Cadfile's Favorite Links on progressive from Diigo

Daniel Dennett's seven tools for thinking | Books | The Observer

Mon May 20 04:07:56 +0000 2013

"Cognitive scientist and philosopher Daniel Dennett is one of America's foremost thinkers. In this extract from his new book, he reveals some of the lessons life has taught him"

Tags: progressive thinking argument philosophy secular humanism scientific method Daniel Dennett

Daily Kos: Chris Hedges NPR Interview: On The Right Wing "Proto-Fascist Movement" in The U.S.

Thu May 16 20:31:30 +0000 2013

" And what you get when you enter that kind of ideological belief system is you no longer deal with reality. You believe that - you believe in magic. You believe that Jesus will intervene to protect you and promote you, and then it becomes impossible to have a kind of rational discussion, for instance with people who believe that, you know, everything - the Earth was created 6,000 years ago, and there were dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden. This is very important; it goes to the heart of the matter when it comes to the reason you see powerful corporatist cartels and the Christian right doing everything they can to feed the right wing paranoia, and the hate, and the scapegoating of certain "target" groups. And in a way, it makes sense. What these corporatist cartels are doing by manipulating these right wing loonies is diverting attention from what they're doing to society, namely, pillage and plundering."

Tags: progressive fake outrage gop fail right wing Corporatism democracy

Conspiracy theorists flummoxed in face of actual scandals - Salon.com

Wed May 15 17:28:54 +0000 2013

"Why would Bachmann, Limbaugh and Jones, who have never met an Obama conspiracy theory they didn’t like, pass up this one? Because the truth is way less sexy than fiction. When you’ve been claiming for years that Obama is willing to manipulate hurricane forecasts for political gain, or use census records to round up political opponents, or deploy drones to kill journalists and political enemies, then asking a few dozen Tea Party groups for some extra paperwork is small potatoes. And there’s little room to add value here — the dots are already connected, the mainstream media is on board and the administration is taking action. The system seems to be working and you certainly don’t want to highlight that if your livelihood depends on convincing people the system is always rigged against them. What’s more, actual attention-grabbing scandals covered by the mainstream press may not be ideal, from a business perspective, for professional skeptics; if viewers can get coverage about them from regular news outlets, there’s less incentive for them to go to the conspiracists. Hence, it may be better for the Joneses and Limbaughs to publicly doubt the scandals’ veracity or relevance."

Tags: progressive conspiracy fake outrage rush limbaugh Michele Bachmann gop fail

Obamacare Is Already Forcing Private Insurers To Lower Their Premiums | ThinkProgress

Sat May 11 02:59:33 +0000 2013

"Although some insurers have been using Obamacare as an excuse to hike premiums despite record profits, such rate hikes have been rarer — and less extreme — since the law’s passage. And to emphasize, this is all happening before the state has had a chance to review and approve initial plan rates — much less launch the actual marketplace. After the exchange opens up, consumers will have even more detailed information about marketplace plans, including the ability to compare — not just rates — but actual benefits offered on the plans side-by-side. That’s particularly significant because much of the current variation in health plan premiums stems from rampant health care price opacity and wildly divergent benefits offered on different health plans — a status quo that won’t last in the Obamacare era since the law requires qualifying insurance plans to offer a base level of ten “essential health benefits,” including prescription drug, mental health, and maternity services. That means that Americans will be able to go online and figure out whether a plan costs more because it actually provides more robust benefits, or because an insurance company is just trying to gouge prices and maximize profits. Insurance offered on the marketplaces will be separated into Bronze, Silver, and Gold plans based on how generous their offered coverage is, making consumer comparisons between similar health plans simple. "

Tags: progressive obamacare health care reform

Boehner And McConnell: Our Way Or We Break Medicare | TPM Editors Blog

Thu May 09 21:39:26 +0000 2013

"It’s not just that Boehner and McConnell hate Obamacare and it’s not just that they’re hypocrites about spending. What they’re saying with their actions is that if they can’t convert Medicare from a single-payer into a private insurance system, they’d rather the whole thing collapse under its own weight. President Obama’s and Paul Ryan’s Medicare plans both envision budget caps for Medicare — the difference is that Ryan wants to let private insurers enforce it while Obama leaves the task to providers, with IPAB as a backstop. The parties are actually in about the same place fiscally with respect to Medicare, but unless reaching a more sustainable trajectory means privatizing the program, Republicans will try to keep it unsustainable. "

Tags: progressive john boehner gop fail austerity medicare

John Boehner Opens Mouth, Inserts Foot, and Insults The Troops In Spectacular Fashion

Thu May 09 18:49:16 +0000 2013

"John Boehner opened mouth and inserted foot in a spectacular fashion when he told Bloomberg that paying back China was a higher priority than paying the troops."

