January, 2010
Snowed in!
Several inches of snow arrived at the Smoking Lounge today, as you can see from the above photo. By the way, this is a rare opportunity for you all to see Raoul in his ectoplasm form, albeit covered in snow. See those two snow drift shapes in the chairs? That’s actually Raoul and Nietzsche in [...]
Best post title on the State of the Union address
It’s from Bruce Dixon over at Black Agenda Report: Obama State of the Union: Guns For the Pentagon, Butter For Wall Street, A Spending Freeze For You Beautiful, innit? Kind of sums it all up. (But go read the whole post, too.) Is anybody planning to watch the speech? I would, but I’m too busy [...]
Obama re-brands himself as a Tea Partier
People, I’m scrambling this week to get the site for a new feminist group launched — no, it’s not in competition with the Justice Party; this is a different thing — which is why I must continue to toil today in my little javascript dungeon of hell. But it’ll be totally worth it. So instead [...]
And now for our next trick, we’ll grant corporations the right to vote and habeas corpus
This is bad. This is really, really bad. Corporations are people now, and money is speech. Dear god. As Doug Kendall observes: Citizens United blows away any notion that conservative judges, who profess to be “originalists” and “umpires,” are in fact faithful to our Constitution’s text and history or bound by reasoned precedent. But of [...]
On the other hand, maybe this is exactly what we need…(Justice Party reboot/open thread)
Last night, considering the Brown victory in Massachusetts, I predicted: “The overwhelming shit train of nonsense that will emerge from this will not be in our favor.” I would love to be proved wrong. I still maintain that the Democrats will interpret this election as meaning they need to move right. That’s what Democrats do. [...]
A silver lining on healthcare reform?
I was fascinated last night to see that Anthony Weiner and Barney Frank were two of the first out of the gate with statements that Scott Brown’s win meant healthcare reform needed to pause. Now, these guys are not conservatives. Weiner is Mr. Single Payer himself, and Barney ain’t no slouch. I thought last night [...]
Ten million people could march on Washington dressed as Che Guevara, and the Democrats would interpret it to mean that Americans want the party to move right
A little over a year ago, Americans elected Barack Obama by a landslide. They elected him because they wanted an end to Republican government. They elected him because they wanted to see a genuinely progressive agenda enacted. True, they had absolutely no reason to expect that Obama would do those things, but still: that’s what [...]
Men’s Rights Activists on Haitian relief: men need maxi-pads too!
Tracy Clark-Flory has a good piece in Broadsheet about the special needs of women in disaster zones. Men’s Rights Activists are outraged: Therefore, according to Clark-Flory, “women in general will be in need of ‘hygiene supplies’ …” Men and boys apparently will not need those things. MRAs are a blight on the earth, but there’s [...]
Arthur Silber needs help (and has some choice words about Martha Coakley)
Arthur Silber needs to scrape up a few hundred bucks to see the doctor. It sounds like he’s in an extremely bad way right now, both medically and financially. If you don’t read Arthur regularly, you should. And if you have any disposable income to spare, please consider helping him out. He is a sick [...]
We need to evacuate Haiti
Across Port-au-Prince, the dead litter the streets, stripped of human dignity, decomposing and covered in flies: Every five minutes, a vehicle pulled up to the gates of Port-au-Prince’s cemetery, delivering another corpse to a mass grave dug by authorities trying to clear the broken city’s streets of the dead. “We have lost any dignity in [...]
