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• SPIN METER: Rivals airbrush anti-Romney words

  Salon.com > All Salon

  16 May 2012 | 12:30 pm

  WASHINGTON (AP) — Remember Newt Gingrich calling Mitt Romney a liar? Michele Bachmann saying Romney's unelectable? Rick Santorum calling Romney "the worst Republican in the country" to run against President Barack Obama?They're hoping you don't. And acting like it never happened (even though most of their words are just clicks away online.)One by one — with the exception of holdout Ron Paul — the GOP also-rans have coughed up endorsements of their onetime rival. And as they do, they're pulling rhetorical backflips to distance themselves from their former harsh assessments of…

• Greece heads to polls after talks collapse

  Salon.com > News

  15 May 2012 | 2:45 pm

  ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Greece headed into a new month of political uncertainty after power-sharing talks collapsed Tuesday, triggering new elections that could determine whether the country retains its cherished position in Europe's currency.Nine tortured days of fruitless talks to build a coalition government led to increasing doubts that Greece can make enough reforms to prevent the world's largest currency union from fracturing."We expect the euro to remain under pressure as a result of this, and pressure on the borrowing costs, the bond yields, of countries like Spain and Italy to…

• SPIN METER: Rivals airbrush anti-Romney words

  Salon.com

  16 May 2012 | 12:30 pm

  WASHINGTON (AP) — Remember Newt Gingrich calling Mitt Romney a liar? Michele Bachmann saying Romney's unelectable? Rick Santorum calling Romney "the worst Republican in the country" to run against President Barack Obama?They're hoping you don't. And acting like it never happened (even though most of their words are just clicks away online.)One by one — with the exception of holdout Ron Paul — the GOP also-rans have coughed up endorsements of their onetime rival. And as they do, they're pulling rhetorical backflips to distance themselves from their former harsh assessments of…

• SPIN METER: Rivals airbrush anti-Romney words

  Salon.com

  16 May 2012 | 12:30 pm

  WASHINGTON (AP) — Remember Newt Gingrich calling Mitt Romney a liar? Michele Bachmann saying Romney's unelectable? Rick Santorum calling Romney "the worst Republican in the country" to run against President Barack Obama?They're hoping you don't. And acting like it never happened (even though most of their words are just clicks away online.)One by one — with the exception of holdout Ron Paul — the GOP also-rans have coughed up endorsements of their onetime rival. And as they do, they're pulling rhetorical backflips to distance themselves from their former harsh assessments of…

• Sacha Baron Cohen’s dark political farce

  Salon.com > Movies

  15 May 2012 | 7:00 pm

  What exactly is Sacha Baron Cohen up to? This question, stupid as it may appear on the surface, has intrigued me ever since "Da Ali G Show" began airing in the United States. It's a stupid question because Baron Cohen is a comedian; as "edgy" or "controversial" as his topics and material may sometimes be, his job is to make people laugh. But most comedians don't try to get laughs by interviewing Pat Buchanan or Boutros Boutros-Ghali ("Boutros Boutros Boutros-Ghali," as Ali G introduced him) under false pretenses, or by leading a group of unsuspecting Arizona nightclubbers in a rousing chorus…

• 

  Salon.com > All Salon

• SPIN METER: Rivals airbrush anti-Romney words

  16 May 2012 | 12:30 pm

  WASHINGTON (AP) — Remember Newt Gingrich calling Mitt Romney a liar? Michele Bachmann saying Romney's unelectable? Rick Santorum calling Romney "the worst Republican in the country" to run against President Barack Obama?They're hoping you don't. And acting like it never happened (even though most of their words are just clicks away online.)One by one — with the exception of holdout Ron Paul — the GOP also-rans have coughed up endorsements of their onetime rival. And as they do, they're pulling rhetorical backflips to distance themselves from their former harsh assessments of…

• Ron Paul sets up Rand for 2016

  16 May 2012 | 11:50 am

  So Ron Paul says he is going to stop actively campaigning, but his supporters will continue to rack up delegates by storming state conventions. What will he do with these delegates? That is still unclear. (Barter them for gold?) What is the point of this strategy, exactly? Also unclear, but the Daily Beast's Ben Jacobs today says it's part of a "sneaky maneuver" to help his son Rand out. Ron will continue to consolidate power but will not appear to be actively sabotaging the party's nominee. Dave Weigel says the maneuver is less sneaky and barely a maneuver: He doesn't want it to be a huge…

• Next Tea Party targets

  16 May 2012 | 11:36 am

  What may be most notable about the surprise triumph yesterday of a Sarah Palin-backed insurgent in Nebraska’s Republican Senate primary is how routine these sorts of things are becoming.Deb Fischer’s late charge to victory wasn’t really rooted in ideology. As Hotline’s Reid Wilson points out, she’s actually racked up a (somewhat) moderate record in the Nebraska legislature, and has some personal connections to the state’s leading GOP establishment figures.But most GOP primary voters probably didn’t know this. Fischer came to the race with little money or name recognition and…

