Victories for working people in this country are rare enough that whenever one comes along, it’s doubly worth celebrating. This is certainly the case with a law that just passed in Chicago, which makes it much harder for your boss to steal from you.

As Salon’s Josh Eidelson reports, wage theft is shockingly common in this country, and it “encompasses a range of offenses” which include “unpaid overtime and hourly rates below the minimum wage.” Eidelson cites these statistics from a recent study:

Two-thirds (68 percent) of the workers reported experiencing some form of wage theft in the past week. Researchers calculated that out of an already-low average $339 in weekly income, low-wage workers each lose an average of $51 weekly in wages they earned but never received. That adds up to over $56 million per week among workers in the country’s three largest cities.

These kinds of abuses long been illegal under the Fair Labor Standards Act. But for decades, Grover Norquist’s plan to shrink the government down to the size where he can drown it in the bathtub has been proceeding along smashingly, and unfortunately, no one is around to enforce the law anymore:

A 2012 report from the Progressive States Network noted that the ratio of federal Department of Labor enforcement agents to U.S. workers has fallen from one for every 11,000 in 1941, to one for every 141,000 today. When state labor agents are factored in, the authors found “less than 15 percent of the total enforcement coverage workers enjoyed decades ago.”

Chicago’s new law says that businesses convicted of wage theft could have their licenses revoked. Experts say that ultimately, how effective the law is will depend on whether unions and other low-wage workers are well-organized enough to use them. But it’s another tool available to them, and it’s always good to have more of those. Besides, the business community tends to scream bloody murder about these kinds of measures, and that is always a good sign.

An op-ed in today’s New York Times by a former political speechwriter named Wendy Button takes on a subject I’ve pondered myself: the dangers guns pose to people who suffer from depression. Button is a woman who lives alone, and after a frightening break-in attempt, she considered buying a gun for protection. What stopped her is her own history of depression. She writes that, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 38,364 Americans committed suicide in 2010, and over half of them chose guns as their method.

Like Button, I am a woman who lives alone. Moreover, I live in an urban area, in an apartment complex where there have been break-ins. About a decade ago, I was a victim of a crime in my neighborhood — I was mugged and pepper-sprayed a few blocks from my home, and my purse was stolen. However, I’ve never considered getting a gun. Here’s why.

It’s not that I don’t worry about crime. It’s already happened to me once, and it does happen in my neighborhood with some regularity. As a woman, I am particularly vulnerable where crimes of sexual violence are concerned. And of course like everyone else, I want to be safe.

The Big Lie about guns is this: that they will keep you safe. But facts are facts, and actually, the opposite is true. Owning a gun will make you less safe. Consider the following data points:

— According to the CDC, having a gun in your home is associated with triple the risk of homicide and nearly fivefold the risk of suicide.

— The Harvard Injury Control Research Center (HICRC) has found that suicide attempts using a gun are far more likely to be fatal than such attempts using any other method. HICRC also reports that the availability of more guns is associated with more accidental deaths.

— A recent peer-reviewed study at the University of Pennsylvania found that people with guns are 4.5 times more likely to be shot during an assault than those who weren’t armed.

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With the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade approaching this Tuesday — happy birthday, Roe! — it’s a safe bet that the anti-choice nutjobs are gearing up to full freakout mode. And sure enough, misogynist-in-chief Rush Limbaugh is “humorously” “recommending” that women seeking abortions carrying them out “with a gun.” What a card ol’ Rush is!

ThinkProgress reports on some of the more obnoxious ongoing tactics of the right-of-lifers who protest outside a women’s clinic in Huntsville, Alabama. Demonstrators’ wacky capers include spraying holy water right in the face of women entering the clinic.

But for me, the tactic that takes the prize was arranging for a children’s choir to serenade entering clinic patients with endless choruses of “Happy birthday, dead baby!” At least one of those on the receiving end of this stunt was a woman who arrived at the clinic because she had experienced an emotionally devastating miscarriage:

Pro-choice marchers recalled a particularly painful event last month when a woman whose baby had died en utero was coming to the clinic to have it removed. In an awful coincidence, that was the day, Watters said, when the pro-life demonstrators collected a children’s choir on the sidewalk to sing “Happy Birthday Dead Baby” to anyone driving in.

