By David Underhill – MOBILE, Ala. – If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the Paris climate conference just built an eight-lane freeway to Hades. Leaders and nerds from 195 countries sifted through separate plans for saving the species from itself and tried to meld them into an agreed text about shrinking…
By Anne Applebaum – Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has announced that he wants to give away $45 billion. I’m sure he needs some advice on how to spend it. Here’s mine: He should use it to undo the terrible damage done by Facebook and other forms of social media to democratic debate and civilized…
By Glynn Wilson – MONTGOMERY. Ala. – Governor Robert Bentley issued a statement on Wednesday in response to the Obama administration’s announcement of an investigation by the U.S. Department of Transportation into the proposed closure of state driver license offices in mostly poor counties populated by minorities. Bentley claimed there were no offices closed and…
By Bill Boyarsky – Watching Donald Trump on television Monday urging that Muslims be banned from entering the United States was like listening to Hitler on the radio in the early 1930s. As was the case with Hitler, Trump appeals to a substantial number of angry people who cheer his call for making outcasts of…
By Eugene Robinson – “A cancer that has no immediate cure” was not the most soothing metaphor President Obama could have chosen, but it was the most honest. He has no idea how to prevent another terrorist attack like the one in San Bernardino – and neither does anyone else, including his Republican critics. The…
By Chris Hedges – The charade of the 21st United Nations climate summit will end, as past climate summits have ended, with lofty rhetoric and ineffectual cosmetic reforms. Since the first summit more than 20 years ago, carbon dioxide emissions have soared. Placing faith in our political and economic elites, who have mastered the arts…
By Edgar Wilson – America’s political leaders are not agents of change. They campaign as thought-leaders and strategists, but they are really glorified marketers. Their primary wares for sale to the public? Overwhelmingly, incentives and punishments—typically financial in nature—that will supposedly herald a sea change in behavior, shepherding the country into the future. Everything from…
By Robert Reich – In this holiday season it’s especially appropriate to acknowledge how many Americans don’t have steady work. The so-called “share economy” includes independent contractors, temporary workers, the self-employed, part-timers, freelancers, and free agents. Most file 1099s rather than W2s, for tax purposes. It’s estimated that in five years over 40 percent of…
By Eugene Robinson – The Republican presidential candidates and the far-right echo chamber have made “politically correct” an all-purpose dismissal for facts and opinions they don’t want to hear. Take Donald Trump’s claim that when the World Trade Center towers collapsed on 9/11, “I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of…
By Glynn Wilson – When we were young and naive, back in the day before the Bush Years, we consumed the government and American history text books that told us how the judicial branch of government is supposed to be above politics. When I first set foot in a newsroom across the street from a…
By Juan Cole – As Donald Trump supporters beat a ‘Black Lives Matter’ protester at a rally in Birmingham, Ala., Trump himself reminded us of the dark days when a paranoid J. Edgar Hoover had the FBI monitor the Rev. Martin Luther King and black Churches of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. “I want surveillance…
By William Greider – At his inauguration in 1981, Ronald Reagan declared that “government is not the solution — government is the problem.” The election of 2016 will tell us whether the American people are ready to overthrow the tyranny of that reactionary proposition. I know it’s possible — but only if the Democratic Party…
By Elizabeth Warren – Over the past four years, millions of people have fled their homes in Syria, running for their lives. In recent months, the steady stream of refugees has been a flood that has swept across Europe. Every day, refugees set out on a journey hundreds of miles, from Syria to the Turkish…
By Robert Reich – The next president of the United States will confront a virulent jihadist threat, mounting effects of climate change, and an economy becoming ever more unequal. We’re going to need an especially wise and able leader. Yet our process for choosing that person is a circus, and several leading candidates are clowns.…
By Robert Reich – The other night I phoned a former Republican member of Congress with whom I’d worked in the 1990s on various pieces of legislation. I consider him a friend. I wanted his take on the Republican candidates because I felt I needed a reality check. Was I becoming excessively crotchety and partisan,…
By Walter Simon – I’m not much of a football fan. But due to circumstances beyond my control, I ended up in a house watching the Alabama-LSU game last night and something dawned on me. In American football, we have it all ass backwards. The defense should be called the offense, and the offense is…
The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – I don’t know if Americans or Southerners are incredibly gullible or just stupid, or if local news outlets are to blame. But we had a good laugh Saturday night when the sportscasters fell for the line calling the Alabama-LSU game (Alabama won, 30-16) “The Game of the…
The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – It seems old stories never die. They just keep going round and around, circling further from the truth as time goes by. I just got off the phone with a producer in New York who wants to interview me, again, about the political prosecution of former Alabama…
Secret Vistas – By Glynn Wilson – MARION, Va. – Listening to a babbling brook running behind the campground in this state park just as the sun went down on Halloween, I could have sworn I heard a small female child crying off in the distance, moaning “hungry mother, hungry mother.” Back during the pioneer…
By Eugene Robinson – Jeb Bush deserves headlines from Wednesday’s anarchic GOP debate, but not the good kind. Something like: “Is Bush Finished?” The evening in Boulder, Colorado, will be remembered for interruptions, non sequiturs, mangled facts and general chaos. But the most significant impact may have been to dramatically lengthen the odds that Bush,…
