Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Why bother holding the vote?

The Supreme Assembly of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) has been elected.  Each of the single candidates in each of the nation's 687 constituencies was elected with 100% of the vote.  The leader of the DPRK (normally referred to as North Korea), Kim Jong Un, was reelected, also with 100% of the vote.

A ballot with only one candidate to vote for is about as useful as a screen door on a submerged submarine.  It's a farce.  Granted, some of the elections in this nation are nearly as big a farce, with the gerrymandering and vast advantages that incumbents have, but they do involve a choice here in a real democracy.

Now there is a move afoot to hold a referendum election about the future of the Crimea and it's going to wind up being nothing more than a vote similar to that just held in the DPRK.  The Crimean parliament, now firmly in the control of Russia, has voted to exclude what it is referring to as "nationalist political organizations" from participating.  In fact, anyone who is suspected of being a member of one of these organizations, or calling for violence, is subject to being detained and prosecuted.

As stated in this blog previously, the only proper referendum is one that allows everyone who will be impacted by the proposed change to take part in the vote.  Just as Los Angeles shouldn't have held a vote on the secession of the San Fernando Valley without the entire city voting, the Crimea shouldn't be excluding all other citizens of the Ukraine from the election.

Control of the only warm-water port Russia currently has access to is at the heart of this power-grab by Vladimir Putin.  But under the Kharkiv Treaty, Russia's lease of their naval base at Sevastopol was extended through the year 2024.  Perhaps Putin's concerns are long-term.  Perhaps he wants to rekindle the Soviet Union.

The West needs to stand firm and refuse to accept the partitioning of the Ukraine to satisfy Putin's aims.

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Apparently being the victim of mistaken identity and crying foul over it isn't enough to mandate that jailers investigate your claim.  What else can be concluded from a recent ruling by a three-judge panel of the U. S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of Santiago Rivera.

In 1985, a warrant was issued for the arrest of Santiago Rivera in connection with a case involving DUI where there was a fatality.  The wrong Santiago Rivera was arrested four years later and spent a week behind bars.  He was released only after fingerprint analysis verified he was not the subject of the warrant. 

Fast forward to 2009 when the same thing takes place.  It doesn't help matters that the two men have the same first and last names, same date of birth and are very similar in height and weight.  This time it took a month for Mr. Rivera, the one not the subject of the arrest warrant, was released.  This in spite of the fact he told the jailers that this had happened before, and it should be easy to verify he was not a wanted man.

After he finally got released he sued.  Now these judges have ruled the deputies who arrested Mr. Rivera and the jailers who did not investigate his claim of mistaken identity acted reasonably.  That's ridiculous. 

It takes 48 hours, 72 at most, to get verification of someone's identity via a live scan fingerprinting.  When someone claims to be the victim of mistaken identity and is being wrongfully incarcerated, the police should make every effort to verify their identity as quickly as possible.  Maybe this is something that should be done before someone's packed off to the county jail or worse.

I don't want to hear about how doing that many additional live scans would be a budget-buster.  People can lose jobs when incarcerated improperly for a day or two, let alone a month.  Lives can be ruined.  It's happened to this man twice.  It should be avoided at all costs.

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Exempt versus nonexempt.  It's a legal concept involving employment.  If you're an exempt employee, you're a professional, or you're high enough up the management chain that you no longer get paid overtime.  In fact, you get no additional pay over and above your salary; at least no pay that is based on the number of hours above 40 you work in a workweek.  In California, where overtime law kicks in whenever someone works more than eight hours in a day, overtime does not apply on that basis in instances of exempt employees.

President Obama is ordering the Labor Department to alter its regulations on how this classification is made, to make fewer employees eligible to be classified as exempt.  Government has gone back and forth on this issue over the years.  After all, the law that governs such things, the Fair Labor Standards Act, was originally passed in 1938. 

The trade-offs that one should receive from being "exempt" and therefore required to work as much as necessary to get the job done don't always come to pass.  The two most frequently cited are higher pay and the ability to get paid for a full day of work when you are there less than eight hours.  However, employers don't pay exempt employees nearly enough to compensate them for the extra hours.  These employers also can require exempt employees to use up their sick time and vacation time before allowing them to work a short day at full pay.  Exempt employees can't be docked for working less than eight hours, even if they've exhausted their paid time off.

