The UAW walks out on Chrysler. The New York Times has this headline: Auto Union Workers Walk Out at Chrysler. The Kokomo Tribune has this early report:
Workers carrying picket signs gathered at the entrances of Kokomo Transmission Plant Wednesday afternoon as the United Auto Worker union strike of Chrysler continued.
Tens of thousands of Chrysler employees, including around 6,000 in Kokomo, went on strike at 11 a.m. today.
Shortly after 11 a.m., Kokomo police reported traffic congestion around U.S. 31 and Lincoln Road and Boulevard as many workers from Kokomo Transmission Plant and Kokomo Casting Plant were seen leaving the factories.
Meanwhile, Delaware County Democrats are upset at the Republicans. From Anderson, it is hard to tell if this is Republican stupidity or something more sinister. The Star Press headlines the story as Democrats cry foul over local GOP envelope:
An envelope used for a recent Republican mailing had both parties crying politics on Tuesday.
The mailing, sent to city residents who applied this fall for absentee ballots, included campaign literature for Republicans running for city offices.
***
The envelope featured the words "IMPORTANT Absentee Ballot Information" underneath the return address, and did not identify the sender.
Inside the envelope was a form letter signed by mayoral candidate Sharon McShurley, city clerk candidate Kris Shroyer and city council candidates Basil Davis, Micah Maxwell, Mark Conatser, Dan Ridenour and Brad Polk, along with a sample ballot and flyers.
The form letter was on Republican Central Committee of Delaware County letterhead.
***
The election board voted to 2-1 dismiss Brown's complaint.
Republican members William Bruns and Karen Wenger voted in favor of dismissal while Democrat Steve Craycraft dissented.
"I don't see any violations of election laws," Bruns, an attorney, said.
Bruns said he believed the envelope was protected under a section of Indiana Code that states disclaimers need not appear on the front or cover page of a communication if the disclaimer appears within the communication.
Of course, I find something off-the wall to be a whole more interesting. I thought the conservatives did not like us liberals and Democrats because we were moral relativists; that we did not find anything absolutely true. Then I read these paragraphs in the Muncie Star-Press:
Speaking before the election board on Tuesday, Brown called the mailing -- postmarked Oct. 1, 2007 -- immoral. *** In an interview with The Star Press after the meeting, Delaware County Republican Party vice-chairman Tom Bennington called the complaint political posturing. "Morality happens to be a personal opinion," Bennington said, referring to Brown's comments. "I do not agree with his personal opinion."
I want to recommend The New York Review of Books. They send out e-mail notices when a new issue appears and a lot of them are available online. Some of the articles are political or historical and the other are book reviews. I will warn you that these are essays and not short articles, and they do have a liberal bias. (It is interesting to read something unabashedly liberal and then look at what the conservatives whine about being liberal. My conclusion a long time ago was that they cried liberal bias whenever anything contradicted their worldview. Not unlike my six year old stepson in that respect).
While not in the latest issue but the last one before the current one, take a look at The Victor?. The article reviews Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States. One paragraph stood out for me:
The scale of the American miscalculation is striking. Before the Iraq war began, its neoconservative architects argued that conferring power on Iraq's Shiites would serve to undermine Iran because Iraq's Shiites, controlling the faith's two holiest cities, would, in the words of then Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, be "an independent source of authority for the Shia religion emerging in a country that is democratic and pro-Western." Further, they argued, Iran could never dominate Iraq, because the Iraqi Shiites are Arabs and the Iranian Shiites Persian. It was a theory that, unfortunately, had no connection to reality.This story reinforces my belief that the neo-conservatives lacked any practical knowledge about Iraq or foreign policy. I have no idea why I keep[ running into these articles about neo-conservatives (see my earlier post Kind of a follow up on Neo-cons examining themselves). Nothing changes my opinion that idealists (in the philosophical sense) are too dangerous to the public welfare to have real power. Ideas are grand things but they need tested against reality, but then that is pragmatism and not idealism.
The article details how our government set itself up with a problematic Iran.
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