Tomorrow is the 106th anniversary of the birth of actor John Wayne, a fitting occasion for me to republish an essay in which I examine his peculiar status as a conservative political icon.
I say “peculiar” because the Duke, as a symbol of manhood, patriotism and American virtues, was all artifice. He wasn’t a cowboy. He wasn’t a war hero. None of the words or actions for which he is best remembered were his own. They were the products of writers and directors, special camera angles and lighting and theme music. It was all Hollywood. None of it was reality....
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Back in my school days, mathematics was not my strongest subject — which is why I sometimes try to redeem myself by fighting against certain glaring examples of innumeracy.
The following passage, which I ran across this morning on the Internet, is a case in point:
For much of our nation’s history, the federal government was quite small. In 1790, it had just 1,000 nonmilitary workers. In 1962, there were 2,515,000 federal employees. Today, we have 2,840,000 federal workers in 15 departments, 69 agencies and 383 nonmilitary sub-agencies.
This exponential growth has led to increasing power and independence for agencies....
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Molly Ball offers the GOP some GOOD ADVICE:
The party is in desperate straits. It has lost the popular vote in five of the past six presidential elections. It consoles itself with a majority in Congress, but even there its ranks are dwindling. On nearly every issue of national significance—from social affairs to fiscal matters to foreign policy—its positions are increasingly out of step with those of the majority of Americans. Riven by factions, it sometimes seems more like a collection of squabbling interest groups than a coherent political entity. People have started muttering that it might become merely a regional ...
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Check HERE for evidence of how Texas Gov. Rick Perry and nine other right-wingers have vented over news that the Boy Scouts of America’s National Council has voted to lift the organization’s ban on openly gay youths....
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HERE‘s a novel theory, if there ever was one:
Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) said Thursday that President Obama would not be president if it weren’t for the 1986 amnesty bill that Ronald Reagan signed into law.
King is a leading GOP critic of efforts to pass an immigration reform bill, and has often said on the House floor that Republicans are overreacting to the 2012 election, which some Republicans saw as a sign that the GOP needs to get behind a reform bill.
In an effort to dissuade Republicans, King argued that the 1986 immigration bill that Reagan signed ...
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Jonathan Chait NAILS IT:
The Internal Revenue Service scandal remains alive and well as an agency screwup story. But agency screwup stories, even ones centering on the agency Republicans most despise and deliberately hobble, have limited political utility. What Republicans want is for the IRS story to be an Obama scandal. And as an Obama scandal, the IRS story is quickly following the same trajectory as the Benghazi story: a fever swamp obsession, in which understanding the fundamentally sinister character of the Obama administration is the predicate for interpreting all information or lack thereof, and the term becomes a
...One would think that the ranking Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee would know what it means to “pack” a court.
But, in the case of Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, one would be wrong.
“Court-packing” is a term that dates back to the administration of Franklin Roosevelt, and it refers to expanding, or trying to expand, the number of seats on a given court for political reasons.
A president who merely nominates candidates of his own philosophical persuasion to fill vacancies on a certain court is not resorting to court-packing. He’s just doing what presidents always do.
But ...
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Anyone who chides the insufferable Peggy Noonan as effectively as THIS is all right in my book. (Note: be sure to watch the video.)
Recently, the IRS has admitted to subjecting Tea Party groups to scrutiny. In fact, for the past few weeks the Obama Administration has been standing “crotch deep in the scandal swamp,” said Jon Stewart of The Daily Show.
Peggy Noonan, former Reagan speechwriter, is the perfect example of what it is to live in the conservative bubble. She recently said that the scandals “make a cluster that implies very bad things…This IRS thing is something I’ve ...
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The question in the headline above is one the right-wing conspiratorialists seem never to ask themselves.
Who blew the whistle on the IRS?
Was it investigative reporters from the mainstream media, as was the case with the Watergate scandal? No.
Was it Fox News or any other conservative news outlet? No.
Was it some member of Congress? No.
Was it some Republican activist? No.
Was it some conscience-stricken leaker at the White House? No.
So who did it?
Answer: The IRS did it.
The inspector general of the IRS had quietly investigated evidence of the targeting of conservative groups, and ...
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A Facebook reader of the Applesauce post just before this one (HERE) has passed along THIS:
Pope Francis rocked some religious and atheist minds today when he declared that everyone was redeemed through Jesus, including atheists…
Using scripture from the Gospel of Mark, Francis explained how upset Jesus’ disciples were that someone outside their group was doing good, according to a report from Vatican Radio:
“They complain,” the Pope said in his homily, because they say, “If he is not one of us, he cannot do good. If he is not of our party, he cannot do ...
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Glenn Beck, the clown prince of right-wing politics, thinks he’s UNCOVERED A SCANDAL at CNN:
Conservative radio host Glenn Beck says that “forces of spiritual darkness” at CNN arranged to have Wolf Blitzer ask an atheist tornado survivor if she thanked the Lord as a plot to promote atheism.
