Our ancestors once cowered before royalty they believed were divinity made corporeal.

These days, supporters of monarchy are reduced to citing tourist revenue in defense of a barbaric relic. Other rationales -- the divine right of kings, a repository of tradition, moral paragons, manifestation of the state, a (barely) living national symbol -- have long been eroded by the tides of the history. So the last excuse for the monarchy is that of the bean counters' ledger: the cost-benefit analysis.

Democracy.

Who used to have it in the USA, and who has it now? People with white skin privilege? People who were born male? People with piles of money, much of it stolen from other people's labor?

I often hear European Americans from all walks of life talking about democracy in the USA - how they want to reclaim it, like in the good old days - and I wonder about how differently from one another we experience this country. This is not our land; not my land nor your land. When European Americans arrived over 500 years ago, we murdered with bullets and small pox blankets - that we intentionally gave to them - the Indigenous people who had lived in balance here for thousands of years. Then we enslaved people of African descent to build the country's wealth, and kept women - who did not even get the vote until 1920 - second class citizens and the property of men for even longer.

The composition of the U.S. Senate could soon partly claim another urban victim - homeland security funds for New York City.

The city that bears the starkest terrorist target on its back must compete with 64 cities for shrinking funds, from $887 million to $725 million in the current budget that runs to Sept. 30. The 20 percent cut was part of the Republican-imposed budget deal reached between President Obama and members of Congress.

New York House members attempted to pare down the number of eligible cities from 64 to 25 or less, but

Senate members vetoed the idea, according to The New York Daily News.

How do values enter politics?

The Bolivian national legislature, pressured by a movement of indigenous people and small farmers, may be about to birth a stunning global precedent in the creation of an environmentally sane future: establishing legal rights for Mother Earth.

On the one hand, huh? How can we reduce nature itself -- the entirety of the universe beyond humanity's small outpost of self-importance -- to an entity that requires bureaucratic recognition? On the other hand, Mother Earth -- Pachamama, in indigenous Andean parlance -- is humanity's vulnerable context, without which, though the universe will go on, we will not. As Bron Taylor, author of Dark Green Religion: Nature, Spirituality and the Planetary Future, put it: "Ecologically maladaptive cultural systems... eventually kill their hosts."

Overview: What sorts of problems will exist in times ahead? What can we do to deal with them? A suggestion ...

At present, numerous environmental researchers are warning of future resource shortages. The list of them is large and includes water, oil, a variety of minerals and metals, as well as other materials.

Yet, most people carry on as if they do not hear the message at all. They refuse to cut back in their dreams of continuing economic growth.

[click image to enlarge]

John Boehner thinks Americans under 54 understand why they won’t get full Social Security and other federal programs. Gotta fight more wars and give more money to corporations!

How do you explain the actions of the Democrats in the Massachusetts House of Representatives? In a state that many claim is a liberal bastion, why have Democrats suddenly started behaving like Republicans? Lots of people would like an answer.

In state after state across the country, the assault on labor, particularly those belonging to public sector unions, is being carried out methodically by Republican governors and legislatures. No stone is left unturned in an attempt to weaken if not kill unions. Collective bargaining, equal representation at the negotiating table, is a particular target. The unions represent public school teachers, police officers, and fire fighters. Traditionally, these unions have been the most major contributors to the Democrats. That explains why Republicans want to silence them.

Now that the president has delivered proof positive he's legit, at least to all three undecided sloths, when does he begin to prove he's a legitimate, history-making president ready to "win the future"? When does Mr. Obama wake from slumber, get on the boat of history, cross the Jordan, and begin working to deliver the Long Form of his Promised Land? That starts not in Hawaii, nor over the rainbow, but by leveraging the greatest bully pulpit in the world and displaying a presidential learning curve.

Hell, the sterling bully pulpit is about the only residual piece of American exceptionalism extant.

Everything the heritage Foundation has been seeking, thinking about, researching, promoting, marketing, writing about and fundraising for - from destroying unions to putting the kybosh on public education - is now on the table it may not leap out at you, but what's going on in Wisconsin and several other states is a fusion of Koch-ist free-market fundamentalism, Tea Party swagger, and the Religious Right's traditional values agenda; think the Heritage Foundation's full-blown project coming home to roost.

With the stripping away of fifty years of collective bargaining rights for public employee unions in Wisconsin, the culture wars of the past three decades are morphing into something much larger: a rightwing cultural revolution. And while battles over reproductive rights, same-sex marriage and an assortment of other highly-charged social issues will continue to be fought over, the political landscape is dramatically changing.

According to polls, only about 6 percent of Americans are following with any close attention the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton. But that's not stopping the media fascination on both sides of the Atlantic with American's supposed fascination with Britain's royals.

