NewsTrust - Politics - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Independent)

The Lost ‘Trifecta of Scandals’

Thu, 16 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Consortium News - By Beverly Bandler - May. 16 (Opinion) - the mainstream news media is abuzz about “the trifecta of scandals” besetting the Obama administration, a narrative that fails to assess the actual significance of the three “scandals.” They don’t measure up to the many important scandals that the media neglects

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Dick Cheney, Benghazi, and White House Lies

Wed, 15 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By David Corn - May. 15 (Opinion) - Dick Cheney has never been short on chutzpah. Jumping aboard the GOP scandal-mongering machine, the former vice president appeared on Fox News (where else?) and declared to Sean Hannity (who else?) that President Barack Obama and his aides "lied" about the attack in Benghazi last September that left four Americans dead. "I think it's one of the worst incidents frankly that I can recall in my career," Cheney huffed—as if 9/11 had never happened. The former veep went the full Monty and echoed (discredited) right-wing charges that the Obama administration refused to deploy military forces to help Ambassador Chris Stevens and other Americans when they were assaulted in Benghazi.

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IRS Fallout: The Real Scandal is Secret Money Influencing US Elections

Tue, 14 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

The Nation - By Ari Berman - May. 14 (Opinion) - The IRS is under siege for investigating conservative political groups applying for tax-exempt status. But the real problem wasn’t that the IRS was too aggressive. It was that the agency focused on the wrong people - “none of those groups were big spendes on political advertising; most were local Tea Party organizations with shoestring budgets,” writes The New York Times—and wasn’t aggressive enough.

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Nuclear Weapons Will be Used -- If We Don't Do Something to Get Rid of the Damn Things

Mon, 13 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Tom Engelhardt - May. 13 (Opinion) - Has a weapon ever been invented, no matter how terrible, and not used? The crossbow, the dreadnought, poison gas, the tank, the landmine, chemical weapons, napalm, the B-29, the drone: all had their day and for some that day remains now. Even the most terrible weapon of all, the atomic bomb, that city-buster, that potential civilization-destroyer, was used as soon as it was available. Depending on your historical interpretation, it was either responsible for ending World War II in the Pacific or rushed into action before that war could end. In either case, it launched the atomic age.

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Austerity Kills: How Harsh Budget Cuts Increase Suicide, Infant Mortality, HIV Infections

Mon, 13 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Alex Kane - May. 13 (Review) - Austerity doesn’t just hurt economies--it contributes to rising suicide rates, infant mortality and H.I.V. infections. That’s the message of a New York Times Op-Ed written by David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu, authors of a new book titled The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills.

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Anna Jarvis, the Radical Behind Mother's Day

Sun, 12 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Steve Brodner - May. 12 (Comment) - This cartoon was originally published in the Los Angeles Times.

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The Most Controversial Chart in History, Explained

Thu, 09 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Chris Mooney - May. 09 (Opinion) - Back in 1998, a little known climate scientist named Michael Mann and two colleagues published a paper that sought to reconstruct the planet's past temperatures going back half a millennium before the era of thermometers—thereby showing just how out of whack recent warming has been. The finding: Recent northern hemisphere temperatures had been "warmer than any other year since (at least) AD 1400." The graph depicting this result looked rather like a hockey stick: After a long period of relatively minor temperature variations (the "shaft"), it showed a sharp mercury upswing during the last century or so ("the blade"). The report moved quickly through climate science circles. Mann and a colleague soon lengthened the shaft of the hockey stick back to the year 1000 AD—and then, in 2001, the UN's ...

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Colbert Mocks Right-Wing Conspiracy Theory That Government Is Buying Up Bullets (VIDEO)

Tue, 07 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Stephen Colbert - May. 07 (Comedy News) - Have you heard that the government is buying up billions of bullets in bulk so that when the feds inevitably go to war with the American citizenry, we'll be totally unarmed?

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The Cancer-Stage Of Capitalism

Mon, 06 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

talkradionews.com - By Thom Hartmann - May. 06 (Opinion) - Unregulated capitalism is cancer on our nation. Like tumors, greed has metastasized, strangling once-healthy parts of our economy, and our social safety net. A new piece on Alternet lists several ways this cancer capitalism has taken hold. For starters, the hoarding of wealth by the banksters and the 1% has diverted resources away from nutritional aid programs. Twenty people in our country collected a whopping $73 billion in investment income – all taxed at a lower rate than working Americans. Compare that with the fact that President Obama couldn’t even get $1 billion to improve childhood nutrition in our schools.

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The Hollowing Out of Government

Sun, 05 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

nationofchange.org - By Robert Reich - May. 05 (Opinion) - OSHA and its state partners have a total of 2,200 inspectors charged with ensuring the safety of over more than 8 million workplaces employing 130 million workers. That comes to about one inspector for every 59,000 American workers. There’s no way it can do its job with so few resources, but OSHA has been systematically hollowed out for the years under Republican administrations and congresses that have despised the agency since its inception. In effect, much of our nation’s worker safety laws and rules have been quietly repealed because there aren’t enough inspectors to enforce them.

