It’s been entertaining watching American public “discourse” since the election. (I use that word in its broadest, most ridiculous sense, since nothing that hinges so completely on self-absorption, rank ignorance and pathological dishonesty can be accurately characterized by such a noble word. But indulge me. I’ve been working on my irony lately.)
On the one hand you have conservatives fainting dead away that we’re now in the clutches of a “socialist” president. Never mind that these folks wouldn’t know a real socialist if he was gnawing their balls off. Never mind that most of these folks think “socialist” is the French word for Negro. Never mind that Obama demonstrably is to socialism what Joe the Plumber is to brie-sucking Northeastern intellectualism. As arch-conservative TV pundit Stephen Colbert says, “this is a fact-free zone.”
On the other you have the righteous outrage of the progressosphere, which feels six different kinds of betrayed by a president who promised them the moon and stars and has now left them to what looks like at least a four-year walk of shame. If I might borrow from an old fraternity joke, imagine the following scene from the Oval Office: Full Story »
There’s a wicked little meme is going around and it seems to have infected a lot of people we’d have hoped were immune. Unfortunately this mental and linguistic virus is particularly virulent, and left untreated it has the potential to be lethal.
I’m referring, of course, to the “Lone Wolf” Flu. It’s precisely the sort of bug we’d expect to strike conservative talk show hosts across the nation - and it has - but lately it’s turned up in what were once considered to be some of the most objective and sanitary environments in the American media landscape.
I’ll stop torturing the metaphor now, lest it seem like I’m treating the subject too lightly. Instead, let’s examine a couple of news items that do considerable damage to the truth of our domestic terror problem. First, a June 13 AP story bylined by Devlin Barrett and Eileen Sullivan came across the wires with this headline: “Shootings show threat of ‘lone wolf’ terrorists.” And yesterday the Wall St. Journal joined in with “FBI Seeks to Target Lone Extremists,” which explained that “[l]one-wolf offenders continue to be of great concern to law enforcement.” Full Story »
Your fellow Americans demand an answer — and we want it now. Just one simple question:
Are you deliberately trying to start a civil war?
Just answer the question. Yes or no. Don’t insult us with elisions, evasions, dithering, qualifications, or conditional answers. We need to know what your intentions are — and we need to know NOW. People are being shot dead in the streets of America at the rate of several per month now. You may not want responsibility for this — but the whackadoodles pulling the triggers make no bones about who put them up to this.
At the risk of putting too fine a point on it, we should note that since September 11, 2001, more innocent American citizens have been killed by anti-abortion activists and other fringe right terrorists than by al Qaeda. Oddly, we’re hearing no calls from Republican legislators or party leaders like Rush Limbaugh (or their Vichy Democrat allies) demanding that we invade Coeur d’Alene.
Dr. Tiller, who had performed abortions since the 1970s, had long been a lightning rod for controversy over the issue of abortion, particularly in Kansas, where abortion opponents regularly protested outside his clinic and sometimes his home and church. In 1993, he was shot in both arms by an abortion opponent but recovered.
He had also been the subject of many efforts at prosecution, including a citizen-initiated grand jury investigation. Full Story »
Break out the linguistic life jackets, folks. We’re about to be inundated with the overuse and abuse of the word mainstream with regard to President Obama’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court.
Politics is at its heart a battle for control of language and symbols. Now that the president has nominated Judge Sotomayor, [insert name of political party or faction here] will seek to [support | undercut] that nominee through [messaging | framing | "truth"]. Ideological control of mainstream, a word signifying ownership of the core values of a majority of Americans, is at stake. Full Story »
In the days following the murders at Columbine High School I visited the school and the grounds of Clement Park. Those walks produced this piece, which was originally published ten years ago today.
We have learned a great deal about the events that took place at Columbine since this essay was written (for instance, we now know that the “Cassie Said Yes” story never actually happened, and we also know that the whole “Trenchcoat Mafia” thing was also a media-propagated fiction). But it seemed to me that going back and revising to account for new information would damage the fabric of what I wrote in late April and early May of 1999. I have therefore elected to leave the factual inaccuracies in place. I do, however, note the spots containing errors with an asterisk (*).
Salon.com and Westword.com provide as thorough and accurate a picture as we are ever likely to have of the shootings and the aftermath, and I recommend them highly.
