I had heard good things about Liar’s Poker author Michael Lewis’ new book about the financial meltdown, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, but as usual I procrastinated a bit about buying it, figuring it would turn up used at Powell’s before too long. Well, when I walked into work on Thursday and found [...]
One kind of funny, and certainly satisfying thing about the conservative “successes” of the past few decades is that so many of them are still just lying around, like turd piles in the yard, that they keep getting stepped in at the worst possible moments. About five minutes before or after John McCain picked Phil [...]
Is it just me, or is GOP giddiness about their chimerical but purportedly inevitable “sweep” in the next election leading them into near daily outbursts of unseemly candor? Those of us on the left know quite well that they hold their non-rich supporters in utter contempt, but they at least used to recognize that most [...]
Hag readers know I harbor an understandably visceral disdain for NBC’s David Gregory, but watching him this morning on his last-place excuse for a show, I think I started to figure out why. He’s an automaton (and a sloppily made, one, too… they evidently put on either the wrong eyebrows or the wrong hair at [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
The New York Time’s notoriously Fox-addled political reporter, Adam Nagourney, engages in some typical but sadly anachronistic “Democrats are doomed” hand-wringing in Thursday’s paper, faux-fretting that given the (factually inaccurate, but that’s par for the course) supposedly massive wave of Democratic retirements in the Senate, Obama will be hamstrung in carrying out his “agenda.” The [...]
Among the punditocracy, which bears so much responsibility for the current disaster in which we find ourselves, the current consensus is that the Democrats are set to lose, and lose big, in November. Of course, since this is the same bunch that bathed Karl Rove’s “Permanent Republican Majority” in the flattering amber glow of inevitability [...]
I’ve been watching the liberal revolt against health car reform with suddenly renewed interest, since, wonder of wonders, the usual rollover didn’t occur. It’s like the dog that didn’t bark. What a difference an astonishingly demoralizing year makes. Back when Obama utterly capitulated on FISA, way before the election, liberals were still so alarmed by [...]