Someone responded yesterday to an AFL-CIO blog in which we mentioned that just days before leaving office, Bush got a whole new set of nearly $600,000 china for the White House. The fellow who commented was rightly appalled.

I don’t know about the rest of you who are reading this, but I am just barely making it the way it is.

Last week, a confluence of events reminded the U.S. public that it’s not just the food we eat that’s increasingly dangerous in our daily lives—inadequate safety on the job still is killing America’s working people.

The week ended with two more deaths from construction cranes, this time in Illinois. These fatalities came within days of four deaths due to a crane collapse in Houston—and raises to 18 the number of workers who died from crane-related deaths so far this year, according to an estimate by The Wall Street Journal, which doesn’t include bystander deaths.