[In case it needs to be said: I don't agree with every word of everything I link to. --L.]
- Has Obama Finally Rejected Austerity – and Will California Reject It Too?
- [Calitics]
It has become the most important political story of the year – the battle between the New Hoovers who demand austerity, and the rest of the world that understands we need prosperity instead of prolonged recession. So far the Obama Administration has been hard to pin down on this. They pushed hard to get the $787 billion stimulus done in early 2009, but made the stimulus too small to pull the nation out of recession for fear of asking for too much.
Since then, calls for austerity have grown louder. Some of this comes from wealthy folks like Pete Peterson spending a ton of money to push this messaging out to the public. Some comes from Austerity Democrats who do not understand how economies actually work.
- Criminal Minds Cuts Female Cast Members
- [Women & Hollywood]
This should be filed in the are you fucking stupid category.
CBS has decided to make the bone headed decision to completely fire one female cast member AJ Cook. who played JJ the agent who handled the press, and cut back the episodes of Paget Brewster who already was the only female agent in the field dealing with the cases.
The reporting is that the cut is for financial reasons. So I guess when you are having money problems on a hit series the first thing you do is cut the women. Nice.
- The Border Violence Lie
- [Racialicious]
- News bulletin: men have hearts that break
- [Pandagon - Amanda Marcotte]
- I Wish I Could Call This Muslim-Hating Video antisemitic…
- [Alas A Blog]
…without getting into the whole question of whether the term antisemitism should apply only to Jews and without the complicating factor that not all Muslims are Semitic. Why? Because if you replace the word Muslim with the word Jew in what this man says and alter the historical references appropriately, he would be speaking–intelligently, articulately, with good humor and a controlled potentially persuasive anger; which is what is most frightening to me–some of the most pernicious of classical antisemitic tropes. And so I wish I could use the term antisemitism, not to make this about the Jews, or even to conjure Jew-hatred, but because I wish I had a word, a single, powerful word that would capture the xenophobic, racist, essentializing, religious hatred of Muslims that this man is espousing. Muslim-bashing doesn’t do it for me because Muslim-bashing captures neither the tone nor the intelligence with which the man speaks.
[So, um, IS there a word that implies "rhetorically powerful but morally repugnant"? -L]
- The Shrill One — once again, the lone voice of reason on the op-ed page
- [Hullabaloo]
Yesterday, I pointed out how this march toward Painful Austerity reminds me of the run up to Iraq and I realized at lest some of that feeling comes from the fact that The Shrill One is one of the only people in the mainstream media to sound the alarm. Again. This time, of course, he has the added gravitas of being a Nobel Prize winner in economics, which makes the shrillness all the more compelling.
He wrote this today…
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