Surprise, surprise, Homeland Security has been monitoring protests against police brutality (and other events that might involve large numbers of black folks). Of course, protestors aren't terrorists -- if they were, they wouldn't be out in public protesting. Worried that today's protestors will throw up their hands tomorrow and start bombing police stations? Then let's not have police officers kill so many black folks.
Hillary Clinton has been attacking the "short-term" thinking of our bankster elites, but Robert Borosage finds her actual proposals "underwhelming" -- no Robin Hood tax, no closing the "carried interest" loophole for hedge fund managers, no breaking up too-big-to-fail banks, and weak (or classically overcomplex) proposals elsewhere. Remember, folks, stuff just ain't that deep, and if it takes too long to explain your sliding scale capital gains tax scheme, it's probably crap.
Paul Krugman reminds us that Medicare isn't "actuarily unsound," as Jeb Bush said the other day -- its costs have always risen more slowly than private health-care spending, and with the Affordable Care Act, these costs have risen even more slowly. The lesson? Even when you meet Republican arguments head-on, they wilt. If the rest of the "liberal" media would figure that out, we might have more of a chance avoiding the privatization of Medicare "for our own good."
Ian Millhiser at Think Progress tells us about a lawsuit filed in Indiana that asserts, essentially, that the folks who would make county clerks give out wedding licenses to gay folks despite their "sincerely-held religious beliefs" are the real bigots. Mr. Millhiser, quite generously, calls this argument "clever," but I maintain that people who claim they're being "discriminated" against by laws preventing them from discriminating against other people are just whiny diaper-loaded brats. I've gotten too old to value the I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I "cleverness" of weaklings.
Finally, the reactionary U.S. Chamber of Commerce plans to spend buku bucks in House primaries taking out the Republicans who have been holding up their big-corporate priorities. Ms. McCarter reminds us that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce helped bring this state of affairs about, by lurching far to the right upon the ascendance of Barack Obama. I'd go further and say whatever "anger" the Chamber has at "intransigent" teabaggers is fake -- the more "mainstream" Republicans they'd support were too far-right just 10 years ago, so the "anger" is just their way of pushing the mainstream ever further right.
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