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Over 4 million people moved their money from Wall Street Banks in 2010, according to Sara Ackerman, project coordinator for Move Your Money.
I bought into the “Move Your Money” movement the day that Arianna Huffington and some associates founded the concept. I had already been doing it for years.
My money is in non-Wall Street banks that have branches, or headquartered, in my home city of Richmond, Kentucky.
Long ago, I learned the importance of having a personal relationship with my banker. I don’t want to call an 800 number and talk to a “customer service” representative in

The race for the Republican nomination for a candidate to challenge President Barack Obama in 2012 will probably be over within fourteen months at the most. Accordingly the race is beginning to take shape. At this time there are probably significantly more candidates exploring the possibility of a campaign, considering the race or trying to figure out whether or not they can win the nomination and the election, so the field of candidates will probably get smaller between over the next six months.
The Republican race for the nomination has the potential to be extremely entertaining and much more open with a far greater degree of uncertainty than any recent Republican nomination battle. It also has the potential to have an impact on the Republican Party for the next decade or

In what is most likely a sign of things to come in next year’s election, three Republican presidential candidates, albeit fringe candidates at the moment, ripped public schools during a homeschoolers convention in Des Moines Wednesday.
The Tea Party darlings threw red meat to a receptive crowd, which ate it up.
Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota noted that she homeschooled her five children and was not allowed to home school 23 foster children, thanks to the evil government.
Herman Cain, former Godfather’s Pizza CEO, said, “That’s all we want is for government to get out of the way so we can educate ourselves and our children the old-fashioned way.”
And then there’s Ron Paul.
Texas Congressman Ron Paul told the crowd government wants “absolute control” of the “indoctrination” of children.
“The public school system now is a propaganda machine,” Paul said, prompting applause from the crowd of hundreds of home schooling families. “They start with our kids even in kindergarten, teaching them about family values, sexual education, gun rights, environmentalism — and they condition them to believe in so much which is totally un-American.”
I don’t know what public schools Paul has been around, but the ones I have been around for the past half-century as a student, newspaper reporter, and teacher have generally been reflective of the community. Most teachers go to church, shop at Wal-Mart and Target, and spend almost no time thinking about how they can increase the level of indoctrination of the apparently empty vessels that fill their classrooms.
The teacher in the room next door to mine even listens to Rush Limbaugh every day during his lunch

The Tea Party is gazing lovingly across the Atlantic, with saliva drooling across its chin, at David Cameron’s massive program of state-slashing — bringing the biggest cuts here since the 1920s. But yesterday, there was a moment when his finance minister George Osborne was unveiling his annual budget yesterday when it seemed, for a second, as though he had glimpsed where he has been going so badly wrong — and why, every time he announces his policies, Britain’s growth rate collapses further. He held up Ireland as a warning-country, an example of a nation descended into disaster.
Could it be…? Had he learned…? Until now, Osborne had held up Ireland as the “shining example” that he wanted Britain to emulate. Before the Great Crash of 2008, he said we should copy its model of tossing regulation for the rich onto a bonfire and reducing taxes on corporations so dramatically the country was classed by some as a tax

I’m a staunch liberal. I used to do sex ed for Planned Parenthood. I sign online petitions for Amnesty International. The Prius in our Tallahassee carport sports an Obama sticker and a peace

Only days after the Arizona state legislature voted for punishing budget cuts in education, the now infamous witch hunt and audit of Tucson Unified School District’s Mexican American/Ethnic Studies program is readying to commence. Price tag: An estimated $170,000.
In a blistering letter yesterday, Tucson attorney Richard Martinez warned the backpedaling TUSD superintendent John Pedicone that the audit “lacks any legal basis,” and “should immediately cease and desist.” Representing the Mexican American Studies teachers and the Save Ethnic Studies organization in Tucson, Martinez called the investigation a “violation of federal mandates set forth in the Family, Education and Privacy Rights Act of 1974,” among other abuses, and called on Pedicone to “confirm without delay that TUSD’s cooperation will cease immediately or at a minimum comport with all applicable legal mandates.”
Only two months ago, the newly hired Pedicone had referred to Arizona’s notorious HB211 law as “unconstitutional.” If found in violation of the law, which bans any studies that “promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, promote resentment of a particular race or class of people, are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group or advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals,” TUSD could lose an estimated $36 million in