“Will had to physically restrain the father,” Watters said, nodding to one of the men marching in a pro-choice jacket. “And by the time she walked through them, she was an emotional wreck.”

It’s always difficult to measure these things, but there is some evidence that suggests that the more restrictive a state’s abortion laws, the more incidents of harassment and violence there are against abortion providers. As the number of state-level laws that are hostile to women’s choice continues to grow in leaps and bounds, this is a particularly troubling trend.

Today in New York City, there will be a memorial for Aaron Swartz, the internet activist who tragically killed himself last week at the age of 26. The memorial is open to the general public. Details can be found here.

Aaron was my friend and, like so many, I am heartbroken by his death. I am also disturbed and outraged at the abusive treatment he suffered at the hands of power-mad federal prosecutors, which played a large role in his suicide. Last year, I wrote about the charges against him here. However, the single best piece I’ve read about the case, which looks at it in the context of increasingly authoritarian behavior by American prosecutors and the war over the democratization of information in the U.S., was Marcy Wheeler’s article for AlterNet.

If you support opening an inquiry into his prosecution and reforming the laws he was charged with breaking, you can sign this petition.

Aaron’s life touched so many, and produced a number of beautiful tributes, such as this one, and this one.

In Aaron’s brief time on this earth, he made a difference. May his restless intellectual energy, his passionate idealism, and his indelible sweetness continue to inspire us all.

I wish him peace. I am sure that he would wish us justice.

UPDATE: Here is some news about the continuing fall-out Aaron’s death is having on the political aspirations of the Javert-like U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz (H/T: Lawyers, Guns & Money’s Erik Loomis). I won’t say more, but when a press conference ends with tears and the words, “‘Does anyone else have any questions, because if not, I’m done,” it’s not hard to guess how it went.

Sadly, though, nothing will bring Aaron back. Ever.

After a day of listening to people talk about a ho-hum House Republican Retreat, I’m ready for a retreat myself (just two days, though). Here are some final news items of the day and week:

* Voteview analyzes the president’s issue positions during his first term and adjudges him “the most ideologically moderate Democratic president in the post-war period.”

* House GOP threat to cut off congressional pay if budget resolutions not enacted within three months would appear to run athwart the 27th Amendment.

* Self-appointed arbiter of presidential greatness Peggy Noonan tells us again that Obama has disappointed her. That’s the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval so far as I’m concerned.

* At Ten Miles Square, John Sides shows there’s no correlation between higher entitlement spending and decreased trust in government, at least since early 1970s.

* At College Guide, Daniel Luzer expresses skepticism about the Cal State University system’s experiment in large-scale online courses for credit—in exchange for fees.

And in non-political news:

* Ozzy Osbourne loses ton o’ hair in house fire. Glad he’s still got it to lose.

Monday is a federal holiday, but also Inaugural Day, so PA will be active as events dictate, but maybe not so much early in the day.

Kathleen Geier is back for her first Weekend Blogging of 2013.

And here again are the Nighthawks kicking off the winter weekend with “Nine Below Zero.”

Selah.

In yet another fine offering from the January/February issue of the Washington Monthly, our editor Haley Sweetland Edwards interviews MLK biographer Taylor Branch about a much-forgotten but momentous incident of Civil Rights history: King’s unsuccessful effort to convince John F. Kennedy to issue a “Second Emancipation Proclamation” (initially on the centennial of the First) declaring Jim Crow laws invalid as unconstitutional. The White House responded with a long series of evasions (and also more legitimate complaints of Cold War distractions), and King then shifted to a request that JFK issue the Declaration—now intended to be mainly hortatory rather than issuing a direct constitutional challenge—on New Year’s Day of 1963 (the 100th anniversary of the effective date of the Emancipation Proclamation). Nothing happened, of course, and according to Branch, this convinced King to dramatically change his strategy:

It was after Kennedy blew this second deadline that King realized he had nothing left to wait for. He had to “go for broke,” as he called it, and head down to Birmingham, Alabama, which was considered the toughest bastion of racism in the South. It’s hard for people to understand what a big leap that was for him, but one way of understanding it is that he didn’t tell his own father, or the board of his protest group, that he was going. He didn’t want them to try to stop him.

