Strib Vote: Posturing or Principle?

Guild vote no circus act: Upon news of the Strib Guild’s 110-to-2 vote calling for Par Ridder’s resignation, newspaper chairman Chris Harte said, “This vote is merely union posturing, and it changes nothing.” Reached last night, Guild chair Chris Serres challenged Harte to define what he meant by posturing. “This rose up through the rank and file,” he told me. “If it was [posturing] we would’ve done it a different way. We would’ve had bullhorns and been out on the street. We would’ve invited TV crews. We could’ve organized a circus-like atmosphere. We chose not to.”

PiPress lays off Circ. staff: Before yesterday’s announcement of the reduction of its staff by another 30 people, including 15 newsroom buyouts, the Pioneer Press quietly laid off four circulation district supervisors. One was a 10-year newspaper veteran and a National Guard member recently returned from his second deployment. “Curtiss Jones’ first tour overseas, from February through July 2003, included a stint in Iraq,” writes the PiPress Guild’s Lucy Quinlivan. “He returned to work from his second deployment, which took him to Afghanistan, in early April. Today, he’s in the market for a job.”

Savage Irony: The man who called progressives “the brownshirts of today” is taking aim at Rep. Keith Ellison for remarks that compares the Bush administration’s post-9/11 power grab to Hitler’s regime following the Reichstag fire. On a recent edition of The Savage Nation, Michael Savage said, “So now Keith Ellison now calls Bush Hitler, thereby degrading what was done to the people by Hitler and diminishing what was done to the people by Hitler,” Media Matters reports. Savage also said, “[W]hat would a devout Muslim radical have in common with atheists? Answer: hatred of Christianity and hatred of Jews.”