The American Spectator

Newsweek

The Republicans’ frightening blueprint for America as seen by comrade Jonathan Alter before heading to Cuba for some dental work:

In brief: repeal health-care reform, so if you lose your job and your kid gets sick, you may have to sell the house; repeal financial reform, so Wall Street scammers and predatory lenders can return to doing everything they did before they wrecked the economy; maintain corporate-welfare subsidies that move jobs overseas; reduce spending by slashing education funding; and ending all clean-energy projects aimed at curbing our dependence on Mideast oil. Republicans insist on extending $700 billion in tax cuts for the wealthy and leaving the $500 billion defense budget untouched.

(November 1, 2010)

The Nation

At our favorite lunatic haunt, editorialist JoAnn Wypijewski demonstrates once again that silliness begets silliness while Dr. Joycelyn Elders continues her crusade for silent pleasures:

In an essay accompanying some of the Indiana study data [about onanism] in The Journal of Sexual Medicine Joycelyn Elders wrote, “We have finally included masturbation in our national conversation and as a result stopped checking our hands for growing hair”; you wouldn’t know it from the days and nights of talk-media devoted to winks and nudges over the adventures of young Christine [O’Donnell]. If there was a liberal commentator who took sex as seriously as O’Donnell had in her passionate abnegation, only from the other side, I missed it. No one said, Come on, masturbation is one of the great, free joys of life; powerful, relaxing, instructive too; as common as rain and as good for you. No one punctured the absurdity of public squeamishness on the issue and argued plainly, like the Spanish socialists in Extremadura with their campaign for youth, that “pleasure is in your own hands!”

(October 25, 2010)

New York Times

Anthropological jottings from columnist Maureen Dowd, writing in her inimitable schoolgirl argot:

We are in the era of Republican Mean Girls, grown-up versions of those teenage tormentors who would steal your boyfriend, spray-paint your locker and just for good measure, spread rumors that you were pregnant.

These women-Jan, Meg, Carly, Sharron, Linda, Michele, Queen Bee Sarah and sweet wannabe Christine-have co-opted and ratcheted up the disgust with the status quo that originally buoyed Barack Obama. Whether they’re mistreating the help or belittling the president’s manhood, making snide comments about a rival’s hair or ripping an opponent for spending money on men’s fashion show, the Mean Girls have replaced Hope with Spite and Cool with Cold. They are the ideal nihilistic cheerleaders for an angry electorate.

(October 17, 2010)

Angle-Reid Debate

The American Demosthenes, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, at the height of his powers, elucidating the mysteries of cancer; and snip, snip, it is gone: