BREAKING: A Halbig Friggin Deal

Think Progress is reporting that the DC Circuit Court of Appeals decision where two of three judges found that Obamacare subsidies were illegal in states that had federal exchanges has been withdrawn pending a full DC Circuit Court review.  Ian Millhiser explains what this means:

The reason why this matters is because the plaintiffs in this lawsuit, known as Halbig v. Burwell, are hustling to try to convince the GOP-dominated Supreme Court to hear this case, where they no doubt believe that they have a greater chance of succeeding than in the DC Circuit, as a majority of the active judges in the DC Circuit are Democrats. The Supreme Court takes only a tiny fraction of the cases brought to their attention by parties who lost in a lower court — a study of the Court’s 2005 term, for example, found that the justices granted a full argument to only 78 of the 8,517 petitions seeking the high Court’s review that term. The justices, however, are particularly likely to hear cases where two federal appeals courts disagree about the same question of law. 

Two hours after the divided DC Circuit panel released its opinion attempted to defund Obamacare, a unanimous panel of the Fourth Circuit upheld the health subsidies that are at issue in Halbig. Thus, so long as both decisions remained in effect, Supreme Court review was very likely. Now that the full DC Circuit has vacated the two Republican judges’ July judgement, Supreme Court review is much less likely.

In other words, if the full DC Circuit Court rules in favor of the government as expected, there's nothing that the Supreme Court needs to decide, and by choosing to not take the case up, the decisions will stand to allow the Affordable Care Act to work as intended.

We'll see.

GOP Minority Outreach, Rafael Cruz Edition

Don't tell me Ted Cruz's father Rafael doesn't speak for the Republican Party, because that's exactly what he's going around the country doing.  His latest stop was in Williamson County, Texas, where he spoke to Republicans about "the blacks".

The father of Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said black people “need to be educated” about Democrats, so that they will vote Republican. Cruz, who made the comments at the Western Williamson Republican Club August meeting, added “the average black does not” understand that the minimum wage is bad.

The Aug. 21 meeting advertised that Cruz would “speak passionately on what can be done to return our nation to the principles that made America exceptional.” During the speech, Cruz spoke at length about a recent conversation he said he had with a black pastor in Bakersfield, California.

“I said, as a matter of fact, ‘Did you know that Civil Rights legislation was passed by Republicans? It was passed by a Republican Senate under the threat of a filibuster by the Democrats,’” Cruz said. “‘Oh, I didn’t know that.’ And then I said, ‘Did you know that every member of the Ku Klux Klan were Democrats from the South?’ ‘Oh I didn’t know that.’ You know, they need to be educated.”

It's funny, because the civil rights legislation that "Republicans" passed is no longer necessary according to Republicans of today, because racism doesn't exist.  Certainly not racism like Rafael Cruz throws it around, am I right?

Cruz cited a book Please Stop Helping Us by Jason Riley, a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board.

“I am going to try to encourage everybody I can to buy a book written by a black journalist. His name is Jason Riley. He wrote a book called Please Stop Helping Us, talking about how all the handouts to blacks have kept blacks in the poorhouse. And I’ll tell you what, I am going to make it my task to buy 15 to 20 copies of that book and hand it out to some black leaders to read.”

“Jason Riley said in an interview, Did you know before we had minimum wage laws black unemployment and white unemployment were the same? If we increase the minimum wage, black unemployment will skyrocket. See, he understands it, but the average black does not.”

Did you know that before minimum wage laws, blacks were slaves?  It's amazing his slective reading of history.  And frankly, Cruz wants to get rid of minimum wage so he can effective reinstate slavery.  The magical notion that corporations will magically hire more Americans and pay them more without a government mandated minimum wage is ridiculous.  After all, we'd have zero unemployment if wages were zero, right?

And finally, nothing says "I want to improve the Republican Party's standing with African-American voters" quite like "black people are too goddamn stupid to realize Democrats are using them."

