Recent items in the news: The commandant of the marine corps said a few days ago U.S. forces will likely be at the “war on terror,” or whatever it’s called now, for a bit longer, maybe another decade. Or more. The marine leader’s remarks echo those by an obscure defense official overseeing undercover doo doo. [...]
Prostitution in the old Massachusetts Bay Colony (1628-92), which then ran north into southern Maine and included the seaside town of Kennebunk (“So Close, Yet Worlds Away”), was a hanging offense. Times have changed however. And so on Friday a state judge in Portland accepted a plea deal from alleged Zumba dance madam Alexis Wright [...]
As I wrote about last week at FDL, I’m still gobsmacked, flabbergasted, you name it, over Supreme Court Justice (!) Antonin Scalia’s comments about the Voting Rights Act, and to my considerable delight, so was the often flaccid and boring Saturday Night Live. Sorry to all about the lame posting, but I’ve been so busy [...]
“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 [...]
One of the chief reasons GOP politicians and the Village Media who love them are able to maintain any semblance of credibility was on vivid display at the Hagel confirmation hearings: for wrongness, there is always strength in numbers. What really lay at the heart of John McCain’s cartoonishly crabby badgering of Hagel about the [...]
For what seems to be the first time, President Obama put on his oft-mentioned but rarely seen “comfortable shoes” to support union rights at a speech in Michigan today. It was Obama at his best; serious but funny, calm but pointed. And not a moment too soon: last week the lame duck Republican legislature pushed [...]
101 years ago, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire horrified a nation; the initial shock of seeing young women leap to their deaths from the inferno was quickly eclipsed by the exposure of the deadly conditions under which they worked; blocked and locked exits, lack of fire escapes, buildup of flammable material, and dangerous machinery all pointed [...]
Over at Thinkprogress, they have a chart up that makes me weep bitter tears for our democracy; they are bragging about the stratospheric profits bloated and insatiable US corporations are enjoying lately at everyone else’s expense; you really have to see it to believe it: That’s right. A purportedly “liberal” blog is falling all over [...]
Ever since Reagan, Republicans have chosen Presidential candidates the same way an ad agency might cast a beer commercial. Literally. Remember all the talk about who voters would want to “have a beer with” when attempting to sell a slow-witted, overprivileged ne’er-do-well who didn’t even drink, back in 2000? They never bother to find [...]
Perhaps one of the most loathsome disasters left to us by Dick Cheney (and there are a lot of them) is the elevation of the criminally incompetent Halliburton he once led to the cash-soaked tippy-top of the Military Industrial Complex. Flush with no-bid contracts even before the bonanza of the Iraq War Cheney so coveted, [...]