Ban the unpaid internship

Nice op-ed in NYT on Take This Internship and Shove It.

Instead of starting out in the mailroom for a pittance, this generation reports for business upstairs without pay. A national survey by Vault, a career information Web site, found that 84 percent of college students in April planned to complete at least one internship before graduating. Also according to Vault, about half of all internships are unpaid.

[...]

What if the growth of unpaid internships is bad for the labor market and for individual careers?
Let's look at the risks to the lowly intern. First there are opportunity costs. Lost wages and living expenses are significant considerations for the two-thirds of students who need loans to get through college. Since many internships are done for credit and some even cost money for the privilege of placement overseas or on Capitol Hill, those students who must borrow to pay tuition are going further into debt for internships.

[...]

How are twentysomethings ever going to win back health benefits and pension plans when they learn to be grateful to work for nothing?

[...]

In this way, unpaid interns are like illegal immigrants. They create an oversupply of people willing to work for low wages, or in the case of interns, literally nothing. Moreover, a recent survey by Britain's National Union of Journalists found that an influx of unpaid graduates kept wages down and patched up the gaps left by job cuts.

I've always been amazed that the unpaid congressional internship, clearly discriminatory and elitist, has escaped greater scrutiny. I say ban 'em.

Kids whose parents can subsidize their summer in DC get a leg up on kids who have to work. I can understand the Republicans doing this, but the Dems? The party of equal opportunity?

One of our leaders should introduce a bill to ban unpaid internship in Congress and federal agencies. Call it the "Equal Opportunity in Educational Internships Act." The taxpayer can surely afford the pittance it would take to pay interns. And while we're at it, how about a living wage law for congressional staff?

I've always thought it abhorrent that MOCs pay staff assistants $24K while the COS might make $120K. Again, maybe in a Republican office, but the Dems should realize that paying entry level staff shit and having unpaid (generally white upper-middle class interns) betrays the party's message as the the part of the equal opportunity.

I can understand non-profits might not be able to pay interns -- so it goes -- but government positions should be different.

Quotes of the week

"More than any president in the history of our country has received" -- Ryan Seacrest, on the 63M "Idol" votes received (Huntsville Times).

Democratic consultant James Carville talking about the current president and his predecessor at a dinner for Dallas Democrats, reported in The Dallas Morning News: "Bush is having trouble with his generals. My man Clinton had trouble with his privates."

bad week to be a Texas icon

Antone: 'Heart of Austin music' had blues in his blood
Impresario nurtured musicians and city to national prominence
By Michael Corcoran

A giant, an institution, a generous soul whose obsessive love of the blues helped make this college town nationally known for stomping-good live music and passionate listeners is gone.

The news shot through the Austin air Tuesday afternoon like a stinging Albert King guitar lead: Clifford Antone is dead.

By giving Chicago blues legends a club in Texas to play, as well as launching a raucous classroom where upstarts such as the Fabulous Thunderbirds, Charlie Sexton and Stevie Ray Vaughan could learn at the feet of the masters, Antone forever changed the Texas music landscape. He was 56.

you know the saying about the sun shining on a dog's ass?

yeah, well, George Will had a really good column today:

Who Isn't A 'Values Voter'?
By George F. WillThursday, May 18, 2006; Page A23

An aggressively annoying new phrase in America's political lexicon is "values voters." It is used proudly by social conservatives, and carelessly by the media to denote such conservatives.

This phrase diminishes our understanding of politics. It also is arrogant on the part of social conservatives and insulting to everyone else because it implies that only social conservatives vote to advance their values and everyone else votes to . . . well, it is unclear what they supposedly think they are doing with their ballots.

[...]

The phrase "values voters," which has become ubiquitous, subtracts from social comity by suggesting that one group has cornered the market on moral seriousness.

Last Saturday, when John McCain delivered the commencement address at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, he was said to be reaching out to values voters. Hillary Clinton, speaking recently at the annual U.S. Chamber of Commerce convention, scolded "kids," by which she evidently meant young adults, for thinking "work is a four-letter word." She was said to be courting values voters. If so, those voters must value slapdash rhetorical nonsense as well as work.

[...]

Conservatives should be wary of the idea that when they talk about, say, tax cuts and limited government -- about things other than abortion, gay marriage, religion in the public square and similar issues -- they are engaging in values-free discourse. And by ratifying the social conservatives' monopoly of the label "values voters," the media are furthering the fiction that these voters are somehow more morally awake than others.

Today's liberal agenda includes preservation, even expansion, of the welfare state in its current configuration in order to strengthen an egalitarian ethic of common provision. Liberals favor taxes and other measures to produce a more equal distribution of income. They may value equality indiscriminately, but they vote their values.

