When folk singer Pete Seeger and some friends launched the Clearwater project in 1969, the Hudson River was an open sewer for industries, cities and towns along its majestic sweep from the Adirondack Mountains to New York Bay. In the years since, the full-sail sight of the Clearwater sloop tacking up and down the river with a pickup crew of excited kids and adults has been paced by outbursts of activism on shore that has prodded cleanups and publicly targeted the major sources of pollution. The inspiration for this hearty brand of environmental activism is a 90-year-old guy who still tramps around with a banjo singing old-fashioned folk songs.

Since the health care debate/fight for our lives seems to be heating up, I thought I would share my own personal story having received health care through a "public option" for the last 4 years. I have been on a New York state program for uninsured people that are HIV+ and make less than $43,000 a year known as ADAP.

Yesterday morning, several Republican Senators took to the Senate floor to make speeches outlining their "concerns" about Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor. By and large, the speeches were entirely predictable, and if I'd been playing a drinking game keyed to mention of Judge Sotomayor's "wise Latina woman" remark, I'd have been three sheets to the wind by lunchtime. But who could have predicted that Senator Jeff Sessions, Ranking Member of the Judiciary Committee, would be critical of Judge Sotomayor for following the words of a statute?

Two weeks ago, I mentioned that Sarah Palin hasn't made up her mind on whether she'll run for reelection in 2010. Well, now Politico reports that many Alaska political insiders consider Palin's current silence as a sign she may not run in order to -- wait for it -- play a bigger role on the national scene.

French investments might have seemed like a dreadful idea for the first two years of French President Nicolas Sarkozy's term. After his election in May 2007, Sarkozy looked like a huge disappointment -- unless you really enjoy tabloid stories. He divorced his wife, married the dramatically old fashioned ex-model Carla Bruni, and went on an enviable honeymoon in Egypt -- but appeared to do nothing useful about France's economic problems. But now there's some good news.

I've been puzzling over marriage a lot lately. I happened to recently read two works of fiction (ironically) that I thought depicted the beautifully flawed, human side of marriage that comes from two imperfect people making a lifelong commitment to each other. How on earth could that possibly be easy? Zadie Smith ("On Beauty") and Joseph O'Neill ("Netherland") have written, gorgeous unvarnished stories about marriages that have at the core of them deep love, commitment and hope.

We have been dreadful planet administrators to date. We have altered ecosystems and the atmosphere to the point of endangering the conditions that make Earth habitable. We came to create a smaller version of the planet in the desert of Arizona, Biosphere 2, and we saw what happened: the experiment ended in a complete fiasco. Meanwhile, we have overpopulated the Earth and have overexploited natural resources. Now we are altering the climate, and though we have scientific evidence and assume that we are intelligent, we have done virtually nothing to change our behavior.

As has been widely reported, when the election was afoot in Iran, neocon Daniel Pipes came out in open support of Ahmedinejad. In a talk at the Heritage Foundation on Wednesday, Pipes said: "I'm sometimes asked who I would vote for if I were enfranchised in this election, and I think that, with due hesitance, I would vote for Ahmadinejad." He followed up on his blog, with a post titled "Rooting for Ahmadinejad."

Let's step back from whether we think that health care co-ops would be an acceptable substitute for a public plan, and focus on how to make them as useful and effective as possible if they are the chosen plan. This will help us to understand whether co-ops really are feasible or just a bamboozle. It is one thing to believe (as I do) that co-ops could be up to the task; to claim that the plan being considered is the way to get there is another kettle of fish.

This news story hasn't been covered as much as the protests in Iran or indeed the financial, parliamentary or any other crises recently, but an uglier side of one of Britain's favourite friendly countries was on display lately in the form of a spate of attacks on Indian students studying in Sydney and Melbourne.

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