The sun does not rise in the west and set in the east. Gravity does not make objects fall upwards. The earth is not flat. And tax cut do not pay for themselves. Despite four decades of bitter experience--and incontrovertible data--to the contrary, Heritage Foundation chief economist Stephen Moore nevertheless took to the op-ed pages […]
Month: December 2014
As 2014 comes to a close, the American economy is finally starting to take off. U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) surged by 5 percent in the third quarter, the best performance since 2003. Employers hired 321,000 more workers in November, marking the 57th consecutive month of private sector job gains. With unemployment down to 5.8 […]
December 27, 1964 is a holy day. Holy, that is, if you live in Northeastern Ohio or, like me, long ago made the exodus to join the large diaspora of Clevelanders now wandering the nation in search of a championship in any sport. That's right. Fifty years ago this Saturday, the Cleveland Browns crushed the […]
New polls from CBS News and the Washington Post shows the American people overwhelmingly support President Obama's decision to reestablish diplomatic relations with Cuba. That common sense consensus to end a failed Cold War policy which has outlived the Soviet Union by a generation has produced some pretty stunning responses from a furious hodge-podge of […]
After President Obama's decision to resume diplomatic relations with Cuba, the response from the usual suspects on the right has been (pun intended) fast and furious. At the forefront is Florida GOP Senator and 2016 presidential wannabe Marco Rubio. Rubio, who previously fabricated a story of his family's heroic exile from the Castro regime, called […]
There's an old saying that the United States is always fighting the last war. If so, then the apoplectic assortment of Cuban-American irredentists, aging anti-Communist crackpots and knee-jerk, Cro-Magnon conservatives opposing the normalization of relations with Havana are several conflicts behind. Simply put, the exigencies of the Cold War and the Monroe Doctrine no longer […]
Working Americans have a problem. And that means President Obama and his Democratic Party have a problem, too. Despite the robust economic recovery, the steep decline in unemployment, a surging stock market, rising investment and plummeting gas prices, wages have hardly budged. After briefly dipping during the great recession which began in late 2007, income […]
"The bottom line, however, is that the mistakes...were just that," Dick Cheney announced to the nation, "mistakes in judgment, and nothing more." There was no constitutional crisis, no systematic disrespect for ''the rule of law,'' no grand conspiracy, and no Administration-wide dishonesty or coverup. In fact, the evidence will not support any of the more […]
Like most Americans, I was horrified to learn about the shocking brutality contained in the declassified Senate torture report. Under a legal edifice erected by the Bush administration, CIA interrogators subjected terror detainees to large scale, state-sanctioned sadism. Thanks to these horrors perpetrated in all of our names, terms of art like "rectal hydration" and […]
As Dick Cheney and the usual suspects circle the wagons to defend the Bush Torture Team, one its most notorious members has been particularly active in rhetorically waterboarding the Senate torture report. On Tuesday, John Yoo, who at the Bush Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel defined torture as "in intensity to the pain accompanying […]