You know, you really have to hand it to the Republicans. They started out with a plan that was seemingly so audacious and unlikely to succeed that Democrats never saw it coming, much less moved to counter it. Selling plutocracy to the rubes, via a systematically concentrated media, has turned out to be like taking [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Rich people say the darnedest things, and they have for time immemorial, but only recently they have been encouraged to do so free of ridicule on national television. During the Health Care Summit today, (h/t crooksandliars.com) CNN helpfully cut away to have the certifiably cuckoo creationist Ben Stein come on the air and proudly say [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]