The chief benefit of body-cams as far as I can see is that for the first time in forty years or more, some elements of the mainstream press are actually beginning to hesitate a little (a very little, but at least there’s some forward movement) and ask a question or two before simply acting as stenographers to law…

It goes back way before Atwater, all the way back to the McCarthy era, the 1950s, when—against the wishes of his corporate superiors at CBS—Edward R Murrow took on the fascist senator from Wisconsin and humiliated him for all the world to see, simply by showing him for what he really was. America’s reactionary right…

There’s a whole industry in the posthumous smear campaign going back to Trayvon Martin and the cult of Zimmerman.

That’s not why the cop says he stopped her, but maybe you know better.

It’s not just Trump. The most terrifying goddamn thing imaginable is that a large number of people could (and will) be persuaded to vote for ANY of these sleazebags. From the Stay Puft Marshmallow fascism of Scott Walker to the bespectacled shaft of white noise that is Rick Perry, not one of these men has the…

I am firmly convinced that the real objective of the Republicans is to peel off young white men, effectively splitting the youth vote—that they are the real objects of this exercise.

I’m as unforgiving and self-righteous as the best of us, and I suppose it’s sport of a sort, to kick someone who can’t kick back, but I can’t bring myself to spend a lot of time hating on this sad, broken, arrogant, pitiful old woman whose whole life has been utterly drained of any meaning it ever had.

Nobody’s actually pretending that so much these days. Everyone who acknowledges the problem of institutional racism at all (mind you, way too few Americans acknowledge it, but that’s another story) understands that it is a national problem, not a regional one. Anyone who has ever lived anywhere in America knows that…

That would not make a buzzing sound, just a high, indistinct whine.

Diptheria “In the 1920s, there were an estimated 100,000 to 200,000 cases of diphtheria per year in the United States, causing 13,000 to 15,000 deaths per year.^[17] Children represented a large majority of these cases and fatalities.”

Well, everybody she knows is this stupid.

The wildest sentence in this, or perhaps in any article.

I’m not as principled as you are. For a billion dollars, I would let him be my father.

This could work, just so long as my new compulsory wife is really, really rich, because my husband and I have this staggeringly huge mortgage that never shows any signs of getting smaller, plus our kids’ college debt. Ideally, my husband’s new compulsory husband will be highly solvent too, so we can not only pay the…

I smoked for years. Tried quitting a dozen times. Finally succeeded through a combination of self-hypnosis and the nicotine patch (crazy dreams on those things!)

This is so cruel. This reminds me of a case I remember reading about many, many years ago—sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s, I think—about a teenage girl in Iowa whose upright, pious, all-American, mega-Christian “I’m in charge here” father decided to punish her for some relatively minor transgression (staying…

The Megyn Kelly who understands that with the aging of the GOP base, Republican candidates and operatives need the crazy Christian right more desperately than ever before.

My early education in feminism back in the early 1970s included a boss who once leaned against my desk, smirking and picking his teeth with a lunch-counter toothpick as he told me that I was the ideal subordinate because as a young, divorced mother dependent on my (staggeringly meager) paycheck for the survival of…

Such a strange, sad, ruined woman. She grew up in an ultra right-wing, reactionary Catholic family, precursors to today’s deranged full-out fascist Republicans: she was the daughter of California Congressman John Schmitz, who was such an obsessive fascist he was ultimately kicked out of the friggin’ John Birch Society…

"Having a guy who doesn't really understand the issues be a spokesperson would be a disaster. MLK, Jr., Malcolm X, and Medgar Evers were the face of the Civil Rights Movement, not Jack Kerouac."