Past Featured Post
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| These are frightening and unusual times. The world of finance and the overall economy are both in perilous condition. Almost every day a new crisis erupts. The stock market has plunged dramatically, and is more volatile, than at any time in memory. Loans between banks have dried up. Major financial houses have either failed or merged. Government bailout follows government bailout. Just how deep the financial crisis is can be seen from this paradox: the Bush Administration, the most wild and irresponsible defender of right-wing economic ideology and free markets in our nation's history, now has to muster one initiative after another to intervene in the financial markets. It is even in the process of nationalizing banks. |
| He was born in Harlem and his family later moved to Hollis, Queens, when his father came into some money from playing the numbers. But really Colin Powell, a child of this city, comes out of theSouth Bronx. He comes off Kelly St. and out of Public School 39 and Morris High and finally CCNY, and somewhere after he left here the dreams had to begin for Colin Powell. Somewhere he had to believe he could become what Barack Obama has now become. Powell, the New York City soldier who became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and secretary of state, had to think that someday he could be the first African-American candidate for President of the United States. |
| As the McCain/Palin ticket lurches toward what is starting to look like certain defeat on Nov. 4, Republican operatives and their parrots in the right-wing media are trying to blame the debacle on election fraud by ACORN and other left-leaning grass-roots organizations. It's not even remotely true. The essence of the right-wingers' case is that thousands of voter registration forms submitted by ACORN workers - out of an estimated 1.3 million registrations completed in 21 states over the past 18 months - turned out to be fraudulent or defective. A fake or defective registration, while troublesome, has no impact on a vote count unless an imposter shows up. |
| For the nitwits who vote for the man or woman they’d most like to have over for dinner, or hang out at a barbecue with, I suggest you take a look at how well your 401(k) is doing, or how easy it will be to meet the mortgage this month, or whether the college fund you’ve been trying to build for your kids is as robust as you’d like it to be. Voters in the George W. Bush era gave the Republican Party nearly complete control of the federal government. Now the financial markets are in turmoil, top government and corporate leaders are on the verge of panic and scholars are dusting off treatises that analyzed the causes of the Great Depression. |
| What's happening in this country, and in this election, is rather simple and easy to see: (1) the country is in total shambles -- possibly far worse than what people even realize; (2) we have lived for the last eight years under virtually absolute GOP rule; (3) the public knows this; (4) the Republican President and his party are therefore intensely -- historically -- unpopular; and (5) the voting public doesn't want to continue living under the rule of the same faction and same political party that has driven the country into the ground. Having Sarah Palin drop her gerund endings and desperately trotting out the standard, tired GOP attack ads to depict Obama as a radical, fist-pumping, America-hating, unhinged socialist -- when everyone can see with their own eyes that he isn't -- won't change any of that. |
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