DL Open Thread: Sunday, August 20, 2023
Gretchen Whitmer Scours Red States For Workers And Employers. My preferred choice for President:
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) has been promoting her state as a place that respects freedom ― as in, the ability to control what happens to your body, who you love, or how you identify yourself.
Now Whitmer is taking that message directly to some states where those freedoms are under assault.
Last week, the Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC) launched a digital ad campaign touting the state’s commitment to inclusiveness and personal liberty. Its target is a half-dozen mostly Southern states where Republicans are in charge and have passed laws restricting abortion, LGBTQ+ rights or both.
MEDC says it has spent $30,000 on the ads, which the agency described as an “initial buy” with the possibility of more to come. The intended audiences are online readers in Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Tennessee, Texas and South Carolina ― a list that’s hardly random, according to Robert Leddy, Whitmer’s director of communications.
Leddy told HuffPost that MEDC and the governor’s office picked those states because they satisfied two key criteria. They are competing with Michigan to woo large new employers, and their officials “have taken action to restrict people’s rights, or have legislation currently in the works, or have talked about doing so.”
The brain drain continues. Y’know, Delaware could do the same thing. Quick, someone wake up John Carney.
When Tom Waits Stopped Drinking. Yes, saved by a good woman:
On Tom Waits’s 1983 album, Swordfishtrombones, there is, in among a lot of fabulously unhinged musical experimentation (Tony Bennett described the record as “a guy in an ashcan sending messages”), a 90-second ballad of such tender beauty that it explains all the rest. The song was written for Waits’s wife, Kathleen Brennan – “She’s my only true love/ She’s all that I think of, look here/In my wallet/That’s her” – and named after the town, Johnsburg, Illinois, in which Brennan grew up. The pair had got together on the set of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1981 film One from the Heart, for which Waits was writing the music and Brennan editing the script, and had married a couple of months later at 1am at the 24-hour Always Forever Yours Wedding Chapel in Los Angeles.
The union liberated Waits from what may have appeared his inevitable fate: of the ultimate bar-room balladeer who descends into dissolution and obscurity. The singer had spent the first decade or so of his career toying with that possibility, living partly in the Tropicana motel on Sunset Boulevard, or in his car, a 1955 Buick, writing and singing about dereliction and doomed love, and playing up to a reputation for “wasted and wounded” chaos. For the first time, having met Brennan, he said: “I now believe in happy endings.” The experimentation of Swordfishtrombones was the first expression of that faith. “My life was getting more settled,” Waits recalled. “I was staying out of bars. But my work was becoming more scary.”
Swordfishtrombones and Rain Dogs are two of my fave albums of all time. Kathleen Brennan is/was his artistic collaborator. A wonderful union in every sense of the word.
How ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) Floods States With Pro-Corporate Bills. Including Delaware. From Claire Snyder-Hall:
Many people probably think that U.S. politics have moved away from backroom deals cut in darkened rooms, but ALEC is proof that that is not the case. The council is a powerful group, billed as a nonprofit, that brings state lawmakers and corporate lobbyists together to collaborate in secret on model legislation.
Its member corporations pay large sums of money to gain direct access to state lawmakers, who are wined and dined at high-end venues and provided with lobbyist-written “model bills” that advance corporate agendas. These ALEC-backed legislators then rush those bills through their statehouses and churning out laws that enrich corporations — and often hurt the rest of us. This makes state legislators look productive, while also advancing the interests of big corporations and right-wing extremists, like the Koch brothers.
Every year, lawmakers across the country introduce thousands of bills plotted and written by corporations and industry groups. A 2019 investigation by USA Today, The Arizona Republic and The Center for Public Integrity found that “10,000 bills almost entirely copied from model legislation were introduced nationwide (from 2011-19), and more than 2,100 of those bills were signed into law.”
It used to be that legislators got compensated for travel to ALEC conferences. I don’t think that’s the case any more, but I don’t know for sure. However, when you hear the term ‘model legislation’, be sure to ask who crafted the model. It could well be the enemy.
‘Long-Time Lurker, First-Time Tipster’: When I sent out an APB for drag queens who might choose to read for us during the Arden Library’s ‘Banned Books Month’ in October, I was pretty optimistic. My optimism was indeed rewarded. Turns out I know one of the drag queens, and it also turns out that the tipster’s mom was great friends with my aunt. Only in Delaware!
What do you want to talk about?
