Even as the corporate lobbyists of ALEC meet in D.C. this week to discuss how best to undermine democracy, The Guardian got its enterprising hands on internal documents charting ALEC's financial troubles since Trayvon Martin's impolitic death and the ensuing unpleasant publicity. Having lost the support of 400 state legislators and over 60 corporations, ALEC plans to make up a huge budget shortfall by plotting to coax back companies under two new projects - Prodigal Son and Jeffersonian - that will help them avoid the pesky legal, ethical and tax challenges that keep arising when they do the frequent lobbying they even more frequently say they're not doing.

With the approach of the one-year anniversary of the Sandy Hook shootings, the planning of vigils and the release of 911 recordings from that grisly day - "They're still shooting! They're still running!" - the group Moms Demand Action has produced a chilling video to demand action on common-sense gun reform. Noting there have been 26 school shootings since Newtown, its No More Silence campaign vows "never to be silent again about the epidemic of gun violence."

Despite this week's wave of evidently good news on Obamacare - costs lower than expected, a million hits a day to an upgraded website, an ad blitz touting its widespread benefits - the Socialist nightmare of affordable health care remains a pathological bugaboo for many on the right wing. Thus do we have a wave of often preposterous legal challenges, House hearings and bogus health websites; witch hunts wherein GOP opponents accuse each other of harboring sympathies for "the disaster that is Obamacare"; and Tea Party rants about how this "Socialist doctrine" is just like rape - "rape of our free will, rape of our religious convictions, rape of free markets, rape of our Constitution, a brutal rape of the American Dream" because, umm...