The Hollywood Liberal

Cheney’s Legacy of Deception

In the end, the shame of Vice President Dick Cheney was total: unmitigated by any notion of a graceful departure, let alone the slightest obligation of honest accounting.?

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Wal-Mart’s $640 Million Sneeze

Wal-Mart will pay as much as $640 million to settle 63 lawsuits around the country alleging that the retailer had exploited its workers. The payout could add up to less than 0.1 percent of the company’s revenues this year.

Bloomberg:

The agreement comes five weeks before Mike Duke takes over from outgoing Chief Executive Officer H. Lee Scott, who has overseen a sales resurgence and sought to burnish Wal-Mart’s image among environmentalists, politicians and labor groups. Wal-Mart may pay from $352 million to $640 million, potentially less than 0.1 percent of its $378.8 billion in revenue in 2008.

“In terms of money, it doesn’t move the needle at Wal-Mart, but cleaning it up is going to be viewed as a positive by everyone, including Wall Street,” Howard Davidowitz, chairman of Davidowitz & Associates Inc., a New York-based retail consulting and investment banking firm, said in a phone interview. “They don’t want to pass this along to the next CEO.”

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Botox Withstands Effects of Age, Recession

When the global economy takes a serious plunge (i.e., like right now), one would think that such frivolities as facial fillers and Botox would be the first to go from the regimens of even the most image-conscious among us.?

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Robert L. Borosage: Bin Laden’s New Weapon of Mass Destruction
Afghanistan, of course, is the central front in the war on terror. But perhaps we’d be wiser to leave bin Laden in his cave, abandon the entire wrong-headed misnomer of a “war on terror,” and give up attempting to build a new democracy in a country on the other side of the world. Make aggressive global policing, intelligence sharing, and a crackdown on financial flows the core of our reaction to bin Laden, and focus our resources and attention on the crisis here at home, which remains truly terrifying to anyone who looks at it closely.

Florida Woman Claims She Was Fired For Saying “Merry Christmas”
PENSACOLA, Fla. — A Christian woman claims she was fired from her job because she greeted callers with “Merry Christmas,” but the vacation rental company…

Witness In Ted Stevens Trial: I Regret Testifying
WASHINGTON — A witness in convicted Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens’ corruption trial has told the judge he never would have testified if he’d known he…

Rebecca Solnit: The Grinning Skull
While the media demonized the New Orleans’ black population for crimes that turned out not to have happened, they ignored the group of white men who went on a shooting spree across the river.

Rose Hayden-Smith: Advice to New Agriculture Secretary Vilsack: Channel Another Son of Iowa
While Mr. Vilsack may not have been the first choice of many people, I think he has an opportunity to make an enormous and positive impact.

Safavian Jury Reaches Verdict
The jury in the corruption trial of Abramoff crony David Safavian has reached a verdict. We’ll learn later today what it is, reports the Associated Press. Safavian, who served as the White House’s chief procurement officer, is on trial for…

Top OTS Official Removed in Wake of IndyMac Failure
The Office of Thrift Supervision has removed its west region director as a result of an inspector general’s investigation into the collapse of IndyMac earlier this year, according to correspondence made public today by Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA). Darrel Dochow…

Work Dries Up for Day Laborers
When the bubble began to deflate, day laborers were among the first and hardest-hit casualties.

Cheney’s Shocking Admissions on How Close He Came to Nearly Destroying the Country
In a series of departing interviews, Cheney challenges anyone to repudiate the imperial presidency constructed in the Bush era.

How We Can Live with Less and Still Feel Rich
Here’s how government can help curb America’s seemingly endless appetite for "more."

Why Do People Cling to the Myth of the Nuclear Family?
A glance through history suggests there’s nothing natural about the "traditional" family.

Rick Warren Is an Unapologetic Christian Radical — And There’s No Need to Apologize for Opposing Him
Progressives are right to hold the line against Warren’s bigoted positions on abortion and homosexuality.

Hebron Agonistes: Too Much For Israel
It has been common for educated Israelis to think, and Israeli diplomats and American Jewish leaders to present, the settler community of Hebron as a kind of radical nuisance. Presumably, the settlers are a side-show of a defensive strategic policy,…

Is The Two State Solution Finished?
It didn’t take long for the “two state solution” to move from the category of radical to banal, but that is what has happened. Today the “two-state solution” is everyone’s favorite remedy. And yet it is farther from realization than…

Bush Era Investment Strategy
Classic investment theory says that investors should pay a premium for safety and command extra compensation for taking risk. But the above chart of the last eight years shows that we have been living in a financial version of…

Obama Report Finds Nothing Improper in Staff’s Contact With Blagojevich
White House Chief of Staff-designate Rahm Emanuel spoke “one or two” times with Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and “about four” times with the governor’s chief of staff but did not engage in any inappropriate discussions about who should be appointed to Barack Obama’s vacant Senate seat, according…

For Stimulus Plan, Obama Team Weighing ‘Green’ Jobs vs. Traditional Projects
In one of the first internal struggles of the incoming Obama administration, environmentalists and smart-growth advocates are trying to shift the priorities of the economic stimulus plan that will be introduced in Congress next month away from allocating tens of billions of dollars to highways,…

Obama Administration May Tie Improved Nutrition to Food Assistance Programs
The worsening economic crunch is causing the tab for food assistance programs to balloon, and with the rising costs has come an intensifying debate over whether — and how — the U.S. government can tackle simultaneously the paradoxically linked problems of hunger and obesity.