(Guest-hosted by Alan Minsky while I was on jury duty–thank you Alan!) Our president gives his first State of the Union speech tonight at 600pm, and apparently Obama will call for an across-the-board three-year spending freeze to placate Republicans who say the deficit is a big problem. Question: Do ordinary people really care about the deficit? And don’t we need a much bigger deficit right now? JOHN NICHOLS will comment: he’s Washington correspondent for The Nation and writes “The Beat” blog at TheNation.com.
Plus: The Supremes’ Blow to Democracy: last week the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that it was okay for corporations to spend unlimited money to overwhelm elections. ERWIN CHEMERINSKY will comment: he says the same 5-4 majority that said corporations must have “free speech” has drastically limited free speech for others. Erwin is founding dean of the UCI law school.
Also: The Culture of Fear: BARRY GLASSNER explains why Americans are afraid of the wrong things: Terrorists, Criminals, Drugs, Minorities, Teen Moms, Killer Kids, Mutant Microbes, Plane Crashes, Road Rage, & Vaccines. “The Culture of Fear will amaze you, make you upset, and give you a new resolve to do what’s best for this country.”—Michael Moore. Barry teaches sociology at USC, and was featured in Bowling for Columbine.
Plus: Palestinian life in Gaza – now, and in 1956, when Israelis killed 275 people in two forgotten massacres. 
In 1969, as the anti-war movement was reaching a peak, Richard Nixon’s White House staff debated what they could do to “show the little bastards” what kind of man they were up against. They were concerned about what would be the biggest antiwar demonstration in US history on Nov. 15, 1969, when half a million people came to Washington D.C. to demand that an end to the war in Vietnam.
Los Angeles County has more uninsured people than anyplace else in the country – three million, many of them immigrants, and many of those undocumented. If the Senate version of health bill passes, with its ban on federal coverage of non-citizens, a million people in California will be denied health insurance–the great majority of them in L.A.
Student protests against tuition increases at the 10-campus University of California system pushed Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to announce on Tuesday an initiative to guarantee that the state spends more on universities than it does on prisons.
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“For a long time now there’s been too much secrecy in this city.” That’s what President Obama said on his first day in office. He was talking about the way George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had used 9/11 as a pretext for pulling a veil over many of their key policies and actions. Last week, Obama announced he was replacing Bush’s executive order on classified documents with a new one designed to reduce secrecy. Obama’s policies are a distinct improvement, but they don’t really solve the underlying problem.
“They’ll send me to jail if I don’t sign up for Obama’s health care,” an 89-year-old woman said at my family holiday gathering last week. She was agitated and angry. “Imagine sending someone to jail – at my age!”
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