Over the last three weeks, Gov. Scott Walker and his allies in the Wisconsin Legislature made a mockery of representative government. Rather than listen to the citizens of Wisconsin, who are strongly opposed to stripping teachers, nurses and other workers of their rights, Walker rammed through a bill that was a blatant political payback to his out-of-state major campaign donors and cronies, who have sought for years to crush the aspirations of workers who dare to demand a voice in the workplace. This charade culminated when Walker shredded 50 years of labor peace, built through bipartisanship and a democratic process, and signed a bill into law against the wishes of a majority of the voters in Wisconsin.

The governor may have won a short-term political victory, but history and Wisconsin voters won't be so kind. Power exercised without discretion and prudence is corrupting. And based on Gov. Walker's actions -- his underhanded maneuvering to get the bill passed, his misrepresentations that the bill was part of reducing the budget deficit, and his manipulation of the process so the bill could be brought to a vote -- it is clear that the process was indeed corrupting. The people of Wisconsin watched this sorry spectacle and took to the streets to protest it. It was deeply unpopular, and record numbers of Wisconsinites are signing recall petitions to force Republican state senators to stand for election again to defend why they stripped workers of their rights. As brazen as Walker was by stripping workers of their rights in the workplace, he can't strip their democratic right to check his abuse of power at the ballot box.

More...

I've just been released from the stocks set up on the red carpet outside the Kodak Theatre. As penance for ranting about two significant flaws in the palace tapestries (see my two most recent flogs), today I shall ponder the reason why we are so enchanted, notwithstanding the imperfections of the king's tailor, by the fabric of its story. Underneath that fabric is a heart that beats in sympathy with Dr. Jung and Dr. Campbell. You won't see their names in the credit roll, but their sway may be detected just behind the arras.

The movie rests its royal head on the satin pillow of a fairytale premise: every sorcerer in the kingdom is charged to cure the prince's stammer, to lift the evil curse placed on him at birth. Then, just when the prince's patience is exhausted with gimmickry and patent formulas, he commands that the search be halted. This is when the noble but suffering hero is usually in danger of losing heart (at a similar moment a frightened and confused Dorothy meets Glinda in Oz). But hark, a lowly toad-like healer from a far-off land ministering with unorthodox spells has been discovered by his princess in a Harley Street basement. Much is at stake here. If the prince's stammer is magically cured, the curse at long last lifted, the prince will be crowned king, and his kingdom will successfully ward off the attack of the fiercest dragon ever to face his people.

More...

Editor's note: "Next Steps for the Anti-Mountaintop Removal Movement" will be a series of interviews with affected residents and activists in the central Appalachian coalfields region, including West Virginia leader Bo Webb, Kentuckian Teri Blanton, Kathy Selvage in Virginia, Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson in Tennessee, and Appalachian Voices legislative aide JW Randolph in Washington, DC. While the EPA scrambles to enforce the Clean Water Act and a Republican-controlled Congress attemps to defund strip-mining regulatory measures, and various state agencies continue to be embroiled in Big Coal machinations, millions of pounds of devastating explosives are detonated daily across mountain communities in central Appalachia. As a national movement, what should anti-mountaintop removal activists do next?

Living underneath a mountaintop removal mining operation in the Coal River Valley in West Virginia, Bo Webb has emerged as one of the most important frontline voices in the coalfield justice movement. Winner of the Purpose Prize last year, this coal miner's son has met with and lobbied EPA and OSMRE officials and members of Congress, made personal appeals to President Obama, co-founded the Mountain Justice movement with Judy Bonds and many others, worked with the Coal River Mountain Watch organization, and organized and led numerous protests, marches and health care campaigns in West Virginia and Washington, DC.

More...

It is difficult to be an American Jewish organization advocating support for Israel today. On the one hand, there is the staunch belief that Israel must be defended at all costs, and that any division will expose a weakness in the united Jewish front. On the other, American Jews traditionally advocate progressive policies in domestic and global affairs, which seemingly contradict their hard-line stances in support of an Israeli government that is apt to reject such liberalism. At a time when Israel is led by a government that is steering it toward unending conflict, and whose actions are threatening Israel's Jewish and democratic nature, much of the American Jewish community today is merely echoing the Netanyahu government's talking points. While unity has kept the Jewish world strong throughout the Diaspora, if it is perpetuated through blind support of misguided policies, it could severely undermine Israel's national security in the name of misplaced sense of unity.

The instinct to unify is one that is ingrained in Jews the world over. This heritage of unity goes back not only generations, but millennia. Divisions among the early Israelites are cited as key factors leading to the destruction of the First and Second Temples of ancient Jerusalem. The expulsion of the Hebrews from the Holy Land, and their dispersal throughout the Middle East and Europe, provided the impetus for the elevated importance of Jewish community for centuries. Whether by choice or by force, Jewish communities banded together to survive the Spanish Inquisition, the pogroms of Eastern Europe and, of course, the Holocaust and the eventual creation of the Yishuv in what would become the State of Israel. Jewish holidays like Hanukkah and Purim celebrate the success of the Jewish people being saved from the threat of destruction, others like Tisha B'av and Yom Ha'shoah commemorate those periods when Jews failed to do so.

More...

For decades, engaged Christians have espoused a prophetic politics that combines personal conversion and efforts to transform society. We have seen faith-based groups move from outreach-style charity or "service" to much more politically engaged forms of advocacy and organizing around social justice issues. The time has come for a new generation of prophets to rise up in America. These prophets will certainly be charitable and have a servant's heart, but they will be engaged in a new kind of prophetic work: empowering communities to develop their potential as public problem solvers. They will join with others to move beyond advocacy to the active work of building thriving, diverse communities, empowering institutions, and a society not defined by consumerism and upward mobility.

This prophetic work is informed by lessons from the biblical story of Nehemiah and from the freedom movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The story of Nehemiah shows a skillful politician who gained permission from the king of Persia in 446 B.C. to return to Jerusalem in order to lead the Jews in rebuilding the city walls, after years of laying in ruin. Nehemiah's leadership was different than the model of Moses leading the people out of slavery in Egypt or Solomon dispensing wisdom. Nehemiah did not undertake the effort of rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem by first setting forth a program on which everyone agreed. Nor did he formulate a detailed theory of wall-rebuilding. No doubt, he could have listed many reasons not to entrust the building efforts to the people themselves. After all, where were the "experts"? What could a delicate-handed goldsmith know of bricks and mortar? How could bands of women and children be as effective in construction as Persian engineers? Fortunately, Nehemiah had a deeper understanding of expertise, efficiency and the meaning of what he called "the good work."