In President Abraham Lincoln’s famous “Gettysburg Address” in November of 1863, he wound up his short speech by exclaiming that the living be dedicated to and increase their devotion to the “unfinished work” that the brave soldiers died for: that a government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth. Almost 150 years later, our country seems still at odds about what that kind of government really means.
Of the people? That could mean the voters electing fellow citizens to office. By the People? Those same voters having a say in what their government does or doesn’t do via their votes or support of a candidate for

My job deprives me of the luxury of partisanship, as I have to reach out to both sides on the issue of free trade–a disastrous policy one can give impeccably liberal or conservative reasons to be against. So I can’t offer any opinion of the Tea Party movement per se. But I can tell you that the way they’re handling the issue of free trade reveals a lot about them.
Over the last year, I’ve interacted with the Tea Party about the issue at both the local level and with some of their leadership. And I’ve observed a few things.
The main thing is just how utterly conflicted they are, in two very different ways.
The first way is simply that the base of the Tea Party has views of free trade very different from its Washington leadership, and very different from the Republicans they’ve elected to

With all the angst about the economy, the deficit, and a looming government shut-down, I’m still concerned that we’re treating symptoms rather than diagnosing the underlying disease.
I know something about this. I spent a week in the hospital last year having loads of tests done — blood work, heart scans, stress tests, sonograms. I was discharged without a diagnosis, merely with hopes that by treating the symptoms, whatever was wrong would go away. It

Do the reckless anti-union machinations by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker make him the Charlie Sheen of politics?
If only celebrated actor Martin Sheen received the same media exposure as his troubled son Charlie. Never has his long-time work for union rights been more needed in the public and media arenas.
Five months before the statehouse crisis in Madison, Wisconsin awakened our nation to the enduring legacy of union rights, the elder Sheen was walking the picket line with Fairmont Royal York Hotel workers during the Toronto Film Festival.
Invoking his own union membership, Martin Sheen told the hotel workers striking for better contracts and collective bargaining rights to “stick to it like a stamp.”
Appearing in Toronto last fall for the premiere of “The Way,” his son Emilio Estevez’s new film on a father-son journey for redemption along the famed Camino de Santiago pilgrimage trail in northern Spain, Martin Sheen reminded the world of his extraordinary commitment to unions, human rights and a sense of humanity in his younger son Charlie’s downward spiral.
“All of us are hungry for some kind of transcendence these days,” Sheen told a theatre critic, “just as part of our

Come on now: Let’s take a breath and put this NPR fracas into perspective.
Just as public radio struggles against yet another assault from the its long-time nemesis — the right-wing machine that would thrill if our sole sources of information were Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and ads paid for by the Koch Brothers — it walks into a trap perpetrated by one of the sleaziest operatives ever to climb out of a sewer.
First, in the interest of full disclosure: While not presently committing journalism on public television, the two of us have been colleagues on PBS for almost 40 years (although never for NPR). We’ve lived through every one of the fierce and often unscrupulous efforts by the right to shut down both public television and radio. Our work has sometimes been the explicit bull’s eye on the dartboard, as conservative ideologues sought to extinguish the independent reporting and analysis they find so threatening to their phobic worldview.
We have come to believe, as so many others have, that only the creation of a substantial trust fund for public media will free it from the whims and biases of the politicians, including Democratic politicians (yes, after one of our documentaries tracking President Clinton’s scandalous fund-raising in the mid-90s, the knives were sharpened on the other side of the aisle).
Richard Nixon was the first who tried to shut down public broadcasting, strangling and diverting funding, attacking alleged bias and even placing public broadcasters Sander Vanocur and Robert MacNeil on his legendary enemies list. Nixon didn’t succeed, and ironically his downfall was brought about, in part, by public television’s nighttime rebroadcasts of the Senate Watergate hearings, exposing his crimes and misdemeanors to a wider, primetime audience.
Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich tried to gut public broadcasting, too, and the George

