Language is a complex beast. A single word, or a sequence of words taken together as a phrase or sentence, may mean one thing now and quite another thing… Read full post »

I signed Jennifer Tyrrell’s petition to tell the Boy Scouts of America to end its policy of discriminating against gay youth and leaders.

You should sign, too.

It had a place for personal comments. This is what I wrote. Feel free to borrow from any part of it if… Read full post »

I guess the Obama administration has decided that rather than fight the moniker “Obamacare” they might as well embrace it. A smart move, I think. Calling it the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is long and clumsy, and its acronym PPACA is really no better.

And anyway, they coul… Read full post »

President Obama said Friday, “My main message is to the parents of Travyon Martin: ‘You know, if I had a son he'd look like Trayvon.’ A/… Read full post »

A friend was looking for an old post on Open Salon. I wrote some remarks on how to use Google to search for it. I find a lot of people don't know these little tips, so I figured I'd share them here.

The first thing to know is that you… Read full post »

During the last week Greg Smith wrote an editorial about why he was resigning from Goldman Sachs, where he said “the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.” Until his resignation, he was executive director and head of the firm’s United States equity deri… Read full post »

The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement has seemed to tap into a deep-rooted sense discontent in the American populace over how capitalism has gone wrong. Criticism has not come just from the Left, but also from the right, as recently discussed on the excellent new MSNBC show Up with Chris Hayes:… Read full post »

I’ve been reading news stories about Ron Paul’s newsletter scandal—in the Huffington Post, The New Republic, and the Christian Science Monitor, to name just a few. And I feel like they’re all overlooking something important.

These analyses all seem to focus strongly on his of… Read full post »

Republican Senator Mitch McConnell famously said, “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” And Republicans in both houses of Congress have seemed dedicated to this quest, opposing virtually anything Obama tries to do… Read full post »

I’ve got a beef with whole “Mitt’s bet” thing from last night’s debate that’s a little different than what I’m seeing in most of the media.

But I’ll start with a recap in case you aren’t up to speed.

What Happened?

Last night in the Iowa GOP deb… Read full post »

It’s common to receive a charity promotion that says “Donate now because someone has offered a matching gift.” For every dollar you send, they’ll send a dollar. It apparently gets people giving more. People like to see their money multiplied that way. Such a donation magnifies… Read full post »

As the movement variously known as Occupy Wall Street (OWS) or “We are the 99%” enters its second month, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on what it's done and where it's going.

Polls continue to suggest that support for the the movement is growing. A recent NBC… Read full post »

A lot of the discussions we have about what's fair to tax seem to refer to questions of how people should “share the pain.” I don't like the way that discussion usually goes, but not because I don't think people should share pain. I just question the definition of “pain” that… Read full post »

We're in a bad situation politically right now, and we need to explore options. This post offers one possible option. I don't have time to think it through completely, but maybe no one person can do that. So I'm sharing it anyway, knowing that there might be flaws. There are a… Read full post »

A couple weeks ago, I wrote a post urging citizens to write their representative a/… Read full post »

As they voted to approve the debt ceiling hike, the almost bigger news seemed to be the return of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) to the House to participate in the historic vote after being shot in the head in January.

If you watch the video, you see that everyone on… Read full post »

Dear President Obama,

Today I’m even more discouraged with you than I ever have been. And please don’t flatter yourself by thinking, as I suspect you do, that because you made “the hard choices” people were bound to be concerned. Do not smugly say to yourself, well “thi… Read full post »

The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) recently ran an exposé about American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a back room coalition of Republican legislators who meet to create “model” legislation which can then be pushed on a state-by-state basis in coordinated fashion. In a… Read full post »

I wrote this article Tuesday after midnight, but decided to hold up on publication while I got some opinions from others about whether this concern was real, even as I worried that it might be a bad idea to wait. Well, I now regret waiting and am going ahead with my… Read full post »

As a compromise in the present stalemate over the debt ceiling, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has proposed the strangest thing I could perhaps have imagined. Under his plan, as I understand it, Congress would transfer control of raising the debt limit to Obama, and so that Congress co… Read full post »