Long past the point where you probably had any doubts, McClatchy reporter Chris Adams pretty much proves the proposition that American democracy has morphed into an oligarchy by researching the way our Democrat administration - a supposedly "liberal" one - has shamelessly kowtowed to corporate interests by refusing to [...]
In an NYT Op-Ed, an ex-Army officer named Jonathan Vaccaro trashes the civilian protection mechanism the military uses, and he has some reason to do so.
In my experience, decisions move through the process of risk mitigation like molasses. When the Taliban arrive in a village, I discovered, it takes [...]
It's so pretty and bright but you can't ride it and it doesn't do any tricks except the one where it rubs itself against a tree to brush you out of the saddle. It may be expensive and largely useless -
It's not just that single-payer was off the table from [...]
Well, that's what the NYT is saying. All over. First, the drop from 10.2% to 10% is "strong".
The nation’s employers not only have stopped eliminating large numbers of jobs, but appear to be on the verge of rebuilding the American work force, devastated by the [...]
Well, if we had any doubts that our cross between an Alaskan Gidget and a clueless Ma Perkins, Sarah Palin, was going to go all Queen Bess on us during her book tour, that doubt has been, shall we say, royally set to rest. [...]
It would appear after last night's speech that Pres Obama has accepted one of two Bushian/right-wing fantasies.
The president’s prolonged and leak-ridden policy review had fanned doubts here and abroad about Mr. Obama’s commitment. He showed no reluctance on Tuesday night. He said he decided to send more troops because he is “convinced [...]
Of course it makes sense. Doesn't it?
President Obama plans to lay out a time frame for winding down the American involvement in the war in Afghanistan when he announces his decision this week to send more forces...
Just a few troops to help with [...]
The absurd - and superlengthy - legal battle Norm Coleman (author of the forthcoming giant true-crime teevee series My Wife Is a Bagman) fought to prevent Al Franken from taking his Senate seat was a terrible idea in every possible way. Which naturally means it's [...]
Well, the predictable orgy around Lynn Vincent's autobiography of Sarahcuda has begun, shot out of Oprah's cannon and into a vat of oatmeal gravy. Newsday noticed that Oprah's main concern seemed to be...herself (go figure) and that Teh Cuda never even mentioned the guy [...]
There is no longer any doubt that Sarah Palin comes alive on Facebook, able to express herself so much more better than she can when she rambles on verbally to insufficiently genuflecting liberal weenies and left-wing intellectuals like, say, Katie Couric, or even her own [...]
There's almost $300M in TARP money that hasn't been disbursed yet. You know, the tiny part that was supposed to go directly to job creation and the business lending Wall Street continues to show no interest in. We've been waiting months, since before Obama was elected, expecting that that mnoney [...]
I don't want to seem too much like a broken record, going over and over the same grooves and playing the same song until My Funny Valentine sounds like Little Lambsy-Divey but I do think we need to understand, deeply and completely, what's happened to our economy and our society [...]
We've commented before on the arrogance Corporate America has developed in the 30 years it took to build a fascist, oligarchic US. They can do anything they want and there's no one to stop them. Not even reality stops them. Their near-destruction of the world economy through blind avarice has [...]
Tom Coburn, who ran on the platform that there were lesbians in lavatories all over Oklahoma and when asked couldn't explain why that was relevant to the Senate race, turns out to be the one who's been blocking veterans' benefits bills for months. (Via [...]
With a book tour right around the corner that will open up on the hardly-noticable Oprah, and in the wake of Teh Cuda's major victory in NY, you'd think Our Sar would be lapping up the publicity with a spoon Bush-style - sort [...]
Net neutrality is still an issue BUT if the corporations control everything on the net, isn't whether or not you can get to it kind of moot?
The Obama Admin has just completed a TOP SECRET copyright treaty that reeks of fascism - govt making rules based on what's best [...]
In the wake of last night's victory in NY, Carly Simon - wait, I mean Carly Fiorina - sees the handwriting on the wall. Clearly taking her cue from Erik Erickson and Sarahcuda, and using the same flawless reasoning and prognosticative genius that brought Hewlett Packard to the brink [...]
It's just so adorable the way capitalists and their lackeys manage to think of themselves as brave, risk-taking pioneers, standing alone against the barbarian hordes in the awesomely dangerous jungles of corporate throat-cutting and skinning-alive Big Business behavior when what they really spend their time doing is cutting risk to the [...]
