I was anxiously awaiting the Murdoch hearings in Parliament this morning, when another horrible rainy day kept me home longer than usual, so I popped into the Guardian, and saw this. My heart leapt. It seems that just minutes after ol’ Rupert denied all responsibility for the hacking scandal, repeatedly and often angrily, some [...]
Well, it looks as though ol’ Rupert Murdoch found a suitably Galtian solution to his little crime spree as it started to get hot: fire a whole bunch of random people, except, of course, those responsible. On Sunday, the undoubtedly checkered 168-year history of The News of the World comes to an abrupt and ignominious [...]
Just when I was contentedly glorying in the delicious schadenfreude of the Wisconsin spring elections, amid the predictable and plaintive wailing about election fraud from the usual suspects, I popped into the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel for another satisfying jolt but instead found this: In a political bombshell, the clerk in a Republican stronghold is set to release [...]
As though hearing the dependably buffoonish Newt Gingrich suddenly smoke the peace bong while all the most (formerly) warmongering congressional Republicans waxed foreboding about the “open-ended” costs (!) of our third (or so) war in Libya wasn’t enough, yesterday I came across a copy of The Economist, which appears to be a surprising new member [...]
UPDATED BELOW: (Saturday) Having had a somewhat longer commute than usual the past few weeks, I have once again become a daily New York Times reader, often to my considerable chagrin. For the last 15 years or so, as my local newspaper, the Oregonian, got thinner and thinner, I readily coughed up the extra [...]
What seems to define modern Republicanism as we approach the 2012 elections is a firm, Randian belief that the only acceptable model for governance be that of a particularly ruthless and avaricious corporation beset by a self-interested and narcissistic CEO bent on looting it. Like their corporate sponsors, Republicans have abandoned any sense of creating [...]
In a more than usually desperate excuse for a column, even for the WaPoo, chickenhawk David Ignatius thinks he’s come up with a genius idea for resolving the simmering dispute between the oft-allied military dictatorships of Pakistan and the US over the sticky wicket of mercenary Raymond Davis, whose “diplomatic immunity” led him to think [...]
While it is widely understood that reality has a liberal bias, never is this simple fact so glaring as when some righty cabal gets busted cooking up an illegal dirty trick or two; the fact that they don’t accept reality, or must clumsily attempt to create it on the ground, always proves their undoing. So [...]
It’s funny how some people don’t really become legendary until they’re dead, and there’s a reason for it; their carefully crafted images never squared with the reality, and each day they continued in public life they could only grow smaller in the eyes of their fans. Leaving the planet, then, turned out to be quite [...]
Reading what passes for Villager political analysis is never pleasant, but “Mouthpiece Theater’s” former co-star, Chris Cillizza, does it better than anyone else, albeit unintentionally. In the piece below, he attempts to avoid the elephant in the room, which is that the GOP base is too crazy to nominate an electable candidate, and instead finds [...]