Well, as the world knows, they have a point guard now. The feel-good story of Jeremy Lin, the underdog Chinese-American player from Harvard, has made NBA fans of millions who scarcely know the 24-second clock from a goaltending call. Here’s hoping they stick around, because it’s a heck of a show. Meanwhile, how about if we dialed down the ethnic sensitivity meter until the kid settles in?

As a lifelong basketball guy married to a coach’s daughter, I’m bewildered by people who say they love the college game but dislike the professionals. Around our house, the end of the NBA owner’s lockout was cause for celebration. It was going to be a long winter without “Da lig” as ESPN’s Hubie Brown pronounces it.

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"If we had a true nationwide policy of self-deportation, I believe we would see our illegal alien population cut in half at a minimum very quickly," Kobach told Salon in a recent intervew. With an estimated 11 million undocumented residents in the country, Kobach is hoping to force 5.5 million people to leave the country by 2016

Kobach, elected to statewide office in Kansas in 2010, advocates "self-deportation" but says  he does not want "to do it at gunpoint." Undocumented residents, he said, "should go home on their own volition, under their own will, pick their own day, get their things in order and leave. That's a more humane way."

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The antiseptically titled “Abuse Standards 6.1: Operation Manual for Live Content Moderators” (along with an updated version 6.2 subsequently shared with Gawker, presumably by Facebook) is still available on Gawker. It represents the implementation of the Facebook’s Community Standards, which present the social media site's priorities around acceptable content, but stay miles away from actually spelling them out. In the Community Standards, Facebook reminds users that “We have a strict ‘no nudity or pornography’ policy. Any content that is inappropriately sexual will be removed. Before posting questionable content, be mindful of the consequences for you and your environment.” But, an oDesk freelancer looking at hundreds of pieces of content every hour needs more specific instructions on what exactly is “inappropriately sexual” — such as removing “Any OBVIOUS sexual activity, even if naked parts are hidden from view by hands, clothes or other objects. Cartoons / art included. Foreplay allowed (Kissing, groping, etc.). even for same sex (man-man / woman-woman" (sic).

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The age old rivalry between Russia and the West is being played out in the Middle-East, pitting the largely Sunni Muslim Arab states against Russia’s ally  in the region- Iran. An important player bridging the gap between Shi’ite Iran and the Arab Sunnis is Lebanon’s Shi’ite resistance movement known as Hezbollah (Party of God.)

Hezbollah has enjoyed enormous popularity across the entire region, perceived by many as the champions of the Arab world, successfully standing up to the bully in the playground, Israel. There was a time when the portrait of Hassan Nasrallah hung on the walls of homes and cafes from Baghdad to Casablanca. Yet, following a relatively cool reception of Nasrallah’s speech on the 16^th of February , one got the distinct impression that the Lebanese resistance leader may not enjoy the same popularity he once did with the Arab masses.

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Straightforward as this hypothesis is, I don’t buy it — I believe the longer the Republican primary battle continues, the more the GOP’s most extreme proposals are given a mainstream platform,  the more their ideas are granted public credibility and the more conservative propaganda is invisibly woven into our most basic political assumptions. In other words, I believe in the Goldwater Principle, which suggests that while the eventual nominee may fail to win the cycle's general election, the elongated nomination contest --  with its news cycle dominance and hardcore ideological edge -- will help permanently shift the supposed mainstream “center” of our public debate to the fringe right.

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The move is supposed to be “revenue neutral” – meaning the administration is also proposing to close assorted corporate tax loopholes to offset the lost revenues. One such loophole allows corporations to park their earnings overseas where taxes are lower.

Why isn’t the White House just proposing to close the loopholes without reducing overall corporate tax rates? That would generate more tax revenue that could be used for, say, public schools.

It’s not as if corporations are hurting. Quite the contrary. American companies are booking higher profits than ever. They’re sitting on $2 trillion of cash they don’t know what to do with.