More...

"Tennessee loved his women," Rex Reed said of Tennessee Williams who was born 100 years ago today. "He didn't want to sleep with them, he exalted them in a completely different way." Legendary actresses who brought Williams' characters to life held court with Reed in a panel opening the 25th annual Tennessee Williams New Orleans Literary Festival. As fans mourn the death of Elizabeth Taylor who played Maggie in Cat in the film version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, actresses Shirley Knight, Carroll Baker and Zoe Caldwell shared their recollections of Williams with Reed in a panel discussion at Le Petit Theatre.

All three actresses told Reed they did not start out wanting to be movie stars, almost unheard of in today's celebrity-maddened culture. Baker (pictured at left) described walking away from a successful film career in America and moving to Italy with her two children and $8,000 in the bank. She made a life there. Williams visited her once a year telling her every time, "I haven't seen you in ages!" Starting out in show business as a young magician with a difficult working relationship with her rabbit eventually led to a switch to an acting career. "I did not like that rabbit," Baker said. Advance publicity posters from Baby Doll raised a holy furor before her movie Giant had came out, and Baker described her first experience with the press: an AP reporter calling to ask for her response to Cardinal Spellman denouncing her role from the pulpit at St. Patrick's Cathedral. "Which film?" she asked. Rumors at the time ran rampant, and at one point, "They said I really slept in a crib!" All in all, she would rather have been an anthropologist.

More...

Over the past months we have been watching those who live in the Mideast and North Africa protest in an effort to obtain the vote. In Egypt, after 18 days of protest in Cairo's Tahrir Square, to avoid bloodshed President Hosni Mubarak stepped down from the position he had held for nearly 30 years. In Libya, dictator since a 1969 military coup Muammar Gaddafi (aka Moammar Gadhafi) chose bloodshed and NATO commenced its missile bombardment. Meanwhile, in California a battle continues over whether to allow the people to vote whether to continue the current state rates for income, sales and vehicle registration taxes or receive reduced state services like education of our children and security on our streets.

Through a majority legislative vote, California could continue the current tax rates, but Governor Brown chose to allow the people to decide whether to continue the current rates in a statewide vote. To have a vote, two-thirds of the state senate and two-thirds of the state assembly must approve placing this issue on the ballot. In an effort to meet the two-thirds requirement, the governor has been speaking with a handful of Republicans who are standing up to right-wing threats and meeting with the governor. Conservative Republican spokesmen have labeled the Republicans who are speaking with the Governor as the "Rogue Five." According to the Los Angeles Times, right-wing Republicans are threatening "the political death penalty for any GOP lawmaker who compromises with Brown and dares vote to call a special election on taxes." Republican spokesman Jon Fleischman urges Republicans "to stand in solidarity with overtaxed Californians, and to stop offering to place higher taxes on the ballot."

More...

CORE spokesman Niger Innis should not find it absurd or insulting that workers and community allies around this country will stand up on April 4, 2011, on the 43rd anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, to show support for workers in states around this country -- like Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio and Michigan -- whose rights to bargain are under attack by anti-worker governors and legislators. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spent the last day of his life speaking out against those who would deny workers the right to collectively bargain. Yes, it was African American sanitation workers in Memphis on April 4, 1968, but Dr. King never left any doubt that he was a proponent of worker rights, not black worker rights, or white worker rights, but worker rights.

Professor Michael K. Honey reminds us in his book All Labor Has Dignity that during the last year of his life, King put justice for poor and working-class people at the center of his agenda. He challenged the country to create an economy of full employment or, lacking that, a tax system that ensured a decent level of income for every American. In Memphis, he renewed his faith in people's movements and found a powerful constituency of the working poor organized into a union-community alliance. In going to Memphis, King returned to an issue he had fought for all of his life: the right of working people to organize unions of their own choosing, free of employer harassment and police intimidation. Unions, he underscored, were the "first anti-poverty program," and they should be accessible to all who work for wages.

More...

It's a famous photo: President Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir are posed together on the overlook at Glacier Point in 1903. Roosevelt stares directly at the camera, looking like he wants to bust a bronco and play a polo match at the same time. Muir, dressed like a well-heeled hobo, gazes off toward the mountains. It was during this three-night camping trip in Yosemite that Muir persuaded Roosevelt that his beloved Yosemite should be a national park -- protected and managed by the federal government for all Americans.

It's too bad we don't still lobby presidents that way because the results were stupendous. By the time Roosevelt left office six years later, he'd helped create 150 national forests, five national parks, and 18 national monuments -- an unparalleled legacy of lands protection for an American president. And for the next hundred years, that legacy served us well.

Now, though, it's time for an update, and that's exactly what the Obama administration has been working on for most of the past year. The interagency initiative is called "America's Great Outdoors," and the first published report on their work is subtitled: "A Promise to Future Generations." A lot of it talks about ways to strengthen and deepen the connection that Americans have with the outdoors -- something Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir would enthusiastically have endorsed. But the report also digs deep into how we can best conserve our nation's incredible natural heritage in a world that neither Muir nor Roosevelt could ever have imagined.

More...

The woman in history who has meant the most to me was a thirteen year-old girl when she began the diary about which John Kennedy wrote, "Of all the multitudes who throughout history have spoken for human dignity in times of great suffering and loss, no voice is more compelling than that of Anne Frank." With German Jews trapped in Amsterdam by the Nazi occupation, the Frank family went into hiding in an attic annex, and it was there that Anne secretly recorded her dreams and sorrows. In doing so, she gave voice to the victims of the Holocaust. She has become a hero and an icon, an example of a time when fascism and brutality set out to destroy a people, but she was also a very human Jewish girl who longed to be a writer.

The Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg wrote that in Anne Frank "one voice speaks for six million -- the voice not of a sage or a poet but of an ordinary little girl." But for me, Anne Frank was both sage and poet, as she was most especially for young Jewish girls who read The Diary of a Young Girl, published in the US in 1951. This harrowing account of the Frank family and their neighbors has sold more than 30 million copies and been published in more than sixty languages, yet it is perhaps the most intimate book ever written, filled with a young girl's sorrows and dreams, and above all else, filled with faith and hope. In what is perhaps the most famous quote from the diary, Anne writes, "Despite everything I believe that people are really good at heart" and in May 26th, 1944 Anne made this note in her diary: "We still love life, we haven't forgotten the voice of nature. And we keep hoping, hoping for... everything." Anne and her sister Margot died of typhus at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945, and yet for a reader she is achingly alive

More...