• Susana Martinez’s veep suicide

  16 May 2012 | 11:04 am

  While Newsweek touted New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez as a possible running mate for Mitt Romney, the erstwhile beneficiary of the hype all but killed her chances of getting the job by opening her mouth.“I absolutely advocate for comprehensive immigration reform,” Martinez  told reporter Andrew Romano. “Republicans want to be tough and say, ‘Illegals, you’re gone.’ But the answer is a lot more complex than that.”With those words, Martinez inflicted multiple wounds on whatever slender chance she had to join the national ticket. First, she indicated support for the immigration…

• Romney’s human shield

  16 May 2012 | 11:00 am

  The only honest line in "Inside the Circus," the recent Politico e-book in which millions of nauseating Republican operatives lacerate each other anonymously during primary season, should be mounted on the computers of all "political news readers": "It is sometimes unclear whether political campaigns are run for the benefit of the voters and office seekers or for the professional consultants who earn their living from politics." Every other line in the book mostly goes like, and then the RNC flack whispered that the campaign flack didn't know what he was doing, but that one sentence about…

• 

  Salon.com > News

• Greece heads to polls after talks collapse

  15 May 2012 | 2:45 pm

  ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Greece headed into a new month of political uncertainty after power-sharing talks collapsed Tuesday, triggering new elections that could determine whether the country retains its cherished position in Europe's currency.Nine tortured days of fruitless talks to build a coalition government led to increasing doubts that Greece can make enough reforms to prevent the world's largest currency union from fracturing."We expect the euro to remain under pressure as a result of this, and pressure on the borrowing costs, the bond yields, of countries like Spain and Italy to…

• NATO invites Pakistan to summit

  15 May 2012 | 10:45 am

  ISLAMABAD (AP) — NATO on Tuesday invited Pakistan's president to the upcoming Chicago summit on Afghanistan, the strongest sign yet that Islamabad is ready to reopen its western border to U.S. and NATO military supplies heading to the war in the neighboring country.Pakistan blocked the routes in November after American airstrikes killed 24 of its troops on the Afghan border. The attack sent ties between Washington and Islamabad to new lows, threatening regional cooperation needed for negotiating an end to the Afghan war.The U.S. expressed regret for the airstrikes and has been quietly…

• Obama’s GI Bill fight

  27 Apr 2012 | 12:21 pm

  The multiple incarnations of the GI Bill are widely considered some of the most effective pieces of social welfare legislation ever passed by the U.S. Congress. Since World War II, millions of veterans have been able to attend college and graduate school via direct tuition assistance from the federal government. The education received by the initial wave of World War II veterans is believed to have played a key role in the massive economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s.So how, then, did we get to where we are today, with GI bill education-related financial aid embroiled in the for-profit…

• Mitt: The real European

  27 Apr 2012 | 7:00 am

  An odd thing happened during Mitt Romney's victory-lap speech after Tuesday's Republican primaries: He didn't once mention the word "Europe."The absence was jarring, because Romney's claim that President Obama is dragging the United States toward a loathsome European-style "social welfare" future has been a staple of the former Massachusetts governor's shtick ever since he started campaigning in earnest.It's always been an easy line for him: Europe, Romney's audience understands, is the land of the not-free. The continent gave birth to Karl Marx, for crying out loud! Every now and then,…

• Wal-Mart’s shame grows worse

  25 Apr 2012 | 11:30 am

  Bloomberg is reporting that Eduardo Castro-Wright, the Wal-Mart executive fingered by the New York Times as the man at the heart of a huge international bribery scandal, has stepped down from his position as a member of the board of directors at MetLife.One has to pity poor Bloomberg reporter Andrew Frye, squelched by the constraints of his employer's by-the-book writing guidelines from expressing his natural aghast incredulity at Castro-Wright's well-compensated sinecure as "a member of MetLife's Governance and Corporate Responsibility Committee."MetLife's governance committee "oversees the…

• 

  Salon.com

• SPIN METER: Rivals airbrush anti-Romney words

  16 May 2012 | 12:30 pm

  WASHINGTON (AP) — Remember Newt Gingrich calling Mitt Romney a liar? Michele Bachmann saying Romney's unelectable? Rick Santorum calling Romney "the worst Republican in the country" to run against President Barack Obama?They're hoping you don't. And acting like it never happened (even though most of their words are just clicks away online.)One by one — with the exception of holdout Ron Paul — the GOP also-rans have coughed up endorsements of their onetime rival. And as they do, they're pulling rhetorical backflips to distance themselves from their former harsh assessments of…

