If you don’t live in or around New Orleans you may have forgotten, but August 29 is the day Hurricane Katrina assaulted the Gulf Coast with Category 3 winds (up to 175 mph) and storm surges of 25 to 28 feet, killing 1,833 and costing some $108 billion in damages, the...
Federal Agencies
House Democrats Demand to Know Why GOP Govs Rejected Medicaid Expansion
Show Us Why You’re Keeping Your People Poor and Sick “In order to better understand the basis for your opposition, I request that you provide . . . copies of any state-specific analyses, studies, or reports that you ordered, requested or relied on to inform your...
7 Million Cheers for ‘Obamacare’
Public Health, Too, Is ‘National Security’ Congratulation to President Obama, the White House, and the courageous Democrats in Congress who voted for the Affordable Care Act in 2010, the most ambitious expansion of health care for Americans since the passage of...
Dianne Feinstein Calls Out CIA for Spying on Congress
California Senator, Long a CIA Defender, Charges Obstruction of Congressional Oversight Please join us in calling Senator Dianne Feinstein (202-224-3841 or 415-393-0707) to say thanks and, as we said to her staffer, “keep up the courage” for having spoken out...
An ‘Obamacare’ Success Story
Insurers, Too, Must Be Held Accountable Our friend Stephen in NYC, who has contributed good ideas to this blog before, shares his experience in enrolling with an insurer. Stephen makes the very important point that the news media (including us bloggers) would serve...
Positively Giddy
The Only Thing They Have to Fear Is . . . Government Itself “We’re very excited. It’s exactly what we wanted, and we got it.” —Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) * “The mood in the Capitol on Saturday, at least among Republicans, was downright giddy. When Republican leaders...
Elvin R. Heiberg III, General Who Took Blame for Hurricane Katrina Failures, Dies at 81
Former Head of Army Corps of Engineers Regretted Not Fighting for Storm-Surge Gates As Tropical Storm Karen approaches the Gulf Coast, and FEMA employees, furloughed by the latest GOP Government Shutdown, are called back to work without pay, The New York Times reports the death of Lt. Gen. Elvin R. Heiberg III, “who rose to the top […]
A Return to Literacy Tests? Take This.
How Many White Folks Does It Take to Pass a Jim Crow ‘Brain-Teaser’? With the Supreme Court’s June 25 decision in Shelby County v. Holder overturning Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and with Republican Jim Crow re-enactors “free at last” to get their electoral racism on, will the United States see a return […]
Supreme Conservatives Drag U.S. Ceaselessly into the (Jim Crow) Past
* “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” —Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, dissenting opinion, Shelby County v. Holder Re-Legalizing Electoral Racism; Red State Republicans ‘Free at Last’ June 25, 2013, will […]
The Life You Save May Be Your Own Child’s
* We see the efforts needed to reduce the slaughter of innocents (of all ages) as comprising three elements: gun control; expanded psychological services; and pressure on Hollywood and video game makers to dial down the ultraviolence. Not only do the citizens of the...
Happy Thanksgiving to You: Much to Be Grateful For
Happy Thanksgiving! We hope you and your friends and family have much to be thankful for this year, and that you’re able to spend the day with people you love. We wish you a festive gathering over a Thanksgiving dinner with good food and drink, and happy memories of...
Ask Not “Why Live There?”—Ask “How Can I Help?”
[ cross-posted at Daily Kos ] Please Give to Red Cross We just made a donation to the American Red Cross. We’re asking all our readers to please make a donation if you can. Click here or phone 1-800-HELPNOW or text “RedCross” to 90999. Even $5 or $10 can help buy...
Hurricane Isaac and Tampa’s Blizzard of Lies
What Would Romney-Ryan Mean for FEMA and Infrastructure? [ cross-posted at DailyKos ] * “One of the themes of the Tampa convention will be the failure of government, and the prosperity that will result if it is cut to ribbons. But in a different corner of the...
“We Cannot Fail to Try”
A Break from “Hell No You Can’t” ”We are not here to curse the darkness, but to light the candle that can guide us through that darkness to a safe and sane future.” —John F. Kennedy, July 15, 1960 * Every year about this time we set aside our JFK assassination...
A Cure for “The Silence of the Dems”
What kind of future can there be for a political party that defers all its speaking roles to a conflict-averse President who does not want to be too closely identified with his party? And what future for that party’s legacy of “social contract” programs—and the people...
We’re Not Forgetting
* Except for posting this brief comment, we are among the millions of New Yorkers who are doing anything but “commemorating” the 10th anniversary. We are not reading the magazines’ special commemorative editions or watching the solemn and reverent broadcasts brought...
Go Big, Obama: Give Us a 10-Year Jobs Plan
* As Long as They’re Calling You a Socialist, Go All the Way What does “Labor Day” mean to the 15+ million unemployed? Below is our Happy Labor Day card to President Obama in advance of his address to the nation Thursday, Sept. 8, about proposals for alleviating the...
What a Deal
Is This What “Winning the Future” Feels Like? “Our enemies could not have designed a better plan to weaken the American economy than this debt-ceiling deal.” —Joe Nocera, “Tea Party’s War on America” (see below) “With all this incessant emphasis on deficit reduction,...
Memo to White House: Time to Use the Constitutional Option
* It’s Time to End This Hostage Crisis This has gone far enough. Whereas Speaker John Boehner has failed to persuade his own party in the House to support his proposed bill to lift the debt ceiling short-term—which the Senate and the President would have rejected...
Wake Up to the National Security Threat
From Our Own Domestic Extremists
“Just supposing our national government . . . had fallen into the hands of men loyal to an alien power, then would the people yank the usurpers out of office at once?” * In 2007 we asked, “Is the U.S. an Occupied Nation?” With the country exhausted by war and the Gulf...