Via 3Quarks Daily comes a link to this article in the Boston Review by WIlliam Hogeland which looks at the century-old disconnect between liberals/progressives and populists. The question is often asked by liberals why populists seem to work against their own self-interests by embracing the political narrative of the right, which is far more interested in the success of the rich rather than the poor. Hogeland does a nice job of explaining the philosophical roots of populism, which tend to win out over the practicalities of leftist reform, and uses the career of William Jennings Bryan as an example of how populist movements are steered rightward by populist demagogues.

As Hogeland says, in the end Bryan was a political leader without any meaningful political portfolio. He lost several runs for the Presidency, but remained a divisive and polarizing figure well into the 1920s, when he finally exhausted his capital in the Scopes Trial. His political legacy, however, is alive and well even today. Toward the end of the article, Hogeland finally turns his attention to the Tea Party as the most recent inheritor of populist fervor and the all-too-familiar figure of Sarah Palin as the modern-day Bryan. Ultimately, though, he is mostly critical of contemporary liberals who seem unwilling or unable to escape the trap that populists have been setting for them for a hundred years.

Needless to say, Maher has caught some flack for using “The N Word”, but not a ton, since no less than Queen Sarah herself was so vocal in defending Dr. Laura Schlesinger a few weeks ago. Seems context really IS everything, eh?

Not in the clip, but quoted elsewhere is this remark from Maher about overstating American greatness:

I am not like Mitt Romney, whose book is called ‘No Apology, The Case For American Greatness,’ Really? You know always waving the big foam number one finger. We’re not number one in most things. We’re number one in military, we’re number one in money, we’re number one in fat toddlers, meth labs, and people we send to prison. We’re not number one in literacy, money spent on education, we’re not even number one in social mobility. Social mobility means basically the American dream, the ability of one generation to do better than the next. We’re tenth. That’s like Sweden coming in tenth in Swedish meatballs.

Mmm, Swedish meatballs…

Required reading:

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.

Christopher Hitchens proves that he isn’t dead yet by giving the ol’ one-two to the Beckapalooza of last weekend. As infuriating as he is, we are going to sorely miss Hitch when he is gone. (If you’ve got the time, I also recommend this long video featuring interviews with teabaggers at the Beckapalooza for an up-close-and-personal look at the terminally stupid)

The always-funny “stupid customer” website Not Always Right.com had a little precautionary tale about what happens when teabaggers show up to vote.

And here’s a little history lesson about the origins of the Tea Party and its ilk:

This just in from the Department of the Screamingly Obvious: The New York Times did a little demographic polling of teabaggers and found that most of them are wealthy, well-educated, middle-aged white Republican men. Whodathunkit?!?!? This group’s agenda boils down to two issues: they don’t like paying taxes and they don’t like that secret-Muslim nigger socialist in the White House. Did anyone think this would play big with anyone other than angry rich racist geezers? The only thing that strikes me at all is the part about them being well-educated — just look at the signs. I guess it does prove how crappy education is in this country that even the “well-educated” can’t spell, but it doesn’t make me have a lot of confidence in the overall brainpower of these people.

Problem is, as a whole, the general public isn’t any more clued-in than these idiots. To wit:

You might have encountered this infographic last week. It’s from a poll conducted by The Economist and YouGov.com. Among other things, they asked people what they thought the government should reduce spending on as a way to reduce the budget deficit, and the Number One Answer was “foreign aid”. But as the graph below shows you, foreign aid makes up a teeny-tiny part of government spending:

(the blue bar shows the percentage of people who said “reduce this”, the red bar shows the percentage that item accounts for in the federal budget. link to original post).

Nobody wants Medicare or Social Security or veteran’s benefits cut, not even the Teabaggers. That kind of “socialism” is just fine and dandy with the “Don’t Tread On Me” crowd. So why is ANYONE paying attention to the Teabaggers at this point? Oh, that’s right…it’s because this greedy, racist, right-wing white guy has devoted an entire news organization to making sure that’s all they talk about.

HOLY CRAP! It’s cloning itself! They weren’t just kidding about 2012 being the End of the World! Watch out, Tina Fey, they’re coming for you first!

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day here in the United States. Most Thanksgiving dinners feature a roast turkey as the main course, and all told Americans will consume approximately 675 million pounds of turkey tomorrow. Resultingly, approximately 900 million hours of tryptophan-induced post-dinner naps will occur sometime in between the conclusion of the meal and halftime of the Dallas Cowboys v. Seattle Seahawks game, waking up just in time to indulge in 479 million hours of insulin-induced diabetic comas from eating 366 million pumpkin pies.

Earlier today, George W. Bush got in a little practice before letting himself and his band of war criminals off the hook by pardoning not one, but TWO turkeys. Luckily the turkeys were named “Pumpkin” and “Pecan”, not “Dubya” and “Dick”, but I suspect he’ll get around to freeing those turkeys before January 20, too.

Poultry processing is a filthy, dangerous, cruel, and relentless thing, just perfect for the backdrop for an interview with Sarah Palin, or an episode of “Dirty Jobs”. If people really knew much about how that mutant hyper-breasted fowl got from the farm to their plate, they would probably never eat a drumstick or slice of breast meat again.

