This is the most enjoyable book on Mark Twain that I've read. It covers the last few years of his tumultuous life, which were largely sad and stressful yet full of activity. The biography reads like a novel.
It was during this late period of his life that he started wearing his now famous white suit. His signature uniform was a late creation to draw attention to himself. Twain wanted to be remembered, and this was one of his tools to fashion his imaage for posterity. It worked.
The book details his work toward revising US copyright law (which worked, extending a writers control over his work for 56 years) to preserve his royalitites for his family, the death of his close friend Henry Rogers, and the tragic death of his daughter Jean in December of 1909. He created controversies that continue to this day: firing his associates Isabel Lyon and Ralph Ashcroft, creating writings that he dared not publish in his lifetime, and dictating long autobiographical writings that will finally be published later this year in the complete autobiography of Mark Twain.
I was sad when I finished the book. I wish it had gone on for another 400 pages. This Michael Shelden, who teaches at Indiana State, is a masterful writer.
I am slowly coming to an appreciation and understanding of Mark Twain.
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Thursday, May 27, 2010
A Personal E-Book Library?
The Chapter And Verse on E-Bookstores
By GEOFFREY A. FOWLER
As books go digital, much of the focus has been on which gadgets offer the best approximation of old-fashioned paper and ink on a screen. But there's another choice that's just as important for readers to weigh before they make the leap to e-books: which e-bookstore to frequent.
Kindle device showing the Amazon e-book store
Reading devices like the iPad, Kindle and Nook will come and go, but you'll likely want your e-book collection to stick around. Yet unlike music, commercial e-books from the leading online stores come with restrictions that complicate your ability to move your collection from one device to the next. It's as if old-fashioned books were designed to fit on one particular style of bookshelves. What happens when you remodel?
Much of this problem stems from the publishing industry, which has demanded that e-bookstores embed digital rights management software in most best sellers to keep them from being stolen and swapped, free, online. The music labels once asked the same from digital-music retailers, but eventually agreed to open up.
The e-bookstores share in the blame. Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc., Barnes & Noble Inc. and Sony Corp. all want you to buy their own gadgets and to continue buying e-books from their stores. For example, purchases from Apple's new iBooks store can be read only on Apple's own iPad (and soon the iPhone). Even though Apple said it would support an industry standard format called ePub for iBooks, in practice your iBooks purchases remain locked on Apple's virtual bookshelf. (So I hope iBooks customers like Apple's light-brown wood paneling.)
WSJ's Geoffrey Fowler finds it's not easy to read material purchased on one e-book on a rival's device. He tells Julia Angwin there's a solution, but there's also a catch.
Many of the biggest e-book providers fall short of putting readers fully in charge of their own digital-book collections, but they have begun to unveil their own solutions for moving your e-books around.
Amazon, which jump-started the shift to e-books with its Kindle, lets customers read its e-books through apps on at least six kinds of devices. Amazon custom-built the free apps for gadgets that include the iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, PC, Mac and (later this summer) devices running Google's Android software. If a device has an Internet connection, the apps automatically load Amazon e-book purchases from the company's website, saving you the fuss of keeping track of files and transferring them between gadgets with cables. In many ways, this is more convenient than the way we manage our digital-music collections by manually adding and deleting files from iPods through a computer.
Amazon's apps are slick and work on many of the most popular devices today, but Amazon buyers should know that they're likely stuck using the retailer's software forever. While Amazon says it plans to keep making apps for more devices, the list of potential devices for reading grows longer every day. Moreover, Amazon sells its e-books in a proprietary format, so there's no way to open those files on another device without an Amazon app or without resorting to cumbersome (and potentially illegal) third-party conversion software.
Barnes & Noble, too, adopted an Internet-connected app approach, providing a seamless way to shift its e-books between the Nook, PC, Mac, BlackBerry, iPhone, WindowsMobile for the HTC HD2 and soon iPad. Barnes & Noble has been integrating its e-bookstore into niche e-reading devices, like those by Plastic Logic, Irex and Pandigital. It also, uniquely, offers you the chance to "loan" some e-book purchases to a friend for 14 days. But its bookstore requires a somewhat annoying step: Each time you download a book to a new device, you must enter your name and the credit-card number that was used to buy the book in order to unfasten the digital lock on the book.