StupidiNews!

• The Department of Justice will open a civil rights investigation into the entire Ferguson, Missouri police department after the shooting death of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown by police.
• A federal judge in Louisiana has ruled to uphold the state's same-sex marriage ban, the first such ruling since last year's historic Windsor decision.
• President Obama and other NATO leaders will meet today in Wales to discuss the group's response to Russian aggression in Ukraine and Islamic State terrorists in Iraq and Syria.
• Al-Qaeda head Ayman al-Zawahiri has announced the formation of a new wing of the terrorist organization in the Indian subcontinent.
• Mobile carrier Verizon will pay a record $7.4 million fine for violating the privacy rights of customers over the last seven years.

Last Call For A Broadside With All Batteries

CNBC is reporting that Tesla Motors's fabled electric car battery "gigafactory" will become a reality in the state of Nevada.

Tesla has finally decided that it will build its battery "gigafactory" in Nevada, sources say.

"That's a go, but they are still negotiating the specifics of the contract," a source within the Nevada's governor's office told CNBC Wednesday afternoon. The source noted that it could be a week before the deal is official.

Nevada is planning a press conference Thursday in Carson City, according to a Dow Jones report.

The Reno area has long been the front runner for the site. As always, the devil is in the details.  So what is Tesla getting for what could be the most important auto manufacturing plant since  the heyday of Detroit Motor City?  Arizona lawmakers recently coughed up $400 million in taxpayer dollars to get the $5 billion plant.  Senate majority leader Harry Reid recently tried to poo-poo the deal as a negotiating tactic.  But it looks like Nevada had what Tesla was looking for: a whole bunch of land relatively close to its California HQ and low taxes.

• Few taxes: No personal income tax, franchise tax, estate tax, inheritance or gift tax, and no taxes on corporate shares. No corporate income tax, although voters will decide in November whether to implement one to finance education — a move U.S. Sen. Dean Heller, R-Nev., said could undermine efforts to attract Tesla 

• Other tax credits or breaks: Up to a 50 percent abatement on personal property taxes for up to 10 years; a partial abatement on sales and use taxes on capital equipment purchases; and a deferral of sales and use taxes on capital equipment. 

• Worker training subsidies: Up to $1,000 per employee for job training if the company provides a 25 percent match, makes a five-year business commitment and pays at least hourly minimum wages. 

• Other advantages: Proximity to the assembly plant in Fremont, California, where Tesla makes its cars; significant deposit of lithium, which is essential to making the batteries.

And all indications are this is a done deal as Nevada has it in the bag.  However, one has to wonder just how good Tesla workers will have it:  Nevada is a right-to-work state.  Will Tesla's 6,500 employees unionize? It's great that one of the hardest-hit states from the Great Recession (Nevada's unemployment was 13.9% this time four years ago and 7.7% now) is getting some badly needed jobs, but will they pay well?

We'll see.  Dreams of an affordable, mass-produced electric car three years from now is one thing, but if it comes at the expense of turning Reno into Silicon Valley with its massive income inequality and obscenly broken housing market, then Tesla's plant needs to be unplugged.

Jury's still out on you, Elon Musk.

The Office, Boxed, In Summer

2014 was, quite frankly, a great summer for some breakthrough films (Guardians of the Galaxy, Maleficent, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes) but for the industry as a whole, a number of high-profile sequel bombs and World Cup action effectively killed the summer box office.  2014 was the worst summer for tickets since 1997.

The film industry had its worst summer in North America, still the world’s No. 1 movie market, since at least 1997, after adjusting for inflation. Between the first weekend in May through the end of August, ticket sales in the United States and Canada are expected to total roughly $3.9 billion, a 15 percent decline from the same stretch last year, according to Rentrak, a box office data company. 

Analysts in the spring had predicted an 11 percent drop, citing viewing distractions like the World Cup and scuttled release plans for films like “Fast and Furious 6” and Pixar’s “Good Dinosaur,” which both had production problems. But the decline was worse than expected, and the reason, analysts and studio executives said, may have been a nasty case of déjà vu. 

