Our Congress has worked around the clock to protect the wealthy at the expense of the lowest economic sector of our nation. We ambushed Saddam Hussein on the pretext of democracy, but the truth is Iraq has oil and we want it.

The battles in the mid east are over oil and protection or destruction of one nation, Israel. The Israelies and the Arabs have been at it since early Old Testament times.

Somalia has only starving people. What is in it for us? No oil! No glory in supposedly saving God's chosen people. Why in the world should we be concerned about a few starving mistreated people who don't have the means to help themselves?

Gail Collins took on a monumental task when she set out to write When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present, published in 2010, with an updated appendix. Collins is the former editorials editor of The New York Times and writes a column for the Times op-ed page. Her method of detailing the history of the second wave of the feminist movement is to include personal anecdotes of individual women with the historical events that marked and shaped their lives. The personal anecdotes based on interviews with hundreds of women make the book readable and entertaining.

As a person who came of age in the '60s and who felt the exhilaration of first, seeing the Civil Rights Movement and anti-war movement unfold, then secondly being a part of The Feminine Mystique generation, I not only had my memory jogged as I read this book, I relived some of the events that took place during those years. Many women of my generation woke up to the realization that they didn't have to follow the traditional path that their mothers and grandmothers had trod. Rather they had choices that included activism but did not necessarily have to include having sex with and making coffee for the men in the anti-war and Civil Rights movements.

Frederick Douglass is best known as an abolitionist and a champion of African American rights. One of the most compelling orators of the nineteenth century, Douglass delivered countless abolitionist speeches and civil rights speeches to defend the African American community from slavery, discrimination and lynching. Frederick Douglass, though, did not fight for only the rights of African Americans. He fought for the human rights of all groups that he saw as being harassed or discriminated against and he involved himself in the great reform movements of his time. Douglass participated in the first Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls in 1848 and signed the Declaration of Sentiments. He supported the labor movement, the temperance movement, and he fought against peonage. One of the little known facts about Frederick Douglass is his advocacy of equal rights for immigrants, especially Chinese laborers. In the book Ripples Of Hope: Great American Civil Rights Speeches edited by Josh Gottheimer, I found a speech that Douglass made on December 7, 1869 attacking the discrimination and violence that Chinese immigrants were facing. In light of the controversy over immigrant rights today, we could draw lessons from Frederick Douglass's speech.

In the 1960s, during the heat of the civil rights, student rights and anti-war movements, women, both black and white, found themselves relegated to the domestic side of leftist activism. Much to the surprise and disgust of leftist activist women, left-wing males let movement women know that their role was to cook, clean, make the coffee, and make themselves available for sex whenever the men wanted it. Author Gail Collins covers this issue in her book, When Everything Changed, an overview of the women’s movement during the last fifty years.

Not every man treated every woman as a subservient being, but the treatment was widespread enough that many women finally decided to form their own movement groups, giving birth to the Second Wave of the women’s liberation movement.

Alexander Hamilton has always been the one Founding Father that I didn't like. There are many reasons for this. Two of my favorite Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, couldn't stand Hamilton. Though I am to the left of the political spectrum, I've always felt that some of the Left's criticism of the Founding Fathers are unfair. The criticism of the Left that the Founding Father's were capitalistic and imperialistic seems to apply though to Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton was a supporter of a strong professional military and championed the North's merchant class, stock markets and a central banking system. While reading Ron Chernow's book Alexander Hamilton, though, I found out that Hamilton was a strong advocate for the abolition of slavery. During the 1780s, Hamilton was one of the founders of the New York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves, which was instrumental in the abolition of slavery in the state of New York. After reading about Alexander Hamilton's work for the New York Manumission Society, I gained a greater appreciation of Alexander Hamilton.

Alexander Hamilton was born in Nevis in the British West Indies in 1757, the illegitimate child of common-in-law couple James and Rachel Hamilton. James abandoned the family when Alexander was ten, and two years later, his mother Rachel died from an unspecified disease. After his mother died, Alexander Hamilton and his brother James were brought under the legal guardianship of their cousin Peter Lytton, who unfortunately committed suicide. During this chaotic childhood, Alexander Hamilton lived in poverty and was a social outcast due to his illegitimate birth. His intelligence was noticed though, and he soon lived with a respected merchant, Thomas Stevens and his wife, Ann.