Beyond the apps, Sony, Barnes & Noble and Apple and a few smaller e-bookstores all promised they'd put their weight behind the industry standard format ePub, which is the e-book version of music's Mp3 and can be read by almost every reading device (except the Kindle). That sounds great in theory, but in practice, the ePub files either can't be transferred or doing so is cumbersome.
The problem is each company adds digital rights management software to an ePub book. A copy of "Moby Dick" I bought from iBooks delivered just blank pages when I opened it on the Nook. A Barnes & Noble e-book produced an error message in Sony's PC ePub reading software. Barnes & Noble says its books will be compatible with devices like the Sony Reader after a software upgrade.
There were two notable exceptions: Purchases from Sony's e-bookstore and a Borders Group-backed store called Kobo could open on the Nook and other ePub-reading devices if I used a free program from Adobe called Digital Editions to transfer it. That's a nice insurance policy but the process is far more complicated than it should be.
For now, the e-bookstore choice comes down to which compromises readers are willing to accept. Anybody who just wants a simple way to carry digital books around might be happy with an app-based approach. But readers intent on building an e-library may want to either invest in an ePub-based collection, or hold off until the industry figures out a better solution.
By GEOFFREY A. FOWLER
As books go digital, much of the focus has been on which gadgets offer the best approximation of old-fashioned paper and ink on a screen. But there's another choice that's just as important for readers to weigh before they make the leap to e-books: which e-bookstore to frequent.
Kindle device showing the Amazon e-book store
Reading devices like the iPad, Kindle and Nook will come and go, but you'll likely want your e-book collection to stick around. Yet unlike music, commercial e-books from the leading online stores come with restrictions that complicate your ability to move your collection from one device to the next. It's as if old-fashioned books were designed to fit on one particular style of bookshelves. What happens when you remodel?
Much of this problem stems from the publishing industry, which has demanded that e-bookstores embed digital rights management software in most best sellers to keep them from being stolen and swapped, free, online. The music labels once asked the same from digital-music retailers, but eventually agreed to open up.
The e-bookstores share in the blame. Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc., Barnes & Noble Inc. and Sony Corp. all want you to buy their own gadgets and to continue buying e-books from their stores. For example, purchases from Apple's new iBooks store can be read only on Apple's own iPad (and soon the iPhone). Even though Apple said it would support an industry standard format called ePub for iBooks, in practice your iBooks purchases remain locked on Apple's virtual bookshelf. (So I hope iBooks customers like Apple's light-brown wood paneling.)
WSJ's Geoffrey Fowler finds it's not easy to read material purchased on one e-book on a rival's device. He tells Julia Angwin there's a solution, but there's also a catch.
Many of the biggest e-book providers fall short of putting readers fully in charge of their own digital-book collections, but they have begun to unveil their own solutions for moving your e-books around.
Amazon, which jump-started the shift to e-books with its Kindle, lets customers read its e-books through apps on at least six kinds of devices. Amazon custom-built the free apps for gadgets that include the iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, PC, Mac and (later this summer) devices running Google's Android software. If a device has an Internet connection, the apps automatically load Amazon e-book purchases from the company's website, saving you the fuss of keeping track of files and transferring them between gadgets with cables. In many ways, this is more convenient than the way we manage our digital-music collections by manually adding and deleting files from iPods through a computer.
Amazon's apps are slick and work on many of the most popular devices today, but Amazon buyers should know that they're likely stuck using the retailer's software forever. While Amazon says it plans to keep making apps for more devices, the list of potential devices for reading grows longer every day. Moreover, Amazon sells its e-books in a proprietary format, so there's no way to open those files on another device without an Amazon app or without resorting to cumbersome (and potentially illegal) third-party conversion software.
Barnes & Noble, too, adopted an Internet-connected app approach, providing a seamless way to shift its e-books between the Nook, PC, Mac, BlackBerry, iPhone, WindowsMobile for the HTC HD2 and soon iPad. Barnes & Noble has been integrating its e-bookstore into niche e-reading devices, like those by Plastic Logic, Irex and Pandigital. It also, uniquely, offers you the chance to "loan" some e-book purchases to a friend for 14 days. But its bookstore requires a somewhat annoying step: Each time you download a book to a new device, you must enter your name and the credit-card number that was used to buy the book in order to unfasten the digital lock on the book.
