A dozen years or so ago I was complaining to my German friend, Marcus, about the dreadful loss of historic architecture in Portland and all across the country after WWII, and he said something that I found hilarious at the time but in retrospect, not so much. (Nazi accent) “After you destroyed our cities, you [...]
I just don’t know what it is about Republicans and the 1950′s, but you may rest assured it isn’t the top tax rate of 91%, the high rate of unionization, or even Ike and Mamie. No, the things they like about the 1950′s are all the things normal people recognize today as, tacky, retrograde, and [...]
Considering that Richard Cohen has been a Villager in good standing since before I could drink legally, typing up dumbed-down Broderisms at the WaPoo with thudding regularity, you’d think he’d have at least absorbed a little bit of what was going on in that town all those years. But no…. it seems he thinks that [...]
I’ve always had a particular loathing for Andrew Sullivan, at least partly because he reminded me, with everything he said, of all the self-hating gay Republicans (and they were shockingly and disappointingly numerous) I met and summarily dumped during my peak tart years. I’ve heard each such drearily unthinking arguments countless times before from someone [...]
“That’s one of the nice things. I mean, part of the beauty of me is that I’m very rich. So if I need $600 million, I can put $600 million myself,” he said. –Donald Trump, in an interview with Ashleigh Banfield, wherein he also announced that something about President’ Obama’s birth and past is a [...]
When I finally stopped laughing, spraying booze all over, and dumbfoundedly slapping my forehead over Wisconsin Governor (!) Scott Walker’s fawning and delusional 20-minute kiss-up to an anonymous caller unconvincingly posing as uber-oligarch David Koch captured on tape, I got to thinking. What, in heaven’s name, could make a person so gloriously, blindly lacking in [...]
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 [...]
UPDATE: Senator Bernie Sanders agrees with the Hag; wants NBC/Comcast merger stopped in light of Olbermann’s firing…. “Comcast has not closed the transaction for NBC Universal and has no operational control at any of its properties, including MSNBC… We pledged from the day the deal was announced that we would not interfere with NBC Universal’s [...]
As a kid growing up in the 1960′s and 70′s, I really believed that America was rapidly becoming a better place, and the future looked bright. In first grade and kindergarten, I attended a school in a nearby “ghetto” neighborhood, where the “War on Poverty” lured privileged white kids like myself by offering gym classes, [...]
Increasingly it seems that Republican candidates are, in the post-Reagan era, chosen solely as spokesmodels; it’s just like choosing an anchorwoman at Fox News, really. Not much upstairs, but what a staircase… You’re hired. This trend has two roots: the first is that Republicans fundamentally believe that intellect, energy, and accomplishment are only found, [...]