Showing posts tagged politics
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In America, anybody can be president. That’s one of the risks you take.
Adlai Stevenson
Octopi Wall Street! From vampire squids to monster octopuses, a visual history of comparing corporate America to cephalopods. — MotherJones View high resolution

Octopi Wall Street!

From vampire squids to monster octopuses, a visual history of comparing corporate America to cephalopods.

— MotherJones
Booth, The New Yorker

Booth, The New Yorker

Democracy - Mr. Fish

Democracy - Mr. Fish

Coulrophobia

Icepick: Who are these people? Don’t you find Glenn Beck frightening?

Tapwater Jackson: Well, yes, I find him somewhat frightening, but only because I have a mild case of coulrophobia.

President Obama Names Susan L. Carney to U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit

Friend Pride
My friend and colleague has been nominated by President Obama to serve on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit; the most important Federal court in the country — even more important than the Supremes.

Just when I was about to give in to the thought that nothing in politics was genuine or a merit-based decision, this happens and restores at least a day of hope for me.

Pride for my friend gives me a lump in my throat. What a beautiful feeling.

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Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.
Robert Louis Stevenson

Noam Chomsky Has ‘Never Seen Anything Like This’

“I have never seen anything like this in my lifetime,” Chomsky added. “I am old enough to remember the 1930s. My whole family was unemployed. There were far more desperate conditions than today. But it was hopeful. People had hope. The CIO was organizing. No one wants to say it anymore but the Communist Party was the spearhead for labor and civil rights organizing. Even things like giving my unemployed seamstress aunt a week in the country. It was a life. There is nothing like that now. The mood of the country is frightening. The level of anger, frustration and hatred of institutions is not organized in a constructive way. It is going off into self-destructive fantasies.”

The Tea Party

A European person I respect and admire asked me about the American Tea Party movement and what it all means to us Yanks. Well, there are times when I just don’t feel like my usual circumspect non-confrontational way of being.

The Tea Party is the Ku Klux Klan.

They are small-minded and powerless bigots furious that a black man is President, and they are being fueled by the powerful and rich Republican party and their propaganda arm of the press to take back Washington for their own personal greed.

Moreover, they have co-opted relatively affluent white males who are threatened by affirmative action and the shrinking job market, and who have never protested anything in their privileged lives before.

It is as simple as that.

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Here is a grand old party frozen, suspended, mesmerized, in thrall to a gaggle of showboats and radio entertainers and small mobs of fist-shakers standing staunch for unreality, and no Republican elected official dares say, “Let us not be nuts.
Garrison Keillor, in The Old America is Fading
Danziger at his best - Via Balloon Juice View high resolution

Danziger at his best - Via Balloon Juice

Mashup: Hell No We Can, Will.i.am pops a Boehner - via Rolling Stone

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GET OFF MY LAWN!
Senator “Old Man” McCain on denying reality.
Mr. Fish

Mr. Fish