Tom Cruise’s futuristic “Edge of Tomorrow,” for instance, looked like a hit — and that was exactly its problem. The title was too similar to “The Day After Tomorrow,” released in summer 2004. The barren landscape too closely resembled Mr. Cruise’s 2013 film “Oblivion.” Characters walking around in robot exoskeletons? Been there (“Pacific Rim”), done that (“Real Steel”). 

Despite stellar reviews, “Edge of Tomorrow” took in $99.9 million at North American theaters, a major disappointment for Warner Bros., which spent at least $250 million on production and domestic marketing. 

“Hercules,” which arrived seven months after “The Legend of Hercules,” turned out to be a box office weakling. “Sex Tape” was heavily marketed on Cameron Diaz’s legs, but moviegoers shrugged: Sorry, we’ve seen them. “Both ‘Sex Tape’ and ‘A Million Ways to Die in the West’ failed to stand out among the other R-rated comedies,” said Phil Contrino, the chief analyst at BoxOffice.com. 

Sameness sells tickets, no doubt about it. The Top 10 movies of the summer all came from familiar brands (Marvel, DreamWorks Animation), featured familiar characters (“Godzilla”) or turned on familiar stories (the raunchy college comedy). Still, only a few of those films truly popped, Mr. Contrino noted, adding that the ones that did “each gave fans something that was unique, fresh and surprising.”

Or maybe for everything awesome like GotG, there's ten crapass movies like Transformers 4: Optimus Prime On A Dinosaur.  I enjoyed Godzilla for instance, but you could have gone the entire summer and just seen Angelina Jolie with wings and Rocket and Groot kicking ass, and you would have been fine.

On the other hand, ticket sales aren't everything, Lucy was terrible, it still made $115 million. Go figure.

Let me know when November rolls around.  Big Hero 6, Interstellar, Dumb and Dumber To, Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1, and Penguins of Madagascar all look like good times.

The Cantor Buried Tales: Epilogue

Recently ousted former GOP House Majority leader Eric Cantor certainly landed on his feet after his quasi-shocking primary loss to David Brat in June.  As expected, the welcoming door on Wall Street is wide open to somebody with his "credentials".

Late Monday night it was reported that former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor would take a job at investment bank Moelis. 

The news has already prompted the predictable eye-rolling about the "revolving door." And to the Tea Partiers who ousted Cantor in a primary earlier this year, the news that he is going to Wall Street is vindication that he was never a populist like them. 

But anyway, Moelis has put in a filing with the SEC, detailing his pay package (Via Erik Schatzker). 

Tell him what he's won, Johnny!

Group LP has agreed to pay Mr. Cantor an annual base salary of $400,000. Group LP has also agreed to pay Mr. Cantor an initial cash amount of $400,000 and grant Mr. Cantor $1,000,000 in initial restricted stock units (“RSUs”), based on the average closing price of the Company’s common stock on the five trading days prior to his start date. The initial RSUs will generally vest in equal installments on each of the third, fourth and fifth anniversaries of his start date. For calendar year 2015, Group LP has agreed to pay Mr. Cantor minimum incentive compensation of $1,200,000 in cash and $400,000 in incentive RSUs, payable in equal quarterly installments. The incentive RSUs will generally have the same vesting schedule as incentive RSUs granted to Group LP’s other Managing Directors.

That adds up to a grand prize package worth $3.4 million, kids.  Not bad for somebody who worked 120 days out of the year, huh?  Plenty of scratch to tide him over should he be thinking about breaking back into politics.  And let's face it, Cantor, like 99% of Republicans (and 80% of Democrats for that matter) is already employed by Wall Street, this just makes it official.

