September 2010
“As a matter of simple survival, minorities tend to know more about the dominant...”
– Jamelle Bouie
Obama On Meeting Dylan
“Here’s what I love about Dylan: He was exactly as you’d expect he would be. He wouldn’t come to the rehearsal; usually, all these guys are practicing before the set in the evening. He didn’t want to take a picture with me; usually all the talent is dying to take a picture with me and Michelle before the show, but he didn’t show up to that. He came in and played “The Times They Are...
MC Fallon & Justin Timberlake’s History Of Hip-Hop...
via stereogum.com Very talented to pull this off. Big ups to the Roots. Posted via email from liberalsarecool.com | Comment »
O'Donnell's History Of Fibbin'
Any single one of Christine O’Donnell’s questionable claims over the past several years about her educational background might be able to be written off as a misunderstanding or miscommunication. But when you string them all together, and add in the fact that she wasn’t finally awarded an undergraduate degree until this month, and it looks like a classic case of trying to...
Compared to the third quarter of 2009, Fox has... →
jonathan-cunningham:
The biggest loser on the network was Bill O’Reilly who saw his program The O’Reilly Factor lose 12% of its total viewers and 21% of its young viewers. Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Bret Baier, and Greta Van Susteren rounded out the top five cable news shows, and they each posted double digit declines.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch.
Invasion of Privacy Charges After Death of Tyler...
via nytimes.com
Very sad story of a college roommate using iChat to secretly stream a private encounter between his roommate and another man. After having his private life broadcasted and gossipped on Rutgers campus, 18 year-old Tyler Clementi jumped to his death off the George Washington Bridge.
Pictured above is Tyler, an accomplished violinist, Dharun Ravi, his roomamate, and Molly Wei, a...
“So how does a group of billionaire businessmen and corporations get a bunch of...”
– Matt Taibbi (via kateoplis)
Still Waiting For The Seriousness From The Right
It’s a recurring theme when it comes to Republicans in recent years — there’s just no seriousness to what they do, how they think, or how they behave. Just a few months ago, the American Enterprise Institute’s Norm Ornstein, not exactly a raging leftist, said House GOP leaders “are becoming the Bart Simpsons of Congress, gleeful at smarmy and adolescent tactics...
“For months, tensions have been growing within the Senate Republican conference...”
– GOP Breakdown: Leading Republican Senators Speak Out Publicly Against Jim DeMint (via ryking)
“Republican” and “leadership” can not be in the same sentence.
New Cato Report: Marijuana Prohibition Costs...
The United States could improve its national budget by nearly $18 billion annually if we taxed and regulated marijuana like alcohol, according to a newly released study from the Cato Institute. via blog.mpp.org Not a proponent of pot smoking, but, if you’re spending billions on the War On Drugs and you can’t stop them, wasting so much money and resources incarcerating people, you...
U.S. Said to Be Looking for a Way Out at A.I.G.
The Obama administration is pressing aggressively for a deal to end its support of the American International Group and hopes to have a completed plan to announce by next week, ahead of the midterm elections. via nytimes.com Remember when Bush bought AIG and brought socialism to America? Oh, that meme didn’t start until Obama was elected in our democracy. Posted via email from...
CBO: Extending the Bush Tax Cuts Increases Deficit...
CBO Director Doug Elmendorf testified before the Senate Budget Committee today and dropped something of a bombshell. Extending the Bush tax cuts, he said, will “probably reduce income relative to what would otherwise occur in 2020.” The reason is simple: Debt. via voices.washingtonpost.com Cutting taxes does not stimulate the economy, in theory and in fact. “The less you...
“To perpetuate privilege and oppression, we don’t even have to do anything...”
– Allan Johnson (Privilege, Power, and Difference)
Geir Haarde, Iceland Ex-PM, Indicted For Role In...
Iceland’s former Prime Minister Geir Haarde has been referred to a special court in a move that could make him the first world leader to be charged in connection with the global financial crisis. After a heated debate Tuesday, lawmakers voted 33-30 to refer charges to the court against Haarde for allegedly failing to prevent Iceland’s 2008 financial crash – a crisis that sparked...
Right Wing Needs To Stop Obsessing On Obama, Focus...
Heather Mac Donald eviscerates Dinesh D’Souza and the “hackneyed psychological theory” he published in Forbes. “…there is not a single policy that Obama has pursued since taking office that does not grow out of the American tradition of left-wing liberalism or more immediately out of the Bush Administration, the latter including bailouts of Detroit and Wall...
Religious people who attempt (badly) to apply...
Religion is modern mythology and metaphors. Science is empirical fact and evidence.
Take all the gods you don’t believe in like Zeus, Apollo and Horus, then add yours. All the same.
GOP Pledge: Glosses Over Eight Years Of Bush, Has...
via thepoliticalcarnival.net Chickenhawks and fake Deficit Hawks = The GOP. Posted via email from liberalsarecool.com | Comment »
Gladwell: The revolution will not be tweeted. →
savingpaper:
Using the Greensboro, N.C., lunch counter sit-ins of 1960 as a backdrop, Malcolm Gladwell writes in The New Yorker that social media will never provide what social change has always needed:
[Social media] is simply a form of organizing which favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger....
“If we dig beyond the rhetoric it isn’t hard to see who the main beneficiaries of...”
