Later On

Interesting report in New Scientist:

Tunisia’s government has fallen and Egypt’s is facing insurrection – and this could be just the start. Food and economic analysts are warning that these governments could be the first victims of the global food crisis, and others are similarly vulnerable.

What seems clear is that surging food prices helped trigger bothuprisings and protests elsewhere in north Africa. The region depends on bread, and imports half of its wheat. So when world wheat prices soared by 50 per cent in 2010, Egypt massively increased spending on the cereal to sell to its poorest citizens as subsidised bread.

Yet on private markets in Cairo, bread prices rose by 25 per cent. This especially affected the lower middle class, which Claire Spencer of the London-based think tank Chatham House says is key to the uprisings. While the poorest must keep working to eat, she says, the slightly better-off have more freedom to stage sit-ins.

If food is far from the only reason for discontent in Egypt, it can nonetheless be a trigger, Spencer says. “People are underemployed, can’t start a business or improve their circumstances, are barely feeding their families, and then food prices go up and literally put them on the breadline. It can be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.”

What lessons can be learned? Countries that depend upon food imports and whose people spend one-third or more of their income on food are most vulnerable to increased global food prices, according to an analysis by Japanese investment firm Nomura. In its top 10 are Egypt, Algeria and Morocco, but also Hong Kong, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Tunisia, Romania and Ukraine are in the top 20. “High food prices… [are] a potential source of protests, riots and political tension,” Nomura warns.

And these are pricey times: the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) announced last week that food prices have reached an all-time high, exceeding even the big spike of 2008. This new spike is due to weather-related crop losses in Russia, Australia and Pakistan, high oil prices and speculation. Prices will stay high at least until major harvests in six months, says Abdolreza Abbassian of the FAO. Then the weather will have to be very good, or harvests may not be enough to rebuild stocks and reduce prices. If it’s bad, “we’re one major crop failure short of a real crisis”.

Read more: Click here to read the original version of this story

Hannah Alam has a very interesting report at McClatchy. It begins:

“To the palace!” chanted the thousands of protesters who’d already besieged state television offices in Cairo and were beginning a perilous march on the presidential residence in the final hours of Hosni Mubarak’s regime. Mohammed Abdellah, 64, one of the last living founders of the former president’s National Democratic Party, found himself just yards away from the seething crowds as he returned from an appointment downtown. He rushed home and swallowed a Xanax, terrified at the possibility that Mubarak could order his elite guard force to open fire on the protesters.

“When they moved to the presidential palace, he had two options: leave, or let the Republican Guards clash and have a real massacre. I don’t think he wanted to go down in history as a president with so much blood on his hands,” Abdellah said late Saturday in a three-hour interview that offered one of the first inside looks on the collapse of the regime.

Just after sunset Friday, Mubarak’s resignation was announced and Egyptian streets exploded in scenes of euphoria. Abdellah watched at home in an opulent apartment where a bookshelf is lined with black-and-white photos of himself with Mubarak and his predecessor, Anwar Sadat.

Through the years, Abdellah said, he’d watched with sadness as Mubarak — whom he first knew as an eager, details-oriented party leader — was transformed into a cocooned authoritarian whose reliance on a tiny group of self-serving advisers led to a deeply divided NDP and, ultimately, the regime’s collapse.

At least, Abdellah thought to himself that night, Mubarak didn’t go out with a massacre of his own people.

“For all his mistakes, Mubarak avoided this last catastrophe,” Abdellah said.

The weakened party structure was slow to react when anti-government protesters took to the streets Jan. 25, and Mubarak didn’t appear to have a crisis manager, Abdellah said.

Decisions such as blocking the Internet, cell phone networks and social media were made without thinking through the consequences. His own Interior Ministry kept on feeding him rosy reports and Mubarak offered concessions, but without a strategy.

Abdellah said the rifts in Mubarak’s regime deepened in 2005, when he surrounded himself with yes-men who reassured him the government was stable even as his closest aides dispatched security forces to crush growing signs of rebellion among Egypt’s impoverished population of more than 80 million.

Abdellah shared his account of the regime’s demise with a candor that would’ve been impossible just days ago. Now, with the NDP in shambles and its top leadership under criminal investigation and travel restrictions, Abdellah had little to lose by revealing the inner tumult of a party that kept a 30-year stranglehold on Egyptian political and economic life.

