I found this cartoon (1948) predicting the future from over 60 years ago. Amazing insights at to what we are facing now in this political cycle. Enjoy! What’s on your mind tonight?

I don’t know a lot about Cesar Chavez (too young) but what I do know is that he was a civil rights and labor rights organizer and leader. And for the City of Sacramento to turn against his tireless legacy of working and speaking for the common average person who has legitimate concerns and grievances over how this country, state, and city are run is the ultimate irony. To arrest people joining together to give voice to political speech against economic injustices would be unconscionable to those who founded this country — and no, I don’t mean the ones you’re thinking of — I mean these ones — really

Fifty years ago today, East German soldiers began overseeing the construction of the Berlin Wall. That wall came down in 1989, but as Der Spiegel reminds us, other walls remain elsewhere in the world.

Even more insidious, though, are the invisible walls we build with money and defend with lawyers, all in an attempt to defend the status quo and nail things down as they are right now.

Sorry, but life is like a river, and you can’t nail it down. Count me among those who yearn for life without such walls.

Welcome to the open road, sisters in Saudi Arabia. There, in a celebration of freedom that has become regular Friday fare in the Middle East and North Africa, women took the wheel and drove themselves about. While no actual law constrains them, women are under a fatwa against taking off driving a car – and are subject to being detained when they do.

It’s a shocking historical juxtaposition. The pro-democracy movement known as the Arab Spring is in significant part a consequence of rising literacy and declining birth rates in the Mideast. Meanwhile, in the U.S., the Right is mounting a direct assault on education and a renewed war on contraception. This ought to tell us something.

One of the tradeoffs made by the US administrations to gain support for entering into Free Trade Agreements is that these agreements impose certain standards on the parties – to protect the environment, human rights and union rights.

So what will the Obama administration do when the terms of one of those agreements are blatantly violated?

American politics has taken a bloody turn. Much of the Right’s agenda is punitive and built upon vengeance against those they have defined as domestic enemies. They seek to disenfranchise their political foes, deny health care to “others,” leave the elderly to die alone in the streets, and abandon public schools so the privileged can use the tax money for their exclusive private schools.

Nadia Idle and Alex Nunns’ new book, Tweets from Tahrir: Egypt’s Revolution As It Unfolded, provides us all with an important first hand view of this movement as it blossomed in Egypt from January 25th through February 12. Using – with permission –running accounts from twitter, the authors are able to trace the movement in the streets in the words of key activists who were there, organizing, strategizing, being surprised by successes and beaten by Mubarak’s thugs.

Just how crazy does a conservative have to be to get Bill Kristol to say please stop, you’re embarrassing us? I bet you can guess who was the first to find out…

John Dewey thinks that the power of unbridled wealth is that it crushes the individual. That happened under the military power of Kings and Emperors, and it happens in democratic societies when economic wealth dominates politics and ideology.