Monday Stuff

It’s kind of late in the game for this as far as I’m concerned, but kudos to Dem U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for refusing to let the so-called "party of Lincoln" propagate their typical “Don’t look there! Look over there instead!” nonsense, which they’ve been practicing for at least 30 years, but the difference this time is that the stakes for our democracy have truly never been higher in the matter of the Gropenfuhrer’s impeachment hearing, as Brian Tyler Cohen explains…



…and Andrew Ross Sorkin, among others, has been an apologist for the “one percent” for a little while now, so this behavior is par for his own wretched course, if you will; the story has to do with CNBC apparently getting ready for the fainting couch over Dem U.S. presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren going after billionaires on tax policy...



…and as Kyle tells us, it looks like Cenk Uygur is running for Congress to fill Katie Hill’s seat (I think this is some particularly astute commentary from Kyle about income levels in voting districts – to help Cenk, click here)…



…and I now give you the latest installment of “This Day In Doomsy History” from 11/18/09, with a Brave New Films segment called “16 Deaths Per Day” (here) having to do with workplace safety violations.

To update this somewhat, I should point out that OSHA is under the DOL run by Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia, who worked hard to overturn a Clinton-era law to protect workers against repetitive strain injuries in the workplace, and he defended SeaWorld when a killer whale killed a trainer (both noted here). However, this tells us that some former DOL officials have said that Scalia has been "very supportive of enforcement litigation to vindicate the rights of workers, both at the trial and appellate levels," to be fair. The Wikipedia article, though, also tells us Scalia “has a long record of defending major corporations against financial and labor regulations” and “Since 2003, he has defended Wall Street firms against financial oversight.”

There are a lot of links out there to worker accidents and citations against companies for safety violations, but I really couldn’t come up with data indicating any trends. I mean, I’d love to think that the number of workplace incidents have decreased, but given that we’re living under the Trump regime, I’m skeptical of that claim for that reason alone (though this was a recent related story that was positive IMHO)…



…and as somewhat of a lapsed NHL fan, I had a bit of passing interest in the latest drama involving Hockey Night in Canada’s Don Cherry, but for all of the reasons David Doel so astutely notes, Cherry’s comeuppance was LOOONG overdue (and this was about as predictable as flatulence after an attack of indigestion)…



…and happy birthday to Graham Parker.