Category Archives: Readings from around the webs…

Hillary Clinton: ‘Failure’ to Help Syrian Rebels Led to the Rise of ISIS | The Atlantic

The former secretary of state, and probable candidate for president, outlines her foreign-policy doctrine. She says this about President Obama’s: “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.”

President Obama has long ridiculed the idea that the U.S., early in the Syrian civil war, could have shaped the forces fighting the Assad regime, thereby stopping al Qaeda-inspired groups—like the one rampaging across Syria and Iraq today—from seizing control of the rebellion. In an interview in February, the president told me that “when you have a professional army … fighting against a farmer, a carpenter, an engineer who started out as protesters and suddenly now see themselves in the midst of a civil conflict—the notion that we could have, in a clean way that didn’t commit U.S. military forces, changed the equation on the ground there was never true.”

Continue reading Hillary Clinton: ‘Failure’ to Help Syrian Rebels Led to the Rise of ISIS | The Atlantic

The Federal Reserve Is Telling Us The Economy Is Pitiful

and
08/07/2014

Fewer than one-third of Americans report being better off financially than they were five years ago, with weak household savings and hefty debt burdens holding back large segments of the economy, according to a new Federal Reserve survey. Continue reading The Federal Reserve Is Telling Us The Economy Is Pitiful

Another Conservative Group Gets Entangled in an Indian Casino Money-Laundering Scandal | BillMoyers.com

Curated from BillMoyers.com
By Joshua Holland
August 8, 2014

Politico came up with a big scoop this week when it uncovered internal documents from the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC) showing that the Alabama Republican Party had “essentially launder[ed] ‘toxic’ money from the gaming industry by routing it out of state and then back into Alabama” via the prominent conservative group.

Continue reading Another Conservative Group Gets Entangled in an Indian Casino Money-Laundering Scandal | BillMoyers.com

America’s 10 Most Hated #Banks | Mother Jones

According to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, these financial institutions draw the most complaints.

| Tue Jul. 29, 2014


If you put out a complaint box for customers of US banks and financial firms, you will get hundreds of thousands of complaints. That’s what the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—which was set up by Elizabeth Warren before she became a US senator—has discovered. And the bank that has drawn the most complaints is Bank of America. Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, and Citibank were other top targets of consumer wrath.

Continue reading America’s 10 Most Hated #Banks | Mother Jones

Cookbook Shows How To Eat Well On A #FoodStamp Budget | NPR

By Molly Roberts

When Leanne Brown moved to New York from Canada to earn a master’s in food studies at New York University, she couldn’t help noticing that Americans on a tight budget were eating a lot of processed foods heavy in carbs.

“It really bothered me,” she says. “The 47 million people on food stamps — and that’s a big chunk of the population — don’t have the same choices everyone else does.” Continue reading Cookbook Shows How To Eat Well On A #FoodStamp Budget | NPR

Hillary for Liberals: A Conversation With Walter Shapiro | The American Prospect

This piece originally appeared in The American Prospect
By HAROLD MEYERSON
JULY 23, 2014
“As a campaigner, Hillary can do a shot and a beer better than Barack Obama can,” Shapiro says. So there’s that.

As a reporter and columnist for Time, Newsweek, the Washington Post, USA Today, Esquire, Salon, and other publications, Walter Shapiro has covered nine presidential elections and the nation’s politics for four decades. He is currently a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University and a lecturer in political science at Yale while he finishes a book about his great-uncle, a vaudevillian and con man who once swindled Hitler.

Shapiro is also an accomplished Hillary-ologist, having first interviewed Hillary Clinton in the Arkansas governor’s mansion for Time in September 1992. In early May, Shapiro sat down with Prospect editor-at-large Harold Meyerson to talk about a question he’s internally debated for years: On balance, would a Hillary Clinton candidacy and presidency be a good or bad thing for the liberal cause?

Continue reading Hillary for Liberals: A Conversation With Walter Shapiro | The American Prospect