Midday open thread

I hope you are all enjoying this extended Labor Day weekend! Say, you did know that the only reason we have weekends at all is because of the labor movement? Not that I'll be doing any labor this weekend because this thread is about to board a plane to Hawai'i. To the links!

• Not good news:

  A longtime Democratic campaign treasurer who has worked for dozens of state, federal and local politicians in California has been arrested on suspicion of mail fraud, officials said Saturday.

  Kinde Durkee, who heads Durkee & Associates in Burbank, was arrested Friday afternoon by the FBI on a criminal complaint filed by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Sacramento, said U.S. Attorney's Office spokesman Thom Mrozek. No further details were available.

  Durkee isn't just any treasurer. In addition to doing campaign treasury services for Senator Feinstein and other federal officials. Durkee's firm handles the accounts for a boatload of Democratic County Committees and clubs across California. How much disruption this could cause is open to question.

• Everyone should remember that Rick Perry has worked very hard to ensure that Texas executes innocent people.
• Kevin Drum writing at Mother Jones makes an excellent point:

  Here's what gets me. Perry's views are getting denounced by all the usual lefty suspects but not much by anyone else. And the reason for this is something very odd: In modern America, conservatives are largely given a pass for saying crazy things. They're just not taken seriously, in a boys-will-be-boys kind of way. It's almost like everyone accepts this kind of stuff as a kind of religious liturgy, repeated regularly with no real meaning behind it. They're just the words you use to prove to the base that you're really one of them.

  Why is this? I'm not quite sure what the left-wing equivalent of this would be, but it would be something along the lines of Hillary Clinton writing a book that proposed repealing the 2nd Amendment and adding one that banned hate speech; limiting defense spending to 2 percent of GDP; raising the top marginal tax rate back to 90 percent on millionaires and 100 percent on anything above, say, $10 million; instituting British-style national health care; and spending half a trillion dollars on new programs for universal preschool, two-year paid leaves for new parents, and an increase in the minimum wage to $15 per hour. But in real life, Dennis Kucinich wouldn't support a platform like this, let alone a front-runner for the presidential nomination. And if one did, he or she would be instantly tarred as an insane nutball and would never see the business end of a TV camera again.

  But when Republicans say the mirror image of stuff like this, it just gets a shrug. Sure, Perry apparently wants to roll things back to about 1900 or so. But hey?it's just a way of firing up the troops. Nothing to be taken seriously.

  But why not?

• Thinking about law school? You'd better be dedicated:

  Post-graduate employment rates are at their lowest levels in 15 years. The typical student leaves school nearly $100,000 in debt. And after several years of recession-driven enrollment gains, applications to law schools nationwide are down nearly 10 percent this year.

  The sobering statistics have prompted plenty of soul-searching in the legal academy, with calls for schools to provide more accurate job-placement data as well as efforts by some law schools to admit fewer students to avoid dumping a glut of newly minted J.D.s onto an unforgiving job market.

• The Rebuild the Dream movement generated over 400 protests during the month of August. Not that you'd know, because unless it's ten people at a rally labeled "tea party" then media won't cover it.

Source: http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/JeVQTCJCS24/-Midday-open-thread

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