Pork Barrel Idiocy ... are terrorists really likely to be targeting Omaha? Louisville?
Anti-Terror Funding Cut In DC, New York »
Washington Post

Happy Mother's Day
US has second worst newborn death rate in the developed world »
CNN

how ya feelin?
We're #36!
Even Cuba Has Better Health Care Than "The Greatest Country on Earth" »
Blake Fleetwood / Huffington Post
WHO Figures show that The United States lags behind 36 other countries in overall health system performance ranging from infant mortality, to adult mortality, to life expectancy ... and looks especially dysfunctional when you consider how much money we spend per capita on healthcare – $6,000 plus per year, twice as much as any other country – and how little we get for it.

Wal-Mart prefers profits over port security »
AlterNet
... smasher of small towns, those crazy folks who seem to think it's okay to pay workers so little that taxpayers foot the bill for their employees' health care costs (among other social programs to the tune of $1.5 billion annually), is now using its might to weaken port security.

The Immigration Battle: Corporatists vs. Racists ... and Labor's Left Behind »
Thom Hartmann
Both the corporatists and the racists are fond of the mantra, "There are some jobs Americans won't do." It's a lie. Americans will do virtually any job if they're paid a decent wage. This isn't about immigration - it's about economics. The reason why thirty years ago César Chávez fought against illegal immigration was because he, like progressives since the 1870s, understood the simple reality that labor rises and falls in price as a function of availability.

From the mouths of elders ...
We took for granted that in America it would always be better for the next generation, but I can't see that's the case anymore »
Jay Bookman / Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Bush's America
Wage gap growing wider »
Wall Street Journal
Since the end of 2000, gross domestic product per person in the U.S. has expanded 8.4%, adjusted for inflation, but the average weekly wage has edged down 0.3%.

Corporate Contortionist Acts »
Molly Ivins
The Dubai ports controversy is only the latest example of how willing Republicans are to bend over backwards to fight for Big Business's right to make massive profits.
Port Deal Concerns Raised in Congress »
NY Times
Dubai Ports World honors boycott of Israel ... Coast Guard intelligence memorandum showed that the agency had security concerns about the deal.
Dubai tries to censor CNN's Lou Dobbs »
AmericaBlog
... a little advice for Dubai: In developed democracies the government doesn't get to tell the media to shut up or else.
Port deal never probed for terror ties »
CNN

Republican hate speak is causing death threats against Supreme Court justices »
AP / AmericaBlog

Does this seem like a good idea?
IRS wants to allow third parties access to your return »
Pam's House Blend
Your tax files for sale? IRS says go for it »
San Francisco Chronicle

Setting the bar way up there
McCain: UAE is freer than that beacon of liberty, China »
Think Progress
"We’ve got some very, very big issues that I think are perhaps more important than whether a country that’s freer than China should have control of some of our terminals."
According to the Freedom House’s 2006 Global Survey of Political Rights and Civil Liberties ... it’s actually a feat to be less free than China – only 7 countries of 192 do it.
Dubai Does Brisk War Business »
CorpWatch
Homeland Security Objected to Ports Deal »
AP

Middle-Class Progress? »
Center for American Progress
The combination of stagnant incomes and staggering cost increases for important middle-class items – housing, health care, education and transportation – have left families with less money to save and spend than just five years ago, and working much longer to achieve the same results as their parents ... with less time to spend with children.

as the rich are getting richer ...
Labor Is in Retreat as Global Forces Squeeze Pay and Benefits »
LA Times

Four years into an economic recovery, workers across America should be riding high. Instead, they're facing new demands to surrender hard-won benefits and agree to wage concessions. Companies say these cutbacks are essential to stay competitive in an increasingly globalized economy.

Chronic US Poverty: Little Hope for Cure »
Reuters

Wasting US »
The American Prospect

Republicans aren’t trying to cut wasteful spending; they’re trying to cut popular, successful programs.

If we had a government
for the people ...
Progressives Can Do Better
AmericanProgressAction.org

With great fanfare House conservatives yesterday proposed a broad set of spending cuts they said would help offset the costs of the Katrina reconstruction effort. Their plan reduces the budget by $500 billion over 10 years, and does so in large part by dismantling programs that invest in middle- and working-class Americans. Progressives can do better. It's possible to cut far more unnecessary federal spending, accomplish it in half the time, and do so while upholding the principles of fiscal responsibility and concern for the common good.

THE CONSERVATIVE APPROACH: The proposal announced yesterday cuts substantial funding from several "long-standing targets of conservative scorn," like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the foreign operations budget. The largest proposed cuts are targeted at Medicaid, "the health care safety net for low-income children, elderly, disabled, pregnant women and parents." The plan cuts $225 billion by converting the federal share of certain Medicaid payments into a block grant, and $8 billion more by increasing Medicaid co-payments. Eliminating subsidized loans to graduate students slices off an additional $8.5 billion. $11 billion more is saved by passing restrictive new rules for federal retiree health care and federal pension programs.

