AUSTERITY 101: The Three Reasons Republican Deficit Hawks Are Wrong
Friday, 16 October 2015 08:51
Reich writes: "Deficit and debt numbers are meaningless on their own. They have to be viewed as a percent of the national economy. That ratio is critical. As long as the yearly deficit continues to drop as a percent of the national economy, as it's been doing for several years now, we can more easily pay what we owe."
Robert Reich. (photo: Richard Morgenstein)
AUSTERITY 101: The Three Reasons Republican Deficit Hawks Are Wrong
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
16 October 15
ongress is heading into another big brawl over the federal budget deficit, the national debt, and the debt ceiling.
Republicans are already talking about holding Social Security and Medicare “hostage” during negotiations—hell-bent on getting cuts in exchange for a debt limit hike.
Days ago, U.S. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew asked whether our nation would “muster the political will to avoid the self-inflicted wounds that come from a political stalemate.”
It’s a fair question. And there’s only one economically sound answer: Congress must raise the debt ceiling, end the sequester, put more people to work, and increase our investment in education and infrastructure.
Here are the three reasons why Republican deficit hawks are wrong. (Please watch and share our attached video.)
FIRST: Deficit and debt numbers are meaningless on their own. They have to be viewed as a percent of the national economy.
That ratio is critical. As long as the yearly deficit continues to drop as a percent of the national economy, as it’s been doing for several years now, we can more easily pay what we owe.
SECOND: America needs to run larger deficits when lots of people are unemployed or underemployed – as they still are today, when millions remain too discouraged to look for jobs and millions more are in part-time jobs and need full-time work.
As we’ve known for years – in every economic downturn and in every struggling recovery – more government spending helps create jobs – teachers, fire fighters, police officers, social workers, people to rebuild roads and bridges and parks. And the people in these jobs create far more jobs when they spend their paychecks.
This kind of spending thereby grows the economy – thereby increasing tax revenues and allowing the deficit to shrink in proportion.
Doing the opposite – cutting back spending when a lot of people are still out of work – as Congress has done with the sequester, as much of Europe has done – causes economies to slow or even shrink, which makes the deficit larger in proportion.
This is why austerity economics is a recipe for disaster, as it’s been in Greece. Creditors and institutions worried about Greece’s debt forced it to cut spending, the spending cuts led to a huge economic recession, which reduced tax revenues, and made the debt crisis there worse.
THIRD AND FINALLY: Deficit spending on investments like education and infrastructure is different than other forms of spending, because this spending builds productivity and future economic growth.
It’s like a family borrowing money to send a kid to college or start a business. If the likely return on the investment exceeds the borrowing costs, it should be done.
Keep these three principles in mind and you won’t be fooled by scare tactics of the deficit hawks.
And you’ll understand why we have to raise the debt ceiling, end the sequester, put more people to work, and increase rather than decrease spending on vital public investments like education and infrastructure.
The Growing Solidarity Between #BlackLivesMatter and Palestinian Activists
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=34297"><span class="small">Ishaan Tharoor, The Washington Post</span></a>
Friday, 16 October 2015 08:38
Tharoor writes: "In January, a group of #BlackLivesMatter activists went on a mission to the Palestinian territories, and emerged more convinced of the shared challenges of their struggles - which, in both instances, hinge on questions of civil rights."
Amid heightening tensions in Israel and Palestine, the U.S.-based Black-Palestinian Solidarity campaign released a video on October 14 entitled 'When I see them, I see us.' (photo: Black-Palestinian Solidarity)
The Growing Solidarity Between #BlackLivesMatter and Palestinian Activists
By Ishaan Tharoor, The Washington Post
16 October 15
he video above, published on YouTube on Wednesday, features dozens of #BlackLivesMatter and Palestinian activists delivering a joint message. "When I see them, I see us," the video's narrators intone.
These include prominent African American celebrities and thinkers, such as Danny Glover, Lauryn Hill, Alice Walker, Angela Davis and Cornel West. They are accompanied by well-known Palestinian activists and writers. Over the course of a couple of minutes, they unite their perceived struggles through photos, slogans and a shared story of state oppression.
They talk of black youths killed by police and Palestinian children bombed by Israeli warplanes.
"When I see them, I see us," the narrative goes. "Harassed, beaten, tortured, dehumanized, stopped and frisked, searched at checkpoints."
