The latest bad idea

For some reason, the Washington DC crowd these days is enamored of government by artificially created crises. Fiscal cliff, debt ceiling negotiations, sequester, whatever, the show goes on and on.

Lately, however, the people who have been hurt by round after round of arbitrary cuts aren't just taking it in silence.

Tonight in Charleston, over 100 people gathered to protest sequester-imposed cuts to the Head Start program, which so far has been forced to eliminate 82 jobs and 461 slots for young children. Among those who spoke out against these dumb cuts were parents and laid-off workers. Here's some coverage from the Gazette and Daily Mail.

Unless this situation gets fixed, I have a feeling that people affected by arbitrary cuts, whether young or old, are going to start showing up in the most inconvenient places to push our congressional delegation to make it go away. And I'll do all I can to make sure that happens.

The reason for no real blog post today...

...is this event dealing with West Virginia's economic future, which ate up around 15 hours or so, counting travel. Good though. We need more talks like this. And action.

The fire down below

One thing that's exciting about the current push to raise the minimum wage is the growing  grassroots action by low wage workers. It's nice when there is pressure from below coming from all over the place. Here's a look at the growing momentum. I hope it keeps on growing.

THE BIGGEST LOSERS under the current system are discussed here.

GET OVER IT. Here's the Washington Post attempting to talk sense to the GOP about health care.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Social studies project

Just in time for Labor Day, here's the latest edition of The State of Working West Virginia. This report is the sixth in so many years and the theme this time is From Weirton Steel to Wal-Mart, the former having once been WV's largest employer while the latter, sadly, now holds that distinction. I worked in this with friends from the WV Center on Budget and Policy. The musical soundtrack as got to be Springsteen.

AND ON THAT NOTE, here's Robert Reich on how workers can get a fair shake in today's economy. Yeah, it'll take a lot of work.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

In the spirit of fair play

El Cabrero does not generally view the world with quite the same lens as Sarah Palin, to put it mildly, but she might have had a point or been close to having one when she said the following:

"So we're bombing Syria because Syria is bombing Syria? And I'm the idiot?"

A bit more seriously, here's what the American Friends Service Committee and several allied groups had to say about the issue.