It’s kind of hard to determine what a background is for me, and this week I was really confused. I am from the south. I have cajun and Jewish and native ancestors. I can’t actually tell what makes me what I am.

Miss Piggy — I Get Around, from episode 415 of The Muppet Show. The filming of this segment was featured in the documentary Of Muppets and Men.

In recent years, as the mendacity and greed of the wealthiest, most powerful elements of our society have become ever more thinly veiled — and ever more unchecked — it’s become more common for people to express offhand, “We’re heading for another Gilded Age“… another era, like the late 19th century, when vast riches were concentrated in the hands of a lucky few who flaunted it brazenly.

So far, that hasn’t become literally true (yet) in the United States, but elsewhere, a tipping point might have been reached.

Mayor Bloomberg fearmongers about unemployment instead of the so-called “debt crisis.” He also seems to suggest that maybe “shared sacrifice” really should be, y’know, shared.

Before the Administration enacted their deportation review, I wrote about the series of protests at Secure Communities task force hearings, where Latino activists denounced the program that has resulted in mass deportations of undocumented immigrants despite assurances that only violent criminals would be swept up. The activists called on the task force members to resign, and to recommend that the Secure Communities program be terminated.

The task force released its findings yesterday, and they were sharply critical.

In the Committee to Protect Journalists’ (CPJ) report on attacks on the press in Ethiopia in 2010, the advocacy organization for press freedom summarized how the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (ERDF) had “imprisoned journalists, jammed foreign broadcasters and blocked websites as it swept general elections in May.” The summary recounted an instance where police interrogated two editors of the weekly Sendek for seven hours just as Prime Minister Meles Zenawi gave a speech on “freedom of choice.”

It highlighted how the government intimidated Awramba Times staffers for “challenging coverage.”

On Monday, September 12, an incinerator explosion at a French nuclear waste processing center killed one, injured four, and created just enough nuclear news to edge this week’s other nuclear story right out of the headlines.

The explosion, which is reported not to have caused any leak of radiation, was at a facility that reprocesses used nuclear reactor fuel in order to create a more toxic, less stable form of fuel commonly known as “mixed oxide” or MOX. MOX, which is a tasty blend of uranium and plutonium, was in at least some of the rods in some of the reactors at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi facility when it suffered catastrophic failures after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami–and the presence of MOX fuel made the fallout from explosions at the Japanese plant more dangerous as a result. (More dangerous than already extremely dangerous might seem like a trivial addendum, but it is of note if for no other reason than the manufacture and use of MOX fuel is what nuclear power proponents think of when they call it a “renewable resource.”)

Susan Grigsby of Twenty Nine Palms, California, recounts the story of her brother dying of cancer while lacking insurance.

As Susan says in the video, her real scorn was reserved for the candidates on stage who want to be President saying nothing when a crowd cheered on the notion of allowing people to die, essentially because of their financial status.

The defense budget is bloated. It’s nearly doubled over the last decade, and the necessity for such increases is sorely wanting. Panetta is a budget insider playing an inside game. But it’s deeply insulting to throw up these wild claims about job loss. By the way, you could end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have no bearing on our national security, and get to the exact same $1 trillion in cuts. Do we have to keep killing people in those countries, too, as a make-work jobs program?

David Brooks piece today is titled “the planning fallacy.” The gist of it is that because of the financial crisis the gods have dictated that the United States simply must experience a prolonged period of high unemployment.