President-elect Barack Obama on Saturday named a Harvard physicist and a marine biologist to science posts, signaling a change from Bush administration policies on global warming that were criticized for putting politics over science.

Both John Holdren and Jane Lubchenco are leading experts on climate change who have advocated forceful government response. Holdren will become Obama’s science adviser as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; Lubchenco will lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees ocean and atmospheric studies and does much of the government’s research on global warming.

Holdren also will direct the president’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology. Joining him as co-chairs will be Nobel Prize-winning scientist Harold Varmus, a former director of the National Institutes of Health, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Eric Lander, a specialist in human genome research.

In FL we have a minimum wage for servers. It’s something like $2 and change. The law also stopped employers playing games with tips.

This is another point of vulnerability for the plantation caucus and their union busting. During the Bush years they gobbled up a lot of money that was supposed to go to state Child Welfare workers, who, I suspect, are unionized in most states. Tragicly, the kids in the hands of the Republican private agencies keep dying.

Woman Who
Drowned Son Given Give Years in Prison

This is from comments at a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel blog

“I worked for New Ventures – the agency prior to La Causa. I left after we were given holiday bonuses of $500-700 I left. I could not get my clients things that they needed such as warm coats or cribs, and felt that this was a misuse of money. I also recalled the CEO to be driving a luxury car, taking long vacations to Africa and the Carribean and walking around in mink coats. She was making way too much money off of the poor people in our community. These private agencies do make money and the top people are getting rich while the hard working OCM are struggling along the best that they can.”

Other comments get much more explicitly into the question of union versus non-union.

Based on the JS reporting, the state is paying the case worker around $17,000 per case. That’s 100% for case work. It doesn’t include what the case might get for daycare, medical and dental assistance from the taxpayers. It’s pretty obvious the plantation caucus wanted to suck on that, because quality control is a joke.

I did an Oxdown diary on this one:

Disability Rights Wisconsin: “A Tragic Result of a Failure to Act: The Death of Angie Arndt” 1999 – 2006

Same pattern, a private agency kills the kid. The photos of this girl are just heart-breaking.

I hope the unions can get these kinds of stories and given them the kind of sunlight they deserve. Whether they exist within the scope of FDL’s brand is way beyone my pay grade.

In August the homeless shelters reported that they had an increase of 5000 more families needing shelter. How many more since then?