The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Earth Heals, Oceans Recede, So Now It’s Time to Trust President Obama, Right?

“Obama: Anatomy of a World Leader,” by Alex Gray (detail) “I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the […]

Mister Popularity, Edward Snowden

Benny Johnson reports at BuzzFeed: As the American intelligence community struggles to contain the public damage done by the former National Security Agency contractor’s revelations of mass domestic spying, intelligence operators have continued to seethe in very personal terms against the 30 year-old leaker. “In a world where I would not be restricted from killing […]

Their Propaganda, and Ours

Michael Moynihan has a splendid piece at the Daily Beast: In the bad old days of the Cold War, those Americans sympathetic to Moscow could purchase clumsy Kremlin propaganda at various radical bookstores, stocked with glossy magazines and turgid tracts about collective farms and Stakhanovite iron output. . . . But the spread of capitalist […]

News from South Africa

And by “news,” of course I mean, horror stories: In 2004 when Mali was 12 years old, she was raped for the first time by an elderly man that her mother brought home from church. He raped Pearl in her own bedroom, which he did daily until she was 16. “My mother didn’t want me […]

‘Blood Bath’ at O.C. Register

Two newspapers in Southern California owned by Aaron Kushner’s Freedom Communications, the Orange County Register and the Riverside Press-Enterprise, laid off about 70 editors and reporters Thursday. For the past 18 months, Kushner had been aggressively expanding his operation, but suddenly — whack! whack! whack! “It’s a blood bath at OCR. Nearly every top manager […]

Ed Gillespie? A Button Marked ‘Crap’ Would Be An Improvement Over Warner

by Smitty (h/t Bearing Drift) A polished ad from the former RNC chief: While I still think Howie Lind and Shak Hill are great guys (the former, a retired squid has my nod for large, haze gray reasons) we’re talking about going after an entrenched, useless tool of an incumbent. Maybe if Governor. . .um. […]

Word of the Day: ‘Transmisogyny’

Transgender feminist @papierhache reacted to yesterday’s notice exactly as predicted, by claiming victimhood, denouncing me as a bully “with sycophant minions” (that would be you, dear readers), and generally lecturing that I am the pluperfect example of how “people … use social media to orchestrate abusive behavior.” Remember: @papierhache jumped into my timeline in response to […]

‘I Didn’t Want to Seem Crazy’

A year before he killed 26 people, Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza called into an anarchist talk show broadcast on an Oregon university radio station and compared Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik to a chimpanzee named Travis that had turned on its human captor. After the broadcast, using his online pseudonym “Smiggles,” went into an Internet […]

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