Tags: progressive john boehner gop fail budget cuts austerity

Policing Their Own » Greta Christina's Blog

Wed May 08 18:30:39 +0000 2013

"I have been hearing a lot of calls for unity in the atheist community. I have been hearing a lot of calls for an end to the debates, an end to the infighting. I have been hearing a lot of calls for atheists to stop focusing on our differences, and look at our common ground. I have been hearing a lot of cries about how the constant fighting among atheists makes us enemies of each other, drains our energy, weakens our movement. And I get it. I’m tired of the arguments, too. But all too often, calling for unity equals silencing dissent. All too often, calling for unity equals a de facto defense of the status quo. All too often, calling for unity equals telling people who are speaking up for themselves to shut up."

Tags: progressive secular humanism bigotry women's rights sexism secularism social justice atheism

Daily Kos: It's completely true that PolitiFact is full of crap on anti-gay discrimination

Tue May 07 19:21:52 +0000 2013

"Yup. According to PolitiFact, because some employers, including the government, don't discriminate, it's somehow less true that those 29 states lack protections for LGBT workers. Here's the thing about workplace protections, including discrimination: You shouldn't have to be lucky to be treated fairly. Equal rights should not be dependent on your employer's personal views. In 29 states, though, that's the situation, and PolitiFact is so invested in pretending that doesn't matter that it's challenging a statement that it acknowledges is correct if framed "in the context of blanket protections by states"—which is exactly how Navratilova framed it."

Tags: progressive gop lies discrimination lgbtq secular humanism church and state bigotry civil rights

The Austerity Delusion | Foreign Affairs

Sat May 04 17:12:56 +0000 2013

"During the 1920s and 1930s, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan all tried to simultaneously cut their way to growth. This project didn’t just fail; it also helped cause World War II. "

Tags: progressive gop lies economic sabotage recovery bank bailout fascism

The Loss Of Government Jobs Is Holding Back The Economy

Sat May 04 16:15:54 +0000 2013

"Overall, the government has shed 718,000 net jobs since President Obama took office. While often accused of bloating the government, the trends show exactly the opposite: Obama has overseen a sharp decline in public sector payrolls as compared to his predecessor President George W. Bush,"

Tags: progressive gop lies economy economic sabotage public sector jobs recovery recession

Daily Kos: Maddow: Bush Library "Decision Points Theater is a National Scandal"

Fri May 03 16:14:28 +0000 2013

"Maddow's point deserves to be driven home, because this Library exhibit does not attempt to portray that the information and intelligence was "flawed" and therefore the decision to invade Iraq was a honest, well meaning mistake. No. If you don't choose to do what GWB chose to do, you get scolded by his former officials and then Bush himself comes on the screen - using current contemporary footage - to argue that there was a "World-Wide Consensus" (yet there wasn't) that Saddam was a danger and that invading his country (and coincidentally getting 4,000 American Troops Killed, and 150,000 Iraqis killed, and unleashing years of Sectarian Violence and disruption, inspiring a brand new world-wide jihad movement and leading our country into a decade of torture and degradation) was the only viable choice."

Tags: progressive bush iraq weapons of mass destruction gop lies library

Too-Big-to-Fail Takes Another Body Blow | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone

Thu May 02 16:13:46 +0000 2013

"Brown-Vitter offers a different and, in a way, more elegant solution to the problem than Brown-Kaufman. Rather than impose size limits, it simply insists that banks with over $500 billion in assets maintain higher capital reserves than are currently required. Companies like J.P. Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Bank of America will have to keep capital reserves of about 15 percent, about twice the current amount. The bill only has such tough requirements for just those few megabanks, which sounds unfair, except that the aim of the bill, precisely, is to level the playing field. Right now, the biggest U.S. banks enjoy a massive inherent market advantage in that they're able to borrow money far more cheaply than other banks, because everybody on earth knows the government will never let them fail and will always bail them out in a pinch, making their debt essentially U.S.-government guaranteed. Studies have shown that these banks borrow money at about 0.8 percent more cheaply than other banks, and that this implicit government subsidy is worth about $83 billion a year just to the top 10 banks in America. This bill would essentially wipe out that hidden subsidy and make the banks bailout-proof."

Tags: progressive economics bank bailout economic collapse banks

How Do You Get Conservatives to Buy Energy Efficient Products? - Tim McDonnell - The Atlantic Cities

Tue Apr 30 20:11:55 +0000 2013

"The study then presented participants with a real-world choice: With a fixed amount of money in their wallet, respondents had to "buy" either an old-school light bulb or an efficient compact florescent bulb, the same kind Bachmann railed against. Both bulbs were labeled with basic hard data on their energy use, but without a translation of that into climate pros and cons. When the bulbs cost the same, and even when the CFL cost more, conservatives and liberals were equally likely to buy the efficient bulb. But slap a message on the CFL’s packaging that says "Protect the Environment," and "we saw a significant drop-off in more politically moderates and conservatives choosing that option," said study author Dena Gromet, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business."