I am on my way to Fort Myers for spring break, currently in the air over the Carolinas, I would guess. It will be one of the last of many journeys -- both great and small -- that I have taken over the past two decades to watch my daughters play softball. It is hard to believe that this spring season, which looks promising for this year's team, may be the last time I enjoy this particular parenting experience.

My younger daughter is the captain of a struggling and unsung Division III softball team. She plays catcher, a new position she picked up last year when the previous year's catcher graduated and it looked like there would be a hole in the lineup. Nobody on this team has a scholarship to play softball, which is the rule for Division III. There are no prima donnas and lots of good friends; the camaraderie, in constrast to the win-loss record, is remarkable. One player just got off her crutches; another has a torn ACL and is going to spring training just to be with the team. The coach is a diminutive young woman with a big heart and great skills in working with college girls. This is her first year with this team and the players love her and rave about the spirit she brings. If any coach can get this team to the post season, she can. I am glad my daughter's last season is with a great coach, for this season will be remembered. That many coaches over the years have not been great is an understatement that too many parents would agree with.

More...

Good morning everyone and welcome to another mega-crisis packed edition of your Sunday Morning Liveblog. My name is Jason, and guess what! We add this weekend another sort of/kind of war to our lives/debt/childrens' responsibilities after we've all died/lives this weekend. It's getting to be a St. Patrick's Day tradition, I guess. No we are helping to enforce a no fly zone over Libya, which is a pretty nice thing to be doing for these rebels, who only a few years ago were joining up with the insurgency in Iraq to enforce a "y'all die zone." But this time I bet we're going to become fast friends. (Like we've become with Bahrain, also known as "take all those proud feelings about the United States standing up for freedom and human rights in Libya and turn them inside out, and vomit into them" Bahrain.

It's all terribly complicated and depressing! So why not compound it today by watching these terrible shows? Just to demonstrate the escalating nature of crisis, I'd note that just before we started Tomahawk missiling Libya, Steven Chu was going to be doing the Full Ginsnurg today, probably to tell us all that the nuclear radiation plumes coming from Japan were not going to kill us (that's what the undersea Cloverfield monsters are going to do). Instead we have Admiral Mike Mullen doing all the shows today, because we're bombing the crudites out of Libya, now.

More...

Karl Giberson, a physicist on the faculty at Eastern Nazarene College, and Francis Collins, the head of the NIH, have a new book out, The Language of Science and Faith: Straight Answers to Genuine Questions. Given that they are both committed Christians, as well as totally convinced that modern science is essentially right and good, the book is intended to defend Christianity against the critics who argue that science and religion are incompatible. Expectedly, it has got all of the junior New Atheists jumping with joyous ire, and all over the blogs are stern condemnations: "this is not a good book"; "the authors's [sic] frequently murky prose"; "I was struck by just how unserious they are on this issue." You get the idea.

I am not about to defend Giberson and Collins -- although I do think that the latter, a man whose life is devoted to the welfare not just of his fellow Americans but of human beings everywhere, has in the past, because of his faith, been subject to criticisms that strike me as vitriolic to the point of obscenity. (And if you think I am referring to the treatment in Sam Harris's The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, you would not be far wrong.)

More...

by Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium blogger

Faced with the nuclear crisis in Japan, governments around the world are confronting the vulnerabilities of their nuclear energy programs. And while some European countries, such as Germany and France, are already considering more stringent safety measures--or backing off of nuclear development altogether--in the United States, the Obama administration is pushing forward with plans for increased nuclear energy production.

Ultimately, these questions are the same that the country faced after last summer's Gulf Coast oil spill. As we search for more and more clever ways to fill our energy needs, can we write off the risk of disaster? Or are these large-scale catastrophes so inevitable that the only option is to stop pursuing the policies that lead to them?

The risks of nuclear

As Inter Press Service's Andrea Lund reports, anti-nuclear groups are using the Japanese disaster as just one example of the disadvantages of nuclear power. Linda Gunter, of the group Beyond Nuclear, told Lund:

Even if you get away from the safety issue, which is obviously front and centre right now because of what's happening in Japan, and you look at solutions to climate change, then nuclear energy takes way too long to build, reactors take years to come online, they're wildly expensive. Most of the burden of the cost will fall on the U.S. taxpayer in this country, so why go there?...The possibility of it going radically wrong, the outcome is so awful that morally you can't justify it. The reliability of nuclear power is practically zero in an emergency when you have this confluence of natural disasters.

And, as Maureen Nandini Mitra writes at Earth Island Journal, there are plenty of nuclear plants that are at risk. "More than 100 of the world's reactors are already sited in areas of high seismic activity," she reports. "And what's happening in Japan makes one thing clear - we have absolutely no idea if any of these plants are actually capable of withstanding unprecedented natural disasters."

Build up

The irony of nuclear energy is that the world started relying on it in part to mitigate the perceived threat of nuclear weapons. Jonathan Schell writes in The Nation about nuclear power's transition from warheads to reactors:

A key turning point was President Dwight Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace proposal in 1953, which required nuclear-armed nations to sell nuclear power technology to other nations in exchange for following certain nonproliferation rules. This bargain is now enshrined in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which promotes nuclear power even as it discourages nuclear weapons....

Eisenhower needed some proposal to temper his growing reputation as a reckless nuclear hawk. Atoms for Peace met this need. The solution to nuclear danger, he said, was "to take this weapon out of the hands of the soldiers" and put it "into the hands of those who will know how to strip its military casing and adapt it to the arts of peace"--chiefly, those who would use it to build nuclear power plants.

While the threat of nuclear war still looms, since World War II, the nuclear materials that have caused the most damage have been those in the energy industry. And, as Schell reminds us, soldiers still have nuclear weapons in hand, as well.

The nuclear era

The Obama administration has always been gung-ho about nuclear energy: The president is from Illinois, after all, where Exelon Corp., one of the countries' biggest nuclear providers, is based. Even in the face of Japan's disaster, the administration is not backing off of its push for nuclear, as Kate Sheppard reports at Mother Jones:

Nuclear power is part of the "clean energy standard" that Obama outlined in his State of the Union speech in January. And in the 2011 budget, the administration called for a three-fold increase in federal loan guarantees for new nuclear power plants, from the $18.5 billion that Congress has already approved to $54.5 billion. "We are aggressively pursuing nuclear energy," said Energy Secretary Steven Chu in February 2010 as he unveiled the budget....In Monday's White House press briefing, press secretary Jay Carney said that nuclear energy "remains a part of the president's overall energy plan."

