by Maggie Mahar If you think fertilized eggs are people but refugee kids aren’t, you’re going to have to stop pretending your concerns are religious– Syd’s SoapBox News reports have been filled with conflicting theories explaining why tens of thousands of unaccompanied children from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, have been streaming into the U.S.  […]

By Dean Baker (2011) Progressives need a fundamentally new approach to politics. They have been losing not just because conservatives have so much more money and power, but also because they have accepted the conservatives’ framing of political debates. They have accepted a framing where conservatives want market outcomes whereas liberals want the government to […]

Hat Tip Digsby and Kos Cartoons “Supreme Court Chooses Religion Over Science” In a footnote, Justice Alito concedes that Hobby Lobby’s religious-based assertions are contradicted by science-based federal regulations: “The owners of the companies involved in these cases and others who believe that life begins at conception regard these four methods as causing abortions, but […]

Yup. Definitely the way to go.  No doubt about it.  Rep. Ellmers has found the key. Out of the mouths of babes.  (One babe, anyway.) Good grace. —- PS: Thanks, Ms. Schow.  Good job.  And thanks, David Weigel.  Excellent job.  

David Kay Johnston re-frames the story of what happens to your money in this age of tax cuts as the road to prosperity: Why are so many Americans feeling squeezed economically even as the economy expands at an accelerating pace? Last month set a new record for sustained job creation: 52 straight months of added […]

The New York Times has a wonderful graphic miss-urled How the Year You Were Born Influences Your Politics. Jon Chait points out that this URL (and a tweet) are accurate only if you are white (he doesn’t add that it only works if you are also a US citizen). I think you will enjoy clicking […]

by Dale Coberly For some time now the Social Security Trustees have been reporting in the “media” using scare tactics like this: “Social Security Going Broke Sooner Than We Thought! Faces [fill in the blank] Trillion Dollar Deficit!” And I have tried to explain that what those numbers mean is that we need to raise […]

Via Demos comes this note on Our enormous retirment subsidies to the rich: …it behooves us to collectively recall just how much money the federal government is already devoting to subsidizing private retirement accounts. Those in policy circles tend to be aware of this stuff, but it largely escapes the glare of everyone else. Each […]

by Barkley Rosser at Econospeak The Wannabe Caliphate Openly Declares Itself So I earlier argued here that ISIS(ISIL) or DAEESH was not yet claiming itself to be a caliphate, and that its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was only calling himself “al Hakim,” or “Ruling Emir,” even as I recognized that he had turned over this […]