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It's time to speak hard truths. The U.S. is the richest country on earth. But the way we spend our money makes us one of the poorer.

The main stream media is at it again. Another blatant attempt to spur on the conservative cannibalism - to try to get us to eat our own. Part will fuss at Bachmann, part will fuss at GOP leaders for "fussing" at Bachmann. Here's our take - what do you think?

The failure of social scientists to seriously question their own ideological and methodological assumptions contributes to the complex interrelationship between global ecological and individual psychological problems. Much of the literature on the tragedy of the commons focuses on saving the global commons through increased centralization and regulation, at the expense of the individual's autonomy and psychological sense of community. "Utopian" speculation in general and anarchist political analysis in particular are necessary correctives to misplaced attempts to merely rearrange the elements of the status quo rather than to radically alter it in a direction more in keeping with both survival and human dignity.

Richard Gage, member of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, is interviewed on KMPH Fox 26 in Fresno, California, about the events of September 11, 2001. He has been an architect for over twenty years, and is experienced in steel structures. He, as well as 700 other architects and engineers, calls for a more thorough investigation into the collapses of the World Trade Center Buildings. Topics discussed: Proof of thermite and nano-thermite (explosives) found in WTC dust.All three of the World Trade Center Buildings were brought down by controlled demolition.Building 7s collapse at freefall speed into its own footprint.Fires had never brought down a steel structure before 9/11, and have never brought down one since.Several tons of molten iron at the base of the buildings.Al Qaeda was not responsible for the collapses.Much more! Watch and spread this video!

On February 17th, 2002, Marc Ash and I attended a forum in Los Angeles where Rep. Dennis Kucinich delivered his "Prayer for America." A few days later I interviewed the Congressman, and he closed the interview with the following statement:  "Peace is in our national interest. International cooperation is in our national interest. We need to have grand civic dialogue about what we might be able to do here to change the direction of the nation. It certainly needs change. We can spend an extra forty-five billion dollars this year for military when they can't even keep track of their own budget, and still we have forty-two million people without adequate health insurance, senior citizens splitting pills in order to try to meet their health requirements and still protect their budget. We have schools that are still falling apart with programs that don't work. We have so much to do. Yet, society is becoming militarized."  "People want change. The fifteen thousand emails in the last three weeks told me that people want a different direction. I think they are representative of millions of Americans who want to take a different approach. They don't want to be trapped into a condition that the level of support for war is equated with patriotism."  Our country has yet to have that dialogue, and things have only gotten worse. The Nation republished the speech yesterday with a new introduction penned by Kucinich. - SMG/RSN 

In terms of understanding how the U.S. is perceived in the Muslim world -- and why some people might become sufficiently enraged to give up their own lives to attack us -- consider the following:

Which is not to say that the Obama era has meant an end to law enforcement. On the contrary: In the past few years, the administration has allocated massive amounts of federal resources to catching wrongdoers - of a certain type. Last year, the government deported 393,000 people, at a cost of $5 billion. Since 2007, felony immigration prosecutions along the Mexican border have surged 77 percent; nonfelony prosecutions by 259 percent. In Ohio last month, a single mother was caught lying about where she lived to put her kids into a better school district; the judge in the case tried to sentence her to 10 days in jail for fraud, declaring that letting her go free would "demean the seriousness" of the offenses. So there you have it. Illegal immigrants: 393,000. Lying moms: one. Bankers: zero. The math makes sense only because the politics are so obvious. You want to win elections, you bang on the jailable class. You build prisons and fill them with people for selling dime bags and stealing CD players. But for stealing a billion dollars? For fraud that puts a million people into foreclosure? Pass. It's not a crime. Prison is too harsh. Get them to say they're sorry, and move on. Oh, wait - let's not even make them say they're sorry. That's too mean; let's just give them a piece of paper with a government stamp on it, officially clearing them of the need to apologize, and make them pay a fine instead. But don't make them pay it out of their own pockets, and don't ask them to give back the money they stole. In fact, let them profit from their collective crimes, to the tune of a record $135 billion in pay and benefits last year. What's next? Taxpayer-funded massages for every Wall Street executive guilty of fraud?

