Our Future: How to celebrate Labor Day? Support the Empoyee Free Choice Act

about.com: How GM derailed public transportation to sell more cars

The Brad Blog: Over 16,000 votes "unaccounted for" in Palm Beach county primary election 'recount'. "Severe repercussions, dire consequences for Novemeber elections and all elections" says Broward County election supervisor candidate.

Calculated Risk: Gustav takes aim at NOLA, oil prices

Philosoraptor: McCain's actual choice for V.P.

The Opinion Mill's Sunday Bookchat: Harold Moore and Joe Galloway return to Vietnam to lay old ghosts to rest -- and deplore the creation of new ones in Iraq. Sidney Blumenthal on the self-destruction of the GOP. Plus: How American workers are getting squeezed, how a unique ecosystem is being threatened, and how publishing thinks small.

AP:

The Bush administration on Thursday proposed stronger job protections for doctors and other health care workers who refuse to participate in abortions because of religious or moral objections.

Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt said that health care professionals should not face retaliation from employers or from medical societies because they object to abortion.

Abortion foes called it a victory for the First Amendment, but abortion rights supporters said they feared the rule could stretch the definition of abortion to include birth control, and served notice that they intend to challenge the administration.

The ACLU released this statement:

"It's deeply troubling and unfortunate that President Bush should fire this parting shot at women's access to basic health care in the waning days of his administration," said Vania Leveille, ACLU Legislative Counsel. "Time and time again, he has put political and ideological concerns above the best interests of the American people, and this is yet another example.

"We continue to be very concerned about the scope and impact of this proposed rule. It leaves open the possibility that institutions and individuals can deny access to birth control and permits individuals to refuse to provide even counseling about basic heath care services."

I'm sure the timing of this has nothing whatsoever to do with the upcoming election. It's surely just a coincidence that this wedge issue rears its ugly head just in time to fire up the right-wing lunatics who otherwise would have no reason to come out and vote. It's not like Republicans use the issue of abortion for political gain every four years or anything.

(full disclosure: I work for the Courage Campaign)

I wanted to report back on my post from Friday, warning that Gov. Schwarzengger was about to cut over 200,000 state worker's salaries down to the federal minimum wage of $6.55 -- a ploy in a political game being played by the Governor. He's trying to hold state workers hostage to try and place pressure on the Democrats instead of the Republicans who are holding up the budget.

Today, I have good news and bad news. It's Arnold's birthday. No, that's not the good news.

The good news is that over 28,000 of you stepped up and signed the petition to Schwarzenegger. The same day, he delayed signing the executive order that would have put the policy into effect.

The bad news is that he only delayed it to Thursday.

We delivered your petitions to the Governor on Monday and created a funny, snarky video you can see above, about our adventure trying to get someone to accept the darn petitions. It helped to have an Assemblymember along with us and a bunch of cameras and reporters, or else we would have been sent straight to the mailroom.

We have about 24 hours until the Governor signs the executive order. Which means we still have time today to pressure Arnold to stop holding state workers hostage to his political budget negotiation games.

On behalf of hundreds of thousands of state workers, please pick up your phone right now and call Arnold. Click here for the phone number and a form to report back your call.

UPDATE: We've already received some interesting call reports, like this one from Gary:

Staff member tried to convince me that things will be alright with our finances because my partner, who is a teacher, can get a zero-interest loan since the banks know that the employees will be getting the money eventually. I told her that we didn't want to be pawns in their political games and that the governor & legislature need to work it out. She said she would pass it along.

Two weeks ago, Huffington Post reminded Americans that John McCain by his own admission doesn't know how to use a computer. Now, McCain campaign aide Mark Soohoo reassured voters that "John McCain is aware of the Internet" and "You don’t actually have to use a computer to understand how it shapes the country."

No doubt, as with so much that for his public policy pronouncements, John McCain didn't let his ignorance get in the way of speaking out. As it turns out, back in April the self-described computer "illiterate" proclaimed eBay was the answer to poverty and recession in the United States.

Earlier this year, the Politico's Mike Allen (video here) asked the GOP presidential contenders whether they used a PC or Mac. In his response, McCain revealed that when it comes to high tech devices large (like private jets) or small (like personal computers), he is dependent on his beer heiress wife:

"Neither. I'm an illiterate that has to rely on my wife for all of the assistance I can get."

But just because John McCain doesn't know how to connect to eBay doesn't mean he doesn't have connections to eBay. As it turns out, former eBay CEO Meg Whitman is not only a senior adviser to John McCain, but plays ventriloquist with him when it comes to the economy.