Abdellah was working as a reporter in Paris when he was recruited by Sadat, who wanted to build a Western-allied Egypt after the death of the charismatic, pan-Arab nationalist President Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Continue reading.

Interesting post, though the implication is that people are helpless to resist a descent into a mindless mob. I wonder: I think that some people would be less apt to join an unthinking mob, and probably it would be a good idea to find out why, so that more people can gain such an ability. David McRaney writes at You Are Not So Smart:

The Misconception: People who riot and loot are scum who were just looking for an excuse to steal and be violent.

The Truth: You are are prone to losing your individuality and becoming absorbed into a hivemind under the right conditions.

When a crowd gathers near a suicidal jumper something terrible is unleashed.In Seattle in 2001, a 26-year-old woman who had recently ended a relationship held up traffic for a little too long as she considered the implications of leaping to her death. As motorists began to back-up on the bridge and become irate, they started yelling “Jump, bitch, jump!” until she did.

Cases like this aren’t unusual.

In 2008, a 17-year old man jumped from the top of a parking garage in England after 300 or so people chanted for him to go for it. Some took photos and recorded video before, during and after. Afterward, the crowd dispersed, the strange spell broken. The taunters walked away wondering what came over them. The other onlookers vented their disgust into social media.

In San Francisco, in 2010, a man stepped onto the ledge of his apartment window and contemplated dropping from the building. A crowd gathered below and soon started yelling for him to jump. They even tweeted about it. He died on impact fifteen minutes later. . .

Continue reading. The behavior described is (to my mind) very bad behavior, and I have a hard time believing that anyone with a shred of empathy could call for the death of someone simply in order to get to work on time. To reveal my own biases, I believe that people who cheer for someone to kill themselves have revealed something quite ugly about themselves, not about the human race. Assuming free will, of course.

However, it is a long post, and several studies are quoted. The studies on children are interesting, but those are studies of immature individuals who have not yet seriously considered their moral code and thought at length about ethical behavior.

Moreover, Halloween, dressing up, and shedding my identity: very little appeal for me. Mardi Gras? No, thank you. I don’t like crowds in the first place, possibly because I don’t like the possibility of deindividuation. Indeed, the sensible course would seem to me to avoid deindividuation.

From The Center for American Progress in an email:

An investigation by ThinkProgress has revealed that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce explored employing three “private security” firms to surreptitiously investigate the Chamber’s political foes (and even their families and children), and to wage an underhanded cyber-campaign against them.

According to emails obtained by ThinkProgress, the Chamber hired the lobbying firm Hunton & Williams, which in turn solicited work from three computer security firms — HBGary Federal, Palantir, and Berico Technologies (collectively dubbed Team Themis, after the Roman goddess of law and order). Hunton asked Team Themis to develop tactics for damaging or discrediting progressive groups and labor unions, in particular ThinkProgress, the labor coalition Change to Win, the SEIU, US Chamber Watch, and StopTheChamber.com.

The Chamber’s efforts to target opponents began after a ThinkProgress investigation last year raised questions about whether the business lobby was using money from foreign corporations to fund its political attack ads.

According to one document prepared by Team Themis, the campaign included an entrapment project. The proposal called for first creating a “false document, perhaps highlighting periodical financial information,” to give to a progressive group opposing the Chamber, and then to subsequently expose the document as a fake to undermine the credibility of the Chamber’s opponents.

In addition, the group proposed creating a “fake insider persona” to “generate communications” with Change to Win in an attempt to mislead and undermine them. Even more disturbingly, emails reveal that HBGary, which spearheaded the work for the Chamber, apparently thought families and children were fair game, as an executive with the firm  circulated numerous emails and documents detailing information about political opponents’ children, spouses, and personal lives, such as where they attended religious services.

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Thank heavens for the time of day stamp, otherwise you’d have no idea.

To the PO, The Healthy Way, Whole Foods, Safeway for Rx, purchase cat food, quick lunch, Pilates, and Megs to vet for pedicure.

Pilates session was excellent and we worked on some fundamentals that I was flubbing. Breathing (it seems to me, still very much a beginner) is the keystone. If an action—say, doing a jump shot in basketball or making a free throw—is considered to be a sentence, breathing is the verb: the center of the thing on which everything is based. You can see it readily in the free throw: the careful breathing as the shot is prepared and then made, but it applies equally to all action, including the jump shot: it’s all built around the breathing. Or at least it seems that way to me at this point.

