American political dysfunction looks pretty bad - but just take a look at what’s going on across the Atlantic. A poisonous wave of right-wing, neo-fascist parties is emerging in response to the continent’s ongoing austerity and hugely ineffectual policy response to the resulting jobs crisis.

The U.S. could be headed in the same direction if the austerity-pushers have their way. Europe is a case study in what happens when mainstream parties on both the right and the left fail to deliver relief to the people. Extremists seize the opportunity to assert themselves, and things get ugly very fast.

Bringing countries together in the European Union was supposed to make violent nationalist conflict a thing of the past. Member countries were supposed to prosper economically. But now countries like Greece and Spain are fracturing politically and falling into a downward economic spiral.

The creators of the euro were like parents fixing an arranged marriage. They knew that they were locking together countries with very different economies and political cultures. But they hoped that, over time, the new partners would grow together and form a genuine bond.

The European Union was banking on three forms of convergence: economic, political and popular. At the time […]

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Spend any time around monetary officials and one word you’ll hear a lot is ‘normalization.

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Employees at an Ohio Wal-Mart store are being asked to donate canned goods to help out co-workers who don’t have enough to eat at the holidays.

‘Please Donate Food Items Here, so Associates in Need Can Enjoy Thanksgiving Dinner,

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Chicken nuggets: Call ’em tasty, call ’em crunchy, call ’em quick and convenient. But maybe you shouldn’t call them ‘chicken.’

So says , a professor of pediatrics and medicine at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. In a published in The American Journal of Medicine, deShazo and his colleagues report on a small test they conducted to find out just what’s inside that finger food particularly beloved by children. Their conclusion?

‘Our sampling shows that some commercially available chicken nuggets are actually fat nuggets,’ he tells The Salt. ‘Their name is a misnomer,’ he and his colleagues write. The nuggets they looked at were only 50 percent meat – at best. The rest? Fat, blood vessels, nerve, connective tissue and ground bone – the latter, by the way, is stuff that usually .

Now, this was an informal test. To conduct their chicken ‘autopsy,’ the researchers went to two different national fast-food chains near their health center in Jackson, Miss., and ordered chicken nuggets over the counter. The fast-food chains involved went unnamed – ‘we felt that would generate negative publicity off topic,’ deShazo told us via email.

When put under the microscope, one chicken sample consisted of just 40 percent skeletal muscle – […]

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If this were happening in any other country, Americans would be aghast. A sentence of life in prison, without the possibility of parole, for trying to sell $10 of marijuana to an undercover officer? For sharing LSD at a Grateful Dead concert? For siphoning gas from a truck? The punishment is so extreme, so irrational, so wildly disproportionate to the crime that it defies explanation.

And yet this is happening every day in federal and state courts across the United States. Judges, bound by mandatory sentencing laws that they openly denounce, are sending people away for the rest of their lives for committing nonviolent drug and property crimes. In nearly 20 percent of cases, it was the person’s first offense.

As of 2012, there were 3,278 prisoners serving sentences of life without parole for such crimes, according to an extensive and astonishing report issued Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union. And that number is conservative. It doesn’t include inmates serving sentences of, say, 350 years for a series of nonviolent drug sales. Nor does it include those in prison for crimes legally classified as ‘violent

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