Nancy LeTourneau

Let’s start the day off with a Paolo Nutini cover of a great one by the Lovin Spoonful. Sweet daydreams everyone!

The big scoop of the day goes to Eric Lipton at the New York Times, who reveals that attorney generals in at least a dozen states have formed secret alliances with energy companies. Uruguay’s President Jose Mujica has agreed to accept six detainees from Guantanamo. That leaves 172 still there, over half of whom have […]

If she wasn’t already in the spotlight as President Obama’s nominee to be the next Attorney General, Loretta Lynch might have reached that status anyway as the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York – where she will oversee the federal inquiry into the choking death of Eric Garner. There is some […]

Two authors I admire a lot have written very conflicting views about hope. Here’s Derrick Jensen: Frankly, I don’t have much hope. But I think that’s a good thing. Hope is what keeps us chained to the system, the conglomerate of people and ideas and ideals that is causing the destruction of the Earth… Hope […]

From Jim Webb this week: Former senator and potential presidential candidate Jim Webb told an audience in Richmond on Tuesday that the Democratic Party has lost white working-class voters by becoming “a party of interest groups.” “The Democratic Party has lost the message that made it such a great party for so many years, and […]

Prior to entering politics, Barack Obama taught classes in the community about power. Unfortunately, neither he nor any of the attendees have written much about the content of those sessions. But in watching him over the last seven years, we can begin to understand his view of the topic. As Riane Eisler pointed out in […]

I grew up mostly in East Texas. To give you an idea of the politics of the area, I lived in the district that is currently represented by Louie Gohmert. During that time, I knew all of two black people – my grandmothers’ maids. When I was about 10 years old, a group of black […]

When I was in high school in the 1970’s, it was not “cool” to like the music of the Carpenters. But I wasn’t very cool, so… Lately, due to someone named Pedro Andrade on youtube, a whole new generation is getting exposed to Karen Carpenter. He’s removed all of the instrumentation in her recordings except […]

The big story of the day is that American Luke Somers – who was being held hostage by al Qaeda in Yemen – was killed during a U.S. special forces rescue attempt. Here’s President Obama’s statement on that. Michael Cohen does a good job of debunking conservatives who suggest that President Obama’s foreign policy is […]

A lot of liberals (like Paul Krugman) doubted that competition among insurers in the marketplaces created by Obamacare would work to control the cost of premiums. But here’s the news from Kaiser this week. A surge in health insurer competition appears to be helping restrain premium increases in hundreds of counties next year, with prices […]