Some people demand that everyone else make the same choices they make about sexual mores.
Currently, Revere High School students who have parental approval can receive free condoms and prescriptions for birth control pills.
No labor scandal ever came close to the cost of the Madoff Ponzi scheme.
Click image for full Tom Toles/Washington Post cartoon.
Next up, the forcast: 
Hurricane nor'easter of wingnuttery.
Click image for full Tom Toles/Washington Post cartoon.
When the elephant has only one line, he never forgets.
Click image for full Tom Toles/Washington Post cartoon.
Click images for full cartoons from John Branch/San Antonio Express-News (left) and Bruce Plante/Tulsa World (right).
No way can I add noticeable page views to Paul Krugman, but here's remedial macroeconomics for all believers in perfect markets:
Mulligan has suggested, in particular, that workers are choosing to remain unemployed because that improves their odds of receiving mortgage relief. And Cochrane declares that high unemployment is actually good: “We should have a recession. People who spend their lives pounding nails in Nevada need something else to do.”Personally, I think this is crazy. Why should it take mass unemployment across the whole nation to get carpenters to move out of Nevada? Can anyone seriously claim that we’ve lost 6.7 million jobs because fewer Americans want to work? But it was inevitable that freshwater economists would find themselves trapped in this cul-de-sac: if you start from the assumption that people are perfectly rational and markets are perfectly efficient, you have to conclude that unemployment is voluntary and recessions are desirable.
David Sirota nails the trouble with our current culture of political hysteria.
This hysteria is mostly driven by the right, though not quite completely. But it infects me, too, to name only a single minor example. There are days when I don't easily find my arsenals of snark and sarcasm - the best rhetorical weapons against frothing stupid rage - and I defend myself and my ideals from attacks with strong counterattacks.Most often, the haters have succeeded in turning political discourse into a war of attrition against their personal demons -a war won by those who can go nuclear the fastest.
That's clearly been the story of the summer on health care - and it continues to be the story on most major issues. I mean, conservatives are quite literally calling the president's plan to promote the value of education to the nation's schoolchildren a secret socialist plot. All of it has convinced me we are living through one of the darkest periods in the last 50 years - one in which intense hatred has now become an accepted - even celebrated - part of our democracy.
Another Hall of Fame pitcher to replace Jim Bunning...
Yah, sure. That worked out so well.
This property crime is, thank goodness, what passes for left-wing terrorism in this country. No one was hurt. No one in fact was terrorized. It's still a crime deserving prosecution, but it's small potatoes. And that's a good thing. We should be glad that ELF isn't injuring people.
We should be glad that the liberal establishment doesn't have raving lunatics in the media fanning the flames of its fringes, the way the conservative establishment does. Unlike conservatives, who often defend their extremes, liberals don't.
There's a key difference between right-wing fringe violence and left-wing fringe violence: The right-wing fringe kills people; the left-wing fringe kills radio towers.
Until I got to New England, I had no idea I had a Southern accent. My college roommates quickly disabused me of the idea that having educated parents had immunized me against regional speech. In time, I overcame my initial distaste for regional New England accents, and I now appreciate them for their distinctiveness even as they sink into the great gray homogenized mix standardized by electronic media.
It's not surprising that a political party that drove its entire public position for a decade off of perjury traps should view the law as pliable to whatever ends they desire.
A central theme of "Camelot" (the musical, not the Kennedy drama) is that the king is bound by law, too. Republicans such as John Ashcroft (though he's hardly the most extreme) could find no law that they would not run roughshod over. The fact that they would hold a man for more than two weeks on a pretext is just one more in a long series of usurpations.
Yet conservatives now want to refresh the tree of liberty. Glenn Beck thinks (I use the word think metaphorically) President Obama achieved coup by election. There's just no oxy in the man.
The Republican Party is a blight on American politics and, until responsible conservatives excise it, America will be unable to make the rational public policy decisions and compromises that are required for the survival of our democracy.
I'm trying hard not to question the sanity of the craaazy wingnuts who think it's inappropriate for their children to hear the President of the United States speak without their specific permission. I've been trying this because we are so deeply divided that I've started to question whether we have a future as a nation.
Really, though, the sanity of the true believers is beside the point. As long as the raving loons in the bilious wingnut media are primed to go nuclear against any Democrat who dares to show his face in public, no matter how innocently, I'm not willing to give their intelligence or their good faith the benefit of the doubt.
Wingnuts are afraid that their children might get a good impression of Barack Obama and come home wondering what else their parents are lying to them about. Could fundamentalism be bullshit? Could evolution be true? Was Jesus really a liberal? Could sex for something besides procreation be a good thing? Even for unmarried people? Even for gay and lesbian people? Could a little recreational - or even medicinal - marijuana be acceptable?
The right and their bullshit issue arsonists in their media want to live in an ultraconservative, fundie ghetto.
You can say no to a dying criminal. Mercy parole is by no means a right.
I guess the Manson family, unlike Libya, has nothing anyone wants.
Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) has the unmitigated gall to whine:
Alexander also complained the White House has cut Republicans out of talks.The Republican Party thinks it has the right to be an abusive spouse. No matter what lies and abuse it heaps upon the Democrats, no matter what slanders and borderline threats it utters against President Obama, it expects to be politely, even timorously, invited to the table to negotiate. Good faith isn't even up for negotiation.
"Either they don't know how to operate in a bipartisan way or they don't want to operate in a bipartisan way," he said.
Joe Klein is out of his depth when he attacks Glenn Greenwald. He shouldn't pick a fight with someone who buys pixels by the megaton. Between all the exclusive parties and the exhausting difficulty of maintaining his access to power, Klein doesn't have the stamina for it.
Greenwald's a big boy, though, and doesn't need my puny defense. Nor does aimai. I've noticed that she can handle herself.
Still, my fellow travellers in the left blogosphere annoy me in one way when they back aimai. She's I.F. Stone's granddaughter! they protest. As if that mattered a whit. As if she had touched the hem of his shroud and was therefore gifted with sacred powers to see through the ever-present bullshit of the big media.
I realize that many are using this identification simply to extend her handle. Others, though, imply that she deserves admission to the conversation because of it. Identity is not central to this dust-up at all. Quite the contrary in fact.
Aimai's commentary has always stood as her own, not that of the priestess of a dead saint. I found it trenchant and incisive and insightful enough long before I knew her pedigree. I remembered her handle and knew when I happened upon her commentary that she would be worth reading.
This is an earned reputation, not the fruit of admission to an elite. Aimai didn't get her credibility through Washington nepotism. Unlike Joe Klein, she hasn't relied on obeisant touches of reliquaries. She has done her homework instead.
Don't forget that that's the path to real credibility.
As a rule, the Boston Globe spends way too much effort reporting on Harvard, trying I suppose to appeal to readers like me. With this little jest of Harvardiana, though, they've succeeded.
What I'd like to see is more than a one-time nod to simpler yesteryear in wry promotion of a newly published book. Harvard's students - and professors, too - need more reinforcement of the proud old and now disused habit of bullshit detection. More than passing familiarity with its odor would be a good place to start.
(Yes, I know that Faith, neé Pride, is not actually a bull, but there's a sweet little joke in that, too. In these welcome days of feminism, why shouldn't a cow be equally able to instruct in the art of literal bullshit?)
Kicking legislative bodies is a common ploy for bullshit traders in the punditocracy. Howie Carr's entire career is filled with perfect examples.
Adrian Walker knows the Massachusetts legislature has been on summer recess, but he stamps his foot and demands action now. As if journalists themselves don't typically send their brains on vacation for the entire silly season of August...
Maybe that explains Walker's column.
