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"It's a hoax," said coal company CEO Don Blankenship, "because clearly anyone that says that they know what the temperature of the Earth is going to be in 2020 or 2030 needs to be put in an asylum because they don't." On the other side of the debate was environmentalist Robert Kennedy, Jr. "Ninety-eight percent of the research climatologists in the world say that global warming is real, that its impacts are going to be catastrophic," he argued. "There are 2 percent who disagree with that. I have a choice of believing the 98 percent or the 2 percent." To social scientist and lawyer Don Braman, it's not surprising that two people can disagree so strongly over science. Braman is on the faculty at George Washington University and part of The Cultural Cognition Project, a group of scholars who study how cultural values shape public perceptions and policy

Iraq experiences 27.79 Fort Hood shootings a day and averages the equivalent casualties of September 11th every 8.23 days. Afghanistan experiences 1 Fort Hood shooting a day and averages the equivalent casualties of September 11th every 231.24 days.

If you take a job away from someone who is paid a reasonable wage because they enjoy the protections and prosperity of democratic government, move it across a border, and give it to someone living under a thugocracy, forced to work for pennies with no protections whatsoever, it should be just plain obvious that the worker on our side of the border and the worker on the other side of the border are not going to be better off. And when you do this on a massive scale it just stands to reason that most people on both sides of the border are going to be worse off. But propaganda being what it is we were somehow convinced to try a worldwide experiment in taking good jobs from democracies and turning them into bad jobs in thugocracies. Now, of course, the experiment has run its course and we can see the results.

Even stupid, self-centered Republican men have the right to their beliefs, I just don't want them imposed on me. Besides, I respect the opinions of people who speak from experience and have a stake in the outcome of the problem they seek to resolve. To my way of thinking, if Republican men really want to have credibility about the abortion issue, then they should get knocked up. Until then, I for one would appreciate it if they would just shut the f**k up.

As one of the "sensible" conservatives on The New York Times' editorial page, Ross Douthat has a habit of using his column to provide a thin veneer of respectability to otherwise ugly ideas. Riffing off of the Cordoba House controversy, Douthat relies on the country's past experiences with unfamiliar immigrants to endorse nativism and xenophobia as a way of pushing immigrants toward greater assimilation. But this is bad history; the nativists of 19th-century America weren't much interested in having "new arrivals adapt to Anglo-Saxon culture," rather, the nativists of mid-19th-century America wanted to keep immigrants off of American shores. [Just like now]

The idea that your mother tongue shapes your experience of the world may be true after all.

Any rigorous conception of youth must take into account the inescapable intersection of the personal, social, political and pedagogical embodied by young people. Beneath the abstract codifying of youth around the discourses of law, medicine, psychology, employment, education and marketing statistics, there is the lived experience of being young. For me, youth invokes a repository of memories fueled by my own journey through an adult world, which largely seemed to be in the way, a world held together by a web of disciplinary practices and restrictions that appeared at the time more oppressive than liberating. Lacking the security of a middle-class childhood, my friends and I seemed suspended in a society that neither accorded us a voice nor guaranteed economic independence. Identity didn't come easy in my neighborhood. It was painfully clear to all of us that our identities were constructed out of daily battles waged around masculinity, the ability to mediate a terrain fraught with violence and the need to find an anchor through which to negotiate a culture in which life was fast and short-lived. I grew up amid the motion and force of mostly working-class male bodies - bodies asserting their physical strength as one of the few resources over which we had control.

At the beginning of the year I visited Israel and came back and wrote a post, Israel's crisis. Last month I got back from my third trip to the country, and that sense is stronger. Israel is headed for the iceberg, as one Israeli friend put it. Its effort as a Jewish state to govern a population that is half-non-Jewish is unsustainable. Palestinians are everywhere oppressed in the occupied territories (and second-class citizens inside Israel). The awareness fills me with dread and a renewed commitment to the American conversation, and even feelings of blasted brotherhood with American Jews, who are the chief enablers of the oppression.

Adam Smith observed in 1776 that economies work best when governments keep their clumsy thumbs off the free market's "invisible hand." Two generations later, in 1817, the British economist David Ricardo extended Smith's insights to global trade. Just as market forces lead to the right price and quantity of products domestically, Ricardo argued, free foreign trade optimizes economic outcomes internationally. Reading Adam Smith in Copenhagen -- the center of the small, open, and highly successful Danish economy -- is a kind of out-of-body experience. On the one hand, the Danes are passionate free traders. They score well in the ratings constructed by pro-market organizations. The World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Index ranks Denmark third, just behind the United States and Switzerland. Denmark's financial markets are clean and transparent, its barriers to imports minimal, its labor markets the most flexible in Europe, its multinational corporations dynamic and largely unmolested by industrial policies, and its unemployment rate of 2.8 percent the second lowest in the OECD (the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development). On the other hand, Denmark spends about 50 percent of its GDP on public outlays and has the world's second-highest tax rate, after Sweden; strong trade unions; and one of the world's most equal income distributions. For the half of GDP that they pay in taxes, the Danes get not just universal health insurance but also generous child-care and family-leave arrangements, unemployment compensation that typically covers around 95 percent of lost wages, free higher education, secure pensions in old age, and the world's most creative system of worker retraining. Does Denmark have some secret formula that combines the best of Adam Smith with the best of the welfare state? Is there something culturally unique about the open-minded Danes? Can a model like the Danish one survive as a social democratic island in a turbulent sea of globali

