Edith and Andy in Guatemala, 1976

Today is the anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. Answers.com:

The worst factory fire in the history of New York City occurred on March 25, 1911, in the Asch building, where the Triangle Shirtwaist Company occupied the top three of ten floors. Five hundred women, mostly Jewish immigrants between thirteen and twenty-three years old, were employed there. The owners had locked the doors leading to the exits to keep the women at their sewing machines. In less than fifteen minutes, 146 women died. The event galvanized support for additional efforts to be made to increase safety in the workplace. It also garnered support for labor unions in the garment district, and in particular for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union.

Crooks and Liars, 24 March 2009:

Lanny Davis enlisted by Big Business to promote a “Third Way” Corporate Compromise on EFCA

Money never misses a chance to lock the doors and let us burn.

Her name is exactly what you think it is when you look at her but we’re calling her Doris. She’s the hygienist at my dentist’s office and I have seen her exactly twice. The first time, two weeks before my braces came off, was the week her husband left her and the children. I don’t mean to sound insensitive, but the last thing you want is someone having a crying jag while sticking sharp objects into your gums. I love my dentist but it was two years before I worked up the nerve to make an appointment for another teeth cleaning.

Mercy, mercy, Doris’ life is moving on even as time stops while I’m sitting in her chair. She remembers me. She asks how I’ve been. I can’t tell the nice lady with the sad blue eyes that the memory of our last encounter haunts me and causes me to brush longer, so I tell her two years ago my life turned upside down, but things are better, and here I am. She tells me her brother drank himself to death and her estranged sister-in-law won’t release the ashes. On a case by case basis I can be a compassionate person, but Doris’ case has lost its handles. Thank Vishnu I’ve been using an electric toothbrush.

Speaking of not handling things well, there may be a better way to handle this.

Stop smooching.

That’s the message of a new sign that went up outside a train station in northern England on Monday.

The goal is to stop departing passengers from pulling up in their cars at a crowded drop-off point and pausing to kiss each other farewell.

Virgin Rail says it installed the sign while refurbishing the station after a local business networking group said the place had to become more efficient.

But profit margins may have been a factor, too.

Virgin Rail says that if passengers want to share an embrace before they part company, they should pay to park their cars nearby where they can kiss all they want.

I can’t wait until a local government ANYWHERE ON EARTH puts up a sign that says PARK HERE AND KISS. If this happened in America, those delicate flowers home-schooled on abstinence-only sex ed would take that as an order. What else could go predictably wrong?

Well, for starters, Doris wants me to floss.

ThinkProgress: this fucker doesn’t make the cut on the varsity cogitating team.

Jesse Taylor:

Kefalinos denies intimating that Obama would be assassinated, and insists that the cookie is “not unflattering. I think it’s a fun face… And anyone who says anything else should be ashamed of themselves.” Besides, nobody got upset about the “Dead Geese Bread” he sold after the recent Hudson River plane crash. (We’re NOT making that up.) Also, Kefalinos insists he can’t be racist because, for one thing, “my brother-in-law, he’s Cuban.”

I like that ubiquitous “I can’t be a racist because [someone else] is [something]” rationale. It’s priceless. By that reasoning, I can’t be a racist because sasquatch is lemurs.

Sometimes it’s hard to feel fucking peaceful.

Insurance loophole claimed in fire deaths
Company says smoke that killed 3 was ‘pollution’

Wha – wha – what?

An insurance company with a potential $25 million liability from a 2007 Houston office fire is claiming smoke that killed three people was “pollution” and surviving families shouldn’t be compensated for their losses since the deaths were not caused directly by the actual flames.

Great American Insurance Company is arguing in a Houston federal court that the section of the insurance policy that excludes payments for pollution — like discharges or seepage that require cleanup — would also exclude payouts for damages, including deaths, caused by smoke, or pollution, that results from a fire.

Here is a brick.
Hold onto that. You might need it.

Before we go on, I’d like to make a point: we will all be dead a whole lot longer than we are alive. I assume you’re alive, but you know what they say about assuming. A lot of people in every story believe in an afterlife in which they will have to explain their actions. Okay, continuing then –

Great American has asked U.S. District Judge Lee Rosenthal to find that the deaths caused by the smoke, fumes and soot from the March 2007 fire set by a nurse working in the building will not be covered by the policy because there is a specific exclusion for pollution and it mentions smoke, fumes and soot.