The state of safety in the U.S. nuclear industry isn't particularly reassuring, though. As Arnie Gunderson told Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman, almost a quarter of American nuclear plants rely on the same design as the one currently faltering in Japan. Even worse, experts have known for decades that the design of this reactor is not safe. Gunderson explained:

This reactor design, this containment design, has been questioned since 1972. The NRC in 1972 said we never should have licensed this containment. And in 1985, the NRC said they thought it was about a 90 percent chance that in a severe accident this containment would fail. So, that we're seeing it at Fukushima is an indication that this is a weak link. It's this Mark I, General Electric Mark I, containment. And we have--essentially one-quarter of all of the nuclear reactors in the United States, 23 out of 104, are of this identical design.

It'd be reassuring if the U.S. government could promise that our superior safety standards would overcome these dangers. But, as Mother Jones' Sheppard writes, the day before the earthquake in Japan, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission extended the life a Vermont plant using this very design, over the objections of the state's legislature.

Stumbling with stellar fire

Whatever the attractions of nuclear energy, it's a dangerous business. The Nation's Schell puts it best when he argues that the fallibility of humankind is the biggest risk factor. He writes:

The problem is not that another backup generator is needed, or that the safety rules aren't tight enough, or that the pit for the nuclear waste is in the wrong geological location, or that controls on proliferation are lax. It is that a stumbling, imperfect, probably imperfectable creature like ourselves is unfit to wield the stellar fire released by the split or fused atom.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

More...

Japan's desperate struggle to contain the nuclear catastrophe at the Fukushima Daiichi reactors should bring the Obama's attempt to reintroduce nuclear power in the US to a grinding halt. Instead, the administration has responded with an anxious defense of nuclear power. Indeed, energy secretary Stephen Chu told Congress on the 15th that learning from the disaster in Japan would "strengthen America's nuclear industry." This ludicrous response and the mindset it reflects should push us to revive discussion of the US antinuclear movement from the 1970s, which posed radical alternatives to the energy policy offered by both major parties, and in doing so defeated the designs of the nuclear industry.

In the waning days of the American New Left, the antinuclear movement emerged to challenge an emergent and powerful industry, and eventually prevented hundreds of facilities from being built across the country. This broad-based struggle is important to consider now for a number of reasons. First, in an era when US politics were shifting rightward, this was a highly successful populist, grassroots, and militant response to powerful energy interests. It brought together workers, farmers, parents, students and others in both rural and urban settings to oppose the introduction of nuclear power. Second, the anti-nuke movement articulated anti-authoritarian organizing practices, relying on direct democratic decision-making and direct action. Third, the movement pushed beyond New Left thinking from the late 1960s and advanced important ideas about the role of hierarchy and domination in the contemporary era; the relationship of human society and the natural world; and the central role of capitalism in the destruction of the planet. The critique of patriarchy was a key note in the anti-nuke movement, and feminist analysis shaped the movement in fundamental ways. Organizations such as the Clamshell Alliance in New England and the Abalone Alliance in California pulled together the most libratory articulations of the counterculture with analytic acuity and political resolve.

More...

The sudden ouster of Zine el Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, and then the wave following wave of demonstrations throughout the region, left me -- like many Israelis, I'd guess -- both stirred and shaken. Stirred by the truth-to-power courage of the protestors (as I write, crowds are gathering in Green Square in Tripoli, though yesterday's crowds were strafed by helicopter gunships) shaken by the uncertainty that these protests leave in their wake. And stirred and shaken at once by how suddenly a stable status quo can collapse, passing from inevitable to impossible in a matter of hours. As Egypt readies for what may be the first democratic elections in its 5,000 years, it is hard not to wonder whether there isn't a lesson for us to learn. Might history be casting up new circumstances that may somehow allow new solutions as well for our own enduring conflict with the Palestinians?

Indeed, it's not just the paroxysms of our neighbors to the south that makes people here think that, even after a century of often-violent struggle, the conflict between Jews and Palestinians here may not be as inevitable as it seems. Overshadowed by the uprisings in the Middle East have been the "Palestine Papers," a large cache of notes and transcripts documenting years of negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis released by Al-Jazeera just days before the unrest began in Tunisia. The papers have been variously interpreted by pundits and politicians; some saw them as proof that peace is a pipe-dream, others as a demonstration of the opposite. A month and a half ago, Bernard Avishai shuttled between Jerusalem and Amman to ask the two prime ministers taking part in the negotiation -- Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas -- how they saw matters.

More...

By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger

About 100,000 people gathered in Madison, Wisconsin to protest Gov. Scott Walker's new anti-collective bargaining law. The state Senate hurriedly past the bill without a quorum last Wednesday. Roger Bybee of Working In These Times reports:

The rally featured 50 farmers on tractors roaring around the Capitol to show their support for public workers and union representatives from across the nation, stressing the importance of the Wisconsin struggle. Protesters were addressed by a lineup of fiery speakers including fillmaker Michael Moore, the Texas populist radio broadcaster Jim Hightower, TV host Laura Flanders, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin, and The Progressive editor Matt Rothschild, among others.

The bill is law, but the fight is far from over. The Wisconsin Democratic Party says it already has 45% of the signatures it needs to recall 8 Republican state senators. So far, canvassers have collected 56,000 signatures, up from 14,000 last weekend. The surge in signature gathering is another sign that the Walker government's abrupt push to pass the bill has energized the opposition.

Polling bolsters the impression that Walker overreached by forcing the bill through with a dubious procedural trick. Simeon Talley of Campus Progress notes that, according to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, Americans oppose efforts to limit the collective bargaining rights of public employees.

Jamelle Bouie of TAPPED notes that the enthusiasm gap that helped elect Scott Walker last year has disappeared. In June 2o10, 58% of Democrats said they were certain to vote compared to 67% of Republicans. In March 2011, 86% of Democrats and 85% of Republicans surveyed said they would certainly vote.