It may seem a bit of a stretch to equate the grievances of Palestinians with questions of institutionalized racism in the United States. After all, the legacy of African slavery and systemic racism in the United States seems a world away from the ongoing Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.
But Noura Erakat, an assistant professor at George Mason University and one of the organizers of the video project, argues that while these experiences are separated by distance and history, there are important underlying themes that bring them together.
"Here were two groups of people dealing with completely different historical trajectories, but both which resulted in a process of dehumanization that criminalized them and that subject their bodies as expendable," Erakat told Al Jazeera America. "Not only were their lives more vulnerable and disposable, but that even in their death, they were blamed for their own death."
Activists on either side of the world began connecting. As the Ferguson protests intensified, Palestinians reached out to those on the streets of the troubled St. Louis suburb. Some even offered advice over how to deal with tear gas. (In both instances, the canisters fired by Israeli and American police were U.S.-made.) In April, Ethiopian Israelis protested police brutality in Jerusalem by reportedly chanting "Baltimore is here!"
In January, a group of #BlackLivesMatter activists went on a mission to the Palestinian territories, and emerged more convinced of the shared challenges of their struggles — which, in both instances, hinge on questions of civil rights. As some scholars have pointed out, there's a long tradition among the African American left in the United States of seeing the Palestinian cause as part of the larger global narrative of decolonization in the 20th century.
How that translates to action now is another matter. Some of these groups have championed calls for BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) of Israel, which they see in the same vein as 1980s anti-apartheid activism. While gaining traction in parts of Europe, BDS remains a largely fringe movement in the United States.
Meanwhile, the day-to-day status quo in the Middle East remains particularly grim.
The past week has seen an alarming escalation of violence between Israelis and Palestinians, with a spate of deadly Palestinian knife attacks on Israelis prompting Israel to deploy thousands of soldiers in major cities and close off Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has blamed the violence on Arab extremism. Other Israeli security officials, though, have pointed to the realities of the political present — not as a justification for violence, but as an insight into its source.
A separate, viable Palestinian state is nowhere in sight, and a generation of Palestinian youth, frustrated by a second-class life under occupation as well as the failings of their own feckless leadership, rage against the legacy of their dispossession. The continued expansion of Israel settlements, deemed illegal by much of the international community, helps to fan the flames.
"Jewish violence toward Arabs is reaching levels we don't recall seeing in the past," an anonymous Israeli military official told Israeli journalist Nahum Barnea, in reference to settler attacks. "Israelis have ripped out hundreds of olive trees belonging to Arabs, ruined houses, smashed cars. The violence motivates counter-violence."
Both the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority, writes Barnea, "have offered the masses of youths who have grown up in Gaza and the West Bank only one option: Despair. Things have reached an apex in recent years: No expectations, no future, no hope."
That sentiment is perhaps familiar to others many thousands of miles away.
Pundits Thought Clinton Beat Sanders - But Did Viewers?
Thursday, 15 October 2015 14:13
Olsen writes: "What the Times and these pundits failed to mention is the fact that every online poll we could find asking web visitors who won the debate cast Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders as the winner-and not just by a small margins, but by rather enormous ones."
Sen. Bernie Sanders with former secretary of state Hillary Clinton at the Democratic debate. (photo: CNN)
Pundits Thought Clinton Beat Sanders - But Did Viewers?
By Gunar Olsen, FAIR
15 October 15
New York Times article (10/14/15) by Alan Rappeport about who won last night’s Democratic presidential debate reported today that “Hillary Rodham Clinton was the clear victor, according to the opinion shapers in the political world (even conservative commentators).”
The Times quoted National Journal columnist Ron Fournier (“Hillary Clinton won,” 10/13/15), Slate writer Fred Kaplan (“She crushed it,” 10/14/15), New Yorker staffer Ryan Lizza (“Hillary Clinton won because all of her opponents are terrible,” Twitter, 10/13/15), Red State blogger Leon Wolf (“Hillary was (astonishingly) much more likable and personable than everyone’s favorite crazy socialist uncle,” 10/13/15), pollster John Zogby (“Mrs. Clinton was just commanding tonight,” Forbes, 10/13/15) and conservative radio host Erick Erickson (“I’m still amazed the other four candidates made Hillary Clinton come off as the likable, reasonable, responsible Democrat,” Twitter, 10/13/15). If these so-called “opinion shapers in the political world” declare Hillary the winner, then Hillary must be the winner, according to the Times.
