Newt Gingrich has done the unthinkable. He has attacked one of the Republican sacred cows. No, not the rich. But almost as bad. Newt attacked former president Ronald Reagan.

The Autism Society of America has teamed up with AMC Theaters to provide venues for families of autistic children to take their kids to the movies, in selected theaters, which have been set up to accomodate the special sensory needs of autistic children. This month, the movie that has been selected for the program is the Pixar blockbuster Up.

The sword of Damocles has fallen; Atlas has dropped the Earth and an earthquake has struck California. Not a seismic earthquake but an economic earthquake. The reverberations in the California real estate market combined with the outsourcing of jobs set into motion the shaking of the state's economic foundations. If you were to see this play enacted in a theater, you wouldn't believe it. I read it again and again and shake my head at what has become reality in this country.

The so-called "second-wave" feminists of the 1960s and 1970s have often warned the women of my generation, born after Roe vs, Wade, to not take legal abortion for granted. I have always had tremendous respect and admiration for the activists who fought for women's rights in that era, but I believed their fear was unwarranted, merely a product of having grown up in the discriminatory 1950s and early 60s. Now I see they are right to be afraid. For the first time in my life, I feel truly scared that we are going backwards on this issue, and that women's right to safe and legal abortions is being infringed upon.

I've been thinking a lot over the last eighteen months about food security, starting way down in the basement where sun, water, and soil come together in our volume grain production. There is a tight connection between our current population overshoot and the fossil energy resources, both fuel and fertilizer, that got us here. Food production, such as we do now, is more of an energy issue than an environmental one, but pile those two issues together with the economic concerns we face and it's a truly poisonous brew.

Scientists have discovered that exposure to a common pollutant may make people more likely to experience severe symptoms from swine flu -- and it's a pollutant emitted in large quantities by coal-burning power plants and other industrial facilities. The culprit is arsenic, a highly poisonous semi-metal which, according to a new study by researchers at the Marine Biological Laboratory and Dartmouth Medical School, compromises a person's ability to mount an immune response to the H1N1 swine flu virus.

How does the old saying go? "When other people lose their jobs, it's a recession; when you lose yours, it's a depression." Things just got depressing in our household. Our sole breadwinner just joined the newly unemployed.

Attorney General Eric Holder is taking firm steps to deal with prosecutorial misconduct during the George W. Bush era. And that's a good thing. But the beneficiaries of Holder's reviews, so far, have all been Republicans. And that is not a good thing -- especially when you consider that perhaps the most egregious example of prosecutorial misconduct in the Bush years came in the case against Don Siegelman, the former Democratic governor of Alabama.

The Louisiana Legislature has passed through the lower house a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would dramatically alter the freedom of speech AND the establishment clause of the state constitution and challenge the US Constitution.

Our county Board of Supervisors voted to ignore the recommendation of their own planning commission against putting a truck stop next to our largest elementary school. I live in Washington County, VA. It's one of the more populous counties in this rural area of Virginia (50,000 or so residents). Concerned parents and local businesses began taking names on a petition against a truck stop at that location over a year ago. It's now over 800 signatures. Local residents organized to oppose the rezoning that would be required for a commercial development of this magnitude. The school board voted unanimously to recommend against placement of the truck stop by the school.

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