Schumer's take on Senate races

not anything shocking but interesting enough to post:

Incumbents
He is comfortable with where all vulnerable D's are at this point

Challengers:
MT Senate - very excited about John Morrison, said Burns continues to be vulnerable as a result of his ties to Jack Abramoff

MO Senate - said that Claire McCaskill is running a great campaign, using the stem cell issue very effectively as Talent has flip-flopped on the issue, she has never been behind in the polls, is from rural MO where she will not win but needs to keep Talent below 60%

RI Senate - Chafee continues to get beat up by Laffey, will be forced to spend money for a late primary in Sept. while Whitehouse has a clear path to the primary

PA Senate - Santorum and 527's on his behalf have already spent $3 million and he is not moving in the polls, cointinues to be down by as many as 13 pts, Casey is doing a good job of not attracting attention, keeping the focus on Santorum, Schumer said it's our race to lose but that Casey still needs money since Santorum maintains a fairly large fundraising advantage ($9 M vs. $4.5 for Casey), interestingly Schumer said that Kate Michelman (who considered running against Casey in the primary) just wrote an op-ed in the Philly Inquirer announcing her support for Casey and urging other pro-choice women to support him

OH Senate - Sherrod Brown ahead by 3-4 pts even though he only has 45% statewide name ID, needs money, very liberal but great in front of different audiences including investment bankers that he won over in a solicitation mtg

AZ Senate - out of all the challenger races believes this is the most difficult one since Kyl is less vulnerable than other GOP incumbents, Pederson is up with ads attacking Kyl on immigration, behind by less than 10 pts

VA Senate - waiting for the outcome of primary, thinks it's a long-shot but also thinks that whichever Dem emerges will force Allen to spend money/time in VA as opposed to running for president


Open Seats:
TN Senate - Harold Ford is a great candidate, Schumer said that at first he wasn't convinced that Ford's early ad buys were the smart strategy, but has become a convert, mentioned Ford was the first candidate to talk about the port security issue in an ad, believes they are effective.

MN Senate - Klobuchar is a dream candidate, running a great race, slightly behind Kennedy on money

MD Senate - tricky state but a very blue state with a Sept. primary, DSCC staying neutral but indicated they may get involved close to the primary, praised both Cardin and Mfume, said Steele has attraction with the African-American community but the attraction dissipates once they find out he is a Bush man since Bush's numbers are even lower in MD than nationally

"Relentless onslaught of hard work"

NYT editorial had a great line blasting Bush's immigation plan.

These are the people who say illegal border crossings must be stopped immediately, with military boots in the desert sand. Never mind the overwhelming burdens of Iraq and Afghanistan, the absence of a coherent and balanced immigration policy, and the broad public support for a comprehensive solution. America must send its overtaxed troops to the border right now, they say, so a swarm of ruthless, visa-less workers cannot bury our way of life under a relentless onslaught of hard work.

Optimism?

If you ignore the fact that redistricting will fuck us for years, you can read a column like this one by Harold Meyerson and get downright giddy about our prospects for '06.

The GOP's Bankruptcy of Ideas
By Harold MeyersonWednesday, May 10, 2006; Page A25

There's no concealing the Republican collapse. In a USA Today-Gallup poll released this week, the president's approval rating had deflated to a dismal 31 percent -- and to just 52 percent among conservatives. Other recent polls have shown that the public prefers shifting congressional control to the Democrats by margins as high as 17 percent. Numbers can change, of course, but it's hard to see what the Republicans can do to reverse this tsunami. They can mount an October surprise attack on Iran, but that would require someone making a convincing public case that Iran poses an imminent threat to us and that preemptive war is the only solution. And who, in the wake of the deceptions with which they justified their war in Iraq, has the credibility to do that? Bush? Cheney? Rumsfeld? These guys have turned themselves into Lucy holding the football, while the American people no longer afford them a Charlie Brown benefit of the doubt.

[...]

In a recent spate of interviews, Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi has emphasized her party's fast-forward version of its first Hundred Days in power -- in this case, what the Democrats would do in their first week running Congress. They would raise the minimum wage for the first time since 1997. They would repeal the section of the Medicare drug plan that forbids the government from negotiating lower prices with the drug industry. They would fully implement the recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission, and they would restore the congressional rule, suspended by Republicans, requiring that all new programs be paid for by a specific new spending source or offset by a commensurate cut in another program.

Pelosi doesn't deny that Congress would resume its oversight functions, but she has made clear that any decision to impeach anybody (which is not on her agenda) would be hers and the caucus's -- not John Conyers's, certainly not the Democratic blogosphere's.