What the Times and these pundits failed to mention is the fact that every online poll we could find asking web visitors who won the debate cast Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders as the winner—and not just by a small margins, but by rather enormous ones.
Online data covering the Democratic Debate in October 2015. (photo: fair.org)
Seventy-one percent of participants in Slate’s online poll, for example, favored Sanders, while only 16 percent preferred Clinton. Time’s web poll of nearly 235,000 had Sanders at 56 percent and Clinton at 11 percent (Webb: 31 percent).
At Daily Kos, which caters to hardcore partisan Dems, 56 percent of nearly 22,000 participants said that Sanders won, vs. 38 percent for Clinton. MSNBC’s poll of 18,000 had Sanders at 69 percent and Clinton at 12 percent.
Sanders also showed appeal among the visitors to right-leaning sites: The conservative Drudge Reportfound that of more than 315,000 people, Sanders polled at 54 percent and Clinton at 9 percent (former Sen. Jim Webb got 25 percent). A poll by KSWB-TV, Fox’s San Diego affiliate, found that 78 percent of 45,000 respondents thought that Sanders won, as opposed to 15 percent who favored Clinton. The Street, a financial news website, found that 80 percent of 13,000 respondents dubbed Sanders the winner, while only 15 percent thought Clinton won.
Although these polls only represent the views of these sites’ visitors who volunteered to participate, the consistently high share saying that Sanders prevailed in the debate, across a range of websites with wildly varying audiences, is striking.
Adam Johnson, associate editor at AlterNet and frequent FAIR.org contributor, pointed out (AlterNet, 10/14/15) that not only had Sanders won every online poll “by at least an 18-point margin,” he also was picked as the winner by various media-convened focus groups: “Sanders won the CNN focus group, the Fusion focus group and the Fox News focus group; in the latter, he even converted several Hillary supporters.”
Online data covering the Democratic Debate in October 2015. (photo: fair.org)
Another, more rigorous gauge of Sanders’ debate performance came from an analysis of Google searches. According to Google, Sanders was the most-searched candidate for almost the entire debate. After the debate was over, he was the most-searched candidate in all 50 states.
There is one outlier in the data about the Democratic debate, but it’s one that should carry some weight, given that it’s the only poll so far ask a random sample of respondents about debate performance. This poll, conducted via automated telephone calls by research firm Gravis Marketing (One America Network, 10/14/15), found that 62 percent thought Clinton won, while 30 percent gave it to Sanders.
The poll, however, is described as a “random survey of 760 registered Democratic voters across the US”—not as a survey of people who actually watched the debate. Given that there are some 43 million registered Democrats in the country and 15 million people who watched the debate, not all of whom are Democrats, it’s highly likely that a large majority of the poll’s respondents got their impressions of who won the debate secondhand.
If they relied on corporate media to tell them about the debate, as no doubt many of them did, it’s no wonder that most of them thought Clinton won.
FOCUS | The Murder of JFK: Another Puzzle Piece Solved
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=26125"><span class="small">Bill Simpich, Reader Supported News</span></a>
Thursday, 15 October 2015 12:22
Simpich writes: "What the mainstream media has not yet realized is that the JFK case is being solved, thanks largely to the brute force of the power of the Internet. As in most suppressed stories, the revelations come one piece at a time."
In this Nov. 23, 1963 file photo, Lee Harvey Oswald is led down a corridor of the Dallas police station for another round of questioning in connection with the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy. Oswald, who denied any involvement in the shooting, was formally charged with murder. (photo: AP)
The Murder of JFK: Another Puzzle Piece Solved
By Bill Simpich, Reader Supported News
15 October 15
Left screen: The wallet found at the murder scene of officer J. D. Tippit.
Right screen: The wallet found at the time of Oswald's arrest.
he mainstream media in America continually fails to understand that Americans are not interested in having a secret government.
Tufts professor Michael Glennon released a book last year on the similarity in security policies of Bush and Obama entitled National Security and the Rise of Double Government. Glennon explains how the roles of the presidency, the Congress, and the courts are “largely illusory” compared to the powers of those safely situated in the back room.