Beyond the apps, Sony, Barnes & Noble and Apple and a few smaller e-bookstores all promised they'd put their weight behind the industry standard format ePub, which is the e-book version of music's Mp3 and can be read by almost every reading device (except the Kindle). That sounds great in theory, but in practice, the ePub files either can't be transferred or doing so is cumbersome.
The problem is each company adds digital rights management software to an ePub book. A copy of "Moby Dick" I bought from iBooks delivered just blank pages when I opened it on the Nook. A Barnes & Noble e-book produced an error message in Sony's PC ePub reading software. Barnes & Noble says its books will be compatible with devices like the Sony Reader after a software upgrade.
There were two notable exceptions: Purchases from Sony's e-bookstore and a Borders Group-backed store called Kobo could open on the Nook and other ePub-reading devices if I used a free program from Adobe called Digital Editions to transfer it. That's a nice insurance policy but the process is far more complicated than it should be.
For now, the e-bookstore choice comes down to which compromises readers are willing to accept. Anybody who just wants a simple way to carry digital books around might be happy with an app-based approach. But readers intent on building an e-library may want to either invest in an ePub-based collection, or hold off until the industry figures out a better solution.
Books Matter
Books in the home as important as parents’ education level.
Whether rich or poor, illiterate or college graduates, parents who have books in the home increase the level of education their children will attain, according to a 20-year study led by Associate Professor Mariah Evans.
Monday, May 24, 2010
By Claudene Wharton
Whether rich or poor, residents of the United States or China, illiterate or college graduates, parents who have books in the home increase the level of education their children will attain, according to a 20-year study led by Mariah Evans, University of Nevada, Reno associate professor of sociology and resource economics.
For years, educators have thought the strongest predictor of attaining high levels of education was having parents who were highly educated. But, strikingly, this massive study showed that the difference between being raised in a bookless home compared to being raised in a home with a 500-book library has as great an effect on the level of education a child will attain as having parents who are barely literate (3 years of education) compared to having parents who have a university education (15 or 16 years of education). Both factors, having a 500-book library or having university-educated parents, propel a child 3.2 years further in education, on average.
Being a sociologist, Evans was particularly interested to find that children of lesser-educated parents benefit the most from having books in the home. She has been looking for ways to help Nevada’s rural communities, in terms of economic development and education.
“What kinds of investments should we be making to help these kids get ahead?” she asked. “The results of this study indicate that getting some books into their homes is an inexpensive way that we can help these children succeed.”
Evans said, “Even a little bit goes a long way,” in terms of the number of books in a home. Having as few as 20 books in the home still has a significant impact on propelling a child to a higher level of education, and the more books you add, the greater the benefit.
“You get a lot of ‘bang for your book’,” she said. “It’s quite a good return-on-investment in a time of scarce resources.”
In some countries, such as China, having 500 or more books in the home propels children 6.6 years further in their education. In the United States, the effect is less, 2.4 years, than the 3.2-year average advantage experienced across all 27 countries in the study. But, Evans points out that 2.4 years is still a significant advantage in terms of educational attainment.
For example, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, Americans who have some college or an associate’s degree, but not a bachelor’s degree, earn an average of $7,213 more annually than those with just a high school education. Those who attain a bachelor’s degree earn $21,185 more each year, on average, than those with just high school diplomas.
The study by Evans and her colleagues at Nevada, UCLA and Australian National University is one of the largest and most comprehensive studies ever conducted on what influences the level of education a child will attain.
The researchers were struck by the strong effect having books in the home had on children’s educational attainment even above and beyond such factors as education level of the parents, the country’s GDP, the father’s occupation or the political system of the country.
Having books in the home is twice as important as the father’s education level, and more important than whether a child was reared in China or the United States. Surprisingly, the difference in educational attainment for children born in the United States and children born in China was just 2 years, less than two-thirds the effect that having 500 or more books in the home had on children (3.2 years).
The study, “Family scholarly culture and educational success: Books and schooling in 27 nations,” was published in the journal, Research in Social Stratification and Mobility (online at www.sciencedirect.com).
