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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
UPDATE BELOW: My letter to the intrepid journalist, and his oh, so redeeming reply.
This morning, Glenn Greenwald had an excellent post about the despicable fear-mongering ad Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol had slapped together to smear not just the Obama DOJ, but basically the entire tradition of western jurisprudence, the evenhandedness of which seems to [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
It is getting harder and harder to believe that September, 11, 2001 was, well, almost NINE YEARS AGO. To hear our politicians speak, you’d think it was last week. We’ve grown accustomed to onerous waits and pointless hoop-jumping in airports, endless and expanding wars all over the globe, militarized policing, the mainstreaming of torture, and [...]
UPDATED BELOW:
Well, I fully expected this to be a rather depressing day, what with the President’s concession speech ahead, but boy, oh, boy, did it turn out differently. First, Measures 66 and 67 passed by a veritable landslide, at last count 54-46, and a lot of obnoxious rich people will have to make good [...]