These idiots are protecting the nation?

Hell, maybe we should outsource it all to Dubai. They might at least be competent.

Presidential plans found in trash

How much do you think Osama bin Laden would pay to know exactly when and where the President was traveling, and who was with him? Turns out, he wouldn't have had to pay a dime.

All he had to do was go through the trash early Tuesday morning. It appears to be a White House staff schedule for the President's trip to Florida Tuesday. And a sanitation worker was alarmed to find in the trash long hours before Mr. Bush left for his trip.

[...]

The documents details the exact arrival and departure time for Air Force One, Marine One and the back up choppers, Nighthawk 2 and Three.

It lists every passenger on board each aircraft, from the President to military attaché with nuclear football. It offers the order of vehicles in the President's motorcade.

Democrats on the road to victory

"We were divided on using the word 'together'" -- Sen. Evan Bayh (D), on Dems spending 40 minutes deciding between "America can do better" or "Together, America can do better" (On Call).

Beer!

We do a lot of bitching on this blog, and understandably so, there's a lot of shit out there to bitch about. But every once in awhile it's good to recognize those things everyone can agree on that make life great. Like beer. Beer is great.

Wine & Food Feature
Coolest Beers

"Without question, the greatest invention in the history of mankind is beer," humorist Dave Barry has written. "Oh, I grant you the wheel was also a fine invention, but the wheel does not go nearly as well with pizza."

As with so many other vital matters, Barry hits the mark on beer. The drink has been delighting, calming and fortifying humans since before the beginning of recorded time. Beer is, in fact, probably older than the wheel. The world’s oldest written recipe, inscribed on a clay tablet in about 1,800 B.C., is for beer.

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Today, beer is the world’s most popular alcoholic beverage–according to Japanese beer maker Kirin, beer drinkers consumed 150 billion liters (about 40 billion gallons) of the stuff in 2004. And the best still comes from cooler climes: Bavaria in Germany, Bohemia in the Czech Republic, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, the U.K. and Ireland.

Should be required reading for an Democrat who speaks publicly on foreign policy

The Rehabilitation of the Cold-War Liberal

By PETER BEINART
This fall, for the third time since 9/11, American voters will choose between Democrats and Republicans while knowing what only one party believes about national security. In 2002, Democratic candidates tried to change the subject, focusing on Social Security and health care instead. In 2004, John Kerry substituted biography for ideology, largely ignoring his own extensive foreign-policy record and stressing his service in Vietnam. In this year's Senate and House races, the party looks set to reprise Michael Dukakis's old theme: competence. Rather than tell Americans what their vision is, Democrats will assure them that they can execute it better than George W. Bush.

Democrats have no shortage of talented foreign-policy practitioners. Indeed, they have no shortage of worthwhile foreign-policy proposals. Even so, they cannot tell a coherent story about the post-9/11 world. And they cannot do so, in large part, because they have not found their usable past. Such stories, after all, are not born in focus groups; they are less invented than inherited. Before Democrats can conquer their ideological weakness, they must first conquer their ideological amnesia.

Consider George W. Bush's story: America represents good in an epic struggle against evil. Liberals, this story goes, try to undermine that moral clarity, reining in American power and sapping our faith in ourselves. But a visionary president will not be constrained, and he wields American might with relentless force, until the walls of oppression crumble and the darkest region on earth is set free.

[...]

Even more important, they described America itself differently. Americans may fight evil, they argued, but that does not make us inherently good. And paradoxically, that very recognition makes national greatness possible. Knowing that we, too, can be corrupted by power, we seek the constraints that empires refuse. And knowing that democracy is something we pursue rather than something we embody, we advance it not merely by exhorting others but by battling the evil in ourselves. The irony of American exceptionalism is that by acknowledging our common fallibility, we inspire the world.

[...]

The liberal story began with a different fear about America. If cold-war conservatives worried that Americans no longer saw their own virtue, cold-war liberals worried that Americans saw only their virtue. The A.D.A.'s most important intellectual — its equivalent of James Burnham — was the tall, German-American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr was a dedicated opponent of communism, but he was concerned that in pursuing a just cause, Americans would lose sight of their own capacity for injustice. "We must take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization," he wrote. "We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect disinterestedness in its exercise nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimized." Americans, Niebuhr argued, should not emulate the absolute self-confidence of their enemies. They should not pretend that a country that countenanced McCarthyism and segregation was morally pure. Rather, they should cultivate enough self-doubt to ensure that unlike the Communists', their idealism never degenerated into fanaticism. Open-mindedness, he argued, is not "a virtue of people who don't believe anything. It is a virtue of people who know. . .that their beliefs are not absolutely true."

