Jefferson County Commissioner Shelia Smoot officially rolled out her campaign to become the first woman elected to represent Alabama in Congress with a bus tour through the 7th Congressional District. Smoot said she will focus on strong solutions to the various challenges people throughout AL-07 face. Her plans include improving health care and education, economic development and improving infrastructure both by building roads and increasing high-speed internet access.

That Richard Perle and Frank Gaffney, two of the neocon cheerleaders for the disaster in Iraq, would blame President Obama for the election fraud in Iran is unsurprising. That once and future Republican White House hopeful Mitt Romney of all people would parrot the charge is hilarious.

Atheists often portray people who believe in God in a fairly disingenuous fashion. God-believing folk, essentially, believe in a pink elephant. Or, a flying spaghetti monster. Even if the portrayal is not so dramatic, people who believe in God are depicted as closed-minded, avowing the righteousness of one path only, swearing by some book that was written by men two thousand years ago. This is disingenuous at best.

For several months I've been hearing about Rahm Emanuel's brother, Ezekiel, who is a physician. He has been promoting a voucher system which clearly seems designed to split America into two groups, the healthy and the sick. The healthy may be able to pay for high deductible care via a voucher, but that care falls into the trap that all consumer driven health care plans do, in that it does nothing to control costs except withhold care.

I watch in awe of the courage, passion and activism of the Persian people. A people sitting directly in the cradle of civilization. A people who are highly sophisticated and intelligent. A people who are showing me, as an American what it looks like to do more than just rant in a blog room on the internet. I am old enough to remember how it felt to be tear gassed, to help carry friends away from angry police lashing out with their sticks as I marched to end the Vietnam War in the seventies.

Whether you are looking to augment your income, replace your lost job, or just get out from under the thumb of management, you may be considering starting your own business. Before you do you may want to check this out for some helpful suggestions and advice to get you started on the path to success (or at least help you avoid the path to failure).

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.

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