Aglet

A trendy point to make in business seminars is that the little plastic thing at the end of a shoelace actually has a name but rarely do people know what it is called. It's called an aglet. Google will tell you this. So if I hear yet another person make this point I'm going to scream.

Bush Runs Away From the Center

My favorite quote from this article is "Bush-Cheney campaign's original swing voter strategy [created by Karl Rove] has simply failed, and there's no Plan B."

My least favorite: "You have to wonder if the Bush-Cheney campaign is drawing its
strategic direction from celebrity pundits Joe Trippi and Arianna
Huffington, who've been circulating a petition urging John Kerry to
stop worrying about those pesky and stubbornly centrist swing voters
and try to win by exciting the Democratic base"

Sorry, NDOL, but that's just not what Trippi and Huffington are saying. They're saying that the center will respect an honest, true-blue, liberal agenda if you explain it right. There's nothing more American than helping your fellow man, standing up for the little guy, etc.

Tom


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THE NEW DEM DAILY, July 21, 2004
Political commentary & analysis from the DLC
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[ New Democrats Online: http://www.ndol.org ]

Bush Runs Away From the Center

( ...read the whole article... )

(no subject)

We live in a litigious society. When frustrated, we sue.

It dawned on me and my SO yesterday (and she deserves credit more than I do for this idea) that if government did their job of regulating things better we wouldn't need to be so litigious. That is, our litigiousness fills the void created by all the so-called pro-business deregulation which is really anti-consumer, fuck you, go to hell if we sell you something that we know is dangerous lets-trust-companies they-would-never-harm-us bullshit.

The lawsuit that put John Edwards "on the map" involved a company that year in and year out had done something that killed little children or put them in a situation where a machine would be required to keep them alive for the rest of their life. The company knew they could have changed their design years ago, but decided it was easier to settle any law suits for a small amount of money. If none of the consumers knew about each other, they could always claim it was a freak accident, and pay them off, begging forgiveness. Edwards found that there were 12 little children who's life was ruined by this company's defective product, and that their claims of "freak accident" wasn't true. They'd been hiding that it knew about this problem and kept it a secret. If this was the wild west, they'd be "run out of town", but it isn't. If this was the U.S. government 20-30 years ago, some consumer protection agency (state or federal) would have shut them down. But those agencies are now the caretakers of laws that have no meaning.

I want a government that regulates. That prosecutes. One that is fully funded to investigate 100% of the reports it receives. One that has the staffing and resources to mount a serious legal attack to shut down evil businesses, scams big and small, and won't fuck up something like the O.J. trial.

I want a government that sticks up for the little guy. Businesses have their own law firms. They don't need government support. Government needs to protect us from business.