Whether rich or poor, illiterate or college graduates, parents who have books in the home increase the level of education their children will attain, according to a 20-year study led by Associate Professor Mariah Evans.
Monday, May 24, 2010
By Claudene Wharton
Whether rich or poor, residents of the United States or China, illiterate or college graduates, parents who have books in the home increase the level of education their children will attain, according to a 20-year study led by Mariah Evans, University of Nevada, Reno associate professor of sociology and resource economics.
For years, educators have thought the strongest predictor of attaining high levels of education was having parents who were highly educated. But, strikingly, this massive study showed that the difference between being raised in a bookless home compared to being raised in a home with a 500-book library has as great an effect on the level of education a child will attain as having parents who are barely literate (3 years of education) compared to having parents who have a university education (15 or 16 years of education). Both factors, having a 500-book library or having university-educated parents, propel a child 3.2 years further in education, on average.
Being a sociologist, Evans was particularly interested to find that children of lesser-educated parents benefit the most from having books in the home. She has been looking for ways to help Nevada’s rural communities, in terms of economic development and education.
“What kinds of investments should we be making to help these kids get ahead?” she asked. “The results of this study indicate that getting some books into their homes is an inexpensive way that we can help these children succeed.”
Evans said, “Even a little bit goes a long way,” in terms of the number of books in a home. Having as few as 20 books in the home still has a significant impact on propelling a child to a higher level of education, and the more books you add, the greater the benefit.
“You get a lot of ‘bang for your book’,” she said. “It’s quite a good return-on-investment in a time of scarce resources.”
In some countries, such as China, having 500 or more books in the home propels children 6.6 years further in their education. In the United States, the effect is less, 2.4 years, than the 3.2-year average advantage experienced across all 27 countries in the study. But, Evans points out that 2.4 years is still a significant advantage in terms of educational attainment.
For example, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, Americans who have some college or an associate’s degree, but not a bachelor’s degree, earn an average of $7,213 more annually than those with just a high school education. Those who attain a bachelor’s degree earn $21,185 more each year, on average, than those with just high school diplomas.
The study by Evans and her colleagues at Nevada, UCLA and Australian National University is one of the largest and most comprehensive studies ever conducted on what influences the level of education a child will attain.
The researchers were struck by the strong effect having books in the home had on children’s educational attainment even above and beyond such factors as education level of the parents, the country’s GDP, the father’s occupation or the political system of the country.
Having books in the home is twice as important as the father’s education level, and more important than whether a child was reared in China or the United States. Surprisingly, the difference in educational attainment for children born in the United States and children born in China was just 2 years, less than two-thirds the effect that having 500 or more books in the home had on children (3.2 years).
The study, “Family scholarly culture and educational success: Books and schooling in 27 nations,” was published in the journal, Research in Social Stratification and Mobility (online at www.sciencedirect.com).
Monday, May 24, 2010
Twain's Autobiography
After keeping us waiting for a century, Mark Twain will finally reveal all.
The great American writer left instructions not to publish his autobiography until 100 years after his death, which is now.
By Guy Adams in Los Angeles
Sunday, 23 May 2010
Exactly a century after rumours of his death turned out to be entirely accurate, one of Mark Twain's dying wishes is at last coming true: an extensive, outspoken and revelatory autobiography which he devoted the last decade of his life to writing is finally going to be published.
The creator of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and some of the most frequently misquoted catchphrases in the English language left behind 5,000 unedited pages of memoirs when he died in 1910, together with handwritten notes saying that he did not want them to hit bookshops for at least a century.
That milestone has now been reached, and in November the University of California, Berkeley, where the manuscript is in a vault, will release the first volume of Mark Twain's autobiography. The eventual trilogy will run to half a million words, and shed new light on the quintessentially American novelist.
Related articles
Nimrod's Shadow, By Chris Paling
More Arts Articles
Search the news archive for more stories
Scholars are divided as to why Twain wanted the first-hand account of his life kept under wraps for so long. Some believe it was because he wanted to talk freely about issues such as religion and politics. Others argue that the time lag prevented him from having to worry about offending friends.