Firefighters shut down bank

Wisconsin firefighters found a way to get back at one of Scott Walker's most generous donors, Madison's M&I Bank, Julianne Escobedo Shepherd reports in AlterNet. Firefighters Local 311 President Joe Conway put a call out to his members who banked with M&I to "Move Your Money." Firefighters withdrew hundreds of thousands of dollars of savings in cashiers checks. The beleaguered bank closed its doors at 3pm on March 10.

John Nichols of the Nation reports that other unions got in on the act. He quotes a pamphlet distributed by Sheet Metal Workers International Association Local 565:

"M&I execs gave more money than even the Koch Brothers to Governor Walker and the Wisconsin GOP," the message goes. "M&I got a $1.7 billion bailout while its CEO gets an $18 million golden parachute. Tell M&I Bank: Back Politicians Who Take Away Our Rights (and) We Take Away Your Business."

Nichols explains that the next big step in the fight to overturn the bill will be the Wisconsin Supreme Court election, set for April 5. Assistant Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg is challenging conservative state Supreme Court Justice David Prosser. Legal analysts have raised serious questions about the bill and the process by which it was passed. A court challenge to Walker's law might stand a better chance if a liberal justice replaces the conservative pro-corporate Prosser.

Guess what? We're not broke

Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly takes on a GOP talking point, the myth that the United States is broke. It's a convenient claim for those who wish to make massive cuts to popular programs without having to justify taking them away. If we don't have the money, we don't have the money. If it's a choice between cuts and bankruptcy, cuts suddenly seem not only acceptable, but inevitable.

But the United States has a $15 trillion economy, immense natural resources, a highly educated workforce, and countless other economic advantages. The problem isn't a lack of resources, it's extreme inequality of distribution. Over the last 20 years, 56% of income growth has been funneled to the top 1% of the population, with fully one third of that money going to the richest one-tenth of one percent.

Benen notes that the Republicans didn't think we were broke when they were advocating for a $538 billion tax-cut package, which wasn't offset by a dime of cuts.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

More...

Apollo 13 astronaut Jim Lovell used to tell a story about a mission he flew in his F2H Banshee off the coast of Japan in 1950. He had missed the rendezvous point when his instruments mistakenly picked up a signal leading him away from his aircraft carrier. Lovell felt hopelessly lost as he flew circles in the dark over the stormy Sea of Japan. As he tried to use his map light, suddenly all of the electronics in the cockpit shorted out and everything went black. A bad omen he thought, until he began looking down at the water below. With the absence of light in the cockpit his eyes began to adjust to the dark, making it possible to see the faint trail of phosphorescent algae which had been churned up by the propellers of the carrier. He began to follow the trail which lighted the way home to the carrier where he landed safely. Were it not for the failed light and the resulting darkness, Lovell might have been forced to ditch his plane. The darkness saved him.

This story is a great metaphor for the observance of Lent. Lent is officially the forty days between Ash Wednesday and Good Friday excepting Sundays. It is meant to be a season in which Christians fast from something as a means of preparation for the celebration of Easter. Lenten fasts -- giving up candy, coffee, soda, television, or meat on Fridays -- are meant to help us see things in a new light. When we fast we voluntarily short out the cockpit lights in our daily routines, hoping that in the self-induced darkness we might actually be able to see our way forward a little better. And if ever a people needed to turn out the lights and sit in the darkness for awhile, it is the typical American Evangelical Christian.

More...

As expected, the heavily-hyped Battle: Los Angeles (teaser/review) topped the box office this weekend, grossing an estimated $36 million. If that number holds, it will be the twelfth-biggest March opening in history, and a rock-solid start for a would-be tentpole that cost (depending on who you asked) $80-100 million. There was talk that the picture would break out and perhaps reach $50-60 million, but that was frankly silly. We've been spoiled the last few years, with massive March openings like 300 ($70 million), Watchmen ($55 million), and the astonishingly-huge Alice in Wonderland ($116 million). But generally speaking, March releases that aren't animated don't even top $35 million. We didn't have a single live-action $35 million opener in March until 2005 (The Ring Two), and there have been only five others since then prior to this weekend (the three above examples, plus Wild Hogs at $39 million, 10,000 BC at $35 million, so getting anywhere close to $40 million in the third month of the year has to be considered a win, especially without any kind of 3D or IMAX advantage.

In honor of Women's History Month, I have been interviewing women who are leading the way in creative travel -- back road, off-the-map and Slow Adventures. The best part of seeking out women to interview is that I haven't had to look very far to find inspired women traveling the world, breaking ground, and feeding our sense of adventure. After some great conversations, I devote this blog to honoring one of the women that I encountered this month.

As a leader in travel and conservation, Susan Hannah is one of those women who, you get the feeling, has always been at the front of the trail. In graduate school she studied with the legendary Margaret Mead and since then she has worked with the Wildlife Conservation Society, CARE USA, and the Intrepid Museum Foundation where she has spearheaded programs across the globe. Travel, undoubtedly, is among the catalysts for the work that she does. While addressing a global health initiative in a speech entitled Impatient Optimist, Bill and Melinda Gates got close to the heart of it. They said, "one of the big reasons for inequities is that the people who see the worst of it don't have the resources to defeat it. And the people who have the resources don't often see the worst of it." Like many of us in the field, Hannah looks to tourism as way to personify that "it," to connect resources and perspectives, and to reach in from both sides and hopefully meet somewhere in the middle. As she describes, Sustainable Tourism, at its best, "provides hard currency, jobs, and connects people to really understand the needs of a community."

More...

If we are going to empower women and girls around the world, we have to find new and better roles for men. Last week I led a State Department-sponsored delegation of women tech leaders to Liberia and Sierra Leone to meet with government officials, entrepreneurs, activists, telecommunication and banking executives, and university administrators to explore ways that technology, particularly mobile technology, can help improve the health, education, and livelihoods of women and girls in both countries. Women are doing amazing things in both countries, from President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in Liberia to First Lady Sia Koroma in Sierra Leone to countless local women and women returning from the diaspora that fled during horrific civil wars in both countries. But as a successful businesswoman was telling me that "women do all the farming" in Sierra Leone, as well as most of the market trading, and as I watched the groups of unemployed young men on every street corner, I kept wondering what men were supposed to be doing. It finally dawned on me that farming was women's work because it was domestic work -- tending family crops. Men were the hunters and the warriors, essential providers of protein and protection. Yet neither of those roles exist today, beyond the option of serving in small national military forces.

