Sam on a more hopeful progressivism:

Optimism is deeply ingrained in American culture. Progressives are in a tough spot in this regard, because they tend to bring America the bad news. And America typically kills them for it. We need a lot more skill in motivating people to correct what’s wrong without simultaneously casting a pall over their vision of the future. Progressives need not surrender optimism to the conservatives. As Thomas Jefferson said, “My theory has always been that if we are to dream, the flatteries of hope are as cheap, and pleasanter than the gloom of despair.” It was the Democrats, after all, who in the runaway election year of 1936 labeled Republicans as “disciples of despair” floundering in a “fountain of fear.” Roosevelt himself got considerable mileage from his insupportable assertion that we had nothing to fear but fear itself. And one of the driving characteristics of the sixties was its vibrant, if unrealistic, vision of the future, including the dream of an Age of Aquarius. Today, the Democrats have an excess of whiners, nagging nannies, and contumelious scolds. Did the politics of joy really die with Hubert Humphrey?

Sam Smith on the move to distinguish corporations from people:

Two bills have been introduced in the Maine state legislature – by Democrat Ben Dudley and Green John Eder – that would deny corporations their personhood ill-gotten from an anti-constitutional court ruling in the 19th century. The Maine Democratic Party has gone on record supporting such a change last year. One Maine measure says, “This bill changes the definition of “person” for the Maine Business Corporation Act to specify that “person” means a human being and not an entity such as a corporation, a state, the United States or a foreign government. The purpose of this change is to specify that a corporation does not have the same constitutional rights as a human, such as the right to engage in political speech or activity. Here are some other legislative proposals in the same direction…

Victory at Georgetown:

A hunger strike at Georgetown University over wages for some school employees reportedly has ended. W-R-C T-V says the students ended their hunger strike late last night after the school offered higher wages and more benefits for contract workers, mostly janitors, food-service employees and security personnel. More than 20 students had survived on just water and juice since the strike began March 15th. The university sent an all-student e-mail last night detailing plans to increase wages and the students accepted the plan. One student says she’s proud Georgetown did the right thing. The school says it wants to make a “significant difference” in the lives of its workers. These contract workers now earn $11.33 an hour. The plan calls for them to earn $13 an hour by July first, with a raise to $14 by July 2007.

Over the summer I highlighted a series of Connecticut lawsuits against employers taking extra advantage of tipped employees by paying them below minimum wage for untipped work. This week, Rhonda Dupuis e-mailed to let me know that she’s now litigating eleven class action lawsuits around the issue, and Outback Steakhouse will have depositions this week. There’s more info on-line here, including tapes she recorded while on the job at Chili’s and documentation of Outback Steakhouse’s “wage mistakes.” Check it out.

The Republican federal judge makes the right move and refuses to order that Terri Schiavo’s ordeal be further prolonged against her stated will:

Judge James D. Whittemore of Federal District Court here, ruling on an emergency request that had been made possible only by the intervention of Congress and President Bush, said that Ms. Schiavo’s case had already been “exhaustively litigated” and that the parents of the 41-year-old brain-damaged woman had not established a “substantial likelihood of success” at a new trial on the merits of their arguments…

The Rev. Patrick Mahoney, director of the Christian Defense Coalition, who has sometimes commented on the case on behalf of the parents, said today: “The arrogance of Judge Whittemore is extraordinary. How dare he wait 24 hours to issue this ruling?” “He shows a profound lack of respect for the disabled of America by denying her constitutional rights,” he added. “He has robbed Terri’s legal team of literally a day and a half of the appeals process.” He said the family was hopeful of a successful outcome in the appeals court, adding “Florida has just not been good on this.”

Of all the cynical dissembling from the right on this issue, perhaps particularly offensive is the repeated invocation of the rights of the disabled, a group whose rights the Republican party has spent the past few decades since the first ADA steadily working to erode. At the core of the rights of the disabled is the right to autonomy and self-determination, a right which society too often denies the very people whose bodily conditions have already reduced their control over their lives. The use the mantle of disabled rights to argue for extending the biological functions of someone who has no meaningful consciousness, and to do so against the will she expressed when she was conscious, is the height of hypocrisy.

Mark Kleiman reminds us just how rank the hypocrisy of the Bush Republicans’ grandstanding on Terri Schiavo is:

Sun Hudson, a six-month-old boy with a fatal congenital disease, died Thursday after a Texas hospital, over his mother’s objections, withdrew his feeding tube. The child was apparently certain to die, but was conscious. The hospital simply decided that it had better things to do than keeping the child alive, and the Texas courts upheld that decision after the penniless mother failed, during the 10-day window provided for by Texas law, to find another institution willing to take the child.

