I agree!
USA-Memo to congressional Democrats: It’s not 2008 or 2009 anymore. Then, when the nation was facing financial catastrophe, it made sense to borrow as much as necessary to stave off economic depression.
Those days are over. Now it’s time to start making choices about what’s vital, and for those programs that are, paying the bills [...]

FROM EC
President Obama is playing one-upmanship with the budget. When his predecessor, President Bush, doubled the national debt in eight years, President Obama on February 1, 2010, submitted a budget with a deficit in excess of $1 trillion for 2011 and for each of the following years for the next ten years. Then, to show [...]

FROM EC
The following article originally appeared on OpEdNews.com.
U.S. law officially proclaims Memorial Day “as a day of prayer for permanent peace.”
However, the US is much closer to permanent war than permanent peace. Corporations are profiting from wars and lobbying politicians for more. The US, and the rest of the world, cannot afford the rising personal [...]

What would Rand Paul think?
AJC-A former football coach at Savannah State University has accused the school of forcing him to resign because his fiancée is black.
Robert Wells, who is white, was fired in January, one month after he had accepted a one-year contract extension. He filed suit against the university, the state Board of Regents [...]

How can we balance the budget with no tax increases?
TH-Conservatives are pressuring Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) to send a message to President Barack Obama’s deficit commission by saying he opposes any tax increases.
One group said the senator faces “political suicide” if he doesn’t take a strong stance against increased taxes.
Hatch, who is set [...]

FROM EC

Everywhere we look Americans are being brought face-to-face with the ailments and afflictions that stem from our addiction to oil. A catastrophic explosion on the British Petroleum-contracted drilling rig “Deepwater Horizon” resulted in a week long environmental saga in the Gulf of Mexico. When the rig sank it tore open [...]

All should read!
DB-As the country’s deficits mount, Robert Gates proposes tough cuts in military spending. Leslie H. Gelb on why Gates is facing fierce resistance.
A crusader image doesn’t fit Robert Gates—the archetypal Midwesterner whose eyes and lips barely stir even in his most animated moments—but he is on a crusade to cut military spending. Well, [...]

A very good essay all should read!
DB-Forget the details of Blair’s tenure as national intelligence director. The bureaucracy will never shape up without a president who empowers the right advisers, writes John Lehman, a member of the 9/11 Commission and former Secretary of the Navy—and neither George W. Bush nor Barack Obama “got [...]

Will this be the story about drugs in the future?
WSJ….It’s a safe conjecture that the snapshot impression most Americans have of the Prohibition era is a gauzy haze of speakeasies, Al Capone, bootleggers, flappers, bathtub gin and Harlem’s Cotton Club. For decades, the Hollywood and literary glorification of those who flouted the 18th Amendment—which [...]

WHY????
HP….The reports from the Congressional Research Service and Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction raise concerns ranging from the existential to the procedural.
Just for starters, there’s the lack of an exit strategy, signs of a slipping timeframe for troop drawdowns and the mixed results thus far of the troop “surge.” There’s also the [...]

FROM EC
Instead of stopping “the motor of the world” by withdrawing their skills from society, as is the case with America’s most economically productive citizens in Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, U.S. business owners are simply taking their skills and assets elsewhere, according to Addison Wiggin, executive publisher of Agora Financial, LLC, an economic forecasting [...]

Obama gets tough on immigration?
AP-President Barack Obama will send 1,200 National Guard troops to boost security along the U.S.-Mexico border, officials said Tuesday, pre-empting Republican plans to try to force votes on such a deployment.
Obama will also request $500 million for border protection and law enforcement activities, according to lawmakers and administration officials. The [...]

What should be done?
DB-A document obtained by The Daily Beast shows that BP, in a previous fatal disaster, increased worker risk to save money. Are there parallels with the Gulf explosion?
This is a story about the Three Little Pigs. A lot of dead oil workers. And British Petroleum.
From the minute the Deepwater Horizon [...]

How much should BP pay?
AP-The gooey oil washing into the maze of marshes along the Gulf Coast could prove impossible to remove, leaving a toxic stew lethal to fish and wildlife, government officials and independent scientists said.
Officials are considering some drastic and risky solutions: They could set the wetlands on fire or flood areas in [...]