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Can we find ideas — political ideas — big enough to be worthy of this moment?

You know, before the cynicism and the disappointment and the recession and the dumbed-down media and, oh yeah, the regrouping Republicans, conspire to dull Barack Obama’s election into the bitter memory of hope and harass his presidency into something that resembles Clintonism and business slightly to the left of usual (if that).

Right now and perhaps for the fabled “first hundred days,” the sense of possibility is as palpable as it is vague. There’s a yearning in the air, but for what? When I was at the post office the other day, the clerk could scarcely contain her enthusiasm for the Lincoln stamps she was showing me — four views of Honest Abe, see. Here he is as a young man; now he’s practicing law; now he’s in Congress; and, finally, here’s the 16th president, the Great Emancipator, deep and wise, the Lincoln we remember, in the embrace of history and myth.

And we both knew, in some unstated way, that she was really showing me Obama stamps. This is what our expectations are, and they’re impossible. Yes, of course.

For the third straight year, against all odds, a national grassroots No Nukes campaign has stripped out of the federal budget a proposed $50 billion boondoggle for new atomic reactors.

The victory gives a giant boost to solar, wind, efficiency, mass transit and other Solartopian technologies that can solve global warming, sustain real economic growth and bring us a truly green-powered Earth.

This latest victory came Wednesday, February 11, as a top-level Congressional conference committee ironed out the last details of the Obama stimulus package. The loan guarantee scam was slipped into the Senate version by Republican Bob Bennett (R-UT) in cooperation with Democrat Tom Carper (D-DE). The loan guarantees would have backed a Department of Energy program supporting new reactor construction, despite a report from the Government Accountability Office warning that such projects would bankrupt more than half the utilities that might undertake them.

This is not a happy time for American autoworkers. Their employers are cutting thousands of jobs, closing plants, and demanding – and getting – major pay and benefit concessions from their union.

Normally, February would be a time of celebration for the union, the United Auto Workers – a time to mark the anniversary of a UAW victory in a sit-down strike in 1937 that led to making its members the world’s most secure and most highly compensated production workers.

But though they are losing that hard-won standing, autoworkers can draw important inspiration from that victory in Flint, Michigan, as they struggle against the severe employer pressures they’re facing today.

The victory ended one of the most dramatic and important economic battles in U.S. history. It pitted the UAW, then struggling for mere survival, against General Motors, then the world’s largest and most profitable manufacturer of any kind.

Mighty GM had vowed publicly that it would never allow the UAW to represent its employees. But the corporation ended up granting that crucial right – and more. It was a stunning victory. It swiftly led to unionization of
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy has now joined House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers in proposing some sort of "truth and reconciliation" commission for the crimes of Bush and Cheney, as if Bush and Cheney have multiplied into a whole population that simply cannot be processed by our judicial system.

Leahy has not introduced legislation, at least not yet. Conyers has introduced a bill, H.R. 104, that would create a commission to spend a year and a half looking at the various crimes of Bush and Cheney. While this might allow congressional Democrats to run election campaigns against Bush and Cheney yet again, even though those two will have been out of office for two years, it's not clear that it would do much else that would be positive.

I recently had the opportunity to catch up with election integrity hero, Steve Heller. Our last interview was back in August, 2007.

You achieved notoriety a few years back. You stole the Diebold documents in January of 2004, the search warrant was served on your house in August of 2004, you were indicted on three felony charges in February of 2006, and you pled guilty to one felony count of unauthorized access to a computer in November of that same year. [For more background and details, all of the press and many of the blog posts on Steve Heller's case can be found here .] So what's happened since then?

Well, in terms of my case, what's happened is that when I pled guilty, I had to pay $10,000 in restitution to the law firm from which I stole the Diebold documents, and I was put on felony probation for three years. After one year, we petitioned the court for a reduction of my sentence from a felony to a misdemeanor. That petition was granted, and as of now, I remain on misdemeanor probation.

The infamous $50 billion nuke power loan guarantee package meant to use your money to build new nuke reactors has gone missing from saturation media coverage of Obama’s Stimulus Package. But it’s still in the Senate version of the bill, it could be voted on this week, and it could kill us all.

Like that $30,000 antique toilet that disappeared into the banking bailout, the corporate media carries not a word about this gargantuan handout to the dying reactor industry. All the hype about a “nuclear renaissance” will come to naught without this massive taxpayer handout. But if it goes through, the landscape could be pock marked with lethal new nukes.

We have days---maybe hours---to stop it. While aid programs to the states, for education and the truly needy are slashed, this gargantuan boondoggle is poised to sail through with virtually no public knowledge.

The loan guarantee package was slipped into the Senate version of the Stimulus Bill by Senator Robert Bennet (R-UT) who proceeded to vote against the overall package. It is not currently in the House version.

Set phasors to Stimulus!

Liberal bloggers seem to be lining up in favor of the $1 trillion-plus stimulus bill to rescue Starship Free Enterpise by boldly going where no economy has gone before.

One guy at Huffpost, Jason Rosenbaum, in a column whose gist is chastising progressives for not supporting the stimulus package enough, believes the economy will never recover if the bill doesn't pass. Then he reminds that there goes health care and all our other cute pet causes with the bath

The President, meanwhile, assures us if the bill does not pass there will be catastrophe, no doubt about it. Both sides of the debate (Cut Taxes! Deficit Spend! Cut Taxes! Deficit Spend!) seem to concur that disaster is immiment if nothing is done.

Maybe not.

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