One thing's for sure: by delaying publication, the author, who was fond of his celebrity status, has ensured that he'll be gossiped about during the 21st century. A section of the memoir will detail his little-known but scandalous relationship with Isabel Van Kleek Lyon, who became his secretary after the death of his wife Olivia in 1904. Twain was so close to Lyon that she once bought him an electric vibrating sex toy. But she was abruptly sacked in 1909, after the author claimed she had "hypnotised" him into giving her power of attorney over his estate.
Their ill-fated relationship will be recounted in full in a 400-page addendum, which Twain wrote during the last year of his life. It provides a remarkable account of how the dying novelist's final months were overshadowed by personal upheavals.
"Most people think Mark Twain was a sort of genteel Victorian. Well, in this document he calls her a slut and says she tried to seduce him. It's completely at odds with the impression most people have of him," says the historian Laura Trombley, who this year published a book about Lyon called Mark Twain's Other Woman.
"There is a perception that Twain spent his final years basking in the adoration of fans. The autobiography will perhaps show that it wasn't such a happy time. He spent six months of the last year of his life writing a manuscript full of vitriol, saying things that he'd never said about anyone in print before. It really is 400 pages of bile."
Twain, who was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, had made several attempts to start work on autobiography, beginning in 1870, but only really hit his stride with the work in 1906, when he appointed a stenographer to transcribe his dictated reminiscences.
Another potential motivation for leaving the book to be posthumously published concerns Twain's legacy as a Great American. Michael Shelden, who this year published Man in White, an account of Twain's final years, says that some of his privately held views could have hurt his public image.
"He had doubts about God, and in the autobiography, he questions the imperial mission of the US in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. He's also critical of [Theodore] Roosevelt, and takes the view that patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrel. Twain also disliked sending Christian missionaries to Africa. He said they had enough business to be getting on with at home: with lynching going on in the South, he thought they should try to convert the heathens down there."
In other sections of the autobiography, Twain makes cruel observations about his supposed friends, acquaintances and one of his landladies.
Parts of the book have already seen the light of day in other publications. Small excerpts were run by US magazines before Twain's death (since he needed the money). His estate has allowed parts of it to be adapted for publication in three previous books described as "autobiographies".
However, Robert Hirst, who is leading the team at Berkeley editing the complete text, says that more than half of it has still never appeared in print. Only academics, biographers, and members of the public prepared to travel to the university's Bancroft research library have previously been able to read it in full. "When people ask me 'did Mark Twain really mean it to take 100 years for this to come out', I say 'he was certainly a man who knew how to make people want to buy a book'," Dr Hirst said.
November's publication is authorised by his estate, which in the absence of surviving descendants (a daughter, Clara, died in 1962, and a granddaughter Nina committed suicide in 1966) funds museums and libraries that preserve his legacy.
"There are so many biographies of Twain, and many of them have used bits and pieces of the autobiography," Dr Hirst said. "But biographers pick and choose what bits to quote. By publishing Twain's book in full, we hope that people will be able to come to their own complete conclusions about what sort of a man he was."
The great American writer left instructions not to publish his autobiography until 100 years after his death, which is now.
By Guy Adams in Los Angeles
Sunday, 23 May 2010
Exactly a century after rumours of his death turned out to be entirely accurate, one of Mark Twain's dying wishes is at last coming true: an extensive, outspoken and revelatory autobiography which he devoted the last decade of his life to writing is finally going to be published.
The creator of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and some of the most frequently misquoted catchphrases in the English language left behind 5,000 unedited pages of memoirs when he died in 1910, together with handwritten notes saying that he did not want them to hit bookshops for at least a century.
That milestone has now been reached, and in November the University of California, Berkeley, where the manuscript is in a vault, will release the first volume of Mark Twain's autobiography. The eventual trilogy will run to half a million words, and shed new light on the quintessentially American novelist.
Related articles
Nimrod's Shadow, By Chris Paling
More Arts Articles
Search the news archive for more stories
Scholars are divided as to why Twain wanted the first-hand account of his life kept under wraps for so long. Some believe it was because he wanted to talk freely about issues such as religion and politics. Others argue that the time lag prevented him from having to worry about offending friends.
