http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NbDOpx4g70

The Approval Voting Primary Act in Oregon has cleared a major hurdle which could allow Unified Primaries to be put before Oregon voters later this year. With the May 8 approval of the ballot title by the Oregon Supreme Court, the secretary of state will begin giving out the petition forms within the week. A total of 87,213 signatures from registered voters by July 3 will be necessary in order to get the measure on the ballot.

On Friday, Kentucky U.S. Senator Rand Paul became one of the highest-profiled elected Republicans to speak out against voter identification laws.

"Everybody's gone completely crazy on this voter ID thing. . . . I think it's wrong for Republicans to go too crazy on this issue because it's offending people," Paul said at a gathering of black pastors in Memphis, Tennessee.

Thomas Piketty, a French economist trained at MIT and a professor at the Paris School of Economics, recently published a book two decades in the making, titled Capital in the 21st Century. The book has gone viral the old-fashioned way; the publishing house in Harvard is clean out of copies and is frantically printing more, and Amazon’s limitless warehouses are out of stock, too.

On Wednesday, May 7, the House Judiciary Committee unanimously passed the "USA Freedom Act," written by U.S. Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.). The bill has received broad support from privacy and civil liberties groups. Sensenbrenner says he wants to make it clear that Congress does not support current NSA spying and data collection programs -- though Congress has not shown much unity on the subject.