July 30, 2011 :: The Editors :: No Comment Yet
Speaker of the House John Boehner has insisted on enforcing a strategy whereby his party dictates all federal budget policy, no matter the law, no matter the makeup of Congress, no matter the risks to the future of the United States of America. Now, after a wasted week of partisan isolationism and refusal to negotiate, he has passed a radical one-sided plan that will hurt most Americans, while doing little to solve the debt crisis or stave off a credit downgrade.
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July 16, 2011 :: The Editors :: No Comment Yet
Anyone who wants to drive the nation to default, in order to “hurt Obama” or promote some narrow ideological interest, hates this country. There is no other way to see it. People who lust after, and joke about, and court and urge and instigate, the failure of their nation, with the idea that doing so might elevate their faction in the resulting chaos, harbors a deep and pervasive resentment against the majority of the people who will suffer as a result.
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March 15, 2011 :: The Editors :: No Comment Yet
Nuclear power plants, like the one at Fukushima Daiichi, contain 1,000 times more radioactivity to leak than the Hiroshima bomb. Nuclear scientists estimate 1,000,000 people would be killed or injured in a major accident, were one to occur at the San Onofre plant in southern California. But Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) on Monday compared the [...]
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March 3, 2011 :: The Editors :: No Comment Yet
Mike Huckabee is a (retired?) Christian minister. He has long sought to present himself as moderate, reasonable and trustworthy. But he has now shown himself to be a flagrant liar, determined to manipulate his audience in order to provoke visceral, race-based reactions he can exploit. The evidence for this is his repeated telling of the outright lie that Pres. Obama “grew up” in Kenya. The president NEVER lived there.
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January 10, 2011 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
The shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who has been targeted by opponents and conservative critics who have put her in gunsights in campaign advertisements and talked of taking her out, has raised ire across the nation for the mounting campaign of extremist rhetoric that over the last four years has seen repeated violent threats against members of Congress, candidates for public office, minority groups and people favoring healthcare reform. Now, the Tea Party Express is raising money, using the shooting and its aftermath as motivation, saying it will not allow anyone to tone down this extremist rhetoric.
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January 4, 2011 :: Denver Lessing :: Comments Off
Capping a season of lavish fundraising events where Republican members of Congress raised huge sums from lobbyists, corporate donors and special interests, one Republican freshman is holding a major bash, at $2,500 per person, complete with live performance by Leigh Ann Rimes, $50,000 all-inclusive package deals and luxury suites at the W hotel. Despite Tea Party opposition to corrupt corporate-interest politics, Rep. Jeff Denham is openly positioning himself to be the go-to rainmaker for fellow Republicans.
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July 23, 2010 :: Riga Listin :: 4 Comments
Andrew Breitbart —a fake journalist whose overt political bias is not only self-declared, but is seething with bile and contempt— is defending his use of rigged reporting and character assassination in a deliberate attempt to distort the truth and sow racist hate. Breitbart posted a clip of a video on his blog, in which USDA official Shirley Sherrod, explained how she came to see beyond race and transcend the temptation to judge people’s character or motives based on the color of their skin.
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July 21, 2010 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
The story of Shirley Sherrod illustrates how injustice and prejudice will flood the scene whenever we give in to a pathological aversion to nuance. Our media culture, our politics, the headline-obsessed pseudo-reporting that passes for “mainstream journalism”, allow loud-mouthed bigots and propagandists like Andrew Breitbart to pervert our free press and ruin lives. Fortunately, the media picked up the mistake, and the White House responded to Sherrod’s resigning with a call for a thorough investigation of the facts surrounding the incident.
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May 31, 2010 :: Riga Listin :: Comments Off
Glen Beck is a menace to the integrity of the American media. His fabrications and falsehoods are a deliberate and immoral attempt to distort the American political mind, to create visceral divisions and to force hostility to undermine productive progressive action to make the country more just and more egalitarian. His lies are shameless and his relentless attempts at character assassination of anyone not in agreement with his fringe politics are an insult to all people everywhere.
