For some time now, there has been an ongoing group-protest on Wall Street and New York’s financial district. The protesters are mainly young Caucasian brothers and sisters, who are totally fed up with where society, capitalism and democracy have been heading for too long now. It is no secret that significant numbers of enlightened folks nationwide are fed up with the many ways money corrupts the political system; and the many ways greed, connections, influence, self-over-indulgence, indiscretion, recklessness, power, unethical behavior and the like, corrupts the economic system.

If Schneiderman is really the national "progressive counterpoint" to Obama, what does it say about progressives that the best they could do is the AG of the 4th largest state?

The governments division of the U.S. Census Bureau has released state and local government employment and payroll data for March 2010. I’ve compiled it for New York City, the rest of New York State (by subtraction), New Jersey and the United States, along with some related and relevant private sector data, and added 2002 data for comparison. Due to technical difficulties, the spreadsheet is located off site at this location. Follow the link to download it and save it. The “local” worksheet (see tabs at the bottom) shows data for local government, and includes a four page (hopefully) printable table. The “state” worksheet includes data for the State of New York and the State of New Jersey compared with the total for all state governments in the U.S., and prints on two pages.

The rest of this post is a discussion of how the data was compiled (mostly copied from a post on a similar exercise for the March 2008 data). I might follow this with a couple of more posts if I can, but I spent a lot of time compiling the information and wanted people to have it now.

Nowhere is the idiocy of conservative ideology more apparent than in matters of the law.  First let us clear the air.  Conservatives accuse liberals of using the courts to make law and that this is wrong because the Constitution should be strictly interpreted.  Yet it is Conservatives themselves that legislate from the bench and this is quite obvious from Citizens United a case that overturned a hundred years of law.

In today’s NY Times, Mark Bittman debunks the myth that poor people are getting fat because junk food is cheaper. It isn’t. People just don’t want to be bothered cooking, and more affordable junk food makes that possible – at the expense of people’s health. This is, I believe, just one example of people doing what is easy rather than what is best. The easy life, intensively marketed, is killing us.

Multiple sources say that by selling Bibi BBB (Bunker Buster Bombs) Obama has proven himself functionally more pro-Israel than Dubya. Of course, Bibi being Bibi, his response was to (metaphorically) offer to let Michele have a ride on his Uzi.

With the rise across the Arab world this spring comes a new era of good feelings where perhaps old discords now give way to new hope that allows even Armenians to rise up and call upon President Obama to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide where 1.5 million Armenians were killed by Turks in what would become Hitler’s blueprint for the Holocaust later in the 20^th Century.

Some are reporting that Jewish voters are reconsidering their support for President Obama believing that his support for Israel has been lackluster.  The reports seem to imply that these voters are betraying the president, the Democratic Party and the country for this belief.

Disguised as an analysis of the 9th CD results, this Forbes article is in sync with my own  articles analyzing middle class anger in NYC.