When I used to teach civil procedure as a law professor, I would begin the year by telling my students that "civil procedure is the etiquette of ritualized battle." The phrase, which did not originate with me, captured the point that peaceful, developed societies resolve disputes by law rather than by force. Litigation thus becomes "ritualized battle." It is not hard to imagine many litigators as modern warriors, just as it is not hard to imagine many investment bankers as competitive hunters -- of deals rather than game. But in societies that have just recently emerged from actual battle, where men fought each other and raped and captured women and that have only rudimentary legal and finance professions, what's the professional alternative to hunting and fighting?

More...

I've been shamed. I recently received an email from a reader who complimented me on my reading of authors from around the world. But then she admonished me for not recognizing just who made it possible for me to read all those wonderful books and get to know all those great writers: the literary translators. "We labor in obscurity," she wrote, being a translator herself, and she is right. Rare is the book cover that acknowledges a translator (their names are reserved for the title page and for copyright information) and I myself, a voracious reader who could name hundreds of writers, could reel off the names of only a few translators and only if pressed to do so.

But now I am here to make things right. I will go back through all my hundreds of reviews of the past three-plus years and make sure that the translators of each foreign tome are acknowledged for their hard -- and largely hidden -- work. Just in the past few weeks I read Parasite Eve by Hideaki Sena, translated from Japanese to English by Tyran Grillo; My Berlin Child by Anne Wiazemsky, translated from French to English by Alison Anderson (who has translated -- and in doing so allowed me to read and enjoy -- so many great books, including The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, The Palestinian Lover by Selim Nassib, and A Novel Bookstore by Laurence Cossé); and The Shadow of What We Were by Luis Sepulveda, translated from the Spanish to English by Howard Curtis.

More...

We face two questions. First, does the United States have a compelling interest in the removal of Gaddafi? Second, if we do, what are the most appropriate means? I believe that the answer as to interests is "yes." The public statements of President Obama, repeated daily by Secretary Clinton, that Gaddafi "must go," have staked America's credibility on the opposition's success -- a credibility made fragile by our letting expedient considerations trump our supposed commitment to democracy in the past. Great powers don't have the privilege of declaring a situation intolerable and then doing nothing to rectify it when they in fact have the power to do so. In addition, as others have pointed out, if our failure to act were to lead to a resurgent Gaddafi exacting a heavy toll in blood, it would send a chilling message to peoples across the region who are putting themselves at risk for the sake of dignity and a measure of freedom. Already, the Bahrain opposition has expressed its bitterness about Washington's siding with the Khalifa monarchy for the sake of its security ties with the Gulf states. Our current position in Bahrain is a close facsimile to that of the British from 1926 until their departure in the 1960s. They feared an Iranian challenge to their dominant political position, moved in to suppress a Shi'ite uprising, and did so due to strategic and economic interests in the Gulf region that it deemed of critical importance. The British installed Lord Belgrave as pro consul who ran the place for 30 years. A similar option does not appear to be open to us.

As to the legitimacy of an intervention, it would have to be approved by the United Nations Security Council under Chapter VII of the Charter. That means dealing with Russia and China, who have no enthusiasm for these ventures. A regional collective security body like the African Union may have some derivative authority to sanction an intervention. Unfortunately, its members right now are having a tough enough time holding onto downtown Mogadishu. Egypt is the exception in terms of military capabilities, but they are otherwise occupied.

More...

Weekly Audit: Standoff Continues in Wisconsin

By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger

The 14 Democratic state senators who fled Wisconsin to thwart the passage of a draconian anti-union have no plans to return.

On Sunday night, a Wall Street Journal blog reported that the senators planned to return soon. Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly found it odd that the piece didn't contain any direct quotes from the exiled Democrats. The claim that the Democrats were planning to return rested on a paraphrase of State Sen. Mike Miller said about the Democrats coming back. Miller says the Journal misconstrued his remarks and that the Dems are only coming back "when collective bargaining is off the table."

It would be an odd time for Democrats to return. Republican governor Scott Walker has offered them zero concessions. Furthermore, as Benen observes, Walker's popularity is plummeting. The latest poll by the Wisconsin Research Institute puts the governor's approval rating at 43%, with 53% disapproving. A majority of respondents had favorable opinions of state Senate Democrats, public employee unions, and teachers' unions.

Benen writes:

The significance of these polls can't be overstated -- they stiffen Democratic spines, while making Republicans increasingly nervous about standing behind an unpopular governor with an unpopular plan.

In YES! Magazine, Amy B. Dean explains why every American should care about the situation in Wisconsin. The collective bargaining rights of public employees are the central issue in this standoff. Walker is testing a radical new approach to unions and several other Republican governors are poised to follow his model if he succeeds. It is naive to assume that the war on unions will end with the public sector.

Jobs gap

Writing at The Nation, Chris Hayes explains why Washington doesn't care about jobs. Hayes argues that Washington elites are insulated from the toll of unemployment by class and geography. The jobless rate for workers with college degrees is only 4.2%, which is less than half of the official unemployment rate of 9% and a quarter of the 16.1% underemployment rate. (The underemployment rate counts both the jobless who are still looking for work and those who have given up and left the labor force.) Furthermore, Hayes notes, the unemployment rate in greater Washington, D.C. is only 5.7%, which is lower than that of any other major city in America. He writes:

What these two numbers add up to is a governing elite that is profoundly alienated from the lived experiences of the millions of Americans who are barely surviving the ravages of the Great Recession. As much as the pernicious influence of big money and the plutocrats' pseudo-obsession with budget deficits, it is this social distance between decision-makers and citizens that explains the almost surreal detachment of the current Washington political conversation from the economic realities working-class, middle-class and poor people face.

Even as the overall unemployment rate falls, economic recovery proves elusive for many workers of color, Shani O. Hilton reports at Colorlines.com. The February jobs report shows that the economy added 192,000 jobs, with overall unemployment falling by a tenth of a percentage point, bringing joblessness to its lowest rate since 2009. However, the unemployment rates for black and Hispanic workers remained fixed in February, at 15.3% and 11.6%, respectively.

Hilton notes that even if the economy were to add 200,000 jobs a month, it would take three years to bring general employment up to pre-recession levels.

Public innovation

The stereotype is that the private sector drives innovation. However, as Monica Potts reports in The American Prospect, industry's well-deserved reputation for innovation is built on a foundation of publicly funded basic research. Conservatives often argue that the private sector would pick up the slack if public funding for basic research were reduced. Potts argues that public funding for basic research is essential because companies will naturally gravitate towards research that has an immediate payoff, instead of investing in cultivating deeper scientific understanding through basic research.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

More...

