Yesterday Glenn Beck compared health care reform to, among other things, the New Deal (which is only scary to his Social-Security drawing audience, natch..) and, get this– Pearl Harbor. Now, really. Obama has nearly three years left in office; what, in heaven’s name, is Beck going to invoke next? Not that anyone in his [...]
It seems that Moody’s, one of the insightful bond rating services that notoriously rated Wall Street junk AAA in the years leading up to the crash, is finally getting tough. Not with the banksters, though, but with the US, UK, and other governments, who, according to this infallible oracle, face structural debt that must be [...]
In Jessica Mitford’s hilarious memoir of her time in the Communist Party, “A Fine Old Conflict,” she outlines the indignities great and small suffered by Americans who, for one reason or another, were “premature anti-fascists,” and thus subject to the long arm of the law for decades thereafter. A product of an eccentric and famous [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]