I’m sure everything will be awesome in 12 months.

An overview of the slums of cable news — talk about your slumdog millionaires.

Mumbo-Jumbo — Send Me To The Electric Chair, Gloucester Blues Festival, 2009.

The craziest wingnut effusion ever of all time forever remains Kim Du Toit’s seminal 2003… essay? rant? dribbling? “The Pussification of the American Male.” (Yes, really.) But just a few days ago Dennis Prager, who is certainly no slouch in the seminal wingnut lunacy area, delivered himself of something special.  It is perhaps not so [...]

One of the great things about being a novelist is that the form enables me to dramatize the way the government and establishment media collude to manipulate public opinion. The phenomenon of the mainstream media laundering government talking points into news in exchange for access to even more such talking points has been ruthlessly documented by many outstanding bloggers such as Glenn Greenwald, Dan Froomkin, Charles Kaiser, Jay Rosen, and Matt Taibbi. I hope to draw more attention to their work by my fictional — or not so fictional — representations of the actual process at work.

And so, here’s what I imagine took place during a hastily convened April 20th late-night White House meeting of panicked BP executives, incompetent Mineral Management Service officials, and one very slick West Wing PR flack.

Secretary Clinton makes it clear that the U.S is ideologically committed to preserving and encouraging independent civil society. The question now is what practical steps can the U.S take towards advancing this goal?

CNN provides no explanation of why Admiral Thad Allen would say that with the new containment cap in place, 80,000 barrels of oil a day could be recovered even though their same story parrots the current government estimate that places an upper limit of 65,000 barrels a day on the leak rate.

This is a couple days old, but it’s worth paying attention to. The two most powerful teachers’ unions blasted the President and his education policies at their annual conventions. In particular, they decried the veto threat the President offered on the war supplemental if the House passed legislation keeping teachers in their jobs, partially offset by cuts to the Race to the Top fund.

The people who benefit from the status quo will fight tooth and nail against movements to reform it. Any grassroots movement that tries to put the power back in the hands of regular people will inevitably be attacked by those who profit from having the power. As we have seen with the Nonpartisan League, its enemies smeared it, tried to subvert its message and stole its techniques.

The study itself (which suffers from some unfortunate biases, including its assumption that members of the military should be more supportive of torture) suggests that Dick Cheney’s pro-torture media blitz might explain why torture became more popular once a purportedly anti-torture President took power.

There may be some truth to that. I wouldn’t endorse it unquestioningly without some evidence to support it. But if it is true, it would serve as a lesson about the Obama Administration strategy to avoid fighting for anything it believes in. That is, the study raises the possibility that–by ceding the field to PapaDick’s relentless pro-torture campaign–the Administration served to make its own stated policy less popular.

But as I said, that may not be the right lesson to take away from this. . . .