Cheers to Lupe Fiasco for doing an extended version of his politically charged song Words I Never Said while performing at an Inauguration concert January 20, 2013.

The satirical newspaper The Onion captured the situation November 7, 2012:

WASHINGTON—According to widespread reports, roughly 314 million Americans across the country have been left without any power following Tuesday’s devastating presidential election.

Jeers to Arizona for the "let me see your papers" law now in effect.

Cheers to the band Outernational for this response:

'Show Me Your Papers' law is in effect today!  Arizona is stopping people, left and right.  Let's get this music video out there, far and wide.  Post this on your Facebook Wall.  Tweet it.  Blog about it.  Email it to your friends and family.  And make sure everyone you know in Arizona sees this.  "THE DEFIANT ONES OUR TIME HAS COME".

Conor Oberst has reunited with his band Desaparecidos, speaking out in new songs performed this year against Joe Arpaio, the fascist sherif of Tucson, and for Bradley Manning. In an interview with the New York Times, Oberst spoke to why he and his bandmates are making protest music again:

Oberst voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and performed at a benefit for him during the primaries, but like others on the left, he has been disappointed by some of the president’s moves. “Obama increased drone strikes and targeted assassinations of American citizens,” he told me. “All the promises he made in the course of that 2008 election, all the things that I thought I heard him saying when I was standing there in the primaries in Iowa on a frozen morning listening to him speak, the person I thought I was hearing, is not the person that is running our government.”

A decade-old protest band has once again found a moment to match their music. “They want everyone to sit down and be apathetic, but we can’t,” Oberst said. “If there’s anything we need to say, it’s that this will not stand, this is not acceptable. The whole idea that you can make someone disappear because they disagree with you politically, and you’re free to spy on them and hold them without charges indefinitely — what is the difference between us and fill-in-the-blank dictatorship? What is the difference? That’s desaparecidos, man.”

The controversy over Günter Grass’s poem about Israel and Iran only confirms what Grass was saying: That it’s impossible to criticize Israel without being lambasted.

Grass, the Nobel-Prize-winning author of The Tin Drum, among many other works, dared to question Israel’s first strike policy against Iran, dared to underscore “the West’s hypocrisy” that permits Israel to have an arsenal of uninspected nuclear weapons and then permits Israel to threaten to annihilate the Iranian people if Iran tries to get one of its own.

Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert took on Attorney General Eric Holder's legal justification for killing American citizens abroad suspected of terrorism, particularly Holder's argument that "due process and judicial process are not one and the same."

"Trial by jury, trial by fire, rock, paper scissors, who cares? Due process just means that there is a process that you do," Colbert said. "The current process is apparently, first the president meets with his advisers and decides who he can kill. Then he kills them."

Pretty much.

Marjane Satrapi, Iranian-French graphic novelist, author of Persepolis:

"If I have one message to give to the secular American people, it’s that the world is not divided into countries. The world is not divided between East and West. You are American, I am Iranian, we don’t know each other, but we talk together and we understand each other perfectly. The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our governments are very much the same...

"The secular people, we have no country. We the people — all the secular people who are looking for freedom — we have to keep together. We are international, as they” — the fanatics of all religions — “are international.”

From an interview conducted in 2005:

At the United Nations Climate Change Conference in December 2011, the United States delegation obstructed any meaningful negotiations over the growing climate change crisis, not only refusing to act but preventing other countries from taking steps to save the planet.

As Todd Stern, the top US negotiator, began to speak at the U.N. summit for first time, Middlebury College student Abigail Borah interrupted the proceedings, saying, "The US government does not speak on my behalf."

Read the transcript:

Miley Cyrus, the young pop singer, released this video in November 2011. She set her song, "Liberty Walk" to images and video from the Occupy protests around the country and around the world, opening with the words,  "This is dedicated to the thousands of people who are standing up for what they believe in."

Watch video now

Harry Belafonte, at 84 years old, is still making headlines.

On Thursday, CNN talked with the actor/humanitarian/activist at the Television Critics Association Tour in Beverly Hills. He was there to promote his upcoming HBO documentary “Sing Your Song," which chronicles his longstanding career and work alongside many notable civil rights activists.

But what caught our attention during the interview were his outspoken words on President Obama and the current budget impasse.