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March 21, 2010 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
Today on Meet the Press, Republican strategist Ed Gillespie asked why has the United States Senate become so polarized, when Pres. Obama “ran as a post-partisan”. The association was deliberately disingenuous; there is nothing about Pres. Obama’s 1st year in office that suggests the climate should be brutally, relentlessly partisan, except the Republican party’s collective vow to oppose him everywhere they can, to undermine his presidency and the credibility of the Democratic majority.
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January 8, 2010 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
There is a fundamental difference between the logic of military tribunals for battlefield captures and the Constitutional order of criminal prosecution and due process: the Constitutional criminal justice system is designed to deal with people who violate laws; military tribunals are meant to be an ad-hoc legal variation of that standard, reserved for representatives of enemy states that violate the laws of war in a battlefield setting. By inveighing against the US criminal justice system’s ability to handle terror prosecutions, the Republican party is not only actively promoting lies, but working to elevate Al Qaeda to the status of a legitimate, sovereign government.
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December 22, 2009 :: Denver Lessing :: Comments Off
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is alleging “back-room dealmaking” and what he believes to be a misuse of office in Sen. Ben Nelson’s securing additional federal funding for his state’s Medicaid program, which is facing a severe budget shortfall. He wants the attorney general of his state to investigate whether anything unconstitutional was done in the dealmaking process. But Graham was part of numerous “dealmaking” sessions in the Bush-era Senate, in which corruption was not only alleged but was more or less publicly demonstrable.
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November 20, 2009 :: The Editors :: Comments Off
The leadership of the Republican party is relentlessly championing a rhetoric of armed rebellion and hate-speech. Seasoned evangelical leader Frank Schaeffer says those who condone this extremist language are “trawling for assassins”. He called those engaged in such extremism “the American version of the Taliban”. He called on Republican leaders who have refused to denounce [...]
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November 12, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
With new regulatory restrictions on predatory lending practices, including constraints on the freedom of banks to raise interest rates to unsustainable levels, major banks have told federal regulators that they will be hiking interest rates and slashing credit limits for millions of customers, even where payments have not been missed. According to CNN, “a minority of banks” have said they will reduce penalties for good customers; economists worry the credit-card cost hikes will impede economic recovery.
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October 11, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
Dick Armey is the latest Republican to use language of incitement to promote lies about Pres. Obama’s health reform agenda. Armey says proposed reforms are “ruthless” in their treatment of healthcare recipients. But just about the only truths in his comments are that there are in fact health reforms being proposed and that they have something to do with healthcare recipients.
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October 5, 2009 :: Webb Tisch :: 2 Comments
Something seems very wrong with Max Baucus. The Democratic senator whose party placed him in the chairmanship of the Senate finance committee, charged by Pres. Obama with crafting legislation that could achieve the president’s stated goals, while bringing centrist Republicans on board, has become one of the chief proponents of the very arguments entrenched corporate-interest Republicans are making to try to kill the Democratic reforms.
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September 16, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
Caster Semenya, the 18-year-old track-and-field phenomenon from South Africa, is a woman whose hormonal chemistry is unusual for the average adult female. Test results are reported to show that her body naturally secretes three times the normal female levels of testosterone, the dominant “male” hormone, which some competitors say gives her an “unfair advantage”. The issue has raised perhaps the most serious challenge to the notion of fairness in sport, and to conventional attitudes about gender.
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September 16, 2009 :: Denver Lessing :: One Comment
FOX News has relentlessly smeared and defamed the umbrella organization for volunteer community groups, ACORN, openly participating in a concerted nationwide effort to promote false charges of illegal activity and force the group to stop all involvement in efforts to bring urban and minority voters to the polls.
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September 8, 2009 :: Denver Lessing :: Comments Off
Why is FOX News using images from the attacks of 11 September 2001, including voice-overs such as “enormous death toll”, to advertise its own airing of a documentary called “9/11: Timeline of Terror”? The ads are flagrantly disrespectful to all those who lost someone on that day: the tone is almost pornographic in nature, highlighting violence, terror and death as a point of attraction for those who might want to view their report.
