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

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.

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.

If we can move beyond torture, do we not have a responsibility also to think for a moment about the obvious fact that torture is not the cruelest thing we do? Torture offends us, in part, because the torturer is not at risk, but neither are most pilots dropping bombs. And how exactly does the risk taken by ground troops mitigate the suffering of those they wound, kill, and terrorize? Hanging someone by the wrists offends us, and yet we might rather have it done to us than be kept in 23-hours-a-day isolation for a decade, a practice that is part of our accepted justice system. Clearly our morality is a scrambled hodge-podge of reactions that could use some improvement.