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When I first began writing about politics in late 2005, the standard liberal blogosphere critique -- one I naively believed back then -- was that Democrats were capitulating so continuously to the Bush agenda because they "lacked spine" and were inept political strategists: i.e., they found those policies so very offensive but were simply unwilling or unable to resist them.  It became apparent to me that this was little more than a self-soothing conceit: Democrats continuously voted for Bush policies because they were either indifferent to their enactment or actively supported them, and were owned and controlled by the same factions as the GOP. 

Robert Reich, a visiting professor at the UC, Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy and former U.S. Secretary of Labor talks about the inequality of income, wealth and opportunity in the United States and asks his audience to speculate on what will happen if these trends continue. Series: "Richard and Rhoda Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley" [5/2005] [Public Affairs] [Show ID: 9521]

TWEEDLE DEE AND TWEEDLE DUMB. THEY'RE TWIN SONS OF DIFFERENT MOTHERS! A LITTLE FACT CHECKING WILL BEAR OUT THAT RONALD REGAN INHERITED A WORSE MESSFROM CARTER THAN OBAMA DID FROM BUSH.

The high cost of healthcare has been a subject that has confounded life in America and in various countries throughout the world throughout history. Why so high? Do higher costs in various countries determine the quality of care? Is health care supposed to be seen just like any other commodity? If a doctor notices that people cannot afford quality healthcare, what is their responsibility to the patient?

Ground Zero Mosque Is Okay According To The President, But Then Again A Nuclear Armed Iran Seems To Be Fine As Well.

The laws and policies of the legislature of the United States of America are now effectively on eBay, for sale to the highest bidder. Are you a Wall Street boss who wants to party like it's 2007? Are you a Big Coal baron who wants to burn, baby, burn? Are you an insurance company that wants to be able to kick sick people off your rolls? Meet John Boehner, the most powerful Republican and soon-to-be Speaker of the House. But -- of course! -- you already have. Here's an example of how you have worked together. In 1995, the House was going to finally repeal subsidies for growing tobacco, because an addictive cancer-causing drug didn't seem like the most deserving recipient of taxpayers' cash -- until Boehner walked the floor of the House handing out checks from tobacco lobbyists to his fellow elected representatives. They changed their minds. The subsidy stayed. Explaining his check-dispensing, Boehner says: "It's gone on here for a long time." So get your bids in: The House is open for business.

A gripe site that incorporates a company's entire trademark into its domain is still protected under the First Amendment, a US District Judge has ruled. In the case of Career Agents Network v. careeragentsnetwork.biz, the judge said that the gripe site made no effort to bolster its own business and was noncommercial, therefore protecting it from Career Agents Network's trademark claims and cybersquatting accusations.

A Google representative has announced that the web censorship policies adopted by China can be classified as 'Trade Dispute' as local companies benefit when the government restricts the operations of foreign companies.

"IT IS TIME to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world. On the all-important question of power - the efficacy of power, the morality of power, the desirability of power - American and European perspectives are diverging. Europe is turning away from power, or to put it a little differently, it is moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation. It is entering a post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity, the realization of Kant's "Perpetual Peace." The United States, meanwhile, remains mired in history, exercising power in the anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable and where true security and the defense and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might. That is why on major strategic and international questions today, Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus: They agree on little and understand one another less and less. And this state of affairs is not transitory - the product of one American election or one catastrophic event. The reasons for the transatlantic divide are deep, long in development, and likely to endure. When it comes to setting national priorities, determining threats, defining challenges, and fashioning and implementing foreign and defense policies, the United States and Europe have parted ways."

Adam Smith observed in 1776 that economies work best when governments keep their clumsy thumbs off the free market's "invisible hand." Two generations later, in 1817, the British economist David Ricardo extended Smith's insights to global trade. Just as market forces lead to the right price and quantity of products domestically, Ricardo argued, free foreign trade optimizes economic outcomes internationally. Reading Adam Smith in Copenhagen -- the center of the small, open, and highly successful Danish economy -- is a kind of out-of-body experience. On the one hand, the Danes are passionate free traders. They score well in the ratings constructed by pro-market organizations. The World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Index ranks Denmark third, just behind the United States and Switzerland. Denmark's financial markets are clean and transparent, its barriers to imports minimal, its labor markets the most flexible in Europe, its multinational corporations dynamic and largely unmolested by industrial policies, and its unemployment rate of 2.8 percent the second lowest in the OECD (the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development). On the other hand, Denmark spends about 50 percent of its GDP on public outlays and has the world's second-highest tax rate, after Sweden; strong trade unions; and one of the world's most equal income distributions. For the half of GDP that they pay in taxes, the Danes get not just universal health insurance but also generous child-care and family-leave arrangements, unemployment compensation that typically covers around 95 percent of lost wages, free higher education, secure pensions in old age, and the world's most creative system of worker retraining. Does Denmark have some secret formula that combines the best of Adam Smith with the best of the welfare state? Is there something culturally unique about the open-minded Danes? Can a model like the Danish one survive as a social democratic island in a turbulent sea of globali

New Jersey Title, an underwriter of title insurance policies in the northeast, has become a casualty of a financial and real estate crisis that has taken many victims. Some of these casualties might never have occurred if the events of the past few years had not taken place, but because they did there are firms and individuals who now face the need to find alternatives at a time when those alternatives may be difficult to come by.