Waiters who worked as suite attendants at the US Open tennis tournaments are suing their catering-company employers for stiffing them on overtime and screwing them out of tips. For many employees, US Open shifts routinely start at 9 a.m. and run through the last set at night. Most were paid $17 hour to operate luxury suites for rich big shots in the blazing heat—but while the catering companies took a 21 percent "service charge" from their posh clientele, that never trickled down to the help, the lawsuit alleges.
[Disclosure: Yours truly spent one hellish August slaving for Restaurant Associates with no tips at the US Open, but after a quick phone call to attorneys, we were told it happened too long ago to cash in on this class action suit. But we look forward to objectively reporting on this lawsuit as it progresses!]
I ran into James Murdoch last night at Minetta Tavern, the movie star joint in the West Village. Murdoch’s chagrin upon seeing me soon passed and he was very gracious toward my son, who had just finished a star turn in his high school musical.
Murdoch is in town, along with all the other big shots from News Corp’s far-flung newspaper empire, at the behest of his father.
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Ron Paul won the CPAC straw poll. Ambers:
Ron Paul crushed--absolutely crushed--all the other GOP big shots on the list except for Mitt Romney, who took a close second. Romney has a history of doing GOTV on big straw polls, but apparently he didn't get an operation in gear to best Paul.
Paul's victory said something about the event, and the type of people who attended it. CPAC was an exposition of ideology and conservative glee, not necessarily political prowess. Ron Paul will probably not be president in 2012; he seems to have no relationship with the tea partiers; he has ceded his conservative stardom to the likes of Sarah Palin.
At least Paul has some core integrity; at least he believes in small government and has long been honest about what he wants to cut; at least he fully understands that continuing an empire with this level of debt is unsustainable and unconservative.
He will continue to be smeared by the more extreme neoconservatives precisely because they see his attempt to unwind an unsustainable neo-empire as an end to open-ended, unconditional support for an increasingly far right and fundamentalist Israel, and its constant wars, threats of wars, continued colonization,and assassinations.
He is not a cynical mannequin like Romney, nor a clinically disturbed fraud like Palin; nor an alleged moderate like Pawlenty now declaring that in government, "God is in charge!" He is real. He is sincere.
Which is why the pundits keep dismissing him. I don't.
(Photo: war criminal vice-president Dick Cheney at CPAC 2010 by Robert Giroux/Getty.)