You didn't think he wasn't going to get a multi-million dollar lobbying job, did you?  Much more on this from Esquire's Ben Collins:

One month ago, Eric Cantor was the highest ranking member of the House of Representatives. Now, Eric Cantor is one of those senior executives he railed against, who "created this mess" that is our broken economy and corrupt congress. 

The only political entities Moelis & Company founder Ken Moelis has donated to in 2013 or 2014 are the National Republican Congressional Committee, Eric Cantor, or Eric Cantor’s creatively named PAC, ERICPAC. 

Cantor is now out of office, but he was the highest ranking Republican in the House up until one month and one day ago. This is the rule, not the exception. There is nothing stopping it from happening again, as it is surely happening right this second.

And now he's literally working for one of his biggest campaign donors.

Stop and let that sink in for a second.

StupidiNews!

• President Obama has authorized deployment of 350 more troops to secure embassies in Iraq in response to the latest Islamic State video showing the beheading of a second US journalist.
• A third American health worker has been infected with the Ebola virus after treating patients in West Africa's outbreak.
• Ukrainian officials are saying progress has been made towards a cease fire between Ukrainian army forces and Russian-backed rebels, but Moscow is denying any truce deal.
• Japanese PM Shinzo Abe unveils his new cabinet appointments this week, hoping that the reshuffle of ministers will help reform Japan's struggling economy.
• The latest major US retailer dealing with possible credit card hacks is Home Depot in a breach that could have affected all of the company's 2,200 stores.

Last Call For The Johnny Volcano And Huckleberry Graham Show

Reminder:  if John McCain were President, we'd be at war with Libya, Egypt, Syria, Somalia, probably Pakistan and Iran and still in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now we'd be at war with ISIS in Iraq and Syria too.

It is a truism to say there is no military solution to ISIS. Any strategy must, of course, be comprehensive. It must squeeze ISIS’ finances. It requires an inclusive government in Baghdad that shares power and wealth with Iraqi Sunnis, rather than pushing them toward ISIS. It requires an end to the conflict in Syria, and a political transition there, because the regime of President Bashar al-Assad will never be a reliable partner against ISIS; in fact, it has abetted the rise of ISIS, just as it facilitated the terrorism of ISIS’ predecessor, Al Qaeda in Iraq. A strategy to counter ISIS also requires a regional approach to mobilize America’s partners in a coordinated, multilateral effort. 

But ultimately, ISIS is a military force, and it must be confronted militarily. Mr. Obama has begun to take military actions against ISIS in Iraq, but they have been tactical and reactive half-measures. Continuing to confront ISIS in Iraq, but not in Syria, would be fighting with one hand tied behind our back. We need a military plan to defeat ISIS, wherever it is.

So basically McCain and Graham want another war, and expect President Obama to be the one to explain to America why we're going to blow another couple trillion dollars and send in hundreds of thousands of troops to fight this year's model of Al Qaeda.  Because that worked so well over the last decade.

There's no military solution to ISIS, but we need military force to stop ISIS.  Jesus.  We dodged a hurricane's worth of anvils in 2008, and you will never convince me otherwise.

GamerGate Goes Gaga

The issue of women in video gaming doesn't get addressed nearly as much as it should, despite 48% of gamers being women and 36% are women over 18.  Women who point out that the industry is terribly unkind to the image of women as a whole are not treated well, and in fact recently such treatment has erupted into a full-blown rift in the gaming industry press.

Some good background on this story comes from The Escapist, but it boils down to this:  gaming critic Anita Sarkeesian, who has made a series of YouTube videos pointing out the ridiculously sexist tropes in gaming over the last two years, released her latest video late last month in the center of a controversy over game designer Zoe Quinn, who was accused of sleeping with a game reviewer in order to secure a favorable review for her game.  The reaction from a bunch of snot-nosed frat boy Dudebros with computer skills was precisely what you'd expect:  Sarkeesian was harassed and her life threatened to the point where she no longer felt safe in her own home.  Adi Robertson at The Verge:

This is an unusual low in the Anita Sarkeesian saga, but death threats in general are more or less par for the course for many women (and men) online. They can easily cross the line from bluster to menace — UK journalist Laurie Penny, for instance, contacted police in 2013 after being sent a very specific bomb threat. In this case, the vitriol might have been compounded by the support her latest video received from popular developers and media figures. Joss Whedon and William Gibson, among others, mentioned it, and Tim Schafer of Double Fine — known for Psychonauts and the Kickstarter-funded Broken Age — spent several hours fielding responses after urging everyone in game development to watch it "from start to finish."

