Politics
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I t’s a very strange experience to have your friends think you’ve gone crazy. Some will tell you so. Others will indulgently humor you.
David Frum on the GOP’s Lost Sense of Reality
Generation gap: Seniors, Millennials at sharp odds in 2012 election
YORK, Penn. – At age 74, Jack Ireton-Hewitt is volunteering in his first campaign, walking door to door and manning an information booth at a county fair to help elect Republican Mitt Romney president. But the retired manufacturing executive has failed to persuade two targets close to home: His granddaughters, ages 19 and 21. The first-time voters back President Obama . That much-debated gender gap?A former hotel housekeeper, Ms. Applewhite, who never had a driver’s license, was suddenly without a Social Security card.
Tougher Voter ID Laws Set Off Court Battles
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Business Insider
IT'S OFFICIAL: Keynes Was Right by Henry Blodget on Dec 17, 2011, 10:20 AM Advertisement
Ron Paul Article
The two axial principles of our age—tribalism and globalism—clash at every point except one: they may both be threatening to democracy Just beyond the horizon of current events lie two possible political futures—both bleak, neither democratic. The first is a retribalization of large swaths of humankind by war and bloodshed: a threatened Lebanonization of national states in which culture is pitted against culture, people against people, tribe against tribe—a Jihad in the name of a hundred narrowly conceived faiths against every kind of interdependence, every kind of artificial social cooperation and civic mutuality.
Jihad vs. McWorld - Magazine
Part of the reason economic policymakers have failed to properly address the poor economy is because the nation’s news media has not properly covered the unemployment crisis. For example, at the beginning of August, when Washington, DC was debating the debt ceiling crisis, the national debt dominated the airwaves . While it was appropriate for the media then to be covering the deficit due to the debt ceiling debate at the time, there was a stunning lack of coverage of the jobs crisis. A ThinkProgress review of the media coverage of the last week of July found that the word “debt” was mentioned more than 7,000 times on MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News, and “unemployed” was only mentioned 75 times: Yet now, things have changed.
Thanks to the 99 Percent Movement, Media Finally Covering Jobs Crisis and Marginalizing Deficit Hysteria | Truthout
As the medical condition of Marine Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen appears to have improved , he is becoming the Neda Agha-Soltan - the martyr of the Iranian Green Revolution - of the "Occupy" struggle for economic justice. What occurred this week in Oakland - including the wounding of Olsen - shouldn't have happened. In June of 2004, the Oakland Police Department reached an agreement to refrain from using the kind of bloody and militarized tactics that they employed earlier this week. According to a November 2004 San Francisco Chronicle article :
Oakland Police Violated 2004 Agreement Limiting Use of Militarized Weapons to Disperse Crowds
November 3, 2011 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. In the gorgeous, purple-and-green-lit Lower East Side headquarters of the Angel Orensanz Foundation, nearly 300 techies, activists and thinkers gathered, shouting out ideas for social justice-minded Web projects that they would break into small groups to attempt to hash out in a day. A man in a plaid shirt stood up and told the moderator and the crowd, “I want to create a tool for organizing debt strikes.”
Debtor's Revolution: Are Debt Strikes Another Possible Tactic in the Fight Against the Big Banks?
Income Inequality Is Hobbling the Middle Class
October 25, 2011 I ncome inequality in the U.S. has been rising for the last several decades, and with it concern about the consequences. For example, to what extent does the large flow of income into the hands of financial executives give them the power to influence Congress through campaign donations? How does this have an impact on the willingness of legislators to impose regulations that would stabilize the financial system but inhibit the ability of the financial industry to make the huge profits that fund political campaigns?
Take the flat tax plan of Gov. Rick Perry of Texas. For all his talk about how it would make filing easier — that is dubious — what it would really do is give high-income Americans a big tax break, while almost everyone else could expect relatively modest tax savings or none at all. In his plan, taxpayers could choose to stick with the current system or use the flat tax, under which wages and salary would be taxed at 20 percent, versus a current top rate of 35 percent for the affluent. Investment income and multimillion-dollar estates would be untaxed, versus a current top rate of 15 percent on most investments and 35 percent on estates.
Flat Taxes and Angry Voters
REading list
Dear Internet: It's No Longer OK to Not Know How Congress Works Dec 19, 2011 Clay Johnson This weekend I read a post titled " Dear Congress: It Is No Longer OK To Not Know How the Internet Works ." The author, Joshua Kopstein, is right: it's not ok to not know about something before legislating or regulating it. The confessions by members of Congress that they are " not nerds " is frustrating at best because these guys, the guys that are regulating the Internet can't tell a server from a waiter. And so a post is born, sympathetically climbing the charts at Reddit and HackerNews, telling Congress to get a clue.
Dear Internet: It's No Longer OK to Not Know How Congress Works
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