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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Well, today (and I can’t believe it’s taken this long,…) we had our first Wonder Bread version of 9/11, and it does kind of make you realize why all these loser whities got so worked up about the first one. In short, those habibs have it all over on us for both audacity and effectiveness. [...]
Sheesh, just when I was complaining about this war business again, with the existing two already lost the righties have picked out a neighbor or two to toss on the pile, and from the looks of it, Pakistan’s already on top. It was an awkward revelation when a dozen Americans were killed (and possibly a [...]
UPDATED BELOW:
I continue to be haunted by the right-wing BS I encountered at OregonLive yesterday, and the stunning success it represents in recruiting committed followers to some of the most reprehensible and elitist ideas ever conceived, all in the name of a twisted and yes, Hitlerian “populism.” Reagan may have been a doddering old [...]
When I was a kid back in the 70’s, it was easy to believe that racism in America was on the way out; no one I knew, and certainly no one I respected, was openly racist unless they were old, dumb, and/or ignorant. Racism still existed, of course, but it was as embarrassing in polite [...]
That was the name of a punk band that played at Sigma Nu during my freshman year at U of O, way back in 1982, and at the time I didn’t yet see that America was becoming that; I was still a Republican, after all. We went from the Great Society to the Punitive Society [...]
Ever since Nixon, the American Right has essentially given up on facts, logic, and evidence, preferring to focus on comic book narratives wherein they’re always the plucky, all-American heroes, fighting valiantly against forces of pure evil. Unable to sell the efficacy of any of their policy goals on the merits, the world has been imaginatively [...]
Just when most Amercans were beginning to think that part of our problem might be that we’re in too many wars, the Washington Ignoratti declare, with the characteristic oracular certainty that is their unfortunate hallmark, that the real problem is too few. After all, where’s our 9/12 spirit, now that all those hypothetically glorious wars [...]