When it comes to our country's financial situation, GAO has bad news and bad news for you. Which do you want first? . . . . OK, so here's the bad news.

Remember when the emergency contraceptive Plan B was approved for over-the-counter sales to women over 18? Well, those in charge of the FDA haven’t forgotten, and it looks like they might be trying to take revenge for having been forced to take a step that displeased some of Bush's powerful constituents.

The Conference Board's latest study finds deep, deep employee dissatisfaction with their jobs. That is the reality, despite all the happy talk about the great economy we are in. No surprise to the reality-based community. Here are the details.

At its most recent meeting, the American Historical Association presented a Resolution on United States Government Practices Inimical to the Values of the Historical Profession. It is now being voted on by the membership.

Among the resources in the comments to smintheus Daily Kos diary is how to reconstruct or find documents that were once there but have now been removed.

There's a mini-debate on Daily Kos over whether smintheus' discovery that the White House is scrubbing and sanitizing the documents that were once on its website. Make that a maxi-debate with about 300 comments so far.

What do you think?

Al Gore was a good sport at the Oscars tonight. First, Ellen DeGeneres was talking about people in the audience and mentioned that they had nominee Jennifer Hudson, who'd been on American Idol. America had not voted for her and here she was. Then she pointed out that America had voted for Al Gore and he was there too. Funny ol' thing, life...

Think Progress has the video of "the announcement" as well as the transcript.

DICAPRIO: So, Mr. Gore, we’ve got a big crowd out here tonight and an even bigger one at home. Is there anything you might want to announce?

GORE: I’m just here for the movies.

(...)DICAPRIO: Now, are you sure, are you positive that all this hard work hasn’t inspired you to make any other kind of major, major announcement to the world here tonight?

GORE: Well, I do appreciate that, Leo. And i’m kind of surpised at the feelings welling up here actually. You’ve been very convincing. Even though I honestly had not planned on doing this, I guess with a billion people watching, it’s as good as time as any.

Go watch the video to see how it ends!

On March 16, 2003 Dick Cheney went on Meet the Press. His absurd claims in that interview have since become politically embarrassing to the White House. For example, he declared...

I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.

You won't any longer find a link to this transcript on the White House website—nor, indeed, are there links to most of Cheney's interviews from before 2006. Don't believe me? Just do a search for that infamous sentence at www.whitehouse.gov.

The WH website evidently has been busy scrubbing links to interviews and perhaps other public appearances by top officials. The operation has proceeded somewhat unevenly, though aggressively. Pretty clearly the WH wants to make it much harder to research the administration's past pronouncements, especially unscripted ones, and especially those pertaining to Iraq.

How embarrassing now for the White House to get caught in the act of scrubbing its website!

For perhaps the first time since he helped to engineer the invasion of Iraq, Dick Cheney was asked by a reporter about his statement in 1991 that invading Iraq would inevitably lead to a 'quagmire'. And Cheney declared that he was right in 1991, and that advocating an invasion of Iraq in 2003 was right as well.

Reading between the lines, it appears that US policy in 1991 was anti-quagmire, but by 2003 it had become pro-quagmire.

Last week, Senator Dorgan introduced the Honest Leadership and Accountability in Contracting Act (S-60), legislation that provides a range of remedies and preventive measures to stop the runaway contracting and fraud we have seen under the Republicans. It will also reinstate the debarment procedure that was the subject of an executive order in the last days of the Clinton administration - and quickly rescinded by Bush.

The CBC reports today:

The Supreme Court of Canada has struck down the security certificate system used by the federal government to detain and deport foreign-born terrorist suspects.

In a 9-0 judgment handed down Friday, the court found that the system, described by the government as a key tool for safeguarding national security, violates the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The high court gave Parliament one year to re-write the law that's keeping three men at the centre of the case in legal limbo.

more here.

This month's newsletter from the Employee Benefit Research Institute includes an article, Retirement Plan Participation and Asset Allocation.

For me, the article raises questions about the request for reparations for descendants of US slaves.

note: Since this was written, the State of Virginia apologized for its role in slavery. A step toward making right a great wrong.