• Ron Paul sets up Rand for 2016

  16 May 2012 | 11:50 am

  So Ron Paul says he is going to stop actively campaigning, but his supporters will continue to rack up delegates by storming state conventions. What will he do with these delegates? That is still unclear. (Barter them for gold?) What is the point of this strategy, exactly? Also unclear, but the Daily Beast's Ben Jacobs today says it's part of a "sneaky maneuver" to help his son Rand out. Ron will continue to consolidate power but will not appear to be actively sabotaging the party's nominee. Dave Weigel says the maneuver is less sneaky and barely a maneuver: He doesn't want it to be a huge…

• Next Tea Party targets

  16 May 2012 | 11:36 am

  What may be most notable about the surprise triumph yesterday of a Sarah Palin-backed insurgent in Nebraska’s Republican Senate primary is how routine these sorts of things are becoming.Deb Fischer’s late charge to victory wasn’t really rooted in ideology. As Hotline’s Reid Wilson points out, she’s actually racked up a (somewhat) moderate record in the Nebraska legislature, and has some personal connections to the state’s leading GOP establishment figures.But most GOP primary voters probably didn’t know this. Fischer came to the race with little money or name recognition and…

• Susana Martinez’s veep suicide

  16 May 2012 | 11:04 am

  While Newsweek touted New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez as a possible running mate for Mitt Romney, the erstwhile beneficiary of the hype all but killed her chances of getting the job by opening her mouth.“I absolutely advocate for comprehensive immigration reform,” Martinez  told reporter Andrew Romano. “Republicans want to be tough and say, ‘Illegals, you’re gone.’ But the answer is a lot more complex than that.”With those words, Martinez inflicted multiple wounds on whatever slender chance she had to join the national ticket. First, she indicated support for the immigration…

• Romney’s human shield

  16 May 2012 | 11:00 am

  The only honest line in "Inside the Circus," the recent Politico e-book in which millions of nauseating Republican operatives lacerate each other anonymously during primary season, should be mounted on the computers of all "political news readers": "It is sometimes unclear whether political campaigns are run for the benefit of the voters and office seekers or for the professional consultants who earn their living from politics." Every other line in the book mostly goes like, and then the RNC flack whispered that the campaign flack didn't know what he was doing, but that one sentence about…

• 

  Salon.com

• SPIN METER: Rivals airbrush anti-Romney words

  16 May 2012 | 12:30 pm

  WASHINGTON (AP) — Remember Newt Gingrich calling Mitt Romney a liar? Michele Bachmann saying Romney's unelectable? Rick Santorum calling Romney "the worst Republican in the country" to run against President Barack Obama?They're hoping you don't. And acting like it never happened (even though most of their words are just clicks away online.)One by one — with the exception of holdout Ron Paul — the GOP also-rans have coughed up endorsements of their onetime rival. And as they do, they're pulling rhetorical backflips to distance themselves from their former harsh assessments of…

• Ron Paul sets up Rand for 2016

  16 May 2012 | 11:50 am

  So Ron Paul says he is going to stop actively campaigning, but his supporters will continue to rack up delegates by storming state conventions. What will he do with these delegates? That is still unclear. (Barter them for gold?) What is the point of this strategy, exactly? Also unclear, but the Daily Beast's Ben Jacobs today says it's part of a "sneaky maneuver" to help his son Rand out. Ron will continue to consolidate power but will not appear to be actively sabotaging the party's nominee. Dave Weigel says the maneuver is less sneaky and barely a maneuver: He doesn't want it to be a huge…

• Next Tea Party targets

  16 May 2012 | 11:36 am

  What may be most notable about the surprise triumph yesterday of a Sarah Palin-backed insurgent in Nebraska’s Republican Senate primary is how routine these sorts of things are becoming.Deb Fischer’s late charge to victory wasn’t really rooted in ideology. As Hotline’s Reid Wilson points out, she’s actually racked up a (somewhat) moderate record in the Nebraska legislature, and has some personal connections to the state’s leading GOP establishment figures.But most GOP primary voters probably didn’t know this. Fischer came to the race with little money or name recognition and…

• Susana Martinez’s veep suicide

  16 May 2012 | 11:04 am

  While Newsweek touted New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez as a possible running mate for Mitt Romney, the erstwhile beneficiary of the hype all but killed her chances of getting the job by opening her mouth.“I absolutely advocate for comprehensive immigration reform,” Martinez  told reporter Andrew Romano. “Republicans want to be tough and say, ‘Illegals, you’re gone.’ But the answer is a lot more complex than that.”With those words, Martinez inflicted multiple wounds on whatever slender chance she had to join the national ticket. First, she indicated support for the immigration…

