Two images making the rounds this week have at least one thing in common. And Here are two things I see: history and causality. The debt graph reaches beyond the last news cycle to put recent contributions to the national debt in a 30+ year perspective. Cornel West goes back even further, reminding us of [...]

[Read more →]

Another post at my Lemonade Stand Meme tumblr. I am all for citizens engaging in civil disobedience to gain notice for their causes and to protest injustice. But I fail to see why protesting against health inspector licenses to operate a food vending business — which is what a lemonade stand is — is not [...]

[Read more →]

The other day I put a new post on my lemonade stand tumblr. Some average citizen has declared August 20th “Lemonade Stand Day” in protest against what he perceives as Big Brother oppressing little kids selling lemonade. I address some of the issues raised by this, but I forgot to note a common argument lemonade [...]

[Read more →]

Sometimes Tom Friedman says something that sounds like the start of a good column. Well, almost the start — there were a couple of paragraphs of crappy writing to skim through before we get to it, but it’s the cabby stenographer, that’s expected. Anyway, here is the germ of an idea: Our slow decline is [...]

[Read more →]

People have always been saying America ain’t what it used to be, even though it never was, because it satisfies some mopey instinct we have to pine for a lost America rather than try to create a country that we can all thrive in. The S&P downgrade and the poorly handled debt limit crisis are [...]

[Read more →]

Reading this morning’s news coverage of yesterday’s significant losses at the stock market, I notice certain phrases keep popping up that seem to indicate a sense of denial or delusion about the actual state of the economy. Let’s use this WaPo article as Exhibit A, it’s chockfulla. The very first sentence starts off with a [...]

[Read more →]

I think we have reached the absolutely absurd end of austerity kneejerking: Eric Cantor has asserted that disaster relief for the thoroughly devastated town of Joplin should not be added to the deficit. Having said that, some other GOPer will prove me wrong and will seek to top that level of callousness. I can’t predict [...]

[Read more →]

From Bob Herbert: The poor, who are suffering from an all-out depression, are never heard from. In terms of their clout, they might as well not exist. The Obama forces reportedly want to raise a billion dollars or more for the president’s re-election bid. Politicians in search of that kind of cash won’t be talking [...]

[Read more →]

So the president went to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and asked the nation’s CEOs to give a shit about someone other than themselves. He promised them he will work on that pesky tax code (the one with the loopholes they exploit? That one.) He said he’d go after “unnecessary and outdated regulations” — whatever [...]

[Read more →]

Despite the addition of 151K new jobs in the U.S. in October (and 1.1 million jobs since January), unemployment numbers still suck. Nearly 15 million people are out of work and actively looking, and the unemployment rate, which remained steady at 9.6 percent, has been relatively flat since May. A broader measure of unemployment, which [...]

[Read more →]