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There are good jobs and there are crappy jobs. There are burger-flipping jobs and there are skilled trades and professions. There are jobs that pay well and have benefits and jobs that don’t.
There is even the job you had, now paying less, with no benefits.
Much of the post-recession job growth is at low end. Many “better” jobs not at the low end pay less and offer fewer benefits than they used

I had one of those moments a week or so ago that you hate to admit to anybody! But I’m also sure I’m not alone in this. On one of my many trips between New York City and Maine last week (my prosthetist is on Long Island and I’m in Maine), I found myself more and more eager to have to stop at a red light.
And why would I want to be slowed down on my long trip in this way? Because these little stops allowed me to sneak a peak at my e-mail on my new iPhone. Is this safe? Definitely not, especially if I hesitated a moment longer than people expected me to.
I realized how easy it’s becoming to get sucked into your technology of choice! Even as I was doing this that day, I felt kind of crazy, but out of boredom — or the thrill of connection — I engaged in it.
Yes, it’s a long drive back, but I made it so much longer than necessary because of what is feeling ever more like a real addiction to

Some sweet irony in the referral of the Gaddafi regime to the International Criminal Court.
As court-watchers well know, longtime Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi long has been a thorn in the ICC’s side.
It’s not just that Libya’s not a party to the Rome Statute that governs the decade-old, Netherlands-based ICC. The same holds true of many of Libya’s Arab neighbors — not to mention a number of very large states east and west, like China, Russia, and the United States.
Rather, Libya’s particularly prickly relation to the ICC stems from Gaddafi’s efforts to exerts his brand of leadership on the African continent.
To cite an example: It’s no accident that, as Pittsburgh Law Professor Charles Jalloh, among others, has noted, the first African Union resolution condemning the ICC’s pursuit of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir occurred at a meeting in Libya. (Bashir remains under ICC indictment on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity related to government attacks on the people of Darfur.)
Libya also is a member of the Human Rights Council, formed in 2006 as a means better to promote human rights within U.N. member states and throughout the world.
The Human Rights Council broke with Libya on

Yesterday, the Supreme Court affirmed a lower court decision that granted full legal rights to male genitals. In a 7 to 2 decision, the high court agreed with the finding of the US Court of Appeals, Eleventh District, in the case of Johnson v. Planned Parenthood. In a rare moment of public commentary, Justice Clarence Thomas explained the majority opinion by citing 19th century jurist, John Thomas (no relation), who argued the principle of penis decisis in his famous ruling against women’s

The premise sounds crazy: the significantly named Ignatius Perrish awakens from a drunken stupor to discover that he’s the devil. Painfully fleshy horns have sprung from his head, and he is suddenly endowed with powers no sane person would want. Everything that is nasty in people is now an open book for Ig, and his presence drives them to act on their ugliest repressed impulses.
Once on his way to an altruistic career in social activism, Ig’s life changed forever when his girlfriend was brutally murdered and he became the prime suspect. Grieving and wrecked, Ig doesn’t think his life can get any worse — until he morphs into the very thing everyone believes he

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker thinks Union girls are bad news… and he’s looking to get into some trouble. The sexy variety. Bow-chicka-bow-wow.
Warning, this might not be safe for

At the National Governors Association, President Obama just threw his weight behind a bi-partisan effort in the US Senate to allow states to innovate with health reform, including adopting a public insurance system or single payer health care system by 2013 instead of 2017.
The governors embraced the state innovations waiver proposal, since conservative states want to weed back the federal health reform and states like California might like to push ahead with public insurance options or single payer health care systems.
The idea is to let states meet federal targets anyway they want to, rather than how the federal government prescribes, by 2013 rather than the current 2017 deadline.
This is one of Obama's only moves left, and a smart one. It gives progressive reformers in California and elsewhere the ability to move forward on ambitious reform plans that can pass at the ballot box in 24 states but would never get the time of day in Washington.
Facing strong legal challenges to the individual mandate, Obama did the right thing by offering flexibility to states to meet targets for access and benefits in the Affordable Care Act. He took a page from longtime labor leader Joe Hill: “Don't Mourn, Organize.” He's giving those of us who favor a public insurance option to the private insurance market an opportunity to move our states

