In what seems to be the final (really!) push on health care reform on Capitol Hill, offices have been deluged with phone calls from across the country. They are pro-reform, anti-reform, blasting reconciliation or begging for an up-or-down vote – engaged voters who are attempting to influence the course of what will be a razor-close vote this weekend.

No one has been more targeted than the 37 House Democrats who voted “No” the first time around on health care, the majority of which did so under the mantle of fiscal responsibility. They are prime gets for Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the White House, who need to peel off a few to make up for the lost votes due to retirements and a change in the abortion provisions in the legislation.

TPM

Just one more example of a single individual standing up for important principles even at the risk of their income, reputation and friendships. Their example is taken up by others, and others and sometimes become a movement, or reverses the status quo of acquiescence to power and authority.

Thanks Charles

Fear of Communist infiltration swept the nation after World War II, and nothing characterized the government’s paranoid reach into citizens’ lives more than the loyalty oaths that thousands of Americans had to sign.

In the summer of 1950, the University of California vigorously enforced a state law requiring public employees to sign such an oath, and more than 11,000 UC employees did so rather than risk losing their jobs.

Charles Muscatine, a recently hired assistant professor of English, said no. He was among 31 UC Berkeley professors who refused to sign.

SF Gate:

The loyalty oath demand is still ubiquitous. After a recent two day course at my local fire department to be a CERT member [Community Emergency Response Team] we were asked to raise our right hands and swear loyalty to the state of California…. I was unable to do so. What a nutty state of affairs. I’d be glad to affirm that I’d follow the team leader, or do no injury, etc… but I’m not even sure what loyalty to the state means,or implies. How could I swear to it?

By Howell Raines
Sunday, March 14, 2010

One question has tugged at my professional conscience throughout the year-long congressional debate over health-care reform, and it has nothing to do with the public option, portability or medical malpractice. It is this: Why haven’t America’s old-school news organizations blown the whistle on Roger Ailes, chief of Fox News, for using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration — a campaign without precedent in our modern political history?

Washington Post

Indeed.

Our friends at Climate Progress has more to say on this….

(Continued…)

Well hallelujah!

The Internal Revenue Service is intensifying its scrutiny of wealthy Americans.

The federal agency increased its audits of taxpayers who earned $1 million to $5 million by 33 percent last year compared with 2008, new I.R.S. figures show.

The numbers, released late Thursday in the agency’s 2009 annual data book, also show that the I.R.S. increased its audits by 16 percent for those earning $5 million to $10 million last year. Audits of those who made at least $10 million rose by 8.5 percent, according to the data.

The figures are the strongest evidence yet that the agency is honoring a vow by the I.R.S. commissioner, Douglas H. Shulman, to increase scrutiny of wealthy taxpayers.

… The I.R.S. created the Global High Wealth Industry Group last fall to scrutinize people earning at least $10 million a year. It focuses on deciphering the techniques the wealthy sometimes use to illegally minimize their tax bills. Those techniques include the use of partnerships, trusts and offshore entities.

NY Times

Leymah Gbowee: My heroes are Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Leymah Gbowee is the bravest woman I know. Starting eight years ago, in the midst of the brutal civil wars that threatened to annihilate her native Liberia, she had the guts to stand up to the warlords with little more than a dream and a white T-shirt. Gbowee (pronounced BEAU-ee) persuaded Monrovia’s market women—a largely uneducated, totally unarmed group of moms and merchants—to stage daily sit-ins demanding peace. She promoted their own Lysistrata moment, convincing the women to deny sex to their husbands until the fighting ended. And one day she faced down the murderous Charles Taylor himself, announcing, “We are now taking this stand to secure the future of our children, because we believe as custodians of society, tomorrow our children will ask us, ‘Mama, what was your role during the crisis?’”

See Pray the Devil Back to Hell for more…

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Cuffs. Cuffs is what we need.

More at HuffPo

Obama gives away his $1.4 million Nobel award.  In fact, he’ll never see it.  The Nobel Committee writes checks directly to those designated. [To whom is it income and pays the tax?]

And good for him.  Proud to have such a president…

The largest share of the Nobel funds, $250,000, will go to Fisher House, which provides housing for families of patients receiving medical care at major military and Department of Veterans Affairs medical centers.

About $200,000 will go to the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, which is raising money for long-term relief efforts in that country after the devastating earthquake.

