Amazing to see the name of Mike Huckabee in Frank Schaeffer's piece in this context this week:
George Grant is one of the far right/theocratic mentors. He appeared with Rushdoony in the video, Gods Law and Society. Grant was the co-author for Huckabees 1998 book, Kids Who Kill: Confronting Our [...]
Today Digby wrote:
Perhaps the Church should just concentrate on doing good works for a while and not concern itself with others' moral failings until it gets itself institutionally straight.
But doing good works doesn't seem to be on the agenda for the Catholic Church these days. They seem to be [...]
I've been reading a remarkable book, An Unexpected Light, about Afghanistan which I plan to review here soon. Today I wanted to share one passage in which Jason Elliot recounts how a drunk Frenchman sees Afghans (pp 440-1 in the paperback edition).
[The young drunk Frenchman] asked how I would' [...]
Dave Johnson makes a very smart case for taxing the rich. As he said, in the hey-day of steep taxes on the rich, America did a much better job of living up to its billing as a land of opportunity for all and everyone was better off then.
While [...]
China rising. Having China's economy grow should be good, yet, when it comes home, as Krugman says, there are some things to worry about.
So picture this: month after month of headlines juxtaposing soaring U.S. trade deficits and Chinese trade surpluses with the suffering of unemployed American workers. If [...]
In Portland Oregon, Habitat for Humanity homes are built to be Platium-LEED certified. So who says we can't make a difference on Global Warming because it will cost too much?
' [...]Last night, NOW discussed Denmark and the culture of energy thrift that has transformed their country and economy. One way that Denmark is ahead of the curve is in acting on Shai Agassi's idea which makes electric cars a no-brainer.
In this TED video Agassi explains how he [...]
Via Paul Krugman comes this gem from Daniel Gross:
In evaluating the relative claims of the pessimists and the optimists, you also have to evaluate the messengers. And in this instance, the Fergusonians lack credibility. H.L. Mencken tagged the Puritans as people possessed of the "haunting fear that someone," [...]
Steve Benen points to the following.
"In a move expected to cause confusion within Anglican and Catholic parishes alike, the Vatican on Tuesday announced it would make it easier for Anglicans uncomfortable with the Church of England's acceptance of women priests and openly gay bishops to join the Catholic" [...]
Levitt and Dubner @ Superfreakonomics are abit taken aback at the reaction they've gotten with their new book. However, statements like this show that they certainly have no clue about the science or economics of energy.
p. 187: Claim that "coal is so cheap that trying to generate'" [...]
Making rapid progress in addressing the challenge from global climate change is difficult because so many people don't understand the problem and don't think it is necessary to change their lives to help solve the problem. Because the danger is so amorphous, people judge the problem based on the level [...]
Tonight Max Blumenthal spoke at Powell's in Portland, Oregon about his new book, Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party. This is an important book covering the history of the political movement of the religious right, the major players in it and their culture [...]
[Here is the case for universal health insurance which I wrote for the Commonweal Institute. A shorter version was originally published in the San Francisco Chronicle.]
One hears: Why should I have to pay for healthcare for people who dont take care of themselves? Many complaints about extending healthcare [...]
Kevin Drum summarizes Conservative plans for fixing healthcare by four conservatives written for the LA Times. Since Senator (Dr) Frist believes the problem can be solved by employers offering wellness programs, one wonders what he would do if he had to go back to the real world to make [...]
Living on Earth had a beautiful definition of the Commons by writer Donna Seaman:
SEAMAN: Commons. A common, or commons, is land that belongs to an entire community. More specifically, it is open land held in common by the people of a town for shared pasturage or the gathering of [...]
Senator Ted Kennedy's death is a tremendous loss to our country and the Senate. And while he was a passionate liberal fighter, he was also a kind, generous and gracious soul capable of forging bonds across ideological boundaries because he was so decent and always willing to see the [...]
The latest C Street expose comes from The World, a Christian Right magazine, with some strong questions for "the family" which believes that somehow God has a special message for the politically powerful elite concerning God's will while actually teaching "muddy theology" and where the word "Christian is taboo." [...]
I've been actively birding for almost 20 years, with most of that on the west coast. I've been fortunate to have observed almost all the shorebird species that frequent the Pacific coast. Yet one semi-common western shorebird eluded me.
For over 12 years, I've been searching for the Wandering Tattler.' [...]
Batacchio has put together a great field guide for the most famous birds that make up the political scene. Definitely a must read.
[...][Here is my argument which I wrote for the Commonweal Institute on why we must have health care insurance reform.]
Today, many of us know someone who has no health insurance and we worry about what would happen if they got seriously sick. Early last year a friend was diagnosed [...]
In Sunday's NY Times Paul Krugman notes that Rational Market theory was still being taught despite the recent lessons that show it has failed.