• Romney’s human shield

  16 May 2012 | 11:00 am

  The only honest line in "Inside the Circus," the recent Politico e-book in which millions of nauseating Republican operatives lacerate each other anonymously during primary season, should be mounted on the computers of all "political news readers": "It is sometimes unclear whether political campaigns are run for the benefit of the voters and office seekers or for the professional consultants who earn their living from politics." Every other line in the book mostly goes like, and then the RNC flack whispered that the campaign flack didn't know what he was doing, but that one sentence about…

• 

  Salon.com > Movies

• Sacha Baron Cohen’s dark political farce

  15 May 2012 | 7:00 pm

  What exactly is Sacha Baron Cohen up to? This question, stupid as it may appear on the surface, has intrigued me ever since "Da Ali G Show" began airing in the United States. It's a stupid question because Baron Cohen is a comedian; as "edgy" or "controversial" as his topics and material may sometimes be, his job is to make people laugh. But most comedians don't try to get laughs by interviewing Pat Buchanan or Boutros Boutros-Ghali ("Boutros Boutros Boutros-Ghali," as Ali G introduced him) under false pretenses, or by leading a group of unsuspecting Arizona nightclubbers in a rousing chorus…

• American influx at Cannes

  15 May 2012 | 10:30 am

  CANNES, France (AP) — Despite the mood in Europe, don't expect any austerity at the Cannes Film Festival, the annual Cote d'Azur extravaganza where glamour is wrapped in world cinema fervor and gauzy Mediterranean sunshine.Except for the Oscars, it's the flashiest red carpet in the world, a ruby staircase flanked by tuxedoed photographers — and a world away from financial turmoil.Yet Cannes, the 65th edition of which starts Wednesday, fetes its directors as much as it does its stars. This year, there are plenty of both: esteemed international filmmakers like Abbas Kiarostami and Michael…

• Whitewashing, a history

  13 May 2012 | 7:00 pm

  All I have to say is that whitewashing has been going on since as long as Hollywood has existed -- it's a tradition -- and rather than non-white people complaining about it, they should embrace it. It will make going to the movies so much easier and more fun. But there are just a few things you need to understand.First, stop watching movies as ethnic people and start watching them as white people. There's nothing that white people like more than seeing other white people in movies and on television. When you go to the movies with your ethnic "judgment" eyes, you miss my point. Watch as a…

• New Yorker profile? No, thanks

  12 May 2012 | 8:00 pm

  Last year, The New Yorker ran a long, flattering profile of the director Andrew Stanton, the Pixar veteran who was engaged at the time in reshoots for the troubled "John Carter." The article, by Tad Friend, noted some of the studio’s concerns about the initial cut of the film, which was Stanton’s debut in live action, but for the most part, its tone was highly positive, portraying Stanton as nothing less than Pixar’s resident storyteller: “Among all the top talent here,” an executive is quoted as saying, “Andrew is the one with a genius for story structure.”Six months later,…

• Child acting’s new golden age

  11 May 2012 | 4:20 pm

  "Never work with children or animals" is an old W.C. Fields chestnut that, for a while in the '90s and '00s, everyone outside of children's entertainment seemed to be holding sacred. Child actors were off on their own in a parallel entertainment universe created by Disney and Nickelodeon, while adults held down the fort in dramas and reality shows. There were some notable exceptions, like Haley Joel Osment and Christina Ricci, but by and large, children were almost entirely absent from grown-up entertainment.Things are very different today. Kid-targeted movies filled with teenage actors like…

• 

  Salon.com > Books

• “The Aleppo Codex”: The bizarre history of a precious book

  13 May 2012 | 4:00 pm

  An ancient and priceless book, a murky history of evasions and coverups, an underground of sinister and possibly violent dealers, a former spy who drops tantalizing hints and a wily 84-year-old millionaire who says stuff like, "The problem with this story is that it could damage your health": Are these the ingredients for a cheesy, improbable historical thriller? Yet "The Aleppo Codex," Matti Friedman's account of his attempts to learn the history of one of the world's most precious books, sports all of these assets, and it's nonfiction. If reporting this story damaged Friedman's health, it…

• Augusten Burroughs: Conquer trauma by letting it go

  12 May 2012 | 2:00 pm

  Many people continue to feel influenced and even controlled by the things that happened to them a long time ago. Sometimes, people harbor dark, traumatic memories from childhood. Or fragments of memories — incomplete scenes, uncomfortable feelings, perhaps even a sense of certainty that something specific and terrible happened to them, but little more than this.Others experienced something traumatic in adulthood that continues to affect them day to day many years later. Maybe an assault has left a person afraid to leave their home or enter a particular neighborhood.For a certain kind of…

• Why did we move to Paris?