So there's growing evidence that Goldman Sachs, Golden Boy Bank of the last two administrations, recipient of billions in tax money to save its sorry ass, and the previous and likely future home of Obama's heaviest economic advisors, Wall Street Timmy Geithner and Lonesome Larry Summers, lied to their customers [...]
Never let it be said that we are prejudiced only against white crackers, wingnuts, and right-wing religious crackpots. In a spirit of bipartisanship and equality, we state categorically that we are also prejudiced against black, brown, and/or polka-dot crackers, wingnuts, and religious crackpots. Like, say, Kimberly Daniels. (Via [...]
Some time back I made note of TBogg's reasoning in re Sarahcuda's sudden blasting out of the governorship of Alaska: that it had a lot more to do with raking in mucho wingnut welfare $$$ than a realistic grab at the GOP nomination [...]
Ron Gettelfinger, UAW's Pres, talked tough last year, banging his fist on the podium at the annual meeting and shouting "No More Concessions!" Almost as soon at that conference was over, Gettelfinger negotiated a series of sweeping concessions at Chrysler and GM which did not prevent the threat of bankruptcy [...]
Well well well. It seems that after 30 years of abuse it's finally paying off to be the member of a union, and the "I spit on unions - pah! pah! - what have unions ever done except take dues money?" crowd ain't at'all happy about it. To quote chief NYT [...]
OK, Quiz Time: If you were a health insurance corpo exec during the first national discussion of healthcare reform since Truman, a time when the public is pressing for a public option on the assumption that it is going to be way cheaper than anything private for-profit investor-driven health [...]
We mentioned a couple of weeks ago that Sarahcuda was becoming the focus of the GOP split between the batshit insane wing (BIW) and the moderately batshit insane wing (MBIW) of the GOP. That split deepened this week when a war erupted over [...]
Having joined Bush Economics by giving away the store to the investor/bankster class in order to buy some time for rich people to get a little richer before the bottom falls out again, the Obama Admin and the Democrats in Congress are now trying to figure out how to [...]
Avedon Carol links to a Media Matters post in which Eric Boehlert quotes ABC's Jake Tapper as being "completely baffled by the White House designation of Fox as a non-news propaganda channel. Which, of course, it is and has been for years as we all have reason to know. [...]
After nearly a decade of the Bush Admin playing with statistics to ensure no one would know how bad it was, I give full credit to Obama for allowing his National Academy of Sciences to correct their poverty formula (or at least begin correcting it) so it reflects the real [...]
“No one could have told me that in a million years: I’d wake up in a homeless shelter,” she said. “I had a house for homeless people. Now, I’m homeless.”
Growing numbers of Americans who have lost houses to foreclosure are landing in homeless shelters, according to social service groups and [...]
OK. Here's the deal: US corpo's consistently claim they can't make money in the US unless they can underpay workers, strip their benefits, and kill their unions, and that that's why they have to outsource, globalize, and hire illegals. Americans, they say archly, don't want to work any more, don't [...]
Thanks to a Gallup poll this week, it has suddenly occurred to the corporate media to think John Edwards and Sarah Palin are somehow fraternal twins. Why Gallup came up with this odd pairing is a mystery but as a result there have been [...]
The Obama Admin sent the message loud and clear and Corporate America got it: workers don't matter. Only the corporations get to be saved. They are the focus.
The result is pretty much what you'd expect: even though economists agree that putting money into the hands of people who will [...]
Writing a couple of years ago in The Democratic Strategist, ex-labor organizer and current union PR consultant Jim Grossfeld summarizes the results of a survey he and his partners conducted into modern attitudes about unions at the request of the Center for American Progress. The results aren’t so much [...]
TBogg notes that on Sunday's MTP all the Pub panelists (that's pretty much all MTP has any more) were wetting their collective panties over the possibility that Sarahcuda could actually end up being the 2012 nominee. Steve Schmidt, McCain's campaign manager (and presumably the brains behind the [...]
Somebody once said that if you could just stay in the same place on the bank of a river long enough, eventually the answers would all float by you. (Though not, presumably, in sequence.) Well, for all those of us who have been sitting by the river waiting to find out why [...]
Well, not yet. Maybe tomorrow when she finally hears about it.
Nearly 600 workers at Norwood Hospital, ranging from respiratory therapists to housekeepers, will join the Service Employees International Union as the result of an election yesterday.
***
Norwood became the third hospital in the Caritas Christi Health Care system, based in [...]
