When I was growing up, we always laughed at the relentlessly upbeat statements that came from the old Soviet Union, where even disasters were turned into triumphs, and leaders, statues, and the names of places themselves switched magically as fashion and leadership required, which usually worked out better for the places renamed than the people [...]
Having found such a gold mine of authoritarian propaganda in the “news” pages of the poor Los Angeles Times over these last two days, I couldn’t help dropping in again for a look-see this afternoon. Would there be yet another journalistic equivalent of an overturned dump truck in the Cahuenga Pass? So enamored am I [...]
My local rag, the Oregonian, has an incurable tendency to take up quixotic and unpopular conservative causes, and then make an ass of itself maniacally defending them against the wishes of all present. When they lose, as they did with assisted suicide and measures 66 and 67, they imperiously scold their readers afterward and hamhandedly [...]
I have a strong feeling that our Media Stars are going to be left with even more egg on their faces than usual as the next elections roll around, so convinced they are that, somehow, the Republicans have recaptured the hearts of that imaginary “middle America” that none of them have evidently ever seen. Of [...]
Every time I start to worry about Republicans’ embarrassing overconfidence in their imminent “resurgence,” along comes Michele Bachmann, and I take heart.
Bachmann thoroughly rejected the idea of a social guarantee of health care, saying that the rights guaranteed in America’s founding ideals affirm “your right to own property, not necessarily the right or a guarantee [...]
Probably one of the most infuriating rhetorical tactics you see these days from the plutocrats and the media who love them is their emphatic insistence that the “free market,” as it is currently constituted, may have its flaws, but in the end it “rewards success.” It does, I suppose, to the extent that it rewards [...]
Today I read (h/t tpmmuckraker.com) that the whole, quite successful, smear campaign about “Mirandizing” the firecrotch bomber, a fake kerfuffle which didn’t surprise me at the time because it was so ordinary: unanimous, hypocritical, and of course, petulantly dredging up an old far-right grievance from the ’60’s; but it was actually a little unique, in [...]
You know, it’s somewhat mystifying to me why, given that there are so many clever Republicans, when they start thinking about the top spot they always go for the dummy. It wasn’t always this way; when my brother was born in 1965 his scalp hadn’t closed, and the doctor peeked right into his brain and [...]
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It’s fitting that the Teabaggers chose Nashville for their hoedown; it’s safely within the Bible Belt, but full of enough crass, ersatz show business to offset its provincial dreariness and add to the absurd fakery of the whole event. It’s been twenty years since I last visited that fair city, but I doubt it [...]
The GOP strategy for achieving its already media-trumpeted 2010 landslide is shaping up, and it has to be admired for its sheer audacity, as well as its desperate but hardly unwarranted reliance on the media continuing to be as stupid as it was throughout the Bush years. Richard Cohen, David Broder, and David Gregory are [...]