, 40% to 37%. (Howard Dean is pulling up third place with 18%.)

Is it possible that Wisconsin is going to throw the Kerry bandwagon off the road after all? This should be good!

UPDATE: Well, it’s 10:20 PM EST and CNN has called it for Kerry, but by a narrow margin — with 48% of precincts reporting, Kerry has 39%, Edwards has 37%, Dean has 18%. Edwards couldn’t pull out a win, but it’s a strong showing nonetheless, and it gives him a rationale for hanging in at least until Super Tuesday. Kerry gets the win, but looks weaker than expected considering that just a few days ago he was expected to pull in more than 50%. And Dean does about as well as anyone expected — now we’ll see whether he intends to stay in the race or not. No matter what, Edwards’ showing means that it certainly looks as if this contest isn’t over yet.

Thank You Kindly

Posted on February 17, 2004

It’s always nice to hear people say that you’re good at your job…

Gen. Abizaid Escapes Attack In Fallujah

Posted on February 12, 2004

From ABC News: U.S. Commander Gen. John Abizaid Unhurt in Mideast Attack.

FALLUJAH, Iraq Feb. 12 — Insurgents launched a brazen attack Thursday on an Iraqi civil defense outpost visited by Gen. John Abizaid, commander of all U.S. forces in the Middle East. Abizaid and his party escaped injury in the gun battle.
Just moments after a convoy carrying Abizaid and his party pulled inside the cinderblock walls at the headquarters of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps in this city west of Baghdad, an explosion rang out. Seconds later, two more explosions were heard near the rear of the compound, and U.S. soldiers responded with a barrage of rifle and machine gun fire.
Several attackers fired three rocket-propelled grenades, and another pelted the party with small arms fire from a nearby mosque. The gun battle lasted about six minutes.
No U.S. soldiers and no one in Abizaid’s party were injured. Residents said one Iraqi was grazed in the leg by a bullet and slightly injured…
Abizaid appeared unfazed. Speaking in Arabic to one member of the Iraqi security force after the gunfight, the general asked about the attack and was told, “This is Fallujah. What do you expect.”

Boy, I’m sure glad that we’ve “brought them to their knees” over there, eh?

E-Voting in Alexandria Now Too

Posted on February 10, 2004

I voted in today’s Virginia primary this morning, and to my surprise my polling place in Alexandria no longer had the familiar ScanTron-type ballots — instead they featured shiny new e-voting hardware, specifically the eSlate Electronic Voting System.

From the looks of it, it’s not too bad of a system. They have special ADA-compliant tablets for handicapped voters, and the ballot information is collected by being stored on flash cards, rather than wirelessly as with Fairfax’s system, so there’s no risk of having the data intercepted “in the air”. I didn’t get a paper receipt, though, so the standard problem of “how do I know my vote actually went anywhere?” still exists.

From a UI standpoint, the device is less than optimal. You use a big wheel to navigate through menus, clicking a big “Enter” button to make candidate selections. Once you’ve chosen your candidates, it gives you a summary of your ballot and asks you if you want to commit it; you can either hit a “Prev” button to go back and re-select, or a red “Cast Ballot” button to finalize your vote.

This sounds easy enough, and they made me watch a volunteer demo the system before I could vote, but I still managed to get it wrong when I actually went to vote — I kept hitting the “Cast Ballot” button to choose candidates, instead of “Enter”. Doing this dumps you to the summary screen with “No Selection” entered for the race you were looking at. This was confusing for me, and I’m a professional geek! Frankly, if the Cast Ballot button is only useful when you’re done, they should have it flash a “THIS BUTTON IS DISABLED UNTIL YOU HAVE SELECTED ALL YOUR CANDIDATES” error message, or something similar.

Still, judging by what people went through last time around in Fairfax, I suppose it could have been a lot worse.

The One Who Got It Right

Posted on February 10, 2004

Hack is right: Scott Ritter deserves an apology.

More on Trippi and the Conflict of Interest Issue

Posted on February 10, 2004

The subject of Joe Trippi’s potential conflicts of interest when he was Dean’s campaign manager hit the front page of the Washington Post this morning. It’s an excellent piece that puts the issue into context and highlights why Trippi’s position within DFA was unusual even by the standards of political campaigns.

UPDATE: Ed Cone points out that Trippi spoke to these concerns at yesterday’s Digital Democracy Teach-In, claiming that he only made $165,000 from his position with TMS and Dean for America; and that Trippi’s remarks in his own defense weren’t cited in the Post story. I agree that this seems sloppy on the Post’s part — but I can also see how “take Trippi’s word for it” isn’t much of a defense. I’d still prefer to see some kind of documentation, either from Trippi, TMS, or DFA, to clear the air on this once and for all.

