When In Bangkok…
Posted on January 23, 2012 in Images
Thou shalt not bring German Shepherds or assault rifles into taxi cabs. Also, thou shalt not have sex.
Mitt Romney: ‘He Might Create Jobs, Just Not In The United States’
Posted on January 23, 2012 in Videos
Two steelworkers tell their story about how they lost their jobs when Mitt Romney and Bain Capital took over the steel plant in Kansas City and eventually shut the place down.
“Best Of” Rick Santorum Quotes: Cartoon Form
Posted on January 23, 2012 in Political Cartoons
Finally, Rick Santorum’s outrageous quotes are paired with something equally unreal: cartoons.
Equal Opportunity In America?
Posted on January 23, 2012 in Articles
The Article: America’s Unlevel Field by Paul Krugman in The New York Times.
The Text: Last month President Obama gave a speech invoking the spirit of Teddy Roosevelt on behalf of progressive ideals — and Republicans were not happy. Mitt Romney, in particular, insisted that where Roosevelt believed that “government should level the playing field to create equal opportunities,” Mr. Obama believes that “government should create equal outcomes,” that we should have a society where “everyone receives the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort and willingness to take risk.”
As many people were quick to point out, this portrait of the president as radical redistributionist was pure fiction. What hasn’t been as widely noted, however, is that Mr. Romney’s picture of himself as a believer in a level playing field is just as fictional. Where is the evidence that he or his party cares at all about equality of opportunity?
Let’s talk for a minute about the actual state of the playing field.
Stop Being Cynical About Politics And Corporations, It’s Time To Be Angry
Posted on January 22, 2012 in Articles
The Article: Stop Being Cynical About Corporate Money in Politics and Start Being Angry by Bill McKibben in Mother Jones.
The Text: My resolution for 2012 is to be naïve—dangerously naïve.
I’m aware that the usual recipe for political effectiveness is just the opposite: to be cynical, calculating, an insider. But if you think, as I do, that we need deep change in this country, then cynicism is a sucker’s bet. Try as hard as you can, you’re never going to be as cynical as the corporations and the harem of politicians they pay for. It’s like trying to outchant a Buddhist monastery.
Here’s my case in point, one of a thousand stories people working for social change could tell: All last fall, most of the environmental movement, including 350.org, the group I helped found, waged a fight against the planned Keystone XL pipeline that would bring some of the dirtiest energy on the planet from Canada through the US to the Gulf Coast. We waged our struggle against building it out in the open, presenting scientific argument, holding demonstrations, and attending hearings. We sent 1,253 people to jail in the largest civil disobedience action in a generation. Meanwhile, more than half a million Americans offered public comments against the pipeline, the most on any energy project in the nation’s history.
And what do you know? We won a small victory in November, when President Obama agreed that, before he could give the project a thumbs-up or -down, it needed another year of careful review. (The previous version of that review, as overseen by the State Department, had been little short of a crony capitalist farce.) Given that James Hansen, the government’s premier climate scientist, had said that tapping Canada’s tar sands for that pipeline would, in the end, essentially mean “game over for the climate,” that seemed an eminently reasonable course to follow, even if it was also eminently political.