I got some fresh sardines, so I’m cleaning those (you buy the whole thing) and using them in a one-pot meal.

I haven’t even got to my day’s Spanish study, so it’s going to be a long evening.

A compact assemblage in the photo, eh? I always get a terrific lather from a D.R. Harris shave stick (which I use as a shave stick, rubbing it against the grain all over my wet beard and then bringing up the lather with the brush—which I use as a brush ), and I should use one more often. The Lucretia Borgia did its usual fine job, and the rhodium-plated Hoffritz slant-bar did a commendably smooth and easy shave with a previously used Swedish Gillette blade. A splash of Marlborough and I’m off to run many errands.

This morning’s weight: 188.7.

I personally see the country as much worse off than it was 30 years ago in many different ways, but I see that the decline is not rapid enough for the GOP, so they are undermining the ground on which we stand:

Once you understand the imperatives Republicans face, however, it all makes sense. By slashing future-oriented programs, they can deliver the instant spending cuts Tea Partiers demand, without imposing too much immediate pain on voters. And as for the future costs — a population damaged by childhood malnutrition, an increased chance of terrorist attacks, a revenue system undermined by widespread tax evasion — well, tomorrow is another day.

That’s from Krugman’s column, which you really should read in its entirety. It’s amazing how absolutely feckless people can be, and how little sense of responsibility and integrity the GOP displays.

I haven’t play FreeRice for a while, so I went to the site (I’m doing a check of the links in my list of links) and was happy to see that I can play using Spanish vocabulary! (They also offer French, German, and Italian, English vocabulary and grammar, etc.) And at the same time feed hungry people.

UPDATE: I have reviewed the links beginning with A through M and those seem okay now. I’ll do N through Z tomorrow.

It’s awkward when a judge simply does not understand the law. Akil Reed Amar, a professor at Yale Law School, writes in the LA Times:

Earlier this week, after grading student papers from my Yale Law School class on constitutional law, I began reading federal District Judge Roger Vinson’s recent opinion declaring “Obamacare” unconstitutional. One thing was immediately clear: My students understand the Constitution better than the judge.

I strive to be apolitical in evaluating students and judges alike. Over the years, many of my favorite students have been proud conservatives, while others have been flaming liberals. The Constitution belongs to neither party.

As every first-year law student learns, lower court judges must heed Supreme Court precedents. The central issue in the Obamacare case is how much power the Constitution gives Congress, and the landmark Supreme Court opinion on this topic is the 1819 classic, McCulloch vs. Maryland.In McCulloch, when states’ rights attorneys claimed that Congress lacked authority to create a federal bank, Chief Justice

John Marshall famously countered that the Constitution gives Congress implied as well as express powers. Marshall said that unelected judges should generally defer to elected members of Congress so long as a law plausibly falls within Congress’ basic mission. Though the words “federal bank” nowhere appear in the Constitution’s text, Marshall explained that Congress nevertheless had the power to create such a bank to facilitate national security and interstate commerce. Other words not in the Constitution include “air force,” “NASA,” “Social Security,” “Peace Corps” and “paper money,” but all these things are constitutional under the logic of McCulloch. Obamacare is no different.

In 34 years as chief justice, Marshall never struck down an act of Congress as beyond the scope of federal power. The modern Supreme Court has followed Marshall’s lead. Since 1937, only two relevant cases — U.S. vs. Lopez in 1995 and U.S. vs. Morrison in 2000 — have held that federal laws transgressed the limited powers conferred on Congress by the framers. . .
 

Continue reading.

In recent years, I learned a couple of things about hard-boiled eggs I hadn’t known, so I thought I’d pass them along.

Most recently, I learned from Steve of Kafeneio how to boil them: start with the eggs at room temperature and the water at a full boil, and that way you can time them accurately. I do use my little egg piercer to punch a tiny hole in the large end so the shell doesn’t crack.

Once they reach “done” (for me, that’s 7-8 minutes), I lift them from the pan with a large slotted spoon (that takes 3 eggs at a time—the same spoon I use to put them into the boiling water) and put them in a very large bowl of ice water. That not only stops the cooking, it seems to break the bond between egg and shell and make them easier to peel.

