In recent years, many government officials seem to have developed a “reverse Midas touch”. You know: everything they touch seems to turn brown and stinky.

I’d like to think that elected people at all levels would respond by working “full time”, learning how to respond constructively to charges like the one my Mother levels against them: “they don’t care about the country, only their party’s and their own personal interests”. SHE IS DISGUSTED!

Instead, in Ohio (but more generally as well), Republicans have resorted to cheating legally. It’s called gerrymandering, and it means “the winning party gets to redraw election districts so it can keep winning, without caring about the country, just their party’s and their own interest”, much as Mom had charged!

No surprise! That’s what parties do. But, if we persuade them how mad my Mom and so many others really are: they might do differently. Two ways to persuade them to try:

• negotiate some variant of philosopher John Rawls’ “veil of ignorance”, according to which neither party would know which group of redistricted districts they would end up with;

What would you do if someone had a button that could destroy the earth and they were walking across the room to push it? Would you stand in the way? Would you talk them out of it? Would you sit by and watch, maybe make a sarcastic remark or two? What if the button might destroy the earth or might just destroy part of it? What if it might leave most of the earth intact but kill millions of people, but what if you had no way of being sure how far the destruction would spread?

Here is an animation made by the Union of Concerned Scientists on the damage a strike on Iran would likely cause, including the death of three million people.

Here is a New York Times article on what would likely happen next, including a war at least regional in scope and involving the United States.

Oil and gas corporations, their trade associations, mass media outlets like the Wall Street Journal and Time magazine, and numerous pundits continue to report there is a new day unfolding in the energy future of the U.S. Indeed, they sometimes say it is a revolution in the making. It's now feasible to mine hitherto unreachable or unprofitable sources of "unconventional" oil and gas. As a result, massive, environmentally-devastating mining of tar sands in Canada expands, with a proposed and controversial pipeline to carry the partly processed oil from Alberto to Texas. Drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico, the arctic, multiple off-shore locations drill ever-more deeply into the ocean floor and beneath it. As far as mining for shale gas and oil goes, the situation is described with words such as gushers, or bonanzas, or energy independence.

Remarks at the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) Conference:

President Obama this week declared the war on Iraq to be an honorable success that has given us a brighter future. Are you fired up? Ready to go?

Eric Holder this month explained that it's legal for a president to kill anyone anywhere, or to imprison them, or to spy on them. I started to get upset about this, but then I remembered that Holder is a Democrat. That made me feel much better.

Leon Panetta told Congress this month that a president can launch a war without Congress and without the United Nations and without any legal restrictions, that a NATO decision to go to war makes a war legal, that a decision by an ad hoc coalition to go to war makes a war legal, and that in fact there's no way for a war launched by a U.S. president not to be legal. At first this sounded like a dangerous doctrine, until I remembered that the president is not a Republican, and no Republican is going to be president for at least several months. So, there's nothing to worry about.

On March 23, protestors gathered in Cleveland to protest the Affordable Care Act’s mandate of contraception coverage, which brings nearly unprecedented reform to women’s healthcare. For young women in America, the ACA’s preventative-related policies are crucial for the maintenance of a healthy lifestyle.

The transition out of high school or college leaves many young women teetering on the edge of limited healthcare or no healthcare at all. Thanks to the ACA, young people can stay covered on their parents’ policy until the age of 26. Young women are now freer to explore entrepreneurial opportunities, non-traditional jobs, volunteer work or further education without having to worry about how or where they can get basic health care.