If you're concerned with balanced budgets or Social Security; if you believe multinational corporations shouldn't have carte blanche to do as they please; if you care a whit about the environment or civil liberties; even if you're a Republican who doesn't want to see your party co-opted by reactionaries — then Pat Toomey isn't your guy.

The "Tainted Justice" series, 10 articles in all throughout 2009, prompted a still-ongoing joint FBI/internal affairs investigation and a slew of Philadelphia Police Department reforms regarding how cops handle their informants.

Let's review what we know: The city's pension system is busted.

Once again, Senate Republicans are filibustering; the goal, sadly, is to ensure that even this most meager progress is put off until after the midterms, because a crappy economy is good for them politically.

I'll be damned if I stay silent while you try to hide the public information that we are entitled to have. We pay your salary. And if you can prove to us that you've earned it, I'm sure we'll keep doing so.

It was Barack Obama's 49th birthday; or, if you subscribe to certain right-wing blogs, it was the 49th anniversary of the day Obama's mother gave birth to Malcolm X's love child in Kenya, then faked a Hawaiian birth certificate and newspaper announcements so that her black child could run for president four decades later and fulfill Marx's vision.

If the polls bear out, the Party of Hell No You Can't stands to be rewarded for its intransigence and corporate servitude with big electoral gains in November.

Facts and reason are now irrelevant, and things that would once have been derided as fringe conspiracy theories, even by mainstream conservatives, are discussed as if both sides are equally meritorious.

There's a chilling disconnect between what Americans want and what we're willing to sacrifice to get it.

With the specter of trillion-dollar deficits lingering overhead, the pressing reality of the economic crunch takes a backseat — no matter the advice of economists, who argue that government spending is essential to economic recovery, itself a prerequisite for any long-term deficit reduction. But the debt is now a political football, and Republicans — and some Democrats — are running with it.