You know, if it wasn't just a minority of pants-wetting, nose-picking, pearl-clutching, batshit-insane, Beckian conservatives, I'd think maybe there was something in the water or swirling around in the air that's eating people's brains. What does one do with, oh, say, something like this?
There [...]
As Marx predicted, so it has come to pass. Unrestricted capitalism is the snake that eventually eats itself after it has finished off everything else. Don't believe it? Here's an example:
For years - decades - now we have all bewailed the notion that "America doesn't make anything any more". There's [...]
The brilliant Democrat policy of following Republican-style divide-and-conquer tactics in the healthcare bill is having the unsurprising and perfectly predictable effect of splitting two of the party's once stalwart base groups by forcing one to pay for the other and threatening the second's coverage.
In hundreds of meetings with millions [...]
Sarahcuda's ghostwriter, far-right-wing scribe and budding neoConfederate/slash/Xtianist hero Lynn Vincent, has finished Sarah's "memoirs" in a mere four months, waaaay ahead of schedule (that's them she's holding at left; she's the one with no tail).
We could be snarky and say, "Well, why not? [...]
The conservative Democrat minority that has been running the show - the Blue Dog Caucus - and voting with the crazed, obstructionist GOP, may have to make a decision real real soon about whether they're going to go down with the sinking Republican ship. And the rest of the party [...]
For once, Rahm Emanuel lost an arm-twisting session. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, browbeaten into agreeing to a meeting with President COS Emanuel, refused to climb down off his white horse. He flat-out told The Enforcer that the public option was the best and most viable of the current (sad) crop [...]
Either something weird is going on here or else the nation's financial honchos are just as confused as everybody else.
The FDIC, which as we wrote last week, is way underfunded for what it's being expected to do, has decided to ask the banksters to pay their 2010-12 premiums [...]
We now have a Labor Dept that doesn't fuck with numbers as much as Elaine Chao's used to, and as a result we're getting a fairly grim picture.
Job seekers now outnumber openings six to one, the worst ratio since the government began tracking open [...]
The Chemical Safety Board has finished its investigation and reports out what we all knew already: Sheptor's management was a disgrace and Sheptor himself is a murderer. 13 times.
Released Thursday, the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board's long-awaited final
report blamed Imperial for [...]Well, it has been quite week for The Sarahcuda. A month or so ago, Palin, in an attempt to build support with military voters for her presidential run in '12, put herself up for sale on Ebay as a charity date - $25K+ (that was the opening bid) to [...]
Prime Blue Dog Ben Nelson, who hasn't made many non-Republican friends lately - or ever - has just sold the New York Times a Bridge to Nowhere, convincing one Robert Pear that, really, Medicare Advantage isn't a huge giveaway to Big Pharma that costs seniors A LOT of $$$ [...]
The left-wing, including, gleefully, yours truly, has been having a lot of fun with the way right-wing whackos have blindly, ignorantly jammed together mutually exclusive concepts without realizing that they were, you know, mutully exclusive. For instance.But while they are slowly moving closer and closer to the truth about [...]
If you haven't seen this yet, it's perfect. (For the record, I ganked this from Adam at A Violently Executed Blog who yoinked it from C&L.)
' [...]
I started out this afternoon by running into tech ticker's Top Ten List of BIG Companies Facing Bankruptcy, which included a few surprises, like Hertz, Goodyear tire, and - oops! - CBS. O yes.
7. CBS
Weak advertising and falling license fees have sent CBS's earnings off a cliff in [...]
This video does two things:
It explains what I've been doing when I'm not studying health care policy and realizing how much I don't know about EVERYTHING; It features John Hamm talking about health care policy, which, in light of the first thing, leads me to the conclusion that we are soulmates. [...]If David Brooks was a dumb move, what do you call the NYT's scooping up the worst conservative columnist this side of Jonah G? Inspired? Or suicidal?
Douthat, in that patented, barely acknowledged aside that smirks, "Everybody knows that", announced in his column today that the problem with Bush was [...]
If you ask the Obama Admin, the answer is: "None of the Above". Even though key provisions of the PA are about to expire, provisions that give Constitutional lawyers nightmares, Obama's assistant attorney general for legislative affairs, one Ronald Weich, sent a letter to Congress suggesting that the PA [...]
No, not Palin exactly but Morningstar Ministries founder and head Rick Joyner, Saracuda's self-proclaimed spiritual guru. Palin has had some very positive things to say about Joyner's "spiritual leadership" of MM and as Bruce Wilson writes at the HuffPost, Joyner is way out in [...]
