The governance, or lack thereof, of the great republic.
Now, before we get too far into this, let me clarify something: I am not arguing that the lottery is, in and of itself, a good investment. The odds, as everyone should be aware, are extraordinary remote, and the argument that it is a kind of regressive taxation on the …
It’s not that I feel sorry for Herman Cain. I don’t. He is, after all, a heartless rich asshole who couldn’t care less about people like you an me, an intellectual flea who only has one idea and a bad one at that, and very possibly a serial sexual abuser. …
In what has to be the top “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me” moment of the week, 24-hour full-service horrible human being Michelle Malkin has penned an article in which she condemns the Occupy Wall Street movement for…being a burden on the taxpayer. Oh, she throws in some other …
So, up until today, the Republic jobs plan has been, essentially, to throw rolled-up balls of newspaper at the President and yell “Sucks to your jobs bill!” But the man who brings them their evening cognac has apparently made them aware of some discontent amongst the rabble, so they took …
The commemoration of any great tragedy is a thorny proposition. Pay it too little attention, and you are open to charges of ignoring the pain of the victims and the grief of the survivors; pay it too much attention, and you become vulnerable to accusations of exploitation and devaluation. This …
It’s hard to write anything like this without seeming to endorse a second term for Barack Obama. This is difficult for me to do, since I’ve generally found Obama to be a Clintonian disappointment; he’s squandered one political opportunity after another, bowed down before the G.O.P. with barely a struggle, …
It’s Labor Day in America. Celebrating what Adam Smith called “the first price, the original purchase that was paid for all things” has always been an iffy proposition in this most capitalist of countries. In fact, the very commemoration of Labor Day here in the U.S. was sped along by …
From Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory. The British fought the war for four years and three months. Its potential of ironic meaning, considered not now in relation to the complacencies of the past but in itself alone, emerges when we consider its events chronologically. The last five …
I’m kicking off a week of Deep Reads, in hopes of jumping back in the habit of reading books, which I’ve fallen out of for the last couple of months. Regular content — including, I promise, new Sandwich Century entries — will resume next week. From Fred Halliday’s 100 Myths …
So everyone is bitching and moaning that the awesome new debt ceiling deal is going to be bad for the economy. Liberals are all running around saying that Obama went all Cave Carson on the deal, and that all the austerity measures, which are totally necessary because America doesn’t have …
So, because I am a self-hating jerk, I was flitting around a bunch of the right-blogs yesterday, to see what horrifying inhumane garbage they had to say about the Norway slaughter. And one of the most common threads, especially at Ace of Spades and Confederate Yankee, was a variant of …
Occasionally, I’d like to share somewhat longer excerpts from things I’ve read and been impressed by than my usual slender quote-of-the-day offerings. Here’s the first, from Hannah Arendt’s Essays in Understanding 1930-1954: “In trying to understand what were the real motives which caused people to act as cogs in the …
1. Playing competitive basketball 2. Attending the University of Hawaii 3. Attending Hawaii Pacific University 4. Attending North Idaho College 5. Competing in beauty pageants 6. Attending Matanuska-Susitna College 7. Working as a sports reporter 8. Working as a sports broadcaster 9. Serving on the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation …
Nobody has suffered today like I have suffered today, unless they also read the entirety of the shitty Libertarian webcomic Roswell, Texas by L. Neil Smith. Allow me to share with you some of its insouciant crappiness in the form of a list. 1. The comic is set in an …
Osama bin-Laden is dead. Everyone is supposed to have an opinion about every aspect of how that sentence came to awarded the status of truth, and I guess I do, but I’ll be damned if I can sort it out into anything worth saying. Mostly, I feel a combination of …