Esquire writer Charles Pierce wrote a story picked up by RSN in the last week discussing how the CIA has been forced to admit, yet again, another clue to how the agency covered up the story of JFK’s murder.
What the mainstream media has not yet realized is that the JFK case is being solved, thanks largely to the brute force of the power of the Internet. As in most suppressed stories, the revelations come one piece at a time. The following story is illustrative of how social media is able to force long-hidden stories to break open.
Just two years ago, the story of the murder of Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit on November 22, 1963, took a most unexpected twist.
A local TV newscast showed footage taken by the local ABC affiliate WFAA on that date more than 50 years ago. In the film, Dallas police captain Pinky Westbrook can be seen handling a wallet at the scene of Tippit’s murder. It appears to be the wallet of the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald.
What makes the footage remarkable is that the official story was that the wallet was not found until about an hour later, when Dallas police detective Paul Bentley removed it from Oswald’s back pocket shortly after taking him into custody at the Texas Theatre, several blocks away from where Tippit was gunned down.
FBI agent Bob Barrett, who was at the scene of Tippit’s murder and is still alive in Pell City, Alabama, now calls Paul Bentley’s story “hogwash.”
The wallet is important because its contents connected Oswald to the guns used in the murder of President Kennedy and Officer Tippit.
The WFAA story
The WFAA story last fall said that the wallet mystery had been “settled.” Reporter Jason Whitley interviewed retired FBI analyst Farris Rookstool, who conducted an investigation of the two wallet stories. Rookstool concluded that the wallet seen in the 1963 footage is an exact match with the Oswald wallet now at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland.
Rookstool argues that the circular snaps, metal strips, and a zipper over the cash compartment are identical in both instances.
Rookstool’s conclusion is that the video footage of the wallet proves that Oswald killed Officer Tippit about 49 minutes after President Kennedy was shot and killed in downtown Dallas a mile and half away.
The power of Internet research suggests another possibility, spelled out in my recent book State Secret: The wallet was planted at the Tippit murder scene. New evidence continues to come in since its release.
Who found the wallet? And when did they find it?
Here’s the story insofar as it is known.
The first officer on the Tippit murder scene was Dallas Police Sergeant Kenneth H. Croy, who arrived as the ambulance was picking up Tippit’s body. Croy told an interviewer that an unknown man handed him Oswald’s wallet right after his arrival. The witnesses who preceded Croy at the crime scene were adamant that no one dropped a wallet anywhere in the vicinity.
The video footage from WFAA shows a wallet wound up in the hands of Captain Pinky Westbrook. The WFAA newscast also shows FBI agent Bob Barrett recounting how Westbrook turned to him at the scene while holding the wallet and asked, “You ever heard of a Lee Harvey Oswald?” I said, “No, I never have.” He said “How about an Alek Hidell?” I said, “No. I never have heard of him either,” Barrett explained.
“Why would they be asking me questions about Oswald and Hidell if it wasn’t in that wallet?”
Why does the wallet matter?
The wallet contained what is the only known instance of Oswald carrying identification under the alias of “Alek Hidell.” The two sets of identification cards found in the wallet are key evidence in the JFK case.
Kennedy was killed on Friday, November 22. By the next day, it was worldwide news that the rifle that was used in the shooting of President Kennedy was purchased by mail order with a postal money order made out by “A. Hidell” and listing Oswald’s P.O. box as the place for pick-up.
Oswald and “Hidell” were now tied by the rifle and the wallet to JFK’s murder, less than two hours after the event.
Again, why did the Dallas captain ask the FBI agent about Oswald and Hidell if their IDs weren't in the wallet?
In custody, Oswald denied that he was the owner of the rifle found at the Texas School Book Depository where he worked and where several people saw one and possibly two gunmen. The gun had been ordered in the name of “Hidell.”
For the FBI man, Barrett said, the wallet made the case against Oswald a “slam dunk.”
Yet the Dallas authorities never wrote a report about any wallet found at the Tippit murder scene. Perhaps that was oversight. Perhaps not.
FBI Man: Dallas cop lied
After 50 years, an FBI agent on the scene has charged that the Dallas officer who brought Oswald to the police station is lying about finding the wallet in Oswald’s possession.
Barrett attacked Bentley’s claim that he found Oswald’s wallet for the first time in the 2013 WFAA news story. “They said they took the wallet out of his pocket in the car? That’s so much hogwash. That wallet was in (Captain) Westbrook’s hand.”
