Pittsburgh On a Monday morning a month ago, I was sitting on the marble floor of the Squirrel Hill branch of PNC Bank, with a circle of activists protesting PNC’s financing of mountain-top removal (MTR) coal mining across Appalachia. MTR causes increased cancer rates and birth defects as well as massive environmental degradation—not to […]

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  At some point we need to stop pretending that we are given a limited cast of individual political actors because there is no one else out there, that the international economy can be guided or manipulated by just the right person, that Wall Street will genuflect and we will all be saved. The economic […]

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(Source: Mashable) It makes sense that we are indignant (though perhaps not indignant enough) about the scandal of illicit spying by America’s National Security Agency. But we should not be surprised. We should have seen this coming. Our reaction recalls Nietzsche’s reproach of people who spend their lives being surprised to discover things they had […]

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(Source: CNN) Think about it. The Obama administration is close to an agreement with the Iranian government to achieve a decade’s long goal. Iran would give up any plans it might have to develop nuclear weapons (verified by international inspections) in exchange for the lifting of some international sanctions that are doing significant damage to […]

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(Source: National Review) One of the more enviable political skills Republicans possess is the ability to sell their policies and ideas to the public even when those ideas directly contradict any notion of reality or good sense. They relentlessly insist the sky is red until voters believe them and Democrats are too intimidated to speak […]

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