Month: September 2011
Saving America From Itself
A lot of hypotheticals made the rounds after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks. “What would you do if” questions were a way to process all the horror, as were scenarios of how to go forward.
My boss back then was a young Jewish woman, raised by her Orthodox rabbi grandfather. She had spent time in Israel, where she said the kind of invasive security procedures that eventually became codified as the Patriot Act were necessary to protect the country. “But if it isn’t America after you’re done protecting it,” I asked, “what’s the point?”
At its core, our country changed. The Tea Party of the Flies and its, “There’s not enough for everyone so I’m gonna get mine” scarcity mind-set with racist, homophobic, fundamentalist undertones took hold.
Ten years later, I still wonder about the answer to that question. When Bush suggested that average Americans could best defeat terrorism by going shopping, we responded. We flooded sport utility vehicle show rooms, and gawked as Hummers and Lincoln Navigators attempted to squeeze into parking spots like paunchy football coaches trying to wear their high school uniforms. We distracted ourselves with the antics of second-rate celebrities as they bounced from sex tapes to drug binges to rehab and back. We went along with invasions, with shock and awe, with rigged videos of statues falling and blond female service members being rescued. We were at war but we were never quite sure with whom: Insurgents? Dead-enders? Enemy combatants?
Constituent Arrested for Confronting GOP Rep. Ryan at Town Hall
And Ryan makes a joke about it.
Sorry, Rick, Galileo Was Not ‘Outvoted’ by Other Scientists
[Although] Perry’s bold (reckless?) commitment to attacking Social Security and Romney’s counter-parry were the most important political dynamics of the encounter, what really set our heads spinning was the Texan’s invocation of Galileo, or, as they refer to him in Austin, “that sumbitch heliocentrist.”
As every school kid knows, Galileo’s insistence that the earth revolves around the sun enraged the big brains of the Catholic Church and, in 1615, the Roman Inquisition started to hound him. After he published his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems — seen as an attack on Pope Urban VIII — he was tried and found “vehemently suspect of heresy,” being finally forced to recant, spending the rest of his life under house arrest.
[…]
Pass This Bill
In his speech, Obama was impassioned, not chill.
He came at Congress with the full force of his political will.
In his full-throated oration
He relied on repetition:
“Pass this bill. Pass this bill. Pass … this … bill!”
