Adamcat

James Wolcott: Signs of Desperation, Hints of Retreat: If I believed in the power of prayer, I would pray for Bush to fire Rove and Rumsfeld, shutter Guantanamo, and stop acting as if global warming was a fiction, but I have no reason to believe Bush would heed the prayers of average citizens any more [...]

From NewDonkey.com: Christ and Christmas Nothing, it seems, not even the Season of Peace and Good Will Towards Men, can evade today’s great secular idol, the conservative kulturkampf. Until I read E.J. Dionne’s column in today’s WaPo, I was only dimly aware of, and in some sort of unconscious mental triage had decided to ignore, [...]

If a monkey is hungry but has his arms pinned, there’s not much he can do about it. Unless that monkey can control a nearby robotic arm with his brain. And that’s exactly what the monkey in Andrew Schwartz‘s neurobiology lab at the University of Pittsburgh can do, feeding himself using a prosthetic arm controlled [...]

Alan Keyes never fails to disappoint. I look forward to him proposing the Federal Adoption Amendment whereby we prevent all of the children of donated sperm/eggs and all of the children who are adopted without a full family history, from copulating. I look forward to that except that he’s never going to actually get elected [...]

HoustonChronicle.com – Why abortion rate is up in Bush years: What does this tell us? Economic policy and abortion are not separate issues; they form one moral imperative. Rhetoric is hollow, mere tinkling brass, without health care, insurance, jobs, child care and a living wage. Pro-life in deed, not merely in word, means we need [...]

I found this interview with Tony Campolo to be interesting: My purpose in writing the book was to communicate loud and clear that I felt that evangelical Christianity had been hijacked. When did it become anti-feminist? When did evangelical Christianity become anti-gay? When did it become supportive of capital punishment? Pro-war? When did it become [...]

If only George Bush’s sense of responsibility included consequences. But alas, it does not. Here’s an excerpt from a Washington Post editorial: There is no justification, legal or moral, for the judgments made by Mr. Bush’s political appointees at the Justice and Defense departments. Theirs is the logic of criminal regimes, of dictatorships around the [...]

Ryan Lizza of TNR on the Terrorism Czar and Spinal Tap Secondly, Townsend’s move was a reminder that the White House counterterrorism job is the bureaucratic equivalent of the drummer in Spinal Tap. Bush has now gone through five of them since 9/11. (Clinton had one.) Like Spinal Tap’s drummers, who often choked on their [...]

Bruce Davidson’s Subway photos from 1980. The transformation from then to 14 years later when I moved here is truly remarkable. Don’t ever believe you can’t change things.