News & Comment

Finally, someone's giving NJ governor Chris Christie (whom fellow blogger Richard Eskow rightly dubbed, "The Heartless, Smug, Bullying Embodiment Of The Republican Party") as good as he dishes out. At the Daily Beast, author Stephen King has posted a response to Christie's suggestion that Warren Buffett should just "shut up and right a check."  A top-selling horror writer, King isn't the least bit scared of Christie's bombast. It's one of the best things I've read today, and not to be missed. What groups like the Patriotic Millionaires and candidates like Elizabeth Warren have said with more civility and eloquence, King puts in language even Christie can understand. read more »

Wear black on Saturday. It is Workers’ Memorial Day, a time devoted to commemorating those killed on the job. read more »

Here are some headlines you won't see after the government releases new figures on Social Security and Medicare later today: read more »

Take a good look at Europe—bloody riots in Athens and Madrid, rising unemployment, spreading poverty and suicide, and a deepening recession—because the current American elite consensus bizarrely read more »

Some companies are learning that supporting hyper-partisan groups can backfire when their customers find out about it. In recent weeks a number of companies are trying to distance themselves from the partisan, right-wing group ALEC before their brands become as damaged as Susan G. Komen for the Cure®. read more »

No doubt about it, large unlimited donations are flowing into SuperPACs from rich individuals and corporations aimed at influencing who is elected at all levels of government in 2012. With the SuperPACs and other forms of political committees regulated by the federal and state election agencies, or by the IRS under section 527, at least we know who the donors are. read more »

A picture of the man who has come to embody the inequities of Greece's financial crisis has begun to emerge, with friends and neighbors shedding light on the life of the elderly pensioner who killed himself in Athens on Wednesday. Named as Dimitris Christoulas by the Greek media, the retired pharmacist was described as decent, law-abiding, meticulous and dignified. The 77-year-old had written in his one-page, three-paragraph suicide note that it would be better to have a "decent end" than be forced to scavenge in the "rubbish to feed myself". "With his suicide he wanted to send a political message," Antonis Skarmoutsos, a friend and neighbor was quoted as saying in the mass-selling Ta Nea newspaper. "He was deeply politicized but also enraged." read more »

The returns aren’t all in yet on today’s Republican primaries but President Obama didn’t wait. He kicked off his 2012 campaign against Mitt Romney with a hard-hitting speech centered on the House Republicans’ budget plan – which Romney has enthusiastically endorsed. Here’s what the President had to say about it: "Disguised as a deficit reduction… it is really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country. It is thinly veiled social Darwinism." We are likely to hear a lot more about social Darwinism in the months ahead. read more »

If there was a question President Obama tried to answer with his speech this afternoon to the Associated Press, it was this—“what happened to the Republican Party?” And to that end, he marshaled evidence from a century of political history to show that today’s Grand Old Party is dangerously unmoored from the American consensus, with a budget proposal that amounts to “thinly veiled social Darwinism.” To a large degree, Obama’s speech was filled with the frustration of liberals who see the extent to which the Republican Party has rejected the notion of a government that works positively within the economy. Obama’s challenge is to convince the public that Republicans would continue on that path if elected to office. At the risk of sounding too certain, I think he can do it. read more »

Although we’ve only been back on the air for a couple of months, in your letters, e-mails and webpage comments a single theme emerges time and again – thank you for the reporting, for the interviews and for your commentary, you tell us, but the problems seem so insurmountable, the forces arrayed against us so large, what can I do, as one person, to make a difference? read more »