You probably think I meant the title figuratively. I could have but I didn't.
This is one of the most famous scenes in movie history: Norma Rae (Sally Field, of course) standing on a table in the middle of the factory just before she gets thrown out for union organizing.
The other day Salon's Joan Walsh wrote a column called "The Blackening of the president" in which she postulated that much of the craziness of his opposition - "white Birthers, Deathers, Grassleys and Wilsons" - was motivated by racism.
[A]fter his win, his white approval rating soared, to a [...]
There is a certain relief that comes over you when someone finally notices that thieves have been, you know, stealing. You. Blind. A NY judge today made no bones about the Pirate Party of the last decade when he refused to accept the SEC's sweetheart deal with BoA and [...]
In what has to be one of the most brazen bits of credit-grabbing in GOoPer history, Sarahcuda announced yesterday that the non-existent "death panels" don't exist because she scared Obama into abandoning them. In effect, Palin's declaring victory in an imaginary war. And she wants credit for it. (Via [...]
Mark has a sizzling collection of Labor Day pieces and editorials that even on a day devoted to workers can't seem to remember what they are or what they do. Maybe that's because movement conservatives, as Salon's Michael Lind notes, have just about convinced everybody that workers, especially [...]
Ever heard this one: "They can't stoop any lower"? Did you believe it? If you answered, "Bullshit. There's always a level they can sink to that's lower than the one they're on if there's a profit to be made", give yourself an A.
Wall Street's newest Big Idea, the one they've been [...]
Well, let's see now. The Honor Roll of subnormal whackos acceptable to the GOP base as potential presidential material has been bouncing around the right-wing like a hot dog at a rabbi convention. There's Sarahcuda "Will she/Won't she/Should she" Palin, Mike "Leftwing Traitor" Huckabee, Haley "Bribes-R-Us" Barbour, [...]
When you're a celebrity it not only doesn't matter if you're dumb as a box of rocks, it doesn't matter if you're frothing at the mouth and falling over backwards while claiming that Barack Obama is the Lizard King of the 7th Dimension who escaped with his demon hordes to [...]
Given the amount of NYT-dissing we've been doing lately it is perhaps time that we give a shout-out to somebody who works there but is neither an apologist for the administration nor an ass-kisser of the rich and powerful. Doubt that there is such a person left at the NYT? [...]
Seems to be "Pick On the NYT Week" - or something - but one can hardly help it. The Times is rapidly approaching in its business pages the kind of propagandistic cheerleading that the Post has become famous for providing in its "war coverage". I have to put that in [...]
I realize that I'm just whistling into the wind here but someone has to say that the phony optimism being ginned up by Wall Street is simply the lead-in to another con.
Nearly a year after the federal rescue of the nation’s biggest banks, taxpayers have begun seeing profits from [...]
Well. I'm feeling so much better about our torture policy now that Obama is in charge of it instead of Dick Cheney. Change is happening. Change you can believe in.
For example, that evil rendition policy where we send (likely innocent) detainees to other countries to be tortured for real, [...]
The "We can't afford it!" crowd of conservatives, Pub and Dem, have apparently won the first round in their War on Social Security. For the first time in 34 years, there will likely be no cost-of-living adjustment (COLA). With inflation currently in negative numbers, that may not sound like much of a [...]
So as I guy I know said the other day, we can all relax. The worst is over. The banks have been saved (he's an Obama Democrat) and housing prices are starting to make a comeback.
Uh-huh.
I've said it before: all Obama did was buy us some time before the next [...]
All life from beginning to end
You pay your monthly installments
Next to health is wealth
And only wealth will buy you justice
Most of us have learned by now that going cheap doesn't usually pay. Oh sure, there's less out of pocket but otoh it won't last as long, do its job as well, or not have to be taken in every week for repairs. The problem is that even if we [...]
A couple of days ago Bob Herbert put the unemployment numbers into context, the ones everyone has been saying prove the economy is coming back.
[F]or American workers peering anxiously through their family portholes, the economic ship is still sinking. You can put whatever kind of gloss you want [...]I missed this last week but Robert Reich didn't. The Obama Admin has just promised to continue the abortion called Medicare Part D - a Bush program that has proven to be a bonanza for greedy drug makers and a nightmare for seniors who need those drugs - in [...]
Wiley
This is, sad to say, an accurate depiction of the way our Corporate Masters think - that they ought to get an award whenever they selflessly restrain themselves from thievery. After all, as M's of the W they expect to be treated as emperors, their [...]
