A Warning We Should Heed Nicholas Kristof offered good advice to Democrats who judge President Obama harshly and threaten to abandon him in the 2012 election: “Think back to 2000. Many Democrats,” he wrote, “feeling grouchy, were dismissive of Al Gore and magnified his shortcomings. We forgot the context, prided ourselves on our disdainful superiority—and won eight years of George W. Bush.” Kristof acknowledged his own disappointments with Obama, but he warned us “It is important to acknowledge the larger context: Obama has done better than [...]

“Republicans and Democrats don’t just have different priorities; they live in different intellectual and moral universes” Paul Krugman wrote in his November 18 op-ed in The New York Times. Democrats, according to Krugman, see a world in which “up is up and down is down. Raising taxes increases revenue, cutting spending while the economy is still depressed reduces employment. But in Republican-world, down is up. The way to increase revenue is to cut taxes on corporations and the wealthy, and slashing government spending is a [...]

Leaders of American corporations publically embrace the idea of reducing tax rates in exchange for eliminating loopholes and deductions. But, as Adam Davidson reported in Sunday’s (November 13th) New York Times, 1,885 “corporations and interest groups… lobbied in favor of loopholes and tax breaks and other benefits in 2010.” How many U.S. businesses and interest groups lobbied in favor of a plan that lowered rates but did away with loopholes and deductions? Zero! Subscribe & Stay In Touch..FacebookTwitteremailAdd to favoritesDiggStumbleUpon

Politico.com reported that “House Majority Leader Eric Cantor on Friday decried the ‘growing mobs’ of protesters flooding Wall Street, charging that the activists were creating a divisive atmosphere that pit Americans against one another. “‘If you read the newspapers today, I for one am increasingly concerned about the growing mobs on Wall Street and the other cities across the country,” Cantor, the House’s No. 2 Republican said Friday. ‘And believe it or not, some in this town have actually condoned the pitting of Americans against [...]

In Asheville, North Carolina a group of women recently demonstrated their freedom from convention by baring their breasts in a downtown park. Thousands of gawkers gathered to witness the event and, by all accounts, the demonstration was lawful and peaceful. But it set off a tempest of fury among moralists and Republicans. Carl Mumpower, a former city council member and a Republican candidate for Congress in 2008, and Chad Nesbitt, the former chair of the Buncombe County Republican party, filed child abuse charges. (Mumpower claims [...]