Tag Archives: politics

September 11, 2010 · 12:08 pm

Paying the Price – NYTimes.com

An excerpt from another great column from Bob Herbert in the New York Times.  Link to full column is at the bottom…

People feel that the country is going to hell, that the system itself has broken down, and President Obama and the Democrats have been unable to assuage that awful feeling. The White House and Democratic Congressional leaders can point to a long string of legislative accomplishments — passage of a health insurance overhaul, financial reform, a stimulus package that may have been misshapen and too small but nevertheless helped stave off a worse economic disaster, and so on.

But voters do not feel that the administration and Congress have delivered the fundamental change they were seeking when they swept President Obama and huge Democratic majorities into office nearly two years ago. Forget about the crazies in the Tea Party for the moment. Forget about the ugly Republican obstructionism that is based on the idea that the failure not just of President Obama but of American society itself is the G.O.P.’s quickest ticket back to power.

Forget about that for a moment. The Democrats are in deep, deep trouble because they have not effectively addressed the overwhelming concern of working men and women: an economy that is too weak to provide the jobs they need to support themselves and their families. And that failure is rooted in the Democrats’ continued fascination with the self-serving conservative belief that the way to help ordinary people is to shower money on the rich and wait for the blessings to trickle down to the great unwashed below.

It was a bogus concept when George H.W. Bush denounced it as “voodoo economics” in 1980, and it remains bogus today, no matter how hard the Democrats try to dress it up in a donkey costume.

via Op-Ed Columnist – Paying the Price – NYTimes.com.

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July 11, 2010 · 5:20 pm

Why is “To Kill a Mockingbird” Being Attacked?

This is an intriguing article by Jesse Kornbluth on the Huffington Post…Here is an excerpt with the link to the full article at the bottom:

I never thought I’d see the day when the lawyer who argued Brown v. Topeka Board of Education before the Supreme Court and went on to be the first African-American to sit on that Court would have his career reduced to that most dreaded of all contemporary labels: “activist.”

I never thought I’d see the day when you can legally carry concealed weapons into airports and bars and — my sweet Lord! — churches.

I never thought I’d see the day when allegedly smart adults would tell me that America’s poor were so powerful that, given the chance to own real estate, they bought so many houses they couldn’t afford that they tanked the economy of almost every country in the world.

But then I never thought I’d see the day when “To Kill A Mockingbird” — a novel that has inspired readers for half a century — would be derided as a book about “the limitations of liberalism” (by Malcolm Gladwell, no less, in The New Yorker, of all places) and “a sugar-coated myth of Alabama’s past” with a hero who’s “a repository of cracker-barrel epigrams” (by Allen Barra, in the Wall Street Journal)

But as we approach July 11th — the 50th anniversary of the publication of “To Kill a Mockingbird” (to buy the paperback from Amazon, click here; shamefully, there is no Kindle edition) — it’s probably not surprising that we’re seeing one of America’s best-loved books criticized for its “politics.”

via Jesse Kornbluth: ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ Anniversary: On Its 50th Birthday, Why Is ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ Being Attacked? (VIDEO).

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July 5, 2010 · 11:09 am

Punishing the Unemployed – NYTimes.com

The latest from Paul Krugman about how our “leaders” in Washington are failing to do their job to help the long-term unemployed.  They seem to forget these folks are unemployed and still can’t get a job  as a result of the Republican mismanagement of the economy and the GOP lead  deregulation of the financial markets that led to the financial crisis causing all this pain.

Here is a sample:

There was a time when everyone took it for granted that unemployment insurance, which normally terminates after 26 weeks, would be extended in times of persistent joblessness. It was, most people agreed, the decent thing to do.

But that was then. Today, American workers face the worst job market since the Great Depression, with five job seekers for every job opening, with the average spell of unemployment now at 35 weeks. Yet the Senate went home for the holiday weekend without extending benefits. How was that possible?

The answer is that we’re facing a coalition of the heartless, the clueless and the confused. Nothing can be done about the first group, and probably not much about the second. But maybe it’s possible to clear up some of the confusion.

By the heartless, I mean Republicans who have made the cynical calculation that blocking anything President Obama tries to do — including, or perhaps especially, anything that might alleviate the nation’s economic pain — improves their chances in the midterm elections. Don’t pretend to be shocked: you know they’re out there, and make up a large share of the G.O.P. caucus.

By the clueless I mean people like Sharron Angle, the Republican candidate for senator from Nevada, who has repeatedly insisted that the unemployed are deliberately choosing to stay jobless, so that they can keep collecting benefits. A sample remark: “You can make more money on unemployment than you can going down and getting one of those jobs that is an honest job but it doesn’t pay as much. We’ve put in so much entitlement into our government that we really have spoiled our citizenry.”

Now, I don’t have the impression that unemployed Americans are spoiled; desperate seems more like it. One doubts, however, that any amount of evidence could change Ms. Angle’s view of the world — and there are, unfortunately, a lot of people in our political class just like her

Here is the link to the full column:

Op-Ed Columnist – Punishing the Unemployed – NYTimes.com.

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July 3, 2010 · 9:33 pm

Robert Reich: Slouching Towards a Double-Dip or a Lousy Recovery at Best

More and more people I respect are sounding the alarm. But no one in Washington is listening…

It greatly disturbs me that no one calls out the Republicans on all this…Their policies caused the financial meltdown and they have done everything possible not to support the people they hurt and to hold back the Recovery for crass political reasons.  And the Democrats- especially the Blue Dogs- haven’t exactly done a great job standing up to them.

I can’t recall ever seeing such a failure of leadership on all sides.

