Do They Know It’s Mardi Gras?
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Outside of New Orleans and southern Louisiana and Mobile, Alabama, Mardi Gras generally comes as news—if it comes at all—to people in the rest of the United States when they see footage on network and cable news. Oh, it must be Mardi Gras again. Look at all those crazy-dressed people ...
Framing the Case for Infrastructure Investment, Taxing the Rich
Attn.: Pro-Infrastructure Activists and Democratic Strategists:
In a Feb. 4 letter to the editor of the New York Times, Rick Stone of Madison, Wisc., makes a point that more of us should heed:
If the wealthy knew with certainty that their increased taxes would make the roads they drive ...
IEA Sees “Irreversible Climate Change in Five Years”
“I don’t know who and where the climate leadership in the administration is. It doesn’t exist. There is no resolve in the Obama administration to do anything.” —Tim Wirth, U.N. Foundation president
“What do you get for pretending the danger’s not real?” —Pink Floyd, “Sheep” (Animals, ...
“There Is a Creative Force in This Universe”
The Poor People’s Campaign, 40 Years before Occupy Wall Street
“Oh America, how often have you taken necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes. . . . God never intended for one group of people to live in superfluous inordinate wealth, while others live in abject deadening ...
How the World Has—and Has Not—Changed in 50 Years
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Portraits of Courage, Struggle, and Defiance
This is the mug shot of Joan Trumpauer, a 19-year-old Duke University student and SNCC member who was arrested by the Jackson, Mississippi, police with eight other activists as they arrived on a train from New Orleans to participate in Freedom ...
As We Enter 2012, Best Wishes to All
May the new year bring you all the good things you wish for.
We’ll be brief with our greetings and good wishes, as last night’s champagne slowly wears off, and as there’s some house-cleaning to do before guests arrive for the New Year’s Day dinner . . .
For all our readers here in the ...
How Many U.S. Soldiers Were Wounded in Iraq?
500,000 vets may suffer from PTSD, depression, or traumatic brain injury
Dan Froomkin, senior Washington correspondent for Huffington Post, reports at Nieman Watchdog that the Pentagon’s figure of 32,226 wounded seriously undercounts the true casualty rate. Possibly more than a half million ...
Tom Piazza on Writing for HBO’s “Treme”
“New Orleans has a mythology, a personality, a soul, that is large, and that has touched people around the world. It has its own music (many of its own musics), its own cuisine, its own way of talking, its own architecture, its own smell, its own look and feel. . . .
“It may be hard for ...
Eisenhower on Military Hyperpower and Dictatorship
The “Crushing Weight of Military Power”
“Any person who doesn’t clearly understand that national security and national solvency are mutually dependent and that permanent maintenance of a crushing weight of military power would eventually produce dictatorship should not be entrusted with any ...
Retrieved from the Spam Filter
On the lighter side of Giving Thanks, and in the holiday spirit of giving, we were moved to share with you our dear readers some of the expressions of gratitude and encouragement we’ve received in recent weeks. Somehow these comments were caught up in the spam filter. How could this happen? We ...
“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
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Every year about this time we set aside our JFK assassination conspiracy books and turn to ...