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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

It’s so fucking irritating the way conservatives, once ejected from running things, speak their minds and–surprise–reveal themselves to have had sensible opinions on controversial issues all along.  Former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist thinks Obamacare is vital?  Naturally–he’s a cardiologist (and co-owns a hospital chain).  Nancy Reagan supports stem cell research?  Duh–her husband died of [...]

It’s either pay attention to the news or stay sane today, so since it’s the fourth day in a row of 100 Years of Solitude-type rain in San Francisco and I feel like writing, I’m going to be self-indulgent, apolitical and irrelevant.
In my long-running grip that the 60s were totally overrated except insofar as the [...]

The last time Massachusetts elected a Republican to the Senate was in 1966, the Thermidorian Reaction against LBJ’s Great Society.  Forty-four years ago, that man was Edward Brooke, the first popularly elected African American Senator.  He was a liberal Republican, the first in the party to urge Nixon to resign, and he had sex with [...]