This Vanity Fair profile of Sarah Palin by Michael Joseph Gross hit the web yesterday. Let’s hope it does for her career what the VF profile of General Stanley McChrystal did for his.
Jane Mayer’s profile of the Kochs, David and Charles, in The New Yorker a couple of weeks ago also helps to put a little sunlight on the monsters behind the Tea Party. If nothing else, it shows that Rupert Murdoch isn’t the only evil supervillian trying to take over the world. Now we just need a real-life James Bond to take these motherfuckers out.
Matt Taibbi is up to his usual snuff with a Rolling Stone post about the recent primary elections and the influence the Tea Party did and did not have on the outcome, and the insidious race-baiting of Murdoch’s FOX News.
First a small bit of context for the first one: I was simply gobsmacked by this Huffington Post story (pointed out by Jack Cluth) that twigged out something that went unreported in the “20% of Americans think Obama is a Muslim” story from last week: 52% of Republicans believe that Osama “probably or definitely” wants to impose Islamic Sharia law on the United States. I will let you ponder the rank stupidity of that while you look at this Venn diagram (via Scott Underwood)
Graphic #2 is, as I say, only marginally related, as it is more specifically about the Iraq War, but considering the lame bit of political theater from Obama last night, it’s worth recalling:
Make of these data points what you will, my friends.
Earlier this year, when the health care reform bill finally made it through Congress, Representative Patrick Kennedy left this little card at the gravesite of his father, Senator Ted Kennedy. The card reads “Dad — The Unfinished Business is done”. Universal health care was the grand cause of the last thirty years of Ted Kennedy’s career, and his death at this time last year came just as the final battle for passage was beginning.
Charlie Pierce (or Charles P. Pierce, as he is usually styled in print), who writes mainly for the Boston Globe, wrote this blog post for Esquire magazine on the anniversary of Ted Kennedy’s death, asking a very real and very important question: who exactly will step up to the plate and be the voice of liberal conscience in the enormous void left by Kennedy’s death? A pullquote:
The former could be replaced, and has been, most notably by a president whose official crest ought to be half-a-loaf of bread, and who now finds himself battling the forces not only of an intractable political opposition, but also the undeniable power of clear and uncompromising public bullshit. It is the latter Teddy that this president needed the most but, looking around at his putative allies within his own party, and assuming that the president is unwilling or unable to do it himself, there was nobody willing or able to step into the role. While it was unquestionably surprising that Kennedy was replaced in the Senate by a stealth Republican named Scott Brown, it is altogether shocking that he has yet to be replaced within his own party by someone willing to be the obstreperous lefty voice to counter an increasingly shrill and increasingly manic Republican Right.
There is an enormous amount of unfinished business to be accomplished, and yet once again the noise machine of the right has brought everything to a (literally) screeching halt over building a “mosque” (or, what Pierce equally mischaracterizes as a “culinary school”; it is neither) two blocks away from the World Trade Center, and STILL not one progressive leader can find a spine or a set of testicles to put the howler monkeys in their place and get refocused on problems far more likely to sink us all than the opening of a cultural center. The vacuum of leadership in this country is palpable, and with each passing day the lack of a strong countervalent force to undo the machinations of the right draws us to a point of no return into chaos. I don’t think that the presence of Ted Kennedy would be the only thing forestalling that, but clearly the role he played was critical and can’t go unfilled much longer. I just wish I had the slightest idea who might do that.
(tip o’ the hat to blog-buddy Steve for clueing me in on the Pierce post)
Topic #1 for the month of August has been and continues to be the ugly return of racism in American politics. The very thin veneer of anti-Muslim sentiment that has been driving the “Ground Zero Mosque” story grows thinner and thinner every day, as the video of the black guy who was mobbed by the anti-Muslim protesters in New York clearly demonstrates, and as the nonsense about Barack Obama being Muslim has now seemingly infected somewhere around a quarter of the entire population. It’s “Scary Black People” Month 24/7 on FOX, as Rachel Maddow recently pointed out, and “Muslim” is just the code-word-du-jour for a certain word that rhymes with Tigger.
But racially-tinged politics and the threat of ethnic violence has been popping up all over Europe, as well. Writing at Project Syndicate, World Jewish Congress president Ronald S. Lauder decries the return of violent anti-Semitism and a series of incidents in the Swedish city of Malmö. Confounding the issue, he says, is state-sanctioned anti-Semitism playing into the hands of anti-Israel Muslims living in European countries, even as Muslims themselves find their own battles with intolerance.
International financier George Soros also has an article at Project Syndicate about the efforts of a number of European governments to expel the Roma people from their countries. The Roma are more commonly, though derogatorily, known as “Gypsies”, and have been a persecuted ethnic minority for centuries. Not unlike the Jews prior to the foundation of Israel, the Roma have no home country to speak of. They mostly come from Southeastern Europe, but through diaspora have ended up in just about every country. The Roma are highly stigmatized as a “criminal element” throughout Europe, but the recent actions in France and Italy to expel them are unusual in targeting the ethnicity as a whole as a criminal group, sadly reminiscent of pre-war imperial times.
The BBC reports that the British department store Selfridge’s will officially roll out its Christmas shopping season this year on AUGUST 2. But American retail chain Toys R Us has them beat with a “Christmas In July” sale that runs this week. (although, as far as I can tell, that’s just a sale and not [...]
On Friday, I decided to stop having Facebook scrape and post my blog feed. I just don’t feel like blog posts fit the very ephemeral vibe of FB, and, frankly, it irritates the living crap out of me when people post comments about the blog posts on FB instead of posting them here. I am [...]
In my copious spare time, usually whilst sitting in the waiting area at Charlotte’s karate studio, I have been making slow but steady progress toward adding tags to all the posts on this site. As of right now, I have completed tagging all the way back to April 1, 2008. The current archive of this [...]
Just the other day I posted about a young man from Nepal who was trying to get into the Guinness Book of World Records as the shortest man in the world. He’s only 22 inches tall, compared to the 29-inch tall He Pingping of China, who is the current record holder. Well, WAS the current [...]
boobcheese tickle fights child actor suicides Betty White Zombie Farrah Fawcett Canadian pissing habits that milkaholic Lindsay ChatRoulette whatever half-assed thing Google did this week out-of-control Toyotas
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we [...]
I recently posted about the use of menhaden in making fish oil dietary supplements and the potential risk that poses to the entire Atlantic Ocean ecosystem. One of the alternatives to using menhaden for omega-3 supplements is algae oil, because algae is the primary diet of the menhaden and is actually the source of all [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT. Since you cannot click [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and neatly into [...]
This week Barack Obama committed the United States to at least two more years of war, 30,000 troops in harm’s way for no other reason than saving face, and umpteen billions of dollars wasted FOR NO GOOD REASON WHATSOEVER and we are inundated with: Tiger Woods proving he knows how to put it in the [...]
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT. Since you cannot click [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and neatly into [...]
