You know what’s no more dangerous than Vodka…?
From Slate’s The New Complacency: “During the past 25 years, there have been countless sentiments that respectable Democratic politicians were never, ever supposed to say out loud for fear of angering the all-powerful Republicans. It still isn’t wise for Obama to say them, but maybe the [growing belief that Obama will win] will loosen other [...]
I Stand Corrected…Maybe We Do Have Some Liberals Here…Though In the Closet
From The New Republic’s That Which Must Not Be Said: “When the National Election Study asks Americans to categorize their political views, they’re much more likely to call themselves conservative than liberal, and have been for decades. Americans say this even though, when Pew asks Americans to say where they stand on individual policies or [...]
Liberals? We Don’t Got No Stinkin’ Liberals Here
In his Washington Post elections blog, Dan Balz writes:
Long before wrapping up the Republican nomination, McCain made clear that against either Clinton or Obama, he would cast the campaign as a contest between liberalism and conservatism. He has strayed from Republican orthodoxy at times in his career, and has irritated his own party repeatedly by [...]
Is a Liberal Renaissance in the Making?
From Alternet’s Is a Liberal Renaissance in the Making?: “Your whole life teaches you that to be a progressive in America is to make Sisyphus look like a slacker. Hey, at least he got to the top of the mountain once in a while! Even if it was all for naught, that’s still a lot [...]
The Aesthetic Principle
Two nights ago, Dawn and I watched Miles Electric: A Different Kind of Blue, a documentary about Miles Davis’s turn from acoustic to electric music. It centers around Miles’ performance at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival, where Miles and his band played to over half a million people. Other performers at the festival included [...]
Links for May 16, 2007
The Realignment of America:“It has become a commonplace to say that population has been flowing from the Snow Belt to the Sun Belt, from an industrially ailing East and Midwest to an economically vibrant West and South. But the actual picture of recent growth, as measured by the 2000 Census and the census estimates for [...]
Structure vs Conjuncture
[Updated with a better excerpt] From the New Left Review’s Structure vs Conjuncture: “The Democrats’ electoral-legislative strategy and likely future trajectory make manifest the transformation of the American polity over the past half-century. From the hegemony of liberalism, in which the Democrats made the running and to which the Republicans had to adapt, this has [...]
Parallel Purges
In Academic Freedom in Iran and America, Robert Jensen, a professor of journalism at University of Texas at Austin, writes, “It’s interesting that [Iranian President] Ahmadinejad justified his desire to deal with dangerous professors because of the university officials’ ‘tendency to introduce politics into academic affairs.’ The phrase is reminiscent of a common complaint aimed [...]
Dear George…
Le Monde has published the letter that Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, wrote to American President, George W. Bush. Ahmadinejad begins, “For sometime now I have been thinking, how one can justify the undeniable contradictions that exist in the international arena…These have prompted me to discuss some of the contradictions and questions, in the hopes that [...]
Fuck South Dakota
You guys remember that wonderful little web page created by Annotated Rant after the 2004 election, titled, “Fuck the South?” Well, it appears that, in light of the new abortion law in the lesser of the Dakotas, everyone’s favorite caustic liberals have struck again. Check out the new site, “Fuck South Dakota.”
