URLs du Jour

2008-06-19

  • Our comrades to the north at GraniteGrok have a couple of amusing YouTube clips of Senatorial candidate Jeanne Shaheen euphemizing her support for the "Employee Free Choice Act." (Which would allow a union organizing drive to avoid a secret ballot election.) Citizen ambush journalism at its best, and she's looking a little peeved about it.

  • Of course, we pretty much already have that "Employee Free Choice" in NH, thanks to our newly Democratic legislature, and the union trying to organize me and my co-workers is extremely pleased about it:
    Under the new system, which we are using here at UNH to organize staff, you vote once – when you sign your card – regarding whether to support a staff union. It’s like voting by mail-in ballot. And it’s completely democratic, as well as anonymous.
    Of course, it ain't "completely democratic" without a secret ballot, and as for a signed card being anonymous—sorry, I don't think so.

  • Speaking of local threats to liberty, the amazing New Hampshire Liberty Alliance has posted its "2008 Liberty Rating for the New Hampshire House and Senate". Granite Staters should go look to see how your reps are doing, freedomwise. My House Reps scored a D, an Incomplete, and three "Constitutional Threat" ratings. My Senator, Iris Estabrook, is also a big fat Constitutional Threat. That's pretty bad, but it's at least easy to know who to vote for: anyone but the incumbents.

  • From a Chicago Tribune story about the efforts of some University of Chicago faculty to not name a new research center after the Nobel Prize-winning, libertarian econ hero Milton Friedman:
    In a letter to U. of C. President Robert Zimmer, 101 professors—about 8 percent of the university's full-time faculty—said they feared that having a center named after the conservative, free-market economist could "reinforce among the public a perception that the university's faculty lacks intellectual and ideological diversity."
    "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

    (Via University Diarist.)

  • Oh yes. I've always suspected this.