Fox points out that academic belief in the perfection of financial markets survived the 1987 stock market crash and the bursting of the Internet bubble.' [...]
When you see incitements to mob violence, how far are you from out-right fascism? Sara Robinson, using Paxton's authoritative studies that laid out the definition of fascism, says the signs of an aggrieved elite promoting thuggery at Congressional town halls puts the US mighty close to the edge. And [...]
A number of very smart people have pointed out that Ross Douhat is all wet when it comes to marshaling an argument that Conservative policies are better than Liberal policies by comparing the economic travails of California and Texas. Douhat's thesis was that California's propensity to [...]
A number of very smart people have pointed out that Ross Douthat is all wet when it comes to marshaling an argument that Conservative policies are better than Liberal policies by comparing the economic travails of California and Texas. Douthat's thesis was that California's propensity to [...]
I'm glad that Digby weighed in on the Gates arrest for "disrespecting" a police officer. I had the same reaction that she did when she read the analysis by police officer who posted on this topic on Crooked Timber.
And I wondered what Dr. Joseph McNamara would' [...]
Newsweek has a piece about Joseph Stiglitz, one of the world's preeminent Nobel Prize economists who doesn't believe Obama has done enough. Stiglitz was one of the early critics that the size of the economic stimulus package was too small and now days it is apparent that he and' [...]
This weekend I am thrilled to ba a guest at Natasha and Chris's wedding. What a wonderful couple and it is so great to get to see Natasha so happy.
[...]NPR had a tremendously important program today about a major contributor to why California's budget problems are so dire.
It's not just Proposition 13. And it's not just the dysfunctional state government. One of the biggest problems in California is the overcrowded prisons that eat more than $10 billion each [...]
The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30cPaul Krugmanwww.colbertnation.comColbert Report Full EpisodesPolitical HumorJeff Goldblum
[...]Well, it seems like Matt Taibbi's piece about Goldman Sachs is stirring up a *lot* of dust. (BTW: Full article is finally online here.)
Eliot Spitzer thought Taibbi's piece was quite good and raised the right questions about whether Goldman's good fortune means good news for the regular [...]
TPMMuckraker asks Was Bush Kept In The Dark On DOJ Concerns About Surveillance?
One passage on the IGs report on surveillance suggests something that perhaps shouldn't come as a surprise -- that President Bush was kept in the dark by members of the White House staff about about serious' [...]
So one thing I want to remind our on-the-fence Democratic Senators who are worried that their constituents would be unhappy if they vote for a workable healthcare plan this year: in 1994 Switzerland passed a healthcare referendum by a very narrow margin (less than 1%). By 2008, even those [...]
Corporate Knights recently hosted Dr. James Lovelock speaking on his latest book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia. Here's the first segment of that talk.
He says the IPPC document is by far the scariest document ever written because it isn't just what we are doing to the earth that [...]
Will Hutton of The Guardian has an interesting interview with Dr. Krugman about the current state of the global economy and his fear that the world could face stagnation. One thing that comes back to me again and again when reading Krugman's analysis, is how we are truly in [...]
... by Walter Brasch
Within a month of 9/11, millions of Americans bought American flags. Small flags they flew from their cars, trucks, and bicycles. Medium-sized flags they planted in their front yards, put onto their home windows, and flew from recently-installed metal poles on doors and porches. Large flags they [...]
What's this story which Marcy writes about today have in common with this story which I wrote about in April? Funny how whenever Dead-eye Dick wants to make sure someone else take the fall for his torture policy, he seems to get his story out through [...]
Guantanamo has been the site of long running hunger strikes for many prisoners who think only death will provide them escape from the camp. Today, one of the hunger strikers found a way to leave the camp forever when he was found dead in his cell of an [...]
Tuesday at 8pm PDT, KQED will be broadcasting a fascinating discussion where Mark Danner interviews Elizabeth Farnsworth about her documentary, "The Judge and the General," which explores the investigation of Augusto Pinochet's torture state.
Mark Danner and Elizabeth Farnsworth -- In 1998, Judge Juan Guzman was [...]
Some of the more interesting thinkers are those who refuse to restrict their focus to narrow specializations and are able to synthesize widely disparate disciplines into a well-reasoned and credible analysis. A few of my favorite public intellectuals who display this trait in spades have recently been in the news: [...]
Expert interrogators know that torture is not an effective method to get reliable information. What does work? Here's how the pros handle getting reliable and actionable information.
Jack Cloonan was a special agent assigned to the FBI Osama bin Laden unit from 1996 to 2002. He was the fellow called' [...]
Marcy has a great takedown of the latest WaPo attempt to manufacture controversy by ignoring facts about what is actually known about the briefings. Reading it, I was struck by something else in this piece and what that says about an amnesiac and credulous press.
