“Last time I checked, Article II didn’t give the President the power to appoint a nominee with the advise and the consent of the media.”
georgia10 at Daily Kos noting all the “Alito will be confirmed” news stories.
This from an article in the New York Times Magazine:
Certainly most Americans do not support higher wages out of immediate self-interest. Probably only around 3 percent of those in the work force are actually paid $5.15 or less an hour; most low-wage workers, including Wal-Mart employees, who generally start at between $6.50 and $7.50 an hour, earn more. Increasing the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour would directly affect the wages of only about 7 percent of the work force. Nevertheless, pollsters have discovered that a hypothetical state ballot measure typically generates support of around 70 percent. A recent poll by the Pew Research Center actually put the support for raising the national minimum wage to $6.45 at 86 percent.
…It was then that the living-wage proponents hit on a scorched-earth, tactical approach. “What really got the other side was when we said, ‘It’s just immoral to pay people $5.15, they can’t live on that,’ ” Oppenheimer recalls. “It made the businesspeople furious. And we realized then that we had something there, so we said it over and over again. Forget the economic argument. This was a moral one. It made them crazy. And we knew that was our issue.”
The moral argument soon trumped all others. The possibility that a rise in the minimum wage, even a very substantial one, would create unemployment or compromise the health of the city’s small businesses was not necessarily irrelevant. Yet for many in Santa Fe, that came to be seen as an ancillary issue, one that inevitably led to fruitless discussions in which opposing sides cited conflicting studies or anecdotal evidence. Maybe all of that was beside the point, anyway. Does it – or should it – even matter what a wage increase does to a local economy, barring some kind of catastrophic change? Should an employer be allowed to pay a full-time employee $5.15 an hour, this argument went, if that’s no longer enough to live on? Is it just under our system of government? Or in the eyes of God?
The minimum wage in Santa Fe became $8.50 an hour in 2003, and $9.50 on January 1, 2006. Is it “The City Different” or a model? As the article notes, the initiative to raise the minimum wage in Albuquerque to $7.50 failed at the polls last October. The federal minimum wage is $5.15 an hour.
NewMexiKen’s position remains as posted previously:
The federal minimum wage is $5.15 an hour. It’s been $5.15 since 1997; loss of purchasing power in that time, nearly 20%. In 1997, Congressional salaries were $133,600. If the federal minimum wage was raised by the same percentage as Congressional salaries have been raised since 1997 (nearly 24% to $165,200), the federal minimum would be $6.37 an hour.
… was born on this date in 1929.
Many may question some of King’s choices and perhaps even some of his motives, but no one can question his unparalleled leadership in a great cause, or his abilities with both the spoken and written word.
There are 10 federal holidays, but only four of them are dedicated to one man: one for Jesus, one for the man given credit for discovering our continent, one for the military and political founder George Washington, and one for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
From an article in today’s New York Times:
Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, would like to outfit this metaphor with a side-view mirror, one reading: “Objects in future appear much larger than they are.” A pioneer in the research of affective forecasting, Dr. Gilbert has illuminated a startling and fundamental mistake that both men and women make: they overestimate how future successes and failures will affect their happiness, for the better or worse.
Not that people are easily disappointed by a promotion or apathetic about being fired. Rather, as Dr. Gilbert has found in charting his subjects’ lives and reactions, “the good isn’t as good, and the bad isn’t as bad as we think it’s going to be.”
A corollary finding is that a single big payoff – a fat raise, an Hermès Kelly bag, a hot cha cha date – affects people’s essential happiness much less than a routine of small delights. And Dr. Gilbert, for one, is sold. He has found, for example, that one of the best things about being at Harvard is not the prestige of his position but that he can walk to work from his house in Cambridge.
And yet another corollary: NewMexiKen, a blog of small delights, will make you happier than the big flashy hot cha cha blogs.
“Feminism isn’t always pretty…. Without it, however, Kate O’Beirne would have been unlikely to have this book published — and most women would not have their own money to waste on it.”
Ana Marie Cox in a review of Women Who Make the World Worse.
… was designated a National Historic Site on this date in 1944.
The Home of Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site contains “Springwood”, the lifelong home of America’s only 4-term President. Also on the site is the Presidential Library and Museum, operated by the National Archives. Visitors may enjoy a guided tour of FDR’s home, take a self-guided tour of the Museum, or stroll the grounds, gardens, and trails of this 300-acre site.
I don’t know about you, but those light green shutters don’t really work for NewMexiKen.
Hard to believe, but it’s been 25 years.
Hill Street Blues, the first network series to include long shots, handheld camera shots and continuing storylines, debuted on this date in 1981.
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