It’s a welcome step to see President Obama appoint two Vietnam veterans to serve as Secretaries of State and Defense. John Kerry and Chuck Hagel are two people who have experienced war directly and have voiced publicly their deep ambivalence about war. Too bad in 2002 neither of them were willing to risk their...
Worse than Swift Boating, worse than Willie Horton, and even worse than the racist push polls Karl Rove used against John McCain in the 2000 South Carolina primary, Mitt Romney is running the most craven, dishonest, and hypocritical campaign we’ve seen in contemporary American politics. The Romney campaign is engaging in “situational demagoguery,” a...
Stephen Colbert’s super PAC exposes the corporate news media’s incapability to express what would be in normal life circumstances a totally justified sense of righteous outrage. Why do people become upset with the notion of anonymous corporate donors filling the coffers of Super PACS and corporations being considered “people?” It must offend a sense...
Despite the redeployment of U.S. troops out of Iraq, during this dismal period of “austerity” the public isn’t likely to see any discernible difference in the government’s misplaced priorities. Our representatives in Washington recently passed a “bipartisan” military budget of $662 billion. That level of “defense” spending, about $7 trillion over 10 years, Congress...
The corporate media (and NPR) have pumped up the Tea Bagger opponents of the health care reform bill with about the same intensity they used to diminish those who marched against George W. Bush’s $3 trillion war in Iraq. From the corporate media’s take on this whole health care debate you’d think Republicans never...
Paul Krugman recently penned an insightful article where he argues that the 1999-2009 decade should be called the “Big Zero” decade because over the course of ten years there was no real job growth or notable “progress” in tackling any of the nation’s problems. But Krugman’s view, I’m afraid, is overly optimistic. What we...
The Americans for Prosperity Foundation’s “National Defending the American Dream Summit” held last weekend at the Marriott Crystal Gateway Hotel in Arlington, Virginia was an assemblage whose only distinguishing feature was its astonishing homogeneity both in thought and in demography. While channel surfing through C-SPAN I caught a full camera pan where the unbearable...
Recession Is Over! (If You Want It)
The National Bureau of Economic Research tells us the Great Recession is “over.” In fact, it ended in June 2009! Hip, hip, hooray! The only thing this announcement reveals is just how out of touch, cruel, and compassionless those who view human society through the lens of quantitative measurements can be. Numbers don’t begin...
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