  12 May 2012 | 11:00 am

  Paris’s neighborhoods, the arrondissements, are organized like a twist. They spiral from the river like toilet water flushing in reverse and erupting out of the bowl — a corkscrew or what have you, a flattened pig’s tail, a whorling braid notched one to 20. But if you walk from one neighborhood to the next, there is little to suggest the numbers changing. So it was confusing. Anyway, if you began in the middle of the Seine and snaked around, we lived on the Right Bank in the top of the third arrondissement, called the haut Marais, the upper Marais, on Rue Béranger, a quiet little…

• Robert Caro’s bloated LBJ biography

  7 May 2012 | 1:40 pm

  “Even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.” When Bob Dylan wrote that line in 1964, the naked emperor was Lyndon Johnson, which makes that image perhaps the most disturbing in all of Dylan’s apocalyptic work.By stripping down Lyndon Baines Johnson to his essence, Robert Caro has himself become an American legend. Since the publication of "The Path to Power" in 1982, Caro has transformed LBJ’s life into a cautionary tale of Shakespearean dimensions. In some wonky circles, the release of a new volume is heralded like the Summer of Love release of…

• “Bring Up the Bodies”: Hilary Mantel’s power play

  6 May 2012 | 7:00 pm

  "Bring Up the Bodies," Hilary Mantel's follow-up to her Man Booker Prize-winning 2009 novel, "Wolf Hall," is a high-wire act, a feat of novelistic derring-do. Mantel makes bold not with form -- by now meaningful experimentation in that area seems exhausted -- but with the very material that brings most readers to novels in the first place: our imaginative identification with fictional characters and the experiences we feel we're sharing with them.As with "Wolf Hall," the central character in "Bring Up the Bodies" is Thomas Cromwell, master secretary to King Henry VIII of England. The son of a…

• 

  Salon.com > Food

• Horrors we hide

  27 Apr 2012 | 7:00 am

  Would Americans eat less meat, and would animals be treated more humanely, if slaughterhouses were made with glass walls and we all could see the monstrous killing apparatus at work? This is the query at the heart of Timothy Pachirat's new book, "Every Twelve Seconds" -- the title a reference to the typical slaughterhouse's cattle-killing rate.Before you think this is a column merely about food, recognize that Pachirat's question isn't (only) about the immorality of the cheeseburger you had for lunch. It’s about the larger phenomenon whereby modern society has reconstructed itself to hide…

• Lessons of a reluctant hunter

  14 Apr 2012 | 9:00 am

  Jazmin is 27 years old and beautiful. She has the fierce, dark beauty of a Mexican Indian, but she’s tall, and when you see her move, you think Masai warrior or maybe ninja. And it’s true: She does have ninja skills. When I first met Jazmin, she’d just killed a pheasant. She was sitting on the deck talking with a friend when she spotted the bird at the edge of the yard, 20 feet away. She casually picked up a two-by-four and hurled it. The missile hit the pheasant in the head, a neat kill. Jazmin walked over and picked it up. “Dinner,” she said.She says she doesn’t particularly…

• Pink slime monster runs amok

  2 Apr 2012 | 3:00 pm

  The battle over "pink slime" is getting messier. Blaming an "unfounded public outcry over the use of boneless lean beef trimmings" in the nation's commercially sold ground beef supply, meat processor AFA Foods Inc. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Monday. Beef Products Inc. -- the South Dakota-based meat titan that invented the pink slime manufacturing process -- is also reeling, idling plants in multiple states. In response, Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, a politician who hails from a state where there is a whole lot of boneless beef extrusion going on, called for a congressional…

• The birth of food-phobia

  24 Mar 2012 | 6:45 am

  At the root of our anxiety about food lies something that is common to all humans — what Paul Rozin has called the “omnivore’s dilemma.” This means that unlike, say, koala bears, whose diet consists only of eucalyptus leaves and who can therefore venture no further than where eucalyptus trees grow, our ability to eat a large variety of foods has enabled us to survive practically anywhere on the globe. The dilemma is that some of these foods can kill us, resulting in a natural anxiety about food.These days, our fears rest not on wariness about that new plant we just came across in the…

• The unexpected lessons of Mexican food

  17 Mar 2012 | 4:00 pm

  I first discovered cooking at age 5, when the earthy smell of boiling pinto beans lured me into the kitchen. It was my dad. He dripped them into an oily skillet and smashed them into a lumpy paste. I started pulling on his apron straps, begging to know the name of the concoction.“Your grandmother always made this,” he said, stirring the bubbling brown stew and pinching in cumin. “I’ll teach you how to make it. Here, try it.” He raised the dripping spoon to my mouth. The mild tingle of cumin and the soft squish of beans lingered on my pallet, like a spicy fingerprint.For as long as I…

• 

  Salon.com

• SPIN METER: Rivals airbrush anti-Romney words

  16 May 2012 | 12:30 pm

  WASHINGTON (AP) — Remember Newt Gingrich calling Mitt Romney a liar? Michele Bachmann saying Romney's unelectable? Rick Santorum calling Romney "the worst Republican in the country" to run against President Barack Obama?They're hoping you don't. And acting like it never happened (even though most of their words are just clicks away online.)One by one — with the exception of holdout Ron Paul — the GOP also-rans have coughed up endorsements of their onetime rival. And as they do, they're pulling rhetorical backflips to distance themselves from their former harsh assessments of…