_________________
Sunday, May 2, 1999
It won’t stop raining, and nobody seems to care. Full Story »
Orson Scott Card is a barking fascist asshat. Let me illustrate.
I always marveled at how some of my friends worshiped the writing of Orson Scott Card. Maybe, I thought, it’s because we’re North Carolinians and he’s from Greensboro. From my perspective he was nothing special, at best, and has in the last couple of decades evolved into perhaps America’s most overrated science fiction author. Ender’s Game was prescient in its way - in a world where weaponry is so technologized that war is a video game, of course kids can be uber-warriors. But when the boy is made into some kind of equally uber moralist and philosopher (or whatever the hell Speaker for the Dead was about) I smelled the pungent aroma of self-indulgence that so often attends SF writers of a certain stripe.
The Alvin Maker series was even less bearable. We were doing fine in Seventh Son, clipping through an interesting enough little story (assuming you could get past the inexplicably patronizing treatment of Native American names) and then - the damnedest what the fuck passage in all of known literature. Full Story »
WASHINGTON (CNN) - Coming soon to a battleground state near you: a new effort to revive the image of the Republican Party and to counter President Obama’s characterization of Republicans as “the party of ‘no.’”
CNN has learned that the new initiative, called the National Council for a New America, will be announced Thursday.
It will involve an outreach by an interesting mix of GOP officials, ranging from 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain to Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor and the younger brother of the man many Republicans blame for the party’s battered brand: former President George W. Bush. Full Story »
Senator Arlen Specter’s announcement yesterday that he was defecting to the Democratic Party surprised a lot of people—but not me.
His move was a loooooooong time coming.
Specter ran into trouble with Conservatives in his own party way back in 1987 when he joined Democrats in defeating Ronald Regan’s nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court.
One of those Conservatives happened to be my grandfather. Full Story »
How did it happen? Why did it happen? There’s simply no way to measure how many hours have devoted to these questions in the ten years and four days since Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold opened fire at Columbine High School, and while we don’t (and never will) have all the answers, we do have some of them. Obviously a good bit of the discussion focuses on the individuals themselves, and other analyses cast a broader net, examining the social factors that shaped the individuals. In a way, the question we’re still debating perhaps boils down to nature vs. nurture. Were Harris and Klebold Natural Born Killers? Or are they better understood as by-products of deeper social trends and dynamics?
The answer is probably “All of the above,” but we can’t simply check C and be on our merry, uncritical way. Full Story »
I recently offered up an open letter to America’s progressive billionaires where I noted how much better conservatives have been historically at making best use of their intellectuals and at assuring that those laying the foundation for political action were taken care of. That is, the Daniel Bells of the world didn’t have to slave at two jobs to scrape together half a salary, and as a result they were able to do important work that paid off - and handsomely - for their patrons.
In truth, the problem runs deeper than just “our side’s” billionaires, or so it appears. It started the other day when some prominent Left Blogistanis decided they weren’t going to keep their mouths shut anymore. The first shot was fired in a Greg Sargent piece at Who Runs Gov: Full Story »
Rush starts, I think, to suggest that the caller isn’t really who he says he is, and by the end seems to allow that the guy may be a Republican, but not much of one. Full Story »
We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas. - Natalie Maines
I don’t even know the Dixie Chicks, but I find it an insult for all the men and women who fought and died in past wars when almost the majority of America jumped down their throats for voicing an opinion. It was like a verbal witch-hunt and lynching. - Merle Haggard
Last night over dinner the subject of The Dixie Chicks came up, and I got mad all over again. Which is unfortunate, because when you think about artists that talented the last thing on your mind ought to be anger. But still, it’s been six long years now since “the top of the world came crashing down,” and I can’t quite free myself of my rage at the staggering ignorance that led so many Americans to piss on the 1st Amendment by attempting to destroy the careers of Natalie Maines, Martie Maguire and Emily Robinson. Full Story »
American-style capitalism, sans regulation, has earned its present bad rap. Even so, some market mechanisms do work quite well. Commodities pricing is discovered and costs kept low because markets are very efficient at making sure that metals, oil, food, etc. are moved to where the demand is the highest from where the supply is greatest. Similarly, a market in traded sulfur emissions imposed by the Clean Air Act has enabled fossil fuel plants to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions (the main source of acid rain) dramatically since the market’s inception.
