We heard a lot about Bill Ayers during the 2008 election cycle; mostly attempts at using his name as a smear because of his past with the Weather Underground. But for the past forty years Ayers has been a teacher, an occupation he calls the most intellectually challenging thing he's ever done. His book To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher has seen multiple editions, and when the publisher asked him about doing a new one, he wanted to do it a little differently. Ayers teamed up with comics artist Ryan Alexander-Tanner and created a graphic novel version of the book, To Teach: The Journey, In Comics, hoping to reach new and different audiences.

An underwater oil spill the size of Jamaica is spreading across the Gulf of Mexico, headed to ruin not only people's Gulf Coast vacations, but also fishing and the life cycles of many birds, fish, and sea turtles who migrate to the Gulf this time each year to mate. Local fishermen may be out of work completely for a season, and the effects on an already-battered area of the country will spread across the nation.

This past year, the History Channel produced The People Speak, a performance of many of the speeches and letters from American history that made up Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, and we could see that issues we grapple with now have been long-standing struggles for the people of this country. Not least of those struggles is the one with Wall Street, of course, and here we have former GRITtv guest Kathleen Chalfant performing a speech from over 100 years ago, "Wall Street Owns The Country."

Republicans might have dropped their filibuster and agreed to allow a debate on financial reform, but with the amount of money that Wall Street firms have sunk into both Republicans and Democrats, does it make a difference? And what kind of reform do we really need, anyway?

Republicans might have dropped their filibuster and agreed to allow a debate on financial reform, but with the amount of money that Wall Street firms have sunk into both Republicans and Democrats, does it make a difference? And what kind of reform do we really need, anyway?

"It's premature to say this is catastrophic." The words of Gulf Coast Coast Guard Commander Mary Landry about the BP oil spill Tuesday were spoken as the families of eleven rig workers were still waiting for word of their loved ones, now presumed dead.

When the WikiLeaks video hit, the video game comparisons came fast and furious, including on this show, where we looked at a report that video games might help overcome people's natural resistance to shooting at one another. Now the Supreme Court is going to look at whether the a ban on sale of violent video games to minors is constitutional. If they support the ban, it would be the first time that the obscenity rule has been applied to violent images rather than sexual ones.

TV networks and bloggers alike got some mileage out of the comments in a Goldman Sachs email that an investment was a "sh*tty deal," but Ed Pilkington of the British newspaper The Guardian thinks it's about time that U.S. politics got a little rougher, say, how they've been in the U.K. for a while now. But an import from U.S. electoral politics--a televised debate between the three main candidates for Prime Minister--has shaken up politics in the U.K. and rocketed a former Nation magazine intern, Liberal Democrat candidate Nick Clegg, to fame.

TV networks and bloggers alike got some mileage out of the comments in a Goldman Sachs email that an investment was a "sh*tty deal," but Ed Pilkington of the British newspaper The Guardian thinks it's about time that U.S. politics got a little rougher, say, how they've been in the U.K. for a while now. But an import from U.S. electoral politics--a televised debate between the three main candidates for Prime Minister--has shaken up politics in the U.K. and rocketed a former Nation magazine intern, Liberal Democrat candidate Nick Clegg, to fame.

Democrats in D.C. are going about this regulation thing all wrong. Want to get Republican buy-in? Give Republicans the kind of regulation they like. As usual in U.S. politics, the states provide the road map.