Well, it turns out that sun and fun with the Koch brothers in Rancho Mirage more closely resembled life in Baghdad’s Green Zone, but thank heaven, the plutocrats were ready. The Kochs, you see, have an awful lot of money, more than $40 billion between them, and consider that amount (with a lot left over [...]
Admittedly, as a simpleton myself, I can only present simplistic arguments against the all-encompassing, truly revolutionary ideology of the American right. They know there are known unknowns that I don’t know about; and I know I don’t know about them. Nolo contendre. Anyway, when one does at least realize that nothing – not credit card [...]
Ted Koppel, one of the last eminences of the old broadcast news era, weighed in some days ago on the never-ending debate about how things just aren’t as august as they used to be (whenever that was) when it comes to informing the American people (instead of just yelling at them). Koppel targeted Fox News [...]
Perusing the Shock Doctrine proposals of the Cat Food Commission, I have to say I’m not surprised, but I do question their rather unseemly honesty. That’s not the way these people usually operate. Throwing caution to the four winds, they start right out by saying that reducing taxes is much more important than cutting the [...]
From the Oil Spill Commission (OSC), 10/28/10: “We have known for some time that the cement used to secure the production casing and isolate the hydrocarbon zone at the bottom of the Macondo well must have failed in some manner. That cement should have prevented hydrocarbons from entering the well.” – snip – “We asked [...]
So it seems that the bubbly but bonkers Delaware Senate (!) candidate Christine O’Donnell helped herself to about twenty grand of her many campaign funds over the years, and now that mean ol’ Melanie Sloan at CREW is getting all schoolmarmish about it. The humanity! Everybody knows at this point that all folks who are [...]
I almost laughed out loud when I saw that Forbes Magazine had published an article about the absurdly tiny but nonetheless (to them) significant, headlong rush of the rich to leave Socialist America, which to the folk at Forbes was a bad thing, rather than a cause for exultation. Would that it were so: think [...]
The more I hear about the BP oil spill, the more I’m struck by the fact that, to save a few bucks, the 4th largest corporation on earth just basically flushed itself down the toilet, and yet almost nobody is talking about the aberrant system of incentives that caused this to happen. Didn’t the tough [...]
Perhaps the most pernicious myth about the wonderful “free market” is how a person of conscience, in the obvious absence of viable alternatives, can supposedly “vote” with their dollars, thus magically driving out bad actors without the overweening schoolmarm of government sending anybody to detention. The trouble with this notion is that consumer choice is [...]
I had heard good things about Liar’s Poker author Michael Lewis’ new book about the financial meltdown, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, but as usual I procrastinated a bit about buying it, figuring it would turn up used at Powell’s before too long. Well, when I walked into work on Thursday and found [...]