A lot of virtual ink has been spilled over the on-going economic crisis in California. Lost in the uproar is the fact that 6 other states are also having budget crisis of their own.

Most ideas for solving California's fiscal situation involve draconian cuts and higher taxes. Both are unavoidable at this late date.
However, in every crisis there is opportunity for more radical, progressive, long-term ideas. I would now like to present an idea for comment.

It was the morning of January 22, 1932, in a quiet, middle-class neighborhood of the Bronx. A crowd was gathering in front of 2302 Olinville Avenue, near the Bronx Park.
City Marshals and Police had moved in to evict 17 tenants who were on a "rent strike". A crowd of 4,000 had gathered nearby.

When the marshals moved into the building and the first stick of furniture appeared on the street, the crowd charged the police and began pummeling them with fists, stones, and sticks, while the "non-combatants urged the belligerents to greater fury with anathemas for capitalism, the police and landlords." The outnumbered police barely held their lines until reinforcements arrived.

Every single reserve police officer in the Bronx had to be called in to prevent being routed by the rioters.

A paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that the virus responsible for the ongoing H1N1 "swine flu" pandemic is the result of a laboratory accident that occurred around 1977, "possibly somewhere in Asia or the Soviet Union." Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh noticed that the H1N1 strain responsible for the devastating 1918 pandemic continued to circulate, human to human, until 1957. For the next twenty years, the H1N1 strain seemingly disappeared as other flu strains took its place. Then, in 1977, H1N1 re-emerged in China, Hong Kong and the USSR. (Telegraph, June 30, 2009)

The authors concluded that the strain responsible for the 1977 outbreak "had been preserved since 1950." The likely cause of its re-emergence was "an accidental release from a laboratory source in the setting of waning population immunity to H1 and N1 antigens."

smintheus, with all due respect, I disagree with you. on the import and motives of the split in the case.

Here is how I think we should look at this case and testing cases in general.

Does anybody seriously believe that New Haven's mayor, or the CSB he appointed, would have taken a stand against certifying the firefighter exam results if minorities had performed disproportionately well on it? That New Haven politicians would have argued, for example, that oral examination boards constituted so as ensure that minorities made up 2/3 of each board created a disparate impact against white applicants?

If not, then it makes a mockery of the city's professed concern that Title VII's provision on disparate impact required it to throw out the results.

The judgment handed down today by SCOTUS' conservative bloc in Ricci v. DeStefano actually was a remarkably liberal ruling. It's altogether too rare for the Scalia wing to stand up for the common man who's been kicked in the teeth arbitrarily by the powerful.

If you are like me, you are probably feeling nostalgic for the good ol’ days when private was private and public was public. But those two are now getting all mixed together in places like Texas, where you would have thought they knew the difference between the two - and that mixing the two up is to bad effect. I guess it's now the Lame Star State.

I have heard rumors that a federal district court chief judge had so much trouble with the General Services Administration (GSA) - essentially the federal government’s landlord - that he used to issue show cause orders to GSA just to make certain that basic functions, like heat and air conditioning were functioning.

A bit extreme, you may say, but I bet GAO would just love to be able to issue show cause orders to get GSA to stop wasting government money and obey basic contracting rules. A new report - just one of so many GAO reports - gives us the low down on why GSA is just plain lucky that the only power GAO has is to study and report . . . and hope Congress takes real action.

The Post publishes a typically silly look at Democratic activists who are pushing their party's conservative Senators to stop undermining the 'public option' (the very mildest reform proposal that has any chance of substantially improving America's health-care disaster). But in the Post's view, the Democratic obstructionists are 'centrists' and the liberal activists are, well, pointy-headed fools of course.

From NPR's report this morning on a radical proposal to give the government the power to lock people up indefinitely without trial, we learn that it is only 'some liberals' who object:

Neocon Gary Schmitt is in a snit over the US soccer team's unprecedented victory in the FIFA Confederations Cup semifinals against Spain. His rant at the American Enterprise blog perfectly embodies the neoconservative philosophy that knowledge is an impediment to understanding.

Guest commentary by Michael Winship, senior writer for Bill Moyers Journal, crossposted with permission.

Being a total history geek, I confess that there's almost nothing as entertaining to me as a good historic house tour. It's a great way to get a feel for how someone from the past lived his or her life. I realize that this nerdish interest would seem to indicate that conversely, I have no life of my own, but bear with me.

by Dr.SteveB crossposted from Daily Kos with permission.

The answer is less than any other health reform.

Below is a review of excerpts from National and State-based single payer cost studies done from 1991 to 2007. Although compiled by PNHP which advocates for single payer, the actual studies were mostly done by non-partisan independent non-advocates -- by the GAO and the CBO for Congress back in the 1990s, and by independent analytic firms (e.g., The Lewin Group, Mathematica Policy Research Group) for State legislatures in the 2000s.

It may not be politically feasible in 2009 inside the beltway, but it is important to still remember the inconvenient truth that as a matter of economic and health policy, we already know that single payer is best.

Odd country. We keep people we know to be innocent in Guantanamo. Yet, according to a new report by the Government Accountability Office, we let 90% of people on terrorist watch lists buy guns. I assume that’s to let them play a role in constructing a well regulated militia in their neighborhoods.

Last September, during the debate over the federal bailout of Wall Street, politicians that supported the bailout used a certain phrase.

"Our time has run out," said Rep. Spencer Bachus, R-Ala., the ranking Republican on the House Financial Services Committee. "We're going make a decision. There are no other choices, no other alternatives."

Recently I saw the same argument made on DKos concerning the deficit spending and bailouts. It seems like common knowledge at this point. If we hadn't bailed out Wall Street then we would headed into a Depression.

The fact of the matter is that this idea, that we had no choice, is wrong on three different levels.