Muda69

Agreed. That is why I have a Master Contract with my current employer. Do you have one?

Some Bears fans would legitimately go insane if this were to happen, like Colts fans if Brady would ever become their QB.

"I'll take Anal Bum Covers for $500 Alex."

lol, IMHO some of the funniest SNL skits. I've watched them on youtube multiple times.

Amateurs:

Yes, that would be him: https://www.npr.org/2021/04/22/989897618/an-overjoyed-levar-burton-welcomes-chance-to-guest-host-jeopardy

I'll hold off on the anointing of Mr. Rodgers as the next Jeopardy! host until I've seen LeVar Burton's upcoming stint as host.

Sorry Bob, you probably didn't get the reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Davis_(gun_retailer)

In Oklahoma and Texas, Parents Who Let Their Kids Play Outside Will No Longer Fear Neglect Charges https://reason.com/2021/04/29/reasonable-childhood-independence-texas-oklahoma-parenting/?itm_source=parsely-api

Biden Is Using the Pandemic as an Excuse for Permanent Expansions of Government Power https://reason.com/2021/04/29/biden-is-using-the-pandemic-as-an-excuse-for-permanent-expansions-of-government/ It is no longer a "government by the people, for the people." It is now "government by the government, for the government."

Westforth's doesn't want to make any money, they just want to sell guns.

https://clintoncountydailynews.com/case-arena-gets-more-historical-recognition/ Truly one of Indiana's basketball palaces.

Another Prestigious School Pummeled by Critical Race Theory https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/another-prestigious-school-pummeled-by-critical-race-theory/

Joe Biden: $6 Trillion Man https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/joe-biden-6-trillion-man/ Agreed. A radical and reckless agenda that will not be paid for by "the rich" but by our children and grandchildren for generations to come.

I have my own personal "Master Contract" with my current employer. Why don't you?

When Joe Biden Talks About Worker Choice, He Means Only 1 Choice https://reason.com/2021/04/27/when-joe-biden-talks-about-worker-choice-he-means-only-1-choice/ So, yes, the law's text does include the word encouraging. However, that word follows a long preamble about preventing "certain substantial obstructions" to commerce, which refer to things like strikes, protests, riots, or any other collective action that could damage a business's ability to operate. The right to collective bargaining existed only in a very limited fashion prior to the NLRA's 1935 passage. The U.S. was in the middle of the Great Depression and 1934 was a particularly troubled year for labor unrest. The passage of the NLRA was intended to put an end to that by giving workers and businesses a less disruptive way to resolve disputes. What if there aren't "obstructions to the free flow of commerce"? Workers still have the right to collectively bargain, hence the NLRA's second part about protecting workers' "full freedom of association," which reaffirms the First Amendment's "right of the people peaceably to assemble." In short, the NLRA was only meant to encourage collective bargaining when that serves the purpose of ending "substantial" disruptions in industries, such as strikes, to avoid harm to the national economy. The NLRA is not a mandate for the government to encourage collective bargaining where there are no disruptions. In those situations, the NLRA says that belonging to a union is solely the workers' choice. The Biden administration seems to know this because it is trying to rewrite the NLRA to make the law encourage unions. The administration supports passing the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act), which would eliminate all state-level right-to-work laws. That would strip many workers in 27 states of the choice to say no to belonging to a union. Had the drafters of the NLRA meant to encourage workers to join a union, they could have made all organized workplaces "closed shops." They could have prohibited right-to-work laws and instead required all workers to join or otherwise support the union if they wanted to keep their jobs. Some lawmakers originally pushed for that but Wagner rejected it, saying during Senate debate that the legislation "does not force any employer to make a closed-shop agreement. It does not even state that Congress favors the policy of the closed shop." A decade later, the Taft-Hartley amendments to the NLRA would clarify that individual states could prohibit closed shops. The 27 states that do this are now called right-to-work states. "All I am trying to do, and I think, you believe me when I say that, is to make the worker a free man to join any organization that he wishes to join," Wagner told a gas station attendant in 1934. Biden's interpretation that the NLRA encourages unions lacks that nuance. He gives lip service to the notion that the choice is solely left up to workers while focusing on aiding his allies in the union movement. That ought to concern workers who would rather make up their own mind about joining a union. Mr. Biden and other progressives believe the vast majority of individuals are too stupid to make up their own mind about union membership, therefore government needs to coerce them.

Welcome back. I hope you find the time to participate.

https://www.indystar.com/story/sports/high-school/2021/04/28/ihsaa-baseball-umpire-shortage-cancelling-games/7341489002/ I would disagree with the "adult participation" statement. Maybe getting the "adults out" of the game is a good thing.

