This week, I’m guest blogging at Crooks and Liars in Mike’s Blog Roundup, once a day for seven days. Here’s my first post.

C&L is one of the main liberal / progressive blogs and gets a whopping 170,000 or so visits a day. It was started by John Amato who got the name from an email list done by Mike Finnegan (now of Mike’s Blog Roundup.) It was the first blog to my knowledge that posted video from news and TV shows, and it was this huge innovation that first got them noticed.

Since then, Amato has turned it into a group blog and it has become an influential force in the blogosphere and beyond. I’ve known John and Mike since long before blogging and it’s been inspiring watching C&L become the powerhouse that it is.

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Elizabeth Kucinich: My husband would “absolutely” consider running with Ron Paul.

So, will Kucinich be asking Paul to return the $500 donation he received from neo-Nazi Klan member Don Black? Lordy, such myopic dimbulbness coming from a supposed progressive is difficult to fathom, indeed.

Perhaps Mr. Kucinich could get Dog The Bounty Hunter to run, so he could join together with his candidacy instead.

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Here in Connecticut, many of the leaves are still on the trees. While they’ve turned color, they haven’t fallen off yet, a highly unusual occurrence. If they stay on much longer, and we get freezing rain, the leaves as well as branches will ice up, and the extra weight could bring trees down.

When I was a kid growing up here, freezing rain didn’t happen much, it snowed rather than rained in the winter. Sub-zero temperatures, while uncommon, certainly happened. Now it never gets much below 15 F. And we’re officially still in a drought! All of which shows a definite trend multi-year trend towards warmer weather.

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If the problem is that we off-shored our production away to China and became a nation of real-estate brokers that just borrow the money from China and sell homes and mortgages to each other then I think the fix of the problem will be that all those fat-assed people seating behind glass doors in various agencies lose their jobs, foreclose their homes and go to factories and start assembling a new generation of fuel-efficient cars and windmill electricity generators.

And the new generation will know that if you want to live well you need to work with your hands or your head and not flipping real estate.

The robber barons, pirates though they may have been, created tangibles like railroads, oil companies, and steel mills. Real estate flippers create little if anything new while investment banks selling CDOs cubed and SIVs create precisely nothing. It’s just all air and hype.

I agree, let’s get together and start creating and building fuel-efficient cars and clean, renewable energy. There will always be a need for investments banks to make loans, but at the end of the day, dare I say it, maybe they’ll feel good because they funded clean tech and helped create something tangible and meaningful.

Maybe all those unemployed flippers and real estate folks can help market and distribute clean energy products . Hey, they could take internal combustion cars and flip them into biodiesel or EVs or refurb old buildings into ones that are lean and green. Those would be really useful flips indeed.

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In the first ever union vote monitored by the federal government at a tribal casino, 3,000 dealers at the massive Foxwoods casino in Connecticut are expected to vote to join the UAW. Foxwoods is owned by the Mashantucket Pequots, who have run a remarkably ham-fisted, blundering campaign trying to block unionization. They’ve placed numerous full page ads in Connecticut newspapers warning of Ominous Problems should the Evil Unions come to Foxwoods. Why, they’ve even promised to listen to what workers want and perhaps even do something about it. But alas, they’ve promised all this before apparently, and that’s why workers plan to unionize now.

Once the dealers unionize, it’s a certainly other groups of workers at Foxwoods will too. The casino has no doubt spent enormous sums to stop the union, I guess no one told them the most time-honored method to block unions (besides sending in the goons as was done in the 30’s) is to treat and pay employees fairly.

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