• Ron Paul sets up Rand for 2016

  16 May 2012 | 11:50 am

  So Ron Paul says he is going to stop actively campaigning, but his supporters will continue to rack up delegates by storming state conventions. What will he do with these delegates? That is still unclear. (Barter them for gold?) What is the point of this strategy, exactly? Also unclear, but the Daily Beast's Ben Jacobs today says it's part of a "sneaky maneuver" to help his son Rand out. Ron will continue to consolidate power but will not appear to be actively sabotaging the party's nominee. Dave Weigel says the maneuver is less sneaky and barely a maneuver: He doesn't want it to be a huge…

• Next Tea Party targets

  16 May 2012 | 11:36 am

  What may be most notable about the surprise triumph yesterday of a Sarah Palin-backed insurgent in Nebraska’s Republican Senate primary is how routine these sorts of things are becoming.Deb Fischer’s late charge to victory wasn’t really rooted in ideology. As Hotline’s Reid Wilson points out, she’s actually racked up a (somewhat) moderate record in the Nebraska legislature, and has some personal connections to the state’s leading GOP establishment figures.But most GOP primary voters probably didn’t know this. Fischer came to the race with little money or name recognition and…

• Susana Martinez’s veep suicide

  16 May 2012 | 11:04 am

  While Newsweek touted New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez as a possible running mate for Mitt Romney, the erstwhile beneficiary of the hype all but killed her chances of getting the job by opening her mouth.“I absolutely advocate for comprehensive immigration reform,” Martinez  told reporter Andrew Romano. “Republicans want to be tough and say, ‘Illegals, you’re gone.’ But the answer is a lot more complex than that.”With those words, Martinez inflicted multiple wounds on whatever slender chance she had to join the national ticket. First, she indicated support for the immigration…

• Romney’s human shield

  16 May 2012 | 11:00 am

  The only honest line in "Inside the Circus," the recent Politico e-book in which millions of nauseating Republican operatives lacerate each other anonymously during primary season, should be mounted on the computers of all "political news readers": "It is sometimes unclear whether political campaigns are run for the benefit of the voters and office seekers or for the professional consultants who earn their living from politics." Every other line in the book mostly goes like, and then the RNC flack whispered that the campaign flack didn't know what he was doing, but that one sentence about…

• 

  Salon.com > Slide Shows

• Whitewashing, a history

  13 May 2012 | 7:00 pm

  All I have to say is that whitewashing has been going on since as long as Hollywood has existed -- it's a tradition -- and rather than non-white people complaining about it, they should embrace it. It will make going to the movies so much easier and more fun. But there are just a few things you need to understand.First, stop watching movies as ethnic people and start watching them as white people. There's nothing that white people like more than seeing other white people in movies and on television. When you go to the movies with your ethnic "judgment" eyes, you miss my point. Watch as a…

• Cruising the street view

  6 Mar 2012 | 10:59 pm

  Most people use Google Street View for practical purposes, whether to look at the façade of a building and discover how an old neighborhood has changed or to check out the looks of an one not yet visited. But a new blog has found a novel use for the Google application: checking out guys. For the last five months, Dudes From Views has been collecting images of men culled from Google Street View, with some concise commentary: "Smooth Ukranian"; "Triceps and biceps on Christopher Street."But beyond just being a novel, tongue-in-cheek use of technology, "Dudes From Views" raises interesting…

• John Williams’ greatest hits

  11 Nov 2011 | 7:30 pm

  A couple of weeks ago, my young son asked me if I had "any more DVDs of John Williams movies." It took me a second to register what he meant by this. He thought that the prolific Hollywood composer was actually the director of some of his favorite movies, a list that at this point consists entirely of the fantasy, science fiction and adventure films that thrilled me and his older sister as kids and kids-at-heart: "E.T.," "Jaws" and "Close Encounters," the "Jurassic Park" and "Harry Potter" and "Star Wars" and Indiana Jones pictures, and many others. I started to explain that Williams was not…

• Stop pretending it’s not climate change

  9 Nov 2011 | 10:47 am

  "All I know is this didn't happen when we were kids."That's how Brian Williams tagged a recent NBC Nightly News report on this year's extreme weather. Floods, droughts, wildfires and tornadoes dominated the news many nights in 2011. Even this week, weather forecasters are keeping tabs on reports from coastal villages in Alaska, like Kivalina, which is under a coastal flood warning from "one of the most severe storms on record” packing hurricane-force winds while it pushes up the Northwest Alaska coast. Lack of protective Arctic sea ice – which is disappearing because of climate change…

