NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden has asked for Clemency so he can come home. The debate his revelations ignited has spawned multiple reform bills in Congress including one from Senate Intelligence committee chair Diane Fienstein. However, the White House and Feinstein continue to scream for his blood in the media. The media has failed to report that Feinstein's bill normalizes rather than reforms the NSA spying on the whole world. The media has also failed to report on the massive profits Diane Feinstien reaps from her husband’s business dealings with the intelligence community and the military.

According to Associated Press reports, Feistein responded to Snowden's clemency appeal by describing it as an "enormous disservice to our country," and declaring "I think the answer is no clemency." Only the President may grant clemency. It is that same legal theory that underpins all of the expanded powers the NSA has been granted in the last twelve years. These are the powers that Senator Feinstein's “reform” bill, the FISA Improvement Act of 2013, further regularizes and entrenches.

I felt the music and the fire as the civil rights movement rose from its slumber.

“Repair . . . justice!” went the call and response last week, in the basement of an old Chicago church at the corner of Ashland and Washington. “Restore . . . life! Rebuild . . . community!”

There was Gospel music and hand-clapping, passion and politics. The Reclaim Campaign launched and the Rev. Alvin Love said, “This is just the beginning. It’s going to take all of us. We’re going to leave this place mobilized, energized and activated. The work begins NOW.”

Reclaim “Chiraq.”

The kids are dying. That’s what they call Chicago: “Chiraq.” The situation has to change; the community has to rebuild.

“Why is so much violence acceptable?” high school senior Keann Mays-Lenoir asked the audience of about 300 people. “Why are adults sitting back and allowing it to happen? We’re in fear of our lives at school. We don’t know who will be shot down next. It is not OK for any child to die senselessly.

“It is not OK that my friends and I have already planned our funerals.”

“No matter what.” These three words have caused the President a tremendous political headache over the past couple weeks, and as such his credibility is ostensibly on the chopping block. We needn’t recall the campaign details from 2008 and 2012 to remember the slogan, “if you like your insurance plan you can keep it, no matter what.” The remarkable ability of Mr. Obama to condense something as complex and fluid as the insurance market to a memorable one-liner was indeed an assurance to the many Americans who supported the Affordable Care Act when it became law. As with many slogans, however, this one turned out to good to be true.

It is now understood that somewhere around five percent of Americans will be dropped from their health insurance policies and forced into the health insurance exchanges. For five percent of the country, then, ‘no matter what’ did not take effect. Millions of people will have their lives sharply interrupted, like it or not. This is a large number and should not be ducked as a detail in the grand scheme of things.

The same week in which a Washington Post columnist claimed that interracial marriage makes people gag, a USA Today columnist has proposed using the U.S. military to aid those suffering in the Philippines -- as a backdoor means of getting the U.S. military back into a larger occupation of the Philippines.

While the Philippines' representative at the climate talks in Warsaw is fasting in protest of international inaction on the destruction of the earth's climate, and the U.S. negotiator has effectively told him to go jump in a typhoon, the discussion in the U.S. media is of the supposed military benefits of using Filipinos' suffering as an excuse to militarize their country.

The author of the USA Today column makes no mention of the U.S. military's history in the Philippines. This was, after all, the site of the first major modern U.S. war of foreign occupation, marked by long duration, and high and one-sided casualties. As in Iraq, some 4,000 U.S. troops died in the effort, but most of them from disease. The Philippines lost some 1.5 million men, women, and children out of a population of 6 to 7 million.

FAST FOR FUKUSHIMA: Today, Monday, November 11, many of us will begin our first "Eleventh Day Fast for Fukushima." Along with so many others, I won't be eating from dawn to dusk. I will do liquids. But the fast will be meant to honor the victims of this horrible disaster, and to focus our efforts on finding ways to survive it.

The fast comes exactly 32 months after the disaster began. Many of us will fast again each 11th day of the month until Fukushima ceases to threaten the health of the planet, which will almost certainly take a long long time. Hopefully the fasts will be good for the planet's health as well as our own.

NEW PETITION: Many of you wrote noting I omitted the link for the new petition from Arnie Gundersen, asking Tepco be removed from Fukushima.

Here it is

We already have 715 signers, and hope for many many more.