"Royal wedding reminds us why we tossed Brits," ran one letter to a local paper recently. That exorbitant $80 million spent on a medieval style ritual in time of 21st century austerity. It's shameful. It's old world. It's just what Americans fought a revolutionary war to throw off.

And then there are the folks like Rupert Cornwall at the UK Independent who argue hat people in the US love British royals precisely because they don't have their own real thing. Gary Younge at the Nation noted that even his liberal friends wanted to know what he, a British citizen, thought of the prince marrying a "commoner." Please.

Ben Bernanke's voice has been known to put humans into a trance even under the best of circumstances, and I was under the influence of a fever and some cold medications. Still, other observers reported a similar reaction to my own. The Fed Chair's press conference felt like a sensory deprivation tank, but with extra-credit math questions.

Was Mr. Bernanke calm? Put it this way: I watched the video feed for several minutes before I realized it wasn't a photograph. A lizard can stay motionless for so long, you start wondering if it's real. It was like that. Then Bernanke turned his head, and I got the same feeling you get when the lizard finally blinks.

That's the Robitussin talking, not me.

Having laughed off Libyan government peace feelers, Official Washington is now beating the drum for a new round of “shock and awe” bombings and close-combat air strikes to “finish the job” of ousting Col. Muammar Gaddafi.

Typically, this Washington debate is being framed as a series of choices for President Barack Obama and NATO: one, abandon the current campaign of air strikes and let Gaddafi prevail; two, continue the conflict at its current pace and accept a stalemate; or three, commit more military resources to “win.”

— from WhoWhatWhy

Here's something extraordinary: a big expansion by the controversial Church of Scientology, barely covered by the hometown LA Times.

This story is full of irony. Here's how the seller reported it in a press release:

KCET, the nation’s largest independent public television station, announced today that it has sold its production facility to the Church of Scientology for an undisclosed amount.

And the buyer:

— from Truthdig

There is a craven disconnect between the eagerness of leading editors to exploit the important news revealed by WikiLeaks and their efforts to distance themselves from both the courageous website and Bradley Manning, the alleged source of documents posted there. Alleged is required when referring to the Army private so as not to repeat the egregious error of a constitutional-law-professor-turned-president who has already presumed Manning guilty of crimes for which he is not even formally charged.

— from TomDispatch

Recently, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates attended a groundbreaking ceremony at Mount Vernon for a National Library for the Study of George Washington. (“I’d like to thank the Mount Vernon Ladies Association for extending this invitation to me...”) He used the occasion for a full-throated defense of the American right to support democracy and freedom with extreme and remarkably self-interested selectivity in the Middle East. “The most successful leaders, starting with Washington,” he told the ladies, “have steadfastly encouraged the spread of liberty, democracy, and human rights... We have at times made human rights the centerpiece of our national strategy even as we did business with some of the worst violators of human rights. We have worked with authoritarian governments to advance our own security interests even while urging them to reform...”

I begin with this: Except for CNN, which makes an honest effort to report real news, cable news in America has let the nation down. If Joe McCarthy had a reality television show on NBC, I wonder if NBC would have promoted McCarthy then the same way it promotes Donald Trump and his campaign for birthers and bigots now?

Cable news in general has turned American democracy into a freak show, where bigots and nuts receive a free megaphone, where shills and hacks parade to the cameras to treat the audience like idiots dishing out spin that many of them don't even believe, where serious issues are not treated in serious ways while celebrity fluff is force-fed to small audiences who often turn elsewhere for news and information.

"Some men rob you with a six gun.
Some do it with a fountain pen."
-- Woody Guthrie, "Pretty Boy Floyd"

We hear a lot about what democracy is about in America. Some of it is true and some of it is the usual boilerplate crap. Whatever you hear about the Cheri Honkala Green Party campaign for Sheriff of Philadelphia - and of course there's a lot of crap going around -- one thing is true, it's real democracy in action.

Honkala is a well-known poor people's activist in Philadelphia who, over the years, has organized large street demonstrations and even gotten herself arrested a good number of times occupying homes and doing other actions to call attention to the plight of the poor. Some say Honkala is out to destroy decency and good government. One writer in Philadelphia referred to her in his headline as an "outlaw" and in his lead as "Philly's most famous embodiment of grass-roots guerilla protestdom."

