One hundred enthusiastic Atlas Shrugged fans braved chilly temperatures on the east steps of the Colorado capitol Friday as part of a nationwide "tea party" protest to rail against the federal stimulus package and the government, in general.

Beyond the typical conservative-Libertarian rhetoric was some practical advice on how to "shrug these parasites off our backs" like opening a black market in your own garage.

by Snarky Anderson crossposted from Blogging for Michigan

Ann Arbor, Michigan's Thomas More Law Center has been on a roll these past few months. Last December, it sued the U.S. Treasury Department, arguing that the government was promoting radical Islam by paying federal bailout money to the insurer AIG. Now it has joined forces with Michael Savage to stop Congress from re-instituting the Fairness Doctrine, which existed between 1949 and 1987.

Remember Ronnie's missile shield, the cooked test results, the money down a rathole? Well, it hasn't gone away. According to the Government Accountability Office:

The Missile Defense Agency (MDA) has spent about $56 billion and will spend about $50 billion more through 2013 to develop a Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS).

Cap and trade is all the rage. Use the power of markets to get regulation and reduction of greenhouse gases without actually having to regulate. The claims might for the magic of the market might have gone unremarked a year ago, but we live in a time when the magic of the market appears to be more aligned with the dark forces.

Finally. A grown-up version of the popular 1970s Schoolhouse Rock TV series. Media designer Jonathan Jarvis uses a creative web animation to explain the "short and simple story of the credit crisis."

As discussed in WashPost: Complicit in Disformation (or explicit collaboration)?, last Sunday's George Will column was a disgraceful example of distorted discussion of climate change issues. This deceitful piece and the Washington Post's seeming backing of it has created an uproar through the blogosphere that is seriously questioning what this sort of shoddy editorial management of opinion pages means for any Washington Post claim to journalistic integrity.

Now, this issue goes beyond this George F Will column to his serial stretching of fact to beyond the breaking point beyond truthiness. This issue goes beyond Will's repeated will-ful deceit to the repeated Post publication of deception, often dishonest opinion pieces related to global warming and climate challenges. This is more than about Will's deceit in Dark Green Doomsayers. Even so, it is worth returning to this specific deceitful piece to provide a simple summary of how it is deceitful with some quick references.

Here are just three of the explicit arenas of his deceit:

1. Claims that scientists (especially climatologists) were united in concerns over Global Cooling in 1970s. FALSE.
2. States that sea ice is same today as 1979. At best, misleading and disingenuous. And, his source disagrees with him.
3. States that there has been no global warming for a decade. At absolute best, misleading and disingenuous. And, his source disagrees with him.

Over the years, unbossed has reviewed various studies and cases involving misclassification of workers as independent contractors. You can find those prior posts here.

The Ohio Attorney General has just issued a study of the dimensions and impact of misclassifiying workers as independent contractors. In addition to reviewing the features of misclassification in general and in Ohio in particular, the report summarizes past studies at the federal and states levels.

Here are some findings from that report.

President Barack Obama is about to make his first trip to another nation flying aboard Air Force One. Traveling north in wintry weather isn't necessarily the most comfortable choice, but Canada is a critical US partner, meriting being on the top of the list for foreign travel for many reasons.

When it comes to Canadian-US relations, there is one issue that lies amid the tangled heart of the intertwined economic, energy, environmental, and climate challenges: Canadian Tar Sands.

Now roughly accounting for 10 percent of the United States' oil imports, the processes for transforming tar sands into fuel for America's gas guzzlers makes traditional oil production (even into ANWR) look benign in comparison. Devastating for the local (water, forests), regional (air pollution, bird), and global (GHG emissions) environment, Tar Sands is the wrong answer to North America's energy challenges.

DOD's Robert Gates, with help from other Republicans, is trying to kill whistleblower protections that were included in an amendment to HR.1, the stimulus bill. The protections were stripped from the final version of the stimulus bill at the insistence of Senator Susan Collins (R.-Maine). But, an attempt to revive the legislation is underway.

Opponents have support from the Washington Post, which published an editorial opposing the legislation that would give whistleblowers at intelligence agencies, as well as other federal agencies, basic due process rights to protect them from retaliatory investigations, dismissals, security clearance revocations, and other forms of reprisal that are common in the federal government. Today, the Post followed up its misleading editorial with a misleading feature story titled, "Obama, Gates at Odds Over New Whistleblower Protections."

The one bright spot within the economic gloom that surrounds so many of us was the Republic Window and Door worker sit in. By sitting in they stood up for their rights. By sitting in they got our attention and sent a lesson of what is possible by engaging in concerted acts of mutual aid and support.

They showed a labor movement that has some real movement.

Evangelical leaders are bellyaching that their self-anointed "moral majority" vocabulary is working against them, according to a story in Christianity Today. So they're on a new mission to erase the hard-edge, politically intolerant-sounding catchphrases from the lexicon of journalists.

