Much of the economic policy discussion over the next few months will be about how to stop the bleeding in the financial sector, and then, how to prevent it from happening again. Understandably so. Paul Krugman is not alone, however,...
Lots of distinguished names on this list of signatories endorsing the Employee Free Choice Act (scroll down below the article for the full list). Notable for their absence are Krugman and Stiglitz--perhaps a fellow denizen knows the stories there. ...
I'd like to see this book get as widespread attention as possible. It is an engagingly reported look at working conditions in the south China industrial factories, which appears to be balanced and should help to ground discussion about our and other countries' policies...
Some good comments in the book club discussion this week on Andrew Bacevich's book, both by invited contributors and cafe denizens. It could be so much better if Michael Klare, Bacevich, and others would engage with us riffraff. Evidently they can't...
Oversimplifying somewhat, there are two basic reasons for the White House and the Democratic Congressional leadership to be open to accepting ideas/requests for changes from individual or groups of Congressional Republicans to a bill they are trying to move....
At the cafe we are fortunate enough to be able to read Dean Baker regularly. But if you are looking for a nice summary, for others as well as yourself, of his explanations of the stock market and housing bubble bursts, and how...
What I'm hearing is Bonior declines when people push him, saying it's time for a younger generation to lead the labor movement charge for the feds. He has reportedly been pushing Mary Beth Maxwell, about whom I know very little. ...
Overheard in downtown DC this morning: "They should just put Obama's likeness on the dollar bill and get it over with." (spoken during a conversation in which the ubiquitous presence of his likeness these days was alluded to.) ...
There were <a href="http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenote/2008/12/the-note-120508.html">rumors</a> floating around earlier today that Caroline Kennedy might be selected to replace Hillary Clinton as New York's next Senator. I am among the many who have a really high opinion of Caroline Kennedy and would be delighted...
I won’t try to paraphrase this Lithub excellent essay by Rebecca Solnit.
This is just one example in the well-wriiten look at how things have changed on the empathy train:
...PBS News Hour featured a quiz by Charles Murray in March that asked “Do You Live in a Bubble?” The questions assumed that if you didn’t know people who drank cheap beer and drove pick-up trucks and worked in factories you lived in an elitist bubble. Among the questions: “Have you ever lived for at least a year in an American community with a population under 50,000 that is not part of a metropolitan area and is not where you went to college? Have you ever walked on a factory floor? Have you ever had a close friend who was an evangelical Christian?”
In a sublime case of poetic justice, the so-called Tax Cut and Jobs Act is backfiring on the Republicans big time. Most voters are unimpressed, and Republicans themselves are ceasing to emphasize it in their campaign material.
Fox News host who said Trump’s fixer ‘knows real estate’ has a portfolio that includes support from Department of Housing and Urban Development, a fact he did not mention when interviewing secretary Ben Carson last year
[....] Hannity’s chosen investment strategy is confirmed by thousands of pages of public records reviewed by the Guardian, which detail a real estate portfolio of remarkable scale that has not previously been reported.
In East New York, Brooklyn, a police observation tower still hovers over the intersection where a 16-year-old boy was gunned down on his way home from playing basketball last November.
They are interviewing him (James Shaw, Jr.) on CNN TV right now, he is a really soft-spoken, polite, humble guy; impressive "young black male," that the Nashville police have already labeled a "hero"no holds barred. By the way, the shooter was clearly white.
Home page lede: Theresa “Red” Terry is trying to stop a natural gas pipeline from coming through Virginia land granted to her husband’s family by the king of England in colonial times. For three weeks, she has endured rain, snow, hail, high winds and nighttime temperatures in the 20s. As the stalemate drags on, “I stand with Red” has become a rallying cry for opponents of the 300-mile, $3.5 billion Mountain Valley Pipeline.
But what Comey’s actions and book reveal is a tendency toward a corrupting belief that his “higher loyalty”—which lifted him above partisan politics—somehow bestowed upon him the right to take actions that were well beyond his role as FBI director. It’s a very dangerous attitude, and one that resulted in him taking unprecedented actions in the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, with devastating consequences.
Verdejo still believes Sanders’s core message about economic inequality is important, but it doesn’t capture the racial complexities of the America that he and other people of color live in — especially in the wake of police shooting after police shooting and recent news about two young black men arrested at a Philadelphia Starbucks simply for asking to use the bathroom of without ordering anything first.
If he runs again in 2020, it won't be the same as 2016 - count on it.
By Friday evening, when the American cruise missiles actually started flying, the vaunted attack had been reduced to a single predawn volley against three Syrian government chemical-weapons facilities, carefully chosen to avoid hitting known Russian or Iranian bases and thus escalating a war from which Trump himself had recently demanded an exit. The strike was bigger than last year’s, but hardly the sustained response with “all instruments of our national power” that the President promised in his televised address announcing the attack.