The animal protection group Farm Sanctuary in Watkins Glen, NY has been running a program called Adopt-A-Turkey since 1986 that lets you “sponsor” your very own rescued turkey living at the program’s farms in New York and California. The rescued turkeys live a life free from the harsh conditions of commercial poultry farming, and even get their own special vegetarian Thanksgiving dinner every year. You can even really “adopt” a turkey to take home and care for yourself…just don’t mention cranberry sauce around the bird when you get him home.

Lately, the one and only news “commentator” who doesn’t come across like a total asshole is Campbell Brown.

Now, I despise Sarah Palin as much as the next person, but Brown has a point. The savagery with which the McCain campaign staff have been scapegoating Palin for Tuesday night’s loss really only serves to make those staffers look bad. Palin does a fine enough job of looking like the total ignoramus she is without any help from these people, but all the latest “behind-the-scenes revelations” only make the McCain people look even worse for having chosen her.

I, for one, would like to forget Sarah Palin. Let her go back to Alaska, return all the expensive duds, and get back to keeping an eye out on Vladimir Putin. The Republican Party shat its own bed and needs to clean it up themselves, not blame her.

Sarah Palin’s single-handed takedown of the Republican Party is not the only sign that the 1980s have finally died their long-lingering death:

The indoor shopping mall was actually born in the 1950s with the opening of the Southdale Mall in the Twin Cities suburb of Edina, MN, but the mall came of age culturally and economically in the 1980s. People of my generation were the first real “mall rats” in our teenage years. Indeed, my high school cohort was even a little too old to really be “mall rats”; the mall in my hometown opened when I was already in high school and looking ahead to college, but many of my friends and classmates were the first disaffected teenage mall workers to sneer at and rudely ignore the scores of customers experiencing mall shopping for the first time.

This article from The Economist from December, 2007 talks about the death of the shopping mall in this first decade of the 21st century. Malls aren’t entirely dead yet, obviously, but there have been more and more of them closing in the last several years, and the economic downturn doesn’t look good for the retail sector as a whole. What will be interesting to see over the next couple of decades will be the repurposing of abandoned shopping malls, much the way old factories were rehabbed into housing, offices, and, yes, shopping malls in the 1980s. I wonder if malls will be turned into cheap housing for all the people who are losing their homes. One mall in our area, the Natick Mall (ooh, sorry, the Natick Collection), actually added a whole section of luxury condos attached right to the mall. They haven’t sold very well (after all, who WANTS to live in the mall?), but as times get tougher and tougher, maybe the dispossed will get them.

Via BoingBoing’s Gadgets sub-blog comes this link to an electronics industry news site that says JVC has stopped production of stand-alone VCRs. JVC was the last of the electronics manufacturers still making stand-alones, which were generally sold under a variety of nameplates. It’s still possible to by DVD/VCR combo units, but in all likelihood the end of production of the separate units will also result in the demise of the combos. We bought a combo several years ago to use expressly as a transitional product so that we could play videotapes we had for Charlotte when she was a baby, but even that usage went away in our household some time ago. I think the only videotapes we even still own are old recordings from television, like my Jeopardy! appearance in 1992 and a tape from my grandparents’ 60th wedding anniversary also in the early 1990s.

Over at RetroThing, James, the site’s author, offers some opinions about the loss of the VCR. I think he’s completely correct that it marks a significant transition in home use of video recording of television programming, and definitely not for the better. Though the VCR never entirely lived up to its promise for time-shifting and redefining how people consumed television programming, it definitely sowed seeds that are popping up from the soil now, for better AND for worse. The popularity of DVRs and the increasing ease of adding DVR technology to home PCs carries on the legacy of “rolling your own” television, but the efforts of the cable companies and content providers to lock that down may yet prevail. Plus the arrival of services like Hulu, which put control of access to the content squarely in the hands of the traditional providers, may be a boon to people who clamor for the programming, but will ultimately squelch alternative sources.

On a slighlty different track, last week the Miller Brewing Company announced that they would stop making the “alcopop” beverage Zima. Zima was actually introduced in 1993, but is unquestionably part of a wave of “alternative” alcoholic beverages that took the stage beginning in the 1980s with the sudden and huge success of wine coolers such as Bartles & Jaymes. Coming late in that initial wave, but before the more recent generation of “alcopops”, Zima was nearly universally scorned as a drink for poseurs and sissies, the sort of thing that a guy with popped collars and a Member’s Only jacket drank. How it survived all this long is a mystery; I didn’t even know they still made it.

Finally, here is a set of links about what will probably be the defining cultural transformation of the next decade: the long-overdue death of conspicuous consumption. First, a recent blog post by Rex Hammock noticing the arrival of mass media treatments of the newly-virtuous non-consumer. He seems to be implying that the meme which says “by the time the mass media cover a trend, it’s already passe” is what’s on order here, but I’m not so sure that’s true. Over at Dangerous Intersection, blogger Erich Vieth riffs on author Bill McKibben’s latest book, Deep Economy to imagine the upside to a no-growth economy. Erich also cites this Harper’s Magazine piece by Steven Stoll, which looks forward and back at consumerism. Then, to cap this all off, Michael Shermer, who also publishes Skeptic Magazine, writes in the latest Scientific American to refute the hallmark 1980s movie monologue by Michael Douglas in “Wall Street” that summed up the entire era with the phrase “Greed Is Good”