Mark at Norwegianity has a post up with a passle of links about Dick's Army and the rest of the Kristalnicht Brownshirt terrorists astroturf town hall disrupters that you really ought to go click through. Big Pharma in particular is using these groups to kill any discussion about your healthcare [...]
When white blood cells begin to proliferate, they kill off red cells - the cells that carry oxygen and nutrients to the brain and body - and deplete the body's ability to fight off disease and infection, turning it into an anemic wasteland with angry [...]
Because I like to think that every time someone posts this, Dana Milbank feels some pain. [...]
Since the mid-90's I've been concerned about a tendency on the left to sanitize and sanctify Bill Clinton's reign as something to be valued and emulated. This tendency doesn't come from any inherent worthiness in his policies. It was at the time primarily a reaction to the attempt by a runaway, arrogant GOP to destroy [...]
It's hard to know where to begin on a day that features Dick Armey attacking global warming on the grounds that God wouldn't allow it, a Raw Story piece on the Big Pharma corpo's who bought the Blue Dog opposition to any public health care option ever, and [...]
And yes, both of those puns were deliberate.
If you want to know just how powerful Rush Limbaugh actually is, consider this: Clear Channel is willing to go broke paying his salary.
Drowning under massive debt and desperate to cut more costs, Clear Channel took [...]
Yessir, when you've got a good thing going and you've squeezed it dry, all you gotta do to make the money flow again is "help" the people you just took to teh cleaners. Plus you get to pretend you're a goddam hero. It's a nice perk.
This week, the Obama [...]
Honest to goodness, I don't know how any self-respecting member of Congress remains a member of the Blue Dog caucus. I know they can't all be stupid but damn, if they don't look like it when they collectively hold up health care reform to work out deals that end [...]
Desperate to obstruct the closest chance we've got to real health care reform, rumor has it that the Senate Finance Committee is considering a uniquely third world-America model of care to replace a public health insurance plan option. It works like this: if you don't have coverage - or even [...]
Politico does its level best to keep the latest crazy zombie health care lie alive. Here are the facts:
Myth vs. Fact: Advance Planning Consultations in H.R. 3200
Few areas are more vital for honest discussion and careful consideration than end-of-life care for America’s seniors. Unfortunately, families often do [...]
My son just got his first paycheck. He paid $8.37 into Social Security and $1.97 into Medicare. I asked him how he felt to pay into Social Security for the first time. "Cheated!" he said. He was kidding. He's a good boy and I'm very proud of my working [...]
I hate to say the same things over and over again but I often don't have much choice: Obama isn't all that different from Bush and it isn't just civil rights or his obeisance to Wall Street. Sarah Posner writes in The Nation that he has just appointed Alexia Kelley, [...]
I wasn't going to weigh in on this idiocy because I expected it would fly South as soon as something more interesting came along, like Sarah's new shotgun. But then it turned ugly. Obama felt it necessary to apologize after Sgt Crowley did some standard cop-whining about how he just didn't [...]
Joe Conason has been doing some homework on the Blue Dogs cheerfully helping Republicans obstruct any sort of health care, even health care that won't actually work, and he's beginning to wonder if we shouldn't quit calling them Blue Dog Democrats and start calling them Pork Barrel Democrats. Seems [...]
Apparently the Bush Administration disconnected all the laws on truth-in-advertising because the insurance industry is lying its bloody ass off in its anti-govt-healthcare commercials. I was at the laudromat yesterday and saw a commercial - replayed several times over the next hour on CNN - in which some Canadian woman [...]
Everything old is new again. You just switch the con to a new angle and rip off the same people you made $millions$ ripping off last year. No prob, Bob.
From the ninth floor of a downtown office building on Wilshire Boulevard, Jack Soussana delivered staggering numbers of [...]
Also known as “innocence” or “prolonged ignorance”, it is often encased in infantilism.
Shortly after the First World War, John Dos Passos declared in his seminal novel 1919 “the death of innocence in America”. It became a catchphrase, the summation of America’s sudden blasted knowledge of a world – [...]
The Robert Rubin Plan to save banks has apparently been whittled down. We taxpayers have only saved two, maybe three investment banks, and the ex-Goldman honchos who surround Obama made sure their old bosses were at the top of the heap.
A new order is emerging on Wall Street after [...]
Now why didn't we think of that? Having the losers in a controversial if hardly brainbending case hauled in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee to whine about losing a case in appellate court that they later won in the Supreme Court.
Frank Ricci, the white firefighter who recently won [...]
