Here is the health-care reform agenda of Republican politicians and the right-wingnuts (pundits and conspiracy theorist deadenders) who constitute the aptly-named Republican “base”:
Defeat Obama.
That’s it. It’s just that simple.
No innovative health policy. No creative health proposal. Just a political calculation: Defeat Obama on this big one, and he becomes a lame duck. Then try to make [...]
As widely reported in the news media, the preeminent scholar of African-American studies, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a public intellectual known to a large American audience for his PBS programs on Africa and on African-American genealogy, was arrested at his home in Cambridge, MA, after he allegedly yelled at police who had come [...]
For two decades, the Southern Poverty Law Center has been warning the Pentagon about the presence of military personnal associated with organized hate groups enlisted in the services. Apparently the Pentagon is more concerned about presence of gay and lesbian people in the service, however, since the FBI reports that the neo-Nazi presence has grown.
As [...]
The summer solstice has come and gone here in Connecticut, with no observable change in the weather–the same chill and damp as all spring.
The same cannot be said elsewhere in the US, where the solstice seems to have marked the beginning of the Republican adultery season.
First, Senator John Ensign, Republican from Nevada, disclosed his marital [...]
Douglas J. Amy, professor of Politics at Mount Holyoke College had a problem: An established scholar with three scholarly books on his curriculum vitae, Amy decided that he had another book to write but one that would reach a wide general audience. However, when he wrote the book, he found no trade press (which would [...]
Like most boys, my second objects of infatuation and attachment (after my parents) were cars.
Growing up in the 1950s and 60s, my friends and I could tell the nuances of styling changes from one year to the next (which baffled my fifth-grade teacher, Miss Keefe), and could even recognize the make of an auto by [...]
The New York Times reports today Obama Is on the Spot as Rulings Aid Gay Partners: “Just seven weeks into office, President Obama is being forced to confront one of the most sensitive social and political issues of the day: whether the government must provide health insurance benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees.”
Every presidential [...]
In a caustic New York Times op-ed entitled “Three Blind Mice” columnist Charles M. Blow characterizes the new Republican dictatorship troika of Limbaugh, Steele, and Jindal as an “axis of drivel.”
Blow blogs at By the Numbers.
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According to a report in today’s Hartford (Connecticut) Courant (where the Connecticut Supreme Court has recently ruled in favor of same-sex marriages so the General Assembly is putting together the legal framework):
Church: Florists Should Be Allowed To Say No To Gay Weddings
By DANIELA ALTIMARI | The Hartford Courant
March 7, 2009
Concerned that the state’s new same-sex [...]
It wasn’t enough that the Right wing, generously funded by the Mormon Church, succeeded in passing a constitutional amendment in California ending same-sex marriage. Now Ken Starr, Bill Clinton’s old nemesis, and the Prop 8 Legal Defense Fund have filed legal briefs defending the constitutionality of Prop 8 and seeking to nullify the marriages of [...]
Those tax-cut ‘hos of the Republican Party–do you remember them, Incurious George’s lap dancers–are shocked, shocked to find deficit spending in the the Obama and Dem economic stimulus package.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, shown here with the affluent white men who frequently constitute his posse . . .
and John Boehner, shown here with Ohio troops [...]
Want to find out who contributed in support of California’s Proposition 8, the constitutional amendment that removed same-sex marriage in the Golden State, and want to find out how much they contributed? You can!
Visit EightMaps!
Then you gotta figure out, what’s contractor David Zuniga’s problem? Or Gary Shepherd Masonry? Or Marina Landscape? Or Jonathan Starr (doesn’t [...]
After dropping off my holiday visitor at the airport, I undertook an expedition to post-holiday shopping in Buckland Hills, CT, where exhausted consumer tribes had assembled in the annual Gathering of the Nation of Shoppers.
Banana Republic features clothes with “modern fit”; I suspect I am suited for “early-modern fit.”
Anthropologie (a women’s clothing and gift store [...]
David Brooks (columnist for the New York Times) has announced his “Sidney Awards” for “long-form journalism and thought,” an antidote to the mental McNuggets of blogs and sound bites. His picks include:
”In the Basement of the Ivory Tower” by Professor X, Atlantic Monthly, June 2008
Sending everyone under the sun to college is a noble initiative. [...]
News reports and editorialists have pointed to many indicators of our parlous economy, but news today chilled me.
NPR journalist Ketzel Levine, along with 64 other NPR employees has been laid off, according to an article in the New York Times. Levine has worked with NPR for over 30 years, the Times reports. She has had [...]
The Republican Party didn’t get it in the 2008 elections, so there’s no reason to expect that the Grand Old Clueless would get now even when the inauguration of Barck Obama is only weeks away.
The New York Times reports:
. . . a candidate for party chairman from Tennessee, Chip Saltsman, distributed [as his holiday greeting] [...]
Another Obama pastoral kerfuffle.
This time involving a pastor on the Evangelical Right. Obama’s inaugural invocational invitation of Rick Warren (he of megachurch fame and The Purpose Driven Life franchise), a vigorous opponent of queer marriage rights in California.
Queer activists in a uproar. Let’s hope that this is something more than the mouse that roared or [...]
Was interviewed tonight by Emily Corwin on “The Thought Spot” (WHUS 91.7). Go visit her ‘blog at http://www.thethoughtspot.org/
On election day 2008, millions of Californians voted to change the state constitution to take away a basic civil liberty from other citizens: to join in marriage with the partner of one’s choice.
You can either cry or laugh.
Enough with the tears. Here’s Prop 8 — The Musical.
See more Jack Black videos at Funny or Die
Conceived [...]
Yesterday’s terrorist attacks in Mumbai (formerly Bombay, a global financial capital) and car bomb outside the American embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, remind us of the instability in Central/South Asia. India, a secular democracy, has a large (over 100 million citizens) Islamic minority, and the Hindu majority country also has a cadre of militant Hindu extremists. [...]
For years I had shopped at Circuit City, the Virginia-based electronics retailer, for a variety of products. News that they are filing for bankruptcy, however, comes as no surprise.
When Circuit City fired experienced and knowledgeable retail sales staff a year or so ago but continued to pay its executives more than those at up-and-coming Best [...]
“When from our exile God leads us home again,
we’ll think we’re dreaming.
Then lead us home, bring us to life again,
even as rivers which, in the desert,
when the first rain falls,
start flowing again.
Sow seed in sadness, harvest in gladness.
A man goes his way and sows seed with tears.
Back he comes, singing,
sheaves on his shoulder.”
–Psalm 126 (translated [...]
The Counsel for the Army Joseph Welch earned his place in history when, responding to Senator McCarthy at the McCarthy hearings in the early nineteen-fifties, Welch said, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” McCarthy was infamous for destroying lives and careers by using guilt-by-association [...]
This handy calculator will give you a ballpark estimate on how much your taxes will be reduced under the Obama tax plan. (This calculator is only an estimate; I’m still taking my taxes to my accountant, Ham Dwyer.)
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Don’t get me wrong. I’ve known Republicans all my life. Some of my best . . . well, some of my friends, are Republicans. Some of my extended family are Republicans. Heck, when I was a teenager we even had black neighbors who were Republican (because it was the Party of Lincoln). So for over [...]
