We've been commemorating failed rebellions lately, so it's worth noting this is the 50th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Or, as the sign at the entrance to the Playa Girón beach resort puts it (in Spanish): "First Defeat of Yanqui Imperialism in the Americas."

Investigative reporter Mark Hertsgaard, author of the new book, Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth was on Democracy Now! On Friday.  He has been investigating climate change since the ‘90s, but was motivated to ramp up his reporting after he met with British government scientists in 2005.  They explained that we have already reached the tipping point at which even with no further CO2 added to the atmosphere, the earth would not stop heating further for at least another thirty years.

Felix Salmon asks Is informationally-insensitive debt a good thing?  

On April 21, I'll be celebrating secession, and hope you'll be joining me too.

See it's all over the ownership of slaves and the growing tyranny of a centralized government changing the rules of the game to discriminate against the rebels, and the unwillingness of the central government to recognize the unique nature of the rebels' culture.

“The truth shall set you free.  But first it’s gonna piss you off.” – Dylan Ratigan

It’s understandable that we blog a lot about the budget fights in Congress, or the contents of Obama’s budget speech this week.  God knows it’s the only semi-serious subject on the the MSM’s radar.  Except among progressive bloggers, 'the crucial need for Deficit and Debt Control' as urgent right now has been written in stone already.  Even the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs has weighed in and called it ‘the most serious threat to our National Security’, though he forgets to point out that our defense budget has doubled over the past ten years.  (Hillary Clinton concurs.)

                THE BALLOT BOX

"The idea of restraining the right of suffrage to the freeholders... would create division among the people, and make enemies of all those who should be excluded."

Many critics are pointing their finger at President Obama for failing to address various issues in the Black community, but that's not his job. The Black community is going to have to stop sitting around waiting for a Messiah to solve our problems. It’s the Black community’s responsibility to address Black issues, no one else’s. We are adults and the second largest consumer group in America, so we don’t need anybody to help us turn our community around. We have more than enough resources to do the job ourselves.

Now, that isn’t to say that we shouldn’t continue to fight to get our piece of America’s pie, but the only way that even that can be accomplish is to change our way of thinking. Our primary problem is, we’ve allowed self-serving poverty pimps to convince us that instead of becoming actively engaged in addressing our own issues, we need them to come to our rescue and twist political arms.

If it is true that those whom the gods would destroy they first send mad, then currently we are in serious trouble in Washington DC. For in the political theatre we have just witnessed – around the shutdown of the federal government – there has been madness aplenty: a madness indeed which, unless quickly and effectively challenged, will inevitably rewrite the entire Obama play, to his immediate detriment and to our long-term cost.