The outbreak of civil rights demonstrations in Alabama, and the brutal response of state and local authorities, generated vast sympathy (not just nationally but globally) for the civil rights movement as a whole. Only then, in June of 1963, did JFK propose major legislation tearing down Jim Crow. And it took, of course, Kennedy’s assassination (and LBJ’s legislative audacity) to create the atmosphere necessary for quick enactment of the Civil Rights Act as a legacy tribute to the slain president.

Branch believes that King made the right decision in investing his hopes not in White House negotiations but in brave displays on the ground of the injustice and immorality of segregation. And that’s not just because JFK was too politically timid; the never-timid Johnson felt similarly, says Branch:

People are always tempted to say that presidents and leaders should supply all the initiative, but in fact what worked in the civil rights movement was the combination of an aroused citizenry, which claimed rights and changed the political mood, and responsive national leaders. President Johnson later said that if, at the right time, King and the priests and ministers who were risking their lives down in Selma changed the political climate enough, then I can and will propose the voting rights bill. And he did. And that was really the pinnacle of cooperation between citizens taking responsibility for their government and government leaders responding to a political climate—a political climate created by the citizens themselves.

On the eve of the annual MLK commemoration, that’s a lesson we need to learn all over again.

Understanding that a restive press corps wanted something tangible to report after a three-day House Republican retreat, Eric Cantor announced the House would take up and pass a three-month increase in the debt limit. So does that mean they’d vote against a further increase in the debt limit if this new deadline comes and goes without the draconian spending cuts they keep demanding the president propose? Maybe not: the big demand at the moment is that the Senate pass a budget resolution, and the only Big Stick Cantor mentioned was a suspension of congressional pay.

It’s not entirely clear to me how the House can cut off pay for Senators. And the demand Cantor made primarily convinces me House Republicans are even more delusional about public interest in the congressional budget process than they are about Fast-and-Furious and Benghazi.

I guess this can-kicking does roughly align the debt limit expiration, the end of the “sequestration” delay, and the lapse in the continuing appropriations measure passed last year. So in theory it creates a Great Big Tripartite Crisis this spring. But Republicans still need to figure out what they are demanding from whom and when. A hostage-taker who’s not sure what ransom to ask isn’t usually real successful.

Seems that Mark Sanford’s candidacy will not be the only strange feature of the Republican special primary to choose a successor to South Carolina congressmen Tim Scott (recently appointed to Jim DeMint’s Senate seat). No, his ex-wife’s not running, which would have been great fun because everyone always figured her to be the brains of the Sanford family.

But already in the field is one Teddy Turner, son of the eccentric media mogul, bison rancher, and major benefactor to the United Nations. In a colorful profile for TNR, Molly Redden explores the candidate’s wandering career as a factotum for his father, a large-yacht sailor, and a hit-or-miss (mostly miss) entrepreneur. It doesn’t appear he has much of a background in policy or a terribly clear world-view; his pronouncements as recorded by Redden are mostly of the middle-school variety of conservative cant, bereft of the fiery attitude Palmetto State conservatives prefer.

But gotta say, the dude has one of the better lines about his preparation for bipartisan debates in Congress:

“I’ve sat across the dinner table from Ted Turner and Jane Fonda and discussed politics,” he says, in the course of explaining why he belongs in Congress. “And everybody’s come away happy.”

It’s a much better family story than anything Sanford’s likely to offer.

But that may not be the case with a potential Democratic candidate for the seat: Elizabeth Colbert-Bush, whose brother is named Stephen.

