California is planning to increase taxes $14 billion and cut $10 billion of services (California has a $43 billion forecast deficit).

New Jersey is required to balance its budget by the state constitution and faces $3.6 billion of cuts.

Philadelphia has a budget deficit of $1 billion and is talking about cuts. NYC has a forecast deficit of $4.3 billion (2010).

In sum, the US states face a total deficit of $183 billion.

A couple good sources of liberal (unfortunately not radical) analysis on the economy:

Economic Policy Institute
http://www.epi.org/
(I recently skimmed their agenda for a better economy. Unfortunately it didn't mention the military, which is silly because deep cuts to the military could fund productive investment and create jobs 2-3 times more efficiently that military spending does.)

Citizens for Tax Justice
They breaks down how much proposed tax cut/increases will benefit regular americans versus the rich.
http://www.ctj.org

Activist social networks are unlikely to reach more than 1/1000 of the number of people of commercial networks like facebook (Facebook has 150 million active members, service oriented Idealist has 178,000, environmental activist oriented WiserEarth has 21,000). These sites not only lack the membership base, but they are also likely to get fewer page views per member as well.

Thus activists are best off piggybacking on existing commercial networks - especially now that this is possible with facebook markup language and the OpenSocial standard.

Someone, perhaps Google, should make a web service that rates pure text and gives it a spam score.

Most webmasters are inundated with spam. It can be sent via email (the traditional method) or by a form. Form spam is commonly seen in blog comments, forum posts, and any other type of form you can think of (ex. a join our site form).

Using a similar algorithm to that which is used to detect email spam, one should be able to have a service that would take a text and an IP address, and output a spam score.

This summer I grew several herbs, primarily basil. I grew them from seed, starting them off in my south-facing window. Then when the massive tree that dwarfs our house grew leaves, I moved them outside. First I put them in the backyard, but I eventually moved them to our only sunny spot - the sidewalk.

I've started tracking annual activist conferences to help populate the calendar. Here is my current list (obviously just a small fraction of all the conferences, but it's a start). Some of these have been going on for over ten years. Apologies for the bad formatting.

I welcome any additions!!!
Email me: aaron@campusactivism.org

Annual Conferences (sort by Date, or at least by season)

-----------------------------------
Spring Annual Conferences
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NGLTF
http://www.thetaskforce.org/
January

After nine years, organizers have put a stop to organizing the annual DC "National Conference on Organized Resistance" as it grew into a massive project that relied upon non-student leadership.

I attended NCOR twice. During it's nine years it grew to be the largest anarchist-leaning conference in the United States, attracting a large number of people (my second hand guess is that attendance might have peaked at 1000).

There is a blog which explains this move:
http://ncor.wordpress.com/

Chocolate lovers are picking Obama chocolates 3 to 1 over McCain in an unscientific poll.

Will the US withdrawal from Iraq include contractors? Obama's commitment to withdrawal is already sketchy. He might leave 30,000 troops in Iraq, possibly in a permanent US base, and call it withdrawal, move many of the troops to Afghanistan - or he might just completely change his mind and not withdraw at all.

One of the main problems of activists advocating for the Democrats in the 2008 US election is that it contradicts our values and will cause the public to stop trusting us.

It's morally fine for activists to advocate for a Democrat vote if you call it a "lesser evil", but when we say that the Democrats are actually "good" then we are being dishonest.