E-Voting in Fairfax Gets Ready to Rrrrumble!

Posted on February 10, 2004

Hey, Fairfax County! It’s Tuesday, February 10, and that means it’s the day of the big Virginia Democratic primary; which means that you’re going to once again be subjected to using the deeply flawed WINVote system to cast your ballots.

But don’t panic! Fairfax Electoral Board secretary Margaret K. Luca says that this time, everything’s going to go just fine:

“We are certainly prepared,” said Margaret K. Luca, secretary of the Electoral Board. “We did everything we could possibly think of” to get ready, she said.

Of course, we’d already established that Ms. Luca is a woman of severely limited imagination. So this doesn’t exactly put my concerns to rest.

The story cites a bunch of fixes that have been applied to the WINVote system to prevent another debacle like the one last November. But these fixes, while welcome (assuming they actually work, which remains to be seen), don’t address the most critical vulnerabilities of the WINVote system.

The most serious issue I see is that none of the “improvements” the Post cites as having been made since the last Fairfax County e-voting debacle and today include a change to the WINVote system’s reliance on 802.11b wireless security. This means that the system is still fundamentally insecure and open to manipulation in ways that wouldn’t be obvious to non-technical people. If someone can hack into the handshake between the WINVote terminals and their master vote counter and inject an extra vote for their man for every 100 or 1,000 cast, that’s a serious problem — but since it’s not the sort of problem that voters would notice and complain about, would Luca and the election board ever know?

Until they fix these basic, ground-level issues with the current crop of e-voting systems — insecure transmission of ballots, lack of auditability, and so forth — those systems will be dangerous to democracy. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be enough to stop morons like Luca from pushing ahead with them, no matter the risk.

Thunderbird 0.5 Is Here, Too

Posted on February 9, 2004

Dunno how I missed this when I wrote my previous post — today also sees the release of Mozilla Thunderbird 0.5, the latest version of Mozilla.org’s excellent e-mail program. Lots of new features and bug fixes in this release, including Palm sync support for the address book (finally!) and multiple identities per mail account (so you can have multiple e-mail addresses that all pipe mail back to the same inbox).

So, if you’re going to get Firefox 0.8 — and you should — go download Thunderbird 0.5 too, while you’re at it 🙂

Firefox (nee Firebird) 0.8 Is Here!

Posted on February 9, 2004

The latest and greatest version of Mozilla.org’s fast-and-light Web browser is here, and with it comes a new name — say goodbye to Firebird and say hello to Mozilla Firefox 0.8.

I’ve been running nightly builds of 0.8 for a few weeks now, and this is a significant upgrade over 0.7. Many of the improvements fall into the realm of “fit and finish” — the little things that make you feel like you’re using a real, complete piece of software and not a preview release. Windows users, for example, now get a Windows installer when they download Firefox, instead of a ZIP file, making installation double-click easy and making it feel more like a “real” application to less technical people. Other improvements include a much, much better download manager and bookmark manager, improvements to the browser’s MIME-type handling (so files sent from incorrectly configured servers no longer show up as garbage in the browser window), and a lot of bug fixes.

So, why the new name? Because, it turns out, there’s already another open-source project named Firebird, and even though they have nothing to do with Web browsing (the other Firebird is a database, of all things), they were pretty obnoxious about insisting that people would confuse Firebird-the-browser with Firebird-the-database. So the Mozilla folks had to come up with another name that wasn’t already in use. Given that, I think Firefox is a pretty good alternative (certainly better than I would expect, given the sorry history of open-source project names).

So what are you waiting for? Go download it already!

Kaleidescape: For the Movie Geek Who Has It All

Posted on February 8, 2004

Do you have a DVD collection so large that you have trouble finding a place to keep them all? Would you like instant, one-touch access to those movies from any room in your house, without toting around the discs? And do you have enough spare cash lying around to purchase a well-equipped sports sedan?

Then Kaleidescape has got a product for you!

The Kaleidescape System is a unique product that lets you rip your DVDs onto a central server, inside which can reside up to twelve 300GB hard drives. That’s a total storage capacity of 3.6 terabytes, and if that’s not enough for you (Kaleidescape claims that you can fit 400 DVDs in there), you can always cluster multiple Kaleidescape servers together until your disk space needs are met.