Six charities working to prepare students for higher education and help them pay for it will each get $125,000: the American Indian College Fund, the Appalachian Leadership and Education Foundation, College Summit, the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, the Posse Foundation and the United Negro College Fund.

Shifting sea ice around Antarctica is already disrupting penguin colonies as the world’s climate warms, according to a new report by a team of polar scientists.

The researchers looked at the complex relationship between emperor and Adelie penguins and their changing habitats and studied how a projected temperature increase in coming decades of 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 Fahrenheit, might affect the way the animals build nests, find food and raise their young. …

The most deadly effect of the changes was already visible 30 years ago among emperor penguins on Adelie Land, along Antarctica’s east coast, where the 2005 Academy Award-winning documentary “The March of the Penguins” was filmed, Ainley said.

Winds there, at Pointe Géologie, swept the solid ice where female penguins laid their eggs and the male emperors kept the eggs warm and reared the chicks. Under those fierce winds, the thinned and unstable ice broke off. Though the males could swim, the chicks drowned. Within a decade, the emperor colony’s population dropped from 6,000 pairs to 3,000, Ainley said.

UC Berkeley professor of political science Wendy Brown was among the more than 200 Berkeley faculty members who traveled to Sacramento on March 4. A co-chair of the Berkeley Faculty Association, she gave the following address on the capitol steps during the “Educate the State” rally.

Not long ago, California public education was an international beacon of excellence. Through much of the 20th century, Californians were committed to quality public elementary and secondary schools and an accessible multi-tiered system of higher education — from guaranteed access to community college for every high school graduate, to great research universities and professional schools.

After decades of demonstrating that this was possible — that there could be affordable mass access to high-quality education — California begin to unravel its own accomplishment. The 1978 passage of Prop 13 marked the beginning of this unraveling, pitching our elementary and secondary schools into the downward decline that today finds teachers facing overcrowded classrooms, insufficient books and supplies, inadequate compensation and lay-offs, and throwing a spectacularly successful higher education system into the mud.

…

Without quality public education in our future, we face a people manipulable through their frustrations, mobilizable through false enemies and false promises. This is the dangerous material of democracy’s opposite — despotism if not fascism.

So California’s disinvestment in education not only entrenches and deepens inequalities, not only breaks the promise of opportunity for every able student, not only chokes the engine of invention and achievement that built California’s 20th century glory. It destroys the fundament of democracy itself — an educated citizenry capable of thoughtful analysis and informed judgment.

California must recommit to first class K-12 education and the California Master Plan for higher education. We must come to our senses, quickly, about preserving the most esteemed public university system in the world. And we must do so not only because education is what lifts people from poverty, equalizes opportunities, reduces crime and violence, builds bright individual and collective futures, but makes democracy real.

Educate the state. Sí se puede.

From UC Berkeley News

Yep. Spain’s great island paradise, covered in snow. Not to mention Barcelona’s historic snowfall on Tuesday…

PALMA DE MALLORCA, Spain – The snowstorm that has lashed Spain in recent days arrived on Wednesday at the Mediterranean island of Mallorca, forcing the closure of highways and schools.

In the capital, Palma, the snow at sea level surprised residents, many of whom immortalized the moment by snapping photos with their cellphones amid temperatures of around 2 C (36 F).

In all, 11 highways and roads were closed to traffic due to the heavy snowfall, which on Thursday is expected to continue falling at higher elevations here.

The snow and cold weather has caused consumption of energy to skyrocket all over the Balearic Islands, with natural gas consumption – for instance – increasing by 70 percent in recent hours.

Meanwhile, mainland Spain’s northeastern Catalonia region is slowly getting back to normal after the regional paralysis caused by Tuesday’s historic snowfall, but problems still remain in the supply of electricity and in traveling by road to France.

The snow blocked the roads and railways, left some 220,000 people without electricity and forced classes to be cancelled for 160,000 students, while coastal towns were battered by waves of up to 7.7 meters (25 feet) and wind gusts of 133 kph (83 mph). EFE

Herald Tribune

Wow! The early reports were that Majority Leader Reid’s wife and daughter were injured in an automobile accident. Well, yes. Broken back; broken neck.

Harry Reid’s wife suffers broken neck, back in D.C. area crash

Since he has the best health insurance in the US, that part will not be a worry to him… The suffering of his two loved ones will weigh as deeply as many of us can understand