Archive for 2015

I received a lovely e-mail this week from Paula, a woman I’ve known for some time online from the comments section at ChrisWeigant.com. I found out Paula is an Ohioan like me who has her own blog at Ec-Ohio – The Ohio-based Green Directory.

She recently read my book and is currently searching for a publisher for her own. She follows SP 101 as well and had a few questions about self-publishing.

In the process, she gave me some feedback on my website (as she is a web designer by trade). One thing she wrote was:

One of the standard WP widgets is the “Subscribe” widget, where people can sign-up to be notified when you put up a new post. I would happily subscribe to that. Any reason why you didn’t implement it?

Yes, indeed, I wrote her back. The reason I didn’t implement it was simply because I’m relatively new to book selling and promotion and didn’t know about it.

I’m almost ashamed to admit it.

So I beat myself up for a couple minutes then went online and started looking for how to do it. It wasn’t long before I came upon the Email Subscribers plugin. 10 minutes later, I had it up on my website (highlighted in red).

Because of Paula’s excellent feedback, I thought how to sell books from your blog would make a good topic for this week.

I think this might be the quote of the week by Father John Cahill, former director of Justice and Peace for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Covington, Kentucky.

Father Cahill writes:

It is time to tell corporations that taxpayers have had enough. We are not going to provide you with cheap labor out of our wallets while you receive favored tax rates on capital gains, reinvested dividends, accelerated depreciation, tax abatements etc. etc. and severely underpay your workers.

Father Cahill recognizes that in our one-sided pursuit of profits, we seem to have lost sight of why we were pursuing profits to begin with.

We’ve lost sight of our values. We’ve lost sight of why we allowed corporations to begin with: for the public good.

He contrasts this with today’s insanity of subsidizing multinational corporations while many of these same multinationals fight to pay people less and less.

For a recent project, I’ve been researching organizations and values within organizations. I happened to come across On Value and Values by Douglas K. Smith because of the following quote: For many years now, I have heard people speak about value and values disjointedly, as though the singular, value, and […]

George Stephanopoulos interviewed Peter Schweizer yesterday in advance of his book “Clinton Cash”.

He asked some decent questions focused on whether Schweizer has any evidence of criminal behavior to which Schweizer basically said “no”.

Of course Schweizer has no evidence of criminal behavior. If he did, Clinton would be under arrest. This is a political attack.

The interesting thing about the attack is that Stephanopoulos mimics what we’re supposed to do. He gets outraged about a lack of evidence. Or as outraged as George Stephanopoulos can get anyways. Meanwhile the attack gets repeated ad nauseum in the media.

Stephanopoulos feigns the role of protagonist, allows Schweizer to repeat all his claims, and ABC shows some scary graphics.

The House of Representatives recently voted to eliminate the estate tax. Because of the recent vote, the topic may come up in conversations with people you know.

This is an easy case to “win” because there is such a strong moral case for inheritance taxes and it’s also a great opportunity to practice talking about what you believe.

Most of what you’ll see in the media, however, consists of the “strong” moral case for corporate special interest groups and a “weak” response. By weak response, I mean a case that doesn’t talk about the morality of the estate tax. A case that is often simply the negation of conservative arguments. A moral case should explain ‘why’ we believe in inheritance taxes.

To start, I believe …

1. Privilege should be earned (not inherited).

To paraphrase Teddy Roosevelt, every dollar received should represent a dollar’s worth of service rendered – not gambling in stocks.

Roosevelt said it better:

No man should receive a dollar unless that dollar has been fairly earned. Every dollar received should represent a dollar’s worth of service rendered — not gambling in stocks, but service rendered. The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men of relatively small means. Therefore, I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more easily collected and far more effective — a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion, and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate.

This is perhaps the best description I’ve seen of Fox News (and AM talk radio for that matter).

I saw this in a tweet today, but it appears it’s been around for a bit. Apologies if you’ve seen before but thought worth sharing.

A number of recent comments and posts have talked about how we can become more active. One of the things I’ve heard is that we need to hit the streets and that people here are more interested in blogging than in organizing.

I agree that we should be looking to do more, to run for office, to work with different campaigns, to look for opportunities to get involved, and think this conversation is great.

I also believe that the most important thing we can do is write. Here’s why.

This is a post to help people understand atheism. I write this because of how atheism is being portrayed in the media as a lack of morals.

The latest example comes from Phil Robertson at a Christian event in Florida:

[caption id="attachment_1873" align="alignright" width="247"] Phil Robertson by Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 3.0)[/caption]

Two guys break into an atheist’s home. He has a little atheist wife and two little atheist daughters,” Phil said at the Vero Beach Prayer Breakfast, audio from which was obtained by Right Wing Watch. “Two guys break into his home and tie him up in a chair and gag him. And then they take his two daughters in front of him and rape both of them and then shoot ‘em and they take his wife and decapitate her head off in front of him. And then they can look at him and say, ‘Isn’t it great that I don’t have to worry about being judged? Isn’t it great that there’s nothing wrong with this? There’s no right or wrong, now is it dude?

Atheists are portrayed as having no morals, as not believing in any right or wrong.

This is ridiculous.

Atheists are actually extremely moral people because atheists own their actions. If we make a decision, we don’t have any god or gods to fall back on.

We don’t say things like: “Well, my God told me that these other people are evil so I’m going to have to fight against them.”

If we make a decision, we have to own it. We use the word “I”.

It’s tax season once again and I’d like to address a question that I rarely see addressed: Who do tax cuts benefit? To start, let’s make a list of the major tax categories: Sales taxes Fees, tolls, and licenses Sin taxes (alcohol, tobacco, etc.) Capital gains taxes Estate taxes Luxury […]

With all of the attacks on public education recently, I wanted to know what our founding fathers thought about education. I found that our founders believed education was critical for democracy and avoiding an “aristocracy of wealth,” that it should be available to all, that is should be free from religion […]