One thing's for sure: by delaying publication, the author, who was fond of his celebrity status, has ensured that he'll be gossiped about during the 21st century. A section of the memoir will detail his little-known but scandalous relationship with Isabel Van Kleek Lyon, who became his secretary after the death of his wife Olivia in 1904. Twain was so close to Lyon that she once bought him an electric vibrating sex toy. But she was abruptly sacked in 1909, after the author claimed she had "hypnotised" him into giving her power of attorney over his estate.
Their ill-fated relationship will be recounted in full in a 400-page addendum, which Twain wrote during the last year of his life. It provides a remarkable account of how the dying novelist's final months were overshadowed by personal upheavals.
"Most people think Mark Twain was a sort of genteel Victorian. Well, in this document he calls her a slut and says she tried to seduce him. It's completely at odds with the impression most people have of him," says the historian Laura Trombley, who this year published a book about Lyon called Mark Twain's Other Woman.
"There is a perception that Twain spent his final years basking in the adoration of fans. The autobiography will perhaps show that it wasn't such a happy time. He spent six months of the last year of his life writing a manuscript full of vitriol, saying things that he'd never said about anyone in print before. It really is 400 pages of bile."
Twain, who was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, had made several attempts to start work on autobiography, beginning in 1870, but only really hit his stride with the work in 1906, when he appointed a stenographer to transcribe his dictated reminiscences.
Another potential motivation for leaving the book to be posthumously published concerns Twain's legacy as a Great American. Michael Shelden, who this year published Man in White, an account of Twain's final years, says that some of his privately held views could have hurt his public image.
"He had doubts about God, and in the autobiography, he questions the imperial mission of the US in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. He's also critical of [Theodore] Roosevelt, and takes the view that patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrel. Twain also disliked sending Christian missionaries to Africa. He said they had enough business to be getting on with at home: with lynching going on in the South, he thought they should try to convert the heathens down there."
In other sections of the autobiography, Twain makes cruel observations about his supposed friends, acquaintances and one of his landladies.
Parts of the book have already seen the light of day in other publications. Small excerpts were run by US magazines before Twain's death (since he needed the money). His estate has allowed parts of it to be adapted for publication in three previous books described as "autobiographies".
However, Robert Hirst, who is leading the team at Berkeley editing the complete text, says that more than half of it has still never appeared in print. Only academics, biographers, and members of the public prepared to travel to the university's Bancroft research library have previously been able to read it in full. "When people ask me 'did Mark Twain really mean it to take 100 years for this to come out', I say 'he was certainly a man who knew how to make people want to buy a book'," Dr Hirst said.
November's publication is authorised by his estate, which in the absence of surviving descendants (a daughter, Clara, died in 1962, and a granddaughter Nina committed suicide in 1966) funds museums and libraries that preserve his legacy.
"There are so many biographies of Twain, and many of them have used bits and pieces of the autobiography," Dr Hirst said. "But biographers pick and choose what bits to quote. By publishing Twain's book in full, we hope that people will be able to come to their own complete conclusions about what sort of a man he was."
Friday, May 21, 2010
The War Is Making You Poor Act
BY Alan Grayson
21 May 2010
Next week, there is going to be a "debate" in Congress on yet another war funding bill. The bill is supposed to pass without debate, so no one will notice.
What George Orwell wrote about in "1984" has come true. What Eisenhower warned us about concerning the "military-industrial complex" has come true. War is a permanent feature of our societal landscape, so much so that no one notices it anymore.
But we’re going to change this. Today, we’re introducing a bill called ‘The War Is Making You Poor Act’. The purpose of this bill is to connect the dots, and to show people in a real and concrete way the cost of these endless wars.
Next year’s budget allocates $159,000,000,000 to perpetuate the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. That’s enough money to eliminate federal income taxes for the first $35,000 of every American’s income. Beyond that, leaves over $15 billion to cut the deficit.
And that’s what this bill does. It eliminates separate funding for the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, and eliminates federal income taxes for everyone’s first $35,000 of income ($70,000 for couples). Plus it pays down the national debt.
The costs of the war have been rendered invisible. There's no draft. Instead, we take the most vulnerable elements of our population, and give them a choice between unemployment and missile fodder. Government deficits conceal the need to pay in cash for the war.
