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Latest Articles: Opinions/Editorials
What Everyone Is Too Polite to Say About Steve Jobs
Post Date: 2011-10-08 22:33:48 by Sebastian
7 Comments
In the days after Steve Jobs' death, friends and colleagues have, in customary fashion, been sharing their fondest memories of the Apple co-founder. He's been hailed as "a genius" and "the greatest CEO of his generation" by pundits and tech journalists. But a great man's reputation can withstand a full accounting. And, truth be told, Jobs could be terrible to people, and his impact on the world was not uniformly positive. We mentioned much of the good Jobs did during his career earlier. His accomplishments were far-reaching and impossible to easily summarize. But here's one way of looking at the scope of his achievement: It's the dream of any ...
Value Voters Summit: Militarism As A Family Value
Post Date: 2011-10-08 13:26:03 by Brian S
0 Comments
You might expect the Value Voters Summit, a convention of socially conservative activists hosted by the Family Research Council, to lead with talk of God, Jesus, family values or other code words like life and the unborn. But you would be wrong. Everyone knows that economic and fiscal concerns have trumped social issues among Republicans in the current election cycle. But what was notable about the morning program at the event in Washington, DC, on Friday was the programming emphasis and crowd enthusiasm for aggressive militarism. House majority leader Eric Cantor ran through all the Republican buzzwords of the moment: “Obamacare” and taxes are bad, small business and a ...
2000s: The Decade from Hell for Almost All Americans But The Richest
Post Date: 2011-10-08 12:08:18 by Brian S
1 Comments
Food pantries picked over. Incomes drying up. Shelters bursting with the homeless. Job seekers spilling out the doors of employment centers. College grads moving back in with their parents. The angry and disillusioned filling the streets. Pan your camera from one coast to the other, from city to suburb to farm and back again, and you'll witness scenes like these. They are the legacy of the Great Recession, the Lesser Depression, or whatever you choose to call it. In recent months, a blizzard of new data, the hardest of hard numbers, has laid bare the dilapidated condition of the American economy, and particularly of the once-mighty American middle class. Each ...
The End of Pax Americana?
Post Date: 2011-10-08 10:49:29 by We The People
3 Comments
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Observing the correlation of forces in this city and the intensity of conviction in the base of each party, the outcome of the ongoing fiscal fight between Barack Obama and the Tea Party Republicans seems preordained. Deadlock. There will be no big jobs-for-taxes deal. The can will be kicked down the road into the next administration. A second truth is emerging. When the cutting comes, as it shall, the Pentagon will be first to ascend the scaffold. Why so? Consider. The Republican House cannot agree to tax increases without risking retribution from the base and repudiation by its presidential candidates. All have pledged to oppose even a dollar in tax hikes for 10 ...
This Is What a Mob Looks Like
Post Date: 2011-10-07 17:17:10 by CZ82
2 Comments
This Is What a Mob Looks Like by Ann Coulter, 10/05/2011 I am not the first to note the vast differences between the Wall Street protesters and the tea partiers. To name three: The tea partiers have jobs, showers and a point. No one knows what the Wall Street protesters want -- as is typical of mobs. They say they want Obama re-elected, but claim to hate "Wall Street." You know, the same Wall Street that gave its largest campaign donation in history to Obama, who, in turn, bailed out the banks and made Goldman Sachs the fourth branch of government. This would be like opposing fattening, processed foods, but cheering Michael Moore -- which the protesters also did this week. ...
Herman Cain: Far from Nationalization, Purchase of Bank Stocks Is a Win-Win for Taxpayers
Post Date: 2011-10-07 10:31:08 by go65
3 Comments
Earth to taxpayers! Owning stocks in banks is not nationalization of the banking industry. It’s trying to solve a problem. The unprecedented financial crisis has caused the Treasury of the United States to take unprecedented measures to help solve the problem of frozen credit and cash flow for U.S. businesses. Most of us had dreams of what we wanted to be when we grew up as children. Some of us wanted to grow up and become a fireman, a policeman, a doctor, a nurse, a lawyer, a teacher, an actor, an engineer, a writer, a dancer, a chef or any number of other professions. But some of us wanted to own a bank because that’s where the money is! Wake up people! Owning a part ...
