You’ve heard the latest one, right? President Obama — or maybe it was Obama working hand-in-glove with BP — deliberately blew up the Deepwater Horizon, sent 11 workers to their deaths, destroyed the country’s biggest fishery, and smeared the coasts of five states with endless tides of oil. Why did he do this? Why, to [...]
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What we need is a new Progressive Dictionary. This dawned on me last week when I spent 1,500 words trying to explain that, no, the word “bureaucrat” was not always a swear word that carries dark connotations of suspect parentage; and that yes, once upon a time, we actually did used to hire smart people [...]
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Brad Johnson at The Wonk Room calls out the “Climate Peacocks” in Congress who are ostentatiously shaking their tailfeathers in mock outrage over the very idea that the Environmental Protection Agency might actually act as agents of environmental protection: Earlier this month, 47 senators — every Republican and six Democrats — voted for Sen. Lisa [...]
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The racist outrages are coming so thick and fast out of Arizona these days that was probably only a matter of time before some Nazi group took advantage of the situation to put itself on the media map. And — whaddaya know! — here they come, right on schedule. According to Stephen Lemon of the [...]
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As I write this, it’s Memorial Day down in the US. All over the country, the flags are flying and the high school bands are playing and the parades are queuing up. (So are the shoppers, hitting the sales at the mall.) And of course, it wouldn’t be Memorial Day In America without old veterans [...]
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America has this long tradition of twisted, odd, widely beloved and yet darkly dangerous right-wing cultural impresarios that pop up out of our landscape like cultural tornadoes, leaving huge swaths of derangement and destruction in their wake. Aimee Semple McPherson. Father Coughlin. Joe McCarthy. Once in a while, when the cultural cross-currents intersect just so, [...]
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The change agenda at America’s Future NOW! Alexander Zaitchik will be featured on a panel entitled “Tea Parties, Beck, Bachman and Blarney” REGISTER NOWfor AFN 2010 America has this long tradition of twisted, odd, widely beloved and yet darkly dangerous right-wing cultural impresarios that pop up out of our landscape like cultural tornadoes, leaving huge [...]
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As the debate over the climate bill heats up, there’s one rule of thumb that may help you keep your bearings as the rhetoric becomes more gaseous and the weeds grow ever higher around the facts. It’s this: There are, in the end, only four possible futures here. Future 1 is Continuation — more business [...]
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Suppose they gave a tea party and nobody came? That’s pretty much what happened on Tuesday, as the first wave of Tea Party primary candidates all went down to abject humiliation at the hands of the voters. Skippy the bush kangaroo surveys the catastrophe (note: evidently, kangaroos don’t use shift keys. And in the interest [...]
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George W. Bush — who knew a thing or two about addiction — was right about one thing: America is addicted to fossil fuels. Looking at the recent headlines, it’s becoming clear that history, Gaia, and our neighbors have all had enough. Look around the room. Look at their faces. They mean it: they’re staging [...]
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