Odds are that the ultraliberal, Occupy movement-supporting crowd in Portland, Oregon, which includes its mayor, who told the Los Angeles Times in late 2011 that "I support a lot of what the movement stands for, as a political leader" -- are already trying to figure out how to stop what they surely see as a dangerous idea which has sprung up about 10 miles to the south: fed-up citizens arming themselves.

Portland is among several localities in the Beaver State which "have banned loaded firearms in all public places." That's apparently not the case in an unincorporated area of Clackamas County near the suburb of Milwaukie, where a fed-up woman is forming a "Glock Block" that Portland's OregonLive.com web site, based on a search on "Glock" returning no relevant results, is ignoring, despite the national attention the group has begun to receive. Portland TV station KOIN has the following story (HT to Zero Hedge):

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All of a Sudden, There Aren't Enough Electric Cars to Keep Up with Demand

For the time being, Honda is sticking with a plan to sell a maximum of just 1,100 Fit EVs in the U.S. As the LA Times put it, "there is little financial incentive to increase production" on the Fit EV because Honda loses money on each of the cars it builds.

James Taranto at The Wall Street Journal is harkening back to the hubbub last fall over "Obama phones" handed out to poor voters last fall. It's not an Obama program, per se, but a long-standing initiative of the Federal Communications Commission to provide land-line or cell phones to people who provide a tax return or an Electronic Benefits Transfer card to prove they are low-income Americans.

Lifeline was a $2.19 billion program in 2012. London's Daily Mail is reporting how investigative reporter James O'Keefe is exposing how contractors handed out the free phones and promised not to "judge" when they were told the phones would be sold to buy heroin:

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I understand that the fact that 1 in 4 U.S. students do not receive a regular high-school diploma is not good enough, with that number increasing to 1 in 2 students in New York City and other places and among Native Americans.

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In Tuesday's Washington Post, Tom Hundley of the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting gave Post readers a textbook example in biased reporting freighted with loaded language. The target was a predictable bogeyman of secular liberal reporters: the Catholic Church.

Hundley painted the constitutional court battle over a "reproductive health law" in the Philippines as a struggle "pit[ting] the entrenched power of the Roman Catholic establishment against a rising tide of modernization and economic aspiration." You read that right. It's progress and prosperity against repression and Romanism according to Hundley.

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Detroit Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr has submitted a proposal that would pay unsecured creditors about 10 cents on the dollar. Similar haircuts would be made to underfunded pension and health benefits for retirees. Orr is hoping that the creditors and the unions that he will be negotiating with will accept this package, but he concedes that there is still a "50-50 chance" that the city of Detroit will be forced to formally file for bankruptcy.
But what Detroit is facing is not really that unique. In fact, Detroit is a perfect example of what the future of America is going to look like. We live in a nation that is rotting, decaying, drowning in debt and racing toward insolvency. Already there are dozens of other cities across the nation that are poverty-ridden, crime-infested hellholes just like Detroit is, and hundreds of other communities are rapidly heading in that direction. So don't look down on Detroit. They just got there before the rest of us.

At least for now (although a statewide referendum may be pending), Arizona governor Jan Brewer, a Republican, has succeeded in her efforts to implement a key part of Obamacare in her state.

"This is a laboratory," said Manar Skandrani, a former activist in the ruling Islamist Ennahda party who has pulled away to try to form a party calling for dialogue between the secular-minded and the fundamentalists.
The political choices are particularly clear-cut in Tunisia, partly because of a large, activist middle class that has long looked toward France, the former colonial power, for much of its inspiration.

"Ecuador would consider granting asylum to whistleblower Edward Snowden, the ex-CIA employee who single- handedly disclosed the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA)'s PRISM mass-surveillance program, a top Ecuadorian official said Monday," the outlet claims.

If you’re looking for a new role model for your daughter, USA Today has a suggestion: heavily-tattooed, androgynous lesbian Brittney Griner.

Newly-famous WNBA player Griner made a few sports headlines recently, but USA Today’s Scott Gleeson lauded her as both “the face of WNBA” and as a “role model.” He simpered over her sense of humor as she picked out new tattoo ink with her current girlfriend, and hailed the moment as an example of how Griner is “finally free to be herself” after coming out last April.  

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