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.

CNN asks this morning what political significance we should attribute to the fact that a bearded Austrian drag queen won the Eurovision contest on the eve of renewed tensions between Russia and Ukraine, especially in light of Russia's recent anti-LGBT policies. I have considered this question carefully, and here is my answer:

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.

In a precedent setting case, a Florida court has approved a settlement against Avmed for a data loss. The decision was handed down by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th District of Florida.

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 Tuesday, June 3, San Diego voters will weigh in on Propositions B and C -- a set of community plan updates for Barrio Logan already passed by the San Diego City Council last year.

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.

Here are some facts about Main Street American Jobs and Earnings:

In April 2014, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released an Occupational Employment and Wage Summary. According to the BLS, 20 percent of Americans work in just 10 occupations. Two of them, retail salespersons and cashiers, together represent over 33 percent of this number, or 7.8 million American workers.

These occupations are:

Today is the two-month anniversary of the disappearance of  Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared on March 7 about an hour after taking off from Kuala Lumpur and heading to Bejing. The plane, with its 241 passengers, has been missing ever since. Just this morning, I got a push notification from CNN on my cell phone letting me know that there would be a press conference today to discuss the most recent developments in the case of the missing plane.