"Most Minnesotans are eager to celebrate the positive things we enjoy in this state, but are unwilling to examine the painful birth of the state and the causes and effects of the race war that followed." -- Waziyatawin

Nick Coleman, Star Tribune

During Minnesota's Sesquicentennial, Woman from the North has been arrested three times for telling the truth. The year isn't over. I'm not betting against a fourth.

Her name is Waziyatawin, a Dakota (or Sioux) word meaning Woman from the North, and it fits her: Woman from the North has blown fiercely across Minnesota all year long, spreading a provocative message about the genocide and racial oppression that helped pave the way to statehood.

It's not easy to talk about this kind of thing, but there was nothing easy about the way Minnesota was violently torn from its aboriginal tribes.

So Waziyatawin teaches, she talks, she writes and she walks. On Wednesday, she was among a few dozen Indian activists who were on Day Six of a cold and snowy 125-mile march to retrace and commemorate one of the state's least-recognized tragedies: the forced march of hundreds of Dakota into years of exile, starvation and disease after the 1862 Dakota War.

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Related:

Dakota Commemorative March For more about the march, see www.dakota-march.

Studs could be cute, and damnably perverse.

John Nichols, The Nation

Terkel at a 2007 rally promoting universal health care

When Studs Terkel was in the seventh grade, his teacher, Miss Henrietta Boone, asked the smart young whippersnapper who he was supporting in the presidential election of 1924.

"Are you for Calvin Coolidge or John W. Davis?" Miss Boone inquired, mentioning the names of the Republican and Democratic nominees.

Terkel, who had already imbibed the radicalism of Chicago's labor left, was for neither of the major party candidates. Rather, he favored the third-party contender who was campaigning against imperialism abroad and Wall Street at home.

"Innocently--or was I damnably perverse even then?--I piped, 'Fightin' Bob La Follette,'" Terkel recalled eight decades later, mentioning the name of the progressive senator from Wisconsin who earned his support that year. "She was startled, poor dear. Why have I always upset such gentle hearts? Why couldn't I have been my cute little button self and said the right thing: 'Keep Cool with Coolidge.'"

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Associated Press

From left, Matthew Perry as Chandler, Lisa Kudrow as Pheobe, Matt Le Blanc as Joey, David Schwimmer as Ross, Jennifer Aniston as Rachel, Courtney Cox Arquette as Monica. 2004 Warner Bros. Television Production Inc., 2004 Warner Bros. Television Production Inc.

New research suggests that pregnancy rates are much higher among teens who watch a lot of TV with sexual dialogue and behavior compared with those who have tamer viewing tastes.

The study is the first to link those viewing habits with teen pregnancy, said lead author Anita Chandra, a Rand Corp. behavioral scientist. Teens who watched the raciest shows were twice as likely to become pregnant over the next three years as those who watched few such programs.

Previous research by some of the same scientists had found that watching lots of sexually charged content on TV can influence teens to have sex at earlier ages.

Shows that highlight only the positive aspects of sexual behavior without the risks can lead teens to have unprotected sex "before they're ready to make responsible and informed decisions," Chandra said.

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Today, while some dream of change, a perfect storm of cultural division, failed leadership, lost principles, military disaster and economic collapse have ripped the mask away, exposing a virus that has undermined and rendered quaint American values of tolerance, generosity, equality and fairness, replacing them with chauvinism, avarice, confusion, fear and despair.

Mike Farrell, Huffington Post

Submitted by Evergreene Digest Contributing Editor Ken Mitchell

"You really do hate America!" This was the parting shot from a man I had just debated on a television show shortly before the invasion of Iraq. Because he's a notorious right-wing blowhard, I laughed it off as the ravings of a crackpot in extremis.

Little did I know...

Soon, those of us who opposed the Iraq war, torture, "extraordinary rendition," Guantanamo, spying on innocent Americans and other illegal tools in the Cheney/Bush black bag began to hear variations on that theme from people one would have expected to know better. And it's gotten worse as they've become more desperate... or do the depths to which we've fallen suggest a fault-line in America's culture?

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