We joke about the “Taliban wing” of the Republican Party, but the truth is there are very few Americans, even within the right wing, who literally want to replace our liberal democracy with a Biblically-based Christian theocracy. They do, however, exist — and they have a plan. At a time when evangelicals are exerting influence […]
As we’ve seen on too many occasions, Friday afternoons are frequently used to release embarrassing information that the Bush gang would like to keep relatively hidden from public view — fewer reporters are working and fewer Americans are paying attention. Alas, this past Friday afternoon was no exception. After 28 months of growing controversy, the […]
After having spent my first 21 years in Miami, I know that hurricane watching can become tedious and anticlimactic. Every year, a handful of storms pop up, sometimes they hit land, and sometimes they do real damage, but real catastrophes are exceedingly rare. In fact, most of the time, hurricanes are among the least-scary of […]
After my longest break in quite a while, I’m finally back at my desk, ready to write some long-winded tirades for your reading pleasure. I’d like to thank my terrific guest-posters — Ed Stephan, Zoe Kentucky from Demagogue, Michael J.W. Stickings from The Reaction, and Thomas McKelvey Cleaver from That’s Another Fine Mess — for […]
There are, believe it or not, only 28 shopping months before the Iowa presidential caucuses for the 2008 presidential election. It seems like an eternity, but the fight for positioning has already begun. This week, I’m wondering: who do you suppose the Republicans will nominate? Will it be one of the many senators eyeing the […]
Guest post by Ed Stephan Most of post-WWII politics in this country has operated on the assumption that the United States is committed to the well-being of its solid middle-class with its not-too-surprisingly middle-of-the-road politics. Americans don’t like to talk in the class-structural terms familiar to most Europeans and much of the rest of the […]
Guest post by Ed Stephan Bush’s approval ratings have been dropping fairly steadily ever since 9/11. They were in the mid-50s during his first half year in office, then shot up to the high 80s with 9/11 (in spite of his “My Pet Goat” performance). They returned to the 50s by March 2003, then spiked […]
Guest post by Ed Stephan Many of us here have said that the “uniter not a divider” split our families into hostile, hardly-speak-to-each-other pro-Bush and anti-Bush factions. I grew up in a New Deal household; my twin sister and I are still there in spirit, but my younger brother and sister are as rabid a […]
Guest post by Ed Stephan Last Thursday we here at TCR began some discussion of possible (probable?) future pandemics. In one comment I mentioned that the U.S. long-term mortality rates are represented by a gradually declining straight line, reflecting slight improvements in mortality throughout the 20th century. I couldn’t add the graph to that comment, […]
Guest post by Ed Stephan When 3,030 of our people were killed in attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, we retaliated with war against Afghanistan and a peculiar “War on Terror” which, somehow, morphed into an invasion and attempted neo-con conquest of Iraq, at a still-rising cost to us of $300 billion, nearly […]