Officially, ten percent of San Franciscoans live in poverty, and homelessness is a massive problem in the city with the third highest median income in the country. There are more than 6,000 homeless individuals in San Francisco -- and probably more than 8,000. This fact is all the more disturbing considering that San Francisco is ranked the 11th meanest city for the homeless in the country by the National Coalition for the Homeless.

View a photo essay from San Francisco

Find out more information from the Coalition on Homelessness, San Francisco.

You can take Greg Palast out of the San Fernando Valley, but you can't take the Valley out of this muckraking journalist.

The longtime Sun Valley resident has become an award-winning investigative reporter for BBC television and Britain's Guardian and Observer newspapers, as well as a New York Times bestselling author, but Palast credits his Valley upbringing with turning him into a prominent critic of President George W. Bush, Enron, globalization, the Iraq war and more. His embittered memories of growing up Valley during the McCarthy and Vietnam eras are anything but "American Graffiti"-like reveries.

"For me, the class war began in the Valley. ... We had this sense that there was a bright city over the hill. Cross Laurel Canyon and you entered the city of the winners. We were in the planet of the losers, below sea level, economically and socially. Most of my area was Chicano. We were the kids who worked at Bob's Big Boy, got your girlfriend pregnant, went to 'Nam - and, if that didn't kill you, overtime at the Chevy plant would."

Not to extend Ann Coulter's fame past the news cycle on her latest indescretion but I have to say Bill O'Reilly got it right when noting that people like her make for bad PR for the "convervatives." It makes me wonder what they are conserving? Ann Coulter gives Connecticut Yankee such a bad connotation I want to take the name off the candle.

As the evidence of global warming becomes inescapable, I fear Americans will switch instead to a fatalistic pessimism. Maybe it’s real and maybe it’s our fault, this sentiment goes, but at this point there’s nothing we can do, so we’re off the hook.

It’s hard to deal with melting arctic glaciers, Katrina refugees who might never return to New Orleans, and floods that recently covered half of Bangladesh. Weather-related catastrophes cost a record $225 billion last year, with the impact of global climate change just beginning. Add in a president deep in denial, and it’s tempting to feel powerless.  We can’t even escape to the Weather Channel without a sense of impending doom.

AUSTIN, Texas -- It occasionally occurs to me that if I could understand the Bush administration's foreign policy, I might like it. After months of threatening Iran with everything up to and including nuclear war, we are now full of Sweet Reason and offering to have diplomatic talks with the very people we have been denouncing as Beyond Vile.

I never mind a good about-face in foreign policy myself. Always reminds me of the times when that great duo Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger decided it would be a good thing to convince the world they were both quite perfectly mad. They succeeded. (Bonus point: What did Richard Nixon say upon first seeing the Great Wall of China? He said, "This is, indeed, a great wall." Almost as good as the time George H.W. Bush barfed on the prime minister of Japan.)