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September 6, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: 3 Comments
The New York Times is reporting that major Wall Street investment banks are looking for a replacement “exotic” brand of investment for the failed bundled mortgage-backed securities, and that they are planning to launch a brazen market in the resale of already-resold life insurance policies. The scheme carries the risk of bundling and reselling high-risk mortgages, perhaps higher, as longevity of the original policy-holder will determine return-on-investment.
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September 4, 2009 :: Webb Tisch :: Comments Off
In an interview with the McAlester News-Capital newspaper, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) —the senior senator from his state— strung together one lie after another, in an apparent effort to slander Pres. Obama and derail healthcare reform. There are no softer words for Inhofe’s incessant lies and fabrications. He has apparently pledged his time and energy to the hard labor of being an inveterate and unapologetic professional slanderer.
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September 2, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) has told a town hall meeting that he doesn’t need to read legislation on healthcare reform or to know any details of what’s in it, he will oppose it out of hand. Astonishingly, the senator told the citizens gathered that “I don’t have to read it, or know what’s in it. I’m going to oppose it anyways”. He didn’t say “let them die” about people in need of medical care who are uninsured, but the sentiment just might be there.
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August 29, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
Pres. Barack Obama and Sen. Orrin Hatch, two men whose views differ in countless ways, but who became, each in his time, close and trusted friends to Sen. Ted Kennedy, should meet privately, then with Congressional leaders, to hammer out workable reform to extend healthcare coverage to all Americans, and honor the life’s work of the late senator. After an initial agreement to commit firmly to weeding out obstructionists and working toward virtuous compromise, Hatch and Obama should gather together a panel of key senators to establish a commitment to passing reform that extends coverage to all Americans.
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August 9, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: 3 Comments
Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin has adopted a brazen approach to countering Pres. Barack Obama’s proposed healthcare reforms: outright fabrication and unscrupulous lying. She has begun to make the 100% false allegation that Pres. Obama’s reforms would create a “death panel” tasked with promoting euthanasia and calling reform “downright evil”. It is perhaps the single most irresponsible and reprehensible lie told in the American political sphere in recent years.
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July 9, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: 3 Comments
The political action group Conservatives for Patients’ Rights is running ads that say “when Congress gets involved” costs go up, citing the infamous $600 toilet seat that was part of a Pentagon contract for special submarine toilets. It was the Pentagon, not Congress, that was behind the outrageously priced toilet seats, special $800 hammers, and no-bid contracts that threw billions of dollars of taxpayer money, in some cases in violation of federal law, at private for-profit firms.
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June 11, 2009 :: Denver Lessing :: Comments Off
The Associated Press is the most widely distributed news wire service in the world. Credible impartiality is vitally important to its reputation as an unbiased source of global reporting. However, that journalists might have opinions, perhaps informed opinions, on matters on which they are not reporting for pay should never be in and of itself cause for reprimand. The AP, like any reputable news agency, has a moral obligation to honor the inherent value of press freedom, and that includes the right of individuals to express their views in other venues.
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May 26, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
Pres. Barack Obama has proposed the closure of the extralegal prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where hundreds of accused terror suspects have been held for years without charge and without access to the due process guaranteed by our Constitution. With critics defaming the president as somehow wanting to “release terrorists on US soil”, an absurd claim, Obama has now muddied the soaring poetry of his defense of our Constitution and its values with an as-yet unspecified plan to establish a “legal regime” of “prolonged detention” without charge or due process.
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May 13, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
The president of the United States has taken what is perhaps his most problematic decision, in terms of following through on bold promises about ethics and transparency reform. The decision to withhold Pentagon photographs reportedly showing extreme interrogations was made due to concern the images could inflame violence against US personnel overseas.
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May 3, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: 4 Comments
The Egyptian government has ordered a 100% blanket cull of its entire pig stock in response to the outbreak of “swine flu” in Mexico and the US. The problem is, the new strain of the virus, technically influenza A H1N1, has not been found in pigs. The H1N1 strain is a flu virus that affects the human population and is spread by person to person contact. It contains genetic material showing it is a hybrid flu containing genetic segments linking it to avian-borne, swine-borne and human-borne flu viruses.
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