U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials in California have stooped to a new, almost unbelievable low: intimidating schoolchildren.

Allow me to state the obvious: schools should be safe.  And they should feel safe for the kids, their parents, and the teachers and staff who work there.  But for the students at four Oakland schools and Berkley High School on Wednesday, school felt anything but safe.  That day, rumors spread throughout the schools that ICE were nearby, possibly planning raids at the schools.  Parents text-messaged their kids, warning them that ICE agents were close by so that the undocumented parents couldn't come to the schools to pick their children up. The Berkley school district became so overwhelmed with calls that they set up an automated voice message for parents, which according to the San Francisco Chronicle, stated that the administration would "not allow any child to be taken away from the school."    The schools -- including Stonehurst Elementary, where immigration officials were parked across the street -- became a panic scene.  

Taxes are one of those things that everybody loves to hate.  Tax collectors are the perennial bad guys, a picture of a 1040 form is squeezed between a picture of Hitler and an MRE on the blog StuffNobodyLikes, and the certainty of death and taxes is widely agreed upon. The Beatles, angered by the high tax rate in England, even wrote a song about taxes (which, allegedly, some post offices actually play on April 15).   "If you drive a car,  I'll tax the street; If you try to sit,  I'll tax your seat," sings George Harrison. Of course, this doesn't acknowledge the fact that taxes made the road possible.

Fiction has its advantages over reality.  Fiction, writes Mark Bowden in the Atlantic Monthly, "...frees you from the infuriating unfinishedness of the real world. For this reason, the very clarity of well-wrought fiction can sometimes make it feel more real than reality."  David Simon, the producer and creator of the HBO series The Wire, has created this kind of larger-than-life fiction in this television show about the urban realities of the city of Baltimore.  By delving into the gritty details of the city's characters, institutions, government, and culture, Simon paints what several have called a Dickensian portrait of the urban narratives of the city.  Simon, by creating his own fictional urban vision, has illuminated many of the problems facing reality.

Imagine if your boss could call your family doctor to find out if you were really sick, and while on the phone ask for confidential medical information.  Or imagine if further constraints on missing work for emergency care forced you to sacrifice job security instead of taking care of a spouse who has a heart attack or a child with a medical emergency.  A current law, the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), protects you from these scenarios.  However, if the 500 pages of changes proposed yesterday by the Department of Labor go into effect, the law could change the leave policies for millions of American workers.

cross-posted from DMI Blog

It's been an exciting week so far.  Not only did the Giants win the Super Bowl in a spectacular upset, but today voters in 24 states will go to the polls and possibly determine the presidential nominees. In honor of these two, uh, "super" events, polls are comparing the relative "excitement level" of Sunday and Tuesday to see if Americans get more excited about football or politics, and even the constantly-campaigning presidential candidates took some time off to watch the Super Bowl.

[Promoted from the Diaries by Meteor Blades because plenty of such stories don't have such comparatively "happy endings."]

On Thursday, after spending 27 years in prison for a crime that he did not commit, Charles Chatman walked free.  The world -- or the world outside of jail, that is -- was a different place than that he had left nearly three decades ago.  After only using spoons in prison, he had to relearn how to use a knife to cut his steak.  The judge for his case even had to teach him how to use a cell phone -- a newfangled technology, for 47-year-old Chatman -- so he could call his family.  Chatman is the 15th wrongfully convicted prisoner in Dallas County who has been exonerated by DNA evidence since 2001.