We Fight Low Information
Election season might be over, but that doesn’t mean Comedy Congress is too. From the Petraeus love pentagon to fiscal cliff worries, join Patt Morrison and her guests to laugh at the madness of it all—the truth hurts far less when it’s told by comedians. The comedic material emanating from Washington D.C., and state capitols across the [...]
Dan Bluemel: The banks are banking on the fact that nobody is going to defend the little guy,.
Robert Illes: But in many ways worse are the watery “liberals” on, say, MSNBC, especially Chris Matthews, whose main interest seems self-serving, to maintain the election as seeming like a tight horse race.
Worrying about government debt is like worrying about the monster under the bed. The issue isn’t debt, it’s power.
Friday Feedback: This week, an article by Steve Hochstadt, Do Republican Candidates Like Most Americans?, drew a series of comments, supportive and not. We’ll lead with Steve’s aggregate response, then include the observations by others he comments on.
Robert Reich: No responsible Democrat should be pleased at the prospect that Gingrich could get the GOP nomination. The future of America is too important to accept even a small risk of a Gingrich presidency.
Denis Campbell: Now the worry is 3,400 people in the Iraqi desert will also be let down because no matter how hard they try, their voices are constantly lost in a sea of “more important” news.
Victoria DeFrancesco Soto: The big worry for the administration regarding Latinos is not that their disapproval will push them into the arms of the GOP but rather that they will not have the same ganas that they did in 2008.
Robert Reich: Our representatives in the nation’s capital continue to obsess about future budget deficits and games of chicken over raising the debt ceiling — neither of which has anything at all to do with the stalled recovery and the carnage on the Street.
Steve Hochstadt: When it comes to global warming, thus far the public is like a teenager who hears that tanning booths will produce skin cancer much later in life: I’ll worry about that later.
Robert Reich: The question on everyone’s mind: Will the Fed signal it’s now more worried about inflation than recession?
Republicans, for their part, worry that if they tell it like it is Americans will want government to do more rather than less. They’d rather not talk about jobs and wages, and put the focus instead on deficit reduction (or spread the lie that by reducing the deficit we’ll get more jobs and higher wages).
Andrea Nill: The Bush brothers don’t appear ready to fully acknowledge the role their party has played in stoking nativism and killing the chances for sensible immigration reform in the near future.
Carl Bloice: Like the knee bone and the thigh bone, the foreclosure crisis is closely related to the jobs crisis. Last week the Obama administration cautioned the public not to expect any dramatic improvement in the jobless rate, largely because thousands of formerly “discouraged” jobless workers sense the situation is improving and have started back looking for work. As a result, some economists have suggested, the jobless rate may well go beyond the 9.7 percent where it stands now.
Robert Reich: The Great Recession has accelerated a structural shift in the economy that had been slowly building for years. Companies have used the downturn to aggressively trim payrolls, making cuts they’ve been reluctant to make before. Outsourcing abroad has increased dramatically. Companies have discovered that new software and computer technologies have made many workers in Asia and Latin America almost as productive as Americans, and that the Internet allows far more work to be efficiently moved to another country without loss of control.
Dan Bluemel: Women’s rights advocates entered a Walgreens pharmacy this week in downtown Los Angeles to protest the Obama administration’s efforts to restrict access to the emergency contraceptive commonly known as the morning-after pill.
Robert Reich: Is the central goal of his second term to achieve a grand bargain on the budget deficit? Or progress on gun control? Or restore jobs? Or reform the immigration laws? It is difficult to tell.
Brent Budowsky: Ryan famously tried to employ Catholic theology on behalf of his budget austerity against the poor, and was quickly forced to retreat as the absurdity of this view became obvious.
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