Finally, something I read a few years ago: I tap the egg on the large end to crack the shell at that end, and then I roll it, pressing down gently as I do, to crack the shell all over, so that it becomes a bunch of tiny tiles held together by the underlying membrane. Peeling is then a simple matter of pulling off the membrane, which takes of the tiny shell pieces.

Pretty simple, but I had to learn a couple of critical steps from others. So now I’m passing along this valuable knowledge.

UPDATE: From Chris Rose in comments: Add a teaspoon of salt to the water in which you boil the eggs to increase peelability.

That’s the title of a book by Wayne C. Booth of the U of Chicago about the liberal arts, but the phrase occurred to me in the context of practical knowledge: such knowledge indeed seems the knowledge most worth having, but there seems to be no efficient way to transmit such knowledge. As the name implies, practical knowledge is acquired by practice. In my own undergraduate work in the liberal arts, it now occurs to me that we were engaged in four years of practice in reading, thinking, questioning, listening, answering—all practical skills acquired through practice. Not enough writing going on, I should say, though I did learn how to write (Ford K. Brown, Sophomore essay). It was an education focused on acquiring skills, aka practical knowledge.

Because practical knowledge takes much practice and thus a long time, it requires a certain amount of discipline and dedication, or enduring enthusiasm, for its accomplishment. With the fragmented attention spans common now among the young, I wonder how such an education can be accomplished.

Frank Rich in the NY Times gives another view of the present state of the US:

When Bernie Madoff was arrested in December 2008, America feasted vicariously on a cautionary tale of greed run amok. But like Rod Blagojevich, the stunt governor of Illinois who had been arrested days earlier, Madoff was something of a sideshow to that dark month’s main events. For a nation reeling from an often incomprehensible economic tsunami and unable to identify the culprits, he was, for the moment, the right made-to-order villain at the right time.

But Madoff was a second-tier player. Some in the upper echelons of New York’s financial world, including in the business press, had never heard of him. His firm’s accountant operated out of a strip mall and didn’t bother with electronic statements. The billions that vaporized in Madoff’s Ponzi scheme amounted to a rounding error next to the eye-popping federal bailouts, including those pouring into too-big-to-fail banks wrecked by their own Ponzi schemes of securitization. The suffering he inflicted on his mostly well-heeled dupes was piddling next to the national devastation of an economy in free fall. In a December when a half-million Americans lost their jobs — a calamitous rate not seen since 1974 — the video of a voiceless, combative Madoff in a baseball cap, skirmishing with photographers outside his Upper East Side apartment house, soon lost its punch.

A month later Barack Obama would be inaugurated and declare “a new era of responsibility.” Now, another two years have passed, and while the economy is no longer in free fall, we’re still waiting for that era to arrive. What’s extraordinary is that Madoff, unlike such tarnished titans of the bubble as Rubin or Fuld or Prince, is very much at center stage, even as he rots in prison. Perhaps that’s because he’s the only headline figure of the crash who did go to prison.

His evil deeds, in their afterlife, are now serving as a recurring wave of financial body scans. Each new Madoff revelation sheds light on an entire culture that allowed far loftier flimflams than his to succeed — though the loftier culprits, unlike him, usually escaped with the proceeds. That financial culture largely remains in place today.

The prime mover in connecting Madoff’s low-tech, relatively low-yield scam to the big Wall Street picture is Irving H. Picard, the bankruptcy trustee pursuing loss claims for Madoff’s victims. Most Americans haven’t heard of Picard. But each day that he accelerates his pursuit of Madoff’s collaborators, he steps further into the vacuum of leadership left by others, including the Obama administration’s Department of Justice. . .

Continue reading.

The Wife and I got to talking about how much I like having a notebook computer—e.g., for posts like this, written without leaving my chair—and she said that she knew I would like it, and she had been surprised I hadn’t liked the Windows netbook and notebook previously tried. The problem was that I couldn’t read the screen on either and the hypersensitive touchpad drove me crazy.

So with the MacBook I can read the screen perfectly, plus it’s cute. What’s not to like? Even the program icons bounce with joy when you click them. It’s pretty evident that the computer grew up in California. Think what the interface would have been like if Steve Jobs had been born and raised in New York, and established Apple there. With dress code, and all men in suits. Formal meetings: “Who will take minutes?” I bet no cutesy icon action then.

