Join the book club for David Sirota's upcoming book, The Uprising, due out on 5/27.

Another primary day, another reemergence of the Race Chasm. With a population that's 7.5 percent black, Kentucky fits right into the Race Chasm, and not surprisingly, Hillary Clinton is favored to win. In Oregon, the population is just 1.9 percent black - outside the Race Chasm - and Barack Obama is favored to win.

As I've always said, it's hard to say race is singularly responsible for any given election result. But clearly, the Race Chasm dynamic is at play.

Join the book club for David Sirota's upcoming book, The Uprising, due out on 5/27.

As promised late last week, the New York Times magazine published an article of mine that explores a little-noticed populist uprising here in the Mountain West - one around the oil and gas drilling boom. The article touches on a region and an issue - environmentalism - that is a major part of my upcoming book, The Uprising (due out on 5/27 and available for pre-order now).

Join the book club for David Sirota's upcoming book, The Uprising, due out on 5/27.

The New Republic's Peter Scoblic has a great op-ed in the Los Angeles Times about Bush's comments to the Israeli Knesset this week. It is a must-read.

Join the book club for David Sirota's upcoming book, The Uprising, due out on 5/27.

For all the talk from "free trade"-backing politicians about needing to engage the world, most of them understand almost nothing about how the world sees our international economic policies. As I show in my new newspaper column this week, our so-called Washington Consensus policies on globalization are stirring a backlash in both the industrialized and developing worlds.

The New America Foundation brands itself as a vaguely progressive organization that exists to "bring exceptionally promising new voices and new ideas to the fore of our nation's public discourse." The organization raises funds from progressive donors - funds that could go to all sorts of progressive causes. As a progressive you may be fine with that, except when you read this invitation.

There has been a long running debate among progressives about what arena is the best to push health care reform. Should the solution come from states or from the federal government? Some in Washington, D.C. have said that states should simply wait for the Wise Elders of the Beltway to act - but a new poll suggests that's not the way the public feels.

Join the book club for David Sirota's upcoming book, The Uprising, due out on 5/27.

Thanks to America's health care system, today was a very stressful day for me. My story is so typical as to be boring - which is a really sad commentary.

This morning, while thumbing through some routine paperwork, my wife discovered that I have no health insurance. Without going into the details, we missed a bi-annual deadline for payment - a deadline that the company buried in fine print, and one that the company didn't even bother to tell us was approaching, or even missed after the fact. They just ended my coverage, with not so much as a letter or a phone call.

Join the book club for David Sirota's upcoming book, The Uprising, due out on 5/27.

The issue of race makes a lot of folks uncomfortable - and that's especially true right now when the nation is closer than ever to electing the first black President of the United States. As my new newspaper column this week shows, many Serious People who dominate our political debate have reacted to this historic election and their own queasiness about race by exposing their prejudices.

Join the book club for David Sirota's upcoming book, The Uprising, due out on 5/27.

This headline is a serious question - I'm not trying to be vitriolic or unduly harsh. I'm being sincere when I say this is a very real, honest question.  

Spin, as we usually refer to it, is trying to take facts and present them in a way that is good for one or another candidate. We see this most often when it comes to setting expectations. Candidates try to spin things to set expectations in a given election one way, so that when they meet or break expectations the media writes positive stories about said candidate having "momentum."

Lying, by contrast, is either saying things contrary to the facts, or pretending the facts just don't exist. We saw this most often in the Bush administration's lead-up to the Iraq War, and more recently, in Hillary Clinton pretending that she never supported NAFTA, when, in fact, a decade of public speeches shows she did. Now, Clinton is doing something fairly new: spinning AND lying - all at the same time.

I received a copy of my new book, The Uprising, in the mail today from my publisher. It is fresh off the printing press. Opening the package was half anti-climactic, and half frightening.

We have been trained to think of states as the supposed "laboratories of democracy," but what they really are these days are a check and balance against federal inaction and Potomac Fever. That's the case I make in my newspaper column out today - especially as it relates to the housing crisis.

