vibinc

Progressive Politics from Memphis

  • My (Continuing) Battle With Smoking

    I remember exactly when I decided to start smoking. I was in Jr. High. A lot of the kids that I went to school with smoked. I was the new kid. I didn’t really know many folks. I wanted to fit in. It was an easy way to immediately have something in common with the…

  • I do not understand Sheldon Adelson

    $150,000,000 That’s how much Sheldon Adelson spent on the 2012 election. If total spending was around $2b, Adelson made up 7.5% of that spending. One dude. 7.5% of all political spending in the country. Damn. Adelson spent all that money with the slew of conservative “dark money” groups that have popped up in the wake…

  • Much is required

    I don’t normally write about national issues, but this fiscal cliff thing is one particularly dumb set of concern trolling on the part of the national media so it seems like a prime target. Its dumb because as the Wonk Blog explains this is anything but a cliff. It’s a slope at best. A slope…

  • Securing the Vote

    Election Day is over, and despite some local reports of problems with too few machines in some places and malfunctioning machines in others…it seems to have gone pretty smoothly. Regardless of your political bent, we should all be thankful for that. It wasn’t that way for everyone, as the video to the left shows. No…

  • Defining The Middle Class

    There’s been a lot of talk about the middle class, and entitlements, and who benefits from what. Newscoma reminded me I wanted to talk about this yesterday. The notion that a household income of $200,000+ makes you “middle class” is not only misguided, its not supported by the facts. Being the research goob that I…

  • More on the Memphis Voter ID Challenge

    From WMCTV. Action News 5 – Memphis, Tennessee