Elizabeth Warren Giving Bankers Hell
Posted on February 19, 2013 in Videos
The senator’s first Banking Committee hearing was delivered on February 14th. What a sweet V-day gift.
Mark Twain’s Most Memorable Quotes
Posted on February 19, 2013 in Quotes
Perhaps the ultimate American wit and the writer whose ranks to which all other American wordsmiths aspire, there was not a single subject that Mark Twain left unexamined during is 74-year stay on Earth.
Congress Killed The Postal Service
Posted on February 19, 2013 in Articles
The Article: Congress—not email—destroyed the Postal Service by John Tierney in Salon.
The Text: You know that feeling of pleasure you get when you see someone stand up to a bullying, incompetent boss? It’s viscerally satisfying, isn’t it?
That’s the way I felt this morning when I heard Postmaster General Patrick Donahue announce that the U.S. Postal Service intended to move forward with a plan to stop Saturday delivery of mail, effective sometime in August. In doing so, Donahue stuck his thumb in the eye of the U.S. Congress, the mail agency’s ultimate boss. Bravo, Mr. Donahue.
You may think I have incorrectly identified the incompetent party here. After all, it’s a deeply ingrained part of Americans’ worldview that our postal service is the epitome of inefficiency and bad management, the perfect example of a bungling, poorly run government bureaucracy. That view gets reinforced from all kinds of sources – jaded journalists, editorial cartoonists given more to clichés than to cleverness, free-market economists, and others.
“Malcolm In The Middle’s” Dewey On God
Posted on February 18, 2013 in Images
Kid’s got a point. But at least ants are strong. The day I see average folks carrying six times their body weight is the day I know steroids pharmaceuticals have lost their patents.
Obama’s War On Whistleblowers
Posted on February 18, 2013 in Articles
The Article: U.S. media complicit in Obama’s drone doctrine by Neil MacDonald in CBC News.
The Text: In 2001, when Israel started killing militant Palestinian enemies (and, often, innocent bystanders) with missiles fired from helicopters hovering so high you could barely see them, foreign reporters were urged by the Israeli government to call the practice “targeted killing.”
Most of us, including many of my American colleagues, preferred the term “extrajudicial assassination.” We felt we were in the news business, not the euphemism business.
Today, 12 years later, the Washington Post carries a front-page headline about the U.S. drone program titled, “Targeted killings face new scrutiny.”
