Digby - July 5, 2005

Which Side Are You On, Boys?

There's an interesting internecine debate over onTPM's Labor Blog about whether the Democrats should actually give a damn about labor. I'm not kidding.

There's quite a bit of back and forth about "what has labor done for me lately" (presumably besides clean your house, fix your food, build your buildings and raise your kids.) And there's quite a bit about how labor seems to, you know, challenge the proper role of the meritocracy and what have you.

Nothing Left To Lose

I'm getting a lot of traffic today from Professor Bainbridge who calls me a freaking out liberal and Patterico who calls me a fringe leftist for being angry that the Dems apparently got punked (again) by the Gang of 14 compromise.

It's Their World

We just live in it. Might I just point out that when a political party openly admits to routinely using derision and ridicule, when they repeatedly insult, demean and deride their political opponents, and particularly when they hold the nation hostage for months with hearings and debates about semen stains, fellatio and cigar dildos for political purposes, they have given up any claim to "dignity and respect?" They wanted to play hardball. Now we play hardball.

Can This Marriage Be Saved?

In the post below I criticized the attitude I saw among liberals toward unions on The TPM Labor site. I wish that instead of characterizing the attitudes of the new Yorkers who criticized the stadium deal I had let the posters on the thread speak for themselves:

My question is what have the unions done for me lately? Union membership is waning. Fewer and fewer workers are members of Unions, and I have to question their utility in the modern economy.