Mar
06

The Devil You Know

The Devil You know

I haven’t been completely disappointed by the GOP primary circus these past several months.

In the fall, things seemed so promising. We had the likes of Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry still in the race–with Sarah Palin not yet totally out of it. But Ms. Palin proved no more than a chimera (go figure), and the other three, along with Mister 999–Herman Cain–each disappeared after one hot minute under the kleig lights of honest-to-goodness fact-checking and reasonably clear-eyed analysis that sometimes infects media coverage in a major political campaign.

So we’ve been left for months with just Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney trying to muster a challenge to Barack Obama from the disparate yearnings of, as Hendrick Hertzberg recently put it in the New Yorker,

[the] excitable, overlapping assortment of Fox News friends, Limbaugh dittoheads, Tea Party animals, war whoopers, nativists, Christianist fundamentalists, à la carte Catholics (anti-abortion, yes; anti-torture, no), anti-Rooseveltians (Franklin and Theodore), global-warming denialists, post-Confederate white Southrons, creationists, birthers, market idolaters, Europe demonizers, and gun fetishists

who make up the Republican “base” today.

Read more…

Apr
28

That Didn’t Take Long

ABC News reports Miley Cyrus, Disney’s most recent pre-pubescent cash cow, is officially “embarrassed” by photographs set to appear in an upcoming issue of Vanity Fair, in which the 15 year-old star of Disney’s hit TV show “Hannah Montana” appears clutching a satin sheet to her naked breast.

Framed in festive graphics with bubblegum hues of pink and purple, Miss Cyrus currently adorns the bedroom walls, backpacks, lunchboxes and projected star-fantasies of millions of young girls across the globe. She has headlined sellout concerts of 10,000-seat plus arenas for much of the past two years and sold several million records of saccharine flavored countrypoppyrock music.

But having the whole world in her hand is never enough and a girl’s got to grow, right? Read more…

Apr
03

Seen That Movie, Too

A CBS News-New York Times poll released Thursday showed Americans are more dissatisfied with the country’s direction than at any time since the poll began asking about the subject in the early 1990s.

In a bad omen for Senator John McCain’s fledgling presidential campaign, “a majority of nearly every demographic and political group ‚Äî Democrats and Republicans, men and women, residents of cities and rural areas, college graduates and those who finished only high school ‚Äî say the United States is headed in the wrong direction.”

Not surprisingly, the last time this particular poll registered such a dismal assessment by the American public, a fellow by the name of George Bush was getting ready to vacate the White House amidst an economy in dire straits.

An interesting twist to the current pulse of the nation is that dissatisfaction usually hits its low point in the months and years after an economic downturn (such as the low reading in late 1992 after the recession that began in 1990), not at the beginning of one.

Today, however, Americans report being deeply worried about the country even though many say their own personal finances are still in fairly good shape.

Two out of three current poll respondents believe the country is already in recession, though government economic data have yet to confirm their opinion.

Mar
11

The Sound of Breaking Glass

America loves nothing more than a sex scandal.

A collective peek up the panty-free skirt of a Former Teen Idol or a glimpse of nipple through the diaphanous gown of This Year’s Model beats the Comeback Victory, the Shaggy Dog, and the Horatio Alger story every time for getting the attention of the caffeine-fueled ADHD citizens of the Most Powerful Nation on Earth.

Combining sex with clergy, or sex and politics, will very nearly get the nation’s arbiters of all things newsworthy soiling themselves in excitement over the eyes and ears a sex scandal will send their way in the next 24-hour news cycle.

Thus, the front page of every newspaper in America today features the frowning, disconsolate mug of Eliot Spitzer. The lede story on every Internet news and gossip site tells the gripping tale of his ‘monumental’ fall from grace, the tragic story of Client 9 — the hard-bitten, former federal prosecutor-turned Governor of New York, who yesterday admitted to contracting for the services of a prostitute. Read more…

Feb
14

Who Loves Ya, Baby?

The true origins of celebrating the notion of romantic love on February 14 are not well documented, though the exchange of elaborate, handmade gifts between paramours was well established by the middle of the eighteenth century in England, and began to really take off in the United States once Esther Howland (herself now considered something of a saint by the American Greeting Card Association) began selling mass-produced Valentine’s cards in the 1840s.

An estimated one billion Valentine’s cards are sent each year, with a surprisingly negligible effect on the degree of love or open-heartedness in the world. Read more…

Oct
20

Roll Over, Beethoven

Speaking on condition of anonymity, aides to unnamed officials at the U.S. Geological Survey confirmed recent upticks in measurable seismic activity from people spinning in their graves worldwide.

The USGS has been keeping so-called crypt-tic data since the early 1980s, when the Reagan administration’s purported small-government policies resulted in major increases in the size of government spending at all levels, and created the little-known Department of Ephemeral and Astrological Findings (DEAF). Read more…

Sep
28

Well And Truly F*cked

President George W. Bush came one step closer today to wielding the power to undo nearly 800 years of human progress with the stroke of a pen.

By a vote of 65 – 34 (Maine’s Olympia Snowe could bring herself to neither a yea nor a nay on the matter), the U.S. Senate approved The Military Commissions Act of 2006, which is, in the august chamber’s quaint description, “a bill to authorize trial by military commission for violations of the law of war, and for other purposes.” Read more…

Aug
30

We Got The Funk

Thaddeus Russell, in a brilliant piece published today in Salon (which may require some hassle to view, but is well worth the annual subscription fee to have at one’s disposal), explains exactly why we can “cut and run” in Iraq, and leave the democratization of the Middle East to its citizens.

Now. Today.

Battles we have left to lose, but the War, we’ve already won. Read more…

Jun
03

Divided We Fall, Part 2

The U.S. Senate will begin debate next week on a constitutional amendment being pushed by President George W. Bush and the White House to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman. The proposed amendment also prohibits judges from ruling that either the Constitution or any state may give same-sex couples the right to marry or the same legal rights as married couples.

One would think people have more pressing concerns.

Nevertheless, the President used his weekly radio address today to flog the idea that the institution of marriage needs protection from “activist judges and some local officials [who] have made an aggressive attempt to redefine marriage in recent years.” He’ll be addressing the issue again on Monday in a nationally broadcast speech. Read more…

Oct
09

End of World

Thank you, Pud.

Mash de button, Shug.

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