Despite the hostile anti-American rhetoric from Iran’s president, a Santa Rosa woman who visited last year says the citizens she met were warm and welcoming.

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The political differences that divide progressives and conservatives run deeper than policies and opinions, says linguist and analyst George Lakoff, they are embedded deep within the brain itself.

UC Berkeley professor George Lakoff is primarily a linguist, and here he explains how that background leads to the political applications that form the basis of his current book, The Political Mind: A Cognitive Scientist’s Guide to Your Brain and its Politics.

George Lakoff(right)  will read from The Political Mind  at Copperfields Books in Montgomery Village Sunday afternoon, September 13th at 2 pm.

President Obama has been praised for actively re-entering the debate over health care reform with his address to Congress this week, but Lakoff says the administration is still bound by a policy-driven approach that stints on making an essential emotional connection with the American electorate.

Local activists are urging customers to boycott Whole Foods to protest the company ownership’s opposition to health care reform and organized labor.

With four stores in Sonoma County, one in Napa and two in Marin, Whole Foods is the dominant purveyor of organic groceries in the North Bay. Georgia Kelly says that joining the boycott has meant disruptions in her personal patterns, but she feels living out her personal values is more important.

Ben Boyce (left), director of the Living Wage Coalition, contends that while John Mackey is certainly entitled to his own personal beliefs, others who do not share those beliefs have a responsibility not to provide the financial support to perpetuate them.

"Even in countries like Canada and the U.K., there is no intrinsic right to health care. Rather, citizens in these countries are told by government bureaucrats what health-care treatments they are eligible to receive and when they can receive them. All countries with socialized medicine ration health care by forcing their citizens to wait in lines to receive scarce treatments..." wrote Whole Food CEO John Mackey (right)  in his Wall Street Journal essay, "The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare."

"Rather than increase government spending and control, we need to address the root causes of poor health. This begins with the realization that every American adult is responsible for his or her own health." Read the full article  here.

Will Shonbrun's response, an Open Letter to Whole Foods Market, was first published in the Empire Report. You can view the main Facebook page supporting the boycott here.

Unrest in Honduras, following the military coup there two months ago, has not abated, but is being widely ignored by most American media.

Global Exchange also maintains this extensive webpage with background reports and other details about the current situation in Honduras. You can read the full 12-page report from the delegation that visited Honduras here.

After talking with dozens of people there, Maria Robinson says it isn’t just the poor and working classes who are unhappy about the coup that deposed Honduran President, Manuel Zelaya (left) but many business owners as well.

The US volunteer delegation also met with the American Ambassador in Telgucigalpa, an encounter that is reported in considerable detail here.

The Catholic Church and other religious groups in Honduras have not taken a public stance on the regime change there, something the Global Exchange delegation has criticized them for. Still, Robinson says one of the most moving moments during her 8-day visit was an outdoor mass led by an activist priest, Father Andres Tomayo.

Members of the delegation also met with some of the victims of violence inflicted on demonstrators by Honduran military and police, and recorded their statements about the incidents in which they were injured. One of them, Robinson recalls, was a woman whose leg had been ruptured by a tear gas canister fired at close range.

Health Care reform and a forward-looking energy policy are not competing subjects in need of Congressional action, but interlocking national priorities, said speakers at a Santa Rosa rally yesterday.

Sebastopol City Council member Kathleen Shaffer (left), spoke out strongly in support of the health reform plan endorsed by President Obama, and the much maligned "public option" within it.

 Photos courtesy of John Hartong

Another speaker at the rally, Sonoma County Supervisor Efren Carrillo, defended proactive climate change legislation as a potential engine for economic, as well as environmental benefits.

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The Santa Rosa rally was one of many scheduled across the country yesterday by MoveOn.org.