Thanks to Arizona, there may be some real protests this weekend, not the tightly-shot over inflated tea party variety.

Featuring new videos by Alabama 3 and Populous.

Round two voting is still open The opposition to the California marijuana legalization measure has a new website, called Public Safety First. It would more appropriately be called the Prison Industrial Complex Profit Protection Racket, because they are the same outfit who organized against California’s Prop 5, the Nonviolent Offender Rehabilitation Act of 2008.  The [...]

When President Obama eulogized the 29 dead miners of the Upper Big Branch Mine explosion this weekend, he noted that no one should “put their lives at risk by simply showing up to work.” Unfortunately, it’s not just miners who fear for their lives while making a paycheck; deaths on the job are unfortunately entirely too common. In its annual report on worker deaths, the AFL-CIO found that 5,214 workers died on the job in 2008. That’s 14 people a day.

Best as I understand it, the shiny new military commission manual says the following about right to counsel. . . .

The real question is about the majority vote for amendments. Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) told blogger Mike Stark today that every amendment would need 60 votes. That would be a subversion of democracy; it’s exactly what was determined for health care, to protect the bill. There is no deal, bipartisan or otherwise, to protect on Wall Street reform, and the majority should be allowed to decide the components of the bill. That’s what Jeff Merkley told me yesterday, that a process without open, majority-vote amendments would be a “travesty for democracy.”

Carl Levin’s committee thinks that Goldman Sachs is an underwriter when it creates and sells securities. Underwriters have real duties to their customers. Goldman Sachs wants to be treated as a market-maker. Market-makers have significantly fewer duties. The Senators are right.

Today is Workers Memorial Day, the day we remember those who have died on the job. They come from all walks of life, merely trying to get ahead and create a better world for themselves and their families. And yet, each year, thousands of people die from unsafe working conditions or hazardous duty; 16 deaths per day, in fact.

During the 2008 elections we were repeatedly assured by the oil/gas industry and their supply-side apologists in both Parties that modern off-shore drilling technology was safe, that environmental safeguards are scrupulously observed, and that off-shore oil spills hardly ever happened and could be easily contained. None of that was true.

Investment bankers Peter Peterson and Robert Rubin have received tens of millions of dollars at taxpayer expense, yet they want to cut the Social Security and Medicare benefits that ordinary workers rely upon when they retire.