Why I'm Rooting for Newt Gingrich To Be The Republican Nominee

If you're a liberal, you've probably had at least one Republican acquaintance inform you that you ought to be supporting Ron Paul for President. This is because Republicans don't really quite understand Ron Paul. Since he believes in civil liberties and doesn't like sending young people off to die in ill-conceived foreign wars, Republicans often assume he's a flaming liberal hippie in disguise. In the black-and-white world of Tea Party Republicans, he's not nearly white enough to be white, and must therefore be black.

House Republicans Hit New Low By Passing The Year's Dumbest Bill

While grocery shopping, I often chuckle at (for instance) the myriad varieties of vegetable oil lining the shelves, proclaiming "No Cholesterol!" It's vegetable oil, for crying out loud. Damn well better not have cholesterol. This sort of nonsense often sets me off on another tongue-in-cheek rant, remarking for the umpteenth time that Crisco ought to tout their product as caffeine-free and sugar-free while they're at it. Why, they oughtta introduce a whole new line of "fill-in-the-blank-free" oils and shortenings (at a premium price, naturally) and even beat the competition to market with an ultra premium line Certified Free of Death Crystals. After all, why would one worry about saturated fats or trans fats now that we're all threatened by Death Crystals? You don't want your family eating Death Crystals, now, do you? Of course you don't! And so on....

Chapter 11: The New Shape of Solar?

Once hyped as a prototypical green jobs pioneer, Solyndra Inc., a California-based maker of high tech solar modules, has filed for bankruptcy. One thousand workers are back to pounding the pavement, and $535M in Department of Energy loan guarantees to Solyndra are in jeopardy, triggering an FBI investigation. Sounds like a bad thing, but—if you're a Republican—bad things are good. Indeed, right wingers are doing victory laps, lambasting Obama's green jobs proposals with Solyndra as their cause célèbre.

Shift The Power: The American Dream Movement Is No "Left-Wing Tea Party"

Ronald Radosh's Pajamas Media piece "Can Van Jones Create A "Left-Wing Tea Party"? Don’t Bet On It" is only one of several recent articles about the American Dream Movement, but it's arguably the most comically irrational. Radosh has made something of a cottage industry out of hissing rather ineffectively at film director Oliver Stone, and occasionally frets about Russian spies and other bogeymen, but Van Jones and the American Dream Movement are the latest targets of his rapier illogic and willful ignorance.

Warren Buffett Stinks up the Billionaires' Garden Party

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett has been preaching higher taxes for the extraordinarily well-to-do for more than a decade, but his August 15th Wall Street Journal op-ed was apparently the last straw for some of his pampered fellows in the velvet pantaloon club. Buffett had the temerity to remind us once again that despite his extraordinary wealth and income, he pays a lower percentage of his income in taxes than ordinary working class Americans. He asked Congress to finally stop "coddling billionaires" and make them pay their fair share, a vulgar indiscretion prompting a fusillade of grunting protests from the ivory towers of Koch Industries to the grimy corridors of the right wing blogosphere.