To get your DVDs into the server, you use another component, the DVD Reader. This device rips an exact copy of the DVD onto the server, with no additional compression applied (so there’s no degredation of the picture or audio). Then, to watch whatever you’ve stored on your server, you use the final component, the Movie Player. You hook a Movie Player to any TV in the house that you want to stream content from your server to, and then hook all the components together using standard Fast Ethernet cabling.

Once it’s all set up, you can seamlessly stream any movie in your collection to any Movie Player-equipped TV in the house. The whole thing can be controlled by a home theater control panel, learning remote, or even a Web browser, allowing you to control and configure the system over a home network.

And the price? A cool $27,000 to start — and it goes up from there as you add disks, Movie Players, and so forth. So it’s probably out of the reach of Normal People for a while. But it’s an interesting glimpse into how we’ll probably all be interacting with home media in ten or fifteen years.

Washingtonpost.com: Get Ready, We’re About To Annoy You!

Posted on February 7, 2004

The Washington Post’s Web site already asks you to provide some basic demographic information — year of birth and ZIP code, pretty much — if you want to read its content. Now, though, they’ve decided that this system isn’t nearly annoying enough, so they’re about to switch to a far more onerous registration system:

Washingtonpost.com already asks online readers for their age, gender and Zip code. Over the next four or five weeks, users will be asked for a job title, a description of their primary responsibility, the size of their company and the industry in which they work. Users will also have to provide an e-mail address and password to enter the site. Users who provide Zip codes in the Washington area will also have to give their home address…
“We are confident that this new registration initiative will help to continue the remarkable growth we’ve seen in ad revenue,” Caroline Little, chief executive and publisher of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Washington Post Co., said in a statement.

Jeez louise! Does anybody actually fill these things out accurately anyway? I always wonder how much valid data sites with similar systems actually collect. And even the New York Times, which forces me to set up a username and password, doesn’t demand to know my home address!

What’s even more galling is that, since I subscribe to the print edition already, they already have most of this information for me. Why do I need to re-type my home address when they deliver the newspaper there every morning? Why not send me a postcard with a pre-generated login, so I don’t have to go to the trouble of setting one up? Or even better, let me opt out of the more intrusive ad-targeting types of questions, as a thank-you for buying the print edition? Do the people at the print edition and the Web edition know that they’re even working for the same company?

What a bunch of losers.

Fiore on E-Voting

Posted on February 6, 2004

Political cartoonist Mark Fiore‘s latest animated cartoon in Salon goes after e-voting, and it’s funny. The best part is the actual excerpts from leaked e-voting system source code he dug up — when you see it, you’ll know what I mean 🙂

Kinsley on “Electability”

Posted on February 6, 2004

Michael Kinsley’s latest column skewers the “electability” canard better than I ever could:

Democrats are cute when they’re being pragmatic. They furrow their brows and try to think like Republicans. Or as they imagine Republicans must think. They turn off their hearts and listen for signals from their brains. No swooning is allowed this presidential primary season. “I only care about one thing,” they all say. “Which of these guys can beat Bush?” Secretly, they believe none of them can, which makes the amateur pragmatism especially poignant.
Nevertheless, Democrats persevere. They ricochet from candidate to candidate, hoping to smell a winner. In effect, they give their proxy to the other party…
Some Democrats cheated and looked into their hearts, where they found Howard Dean. But he was so appealing that he scared them. This is no moment to vote for a guy just because he inspires you, they thought. If he inspires me, there must be something wrong with him. So, Democrats looked around and rediscovered John Kerry. He’d been there all along, inspiring almost no one. You’re not going to find John Kerry inspiring unless you’re married to him or he literally saved your life. Obviously neither of those is a strategy that can be rolled out on a national level.

Lost At Sea

Posted on February 5, 2004

There’s an incredibly sad story in today’s Post about brilliant monologuist Spalding Gray, who apparently has been missing for over three weeks and is feared to have committed suicide by jumping off the Staten Island Ferry.

If you’re not familiar with Gray’s work, you should be. His brilliant monologues are a combination of memoir, comedy, and philosophy; they’re among the best one-man shows I’ve ever seen. Several of them were filmed and are available on video, including Gray’s Anatomy and Swimming to Cambodia, so you can see what I’m talking about if you don’t know already.

Apparently the last few years have been pretty tough for Gray; he and his wife were in a terrible car accident while traveling in Ireland, and it took him quite a long time to learn to walk again. He’d battled depression all his life, and the stress of physical disability combined with those depressive tendencies led to several suicide attempts after he left the hospital. Finally, three weeks ago he went out on the Staten Island Ferry and was never seen again, leaving his wife and three children to wonder what has become of him.

