Well gee, if you can’t trust Tom Delay, who’s left?

The British government minister who resigned over the Iraq War is now charging that her government bugged Kofi Annan’s office:

The ex-cabinet minister, Clare Short, who quit as international development secretary because of her opposition to the war, said she had seen transcripts of Mr. Annan’s conversations. “In fact,” she added in a BBC radio interview, “I’ve had conversations with Kofi in the run-up to the war, thinking `Oh dear, there will be a transcript of this and people will see what he and I are saying.’ ”

At his monthly news conference today, Prime Minister Tony Blair said, “I’m not going to comment on the work of our security services — do not take that as an indication that the allegations made by Clare Short are true. “I really do regard what Clare Short has said this morning as totally irresponsible, and entirely consistent.”

Today GET-UP is on strike:

“This is simply a withdrawal of TA … labor,” said GET-UP Mass Action Committee Chairman Joe Drury. “We’re saying that if you don’t think we do work on this campus, you’ll notice when we’re not doing it,” Drury said.

U Penn has apparently tried to intimidate graduate students out of striking by threatening disciplinary repercussions, prompting the AFT to file Unfair Labor Practice Charges against the University:

Penn Law professor Clyde Summers, who has been referred to as “Mr. Labor Law,” said that he believes that what the University did was “flat out illegal.” Summers called the University’s stance “an unfair labor practice. Any employee who wants to observe the strike is legally protected — they cannot be disciplined or penalized for observing the strike,” he said

The Daily Pennsylvanian, which yesterday devoted a story to undergraduates who don’t want to miss lectures and exams because of the strike without mentioning that GET-UP isn’t asking them to, expects labor tension to pass after the strike, and in arguing its case, seriously misrepresents the state of graduate student organizing here at Yale:

Despite subsequent strikes by Yale’s graduate students, they still have not won the right to unionize and have given up any intention to vote. “The Yale administration has said that it would never recognize the results of the [National Labor Relations Board] decision,” Reynolds said.

GESO hasn’t given up on a vote. What GESO is demanding is a fair process that would avert the legal limbo Levin convinced Bollinger, Simmons, and Rodin to visit on graduate students at Columbia, Brown, and Penn by having the ballots from their NLRB elections impounded for indefinite appeals. GESO rightly refuses to engage in a process without an agreement from both sides to honor the results. The rising labor tension at Penn, as at Yale, is borne out of the administration’s refusal to agree to a vote whose results can be counted and followed by both sides. Until that changes, that tension will only heighten – in Philadelphia, here in New Haven, and on campuses across the country.

After months of rumors, HERE and UNITE have approved plans to merge into the appropriately named UNITE HERE. This consolidates two of the leading unions in labor’s New Unity Partnership, and offers both the chance to take advantage of each other’s organizing (particularly HERE) and financing (particularly UNITE) resources.

The situation in Haiti continues to deteriorate:

Human Rights Watch urged the international community to send a peacekeeping force to Haiti to avert violent retaliation against supporters of President Aristide in the capital. ‘Given the horrendous human rights records of some of the leaders of the armed rebellion, we are extremely concerned,’ said Joanne Mariner, deputy director of the group’s Americas Division.

The United Nations World Food Program, which lost a warehouse of food to looters in Cap Haitien on Sunday, warned that food shortages were inevitable if the situation continued to deteriorate. The program now supplies 373,000 Haitians.

Nathan Newman argues that Haiti is everything that Iraq wasn’t:

So you have Republican Senators warning of a bloodbath endangering tens of thousands of Americans, human rights groups warning of mass murder of the population, and the head of the Haitian government welcoming intervention. And Bush has done nothing but increase the problem by fanning anti-Aristide mobilization of opposition forces…

Remember the absurdly Orwellian Rhode Island Homeland Security proposal mentioned here a few weeks back? Looks like the Governor may be starting to get the message:

Carcieri said he had not read the bill that his staff wrote before he made it public, but he received a briefing. ‘This is not the kind of reaction that I anticipated or expected,’ Carcieri said in a brief news conference outside his office.

Carcieri’s 18-page bill also added language to World War I-era laws that make it illegal to: display foreign flags as symbolic of governments preferable to the United States; ‘speak, utter, or print’ statements in support of anarchy; speak in favor of overthrowing the government; or display ‘any flag or emblem other than the flag of the Unites States’ as symbolic of, or preferable to, the United States government.
Carcieri said he will draft and introduce a new homeland-security bill in this session of the General Assembly.

Not responsible for the bill he proposed because he didn’t write it himself? Give me a break. And surprised by the negative reaction to reviving the Alien and Sedition Acts. The generous interpretation would be that the Governor just hasn’t been paying attention. It’s difficult to feel generous about this one at the moment though.

Sam Smith:

For four years, while insisting that Nader and the Greens had cost it the election, the Democrats did not do one thing to insure that what they claimed was true didn’t happen again. In fact, they went out of their way to insure that American progressives would feel as unwelcome in 2004 as they did in 2000. They made no common cause with Greens on any issue. They appointed no Greens to positions in federal, state or local government. They took not one step to institute instant runoff voting which would have eliminated the problem they complained about. They even moved immediately to redistrict the first state legislative seat won by a Green…

The Democrats will have to live with the vituperative behavior they have displayed towards those they more wisely would have been sought to attract. If some Dean voters stay home, if others join the Nader cause, and if Nader does better than expected, the Democrats have no one to blame but themselves. They then really will have only one choice: either to open up or to shut up – either to welcome those they now excoriate and exclude or have the decency to accept the consequences of their own greed and stupidity without whining and blaming someone else.

For those keeping score, Idaho and Utah fall to Kerry as well.

Dana Milbank argues that the Bush Administration has made an art of the Friday new dump:

The Friday before the Pryor nomination, the White House had two other late-day announcements: word that Bush would testify privately to the 9/11 commission, and a 7 p.m. dump of hundreds of documents from Bush’s National Guard files. Other Friday surprises in recent months include the Justice Department’s approval of a Texas redistricting plan expected to give the GOP as many as seven House seats; a decision by the Environmental Protection Agency not to regulate dioxins in sewage sludge; and the news from the Commerce Department that household incomes had declined for three years in a row and 1.7 million people had fallen into poverty — the first time such statistics were announced on a Friday.

“They’re not as successful now in hiding these Friday stories,” said Robert Lichter of the nonpartisan Center for Media and Public Affairs. “Everybody does it, but this administration has done it too much for their own good.”

And this Friday? Stay tuned…

The Guardian reports on post-docs throwing in the towel and moving into other lines of work:

Karl Gensberg, a post-doctoral researcher who has had short-term contracts at the University of Birmingham, will begin his new career in the summer after completing a plumbing course at Sutton Coldfield College.

His present contract ends in April and Dr Gensberg says the university has emailed him to ask if he would return to the campus to do plumbing work.

Speaker Dennis Hastert agrees that the ammendment is more a symbolic show of bigotry than a viable attempt to enshrine it in the Constitution:

…while a spokesman for House Speaker Dennis Hastert doubted such an amendment would receive the two-thirds majority necessary to pass Congress, he said the issue would still serve to define the choice available for voters come November.

“Sometimes you win for losing,” said Hastert spokesman John Feehery, noting the issue would draw a clear line between Bush and Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Kerry and Edwards, unsurprisingly, are responding with the rhetoric of states’ rights and national unity. Edwards best moment is this:

Edwards said Bush’s announcement shows “The president is not in touch with what’s going on in people’s lives. If he really wants to help married couples, what he should be doing is helping them with their economic problems, their health-care problems,” the North Carolina senator told reporters during a campaign stop in Georgia.