President Obama’s 2012 reelection appears to have left far-right and white supremacist groups with a major sad.
Analysis by anecdote is always a treacherous thing. But sometimes you can see when the tide of opinion and the history is palpably turning. This morning soon-to-be NFLer Michael Sam poked fun at the publicity seeking GOP lobbyist who wants to push a bill banning gay players from the NFL. A has-been PGA golfer made a doofus anti-gay remark about Sam on Twitter and now looks poised to get fined by the PGA for making the organization look bad. And this all comes amidst reports out of Arizona that basically everyone is turning against the “go ahead and hate on gays” bill that now sits on the Governor’s desk, including a good number of the people who passed it in the first place. Even Fox is now wondering whether the right’s new ‘religious liberty’ bills might not be an overreaction.
Venture capitalist Tom Perkins — best known for comparing the war on inequality to “Kristallnacht” — is already winning.
New GOP Obamacare ‘tweak’ bill would cost a million Americans their health care and grow the deficit. Other than that, it’s apparently great.
This is much less accessible to a mass American audience than Pope Francis’s statements on gays or the poor or a lot else. But this headline ‘Founder of Liberation Theology Hailed at Vatican‘ would have been unimaginable at any time in the last 35 years.
I’ve gotten quite a response to the piece I wrote yesterday about leaving academics for journalism and publishing. I’ve published a few emails and gotten many more. But I’ve refrained from posting most of them since, more than usual, they’re intertwined with personally identifying information that isn’t really possible to strip out. But there are a few points people have raised that I wanted to address.
This is pretty amazing. Fox is resurrecting the crudest and most discredited defenses of slavery and the Confederacy, arguing that slavery was on the way out and that the South was willing to let it go. It was just Lincoln who decided to launch a murderous and costly war for no reason. John Stewart takes it from there.
Virtual currencies like Bitcoin seems to create huge efficiencies for losing all your money.
We’re discussing the wages of Bitcoin here at The Hive (sub req).
Since the election of Barack Obama and the concomitant rise of Tea Party Republicanism, there’s been more and more reaching back to the discredited ideas of nullification, interposition and even, at the truly fringe extreme, secession. They are each efforts to preserve power for disempowered minorities after they’ve lost battles in the standard majoritarian system. More simply, they’re workarounds to get out of the consequences of losing political fights. And by definition they are rearguard actions. American history and constitutional jurisprudence has consistently ruled against them. This new raft of ‘religious liberty’ bills to allow you to keep discriminating against gay people simply continue the same pattern. They just move it to purported 1st Amendment grounds.