Who signed that law, the Texas Futile Care Law, which authorizes pulling the plug when families can’t pay up? Texas Governor George W. Bush. The same George W. Bush who is now apparently up in arms over the refusal of some in his party to vote for deeper cuts in healthcare for the poor. This is the man, and the party, now justifying unprecedented congressional intervention to override the judgment of a woman’s doctors, the choice of her legal guardian based on her stated wishes, and a dozen state court decisions which the US Supreme Court expressly declined to review. Somehow, the Republicans’ private claim that they’ve fond “a great political issue” is more persuasive than Bush’s claim he believes in a “presumption in favor of life” (looks like even their political calculations here are wrong).

What’s differentiates the left and the right in this country on wrenching issues like the one facing the Schiavos? The left wants these choices made based on the informed consideration of the patient’s chosen guardian. The right wants these choices based on the patient’s income bracket.

Trying to placate the Hill community without actually negotiating with them, Yale-New Haven Hospital announces a partial response to some of CORD’s demands:

The hospital announced the program this past Friday, the same day it submitted formal plans for the cancer center to New Haven’s Board of Aldermen. The proposal includes a building with retail, office and garage space and a new office and laboratory building, bringing the project’s total cost to $530 million. As part of the community benefits, the hospital will fund new housing development, increase paid internships and college scholarships for city students, organize construction apprenticeships for New Haven residents, help fund existing youth programs, and provide $40,000 of additional day care for low income families in the Hill neighborhood. District 3 Alderwoman Jacqueline James, who represents the Hill neighborhood where the center will be constructed, said the current investments proposal is insufficient because the hospital did not collaborate with community leaders in its formulation. Though the proposal includes benefits suggested by Community Organized for Responsible Development, a local alliance with ties to a union at odds with Yale-New Haven, the group’s leaders said the hospital has not fully compromised with city residents. CORD organizer Rev. Scott Marks said the hospital has refused to negotiate CORD’s benefits agreement, which is based on a poll of about 800 Hill residents.

Clearly the Hospital has figured out that it can’t get away with simply stonewalling. Hopefully they’ll realize next that their neighbors, and their elected officials, aren’t prepared to settle until everyone with a stake in the result has a seat at the table.

A hopeful sign:

Analysts at the Republican National Committee have sent this warning to the House of Representatives: The party is in danger of losing 25 seats in the 2006 election and, therefore, of losing control of the House for the first time since the 1994 election. Although some Republicans on Capitol Hill believe the RNC is just trying to frighten them, concern about keeping the present 232-202 edge pervades GOP ranks. The second midterm election of an eight-year presidency often produces heavy congressional losses for the party in power. A footnote: Rep. Christopher Shays, re-elected from his Connecticut district last year with 52 percent, is considered by colleagues as the most vulnerable Republican incumbent. Other especially shaky GOP House members include Jim Gerlach of Pennsylvania and Rob Simmons of Connecticut.

Nathan on Republican resistance to labor’s strategic investment of workers’ pensions in firms invested in protecting workers’ retirement:

The GOP talks about an “ownership society” but when unions actually demand that they be allowed to invest their pension funds with companies not hostile to workers, then the GOP wants the government to control their investment decisions. This rightwing attempt to use ERISA and labor law to restrict worker control of their own pension funds should be a signal of what “private accounts” really mean. While people might nominally “own” their money, decisions on how to use that money will be under the sole control of corporate financial firms. Policy wonks want to frame this debate about financial returns to investment, but conservatives and unions know this is about power, the power to control capital in our society. Right now, workers through their unions control a chunk of capital that they have been using aggressively to demand corporate accountability. This attack by the House leadership, like Schwartzenneger’s attempt to liquidate the California state pension system, CALPERS, with its heavy union involvement, is all about eliminating any power by workers collectively to control how capital is managed in our society.

Respectful of Otters suggests why the imagined crisis of “crack babies” gets so much more attention than the very real crisis of lead babies:

The lead problem is complex; it implicates delinquent landlords, decaying inner city housing stock, the shift in low-income housing assistance from federally maintained properties to the Section 8 system (which relies on private landlords), and state and municipal governments. That complexity just didn’t fit in with the 80s and 90s zeitgeist in which the problems of the poor were blamed on individual pathology. In contrast, the “crack baby epidemic” was about poor black women being bad mothers, individually to blame for putting their babies at risk.