Tuesday, July 11th, 2006...5:50 pm
John Edwards
Okay…I took pictures at the minimum wage rally at the IBEW hall yesterday. This is one of the better pictures I got, because, as Supervisor Richard Elias said, I was standing in the back with the “sweaty people.”
Of course, sweaty people is what this was all about: people that dig our ditches, change our bed pans and serve us our hamburgers. The rally was in support of an initiative that would raise our minimum wage to $6.75 an hour.
John Edwards’s line that was quoted over and over again:
I’d like to see that crowd in Washington that votes against raising the minimum wage try to live on $5.15 an hour.
Point taken. By the way, Senator Jon Kyl voted against raising the minimum wage (six times!), but voted for a hike in his own pay.
Speakers included AFL-CIO official Rebecca Friend, Sen. Gabrielle Giffords, Jim Pederson, Rep. Raúl Grijalva and even Rep. Steve Gallardo drove down from Phoenix to speak to the crowd. Gallardo has introduced minimum wage bills at the legislature, but they don’t get a hearing. So much for “working class conservatives.”
KVOA teased the story by waying that “Raising the minimum wage may be a ‘no brainer’…”, which was Pederson’s line at the rally. From the teaser, it made it sound like there were all sorts of aggrieved buisinessmen in town that hate raising the minimum wage. Instead, the story featured two buisinessmen, one who supported the wage hike, and the other that had concerns but didn’t seen that opposed. So, if KVOA (not exactly a bastion of labor activism) couldn’t find any buisiness opposition, why do Republicans keep voting against it?
By the way, the speech was wide ranging. It was as if, I dunno, Edwards was running for office. Naw, can’t be.
NB - The Star printed a quote from a flack for the Goldwater Institute:
Do you think King George was giving handouts to the American colonists?
Hm…I don’t know how many American Colonists King George employed, and I don’t know if they worked for minimum wage.
1 Comment
July 12th, 2006 at 9:34 am
I am so confused. What the heck was Olsen trying to say there? She wants the US to become more like the monarchical colony it used to be? Huh?
Those people put the irony in the term ‘think tank.’