Censorship. It isn't appropriate either way - neither side should practice it. And yet, it is happening more and more to many groups. Facebook is rapidly becoming a battleground for this sort of a battle, as is social media with people being able to report "abusive" this or that which is in reality just a difference of opinion. The question is, which side of the argument will the digital giants out there come down on? Our own personal experience with this new rebranding of an old hypocrisy serves as a warning!

Here's a thought: maybe Madison, Wis., isn't Cairo after all. Maybe it's Baghdad - specifically, Baghdad in 2003, when the Bush administration put Iraq under the rule of officials chosen for loyalty and political reliability rather than experience and competence.

And who will bear the brunt of these cuts? America's children. Now, politicians - and especially, in my experience, conservative politicians - always claim to be deeply concerned about the nation's children. Back during the 2000 campaign, then-candidate George W. Bush, touting the "Texas miracle" of dramatically lower dropout rates, declared that he wanted to be the "education president." Today, advocates of big spending cuts often claim that their greatest concern is the burden of debt our children will face. In practice, however, when advocates of lower spending get a chance to put their ideas into practice, the burden always seems to fall disproportionately on those very children they claim to hold so dear. Consider, as a case in point, what's happening in Texas, which more and more seems to be where America's political future happens first.

The Wisconsin recall election was the first major test of the new era in American politics. That new era began in January of 2010 when the US Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v. FEC that the political voice of We The People was no longer as important as the voices of billionaires and transnational corporations. Now we know the result, and it bodes ill for both 2012 and for the tattered future of small-d democracy in our republic. A few of America's most notorious oligarchs - including the Koch and the DeVos (Amway fortune) billionaires - as well as untraceable millions from donors who could as easily be Chinese government-run corporations as giant "American" companies who do most of their business and keep most of their profits outside the US - apparently played big in this election. I say "apparently" because the Supreme Court has ruled that we no longer have the right to know who is really funding our election commercials, or even our candidates themselves. Thanks to an irrational and likely illegal Supreme Court ruling, we have moved into an era of oligarch-run politics. As much as $40 million of our oligarch's money was spent in Wisconsin in a handful of local races - a testing laboratory for strategies that will now be used against Democrats nationwide in 2012. And so now we enter the battle of the oligarchs over the next fifteen or so months. As the old saying goes, when the elephants fight, the mice get trampled. In this case, the mice aren't just the voters. It's democracy itself. America is now - demonstrably, as proven by Wisconsin - just a few years away from the possibility of a totally corrupted, totally billionaire- and corporate-controlled political system. Political scientists call it oligarchy. The Citizens United election experiment is over, and the oligarchs won. Long live the oligarchy.

If thousands of us hang in there day after day, week after week, we may be able to create a spectacular revolutionary experience that fires up the public imagination and eventually maneuvers Obama into doing something that he has so far not had the guts to do: agree to a bold, decisive stroke against the financial corruption of America. Now that would get the American people behind us and cheering us on from coast to coast. If we can achieve that, the sky will be the limit … further demands will follow and a new America will be born.

As a Palestinian-American, award-winning journalist Ray Hanania has had a unique and rare life experience growing up on the Southwest Side of Chicago, which is dominated by Irish, Polish, and Italian working class, where many people think that every Arab is a potential terrorist. But what is even more interesting about Mr. Hanania is the fact that he is married to a Jew.

I know it's not nice to kick a website when it's down, but gop.com is such an easy target, and it is in a very small barrel, and I love the smell of gen-u-ine 2nd Amendment-shot fish so much and...oh what the hell.

Center for a Stateless Society Media Coordinator Tom Knapp, summarizing his experience with the Occupy St. Louis movement, reported a movement "with an ideological center of gravity somewhere in the neighborhood of 'mild reform Democrat.'"  Most of the people there, apparently, were basically Coffee Party people with better signs and slogans. They're probably not representative of the nationwide Occupy Together movement - the vibe coming from Occupy Wall Street, at least, is a lot more like Seattle. But there really is a contradiction in the movement between those who see it as part of a larger process of creating a new kind of society, and those who see it primarily as a source of pressure on the state to revive the New Deal or Social Democratic model.