Why did Barrett wait 50 years to accuse Bentley of lying and obstruction of justice?
It was not a fight he cared to pick. Bentley had been Dallas’s chief polygraph examiner during 1963. It would have been professionally hazardous for Barrett to challenge Bentley before his death in 2008.
So what does the story of the wallet tell us?
It was not public knowledge that Oswald’s wallet was found at the Tippit murder scene until 1996. FBI agent Jim Hosty, who had responsibility for watching Oswald, wrote that a wallet containing identification for both Oswald and “Alek Hidell” was found near a pool of blood. Again, no witness ever saw the wallet on the ground. A second witness, patrolman Leonard Jez, told a conference in 1999 that the wallet was identified at the murder scene as belonging to Oswald.
Rookstool told WFAA that the testimony of Barrett and Croy, Tippit’s billfold, and the WFAA film prove that Oswald’s wallet was at the scene of the policeman’s murder.
Rookstool’s finding is contested by researcher Dale Myers. On his website, Myers argues that the wallet seen on the videotape is thinner and has a straight flap rather than the rounded flap of the arrest wallet. Whether Myers’s contention is correct or not, Myers has also spent years publicizing Barrett’s story that the wallet at the murder scene contained identification for both Lee Harvey Oswald and Alek Hidell.
Seen at the crime: Dallas police officers handling Lee Oswald’s wallet at the scene of the murder of Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit.
The wallet supposedly taken from Oswald when he was arrested.
The best evidence indicates that an unknown person brought something at least resembling Lee Harvey Oswald’s wallet to the scene of Tippit’s murder.
The Tippit murder was a staged scene, designed to inflame the Dallas cops to do everything they could to bring down Oswald.
Solving puzzles like these, one piece at a time, is how determined people take down a secret government.
MORE: See a video clip on Joseph McBride’s book Into the Nightmare, and my own research in Chapters 6-7 of State Secret. This ongoing story leads to some surprising places.
Bill Simpich is a civil rights attorney and the author of State Secret. His work is cited in Salon editor David Talbot's new book, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government, coming out on Tuesday, October 13. Targeting foreign leaders for assassination and overthrowing nationalist governments not in line with his political aims, Dulles employed those same tactics to further his goals at home, Talbot charges, offering shocking new evidence in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
FOCUS: How the Democratic Debate Changed the 2016 Presidential Race
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6853"><span class="small">Frank Rich, New York Magazine</span></a>
Thursday, 15 October 2015 10:58
Rich writes: "Clinton's constant assertion that she would be the first woman president may seem hokey, but it seems less so in the face of the Republican competition, where the No. 1 candidate likens women to pigs and bimbos and the lately favored 'moderate' candidate Marco Rubio said on-camera in a GOP debate that women who are victims of rape or incest must be denied abortions."
Democratic debate. (photo: CNN)
How the Democratic Debate Changed the 2016 Presidential Race
By Frank Rich, New York Magazine
15 October 15
Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. This week: the Democratic presidential primary debate, Paul Ryan and the quest for a new Speaker of the House, and a new era for Playboy.
id the first Democratic debate change anything about the 2016 presidential race?
A lot. The morning-after consensus (left, right, and center) is correct: Hillary Clinton not only romped over the competition — such as it was — but could well have shut down the prospect of a Biden run. But if the Clinton revival sustains itself, the turning point will not have been last night’s debate but Kevin McCarthy’s September 29 public admission on Fox News that the House Benghazi committee’s main motivation was to take her out rather than investigate the deaths of four Americans taken out by terrorists. That bit of truth-telling ended Benghazi as an issue (to the extent it had ever been one beyond the GOP base) and may have kneecapped the email controversy too. It’s worth noting that the two back-to-back moments when last night’s debate first came alive were both on this subject: First, Bernie Sanders’s declaration that the “American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails,” and, second, Clinton’s fast “No” when invited to respond to Lincoln Chaffee’s questioning of her “ethical standards.”
Sanders’s usefulness to Clinton was omnipresent last night. He has pushed her to the left on a number of his populist economic issues, and it’s clear she has worked hard to find a way to make those positions sound less “socialist” (not to mention less New Yawk) than he can. (She has not found a way to explain her flip-flop on the Pacific trade agreement, however.) Sanders also revealed that he has failed to find a way to dig himself out of his occasional heterodoxy on gun control, giving Clinton a free path to milk the one issue on which she is to his left.
