A message to the out-of-touch Washington pundit class: get a grip. What was or was not on Hillary Clinton's email server when she was Secretary of State is not a game-changing news story. In fact, no one outside the chattering class -- and right-wing true believers -- could give a rat's rear about this story -- and there is a good reason: there is no "there" there. If someone really thinks the great "email" story -- or the Benghazi investigation -- are going to sink her candidacy, I've got a bridge to sell them. ...

Via HuffPo, by Democracy Partner, Mike Lux http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-lux/julian-bonds-path-and-the_b_80059...   ...

Heather Booth, Founding Director of the Midwest Academy speaks at the Ignite Closing Plenary at Netroots Nation 2015 in Phoenix. ...

Modern conservatism has slipped from its moral base of protecting traditional small-town and community values, and has gotten so enamored of big-business capitalism, even at its most ruthless, that it no longer cares about those community-minded folks it claims to represent. ...

On this fifth anniversary week of the disastrous BP oil spill into the Gulf of Mexico, it becomes clearer and clearer that oil spills are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to damage the oil industry is doing to our one and only planet. ...

Why Aren’t We Standing Up Against the Assault on Women’s Rights? I’m ready to have gay rights organizations, the media and corporations, such as Walmart, Google, NASCAR and Angie’s List, be as moved to action by Purvi Patel’s 20-year incarceration as they—and I—are about the refusal of a baker to make a wedding cake for same-sex celebrations. ...

With the current spats between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the White House over Iran dominating the headlines and speculation about the Israeli elections that will occur on Tuesday, it was easy to miss two small news items from Israel. One reported Israel’s allocation of $46 million to encourage European immigration. The other, buried in the middle of a report on Netanyahu’s visit – reported that “as a gesture of good will” toward President Obama, after nine-years of refusal, Netanyahu had agreed to grant the newly-built Palestinian city of Rawabi access to water. ...

On October 1, United Airlines is planning to outsource 630 gate agent jobs at twelve airports to companies that pay near-poverty level wages. The airports affected include: Salt Lake City; Charlotte, North Carolina; Pensacola, Florida; Detroit and Des Moines, Iowa. ...

The ability for ordinary working people to organize and collectively bargain over their wages and working conditions is a fundamental human right. It is a right just as critical to a democratic society as the right to free speech and the right to vote.  Over the last 30 years many in corporate America and the big Wall Street banks have conducted a sustained attack on that human right. Unionization dropped from 20.1 percent of the workforce in 1983 to 11. 3 percent in 2013 -- and the results are there for everyone to see. ...