"Everyone Knows . . . "

Dissent, Once The Highest Form Of Patriotism, Now An Endangered Concept
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, and the hopes of its Children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric Power Plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped Hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single ...

Inaugural speeches share similar themes
They invoke history, quote famous men -- from fellow Nevada governors to American presidents -- and nearly always profess optimism in the face of tough times, and then predict better days ahead. When Gov. Brian Sandoval delivered his inaugural address in Carson City on Jan. 5, the Republican mentioned optimism and opportunity two dozen times. He spoke proudly of Nevada's battle born beginnings in 1864 near the end of the Civil War. And he contrasted the state's hard-scrabble mining start to its ...

Wayne Root: The Gabrielle Giffords Tragedy: How Liberal Media Distorted the Message and Lynched the Tea Party
Emailed by Wayne Root to [email protected]: What Liberal Media- Including Fox News- Didn’t Tell You. Is it the Tea Party to Blame, or the Media and Hollywood? By Wayne Allyn Root As Americans and simply decent human beings, all of us should be shocked and saddened by Saturday’s tragedy in Tucson, Arizona. Nineteen shot. Six are dead — including a Federal Judge and an innocent nine-year-old girl. And a talented United States Congresswoman lies in a coma after being shot in the he...

Midday open thread
Keep your eye on Rep. Paul Ryan, the new Chairman of the House Budget Committee. The Economist: What should be made of Mr Ryan’s Rhetoric? The charitable interpretation is that he is pursuing a more patient strategy of adhering to the party line until Democrats cave on entitlements, and then he will put Tax Increases on the table. The less charitable interpretation is that as his prominence in the party has risen, he has morphed from a principled fiscal hawk to an old-school "starve th...

Congressman LoBiondo seeks repeal of health care law
Congressman Frank LoBiondo issued a Press Release on January 7, 2011 which states his alignment with the 112th Congress Republican mantra of repealing the Health Care law (Affordable Care Act) enacted last March by the 111th Democratic Congress. However, Congressman LoBiondo in his Press Release notes his approval of several provisions of the Health Care law including lowered presecription drug costs for seniors and the prohibition of denying Health Care coverage due to Pre-existing Conditions. ...

CBO: Republicans Health Care Repeal Would Increase the Deficit and the Uninsured
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the non-partisan authority on budget Legislation, estimated today that House Republicans’ bill to Repeal the Affordable Care Act (H.R. 2) would “increase in Deficits to something in the vicinity of $230 billion.” CBO estimates that enacting H.R. 2 would increase federal Deficits in the decade after 2019 by an amount that is in a broad range around one-half percent of GDP, plus or minus the effects of technical and economic changes that CBO...

An essential mandate
The Individual Mandate provision of the 2010 Healthcare Reform law is winding its way through the courts, and will probably be decided by the Supreme Court. It's the place of judges to decide the constitutional issues. However, as a physician and a Public Health researcher, respectively, we believe that striking down the mandate would threaten the future of private health Insurance Coverage. Many Republicans — Mitt Romney, Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the Heritage Foundation and many ...

Region's Colder Temperatures Due to Global Warming
Today's Philadelphia Inquirer has an article about the possible cause for colder than expected temperatures the region is facing. December was the Coldest on record in 10 years while January is projected to be the Coldest in possibly 25 years. But it's not just here. Europe experienced a deep freeze this past December, which NASA attempts to explain as a rise in the temperature in the Arctic, melting the Sea Ice thereby affecting the weather. Without going into the scientific details, which you ...

Tea party pollutocrat David Koch denies climate change, shrugs off his carbon pollution
The Koch family put together the Tea Party movement and has surpassed Exxon Mobil in funding Climate Science disinformation and Clean Energy opposition. This Think Progress cross-post is Part 2 of Lee Fang’s amazing interview with David Koch. This week, ThinkProgress conducted an impromptu interview with David Koch — one of the Richest men in America, co-owner of the conglomerate Koch Industries, and a top financier of right-wing front groups — after we found him leaving the swearing...

Inequality and the Labor Market
I cooked up this model in my head whereby asymmetric time spans of slack and Overheating labor market conditions would exacerbate inequality, but then I thought I might be wrong because normally I try to avoid espousing economic theories I haven’t previously read from someone with a PhD. Fortunately, Tyler Cowen does have a PhD and says this was cut from a draft of something he was working on: A worker who wasn’t worth much sweeping up the back room is suddenly valuable when new orders...

Conservatives Running Away from Conservative Conference Because Some Gays Might Show Up
Uh oh! Looks like some of the heads of Conservative Movement's "values voters" wing has caught wind that some gay people are planning on attending their annual orgiastic patriot party. Can't risk being associated with those types… Some of the nation's most prominent social Conservatives are sending a message to their economic brethren by dropping out of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in response to the decision to include GOProud, a gay conse...

Hating the Sinner
Harsanyi: it’s Social Conservatism that will most often turn those with Secular sensibilities away from the right. Even within the movement, a Libertarian vs. social conservative debate has roiled on forever. This dynamic is only going to change when political expediency becomes a force more powerful than faith — which is to say the day after we pay off the National Debt. Now, it’s true that social Conservatives can be unfairly ridiculed as bigots in these debates. But sometimes,...

GOP embrace of violent rhetoric: A chicken coming home to roost
Count on this: over the next few days, you will see and hear the Right Wing desperately scramble to distance themselves from the violence today in Arizona. Don't let them. It does not matter whether the perpetrator of these acts had a political motive - that is utterly irrelevant (although early evidence does suggest that there was some Tea Party-like philosophy/Libertarian political aspect to the shooter, it is, at this point, somewhat obscure). What is relevant is that since the election of...

