Numerous commenters on Greenwald’s Salon radio interview post with MSNBC/NBC’s Chuck Todd found all kinds of imaginative and unimaginative ways of questioning his intelligence. Just because someone disagrees with you and seems to be far off base from your thinking has nothing to do with degrees of intelligence. Deriding your opposition also does little to [...]
As often as I express my deep disdain, and often horror, at the way newspapers waste their precious 1st Amendment rights and costly newsprint printing utter garbage, I will miss them when they’re gone, because what they’ll take with them seems precious and uniquely American; that is, what they once were. Newspapers were more than [...]
(Updated below) If President Lincoln had had a crystal ball, when told the South was seceding, he’d have said, “Woo hoo!” Lord, I wish he had. Especially today. Setting aside the thousands dead, cities destroyed, and money wasted, as decisions go, it was like parents who guiltily decided, once again, to take in their delinquent, [...]
Saddled as they are with a great many aberrant and discredited ideas, Republicans have developed a neat way around this seemingly sticky problem, one that plays into the shallow and narrative-driven way the media covers the news; ad hominem attacks in place of engaging critics’ ideas. The dumber, meaner, and more disastrous the idea, [...]
As one gets older, chunks of time once thought epochal become mere blips; one may start out to say, “But I just…” and then suddenly realizing, add, “well, ten years ago.” Oops. Yesterday that definitely wasn’t, it only seemed like it. Without clear markers, as we settle into middle age we see, and generally [...]
In an earlier post, WT and I were talking about crappy skyscrapers, and mutually decided that some of them were cool. (RIP World Trade Center…) This one, shown from CHNN Headquarters, and then from the street, is Charles Luckman’s building, formerly the First National Bank Tower, which although derided at the time and since by [...]
The process by which large skyscrapers get built, in and of itself, is a fascinating one, even in normal times. But in an absurdly overheated market, with government “incentives,” overeager banks, and a Johnny-come-lately developer who ends up with an empty building and $200 million vanished, it becomes something else entirely. Part melodrama, part thriller, [...]
David Brooks reports that some unnamed Republican Senator had his hand on his inner thigh through a “whole dinner.” This says at least as much about Bobo, to my admittedly jaded mind, as it does about the Senator, who must be pretty disgusting for Brooks to have not named him. I mean, Larry Craig went [...]
Yesterday, the Hag was driven to drink because the Repugs, “In just a few weeks they have cemented in the media and the public consciousness the astoundingly ironic notion that racism is now something only those self-evidently inferior brown people still cling to and must publicly renounce; we superior whites having left that old thing [...]
When I read about the Republican’s numerically laughable but nonetheless attention-getting strategy for opposing the confirmation of Sonia (or Maria, or whatever, the gal with the mop), Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, I’m once again embarrassed to be a Democrat. Those Republicans have their flaws, but failing at political theatre is not among them. [...]