Last week the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board (PLRB) announced the results of the election to represent the 2,300 cafeteria workers and noon time aides in the Philadelphia School District: members of UNITE HERE Local 634 voted by a 2:1 margin to stay with their union and rejected SEIU's anti-union tactics.

After months of attacks directed by New York-based SEIU 32BJ, the PLRB counted 1121 votes for UNITE HERE Local 634 and only 551 votes for SEIU Philadelphia Joint Board.  There were 10 votes for no union and 198 challenged ballots.

First, the Family Research Council held its "Values Voters Summit" on Rosh HaShanah.  Maybe they figured it was a good way to avoid the embarrassment of having any Jews show up because they thought "Values" actually meant "values."  Or more likely none of them knew or cared when Rosh HaShanah was.  That, or they were looking for a way to keep the liberal media away from their conference.

Now, Glenn Beck is calling for a day of "fast and prayer" on...Yom Kippur?  Are the right-wingers trying to win us back?

Wonder what the right-of-right-wingers are cooking up for Sukkot...

In unrelated news, Norman Podhoretz just spent a book puzzling over Why Are Jews Liberals?

(Reposted from here):

I was listening to the Slate's latest (very enjoyable) Culture Gabfest today and was disappointed to see (well, hear) their riff on criticism of the absence of women in Pixar movies (it's roughly 33:00 to 37:00).  First they establish that, indeed, the heroes in Pixar movies are always men, never heroines.  But then Julia Turner interjects that, merits of the criticism aside, "I just resist the sort of close political reading of children's entertainment," offering as an example the "flap" over Disney and race - first, Disney was criticized for offering its multi-ethnic audience only Caucasian protagonists (I remember when I was in the Disney demographic that the bad guys in Aladdin had Middle Eastern accents, but not the good guys), and now that Disney is making a movie with a Black heroine, people are criticizing the portrayal.  Turner and her fellow gabfesters don't like this criticism.  What makes their criticism of the criticism especially annoying is that they're not even arguing Disney's critics are totally off-base.  Turner concedes that:

Jeff Sessions - who couldn't get his own judicial nomination through a GOP Judiciary Committee even after flip-flopping to the correct position on whether the NAACP or the KKK poses a greater threat to the Republic - is now tying himself in knots over whether he would have a problem with a gay Supreme Court nominee per se, or just with one who believed gay people should have the same rights as everyone else.  I'm sure when Strom Thurmond voted against Thurgood Marshall's nomination to the Court, it had nothing to do with him being Black - just with him being a Black man who believed Black people should have their equal protection rights protected.

But while it's funny/ sad/ ridiculous to watch Sessions and Co. squirm in saying first that "identity politics" are bad and then that we should be concerned that a gay nominee would make people "uneasy," or hear the Family Research Council signal openness to a gay nominee without "pro-gay ideology," there's a reason these guys are struggling to say something coherent: Open gay-bashing is becoming less popular in America, but it's hard to explain why LGBT people shouldn't have equal rights if we're not inferior Americans.

It's not by accident that the right-wing opposition to gay equality is a moving target.

In making the case for his recovery plan today, Barack Obama quoted the lesson of the Sermon on the Mount that a storm can destroy a house build on sand, but not a house built on a rock.  The way Obama used the quote reminded me of a debate a few years ago between Sojourners' Jim Wallis and Americans United's Barry Lynn where Lynn said the problem with politicians quoting the Bible is that unlike quotes from other literature, quotes from the Bible are appeals to the author's inherent authority rather than to the author's particular insight.  In other words, biblical quotes are used to support your argument based on who said it (God says don't oppress strangers) rather than why they said it (because you yourself have experienced slavery).  I think Lynn is making an insightful distinction, but it cuts against his argument.

In a multireligious democracy, we should be concerned when politicians' arguments rely on appeal to the authority of their particular religious texts (especially if theirs are shared by a religious majority).  But contra Lynn, not all Bible quotes are appeals to divine authority.  "The Bible says not to steal wages from your employees" is an appeal to biblical authority.  "Let's not copy Moses' mistake when he hit the rock instead of talking to it" is an appeal to biblical wisdom.

