By now you've seen the video and heard the outrage: A group of student demonstrators at the University of California Davis supporting the Occupy Wall Street movement and protesting violent police action against University of Berkeley protesters two weeks earlier were pepper-sprayed by UC Davis police. If the incident doesn't become an iconic, defining moment of the Occupy movement a la images of black Americans being hosed down by police during the civil rights movement, it has at least galvanized the cause and ignited a long-overdue debate about police aggression circa 2011.
While the UC Davis police were acting on orders by the university's chancellor, Linda Katehi, it's unlikely she instructed Lt. John Pike to nonchalantly stroll up and down and shower the students with military-grade pepper spray at point-blank range like he was killing cockroaches in his kitchen. No reasonable civilian would begrudge police officers their right to protect themselves while in the line of duty, but despite UC Davis Police Chief Annette Spicuzza's statement that the pepper spray was used because students were preventing the officers from leaving, video and photographs of the incident contradict her account. Even Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly—who likened pepper spray to a nice, peppery vinaigrette on The O'Reilly Factor last night—thinks Spicuzza's claim is bogus. Continue Reading »
When Sarah Palin's new video message regarding the controversy surrounding the assassination attempt of Democratic congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was released today, I couldn't help but think of Osama Bin Laden. Some will no doubt be tempted to stop reading right here, and dismiss this as the rant of some partisan lefty. A lefty I am, and I make no bones about it, but hear me out. Bin Laden doesn't just release one of his cave messages to the West following a terrorist attack for which he's responsible; he often chimes in after any notable calamity, claiming tacit responsibility or pointing a figure at the consequences of American imperialism.
Leading up to the 2008 election, we posted a series of vintage Rock the Vote ads on the Slant blog. Unfortunately, they didn't survive the transition to the new House, but here's one of our favorites:
Public figures and private citizens of all stripes are joining a movement to tell gay teens suffering from bullying in school or struggling with their identity that "it gets better." The campaign, simply dubbed the It Gets Better Project, was launched by columnist and gay rights activist Dan Savage in the wake of a recent string of teenage suicides across the country which have gotten a surprising amount of mainstream media attention.
But does it really get better? It certainly can, and it most likely will, in a multitude of ways, for most young gays growing up today…if, like the campaign says, they would just live to see it. Cultural change often happens fast, even if it seems unbearably slow; I graduated from high school just a year and a half before the premiere of the first network sitcom with an openly gay male lead character (whose name was in the title, no less!) and just months before my school's first Gay-Straight Alliance was started. The experience of being a gay teen was measurably different between the time I attended my high school and the years that followed soon after. Continue Reading »
Towards the end of Glenn Beck's 200-minute mega-church-style "rally"/sermon "Restoring Honor"—as bagpipes blared an ill-advised version of "Amazing Grace" and cameras searched the crowd for those swept away in a patriotic frenzy—they stopped on an elderly man dressed in one of those folded yellow hats so popular at Tea Party gatherings (the "1776 Clothing Company" was doing brisk business handing out cardboard fans). Seeing himself on the big-screen, he about-faced, slowly saluted in a I'll-never-stop-serving-you-Old-Glory gesture, then returned to singing along. It was as schticky and corny a gesture of Americana as any cynical TV director could've hoped for, and it worked: what Gawker with cruel but acute concision dubbed "America-porn for the elderly in lawnchairs" succeeded in squandering one of the biggest Washington D.C. gatherings in recent memory. The masses (or maybe just media train-wreck watchers) wanted fire and revolution: Beck gave them nearly three-and-a-half hours of Jesus and gospel.
To read the rest of the article at Infinite Philistinism, click here.
The Obama administration is starting to take some serious heat regarding their response to the Gulf oil leak. Last week, choice words came from James Carville, Bob Herbert, and Tom Friedman, who makes some dubious connections to 9/11.
Forget stuffing pantyhose with dog hair. Now there's the "Kevin Costner Solution." Brought to you by Waterworld.
Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.
During the summer of 2008, leading up to the presidential election, Republican nominee John McCain scheduled and then abruptly cancelled a meet-cute with the press atop an oil rig off the coast of Louisiana. Despite claims that weather concerns prompted the change in plans, the real reason appeared to be the fact that, nearby, half a million gallons of oil was gushing into the Mississippi River thanks to a tanker accident. The reality about offshore drilling was sullying McCain's political plans, and Barack Obama, the man to whom he lost the election, is now facing a similar inconvenient truth as president.
In March, Obama announced plans to lift the 20-year moratorium on new offshore oil and gas drilling as part of a comprehensive energy policy. Ever the pragmatist (and hopeless romantic, apparently), Obama presumably intended to grease the wheels of an energy and climate bill that faces an uphill battle in Washington thanks to the influence of Big Oil on both sides of the aisle. Most experts agree that, for a nation that represents 20 percent of global oil consumption but is home to just two percent of the world's reserves, the impact of offshore drilling on gas prices would be negligible, but it was part of a political strategy designed to—foolishly, if the stimulus bill, health care reform, and the right-wing response to Obama's announcement were any indication—lure Republicans to the negotiating table. Continue Reading »
For those of you who didn't watch C-SPAN all night like I—and apparently Ben Craw at The Huffington Post—did yesterday, here's the House of Representatives' historic health care debate and passage in a nutshell...a great, big, socialist, fear-mongering, freedom-lovin' nutshell:
To read the eleventh and final installment in a series of countdown essays written for Salon.com about the most important directors of the decade, click here.
