About half the states in the US require that a woman seeking an abortion be told certain things before she can obtain the medical procedure. In South Dakota, for example, until a few months ago, staff was required to tell women: “The abortion will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being”; [...]
“I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.” – Rebecca West
March, as many of you know, is Women’s History Month. But today is the 100th International Women’s Day. One of the themes for this year’s International Women’s Day celebration is “equal rights, equal [...]
Obama must now prime the pump to get us out of a multi-pronged mess left over from the Bush crowd and seven years of Republican control. Republicans chose to look the other way and ignore the financial chicanery going on right in front of them, while the income gap between the very wealthy and average [...]
Filed in Essays, News Blurbs
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Also tagged Al Franken, Banking, Capitalism, Debt, Deficit, Financial Sector, Free Market, Jobs, Middle Class, Obstructionism, Reform, Regulation, Republicans, Safety Net, Trickle Down, Unemployment
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Thursday, February 25, 2010
Last week, CNN released a poll showing that 86 percent of Americans believe the U.S. government is “broken.” I admit my first reaction was to wonder subversively, “How would they know?” A contemporaneous Pew survey of the public’s “political news IQ” showed that on one of the most heavily reported issues of 2009-10, only 32 [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged ACLU, Barack Obama, Conservatives, Conspiracy Theories, Constitution, Healthcare, Ignorance, Jerry Falwell, Law, Movements, Oliver North, Reform, Republicans, Rights, Rightwing, Rush Limbaugh, Tea Party
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Wednesday, February 24, 2010
So what’s happening here? How come Republicans who can’t imagine spending money on health care reform are more than willing to spend it on job creation?
The answer is that, for all GOP talk about how Washington has to stop spending, for all the talk about how there is no money to do anything, for all [...]
Sunday, February 21, 2010
“When I see that I owe $160,000 on almost a $350,000 home and somebody decides they want to take it — I wasn’t gonna stand for that so I took it down.” – Terry Hoskins, Moscow, Ohio
Monday, February 15, 2010
There has been widespread public anger against the hubris of the banks, who are regarded as being to blame for the financial crisis. Their bonus policies, which have persisted even after the system has been bailed out by the taxpayer, have been attacked by politicians and the media. But what I can’t understand is why [...]
Monday, February 15, 2010
Can someone shut these banking industry narcissists up?
[..]
The industry’s inability to see, much less admit, any culpability, and hence the need for root and branch reform, is pathological. The reaction of the bank chiefs, at least as depicted by Schwarzman, is utter denial. It’s as if someone who drove his car at 150 miles an [...]
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Despite pleas from nearly two dozen people to ax or postpone action on an ordinance to prohibit camping on public property, the Colorado Springs City Council voted 8-1 Tuesday to approve it.
“Doing nothing is not an option,” Councilwoman Jan Martin said after listening to more than four hours of comments from a parade of homeless [...]
Thursday, February 11, 2010
So why isn’t this called The Great Depression II?
The data, which are for the fourth quarter, come from a new study (.pdf) by Andrew Sum, Ishwar Khatiwada and Sheila Palma at Northeastern University’s Center for Labor Market Studies. The researchers conclude that “what has been missing from the public debate over the labor market crisis [...]
By bailing out the markets, we only subsidized the foolishness that created the disaster in the first place. The incompetents were allowed to keep their jobs. And not only keep their jobs—they reaped huge rewards.
Worse, by playing up the “response to crisis” view of the bail out—think about all of the discussion around Bernanke’s performance—we [...]
From the BLS:
The unemployment rate fell from 10.0 to 9.7 percent in January, and nonfarm payroll employment was essentially unchanged (-20,000), the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment fell in construction and in transportation and warehousing, while temporary help services and retail trade added jobs.
Image via Calculated Risk
This graph shows the job losses [...]
Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm wants to push nearly 40,000 veteran teachers into retirement to eliminate their hefty salaries from the state’s 2011 budget. The plan, introduced to state lawmakers last Friday and discussed in her final State of the State speech yesterday, would save an estimated $230 million a year, but it would also leave students with [...]
The long-run budget outlook is problematic, but short-term deficits aren’t — and even the long-term outlook is much less frightening than the public is being led to believe.
So why the sudden ubiquity of deficit scare stories? It isn’t being driven by any actual news. It has been obvious for at least a year that the [...]
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Let me be clear: Our world has changed, utterly. The old Michigan economy is gone.
Anyone who believed that Michigan would just naturally rebound without making deep and lasting change had a rendezvous with reality in 2009. The year that just ended was a dividing line — the finale of what Time magazine has called the [...]
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