to declare or engage in a suspension of (work) until an employer grants certain demands, such as pay increases, an improved pension plan, etc.

(Did you know that the word strike has 88 definitions?)

Barack Obama has pledged to expand a controversial White House program that funnels federal money to religious charities. Many Democrats are reportedly saying it’s the most aggressive outreach to religious voters ever by the party’s presidential nominee.

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As anger percolated among Obama supporters over the warrantless eavesdropping issue, thousands of them have been expressing their protest using the same grass-roots organizing tools previously mastered by the Obama campaign.

More than 7,000 supporters have organized on a social networking site on the senator's own campaign Web site. They are calling on him to reverse his decision to endorse legislation to expand the government's domestic spying powers while also providing legal protection to the telecommunication companies that worked with the National Security Agency's domestic wiretapping program.

During the Democratic primary campaign, Obama vowed to fight such legislation to update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA.

But he now supports a compromise hammered out between the White House and the Democratic congressional leadership. The bill is expected to come to a vote on the Senate floor Tuesday. That decision has brought him into serious conflict for the first time with liberal bloggers and commentators and his young supporters.

Many of them have seen the issue of granting immunity to the telecommunications companies as a test of principle.

"I don't think there has been another instance where, in meaningful numbers, his supporters have opposed him like this," said Glenn Greenwald, a Salon.com writer who opposes Obama's new position. "For him to suddenly turn around and endorse this proposal is really a betrayal."

"The future of our nation depends on the soldier at Fort Carson, but it also depends on the teacher in East LA, the nurse in Appalachia, the after-school worker in New Orleans, the Peace Corps volunteer in Africa and the Foreign Service officer in Indonesia," Obama said.

"Americans have shown that they want to step up, but we're not keeping pace with the demand of those who want to serve."

The Illinois senator said he would set a goal for all middle and high school students to perform 50 hours of service a year, and for college students - who would receive a tax credit worth up to $4,000 - to serve twice that number of hours.

Almost half of AmeriCorps' members are involved in literacy or mentoring. In an August 9, 1999 speech, Clinton congratulated AmeriCorps members while boasting, "You have . . . taught millions of children to read." [18]

One AmeriCorps official recently ridiculed this claim and expressed doubt that AmeriCorps members had taught even a dozen children to read, a tremendous indictment given the number of AmeriCorps recruits in this area. Robert Sweet, the former director of the National Institute of Education, the premier federal education research agency, observed, "AmeriCorps is not working—and Clinton's program is still the fraud that it was in the beginning. The whole foundation of this approach towards teaching reading is faulty." [19]

...

I visited one of the premier AmeriCorps literacy programs, the Energy Express program in Ransom, West Virginia, which enrolls 600 college students to staff public school classrooms for kids during the summer. I asked several AmeriCorps members how much training they had received. Each one looked at me as if I were off my rocker. Member Brian Farar observed, "We're not teaching them to read, we are just exposing them and getting them to like it. You just want them to think they're doing a good job." Incredibly, AmeriCorps members are told not to correct children's grammar. Farar added, "We are trying to trick them into learning." [23] The children in the program sat in cardboard boxes or tents while "reading." In fact, puppet shows, not reading, were a big part of the summer, as was 15 to 20 minutes of politically correct "noncompetitive recreation" each day.

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Thanks to AnarchistLoserKid for the final news story.