Meet the Badass Peshmerga Women
From Samantha Bee at Full Frontal: I have enormous admiration for these fighters and their culture.
Continue reading →Tag Archives: philosophy
Je suis Charlie
via banksy ETA: Original image was created by Lucille Clerc.
Continue reading →The Republican Party’s governing philosophy
Seriously, the Republicans in Congress don’t have one. What drives them is a pure lust for power, and money for their corporate backers. They have no actual ideas about how to grow the economy, how to raise wages, how to improve education, or about what to do for any other problem facing the country. They’ve got nothing. “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” — Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY)
Continue reading →Watch them burn
The most shocking story of the day is up at Think Progress: Tennessee County’s Subscription-Based Firefighters Watch As Family Home Burns Down . Seriously, Obion County has a subscription-based fire department that only covers those who subscribe, rather than the normal sort that is paid out of taxes and covers everyone. So firefighters came to the fire and watched as that family’s home burned to the ground. They hadn’t been paid, so they refused to help. It’s the perfect example of life under a libertarian, big business conservative vision of life, where we have no mutual responsibilities to our community … Continue reading →
Unions and the Tea Party are united on trade
When it comes to free trade treaties, workers in this country are very skeptical. In fact a new NBC/WSJ poll finds that 65% of union members and 61% of Tea Party sympathizers say that free trade has hurt the U.S. I think there are some sectors in the U.S. that have benefited from free trade treaties. Certainly stockholders and CEOs have become fabulously wealthy as they chased cheap labor and poor environmental standards around the globe. But the race to the bottom has hurt U.S. workers, who are now consistently being told that they need to accept the “new reality” … Continue reading →
Stephen Colbert speaks truth to power
I am not a religious person, but I know Colbert is, so I suspect that his study of gospel informed this profound moment in his Congressional testimony on migrant workers last week. Despite our different frames, I found this bit of his statement, when he moved out of character, emotionally deep and true.
Continue reading →Restating the obvious
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. From Anatole France
Continue reading →More on income inequality
Annie Lowrey at the Washington Independent points us to a report on income inequality from the Senate’s Joint Economic Committee. She highlights several graphs and conclusions that show the remarkable way that the wealthy have become even more so over the past decade, while middle class and working incomes have stagnated or declined. The charts are interesting in part because they break out income and tax rates according to the various modern-day Presidential administrations. Here is one example: Even under Clinton you can see that the wealthy increased their share of total income. And in fact, Lowrey notes that according … Continue reading →