I was on Facebook today. I saw something that a good friend of mine had written and the resulting comments.

Mr Obama: not all folks who have money inherited it from their rich parents like your Harvard classmates did.Some of us worked hard to succeed.To get where I am took lots of weekend nights in the library when I should have been out with friends.It took eight years of post graduate education and 12 years in the military,away from home,to finance that education.Demonizing people who work hard does not bring "Hope"!

Over the past month, the eyes of the nation has been transfixed by the fight going on in Wisconsin for workers to preserve their right for collective bargaining. Workers have gradually been losing bargaining powers as unions have been in decline for the past 30 years. As I read about the protests in Wisconsin, I began thinking of Charlie Chaplin's movie Modern Times.

When Chaplin was creating Modern Times, the United States was deep in the Great Depression of the 1930s. The Great Depression had its starting point in the Wall Street Crash of October 24, 1929. From October 24 to October 29, 1929, the market lost $30 billion in value. In July 1933 some $74,000,000,000, or five-sixths of the value of the stock market of September 1929 disappeared. The American Federation of Labor recorded the rise in unemployment: unemployment in October 1930 was 4,639,000; in October 1931 unemployment was 7,778,000; in October 1932 unemployment was 11,586,000; in early 1933 employment was over 13,000,000. The nation's industrial production in 1932 was 47 percent below normal. Between 1929 and 1932, farm values declined 33 percent and farmer's gross income declined 57 percent.

Are we all in a trance, both liberals and conservatives? We sit and watch the evening news, listen to our favorite talk show hosts: Fox, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, Frog Pond Croakers, or whoever. No one seems to be able to differentiate between their BS and their own BS.

The budget wrangles in congress are not even close to addressing the issues with any sane and sensible plan. Wrangling over the difference of 6 billion or 60 billion is 'stuff and nonsense!'

It appears both sides of the aisle are content with targeting those in society, with cuts, who are least able to absorb those cuts without drastic reductions in their lifestyles. Most of those cuts won't touch the upper middle class, and will actually benefit the ultra rich.

I just read, in my local paper, what our U.S. Rep. Tim Huelskamp had to say about our economy and how we can deal with the deficits and long term indebtedness. His opposition in the next election is going to have to be extremely evil, before I choose Tim as the lessor of the two evils!

I've never read Charles Dickens. I was never assigned to read any of his books during high school or college. I've watched various Christmas Carol movies, but had not really watched any other versions of a Charles Dickens book. A few months ago my wife and I watched an old 1930s version of A Tale of Two Cities with Ronald Colman and we both loved it.

Soon after I then read an essay by George Orwell that talked about how subversive a writer Dickens was and how his stories attacked most of English institutions for their apathy towards the poor. It turns out that many radicals and social activists have been influenced by the books of Charles Dickens for his sympathy for the poor and for his critique of the British capitalist system.

During the 2008 election year, one of the biggest political fights in the California state ballot was on Proposition 8, a proposition against gay marriage. Sadly, the proposition passed. One of the keys to the passage of Proposition 8 was the efforts of the Mormon church, the Evangelical church, and the Catholic church to lobby its members to vote for the measure. A friend of mine told me that two weeks before the elections, the pastor in the evangelical church that he attends in Cupertino had a sermon against gay marriage.

After the elections results, many gay rights activists went on marches to protest Prop 8. In anger, some activists vandalized Mormon, Evangelical and Catholic property. Though I was against Proposition 8, I was also against the vandalizing of Mormon, Evangelical and Catholic churches. I wrote a few blogs that you can read here, here, and here where I describe how there are Mormons, Evangelicals and Catholics who support LGBT rights. When I attended an Evangelical church, I met Evangelicals who either supported gay rights or had gay friends and family members and were bothered by how these friends and family members were treated by other people in the church. I worried that in their anger over the passage of Proposition 8, many gay activists would develope a prejudice against Mormons, Evangelicals and Catholics, when in fact there are many Mormons, Evangelicals and Catholics who support gay rights. I was also worried that attacks on the church would give conservative Mormons, Evangelicals and Catholics ammunition to marginalize their more liberal counterparts.