One of the themes I’ve been talking about since November 6 is the frantic search of Republicans in Washington for something, anything to change other than its ideology in order to improve its political standing. There’s endless talk of technology, tactics, outreach efforts, and minor tweaks in selected policy positions involving non-core issues like immigration (where the “change” Republicans are timidly considering actually just involves a partial return to policies championed by the George W. Bush). But none of the real stuff on taxes, entitlements, education, the environment, labor policy, anti-discrimination laws, abortion, foreign policy—or for that matter, the belief that “socialists” are taking the country straight to hell.

Well, maybe they think Democratic errors and a much more congenial midterm electorate in 2014 will save their bacon. But that’s a less compelling excuse in states where the GOP is not only losing ground but has become virtually irrelevant—most notably the largest state, Ronald Reagan’s state, California.

With that in mind I was interested to read an assessment from the veteran reporters at Calbuzz of the most promising and ambitious of candidates to become the new California GOP chairman, a former legislator named Jim Brulte. It’s generally a very positive account of his tripartite strategy for party renewal that includes rebuilding its fundraising infrastructure, focusing on grassroots organization in parts of the state where Republicans are under-performing, and recruiting candidates for local offices now going to Democrats by default. But then there’s this:

[T]he California GOP’s problem isn’t just a failure to communicate - it’s the underlying message that’s being communicated that’s a problem. The GOP brand is poison - among most white voters but especially among Latinos, Asians and black voters. Oh, and women. This is because as long as the Republican federal and state officeholders and candidates espouse misogynistic, anti-immigrant, anti-gay, no-tax-ever ideology, no amount of lipstick will gussie up that pig.

It will be endlessly entertaining to watch Chairman Brulte handle the screwball California Republican Assembly members who want to introduce resolutions for the CRP to adopt at its conventions, declaring that any candidate who votes for any tax increase or any candidate who supports choice or a pathway to citizenship cannot have GOP backing.

Brulte can fix the operational flaws in the California GOP — and his election as chairman would mark a huge leap forward for the state party. But until the Republicans in California — especially those seeking to represent legislative districts at all levels — moderate their politics to more closely align with the mainstream of political thought in the state, The California Republican Party will remain a pariah. No matter who’s chairman.

In other words, if the steak is tough and unappetizing to the taste, all the sizzle in the world won’t make people buy it. If Republicans haven’t figured that out in California, where they are on life support, I’m not sure if they’ll figure it out anywhere absent a few more electoral beatings.

* Daniel Drezner makes the abundantly good point that if holding the debt limit hostage is a bad idea now, it will be a bad idea a few months down the road.

* Buzzfeed’s Ben Smith reports that the insane theory the administration engineered the Newtown massacre to build support for gun regulation is going viral in the wingnutosphere.

* Gallup finds 61% of self-identified Republicans favor abolition of the Electoral College. This should be reported to GOP pols trying to keep the College and then rig it.

* Paul Krugman argues federal deficits won’t be a serious problem for decades—unless we fail to take actions to spur economic recovery.

* Mickey Kaus shows signs of getting obsessive about bashing Ezra Klein. Methinks this will turn out about as well for Mickey as his Senate campaign.

* Former New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin indicted on 21 corruption charges.

And in non-political news:

* Chinese e-commerce billionaire steps down from CEO position because he’s “too old” to run internet-focused business at 48. This makes me laugh bitterly.

Back to blogging after my bitter laughter subsides.

I was just about to perform, as a public service, another deconstruction of another David Brooks column. But Jonathan Chait beat me to the punch by a country mile, and left little to be said in the ruins of Brooks’ argument.

You should savor Chait’s joyfully vicious logic at your leisure, but he does make one point worth underlining as a general indictment of the “reasonable Republicans” who admit the extremism of their party’s dominant elements but lash out at the opposition in their agony:

The prevalent expression of this psychological pain is the belief that President Obama is largely or entirely responsible for Republican extremism. It’s a bizarre but understandable way to reconcile conflicting emotions — somewhat akin to blaming your husband’s infidelity entirely on his mistress. In this case, moderate Republicans believe that Obama’s tactic of taking sensible positions that moderate Republicans agree with is cruel and unfair, because it exposes the extremism that dominates the party, not to mention the powerlessness of the moderates within it.

