Bitter Harvests

Ala.: Inmates can replace Hispanic farmhands - Mackenzie Weinger - POLITICO.com:

In other words "They'll have their barely paid, possibly coerced labor system one way or another, damnit!!!" Be it chattel slavery, illegal immigration or this proposal of forcing prison inmates to work the fields...the imagery and the similarities overall seems entirely the norm for the deep south.

The latent functions and social fallout from this legislation seems to be having more sweeping real world  implications than the mavericks in Georgia and Alabama intended (not that any of that is surprising in and of itself).

What does it say about the local economies of areas like this that they cannot function without exploiting or compelling its workforce to do so for either pennies on the dollar and the threat of deportation or as a contingency of their punishment? Either way, they seem insistent on making sure brown people (especially given the sky high incarceration rates for black men in these states) line their fields one way or the other...
'via Blog this'

If This Doesn't Stimulate the Economy, Nothing Will! (Oh wait)

House passes measure to ban funds for teaching abortion techniques in health centers - The Washington Post

This is ridiculous. As a student that spent a great deal of time at a state university with a med school of some renown, I can't tell you how detrimental even the pretense of this measure is. Half the town I went to was employed by the University, the other half? By the state of the art hospital that...you guessed it, was and is funded and staffed by the University's med school. Teaching medical students to be LESS professionally viable because some fundies have their pearls in a perpetual clutch is not a social good. Much to the contrary its likely to make med school programs in the US less competitive and thinking back to my sleepy southern college town, mean a lot less money to trickle down to the locals via housing, resteraunts and over priced textbooks. Luckily, and with good reason, the odds of passing the Senate aren't the best. I submit for the record another in a very rapid line of Tea Party "shots across the bow" idle threats that do NOTHING but score political points with their increasingly rigid constituency.