It's also coming on the heels of another woman-focused gaming community tempest regardingDepression Quest developer Zoe Quinn, who internet denizens have accused of starting an affair with a games journalist (who never reviewed her game and, as far as I can tell, mentioned her in precisely one piece, which was written before they're supposed to have started dating) in order to secure favorable press for her non-traditional text game. The "corruption" allegations Quinn's critics put forward have started a discussion about how to handle friendships and crowdfunding support within a relatively small community of writers and developers. Our sister site Polygon updated its guidelines and now asks reporters to state if they have given crowdfunded support to developers through the Patreon service, and Kotaku banned such contributions outright. Intriguingly, the harassment and threats sent as part of this anti-corruption campaign seem to have focused mostly on Quinn herself, not the male journalist whose integrity would actually have been compromised by said corruption.

I would have sided with Quinn and Sarkeesian beforehand, because they both have been treated like inhuman trash despite the fact that they have dared to point out the industry caters to and is built on the fantasies of horny dudebros, despite basically half of people who buy and play games being women, but then the jackasses over at Bretbart decided this was something they had to weigh in on.

So this is where the state of the industry is:  somehow, demanding that women aren't treated like walking bags of endless sex and delicious candy makes you a "politically correct lying bully".  If the dudebro signal on this has gone up to the point where Team Dead Guy has gotten on board, it's bad.  Extremely bad.

And the people who said "Hey, we should have never let it get this bad to begin with" are being victimized the most.  This is wrong, dead wrong, and what voice I have I'm using to say it's wrong.

Getting the industry to change starts with admitting that.

Welcome To The Gun Show

As part of the sanctions against Russia over the slow, careful invasion of Ukraine, the United States has stopped certain Russian imports.  Apparently those prohibited Russian imports include a particular model of Russian rifle, the "Avtomat Kalashnikova", originally made in 1947 and still in use today, worldwide.

It's better know as the AK-47.

You can imagine exactly what happens next.

Thirty-six hours after the Obama administration banned importation of the classic brand of AK-47 assault rifles as part of sanctions against Russia, a Maryland dealer specializing in the weapon took stock of its inventory.

There was nothing left.

Laboring almost nonstop, workers at Atlantic Firearms in Bishopville, a Worcester County community on the Eastern Shore, had shipped hundreds of Russian-made AK-47s — an assault rifle prized by both consumers and despots — as buyers wiped out gun dealers’ inventories around the country. The frenzy was brought on, in part, by a suspicion among some gun ownersthat the Russia-Ukraine conflict was a backdoor excuse to ban guns many Democrats don’t like. Some customers bought eight to 10 rifles for nearly $1,000 each or more, stockpiling them as investments.

“The gun community moved very, very quickly,” said Blaine Bunting, president of Atlantic Firearms. “I don’t see this ban going away.”

It's almost like they were ready for it.  But what happens when you can no longer legally get the most popular rifle on Earth in the US?

While gun control advocates fret about the secondary market sales, gun stores and dealers are beginning to worry about the long-term implications of these buying frenzies. Seeing sales go up 200 percent in an instant is a nice jolt to the bottom line, but if it’s a sign that the pro-gun community might be losing the longer war, that’s not so good.

“Yes, Obama is the world’s best gun salesman,” said Tyler Whidby, the owner of TW Firearms in Leesburg , Va., which still has some ­Russian-made AK-47s on its shelves. “Every two to four months, somebody says something about gun control, and people turn around to get a gun.”

