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In an exclusive interview with  New America Media Associate Editor and Huffington Post contributor Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Congressional Black Caucus Chairperson Barbarba Lee discusses the election, the GOP takeover, working with the GOP and Tea Party influenced House members, and the role of the Congressional Black Caucus. The interview was a New America Media production.More...

Congressional Black Caucus Chair Barbara Lee Says Democrats Will Fight On

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This is the first of a multi-part series from the World Music Expo 2010 that took place in Copenhagen, Denmark this year. The accordion is one of the instruments, along with the bagpipe, that contains its own hand-pumped air supply. In the case of the accordion, the bellows can create and support very long lingering tones, or short, staccato passages.  These mechanical "lungs" bring out a physical response in me. I find myself drawn into the breathing of these instruments. And while we think of most accordion music as upbeat, there are several bands (and musicians) who have used this breathing feature to create meditative music. Danças Ocultas is such a band.More...

From WOMEX: Accordion Meditations with Danças Ocultas

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LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- Jockey fights in horse racing are as much a part of the sport as whips, saddles and the $2 bet.Most times, the dustups take place behind closed doors, not in the winner's circle.More...

Jockeys Borel, Castellano Brawl At Breeders' Cup

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Men are in the news lately -- have you noticed? I read with interest the Sep. 10 Newsweek piece "Men's Lib," about "reimagining masculinity" for our modern age, and I read with equal interest Lisa Belkin's piece in the Oct. 24 New York Times Magazine, "Calling Mr. Mom?" which explored the same topic and cited the same Swedish studies and enlightened public policy concerning paternity leave, among other things. Hooray for Sweden. Clearly, men are on our minds, for more reasons than you'd think. I've been meaning to speak up on the subject, so I'll take this opportunity.For several years now, I've been inching toward compassion for the poor slobs, for men in general. Perhaps I should say American men, because that's the species with which I'm most familiar. I grew up in the time of women's liberation, just after the early feminists had cleared the way for me to assume I'd enjoy equal opportunities and respect, have a career and, if I felt like it, a marriage and children, too -- and financial independence. So I did all that, and somewhere along the way, I got to feeling exhausted, and chronically pissed off at my then-husband for not doing more, managing more, caring more, remembering more. ("Did you buy milk, honey?" I'd ask. "Oh, no, I forgot," he'd say. Grrr.) I know lots of couples who are stuck in this blame dynamic, and I have a feeling that plenty of others know what I'm talking about.More...

Men In The Post-Women's-Lib World: Should We Give Them A How-To Guide?

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In his first one-on-one interview since his party suffered crushing losses in the 2010 midterm elections, President Obama reiterated his belief that his administration failed to effectively communicate with voters.When asked by CBS's Steve Kroft whether the elections were a "reflection on your leadership," the president instead focused on his belief that he did not sell his policies:More...

Obama Reflects On Elections In '60 Minutes' Interview (VIDEO)

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We hear a lot these days about the need to return to the Constitution.  With a new group of legislators, many elected on this theme, we may soon hear a lot more.   Some of this call to founding principles is driven by the desire to limit government, to constrain its reach into our lives.  Some of it seems driven by a nostalgic desire to recapture the past.In this spirit, it might help to take a return look at James Madison, rightly called the "Father of the Constitution."  Madison maneuvered a failed convention of the States in Annapolis in 1786 into the Federal Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia.  He was a key part of the campaign to get Washington out of retirement to chair (and lend prestige) to the convention.  In his Montpelier library, Madison produced two documents summarizing the faults of the current national government under the Articles of Confederation and the lessons learned from the failures "Of Ancient and Modern Confederacies."  These papers established him as an intellectual tour de force in the convention and helped him craft the Virginia Plan, which opened the proceedings with a dramatic departure from purely amending the Articles.   Madison then volunteered to take notes of the proceedings and spoke in debate more than 200 times from May to September.  When the convention adopted the Constitution, he led the fight for ratification by being a prime author of the Federalist Papers and then a successful opponent of the far more impassioned anti-federalist orator, Patrick Henry, in the Virginia ratification convention.  Elected to the first Congress of the United States in 1789, it was Madison who proposed the language of what we now know as the Bill of Rights.More...

In Search  of James Madison

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It crosses our mind that there's far too much attention paid to aphorisms about falling in love and not nearly enough to those about falling out of love.So herewith, Huffington Post introduces our own section of divorce aphorisms.  Our inaugural aphorism comes from Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times.More...

Divorce Aphorism Of The Day

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It's an odd story in a way. One day a Texas gal from a ranching family falls in love with the ocean. She loves being in the water and the underwater world, and she has a life-changing 45-minute underwater encounter with a Cephalopod about the size of her thumb. Octopi are Cephalopods and scientists think they could be smarter than we are; some fringy researchers believe Cephalopods might be aliens from outer space or divine beings.  Anyway, if you're going to hang around with a Cephalopod for 45 minutes, you're probably going to have what the Texan called "a seminal moment."  It changed her life.Over a span of thirty-five years, her above- water and underwater journey has taken her from the Texas Panhandle to Micronesia to Polynesia and the Caribbean, to work on coastal management, economic development, and research. Now she is a digital activist working to save our seas. Her name is Charlotte Vick, and she's the curator of the Explore the Ocean layer in Google Earth.More...

Google Ocean: Google's Digital Activism

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As Weiwei states in the video below, the Chinese government "cannot let anything happen if they don't understand it." Following his recent October opening at the Tate Modern, on November 5, 2010, Ai WeiWei, Chinese artist and activist, was placed under house arrest by the Chinese police.  Weiwei said this house arrest was planned to prevent him from attending a party to mark the demolition of his newly built Shanghai studio, an order from the Chinese government.  We learned on Artdaily, that just as he was finishing construction on his new studio, he received a notice from the government informing him that he would have to knock it down.  In good activist fashion, Weiwei planned a party to commemorate and draw attention to this event.  Watch the video below for a few words from Weiwei himself.More...

Chinese Artist Ai WeiWei On House Arrest, Shanghai

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Arnold Schwarzenegger has an answer for an age old question: What are you smoking?His response: Who cares? At least if it's pot.More...

Schwarzenegger Talks Pot With Leno: 'No One Cares If You Smoke A Joint Or Not' (VIDEO)