San Francisco Bay Guardian

Editor's Note: While the teabaggers try to claim Tax Day as a national day of protest against government and taxes, San Francisco author and activist Steven Hill (the father of the city's ranked choice voting system) offers a different perspective, noting that it isn't taxes and government that we should be so angry about today, but how little we get for them, thanks largely to right-wing opposition to expanding public services

By Steven Hill
Most Americans seem to regard April 15 -- the day income tax returns are due to the Internal Revenue Service -- as a recurring tragedy akin to a Biblical plague.  Particularly this year, with US government deficits soaring, everyone from the teabaggers to Fox News and Senate Republicans are sounding the alarm about a return to "big government." Recently former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani even stated that President Obama was moving us towards -- gasp -- European socialism. Read more »

As the teabaggers hit the streets again on April 15 to shout their denunciations of taxes and government, a new poll in the New York Times confirms what most of us knew: these people are angrier, more conservative, and less informed than the average American – a deadly combination.Read more »

Josh Wolf has landed in hot water again -- this time in connection with his reporting from inside the student occupation at Wheeler Hall on the University of California Berkeley campus to protest budget cuts. Read more »

Under just the right ocean conditions, the low-frequency call of a blue whale off the coast of California can be detected by another whale off the coast of Hawaii. As part of our annual Green Issue, we report this week on the noise impacts of shipping traffic on marine mammals that rely upon sound for their basic survival behaviors. Click on the player to hear a blue whale call, a form of communication that is often masked by shipping traffic. Read more »