Everybody knows that if you torture people you don't get good information. It was never about that. Disappearing people and putting them into orange jumpsuits, and into legal black holes and waterboarding them and freezing them and killing detainees was about signaling to the rest of world that you can not challenge or stand up to American power, because if you do, we will respond without constraints, and there is nothing anybody can or will do about it. It was about creating a climate of repression and fear to deter any would-be dissenters or challengers to American power. And that is what this war on whistleblowing and this war on Wikileaks is about as well.

Spurred by memories of the World War II-era roundup and internment of 110,000 of their own people, Japanese Americans, especially on the West Coast, have been among the most vocal and passionate supporters of embattled Muslims. They've rallied public support against hate crimes at mosques, signed on to legal briefs opposing the indefinite detention of Muslims by the government, organized cross-cultural trips to the Manzanar internment camp memorial in California and held "Bridging Communities" workshops in Islamic schools and on college campuses.

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!"

Stock market is a market where each and every person want to try his/her own luck and want to become rich easily and faster. But this is partially true in stock market, here no one becomes rich easier, but yes they can become rich faster by good Stock Tips. http://beststocktipsindia.blogspot.com/2011/05/stock-tips-for-today.html

Since 91% of stocks are owned by the Plutocracy, the much-ballyhooed rise in the stock market as proof the recession is over is perception management/ propaganda.

Martin Luther King - A Time to Break SilenceStarting in 1965, King began to express doubts about the United States' role in the Vietnam War. In an April 4, 1967, appearance at the New York City Riverside Church - exactly one year before his death - King delivered Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence. In the speech he spoke strongly against the U.S.'s role in the war, insisting that the U.S. was in Vietnam "to occupy it as an American colony" and calling the U.S. government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.""Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.""At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called "enemy," I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor." Martin Luther King, Jr. (January 15, 1929 -- April 4, 1968), was one of the main leaders of the American civil rights movement. A Baptist minister b

In states across the country, women are being arrested for the crime of ending their own pregnancies-though they have a constitutional right to do so in a doctor's office. Michelle Goldberg on a worrisome new trend.

It's the perfect self-perpetuating cycle:  (1) They hate us and want to attack us because we're over there; therefore, (2) we have to stay and proliferate ourselves because they hate us and want to attack us; (3) our staying and proliferating ourselves makes them hate us and want to attack us more; therefore, (4) we can never leave, because of how much they hate us and want to attack us.  The beauty of this War on Terror -- and, as the last two weeks have demonstrated, War is the bipartisan consensus for what we are and should be doing to address Terrorism -- is that it forever sustains its own ostensible cause.

It is difficult to describe this emotion. I'm used to disappointment, fairly comfortable with heartbreak, and am well acquainted with rage. Over the course of my lifetime, my presidents have been Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and now Obama…and each, in his own way, has been worse than the last.

That Terrorism means nothing more than violence committed by Muslims whom the West dislikes has been proven repeatedly.  When an airplane was flown into an IRS building in Austin, Texas, it was immediately proclaimed to be Terrorism, until it was revealed that the attacker was a white, non-Muslim, American anti-tax advocate with a series of domestic political grievances.  The U.S. and its allies can, by definition, never commit Terrorism even when it is beyond question that the purpose of their violence is to terrorize civilian populations into submission.  Conversely, Muslims who attack purely military targets  -- even if the target is an invading army in their own countries -- are, by definition, Terrorists.  That is why, as NYU's Remi Brulin has extensively documented, Terrorism is the most meaningless, and therefore the most manipulated, word in the English language.  Yesterday provided yet another sterling example.

Why doesn't money (usually) buy happiness? Alain de Botton breaks new ground for most of us, offering reasons for something our grandparents may well have told us, as children. It is rare, and pleasing, to see a substantial philosophical argument sustained as well as it is in this documentary. De Botton claims that we are more anxious about our own importance and achievements than our grandparents were. This is status anxiety.

The debt deal will hurt the poorest Americans, convinced by Fox and the Tea Party to act against their own welfare

magine you helped prepare a great feast with 99 other people - one of them is morbidly obese, the rest are frail and anorexic. Now imagine the morbidly obese man lining up first, piling almost all the food onto his own plate, and leaving nothing but scraps for you and the rest of the dinner party. If he said you should eat less, would that justify his greed?