Liberal Talk Radio

Bang-up piece, as per usual, from Mark Schmitt, this time on conservatives’ brand of identity politics: “we’re real Americans and the rest of you are, well…. not.” Hard to excerpt a money quote so you’ll have to go read the whole thing.

Fascinating two-part series on NPR this week on Muslim polygamy in the U.S., among a small number of Muslim immigrants, but also African-American converts to Islam. While various conservative nitwits have gotten the vapors, what I find interesting is the fact that, at the root, this issue, like so many others in the world, can [...]

Longtime reader Nihilist Easter Bunny wrote in with his own reinterpretation of Hillary Clinton’s comments about the strength of her white support: White men! White women! Clinton is calling you! The Muslim is using the black as muscle against you. And you are left there helpless. Well, what are you going to do about it, [...]

I like’d Ezra Klein’s take on whether Wright would be a problem for Obama if he and Obama were white: So here’s the thought experiment: If in 2004, it turned out that John Kerry’s minister of 20 years — a man who had been like a father to him, who had married Kerry and Theresa [...]

The U.S. Air Force has adopted the phrase “Above All” as its new slogan. My evidence is strictly circumstantial, but I regard the Air Force slogan’s similarity to the results of a Youtube search for the phrase as…probably more than coincidental. Really, how much less subtle could this be? To paraphrase Mitt Romney, who let [...]

Jamal Simmons points out the similarities between an Obama-McCain election and the Santos-Vinick campaign from Season 7 of The West Wing: Then there is Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who is perfectly filling the role Alan Alda played, Arnold Vinick, the older maverick Republican senator from the West (California in the show). Due to his [...]

This is a few days old, but still wild: I really like the beginning, where she and Hannity have a bizarre exchange about torture. It’s extremely hard to follow, because you assume that they’re supporting the candidate that’s against torture, but then you realize that, no, they’re actually mad at McCain for not supporting torture. [...]

Nice effort at jujitsu from the McCain camp: rather than get hit again with the infamous “black baby” smear of 2000, they’re openly using the fact that he and his wife adopted a Bangledeshi girl as proof of his long-time pro-life record (as opposed to the Mittster).

The key insight of Tom Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? was that rural, conservative voters were inexplicably voting for a party — the Republicans — who went against their economic interest. Frank thought it absurd that these poor people would vote for a party that, when you really looked at their record, was mostly [...]

I have to say that I didn’t tear up or choke back anything in the final scenes of Juno, like A.O. Scott says he did; the film was too glib and slick to be believable — not to mention unfunny (not that it was unfunny, but it wasn’t consistently humorous, just grating like someone who [...]