Rights

President Barack Obama will use tonight's State of the Union Address to announce a group that will explore ways to improve "the Election Day experience." The Huffington Post, which broke the news, calls the group "a bipartisan presidential voting commission." 

It was inevitable that after the massacre in a Colorado movie theater, the matter of gun control would come up and that the president would weigh in on the subject. And, according to this report by Michael A. Memoli in the Los Angeles Times, he has:

An essay in the latest issue of Foreign Policy by Egyptian-born activist and journalist Mona Eltahawy, “Why Do They Hate Us? The real war on women is in the Middle East,” couldn’t have come at a more appropriate time.

MSNBC host Al Sharpton held a rally today, reenacting the famed civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery.  "[I]nstead of protesting Jim Crow segregation and police brutality, he's opposing voter ID laws, right-to-work laws, and the Alabama illegal immigration bill," the Washington Examiner reported.

It's understandable if you who haven't jumped on the Twitter bandwagon, but please know that it's good for one thing. The conversational, off-the-cuff nature of medium is very good at exposing the limits of one's knowledge. Case in point: Here's Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas reacting to Rick Santorum's speech tonight. Apparently some truths aren't as self-evident as they once were:

This story got a bit lost in the shuffle yesterday, but unions just suffered a big blow in Michigan. Now that the state is controlled by a Republican governor, they just put a stop to one of the most egregious examples of union overreach in the country.

The cover of Time magazine shows the shocking image of a young Afghan girl named Aisha who was disfigured when her husband sliced off her nose and ears.

It took the mainstream media nearly a year to catch up. Jennifer Rubin began reporting on the New Black Panther case in August 2009, hit it again in December 2009, and then provided a tick-tock of the scandal last month.

It’s been a rough seventeen months for Americans whose calling is to fight for the rights of people who’ve been stripped of them by force—young men and women beaten to death in full view of the world by the agents of their oppressors for daring to demand that their votes be counted; others hacked to death with the complicity of the autocrats in power over them for having been born the wrong color or to the wrong tribe; girls subjected to the lash, or, worse, murdered by their own mothers, fathers, or brothers for appearing in public in the wrong company; believers imprisoned for professing faith in the wrong god or the wrong political system; non-believers sentenced to death for “wronging” a wrathful, vengeful religion. And it’s been a dreadful period for the victims themselves, left as they have been to ask themselves in silent desperation what has become of their champion.