The Tea Party congresspeople are surging into Washington, bringing to their new majority calls not only to overturn health care reform but to ban earmarks and to generally stall major legislation on the Democrats' agenda. Meanwhile, there seems to be little coming out from Obama and most of the Democrats on what is exactly on their agenda for the next two years.

The New York Times is finally calling it torture—when someone else has admitted to it. “At least someone is owning up to the awful legacy of Mr. Bush’s illegal detention policies,” their editorial concludes, after discussing the decision from the British government to compensate former detainees at Guantanamo Bay. The settlement payments could run over a million pounds in one case.

As Republican freshmen head to Congress, many of them are riding a wave of promises to repeal "Obamacare." As Jamie Court noted on our show last week, one of the most unpopular elements of the bill is the mandate that Americans purchase private health insurance. But Wendell Potter, former health insurance industry insider, notes that that is the part of the bill that is most popular with the insurance companies that bankrolled those same Republicans.

Hope is in short supply these days, particularly for those in America's packed prison system. California incarcerates more women than any other state, and when those women get out of jail they often have nothing more than $200 in their pockets and hope to go on. Susan Burton was one of those women once, and now she's founder and executive director of A New Way of Life Reentry Project, a nonprofit organization that helps formerly incarcerated women get their lives back together.

As Republican freshmen head to Congress, many of them are riding a wave of promises to repeal "Obamacare." As Jamie Court noted on our show last week, one of the most unpopular elements of the bill is the mandate that Americans purchase private health insurance. But Wendell Potter, former health insurance industry insider, notes that that is the part of the bill that is most popular with the insurance companies that bankrolled those same Republicans.

“It's the wrong answer to not a problem," says Dean Baker of the report out last week from the leaders of Obama's deficit commission, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson. The report, which recommends massive cuts across the budget, most significantly to Social Security and health care programs, has been roundly criticized by progressives for its targeting, but Dean notes that the biggest problem with it is that without the health care crisis we still have, we wouldn't have deficits in the first place.

"We're on a collision course with our finite supply of water," says Susan Leal, co-author of the new book Running Out of Water. It's not just that the supply is limited, she notes, it's our growing population, increased personal use, and climate change that are all playing into what journalist Anna Lenzer calls "the coming shock."

“It's the wrong answer to not a problem," says Dean Baker of the report out last week from the leaders of Obama's deficit commission, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson. The report, which recommends massive cuts across the budget, most significantly to Social Security and health care programs, has been roundly criticized by progressives for its targeting, but Dean notes that the biggest problem with it is that without the health care crisis we still have, we wouldn't have deficits in the first place.

"It's fair to smash up someone's future but not to smash up someone's lobby," notes UK journalist Laurie Penny of the student protests in London last week, now being branded as "violent" and "out of control." Aside from one person who dropped a fire extinguisher off a building, she points out, the protests were free of violence against people, and property damage needs to be put in the proper perspective.

"We have a choice," says Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Chris Hedges. "You can either be complicit in your own enslavement or you can lead a life that has some kind of integrity and meaning." Hedges argues for moral responsibility in a world bankrupt of it, and discusses the downfall of what he refers to as the liberal class in his newest book. From World War I to the present, he traces the rise and fall of liberal values, and paints a grim portrait of the future.