If you’re willing to wade through some (tounge-in-cheek) problematic gender politics, Alek has an encouraging post on the California Nurses’ Associations’ legal victory over Schwartzenegger’s attempt to rollback the staffing ratios they’d won:

So the CNA sued, and for the last two months they have been targeting Schwartzenegger in force. Last Friday, Judge Judy Holzer Hersher issued an injunction against the emergency regulation, and told Arnold that instead of appealing he should just go sit in the back of the class and babble incoherently about steroids like an idiot. It’s possible I was reading between the lines a little there.

The highlight is Nurse Martha Kuhl’s fierce and unapologetic rejection, in a Newsweek interview, of the idea that working people fighting for a real social contract represent a greedy “special interest“:

I spent my day treating kids with cancer. I guess you could call that my special interest.

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The Pennsylvania ACLU and and Center for Democracy and Technology are bringing legal challenge against a state web censorship law which has blocked over a million legal websites. A victory there could provide momentum towards overturning state laws in several nearby states which levy punishment against public institutions which fail to restrict the right of adults and children to access information on the web. Let’s hope so.

Bob Kerrey writes an panegyric to the median voter theorem disguised as a call to political courage:

So, show me the person, like Mr. Lieberman, who has angered a partisan Democratic audience with an unpopular idea and you have someone with what it takes to be our next president. And the next time you jump to your feet with applause for a candidate who says what you want to hear, remember that you may be leading them — rather than the other way around.

God forbid the agenda of a Democratic Presidential candidate should be influenced by Black people, poor people, the labor movement, and those other “special interests.”

Good thing after Kerrey lost the primary in 1992 we were saved from having the standard bearer of the Democratic party be someone who dismantles the values and institutions of the New Deal in the name of political maturity and sees leadership in turning away from the constituencies which represent the base of the party and its moral compass – oh, wait…