Another 2.6 million people slipped into poverty in the United States last year, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday, and the number of Americans living below the official poverty line, 46.2 million people, was the highest number in the 52 years the bureau has been publishing figures on it.
And in new signs of distress among the middle class, median household incomes fell last year to levels last seen in 1997. 

Speaking the truth can be painful. I had heard about Maryland's proposed redistricting before, but hadn't put two and two together until I read Outsider Bartlett faces political challenge of career.
 

We, the General Assembly of Occupation ___________, constituting all who have joined together in __________, whether in person or virtually, to be part of our movement to reclaim, through non-violent means, American democracy from the corporatists, militarists, and theocrats, declare the following to be our operating principles and goals:

Last week, I sat in a room and listened to a billionaire tell me, and a couple of hundred other people, that the thing he fears most is the government.  He justified his fear by saying that the government is often arbitrary in its rulemaking and in the way it uses its power.  Also, he hates Obama and accused the president of encouraging the Wall Street protesters when "he should be doing the exact opposite."

It's become disturbingly clear that the people occupying Wall Street, and the centers of several other major American cities, have no plan for the future. No vision. No coherent ideas. No sense at all of what to do next.

I just googled Occupy Baltimore, found wwwdotOccupyBaltimoredotcom, and thought, hey they're making progress. But at the bottom of the page, above links to 124 other Occupy domain links, is a link to Occupy Party. If you followed the discussion in Genghis' latest article, Lost in Liberty Square, he commented:

It took me half an hour to find the Internet Working Group at the Occupy Wall Street demonstration in downtown Manhattan. The protesters have been here 24-hours a day for three weeks to denounce corporate greed and economic inequality. They sleep on the ground under blue tarps, which I discovered after almost stepping on one.

I wasn't sure what the Internet Working Group was, but it sounded intriguing. The www.occupywallst.org website promised a meeting at 5 p.m, so I took the subway downtown and plunged into the ragged mass of thousands packed into an unremarkable urban plaza of less than an acre. The organizers have been calling the park by its original name, Liberty Plaza, though they've refashioned it Liberty Square, which sounds more like an iconic protest setting and less like a suburban shopping mall.

For her CNN "Out Front" debut on Monday, Erin Burnett went to the Occupy Wall Street protesters to see for her corporate-shilling self what the heck all the fuss was about.  She couldn't find a single person who knew why they were protesting.  Imagine that.
 

I walked over to see Occupy Baltimore today. First I saw a large group of people doing jumping jacks. That turned out to be Health City. Then I got to McKeldin Square, at the corner of Pratt and Light Streets in view of Inner Harbor. There were maybe fifty people, including a dozen journalists and half a dozen police (poh-leece), three of them on motorcycles. A few dozen onlookers stood around the edges of the small plaza but it seemed clear that they weren't part of it.

No one was doing calisthenics, but a few casually-dressed people were on their knees writing signs on sheets. I felt like saying, "Please don't misspell morons." A camera-toting fellow was interviewing a fellow with a beard, who made it clear that he didn't speak for everyone, but who was the only one speaking. A fellow wearing a LaRouche breadboard was handing out flyers, and a few folk were holding copies of a thin Workers' Week paper. The bearded fellow invited anyone to make a sign.

Today's horrible story about a man's suicide after being fired from his job makes me think of Willy Loman, and the anxieties of power and employment that have always been part of American society.  In "Death of a Salesman," Arthur Miller broke with tradition and wrote a classical tragedy about an ordinary man.  This is something we take for granted now, but when Miller was writing, people in the theatre were  seriously debating whether or not it was even possible to write a tragedy with a prosaic

WARNING:  Hot graven images ahead.  Turn back if you believe Jesus' image on toast should remain a miracle and not be used as a promotion by clever, sacrilegious Vermonters for a Made in China toaster.  (It's International Blasphemy Rights Day today but I swear I didn't know that when I chose this segment.  Not that I'm not okay with it.  I am.)

As a non-religious person I have faith that religion will always be with us.  It's the way of the world, and if I'm baffled by its constancy, by its influence, by the sheer numbers of people involved, I'm even more befuddled watching the successful move away from any pretense at goodness and mercy by the Religious Right in favor of a peculiar form of public, political bullying.

If you're in a really generous mood, you can kind of forgive a few people for shouting "let him die!" in response to a question about a person without health insurance who is suddenly stricken ill.  That shrieking answer might well be directed at the hypothetical itself and not any one individual.  Hypotheticals like that can be frustrating, particularly when you lack a non-sociopathic answer.

I can't believe it's not butter!  In Wisconsin there is a law on the books that forbids restaurants, schools, hospitals and prisons from serving margarine instead of butter.  This weaker version of a 1897 law has been on the dairy state's books for 44 years but most restaurants can get around it, since the interpretation of the law these days is that if a customer asks for margarine it's okay to give it to them.  No mention of how the margarine is delivered to table -- in plain sight or disguised as something else.  (The bovine version of "Don't ask

If presidential hopeful Rick Perry should awaken one night in a cold sweat with the Ghost of Republican Past hovering by his bedside, the apparition will likely take the form of Sen. Charles Percy, who passed away on Saturday after a long struggle with Alzheimer's disease.

Percy's political career ended when he lost his Illinois Senate seat in 1984, the same year that future Texas Gov. Rick Perry won his first election to the Texas House of Representatives as a Democrat. Charles Percy's fall from GOP wunderkind to party outcast offers a vivid illustration of the Republican Party's mutation from a vibrant and diverse coalition to the dogmatic cult of conservative ideology that it has become today.

Read the full article at CNN.com

I never even know even the most scant details about most death penalty cases and that I only  take notice when one makes the national news -- that's sad.  In a lot of ways, that's understandable, but it's also, given the magnitude of the punishment that society is about to deliver, unforgivable.

It's also, at least by my watching of CNN over the last hour, very disturbing to me as an observer of human evolution.  This "death watch" coverage is very bread and circuses. 

If I can be Stone Column Punk about it:

In his Foreign Policy article Got Cheap Milk?, "The Optimist" Charles Kenny decries local, organic food and especially government subsidies to farmer's markets:

I hadn't seen the advert in which Chris the customer says he bought a Ford because they hadn't been bailed out, but TTAC has the youtube in their article Ford Takes the Gloves Off About the Bailouts:

One interesting thing about the current American political climate is that you only ever seem to hear the phrase "class war" coming out of the mouths of those on the political right.  Predictably, talk of raising taxes on millionaires, which I regard as a political slam dunk that probably should have been a center-piece of Democratic politicking for some time now, has also raised cries of class warfare from the right of the political spectrum.

For once, the stars aligned to favor an unlucky people. Defying the odds, the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council agreed to admit a country of refugees still struggling to build a permanent state. The Security Council's recognition did not change the "facts on the ground." The refugees still had to fight for sovereignty and security. But the international recognition offered them a symbol of dignity that they had never experienced. They were not just a people. They were a nation.

That nation was Israel. The year was 1949.

The Palestinians now seek to emulate Israel's example. President Mahmoud Abbas has defied the United States, the Arab League, and even Hamas by seeking full U.N. member status, which requires Security Council approval.