Voting

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I am in the unusual position of finding myself agreeing with Steve. I am a big proponent of (uncorrupted) unions. There is no other way for the working class.

> There is no other way for the working class.

That gets into a complicated discussion that I'll now avoid (although I'm not saying that I disagree), but it's hard to argue that unions didn't serve a valuable and humane purpose early on. Conditions for factory workers were typically horrendous, as were the hours they were expected to work.

I agree. Hence "aren't what they used to be ".I just think, like a lot of other things, they've outlived their usefulness and are too often counterproductive.(Actually, "union" and "productive" aren't words you see used together a lot anymore.)

When unions began, workers had virtually no protection. Employers could pretty much get away with anything. Now that there's a fairly broad body of laws protecting workers, unions don't serve as critical a purpose; they largely bargain on behalf of workers for salary and benefits. Of course, there are still horrendous working conditions to be found, such as in coal mines. The Sago Mine disaster early this year was unconscionable. Poultry packing plants are another horrible example.The unions are responsible for many if not most of the laws protecting workers. Since the current administration can't just repeal them, they are doing their best to enforce them as little as possible. Unions were sometimes quite excessive in the 60's through the 80's, but their existence helps keep things in balance.

My experience is that Unions still serve a purpose.
It depends alot on where you live and local laws and mostly HOW the company you work for is about its labor.
At MagCorp, Unions were needed, I was very pro union and very active in the union, all meetings and serving on the grievence committe and shop steward.
While laws are in place to help, Utah is a right to work state and that particular company took advantage of that fact. @0 hour mandatory shifts were not uncommon, and a minimum of 16 hours unless it was your last day on set was pretty damn common as well.
The union (Local 3198 USWA) did alot of good. Iv worked in other places though that a union was a joke.
The most important thing to remember is that a union is only as strong and as good, as its members.

I've been watching Fox News a lot lately, and, without deep analysis, it appears that their news is reasonable compared to other cable news outlets, but there's hardly any time devoted to news, at least when I'm home. Most of their broadcast day is devoted to commentators. It's almost all quite biased to the right. I hope no one thinks their morning show (Fox & Friends) is "fair and balanced".

As for most of the day being devoted to commentary...I think that's the problem with 24 hour news channels. There's not enough news to fill 24 hours. So your only choice is to fill the time with commentary (right on Fox, left on CNN) or go on and on ad nauseum about some pregnant, spoiled dilatante being murdered by her greedy bastard fiance in Provo, Utah.

There's plenty of news, but the kind of people who watch cable news would be bored silly watching reall news stories for most of the day. I don't know if you remember CNN from the 80's, but they had a lot more news coverage, rather than features. Even into the 90's, they had live, around-the-clock news. Even now, they could switch to their European desk late at night, if they wanted to, rather than rerunning Larry King (possibly the worst interviewer I've ever seen on a national network) a third time.CNN lost a lot of viewers to Fox in the late 90's, and it wasn't because they were too liberal, or their news coverage wasn't deep enough. Fox did a great job with with shows involving ideologues yelling at each other and saying outrageous things. CNN just couldn't make their yelling programs as interesting. Fox did a good job with noisy music and splashy graphics as well. What the did a piss-poor job on was covering the news. And by the time of 9/11, they were little more than a mouthpiece for the Bush adminstration. They weren't just not "fair and balanced"; they were the most popular source of government propaganda. All they while, they were making themselves increasingly popular with the conservative talk radio crowd.Over the past five years or so, there has been a stream of people moving from CNN to Fox, and most of them had pretty clearly conservative agendas. The business commentator with the British accent and Rudi Baktiar are two who come to mind. I'd say that CNN has moved a bit to the left in general (not sure about the complexion of their news coverage specifically). I'm not sure about MSNBC; they have Keith Olberman, but they also have Joe Scarborough and that really right-wing guy in the evening.They're all in it for the money. All of the cable news networks are profit centers (or are trying to be) for the corporations that own them. In fact, most news media is owned by large, publicly-owned corporations, and the objective of large, publicly-owned corporations is to make money.

Want to tell me how you know about the provo shit when your so far away an I had not heard shit about it and live but 45 minutes from provo?Fuck, its time I turn on the tv I guess.

Actually that "provo shit" was just an off the cuff compilation of too many stories I've gotten sick of over the past decade. Provo is just the town that's always on the tip of my tongue (or fingers) when I pull crap like that out of my head.One of these day's I'm gonna go to Provo.