There is a growing convergence of thinking about where the US Occupy movement should go as a next step to turning its values, concerns and commitments into changing what most Americans see as broken government under control of corporate interests. When it comes to political and social movements, history shows us that they usually fail not because they disappear, but rather because they become marginalized, unimportant despite a core group of committed people and groups.

An old friend and I were conversing recently and reminiscing about the world we grew up in as opposed to the world we actually live in today. It is something “old-timers” like us have been doing since the dawn of time.

We were comparing the price of gasoline where he lives as opposed to the price for the same gasoline here, where I live, on the edge of a coastal resort area.

I have been doing some reading lately. What I am doing is re-reading a couple of books that I read years ago. One of them is “Death of a Nation” by John A. Stormer. He is also the one that wrote the book “None Dare Call it Treason.” In both of these books he shows how our government is turning into a communist government. I agree with most of what he says, but see more fascism in the works today than there probably was when he wrote the book in 1968. Many people still do not know how closely communism and fascism are.

Now that Newt Gingrich has become the latest in a series of Republican front-runners, he is getting the kinds of scrutiny and attacks that have done in other front-runners.

One of the issues that have aroused concern among conservative Republicans is that of amnesty for illegal immigrants, especially after Gingrich said that it would not be “humane” to deport someone who has been living and working here for years.

Let’s go back to square one. The purpose of American immigration laws and policies is not to be either humane or inhumane to illegal immigrants. The purpose of immigration laws and policies is to serve the national interest of this country. Read More

Representative Barney Frank announced that he wouldn’t seek re-election next year. And the news wires are filling with little tributes and remembrances of his 30 year career. But there is one notable even that isn’t mentioned in most of them.

Reuters didn’t mention it. The New York Times didn’t bring it up. The Guardian didn’t note it either.

The Washington Post got to it in the 17th paragraph…

I can almost hear people’s thoughts before they even begin to read what I am about to say; “Neal has finally gone off the deep end, talking about zombies now.” When someone mentions the word zombie the first thing that comes to peoples mind are brain dead flesh eating ghouls, like the ones seen in the move Resident Evil, or on the TV series The Walking Dead.

But you know if you look zombie up in the dictionary, one of the definitions you will find is: “an offensive term for a person considered to lack energy, enthusiasm, or the ability to think independently.” If you apply that definition, there certainly are a great many zombies walking amongst us right now. Zombies don’t think, they don’t prepare, they act on pure animalistic instinct; and their only instinct is to survive.

It is utterly baffling to a man of my generation to read, see, and hear stories about modern youngsters unable to handle bullies.

Have we, as a nation, become so politically correct that we will not stand up for ourselves against a bully? Apparently we have — and it is deeply distressing. It denotes a nation of wimps.

Look. I was a skinny, scrawny, little kid when I was a lad. That made me the target of a number of bullies. However, the confrontations between the aforementioned bullies and myself were learning experiences that have served me well over my lifetime — right up to today.

At present, the amount of the annual Gross Domestic Product, $14 trillion—the value of all the goods and services that generate income—is exceeded by the nation’s debts.

America is presently $15 trillion in debt and it grows daily.

In a November 21 Wall Street Journal interview, Erskine Bowles of the presidential advisory commission on the nation’s debt, said “If you take 100% of the revenue that came into the country last year, every single dime of it was consumed by our mandatory spending and interest on the debt.”