One of the Koch brothers stepped from the shadows recently to offer a detailed glimpse into his worldview in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. The piece is revealing at a number of levels, but most interesting to me is the stunted and historically inaccurate way in which Charles Koch thinks about his own core value, […]

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Washington politicos aren’t quite right when they say that federal budget proposals are “dead on arrival.” Even if they don’t become law, budgets stand as living, breathing testimonies of the values and priorities of the people who write them. And it may surprise you that the budget proposal that’s most likely to line up with […]

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  As readers of these posts will recall, I’m not the biggest fan of the Affordable Care Act. My view is that the legislative compromises needed to get the ACA through Congress made it an unwieldy mess; that the bungled roll-out was a logical outcome of its Rube Goldberg structure. The claims of the president’s […]

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(Photo Source: AJAM) It’s sounding again like the drought of 1976-77: “Shower with a friend.” “Put a brick in your toilet tank.” “Fix your leaky faucet.” “Replace your lawn with a cactus garden.” And then the pictures: denuded ski slopes, boat docks resting on the bottom of empty reservoirs, dry brown furrows stretching to the […]

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  Amid 200 pages of predictably and mind-numbingly dry text, the world’s seventh-largest oil company foreshadowed something big. Here are the exact words, which Shell buried in the  report’s “risk factors” section: “If we are unable to find economically viable, as well as publicly acceptable, solutions that reduce our CO2 emissions for new and existing projects or […]

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