Providence Business News reports  big cuts to wages and health care in the Laborers’ International Union of North American Local 1033’s–the biggest union in town–new contract with the city.  Remember, lower wages and inaccessible health care for union workers means lower wages and inaccessible health care for everyone who works for a living: 

The City of Providence said changes were made to prevent layoffs and maintain job, financial and retirement security for employees (including an 8-percent wage increase over the next 37 months), and are seen as a big step forward in public-employee labor negotiations, according to Mayor David N. Cicilline. With other union contracts coming up, the new deal may serve as a model. . . .    

One change that will have an impact on union workers is an increase in health-care cost co-sharing, which will nearly double over the next four years. Individuals’ cosharing will jump to $1,000 per year from $400, while family plans will see an increase to $1,900 from $900.

 I know there’s a recession on and we’re all suffering, but I can’t help but wonder why Cicilline and some of his well paid staffers,  who make six figures, aren’t stepping up to cut their salaries and take their share of the pain.

Itinerant reader Nathaniel tips us off to this smokin’ hot video of a Bush lobbyist shaking down representatives of Kyrgyzstan’s exiled ex-president for “a couple hundred thousand dollars” in Bush library contributions in exchange for a visit with Dubya.

And that’s legal?? The UK Times says this is a real “row,” which I assume means one more in a series of soul-numbing lessons on the direct relationship between power and corruption. Thanks Lord Acton!

Or perhaps it’s just that Presidential libraries are the ultimate shakedown.

* Dennis Kucinich gets a just little less lonely as Florida Congressman Robert Wexler, of Colbert/Cocaine, and more recently Obama-backing fame, co-sponsors articles of impeachment for Dubya. Maybe he read Vincent Bugliosi’s book?

* Only an Obama-caliber uniter could bridge the gap between sci-fi overlord George Lucas and traditionally conservative Evangelical Christians. Plus, he wears a helmet!

* Scientists create souped-up, 100 mpg Prius; The experimental uber-car is then fed to Truckasaurus.

* Rhode Island schools closed for the heatwave; local students work on “sweat your ass off at home” independent study project.

* Lil Wayne is finally getting his due: an New York Times article praising his emotional vulnerability.

* Google Founder Brin heads to space to meet with Data, Captain Sisko, and swarthy Cosmonauts.

* And, bringing it back to one, President Bush is sorry about all the messed up shit he said; messed up actions still ok, though.

Phrases such as “bring them on” or “dead or alive”, he said, “indicated to people that I was, you know, not a man of peace”.

We did real well, should you be wondering.  Thanks for those who turned out last night.  Our goal is to sure up incumbents and help fight for open seats this election season.  Be on the look out for more activity, and activism, in coming weeks and months.

Who’s that Mark Penn guy that all the TV shows and what not are discussing this week? Yeah that guy.

The one who was until recently the “chief strategist” of the Clinton campaign. The one whose firm has made 14 million dollars from HRC’s campaign so far. That Bill and Hill are furious at not because his giant global PR firm was working for Countrywide and Blackwater, but because he was personally working to build support for a free trade pact with Columbia that HRC opposes and that Bush is fast-tracking. Probably because this is just a reminder that Hillary threw her support of NAFTA under a bus bound for Ohio. The single biggest advocate for an attack-dog strategy that has pumped Hillary’s negatives and compromised the party. The one whose firm’s lobbying arm was run by John McCain’s top strategist. That guy.

Oh him? He’s just this guy. Don’t worry, he’s still totally working for the campaign though. Totally. (more…)

Opposition claims Zimbabwe election victory; Robert Mugabe mum with the “official count” still secret.

Keith Richards is too high to write autobiography, remember life.

Saudi Prince plans mile-high tower in Jeddah. Tower-of-Babel jokes not OK. Penis jokes inevitable.

Russia wants to build a tunnel from Siberia to Alaska, mostly to export their cave-dwelling, anti-credit card and processed food doomsday cult.

As the Olympic torch sets off from Tiananmen Square, German Chancellor Angela Merkel says she’ll boycott the Beijing Games.

Turkish Supreme Court to hear case “to ban the President, Prime Minister and the country’s ruling party on grounds that they’re threatening the constitutionally-mandated secular basis of the state.” Now that’s separation of church and state.

From the Globe:

DARTMOUTH, Mass.—Rhode Island residents last year for the first time spent more money at gambling facilities in their home state than they did in Connecticut.

That’s according to a new study by the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth.

UMass professor Clyde Barrow says Ocean State citizens spent an estimated $271 million at the Twin River and Newport Grand slot parlors in 2007, compared to an estimated $261 million at the Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun casinos in Connecticut.

No, this has nothing to do with the Israel lobby or usury or Wall Street or 47th Street or campaign donations. This, my friends, is about poop.

The Washington Post reports:

JERUSALEM (AP) — Something didn’t smell quite right with a pile of cash discovered Thursday at a sewage purification plant in northern Israel. Shocked workers at the Tiberias plant found about 7,000 shekels ($2,000) of the dirty money, all in 200 shekel bills among the smelly sewage. Israeli TV showed the bills sticking out of sewage and stuck in pipes. The bills were cut in half.

(more…)

First the good news: you know “Kristen”, aka Ashley Alexandra Dupre, the instantly famous call girl who got jiggy with Client #9 on Valentine’s Eve? Turns out she’s a recording artist. And while her myspace page, after being discovered, got a million hits in like an hour and was promptly shut down, Ms. Dupre’s jams are for sale at Amie Street, a content sharing site started by some recent Brown grads and named after a residential block in Fox Point!

