Much of the coverage of the disaster in Japan (including ours at FDL) has been focused on the nuclear reactors in Fukushima. As troubling as those reactors are, however, they are only part of the story. While the Fukushima Fifty and their colleagues work on the reactors, thousands upon thousands of other relief workers are laboring elsewhere — and they’ve got a LOT to do.

As I stood witness to the Triangle Shirtwaist fire centennial commemoration at the corner of Washington Place and Green Street on Friday, March 25, I was surprised and impressed by the size of the crowd, but the most unexpected moment of the day came when New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg stepped to the microphone.

As I have noted before, there are a number of paragraphs in the May 6, 2004 Goldsmith memo authorizing warrantless wiretapping that appear to be badly overclassified. Not only were many of the same paragraphs printed, almost verbatim, in unclassified fashion, in the White Paper released in January 2006. But many of those paragraphs contain nothing more than discussions of published statute.

Support on Capitol Hill for saving Social Security must be stronger than I thought: Pete Peterson’s flying monkeys are working overtime dropping dungbombs on anyone who opposes gutting the government program that lifted elderly Americans out of the grinding poverty that was their standard fate before 1935.

Earlier this month, I met a friend from work and it was off to the Philadelphia Flower Show.

Quongo and The Showman — A Lovely Bunch of Coconuts, from The Muppet Show, episode 513.

Outgoing Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, known everywhere as The Sane Moderate One (or The Other Mormon Dude) among 2012 Goat Rodeo participants, has a bit of an “oopsie” of the Ann Coulter variety when it comes to his voter registration…

Remember just a few weeks ago when Karl Rove told Republicans they needed to banish birchers?

You could make an argument that this is a great time for the labor movement, energized by the battle in Wisconsin and ready to re-establish themselves in the American consciousness as part of what builds and protects the middle class. And to an extent that’s true. But the wave of labor protests sweeping the country are the direct result of rear-guard, defensive actions where right-wing politicians are attacking and assaulting the rights of the worker. And they won’t all end in victories for labor.

When I first read about this, I actually dismissed it. There was no way that the laws of the state of Wisconsin would be so consistently abrogated in this fashion, I thought. Well, fool me once…