A War Worth Fighting
Post Date: 2011-10-06 16:48:43 by Brian S
1 Comments
My father grew up on Gordon Avenue on the South Side of Fort Worth. After high school at Trimble Tech, he apprenticed in the construction industry and became a journeyman electrician. In the 1970s he earned an average of $40,000 a year. It was a fair wage, a good wage. The average price for a new home was $50,000. The average price of new car was $4,500. Gas was 57 cents a gallon. A bottle of soda pop ran 35 cents, and you could get 5 or 10 cents back if you returned the bottle. Being as an electrician was a great way to make a living. Today, the average journeyman electrician still makes approximately $40,000 a year, but the average price for a new home is $100,000 and the typical price ...
Conservatives Want America to be a "Christian Nation" -- Here's What That Would Actually Look Like [Full Thread]
Post Date: 2011-10-05 14:51:23 by Brian S
74 Comments
In a campaign speech in September, Rick Perry hit upon some familiar Republican themes. According to a Bloomberg Businessweek article: Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry, in an appeal to evangelical voters, said "Christian values" and not "a bunch of Washington politicians" should be the touchstone guiding how Americans conduct their lives. ..."America is going to be guided by some set of values," Perry told a crowd of 13,000 students and faculty members yesterday at a sports arena on the school's campus. "The question is going to be, 'Whose values?'" He said it should be "those Christian values that this country was based ...
Hooray for Federal Loans! (Solyndra)
Post Date: 2011-10-04 08:54:45 by go65
2 Comments
n this country, it is relatively easy to get venture capital for a good idea — and alternative energy has attracted billions in the past few years. What is hard to come by is money to fund the far more expensive process of commercializing the innovation. Andy Grove, the former chief executive of Intel (and still one of the great business minds in America), has been sounding the alarm about this, pointing out that one reason so many American innovations wind up being manufactured in China is that the Chinese are more than happy to finance the commercialization process. One company that has received three federally guaranteed loans, totaling more than $3 billion, is First Solar. That ...
China or the US? Make your choice
Post Date: 2011-10-03 22:13:16 by A K A Stone
6 Comments
The defining geopolitical drama of the next century will be the battle for power and influence between China and America. That emerging struggle is already posing awkward choices for Asian countries, caught between the two global giants. On Monday the US Senate was expected to pass a bill allowing for the imposition of tariffs on Chinese goods. Even if the protectionist drive in America now pauses for a while, this confrontational mood in the US poses a dilemma for China’s neighbours. China is now the largest trading partner for Japan, India, Australia, South Korea and most of the nations of south-east Asia. But these countries still have their most important military relationship ...
An indecent proposal
Post Date: 2011-10-03 15:57:49 by Ferret Mike
13 Comments
Conservatives seem to think they've stumbled on a very clever argument, which is that people who want taxes raised on the wealthy should just donate money instead and let the various more greedy sons-of-bitches in America continue on as usual. Ha ha! Take that, you intellectuals! First off, I note that Grover Norquist is too cheap to spring for a stamp, indicating that the total sum Mr. Norquist is willing to invest in his clever scheme is considerably less than one dollar. And I don't expect Norquist particularly gives a damn if someone points out that his solution is, shall we say, spurious, because most of what Grover Norquist does in life is come up with spurious arguments as ...
Friedrich Hayek Joins Ayn Rand as a Hypocritical User of Medicare
Post Date: 2011-09-30 10:02:56 by lucysmom
7 Comments
We’ve been a bit hard on the left of late, so we figured we’d take some steps to balance our programming. Mark Ames, who has been doggedly on the trail of the Koch brothers, found a delicious failure to live up to his oft-repeated standard of conduct by a god in the libertarian pantheon, Friedrich Hayek. And this fall from grace was encouraged one of the chief promoters of extreme right wing ideas in the US, Charles Koch. Bear in mind that Charles Koch has not merely promoted libertarian ideas generally but in particular founded the Cato Institute, which has done more than any other single organization to wage war on Social Security. Koch wanted Hayek to come to the US in 1973 to ...
What's behind the scorn for the Wall Street protests?