Check it:

Ashley Alexandra Dupré, a struggling singer, uploaded a new track to Amie Street, an online music-seller, hours after she was exposed as the prostitute Kristen talking on tape about the disgraced Eliot Spitzer.

Ms Dupré apparently hopes to cash in on her notoriety with sales of her CD Unspoken Words. At about midnight local time on Wednesday she logged on to the website to upload Move Ya Body, a second track from the album. Move Ya Body and the first track, Can You Handle Me, Boy?, quickly surged to the site’s maximum price of 98 cents, based on popular demand. Before the news broke, Can You Handle Me, Boy? had been selling at 9 cents. “This is definitely the most traffic we have had,” Joshua Boltuch, a spokesman, told The Times. He said that the demand- driven prices of her songs had risen just as fast as or faster than major artists selling through the site.

In other news, Wonkette recently discovered that prostitution is legal in Rhode Island. It’s true! (more…)

America’s favorite past-time ( no, not $1000/hr prostitutes) has taken yet another hit recently, this time in Rhode Island’s heartland, Cumberland. An alleged swindler had allegedly bilked 11 Northern RI families out of some $35,000 after he claimed to be a former minor league players with connections to the Baltimore Orioles.

Heartbreaking aspect number one: this dude secured loans from local parents to help him start the “Field of Dreams Baseball Academy,” a scheme at which one must gasp for its cruel exploitation of a heartwarming story about lost youth and the great game to steal from hardworking Cumberlanders. Heartbreaking aspect number two: He has been doing this all across the country.

There is no joy in Mudville, or the Blackstone Valley in this case, for this dude. (more…)

And letting me know if it’s a joke or not?  Mine eyes are broke:

WHEN WAS the last time that you had any need for a $100 bill or perhaps a $50 bill? Indeed, most purchases that Americans conduct over $20 are in the form of a check, wire transfer, credit or debit card. This begs the question, who has the need for the $100 bill?

The answer is clear — the underground economy and criminal economy thrive on paper cash, especially the $100 bill. Drug dealers, criminals, terrorists, illegal immigrants, smugglers, human traffickers, tax evaders and corrupt government employees all rely on paper cash, especially the $100 bill.

Not in the headline: Tuition will increase for higher income students. Yay, redistribution! Huge move for Brown, keeping itself competitive for our nation’s best and brightest students.

The NYT has the story:

Brown University is eliminating tuition for students whose parents earn less than $60,000, after decisions by fellow Ivy League universities to bolster financial aid as their endowments grow.

The university, in Providence, R.I., said on Saturday that it also planned to substitute grants for student loans in the financial aid packages of students whose families earned less than $100,000 a year. The new program cuts reliance on loans for all students regardless of family income, the university said in a statement posted on its Web site.

Brown also announced plans to increase tuition by 3.9 percent for the 2008-9 academic year to $36,928. With room and board, the costs are $47,740 for one year.

Brown’s admission policies favor Rhode Island students, and one has to imagine that this policy is going to help RI students who are admitted but unable to fathom being yoked by a six-figure student loan package.

I could have sworn Ginsu knives were from Japan, but apparently they are a homegrown commodity: Indeed, it was Rhode Islanders who “slapped a faux-Japanese name onto a cheap serrated knife and used TV infomercials to turn it into a ubiquitous brand parodied by Saturday Night Live.”

State Rep. David Caprio is proposing we honor this forgotten chapter in our shared history by re-naming a quarter-mile stretch of road in a Warwick office park “Ginsu Way.” (more…)

More specifically, on the economic stimulus package that La Bushe just signed into them thar law-books. This seems to mean that he won’t be running for President, probably, because no one who’s running for President would badmouth cutting $600 checks to American workers. Right?

Some money quotes:

“They want to send out a check to everybody to stimulate the economy. I suppose it won’t hurt the economy but it’s in many senses like giving a drink to an alcoholic.” AND…

“America has a balance sheet that’s starting to look more and more like a third-world country.”

Ouch Mikey! Quit it! Also, Barack Obama proposed a New Deal-style $60 Billion “ National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank to rebuild highways, bridges, airports and other public projects,” which Bloomberg likes.

$2800, to be exact. It’s standard practice for big-money donors to funnel yet more dough by having their spouses, kids, extended family and dead grandma give that campaign ca$hmoney. But you’ve got to wonder if the people whose names end up in the FEC database really support their candidates.

This is a tricky area, because there are certainly young people who just plain have an a$$load of money and can max out to campaigns. But there are also young people who don’t have that money, but whose parents give it to them so they can give to the campaign, which is essentially what Norman Hsu and other shady bundlers did, except with defrauded business partners instead of his children. When kids are just giving because their parents have maxed out, it seems icky.

I know Quizno’s legal department probably has a lot on their hands already, but I think I have no choice but to sue. Popping into their new Dorrance street location I noticed their new flatbread “sammies” being advertised in the window. I don’t want to be a jerk about this, but I invented the word “sammie” to describe a sandwich. To add insult to injury, when I brought this up with the employees there, and told them they owed me money, they laughed in my face. This means war.

I’ll be joined in my suit by rock band The Sammies, R-and-B crooner Sammie, featured above, elderly Samoyed group Silver Sammies, and my college room-mates, who also coined the word sammie as applied to sandwiches. Anyone else?

Quizno’s: You have been warned. Cut chex and get it over with.