Thanks to the unjust blindness of our Supreme Court that somehow can't tell the difference between dollars and words and therefore condone the massive influx of money to dominate political debate and jockey for the agenda: a couple of new billionaires are vying to get into the act.
One is at least on the right side of reality. From the NYTimes: "A billionaire retired investor is forging plans to spend as much as $100 million during the 2014 election, seeking to pressure federal and state officials to enact climate change measures through a hard-edge campaign of attack ads against governors and lawmakers."
The donor is Tom Steyer but before you get too impressed, he just provided $11 million to elect the dubious Democrat Terry McAuliffe governor of Virginia. Still, he's organizing other billionaires to join the fight, as a counterweight to the notorious Koch brothers. If it sounds like something out of the Wild West, well...gunfighting is speech too, pardner.
Meanwhile, a new wild bunch of Republican billionaires are entering the political fray, though perhaps the interesting thing is they seem to be trying to save the party from the Tea Party, and once again, the notorious Koch brothers.
In other climate crisis news, that is apart from the usual bad news (yes, the Arctic is melting, etc.) there's the interesting situation in Nebraska where a judge has countered the high-handedness we've become used to from Republican governors when it comes to sucking up to their fossil fuel billionaires, and denied permission for the Keystone Pipeline to run roughshod through the state, "condemning" farm land in favor of pipeland. He ordered the pipes people out of the state.
Some interesting reading:
Slate finds the research that says what many of us have figured out: Internet trolls are sick and evil. Nothing to say however about the ones who are paid to be sick and evil.
A concise history of newspapers, and why they are still the best medium to explain the daily world, though they may have lost track of that.
A journalist crashes a secret society of the 1% and they are as disgusting as we figured. So far it seems this is a real story, though not far from an Andy Borowitz column. Meanwhile, Jonathan Chiat demolishes another of the psychotic 1% arguments, and this one involves Iron Man.
On the other side of the ledger, the Wonkblog reveals "how Obama secretly became the anti-poverty president."
Everyone agrees that Congress isn't going to raise the minimum wage, though President Obama has raised it for federal contracts, and some individual businesses are raising theirs. So take comfort in the fact that there are no more good arguments against raising it.
And finally, in the new Baffler, David Graeber chronicles the long history of science's most perplexing mystery: why is there fun?
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