Rachel Maddow talks about how our elections have become proxy battles for billionaire interests. A large segment, starting at around the 3:00 mark, deals with Mitt Romney’s secretive national finance co-chair Frank VanderSloot whom [Read more…]
The website Antiwar.com is essential reading for me. In my opinion, it is the most useful and important comprehensive news and opinion site around.
The people behind it can likely be labeled as a mix of paleo-conservatives and libertarians who are refreshingly open to a wide spectrum of news and opinions from across the political spectrum and around the world, with a perspective that consists of opposing the idea of the US being a military empire, opposing wars of aggression, and protecting civil liberties.
They are holding a fund drive and I urge those who can to donate something.
Frank VanderSloot is an Idaho-based billionaire CEO of a company called Melaleuca that sells dietary supplements and cleaning products in a manner that has been likened to the dubious Amway model. He is supposedly a devout Mormon who has opposed measures that are seen as gay-friendly and he and his company are one of the largest donors ($1 million) to the pro-Romney SuperPAC, Restore Our Future and [Read more…]
Like most people, I find Wikipedia to be quite useful. It has grown on me over time and I have donated to their fund drives as I think it serves a valuable function and is also a great experiment in open-source knowledge and the wisdom of the crowds. I have found that on topics that I know something about, it has often been quite good. I generally tend [Read more…]
Rush Limbaugh seems to think that with the perception that the economy is improving, the best strategy for Republicans would be to wage yet another ‘culture war’ election. He says, “Something tells me, that if the upcoming election could be decided on social issues, the Republicans could win that in [Read more…]
In a post yesterday I wrote about the dumbing down of news in America by replacing news coverage with [Read more…]
Stephen Colbert got a lot of comedy mileage by creating his own Super PAC. Colbert is the latest in a long line of such political satirists. Older readers may recall the Youth International Party (or ‘Yippies)’ that ran a boar hog named Pigasus for president in the 1968 elections under the slogan “Pork power!” Or perennial candidate Pat Paulsen, with his woebegone [Read more…]
The Daily Show finds that Time magazine’s cover stories vary with the different editions for the various regions of the world. This is not surprising in itself except for the fact that it seems as if Time believes its American readers are more [Read more…]
My daughter just sent me the link to this ad for a new line of LEGOs being marketed to girls. She saw it as a retrograde step in attitudes towards women. I have to agree, mainly because of what the new LEGO figurines are portrayed as interested in doing.
It seems like there are many parents who [Read more…]
I saw the latest Muppets film over the holidays and it was fun, though not great. But because the villain was an evil oil executive named Tex Richman (played with relish by Chris Cooper), Fox News seemed to think that the film was a brazen [Read more…]