“Listen, Saint Peter, I couldn’t not do it, right? Millions of dollars were at stake, not to mention our S&P rating. Plus, it had the merit of being practically diabolical – oops…”

In October, vocational nurse Misty Ann Weaver was sentenced to 25 years in prison after pleading guilty to three counts of felony murder and one count of first-degree arson for setting the fire to conceal that she had failed to complete paperwork on time.

Great American’s legal request, filed in late November and set for hearings in February, notes that there are four pending lawsuits against the property owners for wrongful death and injury, and contends that the insurance company should not have to pay on any of them.

Kevin Sewell, the Dallas lawyer who filed the request, did not return phone calls Tuesday afternoon. Great American spokeswoman Diane Weidner said company policy is to not comment on pending litigation.

“I can explain! Let me explain! See, the people were already dead, so it wasn’t like we were hurting them or anything, and who knows, maybe they really liked smoke. It’s tasty on ribs, am I right?”

Seth Chandler, a University of Houston Law Center professor who teaches insurance law, said while the insurance company’s maneuver wasn’t out of bounds, it will test the limits of the law.

“This is pushing the boundaries of the absolute pollution exclusion,” Chandler said. “We’re going to have a battle between the literal language of the policy and the way people speak of pollution.”

A question of semantics
He said the issue is an ongoing conversation between the courts and the insurance industry. Chandler said he doesn’t know of any other Texas cases on this issue. Nationwide, he said, even carbon monoxide poisoning has been found to be covered by insurance despite a pollution exclusion.

Despite this slightly-less-evil fucker’s assertion that it’s all words it is NOT all words. This is a question, as so many are, of common decency. That insurance companies employ vicious bastards is one of the main reasons insurance companies cannot be trusted, and there is nowhere where they prove it day in and day out like on the issue of healthcare. Frankly, the whole premise of health insurance doesn’t make any sense when insurance companies are for-profit since there’s no incentive to provide decent healthcare. There’s plenty of incentive to deny claims. Every denied claim is greater profit. We’re in sad shape, but there’s a glimmer of hope: the incoming administration has promised reform.

The Obama transition team is having people organize house parties to give their thoughts on health care reform. They are open, deliberative processes. So of course the insurance industry is seeking to sabotage them.

Now, about that brick…

I can’t form a coherent sentence anymore about politics. The absolute worst thing I’ve ever heard was the suggestion that the Democratic candidate killed his grandmother today for sympathy votes. My response to this has been swift and direct: god damn it, I’m going to knit some fucking cat blankets in my extreme and shitty frustration that reprobate howler monkeys qualify to vote, and put some Good after Bad. Fuck!

And I urge you to give a street person a quarter and a granola bar, put spare change in a parking meter, feed some stray cats, because we have seen enough, and you’ve probably still got a quarter.

This morning, I walked to work. It was tough going, what with the fuzzy lungs and me allergic to cashmere. While I was dramatically infirm, I noticed a new recruitment ad for the military that made me delicately irate. In it, an older man of color asks an olive-skinned woman if her son is still talking about joining the military. She says the young man talks about nothing but. The older man asks if she is still opposed to her son joining. She says her son can be very persuasive, and her mind is opening to the idea. The older man says he’s impressed with both of them.

Congratulations to the US military, which has finally managed to convey what some of us have known all along: our sons are born to be cannonfodder in self-perpetuating imperialist wars. It is only our stubborn belief that children matter individually preventing the military from snapping them up like dropped pennies and turning them into gravestones or worse. And if mothers and fathers would stop being so damned picky about that whole PSTD-head injury-full-thickness burns-lost limbs-depression and suicide thing, it would just be so much easier to conduct these endless, pointless wars that are such a boon to the military-industrial complex. So this morning, when I walked around a ROTC flag raising ceremony because the sidewalk was blocked by shivering crew-cut teenagers, I was in a bit of a snit. But why talk about architecture when we can dance about war?

This is my grandmother Edith, my father’s mother, my refuge, anchor in life I still miss daily seventeen years after her death. And an, um, friend. Edith called this picture “Two Mules.” She was six when it was taken and always hated it. You can see – or at least I can – that she never really had a child’s face, though it is charming to see her nose before she broke it playing football with her brothers. As the middle of seven children and the oldest girl in an immigrant Sicilian family, she always carried more responsibility than she should have had to bear.

I like the detail of the shoes, and that this picture was taken, if I recall correctly, in New Brunswick, where no one ever sees a mule just in passing anymore, though if one did, one would not expect this mule’s jaunty joie de vivre.

