Bereft as they’ve always been for any policies that might actually benefit working Americans, the Republican Party has instead had a strategy of making friends by finding enemies, and happily, this approach turns out to be just as successful at the real goal, influencing people, but without those nagging obligations friendship can entail. No one [...]
One of the most infuriating things about dealing with a cuckoo person is that they simply don’t have separate mental boxes for “real things” and “imagined things.” Their anger, fear, and persecution fantasies are based on things that never happened, won’t happen, and certainly aren’t happening now, but if you try to explain this they’ll [...]
In the wake of the inciteful words and subsequent violence from the right following the health care vote, it didn’t come as much of a surprise to me that no Republican dared to utter an unqualified denunciation of even the acts themselves, much less the violent rhetoric from Fox and talk radio that provoked them. [...]
For about the thousandth time, the Republicans are gleefully announcing the death of the Democratic Party, assuming correctly that the dead are about the only ones they can beat, and even then not always. What is being said about the health care reform could be old tape of what Republicans have said about any non-right [...]
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 [...]
Lord, but have we been hearing a whole lot about “freedom” lately, and how “government” is its enemy. This message which would have been considered by our lately revered but strategically unremembered founders to be something of a slap in the face, but in today’s climate of unabashed corporate ownership of both our “free” press [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]