It’s hard to read the story and believe that there could be any explanation other than suicide. But I really, sincerely, hope that there is one. The world needs more Spalding Grays, not fewer.

Do You Shop At Safeway? Well, Don’t

Posted on February 5, 2004

If you do your grocery shopping at Safeway, or one of its subsidiaries (Vons, Randalls, Carrs, etc.), I’m going to ask you for a personal favor:

Don’t.

Huh? Why not?

I’m asking you to stop shopping at Safeway because of a really appalling stunt they are trying to pull out in California — a stunt so bad that 70,000 of their employees have been on the picket line for five months now trying to stop it. Here’s the story.

The issue is a new proposal by three major grocery chains, led by Safeway, to renegotiate their employees’ health benefits. Currently, the chains cover health insurance by paying into a fund an amount equal to about $4 times the total number of hours worked by all employees. The chains claim that this is too expensive for them to sustain, so they are proposing to split employees into two groups — existing employees, who would be covered in a pool that would still be set at the amount of $4 times their hours worked, and new hires, who would be covered at the much lower rate of $1.35 times their hours worked.

To hear the employers tell it, that’s not that big a deal; making up the shortfall, they claim, would require employees to “pay a small portion of their premium for health-care coverage — just $5 a week for individual employees and $15 a week for employees and their families.” Doesn’t sound so bad, right? Well, that’s the idea. The problem is that these figures don’t show you the true cost of the proposal.

Here’s the problem. If you’re one of those new hires, it’s pretty clear why the new plan sucks for you — an independent analysis of the plan by the San Francisco Chronicle found that the new employees would end up paying four to six thousand dollars a year in health care costs, which is a lot of money for anybody, much less for someone working the deli counter.

But the thing that isn’t obvious is, the plan sucks for existing employees too — even though they still have the $4 figure rather than the $1.35 one. Why is that? It’s because their cut doesn’t come to the dollar figure, it comes to the “hours worked”, since every time a new employee is hired his or her time gets counted outside the original employees’ pool.

The end result is that the new plan takes the cost of health care — a cost that grocery workers, of all people, can’t afford to bear on their own — and drops it square on the employees’ shoulders. Sure, Safeway puts in a few bucks for appearances’ sake, but when you start talking about expecting $95 co-payments, something’s clearly wrong.

Now, when Safeway floated this proposal, it didn’t take long for its employees to figure that out for themselves. Through their union (the United Food and Commercial Workers), they pulled together, pushed back, and, when Safeway refused to compromise, went out on strike in protest.

That was last October. It’s now February — five months later — and they are still out there.

Yes, that’s right — on top of everything else, Safeway has decided that the way to win this dispute is not by sitting down with its 70,000 striking employees, but by, essentially, starving them out. Never mind how much business they lose in California, or how much goodwill they lose between management and employees; no, they are out to play hardball and put those uppity workers in their place!

So here’s what I’m asking you to do. These folks have gone for five months without a paycheck or health insurance, living off an increasingly threadbare strike fund. They’re fighting against plain old greed — the companies behind the new proposal have seen their operating profits go up 91% since 1998, and they still see the need to dump on their workers like this. Those workers are just trying to earn a living without having to pay backbreaking, unreasonable insurance fees. They deserve your support.

So give it to them!

• Don’t shop at Safeway while the strike is on. Duh. You can’t cross the street and shop at Giant?
• Put a few bucks in the strike fund. The strikers have bills to pay like anyone else, and five months on the picket line means five months with no paycheck. You can contribute online to the UFCW’s strike fund through the AFL-CIO Web site.
• Make your voice heard. The UFCW has a tool to send an e-mail to the companies behind the plan registering your protest. Even better, if you have a Safeway Club card, cut it up and mail it to them (Safeway Inc., 5918 Stoneridge Mall Road, Pleasanton, CA 94588) with a note explaining why you did it — remember that you can always get a new one when Safeway comes back to their senses!

You’ve got to admire the tenacity these people are showing — holding a strike together for five months takes some serious commitment. But tenacity doesn’t pay the bills, and commitment won’t beat some common sense into Safeway’s collective skull. They need the rest of us to pitch in and help them out. So do what you can — cut up that Club card, cross the street for your groceries, or, if you’ve never shopped at Safeway, at least throw a few bucks in the strike fund. Every little bit helps.

In MA, Civil Rights Are For Everyone. What Radicalism!

Posted on February 4, 2004

The Massachusetts Supreme Court appears to have upheld a lower court decision requiring that the right to marry be extended to gay couples on civil rights grounds.

Wow, letting gays and lesbians have the same rights as the rest of us. Those Boston liberals and their crazy ideas!