Post Date: 2011-09-29 12:24:51 by lucysmom
2 Comments
It's unsurprising that establishment media outlets have been condescending, dismissive and scornful of the ongoing protests on Wall Street. Any entity that declares itself an adversary of prevailing institutional power is going to be viewed with hostility by establishment-serving institutions and their loyalists. That's just the nature of protests that take place outside approved channels, an inevitable by-product of disruptive dissent: those who are most vested in safeguarding and legitimizing establishment prerogatives (which, by definition, includes establishment media outlets) are going to be hostile to those challenges. As the virtually universal disdain in these same circles ...
You’ve been lied to: Freedom and democracy don’t mean same things
Post Date: 2011-09-28 09:30:50 by war
2 Comments
an you tell me the difference between freedom and democracy? I’ve tried this with dozens of people over the years. They almost always look at me blankly, because they’ve been taught the words mean exactly the same thing. They were taught a lie. I’m reminded of this because of a great article my friend Zachary Caceres published Wednesday that centers around mainstream intellectual ignorance on this subject. (If you’d like to know more about where Zach is coming from, check out his TED talk last spring about free cities.) If you’re already familiar with the difference between freedom and democracy, you’ll find his article a treat. I urge you to read it. If ...
Might As Well Vote for Obama
Post Date: 2011-09-27 13:36:29 by Ferret Mike
3 Comments
Grin and Bear It was the name of a Sunday comic strip I loved. Its writer/artist went by the name George Lichty. When I was a kid, he did one I've always remembered. In Stalinist Russia, two bureaucrats with star-shaped "Hero" medals on their chests stand either side of an office safe with a broken door. One of the two is lamenting, "Is terrible news, Comrade! Someone is stealing results of next week's election!" Welcome to 21st century America. You've seen it yourself, and recently. The state-controlled "news" media announce that Michelle Bachmann (or Herman Cain or whoever) wins a "straw poll", while Mitt Romney (or some other zombie) ...
Accept It, GOP: Mitt Romney Is All You've Got:
Post Date: 2011-09-27 13:29:05 by Ferret Mike
12 Comments
There's one part of the Rick-Perry-sucks-at-debatin' story that's been left out: it wasn't just that Perry may as well have been on stage blowing goats for how appalling he was. That's the easy headline. No, the truth is that Mitt Romney kicked Perry's ass all over the Orlando Convention Center last week. When he first announced he was running, pundits across the spectrum expected Perry to just saunter into the GOP saloon, order whiskey, shoot the piano player, down the shot, and take the whore upstairs, all before the doors had stopped swinging. But at the Fox "news"/Google (really?) debate in batshit insane central Florida, it was the Harvard-educated ...
The Liberal Modus Ponens Versus The Republican Modus Tollens
Post Date: 2011-09-27 12:30:42 by lucysmom
12 Comments
In my previous post, “The Republican Modus Tollens”, I pointed out that arguments apparently having the valid form (1) If P then Q (2) Not-Q (3) So Not-P allow for serious irrationality when P represents a matter of well-confirmed scientific theory and Q represents a prescriptive policy preference or a tenet of religious faith. So, to use one of the examples from my previous post, we have arguments about climate change that seem to be guided by the following pattern of thought- (1) If climate change is occurring, then we should regulate CO2. (2) We shouldn’t regulate CO2. (3) So climate change isn’t actually occurring. Of course, probably no opponent of climate ...
The Occupied Turn Occupiers
Post Date: 2011-09-27 10:41:12 by lucysmom
7 Comments
In a recent debate Congressman Ron Paul claimed the United States military had troops in 130 countries. The St. Petersburg Times looked into whether such an outrage could actually be true and was obliged to report that the number was actually 148 countries. However, if you watch NFL football games, you hear the announcers thank members of the U.S. military for watching from 177 countries. The proud public claim is worse than the scandalous claim or the "investigative" report. What gives? We are supposed to be proud of the U.S. empire but to reject with high dudgeon any accusation of having an empire. Abroad, this conversation makes even less sense, because those troops and their ...
The Price of Gold in the Year 2160
Post Date: 2011-09-24 10:09:09 by lucysmom
24 Comments
It’s become quite popular to talk about the price of gold . . . in blogs, the press, at dinner parties. The latest topic of debate is not about the price of gold as a commodity, but about gold as the one and only king money. The basic argument is that 5,000 years of tradition will overwhelm the tyranny of modern government and the fiat printing press. The barbaric relic will defeat socialism, fascism, Obama-ism, and restore liberty to the world, after a terrible economic collapse in which gold-owning visionaries become fabulously wealthy. Perhaps they are correct—or perhaps not. I don’t know what will happen in 10 years. However, unless civilization utterly collapses (which ...
