The health care billionaires are going ape-shit over Rep. Alan Grayson, because he represents their worst nightmare: a Democrat with balls. Grayson is responding exactly the way a politician in this battlefield should do when attacked: the more they go after him, the more Grayson fights back and goes on the offensive. Liberals aren’t supposed to do that. It’s as though he violated some unwritten rule that’s shocked even his supposedly-liberal “allies.” Now that it’s clear that this guy Grayson isn’t easily-cowed like the rest of his spineless liberal colleagues, the billionaires have decided to go nuclear: now they’re accusing Grayson of being a Jew-hater. Seriously. And this lie is spreading fast. (more…)

Someone on Jon Stewart’s staff molested me this past Tuesday. He or she plagiarized my Fresno/Hannity story, which Alternet ran Monday, and the Daily Show aired Tuesday, much to my horror. It was as though someone—say, a writer/producer—fondled my funny-taint, and now it’s bleeding. Well, I am not pressing charges, yet, but I am attaching an Invoice. (more…)

So now it’s official: I was right and the rest of the media was wrong about the war in Georgia last year. The EU just issued a report blaming Georgia for starting last year’s war with Russians. About 1 year and 1 month after I wrote the same thing. Unlike everyone else in the Western media, from the very start I wrote in The Nation that Georgia was to blame for starting the war, first here on Day 1 of the war, and then here a few days later. (more…)

Zoinks! I think I heard a liberal blogger!

This is just like America’s rightwing pussies: all bluster and no fight. When no one’s looking, they’re screaming crazy treasonous shit like they’re badass revolutionaries, but at the first whiff of liberal-blogger criticism, they’re fleeing with their tails between their legs. (more…)

Maybe the answer to the banking oligarchy’s stranglehold on America is something much more radical than all these hollow attempts at merely adjusting the system and “making it work better.” How can you make something “work better” when it doesn’t work for you but rather against you? Maybe America needs its own Mao to sweep it all away and start from scratch, something Twain called for a hundred years ago.

(more…)

Can someone get me my beta blockers? You have to have a bottle of something close by if you dare to read the financial news on any given day. Like, oh, say, Monday, the Day of Atonement: Businessweek reports that over in the rigid class-based United Kingdom, even they have the guts to reign in the banker class, with new plans to ban annual banker bonuses: (more…)

This article first appeared in Alternet.

There was another workplace rampage killing last week, just outside of Fresno, California, leaving two company employees dead and the other employees grateful to be alive.

Fresno, like so much of unofficial America, is still in a state of shock these days, after suffering from a non-stop barrage of tragic events and trends, of subprime devastation and a three-year drought, and political corruption and machinations that seem to be accelerating with every month. So unlike workplace shootings in the past, this one was quickly pushed off the front pages and almost forgotten, just a couple of days after it happened.

(more…)