At the conclusion of his Tuesday interview with Rebecca Vitsmun, Blitzer told the woman who lost all of her worldly possessions that “you gotta thank the Lord, right? Do you thank the Lord?”
“I’m actually an atheist,” Vitsmun politely replied, adding, “I don’t blame anybody for thanking the Lord.”
During Wednesday’s ...
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Greg Sargent NAILS IT:
Republicans are working overtime to connect the IRS scandal to President Obama. Theoretically, this task should be made more difficult by the lack of evidence of any such connection. In practice, it’s not dissuading Republicans in the slightest from drawing that link. John Boehner [above] claims it is “inconceivable” that Obama didn’t know about the IRS targeting of conservative groups.
In that context, don’t miss today’s big Post piece documenting the behind-the-scene moves by the Obama administration as it dealt with the news of the impending inspector general’s audit. The piece reports that White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler, having learned of ...
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As I’ve reported several times in the past week (most recently HERE), President Obama is holding up well in the polls despite all the so-called scandals swirling about his administration.
Nor is their much reason to expect that situation to change any time soon, as Jill Lawrence EXPLAINS:
Given the noise level on Capitol Hill, cable TV, and social media, Obama’s 50 percent-plus showings in recent polls from CNN, Pew, and ABC/Washington Post seem somewhat surprising. But two veteran political pollsters, one from each party, say that Obama can expect to maintain his standing as long as ...
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Considering the feverish zeal with which Obama-haters are pushing their conspiracy theories these days, I guess THIS KIND OF THING was inevitable:
If our planet’s increasingly extreme weather isn’t caused by man-made climate change, then it stands to reason that it’s actually caused by man-made supervillains using government technology to take American Freedoms with superstorms like Monday’s mile-wide monster tornadoes.
If that makes no sense at all, it’s because the Powers That Be don’t want you know the real truth about Hurricane Katrina, Superstorm Sandy and this week’s devastating twisters that mowed down entire towns in Oklahoma.
The Tornado Truthers ...
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HERE‘s a great collection of arguments to use against the disinformation campaigns of global-warming deniers.
Each of these quick responses is accompanied by a link to a scientific article dealing with the specific subject at issue.
You might want to save this post for use when you come up against folks whose grasp of climate issues is limited to what they hear from Rush Limbaugh or Fox News....
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Harvard Law School Professor Cass Sunstein WRITES HERE of a fascinating study conducted by Philip Fernbach and a team of academics at the University of Colorado whereby political extremists are turned into comparative moderates:
Their central finding is that if you ask people to explain exactly why they think as they do, they discover how much they don’t know — and they become more humble and therefore more moderate.
The study came in four stages. First, people were asked to state their positions on a series of political issues, including a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions, a national flat tax, ...
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As you may already know, some of the vermin on the far, far right of the American political spectrum have been peddling theories that last month’s Boston Marathon bombings were a nefarious plot hatched by the Obama administration — a “false flag” operation, as the loonies like to put it — as part of some broader scheme to disarm decent folks or put all the true patriots in concentration camps or something.
Well, there’s BREAKING NEWS this morning that an FBI agent has killed a man who was said to have had connections with suspected Boston bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev ...
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THIS is pretty interesting:
GOP aides are criticizing the House Republicans’ partisan witch-hunt over the Obama administration’s handling of the attacks on a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya last year, arguing that the Party should focus more on substantive issues, such as lessons learned and how to recalibrate diplomatic security.
Roll Call reports that Republican aides are saying staffers are getting bogged down chasing bogus accusations.
“We have got to get past that and figure out what are we going to do going forward,” a GOP aide told Roll Call. “Some of the accusations, I mean you wouldn’t believe ...
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Political analyst Charlie Cook, who’s widely respected in both parties, SAYS Republicans are too obsessed with their bitter battles against President Obama:
Red-faced Republicans, circling and preparing to pounce on a second-term Democratic president they loathe, do not respect, and certainly do not fear. Sound familiar? Perhaps reminiscent of Bill Clinton’s second term, after the Monica Lewinsky story broke? During that time, Republicans became so consumed by their hatred of Clinton and their conviction that this event would bring him down that they convinced themselves the rest of the country was just as outraged by his behavior as they were. ...
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David Sirota NAILS IT:
Was the severe weather system culminating in yesterday’s Oklahoma City tornado intensified — or even created — by climate change? That question will almost certainly be batted back and forth in the media over the next few days. After all, there is plenty of scientific evidence that climate change intensifies weather in general, but there remain legitimate questions about how — and even if — it intensifies tornadoes in specific.
One thing, however, that shouldn’t be up for debate is whether or not we should be as prepared as possible for inevitable weather events ...
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