Daily Clips

Hillary leaves the left cold Liberal Democrats feel the wind is at their backs, making it all the more irksome for them that Hillary Clinton could be their presidential nominee in 2016. For many on the left, Clinton is the woman who supported the Iraq War, ran to the right of President Obama, and is associated…

Younger members split with GOP on social issues At a recent meeting, the Tampa Bay Young Republicans recited the Pledge of Allegiance, prayed, and then tackled the night’s topic: marijuana. Their guest? Personal injury lawyer John Morgan, a huge Democratic Party donor campaigning to legalize medical marijuana in Florida. Months earlier, the same group supported a…

How corporations get away with rampant wage theft For workers stuck on the bottom rung, living on poverty wages is hard enough. But many also are victims of wage theft, a catch-all term for payroll abuses that cheat workers of income they are supposedly guaranteed by law. Over the last few years employers ranging from baseball’s…

No more liberal apologies as Elizabeth Warren takes the offensive Elizabeth Warren is cast as many things: a populist, a left-winger, the paladin against the bankers and the rich, the Democrats’ alternative to Hillary Clinton, the policy wonk with a heart. The senior senator from Massachusetts is certainly a populist and her heart is with those…

The coming realignment: cities, class, and ideology after social conservatism Following Barack Obama’s historic victory in 2008, pundits posited that a new Democratic majority would dominate American politics for generations to come. But according to Michael Lind, no such majority will hold: political conflict is with us to stay, though traditional terms like ‘left,’ ‘right,’…

Who watches the watchers? Big Data goes unchecked The National Security Agency might be tracking your phone calls. But private industry is prying far more deeply into your life. Commercial data brokers know if you have diabetes. Your electric company can see what time you come home at night. And tracking companies can tell where you…

Don’t be fooled: McConnell’s victory in Kentucky is also a Tea Party win Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell’s primary victory Tuesday night in Kentucky will undoubtedly tempt many a pundit to write the Tea Party’s eulogy. But the Tea Party will achieve in electoral death what it could never achieve in life: lasting control of the…

Not everyone shares in Boeing’s success Taxpayers around Washington state are trying to understand Boeing’s recent announcement of layoffs, just months after the Legislature met in special session to grant $8.7 billion in tax preferences—the largest such deal in American history. Our relationship with Boeing has definitely changed. For decades, Boeing products excelled in the marketplace. The…

Jane Kleeb vs. the Keystone Pipeline Trans­Canada, the $48 billion Canadian company that owns the Keystone, has repeatedly said the XL will be “the safest pipeline ever built on U.S. soil,” a technological marvel with automatic shutoff valves and satellite monitoring. The exact composition of what will flow through the pipeline is not publicly available,…

The problem with Piketty: “Capital” destroys right-wing lies, but there’s one solution it forgets What makes Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” such a triumph is that it seems to have been written specifically to demolish the great economic shibboleths of our time. The stock market is not an instrument of economic democracy, it…