(REAL TIMES MEDIA)—During the Great Depression you had literally millions of Americans across the country out of work for years. With the industrial base of the nation located in a few major metropolitan centers, those who lived in the midwest and the south, hit with droughts and archaic land usage laws that dated back to slavery, were hard pressed to make a living for themselves, let alone hire others.

With the nation in financial ruin for years in the 1930s, many Americans still had the skills to turn back to good ol’ Mother Earth for subsistence, and it might be time to re-learn those old skills. There is a quiet drumbeat out there suggesting that we might be headed for a food crisis on top of the financial crisis in America, and taking the time to start up your own “recession garden” might be your best chance to combat what is coming ahead.

(NNPA)—There’s a war going on outside. Despite the public’s belief, this war isn’t confined to the battles waging in Iraq or Afghanistan. Nor is it occurring only in distant lands like Nigeria or Thailand. There is another conflict much closer to home taking place virtually every single day in cities and towns all across this nation. 

It is the vicious epidemic of gun violence that is claiming the lives of our young men and women in horrific record-shattering numbers.  And when the Supreme Court overruled Chicago’s ban on handguns, they literally opened the floodgates for a drastic rise in shootings, instability and homicide in a country that already leads the way in lethal violence.

What is amazing about the confirmation hearing of Elaine Kagan for the Supreme Court is not the loud rancoring coming out of the Republican Party, but the deafening silence coming from the radical left—especially within the Black and Latino communities. Their silence speaks so loud.

When will the Black community become more sophisticated in their approach to politics? If you are on the wrong side of Israel, the Jewish community will withhold their money and vote you out of office. If you are against amnesty for illegals, the Hispanic community is finally finding the backbone to tell both parties that they will vote against them during elections. But when you are on the wrong side of issues of concern to Blacks, they just say, maybe next time!

(NNPA)—At Elena Kagan’s Senate nomination hearings to be the next Supreme Court justice, I admit to being somewhat surprised when Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona saw her clerkship with Justice Thurgood Marshall as an opening to define her as being a potentially “activist judge.”

Although conservatives had often made that charge, they had not been explicit in naming justices they believed acted in that manner. Although Sen. Dick Durbin strongly defended Marshall’s legacy, his role as a judge who understood the impact of the law on people should be emphasized.