Congratulations To Paul Krugman
For, as a Longtime Contributor to This Page, Winning
The 2008 Nobel Prize for Economics
We Look Forward with Relish to Publishing Years More of His
Delightful Garbagespiel
Meet the Press
Ted Turner, a historical illiterate in action:
We have an FBI, and we’re not prejudiced against somebody who’s
worked at the FBI. It’s an honorable place to work. And the KGB, I
think, was an honorable place to work. It gave people in the former
Soviet Union, a communist country, an opportunity to do something
important and worthwhile.
(November 30, 2008)
Columbia Spectator
(online edition)
One of the Republic’s great universities is again the
victim of an apparent prankster online. Cut the comedy,
fellows:
This week, the QuAm will celebrate the end of its annual Queer
Awareness Month. The month-long series of events is devoted to
raising awareness of sexual diversity on campus and has become a
symbol of the University’s openness towards differences in sexual
preference. Still, QuAm’s organizers would better cater to students
of all comfort levels by advertising the month’s educational
programming as much as it does the more explicit revelry of Queer
Awareness Month.
Over the past several years, QuAM has grown more visible and
active on campus and its Queer Awareness Month has grown in
popularity. Indeed, many of the lectures and workshops that they
hosted this month were great successes. Academics and scientists
addressed students about the details of gay history, more worldly
students chose to attend sex-toy workshops, and the rainbow-colored
arch of balloons over Low Library was a palpable indicator of the
University’s commitment to tolerance. That said, the organization
largely focused on promoting events that emphasized sex over
awareness. The Genderfuck party--where attendees donned only
underwear--bore more of a resemblance to a raucous First Friday
Dance than a laid-back affair where people could casually discuss
sexuality.
(October 29, 2008)
New York Observer
Jason Horowitz, an obvious patriot, retails some
asseverations confided by Dr. Erica Jong, the celebrated Master
Baiter, to an Italian daily during the last weeks of the late
presidential campaign. Miss Jong did not agree to a urine
test:
The record shows that voting machines in America are rigged….My
friends Ken Follett and Susan Cheever are extremely worried. Naomi
Wolf calls me every day. Yesterday, Jane Fonda sent me an email to
tell me that she cried all night and can’t cure her ailing back for
all the stress that has reduced her to a bundle of nerves…. My back
is also suffering from spasms, so much so that I had to see an
acupuncturist and get prescriptions for Valium….After having stolen
the last two elections, the Republican Mafia…. If Obama loses it
will spark the second American Civil War. Blood will run in the
streets, believe me. And it’s not a coincidence that President Bush
recalled soldiers from Iraq for Dick Cheney to lead against
American citizens in the streets…. Bush has transformed America
into a police state, from torture to the imprisonment of reporters,
to the Patriot Act.
(October 30, 2008)
The Progressive
Glad tidings as reported in the journal of the professional
malcontents:
To be sure, Obama’s victory spells neither the end of racism nor
the realization of full equality. Prepare for a backlash. Prepare
for a generalized sentiment in the white population that there no
longer is a need for affirmative action or other civil rights
protections once a black man sits in the Oval Office. Prepare for
blaming the victims of lingering and institutional racism for not
being able to get ahead.
(December 2008)
New York Times
Another episode in the ongoing soap opera that is the
National Football League, wherein middle linebackers can still be
“victimized” without apparent embarrassment:
The Giants’ first home defeat ended a seven-game winning streak
and followed a tumultuous week in which their star receiver,
Plaxico Burress, was suspended, arrested, handcuffed, briefly
jailed and charged with two firearms offenses after accidentally
shooting himself in the leg in a Manhattan nightclub with an
unregistered handgun.
Burress will not play for the rest of the season or the
playoffs, but middle linebacker Antonio Pierce will. Pierce was
with Burress during the November 29 mishap and was questioned by
authorities on Friday about his role in the events.
It is impossible to know if the pressure affected Pierce’s play
Sunday, but he took two unfortunate penalties during the second
quarter and was victimized on Philadelphia’s pivotal touchdown, a
short pass behind him to Brian Westbrook.
(December 8, 2008)
Washington Post
Columnist Harold Meyerson, a louse in louse clothing, espies
the economic consequences of his ideological allies’ sub-prime
social engineering, shoddy banking practices, and apolitical greed;
and what is his response? He compares “unregulated capital” to an
ideology that in the 20th century killed 100 million people and
impoverished still more.
In 1949, a number of famous writers, among them Arthur Koestler,
Andre Gide, Richard Wright, Stephen Spender and Ignazio Silone,
wrote essays explaining why they were no longer communists. The
essays were collected in a volume entitled “The God That
Failed.”
Today, conservative intellectuals might want to consider writing
a tome on the failure of their own beloved deity, unregulated
capitalism. The fall of the financial system has been so fast and
far-reaching that there’s been no time to fully consider its
implications for the reigning economic theology of the past 30
years.
(October 15, 2008)
Boston Globe
And from the prestigious Boston Globe comes word of
the demise of one of young Harold Meyerson’s early
inspirations:
Marilyn Ferguson, whose best-selling book The Aquarian
Conspiracy helped establish the New Age movement by tying
together its disparate threads, has died. She was 70…. The
Aquarian Conspiracy, published in 1980, was the first
comprehensive analysis of the various unconnected efforts--such as
scientists investigating biofeedback, midwives running alternative
birthing centers and a Christian evangelist promoting
meditation--that would coalesce into the New Age movement…. ”After
a dark, violent age, the Piscean, we are entering a millennium of
love and light--in the words of the popular song the ‘Age of
Aquarius,’ the time of ‘the mind’s true liberation,’” Ms. Ferguson
wrote in the book.
(October 3, 2008)
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From the Archives
Timeless Tosh From Current Wisdoms Past (February
1989)
Gainesville Sun
The sad somniloquy of James A. Michener the same night some
cad put garlic in his tapioca pudding:
This year’s election scared me. It was conducted with a
brutality and lack of attention to basic issues that appalled, and
the success of its ugly strategies flashed signals that this was
the kind of electioneering we should expect during the next three
national campaigns of this century.
What frightened me? The tactics that proved so effective were
those which Joseph Goebbels found useful in destroying the German
Republic in the 1930s.
Michael Dukakis was not defeated, he was destroyed, and that
kind of victory does not serve the republic well. If persisted in,
it could lead to American-style fascism.
(December 11, 1988)
Washington Post
Rockets go off when Mary McGrory meets the fellow with the
map of Florida on his forehead:
Mikhail Gorbachev, somebody said, sounded as if he were running
for president of the world. His speech before the United Nations
was an experience in political oratory that our recent campaign in
no way prepared us for. The Soviet leader unfurled a blueprint for
saving the planet and democratizing the world. No “thousand points
of light,” no “I’m on your side,” no one-liners, no sound bites.
This was cosmic stuff, an announcement of a new order, one in which
the Soviet Union will march side by side with, although a step
ahead of, other nations toward peace and reason on Earth.
Never mind that back home his grand plans for efficiency and
honesty are making snail’s progress. This is one of the reasons he
was here. The folks in Moscow had to see that Comrade Mikhail can
set the world on its ear, outclass any Western orator and boldly
proclaim that the erstwhile number one police state is going to
show the world the way to the rule of law and decency.
(December 8, 1988)