Last week, the National Labor Relations Board General Counsel announced that it had reached a settlement for $3.5 million dollars for employees of kosher bakery Korn's Bakery. Details below.

If you are an American worker - and can take time off work when you are sick - and get paid for it - well, then, thank your lucky stars. Half of us cannot.

The New Yorker’s financial columnist James Surowiecki has a new (to me, at least) angle on the Bush administration’s escalating Iran rhetoric. It seems that tough talk from the U.S. actually improves Iran’s oil revenues.

I came across this article yesterday and found it disturbing on multiple levels.

Increase in egg donors raises concerns

CHICAGO - Human egg donation was a rarity not so long ago. But heightened demand for eggs — and rising compensation for donors — are prompting more young women to consider it.

Where to start? Personally, I believe anonymous donation is problematic in the first place, but putting that issue aside, buying donations, especially from women, raises similar ethical concerns as buying organs. Then there's this:

A small survey from an Illinois clinic, included at a recent ASRM meeting, found that donors used compensation for everything from savings and down-payments on property to school expenses and car payments. Half of them also used some of the money to pay credit card debt and other loans.

Ali Shalal Abbas, a former prisoner at Abu Ghraib, has submitted an affidavit under oath in Malaysia about his brutal treatment at the prison. Last year he was widely identified as the hooded prisoner seen in the photo he is holding here. Although significant doubt was raised subsequently about that identification (I postpone discussion of that until the end), it's certain that he was held in Abu Ghraib at the time. His testimony may have credibility, then, and on that presumption, I agree with journalist Helena Cobban that it ought to be widely discussed. She deserves credit incidentally for drawing attention to the affidavit.

Ali Shalal's testimony is grim. Skip down toward the end if you have a weak stomach.

Judges see it all the time - people trying to avoid jury duty. And employers making it hard for those willing to serve to be on juries. So recently one judge took action.

What follows is the complete decision as to whether the employer should be held in contempt, and a paeon to the value of jury service in our democracy.

It turns out that Democratic Senators are criticizing the politicization of the NIE on Iraq along much the same lines as I did in my recent (yes, lengthy) analysis of the document: A sucker's guide to unclassified reports.

I identified several signs that the unclassified executive summary of the NIE, the Key Judgments, is disingenuous, incomplete, misleading, and rhetorical. Like the unclassified version of the 2002 NIE, the latest Key Judgments try to persuade the reader to draw certain conclusions. They put the best possible spin on administration policy.

The organizing 'principle' behind the document was a determination to justify the continued occupation of Iraq and, by extension, a policy of escalation. It was not a candid survey of the situation we face there.

Walter Pincus reports today that behind the scenes in the Senate, Democrats have put John Negroponte on notice about that spin. Good. The document (as we have it) is intolerable.

. . . as long as you are a contractor working for DHS or similar agencies. But if you are working for the Department of Education, well then we need to background check you up the wazoo.

Digging out from the storm in another state, a city, longing for my valentine and cherished countryside, I took thought of this poem of Robert Frost, A Line-storm Song:

The line-storm clouds fly tattered and swift,
The road is forlorn all day,
Where a myriad snowy quartz stones lift,
And the hoof-prints vanish away.
The roadside flowers, too wet for the bee,
Expend their bloom in vain.
Come over the hills and far with me,
And be my love in the rain.

For a couple decades now a huge fight has been brewing over whether access to scientific information should be open and at no or low charge - in order to advance science - or fee-based so that science can be advanced by ensuring it is financially supported. Now that is the nice way to put it, but it is a huge battle, and a battle that affects us all. Last year the supporters of information for a fee hired a publicist whose recent clients have included Jeffrey Skillings and Exxon-Mobil. Here are some of the details.

Last week, Junior Achievement released poll results that found business to be the top choice for US teens. If past experience predicts what will happen with this year's poll results, the story will be picked up on the worldwide web and the worlwide world.

But if you find that poll results reported uncritically, then your reporter was merely acting as a stenographer. Here's why this is a totally meaningless poll.

