When I analyzed the long-shot possibilities of progressive Zephyr Teachout winning the Democratic primary for New York governor a few days back, I made a huge analytical mistake. I forgot that the Working Families Party has already nominated Andrew Cuomo for Governor, so even if Teachout should pull off the miracle of miracles and defeat […]
Read More… from Progressives all over the country should Reach Out for Teachout!
The front page of today’s New York Times tells the sad story of Los Angeles’ crumbling infrastructure. Roadways, sidewalks and water pipes are in a state of decay thanks to several decades of tight municipal budgets. Close to 40% of LA’s roads are graded D or F. The average age of a city water pipe […]
Read More… from The lesson from LA’s decaying infrastructure is that tax rates are too low
The single most important news story of the day—the one most likely to still be affecting lives in 10 or even 100 years—was buried on page A13 of the New York Times. The Wall Street Journal didn’t cover it all, nor did Yahoo! News or Google News. A search of Google News yielded a mere […]
Read More… from NRC storage decision may lead to building of more dangerous nuclear power plants
New York State could serve as a model of how progressives can move the right-of-Eisenhower Democratic Party back towards the left. Andrew Cuomo, New York’s version of Barack Obama, is running for reelection as governor of the Empire State. But first there’s the little matter of the September 9 primary in which Cuomo faces Zephyr […]
Read More… from To New York progressives: Vote for Teachout in primary!
The American public is relearning many lessons from the events in Ferguson following the shooting of an unarmed teenager by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. The three biggest takeaways from this tragedy and its aftermath are: We have gone way too far in militarizing our local police forces. There is still rampant institutional racism […]
Read More… from America can learn a lot from the Ferguson situation, that is, if we’re willing to
In a lead editorial, the Wall Street Journal proposes the truly bizarre theory that overly generous police contracts helped cause the civil unrest in the wake of the shooting of an unarmed African-American man by a police officer in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri. To come to this outrageous conclusion, the Journal must […]
The recent deaths of two well-known actors, Robin Williams and Lauren Bacall, dominated the news media this week, but in very predictable ways. The news media has got celebrating the life of a famous person down to a science. If the feeding frenzy on the dead bones of a troubled comic or a classy New […]
People have gotten meaner because they have no vested interest in worrying about their fellow human beings. That’s the conclusion of Tom Clark (with Anthony Heath) in Hard Times: The Divisive Toll of the Economic Slump¸ a recent book that sifts through a slew of recent research and impressionistic interviews related to the effect of […]
Read More… from Have people in America & Great Britain gotten meaner, & if so, why?
Someone on Facebook recently wondered why it’s okay for the United States to bomb the ISIS positions in Iraq but not okay for Israel to bomb the Gaza strip. By “okay,” I’m pretty sure she was asking why the mainstream news media and our political leaders applauded one and not the other. She was correct […]
Standard & Poor’s, the agency that rates financial instruments, has released a report that demonstrates that inequality of income is a drag on the American economy. S&P predicts that the economy will grow at an annual rate of 2.5% over the next 10 years, which is .3% lower than it predicted five years ago. S&P […]