May, 2012 archive
All That Is Old Is New Again 0
PoliticalProf summarizes the history America’s bigotry against immigrants.
A nugget:
- The Puritans hated Quakers and other non-Puritans when such people started coming to America. In time, however, they all became “WASPs”—White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Or what some people call “Americans.” (Not Politicalprof.)
- WASPs hated Catholics when they — mainly Irish — started in immigrate in large numbers in the 1840s. (Think potato famine.) WASPs started the Know Nothing Party to stop Catholic immigration into America. Now, of course, lots of our presidents have some Irish heritage … including, as it happens, Barack Obama. (And me, were I to become President!)
Hate keeps re-inventing itself in most marvelous ways.
Driving while Brown 0
Law enforcement as S&M fantasy come to life–and its fans.
Hole in the Center 3
The Booman savages the pundits who claim that me need a new “centrist” party. (Someone, I think Atrios, once defined “centrism” as a position that agrees with that of the pundit advocating it).
A nugget:
Living Levitra Loco 0
I’ve said for a long time that gunnuttery has nothing to do with rights and everything to do with–er–stimulation.
Facebook Frolics 2
The other half were busy posting Farmville updates.
Mitt the Flip Snip 0
Scott Herhold recalls getting caught up in bullying a classmate when he was in high school and how, as the years passed, the incident weighed more and more heavily on his mind.
He’s not having any of Mitt the Snip’s professed amnesia over his short-lived career as a barber:
From experience, I can guarantee you Romney’s professed lack of memory is a lie (tellingly, the denial came through a campaign spokesman, not from the candidate himself).
Afterthought:
If the Flipper is, indeed, not lying, his ability to dismiss the memory of assaulting a fellow student because he didn’t like the student’s looks is disturbing in and of itself.
Update from the Foreclosure-Based Economy 0
Uh oh.
Locally, foreclosures and short sales as a portion of all sales reached a high of 42 percent in May 2011.
“Blaming the Victim” 0
They say that are not, but it sure looks like they are.
The article did not mention how much the assaulters, many of whom likely consider themselves seductive Don Juans, had drunk or what role they had in serving up the booze.
Follow the link for the disclaimer.
Twits on Twitter 0
The Guardian offers five steps to being twitterific. A nugget:
Restraint. Thoughtfulness. An ability to stop when the argument is exhausted. All qualities that the dedicated Twitter fighter must strangle inside if they are to succeed. Make Courtney Love your model: the more you can blurt out, the more litigious and the less punctuated it is, the better your form will be. One sign that you’ve really got your bicker on is the “repeated goodnight” tactic, as used by Joey Barton while ranting about Alan Shearer on Match Of The Day. Barton signed off his furious tweets “goodnight”, “sleep well” and “goodnight”, all within an hour, and so demonstrated that he was definitely very calm, very contained and not hovering over his Blackberry gnarled by a fury that could never be relieved no matter how many times he tried to lance his rage-pus with tweets.
Go get your twit on.
Never fear. I shan’t be paying attention.
Why We Need the ACLU 0
As much as I contemn Libertarians for being misty-eyed romantics who delude themselves as to the real-world implications of their beliefs or, more accurately for most “Libertarians,” as Republicans who are ashamed to admit it, this is a good cause.
They deserve a full and fair right to get kicked down the hall at the polls.
God Spake in Elizabethan English 0
Or maybe not.
Christopher Lane explores the morphing English translations of the Christian Bible since the KJV.
Anyone who fancies literalism would do well to read it.
“Disaster Capitalism” 0
A. P. Ticker comments on the campaign to loot “privatize” public education. He’s talking about Philly, but it’s going on everywhere.
Read more here.
So Much Money They Don’t Know What To Do . . . 0
. . . or, for that matter, how to do it.
The video captures a rather rambling discussions, but the numbers . . . .
The Volcker Rule, which they refer to without defining, simply returns the banking model to what it used to be: banks would not be able to gamble with customers’ deposits.
Conservative Xanadu 0
Reg Henry, writing at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, gets to the heart of the wingnut fantasy world. (Like most fantasy worlds, this one never existed outside of imagination, but never mind).
A nugget:
In recent years, conservatives have not just been yelling for the train of history to stop right here, but to go back down the track to the station known as 1788, not stopping at the stations for the 19th or 20th centuries where vital lessons could be learned about how a nation grew to maturity as the greatest power and influence in the world.
No, we can only be free if we return to the Garden of (American) Eden, the republic as the Founding Fathers envisaged it when they ratified the Constitution.
Mind you, this is not the Constitution as others understand it, but the one that conforms to the conservative dreamscape of an America of independent farmers and musket-toters in which you don’t need the government to give your vehicle (a horse) an emissions inspection sticker.