And it’s not as if corporate taxes are high. In fact, corporate tax receipts as a share of profits is now at its lowest level in at least 40 years. According to the Congressional Budget Office, corporate federal taxes paid last year dropped to 12.1 percent of profits earned from activities within the United States. That’s a gigantic drop from the 25.6 percent, on average, that corporations paid from 1987 to 2008.

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Romer and Boskin agree that government should do nothing to save or promote the manufacturing sector in the United States.  Their critiques of industrial policy, in turn, have produced responses by prominent advocates of federal aid for technological innovation and manufacturing, including Clyde Prestowitz, a former Reagan administration official and founder of the Economic Strategy Institute.

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Syria looks like Libya all over again. A brutal dictator uses his military to repress his country’s protests. A civil war erupts. And, oh yes, a split opens among American liberals over what to do about it.

With a few notable exceptions, the conservative movement has been of one mind on foreign policy issues since 9/11. All right-wingers supported the Afghanistan war, and virtually all supported Iraq, as well. Every conservative believes President Obama has been a craven appeaser of America’s enemies, and now all believe that pressure should increase against Iran, even if that means another war in the Middle East.

Liberals have shown no such unanimity. They were divided not only on Iraq but also on President Bush’s 2006 surge, Obama’s Afghanistan escalation, and the intervention in Libya. Views fall roughly along two lines. Dominating the party since Bill Clinton’s ascension are liberal hawks who believe it is in America’s interest to use military power abroad to promote human rights and expand democracy. More popular among the rank-and-file of the Democratic Party are attitudes skeptical of the use of force in major wars. (The only exception to this split is over the use of drones, which nearly all Democrats support).

Though Barack Obama opposed the Iraq War when he was a state legislator, as president he is closer to the liberal hawks camp. The best account we have of the decision-making on Libya, from Michael Hastings in Rolling Stone, has the president explicitly declaring that America needs to have an expanded conception of its role in the world. Just looking after its own affairs, attending to its national interests, is “not how America leads,” Obama said. The rationale Obama employed in a speech delivered at the National Defense University in March of 2011 was the closest he has come to defining an Obama doctrine.

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The argument was simple: Employers were refusing to hire because they feared the "regulatory uncertainty" flowing in the wake of the passage of the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank bank reform law. Terrified that the future implementation of these reforms would crimp their profits, employers laid low. A policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation provided the smoking gun: He argued that job growth slowed dramatically almost immediately after the passage of the Affordable Care Act in April 2010 -- "this suggests," he wrote, "that businesses are not exaggerating when they tell pollsters that the new health care law is holding back hiring."

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The man who calls contraception "a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be" went from being a failed Pennsylvania senator, Mr. "Man on Dog," to GOP presidential front-runner over the last month. Now he's crusading against prenatal testing because he claims it encourages abortion (when in fact most prenatal testing helps women help babies who develop in utero health issues) and claiming President Obama's policies will ultimately send Christians to the guillotine. (By the way, I apologize for harping on the way Protestants have persecuted Catholics in the U.S., because Santorum reminded me of some of the reason why, with his charge that mainline Protestant churches are a Satan-sponsored "shambles" that are "gone from the world of Christianity as I see it.") He and Mitt Romney, who's trying to match him outrage for outrage, have been chasing women voters away from the GOP in droves over the last couple of months.

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In his recent column in the New York Times, Ross Douthat argues that even though conservatives have failed in selling chastity to the public (even in solidly red states), a remedy he seemingly wants to offer for married couples too, "the liberal narrative has glaring problems as well." What, exactly?

To begin with, a lack of contraceptive access simply doesn’t seem to be a significant factor in unplanned pregnancy in the United States. When the Alan Guttmacher Institute surveyed more than 10,000 women who had procured abortions in 2000 and 2001, it found that only 12 percent cited problems obtaining birth control as a reason for their pregnancies. A recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study of teenage mothers found similar results: Only 13 percent of the teens reported having had trouble getting contraception."

