Satanists, who proposed putting their own symbol on the Oklahoma State Capitol grounds next to the Ten Commandments monument that legislators already put there, have submitted their design for the monument. [Read more…]
Some of you may remember Lee Atwater. He was a Republican political operative, a wunderkind, known for his vicious, ruthless style who would do anything to help his candidate win, especially using racist messages in overt and coded language. He worked for George H. W. Bush and ran a particularly vicious campaign against Michael Dukakis in the 1988 election. He was diagnosed with aggressive form of brain cancer in 1990, converted to Catholicism, and tearfully issued apologies to all he had harmed in his slash-and-burn career, though it is suspected that even those apologies were fake and manipulative. He died in 1991 at the age of 40. [Read more…]
Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow provides a good example of the form monomania takes, in this case with one particular Republican obsession.
I do not know who Paul Carr is (apart from the fact that he is a Briton who lives in the US and agrees with the call by the New York Times for ‘clemency’ for Snowden, whatever that might mean) but his piece on Edward Snowden is dripping with the condescension that we have come to expect from some of the media who seem to be obsessed with finding personality flaws in him, while grudgingly acknowledging the importance of the information he released. [Read more…]
The US Supreme Court has ordered a stay of any further same-sex marriages in Utah until the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals decides the case. [Read more…]
After writing about Max Blumenthal, I recalled earlier work that he did on US domestic politics and a short documentary in 2010 that took a look at the Tea Party and its wealthy backers and the racist messages that drove much of the rhetoric. It was the standard Blumenthal method of going to their meetings and talking with them and you can see the angry reaction from people like the late Andrew Breitbart, while Blumenthal remains calm with a smile on his face. (For some reason, the 28-minute documentary is followed by 12 minutes of a blank screen.) [Read more…]
While America has shifted into the mode of near-constant electioneering, even numbered years are particularly bad since they feature elections to House and Senate seats. Matt Taibbi writes that one thing that will be interesting to watch is the Republican party leadership trying to wrest back control from the very people they promoted in years gone by as the ‘real Americans’. He says that the US Chamber of Commerce is bankrolling this effort to the tune of $50 million to prevent ‘loser’ candidates from being the party’s nominees. [Read more…]
Joshua Frank interviews Max Blumenthal about his new book Goliath and how it has exposed the many PEPs (progressive except for Palestine) in the US who will talk freely against injustice except when it comes to the apartheid policies of Israel and the support it gets from the US government and Congress as a result of the powerful Israel lobby. On this issue, the PEPs become strangely silent or attack those who try to bring greater awareness to what life in Israel is really like. [Read more…]
I have written harshly in the past about NPR’s national security correspondents Tom Gjelten and Dina Temple-Raston, describing them as serving pretty much as mouthpieces for the national security state. I came across this clip from a conference at New York University in 2010 in which from the audience she posed a question regarding Anwar al-Awlaki to Glenn Greenwald who was on the panel that showed how much she is locked into the mindset of believing what the government tells her. The exchange between her and Greenwald is very revealing. [Read more…]
It turns out that about 6 million people have signed up for lower-cost health insurance under either the health care exchanges or are eligible for the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, the latter being designed to take care of those who earned too little to be eligible for the former. That is undoubtedly good news. [Read more…]