In 1998, the murder of Matthew Shepard sent shock waves through the nation. A 21-year-old gay student at the University of Wyoming, Shepard was brutally beaten, tortured, tied to a fence, and left for dead. Eighteen hours later, a bicyclist found Matthew, initially thinking he was a scarecrow. He was rushed to the hospital and died five days later. Now, more than a decade later, the U.S. Senate is set to vote on a bill that would give the government additional tools to combat and prevent such heinous acts.bias-motivated violence. Though it is widely believed and

There's a war going on. It's happening mostly behind the scenes, at the desks of a coven of crooked bureaucrats and banksters nationwide. If you thought the bank bail out ate a hole in your pocket, look at what the banksters, unindicted bureaucrats and land thieves have been doing to the nation's farmers and to the security of your food supply.

A recent study was done on past climactic shifts that could spell out less doom than we had feared. As many people know, our planet has been in an ice age for the last 2.58 million years or so -- within this period of time there have been several massive shifts of cooling and warming. While we cannot directly see the creatures that were effected by these shifts, we can look through the fossil record and search for clues regarding them.

Desperately looking for something, anything, to discredit the Obama White House, Republicans have been trying to promote the story about how the White House summarily dismissed AmeriCorps' inspector general Gerald Walpin as a politicized firing. The Republicans are trying desperately to make it stick as a black mark against the Obama Administration.

I am pretty far removed from a prude. In my heyday, I was a wild "try anything" (and everything) type. As a parent, however, I find the Calvin Klein orgy ad campaign offensive. The company has posted a giant billboard that intimates a young woman is involved in an orgy with three men.

On June 10th, the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) filed charges with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging that school "turnarounds," a "Renaissance 2010" policy, have a disparate impact on African American teachers. Teachers who filed the charges contend that African American teachers suffer a disproportionately adverse impact.

Based upon the recently released transcripts from the 2007 Guantanamo military tribunals (CSRTs) detailing the charges against several "high value" detainees, Abu Zubaydah may have endured severe physical or psychological suffering during CIA interrogation. his testimony makes one thing clear; He had an old brain injury that caused mental dysfunction, "including the complete loss of [his] memory and an inability to speak, read, or write." With an old brain injury, he was at increased risk for new brain injury. The Bybee memo was thus wrong when it asserted that Zubaydah had no known risk for mental or psychiatric pathology.

Every so often, Hollywood produces a film about racial issues that is so honest, so truthful, so powerful that I wish every person could see it. Do The Right Thing (1989) was one such film. Crash (2005) was another. It's not that these are perfect films, just that they know how to deal with the racial themes they take on. Unfortunately, these films are the exception rather than the rule.

Today I received this email from Amazon: "We regret to inform you that the North Carolina state legislature (the General Assembly) appears ready to enact an unconstitutional tax collection scheme that would leave Amazon.com little choice but to end its relationships with North Carolina-based Associates."

Item Number 14 in the most recent Harper's Index (July 2009) is a pithy and tantalizing little factoid: Minimum number of Americans whose health care is paid for by taxes: 83,000,000. The cited source for this information is the US Census Bureau, and when I did a little hunting, I found this report, Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2006, published in August 2007 and prepared under the previous administration. It tries not to, but the report inadvertently makes an excellent case for publicly-funded health insurance: not only is it possible, we're already doing it.

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