During his now-forgotten "Forgotten Places" tour two months ago, McCain told an audience in Inez, Kentucky, "You have a right to expect us to show as much concern for helping you create more and better choices to make for yourselves as we show any other community in America." And one of those better choices, according to John McCain, is to become a seller on the auction site, eBay:

"Today, for example, 1.3 million people in the world make a living off eBay, most of those are in the United State of America."

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Today is World Refugee Day. Yesterday the House passed an Iraq Supplemental with no deadlines for withdrawal and with funding for the occupation into next year.

Every day in Iraq, the Iraqi Red Crescent workers put their lives on the line to bring food, water, and medical care to their fellow Iraqis. Scores of these humanitarian workers have been kidnapped, murdered and harassed by death squads. Reports of raids on Red Crescent offices by our forces are frequent. Yet they keep on working – doing all they can to bring relief to internally displaced Iraqis and to their neighbors across Iraq. IRC is the only organization still bringing such aid to every region of Iraq and across all sectarian lines.

A number of us thought today was a very good day to flood the IRC with donations – and even if you can only donate a little, they will put every bit to work. This is one small way we can show our opposition to the occupation and our concern for the devastation our country is causing the Iraqi people.

To send a donation, click here and select “Iraq Humanitarian Response” in the “I want my contribution to go here” box. 100% of your donation will go directly to assisting Iraq Red Crescent’s work. Here's what your donation will buy:

Every 15 days, Iraqi Red Crescent networks deliver food rations that include flour, rice, sugar, vegetable oil, tomato paste, salt, jam, spaghetti, lentils, tea, sardines, and cheese. The $33.50 USD cost per family ration covers the expense of the food, distribution, transport and security. (These rations are delivered to 200,000 families.)

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Because the media over the last six months or so has made the primary races the be all and end all of the news, creating narratives to make the horse race seem closer than it was or piling on the cream to encourage the pie fight (if you'll excuse the mixed metaphors), it's easy to not realize that the country is, as a whole, swinging back to the left side of the political spectrum as a response to how far right we've gone in the last decade or so.

David Sirota has documented this swing in his new book The Uprising and he sat down with Stephen Colbert to discuss it:

Download | play Download | play (h/t Heather)

DS: The Uprising is not about any candidate. The Uprising is about seeing candidates and politicians as vehicles for a movement. People want…

SC: Okay, what candidate is the vehicle for the movement? Let’s…okay, it’s the people, the people swell up underneath the candidate and they inflate him like a political power balloon. Who’s inflating faster?

DS: It’s your state legislators; it’s your city council people; it’s your governor…

SC: I wouldn’t want those people as President. I’ve met those people…

DS: That’s the whole point. We’re led to believe, by people like you, that the President is the only place…the presidential campaign is the only place where change really happens. And the point is that change happens all over the place. When I went out and reported this book, again, I met with people who are unionizing workers in Seattle. I met with people who are forming a third party in New York. I met with people again on the border. These are people who say change is happening far away from the presidential race.

SC: The New York Times—and I’m seeing why—even the NY Times has called you “a populist rabble-rouser”, okay? Are you a Che Guevara? Are you a Che Guevara for our age? Do you look forward to a day where college students wear your face on their shirt and don’t know what you did?

KAKE.com: (h/t J)

No criminal charges will be filed in the death of a Goodyear worker, who passed away after being tased by Shawnee County Sheriff's deputies.

Shawnee County District Attorney Robert Hecht released his report Tuesday on the March 29th death of 59-year old Walter Haake. The report says Haake had suffered a head injury in a fall at his home the night before his death. It says Haake had been incoherent at work and fellow workers tried to deter him from driving when he left the plant. Shawnee County Sheriff's Deputies were called in when Haake refused to get out of his vehicle.

"Mre Haake physcially resisted removal, leaving the officers in the position of simply leaving him in the vehicle and letting the medical condition play out or using such force as may be required to remove him," Hecht wrote in the report.

The deputies chose to remove Haake by tazing him, then restraining him. The coroner ruled that an existing heart condition, combined with the compression to his chest when he was placed on the ground to be handcuffed, led to his death. Read on...

We posted this story back in April, and it appears the tragedy has gotten even worse. Haake was guilty of being injured and refusing treatment -- nothing more. That no charges will be filed against these officers is a travesty of justice and its a slap in the face of his poor family. This man's civil liberties were obliterated and I hope his family files a civil lawsuit. This case deserves national attention, as it sets a very dangerous example.

