Author Archives: Josh Eidelson

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Tonight’s episode of the West Wing, from what I caught (admittedly, since the writing’s tanked I find it too painful to really concentrate on the show for a full hour), was about the conflict between two positions:

Well-meaning, bleeding-heart “anti-traders” want to protect the jobs of Americans who have them now because they believe Americans are more important than poor people in the third world, and that having jobs today is more important than having jobs in a generation, and because they want unions to vote for them.

Rational, thoughtful free-traders care about everyone’s jobs everywhere and recognize that millions of Americans may need to lose their jobs to outsourcing in the short term, and it hurts them more than it hurts the unemployed, but they have the moral leadership to do the hard thing by pursuing the policies which will rain down wealth on everyone around the world in the long-term.

Needless to say, no discussion of the benefits to workers around the world from “raising the floor” of wage standards and working conditions, or the threat to workers in this country and every other from a corporate race to the bottom spurred on by neoliberal trade policy designed to maximize short-term profits for transnational elites. Instead, the free-traders learned that they should respect the “anti-trade” folks because they mean well even though they’re wrong, and the “anti-trade” folks learned that they’re wrong.

Do people really still see The West Wing as part of that ubiquitious, malignant liberal media we’ve all heard so much about?

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Now I acknowledge that unlike some, I don’t know from (weird Hebrew-ish construction, I know…) music other than a very narrow selection of it, and I pretty sure I know less about Blender Magazine. But apparently, in a verifiable Blender Blunder, these people have named “Sound of Silence” by the prophetic Paul Simon, as the 42nd worst song of all time. Now I do know that there are many, many more than 42 songs out there, many of them written by non-prophetic writers, and thus feel comfortable declaring Blender Magazine to know nothing about music (or, for that matter, prophecy). Maybe Brian and I can start a bi-partisan campaign to shame them into submission.

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Harvard sets another example Yale should follow:

The U.S. government needs to make immediate revisions to its national security policies to improve the current visa application process if it wants to help universities across the country retain their most promising international students, Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers wrote Monday in a letter addressed to Secretary of State Colin Powell and U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge ?67.
?If the visa process remains complicated and filled with delays, we risk losing some of our most talented scientists and compromising our country?s position at the forefront of technological innovation,? Summers wrote.

Levin, meanwhile, is presumably still working on this through “back channels.”

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Matthew Yglesias on Bush’s Ambassador of Choice to Iraq:

The defense, moreover, that Negroponte was somehow unaware of political conditions in Honduras fails miserably as an effort at exoneration. To his critics, he was complicit in human-rights violations. To his defenders, he didn’t know about them (in other words, he was an incompetent ambassador). Either way, he’s grossly unsuited for further service in the U.S. government, especially for a job in which he would be overseeing further counterinsurgency efforts supposedly undertaken in order to spread the gospel of democracy to the Middle East.

Really, though, this picture says it all:

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Ryan Lizza unearths an NPR Exchange with John McCain from last week that makes one wonder how earnestly he’s really campaigning for Bush’s re-election:

McCain: One of my earliest–I don’t know because I don’t know–I’d wait until I see the nine-eleven commission’s findings and recommendations. One of my earliest recollections as a very young boy was when the captain of the battleship Missouri was asleep in his cabin, the navigator ran the battleship aground near Norfolk. The captain was gone from the ship within two hours. He was responsible.

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To the Editor:

The New Haven Student Fair Share Coalition, which Associate VP for New Haven and State Affairs Michael Morand called a “small group” making a “partisan press bid,” (“Fair share coalition presses for payment”) represents sixteen undergraduate organizations, from the Yale Hunger and Homelessness Action Project, to the Black Student Alliance at Yale, to the Muslim Student Association, to Peace by Peace, which together are calling for Yale to make an institutional financial investment in New Haven commesurate with Yale’s economic power in New Haven and its aspirations for local and national leadership. Last night, before a vote in which half of Dwight Hall’s Cabinet demonstrated support for the Fair Share Campaign, Yale’s Associate General Counsel referred to the push for the nation’s second wealthiest university to contribute more to one of the nation’s poorest cities as “a zero-sum game” (“Dwight Hall rejects Fair Share proposal,” 4/21). This echoes Morand’s argument in these pages (“Math won’t add up in proposed PILOT cuts”, 3/5) that for an $11 billion institution to spend more money on improving the public school education of low-income children would have to mean spending less money on extending a Yale education to low-income undergraduates. Our coalition is calling on Yale to stop clinging to an 1834 tax “super-exemption” and to show civic leadership at a time of fiscal scarcity when citizens throughout the city will be paying increased taxes for the third year in a row and further cuts to education funding appear imminent (“City ready for cuts in state aid,” 4/14). For the Office of New Haven and State Affairs to pit the needs of undergraduates and those of New Haven’s other students against each other while accusing our coalition of being “divisive” is as cynical as it is ironic.

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Denmark’s Former Prime Minister calls for the Dutch Group 4 Falck’s Wackenhut security company to recognize a union:

In a letter to Group 4 Falck Chief Executive Lars Norby Johansen, he said the evidence shows “that Wackenhut prevents the forming of a union among their employees through selective firing, completely against ILO conventions”. He also said the evidence shows that “Wackenhut doesn’t treat employees according to the standards for wages and working conditions that is normal for American corporations working with security. For instance Wackenhut employees have to pay their own health insurance which is accounting for one week’s salary every month.”

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Freedom of Information – if you have enough free time and an appointment:

NOTASULGA, Ala. — The city council has amended its policy that limited access to public records to two hours a month, opting for a one-hour-a-day rule that requires an appointment and a “valid reason” to inspect city documents.

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Pottery Barn corrects Colin Powell:

Supposedly Powell warned Bush that if he sent U.S. troops to Iraq, “you’re going to be owning this place.” That was based on what Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage called “the Pottery Barn rule” of “you break it, you own it.”

The real Pottery Barn has no such rule. And it’s a bit weary of Powell’s remarks being quoted in newspaper and television reports the last few days. “This is very, very far from a policy of ours,” said Leigh Oshirak, public relations director for the brand, owned by Williams-Sonoma Inc. of San Francisco. “In the rare instance that something is broken in the store, it’s written off as a loss.”

Given, one of so many examples, how little we hear about Afghanistan these days, the actual Pottery Barn rule may be exactly the operating policy of the US government.

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On the verge of a strike, NYU settles with its adjuncts:

Though neither side would divulge the specifics of the contract, the university has confirmed that it will be a multi-year agreement that includes wage increases and benefits for adjuncts, while retaining the university’s role in management and academic decisions.

The union came out of the 12-hour talks pleased, said Scott Sommer, spokesman for United Auto Workers Local 7902, which represents NYU’s part-time professors. “There were times that we thought we would settle, and times that we thought it would fall apart right until the last minute,” Sommer said.

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Human Rights Watch:

The Jordanian government imprisons women threatened with “honor” crimes rather than the male relatives who threaten them, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. In cases where women are killed, the perpetrators receive minimal punishment.

The 37-page report, “Honoring the Killers: Justice Denied for ‘Honor’ Crimes in Jordan,” documents the killings and attempted murders of women by male family members who claim they are defending family “honor.” The report also details the cases of women, threatened with “honor” crimes, who languish in prison for years while held in protective custody.