By Hank Stram, December 2008
Just in case it’s not abundantly clear, I want to point out that in Right-wing world, nothing is ever Bush’s fault. Everything bad that happened up until a few months ago? Clinton’s fault. Everything bad that happened since a few months ago? That’s the market responding to the terrifying reality of the impending Obama presidency. Read the rest of this entry »
By Hank Stram, November 2008
This month’s column is going to be short and sweet. Copy deadlines being what they are, I’m writing this a full week before the 2008 presidential election and I’m going to go out on a limb and offer my prognostications. In brief, I predict a merciful end to Karl Rove’s vaunted “permanent Republican majority.” Read the rest of this entry »
By Hank Stram, October 2008
The Republican Party used to be a party of ideas, granted, they were stupid and fucked-up ideas, but they were ideas. The Sarah Palin ordeal, however, shows that they are only interested in ideologies: theocracy and corporatocracy. Read the rest of this entry »
By Hank Stram, September 2008
“It’s like these guys take pride in being ignorant.” – Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama
“Forty percent of the mass of every tree in the forest is crude oil.” – Rep. Bill Sali (R-ID), suggesting Idaho could be the next Saudi Arabia (but confusing cellulosic ethanol with oil).
By Hank Stram, August 2008
Imagine for a moment that you are the owner of the most wildly successful business in human history. You manufacture a product upon which nearly every person in the industrialized world is utterly dependent.
By Hank Stram, July 2008
It’s the N.I.E., Stupid
With every other justification for the blunder in Babylon having gone up in smoke, the Bushies and their defenders have returned to the dusty old canard that “everyone believed Saddam Hussein had WMDs – even Congress, which had access to the same information as the White House. That’s why even a bunch of Democrats authorized the use of military force against Iraq.”
By Hank Stram, June 2008
Don’t it Make My Red States Blue?
Amid the chaos surrounding the 2008 elections, the media has underplayed some very positive news for Democrats. So far there have been three special elections to fill vacated congressional seats. The first of these was a contest to replace former Speaker of the House and heart-attack-in-waiting Denny Hastert’s seat in Illinois’s 14th congressional district.
By Hank Stram, May 2008
Lost in the discussion of how successful the glorious Surge has been is a serious examination of life in an occupied country from the perspective of the occupied. Regardless of our perception that pre-invasion Iraq was a lawless failed state with no functioning institutions, it really wasn’t.
By Hank Stram, April 2008
It’s more than a little amusing watching the Republicans and their big-media surrogates feign bewilderment that some of us find it creepy that they insist on using the appellation Barack Hussein Obama. “What’s the problem?” they ask. “His middle name is Hussein. Why shouldn’t we use his middle name?”
By Hank Stram, October 2007
Because minorities tend to vote Democrat, there is already a built-in structural disadvantage by dint of inefficient polling places in minority neighborhoods. But the clever obstructionist realizes that a few more percentage points can be shaved from the “D” tally by introducing procedural impediments that will “gum up the works” and slow things down even more.
Read the rest of this entry »