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When the GOP announced its transportation bill last month, Capitol HIll  jaws dropped. The $260 billion five-year plan would, for the first time, tie transit funding to a bevy of new oil and gas projects. One would open up the long-preserved Arctic National Wildlife Refugee. Another would offer up millions of acres of public lands to shale drilling. Still another would open nearly all the nation’s coastline, including the recently oil-soaked Gulf of Mexico, and mandate a host of new offshore drilling operations.

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The answer is a rousing “maybe.”

On Friday, the CFPB inserted a 17-page rule proposal into the Federal Register, in a major step toward getting a grip on the out-of-control debt collection business, as well as riding herd over consumer credit bureaus.  But this was just the first step on a long and perilous journey into one of the most nauseating back alleys of free enterprise. It’s an open question whether the CFPB, under its new director, Richard Cordray, is up to the task of corralling these corporate snakes. It’s almost certain to run into stiff opposition from the debt-collectors’ pals in Congress.

But let’s look on the bright side. This is Cordray’s big opportunity, a chance to really make a difference in an area that matters to millions of consumers. Let’s hope he doesn’t blow it.

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As the protests took root in Zuccotti Park, the 99ers found a mass of people who care about the plight of the jobless and want to do something about it. As seen in last week's episode of our video series, "Occupy Meets MacArthur's Tanks," Occupy Wall Street is just the latest in a long line of American protest movements demanding economic justice. The emergence of the Occupy movement, one 99er said, felt "like the early stages of a revolution."

And then the question arose: What do America's jobless want? As the video shows, the 99ers have some answers.

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Until they did.

Revolutions are always like this: at first all men are brothers and anything is possible, and then, if you’re lucky, the romance of that heady moment ripens into a relationship, instead of a breakup, an abusive marriage, or a murder-suicide. Occupy had its golden age, when those who never before imagined living side-by-side with homeless people found themselves in adjoining tents in public squares.

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As Salon reported last week,  Heartland  called the strategy document a fake, while tacitly admitting the other documents were authentic.

Read Gleick’s statement on Hufffington Post.

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Now all it has to do is help the country pull out of a five-year recession, get the one-in-five unemployed Greeks back to work and make sure that Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Italy don't end up sharing a similar fate.

Tuesday's agreement among euro zone finance ministers came after another tense bout of all-night negotiations at the end of months of bickering between Brussels, Berlin and Athens on whether the Greek government could be trusted to make good on austerity pledges given in return for the rescue funding.

"In the past two years and again tonight, I've learnt that marathon is indeed a Greek word,” said the EU's Economic Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn. “But in the end we came to an agreement."

The deal is certainly a major achievement in the battle to get both Greece and the whole of the euro zone out of their economic mess. But nobody has any illusions that the euro zone is anywhere near the finishing line of its long-distance race to get out of the economic hole.

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Thousands marched in the streets of Europe last weekend, with protests reported in Budapest, Paris, Prague, Vilnius, Transylvania and beyond. Bulgaria has pulled out of the process of signing ACTA, as the agreement is known. Latvia has called for greater consultation. Poland has suspended its involvement. And Germany is holding off, as are the Czech and Slovak governments.  Hollywood had expected a neat and tidy ending to the years-long negotiation of a new global copyright regime. What it has gotten is something as complex as a Fellini film.

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Israeli, Palestinian and international rights groups have long said that Israel’s administrative detention practices are unlawful, but Adnan – whose hunger strike was the longest of any Palestinian prisoner –gained particular attention. Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails and members of Palestinian political factions had gone on solidarity hunger strikes, and demonstrators in the West Bank, Gaza and in Tel Aviv called for Israel to end arbitrary administrative detentions. Security forces dispersed protests outside the Ofer military jail in the West Bank with rubber bullets and tear gas.

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