Michelle Alexander, author of the excellent The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness:

After years as a civil rights lawyer, I rarely find myself speechless. But some questions a woman I know posed during a phone conversation one recent evening gave me pause: “What would happen if we organized thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of people charged with crimes to refuse to play the game, to refuse to plea out? What if they all insisted on their Sixth Amendment right to trial? Couldn’t we bring the whole system to a halt just like that?”

Short answer? Yes, but it might mean risking everything.

“We are very pleased to see the Santorum surge sweeping through the Jayhawk State,” Santorum’s communications director, Hogan Gidley, said in a statement. “This is a great win for the campaign and further evidence that conservatives and tea party loyalists are uniting behind Rick as the true, consistent conservative in this race.” (emphasis added)

Oh, snap!

Max Abelson for Bloomberg:

The smaller bonus checks that hit accounts across the financial-services industry this month are making it difficult to maintain the lifestyles that Wall Street workers expect, according to interviews with bankers and their accountants, therapists, advisers and headhunters.

“People who don’t have money don’t understand the stress,” said Alan Dlugash, a partner at accounting firm Marks Paneth & Shron LLP in New York who specializes in financial planning for the wealthy. “Could you imagine what it’s like to say I got three kids in private school, I have to think about pulling them out? How do you do that?”

Abelson’s piece read so much like satire I’m unsure that I can react to it non-satirically.

It’s a cruel world out there for the 1%. Ouch, that sentence hurt to type.

Mac McClelland, a human rights journalist for Mother Jones, goes undercover in a warehouse shipping facility:

“You look way too happy,” an Amalgamated supervisor says to me. He has appeared next to me as I work, and in the silence of the vast warehouse, his presence catches me by surprise. His comment, even more so.

“Really?” I ask.

I don’t really feel happy. By the fourth morning that I drag myself out of bed long before dawn, my self-pity has turned into actual concern. There’s a screaming pain running across the back of my shoulders. “You need to take 800 milligrams of Advil a day,” a woman in her late 50s or early 60s advised me when we all congregated in the break room before work. When I arrived, I stashed my lunch on a bottom ledge of the cheap metal shelving lining the break room walls, then hesitated before walking away. I cursed myself. I forgot something in the bag, but there was no way to get at it without crouching or bending over, and any extra times of doing that today were times I couldn’t really afford. The unhappy-looking guy I always make a point of smiling at told me, as we were hustling to our stations, that this is actually the second time he’s worked here: A few weeks back he missed some time for doctors’ appointments when his arthritis flared up, and though he had notes for the absences, he was fired; he had to start the application process over again, which cost him an extra week and a half of work. “Zoom zoom! Pick it up! Pickers’ pace, guys!” we were prodded this morning. Since we already felt like we were moving pretty fast, I’m quite dispirited, in fact.

“Really?” I ask.

“Well,” the supervisor qualifies. “Just everybody else is usually really sad or mad by the time they’ve been working here this long.”

It’s my 28th hour as an employee.

If union-busting, government deregulating types like Scott Walker and Mitt Romney—hell, the Republican Party—get their way, these are the kinds of jobs Americans have to look forward to.

Fuck everything about that.

Cord Jefferson, in response to Andrew Leonard’s Salon piece entitled ‘There is No Ethical Smartphone’:

Laptops, televisions, digital cameras, and every consumer electronic in between wreak havoc on people and environments at every point in their lifespan—save, of course, for when you own them. From the mining that yields their minerals to their assembly line production to, ultimately, their disposal, our devices make messes that leave people sick and landscapes pillaged. How do we live up to our moral ideals without having to quit our jobs and live in an off-the-grid, self-sustaining commune? The answer might be simpler than you think.

Buy less shit.

The question that stays in my mind: was Beachy a calculating psychopath in the tradition of the infamous Bernard Madoff, or a genuinely clever individual working for the greater good who just got in over his head (and in the process got a bit greedy as well)?

Jonathan Chait:

Instead the party has bet everything on 2012, preferring a Hail Mary strategy to the slow march of legislative progress. That is the basis of the House Republicans’ otherwise inexplicable choice to vote last spring for a sweeping budget plan that would lock in low taxes, slash spending, and transform Medicare into ­private vouchers—none of which was popular with voters. Majority parties are known to hold unpopular votes occasionally, but holding an ­unpopular vote that Republicans knew full well stood zero chance of enactment (with Obama casting a certain veto) broke new ground in the realm of foolhardiness.

The way to make sense of that foolhardiness is that the party has decided to bet everything on its one “last chance.” Not the last chance for the Republican Party to win power—there will be many of those, and over time it will surely learn to compete for nonwhite voters—but its last chance to exercise power in its current form, as a party of anti-government fundamentalism powered by sublimated white Christian identity politics. (And the last chance to stop the policy steamroller of the new Democratic majority.) And whatever rhetorical concessions to moderates and independents the eventual Republican nominee may be tempted to make in the fall, he’ll find himself fairly boxed in by everything he’s already done this winter to please that base.

Good piece by the New York Magazine on the GOP’s whopper of a gamble for 2012: bet the ranch on identity politics and fear-mongering. Instead of trying to expand their base and make their message more attractive to the general electorate, Republicans are headed towards the other scenario. The scenario in which they reignite the culture wars and apocalyptic rhetoric in order to inflame their (aging, white) base to take back the White House in November.