Ask Shannon Hilt, who's seen our broken system for forming unions firsthand, and she'll tell you that there's no question: Workers need the Employee Free Choice Act. Hilt spent three years as a field examiner for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), overseeing the elections process and investigating unfair practices. She says the system we have now, one in which companies, not workers, have all the power, isn't free, it isn't fair and doesn't protect workers.

I think it is safe to say Republicans don't much like government, much less respect what it can and does accomplish. Therefore, it seems to me they don't listen when some department issues a report produced by subject matter experts. Now our government is far from perfect. But I think it is about time we start to promote that government does in fact work.

As South America wakes up this morning, Peruvians will decide whether to engage in strikes to stand against "free trade" and support indigenous people of the Amazon who were tragically attacked last week by their government. The official death toll from last week's police attack on indigenous people in Peru is 30 lives lost, though it is estimated that many more have died. They died while protesting the harmful impact of the US-Peru Free Trade Agreement on their forests, their families, and their ancestral lands.

I wish Janet Napolitano had not apologized for her gracious omen on right-wing extremism. She was right. Recently, the prophecies of Napolitano have slithered into fruition from the darkest fringes of the American born. First it was Kansas, then Arkansas, and now the Nation's Capital. Indeed, our most vulnerable selves have been stripped naked of our fears as our most recent encounters with terrorism have not haunted us from a foreign land, aloft from some transnational desert, scribbled in Farsi or Arabic. No, these encounters have come in standard red, white, and blue English, harvested in the soil of American citizenship.

Newt Gingrich has done the unthinkable. He has attacked one of the Republican sacred cows. No, not the rich. But almost as bad. Newt attacked former president Ronald Reagan.

The Autism Society of America has teamed up with AMC Theaters to provide venues for families of autistic children to take their kids to the movies, in selected theaters, which have been set up to accomodate the special sensory needs of autistic children. This month, the movie that has been selected for the program is the Pixar blockbuster Up.

The sword of Damocles has fallen; Atlas has dropped the Earth and an earthquake has struck California. Not a seismic earthquake but an economic earthquake. The reverberations in the California real estate market combined with the outsourcing of jobs set into motion the shaking of the state's economic foundations. If you were to see this play enacted in a theater, you wouldn't believe it. I read it again and again and shake my head at what has become reality in this country.

The so-called "second-wave" feminists of the 1960s and 1970s have often warned the women of my generation, born after Roe vs, Wade, to not take legal abortion for granted. I have always had tremendous respect and admiration for the activists who fought for women's rights in that era, but I believed their fear was unwarranted, merely a product of having grown up in the discriminatory 1950s and early 60s. Now I see they are right to be afraid. For the first time in my life, I feel truly scared that we are going backwards on this issue, and that women's right to safe and legal abortions is being infringed upon.

I've been thinking a lot over the last eighteen months about food security, starting way down in the basement where sun, water, and soil come together in our volume grain production. There is a tight connection between our current population overshoot and the fossil energy resources, both fuel and fertilizer, that got us here. Food production, such as we do now, is more of an energy issue than an environmental one, but pile those two issues together with the economic concerns we face and it's a truly poisonous brew.

Scientists have discovered that exposure to a common pollutant may make people more likely to experience severe symptoms from swine flu -- and it's a pollutant emitted in large quantities by coal-burning power plants and other industrial facilities. The culprit is arsenic, a highly poisonous semi-metal which, according to a new study by researchers at the Marine Biological Laboratory and Dartmouth Medical School, compromises a person's ability to mount an immune response to the H1N1 swine flu virus.

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