How should we take these [...]
Bucking the trend to ever larger houses, Dee Williams has built a house that has a very small footprint.
Via LivingOnEarth
[...]This week Bill Moyers talked with Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, about his new book, Ecological Intelligence.
Bill Moyers introduced the segment by describing the brilliant piece, The Story of Stuff, by Annie Leonard that describes the impact on the environment from the stuff we [...]
One of the Bush desaparecidos has been reportedly found dead of a suicide in a Libyan prison.
Awfully convenient that it was the one detainee that caused so much angst for the Bush administration that they effectively "disappeared" him even as they decided to [...]
Sara Robinson has a couple of very interesting posts that delve into the major differences between conservative and liberal philosophies. The first post goes into how differently conservatives and liberals view discipline, accountability, responsibility and punishment.
Thirty years of conservative misrule have muddled Americans' understanding of words like responsibility,' [...]
How do pesticides affect our lives? New studies show that exposure at conception and birth can not only cause diseases that show up in adults, but also can cause changes that affect subsequent generations even when there is no further exposure.
Amazing how many experiments our era has enacted [...]
Slate's Dahlia Lithwick asks whether just getting over it is the right answer when the subject is torture.
Indeed.
One article that was burned into my brain as the Bush administration was embedding torture as a matter of bureaucracy and routine was this one by Vladimir Bukovsky. As [...]
This is amazing.
[...]Sometimes it is very hard to remember what the world was like just a few years ago before we had the WWW, cell phones, automated tellers or debit cards. Today, a major outage of the fiber optic cables that serve as our core technical infrastructure in the south San [...]
Thursday, Terry Gross interviewed Robert Martensen, emergency room doctor, bioethicist and author of the newly published A Life Worth Living: a Doctor's Reflections on Illness in a High-Tech Era.
It was an incredible and deeply personal interview with a man who has long thought about our country's obsession with [...]
Thursday, Terry Gross interviewed Dr. Michael Grodin about his work in providing therapy for people who have been been badly traumatized in their lives. He works with Tibetan monks who had been tortured and has also worked with Holocaust survivors. What he says is that the traumas these victims [...]
When humans face major system breakdowns, the instinctive response is to try to mend (jury-rig) the system so it will start running again. Yet, sometimes the failure points out a major flaw in the system requiring changes that completely undermine the status quo and force a re-formulation of the underlying [...]
On the global warming front, some really bad news and some good news.
Bad news first: Sea levels are rising twice as fast as had been thought (via)
As evidence mounts, it is clear the uncertainly in the 2007 IPCC report meant the report was much too optimistic. Those [...]
Our changing world:
Blue collar workers have watched their jobs and financial security slip away for several decades. In today's economy, college educated workers are seeing the same forces hit their lives.
Having a college education doesn't prevent older workers from facing a significant risk of experiencing a downsizing of their' [...]
Satyajit Das, the world's leading expert on credit derivatives, has a blog that is worth checking out.
Here's his review of The Age of Aging: How Demographics are Changing the Global Economy and Our World
George Magnus (2009) The Age of Aging: How Demographics are Changing the Global' [...]
Well, Brent Wilkes old friend, Dusty Foggo, formerly number the in the CIA, has been sentenced to 37 months for steering contracts to Brent who was convicted of bribing Duke Cunningham.
Just a bit over 3 years for Dusty. Wonder what Brent Wilkes or the Dukester think of the [...]
William Saletan talks about how Obama wants to end the culture wars and is working to bring some practical morality to the table. What Saletin believes is that the left just needs to admit that abortions are caused by unplanned pregnancies due not to unavailable contraception, but because people [...]
Some years ago I was in the Yucatan for a holiday in late February around the time the East Coast students had arrived for Spring break. My friend and I skipped out of Cancun as fast as we could get away and took off for Playa del Carman using the [...]
What has been California's secret for achieving decades of increased energy efficiency? It's a policy known as decoupling where the energy companies share in the savings achieved by helping their customers save energy.
It seems like such an incredibly smart thing to do: align the interests of the energy [...]
This story is just horrible.
It is a story of greed in a country which glories in its tough-on-crime stance and where mercy and tolerance are eschewed. If as a nation we had a sensible policy on crime, I cannot see how this type of injustice could have been tolerated [...]
My goodness, Republicans have a strange sense of history.
First there was Steve Austria (R-OH) who declared FDR caused the depression because he sponsored fiscal spending in 1933. Austria missed the fact that the spending FDR started was in response to a historic depression that started in 1929.
Then [...]
Steve Benin on Newt Gingrich and his hold on the Republican imagination.
Why they ever let a brilliant mind like this go is a mystery to me.
What a remarkably good question.
