This week’s news release by the Peanut Institute uses a common misunderstanding fed by an accident of language to deceive us into thinking that its healthy product is even healthier. The news release repackages the earlier announcement of the release of a massive study of food consumption and mortality by the Harvard School of Public […]
Bravo to Eduardo Porter for his article titles “A Nation of Too Many Tax Breaks” on the front page of today’s New York Times’ business section. Porter demonstrates that while the poor do get more in government benefits, the rich more than make up for it in the tax breaks that enable them to reduce […]
Read More… from NY Times article shows that wealthy get more in tax breaks than poor do in benefits
It seems as if it were only yesterday that I first saw the new TV commercial starring Mean Joe Greene, a professional football player from the 1970s. The commercial, for a laundry detergent, parodies a TV spot that Mean Joe did in 1979 that makes all the lists of top 10 or Top 25 American […]
Read More… from Television commercials enter our cultural pantheon next to Shakespeare and Lincoln
After I wondered the other day why those against health insurance covering birth control for women make no such objection to coverage of erectile dysfunction pills, several people tweeted me to uncover what they think is a fatal flaw in my argument: ED pills treat a medical condition, whereas birth control does not. Medical condition […]
Every few weeks now we seem to get an update in the mainstream media about the assault against women’s health taking place in state legislatures now Republican-dominated because Democrats forgot to vote in 2010. For example, today’s round-up of state cuts to birth control funding by Reuters titled “States slash birth control subsidies as federal […]
Yesterday was one of the more bizarre news days in a long time, mainly because two of the most widely-disseminated news stories revolved around right-wing propagandists, Rush Limbaugh and Andrew Breitbart. Note, we’re not talking about two right-wing ideas, nor about two right-wing legislative initiatives, nor about two right-wing candidates. No, the two in question […]
Most people who have been reading the progressive or the mainstream news media know that the last 30 years have seen the United States become a less equitable society, with fewer people in the middle class and more people who are poor and near poor. By income, assets or any other measure, the top 1% […]
The news this week that a new study found that wealthier people were more likely to behave unethically set off a chicken-or-egg debate in my mind. In the study, Paul Piff, a graduate student at the University of California-Berkeley, led a team of researchers at UC-Berkeley and the University of Toronto in a variety of […]
On the back cover of a recent New York Times Book Review was a full-page advertisement for a “Great Course” (that’s the brand name) set of DVDs or CDs titled “The World Was Never the Same: Events That Changed History.” I never read these ads, but the idea of reducing history to 36 incidents appeals […]
The Republicans are doing a lot to restore my faith in President Obama. First Rick Santorum accused Barack Obama of being the most anti-religious president in the nation’s history. Then Mitt Romney said that Obama sought to substitute a “secular agenda” for one based on faith. What a relief to know we have a secular […]