The president damaged his party, but finally made the right decision. Now, there are huge opportunities, if Dems don’t repeat their mistakes.
Lisa Orton an accounts receivable officer for a Surry Hills based marketing company has proudly told colleagues that she not only has never watched a game of footy in her life, she doesn’t even know which team’s which. The statement... Read More ›
There was the old American lefty paper, the Guardian, and the Village Voice, which beat the Sixties into the world, and its later imitators like the Boston Phoenix. There was Liberation News Service, the Rat in New York, the Great Speckled Bird in Atlanta, the Old Mole in Boston, the distinctly psychedelic Chicago Seed, Leviathan, Viet-Report, and the L.A. Free Press, as well as that Texas paper whose name I long ago forgot that was partial to armadillo cartoons. And they existed, in the 1960s and early 1970s, amid a jostling crowd of hundreds of “underground” newspapers — all quite above ground but the word sounded so romantic in that political moment. There were G.I. antiwar papers by the score and high school rags by the hundreds in an “alternate” universe of opposition that somehow... Read more
James Fallows is a great writer and a professional speechwriter. His examination of Trump’s dumpster fire of a speech and the media’s reaction to it is well worth your while. Every journalist and opinion writer needs to read it . The piece begins like this: This post has one central point. It is that the press should give “fair and balanced” attention to what each of the major candidates is revealing about temperament, competence, and cognition, especially in their public performances. Right now we have these opposing, imbalanced narrative cycles: —For Joe Biden, every flub, freeze, slurred word, or physical-or-verbal misstep adds to the case against him. There’s an ever-mounting dossier, which can only grow in cumulative importance. “In another difficult moment for the President….” “Coming after his disastrous debate appearance…” —For Donald Trump, every flub, fantasy, non-sequitur, “Sir” story, or revelation of profound ignorance dulls and blunts the case against him. “That’s just Trump.” “Are you new here?
The Australia China Joint Communique of December 1972 is the foundational document underpinning bilateral relations ever since. It is not a long document, and at a cursory glance appears quite simple. Recently, however, some commentators have questioned its language and suggested it is ambiguous, particularly concerning our government’s position on the status of Taiwan. A Continue reading »
Friday’s findings of the International Court of Justice on Israel’s conduct must be at the forefront of our legislator’s minds when they are pushed by the Israel lobby to enact the IHRA definition of antisemitism. The attempt by Zionist lobbyists to silence criticism of Israel is running in top gear to try to counter the Continue reading »
Twenty years’ ago the then leader of the conservative New Zealand National Party, Don Brash, got into hot water when a Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) official reported that he had assured a visiting delegation from the US Senate that if his party were elected to office NZ’s ‘nuclear-free policy’ would be ‘gone Continue reading »
In the West the claim is often made that Palestine is an issue that Arab or Muslim governments manipulate to stay in power by appealing to a populist cause. The deeper truth is that Palestine has become a subversive issue in the Middle East: the liberation of Palestinians through a South Africa-style dismantling of an Continue reading »
With just a few more stories farmers in the south of Israel would have been granted as much air time as all the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander nations in Australia put together. Continue reading »
Governments and politicians should be investing in community initiatives and addressing the social determinants of crime, and health, instead of focusing on “tough on crime” policies, according to two members of the National Network of Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, Tabitha Lean and Debbie Kilroy. Tough on youth crime policies are short sighted Continue reading »
One of the characteristic features of modern western democracies is, as John Ralston Saul has pointed out, that it has focused on the development of narrow forms of expertise and then used reason to apply that narrow expertise to addressing specific social, cultural, economic and political issues. This is particularly true of the proliferating management Continue reading »
The trans–Atlantic alliance’s true purpose of global dominance is too objectionable to profess. Instead, it operates on the basis of fantastic conjurings, which no member questions. It is now five years since Emmanuel Macron, in one of those blunt outbursts for which he is known, told The Economist, in a reference to the collective West, “What we are currently Continue reading »
If leading central banks can grow their balance sheets by billions of dollars during the pandemic, they can do the same to fight global warming. Last year was the hottest summer on record and, while this summer is not over yet, it feels like it will break last year’s record. My air-conditioning bill has gone up because Continue reading »
Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 21 2024
by Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
David Sirota, July 18, 2024 [The Lever]
In 2008, I published a book with a straightforward premise: the upcoming era of American politics would be defined by a competition between the left and right to harness the working class’s intensifying rage in a society being pillaged by corporate interests.
If you want to see all the highlights, you can see them at @atrupar on twitter. If you just want to read through a succinct recap, here’s a handy one from @artcandee:
Trump is not being cared for by a licensed physician but rather by his former “gentleman of the stool.” (Ronny “Johnson” is no longer a licensed physician.) Here is a letter that rivals his former Dr. Feelgood who distributed a dictated statement from Trump himself: He is not a real Dr and It appears he wasn’t one even when he was licensed. He was a pill pusher. It’s a shocking fact that he was ever the White House doctor. We have not heard from any legitimate doctor about Trump’s “wound.” Dr. Sanjay Gupta, a neuro-surgeon, has said that we need to know if there was any neurological damage which could have happened if that was, in fact, a bullet wound. It appears they have no intention of doing that. And it also appears that the press has no intention of pushing for “transparency” on the issue. I’m sure I don’t have to remind you that they have held Joe Biden to a very different standard. The Parkinson’s “debate” is recent. Remember this one?
A stopped clock Not a big Bill Maher fan, but this week’s show had some moments. Digby noted a big one. Here are some others. ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.
The Republican platform is embracing guns even after Trump’s assassination attempt, and more from The Lever this week.
But not if the beatings continue One may find polls to support about any position out there. A set of polls that consistently tilt one way are those reporting that conservatives are happier than liberals. These findings date back years. Contra that, Rachel Bitecofer cites data from the World Happiness Report—a partnership between Gallup, the Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre and the United Nations—that suggests people who live in red states are, by and large, less happy than those who live in bluer states. European countries, you have heard, report greater hapoiness than the U.S., however. This too is a consistent result. Indeed, “the U.S. fell eight spots to number 23 in the global rankings between 2023 and 2024,” dropping out of the top 20 for the first time in the survey’s history. But not so fast. Polling of individiuals still more consistently shows that conservatives report being happier than liberals. Real Clear Science from August 2022: Social psychologist Jaime Napier, Program Head of Psychology at NYU-Abu Dhabi has conducted research suggesting that views about inequality play a role.
Così come la macroeconomia tradizionale del dopoguerra è stata criticata per essere fondata su una metodologia matematica assiomatico-deduttiva, ritengo che il nucleo del neo-ricardianismo sia basato sulla stessa metodologia. Per risolvere il problema di trovare una misura del valore che non sia influenzata dai cambiamenti nella distribuzione del reddito, Sraffa — in “Produzione di merci […]