[...]

In America, no less than in the Islamic world, the struggle for democracy relies on economic opportunity. To contemporary ears, the phrase "struggle for American democracy" sounds odd. In George W. Bush's Washington, such struggles are for lesser nations. But in the liberal tradition, it is not odd at all. Almost six decades ago, Americans for Democratic Action was born, in the words of its first national director, to wage a "two-front fight for democracy, both at home and abroad," recognizing that the two were ultimately indivisible. That remains true today. America is not a fixed model for a benighted world. It is the democratic struggle here at home, against the evil in our society, that offers a beacon to people in other nations struggling against the evil in theirs. "The fact of the matter," Kennan declared, "is that there is a little bit of the totalitarian buried somewhere, way down deep, in each and every one of us." America can be the greatest nation on earth, as long as Americans remember that they are inherently no better than anyone else.

RIP Rule of Law

We knew ye well, but you left us too soon.

Bush challenges hundreds of laws
President cites powers of his office
By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff April 30, 2006

WASHINGTON -- President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution.

Among the laws Bush said he can ignore are military rules and regulations, affirmative-action provisions, requirements that Congress be told about immigration services problems, ''whistle-blower" protections for nuclear regulatory officials, and safeguards against political interference in federally funded research.

Legal scholars say the scope and aggression of Bush's assertions that he can bypass laws represent a concerted effort to expand his power at the expense of Congress, upsetting the balance between the branches of government. The Constitution is clear in assigning to Congress the power to write the laws and to the president a duty ''to take care that the laws be faithfully executed." Bush, however, has repeatedly declared that he does not need to ''execute" a law he believes is unconstitutional.

[...]

Bush is the first president in modern history who has never vetoed a bill, giving Congress no chance to override his judgments. Instead, he has signed every bill that reached his desk, often inviting the legislation's sponsors to signing ceremonies at which he lavishes praise upon their work.

Then, after the media and the lawmakers have left the White House, Bush quietly files ''signing statements" -- official documents in which a president lays out his legal interpretation of a bill for the federal bureaucracy to follow when implementing the new law. The statements are recorded in the federal register.

[...]

On at least four occasions while Bush has been president, Congress has passed laws forbidding US troops from engaging in combat in Colombia, where the US military is advising the government in its struggle against narcotics-funded Marxist rebels.

After signing each bill, Bush declared in his signing statement that he did not have to obey any of the Colombia restrictions because he is commander in chief.

Bush has also said he can bypass laws requiring him to tell Congress before diverting money from an authorized program in order to start a secret operation, such as the ''black sites" where suspected terrorists are secretly imprisoned.

[...]

David Golove, a New York University law professor who specializes in executive-power issues, said Bush has cast a cloud over ''the whole idea that there is a rule of law," because no one can be certain of which laws Bush thinks are valid and which he thinks he can ignore.

[...]

The courts have little chance of reviewing Bush's assertions, especially in the secret realm of national security matters.

''There can't be judicial review if nobody knows about it," said Neil Kinkopf, a Georgia State law professor who was a Justice Department official in the Clinton administration. ''And if they avoid judicial review, they avoid having their constitutional theories rebuked."

Without court involvement, only Congress can check a president who goes too far. But Bush's fellow Republicans control both chambers, and they have shown limited interest in launching the kind of oversight that could damage their party.

The drum circle is back

from this weekend:

Photos

So I'm clearing out my digital camera and thought I'd post a few:

Here are the same shots that every single tourist takes at the Cherry Blossoms:

To be in New Orleans

Springsteen playing Jazzfest:

Out-of-town performers also paid homage to the city. In one of the weekend's most exuberant performances, Springsteen and the Seeger Sessions Band played a slew of songs that resonated with New Orleanians. Using a full horn section, fiddlers, a banjo player and an accordionist, he delivered a two-hour set Sunday evening that opened with "Mary, Don't You Weep" and included his rewritten version of the folk song "How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?"

Before a crowd of thousands he sang the new lyrics:

There's bodies floatin' on Canal and the levees gone to hell

Martha get me my 16 gauge and some dry shells

Them's who's got got out of town

And them who ain't got left to drown

Tell me, how can a poor man stand such times and live?

Before the song, Springsteen also delivered a scathing assessment of President's Bush response to Hurricane Katrina, saying that having surveyed the city on Saturday, "The criminal ineptitude makes you furious. This is what happens when political cronyism guts the very agencies that are supposed to serve American citizens in times of trial and hardship."

But the most emotional song of the set came when Springsteen performed "My City of Ruins," as the crowd joined in the refrain, "Come on rise up, come on rise up."