The 1920 US Census marked a historic milestone in American social history: For the first time a majority of Americans lived in urban metropolitan areas rather than in rural or small-town regions. That was nearly 100 years ago, and in the interim the migration to cities and suburbs has continued undiminished.
So why are we still [...]
‘Tis the season for Faux News to crank up its annual “Secularists War Against Christmas.”
Since Republicons are usually hysterians rather than historians, this page from our Puritan founder William Bradford (1590-1657) might be instructive:
“On the day called Christmas-day, the Governor called them out to work, (as was used) but the most of this new company [...]
The 2012 Republicon presidential primary campaign debuts Republicons’ new family values: Marrying the mistress with whom you were unfaithful to your previous wife.
Pictured here, serial adulterer Newt and his latest wife Callista Gingrich. (Is that necklace from Tiffany’s?)
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Twenty years ago I drew the ire of the governor of Virginia.
I was an instructor at a public community college (the second lowest genus on the higher education food chain), and L. Douglas Wilder was the governor. Virginia’s economy had slipped into recession, and the US was in the midst of a presidential primary campaign. [...]
Readers of a certain age will recall George H. W. Bush’s (i.e. George I, not his idiot boy, George II) characterization of Ronald Raygun’s proposed economic policies when they both were running for the Republicon presidential nomination in 1980: “voodoo economics.” Laurie Essig has a better metaphor for it: “zombie economics.”
Writing for the Chronicle of [...]
Republicon governor Rick Perry has declared a public day of prayer and is organizing a major national public prayer event, using the typical language of the 17th-century jeremiad: America in crisis . . . facing doom . . . must act now . . .
But what would Jesus do? Fortunately, we know without any biblical ambiguity, the [...]
OK, American; you’ve had a taste of what life under Republicons would be, and you don’t like it. As reported today, “Disapproval of Congress at Historic Level,” in the New York Times:
The debate over raising the debt ceiling, which brought the nation to the brink of default, has sent disapproval of Congress to its highest level [...]
George Packer, writing in the 25 July 2011 New Yorker:
The sociologist Max Weber, in his 1919 essay “Politics as a Vocation,” drew a distinction between “the ethic of responsibility” and “the ethic of ultimate ends”–between those who act from a sense of practical consequence and those who act from higher conviction, regardless of consequences. These [...]
Denizens of erotic culture and aficionados of American slang will know that “tea bagging” is the term of art for the practice of a man’s inserting his scrotum into the mouth of a sexual partner for the purpose of deriving pleasure. This sexual feat is sometimes performed (and photographically documented) while the passive party is [...]
James Fallows, writing on the Atlantic Monthly Web site, “Another Chart for Your Debt Ceiling Discussions,” graphically displays our current debt crisis:
“. . . the Bush-era tax cuts, extended last year under Obama, were the biggest single policy source of deficit increase over the past ten years. Therefore you can be for reducing deficits, or [...]
Donald Trump, frontrunner for the Republicon presidential nomination, revealed today that his hair was designed by American architect Frank Gehry. This revelation came on the heals of Trump’s victory in forcing the hand of President Obama to make available his alleged Hawaiian birth certificate. Since then critics and bloggers had begun to question the national [...]
Remember when right-wingnuts did a sting on Acorn (Andrew Breitbart’s agents posing as a pimp and ‘ho)? Remember when they tried the same sting recently on Planned Parenthood? Well, turnabout is fair play. Or, to quote the Bard: Hoist on their own petard. Ian Murphy of Buffalo Beast called up Gov. Scott Walker, posing as wealthy [...]
Thanks to Anderson Cooper of CNN for deconstructing Michelle Bachmann’s destruction of the historical record. Those who forget history are doomed to rewrite it to suit their own agendas.
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Ronald Reagan is sometimes praised by both sides of the political house for his concern that nuclear arms proliferation endangered world security. Contrary to ideologues on the Right, he understood that no limits on nuclear arms did not make the world a safer or more secure place. We were reminded of his legacy (and of [...]
Let’s call it what it is: right-wing terrorism. For well over a century, Americans have witnessed (though often with eyes closed and mouths shut) a countless number of right-wing terrorists, from “lone gunmen” (usually dismissed as pathological in order for Americans to evade the political implications of their violence) to organized hate groups (starting with [...]
President Obama is a lawyer (Harvard, 1991), but I’m sure glad that he’s not my lawyer, otherwise I could imagine this scene with a DA: “Right from the start let me say that my client is guilty as charged. Are there any other charges that you would like him to plead guilty to? OK, now [...]
Roger Ailes, Faux News CEO, recently characterized the executives of National Public Radio as Nazis several times in an interview after NPR fired news analyst Juan Williams for having made an impolitic comment about traditional Islamic garb. According to Ailes: “They are, of course, Nazis. They have a kind of Nazi attitude. They are the [...]
The Amazing Republicono Snake Oil Revival and Medicine Show was ridden out of town on a rail in 2006 and 2008, townspeople having discovered that its patent medicine not only didn’t work, it made people worse off. So one has to admire the persistence of the Amazing Republicono who hasn’t even changed the label, and [...]
I left Virginia over two years ago partly to shake the dust off my sandals of a state whose Republicon majority seemed more preoccupied with the nineteenth century than with the twenty-first. Here’s more positive evidence that I made the right move. Announced today in the Hartford Courant, the mayor of Connecticut’s capital, Hartford, Pedro [...]
How can a political party govern that doesn’t believe in government?
The biennial student government election at Uncle Sam Middle School is over, and the tweens have demonstrated their usual hormonal bipolarity. Yesterday’s Best Friends Forever are . . . so yesterday.
Case in point: A self-described liberal friend in Virginia who got her panties in a bunch because the Obama Administration recently defended in court a [...]
Like an alcoholic boyfriend, the Republicon Party wants you to believe that it has given up besotted binges of deficit spending.
It wants you to forget (or at least forgive) the fact that the national debt quadrupled under Ronald Raygun and George H.W. Bush, and doubled again under George W. Bush. It wants you to forgive [...]
Buying democracy, one race at a time.
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If the US were really a Communist dictatorship, as the Teabaggers and Republicons claim, President Obama would’ve put them all in jail.
Case in point: The Communist dictatorship of China, the place of manufacture of the computer on which you are reading this and the computer on which I am writing this.
China’s dictators imprisoned Liu Xiaobo [...]
What do Minister George Rekers; Pastor Ted Haggard, WA Legislator Richard Curtis, former congressman, Mark Foley, and Alabama Attorney General Troy King, and most recently Rev. Eddie Long (no relation to me!) have in common? Each one of them took rabid anti-gay positions in their public lives. Each one of them has been accused of [...]
