Barbara Ehrenreich, an always-powerful voice for feminism and social justice, has put out an excellent-looking book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America [review by NY Times]. Ehrenreich spent three months trying to make ends meet in low-paid unskilled labor, the kind of situations faced by millions since the obliteration of welfare (it’s 6 years after the 1995 welfare reform, meaning that the first wave of people booted off the rolls by the five year restriction are now facing the increasingly troubled job market without anything resembling a safety net, without any chance to go to school to better their chances (since that doesn’t count as working for the purposes of TANF), and generally just in a pretty shitty situation. Ehrenreich’s time spent living in a trailer, so exhausted and in a neighborhood so desperate that she could only describe herself and her neighbors as canned labor, is a frighteningly real response to those feel-good liberals who proclaim the virtues of voluntarily living in poverty and complain about how frustrated they feel with their Palm Pilots and SUVs.

Arianna Huffington continues her streak of pure awesomeness with an exposé of Washington’s use of your tax dollars on mercenary military corporations to fight the drug war in South America without inconveniences like democratic accountability or human rights protections or the informed consent of the American public. Huffington reports firefights between DynCorp agents (who are virtually all former US military troops) and FARC left-wing rebels in Colombia — while Washington maintains that Plan Colombia is not getting us involved in Colombia’s civil war. Yeah, right. We’re not, it’s just that American troops employed by an American corporation with tax money from Congress and the CIA are getting involved in Colombia’s civil war. If we keep this up, we will need to retrofit an old slogan designed for a different Latin American country: Colombia is Spanish for Vietnam.

Microsoft has unveilled the latest update to M$ Office, Office XP, with lots of new features, the vague beginning of .NET integration, and, most mercifully of all, THE DEATH OF CLIPPY! [NY Times]

Freedom of expression online is again under assault, as the FBI and Secret Service have begun to target the Seattle IMC in intimidating fishing expeditions, demanding that they turn over server logs despite the fact that federal agents have admitted that the IMC itself was not suspected of any criminal activity and there was no violation of US law. Thankfully, a sane judge has lifted the gag order that was imposed on Seattle IMC, so they have been able to publish their side of the story; federal sources leaked information about the story with impunity before the gag order was rescinded, showing that apparently the FBI’s only concern was to be able to spin the story as it pleased without backtalk.

In other good news, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is standing up for the IMC on this one, and the FBI’s fishing expedition is so blatant and poorly constructed that it will hopefully be laughed out of court. But this sets a very troubling precedent for the revival — or continuance, really; it never much stopped — of the FBI’s repressive surveillance against activist organizations. As the left / anarchist activist coalition grows in power, power brokers are getting scared. You could see this already in the Summit of the Americas, World Economic Forum, etc. buckling down into cities temporarily turned into militarized police states. The growing willingness of the free world’s states to use these kind of repressive tactics is something that we really have to keep a watch on, and fight back against.

If you’re a fan of retro marriage manuals — and who isn’t? — you’ll enjoy this review of the genre and its modern-day incarnations [Salon.com]