A "New flava in ya ear!" Production starring Drake & The Weeknd.
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Wednesday, November 09, 2011
The Crow.
"Make a joyful noise."
Words. For Your Consideration.
"...We are nowhere near the post-racial moment that Barack Obama’s election was supposed to usher in; instead, we seem more obsessed with race than ever, and more attuned to identity politics in all its permutations. But Herman Cain’s candidacy has confirmed what the experience of the Obama era has already suggested: In national politics, race matters, but ideology matters much, much more.
It didn’t used to be this way. Before the 1960s, white racism was one of the great organizing principles of American politics, capable of trumping ideological differences and creating otherwise-inexplicable political alliances. In the New Deal era, for instance, progressive Northern Democrats and conservative Southern Democrats could share the same political party because the Southerners cared more about preserving racial privilege than they did about the cause of limited government: They lived with F.D.R.’s liberalism because he left Jim Crow alone.
Even in the late 1970s and 1980s, with the cause of white supremacy largely finished and overt racism increasingly taboo, it was still possible to pick out a nest of high-profile issues where racial attitudes plausibly shaped ideological positions as much as than the other way around — the tangle of crime/welfare/affirmative action, in which it was sometimes hard to separate the principles involved from the long shadow of Jim Crow.
But now those issues, too, have receded from the national debate. (When was the last time you heard a national Republican politician attack affirmative action, or a national Democrat complain about mass incarceration?) In their place, we have a politics where partisans on both sides strain — and strain, and strain — to put a racial spin on ideological disagreements that have little to do with race, deploying claims of racial animus as bludgeons on issues that are only tangentially connected to America’s history of slavery and segregation.
The election of America’s first black president has raised the temperature around race without fundamentally changing this dynamic. The great debates of the Obama era have largely focused on issues like health care, financial reform, entitlements and deficits, rather than the more racially charged controversies that divided liberals and conservatives a generation ago. Yet they’ve taken place amid a blizzard of racial charges and counter-charges — against Tea Partiers and talk radio, against Planned Parenthood and the N.A.A.C.P., against the president himself. From the rhetoric on both sides, you would think that the Ku Klux Klan, black nationalism and the eugenics movement were all live forces in American politics, instead of fossilized remnants of an era when race was a defining issue rather than a sideshow.
The entire Cain candidacy has been a reductio ad absurdum of this tendency — a case of anti-Obama conservatives reacting to the left’s overheated charges of right-wing racism by rallying around an African-American conservative who delights in playing the race card himself.
In a sense, all of this is understandable. Racism is America’s original sin. The story of race in America has been one of the great dramas of our history. It makes sense that the presidency of Barack Obama has brought these issues rushing back to the surface.
But they’re mostly a distraction..."
THE NEW YORK TIMES: The Herman Cain Scrunity
Blow the Whistle.
A Moment of Clarity.
Words.
"This week’s elections around the country were brought to you by the word “overreach,” specifically conservative overreach. Given an opportunity in 2010 to build a long-term majority, Republicans instead pursued extreme and partisan measures. On Tuesday, they reaped angry voter rebellions.
What’s often lost is that the conservative Republicans elected in 2010 aren’t simply pushing right-wing policies. Where they can, they are also using majorities won in a single election to manipulate future elections — by making it harder for young and minority voters to cast ballots, and by trying to break the political power of unions. The votes in Maine and Ohio were a rebuke to this strategy.
...Tuesday’s results underscored the power of unions and populist politics, the danger to conservatives of social-issue extremism and the fact that 2010 was no mandate for right-wing policies. They also mean that if Republicans don’t back away from an agenda that makes middle-class, middle-of-the-road Americans deeply uncomfortable — and in some cases angry — they will lose the rather more important fight of 2012."
THE WASHINGTON POST: The right-wing’s shellacking
Words.
"This week’s elections around the country were brought to you by the word “overreach,” specifically conservative overreach. Given an opportunity in 2010 to build a long-term majority, Republicans instead pursued extreme and partisan measures. On Tuesday, they reaped angry voter rebellions.
What’s often lost is that the conservative Republicans elected in 2010 aren’t simply pushing right-wing policies. Where they can, they are also using majorities won in a single election to manipulate future elections — by making it harder for young and minority voters to cast ballots, and by trying to break the political power of unions. The votes in Maine and Ohio were a rebuke to this strategy.
...Tuesday’s results underscored the power of unions and populist politics, the danger to conservatives of social-issue extremism and the fact that 2010 was no mandate for right-wing policies. They also mean that if Republicans don’t back away from an agenda that makes middle-class, middle-of-the-road Americans deeply uncomfortable — and in some cases angry — they will lose the rather more important fight of 2012."
THE WASHINGTON POST: The right-wing’s shellacking
Tuesday, November 08, 2011
Headlines.
"Roberson boost the rate up / Time that somebody paid up / A lot of these niggas came up off a style that I made up / But if all I hear is me / Who should I be afraid of?" - Drizzy.
STEREOGUM: Stereogum Q&A: Drake
Monday, November 07, 2011
getupgetoutanddosomething.
A Moment of Clarity.
Words.
"Attention young people. The good news is you can finally get some political power this year. The bad news is you're going to have to do something really, really boring on Tuesday. You're going to have to pretend to care about who is on your Soil and Water Conservation Board. You are going to have to vote in an off-off-year election.
Follow me here: If you feel like your government has been ignoring you, you're right. You do something dramatic like Occupy Wall Street, which poll after poll has shown Americans basically agree with, and you get more attention from the police than from politicians. The Tea Party has an entire caucus in Congress, while you have an extremely convincing tumblr. Ever wonder why?
It's because the Tea Party hardcore voted. They voted in primaries. They targeted comfortable, well-liked politicians and cost them their jobs. They showed up and got their stickers. And they'll do it again. They are feared. And if you want a government that fears YOU, you're going to have to go to the local middle school library and get your name crossed off the list. And you're going to have to do it now, so your numbers register for next year's campaign, when it matters.
...Men in suits have been pandering to our demographic for years, only they've been doing it by making sexy action reboots of David the Gnome. Let's have a sexy action reboot of representative democracy this time."
THE WASHINGTON POST: Time for young people to vote
Words.
"Attention young people. The good news is you can finally get some political power this year. The bad news is you're going to have to do something really, really boring on Tuesday. You're going to have to pretend to care about who is on your Soil and Water Conservation Board. You are going to have to vote in an off-off-year election.
Follow me here: If you feel like your government has been ignoring you, you're right. You do something dramatic like Occupy Wall Street, which poll after poll has shown Americans basically agree with, and you get more attention from the police than from politicians. The Tea Party has an entire caucus in Congress, while you have an extremely convincing tumblr. Ever wonder why?
It's because the Tea Party hardcore voted. They voted in primaries. They targeted comfortable, well-liked politicians and cost them their jobs. They showed up and got their stickers. And they'll do it again. They are feared. And if you want a government that fears YOU, you're going to have to go to the local middle school library and get your name crossed off the list. And you're going to have to do it now, so your numbers register for next year's campaign, when it matters.
...Men in suits have been pandering to our demographic for years, only they've been doing it by making sexy action reboots of David the Gnome. Let's have a sexy action reboot of representative democracy this time."
THE WASHINGTON POST: Time for young people to vote
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