The story quoted New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) claiming that the effort to raise wages for the poorest of his constituents represents a "broader and deeper" divide than the recent successful fight to legalize same-sex matrimony in the Empire State. Though the piece quickly dissolved into the ether, it should have received more attention because it is an important Rosetta Stone -- one that translates this era's inscrutable political rhetoric into a clear admission that money trumps everything else.

Decoding this Rosetta Stone requires just a bit of contextual information from Siena College. According to the school's surveys, only 58 percent of New Yorkers support legalizing gay marriage, while a whopping 78 percent support raising the minimum wage from $7.25 to $8.50.

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Regardless of whether the Obama campaign's attack ad on Bain Capital is 100-percent accurate, its overarching message -- and that of similar ads -- is crystal clear. As embodied by Joe Soptik's quote, the basic argument is that Mitt Romney is a particularly bad guy for laying off workers, ruining communities and making bank as a private equity magnate at Bain Capital.

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In the last week, Colorado was the testing ground for this talking point. At the presidential level, Republican nominee Mitt Romney criticized a Denver television reporter for daring to ask about his position on, among other issues, same-sex marriage. Before restating his opposition, he scoffed at the question, asking: “Aren’t there issues of significance that you’d like to talk about [like] the economy? The growth of jobs? The need to put people back to work?”

At the same time, Colorado's Republican House Speaker Frank McNulty twice blocked a vote on a bill to legalize civil unions. His rationale? “We should not be spending time on divisive social issues when unemployment remains far too high and [when] far too many Coloradans remain out of work,” he said. Echoing that sentiment, the shadowy Republican front group Compass Colorado financed an automated telephone call telling thousands of voters that the push for civil unions was unacceptable because it is “promoting [a] divisive social agenda over Colorado job creation.”

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In the last day, we’ve learned that America has reached a demographic tipping point. For the first time in history, there are more minority births than white births in the United States, meaning we’re closer than ever to becoming a majority minority nation.

At almost exactly the same time these numbers were being released, a top Republican lawmaker, U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman, R-Colo., was making national headlines with a leaked audio recording of him publicly declaring that the first African-American president is “not an American.” Here’s the audio and full quote from Coffman’s remarks at a Republican fundraiser:

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And yet, as relentless as the obesity crisis appears to be, its expansion doesn't have to be a foregone conclusion. That's because, unlike a naturally occurring epidemic, it's almost completely human created -- a reality that allows for the possibility of a human-directed reversal.

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Yes, of course, in the intervening years I've had the chance to drive an automatic transmission. But that has always felt a bit like playing a post-Konami Code game of Contra -- a bit too easy, a bit too idiot proof, a bit too, shall we say, inauthentic. On top of that, the automatic always seemed like a wasteful luxury because it always was more expensive and less fuel-efficient. That difference consequently added an ascetic populism to the inherent machismo of the engine-revving manual transmission.

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That nebulous word "stuff" is significant. It asks us to see all exports as the same and to refrain from making nuanced value judgments about what exactly we're shipping overseas. In this coldblooded view, a job-creating export is a job-creating export, and that's as far as any conversation should go.

At first glance, such reductionism seems logical, rational, even boringly uncontroversial. But two recent news items highlight how in a globalized economy, there are troubling consequences that come from the particular kind of export economy we're building.

The first bit of news came from the Washington Post, which this week reported that "the Obama administration is crafting a proposal that could make it easier to export firearms and other weapons." Though the Homeland Security and Justice Departments say the new rules could make it easier for terrorist and drug cartels to further arm themselves, the White House is nonetheless citing the "stuff" theory of exports to ignore the objections.

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In light of Obama's past support for gay marriage as a state legislator and his recent refusal to sign an order barring federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation, it would be logical to assume that -- sans a full-scale reversal (which may be in the works tonight) -- the president's position has been "evolving" toward more entrenched opposition to equality.

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But ever so quietly, we are starting to see the rise and success of a competing vision, one that turns the old assumption on its head. In the technology arena, for instance, Apple is successfully challenging the PC world with a business model that convinces consumers to pay higher prices in exchange for better reliability, durability, efficiency and customer service. Likewise in the transportation world, more and more consumers are willing to pay higher prices upfront for hybrid and electric vehicles in exchange for the promise of lower long-term energy costs. This has encouraged companies like Philips to introduce more expensive light bulbs, in hopes that consumers will pay more for illumination that promises to use less electricity and last 20 years.

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Last week’s big technology announcement spotlighted the thorny issue. As the Los Angeles Times reported, Google’s announcement of its “Google Drive” came with the promise that users will “retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content.” But when you save files to Google’s new hard-drive folder in the cloud, the terms of service you are required to agree to gives Google “a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works, communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute (your) content” as the company sees fit.

When asked about this, Google argued that its provisions merely “enable us to give you the services you want - so if you decide to share a document with someone, or open it on a different device, you can.”

