Stephen Herrington

The attack on Elizabeth Warren's sometime allusions to American Indian heritage as being untrue is very likely unsupportable. The thing is, a similar accusation would be baseless for unknowable numbers of American Indian descendants. The records are known to be inaccurate and the Indian Nations take that into...

Mitt Romney is currently running on the notion that he would have done and can now do better than Obama in fixing the economy. He assumes that we assume that a businessmen can do better because they understand economics better than the rest of us. George W. Bush was our...

The knees of the GOP have wobbled a little in the last weeks. The polls have been running against them for a year and they seem to have started worrying about it. The U.S. House of Representatives relented on payroll tax relief. Virginia blinked, a little, on the state-mandated rape...

Ever since passage of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, speculators have been empowered to own the commodities markets through manipulation. It's an enormously complex and agonizingly obscure field of investment, fraught with anti-manipulation law and oversight dating back to regulations imposed during the Great Depression. The CFMA relieved...

Trayvon's life is over. There is no going back to when he is still alive. There is no longer sound of his playing and joking. There is no coping with his troubles nor celebrating his successes. There is no hugging him under your shoulder and no fixing his dinner. You...

To listen to our Supreme Court justices Tuesday, you'd think they were shopping for produce rather than reviewing the law. It seemed so because the arguments devolved to how is broccoli different from health care. Verrilli seemed unable to explain the difference in a meaningful way.

Conservatives and their pet...

Paul Ryan, (R) Wisconsin, just re-released his Roadmap for America's Future. To him it may still seem to be a roadmap, but it's actually more like some defective GPS system that's insisting you to drive off the wet end of a pier backwards.

Democracy is all about ideas....

Hester Prynne, sympathetic heroine of The Scarlet Letter; Nathaniel Hawthorne, suffered fictional but historically accurate indignities for her adultery. The novel was set in 1642. It now seems as if the Tea Party, ALEC, and the Koch Brothers are leading us on a sentimental (for them) journey for...

The Arizona legislature is the latest collection of medieval throwbacks to attempt to contravene the contraceptive coverage mandate coming from the Affordable Care Act. Their AZ 2625 includes new language that attempts to exempt employers from providing contraceptive prescriptions on moral grounds. Their AZ2625 language appears intended to...

Softly, he speaks softly, Eastwood whispered the thing that is on everyone's mind. We need to pull together, as families, as communities, as states of the union and as a nation. His halftime Super Bowl ad for Chrysler, purposely akin to a coach exhorting his team to victory, channeled a...

Newt Gingrich, in the effort to depose Mitt Romney as the front runner in the GOP presidential primary, was prepared to sensationalize the practice of corporate raiding in the South Carolina Republican primary. With ad buys and a half hour "politimentary" movie, Newt was going to paint a picture for...

(The short version)

Our latest generation of college bred, bound or graduated are now manning the "Occupy" movement instead of being at an office with a job they had the expectation of getting. With something like half of the recent grads unemployed or underemployed, it's easy to see why they...

All power is derived from the people. It always has been. In the last 600 decades, power has been concentrated and dispersed many times. "Occupy" (everything) is about to accomplish that dispersal again. It's what this country and it's people were forged to do.

Some might consider "Occupy" late to...

When the 2011 federal budget was being bludgeoned into it's final form, the Republicans/Tea Party screamed that continued borrowing would raise the cost of borrowing by increasing the perception that the U.S. government might not be able to service higher debt. At what level a punitive demand for...

The GOP proposes social spending cuts in order to fund tax cuts as a solution for our national debt. They, and the Beltway press, are undeterred by the OMB finding that their Paul Ryan-authored plan will do nothing of the sort. They are also undeterred by economists' warnings that social...

Apparently those inside the Beltway, and those who report on what goes on there, haven't heard - the economy sucks, still. Government spending is third on the list of public concerns. Number one, for three years running, is jobs and the economy. In Washington, whether to fix it or not...

As Reuters reported Monday morning, the S&P rating agency has just threatened to downgrade U.S. Treasury debt. It remains AAA, but S&P says that might change if measures aren't taken to correct the trajectory of growing indebtedness.

The political aspects of this decision by the S&P obviously favor...

On balance, President Obama finally spoke in defense of progressive policy on Wednesday. It was a speech for which liberals have been praying for a couple of years. If it didn't hit all the notes exactly right it may be because expectations have been lowered. Something, anything, is better than...

What dominates every spare news cycle since January, when not usurped by myriad natural and man made disasters, geopolitical unrest and cute puppy stories, has been about the "deficit crisis." The GOP seems to insist they captured the House because they promised to fix the "deficit crisis" and everyone else...

The raw numbers are enough tell an inconvenient tale of this mainstay of conservative politics, that lowering taxes spurs the economy and so increases government revenue based in economic growth. The chart (below) of federal budget, by year, from the Office of Management and Budget history data (page...