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During the presidency of Ronald Reagan, Republicans latched onto three theories that allowed them to hand out tax cuts and pile up debt. One theory is “Starve the Beast“, which says to cut taxes now, so to bring on a budget crisis that would force cuts in social spending later. As one Republican consultant put […]

Rep. Roskam (R-IL) shakes his Etch-A-Sketch as Pres. Obama looks on. from C-SPAN “[The American people] … have rendered a judgment about what we have attempted to do so far,” said Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) at the president’s big health care meeting last week.30+31 “[P]ut that on the shelf and … start over with a […]

From Climbing Mountains to Building Schools K2 from air, West Face (Guilhem Vellut) Greg Mortenson is an American, who grew up near Mount Kilimanjaro, where his father started a teaching hospital and his mother started a school.20+21 From that background, Mortenson became a nurse, and an avid mountain climber — but later switched to become […]

Haplocanthosaurus, where it belongs. Cleveland Museum of Natural History Since U.S. states abandoned their old laws that curb corporate power, many corporations have become dinosaurs — huge beasts that have outlived their time, but that keep on stomping through the world.1 One type of dinosaur is the big oil company, whose products feed disastrous global […]

Today’s global warming is unique among the Earth’s warm periods. The rise in average world-wide temperature (0.7°C over the past 100 years) is much faster-paced than the warming after an ice age (4 – 7°C over 5000 years).90 And the rise of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere (80 parts per million (ppm) — up […]