By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
While deficit spending may be doing wonders in the short-term for getting the economy moving again, we’re mortgaging our future. Over the next decade, we will add an additional nine trillion dollars to the deficit. Paul Krugman explains why this is a really big problem.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/28/opinion/28krugman.html
2) The Republican Death Machine
By Jacob Weisberg, Slate
This piece serves as an amazing supplement to my column on health care from yesterday. It details the ways in which Republicans are killing seniors in a myriad of ways that Democrats would never even dream of. These include the expiration of Chuck Grassley’s estate tax cuts (if you pull the plug on Granny before 12/31/10, you don’t have to pay a 55% tax on her multi-million dollar fortune), the rise in suicide rates that might be caused by privatizing social security, and stem cell research (which thanks to Barack Obama will save approximately 23,000 lives per year).
http://www.slate.com/id/2226518/
3) Twenty-six Lies About H.R. 3200
By FactCheck.org
The list of false claims circulating about H.R. 3200 are too many to count. FactCheck.org takes on a popular chain e-mail and its forty-eight assertions. They found that of these, twenty-six were lies, eighteen were misleading and the other four were actually true.
http://factcheck.org/2009/08/twenty-six-lies-about-hr-3200/
By Austin Ramzy, Time Magazine
With the help of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Climate Group and philanthropic Chinese martial-arts star Jet Li’s One Foundation, China has been working to implement some pretty exciting green technologies including solar-powered street lamps. Small steps like these can help a green mindset become a priority for a country that still believes in the Maoist ideology of growth above all else. China is already a global leader in environmental technology and may dominate this sector in the twenty-first century.
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1918757,00.html
5) The lessons of Katrina: Global warming “adaptation” is a cruel euphemism — and prevention is far, far cheaper
The Storm of the Century (so far)
By Climate Progress
Today is the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina creating a path of destruction through New Orleans. Climate Progress does a fantastic job of explaining what we need to take out of this disaster and learn from it. Humans cannot “adapt” to climate change. The only solution is to fight it. Otherwise, the entire Gulf Coast will become sitting ducks for warming-driven superstorms.
As an added bonus, The New York Times explains why millions in Nepal are facing hunger also as a result of climate change. This really is a problem of global proportions right now if it wasn’t clear already.
http://climateprogress.org/2009/0829/the-lessons-of-katrina-global-warming-adaptation-is-a-myth-mitigation-prevention-cheaper/
http://climateprogress.org/2009/08/28/the-storm-of-the-century-so-far-katrina-new-orleans/
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/08/28/world/AP-AS-Nepal-Climate-Change.html