Natasha Chart at Open Left:

Glenn Hurowitz recently wondered who's going to help Tibet bring down China, like the Russians were brought down in Afghanistan and the British in India.

International pressure and protest seems to carry no weight among the Chinese. Their government is still arresting monks for "unauthorized gatherings", they're still shooting and killing Tibetans. They've also been shipping weapons to Zimbabwe's dictator, who's currently ignoring the results of an election that voted him and his party out of power. They buy 90 percent of Sudan's exported oil, and sells them small arms destined for Darfur. Darfur, where the Sudanese government is carrying out air attacks against helpless civilian targets. Oh yes, and they're now the world's top carbon polluter, though the US still remains the top carbon polluter per capita.

Yeah, that Chinese government, complete jerks, tyrants, to put it charitably. People are surprised that the Olympic torch protests seem only to have stirred Chinese nationalism, surprised that the Chinese don't understand why people are angry. Still, I think Glenn asks the wrong question. Because who is it that raised China up? The lack of self-awareness in this situation isn't exclusive to the Chinese, people everywhere have an amazing capacity to accept almost anything as normal.

Indeed, let's cut right to the heart of the matter: whom else will we buy our shoes from?

I looked this up once when I was working at my community college paper in 2005. There was an editorial insistence on doing a fashion insert, so I contributed something about sweatshops and the offshoring of clothing manufacture. (I know, total killjoy.) I found a copy of that article in my old files, and according to the research that I'd done at the time, the US had lost over 860,000 textile and apparel jobs since 1993, and China was making 80% of the world's shoes.

Sure, if you have (usually) more money to spend, you can find shoes made somewhere else. But not everyone has that kind of time or latitude. Funny thing, though, now shoe manufacturers are closing down in China. Now that "many factories have to meet social obligations" and workers have been agitating for better pay, manufacturing jobs are slowly starting to leave China as they once left the US. Read on...

Talk about "elitism." Last night while discussing "downscale voters," salt-of-the-earth FOX News contributor (and Weekly Standard editor) Fred Barnes ridiculed and demeaned working class Americans by making the distinction that they aren't "lower income," but rather "lower class."

Download | play Download | play (h/t Bill W.)

Look at the smug look on his face as he demeans the majority of Americans. Apparently to Barnes union workers and, indeed, anyone who actually labors for a living, is not as good as him. Kudos to the panel who, for reasons you can decide yourselves, distances themselves from his insensitive and bone-headed remarks.

Something tells me we're looking at Duncan's "Wanker of the day."

TPM has more and Faiz sums it up nicely:

Hume opened the segment by asking Barnes to elaborate on his view that many of Hillary Clinton’s supporters are “downscale.” Barnes could hardly contain his laughter as he explained that the term “working class” is a euphemism because “it’s kind of mean to say ‘lower class.’ It’s as simple as that.” He explained that the “lower class” are people of low “social class.”

WaPo:

For the first time since the Spanish influenza of 1918, life expectancy is falling for a significant number of American women.

In nearly 1,000 counties that together are home to about 12 percent of the nation's women, life expectancy is now shorter than it was in the early 1980s, according to a study published today.

The downward trend is evident in places in the Deep South, Appalachia, the lower Midwest and in one county in Maine. It is not limited to one race or ethnicity but it is more common in rural and low-income areas. The most dramatic change occurred in two areas in southwestern Virginia (Radford City and Pulaski County), where women's life expectancy has decreased by more than five years since 1983.

The trend appears to be driven by increases in death from diabetes, lung cancer, emphysema and kidney failure. It reflects the long-term consequences of smoking, a habit that women took up in large numbers decades after men did, and the slowing of the historic decline in heart disease deaths.

It may also represent the leading edge of the obesity epidemic. If so, women's life expectancy could decline broadly across the United States in coming years, ending a nearly unbroken rise that dates to the mid-1800s.

"I think this is a harbinger. This is not going to be isolated to this set of counties, is my guess," said Christopher J.L. Murray, a physician and epidemiologist at the University of Washington who led the study. It is being published in PLoS Medicine, an open-access journal of the Public Library of Science.

Said Elizabeth G. Nabel, director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health: "The data demonstrate a very alarming and deeply concerning increase in health disparities in the United States."

The study found a smaller decline, in far fewer places, in the life expectancy of men in this country. In all, longevity is declining for about 4 percent of males.

The phenomenon appears to be not only new but distinctly American.

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