We are a long way from a post-racial society, at least in part because the issue of race makes us stupid. We say stupid things. We act against our best interests because we stupidly can’t see what they are. I can’t claim to be smarter than the next idiot but I can tell you this: anything that creates or prolongs suffering adds to the Stupid, and whatever works for the Common Good speaks for itself. Perhaps that is why I love this picture, below, so much. It’s nothing, it’s just a young man and his grandparents. They could be anyone and I would still feel the same way about it.

Very few of us are simply, genetically, one thing. There are remote places where people have not intermingled much with the world, but you should expect to find few teeth and supernumerary digits. Further, history is full of raping, pillaging, slavery and diaspora, so no matter how you slice it, a picture of your family tree will inevitably come up short a few branches – or maybe you’re missing from someone else’s.

I take the election season’s racial dogwhistling very seriously. It’s not hard to predict the outcome. When the Towers came down and Americans waved flags, I said, “Brown people are now going to die, as they do every time jingoism is the zeitgeist.” And now I say we are about to revisit that part of our comparatively recent history where white people act on their basest, most vile impulses and truly believe they are acting in the interest of White Pride or White Heritage or …whatever. But Americans really ought to know in 2008 that there is not now nor was there ever any such thing.

There is, however, you and your grandchildren. You and your grandparents. You and your cousins. You and your people, who may not be who you think they are. You and your own people are our people, and now is the time to ask yourself who they might be, because we cannot truly, absolutely know. You can’t know.

dday reports:

Yesterday, at two major rallies for the Republican candidates, audience members yelled out that Obama is a terrorist and that he should be killed (or maybe that Bill Ayers should be killed, hard to know from the context, but when you’re talking about someone approving of murder in the presence of a Republican candidate, it’s a distinction without a difference). Today, an audience member screamed “Treason!”

The right has made a cottage industry of whipping up their side into a frenzy, demonizing liberals, blaming them for every ill of society and ramping up that rhetoric louder and louder until it essentially has no distinction from eliminationism. And as much as the conservative noise machine gets all wounded and indignant when you say this, such rhetoric does play itself out into acts of violence.

Indeed, John McCain has actively shielded domestic terrorists from prosecution through his votes in the 1990s. These are the characters, the Randall Terrys, the Chad Castagnas, that are never subjects of ads or whisper campaigns.

Republicans, in the words of the immortal cinematic antihero Marcus Brody:

You’re meddling with powers you cannot possibly comprehend.

For the complete, terrifying rundown of rightwing hate groups operating in the US, the authority is Dave Neiwert, and the last word is Orcinus. If I were a registered Republican voter, I would give very serious consideration to with whom these candidates make common cause.

Nouriel Roubini:

Over the past year, whenever optimists have declared the worst of the economic crisis behind us, Roubini has countered with steadfast pessimism. In February, when the conventional wisdom held that the venerable investment firms of Wall Street would weather the crisis, Roubini warned that one or more of them would go “belly up” — and six weeks later, Bear Stearns collapsed. Following the Fed’s further extraordinary actions in the spring — including making lines of credit available to selected investment banks and brokerage houses — many economists made note of the ensuing economic rally and proclaimed the credit crisis over and a recession averted. Roubini, who dismissed the rally as nothing more than a “delusional complacency” encouraged by a “bunch of self-serving spinmasters,” stuck to his script of “nightmare” events: waves of corporate bankrupticies, collapses in markets like commercial real estate and municipal bonds and, most alarming, the possible bankruptcy of a large regional or national bank that would trigger a panic by depositors. Not all of these developments have come to pass (and perhaps never will), but the demise last month of the California bank IndyMac — one of the largest such failures in U.S. history — drew only more attention to Roubini’s seeming prescience.

As a result, Roubini, a respected but formerly obscure academic, has become a major figure in the public debate about the economy: the seer who saw it coming.

Roubini argues that most of the losses from this bad debt have yet to be written off, and the toll from bad commercial real estate loans alone may help send hundreds of local banks into the arms of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. “A good third of the regional banks won’t make it,” he predicted. In turn, these bailouts will add hundreds of billions of dollars to an already gargantuan federal debt, and someone, somewhere, is going to have to finance that debt, along with all the other debt accumulated by consumers and corporations. “Our biggest financiers are China, Russia and the gulf states,” Roubini noted. “These are rivals, not allies.”

The United States, Roubini went on, will likely muddle through the crisis but will emerge from it a different nation, with a different place in the world. “Once you run current-account deficits, you depend on the kindness of strangers,” he said, pausing to let out a resigned sigh. “This might be the beginning of the end of the American empire.”

