I believe the US Constitution guarantees the right to own guns, but it definitely does not guarantee the right to incite violence. And that is the problem with the pro-gun industry in this country. They are using fear and lies to satisfy their own greed. The NRA used to be about hunting, but their original […]
© Scott Bateman Anyone who thinks that our society (or even individual people) is beyond racism is deluding themselves. I would be willing to bet that every one of us has done racist things in their lives. Racism is not something that magically goes away (like, if we suddenly elect a black president), it is […]
“When the rate of return of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of output and income, as it did in the nineteenth century and seems quite likely to do again in the twenty-first, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which which democratic societies are based.” […]
Tuesday, the Supreme Court handed a small victory to the Obama administration, ruling 6 to 2 to uphold the EPA’s authority to regulate coal pollution that crosses state lines. The two dissenting votes were from Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. They are not the brightest jurists on the court, but in their dissenting opinion, […]
There is a rather unusual poll out from Gallup. In the poll, they asked residents of all 50 states to rate their own state as the best place to live. Thus, the survey was not based on objective measures like crime rates or cost of living, but was completely subjective. Or put another way, the […]
America just passed another milestone. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that a milestone passed us. For many years, the US has been known for having the more affluent middle class in the world. Indeed, we’ve used this fact to make fun of other countries, mocking them for their high taxes, or […]
You may have seen terms like “mesh network” and “power grid” but not paid much attention (or even knew their significance), but the ideas behind these terms are becoming very important in many diverse ways. Whenever you connect things together, there are generally two ways to do it: in a centralized way, or in a […]
© Jen Sorensen I have never understood why some companies treat talking to other employees about salaries as a firing offense. Seriously? Do they really have that little faith in their employees? I’ve run a number of companies, and we always treated everyone’s salary as public information (at least internally), so everyone understood everyone’s compensation. […]
Charles Cooper was a former top official in the Reagan Justice Department and was named “Republican lawyer of the year”, but he is more recently famous for defending California’s ban on gay marriage (Prop 8) in front of the Supreme Court. He lost. Ironically, Cooper now finds himself planning his daughter’s gay marriage. Cooper learned […]
There has been quite a bit of attention focused on high frequency trading recently, partially brought on by the book “Flash Boys”. But in a must-read editorial in the NY Times, Paul Krugman points out that the stunning amounts of money being spent on high frequency trading systems is really just one symptom of an […]
The Congressional Budget Office has issued an updated accounting report on the Affordable Care Act, and there is good news. We already know some of the good news — more people will be covered by Obamacare than expected. But I just want to remind people how significant that is — the whole point of health […]
Politicians! Accused of pesky ethics violations? No problem! In South Carolina, the Republican Speaker of the State House Alan Wilson is being investigated by the Republican Attorney General for ethics violations. How to solve this problem? Just introduce a bill that allows the Speaker to pick the special prosecutor to investigate ethics violations by legislators. […]
© Tom Tomorrow The Republican majority on the Supreme Court seems hell bent to solidify oligarchy in the US by ruling that money is free speech. Indeed, a recent study done at Princeton and Northwestern Universities looked at 1,800 laws enacted between 1981 and 2002 and compared them to the interests of average Americans (in […]
I could never understand why marijuana was classified as a dangerous drug — so dangerous that it was illegal to even do any studies on it, or to prescribe it as a pain killer (even though much more powerful drugs like morphine were routinely used for pain relief). Why? Because opponents claimed that using marijuana […]
The Miami-Dade County elections department received an inquiry earlier this year about whether the bathrooms in their polling places were accessible to disabled voters. Their response? They are closing all restrooms at polling places “to ensure that individuals with disabilities are not treated unfairly.” That’s an interesting way to ensure fairness. Screw everyone! So that […]
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