Just as conservatives want Obama to provide cover for their unpopular “entitlement reform” proposals, Republican “moderates” want Obama to give them the power they so completely lack by offering deals to the GOP that don’t offend the Right and give the “moderates” a position as brokers.

What I don’t understand is the extraordinarily blind conviction that the only reason these “moderates” have no power is the absence of deals on the table, which, because they can only be supplied by Democrats must be supplied by Democrats. This ignores the half-century story of the rise of the conservative movement and its eventual conquest of the GOP, which has nothing to do with “deal-making” and everything to do with repealing most of the policy legacy of the twenty-first century, as created by both parties. Perhaps some fine day, after the 100th “RINO Purge” primary or the millionth op-ed denouncing Republican “surrender” to socialism and secularism, David Brooks will wake up and figure out that movement-conservative types view people like him as dinosaurs who belongs on the ash heap of history. In the mean-time, Chait is right: progressives may sympathize with Brooks’ agony, but we have no responsibility to sabotage our own aspirations for the country to salvage his.

A new study has been published by the U.S. Military Academy’s Combatting Terrorism Center analyzing the potential threat of far-right groups espousing violence to achieve their goals.

Like a DHS-authorized study in 2009 on the same topic, this paper is drawing predictable outrage in right-wing circles (though it’s not clear yet whether the pressure will produce denials and apologies from the administration, as happened in 2009).

Here’s the lurid description of the West Point study by Rowan Scaraborough of the Washington Times:

The West Point center typically focuses reports on al Qaeda and other Islamic extremists attempting to gain power in Asia, the Middle East and Africa through violence. But its latest study turns inward and paints a broad brush of people it considers “far right.”

It says anti-federalists “espouse strong convictions regarding the federal government, believing it to be corrupt and tyrannical, with a natural tendency to intrude on individuals’ civil and constitutional rights. Finally, they support civil activism, individual freedoms, and self government. Extremists in the anti-federalist movement direct most their violence against the federal government and its proxies in law enforcement.”

The report also draws a link between the mainstream conservative movement and the violent “far right,” and describes liberals as “future oriented” and conservatives as living in the past.

And here’s the pivot from carping to freaking-out, courtesy of some anonymous GOP congressional staffer:

A Republican congressional staffer who served in the military told The Washington Times: “If [the Defense Department] is looking for places to cut spending, this junk study is ground zero.

“Shouldn’t the Combating Terrorism Center be combating radical Islam around the globe instead of perpetuating the left’s myth that right-wingers are terrorists?” the staffer said. “The $64,000 dollar question is when will the Combating Terrorism Center publish their study on real left-wing terrorists like the Animal Liberation Front, Earth Liberation Front, and the Weather Underground?”

As a matter of fact, most government-backed analyses of domestic terrorism threats cover left-wing and right-wing extremists together, and the FBI did a particular study on “eco-terrorism” quite recently. This is aside from classified materials, and the rather robust interest of federal law enforcement authorities in left-oriented anarchist groups.

But putting aside the question of “balance” in studying different kinds of terrorism threats, is there a reason experts should be particularly concerned about right-wing activity right now? Gee, think it could have something to do with the constant assertions, even in respectable conservative periodicals, that “patriots” need to stockpile military weapons in order to undertake (if so dictated by their perceptions of endangered essential “liberties,” which may include freedom from Obamacare or from progressive taxes) the violent overthrow of the United States government?

The conservative movement really does need to distance itself from “right to revolution” talk, particularly when connected to absolutist notions of “legitimate” or “American” governing models for the nation. If that’s too much to ask, then conservatives need to stop carping every time the rest of us get a little worried about armed-to-the-teeth wingnuts shrieking hatred at the duly elected U.S. government.

