It’s the word “losses.”  What exactly makes that plural?  There has only been one Democratic loss lately, but the way it’s echoing across the continent it seems to have compounded.
Is it the gigantic Congressional majorities gained between 2006 and 2008?  Barack Obama’s sizeable margin of victory?  The string of Democratic pickups in special elections, culminating [...]

If there’s a sign that Simpsons has become irrelevant, it’s this.  You’d have thought it was inevitable that Fox the network and Fox the news mall-kiosk would have collided.  I guess most politicians are smart enough to know that being satirized is like being approached by a brown bear.  Just lay back quietly and it’ll [...]

I love when the Sunday NYT, in its vastness and its multiple sources, acquires a sort of cosmic in-joke status where totally unrelated articles refer inadvertently to one another.
Exhibit A: In the Philippines, people take karaoke so seriously that, when drunk people with guns get pissed off over bad etiquette, they kill.  Usually this happens [...]

China’s kind of like Wal-Mart in that while it’s obvious to any thinking person that its practices are supremely destructive and unsustainable and bad for human bodies, you want to believe that it’s vast enough that some people with solutions might clamor their way towards positions of power, and change course.
Also, China is probably lying [...]

The media treats the GOP the way the GOP treats heterosexuality, as if they were the natural state of things and any deviation were artificial or decadent or temporary.  A primary avenue of normalizing Republicanism comes by making Democrats look like gender outlaws.
Hillary is a castrating shrew, Janet Reno is Chelsea Clinton’s father, Al Gore [...]

Do people really think that if the ban on gay Myrmidons is lifted, all of a sudden there will be this massive Guam-to-Guantanamo dance party and Osama will swoop in on a carpet and bomb everyone?  Is it that ten thousand faggots will suddenly want to fight for Amurrica, or that tough guys universally assumed [...]

I can’t believe the guy was ever proclaimed a hero.  “Democrat Opposes War!” is hardly news, even when the Democrat in question is a fat, ugly old white guy who opposes abortion and flag burning and who fought in Vietnam.
But that’s going to be his epitaph, in terms of how he’s remembered: the Democrat who [...]

It seems that the only thing more massively ineffective than all the various “Wars on X” that Americans love so much (Crime, Cancer, Terrorism) is any effort to end another–frequently undeclared–War.  I’m thinking of a flyer I saw the other day urging people to gather somewhere earnest in the Mission and stop the War on [...]

So it seems like Prop 8 might really go down–at least until it reaches the Supreme Court, where Anthony Kennedy will decide for 20 million American homos what they can or cannot do.  I never really thought about it, but the courts really are a bad forum for the bad guys.  They aren’t permitted to [...]