Posts Tagged ‘banana republic’

On The Table, and Off

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 [...]

LA Times Channels FOX, Literally

Yesterday LA Times crack reporter Rick Serrano published a story that was straight off the Republican Noise Machine, willfully deceptive about the nature of our legal system, and, well, old.  To do so and make it plausible, he “interviewed” such heavyweights as Sen. Jeff Sessions, a bunch of anonymous Republicans, and carefully pored over a [...]

SSSHHH… Not in Front of the Servants

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 [...]

Back to the Future

UPDATED BELOW:
When I was a kid in the 70’s, everybody listened to KGON, the local FM rock station, and it was avowedly liberal: pro-pot, anti-Nixon, anti-war, with a great cast of hippie-ish DJ’s that became like family.  As Archie and Edith wistfully sang, “Those Were the Days.”  They had a feature in the morning, “Nukes [...]

Market Shmarket

If I hear, one more time, someone speak of the wonders of the “free market,” I’m going to do something desperate.  Why aren’t these cretinous martinets ever asked to explain what, in heaven’s name, they mean?  The reality has gotten so far removed from the homilies that some explanation is in order.  In an offensively [...]

Fuzzy Math

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 [...]

The Island of Misfit Toys

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 [...]

Too Much is Never Enough

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 [...]

Torts Are Fattening, You Know

For all their other faults, Republicans’ worst mistake often tends to be their timing.  Bushes pere et fil started their wars too early for their electoral purposes, but since the winner lost and the loser won, the wrong lessons were learned.  Who can forget Bush crowing about  the “capital” he had earned by stealing Ohio in [...]

Party Like It’s 1853

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 [...]