How do you prefer your soul music – Sweet or Memphis style?

Arthur Conley –Sweet Soul Music.
King Curtis & The Kingpins– Memphis Soul Stew.

It’s a full moon! Let’s go crazy! I don’t know where to start–celebrating idiocy or celebrating Ricky Martin. Oh heck, let’s go Ricky! I saw El Vez, the Mexican Elvis do a great slow creepy version of Living’ La Vida Loca, and it was then I realized how utterly dark the lyrics are for this [...]

Most of the industrialized world pays less for it yet gets more. There is a stark imbalance between the rich and the poor’s access to it. Enormous and powerful corporations want the government to “reform” the system by delivering them lots of customers and goodies and then staying out of their way.

I speak, of course, of broadband internet.

I hope we can be honest about what “Race to the Top” actually represents: blackmail. It forces states to change their education laws to fit particular notions about how to manage public education in America. And it does so at a time of crippling state budgets, when the Race to the Top funds mean the difference between thousands of teachers laid off or kept on the job, between class sizes expanding or shrinking. Basically, Arne Duncan and the White House are leveraging crisis to make preferred changes in education policy.

The Long War is all kinds of crazy and absurd. Nobody wants a forever war with “unimaginable” costs, a collapse of the domestic political agenda, and untold thousands of dead. We don’t need to waste time legitimizing crazy ideas like the Long War doctrine, we need to have congressional hearings and media scrutiny on the actual events on the ground.

If Treasury wants to pretend they have solutions to deep-seated problems in the economy, you’d think they’d invest in some better explanations. Or alternatively, do what’s needed to fix the problems.

Elections are not just about choosing your representatives, political executives, and party standard bearers. Election season is about more than the horse race between Republicans and Democrats. For a large part of the country, election day is an important moment of direct democracy, through ballot initiatives and referendums. The initiative process allows citizens to directly vote on laws and state constitutional amendments. On FDL Elections, as well as the other parts of Firedoglake, we hope provide some increased focus on this part of the democratic process, and want to hear about what state and local ballot initiatives are happening in your area.

Arlen Specter didn’t vocally oppose the Employee Free Choice Act. He single-handedly killed the entire bill.

The NYT Business page reports that AT&T, Caterpillar, Deere & Company and many other large corporations are complaining that the new health reform law will strip them of a large tax subsidy. But the provision is a corporate scam for looting taxpayers and raising drug prices.

When President Obama signed the Student Lending and Fiscal Responsibility Act today, it dealt an enormous blow to Wall Street banks. He deserves huge props for that. I’m not sure people know how big a victory it was. Sallie Mae spent $3 million on lobbyists last year, and got none of what they wanted. Zero, zip, nada. . . . His student loan reform package represents, in essence, a “public option” for the student loan system, and demonstrates why proponents were fighting so hard for the same thing in the health care bill. . . . But it almost didn’t happen.