This week, the American Spring began. It was a celebration of what's best in America -- civic community and self-expression. But last night I also saw the worst of America.

Douglas Rushkoff: Media derides the Wall Street protest at its peril. The net-driven movement is a preview of a new sustainable disussion on disconnect in U.S.

Thomas Drake on life inside the National Security Agency and the price of truth telling the truth. Its even worse than under Cheney/Bush!

The battle for birth control revives a feminist movement that was dormant and defensive...

 

Only claiming women’s right to a flourishing life and to any social technology, including, openly, abortions, which enables it, will stop the long downward spiral of the women’s movement. Are women ready? It’s been 40 years since the Hyde Amendment. Maybe American women have been sleepwalking in the wilderness long enough.

Frank VanderSloot, Romney finance co-chair, suppresses scrutiny by threatening reporters and bloggers...

 

Time to start arresting these people who are abusing the Courts and the Legislature (thru their cronies). These are enemies of the People and Democracy. They are traitors that should be proscecuted to the point where they are in jail for the rest of their lives as a warning to others who would use their ill gotten gains to run roughshod over the Constitution and the People of the United States.

Star Wars meets the RIAA, the MPAA, Intellectual Ventures, and everyone else scheming to enthral the people with digital “rights” management and criminal prosecution of “file sharing.”

It's simple: When workers gain some leverage, it gets a little harder to generate totally obscene profits...

I want the abortion rate to plummet, but abstinence-only sex ed and reversing Roe v. Wade

 

Where is the lowest abortion rate? The Netherlands – where abortion (and prostitution) are completely legal. What do they have that we don’t? Accordingly to U.S. News & World Report and the Guttmacher Institute, their low abortion rate is credited to very comprehensive sex education and easy access to contraceptives.

In the war against obesity, one’s own fat cells may seem an unlikely ally, but new research suggests ordinary fat cells can be reengineered to burn calories.

 

http://goo.gl/Z7IjG

The Stratfor analyst “told him he was nuts to rule anything against Halliburton.” The case appears to be a November 2007 case against Hallburton Energy Services brought by the US government, though interestingly the Southern District of Texas already had a misconduct inquiry ongoing against him. The Justice Department was not revealed publicly to be involved until December.

A lot of Republicans complain about voter fraud. But they are the most egregious perpatrators.

The Republican war on women has awoken a sleeping giant and she is furious, driven, educated, and will remove these male supremacists from power.

Better-educated Republicans are more likely to doubt global warming and believe Obama's a Muslim.

 

This was my first encounter with what I now like to call the “smart idiots” effect: The fact that politically sophisticated or knowledgeable people are often more biased, and less persuadable, than the ignorant.

 

But it’s not just global warming where the “smart idiot” effect occurs. It also emerges on nonscientific but factually contested issues, like the claim that President Obama is a Muslim. Belief in this falsehood actually increased more among better-educated Republicans from 2009 to 2010 than it did among less-educated Republicans, according to research by George Washington University political scientist John Sides.

What's the main impediment right now to jobs, jobs, jobs?

Max Berger: We know it will take more than a season to make change on the scale we seek.

 

Before Occupy, politicians and the news media were obsessed with how much to cut the programs that benefit people in need. In a few short weeks, Occupy Wall Street put normal people back in control of the narrative. Instead of listening to the 1% lecture us, we showed that wealth and power concentrated in the hands of the few is keeping the rest of us from getting what we need.

Global warming is wreaking devastation, but Big Oil won't give up profits without a planet-destroying fight...

After three years, it's time for Obama to deliver on his promise to curb money in politics...

 

The corruption of this government is a cancer. And you don’t launch an attack on cancer by prescribing good eating and exercise. Nor can you make change believable by pushing for reforms that won’t change anything in that corruption. What Obama must do if he is to make American democracy possible again is to speak boldly, not practically, about reform. He has to give us the big ideas that would actually have an effect, not the pathetic tinkering that only makes the lobbyists laugh.

Wall Street's favorites resist the effort to ban profiteering on non-public information...

 

This is not just insider trading, but another form of bribery. US Politicians of both parties are corrupt to the core. They should be perp walked to jail now. Unfotunately they still control the courts, police and army. The Media Pundits eat their crums (and probably get passed insider tips)