Russ McBee

Regarding the 2008 Republican platform, Chris Kelly said this: See, the problem here, for most Republican politicians, is that the platform is horrifying. A catalogue of revenge dreams and power fantasies, impossible and illegal, most of them involving women and scourging. It's the portrait in the attic of what Republican rule would look like, ...

An article in today's NYT discusses the similarities between the current financial crisis and another one in 1907, and the similar roles played in those respective crises by Warren Buffett and JP Morgan. On Buffett's recent investments in Goldman Sachs and GE, the financial historian Ron Chernow said this: ''It's a high-risk moment, and I think ...

Via the mighty Joe Powell, Matt Taibbi said this about Sarah Palin's address to the GOP convention: It was like watching Gidget address the Reichstag. That, my friends, is priceless.

The inimitable Newscoma had this to say about the bailout and the growing job losses in small town America: People are hurting everywhere and if one, and I mean, ONE, Wall Street exec gets a bonus for bad behavior, the local sheriff is just going to have to come and get me as I will be stopping traffic in the road. For context, see this post ...

E.J. Dionne summarizes the crisis in a nutshell: There is a moral problem for capitalism itself if taxpayers take on a burden created by the foolishness of the privileged and get little compensation in return.

From Taking Note: One good thing to emerge from this week’s market turmoil is that it lays waste to the argument that privatizing Social Security is in everyone’s best interest. Amen to that. Just try to imagine what would have befallen Social Security recipients if their income had been dependent on the shell game artists responsible for the ...

Commenting on the MSM coverage of the Democratic National Convention, Jim Voorhies said this (in comments here): It’s so much easier if you don’t watch at all and just read about it online afterwards. That way you get to do something else. It’s almost like multitasking, without the screwing two things up at once. Amen.

I ran across these two quotes from Angela Davis, both of which bear remembering: First, on President Bush: When Bush says democracy, I often wonder what he's referring to. Then, dear Angela pretty much sums up our shallow culture's obsession with style over substance: It is both humiliating and humbling to discover that a single generation ...

Last night, an electrical storm threatened to cancel my family's annual July 4th fireworks extravaganza. We had everything ready to go: the launchers were set on the ground, and six of us sat in two trucks on top of a hill with the fireworks in covered boxes in the truck beds. The storm came, the rain started, and lightning surrounded us. We ...

The Anonymous Liberal said this about Jonah Goldberg: For reasons I cannot explain, big publications keep hiring Jonah Goldberg to write columns that make everyone dumber for having read them. That pretty much sums it up.