The word slut is used to dehumanize and blame far too many victims of sexual assault. Well, some women have had enough and are arranging Slut Walks all over the planet.

I’m not going to act like an economist and claim to be “surprised” that folks are spinning various education pieces today. No, I am not at all surprised that it is happening, but I am a little frustrated when I see something like this from today’s (Sunday May 22) NY Times where the headline uses “grassroots” and “Bill Gates” together. The idea of anything funded from the coffers of a billionaire being considered “grass roots” is beyond ludicrous.

Rarely do lies simply go out in the world and stand on their own. To have staying power, they require a complex network of ancillary lies and human enablers (sometimes knowing, sometime unwitting) who create a web of falsehood. These tangled webs can drain families’ bank accounts, get people killed, cause great institutions to fall, even help crash an economy.

Hi folks, Happy Easter! It has been a pretty frustrating week on a lot of the fronts we follow here. But that was the week that was, now it is Easter Sunday and it is time to relax, eat and have some fun, whether it is a religious holiday for you or just a good chance to chill.

It’s very easy for the Third Way to congratulate itself that it got a bunch of people “from Middle America” to complain that gay men and women deprived of civil rights “don’t get it,” it’s a fundamentally dishonest project. But the people who “don’t get it” are those who pretend they can separate the institution of marriage from society’s full recognition of that institution, legally, through the rights it conveys.

For all the caterwauling from the right and, stupifyingly, from the Obama Administration and Blue Dog left as well, here is the real reason the United States has the sizable deficit issues it does (well, in addition to the fact we will not tax even rich individuals appropriately either) – our biggest corporations pay no tax.

David Sirota has written a wonderful new book with an expansive Theory of Our Zeitgeist: that the toxic 1980s — as well as our current culture’s funhouse-mirror view of that warped decade — are still poisoning our country. His powerful argument will be familiar to Firepups: the adulation of Ronald Reagan, along with our renewed taxcut fetish, admiration of greed, and mainstreaming of militarism have ruined any chance of restoring balance to our nation’s income inequity and spoiled our planet’s chance for peace, harmony and (possibly) survival.

Three weeks ago I woke up and started organizing my thoughts to write this post. I had no more than written the title when news started coming in hot, first on Twitter and then local news channels, that Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords had been shot in Tucson. In a strange dichotomy, it was both an event which brought the ugly underbelly of hate in my state into even better focus than it had been before, which is the subject of this post.

I love New Orleans. I fell in love with the city as a little girl, just by reading stories set there. I watched in agony as Hurricane Katrina approached, prayed with friends that the city would be spared and wept when the levees broke and destroyed so many lives. I was given the opportunity to research and fact-check the city online post-Katrina, followed by two amazing, transcendent trips to NOLA in 2006 and 2007 for the Voodoo Music Fest and then Mardi Gras. I cheered when the Super Bowl was held there with U2 playing at halftime and whooped with ecstatic joy embracing a group of Orleans-loving friends when the Saints won last season. New Orleans is at once languorous and vital, seductive, dangerous, joyous, profound, sacred, nasty, naughty, glorious. She is the Holy of Holies, full of magic and mystery, charm and force; fierce and exuberant.

Donatello’s Maddelena Penitente shows us the pain of separation from the Almighty.