[...]I might have missed this incredible exclusive by Michael Bérubé as he interviewed the new Republican head of the RNC if he hadn't left me a comment. I sure don't want you to miss it because it effectively shows how the Republicans plan to beat Obama and the Democrats. [...]
John Cole wrote a great piece, We Are All Somerby Now, about how awful the DC media machine is today. The Villagers obviously don't give a sh*t about this country - they'd rather be part of the cool kids, and Drudge is so much more fun than those boring [...]
Paul Krugman noted that this comment to Brad's post didn't go far enough in expressing the backwardness of the wrong-way economists.
Astrophysicists might disagree on string theory, they don't argue that the universe doenn't exist...
What Fama and others do is willfully forget Keynes central insight: a money economy is' [...]
Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong are aghast at the incoherent reasons the economists from the Chicago School of Economics give for being against a stimulus package all because they are convinced that Keynes was proven wrong. Brad even brings up the point the Milton Friedman accepted the use [...]
Tonight I was listening to Robert Reich on KQED and was delighted to hear him use the phrase "...nascent, inchoate administration..." to describe the Obama administration. What a wonderful and complex vocabulary he has to use such words in his spontaneous discussions. These are words that are so rarely [...]
The Prius has long been praised as an excellent car, having won the Car of the Year in 2004 for it's hybrid technology, ultra-low greenhouse gas emissions and comfortable ride. However, it turns out the Prius can be used as an emergency backup generator when the power [...]
One area of consensus for economists is the belief that things are going to get a lot worse before they get better. As John Mauldin points out in his news letter, a number of economic factors are working together that need to change before we will see any improvement:
Overcapacity, [...]
Wired's DangerRoom blog has been following a strange and somewhat spooky story for that past few months. In September 2007, they posted an item about how in search of better tactics for conducting an insurgency, the military was turning to social scientists for conducting field research in Afghanistan and [...]
Many financial articles discussing the financial crisis mention Hyman P. Minsky, an economist from a quarter of a century ago, and his insight into asset bubbles. When he wrote his observations and conclusions about the types of problems that could arise from financial deregulation, just as the Chicago boys [...]
Today I found a well-written paper titled Introduction to Chaos Theory, which explained why people use the analogy of a butterfly's wing flapping to explain the unpredictability of weather. When Edward Lorenz went back to rerun a test, the difference in the starting point for his second sequence was [...]
TPM highlights a report by Vanity Fair that Bush aides believe Katrina was the nail in the coffin of Bush's ability to connect to the American public. No kidding. After all, Katrina was truly the topping on the cake of a year where Bush proved for once and all [...]
One of the more insightful books I read was The Authoritarians by Robert Altemeyer. I first found out about his incredible studies on authoritarian personalities reading John Dean's Conservatives without Conscience. Then in 2007, Dr. Altemeyer provided a very readable and accessible online book which synopsized his studies [...]
Rachel Maddow asks whether the Rick Warren choice is The Wrong Choice.
Other problems with Pastor Rick can be found in Katha Pollit's column in the LA Times.
And Bruce Wilson provides more context on who exactly Warren has been promoting. Bruce noted that the Archbishop of Nigeria, Peter [...]
Heading to Portland tomorrow night, if the flights don't get canceled. And this is what I'm heading into.
And in Santa Cruz yesterday the high was close to 60 degrees.
No doubt I've become a [...]
During the Bush years, many people found themselves compromised by his legal and immoral policies. They found themselves having to pick between their job and security over their sense of honor and their promise to uphold the Constitution. Here's one more sad story of the whistleblower who exposed the [...]
Wow: incredibly good news today: President-elect Obama expected to select Nobel physicist Steven Chu as Energy secretary
ThinkProgress has a video clip of one of his talks and this guy really gets it. He even used one of my favorite points which is illustrated here:
Note [...]
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This week Bill Moyers brought back Mark Johnson to discuss his incredible documentary and project called Playing for Change. Johnson's vision and dream is to use music to bind the world in beauty. This Moyers' episode contains shots from Johnson's movie [...]
Garry Wills is a Catholic intellectual who has long disagreed with the Roman hierarchy. He succinctly names the problem lots of Catholics have with the pope and his attitude to the human condition.
Reading Bare Ruined Choirs today, it can be difficult to understand how anyone felt blindsided by [...]
Dave Johnson has a very important post about the state of California's democracy. In the last election, a vote that consisted of small fraction of voters over 50% voted to deny gays the human right to create a family. Yet, to pass a funding or tax law, the state [...]
Mitch Wade is one of the people charged with bribing former Representative Duke Cunningham to the tune of $1.8M.
Now years after Cunningham's fall, Wade is coming before the judge to receive his sentence for corrupting a sitting Congressman. Wade is looking for clemency because he's been very cooperative [...]
