A video broadcast from inside Benghazi Libya tells of the massacre being carried out by Qaddafi’s mercenaries. Even with a media blackout, Libyans get word out of the horrors they face in response to their demand for reform.

Revolutions here and abroad, and budget stuff.

Terrier Stricken starring Claude Cat and Frisky Puppy. This Warner Bros. Pictures Inc./Merrie Melodies cartoon was released on November 29, 1952.

Most of us can’t be in Wisconsin for the protests to defend workers’ rights. I’d like to be! But failing that, my first online stop for Madison news is First Draft, home of my buds Scout & Athenae (our own Athenae), who with their crew are producing great stuff. And then there is this class [...]

But here’s what was interesting. The Senate is now off for a week. When they come back it’ll be February 28. The continuing resolution to fund the government expires on March 4. So naturally, the Senate will next take up – a patent reform bill. And in the meantime, Reid is raising the pressure on John Boehner’s statement yesterday that he would not go for a short-term continuing resolution, which means a government shutdown, essentially.

On Wednesday, I wrote a post with the (admittedly rhetorical) title “Is Cutting Jobs Programs to Create Jobs Like Cutting Taxes to Increase Revenues?”

Today, I’d like to offer up a few more examples of how the new governors’ of Florida, Ohio, and Wisconsin are treating workers within their states as they “create” jobs.

Jack Goldsmith links to an interesting document from the RummyLeaks library: then Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld’s memo to President Ford reviewing possible candidates to replace William Colby as head of the CIA.

But Goldsmith doesn’t call out the most amusing part of the memo: the way that Rummy asserts that Poppy has the intelligence experience to do the job without pointing out where he got that experience.

In Iraq’s capital Baghdad, more than 1,000 women and children took to the streets and called for the government to provide better care for the war-torn state’s orphans and widows.

Danielle McGuire, the prizewinning author and assistant professor of history at Wayne State University, has written a beautifully crafted and richly researched testimony of the hidden transcript of the Civil Rights Movement. At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power makes a powerful case for re-imagining the Civil Rights Movement in the South through the lens of sexual violence. This path-breaking book spotlights incidents of sexual assault from the early 1940s to the mid 1970s. Rather than remaining secreted, these brutal attacks inspired community protests among African Americans and their white allies. These grassroots struggles of resistance to white supremacy helped initiate the wider Civil Rights Movement that emerged after World War II and which eventually forced the national government to end racial segregation and black disfranchisement. Also, these community-based networks of support provided the infrastructure for the more familiar history of civil rights activities in Montgomery and Selma, Alabama, Jackson, Mississippi, Tallahassee, Florida and other southern cities.

Recently elected Democratic Governor Dan Malloy wants Connecticut to join its neighbor Massachusetts in making the penalty for minor marijuana possession a simple fine.