dan gross

Last Friday, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed into law the country's most repressive immigration bill, SB 1070, which criminalizes undocumented immigrants and gives police the authority to demand papers from anyone they suspect of being undocumented. Though Brewer, a Republican who took over from Janet Napolitano when she left to become Obama's Homeland Security secretary, claims that there are protections in the bill to prevent racial profiling, it's hard to imagine a way that officers will decide from whom to demand papers that won't involve the color of their skin or the language that they speak. Rinku Sen of ColorLines and the Applied Research Center joins us to discuss the bill, the criminalization of immigrants, and what to do to fight back. "America is coming back stronger, better, and faster than nearly anyone expected, and faster than most of its international rivals," says Daniel Gross in Newsweek recently, declaring that all the doom and gloom about the economy was just exaggeration. But is that really the case? Or is the economy still failing far too many people? David DeGraw, author of "The Economic Elite vs. The People of the United States of America," says that the story of recovery is just a bit premature. Both men join Laura in studio to debate the state of the economy. New York City braced last week for a strike by the doormen of the Service Employees International Union's local 32BJ. Late negotiations might have prevented the strike for now, but GRITtv was on the scene as the mobilization grew and we're happy to bring you this report on their struggle. A special thanks to Anna Gold and Zuhal Danyildiz for this report. And speaking of New York's doormen, Laura has some thoughts about workers and the jobs they do--and how they get compensated for all that hard work.

In the wake of health care reform, new attempts to restrict women's access to abortion services have surged. Nebraska has passed a new law that criminalizes abortions after 20 weeks of gestation on the basis of "fetal pain," and another that forces women to undergo mental health examination before obtaining an abortion at all. Eesha Pandit of MergerWatch and Raising Women's Voices For the Healthcare We Need returns to GRITtv to discuss the new attacks on women's right to choose and the chilling effect they're intended to have. Is the economy coming back--or is our debt going to sink us? Are people who don't pay taxes this year just freeloading? Did Virginia's governor really forget that slavery was a big part of the Civil War? Who's fact-checking the news, and what about that WikiLeaks tape, anyway? Danny Schechter, News Dissector, and Lizz Winstead, cofounder of the Daily Show, join us in studio to answer these and other pressing questions about the week in news. Finally, the Tea Party supposedly originated from opposition to taxes and government spending. Yet a New York Times poll finds something a little different behind the anger. Laura discusses.