The New V: Birther Sci-Fi

When I was growing up, I loved everything about the NBC mini-series V. I loved that Marc Singer was in it because The Beastmaster was awesome (to elementary school aged me). And the special effects seemed awesome at the time. The lasers were especially great. And the music ruled. The fact that it was in [...]

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George Wallace and Tea Bagging

Confused by the current public rage? A bit of history to help us understand the present moment:
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Polish writer Ryzard Kapuscinski traveled through the Soviet Empire during its last days from 1989 through 1991, and watched the unsettling costs of social upheaval. As the Communist Party, the state security apparatus , and the crude but reassuring [...]

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More on Astroturf

Dear “The Left” –
Things seemed pretty great for you a while back, eh? You had helped elect a black guy to the presidency. You defeated a feminist war hero and a crazy beauty queen from Alaska. At the swearing in, there was a lot of crying. Words like “hope” and “optimism” were tossed around so [...]

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The grass, its roots, and their imposters

Dear “the left,”
Please stop acting all shocked and appalled about the right-wing groups that have been deployed to yell about health care reform, disrupt public meetings, and stage protests. Pelosi and Steny Hoyer (on the left, if not very far) actually called the tea party people “unAmerican.”
It is either the height of hypocrisy or [...]

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Tea Protest Followup

We got to thinking some about our experience with the teabag brigade and also about the extraordinary national attention devoted to the protests. We followed the extensive antics over at Wonkette and at a site set up just to collect tea-themed blog posts, Tea Blogging. We read the mainstream media coverage and listened to TV [...]

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Teabagging, Alabama Style

Father Charles Coughlin was a radio personality from the 1930s. He was very popular (45 million-plus listeners by 1930) and known for his populism and racism which ultimately morphed into praise for Mussolini and Hitler.
Father Coughlin’s sermons laid the groundwork for all manner of American populists in subsequent decades, from George Wallace to the xenophobic [...]

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