I know all about this because of a job I was working in early 2005.  I was a manager.  My contract specified I was an exempt employee.  I was being paid the princely sum of $635 per week, which on a 40 hour workweek basis wasn't bad.  Nearly $16 per hour.  But I was averaging between 60 and 70 hours per week.  On that basis I was earning less than $10 per hour for managing an office where I was responsible for everything that happened there, seven days a week, and I was supervising 20 people.  Years later, I was informed there was a class action lawsuit going on, and I was entitled to recover.  I went ahead and filled out the forms.  Eventually I got $430 or so.  Doesn't quite begin to make up for the hours for which I wasn't truly compensated.

I do agree that this is the right thing for President Obama to do.  But there is a delicious irony here.  Last month there was another class action lawsuit filed.  This one involves as many as 150 employees of a call center in Idaho.  An Obamacare call center, run by a government contractor.  I scratched my head when I saw this, in light of this move by the President.

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Random Ponderings:

Conrad Murray might have been a great cardiologist once, but no one should be letting him anywhere near the practice of medicine.  Except maybe as a patient.

In case you want proof that shoving a cop is a bad idea, no matter what, as Simona Fusco (she was one of the hot blondes in "Beerfest").

Johnny Carson must have been really drunk, or high, on the night Joan Rivers claims she had a one-night fling with him.

It might not change your mind about Mel Gibson and whether or not he is an anti-Semite, but reading this http://movies.yahoo.com/news/journalist-plea-10th-anniversary-passion-christ-hollywood-mel-214854535.html is definitely worth a moment or two to at least explore the notion.

Arizona's governor Jan Brewer has announced she won't run for a third term.  The fact she might have been able to mount a legal challenge to that state's constitution is an indicator to the state's legislature that they need to fix that loophole.  She didn't serve two full terms as governor as she assumed office in the middle of Janet Napolitano's term when Ms Napolitano left to work in the Obama Administration.

I don't care how good the food is, I wouldn't wait five hours in line to eat it.  Even in comfortable leather recliners.

Jerry Sandusky's wife saying the media convicted him before the trial isn't entirely accurate, but it isn't entirely wrong either.  However, in my mind there is no doubt he did the crime for which he is now doing the time.

Alabama, Idaho and Utah all have bills working their way through their legislatures to limit predatory payday lending practices.  This is a good thing.

Meanwhile, guntry clubs, gun clubs with a country club feel, are springing up all over.  Nothing wrong with responsible gun ownership.

The widow of Lt. Garlin Murl Conner has been trying for years to see him awarded the Medal of Honor.  Her quest has now ended on a technicality according to a judge.  If what the Board for the Correction of Military Records wrote in 2009 is accurate, it isn't just the technicality that will prevent him from earning the award.  The Board said the eyewitness accounts she submitted after the deadline had expired weren't new evidence.

Can Target continue to survive after making one gaffe after another?

A nickel is worth five cents.  It costs eleven cents to make one.  Doesn't add up to me.

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March 12th in History:

