America...What the Hell Is Wrong With Us?

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Thursday June 05, 2014 · 6:10 AM PDT

2014/06/05 · 06:10

Cross-posted at Attytood:

A politician who's in a tough re-election fight deleted a Twitter posting yesterday because he thought would offend voters in his home state. I know, I know, these days "politician-deletes-thoughtless-tweet" articles are the dog-bites-man stories of American journalism. Solet's see what outrageous and offensive thing Sen. Thad Cochran wanted to hide from the world:

Welcome home, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. A grateful America thanks you for your service. -- @SenThadCochran

attytood

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Thursday May 08, 2014 · 6:25 PM PDT

2014/05/08 · 18:25

Cross-posted at Attytood:

It's now been more than six years since the night that Dagma Rodriguez, a 33-year mother of three from the rugged neighborhood of West Kensington, said that she was sexually assaulted. Her assailant, she alleges, was a man who pressed her against a wall and began to fondle her.

"He started rubbing my breasts, rubbing my nipples," Rodriguez said. "I was so scared. My legs wouldn't stop shaking." The man kept talking lewdly, and kept fondling Rodriguez, until she began to cry...her assailant commanded her to "shut the f--- up."

attytood

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Sunday May 04, 2014 · 5:37 PM PDT

2014/05/04 · 17:37

Cross-posted at Attytood:

Their killing shocked the nation, as it should have. Four innocent, God-fearing Americans from the Heartland, gunned down in cold blood by an armed militia. It's been a while now, but the questions still gnaw.

Who was ultimately responsible for the assault, and why have the perpetrators not been brought to justice?

attytood

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Sunday March 30, 2014 · 7:52 PM PDT

2014/03/30 · 19:52

Cross-posted at Attytood:

Memo to self: Don't take a three-day weekend if you're trying to stay on top of the Gov. Chris Christie beat. Since I last sat at my newsroom desk Wednesday night, New Jersey's Most Convenient News Source™ has released a report that was commissioned by Chris Christie -- and paid for with your tax dollars -- that found that Chris Christie had absolutely nothing to do with the Chris Christie Bridgegate scandal, tangled with reporters, accepted the resignation of Port Authority chairman David Samson (who, by the way, had nothing to do with David Samson's Port Authority scandal), then flew his Lear jet to Las Vegas to seek the 2016 presidential nod of casino gazillionaire Sheldon Adelson, only to crash in apologies and bickering over his view of Israel on the West Bank and Sharia law. (Thus proving that right wingers do believe in "political correctness"...when it's their politics.)

attytood

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Wednesday February 19, 2014 · 3:32 PM PST

2014/02/19 · 15:32

Cross-posted at Attytood:

There's a reason that Gordon Gekko's famous speech scene in "Wall Street" -- "The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works" -- won Michael Douglas an Academy Award and is considered one of the more memorable movie scenes of the (relatively) modern era. It's because it didn't just happen in a vacuum -- it happened in a special time and a special place, Ronald Reagan's America.

attytood

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Wednesday November 13, 2013 · 5:39 PM PST

2013/11/13 · 17:39

Cross-posted at Attytood:

For the majority of us who care about stuff -- whether it's politics, or the direction of the country...or the media that write about those things -- there is nothing more frustrating than the lack of recourse for a legitimate grievance. In the political realm, there are elections -- yes, it's ridiculously hard to vote out incumbents, but there's always hope -- and we've also seen protest movements (the Tea Party on the right, Occupy Wall Street on the left) to fill some of the gaps.

attytood

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Monday November 11, 2013 · 6:39 PM PST

2013/11/11 · 18:39

Cross-posted at Attytood:

I'm know I'm going to sound like an old man again, but I can remember 1997 like it was yesterday. I can almost taste it, smell it -- the time when a couple of Yankee kids named Jeter and Rivera ruled the baseball world, when Hillary Clinton was strolling the corridors of the White House, and when the Dow hit the Olympian heights of 8,000. It seemed like those times would never end, but now it's 16 long years later (that's not a typo...1-6!) and time continues to march inexorably forward.

attytood

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Friday May 03, 2013 · 8:20 AM PDT

2013/05/03 · 08:20

Cross-posted at Attytood:

The other day one of my blog trolls wrote something that actually made me laugh out loud. He was complaining about something I wrote and added, "at least it wasn't my 285th post about Kent State." I thought of that last night as I sat down to write "my 285th blog post about Kent State" (give or take maybe 279).