JUBA, South Sudan.
The Kibbutz movement is dying? Don’t tell that to Emmanuel Logoro. “I have a dream,” he says, sitting in his hut near a plastic Christmas tree he brought home from Eilat, and taking out a briefcase filled with diagrams about kibbutz structure. “I have plans.”
Logoro, 29, tall, muscular and talking a mile a minute in perfect Hebrew — complete with all the requisite slang — was one of the very first Sudanese asylum seekers to cross the border into Israel from Egypt, back in January of

Ever challenging, provocative, and fun, The Garage Theatre celebrates its venerable first decade with a production of Ethan Coen’s Almost An Evening. Directed by Kristal Greenlea and Eric Hamme, the three pieces, “Waiting,” “Four Benches,” and “Debate” address and then skewer our picayune attitude about Big Picture matters. Providing an hilarious middle ground between theatre that teaches and theatre that entertains, the well-acted, nicely-directed production raises ingenious what-if questions about subjects that may have seemed serious to us in third grade though, as we got older and wiser, most certainly are not.
Characterized by diverting scenarios and staging that is as minimal as the direction is invisible, the scene-lets are slight but funny, appetizers, not main

With Libya’s inevitable collapse, Europe will likely see a tsunami of black refugees sweeping across the Mediterranean. And Malta and Italy will be the first to feel the impact. To reach Europe, Sub-Saharan migrants often pass through Egypt, Tunisia or Libya, where life for black hued residents can be more than problematic. But despite the dangers, migrants keep trying to reach Europe – and most do not

While currently on sabbatical in Australia, I noted the country’s wacky erectile dysfunction ads.
Ad execs must have a field day with Viagra ads. Scouring You Tube for online Viagra commercials, there seems to be a familiar theme amongst ads that have been banned in the U.S.A. The commercial motifs center on taking on various daily tasks with the assistance of an extra

In the past month Egypt witnessed a change of leadership within the existing regime, not regime change. Egypt has been, and still is, a military regime with a civilian layer of politicians who administer the day-to-day affairs of the country. The popular revolt that brought down Mubarak has merely stripped the civilian veneer from the main pillar of the regime, the military. But the same people and institutions that repressed and stifled Egyptians for the past 30 years are still in

Crossposted with TomDispatch.com.
The call reportedly arrived from Cairo. Pizza for the protesters, the voice said. It was Saturday, February 19, and by then Ian’s Pizza on State Street in Madison, Wisconsin, was overwhelmed. One employee had been assigned the sole task of answering the phone and taking down

JUSTICE — GOVERNMENT — LEGISLATION — LIBERTY. Choose the order in which to recite them. Those are themes of the four murals that adorn the Capitol Rotunda in Madison, Wisconsin and surround the throngs of citizens who have gathered for many days now to protest and, we hope, block passage of the anti-labor, indeed, anti-democratic Budget Repair Bill proposed by Governor Scott Walker. It’s a bill that not only slashes public workers’ incomes, but also strips them/us of their/our democratic rights to bargain collectively.
On Friday my wife Lorna and I decided, quite suddenly, to go down to

Part of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s union-busting agenda is including a “right to work” rule for public-sector employees. Several other Republican governors are considering similar measures for both the public and private sectors. Insofar as they succeed, these right-to-work measures will seriously weaken the bargaining power of workers.
“Right to work” is a great name from the standpoint of proponents, just like the term “death tax” is effective for opponents of the estate tax, but it has nothing to do with the issue at