The latest James O’Keefe success story against NPR has taken a predictable pattern — panicked press releases and firings, followed by denunciation of O’Keefe in a belated attempt to discredit him. Naturally, conservatives are crowing about it, but I wanted to give a little perspective to those Huffington Post readers — whatever your political stripe — who share my passion for free speech, honest debate, and fairness in the media.
Over the past year, the mainstream media has collaborated with the White House in an attempt to paint the Tea Party as racist. Remember the protests on Capitol Hill last March against ObamaCare, and the media’s lie that members of the Congressional Black Congress had awful racial slurs hurled at them by Tea Party members that weekend? Did you know that there’s video evidence that it isn’t true?
Not just one video, either. Four of

(click for full expression)
The next far-right Governor moving into the spotlight for his slash-and-burn style and a boundless mission to destroy? It’s Florida’s Rick Scott.
I pulled this shot from the lastest set on Rick’s Flickr stream. Try expanding this photo and checking out his eyes. Does this look at all like someone involved in a give-and-take? And think about it, the Flickr site being a pure PR vehicle, his own team put this up as a representation of Scott’s connection with the citizenry — and the friendlies, to boot, at this hisTampa Young Professional Republican meeting.

read full news from www.huffingtonpost.com

In their quest to defeat President Obama and hold a White House Tea Party, Republicans and their corporate allies have a new youth outreach message: Don’t Vote. While our troops fight and die for the rights of young Afghanis and Iraqis to vote and our leaders call for a freedom agenda across the Middle East, our Republican opponents seek to deny those rights to young Americans here at home.
The contrast is quite striking: in the Middle East, from Tunisia to Egypt to Lybia to Yemen, millennials are fighting for the right to have a stake in their own future. And while Republicans cheer them over there, they suppress millennial Americans here at home. From New Hampshire where the GOP House Speaker says http://www.fosters.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2011701139913 you should not register to vote in your college community unless you or your parents lived there before matriculation to Colorado, Maine, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin where there are photo ID bills to ban students from using in-state university- or college-issued IDs for proof-of-residency when voting and/or end same-day voter registration at the polls to the Koch-funded corporate entity American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) that set up “model” legislation to disenfranchise young voters http://campusprogress.org/articles/conservative_corporate_advocacy_group_alec_behind_voter_disenfranchise/ the radical right is organized, methodical, and determined to keep young people home.
The motives for tea party Republicans are obvious: young people propelled President Barack Obama to victory in 2008 with a 22% margin and supported Congressional Democrats in 2010 by a solid 17% http://www.civicyouth.org/youth-voters-in-the-2010-elections/

Rango
2011
107 minutes
rated PG
Rango is the very definition of an odd-duck. It is a gorgeously-animated little fable that works both as an homage to westerns (spaghetti or otherwise) and film noir, as well as a thoughtful and spiritual hero’s journey. It may not be a prototypical talking animal cartoon, and it keeps its emotionalism in check for most of the running time, but the picture remains an aloof and endlessly imaginative piece of art cleverly disguised as throwaway pop-entertainment. As a piece of political fiction, it shows us yet again how warped our discourse has

A Conversation with Lucinda Williams
Mike Ragogna: Hello there, Lucinda. How are you?
Lucinda Williams: Good.
MR: So, your new album is titled Blessed, and you brought in Don Was on production.
LW: Yeah, he was co-producing with Tom (Overby) and Eric (Liljestrand).
MR: Nice. The mix, of course, is the usual–a beautiful combination of country, blues, folk…
LW: Thank you. Yeah, I’m really excited about

