Cross-posted from Media Matters…
It is not insulting Fox News host Greg Gutfeld to say he doesn’t know much about the subjects he jokes and chats about for a living. He draws pleasure from saying so himself, over and over again, in a thousand repetitive ways.
Like the network he works for, Gutfeld’s shtick is premised on the loud embrace of a pugilistic, media-bubbled conservatism. Gutfeld considered the late Andrew Breitbart a close friend and inspiration, and indeed represents what might be called the Breitbartian wing of the Fox News spectrum: he revels in media war for its own sake, prefers pop culture to political history, and spends his time buried in a trough of Twitter feeds and feuds. His new book, The Joy of Hate, reads like an extended riff on the author’s admission to being just an oversexed, Internet-and-TV addicted former lad-mag editor, who not all that long ago was teaching “old people how to do sit-ups on cruise ships,” and whose idea of journalistic legwork is using the search box at FoxNews.com. (more…)
This article is cross-posted from In These Times On September 13, two-time Pulitzer-Prize-winning New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof penned an op-ed titled “Students Over Unions” bashing the Chicago Teachers Union’s current strike. Kristof writes, I’d be sympathetic if the union focused solely…
On Monday, September 10, the Chicago Teachers Union—the oldest teachers union in America—went on strike. Teachers are striking for better pay, smaller class sizes and more job security. They are striking against school privatizations, teaching to standardized testing and the general…
To celebrate today’s announcement that Ayn Rand fanboy Paul Ryan will in a few months’ time be a heartbeat from the presidency—and to honor this special moment, marking the final syphilitic pus-spasms of America’s decline and fall–we are reposting for…
Calling yourself a libertarian today is a lot like wearing a mullet back in the nineteen eighties. It sends a clear signal: business up front, party in the back. You know, those guys who call themselves “socially liberal but fiscally…
This hidden history of our national celebration is only a small portion of Carey’s account of the extent and reach of the Americanization campaign. It shows how big business has led a long standing, persistent, and well financed campaign to turn the public against fighting for one’s rights if those rights are workplace rights.
This article is cross-posted from In These Times… For the last two years, I have covered union busting efforts by Honeywell, their close connections to President Obama and how federal agencies have assisted Honeywell in three different labor struggles since Obama came to…
“Dave Cote is feeling the beat. He takes a sip of Mountain Dew and bobs his head in time to the throbbing bass of Jay-Z’s “Hard Knock Life.” So begins a Fortune magazine profile titled “How Dave Cote Got Honeywell’s Groove Back.”
Creator of NPR’s Planet Money Adam Davidson is moving up in the world. He has gone from fellating the 1% to the top 0.1%.
There’s a new Boomer vs. Millennial piece over at Esquire making its way across the intertubes. If you hadn’t noticed, wringing one’s hands about Baby Boomers gorging themselves on the syrupy sweet hopes and dreams of the young’ns is the…
A few months back I had a long conversation with Freke Vuijst, a journalist from the lefty Dutch magazine Vrij Nederland, about the history of the Koch clan—specifically, we talked about what I learned during my trip to Quanah, Texas, the…
A man shot himself on April 4th in the very center of Athens. He is the latest in hundreds of suicides during and because of the crisis. Dimitris Christoulas chose the place (Syntagma Square) and the time (rush hour) to pass his message…
The depressingly familiar dead-end life that One L. Goh found himself in — surrounded by petty scams as revealed in the ex-staffer’s lawsuit and the bleak performance of the school’s graduates, combined with the back-to-back deaths of two family members — could make a lot of sane people desperate and enraged and suicidal…
One thing that the historical record makes obviously clear is that Adam Smith and his laissez-faire buddies needed brutal government policies to whip the English peasantry into a good capitalistic workforce willing to accept wage slavery
A little over a year ago, while researching the Confederacy’s economy, I stumbled across an unnerving graph charting the value of America’s “stock of slaves” in the last decades before the Civil War that helps give form to the brutal crackdown on the Occupy protests — and suggests darker things to come as we try to free ourselves from their vision of civilization, and our place in it.
This article was first published at TheNation.com If there’s one thing that distinguishes Ron Paul from the rest of the GOP field, it’s his principled stand against American empire and his ardent defense of individual liberties. [1] Paul’s opposition to wars, bloated…
In the spirit of the Millennial vs. Boomer debate raging in the comment section of Connor Kilpatrick’s great piece, “Thirty More Years of Hell,” I’d like to republish my account of an anti-healthcare town hall meeting I attended way back in 2009 in the subprime Southern California suburb of Victorville…
This is for my fellow Millennial. The one who gets his or her rocks off to visions of a glorious Boomer-hegemonic extinction, like those old claymation movies of dinosaurs getting nuked by meteor-fire. This is for those of you who, like me, need a vision of that mighty Boomer Brontosaurus keelin’ over for good…
The Oakland Police Department went on another massive tear this weekend. On Saturday, they used rubber bullets, pepper flash-bang grenades, tear gas and batons to violently crush an attempt by Occupy activists to take over a vacant convention center in downtown Oakland…
Earlier this week, I got into a little Twitter battle with Matthew Yglesias after the prominent blogger tweeted out “”EXCLUSIVE: The activities of individual business executives have no relationship to the level of economy-wide employment.”
Last Thursday I got up at 7:00 a.m. and drove NASCAR-style to make it in time to my arraignment hearing at the Central Arraignment Court in sunny downtown Los Angeles 8:30 a.m.–only to find out that I’d wasted my time….
A video recorded during last week’s early-morning raid on Occupy Berkeley shows a burly Berkeley cop strutting around with a repeat-fire tear gas grenade launcher, menacingly pointing it at protesters without provocation. At one point the bloodlusting cop threatens to shoot pointblank the guy with the camera…
Free Press’ Josh Stearns has put together, and continues to maintain, a great up-to-date resource that’s keeping track of all the journalists arrested while covering the Occupy movement. As of today that number stands at 36, and includes the recent…
With violence and government crackdowns making headlines from so many familiar parts of the world, there’s hardly been a peep in the media about the biggest and ugliest massacre of all: Last Friday in Kazakhstan, riot police slaughtered up 70…
Late last week, as I was reading a story by the Family Guy writer who had been brutally arrested and mistreated at the Occupy LA crackdown, I suddenly realized, “Holy shit, I remember that guy!” I didn’t catch his name…
