When the news arrived from the White House yesterday that Barack Obama would veto the proposed Keystone pipeline bill, I thought back to a poll that the National Journal conducted of its “energy insiders” in the fall of 2011, just when then issue was heating up. Nearly 92% of those insiders thought Obama’s administration would approve the pipeline, and almost 71% said it would happen by the end of that year.

Keystone’s not dead yet -- feckless Democrats in the Congress could make some kind of deal, and the president could still yield down the road to the endlessly corrupt State Department bureaucracy that continues to push the pipeline -- but the President's veto threat shows what happens when people organize.

By pledging to veto the Keystone XL bill, President Obama took an important step towards backing up his climate talk yesterday, and we should applaud that. He showed the kind of courage that will be needed to stop this pipeline and begin to turn the tide against the fossil fuel industry.

The trial of former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling, set to begin in mid-January, is shaping up as a major battle in the U.S. government’s siege against whistleblowing. With its use of the Espionage Act to intimidate and prosecute people for leaks in “national security” realms, the Obama administration is determined to keep hiding important facts that the public has a vital right to know.

After fleeting coverage of Sterling’s indictment four years ago, news media have done little to illuminate his case -- while occasionally reporting on the refusal of New York Times reporter James Risen to testify about whether Sterling was a source for his 2006 book “State of War.”

Risen’s unwavering stand for the confidentiality of sources is admirable. At the same time, Sterling -- who faces 10 felony counts that include seven under the Espionage Act -- is no less deserving of support.

There is a mental health epidemic in our midst and it is happening to some of our best people.

While the United States government continues its eternally self-defeating War on Drugs, the Veterans Administration (VA) is producing junkies at an exponential rate. But the drugs they are taking are legal. And one side-effect doesn’t last long because you won’t be around to suffer – its suicide. No surprise is that one veteran commits suicide every hour, this according to the VA.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is the number one affliction affecting our nation’s Iraqi and Afghanistan veterans. And after rotating countless patients through every single antidepressant and antianxiety medication that modern psychiatry has to offer, the VA says they have a cure.

The VA believes the most successful medication prescribed for combat PTSD is the benzodiazepine. A class that includes Xanex, Valium, Klonopin, and Adavan.

“The only good Talib is a dead Talib.”

These words, uttered half a decade ago by the head of intelligence for the NATO coalition force in Afghanistan, summon a far earlier American savagery. As the American empire affects to close the door on its war with Afghanistan, the words also serve as a sort of doorstop propping open our further intervention in this broken country.

The war isn’t really ending. Some 18,000 foreign troops will stay in Afghanistan, almost 11,000 of them American, under a new mission called “Resolute Support.” U.S. forces will also have “a limited combat role as part of a separate counterterrorism mission,” according to the Wall Street Journal. Incredibly, we’re not letting go. We’re just disappearing the combat mission into global background noise.

Next week, Columbus viewers will get the chance to see Selma, a smart and impassioned film about a pivotal moment in America’s Civil Rights Movement.

While they’re waiting, they may want to check out the documentary Concerning Violence, a collection of film footage shot during the 1960s and ’70s. Though it’s set in colonial Africa rather than the United States, the underlying racial inequities are all too similar.

Subtitled Nine Scenes From the Anti-Imperialist Self-Defense, the documentary takes us to various countries that were ruled by European governments or business interests. The vintage footage, shot for Swedish television and compiled by Swedish director Goran Hugo Olsson (The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975), offers a diverse look at an era of African upheaval.

Several revolutionaries talk about the lengths they’ve gone to in their fight for freedom—and the lengths their government has gone to in its attempt to suppress them. A smattering of graphic images underscore their words.