It’s big news here in Israel that “Strangers No More”– a documentary film that focuses on a South Tel Aviv school attended by zarim, Hebrew for foreigners or strangers–has won an Oscar.
“Thank you most of all to the exceptional immigrant and refugee children from 48 countries at Tel Aviv’s remarkable Bialik Rogozin school,” Karen Goodman, co-producer and co-director said in her acceptance speech. “You’ve shown us that through education, understanding, and tolerance, peace really is possible.”
So what is the Israeli government showing us by planning a mass expulsion of such children? Understanding and tolerance won’t be found here. (And you’d better look somewhere else for peace, too).
After a five month delay (the expulsion was scheduled to begin in October 2010), which followed a year-long battle over the matter, the deportation of 400 children and their parents is scheduled to begin on Sunday–just a week after “Strangers No More” won an Oscar. Just a week after a crowd in the US applauded the touching story of foreigners who find a home here in

The national debate on whether teacher layoffs should be done by seniority now focuses on New York City, where on Sunday the Department of Education released a worst-case list of layoffs — with the last hired at the top of the lists.
With the state senate set to vote on whether to allow layoffs based on issues such as teacher performance, the department wanted parents to know what could happen. Are the freshest-hired teachers on this list at their neighborhood schools really the ones you want to see disappear?
With federal stimulus money dried up, many school districts will have to lay off teachers. Nearly everywhere when this happens, the newest teachers, rather than the worst ones, lose their jobs. Political leaders would like to get rid of last-hired-first-fired policies so that the best teachers stay on the job, but that means taking on the unions, which can feel like political

On February 24, 2010, President Obama nominated the well-qualified and highly regarded legal scholar Goodwin Liu, Associate Dean and Professor at Berkeley Law School, to fill a seat on the Ninth Circuit, one of the busiest appellate courts in the country. Despite being voted out of the Judiciary Committee in May, Professor Liu never received a vote on the Senate floor during the last Congress, one of many victims of the unprecedented obstruction by Senate Republicans of the President’s judicial nominees. As a result, Liu’s nomination “died” at the end of the Congress, and Liu has now been forced to endure the further delay of re-nomination and yet another hearing before the Judiciary Committee, scheduled for this Wednesday, March 2, 2011.
The judgeship to which Professor Liu has been nominated is a new seat, added to the Ninth Circuit by legislation co-sponsored by Senators Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) to help meet what the two Senators called “a judicial emergency so severe that judges [on the Ninth Circuit] have the highest caseload in the nation.” Senator Kyl elaborated on the very real harms suffered by individual Americans when our nation’s courts are understaffed:
But the seat still sits empty, a year after Professor Liu’s nomination, and the situation has gotten even worse. The vacancy is now one of three on the Ninth Circuit, each of them denominated a “judicial emergency” by the federal judiciary because of the court’s staggering

Despite my best intentions to avoid junk food, I still occasionally find something so interesting that I just have to give it a try. This happens most often in foreign countries, where foods are unfamiliar to me and I really want to gain the experience of trying something new.
When I was in Thailand recently, learning as much as I could about Thai food, my friends Josh and Kim had a bag of pork chop-flavored Lay’s potato chips. My first thought was, “Um, gross,” but after a few days the idea grew on me. My husband and I walked down to 7-11 (because there’s one on every corner in Bangkok) and bought a bag.
We opened the bag and smelled the

My brother called yesterday — he was in the middle of a bad dialysis session. There were issues with his chest catheter, things like too much bleeding after days of discomfort, the usual five minute hookup took 45 instead. He knew it was going to be a long night.
A chest catheter is only a temporary measure — his dialysis port failed last fall in spite of four operations trying to save it.
A kidney transplant could make all the

This is the second in a 3-part series from author Ginger Emas about The Men We Date, and how to open up to new possibilities.
In Part 1 of this trilogy, I exposed my own personal truth: that for most of my life, I kept choosing the same type of man, expecting different results. As Dr. Phil would say, “How’s that working for you?” I can tell you, not so

I’ve been practicing divorce and family law for 22 years. Back when I litigated divorces, I drove a Rolls Royce. I’m not kidding. I traded that car for a Honda Accord when I became a mediator (again, not