It’s quite dispiriting to write a blog, particularly about things that matter, when the available media is so maniacally obsessed with things that, well, don’t. So successful have the Republicans been in creating their post-reality “empire” that even those few in the media who know better are constantly reduced to anointing, say, Newt Gingrich, as [...]
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 didn’t take long. Perennial austerity advocate Robert J. Samuelson over at the WaPoo frets about the poor little feelings of America’s rich, in these troubled times: There are many theories about why inequality has increased, though no consensus: New technologies reward the highly skilled; globalization depresses factory wages; eroded union power does the same; [...]
UPDATED BELOW: (Saturday) Having had a somewhat longer commute than usual the past few weeks, I have once again become a daily New York Times reader, often to my considerable chagrin. For the last 15 years or so, as my local newspaper, the Oregonian, got thinner and thinner, I readily coughed up the extra [...]
In a more than usually desperate excuse for a column, even for the WaPoo, chickenhawk David Ignatius thinks he’s come up with a genius idea for resolving the simmering dispute between the oft-allied military dictatorships of Pakistan and the US over the sticky wicket of mercenary Raymond Davis, whose “diplomatic immunity” led him to think [...]
While it is widely understood that reality has a liberal bias, never is this simple fact so glaring as when some righty cabal gets busted cooking up an illegal dirty trick or two; the fact that they don’t accept reality, or must clumsily attempt to create it on the ground, always proves their undoing. So [...]
Reading what passes for Villager political analysis is never pleasant, but “Mouthpiece Theater’s” former co-star, Chris Cillizza, does it better than anyone else, albeit unintentionally. In the piece below, he attempts to avoid the elephant in the room, which is that the GOP base is too crazy to nominate an electable candidate, and instead finds [...]
One of the more annoying things (and there are many…) about Randian Righties is the way they repeatedly announce, against all evidence, that their destructive, rich-coddling economic policies are the One True Way, handed down to us by the God of the Market, and all we need to do is throw another virgin or two [...]
Thomas Jefferson, who was constantly and viciously hounded by his opponents in the press, once declared that, given the choice, he’d still rather have newspapers and no government than government and no newspapers. Fortunately, television had not yet been invented, so that Sally Hemings story took a couple of hundred years to take off; maybe [...]
Ted Koppel, one of the last eminences of the old broadcast news era, weighed in some days ago on the never-ending debate about how things just aren’t as august as they used to be (whenever that was) when it comes to informing the American people (instead of just yelling at them). Koppel targeted Fox News [...]