The first time Muhammad Ali—then known as Cassius Clay—beat Sonny Liston to win the heavyweight title later unfairly stripped from him, it was a big media event in the days in which there were many more newspapers, but only three television networks. Mass culture tended to be more homogeneous than today: people heard the same […]
After years of manufacturing false scandals around Hillary Clinton, right-wing attack dogs and the mainstream media finally have a bone to gnaw that has some meat on it: Hillary’s handling of emails while she was secretary of state. Let’s first review all the false scandals: The Whitewater investigation turned up nothing but evidence of an […]
President Obama has issued a number of executive orders over the past two years that have overridden the obstructionist Congress to give Americans what they voted for: a left-looking centrist administration. Among other things, he has negotiated an historic treaty with Iran that stops nuclear proliferation, tried to end the stalemate over creating a path […]
That a failed developer turned reality TV star and brand marketer could win enough votes in Republican primaries to become the presumptive GOP nominee confirms the essential contradiction of a consumerist capitalist society organized as a representative democracy. Democracy requires well-informed, well-read, well-adjusted and well-educated citizens, whereas consumer capitalism demands consumers who are dumb and […]
It was to be expected that conservative politicians and business organizations would complain about the U.S. Labor Department’s new overtime regulation, which mandates that anyone making under $47,476 a year automatically qualifies for time-and-a-half pay for any hours worked over 40 per week. For example, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan criticized the new rule […]
The mainstream and left-wing media has slapped the label “hawk” on Hillary Clinton, but if we are to believe the words of her senior policy advisor, Jake Sullivan, a more accurate description would be call her a “coalition-builder.” It’s clear from the comments Sullivan made in front of an audience of about 250 people at […]
One of the many things that Donald Trump doesn’t seem to understand is that sometimes merely saying something can be hurtful. The classic case is Trump’s outrageous lie months ago that he knew a child who had gotten autism because of a vaccination. It was a bold-faced lie, the telling of which in and of […]
Read More… from Trump’s business techniques would cause a stock & bond market crash and depression
The American people now have a clear choice for their next president. Do we select someone who is knowledgeable and informed about every issue or someone who knows nothing about many important domestic and foreign issues? Do we want someone whose campaign is built around facts and the issues or someone whose campaign is built […]
Someone took an online poll that finds that more than half of all Americans think that the primary system is rigged. If the primaries are rigged, the fix favors rural counties and rural states, which tend to be more conservative. In that, our nominating process resembles our bicameral system—one house for direct representation from a […]
A very strange thing happened at our family Seder, which included 14 people ranging in age from 12 to 94. No one took a photograph. It’s not that the group is anti-technology. The five under 30 are all very social media savvy and four of the Baby Boomers routinely post photos of events on Facebook. […]