Let the Debate Begin, by Arnold Kling
So says Uwe E. Reinhardt. Even the word private in "private charitable giving" is not completely accurate. A more accurate term would be "private donations coupled with involuntary, tax-financed public subsidies." If Progressives want to attack private charity because they prefer Government Spending, we should have that debate. There is not much to be said on behalf of private charity, other than: 1. I think that a higher percentage of private charity goes to causes that I can support, even ta...

The Attitude, by Arnold Kling
David Cole writes, We, the Real Americans, in order to form a more God-Fearing Union, establish Justice as we see it, Defeat Health-Care Reform, and Preserve and Protect our Property, our Guns and our Right Not to Pay Taxes, do ordain and establish this Conservative Constitution for the United States of Real America. Read the whole thing, which the Washington Post thought deserved prominent position in its Sunday "Outlook" section. It expresses what I call "The Attitude." With The Attitude, p...

Things We Learned in 2010
from CFIF In life, there are good years and bad years. Then there are years like 2010, when the countdown to New Year’s feels like a Parole hearing. 2011 is looking up, with a new batch of Conservatives on Capitol Hill, a presidential contest that will soon get underway in earnest, and news that the Obama Administration is now taking an official stand against Torture (I refer, of course, to Robert Gibbs’ departure as White House Press Secretary).  But before we leave 2010 to our generatio

Obama Wants Internet ID For Americans
US President Barack Obama has tapped the Commerce Department over federal security agencies to create an Internet ID for Americans, a White House official announced Friday. White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt, who made the announcement, told attendees at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research that “we need the Private Sector to lead the implementation of this” as opposed to National Security agencies, adding that “I don’t have to get a creden...

Bob Burnett: Barack Obama and the Three Envelopes
The frantic final days of the 111th Congress were an emotional rollercoaster that mirrored Barack Obama's first two years as President. As he prepares to run for Reelection in 2012, he faces grave national problems, a recalcitrant 112th Congress, and disgruntled Democrats. Obama should reread the classic management tale of the "three envelopes". A newly hired CEO moves into his office, where he finds a note from his predecessor: "Good luck! If things don't go the way you plan, here are three e...

Eric Alterman on America's "Kabuki Democracy"
Many of the issues raised in Alterman's new book demand the focus and attention of Progressives. Gridlock in governance, particularly the Senate, routinely prevents progressive change. The power of corporations has turned progressive organizations into anemic entities, which pose a miniscule threat to corporatist leaders in Washington. And, the need for reforming Elections and ensuring all Americans have Voting Rights has never been more urgent. But, unfortunately, Alterman chooses to suggest ...

Don't Like the Facts? Ignore Them.
As a rule, ideologues are blinded by their devotion, but I'm continuously impressed by the GOP's ability to ignore all inconvenient facts, like the Congressional Budget Office's projections on Health Care reform: Rescinding the federal law to overhaul the health-care system, the first objective of House Republicans who ascended to power this week, would ratchet up the federal Deficit by about $230 billion over the next decade and leave 32 million more Americans Uninsured, according to congressio...

"Can someone tell me why Sarah Palin is not in Jail?"
I want to piggyback onto Locutisprime's post where he had this (and much more) to say about yesterday's tragic events: The smoke had barely cleared and the dust barely settled before the liberal banshees were attributing yesterday's shooting in Arizona to their political enemies. And by this morning and by Monday at the latest, there is absolutely no telling the level of vitriol that this incident will have brought forth from the radical wing of the Democrat party and their friends in main str...

Republican Assault on Health Care Could Backfire
When it comes to Health Care, Republicans should be careful what they wish for. Their upcoming vote to Repeal the health-care law will be largely symbolic — they don’t have the votes to override President Obama’s certain Veto. The real thing happens later, when they try to strip the Department of Health and Human Services of money needed to implement the law’s requirement that all Americans buy Health Insurance. This could easily precipitate a showdown with the ...

Have an uninsured child? Tell us your story
Call to readers: Are you stuck between a rock and a hard place? Make too much money to qualify for Medicaid or FAMIS Insurance for your Children, but not enough to cover the costs of private Health Insurance? We'd like to hear your story. Call Pilot reporter Amy Jeter at (757) 446-2730 or e-mail [email protected] Login or register to post comments COMMENTS ADVISORY: Users are solely responsible for opinions they post here; comments do not reflect the views of The Virginian-Pilot or its w...

The only change Obama brought us was more corruption [Reader Post]
What is clear from the list is that the notion of equal protection ensconced in the Constitution was missing in September 2008. Rather than trying to spread both the burden and benefit of the Bailout evenly among members of the U.S. Financial Services industry, key decision makers at the Fed and Treasury arbitrarily determined which companies should become wards of the Federal Government (AIG) and which should be permitted to live on (Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley). Goldman Sachs was permitte...

Reid dismisses healthcare repeal attempt
WASHINGTON, Jan. 9 (UPI) -- Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is scorning vows by House Republicans to Repeal the U.S. healthcare law as "a gesture of futility." In an interview with NBC's "Meet the Press" broadcast Sunday, the Nevada Democrat said, "Even the people who report the news recognize that this is just a gesture of futility. "They can't be serious, to increase the Debt by more than a Trillion dollars? They can't be serious to have people now that have pre-existing disabilities no lo...