The authoritarian right has created a false image of frontier-style individualism, out of sync with the broad-mindedness of our country's real frontiersmen. Can Disney's Davy Crockett save us?

We are fast approaching the time of the next great battle over evolution. The Neo-creationists will be corporations, and they will argue that they could not possibly be descended from human beings.

American journalists who questioned President Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize have lost their already tenuous tether to reality. They need to quit sucking the helium of right-wing nuts and come back to down to the streets of the real with us.

In America, capital punishment is a national gang initiation rite. Typically, an aspiring politician is accepted into our Crips-and-Bloods, two-party political arena only after declaring for the death penalty.

Rick Perry may have violated federal law when he obstructed a state investigation into the execution of an innocent man.

Prairie humanists take care of one another, but they stay of out of another’s way, too. Progressives often don't connect with so-called conservative Americans because we fail to talk the language of caring for one another as free individuals.

Isn't that what we struggle to do, to write a republic? Aren't the voices echoing now in our homes and offices the songs of democracy, including even the songs of a chorus that really doesn't like democracy at all? Isn't the word blog an ugly and unpoetic term for the place of the singing?