When I had cancer, a close friend asked if I ever wondered: why me? I told her that I didn't. I told her that given that one in three Americans will, at some point, be diagnosed with cancer, I felt why not me? Cancer happens. It's sometimes random. It happened to me. There was neither rhyme nor reason. It just did.

Recently unsealed internal company documents from Eli Lilly & Co. show it urged doctors to prescribe the house drug, Zyprexa, to elderly patients suffering from dementia when fully aware that it had absolutely no beneficial effect against the disease.

I have to apologize to white working class men today: I was racist! Yes, me, an African American woman cringed today when I encountered you. It brought me to tears in the restaurant today. I sincerely apologize for my racist thinking and my prejudging you in fear.

Yesterday I was honored to be on a call with America's leading mayors and the US Conference of Mayors to talk about a huge problem affecting cities from coast to coast: the foreclosure crisis. A family is losing their home every 13 seconds for awhile now and the recent failure by Congress to enact bankruptcy reform to protect homeowners because of industry pressure was a real blow to stopping that clock. The failure in Washington isn't going to stand in the way of ACORN's push to address the crisis at the heart of the economic meltdown and teaming up with some of the leading mayors in the United States is a major way we're moving forward to help families stay in their homes.

I recently emailed my cousin in Toronto, Ontario regarding her thoughts on the Canadian health care system. I was pleased with the response that I got and that she actually discussed the question with some of her coworkers.

As the term suggests, coral bleaching is the whitening of living coral colonies, a phenomenon associated with anthropogenic changes in the animal's habitat which lead to the weakening of the colony's health and its eventual death. Let's take a look at what exactly is being bleached, what's causing the bleaching and why bleaching is so devastating to these animals and their ecosystem.

It's a process to be sure, but my husband and I are gradually withdrawing our support from corporate America. We do not wish to give financial support by way of our hard earned dollars to businesses that do not share our values: ethical conduct, respect and concern for the environment, and lack of greed.

Total US GDP is roughly $14 trillion dollars in total size. Because of this size it simply won't reverse on a dime -- especially considering the length and breadth of the current recession. Instead gradual change is how to measure progress. On several fronts this week we saw the news continue to signal that the worst of the recession is probably behind us.

One of the quotes I remember most from the Presidential primary last year was this, "We simply cannot replace Corporate Republicans with Corporate Democrats and expect any kind of real change". John Edwards told us that at a rally in Columbus, Kentucky. Now, no matter your view of him, and no matter how unwise his personal decisions have been this particular gem of wisdom continues to ring true. Nowhere is that better demonstrated than the "centrist" New Democrat and Blue Dog coalitions corporate reactions to the health care debate

If you want to understand President Obama's soul, read his books. But if you want to understand his beliefs, read John Rawls. The Harvard academic, who died in 2002, was the most important philosopher of liberalism in the twentieth century, mostly because, in so many ways, Rawls' ideas describe the world we live in.

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