Posts Tagged ‘wingnuts’
Easter Thursday and the Living’s Easy Links
* BREAKING: The NCAA has approved unlimited snacks. Can we please stop all this silly union talk now?
* Unintentional metaphor watch: In other words, for every year Citicorp Center was standing, there was about a 1-in-16 chance that it would collapse.
* Extremism and the college classroom.
* Unpaid Interns Gain the Right to Sue. What a country!
* Women, confidence, and institutional sexism.
* “I’m sorry, that sounds horrible,” he continued. “I would have put my own wife or daughters there, and I would have been screaming bloody murder to watch them die. I would gone next, I would have been the next one to be killed. I’m not afraid to die here. I’m willing to die here.”
* Accreditors ask City College to voluntarily terminate its own accreditation. Tempting, but….
* Rare Video Of People Actually Riding Action Park’s Infamous Water Slide.
* A new study which statistically analyzed temperature data over the pre-industrial period and the industrial period has rejected the hypothesis that global warming is due to natural variability at confidence levels greater than 99%.
* North Dakota Finds Itself Unprepared To Handle The Radioactive Burden Of Its Fracking Boom.
* Informed awareness is the worst, part one: A Mrs. Doubtfire sequel is in the works. Because you demanded it!
* Informed awareness is the worst, part two: Why are they even calling this show 12 Monkeys?
* Democracy is a shell game: Cities in Oklahoma are prohibited from establishing mandatory minimum wage or vacation and sick-day requirements under a bill that has been signed into law by Gov. Mary Fallin.
* When Google Tried to Build a Space Elevator.
* Aaron Sorkin’s The Foodroom.
* The Secret “Ronbledore” Pages of Harry Potter Revealed By Court Order. I always knew.
* 1648: The first emoticon.
* What’s on Captain America’s to-do list in other countries that aren’t America.
* And your periodic reminder that child poverty is a policy choice. Maybe it’s time we just turn things over to the rats.
Random Monday Links
* Today Jim Henson has been dead for 21 years. In other news, the world has been completely terrible for 21 years.
* American popular culture hits rock bottom: Seth MacFarlane will reboot The Flintstones.
* Pollutocrat Koch fueling far right academic centers at universities nationwide.
* Is there any governmental body more useless than the FEC? I mean really.
* I grow old: AIM is dead.
* From the too-bad-it-will-never-happen file: I, Amy Myers, do hereby challenge Representative Michele Bachmann to a Public Forum Debate and/or Fact Test on The Constitution of the United States, United States History and United States Civics.
Wednesday Politics Minute
Nate Silver says I shouldn’t be as annoyed at Jim Webb as I feel at the news that he’s retiring after just one term. Josh Marshall says I shouldn’t believe a return to Macacamania is inevitable, though I do. I will have to console myself with the fantasy that right-wing talk radio may finally be dying.
I can’t wait!
Monday Night!
* The latest Detroit atrocity: Detroit mayor shoots down idea for Robocop statue. When will that poor city finally get a leader with some vision?
* How “The Fridge” lost his way: Elegy for William “The Refrigerator” Perry.
* Football vs. labor: Will the NFL play next year?
* Dystopia watch: Disney Now Marketing To Newborns In The Delivery Room.
* David Cole plays “Is Health Care Reform Constitutional?”—almost by name!—in the New York Review of Books.
As Judge Hudson sees it, the health care reform law poses an unprecedented question: Can Congress, under its power to regulate “commerce among the states,” regulate “inactivity” by compelling citizens who are not engaged in commerce to purchase insurance? If it is indeed a novel question, there may be plenty of room for political preconceptions to color legal analysis. And given the current makeup of the Supreme Court, that worries the law’s supporters.
But the concerns are overstated. In fact, defenders of the law have both the better argument and the force of history on their side. Judge Hudson’s decision reads as if it were written at the beginning of the twentieth rather than the twenty-first century. It rests on formalistic distinctions—between “activity” and “inactivity,” and between “taxing” and “regulating”—that recall jurisprudence the Supreme Court has long since abandoned, and abandoned for good reason. To uphold Judge Hudson’s decision would require the rewriting of several major and well-established tenets of constitutional law. Even this Supreme Court, as conservative a court as we have had in living memory, is unlikely to do that.
The objections to health care reform are ultimately founded not on a genuine concern about preserving state prerogative, but on a libertarian opposition to compelling individuals to act for the collective good, no matter who imposes the obligation. The Constitution recognizes no such right, however, so the opponents have opportunistically invoked “states’ rights.” But their arguments fail under either heading. With the help of the filibuster, the opponents of health care reform came close to defeating it politically. The legal case should not be a close call.
* Did Bush cancel a trip to Switzerland out of fear of criminal prosecution? Probably not—but isn’t it pretty to think so?
* The lunatic fringe of the Republican Party finds another RINO: godfather of neoconservatism Bill Kristol.
* The end of the DLC. My inclination is to say “make sure you bury it at a crossroads so it can’t come back,” but of course Ezra’s more or less right: the DLC can safely disband because it won.
* The city-states of America, “those states where the majority of their populations lie within a single metropolitan area.” Via Yglesias, which has some light speculation on the politics of all this.
* On the Soviet Union’s rather poor plan to reach the Moon.
* Star Wars, with all those pointless words and images taken out. Note: falsely implies Chewbacca received a medal at the end of the film.
* Charles Simic: Where is Poetry Going?
“Poetry dwells in a perpetual utopia of its own,” William Hazlitt wrote. One hopes that a poem will eventually arise out of all that hemming and hawing, then go out into the world and convince a complete stranger that what it describes truly happened. If one is fortunate, it may even get into bed with them or be taken on a vacation to a tropical island. A poem is like a girl at a party who gets to kiss everybody. No, a poem is a secret shared by people who have never met each other. Compared to the other arts, poets spend most of their time scratching their heads in the dark. That’s why the travel they prefer is going to the kitchen to see if there is any baked ham and cold beer left in the fridge.
* An evening with J.D. Salinger. It ends pretty much exactly as you’d expect:
The three of us got into the cab. Joe gave the driver my address and when the cab began to move Salinger began walking, then running, alongside, still asking us to change our minds. He hit the cab—with his fist, I supposed—and the driver braked.
Joe said, “Drive on!” Salinger was looking in through the window beside me. “Stop. Please come back!” He was shouting now in the quiet street.
The cab moved and got through the intersection. Joe said angrily, “He’s absolutely crazy.”
* And the headline reads: Global food crisis driven by extreme weather fueled by climate change. Enjoy the century.
‘The Most Important Thing to Recognize about the Right-Wing Freakshow’s Latest Pimp-N-Ho Videorama Is That Today’s Anti-Choice Activists Don’t Think They Can Get Their Way If They Say What They Actually Believe’
What James-O’Keefe-style hoaxes really say about the right, from Jed Lewison at Daily Kos.
I’ve Got My Pipe Because We’re Going to Speak About Schoolish Kind of Things
In 2007, Beck, then the host of “Glenn Beck,” on CNN’s Headline News, brought to his show a John Birch Society spokesman named Sam Antonio, who warned of a government plot to abolish U.S. borders with Mexico and Canada, “and eventually all throughout the Americas.” Beck told Antonio, “When I was growing up, the John Birch Society—I thought they were a bunch of nuts.” But now, he said, “you guys are starting to make more and more sense to me.”
A secret history of Glenn Beck, by way of Robert Welch, Willard Cleon Skousen and the John Birch Society. From the New Yorker.
Gerry Canavan 