Santa Barbara — While the “Eco:nomics — Creating Environmental Capital” — conference is hosted by The Wall Street Journal, the anti-government bias that dominates the Journal’s editorial page was slammed by speaker after speaker, beginning with venture capitalist Vinod Khosla. Khosla went after what he
called “incumbent capitalism,” in which government policy and incentives are designed not to encourage competition and innovation, but to protect entrenched incumbent interests, with coal, oil, nuclear, and utility monopolies being the most spectacular beneficiaries of this bias against innovation.
Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris would seem to represent a well-entrenched incumbent company, then piled on. Liveris, an Australian, has a new book
called Make It In America: The Case for Re-Inventing The Economy, which makes the case for bringing America back as a manufacturing power. Liveris concedes that — for wierd historical reasons — the term “industrial policy” is too politically toxic to use, but that’s what he’s talking

The February unemployment rate is 8.9 percent. The broader Bureau of Labor Statistics U6 jobless rate is 15.9 percent. The report shows a net increase of 192,000 jobs. However, we need 127,000 new jobs every month to keep up with population

Mark McKinnon — the Republican campaign consultant who helped create George W. Bush, and who for a time ran John McCain’s campaign — and I don’t agree about much. We do agree about the need for fundamental reform of the way campaigns are funded. About a year ago, I said to McKinnon that “the only way we win this issue is if a Republican makes it his.” “There’s only one Republican,” he said to me, “who could do that credibly, and he is not running.”
On Thursday, Buddy Roemer proved McKinnon

Mike Huckabee has not declared he is a candidate for president, but the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows he is now the favored candidate among Republicans. 25 percent of those polled supported the former Arkansas governor and Fox News contributor, edging out former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who had 21 percent in the poll.
Huckabee, who ran for president in 2008, has always played the nice guy. In his latest book he writes, “If you’ve come here looking for a personal attack on President (Barack) Obama and those in Washington, you should head to another shelf in the bookstore.” The book, which he is busy promoting, is called, A Simple Government: Twelve Things We Really Need From Washington (And a Trillion That We Don’t!).
Of course, Huckabee was a preacher in Arkansas for 12 years beginning in the early

By Nick Schwellenbach, crossposted with POGO
There is no shortage of headlines with a variation on a theme such as: “Tea Party Declares War on Military Spending,” “Tea Partiers Say Defense In Mix For Budget Cuts,” and “Veteran Republicans Fear Tea Party, Liberals Will Unite To Cut Defense.” Much of the media has fostered the narrative that the current crop of Tea Party-influenced GOP freshmen are gunning to slash the Defense Department’s budget. But the reality, so far, has hardly lived up to that storyline.
According to a new analysis by the conservative Heritage Foundation, freshmen Republicans in the House have, on average, voted against defense cuts more than other House Republicans. At about one third of the discretionary federal budget, the more than $600 billion annual defense budget (and up to $1.2 TRILLION for the entire national security budget, depending on how you count it)–which has doubled in size since 9/11–is not currently facing any serious challenges from House GOP freshmen. It’s not for a lack of numerous proposals, such as the bipartisan Deficit Commission’s detailed defense proposals.
However, you might not know it reading some news

Huffington Post Political Reporter Sam Stein appeared Wednesday on MSNBC’s ‘Hardball,’ along with Clarence Page of The Chicago Tribune, to discuss contenders for the 2012 Republican Presidential nomination.
When asked by Chris Matthews if there are potential candidates that the Obama White House sees as a threat in the coming election, Stein explained, “there are people in the top White House circles who were very afraid of John Thune,” before Thune decided not to make a run for the Presidency.
Expanding on his answer, Stein said, “there is no one who’s out who they’re directly fearful of.

read full news from www.huffingtonpost.com

The Jimmy Carter comparisons began on the campaign trail, before Barack Obama won the election in 2008. As candidates both men were relatively inexperienced. Both offered a fresh alternative to a departing administration that had grown profoundly unpopular. As presidents, Carter and Obama both struggled against a slumping, stubborn

We were young, assured, and ready to vote our passionate convictions. True believers, all of us knew — with absolute surety — that we had the wind of rising public opinion at our back, that history was with us, and it would prove how right our cause was. The party establishment had first opposed, and then divorced us, but who cared? Enthusiasm, which we had in abundance, was sure to carry the day. Thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of Americans showed up at our rallies, to cheer for the