With a nine-hour ceremony and amid much fanfare - South Sudan became the world's 193rd country on Saturday. The country's independence was the climax of a 2005 peace agreement that ended decades of civil war with the Arab-dominated North Sudan - a bitter conflict that cost over 2 million lives - and called for a referendum last winter when South Sudan voted overwhelmingly for secession. The people of South Sudan are exuberant over their newfound independence, but they also seem to be very aware that they have a long road ahead of them. North and South Sudan still have to agree on a border and clarify the critical issue of citizenship. And they have yet to reach an agreement on oil and wealth sharing - as South Sudan holds the lion's share of this valuable natural resource and the North will be dependent on it to keep their country running. And - of course - South Sudan must develop all of its democratic institutions while fighting corruption and dealing with threats from insurgent groups. Joe Madison is the host of the Joe Madison Show and was in South Sudan to witness the birth of a nation with his own eyes and is here tonight to share his thoughts on what is next for the world's newest country.

Thom Hartmann's crazy alert

Neal Asbury, Conservative Talk Show Host joins Thom Hartmann for a debate. The core issue behind this ongoing debate between Democrats and Republicans in Washington boils down to just one thing: INEQUALITY.

In last night's Daily Take - I said that I agree with Newt Gingrich when he said that the Supreme Court has to work under rules set by Congress; that Congress can limit the Court's powers; and that the court has taken onto itself the power to both shut down legislation and to create doctrine - like the ideas that corporations are persons and money is the same thing as speech. I pointed out that the Founders never intended - as you can read in Federalist 78 and Federalist 80 - for the Supreme Court to have jurisdiction over Congress and the President. The Supreme Court was beyond their Constitutional power when they handed George W. Bush the victory in 2000. They were beyond their Constitutional power every single time they struck down a law passed by Congress and signed by the President and - most importantly - every single time they created out of whole cloth new legal doctrines like "Separate but Equal" in Plessey versus Ferguson or "Corporations are people" with Citizen's United. If you want to see the whole thing, complete with the quotes from Hamilton and Jefferson, it's the July 12th, 2011 Daily Take on our YouTube page, and you can easily find it via thomhartmann.com. So - in response to yesterday's daily take, a number of people have posted messages over at thomhartmann.com and on youtube and other places asking a few questions about this. The first is, if the Supreme Court can't decide what is and what isn't Constitutional, then what is its purpose? What's it ...