All the buzz yesterday on the talk shows (besides Michele Bachmann repeating her talking point dozens of times on Meet the Press rather than actually answering questions) was tapping the Strategic Oil Reserve to somehow lower gasoline prices.  To even suggest such a move is not only a bad idea and bad policy, it won't help.

First, a little history.  The Strategic Petroleum Reserve, or SPR, made up primarily of salt dome storage along the Texas and Louisiana coasts, was created after the oil shock of 1973 - 1974, when OPEC flexed its muscles by embargoing oil exports to the US to punish us for our Israeli policies at the time.  The emargo had the desired effects; first it drove oil prices to historic levels and second, it scared the bejesus out of everyone, including our elected leaders.   Injections of crude oil began in 1977, and was not actually filled to it's working capacity of around 727 million barrels until the end of 2009.  The reserve was established to be used in emergencies such as wars and embargos, and it has been used for that a couple of times, notably Gulf War 1 and during the Gulf of Mexico production shut down during and after Hurricane Katrina.  About 30 million barrels were drawn down during each event.  It was used for political purposes in late 2000, when President Clinton arranged a "swap" of about 30 million barrels with private industry to help fuel prices during that year's Middle East tensions.  The swap moved government oil into the private sector, to be returned the following year.  After several re-negotiations of the deal, all the oil was finally returned to the SPR by 2004.  This use of the SPR certainly didn't meet the emergency or war standard, and some believe it was used to manipulate fuel oil prices downward during the price spikes in those years.

Which brings us to today.  White House Chief of Staff William Daley yesterday, coincidently, also on Meet the Press, suggested that the administration is considering tapping the reserve in response to rising crude prices due to the latest unrest in the MIddle East.  That idea is not only stupid, it just won't work.  Currently, the US is importing about 11 million barrels of crude oil and petroleum products per day of which about 8.6 million barrels comes in as crude.  We currently consume about 19 to 20 million barrels per day of liquid petroleum products, making our import percentage about 60% of daily use.  With a 727 million barrel inventory in the SPR, that would give us about two months supply if all imports were cut off.  If only half was cut off, that still only give us 4 months, and we would be completely vulnerable to energy supply disruptions and unrest in the Middle East.

Which brings us to the real issue...the only way to reduce gasoline prices is to use less.  That is the only way.  Our elected leaders have been kicking the can down the road for over 40 years since the first oil shock, and continue to do that today, only fiddling around the edges of comprehensive energy policy. We must deal with this problem now, expanding our use of renewables, natural gas, and have an adult conversation about mass transit and nuclear power.

Until we do, we'll continue to be at risk for our own future, and will continue tossing around stupid ideas like drawing from the SPR before we really need it.
 

Bob Cavnar, a 30-year veteran of the oil and gas industry, is the author of Disaster on the Horizon: High Stakes, High Risks, and the Story Behind the Deepwater Well Blowout. He is CEO of Luca Technologies.

 

More...

I used to be angry, now I am apoplectic. I also used to be fraulein and now I am a frau. I used to be a mademoiselle and now I am a madam, a senorita and now a senora. In other words, I am a mature woman, whose human rights are vanishing before her very eyes. For a long time, I have confused myself with a man and a human and become habituated to freedom. I don't like it when Congress treats me like a girl by hacking away at abortion rights and thinking about ELIMINATING funds for family planning.

From deep within my apoplexy, I ask: What in the name of God and goodness is Congress thinking? My reluctant and puzzled conclusion: Congress IS moralizing about sex and how some people are not supposed to have it while one member (and I do mean "member") after another is discovered in a bathroom with his pants pathetically down or on a screen showing off his biceps. Larry Craig, Eliot Spitzer, Mark Sanford, John Kennedy, Gary Hart -- all sides of the aisle -- remind me of nothing so much as my 16-year-old son, who forgot to remove a used condom from his jeans' pocket, for me to find when I laundered the pants. I don't remember moralizing. I do remember conversation. We decided, sex ed for him was "everybody agrees, no one gets hurt, no one gets pregnant." He posted these notes on his bedroom wall. Moralizing is not conversation. Congress wants to be punishmentalist and moralizing about female sexuality, as though it was theirs and not mine.

More...

Just a few years ago, before the economic meltdown of 2008, there seemed to be a barrier between wine as a part of our eating culture, and wine as a central prop for having the right "label" to show off. Today, there is more pride than ever in finding the great undiscovered wines that represent real values in the marketplace. I am sure this is in response to our economic condition, but at the same time, I think it gives us a little more opportunity to develop a more mature and pragmatic approach to buying , consuming, and enjoying wine.

I find it encouraging to see consumers picking up wine packaged in tetra-pack containers, wine bars pouring from a keg, and more and more creativity to find real value for the consumer. There is a real shift from an industry that was built on winery branding to the brand loyalty of those who can provide the best selection of wines at the fairest price. The messenger; whether it is the internet, your local retailer, a sommelier, or another news source; have become the brand for sources of wine information; a far more healthy marketplace than an industry that was predominantly getting their information from Robert Parker and the Wine Spectator only a few years ago. This growth pattern of sources takes away some of the semi-monopoly of wine evaluation, and opens it up to a far greater amount of sources that have a far wider range of interests and opinions. The good news is there wouldn't be room for these sources, if there wasn't a growing market with an interest.

More...

I can't remember a winter that has seemed longer, and more depressing in general. However, it is now officially March, which means that even though it won't be warm and wonderful for at least another month or two, it is now permissible to reasonably expect that gardening season will return, and one must be prepared. And even though I've been gardening for almost 30 years, I still have to remind myself of everything that must be done. So here is my list of things to do to prepare for garden season.

1. Start by making a list of your overall goals for this growing season. Do you want to add fruit trees? Try new varieties? Find new flowers? Landscape a new area of your yard? Get chickens? Reduce your maintenance? My lists shrink as I run out of space, but I definitely want to try new varieties of vegetables (field peas and okra!), add a few more fruit trees to my new orchard (I was thinking quince and pawpaw), and perhaps tackle and try to civilize an area near my side porch that would make a nice woodland garden. So, as you can see, gardening for me is about the whole landscape, not just veggies. And I'm still looking for basket willows to plant.

More...

