Even if you believe that some patch or change to the system would have to come if the mandate gets struck down, you’d have to agree that Cutter’s rigid stance here doesn’t even allow for that possibility.

Mikal Jakubal’s One Good Year follows several people in Southern Humboldt County who work in the area’s biggest economy: Marijuana. Jakubal follows an entire grow cycle with “mom-and-pop” growers who are part of medical marijuana collectives, people who like the majority of residents in SoHum rely on pot as their main cash crop. Join us as we discuss this movie and the promise of One Good Year.

Richard Holbrooke, the US Special Envoy to Afghanistan, has died. He had been in critical condition after emergency surgery to repair a torn aorta.

KORUS as a whole will contribute to the increasing financialization of our economy at the expense of our manufacturing base. Yet oddly, by leveraging payback for its various bailouts differently, the Administration has elicited cries of support from both the finance and the manufacturing industry.

Or maybe it’s just that unlike the UAW, the banksters have found a way to roll Obama over and over.

Here it is, to be laid out by the latest National Intelligence Estimates: no real partner in the corrupt central government, lagging development and security training, no buy-in from Pakistan to root out safe havens, fading support from the public, and a country still under Taliban control, for the most part.

Other than that, great war we’re running.

If the GOP wants to keep passing tax cuts for the rich WITHOUT extending unemployment benefits, the plan will be unpopular. The President would be well within his right to veto it and send Congress back to the drawing board, but also have public support with him for forcing an unemployment benefit extension.

Democrats are accepting the budget-busting extension of the Bush tax cuts because of the stimulative effect expected from the other provisions in the bill. Republicans see those other provisions, essentially, as the impetus to cut spending and essentially cancel out the stimulative properties.

On Friday afternoon, Senator Bernie Sanders took the floor of the US Senate for nearly nine hours in a lengthy speech about the Obama-GOP tax plan. While some observers called it a filibuster, Bernie wasn’t actually stalling any legislation on the floor of the Senate. Nonetheless, his speech was an eloquent defense of economic justice in America.

You don’t need an individual mandate penalty forcing Americans to buy insurance from a private company to create a near universal health care system. There are dozens of ways to design a health care system without using the government to force people to give money to private companies.

Make no mistake: this is still the party of “deficits don’t matter.” All that matters to these people is tax cuts.