It's tempting to expect perfection from those we admire, but we romanticize lone heroes at our peril. A few years before one-time supporter Jon Krakauer challenged the truthfulness of Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea, a professor asked me my thoughts on using the book as a reading for first-year students, to encourage them to become more engaged with global issues. I hesitated. Mortenson was doing valuable work, I said. The book was a great read. I admired his creativity and courage, and the leap of faith he took to begin building his schools without the slightest guarantee of success. I admired how he persisted through seemingly endless obstacles to sow seeds of hope. His approach seemed a powerful rebuke to Bush administration assumptions that if the U.S. just bombed enough of the bad guys, the region's problems would disappear. Mortenson also appeared to respect local Pakistani and Afghan culture in a way that seemed to offer key lessons for America's broader relationship with the world.

Say the words “National Parkâ€? in front of a New York City resident and he (or she) will have a Rorschach reaction and immediately conjure up images of grouchy grizzly bears, surly rattlesnakes, and insatiable bloodthirsty mosquitoes lurking in vast patches of poison ivy.

There is, however, a slim hope that they can be weaned away from their natural aversion to any location perceived by them as harboring a vast array of examples of photosynthesis at work and that ultimately they can be convinced to visit a countervailing example which can be found in Richmond California where the Department of the Interior has established the Rosie the Riveter World War II Home Front National Historical Park to commemorate the effort civilian workers provided for America’s participation in the FDR era defense of the Four Freedoms.

Perhaps it's the media fever over the Royal wedding in Great Britain or perhaps it's my own disgust about hearing that Exxon Mobil makes $100M a day in profits, but either way I am pretty certain many Americans would rather go to their deaths believing in fairy tales than fighting reality.

Most of us will never celebrate weddings like that of William and Kate and most of us will never make $1,000 a day in profits much less a million or 10 million or $100M. I think we all get that somehow - even if we watch and wonder and even sometimes plan how we would spend our millions.

Here's the news as I received it in an Email from Thom Hartmann's radio show on Wednesday:

"Vermont is one step-closer to becoming the first state to set up a truly universal, single-payer health care system. The Vermont Senate passed the new healthcare bill yesterday - following in the footsteps of the state House that passed the bill last month. Now - it just needs to be signed into law by Governor Peter Shumlin who's already expressed his support for the measure. There IS one last step though - Vermont would need to secure a waiver to opt out of Obamacare in order to build its own healthcare system.

The facts all point to this "inconvenient truth" -- the time has come to shut down California's two nuclear power plants as part of a swift transition to an energy policy focused on clean and green renewable sources and conservation.

The Diablo Canyon plant near San Luis Obispo and the San Onofre plant on the southern California coast are vulnerable to meltdowns from earthquakes and threaten both residents and the environment.

Reactor safety is just one of the concerns. Each nuclear power plant creates radioactive waste that will remain deadly for thousands of years. This is not the kind of legacy that we should leave for future generations.

— from the Bloomington Alternative

With regard to nuclear reactors, Don Lichtenberg operates on the principle that "if things can go wrong, they will -- though not often."

On March 31, Lichtenberg, professor emeritus of theoretical nuclear physics at Indiana University, spoke at the Monroe County Public Library on lessons on nuclear power that the United States can learn from the nuclear accident in Fukushima, Japan.

Lichtenberg received a doctorate in theoretical physics at the University of Illinois and later joined the faculty of IU's physics department. He taught and did research in subnuclear theoretical physics at IU for about 30 years, until his retirement. He wrote two books on physics and more than 100 original research papers. He has followed nuclear developments in the United States and abroad since 1945.

Crossposted from the Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet.

Increasing demand for water continues to put a strain on available water sources, threatening the livelihood of millions of small-scale farmers who depend on water for their crops. At a time when one in eight people lack access to safe water, Nourishing the Planet points to low-cost, small-scale innovations to better manage this vital resource. These efforts are increasing the availability of water for crops and helping farmers improve crop productivity and become more food-secure.

Seventy percent of the world’s freshwater is used for irrigation, and global water resources are drying up as climate change takes hold and population growth continues. 60 percent of the world’s hungry people live in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa—most of them on small farms—where they do not have a reliable source of water to produce sufficient yields. Only 4 percent of the cultivated land in sub-Saharan Africa is currently equipped for irrigation. 95 percent of cropland in the region depends on rain, and climate scientists predict that rainfall on the continent will decline in the coming decades. But there is great potential to expand irrigation with small-scale solutions.

By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger

The Vermont state Senate passed legislation to create a single-payer health insurance system, Paul Waldman reports for TAPPED. Since the state House has already passed a similar bill, all that's left to do is reconcile the two pieces of legislation before the governor signs it into law.

Waldman stresses that there are still many details to work out, including how the system will be funded. Vermont might end up with a system like France's where everyone has basic public insurance, which most people supplement with additional private coverage. The most important thing, Waldman argues, is that Vermont is moving to sever the link between employment and health insurance.