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5 Ways That Raw, Unregulated Capitalism Is Acting Like a Cancer on American Society

Sun, 05 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Paul Buchheit - May. 05 (Opinion) - The uncontrolled growth of investment wealth is diverting resources away from vital programs, effectively smothering them.

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NRA Leader Warns of Rising Cost of Senators

Sun, 05 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

readersupportednews.org - By Andy Borowitz - May. 05 (Comedy News) - "Over the past few years, we've seen the price of purchasing a Senator surge astronomically," he told the N.R.A. faithful. "Unless something is done to make Senators more affordable, the ability of a tiny lobbying group to overrule the wishes of ninety per cent of the American people will be in jeopardy." The days are over, he said, when "you could buy a Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) for little more than pocket change."

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Let's Do It, Let's Repeal The Sequester!

Sat, 04 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Jason Linkins - May. 04 (Opinion) - the happiest thing going on in the political discourse is how the whole fiscal discussion seems to be changing from hack-dominance to, potentially, something more sensible. The catalyzing event seems to have been the work of America's greatest graduate student, Thomas Herndon, who was afforded the opportunity to analyze the data set of economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff -- whose very famous study, which contends that there are debt/growth tipping points, had become the urtext of the global austerity movement -- and very quickly determined that it was riddled with errata and LOLs.

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We Decide How to Share Gains

Thu, 02 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Stan Sorscher - May. 02 (Opinion) - Multinational employers steadily move work offshore, and lay off thousands of workers. We've cut funding for education; student debt is over a trillion dollars. We've terminated pensions, weakened unions, made work more contingent and more precarious. Wal-Mart cuts hours to avoid paying for health care. Some elected officials demonize teachers, and public employees, and turn public opinion against any regular worker daring to hope for a higher standard of living. Globally, workplace insecurity and inequality are at historic levels.

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George W Bush's $250 Million Can of Whitewash

Thu, 02 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

creators.com - By Jim Hightower - May. 02 (Opinion) - What a piece of work it is: a $250 million, 226,000-square-foot edifice on 23 acres in Dallas. His brick-and-limestone structure is certainly imposing, but once inside, you quickly see that it's a $250 million can of whitewash.

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Would we give up burgers to stop climate change?

Thu, 02 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Salon - May. 02 (Opinion) - In case you missed the news, humanity spent the Earth Day week reaching another sad milestone in the history of catastrophic climate change: For the first time, measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere surpassed 400 parts per million, aka way abo

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'Do Nothing F@#ktards' Just Fix The Cuts That Affects Them (VIDEO)

Wed, 01 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Jon Stewart - May. 01 (Comedy News) - In a show that focused largely on the sequester cuts, Jon opened with a segment on legislators coming together to fix the one problem that affects them... more specifically, their vacations.

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Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann Explain Why Congress is Failing Us

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

billmoyers.com - Apr. 30 (Opinion) - they argue that congressional gridlock is mostly the fault of right wing radicals within the Republican Party who engage in “policy hostage-taking” to extend their political war against the president. What’s more, Ornstein and Mann say, the mainstream media and media fact-checkers add to the problem by indulging in “false equivalency” — pretending both parties are equally to blame.

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U.S. Judges Admit to Jailing Children for Money

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

inquisitr.com - Apr. 30 (Opinion) -

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Something America and China Could Do Together

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - Apr. 29 (Opinion) -

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The Right Wing Cult Machine Exposed

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Thom Hartmann - Apr. 28 (Opinion) - a cult is a group or sect bound together by adoration of the same thing, person, ideal, etc. A cult promises you redemption. It tells you that if you do what it says, and as it believes, you will be protected from the evil people that are out to get you and the rest of society. A cult purges the non-believers. And it actively tries to vilify all those who are not part of the cult

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Explaining the upper crust’s preference for austerity economics

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

seattletimes.com - By Paul Krugman - Apr. 27 (Opinion) - At this point, the austerian position has imploded; not only have its predictions about the real world failed completely, but the academic research invoked to support that position has turned out to be riddled with errors, omissions and dubious statistics. Yet two big questions remain. First, how did austerity doctrine become so influential in the first place? Second, will policy change at all now that crucial austerian claims have become fodder for late-night comics?

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In Gasland sequel, fracking saga’s pressure ratchets up

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Grist - By Sarah Laskow - Apr. 27 (Review) - Gasland Part II shows how much higher the stakes have grown in the battle over fracking since Josh Fox made its predecessor.

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Mark Zuckerberg's Political Group Is Trashing Obama And Obamacare And Promoting Oil And Gas Interests

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

businessinsider.com - Apr. 27 (Opinion) - If you want to get a feel for how American politics really works, as opposed to the way they tell you it works, look no farther than what's going on behind the scenes at the new political action group started by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and dozen

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277 Million Boston Bombings

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

readersupportednews.org - By Robert Scheer - Apr. 24 (Opinion) - I list all those dreary statistics to drive home the point that the horror of two pressure cooker bombs in Boston that has so traumatized us should help us grasp the significance of the 1.8 million bomblets dropped in Iraq over a three-week period. Obama was right to blast the use of weapons that targeted civilians in Boston as inherent acts of terrorism, but by what standard do such weapons change their nature when they are deployed by governments against civilians?

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