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The Anti-Defamation League, founded in 1913 to combat anti-Semitism.

Unfortunately, the important work done by the ADL took a wrong turn in the 1970s, when the group spied on Jewish linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky. We break down the spy memos here.

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What is this?

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Digital Underground rapper Shock G’s alter ego.

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TED Talk audiences feature some of the wealthiest and most influential members of American society. Attendees of past talks include Bill Gates, Vice President Al Gore, Fox News chief Rupert Murdoch, Dreamworks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, and scientist Richard Dawkins, among many other luminaries.

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The Huffington Post obtained a Democratic Party powerpoint presentation delivered to freshman members of Congress just a week after the 2012 election. Party leadership laid out the plan: fundraise, fundraise, fundraise.

Below: A prescribed schedule from the presentation allowing for only 1-2 hours of actual legislating

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An analysis of 467 Congressional races in 2012 found that the better-funded candidate won 91% of the time.

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The Genius annotation is the work of the Genius Editorial project. Our editors and contributors collaborate to create the most interesting and informative explanation of any line of text. It’s also a work in progress, so leave a suggestion if this or any annotation is missing something.

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Jerry Brown’s 1992 presidential campaign only accepted donations of $100 or less. Brown, a former Jesuit seminarian, explained:

St. Paul talked about … how the love of money is the root of all evil. If you go to a corporation and say, ‘What about morality?’ they say, ‘Well, that’s not our business.’

There has to be another principle, and that principle is social justice.

However, Brown, now running for his fourth term as California governor, has amassed a $17 million war chest with “the overwhelming majority of those funds coming from big corporations, labor unions, oil companies and high-worth individuals that routinely lobby state government.”

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Though only a coincidence, 144,000 has been a significant number for almost 2,000 years in Christian eschatology, being found throughout the Book of Revelations. It is the number of people Jehovah’s Witnesses believe will be admitted into heaven.

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Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons. Lessig uses a Simpsons character for his Lester:
http://imgur.com/GszK397

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Order The USA is Lesterland   HERE

Lawrence Lessig is a lawyer, director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University and a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Along with Hal Abelson, and Eric Eldred, Lessig founded Creative Commons, a non-profit based in Mountain View that was created to “enable the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools.”

Lessig recently founded the May Day Pac a crowd-funding-inspired Super PAC with the sole purpose of getting money out of politics.

“…a citizens' funded and crowdsourced superPAC – to end all superPACs”
  —Mayday PAC website

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Poet Tony Hoagland teaches at the University of Houston.

Read some of his work here.

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