And then I realized I had just described IBM—though, I admit, Boca Raton rather than New York. And IBM did come out with an OS (too early, though, before object-oriented programming—hell, before structured programming): OS/2 (or, as Phillipe Kahn of Borman called it, “Half an operating system”).

I never used OS/2, but I get the idea it was really pretty nifty, with a graphical interface with a lot of drag-and-drop action. A solid product, but the zeitgeist was blowing another direction, plus IBM had required Microsoft to write the code in assembly—presumably for speed, but also ensuring gruesome porting jobs should the microcomputer industry ever come out with a new processor (and here IBM must have been thinking of timelines scaled to mainframes). And of course a new processor quickly did appear (with others to follow in rapid succession, each generation faster, better, and cheaper), and Microsoft was there first because they wrote in C. And Microsoft had learned a lot from IBM, I think.

At any rate: Apple in the Big Apple: it was IBM.

I just read the Wikipedia article on Worcestershire sauce. The article states that the original recipe seems to have used malt vinegar, so now I want to make another batch. But first I’ll use up this one.

Another two-lather shave, this one inadvertant. The Omega Pro 49 has been doing so well, I thought today I would try it with a shave stick—tricky, since I can’t very well rerub the stick on my beard after two passes—which is when the brush ran out of foam. I picked this particular shave stick (Kell’s Original Energy stick) because I like the fragrance, but perhaps a tallow-based stick (Valobra, say, or D.R. Harris) would work better. We’ll see.

At any rate, I got two good passes with the Energy lather, and the Rapira blade (recommended by a commenter to a n earlier post) seemed pretty good as well, though I need to use it more to be sure. For the third pass, I worked up a lather from a handy tub of soap: Durance L’òme was the choice since it was there and has no lid. Plenty of lather for final pass.

A splash of Stetson Sierra and I’m off to the Apple store to solve a problem.

I have had a request that each post include the time as well as the date of the post. That’s a good idea: I like to know when I read a post if it was posted at, say, 2:30 a.m. One uses a bit of Kentucky windage to adjust one’s view of the post in that case.

So I’ve asked The Wife to cast her eyes on the custom CSS for this theme to see if the time stamp can be added. If not, I shall look for another theme.

UPDATE: Had to go with another theme. The time stamp is becoming rare in WordPress themes. This current theme is Journalist v 1.9. Others with time stamp listed here.

Sounds like an intriguing book. I know I have some Buddhist readers. Here’s the review:

Buddhism through American Women’s Eyes
by Karma Lekshe Tsomo

A review by Chris Faatz

There are a lot of good books on Buddhism out there. In fact, there are some real hum-dingers: Stephen Batchelor‘s Buddhism without Beliefs, Thich Nhat Hanh‘s Being Peace, Charlotte Joko Beck‘s Everyday Zen, and Rick Fields‘s How the Swans Came to the Lake, among others. Well, let’s add another to the list: Buddhism through American Women’s Eyes, edited by Karma Lekshe Tsomo, originally published in 1995 and recently reprinted by Snow Lion Publications.

Buddhism through American Women’s Eyes gathers essays from several Buddhist women representing traditions ranging from Tibetan to Zen to Shingon in a full-on attempt to show how Buddhism is applicable right now, in the present moment, to everything we do, to all the choices we make, and in all the relationships into which we enter.

With essays that include “Forging a Kind Heart in an Age of Alienation,” “Everyday Dharma,” “Mothering and Meditation,” and “Dealing with Stress” (the latter by Ayya Khema, who was born in Germany but later became a U.S. resident), the book has many high points and is calibrated to have something that will speak to most readers. And, it doesn’t draw back from difficult issues: there are excellent pieces both on abortion and on alcoholism and the 12 steps. To cap it all off, there’s a fascinating round-table discussion of monasticism, which includes women from many traditions.

As the title may suggest, women are the intended audience. Take, for instance, this passage from “Mothering and Meditation”:

The Dharma needs to be adaptable and inclusive. If it is only for monasteries, childless women, women with grown children, women who can afford child care, or women with supportive husbands, we are in trouble. We have a fringe religion. No matter how many women have become enlightened before us, no matter how many enlightened women are mentioned in the scriptures, no matter how many enlightened women are revered, unless it translates into society, it is useless.

