The Unmentionables starring Bugs Bunny. This Warner Bros Merrie Melodies cartoon was released on September 7, 1963.

I don’t believe I’ve ever been guilty of accusing American conservatives of intelligence, but in one specific area I suppose I must allow that the right wing consistently demonstrates a pathology that, from a certain perspective, if you squint hard, and you’ve been drinking the sorts of fluids that make photocopiers work, might be taken [...]

What’s the best relationship advice you’ve ever gotten?

At long last, Rep. David Obey has called the question: which is more important to America – saving teachers’ jobs, or pointless killing in Afghanistan? This could be the beginning of the end of the Washington consensus that wars and other military spending exist on their own fiscal planet. But where are the big Democratic constituency groups? It isn’t just a question of missing an opportunity: there is a freight train coming called “deficit reduction,” and if cuts in military spending aren’t on board the train, the train’s cargo will be cuts in Social Security and Medicare benefits.

Wendell Berry is a farmer and author who writes on issues of agriculture, the environment, and sustainability. In his 1997 essay “Energy in Agriculture,” he blames the rise of fossil fuels for the damaging shift from family farms to industrial agriculture. He then connects this transformation in agricultural practices to the all-conmsuming oil addiction that is slowly bringing America to her knees – calling it theft from future generations.

Yesterday, AFL-CIO’s Richard Trumka gave a speech in Cleveland, Ohio, on immigration reform, an issue where labor has traditionally been neutral or openly hostile. Trumka’s strong support for immigration reform shows both the changes in the diversity of the labor movement, as well as the understanding that common values and common purpose, not individual fiefdoms, will increase power of a mass social movement outside of politics.

In 2007 and 2008 Junger and his photographer Tim Hetherington spent several months living with a platoon of U.S. Army paratroopers in eastern Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. At one point during a spike in the fighting, the 30 young men of Junger’s Second Platoon — part of the 173rd Airborne Brigade based in Italy — accounted for around a third of all the combat experienced by the 160,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan. Half of the platoon fell dead or wounded. Others suffered psychological injuries.

The Republican Party recently told its leaders to call the Obama administration’s new health law “Exhibit A” of a “runaway Washington government.” But that’s not how longtime GOP health expert Thomas Scully sees it.

Now that I have effectively turned this blog into Gawker, I might as well take one more crack at the well heeled aristocracy. Today’s jet setting celebrity is none other than BP Big Man Dr. Anthony Bryan Hayward, CCMI. Better known to us “small people” here in the States as Tony Hayward, CEO of the [...]

The Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) was a left-wing political party that emerged in rural western Canada during the Great Depression. The party won control of Saskatchewan’s provincial government in the 1940s. While in power, the CCF created the government-run single-payer health insurance system, which was soon adopted nationwide. The CCF is the source of Canada’s universal health-care system.