MORNING MESSAGE: “60 Minutes” And America’s Billionaires Want Us to Beg OurFuture.org’s Richard Eskow: “’60 Minutes’ was once a shining light of independent journalism. Now it’s a covert mouthpiece for the far-right, anti-government values of the Peterson crowd. Once it spoke to, and for, a majority whose interests it fought to defend. Now it represents [...]
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If you’re a jobless person looking for food or a wounded vet who needs health care, “60 Minutes” has a solution: Beg a billionaire for it. That was part of the powerful, if covert, message behind last Sunday’s “60 Minutes” broadcast. The rest of Sunday night’s message, which tracks closely with the right-wing agenda promoted [...]
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Right-wing obstructionism reached another low today when Republicans on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee would not even show up to vote today on the nomination of Gina McCarthy to be director of the Environmental Protection Agency. The spectacle was the equivalent of the six-year-old, willful diva-to-be slamming the doll on the ground and [...]
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Earlier this week, I noted that the Republican plan to take the debt limit hostage to demand unspecified tax reform at a future date was too ridiculous to be believed. But that battle plan looks like the Invasion of Normandy compared to the latest Keystone Kops scheme the Republicans floated to Politico today: hold the [...]
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MORNING MESSAGE: Pass The Warren Student Loan Bill OurFuture.org’s Robert Borosage: “…we are enthusiastically endorsing the first bill introduced by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), which would lower student loan interest rates for one year to 0.75 percent, the same rate at which the government loans money to the banks through the Federal Reserve discount window. [...]
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Republicans are refusing to do their part in governing the country. They say “do it our way or we won’t let anything get done at all.” Their agenda is all ideology, all the time (and of course helping the wealthy). As a result We the People are on our own. We get no jobs programs, [...]
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Republican judges on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals have ruled that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) cannot require employers to put up posters explaining to workers that they have the right to unionize, because this violates the employers’ “free speech.” This is the same group of conservative-Republican judges that ruled that recess appointments [...]
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At least three Senators up for re-election in Republican-leaning states next year are defying President Obama by indicating they’ll refuse to support the White House’s Social Security cuts in any “Grand Bargain” on the budget. There are a number of reasons why this is important, including the fact that it may scuttle the chance (if there ever was one) for any deal.
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MORNING MESSAGE: Stop High Stakes “Common Core” Testing OurFuture.org’s Jeff Bryant: “Ratcheting education standards ever higher at the same time we cut supports that schools and students need to reach those standards never made any sense to begin with. And the value placed on testing isn’t yielding the return promised in terms of significantly better [...]
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By now it's become clear to anyone willing to pay attention that our nation's obsession over education standards and testing has gotten out of hand. In a moment of sanity last week, a leading proponent of the new standards-aligned tests defected from the run-up to implementation and called for a moratorium on the high stakes associated with the Common Core and its new tests.
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