– America is Not a Conservative Nation (via azspot)
Wedge issues and identity politics. That’s all the GOP have. Not one successful platform.
“The Republicans - they blocked the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. …I don’t...”
– BILL MAHER, Real Time (via inothernews)
roald-darling asked: What do you think about this video? My best friend's mom posted it on her facebook and it gives me mixed feelings. Her family & my family have totally different political views. I'm tempted to comment, but I'm only 16 and not well versed (compared to others) with all the little details, so I don't really want to comment on it and sound like an idiot haha.
“The difference between patriotism and nationalism is that the patriot is proud...”
– Sidney J. Harris
“New Rule: The next rich person who publicly complains about being vilified by...”
– Bill Maher: New Rule: Rich People Who Complain About Being Vilified Should Be Vilified (via think4yourself)
A rising tide raises all ships. A Republican tide sinks them all.
Tax Expert David Cay Johnston: The Bush Cuts...
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy All the Bush policies failed. The narrow group at the very top won. The rest of us, we all failed. The results were awful. The two rounds of tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, including tax cuts in capital gains and dividends, slowed the economy so much that Americans made $1 trillion less income with the cuts then if income...
Tax.com On The Bush Tax Cuts: They F*cked America →
Would Bush have been able to give his tax cuts had...
Democrats did a good job during the Clinton years to get the economy on the right track, including creating a budget surplus, only to have Bush and his Republican pirates blow it all in 2001 and 2003 on non-offset tax cuts.
Had the economy not been so healthy, Bush would not have been able to “justify” the tax cuts. He took credit for Clinton just like the bratty rich kid he is.
...
The GOP Pledge: An Unserious Party Unready For...
“[W]hat really struck me as I went through it the first time was the foreign policy section, which is…how should I say this…amateurish and pathetic. What’s the current Republican foreign policy? Stripping out the immigration stuff from that section of the document, what remains is (1) Gitmo; (2) Missile defense; and (3) threatening Iran. That’s it. Iraq and...
Do They Really Need More Tax Cuts?
A hypothetical Small Business owner, after they have paid all his costs, labor, rent, supplies and everything else that goes into running a company, makes $250,000.
The taxes go up 3% and now they make $242,000. Again, after all their costs are covered. [Note: for sake of this example, all the income was taxed. In actual terms, only the last $50,000 would be taxed 3% more, so they would pay even...
“House Republicans released their “Pledge to America,” supposedly outlining their...”
– Paul Krugman
Americans Vastly Underestimate Wealth Inequality
Americans vastly underestimate the degree of wealth inequality in America, and we believe that the distribution should be far more equitable than it actually is, according to a new study. Americans thought the richest 20 percent of our society controlled about 59 percent of the wealth, while the real number is closer to 84 percent.”via huffingtonpost.com So income redistribution is in...
Boehner Admits No Solutions on Social Security,...
Addressing a central criticism of the “Pledge to America,” House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) said he doesn’t have the answer to funding problems with Medicare and Social Security, The Hill reports.
Instead, Boehner said Congress will first have to initiate “an adult conversation” with voters.
Said Boehner: “It’s time for us as Americans to have...
O'Donnell Crushed in Latest Polling
The new CNN poll shows Chris Coons with a significant lead over Christine O’Donnell. 55-39. Ironically, if Mike Castle had been the Republican nominee, the numbers would be almost exactly reversed with Castle leading 55-37. Further evidence of Palin’s ridiculous political flailing utterly backfiring. via bobcesca.com The Witchy Woman is afraid of doing press, even avoiding her...
“Being a leftist is to first think of the world, then of your country, then of...”
– Gilles Deleuze, original translation. [Thanks to a friend for this quote] (via crimsonlambda)
“Conservatives” cannot grasp that the U.S. economy has spiraled into the black...”
– Is Paying 10 Million People Not to Work Really a Good Idea? (via azspot)
Pundits are not paid to think, they are paid to repeat.
Obama Speaks To America Like An Adult: GOP Can't...
“Basically Republicans are outraged and offended at the notion that the president has enough faith in the courage of the American people that another terrorist attack wouldn’t reduce them to a quivering mass of frightened little children.” Adam Serwervia andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com Americans are brave and resilient. Not when a Democrat is in office and not when a Republican...
“The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.”
– Delos B. McKown (via ageofreason)
People who use what they don’t know to define who they are.
The Basics Of Health Reform
via andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com The Kaiser Family Foundation has created what Kate Pickert calls “a surprisingly helpful” cartoon explaining the healthcare bill. Posted via email from liberalsarecool.com | Comment »
'Harlem Children's Zone' To Be Replicated Across...
In 1997, Geoffrey Canada founded Harlem Children’s Zone, a comprehensive system of programs and charter schools designed to help Harlem children succeed. Children enter the program as infants and graduate college-bound. In just over 10 years, Canada revolutionized a broken education system in a community where poverty and drop out rates ran high.
The program’s incredible success has...
Bed Bug Registry: Check Apartments and Hotels...
via bedbugregistry.com “The Bed Bug Registry is a free, public database of user-submitted bed bug reports from across the United States and Canada. Founded in 2006, the site has collected about 20,000 reports covering 12,000 locations.” Posted via email from liberalsarecool.com | Comment »