Union: Workers told to use urine bags

Union officials in Colorado say a Qwest supervisor tried to cut down on lengthy bathroom breaks by telling workmen to use disposable urinal bags in the field.

“We deal with a lot of silliness in corporate America, but you’ve got to admit, it takes the freakin’ cake,” said a union administrative director.

I’m guessing the Qwest supervisor did not, in fact, issue himself a urine bag.

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One important Clinton adviser estimated to Politico privately that she has no more than a 10 percent chance of winning her race against Barack Obama, an appraisal that was echoed by other operatives.

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The Guardian discloses how the thousands of Iraqis hired by the US to hunt al-Qaeda are on the verge of going on strike because they haven’t been paid.

The incompetence and venality of the Bush Administration is quite extraordinary, isn’t it?

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But as one who has helped organize a multitude of antiwar protests, some of which drew hundreds of thousands of people, well, if you keep doing what you’re doing, you keep getting what you’re getting. The turnout for the antiwar actions of the past week was quite small and mostly ignored by mainstream media. Why? Mostly I think because street protests aren’t newsworthy anymore. It’s been the same old speeches and the same old signs for five years, and the number of people participating in such protests steadily drops. That’s not because the populace doesn’t oppose the wars, because they do, but because such street protests have been done so often that they no longer get much attention.

The antiwar movement needs some new ideas.

Tip: Intoxination

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I don’t care about Rev. Wright, or what McCain did or didn’t say, or snooping into Obama’s passport record, or Hillary’s White House schedule when Bill was prez, or any of the other banal trivialities being passed off as news..

All of it is almost totally irrelevant. The presidential campaign is already disintegrating into a swamp of attacks, innuendo, and we still have seven more months to go. Imagine the crazed levels of hysterical attacks we’ll be hearing come October. Might be a good time to leave the country or unplug from the Net.

The economy has huge problems, the country is fighting and losing two wars, millions may get foreclosed - and none of the candidates are addressing any of this in a serious way. We need to know from all of them what their plans of action are, not sound bites or feel-good phrases, but real, workable solutions.

But we probably won’t get that. Attack ads and sliming are so much easier to do.

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That’s the Wall Street phrase for a market that is rebounding for no particular reason, except that if you drop a dead cat from high up enough, it will bounce when it lands, but that doesn’t mean it’s alive.

The strong rallies these past few days in the stock market may well continue for a while (hey, the market did dodge a bullet early this week, several of them in fact, so a little jubilation is certainly in order) but the underlying fundamentals haven’t changed, so that cat will be falling back to earth soon enough.

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