By Catherine A. Traywick, Media Consortium blogger

President Obama is taking heat from all sides this week for his 2012 budget proposal, which proposes increased funding for immigration enforcement and border militarization. While immigrant rights advocates are predictably up in arms over the proposal, House Republicans are (somewhat uncharacteristically) demanding significant cuts to border security funding -- on the grounds that the Obama administration's efforts to secure the border have been ineffective and fiscally irresponsible.

Obama's future immigration priorities remain counterproductive

As Walter Ewing reports at Alternet/Immigration Impact, the proposed Department of Homeland Security (DHS) budget reveals the Obama administration's consistently conflicted priorities on immigration. While the budget makes good (albeit modestly) on the administration's promise to fund humane detention alternatives and better oversight of enforcement programs, the overwhelming bulk of the funding supports expansion of controversial and ineffective enforcement programs. Ewing writes:

The enforcement-heavy focus of the President's proposed DHS budget is readily apparent in the top-line numbers. The budget for Customs and Border Protection (CBP) would be $11.8 billion; up 3 percent from FY 2011. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) would receive $5.8 billion, up 1 percent from the previous year. And U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) would get $2.9 billion, down 5 percent from FY 2011. As is so often case, immigration services get the short end of the stick.

The administration's continued emphasis on border security is particularly troubling in light of three recently released reports which suggest that increased enforcement efforts have proven to be totally ineffective at securing the border.

Despite increased funding, border remains unsecured

According to a newly released report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), more than 93 percent of the American-Mexican border remains porous by DHS's own standards. The American Independent's Kyle Daly reports:

Of the 1,969 miles of the border stretching from California to Texas, just 873 miles are deemed secure, according to the standards of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Within those 873, only 129 miles were classified in the GAO report as "controlled," meaning there are resources in place to either turn away or apprehend people attempting to cross into the United States illegally.

The finding flies in the face of DHS's increasingly costly efforts to secure the border. Last August, the president signed into law a $600 million border security bill and, more recently, DHS raised funding for aerial border patrol drones to $32 million. The administration's 2012 budget proposal is similarly gratuitous, including "nearly $300 million for border technology, $229 million for border personnel and more than 40,000 additional border patrol agents and officers," according to Daly.

Costly border security fails to secure

Meanwhile, the National Immigration Forum and the Immigration Policy Center have each released policy briefs arguing that border enforcement has proven remarkably ineffective. As Nicolas Mendoza explains at Campus Progress, funding for border enforcement has increased exponentially in recent years with little apparent impact on either unauthorized immigration or crime rates at the border:

Border Patrol funding has been increasing dramatically since 2005, rising at an average of $300 million per year. [...] This in spite of the fact that "crime rates were already down in the border region" before the National Guard was deployed, with border cities like El Paso, Texas and San Diego, Calif. boasting some of the lowest crime rates in the country. [...] Meanwhile, the Immigration Policy Center's report argues that "no specific policy decision to beef up border security in the last 20 to 30 years has significantly reduced the flow of illicit drugs and people into the United States."

In fact, as one brief points out, the only thing that has managed to decrease unauthorized immigration is the economy; Inflows have decreased by 200,000 since the beginning of the recession, as employment (the chief pull factor for unauthorized migrants) has dried up.

House Republicans vote to cut border security funding

On the heels of mounting evidence that border enforcement is both costly and ineffective, House Republicans are retreating from their usual pro-enforcement stance on border security and demanding significant cuts to DHS's 2012 budget.

Care2's Robin Marty reports that House members would like to cut $272 million in funding for border surveillance systems and eliminate 870 Border Patrol agents -- on the grounds that the Obama administration's border security efforts have been ineffective at quelling unauthorized immigration. While that's certainly true, Marty notes that the move may simply be an effort to obstruct Obama's agenda -- at whatever cost.

Unfortunately, if they succeed on the first count, they'll likely succeed on the second. The GOP has long stated that it would not move forward on comprehensive immigration reform until the border is secured, and the administration has attempted to meet that demand by putting off reform in favor of increasing border enforcement funding and capacity. In return, House Republicans have thumbed their noses at Obama's border security efforts, painting him as incompetent on immigration and security issues and, in doing so, making it quite clear they won't help him move forward on comprehensive immigration reform.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about immigration by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Diaspora for a complete list of articles on immigration issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, and health care issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Pulse. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

More...

It's not often that you get to witness our society changing before your eyes. Last week I had the extraordinary opportunity to do just that. The place I saw this change was, oddly enough, not in our country, but in Argentina. And odder still, it was on a trip with a private company in the prosaic and dare I say "pedestrian" business of selling shoes. The company is called TOMS Shoes and this trip to the rural Misiones region of Argentina was another in a long series of the company's "shoe drops," in which they give away shoes to people in need. This trip was particularly special because during the course of this trip, TOMS gave away its millionth pair of shoes. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that TOMS paid for my trip and expenses.)

So what is a for profit company doing giving away a million shoes, you might ask? TOMS business model is simple: for every pair of shoes you buy, they give one pair away. TOMS calls their model -- appropriately -- One for One. And the name TOMS is taken from the word "tomorrow," as part of the idea that if you buy a pair of TOMS shoes today, a pair is given away tomorrow. TOMS is a new kind of business that fits into the much-hyped "social entrepreneurship" model. This term, and others variants on this theme, have become catchphrases in the business community and on college campuses, where courses and even majors with these names have sprouted from the Ivies to community colleges. in the past few years.

More...

Even with the rapid growth in online activity, television remains the #1 form of social communication. In the US, people still spend more time watching TV than they spend on internet, radio, newspapers, or mobile phones combined. Cable TV is still the most popular TV delivery method, and if you live in Denver, you likely only have one choice for cable television. The City of Denver has a franchise agreement with Comcast, enabling them to utilize public rights of way, utility poles, and other public resources to build their communications network. In exchange for this, Comcast makes certain concessions to the city, including channels set aside for public access, educational or government programming, and gives a percentage of their revenues from Denver subscribers to compensate the taxpayers for use of this common space.

Every ten years or so, the City negotiates a new franchise agreement with Comcast, and for the next three days, the residents of Denver will have an opportunity to tell the City what we expect from Comcast in the 2012 franchise renewal process. An online survey is available on the Office of Telecommunications website, but your best opportunity to be heard is to attend one of the six community forums scheduled for March 1-3, 2011. At these forums, every Denver resident can have direct input. Participation in this process will help the city effectively represent the community as it works to ensure quality cable television service for its residents in the Comcast cable franchise renegotiation process.

More...