Today former President (!) Richard Nixon would have been 100, and I’m sorry the ol’ creep isn’t still around; since he would undoubtedly be in a very bad mood. You see, his most infamous legal doctrine, “if the President does it, it is not illegal,” once a shockingly outrageous statement, is now comfortably enshrined [...]
Rupert Murdoch ✔ @rupertmurdoch Thanks Bloomberg right decision.@now Christie, while thanking O, must re- declare for Romney, or take blame for next four dire years. 2 Nov 12 Reply Retweet Favorite There are several reasons Republicans are currently snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, but by far the most significant one is [...]
In the Guardian Saturday, the alert reader might have spotted this, buried in a deceptively bland story about Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp buying the LA Times and Chicago Tribune out of bankruptcy for a song: The paper said a deal might require a waiver of federal laws that block ownership of newspapers and [...]
In Sunday’s Oregonian, right-wing affirmative action hire Elizabeth Hovde celebrated Labor Day a day early by calling for Oregon to become a “Right to Work” state. Seriously. Like other righty martinets polluting op/ed pages from coast to coast, her arguments weren’t just based on shaky facts, they were the exact opposite of the truth. Quoting [...]
I suppose it was inevitable that Romney would start calling President Obama “angry,” simply because it sounds so nice with “….black man” to the Archie Bunker base, but the term is accidentally more deeply revealing than that. I have repeatedly seen the use of this clever dodge; in my experience, it reflects the often mistaken [...]
I ran across a story at Huffpo today that pointed out the travesty that the already absurdly low minimum wage doesn’t apply to “tipped” employees; in most states it’s still $2.13 (!) per hour, where it has been stuck for twenty years due to (surprise!) restaurant industry lobbying. Needless to say, it is the worst [...]
One of the great advantages of having spent an embarrassingly large amount of my disposable income over a quarter century on books is that the darn things just never stop coming in handy. Although lack of space, blogging, and less travel in the last few years has sharply slowed my acquisition rate, for each Presidency [...]
Considering that Richard Cohen has been a Villager in good standing since before I could drink legally, typing up dumbed-down Broderisms at the WaPoo with thudding regularity, you’d think he’d have at least absorbed a little bit of what was going on in that town all those years. But no…. it seems he thinks that [...]
UPDATE: Here’s Monday’s subversive, unprintable horror: Courtesy of Doonesbury.com (h/t Daphne) For about the eleventy thousandth time in my life, I’m moved to deeply regret the long, miserable three years I spent faithfully delivering the Oregonian, although it was, much to my chagrin at the time, a heavier and more widely subscribed rag back then, [...]
When one ponders what could possibly be wrong with us as a society when all our time, money, and political energy is devoted to developing a larger and more formidable military and police state, and in our spare time, all we manage to do is call gays icky and women sluts (and worse). Politics, to [...]