Another Democrat in the White House, such as Hillary Rodham Clinton, would “financially benefit us in the short term,” Whidby said. But in the long term, “it might put us out of business.”

So how much pressure will the NRA start putting on Congress to lift sanctions against Russia?  We're about to find out.

StupidiNews!

• US military forces conducted a raid against Somalia's Al-Shabaab militant group late Monday as part of assisting African Union troops in retaking several villages.
• Ukrainian officials are warning of a "Great War" in Europe as Russian-backed rebels gain ground while EU-sponsored talks continue in Belarus.
• Polls show Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff is facing a tough challenge from environmentalist challenger Marina Silva in October's national elections.
• Pakistan's parliament will hold an emergency meeting on Tuesday as two weeks of protests against the government of PM Nawaz Sharif have turned violent.
• Apple in investigating how its iCloud data service was breached as dozens of celebrities had racy photos leaked over the internet at the same time.

Last Call For NATO On The Move

It finally looks like Europe has reached the point where a military response to Russia's annexation of the Crimea and other parts of the Ukraine is not only possible, but virtually assured under the banner of NATO.

NATO members meeting this week in Wales are expected to create "a very high-readiness force" to deal with Russian aggression in Ukraine and other international conflicts, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said Monday.

In a speech on the NATO website, Rasmussen said the fighting force will be part of an overall Readiness Action Plan that "responds to Russia's aggressive behavior -- but it equips the alliance to respond to all security challenges, wherever they may arise."

He said this "spearhead" force would be able to "travel light, but strike hard if needed."

NATO will look at possible upgrades to infrastructure that could include airfields and ports, he said.

New bases will be set up and equipment pre-positioned at bases, a NATO diplomatic source said.

"We are also facing crises to the southeast and south," said a senior NATO official. The plan "needs to be able to deal with all crises that we might be facing in the future from wherever they might come."

Rasmussen said President Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine will attend the summit and NATO will "make clear our support for Ukraine."

Also on Monday, UK Prime Minister David Cameron told Parliament that the presence of Russian soldiers on Ukraine soil is completely unjustified and unacceptable.

"Russia appears to be trying to force to Ukraine to abandon its democratic choices through the barrel of a gun," he said.

Cameron said new sanctions measures will be drawn up by the EU within a week.

If NATO and Europe are finally getting serious about a unified effort to oppose Russian aggression, then I'm all for it.  It's not the US's job to police the world unilaterally, but that's what a treaty group like NATO is supposed to be used for.

Maybe this will finally get Russia's attention.

Your Bonus Annual Labor Daze Post

Kevin Williamson of the National Review spends about 2,500 words trying to convince people that raising the minimum wage and giving workers more collective bargaining power to raise wages won't actually raise wages and give workers power to collectively raise wages in today's other example of conservatives being utterly clueless about economic issues.

The Left sees inequality as a cause of economic facts, not an effect of them. As EPI sees things, inequality is an independent actor, a motive force in world affairs: It is not only a “determinant” of economic conditions but “by far the most important determinant”; it has, under its own steam, “blocked living standards growth for the vast majority”; and it is “the key driver behind stagnant wages for workers at the bottom.” This is a deeply weird view of how the world actually works: The Left thinks that inequality is not a mere measure of relative incomes or wealth but something that does things in the world, something that acts — and not only acts but acts decisively, determining Americans’ economic prospects. This sort of flatly preposterous analysis is the unfortunate effect of mistaking the map for the territory and the model for the thing modeled, the kind of magical thinking that causes people to believe that Superman could turn back time by reversing the rotation of the Earth.

