Now Barack Obama, who campaigned for transparency, is the President defending secret negotiations on new trade agreements that are largely being written by corporate lawyers and lobbyists. He would give corporations the key to the treasury while he gets the authority to fast track another hammering of working people and the environment. Yet the only people who get a real tongue-lashing from this President's White House are progressives around town who dare to call him on the carpet for abandoning his promises.

America's corporate and political elites now form a regime of their own and they're privatizing democracy. All the benefits - the tax cuts, policies and rewards flow in one direction: up.

Our very lives depend on the ethics of strangers, and most of us are always strangers to other people.

What's right and good doesn't come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does.

If being tolerant of differing opinions, if believing that America has to make it as a pluralistic nation, if being civil, if that makes you a liberal, I plead guilty.

Ideas are great arrows, but there has to be a bow.

Jon Stewart is a remarkable satirist and parodist in the vein of Mark Twain, because Jon Stewart understands what Mark Twain knew, which is that the truth goes down more easily in a democracy when it's marinated in humor.