What the others were doing onstage wasn’t clear. None of them made the case that there should be more debates than already scheduled. As long as O’Malley, Chaffee, and Webb hang in, the ratings are likely to go down. Anderson Cooper was a well-prepared, ungimmicky moderator, but it took nearly an hour before any of the candidates deviated from scripted talking points. CNN also tried the audience’s patience by hyping the debate incessantly over the preceding day or so with an onscreen countdown clock that turned out to be a fraud: The show actually started some 20 minutes after the clock hit the zero hour.
The debate’s immediate effect may be limited to calming Democratic jitteriness about Clinton and buzz about Biden. But while there’s still plenty that can go wrong for Clinton — the quid pro quo agenda of sleazy donors to the family foundation, not the emails, has always struck me as the potential Pandora’s box of scandals — she comes out of this in an undeniably enhanced position. Her constant assertion that she would be the first woman president may seem hokey, but it seems less so in the face of the Republican competition, where the No. 1 candidate likens women to pigs and bimbos and the lately favored “moderate” candidate Marco Rubio said on-camera in a GOP debate that women who are victims of rape or incest must be denied abortions.
Meanwhile, Clinton’s victory over the Benghazi inquisitors remains, as the man would say, “yuge.” If the first act of that supposed scandal’s unraveling was McCarthy’s suicidal admission, and the second act was last night’s debate, act three should arrive next week, when Hillary testifies before the House committee and likely crushes it much as she did the men coming after her in Vegas.
Paul Ryan's hesitation to answer the GOP's call to be its next Speaker of the House is fueled, some observers think, by his fear that involvement in a partisan mess is an impediment to his longer career. Is a case to be made that the second most powerful position in government is beneath him?
Ryan seems to think everything is beneath him except his lofty engagement in policy as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee — policy being defined as cutting taxes for the GOP donor class and cutting entitlements like social security and Medicare for everyone else. The real question, and clearly the one he is wrestling with, is whether he can come out of the speakership unsoiled should he deign to answer the party Establishment’s call and run to the rescue of a caucus in utter chaos.
The answer is no. No matter who becomes speaker, the math will remain the same: There are some 40 radicals in the House who would rather shut down Washington than govern, and there is a fierce presidential candidate in the Senate, Ted Cruz, aiding and abetting them. There is also a strong auxiliary in the right’s media complex — Drudge, Mark Levin, Erick Erickson, Laura Ingraham, et al — that is on the radicals’ side and is already attacking Ryan. Ryan is not used to being attacked by his own cohort — he is usually treated worshipfully — and it’s hard to imagine how he would weather it. Indeed, Ryan has everything to lose and nothing to gain should he take the plunge. He’ll own his party’s severe dysfunction. About the best success you can hope for as a GOP Speaker in this era is to leave the job without being caught in a sex scandal.
Speaking of sex: Playboy magazine has announced that, beginning in March, it will no longer feature nude women. Will people now read the magazine only, as they say, for the articles?
As Hillary Clinton exemplifies, America has come a long way in the more than 60 years since Hugh Hefner invented both Playboy and a certain aspirational masculine lifestyle that has now devolved into Donald Trump. What is Trump Tower, after all, if not the Playboy mansion executed with less taste? And what is Playboyas a business today if not a Trump-like operation licensing its brand and logo to any takers for almost any purpose around the globe?
I haven’t seen Playboy in decades. I don’t know what to make of the Times’report that its website both reduced its median age (from 47 to just over 30) and gained an exponential amount of traffic (rising from 4 million unique users per month to 16 million) when it dropped nudity last year. This is a counterintuitive sociological development that demands deeper investigation. But that said, I have nostalgia for the Playboy of my pubescent years. I still remember which friends’ fathers and older brothers had stashes buried in their drawers and how many Hardy Boys–like adventures we all had in uncovering those treasures; I still remember the bad cartoons; I still remember Barbi Benton; and I still remember the late 1960s television iteration, Playboy After Dark. But wait — wasn’t Bill Cosby a regular?
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ongress is heading into another big brawl over the federal budget deficit, the national debt, and the debt ceiling.
he video above, 
New York Times article (
id the first Democratic debate change anything about the 2016 presidential race?
