The Rev. William Alberts describes "The Vocabulary of War Criminals." His essay is brought to you by the words "mistake," "hindsight," and "faulty intelligence," words that those of us who always opposed the invasion of Iraq never have to use in this context. A better word for what Our Glorious Elites did, Rev. Alberts instructs us, would be "criminal."
The Pew Research Center finds a large majority of Americans (58%) agreeing with the proposition that "free" trade agreements have been good for our economy. But of course they asked that question before they asked whether "free" trade agreements slow down the economy, depress wages, or lead to job loss, and while the answer to that first question is neck-and-neck, it hasn't been in past years, and plenty more folks believe that "free" trade agreements depress wages and lead to job loss than believe the opposite -- which renders the first result questionable, to say the least.
A hedge fund manager wishes Hillary Clinton would "stop crapping all over what I do for a living." And then goes on to explain all of the vital functions hedge funds serve in society! I kid, of course -- he merely says his hedge fund donates to universities, charities, and "cultural institutions," and of course none of that is tax-deductible! If Mrs. Clinton wants to compare hedge fund managers and truck drivers without drawing the ire of fact-checking bean counters, she might want to read this Center for Effective Government blog post, entitled Meet the 25 Hedge Fund Managers Whose $2.2 Billion Tax Break Could Pay for 50,000 Highway Construction Jobs." You're welcome, Mrs. Clinton.
Ruth McCambridge at Nonprofit Quarterly takes reporters to task for flogging news about "the nation's first non-profit grocery store" -- by naming four other non-profit groceries, reminding us about the long history of food co-ops across America, and noting that the "first non-profit grocery" in question, Daily Table, sells nearly-expired food in low-income neighborhoods, as if they hate the people who live there or something.
Ian Millhiser at ThinkProgress predicts that the Supreme Court will rule that lawsuits alleging racial discrimination in housing will have to prove not that the result of a landlord's actions were racist, but that his intent was racist. I suspect he's right, since the Roberts Court (in an act one might reasonably call judicial activism) went rather far out of its way to take up a matter that lower federal courts had unanimously concurred upon, and also since this Court has been no friend to racial minorities. I also remember that Justice Scalia attacked Justice Kennedy's opinion striking down Colorado's anti-gay Amendment 2, writing that looking for an "animus" in a law was impossible, but then, being a right-winger means never having to be consistent.
Finally, our federal government approves three solar farms, to be built on federal land in Clark County, NV, which may ultimately produce enough power to serve over 130,000 homes. But being, as I am, extremely suspicious of folks' repeated calls for "fewer burdensome regulations," I would like to know what the "streamlined permitting process" entailed. I shudder to think that if any of these solar farms fails spectacularly, we'll find out.
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