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On August 14th, 1912, a small item appeared in a New Zealand newspaper, the Rodney and Otamatea Times, Waitemata and Kaipara Gazette, under the headline, “Coal Consumption Affecting Climate”: “The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons […]
“The fact that people are poor or discriminated against doesn’t necessarily endow them with any special qualities of justice, nobility, charity, or compassion.” Saul Alinsky “Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.” H.L. Mencken I was thinking about the […]
I am not even going to pretend not to gloat. We warned you. A Nazi tattoo. Racist and gay-bashing social media posts. Allegations of mis-treating women. Sexting after his recent marriage. The ducking and dodging and fumbling and stumbling when questions arose. Finally, a credible claim of out-and-out sexual assault. All this stuff has been piling up for months, yet, […]
Republicans have really become creatures of habit. Lying, cheating, and racism, all in the service of inflicting oppression, have firmly embedded themselves in the party’s collective DNA. Case in point: all things being equal, honest, and above-board, the Rs are on track to get royally creamed come Election Day in 133 days. So—and not surprisingly—they are […]
In late 2008, a few months before I joined millions of other Americans on the unemployment lines because of this bastard, I penned this op-ed. Thought this was a good time to recycle it: “A mistake.” That is, in a nutshell, how former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan recently explained the worst economic crisis since the Great […]
We have been begging y’all to look, because some of us never had the option to wait until it felt close. We were born close, raised close; we learned how to survive close. Hope Giselle Experience keeps a dear school,yet Fools will learn in no other. Benjamin Franklin, “Poor Richard’s Almanack” Yesterday, the SCOTUS MAGAT Six […]
“I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” Lyndon Baines Johnson By now, that LBJ quote is practically a […]
Thirty-five years ago, I was a journalist in Wisconsin, and I tracked down Jim Zwerg–who grew up there and who joined the Freedom Riders in 1961–and interviewed him about his experience. The piece ran in Isthmus, a Madison-based magazine. I’m posting it here on May 14th, the anniversary of the Freedom Riders’ bus being firebombed […]
“The Republican Party has become a collection of arsonists targeting every part of civil society, liberalism, and democracy. What unites them all, however, is corrupting the election process.” Marc Elias, chairman of Elias Law Group and founder of Democracy Docket As I write this, we’re inside of 200 days until Americans cast ballots in the mid-term elections, and there’s […]
I went to watch a production of “1776” this past weekend, and, while I enjoyed the performance, I could not help but come away with a certain nagging gloom. First, it was an odd feeling to watch a musical about the founding of our country in the theater where President Abraham Lincoln was murdered; because […]
