Bush Downplays Digital Divide - Cooking the numbers, the Bush administration has declared that unequal access to the Internet by the poor and minorities is...
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FBI Covered for Mobsters - On top of their 911 fuck-ups, the disasters of the FBI labs (remember OJ?), and their whole history of domestic...
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May 30, 2002
THE Politics Story - The New Republic bemoans that a likely result of McCain-Feingold's campaign finance limits will be a shift of control over...
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College Tuition Falls - Okay, here's counter-intuitive good news-- the cost of private college tuition at the best schools has dropped substantially for lower...
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Chomsky on CNN - Noam Chomsky debated Bill Bennett on CNN this morning (check out this transcript) which was remarkable mostly for the fact...
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May 29, 2002
Supremes Drop the Big One - The Supreme Court yesterday dropped a bomb against federal regulation of the economy, supposedly the core power delegated to the...
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May 28, 2002
Clean Money Repo Men - Okay, for those who haven't been following the hilarious (and encouraging) saga of campaign finance reform in Massachusetts, read Clean...
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Proportional Democracy - Larry Kestenbaum expressed his skepticism of proportional representation as a solution to the problem of gerrymandering, noting the "Japan's Diet...
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Anti-Choicers Use Camera as Weapon - A Wall Street Journal article detail a new tactic of abortion protesters using cameras to intimidate mothers seeking abortions. Pictures...
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May 27, 2002
Bloomberg Mandates MD Abortion Training - Starting in July, abortion training will become part of the required curriculum, rather than a generally bypassed elective, for obstetrics...
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Bogus Growth Numbers - In the May 16th Economist, the magazine detailed how unemployment in Europe has been dropping even as it has been...
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GOP Marriage Hypocrisy - Despite all the rhetoric, the GOP doesn't care about poor unwed mothers. All their worry about "marriage penalities" and handwringing...
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May 26, 2002
Greens Go Nuts - Walking into the twilight zone of political insanity, the Green Party has decided to run a candidate in Minnesota against...
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May 24, 2002
Buchanan- Fear of a Brown Planet - Pat Buchanan is betraying his racist fears at WorldNetDaily in "The "no-whites-need-apply" caucus." Recently, the Black, Hispanic and Asian caucuses...
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ABA Feud over Copyright Giveaway - In a recent legal article, Split IP Bar Feuds Over Copyright Law, it highlighted how much the American Bar Association's...
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Gerrymandering away democracy - Larry Kestenbaum has a great new blog called Polygon, the Dancing Bear. He has a love of political history, and...
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The Descent of a Man - A great tribute to Steven Jay Gould whose life was one of both science and passion, a man who was...
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TN Abandoning Sales Tax? - Over in Freeperland (freerepublic.com), there is much agitation over the Tenneessee legislature's movement to replace much of the state sales...
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ByeBye Andrew - Closer to home, any chance I had of rooting for Andrew Cuomo to get the nomination for his Dad's old...
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May 20, 2002
Economics Trumps Religion in Israel - News that Sharon has Dismissed Cabinet Ministers from two major religious parties is going to scramble the politics of the...
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Strikes and Organizing - Two union stories of especial interest to me at old employers. My first union job was as an organizer in...
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"Fast Track" to Unfair Trade - As this article from last week highlights, Senate ignores veto threat on trade bill, keeps critical amendment alive (note I...
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Liberalism versus Democracy - In my new upcoming Populist column, Remembering the Popular Will for Civil Rights, I am trying to recover the memory...
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Returning Max's Plug - My friend Max Sawicky at his MaxSpeak Weblog attributed to me the argument that "a socialist is defined simply as...
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Bankrupt Politics - In A Quiet Attack on Women Professor Elizabeth Warren writes, "After five years of enormous contributions and lobbying from the...
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May 19, 2002
Return of the Nerds - For a period at the end of the 1990s, "geek" became a term of power with technology and money making...
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Labor-Latino power in California - This story The Sacramento Bee -- From farm laborer to potentate in Capitol highlights the key story of California politics...
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May 18, 2002
Capitalism's Pyrrhic Victory? - Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton has a wonderful essay in the UK's The Guardian | History gets the last laugh...
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Lula's the One - While the left is getting pummelled in Europe, it's making a comeback in Latin America, from Venezula's Hugo Chavez to...
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Giving it Away - Modeled on the idea of open source software, Creative Commons is "founded on the notion that some people would prefer...
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Rise of Right in Europe - While this article Europe 'Is Rubbing Its Eyes' at the Ascent of the Right does not mean the Nazis are...
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Senator Phil Gramm has no shame - His wife was on Enron's auditing committee, which would make most politicians, especially those retiring, take themselves out of the...
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May 17, 2002
Launching this Blog- - Well, I've abandoned my old Blogger Software and moved my whole site to www.liquidweb.com. I'm now using Greymatter blogging software--...
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Wal-Mart Doing Good for Environment - Seriously. This initiative by Wal-Mart to promote energy-saving light bulbs is a major environmental initiative. "Compact fluorescent" bulbs fit in...
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The Collapse of Tax Cut Politics - You can check out Progressive States rundown of progressive successes in the states on Tuesday, but I want to focus...
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November 08, 2006
A Good Night for Progressives - Let's be clear-- this wasn't just a good night for Democrats. It was a good night for progressives, and no...
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November 01, 2006
Labor Cold War Ends - New International Labor Federation - At the dawn of the Cold War, the international union movement divided up between the ICFTU, dominated by US and Western European unions, and the World Confederation of Labor, largely allied with the Soviet Union. It's taken a decade and a half, but the irrelevancy of that division will end today as the two federations merge-- bringing together 241 labor organizations from 156 countries representing 190 million workers. The new International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) is a good step for a labor movement looking to globalize itself in the taking on global capital power....
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- Valuing Families: State Legislative Models Brought to you by Progressive States and MomsRising What would a policy that really values families look...
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October 09, 2006
Emaciated Models, Labor Regulation - There's a bit of debate in the blogosphere around Spain's new law banning underweight models from the runways in that country. See Jordan, Amanda at Pandagon and Lindsay Beyerstein at Majikthise on whether this is an intrusive regulating violating free expression or something like that and whether OSHA safety regulations are appropriate. Just to throw my two cents in-- any broader OSHA approach would seem cumbersome and bureaucratically intrusive in a deep way. But the original Spanish proposal is brilliant in its high-impact, low-intrusion approach. Regulate only the fashion week type runways, where in a single spotcheck, models can be...
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October 03, 2006
Big loss for Labor-- - The National Labor Relations Board ruled today that a range of professionals are now deemed "supervisors" and thus lose all protections under labor law. That means if they say a positive thing about unions, their bosses are free to fire them at will. The AFL-CIO has more here. To put this denial of labor rights in perspective, 32 million workers or 25% of the workforce already have no right to form a union under federal, state or local law (see this GAO report and this ARAW summary). This includes: Supervisors 16.6 million workers, 8 million new supervisors plus traditional 8.6...
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