However, the essays speak with equal eloquence to any reader, male and female alike. It’s a treasure chest of inspiration and experience offered up as a gift by practitioners who really know their stuff. The following quote, from “Karma: Creative Responsibility,” captures, in many ways, the whole vision out of which Buddhism through American Women’s Eyes arises.

In the Buddhist system there is no one sitting in judgment, no punishing God, and no one dictating right and wrong. Instead, there is the Noble Eightfold Path of right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration based upon an understanding of the impersonal law of cause and effect, known as karma. Just as mango seeds give rise to mango trees and chili seeds give rise to chili plants, wholesome deeds lead to happiness while unwholesome deeds lead to suffering. Since everyone wants to be happy and no one wants to suffer, it stands to reason that we should strive to avoid unwholesome actions and create wholesome ones. Buddhism does not decree absolute right or wrong, but leaves individuals free to determine for themselves the appropriate course of action in the particular circumstances. Thus Buddhism presents an ethic of personal choice and responsibility, based on an understanding of cause and effect, and informed by compassion and wisdom.

An emphasis on practicality is one of the book’s consistent themes. If the Dharma doesn’t have the potential to impact your life right now, it’s useless. And that’s what makes Buddhism through American Women’s Eyes so powerful and relevant. It presents teachings, insights, and stories that are immediately applicable in the mixed-up, filth- and beauty- and noise- and confusion- and hope-filled whirlwinds that make up our lives. Take it from me: this is a great book, for all of us.

I had a little bounce in my weight—I had a tough day, and followed dinner with some snacks (string cheese and hard-boiled eggs) and a glass of wine. But I immediately got back to business, and now I’m back to regular weight before the bounce—having lost 5 days, of course—and hope to see myself below 190 lbs by the end of la semana que vienes viene [see comment] (i.e., “next week”: I use every opportunity to practice my Spanish).

UPDATE: Sunday 13 Feb 6:07 a.m., 21 hours after posting the goal: I just weighed in at 189.0 lbs. Now that’s how I like to achieve goals.

I had no problem doing the Nordic Track before breakfast (indeed, as breakfast cooked) and it was nice to get it out of the way.

And I’m so happy with my Mac, though I do have another trip to the store coming up: I installed the little Go game widget (9×9, using GnuGo engine), and it said it needed Rosetta. I downloaded Rosetta and tried to install, but got nowhere and now I can’t even find the download. So back to the store for help—and getting help locally by talking to someone and showing them the computer: that’s nice. [Later: Problem solved itself as I waited.]

Bob Herbert has a better platform in the NY Times than I do with Later On (hard truth, but I recognize it), and he is speaking out on the fall of the US democracy much as I am—and despite his fine platform, he also will be ignored, I believe. Once a country starts down the road to oligarchy and secret relationships between the wealthy and the government, even without delivering critical governmental functions to private industry, the government falls under the control of wealthy businessmen, and they will not let go. And, alas, our current crop of politicians seem only too eager to be purchased—many seem to have gone into politics to make money, and make it they do.

Bob Herbert:

As the throngs celebrated in Cairo, I couldn’t help wondering about what is happening to democracy here in the United States. I think it’s on the ropes. We’re in serious danger of becoming a democracy in name only.

While millions of ordinary Americans are struggling with unemployment and declining standards of living, the levers of real power have been all but completely commandeered by the financial and corporate elite. It doesn’t really matter what ordinary people want. The wealthy call the tune, and the politicians dance.

So what we get in this democracy of ours are astounding and increasingly obscene tax breaks and other windfall benefits for the wealthiest, while the bought-and-paid-for politicians hack away at essential public services and the social safety net, saying we can’t afford them. One state after another is reporting that it cannot pay its bills. Public employees across the country are walking the plank by the tens of thousands. Camden, N.J., a stricken city with a serious crime problem, laid off nearly half of its police force. Medicaid, the program that provides health benefits to the poor, is under savage assault from nearly all quarters.

The poor, who are suffering from an all-out depression, are never heard from. In terms of their clout, they might as well not exist. The Obama forces reportedly want to raise a billion dollars or more for the president’s re-election bid. Politicians in search of that kind of cash won’t be talking much about the wants and needs of the poor. They’ll be genuflecting before the very rich.

In an Op-Ed article in The Times at the end of January, Senator John Kerry said . . .

Continue reading.