2
POPS Pegging Biden Update: I loved it when Sarah Palin said "I watched all those debates" basically telling Biden in not so many words that she knows what he said in those primary debates and what he is saying now is not true. I smiled when she said that because I know she probably watched "those debates" this week in preparation for this debate and almost certainly remembered more of what Joe Biden said in them than he did.
6
POPSFrom the Mouth of a Conservative: The Palin Pick "To the extent the experience, qualifications, and national-security arguments are taken off the table, Obama wins." No kidding. That's why the Palin pick appears superficial, a desperate grab to pick up disaffected Hillary voters, and to help us forget that John McCain has been in Washington DC a long time. And while the pick temporarily distracts the US from one of the greatest speeches delivered in history of the US (Obama's last night), within 2 weeks Palin will be seen as a liability, another deer caught in the headlights like Dan Quayle. The allegation that she had a trooper fired for divorcing her sister won't help, especially since the firer said he was pressured from her to fire the trooper. That no doubt credentials her with Rove and his Rovian minions within the GOP.
0
POPSTourism for American Soldiers in Iraq Unfortunately this article is behind a pay wall. I clipped what was available, but I recommend finding a way to read it. The piece focuses on a tour of the former presidential palace in Iraq. It is led by an Army sergeant who hands out full-color brochures and sketches of how the buildings looked prior to being bombed in 2003. Because of safety concerns, troops stationed in Iraq rarely travel outside of heavily protected bases. This tour is an opportunity to do so and 3,000 people have participated to date.
9
POPSPride and Progress: How Far America Has Come In The Last 40 Years food for thought from Jonah Lehrer a bit more: "Over time, these conscious limits on language helped re-engineer our unconscious beliefs, allowing people to slowly purge themselves of obsolete stereotypes. (We tend to think of the unconscious as the domineering elephant of the mind, but sometimes the feeble rider manages to steer the beast in the right direction.) Of course, the unconscious remains a murky and biased place, but I think white Americans have shown that it can be amended, that simply altering the ways in which we refer to people can, over time, change what we secretly think of people."
5
POPSDeficiencies in right-wing patriotism The last example is especially strange -- despairing about the political culture of the South in the 1920's, where disenfranchisement, lynching, and even slavery were routine practices, is a sign of insufficent patriotism? If that doesn't show the deficiencies of the right's style of patriotism, nothing does. Via Matt Yglesias
4
POPSMommy Fascism ( or Statism, if you like ) "When we get to today's liberal fascism Jonah (Goldberg) describes what I would like to call mommy fascism. The fascism of the 1930s was a daddy fascism featuring a militarized command economy and smart CCC uniforms with everyone marching in step. Mommy fascism is different and Jonah takes the reader through Hillary Clinton's It Takes a Village to show how it works." "If Orwell's 1984 described a masculine dystopia then Clinton's Village echoes the feminine dystopia of Brave New World "where man is smothered with care, not cruelty" from the very cradle. "
5
POPSWhite Fright I wonder how the right wing will be able to keep their attitudes about women and minorities under control. They are not fans of political correctness. My hope is that when the racist and sexist attacks come, the American public will rise up in outrage, leading to real discussions about race and gender in this country.
21
POPSRepublicans: Crazy, Or Nuts?
Who in their right mind would argue with the observations in this article? More: "The Republican Party has become an aggregation of people who prefer to live in a world of fantasy -- and their first fantasy, the Ur-myth on which the entire conceit rests, is (classically) "we are the realists." "It degrades, into farce and Newspeak, from there. The perpetrators and defenders of the outing of a CIA agent are "patriots." Tom DeLay is a "leader" and Newt Gingrich is a "visionary." The President plays guitar while New Orleans drowns, causes a hundred thousand Americans and Iraqis to be killed or injured, and outsources torture, and it's the Democrats who, per the repellent Ramesh Ponnuru, are the "party of death." "It has gotten so that you have to muster all the compassion and understanding of which you are capable just to think of the Republicans as a party of greedy corporatists manipulating the credulous, the provincial, and the bigoted. That's the nice way of putting it.”
3
Pops
Newest Clips
Latest Comments
Most Pops
Print
Save
Turn on live update