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Jim Hightower
"If all economists were laid end-to-end -- it would be a good thing." -- JK Galbraith
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Hightower Lowdown:
The "Drug War" is doing far more harm than marijuana itself ever will
You might remember Robert McNamara's stunning mea culpa, delivered a quarter century after his Vietnam War policies sent some 50,000 Americans (and even more horrendous numbers of Vietnamese) to their deaths in that disastrous war. In his 1995 memoir, the man who had been a cold, calculating secretary of defense for both Kennedy and Johnson belatedly confessed that he and other top officials had long known that the war was an unwinnable, ideologically driven mistake. "We were wrong," he wrote, almost tearfully begging in print for public forgiveness. "We were terribly wrong."
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The General Store
"The People Are Revolting! (in the very best sense of the word)"
With his aw-shucks charisma and no-nonsense attitude, he dishes out what's wrong with the eroding...
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Let's Stop Beating Around the Bush
It's time to make politics fun again! With uncommon insight, political fearlessness and laugh-out...
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Thieves in High Places - Hardback
America is at an historic divide between rulers and rulees and the rulees are restless. Hightower...
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Have a gander at the whole store here...
A SOFT LANDING IN ROUGH TIMES
These are rough times. How rough, you ask? So rough that even the relative roughness of toilet tissue has arisen as a question of economic and political fairness.
This pressing issue is being played out in California (naturally) – a state that is always in the forefront of public policy debates. Specifically, the county of Riverside is grappling with the delicate matter of tissue texture.
It all started a couple of years ago when county employees complained that the one-ply toilet tissue being used was... well, rough. So, the county supervisor rolled out a new policy of putting two-ply in all stalls. Employees beamed with smiles of comfort.
But not for long. The county's 18,500 employees recently learned that a double level of tushy cushiness has been delivered to the toilet stalls used by the top 10 elected officials and the executive staff. These special ones are blessed with a four-ply tissue, sold under the brand name of "Angel Soft."
Why do these 100 or so executive-level employees get twice the softness that we do, demanded the other 18,400 county workers? There was no good answer. A county spokesman could only say, "There was a texture test, and then the Facilities Management Department decided that Angel Soft would be utilized for elected officials and their guests."
This did not sit well with the two-ply crowd, which was already feeling shorted by having to take a 10-percent pay cut due to budget constraints. After all, every three sheets of Angel Soft cost the county a penny more than three sheets of the common tissue, so it also became a matter of budgetary integrity.
Good News – top county officials now say that, in the interest of tissue egalitarianism, they'll revert to two-ply! Once again, California has put itself on the cutting edge of social progress.