(3 comments) SHARE        Thursday, August 19, 2010
Mosques, Muslims and America in Darkness First of all, the Cordoba House is not a "Ground Zero Mosque." It is a Muslim community center, it is two blocks away from the site, and in a neighborhood that already has a mosque...and a strip club, and a lot of other stuff that makes talk about "desecrating hallowed ground" sound like the nonsense that it is.

(1 comments) SHARE        Wednesday, August 11, 2010
The Bad Old Days It started with Bush v. Gore, and went from there into a bunch of faith-based baloney, a huge tax cut for rich people who didn't need it then and need it less now, a ban on stem cell research because sick people can screw themselves...and that was only nine months and ten days into the beginning of the last decade. It got so much worse on the eleventh day.

SHARE        Wednesday, August 4, 2010
New Dawn, Old Story As for the 65% of U.S. soldiers who will be out of Iraq at the end of the month, don't expect any tickertape parades or tearful, permanent homecomings. If they make it back to the States at all, many of them will be retrained and retooled for deployment in Afghanistan to support President Obama's escalation of that war.

(5 comments) SHARE        Saturday, July 31, 2010
The Missing Piece Meets the Big O The public's collective impression of Obama's performance to date has been thoroughly skewed by the absence in our national discussion of the last guy to occupy the Oval. The media wants you to forget George W. Bush ever happened. Don't fall for it.

(2 comments) SHARE        Friday, July 23, 2010
The Dog Whistles og-whistle politics, also known as the use of code words, is a type of political campaigning or speechmaking employing coded language that appears to mean one thing to the general population but has a different or more specific meaning for a targeted subgroup of the audience.

(1 comments) SHARE        Friday, July 23, 2010
Bring It On Instead of any sort of high-minded debate on the issues of the day-Afghanistan, Iraq, energy policy, the Gulf, the economy, the banks, the mortgage crisis, the environment-we will be subjected to four stupid months of name-calling, obstructionism and general nonsense, again. there's a lot of high-level conversation in the GOP ranks about championing the presidency of George W. Bush as a reason to vote Republican in November.

(6 comments) SHARE        Thursday, July 15, 2010
Seeing the Elephant If the beyond-terrible GOP option seems valid to a majority of people after everything we've been through, if voters who know better can't find the motivation to pull the lever and keep the worst from happening, well, then Mencken was right: we get what we deserve.

SHARE        Friday, July 9, 2010
Playing the "Too Big To Fail" Card Capitalism, as practiced in the United States and, unfortunately, throughout much of the world is, at bottom, a fraud and a sham. The cementing of "Too big to fail" into our public discourse is proof enough of that. Capitalism without meaningful regulation is a ticking time bomb, and that time bomb has gone off with both a terrible bang and a pathetic whimper.

(2 comments) SHARE        Sunday, July 4, 2010
Ridiculous America Happy birthday, you ridiculous nation. You are a great and terrible place, and you must do better. Not just because you have to, which you do, but because you can. You have the necessary pieces, and you have the potential. Go.

SHARE        Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Summer in Iraq It would be a hell of a thing if this country, its people and its "mainstream" media could focus on more than one thing at a time, wouldn't it? Because we are still at war in Iraq, too.

(3 comments) SHARE        Thursday, June 24, 2010
These Empty Spaces At no time in history had any nation premised its existence on the bedrock truth that all of us are created equal until the Founders did so in Philadelphia, and in doing so, they created a self-improving process of national growth and redemption that functions through the will of the people alone. Too many of us, including our president and congressional representatives, have forgotten this.

(2 comments) SHARE        Thursday, June 17, 2010
Enough of This Crap, Part II: This Note's For You There are a great many people like me, who for reasons of employment, family, health or whatever, are unable to saddle up and head to the Gulf to do what needs doing. To you, I have this request: put this information in front of any and all whom you think has the time and capacity to give of themselves in this time of crisis.

(32 comments) SHARE        Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Enough of This Crap Perhaps having thousands of people descend upon the Gulf is a dumb idea, not feasible, even crazy. But imagine what would happen if we did just that. Imagine Wall Street thronged with citizens whose futures have been looted, refusing to leave until real change is finally effected. Imagine what would happen if this slumbering, pissed off nation rose up and got moving again.

(3 comments) SHARE        Friday, June 11, 2010
Our Fault, Too We are learning a savage lesson in the Gulf. We are witnessing the end of a way of life we have become all too deeply accustomed to. We drive, we eat, we fly, we vote, and in doing so, we share the blame for what is happening, and what is to come.

(10 comments) SHARE        Wednesday, June 9, 2010
I Come to Praise Helen Thomas, Not to Bury Her Frauds. Mouthpieces. Dupes. Willing participants. Colluders. Conspirators. Traitors. That's what much of the press has become over the last ten years, but not Thomas. Never Thomas.

(1 comments) SHARE        Thursday, June 3, 2010
Down to Raisins Mud to fill the hole, and now movie directors to save the day. You really can't make this stuff up. Hurricane season began on Tuesday, the saw got stuck, and the end of August is more than 70 days away. Christmas is too massive to contemplate, but contemplate it we must, because we are down to raisins with this thing.

(2 comments) SHARE        Saturday, May 29, 2010
Top Kill Indeed There are millions of gallons of oil threatening thousands of miles of coastlines, ecosystems and livelihoods. Nobody knows how much there is, or where it will appear, or when. It's about to be brutally hot exactly where the clean-up needs to happen, and a whole slew of hurricanes and tropical storms are on the way.

(2 comments) SHARE        Monday, May 24, 2010
Two Stories, One Truth That front page on Monday told me everything I needed to know about how it is in America today. I knew it already, but those two stories were like getting slapped in the face with an oil-murdered fish.

SHARE        Thursday, May 20, 2010
Short Tales From Bizarro World, Part CDXX the Tea Party is for real. Not really, not in any larger national sense, but they are certainly a force within the Republican Party now, and boy, oh boy, it is going to get wildly entertaining from here. While the Tea Party itself is largely a creation of Big Media's desire to apply "balance" where none actually exists, like it or not, their focus on this ridiculous phenomenon has borne some bitter fruit for the GOP.

(2 comments) SHARE        Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Killing Our World We've been through so much in the last ten years. So much damage has been done in so many places and in so many ways. Millions of people have died in wars and acts of terrorism, of disease and starvation and neglect and atrocity.