Duty to Warn

Another season of professional baseball is upon us, another season of a sport that’s billed as the “National Pastime,” yet bars half the population – the female half – from the playing field.

Major and minor league teams, as well as most amateur and semi-professional clubs, have kept the game largely what it has been since its beginnings: a chewing, spitting, macho game reserved for men. Women are allowed to watch, but only rarely have they been allowed to come out of the stands and play.

Major League Baseball made it official in 1952, when teams were banned from signing major or minor league contracts with women.

Baseball officials have not even bothered to explain why they’ve barred women from play. Just about the only public explanation came many years ago from former Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis.

Voiding a contract between the minor league Chattanooga Lookouts and pitcher Jackie Mitchell in 1931 – the first contract ever between a men's professional team and a woman -- Landis declared that women were unfit to play baseball because it is “too strenuous” for them.

Ohio election officials purged more than a million voters between the 2004 and 2008 elections. The number is three times that of voters purged between the 2000 and 2004 elections in that key swing state.

The Free Press Election Protection Project requested data from Boards of Elections in all of Ohio’s 88 counties. A detailed analysis of the records reveals shocking and unprecedented purges. The total number of people whose names were removed from the voting rolls is a stunning 1.25 million.

The Ohio data shows enormous disparities in the number of people purged in different categories from county to county. These results suggest obvious violations of equal protection and due process. The documents demonstrate that the voting rights of a million Ohioans were destroyed based on the arbitrary whims of local election officials. Purging appears to be subject to widely diverse interpretations of state and federal laws by different Ohio Board of Elections officials.

People died---and are still dying---at Three Mile Island.

As the thirtieth anniversary of America's most infamous industrial accident approaches, we mourn the deaths that accompanied the biggest string of lies ever told in US industrial history.

As news of the accident poured into the global media, the public was assured there were no radiation releases.

That quickly proved to be false.

The public was then told the releases were controlled and done purposely to alleviate pressure on the core.

Both those assertions were false.

The public was told the releases were "insignificant."

But stack monitors were saturated and unusable, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission later told Congress it did not know---and STILL does not know---how much radiation was released at Three Mile Island, or where it went.

It’s way past time that Congress declared the March 31 birthdate of Cesar Chavez a national holiday. President Obama agrees. So do the millions of people who are expected to sign petitions being circulated by the United Farm Workers, the union founded by Chavez.

Eight states and dozens of cities already observe Chavez’ birthdate as an official holiday – and for very good reason. As the UFW notes, “He inspired farm workers and millions of people who never worked on a farm to commit themselves to social, economic and civil rights activism. Cesar’s legacy continues to educate, inspire and empower people from all walks of life.”

Obama says, “We should honor him for what he’s taught us about making America a stronger, more just, and more prosperous nation,” and for providing inspirational strength, “as farm workers and laborers across America continue to struggle for fair treatment and fair wages.”

Chavez showed, above all, that the poor and oppressed can prevail against even the most powerful opponents – if they can organize themselves and adopt non-violence as their principal tactic.

“But administration officials also worry that taking too hard a line with AIG and other companies could discourage top financial experts and institutions from joining the government efforts to fix the financial system.” — Weisman, Reddy and Pleven, Wall Street Journal

“AIG built this bomb, and it may be the only outfit that really knows how to defuse it.” — Andrew Ross Sorkin, New York Times

So, OK, we’re being held hostage and we have to pay up — give the AIG “brainiacs,” as Sorkin calls them, their unearned, taxpayer-underwritten $165 million in bonuses — or they’ll walk away from the disaster they created and let the whole global financial structure collapse in ruin.

Wow. I whistle in awe at the fiendishness of what can only be called financial terrorism, and as I do so a modest idea pops into my head, in the spirit of Jonathan Swift, of course.

The myth of a successful nuclear power industry in France has melted into financial chaos.

With it dies the corporate-hyped poster child for a "nuclear renaissance" of new reactor construction that is drowning in red ink and radioactive waste.

Areva, France's nationally-owned corporate atomic façade, has plunged into a deep financial crisis led by a devastating shortage of cash.

Electricite de France, the French national utility, has been raided by European Union officials charging that its price-fixing may be undermining competition throughout the continent.

Delays and cost overruns continue to escalate at Areva's catastrophic Olkiluoto reactor construction project in Finland. Areva has admitted to a $2.2 billion, or 55%, cost increase in the Finnish building site after three and a half years. The Flamanville project---the only one now being built in France---is already over $1 billion more expensive than projected after a single year under construction.

In 2008, France's nuclear power output dropped 0.1%, while wind generation rose more than 37%.

I took a month-old parsnip out to the compost pile yesterday, and I could tell it came from the supermarket because of the thick coating of wax that covered it. Without thinking about what I was doing, I started peeling the wax off. It was as if someone had decided, for some odd art project, to turn the parsnip into a candle, proceeded to put a few layers of wax on it, then changed their mind, and decided to sell it as a parsnip anyhow. My hands now covered with wax, I realized that I didn’t even find this waxy parsnip suitable for putting in the compost, much less eating. “Here,” I said to myself, “is another reason many people like to get their food fresh from local farms.”