"Some days you eat the bear, some days the bear eats you." You've probably heard this saying before. Of course, very few people have actually been eaten by a bear, and even fewer have lived to tell about it. My big brother is one of the few.

People aren't asking for "health insurance" so much as they are asking for "health care." And there is a difference. "Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane" -- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. We want health care equality. We also want our health care to be more affordable and better quality. To achieve all of that, we will need to reform our current system by retooling the methods of financing.

Another ugly episode from RNC Chairman Michael Steele's tenure as Maryland's lieutenant governor is coming back to haunt him. This time it's a state audit finding that while Mr. Steele was in office, his close friend and advisor, Washington lawyer Sandy Roberts, who is black, posed as an independent airport retail business owner so that airport retail giant Hudson News could meet minority participation goals at Baltimore Washington International Airport.

It can if that number is 350. That's the safe upper limit of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere: 350 parts per million (ppm). It's also the rallying cry of a creative campaign to raise awareness of the climate crisis and build grassroots support for the 2009 Climate Conference in Copenhagen.

He was already elderly when we moved into this house in 1984. For almost a quarter century he was a part of our lives, although in recent years he was fading. Yesterday I went out to the car to put a bag in of someone I was taking to Union Station in DC, and realized he was finally gone. The heavy rain had been too much, and as the soil loosened, he gave up the ghost and keeled over, into the driveway.

Supporters of the law that allows same-sex couples in Maine to marry announced today that they have formed a political action committee to protect marriage for all Mainers. The new organization, "Maine Freedom to Marry," will draw on resources that were crucial to the legislative victory this spring, and will also free up the campaign to raise and spend money for the statewide referendum expected this fall.

While the professional journalists in Iran have been locked down in their hotels, prohibited from taking photographs or interviewing Iranians, ordered out of the country and even arrested, a new breed of citizen journalists have taken their places, successfully sending news, photographs and videos of Iranian events to the outside world. The camera phone has replaced the Uzi as a guerrilla weapon.

Fahreed Zakaria is a smart political analyst, who doesn't just yap to hear himself talk like most of the political bloviators on CNN. I get the feeling he actually knows -- and understands -- history! He gives his take this morning at CNN.com on whether or not the Islamic Republic can sustain itself: "One of the first things that strikes me is we are watching the fall of Islamic theocracy."

It may not be fair, but the news coming out of Southwest Asia on a regular basis via the Air Force's airpower summaries remind this reader of nothing so much as stories about hunting wolves with helicopters in Alaska. There's just no sense of proportionality.

You should read Global Voices Online. You should write for them. You should re-publish Global Voices stories from around the world in whatever medium you produce.

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