Here is  another article on this subject, this time from Robert Reich, who says:

The people who are suffering the most from the failure of public officials and the greed of large bankers are the least able to endure it. Unemployment among people with four-year college degrees is barely over 5 percent; among high-school dropouts it’s over 25 percent. Those who have been jobless the longest or who have left the labor force altogether are men over fifty who are least likely to get back in. Families most in need are losing the services – state-supported Medicaid, child dental care, after-school programs for the kids, public transit – they most depend on.

And sadly, the people mentioned above still vote for Republicans.

Secretary Reich continues:

The irony is that had there been no bank bailout in 2008 and 2009, no large stimulus, and no extraordinary efforts by the Fed to pump trillions of dollars into the economy, we’d have had another Great Depression. And because it would have sucked almost everyone down with it, the nation would have demanded from politicians larger and more fundamental reforms that might well have lifted everyone, and set America and the world on a more sustainable path toward growth and shared prosperity: A stimulus that financed the rebuilding of the nation’s infrastructure and alternative energies, single-payer health care, a cap on the size of big banks and resurrection of Glass-Steagall, earnings insurance, an Earned Income Tax Credit that extended into the middle class, and a truly progressive tax coupled with a price on carbon to pay for all of this over the long term.

Link to full article:

Robert Reich: Slouching Towards a Double-Dip or a Lousy Recovery at Best.

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July 1, 2010 · 10:34 pm

Professors rank President Obama 15th Best President, George Bush Ranked One of 5 Worst

I know this is going to raise the blood pressure of some of my friends and family…

Interesting article.  While Obama has not done as much as some of us would like, we sometimes forget that he has accomplished an awful lot in a short period of time…and came into quite the mess to clean up from the Bushies…

In the overall ranking, Obama rated two places below Clinton, who was 13th best, and three better than Reagan, who is ranked as the 18th best.

Franklin D. Roosevelt again earned the top spot, as he has every time since the poll was first conducted in 1982. He and the Mount Rushmore presidents — Teddy Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson — have consistently been the top five presidents in the poll’s findings.

Obama’s 15th ranking is slightly higher than other presidents who have taken office since the poll started nearly 30 years ago. Most start out at about number 20, said Siena statistics professor and poll director Douglas Lonnstrom.

“[Obama’s] doing a little better, but he’s generally in the same ballpark,” he said.

While he ranked high on traits like imagination (6th), communication ability (7th) and intelligence (8th), Obama rated poorly ratings on background (32nd), which was composed of traits like family, education and experience.

Lonnstrom said the main factor that gives a president a top-five or top-10 ranking is his accomplishments — and an all-around high ranking in most categories.

FDR, for example, ranks in the top 10 for every category except integrity, he said.

“The experts really are looking for consistency, a president who is looking good across most of these categories,” he said.

Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, was ranked at number 23 in 2002 — the last time Siena’s presidential expert poll was conducted — but has since dropped to number 39, qualifying him as one of the five worst presidents. Bush came in at number 42 — second to last — on issues such as handling the U.S. economy, foreign policy accomplishments and intelligence. (Warren G. Harding was rated the least intelligent president).

Bush joins Harding, Andrew Johnson, James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce, all of whom have consistently ranked as the worst presidents since the poll started, in the bottom five.

via Professors rank President Obama 15th best president – Emily Schultheis – POLITICO.com.

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June 10, 2010 · 11:20 pm

Rare photo of slave children found in NC attic

Thanks to my friend Kirk for sending this to me…link to the entire article is at the bottom.

A haunting 150-year-old photo found in a North Carolina attic shows a young black child named John, barefoot and wearing ragged clothes, perched on a barrel next to another unidentified young boy.

Art historians believe it’s an extremely rare Civil War-era photograph of children who were either slaves at the time or recently emancipated.

The photo, which may have been taken in the early 1860s, was a testament to a dark part of American history, said Will Stapp, a photographic historian and founding curator of the National Portrait Gallery’s photographs department at the Smithsonian Institution.

“It’s a very difficult and poignant piece of American history,” he said. “What you are looking at when you look at this photo are two boys who were victims of that history.”

via Rare photo of slave children found in NC attic – Yahoo! News.

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June 9, 2010 · 11:44 pm

Yesterday, Once More

I’ll take us back to the 1960’s one more time…

I just came across a few snapshots in time.  Some  “time capsule” moments on YouTube.

I keep looking back because I keep wondering where the energy for change has gone.

It’s hard to believe how much times have changed…for the better– since the early 1960’s.  But I never realized how depressing the 1960’s–which I always thought of a as a decade of hope and change– could be…It’s remarkable, given the restrictive society at the time, how much hope was alive then.

I wonder if it still is…

There were so many people afraid of change then– just like now.

Today, the Afghanistan war has just surpassed Vietnam as our longest war.  Bush’s personal vendetta/ war or choice in Iraq is still going on.  Ghetto’s still exist.  The Tea Baggers prove racism is still alive .  The old “Silent Majority”, which isn’t either, is still around.  Post-feminism wants to return women to the kitchen and subservience, while the Men of the Religious Right still try to take away their right to control their own bodies.  I’m almost relieved we haven’t come far enough on Gay Rights to start dismantling them…

I think we need to look back to see “the way we were” to see how far we have come.

Then, maybe, we can gain the courage and the energy to keep moving forward.

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April 22, 2010 · 12:04 am

The Few, The Proud, The Uninformed with Bus Tickets…

I’m so tired of these Tea Party People.  I just can’t respect people who form opinions without facts or contrary to the facts.  Ignorance may be bliss, but it’s also very dangerous.

This is a great  video of the Tea Party crowd’s miniscule protest on Tax Day–when they should be celebrating the fact that taxes are lower on 95% of Americans than they have been in 60 years!  They need to turn off Faux News…and open their minds and ears!

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