By Liz Borkowski, originally posted at The Pump Handle

Earlier today, the House of Respresentatives Committee on Science and Technology held a hearing on President Bush’s amendements to Executive Order 12866, and three of the witnesses painted a dismal picture of regulation under these new rules. (The fourth, William Kovacs of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, suggested that small businesses are drowning under regulations and the new requirements are needed to stem the tide.) David Michaels and Celeste Monforton have also written here about why this new order is problematic.

This is going to be just a list of reports I think are worth a look - no analysis. The two most recent focus on security issues in transportation. In addition, there is response to a request from Sen. Carl Levin for information on whether background checks are being performed on contractors who perform public work. The third category is on Medicare Drug Programs. Some shockers included.

February 2, the National Labor Relations Board ordered employer Comar, Inc. of Buena, New Jersey to pay $2,625,663.78 in backpay to its employees and other remedies for violations including failure to bargain and failure to provide the union with information it needed to bargain.

On Sunday's Weekend Edition, Jim Zarroli reported on the situation of workers who were laid off two years ago after Carrier Corporation shut down a plant and laid off workers from its Syracuse plant - Workers Face a Cold World After Carrier. The story repeated over and over again for these workers is that they are barely getting by after losing their manufacturing jobs. But something important was missing from the discussion.

There's something just a little bit odd about the latest NIE on Iraq. I don't mean the fact (helpfully omitted from news reports last week) that the Bush administration held back its release for months—after failing to produce a new NIE for years. I'm more struck by how calculated and manipulative the unclassified version of this document is. The Key Judgments (the only part declassified) is so incomplete and vague that it must be giving us a grossly misleading picture of what the full NIE has to say.

We've been here before, with the notorious NIE from 2002. And yet, almost as if Bush & Co. had not manipulated public perception of Iraq during the last go round, once again most reporters greeted the unclassified version as if it were a straightforward summary of the intelligence on Iraq. But it is in fact a highly rhetorical document, and far from candid, as a few moments of thought would have shown.

So, what's the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) been up to lately?

OSHA has just issued a 47-page manual telling employers how to deal with a pandemic. By coincidence, the Department of Labor has requested comments on changes to the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA).

In the matter of pandemics, the two share more than merely being agencies connected to the Department of Labor.

In the unbossed archive, you will find a story about righwing groups masquerading as bona fide academic organizations. Wolves in academics' clothing One of this alliance of right wing groups that attacks academics has sent a threat to Northeastern University. Nice guys.

Recently, Revere at Effect Measure has been calling for a stronger public health infrastructure, and is making a good case. Effect Measure is written by a group of senior public health scientists and practitioners, so there’s good reason to worry when Revere says this:

Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao spoke January 30, at a Government Performance Summit hosted by the Performance Institute. Actually, she double-spoke.

The word on the street is that this the best of all economies, fueled by tax cuts, freeing up capital to do what it does best, and freeing corporations from the fetters of regulation. That's the word on the street if your street is Wall Street. But what if it's Main Street or the back streets?

Senator Dodd, who was instrumental in enacting the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), has since been attempting to expand the number of employees covered by the FMLA and to provide paid, instead of unpaid leave. Now those efforts may no longer be futile.

I think this Sunday is the end of intelligent life - as a series - not as we know it. I'm including miscellaneous tidbits I forgot to include or that didn't fit into other categories.

Now you can find out. The Sustainable Endowments Institute has just released its College Sustainbility Report Card — A Review of Campus & Endowment Policies at Leading Institutions. From this link you can find the complete report and sizeup how your college is doing compared with the folks you root against.

The Sustainable Endowments Institute is a special project fund of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors and is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 2005, the Institute is engaged in research and education on the sustainability of higher education endowments.

The Far Right, that's who.

According to NPR this morning, the only constitutional law scholar to be consulted on the legalily of the secret Bush eavesdropping program is ultra-conservative Douglas Kmiec. And what does Kmiec about the program? Perfectly legal and the ACLU is wrong to attack it. NPR needs to be called on this.

The former head of CIA operations in Europe, Tyler Drumheller, continues to spill the beans about the Bush administration's determination to attack Iraq notwithstanding the evidence.