Question of Today: Business Model?

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If Big Business demands tax cuts and bailouts and loopholes and outsourcing to feed its hungry greedy maw, destroying [the buying power of] the Middle Class in the process, how is that a successful business model?
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Global Warming? It's Already Here

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Those who pooh-pooh that global warming is a certainty in our future, take note.

It's already here.

In the Boundary Waters of Northern Minnesota. The land of tall pines. A blowdown in 1999 took out huge swaths of those pines. And instead of growing back, trees like red maples are springing up.

The new north woods growing up to replace the millions of blown down trees isn't really a north woods at all but something more akin to the grassland savannahs farther south. Indeed, over the last decade or so, the blowdown has become a giant laboratory for measuring the ecological effects of a warming climate and the role humans are playing in accelerating the change.

Look around your own hometown. I'll bet you'll find changes there, already, too. Or keep your head in the sand and listen to Rush. Yeah, that'll work.
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crossposted at firedoglake's Seminal

Franken on Net Neutrality

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Must reading...Senator Franken's op-ed at the cnn.com website.

Our free speech rights are under assault -- not from the government but from corporations seeking to control the flow of information in America.

If that scares you as much as it scares me, then you need to care about net neutrality.

"Net neutrality" sounds arcane, but it's fundamental to free speech. The internet today is an open marketplace. If you have a product, you can sell it. If you have an opinion, you can blog about it. If you have an idea, you can share it with the world.

And no matter who you are -- a corporation selling a new widget, a senator making a political argument or just a Minnesotan sharing a funny cat video -- you have equal access to that marketplace.

Until you don't.
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crossposted at firedoglake's Seminal

Timeout from Target

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It's a busy summer. It would be so easy to let this one slide. Except....

I've been a sizeable consumer at Target. And I spend many a weekend in Minnesota. Even think of retiring there one day. Someplace where the grandkids can come visit and their grandma can hold her head up with pride.

Because it ain't easy to fold up the red bulls-eye canvas bag and the white bullseye red thermal bag and take my dollars elsewhere. But I've done it. I'm taking a Timeout from Target.

As I commented over at Huffington Post:

Emmer/Pawlenty/Minnesota Republican policies aren't just anti-gay. They are anti-worker, anti-public education, anti-rural, anti-small town Main Street business, and, may I add, anti-lakeshore. The tax burden on mom-and-pop resort owners is horrific these days. Pawlenty built his reputation by cutting state taxes, shifting the burden on property taxes in counties, small towns and townships. And Emmer will do more of the same.

Frauds, the both of 'em. And shame on Target's new aristocracy for funding their politics and gouging.

That's why I've taken a Timeout on Target.

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crossposted at firedoglake's The Seminal

Southern Strategy for Dems

Maureen Dowd is on to something....
[no, I didn't mean to write MD is on something...hush, now....]

She suggests that Shirley Sherrod should be in charge of black outreach for the White House.

That doesn't go far enough. There should be only two job offers Shirley Sherrod should be considering. And neither one is at the USDA.

Either at the White House or at the DNC, Shirley Sherrod should be in charge of working class development. Arguably we need black outreach...hispanic, Asian, Native American, anyone?

But even more, we need a crystal-clear voice to reach out to all the disenfranchised, and that includes the white working class. Ms. Sherrod gives the most powerful testimony we've heard lately of who is actually working against the interests of both black and white. And who has climbed over the walls of hate and division to make things better for everyone.

Her history lesson of how blacks and whites both worked through servitude side-by-side, intermarrying, getting by, until the powerful elites institutionalized division and racism is a compelling reminder of the power of education. Know your history. Know your nation's history. Seek truth for yourself, don't just rely on screeching heads.

White House, DNC? Do you care? Do you care more than the minority leader of the House who doesn't even know whether his own two brothers have found jobs yet?

We are all brothers. And one sister has shown us a powerful pathway to making sure both white and black can enjoy and aspire to the best of America, not the hate and division.

Now that's a "Southern Strategy" that folks can believe in.
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crossposted at firedoglake's The Seminal

Rich Raging

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Frank Rich opines on the sorry reaction to the smearing of Shirley Sherrod.

Maybe Frank gets together with these guys for tea and crumpets from time to time. But it's long past time to recognize that this situation, this evil, persists because too many in the media, too many in the political elite, treat the Breitbarts and Limbaughs and Drudges as some amusing little theatre.

Yet incidents of violence are on the rise, threats of danger are on the rise. Who will own the tragedy now foreshadowing?

Who will look in the mirror honestly and admit the false equivalencies, the ginning-up, the "it's out there" level of danger growing within? Beck? O'Reilly? Ailes? Murdoch? Armey? McConnell? Bachmann? Angle? Palin? Erickson? The numbers are legion.

The willful blinders shamefully obvious. The enabling media equally so.

The Breitbarts never change. The evil oozes out of them like fetid slime, spreading fear, hate, division. The wonder is that so many, still, whitewash the full depth of what they do.

White sheets...too easy to crawl between 'em and close your eyes.
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crossposted at firedoglake's The Seminal

Media Fail

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Be sure to read Josh Marshall this morning on the—my word would be "appalling"—lack of reporting during and after this sorry episode [of trashing Shirley Sherrod] from the millionaire sheep media's club about the true villains of the case: Andrew Breitbart and the execrable Fox Empire.

Unlike Rick Sanchez yesterday, I cut no slack for any "newsers" inside Fox...or outside for that matter. Those who take Rupert's paycheck wear the same sh*tty overcoat. Those who schmooze with Rupert and Roger in the salons in polite Village society, no slack either. Roger Ailes is the unspoken in the punchbowl.
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crossposted in comments at firedoglake's The Seminal