"I don't think we need it now," a prominent U.S. senator said in a statement yesterday regarding a public health care option, and it wasn't a Republican. Once again, "Democrat" Joe Lieberman has gone rogue. Shortly after the 2008 election, I posited a scenario under which Lieberman, who failed at almost every turn to use his chairmanship on the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs to hold the Bush administration accountable, would become a thorn in the side of the Obama administration. Democrats, led by the new president, refused to strip Lieberman of his title or his seat in the Democratic caucus after the Connecticut senator not only campaigned against his own party during the presidential election, but did so rather unscrupulously.
Senate majority leader Harry Reid said then that he trusted Lieberman, but this new development in the seesawing life of the so-called public option should come as no surprise: Lieberman went on record as being against a filibuster-proof majority months ago, and he's fought against his own party on key issues for years. Until now, it's been his position on foreign policy that has been most troubling (it's disturbing, if not downright dangerous, to have a politician who pals around with a hatemonger like John Hagee simply because—even though Hagee's position on Israel is based on his belief that the preservation of the Jews is integral to the coming Rapture—he supports his Zionist agenda to chair a national security congressional committee), but Lieberman's maverick-y impulses are now poised to kill what could potentially be a transformative piece of domestic legislation. According to Firedoglake, if Lieberman votes against cloture, the process by which Democrats can prevent a filibuster by Republicans, it will be the first time in American history that a member of a super-majority has joined the opposition to filibuster a bill. Continue Reading »
Earlier this year, the National Review published a list of the top 25 conservative movies. Number two on this list was Pixar's The Incredibles:
This animated film skips pop-culture references and gross jokes in favor of a story that celebrates marriage, courage, responsibility, and high achievement. A family of superheroes—Mr. Incredible, his wife Elastigirl, and their children—are living an anonymous life in the suburbs, thanks to a society that doesn't appreciate their unique talents. Then it comes to need them. In one scene, son Dash, a super-speedy runner, wants to try out for track. Mom claims it wouldn't be fair. "Dad says our powers make us special!" Dash objects. "Everyone is special," Mom demurs, to which Dash mutters, "Which means nobody is."
I had intended to write a series of blog entries on health care reform this summer focusing not only on already well-documented problems within the system and challenging illogical, boogeyman arguments against a public option, but also on issues that haven't received enough—or any—mainstream media attention, like the underinsured and the role doctors play in the rising costs of health care. Though perhaps inevitable, but no less unfortunate, the spate of attacks on reform that erupted during Congress's August recess required those in favor of it to go on the defensive instead, spending time combating misinformation and distortions about public opinion when they should have been touting the progress Congress has made in making reform a real possibility for the first time in decades.
I found myself unwilling, if not unable, to comment on the distractions, partly because it was so downright depressing to me—a reminder of the brief period just after Sarah Palin was announced as the vice presidential candidate for the Republican ticket last fall and before she revealed herself to be a perpetual political punchline. At a Labor Day barbeque, a friend and staunch Barack Obama supporter glibly called me "un-American and un-democratic" for suggesting that hecklers shouting down a congressperson until his or her public forum grinded to a halt is not democracy but the ugly face of corporate-sponsored astroturfing. It's a tactic used to stifle progress and send a message. That message, of course, is "Kill the bill!," a slogan brought to you by the same masterminds who crafted last year's "Drill, baby, drill!" and which was chanted ad nauseam at town halls across the nation during the final week of summer. Continue Reading »
For the past several weeks I've wanted to comment on the industry-organized lobbying efforts masquerading as grass-roots outrage about health care reform, but each time I tried to write something, my head nearly exploded at the futility and nonsensicality of it all. It would be, as Barney Frank generously put it at a town hall meeting in Massachusetts yesterday, like arguing with a dining room table:
The Republican Party is so bankrupt of new ideas that they've taken to co-opting every criticism that was launched at the Bush administration for eight long years and lobbed them right back at Barack Obama. The Grand Old Party hasn't even bothered to give it the good old college try by paraphrasing their stolen ideas or disguising them with little mustaches. Just find "Bush" and replace-all with "Obama" and you've got the party's current talking points.
According to the right, the "corrupt" Obama administration is attempting a "power grab" that is "fundamentally transforming" the country and "dismantling the Constitution." Corruption isn't partisan, of course, and the new administration deserves as much scrutiny as its predecessor when it comes to presidential powers and constitutionality, but most disturbing and transparent is how the left's claims that Bush's presidency was illegitimate has been countered by a small but increasing—and increasingly vocal—fringe faction of the Republican party who claim that Obama isn't an American citizen and therefore isn't eligible to be president. After getting all the ratings mileage out of bashing Mexicans that he could, even CNN's Lou Dobbs has taken his xenophobia to a new level of parody, giving the Birthers a mainstream platform—and credibility—they hadn't enjoyed previously. Continue Reading »
Recent Comments:
2012 Grammy Awards: Winner Predictions
by Gabe
Lana Del Rey's Feminist Problem
by felonious punk
Oscar 2007 Nomination Predictions
by monkeypox6
Oscar 2007 Nomination Predictions
by monkeypox6
2012 Grammy Awards: Winner Predictions
by LovelyDay