538 – Vitiges, king of the Ostrogoths ends his siege of Rome and retreats to Ravenna, leaving the city in the hands of the victorious Byzantine general, Belisarius.
1550 – Several hundred Spanish and indigenous troops under the command of Pedro de Valdivia defeat an army of 60,000 Mapuche at the Battle of Penco during the Arauco War in present-day Chile.
1622 – Ignatius of Loyola and Francis Xavier, founders of the Jesuits, are canonized as saints by the Catholic Church.
1689 – The Williamite War in Ireland begins.
1811 – Peninsular War: A day after a successful rear guard action, French Marshal Michel Ney once again successfully delayed the pursuing Anglo-Portuguese force at the Battle of Redinha.
1864 – American Civil War: The Red River Campaign begins as a US Navy fleet of 13 Ironclads and 7 Gunboats and other support ships enter the Red River.
1868 – Henry O'Farrell attempts to assassinate Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh.
1881 – Andrew Watson makes his Scotland debut as the world's first black international football player and captain.
1885 – Tonkin Campaign: France captures the citadel of Bắc Ninh
1894 – Coca-Cola is bottled and sold for the first time in Vicksburg, Mississippi, by local soda fountain operator Joseph Biedenharn.
1910 – Greek cruiser Georgios Averof is launched at Livorno.
1912 – The Girl Guides (later renamed the Girl Scouts of the USA) are founded in the United States.
1913 – Canberra Day: The future capital of Australia is officially named Canberra. (Melbourne remains temporary capital until 1927 while the new capital is still under construction.)
1918 – Moscow becomes the capital of Russia again after Saint Petersburg held this status for 215 years.
1921 – İstiklal Marşı was adopted in TBMM(Turkish grand national assembly).
1922 – Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan formed The Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic
1928 – In California, the St. Francis Dam fails; the resulting floods kill over 600 people.
1930 – Mahatma Gandhi leads a 200-mile march, known as the Salt March, to the sea in defiance of British opposition, to protest the British monopoly on salt
1933 – Great Depression: Franklin D. Roosevelt addresses the nation for the first time as President of the United States. This is also the first of his "fireside chats".
1934 – Konstantin Päts and General Johan Laidoner stage a coup in Estonia, and ban all political parties.
1938 – Anschluss: German troops occupy Austria.
1940 – Winter War: Finland signs the Moscow Peace Treaty with the Soviet Union, ceding almost all of Finnish Karelia. Finnish troops and the remaining population are immediately evacuated.
1947 – The Truman Doctrine is proclaimed to help stem the spread of Communism.
1950 – The Llandow air disaster occurs near Sigingstone, Wales, in which 80 people die when their aircraft crashed, making it the world's deadliest air disaster at the time.
1961 – First Winter Ascent of the Eiger north face.
1967 – Suharto takes over from Sukarno to become Acting President of Indonesia.
1968 – Mauritius achieves independence from the United Kingdom.
1971 – The March 12 Memorandum is sent to the Demirel government of Turkey and the government resigns.
1992 – Mauritius becomes a republic while remaining a member of the Commonwealth of Nations.
1993 – Several bombs explode in Bombay (Mumbai), India, killing about 300 and injuring hundreds more.
1993 – North Korea nuclear weapons program: North Korea says that it plans to withdraw from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and refuses to allow inspectors access to its nuclear sites.
1993 – The Blizzard of 1993 – Snow begins to fall across the eastern portion of the US with tornadoes, thunder snow storms, high winds and record low temperatures. The storm lasts for 30 hours.
1993 – Janet Reno was sworn in as the United States' first female attorney general.
1994 – The Church of England ordains its first female priests.
1999 – Former Warsaw Pact members the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland join NATO.
2003 – Zoran Đinđić, Prime Minister of Serbia, is assassinated in Belgrade.
2004 – The President of South Korea, Roh Moo-hyun, is impeached by its National Assembly: the first such impeachment in the nation's history.
2005 – Karolos Papoulias becomes President of Greece.
2009 – Financier Bernard Madoff pleads guilty in New York to scamming $18 billion, the largest in Wall Street history.
2011 – A reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant melts and explodes and releases radioactivity into the atmosphere a day after Japan's earthquake.

Famous Folk Born on March 12:

John Aubrey
Adolph Ochs
Idris of Libya
Vaslav Nijinsky
George W. Mason
Masayoshi Ohira
Agathe von Trapp
Julia Lennon
Willibald C. Bianchi (Medal of Honor Recipient and Bataan Death Marcher)
Gordon MacRae (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbrnXl2gO_k)
Jack Kerouac (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaBnIzY3R00)
Clara Fraser
Edward Albee
Herb Kelleher (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fw6_LpI0BDQ you can practice your Italian with the subtitles on this)
Andrew Young
Barbara Feldon (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEXgWfkq04g she was a $64,000 Question winner)
Lloyd Dobyns (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VD2gjm7ljM8)
Eddie Sutton
Al Jarreau (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otVH5cv9z1A)
Sammy "The Bull" Gravano
Liza Minelli (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moOamKxW844)
Mitt Romney (you've seen enough video of him)
James Taylor (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9MncdJ_lOs)
Rob Cohen
Carl Hiaasen (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nz4JzKdOs-Y)
Ron Jeremy
Steve Harris
Dale Murphy
Marlon Jackson
Julia Campbell
Darryl Strawberry
Aaron Eckhart (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZzoFSgymJo)
Jake Tapper
Casey Mears