If you're the kind of person who comes here a lot, you probably know that Saturday is 43rd anniversary of those tragic events on that Ohio campus -- May 4, 1970, when National Guardsmen murdered four students during a chaotic protest against President Richard Nixon's escalation of the war in Southeast Asia. It was, for all intents and purposes, the spiritual end of the era that we call the 1960s (or the '60s. or the Sixties...take your pick), later wrapped up in a bow by the surprise epilogue of the Watergate scandal.

attytood

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Monday March 18, 2013 · 5:47 PM PDT

2013/03/18 · 17:47

I spent a couple of nights last week on the lookout for a cloud of rising smoke. From the chimney at the Vatican? No thank you -- there were already thousands of journalists around the globe fixated on the ancient mystical wizardry in St. Peter's Square. I was a lot more concerned that black smoke was going to rise from the damp, raw streets of East Flatbush, in a corner of Brooklyn many blocks removed from the high-tech glitz of that borough's new Barclays Center. Night after night, hundreds of young people -- most from the neighborhood -- marched on their local police station house because they wanted answers to a simple question.

Why was a 16-year-old boy named Kimani Gray shot seven times by the New York cops -- three times in the back?

attytood

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Wednesday January 23, 2013 · 6:06 PM PST

2013/01/23 · 18:06

Cross-posted here.

On Monday, President Obama hailed the pioneers who in 1848 first fought for women's rights at Seneca Falls.

On Wednesday, Obama's Pentagon sent America's female troops charging up Hamburger Hill, metaphorically speaking.

Leon Panetta, the outgoing defense secretary, has decided that for the first time U.S. women troops will be eligible for front-line combat infantry or artillery jobs that have long been restricted to men -- first by tradition and after 1994 by official Pentagon policy, according to multiple news accounts.

attytood

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Monday December 17, 2012 · 6:55 PM PST

2012/12/17 · 18:55

Cross-posted here:

“The election season's overheated political rhetoric is adding fuel to the fire," [said Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center.] The more polarized the political scene, the more people at the extremes.” Many Americans are enraged by what they see as America's decline, and opportunistic politicians have done their best to stoke those fears and demonize President Obama in the process.

-- The Southern Poverty Law Center, 2012 report.

It's time for America to wake up to a new reality -- that for more than a generation, a radical fringe group has held sway over the American political process, a cadre that now traffics in conspiracy theories as loony as many militias or "Patriot" groups, that has with no evidence accused the president of planning to grant himself dictatorial powers while embracing "black helicopter"-style tropes about the U.S. surrendering its power to the United Nations, a posse that's clashed with America's police chiefs over issues like so-called "cop killer" bullets and has thwarted all efforts to eliminate weapons that are only good for committing mass murder.

attytood

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Wednesday December 12, 2012 · 12:25 PM PST

2012/12/12 · 12:25

Cross-posted here:

This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America.....Our chief weapons in a more pinpointed attack will be better schools, and better health, and better homes, and better training, and better job opportunities to help more Americans, especially young Americans, escape from squalor and misery and unemployment rolls where other citizens help to carry them. Very often a lack of jobs and money is not the cause of poverty, but the symptom. The cause may lie deeper in our failure to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities, in a lack of education and training, in a lack of medical care and housing, in a lack of decent communities in which to live and bring up their children.

-- President Lyndon B. Johnson, Jan. 8, 1964

Most pop music is, and will always be, about the eternal themes of love and death and the pursuit of happiness, but if you listen harder you can also hear the political and social background noise of a generation. Like when I came of age in the so-called "Me Generation" of the late 1970s, amid the nihilistic twin peaks of disco and punk rock. Or 1967's Summer of Love, ushered in by Sgt. Pepper, "A Whiter Shade of Pale," and "San Francisco." or Madonna hailing the Reagan years with "Material Girl."

In the mid-1960s -- at roughly the same moment that LBJ delivered his famous War on Poverty speech -- there were a lot of songs about poor people

Newer
Older

RSS

America...What the Hell Is Wrong With Us?

Why not a national story? Philly cops accused of robberies, sex assaults, and system does nothing

4 Dead Americans

Chris Christie: Male chauvinist pig

Peggy Noonan writes the most ironic, un-self-aware column in the history of Western civilization

I'm done with '60 Minutes' and its sponsors -- and you should be, too

Atlanta's Turner Field Is Dying -- And American Sanity Is Dying With It

Yes, the 43rd anniversary of Kent State does matter...now more than ever

The long hot summer of 2013

How can you ask a woman to be the last woman to die for a mistake?

It's time to marginalize a fringe group called the NRA

Down in the boondocks