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"Now we think not only us are going to have to review our sense of comfort. I am not very comfortable." says Leo Gerard, President of the United Steelworkers union. Gerard himself was once a union representative at a facility that mined and refined uranium, and he represents many workers in such dangerous conditions across the country today. The USW has long been part of the Blue-Green Alliance, creating a labor-environmentalist coalition, but stopped short of calling for an end to nuclear power--but will that change after Japan? Leo joins Laura via Skype to discuss the crisis in Japan, the situation of the workers there, and why this crisis is linked to workers' protests around the US. Republicans have NPR and PBS in their sights once again, and once again progressives and media reformers have to fight for every penny that public media gets. Just how many pennies is that, though? Sally Kohn of Movement Vision puts that funding in perspective in this video. "You see this coming together of networks of educated people—I call them the graduates with no future—with the urban poor, with sometimes organized labor. This mixture is there everywhere the protests have been," says Paul Mason, Economics editor of BBC Newsnight and author of Live Working or Die Fighting: How the Working Class Went Global. Mason notes that from student protests in London to workers in Wisconsin, revolution in Tunisia to uprising in Libya, many of the same characteristics are visible. Paul joins Laura in studio for a conversation about the global protest movement, the role of social media, what different areas have in common, and much more. You can see Paul and Laura along with Cornel West and Barbara Ehrenreich in New York on Friday night at the opening plenary of the Left Forum--more information here! Finally, the US Government paid $2.3 million to have CIA contractor Raymond Davis freed in Pakistan. But what are other lives worth--or other jobs? Distributed by Tubemogul.

One of the biggest stories of the past few weeks has been the story of Americans discovering Al Jazeera English. It shouldn't have been so hard. As the protest movement in Egypt grew, Americans found that Al Jazeera had what no US network has any more: fully staffed reporting teams working round the clock in Cairo. But other than in a handful of pockets across the U.S. -- including Ohio, Vermont and Washington, D.C. -- cable viewers couldn't watch Al Jazeera. Some cable operators have blamed political pressure. Others have said they had little time for it. Distributed by Tubemogul.

The House of Representatives, under Speaker Nancy Pelosi, passed historic health care reform late Sunday night. That's a fact. Also a fact is that the bill is far from perfect, and legislators from all sides will be working to shape the bill more to their liking. Progressives regret the lack of a public option, let alone single payer, and the use of women's reproductive choice as a political football in the negotiations--Obama was forced into an executive order reaffirming the Hyde Amendment's commitment not to use federal dollars for abortions. But what does it all mean? Will the protests die down, or just get worse? What can we do to get REAL change we can believe in, with a country this polarized? Laura asks Chip Berlet, an expert on right-wing populism and senior analyst with Political Research Associates, and Nina Agrawal, pediatrician and director of community outreach with the National Physicians Alliance. The flawed health care bill that finally made it through Congress might show the limitations of democracy in the U.S., but Gary Younge, correspondent for the Guardian and the Nation, assures us that it's worse in Europe. Gary joins Laura to talk about Greece, England, the rise of fascist parties across Europe--and how it all relates to our own tea party movement. With all the news over health care reform's passage, the beginning of the eighth year of the war in Iraq seems to have slipped out of the headlines. But over the weekend, antiwar protesters took to the street across the U.S. Rod Laughridge sent us this video from one protest in San Francisco. Don't forget, if you're making video where you live, we'd love to see it and maybe even play it in the show! Finally, Laura remarks on what she learned through the weekend in health care reform news.