There was this annoyingly triumphant song we used to sing in school about what a keen place Oregon was back in 1915 or so, and even as a kid I thought it was weird. The chorus ended with, “Forward on and on… Hail to thee, land of heroes, my O-re-gon.” Never mind that the lyricist [...]
Back in the days when Hitler comparisons were verboten, that is, when we had a far-right President whose social, military, and civil liberties policies looked a lot like Der Fuhrer, I often got a laugh out of them. Hitler, after all, in addition to making the trains run on time, hosted a successful Olympics, built [...]
One thing we’ve all noticed by now about the right is their incomparable message discipline; as soon as one of the smarter ones comes up with a deliberately misleading three-second, fact-bereft emotional appeal, it is immediately disseminated to the minions and they all say it, verbatim, until they’re told to say something else. When I [...]
Today on his radio show, Ed Schultz of MSNBC continued his often lonely fight for universal health care by pointing out the rank hypocrisy of the religious right in its silence, or worse, opposition, to making health care available to all Americans. Quoting the bible, he spoke of Jesus’ commitment to feeding the poor, [...]
The birthers, ‘baggers and death panelists, alarming and aberrant as they seem on the surface, are nothing but the latest manifestation of a drearily familiar Republican tactic; crassly and audaciously projecting their own least desirable traits on Democrats to delegitimize them since they can no longer beat them. Having nothing to offer the American people [...]