RZPGirl

Jump to Comments (The original review featured an image of an outdoor porch thermostat reading about 110 degrees) By Richard J. Garfunkel — Host of “The Advocates,” WVOX-AM, New Rochelle, NY This isn’t a day to go out for a little half-court basketball, or singles in tennis. This is a real Palm Desert heat wave. It is best to be indoors sipping a cool lemonade or an iced tea, and reading “The Age of Greed” by Jeff Madrick; and learning how the other half has been living over the past 40... Read Full Story

House Speaker John Boehner on Thursday continued the current Republican Party’s habit of publicly dissing the President of the United States; this time, by cutting off negotiations on an agreement to raise the nation’s debt ceiling. As described in Politico , this action followed a day and a half of Boehner refusing to return the president’s phone calls, like that obnoxious teenage chick who plays head games with a guy when she has no intention of dating him. See, I don’t believe Boehner has... Read Full Story

It’s really fascinating how two deals that have America on the edge of its collective seat are fast approaching their deadlines to get done, within the same time frame: “by the beginning of August:” I’m talking about the NFL owners-players labor lockout and the raising of the federal debt ceiling by the U.S. Congress, with major shepherding by the Obama White House. Read Full Story

Well, they’re baaack …. Not exactly the Magnificent Seven, but not the Frustrated Five, either. Who am I talkin’ bout? Why, the “Gang of Six,” of course — six U.S. Senators who look slightly like the lead officers in a cavalry coming to the nation’s emotional rescue on raising the debt ceiling. Maybe President Obama isn’t the only grownup here in the Swamp, after all. Read Full Story

Jump to Comments With the debt ceiling crisis looming overhead, I thought I’d give a little more context to why GOP members of Congress might be feeling the heat to stick to their anti-tax position. Grover Norquist heads up Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) and has pushed GOP presidential candidates and other politicians to sign a pledge not to “raise taxes” under any circumstance, ever. For example, according to the pledge forms on the ATR website, U.S. House members must pledge to... Read Full Story

I don’t know about you, but I hate it when the press covers all the political blabbity blah in Washington and DOESN’T EXPLAIN TO US WTF IT MEANS (pardon the occasional vulgarity, but really a lot of what goes on here in the Capital of Swamp Things IS vulgar). Read Full Story

NPR’s Tell Me More” with host Michel Martin on July 13 featured two compelling segments, “Anti-White Bias on the Rise” and “Racism as a Zero Sum Game.” However, in that second segment in particular, the authors of the study in question failed to address a major source of perceptions of “anti-white” discrimination: right-wing talking heads who have fomented a sense of white injury about the evolving equalizing of opportunity in America for minorities. The most glaring culmination of the long... Read Full Story

“Social Security is not the source of our deficit problems.” So sayeth President Obama in today’s White House news conference addressing the ongoing debt ceiling debate. In this respect, Obama echoes former REPUBLICAN Sen. Alan Simpson of Wyoming, one of the president’s two go-to guys on the recent Deficit Commission report. So why are so many people focused on Social Security in the context of this debate? Um … maybe trying to avoid facing at least one REAL source of our deficit problems... Read Full Story

The talk this week in the Navel of Power and Corruption — a.k.a., the nation’s capital — is finally and almost completely focused on that all-time favorite aspect of a functioning democracy: taxes. Specifically, who is going to have to pay more of them in order to address the nation’s debt. Read Full Story

Author’s note : Two recent news stories inspired me to reach WAY back to an unpublished piece I wrote in April 2000 during an allergic reaction to the overdose of sexual imagery and acting out in American culture. Those stories? The saga of Rep. Anthony Weiner and the perils of women dressing like “sluts.” Some of my POV as expressed here made it into my book “Democrats in the Red Zone,” in my discussion of pop culture, porn addiction, and how Democrats so often end up on the wrong end of the... Read Full Story