The union bust up
I don't know what to think of this: ["Largest Union Decides to Bolt AFL-CIO"]. On the one hand, the AFL-CIO has made some huge mistakes over the years. I won't even go into how pissed off I was when Lane Kirkland was helping Bill Clinton get NAFTA passed.
But at the same time, the people who are breaking away are the same folks who abandoned Howard Dean in 2004 when it looked like his ship was sinking - instead of sticking with the candidate you endorsed until the very end. What kind of loyalty is that?
They also don't seem to be thinking about the big picture. It isn't about getting national health care - it is about getting decent wages first and job security. Health care should be second.
We all know what some of the problems are with the union movement and the lack of union jobs. But at the same time, some unions have been their own worst enemy by the decisions they have made, the candidates they have backed, and the things they have refused to do. Having worked with a number of union folks over the years, I know about their problems and I have experienced their arrogance first hand. Here's hoping they can work things out. After all, as the bumpersticker says, these are the folks who brought you the weekend.

The latest gossip
Novak has an interesting piece this weekend. He notes that "New York liberals" are worried about Hilary Clinton not being able to win in 2008 and are looking to Richardson. He also notes that when Virginia Gov. George Allen was in New Hampshire recently, activists called his performance, "odd": ["Supreme runner-up"].

9/11
Danny Schechter, who has some interesting thoughts and theories, has a new piece on Common Dreams about the 911 Truth Movement: ["Conspiracy Theories and the Fight for Truth"]. Since I am halfway through the very novelesque "9/11 Commission Report," I wonder about some of his points:

Some see a conspiracy behind the 9/11 Commission's conspiracy finding, noting that that body was never really independent, It was instead controlled by staff director Phillip Zelikow, a Republican intelligence professional, who had previously worked and co-authored a book with Condoleezza Rice. It was also peopled by Commissioners and staffers with clear conflicts because of their links to policymakers, the defense industry and oil interests. That included Chairman Kean who was, bizarrely enough, tied into a Saudi Arabian oil enterprise run by two Bin Laden relatives. He sold his shares two weeks before he began chairing the Commission. None of that seem to matter at the time because the news coverage was rarely analytical. The Commission's findings were embraced by most of the mainstream media even as the press proved to be out of step with the public. Several public opinion surveys found that as many as half of the people questioned believed the government either wasn't telling the whole story, or had foreknowledge and didn't act, or, worse, had something do with it.

Isn't that amazing? I don't recall ever hearing about this on television or the radio. A lot of this makes you wonder.
Also, I did a google news search of "Jersey Girls" and all I found was a press release for the Friday event on a New Zealand Web site. When I did a google news search on one of the Jersey Girl's name, Lorie Van Auken, I got a press release from the U.S. Newswire, and a couple of older articles: ["Civil libertarians rally to 'fix' Patriot Act"] and "Families press CIA to release Sept. 11 report," of which the link is dead. However, there is no news on google news about the hearing.
When a search was done on "Mindy Kleinberg," two stories came up: ["Mindy Kleinberg's 9-11 Commission Testimony"] and ["9/11 report brought intelligence reforms"], which wasn't about Friday's hearing. Very interesting.