I bring this up because I think it explains why, as a non-Christian (in a democracy with a Christian majority), I'm not bothered on a gut level when a Christian President quotes the New Testament parable about building your house on sand or on a rock to make a point about our economic recovery.  The plain meaning of Obama's speech is not that the Bible commands us to make new rules for wall street, investments in education, etc... His plain meaning is that this metaphor from his tradition, which may be familiar to many listeners, illustrates well why it's urgent and worthwhile to do so.

This is not always a clear-cut distinction.  But I think it's a useful one.  Maybe a useful thought experiment in assessing what kind of appeal to religious text we're dealing with is to consider: Would using this quote in this way still make sense if the speaker's religion were different from the quotation's?

I was surprised to see Ezra Klein endorse Nicholas Kristof's column arguing that "the central challenge in the poorest countries is not that sweatshops exploit too many people, but that they don't exploit enough."  Back in my college Macroeconomics class, this argument was expressed as "They're not poor because they work in sweatshops.  They work in sweatshops because they're poor."

Well actually, they're poor because they don't make enough money to support themselves.  If the people who hire them paid them enough, they would not be poor.  Providing jobs to people who would rather work them than stay unemployed doesn't release whoever provides the job from responsibility for how they treat them, just as saving someone from drowning would not give me any more right to mug that person than I have to mug anyone else.

The Post reported in 2005 that National Labor Committee Head Charles Kernaghan

gets angry when he recalls what a worker told him in Bangladesh: "If we could earn 37 cents an hour, we could live with a little dignity." (As opposed to the 21-cent hourly wage that barely staved off starvation.)

As CAPAF's Sabina Dawan observes, it's not as though the International Labor Organization and allied groups working to close such gaps and to see basic human rights protected in plants that make Western companies so rich are out to drive the people of Cambodia out of their jobs - or as though that's the inevitable result of letting workers go to the bathroom, or leave work to give birth.  Does Kristof believe that the Bangladeshi worker Kernaghan references makes 21 cents an hour because at 22 cents his plant would stop making a profit?

As Richard Rothstein wrote in his rejoinder to Kristof:

As our friends at The Corner debate whom conservatives should blame for losing the reigns of government, Jim Manzi argues that on social issues like abortion and gay marriage

many people who share the same country disagree in good faith, and are unlikely to be persuaded within our lifetimes. As I have argued at length, I think that the only workable compromise is not to try to force the creation of uniform national law when no national consensus on the morality of these issues exists. Instead, I believe that we should have an agenda of devolving as many of these social issues, as a matter of law, to as local a level as possible.

If we really want to devolve these questions - is abortion permissible?  What about same-sex marriage? - to as local a level as possible, how about the individual?  I can have my abortion, and my neighbor can opt for adoption (maybe by the gay married couple down the street).

Four years ago, after watching John Kerry on TV conceding the election, I went into my room, put Barack Obama's convention speech on repeat, and wept.  I'd first watched that speech in Tampa, where friends and I spent a summer outside supermarkets and inside trailer parks registering people to vote.  From summer through to fall, we knew we were going to win.  We had an endless paper chain of hopeful justifications - another paper endorses the Democrat for the first time in this many elections; another Bush gaffe sure to drag him down; the Tin Man is beating the Scarecrow in a Zogby poll; undecideds always break for the challenger; I canvassed a man today who voted Bush-Dole-Bush be he says it's time for a change.  And that was before the exit polls started coming in.  I spent a lot of election day in Philadelphia with college classmates co-ordinating GOTV in a basement, but at one point I stumbled upon a TV somewhere just in time to see Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee speculating on how John Kerry had carried his state.  By the time we were driving back to my parents' house, there was a steady stream of exit polling, sweet and plentiful like Halloween candy, and I made some snarky comment to a friend about the foolishness of cynical leftists that doubt the essentially good judgment of the American people.  Within an hour, the real results were coming in, and our beloved Florida - which we'd sworn we wouldn't let be lost again by a fraction of a percentage point - went for Bush by five points.