Tags: progressive secular humanism economics conservatives energy independence

The 1 Percent’s Solution - NYTimes.com

Sat Apr 27 21:31:07 +0000 2013

"Part of the answer surely lies in the widespread desire to see economics as a morality play, to make it a tale of excess and its consequences. We lived beyond our means, the story goes, and now we’re paying the inevitable price. Economists can explain ad nauseam that this is wrong, that the reason we have mass unemployment isn’t that we spent too much in the past but that we’re spending too little now, and that this problem can and should be solved. No matter; many people have a visceral sense that we sinned and must seek redemption through suffering — and neither economic argument nor the observation that the people now suffering aren’t at all the same people who sinned during the bubble years makes much of a dent. "

Tags: progressive secular humanism income inequality economics religion austerity budget cuts

What Went Wrong in West, Texas — and Where Were the Regulators? | Occupy America

Sat Apr 27 04:40:34 +0000 2013

"A week after a blast at a Texas fertilizer plant killed at least 15 people and hurt more than 200, authorities still don't know exactly why the West Chemical and Fertilizer Company plant exploded. Here's what we do know: The fertilizer plant hadn't been inspected by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration since 1985. Its owners do not seem to have told the Department of Homeland Security that they were storing large quantities of potentially explosive fertilizer, as regulations require. And the most recent partial safety inspection of the facility in 2011 led to $5,250 in fines. We've laid out which agencies were in charge of regulating the plant and who's investigating the explosion now"

Tags: progressive secular humanism regulations disaster west texas fertilizer plant explosion

12 Programs Congress Refuses To Save From Automatic Spending Cuts | ThinkProgress

Fri Apr 26 19:02:43 +0000 2013

"That means lawmakers will be able to fly home for recess this weekend without any delays — and tourists and people who travel for business won’t have to experience the delays either. Unfortunately, though, Congress has shown no willingness to provide similar relief for the families that are being hammered by sequestration in other ways. Here are 12 programs that have experienced devastating cuts because Congress insists on cutting spending when it doesn’t need to — and that have been ignored by the same lawmakers who leaped to action as soon as their trips home were going to take a little longer"

Tags: progressive secular humanism congress sequester gop fail welfare social safety net

Right-Wingers Use Boston Bombing to Paper Over Their Own Extremist Terror | Crooks and Liars

Wed Apr 24 18:25:27 +0000 2013

"The fact, however, is that the speculation about right-wing extremism's potential role was entirely rational, considering that in the past four years, there have been nearly 70 acts of domestic terrorism committed by right-wing extremists in the United States, compared to just over 30 such acts committed by Islamist extremists here. (I have prepared a report on this that Mother Jones will be publishing soon.) And let's not overlook the OTHER terrorist attack that occurred in the same week -- namely, the ricin attacks on the White House and Senate, a case that is still officially unsolved, now that the original suspect has been released. However, considering both the targets and the fact that ricin has long been a favorite weapon of right-wing extremists, there is a high likelihood that one or more of them will eventually prove to be the source of these attacks."

Tags: progressive secular humanism church and state terrorism Boston marathon bombing anti-government right wing

GOP quits public policy - Salon.com

Wed Apr 24 17:39:37 +0000 2013

"While I’ve been saying that the GOP is broken and hopelessly dysfunctional, Rachel Maddow has come up with a new name for part of that dysfunction: Republicans are “post-policy.” To some extent, that’s because they’ll simply oppose whatever Barack Obama proposes, but there’s also an even more interesting aspect of it that they simply have given up on and lost the capacity for developing policy ideas. And, no, it’s not just because they are conservatives and conservatives are inherently less likely to have policy ideas. A look at the evidence will demonstrate this."

Tags: progressive gop congress cheap labor conservative gop fail

Bye Bye, Baucus! Enjoy Your Retirement | Crooks and Liars

Wed Apr 24 02:39:47 +0000 2013

"Here's why I'm doing the happy dance: Obamacare. Max Baucus did everything he possibly could to make sure the Affordable Care Act was as complex as could be. When he was done making it complex and delaying the meaningful provisions for four years, he had the nerve to dress down Kathleen Sibelius last week for it being a "train wreck." Just for review, the House sent over a bill that had national insurance exchanges, not state-based. Their bill had a public option, it had better rate bands and it had a more coherent effective date schedule. After Baucus sat on it as long as he could, he rolled out a bill that ultimately became law which included state-based exchanges, less favorable rate bands, and then opposed all efforts to negotiate drug prices."

Tags: progressive budget cuts max baucus obamacare health care reform

'Family' Group Co-Opts Tragedy To Oppose 'Sexual Liberalism' | ThinkProgress

Fri Apr 19 20:54:05 +0000 2013

"In an email sent to supporters before Thursday night’s manhunt began in Massachusetts, the Family Research Council attempted to appropriate recent tragedies as arguments that support their social conservative positions. Referring to the Republicans’ Senate filibuster of the gun safety bill, FRC’s Tony Perkins claimed that tragedies like Newtown and Boston — as well as the shooting at its headquarters last summer — are the result of “sexual liberalism” and the lack of Christian influence on society:"

Tags: progressive secular humanism church and state Family Research Council Boston marathon bombing co-opt