The Questioning Librarian

Increasingly, the economic news has been better and better. Unemployment continues to decline, to a current low of 5.6% , while the stock market has never been higher . Officially, the recession ended a few years ago . Yet the pain of the recession hasn't abated for the many millions who remain unemployed, including a large number of unemployed millennials, whose unemployment rate stood at 15% as of September 2014, especially those who have lost unemployment benefits. It does not lessen the pain of a family with two working parents, struggling to get by, who have had their SNAP benefits cut by Congress. The nearly one in four children in this country who live in poverty don't care a bit about how high the stock market has gone. The schools, universities and libraries across the country that have seen sharp cuts in funding can take little solace in decreasing unemployment, as they come up with increasingly creative ways to keep the lights on. The disconnect between politi...

It's no secret to anyone who knows me that the upcoming holiday season is quite possibly my least favorite time of year. Whenever I mention this, without fail, I get derided as a Grinch, a Scrooge, or at the very least a generally joyless person. Yet I would be more likely to welcome and enjoy this part of the year were it not for the fact that Christmas, and the months surrounding it, have been turned into an unending festival of greed. Christmas has become the most wonderful time of year only for companies looking, as always, to turn the holidays into one last occasion for the year to take our money and have us thank them for it.  This is an old complaint, certainly. Famously Charles Schulz had Charlie Brown ask, "Isn't there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?" back in 1965. He too, nearly fifty years ago, was disheartened by the commercialization of the season. The answer he got, of course, was the religious meaning of the season for practicing Chri...

It's no great secret that I used to vote straight-Republican in nearly every election. I was proud to vote for the party of individual responsibility and small government, as I saw it then, as opposed to what I viewed as the party of dependency and the nanny state. But the GOP I used to vote for isn't the same one, and I've changed myself. We parted ways several elections ago, and at this point I cannot bring myself to vote for a single Republican in any election, from the local representatives all the way up through to the Presidency. The Republican Party is, to put it at its mildest, a party driven by greed and by hostility to all those who are unlike themselves. They are the party of Avarice and the party of Cruelty, and they show this in their every word and their every action. The singular accomplishment of the modern GOP is the fusion of pro-corporate economics with radical religious fundamentalism. Both are toxic to the freedoms and liberties of the citizens of ...

   There are some books that one enjoys reading. There are others that one reads because they have to know the contents of it, whether the journey is enjoyable or not. Thomas Frank's The Wrecking Crew is definitely in the latter category. It is a book that is not a pleasant read, but one that should be read nonetheless. I've had it in my possession for years, but I long held off reading it because I still thought myself a conservative at the time it was given to me. The subtitle ( How Conservatives Rule ) and my own biases made it all too easy to push off to the side. When I was no longer a conservative--or at least when those who claimed the name conservative in the public sphere had grown so offensive and ignorant that I could no longer share the label--I suspected that the book would not be a joy to read, rather along the lines of Crimes Against Nature by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. I was right on that account, but I should have read it sooner nonetheless. ...

Once more, dear readers, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review proves itself no friend of the environment, nor a help in finding solutions to America's coming energy crisis. No, instead, they remain stuck in the past, helplessly, willingly, in thrall to the gas, oil and coal companies that once powered our country but whose time has now come. The good editors at the Trib decided to take aim at solar power in their editorial "More 'green' folly." The occasion? The shutdown of Evergreen Solar, Inc. in Massachusetts after two years there and $30 million in state subsidies. This serves as an excuse for the attack against green technology that follows. http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/opinion/s_719316.html The editors claim that alternative fuels are a white elephant, the only thing green about them their "insatiable appetite for the public's green." They "remain affixed to the public dime. And that's neither palatable nor sustainable...