Should the federal government help Oklahoma after this weeks tornadoes? Normally I would say absolutely yes. However, both of Oklahoma’s Senators, Jim Inhofe and Tom Coburn have repeatedly voted against funding FEMA and voted against relief for other areas of the country. The both voted no for Hurricane Sandy relief. So now comes Oklahoma with their hat in their hand wanting money from the government after they said no when the rest of the country needed help. Shame on you! Shame on you!

So – should we help them? Yes – we are America and we take care of each other in times of disaster. Certainly the little children aren’t responsible for how the senators vote. And I say we should help even though I know that if we have a big earthquake that Oklahoma is going to vote no to help us.

But if I were a senator I would tell Coburn and Inhofe that I’m not going to support disaster relief till the begged for forgiveness on the floor of the Senate. And I would make them pledge to never vote against disaster relief again. There just has to be a price to pay for that level of hypocrisy.

As global capital becomes ever more powerful, giant corporations are holding governments and citizens up for ransom — eliciting subsidies and tax breaks from countries concerned about their nation’s “competitiveness” — while sheltering their profits in the lowest-tax jurisdictions they can find. Major advanced countries — and their citizens — need a comprehensive tax agreement that won’t allow global corporations to get away with this.

Google, Amazon, Starbucks, every other major corporation, and every big Wall Street bank, are sheltering as much of their U.S. profits abroad as they can, while telling Washington that lower corporate taxes are necessary in order to keep the U.S. “competitive.”

Baloney. The fact is, global corporations have no allegiance to any country; their only objective is to make as much money as possible — and play off one country against another to keep their taxes down and subsidies up, thereby shifting more of the tax burden to ordinary people whose wages are already shrinking because companies are playing workers off against each other.

Is this the start of this generation’s Woodward and Bernstein-type
reporting on White House misconduct? Or is the White House simply trying to keep us safe from evildoers who happen to be in the media?

When the Justice Department began investigating possible leaks of classified information about North Korea in 2009, investigators did more than obtain telephone records of a working journalist suspected of receiving the secret material.

They used security badge access records to track the reporter’s comings and goings from the State Department, according to a newly obtained court affidavit. They traced the timing of his calls with a State Department security adviser suspected of sharing the classified report. They obtained a search warrant for the reporter’s personal e-mails.

Isn’t it obvious what position each supports?

Men’s upper-body strength predicts their political opinions on economic redistribution, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
[...]
In line with their hypotheses, the data revealed that wealthy men with high upper-body strength were less likely to support redistribution, while less wealthy men of the same strength were more likely to support it.