That leads to the sort of silly writing exemplified above, but it also leads to bad policy ideas. EPI is about as respectable an economic-policy outfit as the Left has to offer, but its preferred policy responses to wage stagnation are basically primitive: raising minimum wages, as though long-term prosperity could be brought about by congressional fiat; passing paid-sick-leave laws; and changing corporate governance and financial regulation in ways that would impede or discourage income growth among corporate managers and financial professionals, who along with the occasional professional athlete and movie star make up the top 1 percent. There is more magical thinking in that, too: There is no big bucket of “national income,” and $100,000 in forgone pay for a CEO or private-equity investors does not mean that there is an extra $100,000 sitting around available to be used as income for somebody else. We talk about the “distribution” of income, but that is a purely statistical idea. There is no distributor of income, and income cannot simply be moved from one pocket to another like wampum.

Similar magical thinking infects the Left’s ideas about unions. Unions are in decline practically everywhere in the private sector, in no small part because the thuggish, corrupt, rapacious leadership of U.S. industrial unions helped to diminish or outright destroy the industries they once were associated with. Unions live on mainly in government work. But that is good enough for EPI to conclude that a renaissance of unionization is desirable: “This policy choice is clear when one looks at the evidence. . . . Unionization has held up much better in the public sector, where employers have less ability to fight organizing drives.” What else might distinguish public-sector employers from, say, General Motors? The main thing is a complete lack of competitors and, most important, the ability to command revenue from the public at gunpoint via taxation. This is not true of, say, McDonald’s.

The notion that income inequality in America has gotten so awful (especially among African-Americans and Latinos) that it's actually damaging our economy rather than being a symptom of a damaged one is debateable.  The notion that US corporations are making record profits despite the "highest corporate tax rate in the developed world" is not.  It's an economic fact, because the effective tax rate is far lower than 35%, and it's because many of the largest US corporations do not pay any corporate taxes at all.

Somehow, the corporate profits that McDonald's makes can never be re-invested in worker wages.  But remember, raising the minimum wage, paid sick leave like every other developed country has, and limiting CEO pay is "magical thinking" while lowering corporate taxes that corporations don't actually pay is "serious economic reform".

Happy Labor Day, indeed.

The Annual Labor Daze Post

No Labor Day would be complete without an annual example of conservatives missing the entire point of the holiday, and who had to sacrifice for it: union workers and the people who bled for them, only to be casually destroyed by global conglomerates.

According to the Seattle Times, business backed conservative think tank the Freedom Foundation plans to protest the national holiday by refusing to take Monday off and having a “work-in” all day instead.

“I can’t think of a problem in society that can’t be traced in some way back to the abuses of organized labor, so it would be hypocritical of us to take a day off on its behalf,” said the Freedom Foundation’s CEO Tom McCabe.

Times columnist Danny Westneat pointed out that if McCabe really wants to protest union-led reforms in the workplace, then he should work every Saturday, as well.

“What’s odd about it, though,” Westneat wrote, “is that only 12 percent of American workers even belong to unions anymore. Yet we — I say ‘we’ because I’m in that 12 percent — somehow retain an almost supernatural mind-meld authority over the oppressed and hapless other 88 percent.”

Freedom Foundation materials call public labor unions a “disease” that is “running rampant” in Washington state.

Sure.  The real problem are the people that think workers should be empowered to stand up to their employers, that they should have rights and the ability to bargain as a group when real wages have been stagnant for nearly 40 years while corporate profits have tripled in the last 14 years.

But go ahead and tell yourself the problem is "greedy unions" while you wonder why you can't afford to send your kids to college.

StupidiNews, Labor Day Edition!

• China has voted to change Hong Kong's election process, declaring that only pre-approved candidates may run for the territory's Chief Executive.
• Bavarian bakers are threatening to go on strike during Germany's Oktoberfest, which could affect the festival's famed pretzels.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin is calling for talks on "statehood" for annexed Ukrainian territory, but stopped short of endorsing rebel independence from the Ukrainian government.
• Chinese search giant Alibaba is delaying its US stock offering for a couple of weeks due to questions from securities regulators.
• A British artist is experimenting with a "personal messaging app" that sends an actual person to relay a message to users.