Report from the North Idaho Fair Democratic party booth, day 1
This year I'm working two days at the Democratic party booth at the North Idaho Fair. (If you're in the area: I-90 to Idaho exit 12 (US 95 exit), north on US 95 to Kathleen Avenue (Super 1 Foods, Sunset Motors and Parker Toyota are at that corner), right on Kathleen, left on Government Way and you're right there. Three dollars parking, $9 admission, the Democratic Party booth is straight up from the main gate.) Status report follows:
This year our main push is getting people to sign a petition to put an initiative raising the minimum wage in Idaho on next year's ballot. We got a lot of signatures. We also got a lot of people who were in one of two camps: that it should stay the same, or that it should be lowered. Apparently the theory is that if we lower the minimum wage more jobs will be created because employers will be able to spread their payroll around to more people. We'd have to lower it by a bunch to do that. (We had a man who claimed to be an economics professor tell us that. He didn't say where he taught economics; if he would have I could have told you where not to study economics.) We also got a LOT of new voter registrations.
I was serving from 10 am to 2 pm on Thursday when a lot of people are at work, so we didn't get a lot of teabaggers. We did get one and this guy was fuckin' hilarious, in a sad sort of way: One of the teabagger groups in Idaho has produced a book that contains the Idaho and US Constitutions. It's a nice book, printed on good paper with an offset press (yes, I can tell) and perfect-bound with a heavy durable cover. It's even got a foil-stamped cover. He wouldn't give me one and he was carrying four...and I think the reason he wouldn't give me one is he was stupid enough to open the book to Article 1 of the Constitution, point at Sections 8 (powers of Congress) and 9 (limits on Congress), and tell me those sections created a "limited government." I took Constitution in hand and explained to him, very calmly, that a document that allows Congress to levy taxes, borrow money and write any law it deems necessary to provide for the general welfare and common defense of the United States is a document that allows Congress to do, with very limited exceptions, whatever the hell it wants. (I even pointed at the three lines which do that.) At which point the teabagger went into the "original intent" thing and the "Federalist Papers" thing, to which I responded that the people who wrote the Constitution were also the people who wrote the Federalist Papers so they must have had a reason to write the Constitution in the way that they did. That made him madder...it was good for the soul.
= new reply since forum marked as read
