“Gentlemen, we have run out of money. It’s time to start thinking.” – Ernest Rutherford, British explorer – quoted sometime after 1910 Political analysts unaffiliated with The Onion suggested Monday that Silvio Berlusconi and upstart challenger Beppe Grillo may have enough votes between them to form a new, coalition government in Italy. If this [...]
Against my better judgement, I wandered over to Politico for a little look-see at what was passing for Village Conventional “Wisdom” on this dreary Tuesday, and boy howdy, should I have stayed home. Although there was, at the top of the page, one article that mentioned the, uh, President; except for an irrelevant smidgen of [...]
Rupert Murdoch ✔ @rupertmurdoch Thanks Bloomberg right decision.@now Christie, while thanking O, must re- declare for Romney, or take blame for next four dire years. 2 Nov 12 Reply Retweet Favorite There are several reasons Republicans are currently snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, but by far the most significant one is [...]
In the Guardian Saturday, the alert reader might have spotted this, buried in a deceptively bland story about Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp buying the LA Times and Chicago Tribune out of bankruptcy for a song: The paper said a deal might require a waiver of federal laws that block ownership of newspapers and [...]
By now, we’ve all had a chuckle over the fact that the rotting corpse of CNN got the Supreme Court ruling on Obamacare, well, spectacularly wrong, and failed to correct the error for several minutes while the whole world watched. What isn’t so funny, and falls more into the depressing category, is that such an [...]
I ran across a story at Huffpo today that pointed out the travesty that the already absurdly low minimum wage doesn’t apply to “tipped” employees; in most states it’s still $2.13 (!) per hour, where it has been stuck for twenty years due to (surprise!) restaurant industry lobbying. Needless to say, it is the worst [...]
John Avlon, CNN contributor and Villager extraordinaire, has made a veritable career out of pushing false equivalencies; he literally wrote the book on the subject, in which he touted, among other things, the risible notion that Alan Grayson was exactly the same as Glenn Beck. Entitled “Wingnuts,” the thesis of this discount-bin tome was that [...]
One of the great advantages of having spent an embarrassingly large amount of my disposable income over a quarter century on books is that the darn things just never stop coming in handy. Although lack of space, blogging, and less travel in the last few years has sharply slowed my acquisition rate, for each Presidency [...]
The media is duly abuzz about the Supreme Court hearing arguments for (and agin’) Obamacare, beginning today. But the coverage is revealing; the case is discussed solely in political terms, blandly acknowledging that the highest court in the land functions not as a neutral arbiter of “Equal Justice Under Law,” but as just another sleazy [...]
Considering that Richard Cohen has been a Villager in good standing since before I could drink legally, typing up dumbed-down Broderisms at the WaPoo with thudding regularity, you’d think he’d have at least absorbed a little bit of what was going on in that town all those years. But no…. it seems he thinks that [...]