Times Online:

McCain camp prays for Palin wedding
The marriage of the vice-presidential candidate’s pregnant teenage daughter could lift a flagging campaign

Yeah, you read that right. Stop gasping and read some more:

In an election campaign notable for its surprises, Sarah Palin, the Republican vice- presidential candidate, may be about to spring a new one — the wedding of her pregnant teenage daughter to her ice-hockey-playing fiancé before the November 4 election.

Inside John McCain’s campaign the expectation is growing that there will be a popularity boosting pre-election wedding in Alaska between Bristol Palin, 17, and Levi Johnston, 18, her schoolmate and father of her baby. “It would be fantastic,” said a McCain insider. “You would have every TV camera there. The entire country would be watching. It would shut down the race for a week.”

There is already some urgency to the wedding as Bristol, who is six months pregnant, may not want to walk down the aisle too close to her date of delivery. She turns 18 on October 18, a respectable age for a bride.

Hello, dahhhhhhhhhhhlinks. I’m Ta, your hostess here at flaming, shameless Poor Impulse Control. Can I get you a drink? Have a seat. Let’s have a chat, but not the one I expect you’re – it’s okay to laugh – expecting.

As a matter of fact, I was a pregnant teen. No matter what any debutante tells you about fighting your or someone else’s babyfat, this experience is highly overrated. In fact, if you must procreate, I recommend waiting until you’re staring menopause in the sweating face so when you retire your children are too young to follow you to your adult community. That’s for stealing the car, Junior! Fund your own tattoos!

Being a grandparent is – and I can’t say this enough – made of awesomeness. Mazel tov to Mr. and Mrs. Palin! Their children and grandchildren can play together! It’ll be a blast, so long as Mom and Dad remember who’s who, which will be tougher than they think. We’re getting to that age where finding our car keys becomes a challenge on a par with the Riddle of the Sphinx. But don’t worry. Their children will pretend to “help.” But it’s not our recalcitrant teen’s situation we should discuss. No. I am a woman close to Sarah Palin’s age, I have a daughter and a grandson, and I have extensive experience with being the poster child for Maybe We Should Sober Up First, but beyond that scintillating resume, I also used to be a writer of some skill. Let’s talk about me.

I was a big believer in letting characters write themselves. If you let them tell you about themselves you can’t end up with Mr. Darcy playing with Tonka Trucks or anything by Jeff Foxworthy, but you’re a sucky writer if you force characters to do stuff that’d be outside the range of their personality. It’s a complex business because people are so complex. Learn from events. What do they mean? If you close your eyes, and listen, and let yourself feel your way around the psyche of your imaginary friend, you will be okay. This technique also teaches you – meaning me – when people are doing something outside of their ordinary behaviors. In other words, when Samantha stutters, Darren – either Darren – knows Endora’s camped up in the nursery, because Sam doesn’t stutter. Instinctively, you know the basics. You don’t trust people who smile all the time and speak slowly, and when calm people start blinking they’re rethinking a situation under stress. In other words: they’re lying. So let’s draw a character for a moment, remembering that there are no easy answers, and let’s call her Sarah Palin.

You’re a saucy damsel raised in the kind of End Of Days church athiests cross themselves and avoid, you’ve been married to the same snowmobiling dude for about twenty years and you have a pack of children you may or may not pay much attention to over a long period of time. You seem to believe in the fire and brimstone stuff, but you’re an elected official and not home baking cookies. You believe you’re on a mission from God, which means you’re allowed to eliminate your enemies. They deserve it. One day, you’re a free-wheeling state governor, when your political party’s presidential candidate calls and asks what you’re doing next week, and for the next four years. So far, I understand you as a character. As a poet or novelist, I could help you walk, talk and sign distasteful bills into law. But then something happens. Your oldest daughter, who had better knock it off, comes up pregnant and everyone, everywhere, says something stupid. Weeks pass, and the presidential campaign may be in trouble.

Inside John McCain’s campaign the expectation is growing that there will be a popularity boosting pre-election wedding in Alaska between Bristol Palin, 17, and Levi Johnston, 18, her schoolmate and father of her baby. “It would be fantastic,” said a McCain insider. “You would have every TV camera there. The entire country would be watching. It would shut down the race for a week.”

Poor Impulse Control reader: you’re a creative, empathic person. You know that most teen marriages fail spectacularly within five years, usually with lifelong repercussions. You know this is a disaster in the making. Our character did not have to agree to join the candidate on the trail, or when the rabbit died, could have retired to the governor’s mansion. In a quiet moment, ask yourself this question for which there are no easy answers: what kind of mother, what parent, what human being, what psyche places her daughter’s shotgun wedding in a presidential election season and invites the international press?