• The art of the AIDS poster

  3 Nov 2011 | 4:40 pm

  Each of the more than 6,000 images in Dr. Edward Atwater's peerless collection of AIDS-related posters -- now owned by the University of Rochester's Rare Books and Special Collections Library -- freezes its viewer at a particular social, cultural, political and geographical point in the 30-year history of the disease.Some of the posters are provocative, explicit or overtly sexual; others are straightforward, tame -- even prudish. Some rely on shock-and-awe tactics to make a general point; others offer detailed advice for HIV protection. Some, created in the 1980s or '90s, are already very…

• 

  Salon.com > War Room

• Next Tea Party targets

  16 May 2012 | 11:36 am

  What may be most notable about the surprise triumph yesterday of a Sarah Palin-backed insurgent in Nebraska’s Republican Senate primary is how routine these sorts of things are becoming.Deb Fischer’s late charge to victory wasn’t really rooted in ideology. As Hotline’s Reid Wilson points out, she’s actually racked up a (somewhat) moderate record in the Nebraska legislature, and has some personal connections to the state’s leading GOP establishment figures.But most GOP primary voters probably didn’t know this. Fischer came to the race with little money or name recognition and…

• W’s elevator endorsement trick

  15 May 2012 | 2:45 pm

  George W. Bush may have established a new world record today for the shortest, most awkward public endorsement statement in presidential campaign history:“I’m for Mitt Romney,” Bush told ABC News this morning as the doors of an elevator closed on him, after he gave a speech on human rights a block from his old home — the White House.The reason for this strange scene is obvious: Romney and his fellow Republicans want absolutely nothing to do with the 43rd president, lest voters connect the epic financial meltdown that played out on his watch to the economic anxiety they’re now…

• The Bain beast returns

  14 May 2012 | 11:18 am

  With the release of a new two-minute (!) negative ad from the Obama campaign, it’s now official: Mitt Romney’s perfect record of being attacked over his Bain Capital days is still intact.OK, there’s an asterisk: Technically, Bain didn’t come up in Romney’s first campaign, for the 1994 Republican Senate nomination in Massachusetts. But that was barely a race: His opponent, John Lakian, had been shamed out of politics by a résumé embellishment scandal a dozen years earlier, barely qualified for the primary ballot, and lost to Romney by 66 points. And Lakian’s background was in…

• Ron Paul’s chaos threat

  13 May 2012 | 7:33 pm

  This weekend brought another reminder of the real threat that Ron Paul and his supporters pose to Mitt Romney: chaos in Tampa, Fla.As they’ve done elsewhere, hundreds of supporters of the libertarian congressman descended on Saturday’s state Republican convention in Arizona, which was being held to choose delegates to the party’s national convention. The state’s delegation will be pledged to support Mitt Romney, who easily won Arizona’s Feb. 28 winner-take-all primary, in Tampa, but there’s nothing to prevent Paul-ites from packing state conventions and gobbling up delegate slots,…

• Scott Walker’s politically suicidal exchange

  11 May 2012 | 1:58 pm

  Scott Walker’s hopes of surviving Wisconsin’s June 5 recall election in part depend on his ability to convince voters that he’s only worried about a very particular type of union – and only because of fiscal issues, not philosophical ones. Democrats’ hopes of ousting him depend in part on convincing voters this isn’t true, and that their governor is waging an ideological war on all unions.This is why a newly-released video could be very significant. The video, which was shot by a pro-Tom Barrett filmmaker who is working on a documentary, shows Walker in January 2011 talking with…

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  Salon.com > Glenn Greenwald

• Obama’s new free speech threat

  16 May 2012 | 7:48 am

  (updated below)There is substantial opposition in both Yemen and the West to the new U.S.-backed Yemeni President, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi. Hadi was the long-time Vice President of the Yemeni dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh, and after Saleh finally stepped down last year, Hadi became President as part of an "election" in which he was the only candidate (that little fact did not prevent Hillary Clinton from congratulating Yemen "on today's successful presidential election" (successful because the U.S. liked the undemocratic outcome)). As it does with most U.S.-compliant dictators in the region,…

• Likely victory for MeK shills

  15 May 2012 | 7:47 am

  (updated below)A bipartisan band of former Washington officials and politicians has spent the last two years aggressively advocating on behalf of the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MeK), an Iranian dissident group that has been formally designated for the last 15 years by the U.S. State Department as a "foreign Terrorist organization." Most of those former officials have been paid large sums of money to speak at MeK events and meet with its leaders, thus developing far more extensive relations with this Terror group than many marginalized Muslims who have been prosecuted and punished with lengthy prison…