The Cancer of Critical Race Theory: https://spectator.org/critical-race-theory-cancer/

Why specify "American politics" Dante? If monarchy is good for the goose then it must be good for the gander, right?

Do you categorically deny making such statements, Dante?

https://mises.org/wire/why-empowering-organized-labor-will-definitely-not-help-economy As he often does, Krugman presents a scenario of a prosperous America in which organized labor helped create a productive and happy society, although one might question his knowledge of history. He writes: While he is partly correct in his statement, Krugman then paints an alternate picture of history, claiming, in effect, that the source of economic growth is high factor prices. First, and most important (and maybe most shocking), the 1930s constituted the Great Depression, when unemployment was in double digits and living standards for many Americans fell from their levels a decade before. The notion that the Roosevelt administration “created” a middle class by putting people out of work is preposterous on its face. Second, Robert Higgs forcefully destroyed the lie that the US economy during World War II brought prosperity and helped turn the country into a “middle-class nation.” Such thinking only can reflect a mindset that sees the US economy as being “managed” by the state, and that middle-class incomes are solely a function of state power to confiscate income from some and turn it over to others. To take a time when the nation was in an economic crisis and later involved in the most destructive war in history and then present it as a permanent model for society is perverse beyond words. To better understand why Krugman would write such things, we need to understand his view of the economy, a view shared, apparently, by most political, academic, and social elites in this country. In the Krugman view—and I will try to keep from veering into presenting a caricature of his beliefs—private enterprise rests on a tenuous foundation. Like J.M. Keynes, he believes that the economy is circular in nature. More than a decade ago, I wrote that Krugman and others see the economy as being like a “perpetual motion machine” in which individual savings actually work against economic prosperity: I continue: Krugman has used this analysis to explain every economic downturn, including the Great Depression, and since he left the Princeton University faculty to dedicate his academic work to examining what he calls income inequality, he has doubled down on his rhetoric. In his view, business firms create goods which people purchase, and the income ultimately flows back to business owners, making them wealthy. As long as these wealthy business owners continue to spend all of their income either on consumption goods or new capital, the economy can move along. The likelihood of that chain of events happening, however, is near zero and, instead, the wealthy often will save (read: hoard) much of their income. Instead of buying cars, yachts, jewelry, and whatever else the rich like to purchase, and instead of putting back the rest of their income to purchase new capital or replenish existing capital, they stuff the money into nonproductive accounts and don’t spend at all. On top of that, Krugman holds to the Thomas Piketty theme that over time wealthy people receive increasing returns to the capital they own so that we see the proverbial scenario of “the rich getting richer and the poor becoming poorer.” Once that becomes a guiding narrative, of course, everything that happens seems to fulfill the Krugman-Piketty theme. Over time, hoarding by the rich throws sand into the gears of the perpetual motion machine, grinding the economy to a halt and throwing it into recession. While pundits like Karl Marx, Keynes, and Krugman will deviate among themselves as to the causes of economic downturns, they generally agree that the system implodes from within and only can be turned around by massive governmental involvement. The Keynes-Krugman “solution” to this obvious problem is for government to create a system of massive wealth transfers from the wealthy to everyone else. High wages generated through labor union activism, high marginal tax rates, and a huge welfare system serve to take income away from the wealthy, give it to others who will continue to spend and keep the perpetual motion machine well oiled and moving. Thus, high taxes and high wages obtained via coercive activities by organized labor actually help everyone from the poorest people to the wealthy business owners. Lower-income people receive money, goods, and services while the wealthy find that their enterprises flourish when people have more money to spend. It is win-win for everyone. Given his tendency to mangle economic history, it is not surprising that Krugman falsely blames Ronald Reagan for the decline of labor unions just as he falsely claims that organized labor created prosperity. He writes: First, and most important, union membership as a percentage of the population had declined ever since its peak in the post–World War II economy. In the early 1950s, about a third of US workers were in unions, but by 1980, that number had declined to about 20 percent. Union membership did decline during the Reagan years, but that decline continued even after eight years of Bill Clinton, who had the enthusiastic support of organized labor. The graph below shows the pattern. Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics As one can see, union membership fell drastically in the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, a time when the US economy went through two recessions, which at that time meant the loss of unionized manufacturing jobs. The Reagan-killed-the-unions myth came about because of Reagan’s response to the air traffic controllers’ strike in 1981. The union, which had the acronym PATCO (Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization), actually endorsed Reagan in 1980 (along with the Teamsters—because Reagan agreed to delay trucking deregulation for two years, something Krugman ignores). In August 1981, the union struck, throwing airline traffic into mass confusion. (I flew from New York City to Atlanta the first weekend of the strike, and it definitely was a chaotic time.) Reagan responded by firing the striking workers and ordering the hiring of new controllers. The strike quickly was broken, along with PATCO, and air travel soon returned to normal. Democrats accused Reagan of “union busting” and worse. It is difficult to place the PATCO incident in larger context, since PATCO was a relatively small union and it represented government employees whose illegal actions (it was against the law for federal employees to go on strike) had serious consequences on flight travel and endangered the jobs and safety of airline employees, many of them unionized themselves. Nonetheless, entities like the New York Times chose to take the view that this was the turning point in labor history, an event that permanently changed the landscape for organized labor. However, there is another explanation that doesn’t require the invocation of symbols. In late 1981 and through much of 1982, the US economy suffered through a massive recession, one that altered much of the economic landscape in this country. For example, much of the steel industry that once defined cities like Pittsburgh and Allentown in Pennsylvania and Youngstown, Ohio, closed shop and did not reopen. This recession hit the unionized sectors hard and had a significant effect in unionized jobs in domestic steel, automobiles, and textiles. This was not by design (in other words, the recession was not a Reagan-organized conspiracy) but rather the result of excesses that had built up over the years that slowly made these industries uncompetitive. According to US Department of Labor statistics, the highest rates of unemployment during the 1982 recession came in construction (20 percent), manufacturing (12.3 percent), and mining (13.4 percent), along with agriculture (14.5 percent). All of these lines of production are tied to capital goods and are highly unionized. While all of these sectors did rebound during the recovery, which began in 1983, the scope of manufacturing changed in the USA, especially in the automobile industry. During the recession of 1982, not only did the sale of domestic automobiles fall drastically, but sales of Japanese-owned Toyota, Honda, and Nissan rose almost 30 percent from the late 1970s into the early 1980s. Ford Motor Company’s employment alone fell by about 46 percent due to the recession. The recession alone would have had a devastating effect on union employment, an effect much more significant than the failed PATCO strike. To further accelerate the drop in union employment, President Jimmy Carter’s massive deregulation efforts in the latter years of his term in office would ultimately change the scope of competition in passenger airlines, trucking, railroads, and telecommunications, all highly unionized industries. It is much harder for labor unions to organize workforces in competitive industries than it is in industries that are made legal monopolies, which is what the regulatory systems governing these industries actually did. Take trucking for example. Before passage of the 1980 Motor Carrier Act, there were about 1.3 million truck drivers, with the industry dominated by the Teamsters Union. After deregulation swept away many barriers to entry, the number of truck drivers had increased to 3.5 million by 2018. Not surprisingly, average real pay of truck drivers is not as high as it was when they mostly were unionized and the industry kept artificially small. However, contra Krugman, the current dearth of unionized drivers is not due to newly discovered hardball tactics of employers but rather the realities of competition, and one of the results has been that unit costs of rail and surface transportation have fallen in real terms in the past forty years, which has contributed greatly to a higher standard of living. All of these examples present a much more clear picture of the decline of organized labor in private industries than Krugman’s “The Evil Ronald Reagan Did It” narrative. One can excuse a union partisan for such ignorance, but when a Nobel-winning economist makes such an erroneous pronouncement, the only proper response is outright scorn and derision. Indeed, we should be thankful that, at least in private industry, organized labor has lost the stranglehold it once had in this country. Unions gained drastically after 1935 due to passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act and the Roosevelt administration's backing of organized labor. Furthermore, unions gained their share in the labor force during World War II, when it became next to necessary for businesses to accept unions in order to be eligible for federal contracts, which often were the only production game in town. Contrary to what Krugman might argue, the mercurial growth of organized labor in the US workforce was much more the work of government prodding and outright coercion than it was a natural progression of the American workplace. Given that, perhaps we should not be surprised to know that less than a decade after World War II ended, unions as a percentage of private employment in this country began to decline, and that downward path has continued for more than six decades. While the Joe Biden administration no doubt wants to boost union fortunes—Biden even calling for a federal version of the disastrous AB 5 in California, which put a lot of people out of work—one doubts that the president can make much of a difference. The reason for the decline of unions in this country has not gone away, and it isn’t Ronald Reagan. Agreed. Private sector labor unions provide no real service anymore, other than the pad the pockets it's organizers and management. And Public Sector Unions should be made illegal, and their very existence is a massive conflict of interest.

I'm not your search engine Dante, and those posts are probably on one of the earlier defunct versions of the GID. But all of us here who have discussed governmental/political systems with you before remember your fondness for a Benevolent Monarchy.

Steve McMichael announces he has ALS https://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2021/04/23/ex-bear-steve-mcmichael-announces-he-has-als/ One of my favorite Bears of all time. Awful for "Mongo" to have to deal with this new challenge. My thought will be with him and his family.