A PROGRESSIVE APPROACH -- MORE SAVINGS IN LESS TIME: A progressive approach to trimming the budget could result in greater savings over a shorter period of time. For example, rolling back the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans would save $327 billion over five years. Cracking down on offshore tax shelters would save $65 billion over the same time period. Simply allowing Medicare recipients to purchase drugs through the mail would save $43 billion over five years. Repealing subsidies to the fossil fuel industry contained in the recent energy bill would save $8.5 billion. Shelving costly and unnecessary weapons systems would save $200 billion. Getting rid of counterproductive agricultural export subsidies would save $30 billion over the first five years along. Giving up half of the 6,371 special earmarked projects of the 2005 transportation bill would save an additional $12 billion. A progressive approach to trimming the budget could cut $688 billion in federal spending over just five years.

NY Times: At Public Universities, Warnings of Privatization - Taxpayer support for public universities, measured per student, has plunged more precipitously since 2001 than at any time in two decades, and several university presidents are calling the decline a de facto privatization of the institutions that played a crucial role in the creation of the American middle class.

Inter Press Service: Poverty Campaigners Take On War Spending - a total of half the world's people live on less than two dollars a day ... We can easily save up to 60 billion dollars in the U.S. military budget without having less security ... We are the ones with the cigarette in the hand telling others not to smoke.

Junking Science »
AlterNet

From Terry Schiavo to global warming ... how conservatives undermine science by whipping up controversy and manipulating the media.

By the numbers:
• 20 Things We Now Know 4 Years After 9/11
• 25 Mind-Numbingly Stupid Quotes About Hurricane Katrina And Its Aftermath
• 10 Great Ways You Can Help
• Who benefits from this war?

How uncaring and brutally incompetent can the right wing get? »
Albuquerque Tribune

.... Roberts is apparently one of those every-man-for-himself, women-and-children-last kind of Republican, the perfect judicial scissor-man to continue snipping away at the social safety net and its weakening strands of equality and freedom.

While right-wing media vipers with their poison tongues blamed the victims, the Republican leadership in Washington cravenly blamed the states for their own incompetence.

Michael Moore: A Letter to All Who Voted for George W. Bush from Michael Moore

Behind the numbers
Watching the Economy Crumble »
Paul Craig Roberts / CounterPunch

Good news! Soon you'll no longer need an expensive college education to work in the US.

The public heard that 207,000 jobs were created in July ... Of the new jobs, 26,000 (about 13%) are tax-supported government jobs. That leaves 181,000 private sector jobs. Of these private sector jobs, 177,000, or 98%, are in the domestic service sector.

The Last Throes of US Dominance »
Paul Craig Roberts / Antiwar.com

Last Friday, the price of light sweet crude oil on the New York Mercantile Exchange for August delivery closed 16 cents short of $60/barrel – the highest price ever and an ironic outcome for the millions of Americans who believe that cheap oil was the reason for Bush's invasion of Iraq.

Equally shocking to Americans was the announcement that China has outbid U.S. oil giant Chevron for the American oil company Unocal.

Polls showing that a majority of Europeans have a higher opinion of China than of the U.S. were another blow to the pumped-up self-esteem of Americans, deluded as they are by Bush administration hubris and claims of American "exceptionalism."

The decline in economic and diplomatic standing that Americans have suffered under Bush is exceptional. How much longer will Americans support the incompetent Bush administration that is driving them and their country's reputation into the ground.

Ridge: "bizarre, unique, unorthodox, unprecedented" analysis led to December  2003 terror alert »
MSNBC

CIA experts saw a secret code on Al-Jazeera that wasn't there ... so the United States raised the alert level and canceled flights.

... some top CIA officials who learned about it were skeptical. Top officials at the Directorate of Operations, which conducts clandestine operations, and others who worked at the CIA Counterterrorism Center, felt that the whole theory was implausible and was being taken far too seriously.

Hey! Some good news!
Activist action checks right wing swing
House rescinds proposed $100 million cut in PBS budget »
NY Times / AP

The Public Broadcasting Service undertook a high-profile campaign to rescind the proposed cut. Lawmakers were flooded with letters and phone calls.

Fiddling While Crucial Programs Starve »
Robert Scheer
Welcome to late-era Rome, where mindless militaristic expansion is considered patriotic and where demagogues who recklessly waste taxes and young lives in empire-building are deemed valorous.

Already the red state of Missouri is set to end its Medicaid program entirely within the next three years because of a lack of funds ... that will save the state $5 billion, but at the cost of ending healthcare for the more than 1 million Missourians enrolled in the program. That sum is less than half of what Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney's old company, alone has been paid for reconstruction efforts in Iraq, without much to show for it in terms of improving the Iraqis' quality of life.

A new federal move to limit
teen abortions »
Christian Science Monitor
The House considers new out-of-state restrictions.

Bush Wants Refineries Built on Closed Military Bases & Taxpayer Financed Insurance for Nuclear Power Plants »
ABC

Sunday Bloody Hypocrite Sunday »
The Nation
A little background on the racist pasts of the preachers who led 'Justice Sunday'.

Why is the news so bad?
What can progressives do to fix it? »
In These Times

The Silent Scream of Numbers »
Robert C. Koehler

As they slowly hack democracy to death, we’re as alone — we citizens — as we’ve ever been, protected only by the dust-covered clichés of the nation’s founding: “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

The media are not on our side. The politicians are not on our side. It’s just us, connecting the dots, fitting the fragments together, crunching the numbers, wanting to know why there were so many irregularities in the last election and why these glitches and dirty tricks and wacko numbers had not just an anti-Kerry but a racist tinge. This is not about partisan politics. It’s more like: “Oh no, this can’t be true.”

domestic issues archive »

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