Letting the media just do its job just isn't enough for the Bush administration. It's hard enough to find honest aggressive media when only FIVE corporations now control the majority of all forms of the media in this country (this includes ALL the media: TV, movies, music, newspapers, magazines). So…
Senator Talent allegedly represents me. He is allegedly a thinking man. He allegedly cares about our country.
Senator Jim Talent sends me an email newsletter every month or so. His current newsletter says this about Iraq:
As day-to-day life there improves, my hope is that more Iraqis will view the liberation of Iraq and the ongoing political progress as a turning point for Iraqi society.
When was that written, I wonder? Two years ago? Three years ago?
What else has Senator Jim Talent been up to? [If you’re wondering why I always say “Senator Jim Talent,” I’m hoping that it will make this article more search-engine-friendly than not saying “Senator Jim Talent. After all, Senator Jim Talent is facing an election in November].
Senator Jim Talent does prominently announce some things. He’s so upset that payday loan shops are so incredibly evil (with their 500% interest loans) that he has announced that he is supporting a bill so that would require payday lenders to offer reduced loan rates, but only to members of the military. Screw everyone else, I suppose. I guess it never occurred to Senator Jim Talent that we should pay members of the military decent wages so they don’t have to desperately walk up to the counters of the payday lenders. Senator Jim Talent is also against promising new forms of stem cell research, but he somehow forgets to put it prominently in his newsletter that he prefers to let real children die in order to protect …
There wasn't any holding back here. Here's an excerpt from Mayor Rocky Anderson's speech: Blind faith in bad leaders is not patriotism. A patriot does not tell people who are intensely concerned about their country to just sit down and be quiet; to refrain from speaking out in the name…
A couple days ago, after much work and careful deliberation, a federal court declared the obvious:
A federal judge Thursday ruled that cigarette makers were liable for a decades-long conspiracy to hide the dangers of smoking but declined to impose financial penalties on the industry.
In her 1,653 page opinion, U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler wrote:
Cigarette smoking causes disease, suffering, and death. Despite internal recognition of this fact, defendants have publicly denied, distorted, and minimized the hazards of smoking for decades.
Why is this story even news? The dangers of tobacco and the deceit of tobacco companies have long been obvious. There has never been a more damning case against any industry. See here. See also, the Executive Summary of Preliminary Proposed Finding of Fact in US v. Philip Morris, et al.
…Cigarette smoking and exposure to secondhand smoke kills nearly 440,000 Americans every year. The annual number of deaths due to cigarette smoking is substantially greater than the annual number of deaths due to illegal drug use, alcohol consumption, automobile accidents, fires, homicides, suicides and AIDS combined. Approximately one out of every five deaths that occur in the United States is caused by cigarette smoking.
At the end of 1953, the chief executives of the five major cigarette manufacturers in the United States at the time – Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, Brown & Williamson, Lorillard, and American – met at the Plaza Hotel in New York City with representatives of the public relations firm Hill
In the September, 2006 Harper's "Notebook," Lewis H. Lapham begins with this quote by Rainer Werner Fassbinder: In the last analysis, terrorism is an idea generated by capitalism to justify better defense measures to safeguard capitalism. Is there money to be made in Iraq? Lapham, who has wielded a sharp…