From the Congressional Record in 1935:

While 60 percent of the families in America contributed only 1.6 percent to the total savings of the country, 2.3 percent of all families contributed 66-2/3 percent to all savings, and 60,000 families at the top of the economic ladder saved almost as much as 25,000,000 families on the lower rungs. Corporate surpluses rose from $8,500,000,000 in 1923 to $16,000,000,000 in 1929. These accumulations of the few sought outlet through investment in plant facilities. Contrasted with the 10 percent rise in wages between 1922 and 1929, the production of machinery increased 91 percent and of capital equipment 70 percent. Production mounted beyond any possibilities of market absorption.

For a short while we staved off inevitable disaster by the pipe dream of installment selling and by lending Europe money with which to buy our own products. But when the domestic market finally closed to further investment, and foreign trade collapsed because our own people had no money with which to buy European goods, the crash came.

79 Cong. Rec. 7567 (1935).

by gjohnsit posted with permission

"Banking was conceived in iniquity and was born in sin. The bankers own the earth."
- Sir Josiah Stamp, 1927

It was a news story that didn't get much traction. Yet it is a reflection of all that is wrong with the world of finance today.

Curious about CEO pay in those days before we had heard of limiting them to poverty wages in the mid-6 figures? What could be more of doldrum than mid-February in the midst of a serious recession? So how about a fun website that lets you see how the CEOs got paid, who got how much TARP money, and more? And why is it that worker pay is always blamed for the trouble we are in?

by UnionGal - crossposted by permission

It's that corporate holiday where men and women show how much they love through the purchase and giving of chocolates and flowers.

But did you know that cocoa exported from West Africa is primarily produced using child slave labor? That women working on flower plantations are routinely harassed or raped in Central and South America? Did you also know that there is something you can actually do about this?

by Snarky Anderson, used with permission

Did you know that February 11 was White Shirt Day? And do you know its significance in Michigan history?

For more and more of us, health insurance and access to good healthcare is a vanishing dream. By tying health coverage to having a job - unless you have the great (mis)fortune to be poor or old - health as jobs go south, health coverage is just unavailable.

A new report, Unemployed and Uninsured in America tells a grim story for those who are now losing their jobs, and their health coverage.

by gjohnsit - posted with permission

Friday's headline economic numbers were bad. Really bad.

The jobless rate rose to 7.6 percent from 7.2 percent in December, the Labor Department said today in Washington. Payrolls fell by 598,000, the biggest monthly decline since December 1974.

Those are some ugly numbers. They are awful enough to stand on their own without comment...but they aren't the end of the story.

In fact, the news is much worse than that.

Remember those sit-in strikers back a month ago or so? The ones who got a lot of public support and, as a result, got money owed to them. Well they have continued to be busy and creative in pressing their rights and interests. You may even be able to see them in person. They are going on tour.

Here's an update.

Of course, that’s not the concern of the NY Times Style Section, which has as its front page news, You Try to Live on 500K in This Town - a tale of woe for the financial executives who accept taxpayer money and in exchange must adjust to living on just $500,000 a year.

So here's what it's like for those in the lower 50% of wage earners in the US, whose lives have been destroyed by the decisions of those executives.

Keep in mind: These are figures from when things were "good".

Good Jobs First has just issued an important policy study on the intersection of worker rights and environmental action, High Road or Low Road? Job Quality in the New Green Economy (February 03, 2009), commissioned by Change to Win, Sierra Club, the Laborers' International Union, and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

by BruceMcF at Burning the Midnight Oil

OK, so, to make an egregiously long story merely excessively long, a very strange thing happened on the road to the Stimulus Package. As Rep. Oberstar told the U.S. Conference of Mayors:

That is why we set forth this $85-billion initiative from our committee. It's been reduced in the final going. We expect that it'll come out somewhere around $63 billion, but $30 billion for highways.

The reason for the reduction in overall funding ... was the tax cut initiative that had to be paid for in some way by keeping the entire package in the range of $850 billion.

As I described in Transport Stimulus: You're Doing It Wrong, actual effective stimulus spending was shortchanged -- and in particular spending with substantial long term economic and strategic benefits -- to "pay for" tax cuts.

by BruceMcF at Burning the Midnight Oil

There is this big emphasis on "shovel ready projects" in the Stimulus Bill ... but now that the details are coming out, we can see that in transport, its just a load of horseshit used as an excuse for supporting business as usual.

The headline numbers are $30b highway spending, $10b for public transport and rail:

• Transit Capital Assistance, $15.9b in shovel ready projects, $6b in funding
• Amtrak, more than $10b in capital backlog, $0.8b in funding
• Fixed Guideway Infrastructure Investment, $50b capital backlog, $2b in funding
• Capital Investment Grants, $2.4b in already approved projects, $1b in funding

I got a "shovel-ready" project for you ... shoveling out the bullshit from the Bush Administration Department of Transport and replacing the pandering to the oil companies with a concern for America's Economic Future.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 has been in the news a lot lately. It's the stimulus package that the House Republicans voted against because of its lack of tax cuts.

The official description of the bill says:

Making supplemental appropriations for job preservation and creation, infrastructure investment, energy efficiency and science, assistance to the unemployed, and State and local fiscal stabilization, for fiscal year ending September 30, 2009, and for other purposes.

But did you know that it is also a bill that protects whistleblowers?