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In the past, when anyone has aired criticism of hockey’s connection to violence, the typical response is that it’s part of the sport’s tradition. In much the same way it has been used in politics to pretend problems are unfixable, this “culture” argument in hockey has served as a flippant conversation ender -- one that short-circuits any frank discussion of what fuels such a culture and whether it should be changed. As the logic goes, the culture has always defined the sport, and always will -- so why judge its value or lack thereof?

Left unexplored is why such a culture exists? That topic is avoided because it might make the violence seem like a symptom of something bigger rather than an isolated problem. That is, it might turn the mirror away from the game and onto its fans -- in the process reflecting back the image of a violence-glorifying society that all-too-eagerly condones brutality as a matter of principle.

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It was always bound to go there, but few likely expected it would be so blatant. I'm talking about the ongoing campaign against organized labor; for decades deeply rooted in American political culture, the crusade has been periodically amplified in popular culture as well, from 1954's "On the Waterfront" all the way to the Sopranos' depiction of mob-controlled unions (and sometimes pop culture and political culture have even fused). So it was only a matter of time before vilifying rank-and-file union members would be commodified into a consumer brand by a company looking for an edge in the high-end retail market.

That's where Kenneth Cole now comes in. The clothing designer has just launched a new crusade to tie his expensive clothing and shoes line to the elite's movement du jour: the fight to demonize public schoolteachers and their unions. In a billboard and Web-based campaign, Cole's foundation portrays the national debate over education as one that supposedly pits "Teachers' Rights vs. Students' Rights."

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Before you think this is a column merely about food, recognize that Pachirat's question isn't (only) about the immorality of the cheeseburger you had for lunch. It’s about the larger phenomenon whereby modern society has reconstructed itself to hide so many horrific consequences from view.

Calling this the "politics of sight," Pachirat's blood-soaked experience inside a slaughterhouse spotlights only the most illustrative example of how we've divorced ourselves from the means of producing violence -- and how, in doing so, we have made it psychologically easier to support such brutality. Sadly, billions of factory-farmed animals dying barbaric deaths are just one subset of casualties in that larger process.

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These are questions that can be answered -- and, in fact, are already answered -- most accurately by dispassionate scientists. But in a country whose public policymaking apparatus is so dominated by money, the scientific questions may ultimately be less important than a set of key political questions: namely, which level of government gets to decide whether drilling moves forward -- state or local?

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Tiberi, like so many of his conservative colleagues, argues that millions of the loafers "don't pay taxes" - a fantasy that effectively reimagines GOP opposition to, say, the Buffet Rule as an honorable attempt to prevent a supposedly progressive tax system from becoming more progressive. That opposition is portrayed as part of a larger effort to push the system toward flatness. And, of course, flatness in tax rates is the conservative vision of pure fairness, with the right going so far as to label its flat tax initiatives a "fair tax" campaign.

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That headline, from London’s Daily Mail, summed up the two-tiered conclusion of a new report from the British think tank Demos, which found that in England 1) “religious people are more active citizens (who) volunteer more, donate more to charity and are more likely to campaign on political issues,” and 2) “religious people are more likely to be politically progressive (people who) put a greater value on equality than the non-religious, are more likely to be welcoming of immigrants as neighbors (and) more likely to put themselves on the left of the political spectrum.”

These findings are important to America for two reasons.

First, they tell us that, contrary to evidence in the United States, the intersection of religion and politics doesn’t have to be fraught with hypocrisy. Britain is a Christian-dominated country, and the Christian Bible is filled with liberal economic sentiment. It makes perfect sense, then, that the more devoutly loyal to that Bible one is, the more progressive one would be on economics.

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Between my exuberant reaction to the first story and my disgust at hearing the second story, I wondered: Why did I feel psyched about one mega-chain coming to my area but disgusted at the news of another coming to the same locale? As someone aspiring to be an "ethical consumer" who cares about my community (if that's not, unto itself, an oxymoron), aren't I supposed to hate both bits of news? Or is it possible that not all national chains are created equal? Is it possible, in fact, that some are better than others?

Upon some hearty investigation, I think the answer is yes, some are better than others -- and I'm not saying that (only) because it helps me avoid feeling like a complete sellout to the corporate machine.

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Skip forward to 2012 -- a superheated moment primed by seething protest campaigns and a divisive presidential election. Not surprisingly, the sports world has again shifted, becoming just as politically fraught as the society it entertains -- and whether or not you agree with a particular sports icon’s opinion, the larger change is a welcome development for participatory democracy.

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That's why the past week has been so important for the cause of ending the drug war -- because it has provided three tragic examples of how that war harms not only its dead and/or incarcerated victims, but also how it makes society as a whole more susceptible to horrific crimes.

In Boulder, Colo., for example, the Daily Camera reports that "the University of Colorado announced a new plan to snuff out the Boulder campus's 4/20 smoke-out, warning that police will ticket pot smokers at this month's event." In a state whose police forces have faced serious budget cuts, this decision clearly reflects a hardcore War on Drugs ideology by removing finite police resources from safety and security operations and instead focusing them on punishing pot use.

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