With Major League Baseball’s 2011 season under way, our friends at the Alliance for American Manufacturing remind us that the all-American pastime still features some Made-in-USA sports gear.

Opportunity can strike at the strangest of times and places. For AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler, who believes in getting the union movement’s message out to audiences that normally don’t hear it, that opportunity came on a recent flight from Washington, D.C., to Detroit when Republican pollster/strategist and Fox News regular Frank Luntz sat right down in the middle seat next to her.

AFL-CIO Media Outreach fellow Jennifer Angarita describes Democratic Senate support for the DREAM Act.

This week, 22 Democratic senators sent a letter to President Obama urging him to “support a grant of deferred action” and to grant relief to qualified undocumented youth.

On a near straight party line vote (235-193) this afternoon, the U.S. House passed the Republican budget plan that privatizes Medicare, cuts corporate taxes and taxes for the wealthy, cuts Medicaid funding repeals health care reform and costs up to 2 million jobs. All Democrats as well as four Republicans voted against the bill. (Get the vote breakdown here.)

A unanimous New Mexico State Supreme Court said Wednesday that tea party Republican Gov. Susana Martinez overstepped her authority when earlier this year she fired two members and the executive director of Public Employee Labor Relations Board. The New Mexico Federation of Labor (NMFL) filed suit against Martinez’s action.

The drive to repeal a law backed and recently signed by Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) that eliminates the rights of 350,000 public employees to bargain for middle-class jobs, got the official go ahead this morning. The Ohio attorney general and secretary of state certified the 1,000 signatures needed and approved the petition language submitted earlier this month.

In this cross-post from Our Fiscal Security, Tamara Draut, vice president of Policy & Programs at Demos, gives us a quick list of the top 10 tax stats.

Members of Transport Workers (TWU) local unions from throughout the New York area, joined by Office and Professional Employees (OPEIU) 153, rallied yesterday outside Trump Tower in Manhattan, headquarters of Qatar Airways. Qatar is moving operations to Kennedy Airport Terminal 8, operated by American Airlines, but, unlike other foreign carriers, is not using American ground service workers who are members of TWU Local 501.

As part of the Tax Day: Make Them Pay mobilization, the AFL-CIO community affiliate Working America is urging people to tell Congress to close the corporate tax loopholes that allow companies like ExxonMobil to rake in $19 billion in profits in 2009 and yet pay no federal income taxes—and instead, get a $156 million rebate from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). You can tell these corporate tax scofflaws to pay up—click here.

Today, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka will host a special presentation and discussion at the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C., of the new book, “Exiting from the Crisis.”