Markets don’t work for everything, however. The sulfur dioxide emissions market works because the effects are not hyper-localized - farmers in Kansas and Iowa won’t notice the difference between the emissions from coal plants in Denver, Boulder, or Fort Collins. However, in the case of mercury emissions from coal plants, an emissions market would be a very, very bad idea. Coal-produced mercury precipitates out of the air in a plume immediately downwind of the emissions source, and so there’s no way to fairly balance the increased emissions of one coal plant with the lower emissions of another. In this case, all the increased mercury emissions would to is poison more mothers and children.
But because markets work so well for so many things, the creation of a cap-and-trade market for carbon dioxide (CO2) makes a lot of sense. In a similar fashion to sulfur dioxide and unlike mercury emissions, CO2 emissions mix well with the atmosphere and so trading emission credits between one source and another is viable. Full Story »
In years to come, it seems likely that the ongoing civil suit brought against the University of Colorado by former professor Ward Churchill will provide students in many law classes with a lively case study to debate. If you aren’t already familiar with the details of the clusterfuck story, you can catch up at the NY Times and Boulder Daily Camera. If, at that point, you still haven’t slaked your thirst for data on all things Ward, you can keep on Googling here.
Buff U is pointing to all manner of irregularities in Churchill’s scholarship, asserting that he was fired for plagiarism. Ward’s attorneys have another theory: Full Story »
Dear Mr. Buffet, Mr. Gates, Mr. Turner, Mr. Soros, Ms. Winfrey, and any other hyper-rich types with progressive political leanings:
If this essay has, against all odds, somehow made its way to your desk, please, bear with me. It’s longish, but it winds eventually toward an exceedingly important conclusion. If you’ll give me a few minutes, I’ll do my best to reward your patience.
_______________
In the 2008 election, Barack Obama won a landmark political victory on a couple of prominent themes: “hope” and “change.” He has since been afforded ample opportunity to talk about these ideas, having inherited the nastiest economic quagmire in living memory and a Republican minority in Congress that has interpreted November’s results as a mandate to obstruct the public interest even more rabidly than it was doing before. Reactions among those of us who supported Obama have been predictably mixed, but even those who have been critical of his efforts to date are generally united in their hope that his win signaled the end of “movement conservatism” in the US. Full Story »
Obama was in town yesterday to sign his stimulus bill. This victory, the first great moment of the Obama administration, was a hard-fought one earned in the face of fierce opposition from fiscally responsible Congressional Republicans. These staunch guardians of the American purse strings have proven, time and again, their willingness to combat wastefulness and ill-advised spending by…
Let’s go back to one month after 9/11. The country just suffered its worse terrorist attack in the nation’s history and was going through another. Weaponized anthrax was being sent through the mail targeting politicians and the 4th estate. The intelligence agencies failed catastrophically and didn’t cooperate with each other. The nation panicked and didn’t know if it could protect itself.
33And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.
34Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:
35For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:
36Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.
37Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?
38When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee?
39Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?
40And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
- Matthew 25: 33-40
I was reminded of this little passage today as I reviewed these numbers: Full Story »
A modest proposal, perhaps.
There’s a wicked little meme is going around and it seems to have infected a lot of people we’d have hoped were immune. Unfortunately this mental and linguistic virus is particularly virulent, and left untreated it has the potential to be lethal.
By Sara Robinson
Two people have been shot at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC.
Orson Scott Card is a barking fascist asshat. Let me illustrate.
You have to love the headline: 
Senator Arlen Specter’s announcement yesterday that he was defecting to the Democratic Party surprised a lot of people—but not me. 
Part two in a series
In years to come, it seems likely that the ongoing civil suit brought against the University of Colorado by former professor Ward Churchill will provide students in many law classes with a lively case study to debate. If you aren’t already familiar with the details of the 
Obama was in town yesterday to sign his stimulus bill. This victory, the first great moment of the Obama administration, was a hard-fought one earned in the face of fierce opposition from fiscally responsible Congressional Republicans. These staunch guardians of the American purse strings have proven, time and again, their willingness to combat wastefulness and ill-advised spending by…
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