In drawing up the agenda for the House Republican retreat underway in Williamsburg, I am very confident in asserting that organizers did not for a moment consider America’s preeminent number-cruncher, Nate Silver, as a potential presenter. He is, after all, still being punished for correctly predicting the outcomes of the last two presidential elections.

That’s too bad, because the solons might have learned something—and not just about public opinion. Earlier this week Nate put up a post at FiveThirtyEight that analyzed government spending over time and as a percentage of gross domestic product. You can and should read the whole thing, but I want to draw attention to four particular findings by Nate that are very important as we enter the annual season of national agonizing over federal spending.

The first, and best-known, data point, is that the growth of “entitlement spending” in recent years has very much been the product of a health care cost spiral that has equally affected public and private spending. That’s significant because progressives tend to favor more government intervention to stabilize health care costs (while expanding coverage), while conservatives tend to favor privatization (while abandoning or paying little attention to a goal of universal coverage that used to be a bipartisan totem). Both sides claim their policy prescriptions will break the cost spiral, but in case that doesn’t happen right away, progressives favor socializing the costs through mandatory cost-sharing in private markets and progressive taxes in the public sector, while conservatives favor shifting costs to consumers (or in the case of public programs, beneficiaries) on the theory that Americans should take greater “personal responsibility” for health care.

These are diametrically opposed approaches based on different philosophies, policy goals, and readings of empirical reality. Compromising between them could produce outcomes perverse to both points of view.

The second data point I’d like to highlight is that of all the contributors to “runaway federal spending,” the item that can’t be blamed at the moment is interest on the national debt, which as Nate points out represent less than half the level of 1991 as a percentage of GDP. So for all the endless talk of an unsustainable debt burden that will blight the lives and crush the souls of our children and grandchildren, persistently low interest rates (themselves a refutation of the claim that financial markets are panicked about debt) have made federal borrowing a bargain.

The third often-forgotten fact is that although defense spending is much lower as a percentage of GDP than it was at the height of the Cold War, it’s still a lot of money for a nation in relatively peaceful times, and currently represents 24% of federal spending, up from 20% just a decade ago.

And finally, Nate’s analysis illustrates the remarkably little-understood fact that much of what we think of as “government spending”—the vast array of non-entitlement federal programs that deal with everything from roads and bridges to schools and prisons and environmental protection efforts—represent a very small (2.5% of the budget in 2011) and generally stable (less as a percentage of GDP than it was in the early 1970s) share of the federal budget and of GDP.

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As House Republicans sit through presentations and discussions about their immediate and long-term fate in Williamsburg this weekend, the buzzkill background includes not only the 2012 election results and the strategic and tactical traps they seem to keep entering in negotiating with the White House on fiscal issues—but also current polling, which is not friendly.

The latest big poll from NBC/WSJ confirms the bad news. One of those mood-ring polls that mainly test how Americans are feeling about this and that, its approval rating numbers are an extended reality check for House GOPers. Interestingly enough, the president’s job approval ratio (52/44) is now very similar to his personal favorability ratio (52/37). This wasn’t the case during much of his first term, when the job approval numbers were often significantly lower. The “how do you feel about” numbers for the GOP are simply dreadful: the party as a whole is at 26/49; John Boehner is at 18/37; and the Tea Party Movement that has a mortgage on the GOP’s soul is at 23/47. The one major political figure with higher public standing than Obama right now is the woman most likely to be his successor as the Democratic nominee for president, Hillary Clinton (56/25, with a job approval rating of 69/25).

You never know, but it’s doubtful the GOP numbers are going to improve in the short term, as reflected in the reality that the retreating House Members are debating whether to sullenly accept the president’s position on the debt limit, or to threaten to destroy the U.S. economy unless wildly popular retirement and health care programs are cut. And the main help on the way (unless it’s in the “looming Dem divide” that Politico is ritualistically trumpeting today) is a midterm election in which Republican fortunes improve because fewer people vote.

But at least they’ll leave Williamsburg with the benefit of some sage political advice, and will mutter to themselves as they return to Washington: “Don’t talk about rape. Don’t talk about rape.”