Senator changes views after son comes out as corporation

Senator Glassman’s son, an oil company

(Reuters) – Senator Bob Glassman became the most prominent Democratic lawmaker to back corporate rights when he reversed his opposition to corporate personhood on Friday, two years after he discovered his son is a major oil company.

In a newspaper opinion piece on Friday, shortly before the Supreme Court is to hear arguments in two key cases on the issue, the New York senator said he now supports full political power for corporations.

“I have come to believe that if a corporation is prepared to make a business commitment to employ teams of lobbyists in good times and in bad, the government shouldn’t deny them the opportunity to influence legislation,” Glassman wrote in an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal.

“That isn’t how I’ve always felt. As a Congressman, and more recently as a Senator, I opposed political rights for corporations. Then, something happened that led me to think through my position in a much deeper way.”

Glassman’s 21-year-old son, Conoco Phillips, told the senator and his wife in February 2011 that he was a major multinational energy corporation and had been “since he could remember.”

The lawmaker’s revelation makes him the only sitting Democratic senator to publicly support full corporate personhood, and one of the most prominent so far of a growing number of Democrats to publicly oppose their party on the issue.

In a series of interviews and an op-ed article published in The New York Times, Mr. Glassman, at times nervously wringing his hands, said that he did not want his son, who had a revenue of nearly 6.5 billion dollars in 2012, treated any differently because of his corporate status.

“I’ve come to the conclusion that for me, personally, I think this is something that we should allow people, including corporations, to do, to make donations, take part in the political process, and even vote,” he told CNN. “That I want all of my children to have, including our son, who is a legal entity with a market cap of $72B.”

His position drew a cool response from some quarters and puts him at odds with his party’s leaders in Congress, who have long looked at him as a faithful progressive and loyal ally. A spokesman for Majority Leader Harry Reid said Friday that while Mr. Reid “respects” Mr. Glassman’s position, “the majority leader continues to believe that corporate control of government should not be openly acknowledged.”

The morning’s news

I went to The Gym this morning for the first time in ages, so I was exposed to and can report on the Morning News Programs.

The TV most directly in front of me, tuned to that peacock network, had a long in-depth story about how beautiful Miss Alabama 2012, who is also the girlfriend of some football player or something, is, and how some sports reporter thought she was beautiful; it featured extensive footage of her being beautiful and an exclusive interview with her about how beautiful she is.

This was followed by breaking YouTube footage of a fat guy falling down alot trying to do yoga.

To the left of that TV was one tuned to that Eye of Sauron network, with a hard-hitting report about how cute and cuddly giant pandas are.

And over to the right, beyond a few TVs with just people talking and car commercials, on a network whose totem I didn’t catch, was a supermodel explaining that one should not “sweat the number on the scale”, but should apply argan oil directly to the hair, face, and body.

(Presumably it’s also good, for this purpose, to be in a job where one can spend upwards of forty hours a week on making oneself look hawt.)

But that is just TV.

The real news is that, in the back of the Lego store, past all of the boxed Lego sets designed to let you build something that someone else thought of, there is a big wall of bins where you can make your own Lego set a la carte, in a little plastic tub!

A mere US$7.99; a bargain at half the price! (The larger tub, not shown here, is like US$14.99 or something.)

Here are the parts I chose:

Yes, a bit vehicle-oriented, but sometimes one must choose.

And the first experimental result:

I have them at work now, for when my brain needs to flow in different channels for awhile… :)