We put the cost of both guns and butter on our Chinese credit card. In fact, we don't even put these wars on budget; they are still passed using 'emergency supplemental'. A nine-year ‘emergency’.
Let's show Congress the cost of these wars is too much for us.
Tell Congress that you like 'The War Is Making You Poor Act'. No, tell Congress you love it. Act now.
http://www.TheWarIsMakingYouPoor.com
All we are saying is "give peace a chance." We will end these wars.
Together.
21 May 2010
Next week, there is going to be a "debate" in Congress on yet another war funding bill. The bill is supposed to pass without debate, so no one will notice.
What George Orwell wrote about in "1984" has come true. What Eisenhower warned us about concerning the "military-industrial complex" has come true. War is a permanent feature of our societal landscape, so much so that no one notices it anymore.
But we’re going to change this. Today, we’re introducing a bill called ‘The War Is Making You Poor Act’. The purpose of this bill is to connect the dots, and to show people in a real and concrete way the cost of these endless wars.
Next year’s budget allocates $159,000,000,000 to perpetuate the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. That’s enough money to eliminate federal income taxes for the first $35,000 of every American’s income. Beyond that, leaves over $15 billion to cut the deficit.
And that’s what this bill does. It eliminates separate funding for the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, and eliminates federal income taxes for everyone’s first $35,000 of income ($70,000 for couples). Plus it pays down the national debt.
The costs of the war have been rendered invisible. There's no draft. Instead, we take the most vulnerable elements of our population, and give them a choice between unemployment and missile fodder. Government deficits conceal the need to pay in cash for the war.
We put the cost of both guns and butter on our Chinese credit card. In fact, we don't even put these wars on budget; they are still passed using 'emergency supplemental'. A nine-year ‘emergency’.
Let's show Congress the cost of these wars is too much for us.
Tell Congress that you like 'The War Is Making You Poor Act'. No, tell Congress you love it. Act now.
http://www.TheWarIsMakingYouPoor.com
All we are saying is "give peace a chance." We will end these wars.
Together.
Recent Historical Truth
by Paul Krugman
May 21, 2010, 4:23 pm
Parties Change
You know, if Rand Paul loses his Senate race, in a way I’ll be sorry. He’s been so much fun in such a short period of time!
Anyway, given the flap over his assertion that he wouldn’t support the Civil Rights Act of 1964, some Republicans are making the argument that they were the party of civil rights, while Democrats were the enemies. And there’s some truth to that: in the 1950s and early 1960s, the opponents of civil right were largely Southern Democrats.
But what happened to those Southern Democrats? They became Republicans. And I’m not just speaking metaphorically: many Republican members of Congress during the era of GOP dominance were, literally, former Democrats who switched parties.
The point is that today’s Democratic party is, effectively, the party of Lyndon Johnson, whose decision to push forward on civil rights cost the party the South, as he knew it would. Meanwhile, today’s Republican party is the party of Richard Nixon, who cynically exploited the backlash against civil rights to build a new majority.
So yes, let’s honor the great Republicans of yore; I’m a Lincoln man, myself. But let me tell you, George W. Bush was no Abraham Lincoln.
May 21, 2010, 4:23 pm
Parties Change
You know, if Rand Paul loses his Senate race, in a way I’ll be sorry. He’s been so much fun in such a short period of time!
Anyway, given the flap over his assertion that he wouldn’t support the Civil Rights Act of 1964, some Republicans are making the argument that they were the party of civil rights, while Democrats were the enemies. And there’s some truth to that: in the 1950s and early 1960s, the opponents of civil right were largely Southern Democrats.
But what happened to those Southern Democrats? They became Republicans. And I’m not just speaking metaphorically: many Republican members of Congress during the era of GOP dominance were, literally, former Democrats who switched parties.
The point is that today’s Democratic party is, effectively, the party of Lyndon Johnson, whose decision to push forward on civil rights cost the party the South, as he knew it would. Meanwhile, today’s Republican party is the party of Richard Nixon, who cynically exploited the backlash against civil rights to build a new majority.
So yes, let’s honor the great Republicans of yore; I’m a Lincoln man, myself. But let me tell you, George W. Bush was no Abraham Lincoln.
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