Personal responsibility does not a moral system make.
Quantum mechanics suggests that as you bore down deeper into matter, Newton’s laws break down. You enter a quirky, alternate universe of gluons and quarks, of probabilities and spin, and particles with “flavors” like charm and strangeness where the rules governing ordinary reality no longer apply.
Now enter the world of quantum conservatism, where commonsense [...]
Trouble with a capital “T”
And that rhymes with “P” and that stands for pool!
Friday, a friend put me on to a musical bit that I know by heart, but he gave me a fresh perspective on it. I had never seen it in a modern political context, in a cable news/talk [...]
No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon. – Matthew 6:24
President Richard Nixon once observed, “Flexibility is the first principle of politics.” But that brings [...]
The late George Carlin had this comedy bit involving a four-letter word starting with S. He marveled at how it was this all-purpose expletive. He provided lots of examples. What fascinated Carlin was how everyone used the S-word figuratively. Almost never literally.
Socialist is like that. Conservatives started throwing the word around [...]
So much misdirected anger.
Over at Daily Kos, Zwoof has seen a rash of chain emails about “welfare junkies” who are “drug-fueled slackers.” Obligingly, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) has introduced the Welfare Reform Act of 2011 to discipline deadbeats on food stamps.
This is old news. It is Ronald Reagan’s “welfare [...]
What did the politicians in Washington think would happen? They forgot about the “We, the People” part of our Constitution. After bailing out the banks and bankers and interests of the top 1% they fiddled while our jobs burned and mortgages defaulted. With people losing their incomes, pensions and healthcare they worried about deficits instead [...]
Have you heard about Zombie ACORN? The conservative media is a-twitter with ACORN sightings over a year and a half after the right wing succeeded in killing off the voter-registering, community organizing group. Behind the 99% in the Occupy movement is ACORN, did you hear? They just won’t die.
It’s ironic. The [...]
We were sitting in a Waffle House in Staunton, Virginia discussing the state of the nation over breakfast. I had just read an Ed Kilgore column in Salon about the nationwide Republican war on voting rights, and the conservative debate over whether voting is even a right or not.
As I am [...]
Last week big oil/big coal sent a not-subtle message to the country’s investment community: if you back companies or technologies that compete with us we will crush you. Our media/political machine will accuse you of every crime in the book. Your picture will be plastered on the front page of every newspaper in the country [...]
Oil-backed Republicans are doing everything they can to turn the public against … alternatives to oil. Today a Republican Congressional committee held a hearing, named the hearing “How Obama’s Green Energy Agenda is Killing Jobs,” and released a “report” with the same name. The report calls the push for green-energy jobs “a propaganda tool designed [...]
I haven’t posted in a long time, but I have to say something about the audience response to Wolf Blitzer’s question to Ron Paul about health care at the recent debate sponsored by the Tea Party Express on CNN.
The debate is supposed to show the knowledge and character of Republican candidates for [...]
This tactic of inducing public distrust of government is not only cynical, it is schizophrenic. For people who profess to revere the Constitution, it is strange that they so caustically denigrate the very federal government that is the material expression of the principles embodied in that document.
– Mike Lofgren, former GOP [...]
Just ten years ago this country was running huge surpluses and paying off its debt. But then we elected Obama and all hell broke loose. Oh, wait…
Something Happened
Between the time ten years ago when we had big surpluses and were paying off the debt and now when we are told the [...]
Mitt Romney has been kicking ass on the campaign fundraising trail, leaving his GOP rivals in the dust raising $15-20 million through June 30, 2011:
“Obviously, Romney has leveraged his standing in the polls to raise early money in the race,” said Tobe Berkovitz, a professor at Boston University’s College of Communication. [...]
Step back from the day-to-day, hour-to-hour details of the debt-ceiling negotiations for a minute and look at the bigger picture. Look what we’re in the middle of. Our legislators are being stampeded by a manufactured “crisis” into profoundly changing the nature of our country and who our economy is “for,” on extremely short [...]
In 2010 Republicans and corporate front groups ran ad after ad after ad after ad claiming that Democrats had “Cut 500 billion from Medicare.” Those ads brought them the senior vote, and they took the House. Confident in their ability to “create their own reality” they came out with a plan to privatize [...]
The latest round of argument within the progressive coalition over the Obama Administration – touched off by Cornel West’s scathing criticism – has generated a lot of heated discussion. Most of it seems to simply repeat the same arguments that have been played out over the last two years: Obama is a sellout, [...]
Part two in a series.
Forgive me for abstracting and oversimplifying a bit, but one might argue that American politics breaks along the following 10 lines:
Social Conservatives Neocons Business Conservatives Traditional Conservatives (there’s probably a better term, but I’m thinking of old-line Western land and water rights types) Blue Dog [...]
Part one in a series.
A little thought experiment for a Tuesday morning…
Over the past few years I have tried to make as much sense as I could out of the American political landscape. By nature, I’m a theoretically minded thinker, and the point of these exercises has been to [...]
Recent Comments
- Kucuka.net on Intellectual Property is a bad thing.
- evgeniy levchenko datums aangemeld on Debt slavery is a natural consequence of unregulated capitalism
- best career counselor on What will it take to address the climate emergency
- hyip on Debt slavery is a natural consequence of unregulated capitalism
- Tony Williams on Debt slavery is a natural consequence of unregulated capitalism
Blogroll
- 4dancers
- Aaron Krager
- Amygdala
- Autonomy for All
- Away Point
- Blue Jersey
- Bluemars
- Brad Blog
- Campaign for America's Future
- Cassandra Files
- Clear It with Sidney
- Cogitamus
- Crooks and Liars
- Cucking Stool
- Daily Show with Jon Stewart
- Dirty Hippie Sports Talk
- Disaffected and It Feels So Good
- Dispatches from the Culture Wars
- Dork with a Nerd Rising
- Eastern Sunz
- Florida Progressive Coalition
- Focal Points
- FOK News Channel
- Frederick Clarkson
- Frustrated Teacher
- Greatscat!
- HandPicked Nation
- Jazz from Hell
- jazz89 KUVO Public Radio
- Kenneth J. Bernstein
- La Bloga
- Lee Camp
- Litbrit
- Live Free or Die Alliance
- Live from the Left Coast
- MarioWire
- Media Matters
- Merge Left
- Mind Potion Radio
- MPA Political
- New York Communities for Change
- Nuclear Diner
- Political Carnival
- Progressive Leadership Action Network
- Progressive PST
- Radio or Not
- Republic Report
- Scholar as Citizen
- Scholars and Rogues
- Seeing the Forest
- Smirking Chimp
- Smoking Politics
- SomaFM
- Somos Tejanos
- Speak Out California
- Spedwybabs
- Spocko's Brain
- Stark Reports
- StarTalk
- Suburban Guerilla
- Symphony of Science
- Talk to Action
- thereisnospoon
- Today's Workplace
- Truth Vigilante
- Waking from the American Dream
- Worldwide Hippies
- WTF Is It Now?!?
- Error: Could not open handle for fopen() to http://heyhippies.tumblr.com/api/read?num=2
CALENDAR
October 2024 M T W T F S S « Apr 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 Category Cloud
Activism Americans Barack Obama Blogging Budget Bush II Administration Business Capitalism Class Warfare Congress Conservatives Corporatism Corruption Democracy Democrats Dirty Hippies Economy Education Elections Extremism Government Greed Health Care Jobs Journalism labor Media messaging Obama Administration Politics Progressives Religious Right Reproductive Rights Republicans Satire Social Security Taxation Tea Party Uncategorized Unions US Politics Violence Wall Street Wealth Wisconsin