Join the book club for David Sirota's upcoming book, The Uprising, due out on 5/27.

Sometimes racial denigration is easy to see - think white police officers in the segregation era using hoses to stop peaceful protests. Other times it is more subtle - like a few days ago on ABC's Nightline.

Join the book club for David Sirota's upcoming book, The Uprising, due out on 5/27.

On Monday, I wrote about Hillary Clinton airing an ad decrying the closure of a defense manufacturing factory that her husband, Bill Clinton, helped close by approving the sale of the company to a Chinese state-owned firm. Now, ABC News is running with the story, and uncovers some more ugly details. The Clinton campaign has responded not by fessing up, but by putting out more dishonest deceptions.

Join the book club for David Sirota's upcoming book, The Uprising, due out on 5/27.

My column last week criticizes ABC's Charlie Gibson for using his position as debate moderator to focus the presidential discourse on the supposed unfairness of asking very wealthy people to pay the same tax rate on their stock profits as their servants pay on hard earned wages. Gibson led us to believe raising the capital gains tax rate would severely harm most Americans, when the hard data shows that the richest 1 percent pays most of this tax (not surprising, considering the richest 1 percent own most of the stock).

So what should Gibson have asked when it comes to capital gains taxes? How about asking the candidates whether they are serious about ending the situation whereby their wealthy donors in the private equity industry are being allowed to bilk American taxpayers?

Join the book club for David Sirota's upcoming book, The Uprising, due out on 5/27.

In my upcoming book, The Uprising, one of the threads tying together the disparate forms of populism on both the Right and Left is a sense of confused frustration at a political system whose politicians employ disinformation and propaganda to make basic economic issues indecipherable. This has been no more obvious than on the issue of trade and globalization in the presidential race - and Hillary Clinton's latest television ad (which is also a standard part of her stump speech) shows exactly what I'm talking about.

Join the book club for David Sirota's upcoming book, The Uprising, due out on 5/27.

Jim Clyburn makes a very good point in the Washington Post today:

"We keep talking as if it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter that Obama gets 92 percent of the black vote, because since he only got 35 percent of the white vote, he's in trouble," Clyburn said. "Well, Hillary Clinton only got 8 percent of the black vote. . . . It's almost saying black people don't matter. The only thing that matters is how white people respond. And that's what bothered me. I think I matter."

Clyburn is, unfortunately, spot on - and there's two reasons why the phenomenon he describes is such a problem.

Join the book club for David Sirota's upcoming book, The Uprising, due out on 5/27.

The "controversy" over Barack Obama's "bitter" comments was a media creation from start to finish - a brouhaha manufactured by very wealthy reporters and pundits who do anything they can to ignore, reject or otherwise downplay the very real issue of inequality and economic class in America. Using MSNBC's Chris Matthews and "The Wire's" Jimmy McNulty, I show in my new newspaper column out today that the very media ideology that spins up these "controversies" has gone from subtle to brazen in the last few weeks - and that intensification is breeding, yes, bitterness.

Join the book club for David Sirota's upcoming book, The Uprising, due out on 5/27.

In a stunning - if predictable - story, the Hill Newspaper reports that congressional Democrats are now saying that they will effectively thwart any effort to create a national health care program. Here is the key excerpt:

"Congressional Democrats are backing away from healthcare reform promises made by their two presidential candidates, saying that even if their party controls the White House and Congress, sweeping change will be difficult...Sen. Charles Schumer (N.Y.), a member of Senate Democratic leadership and a key Hillary Clinton ally who also sits on the Finance Committee, said he is 'not sure we have the big plan on healthcare.'...'Healthcare I feel strongly about, but I am not sure that we're ready for a major national healthcare plan,' Schumer said...Rep. Kendrick Meek (D-Fla.), a Clinton supporter who sits on the House Ways and Means Committee, said "the money is not necessarily there right now" to enact the plans."

There's a lot to unpack here.