The Social Contract [Full Thread]
Post Date: 2011-09-23 10:11:31 by war
45 Comments
This week President Obama said the obvious: that wealthy Americans, many of whom pay remarkably little in taxes, should bear part of the cost of reducing the long-run budget deficit. And Republicans like Representative Paul Ryan responded with shrieks of “class warfare.” It was, of course, nothing of the sort. On the contrary, it’s people like Mr. Ryan, who want to exempt the very rich from bearing any of the burden of making our finances sustainable, who are waging class war. As background, it helps to know what has been happening to incomes over the past three decades. Detailed estimates from the Congressional Budget Office — which only go up to 2005, but the basic ...
The Dark Legacy of Reaganomics
Post Date: 2011-09-20 15:04:41 by Brian S
2 Comments
For half a century – from the depths of the Great Depression until the rise of Ronald Reagan – the U.S. government invested in building the nation and funding key research. And the country flourished. But Reagan then reversed those priorities. The results are in, writes Robert Parry. By Robert Parry It may be political heresy to say so, but a strong case could be made that the greatest American “job creator” over the past 80 years has been the federal government – or put differently, the government built the framework that private companies then used to create profits and jobs. This heretical view also would hold that it was Ronald Reagan’s deviation from ...
Patrick J. Buchanan: Whose Country Is It, Anyway?
Post Date: 2011-09-20 13:25:05 by Brian S
3 Comments
For the third straight year, the median income of the typical American family fell in 2010. Adjusted for inflation, it is back where it was in 1996, the longest period of zero growth since the Depression. And the poverty rate has inched up to 15.1 percent. Both figures, however, should be put in perspective. For example, a family can be classified as poor and own a car, a flat-screen TV and a computer, and have a washer-dryer and a garbage disposal. Folks below the poverty line have their kids educated free in Head Start, for 13 years in public schools, then get Pell grants for college. They get free food stamps and health care through Medicaid. They get subsidized housing and earned ...
June Carbone: Why David Brooks Misses the Real Source of Moral Decay – Thirty Years of Class Warfare Against the Working Class
Post Date: 2011-09-20 10:18:34 by lucysmom
3 Comments
The New York Times told two separate stories earlier this week, with no apparent recognition that they might be related. On September 12, David Brooks published a column decrying the moral “relativism and nonjudgmentalism” of the young. On September 13, a front page story announced that “Soaring Poverty Casts Spotlight on ‘Lost Decade,’" explaining how the economic decline of the bottom half of the population over the past decade has grown worse during the financial crisis. What do the two stories have to do with each other? Brooks writes as though the country has – or should have – a set of shared values. Yet, he ignores class and cultural ...
Tea Party Gets the Constitution Wrong
Post Date: 2011-09-18 14:07:48 by Brian S
2 Comments
It is now an article of faith in the Tea Party and on the American Right that the Founders wrote the U.S. Constitution to restrict the power of the federal government and protect states' rights. But that analysis is simply wrong. Like any government document, the Constitution can only be understood in the context of what it replaced -- and why. The Constitution superseded the Articles of Confederation, which guided the new country starting in 1777. The Articles granted broad authority to the states with only a weak national government. As the Revolutionary War wore on and during the early years of peace, many American leaders -- including George Washington, John Adams, ...
Lost My Appetite for Olive Garden
Post Date: 2011-09-17 09:35:03 by CZ82
35 Comments
Lost My Appetite for Olive Garden Charlotte Cushman Looks like I won't be eating at Olive Garden anymore. In addition I won't be eating at Red Lobster, LongHorn Steakhouse, The Capital Grille, Bahama Breeze or Seasons 52, all Darden Restaurants. I have now added them to my list of government suck-ups. (And I normally can't stand the expression "suck-ups", but in this case no other one will do.) On September 15, 2011 Darden Restaurants decided to collaborate with Michelle Obama's childhood anti-obesity campaign. They have announced that they will reduce the amount of calories and sodium in its menu by 20% over the next ten years. It just so happens (I am just ...
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