Yesterday’s Supreme Court decision to allow privately held companies to opt out of covering contraception for their female employees pretty much delivers the 2016 presidential election to the Democrats, which probably means Hillary Clinton. The numbers (which come from the Gutmacher Institute) speak for themselves: 99% of all women, aged 15-44, have used at least one […]
Remember when the growth of the Internet was supposed to level the playing field between large and small companies and between rich and poor individuals and organizations. Sure, the wealthy and large could buy more ads, but the cost to set up a web page or blog—and later to build a network through social media—made […]
Global Crisis by British historian Geoffrey Parker presents the 17th century as a case history of the devastation that climate change can wreck upon human societies. The 1600s experienced an enormous number of droughts, lengthy winters, floods, major earthquakes and other extreme weather phenomena resulting from what scientists and historians call “The Little Ice Age.” […]
With “22 Jump Street” one of the most popular movies of the summer, it is instructive to remember how the two bros of this cop bromance met in “21 Jump Street,” the first of the Jump movies. The Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum characters knew each other in high school, but only as acquaintances. Seven […]
People don’t seem to want to give Barack Obama credit for the little improvements he has made over former presidents. No matter how bad drone assassinations are, they are much less barbaric and inhumane than Bush II torture. Under Obama, our veterans wait a long time to get quality care, to be sure. But under […]
Read More… from No matter what happens, we shouldn’t send troops to Iraq
Now that conservatives and their academic factotums realize that they can no longer deny that we have become a world in which inequality is growing, they are beginning to fight a rear-guard action by declaring that the way to reverse the trend of greater inequality is to promote the very policies that created it. In […]
The hullabaloo around the exchange of one U.S. serviceman for five Taliban prisoners kept for years at the Guantanamo prison on the island of Cuba has grown beyond the point of a tremendous echo that is so loud it swallows itself. But lost in the numerous condemnations and defenses of the Obama Administration’s actions and […]
I have another book review in Jewish Currents, this one about David Landau’s extensive biography of Ariel Sharon, known for both his brutal prosecution of war against the Palestinians and his unilateral decision in 2005 to dismantle Israeli settlements and withdraw from occupied territory. For the complete review and some other very interesting articles in […]
The number 400,000 has taken on a new significance. It’s a big number, and when you add a dollar sign in front of it, it looms even larger. As it turns out, only about the top one percent of all individual or joint tax filers report adjusted income of $400,000—the actual number to make the […]
Read More… from Another proof that it’s time to raise taxes on the ultra-wealthy
A new study makes the amazing discovery that politicians usually vote conscience—unfortunately it’s the conscience of the rich people who contribute the most to their campaigns. In an article titled “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups and Average Citizens,” Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern analyze 1,779 American opinion studies […]
Read More… from Study proves with numbers that politicians tend to vote for what rich people want