• Andrew Sullivan’s father figure

  14 May 2012 | 11:21 am

  (updated below - Update II - Update III [Tues.] - Update IV [Tues.])Andrew Sullivan -- who has become the most reliable media hagiographer of an American President since . . . . the 2002 version of Andrew Sullivan under President Bush -- spent the past three years continuously insisting that President Obama's opposition to same-sex marriages was largely irrelevant ("We will win not by begging presidents to back us (they have no role in a matter involving state legislatures, governors and courts")). Based on that view, he constantly berated gay groups and gay activists for complaining…

• Chomsky on Obama

  14 May 2012 | 10:11 am

  Appearing on Democracy Now this morning, Noam Chomsky said the following:If the Bush administration didn’t like somebody, they’d kidnap them and send them to torture chambers. If the Obama administration decides they don’t like somebody, they murder them.Though a bit oversimpified -- the Bush administration killed plenty of people, while the Obama administration makes use of kidnapping and torture chambers albeit by proxy; also, as this tweeter noted: it's "unfair to say the Obama administration kills those it doesn't like, since they claim power to kill people without even knowing who…

• Various matters

  11 May 2012 | 5:19 am

  (1) On Wednesday, I was on Cenk Uygur's Current TV show with Michael Hastings discussing the Yemen bomb plot, and the video of that seven-minute segment is below. The discussion focused on the way in which U.S. "counter-Terrorism" policy in Yemen causes the very Terrorism it ostensibly seeks to battle. Yesterday, The Washington Post reported on several U.S. attacks in Yemen from this week alone and noted: "The latest strikes, aimed at al-Qaeda operatives in southern Yemen, bring the total this year to at least 15, about as many as in the previous 10 years combined"; just this morning, 17…

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  Salon.com > Joan Walsh

• Romney’s Bill Clinton gambit

  16 May 2012 | 6:00 am

  Desperate Mitt Romney is not only taking credit for the auto bailout he opposed, and pretending to be a "job creator" rather than a Bain Capital job destroyer. Now he's regularly praising former President Bill Clinton as a centrist whose legacy has been betrayed by the "liberal" President Obama. Actual liberals laugh, but can Romney's gambit work?Of course not, but Mitt's not giving up.In Lansing, Mich., last week, Romney derided Obama as an "old school liberal" compared to Clinton, whom he called a "new Democrat." Where Clinton "said the era of big government was over, President Obama…

• Romney’s “vampire capitalism”

  15 May 2012 | 9:41 am

  Former Obama auto "czar" Steve Rattner stepped on his old boss's message a little Monday morning, telling the folks on "Morning Joe" that President Obama's just-released ad blasting Mitt Romney's Bain career was "unfair." As Rattner explained: “Bain Capital’s responsibility was never to create 100,000 jobs, or some other number, it was to make profits for its investors.” Rattner is a big Democratic Party donor who worked at Lehman Brothers before starting his own private equity firm, Quadrangle (where he was accused of participating in a New York state pension fund kickback scheme and…

• John Roberts’ Gilded Age SCOTUS

  14 May 2012 | 2:09 pm

  The most important revelation in Jeffrey Toobin's 10,000-word New Yorker piece on Chief Justice John Roberts' takedown of campaign finance laws in the Citizens United case is the extent to which modern conservatism is trying to restore the Gilded Age. That was a time when corporations had more rights than individuals, when a conservative Supreme Court did its best to protect those corporate rights, and wealth and corruption ran unchecked. Of course, we live in a neo-Gilded Age, when income inequality is more pronounced than at any time since the Great Depression, and the Roberts court's…

• Yes, Mitt gets worse

  11 May 2012 | 3:05 pm

  It's not precisely the same as Gary Hart daring reporters to follow him, when faced with Donna Rice rumors back in 1988, and then getting caught in an affair. But when Ann Romney pointed to her husband's fun-and-games prankster high school days to show us "the real Mitt," she made those years even more interesting and relevant to political reporters, and potentially to voters. "I still look at him as the boy that I met in high school when he was playing all the jokes and really just being crazy, pretty crazy," she told the CBS "Early Show" 10 days ago. "There's a wild and crazy man in…

• Mitt, the prep-school sadist

  10 May 2012 | 5:59 am

  (Updated below)Last week we learned about President Obama's first post-college romantic relationships. This week, we're discovering details of Mitt Romney's prep-school sadism. While I think we should tread carefully when examining the youthful experiences and mistakes of both presidential candidates, I thought Obama's romantic past was fair game in Vanity Fair. I think the Washington Post's well-reported feature on Young Mr. Romney's entitled cruelty to gay classmates and a disabled teacher is even more revealing and important.The Post has four named sources and a fifth who stayed anonymous…

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  Salon.com > Ask the Pilot

• Behind the underwear bomb

  10 May 2012 | 7:00 pm

  Another deadly plot taken down in the planning stages. This time, thanks to the work of a CIA double agent, officials were able to infiltrate a Yemen-based al-Qaida plot to destroy a U.S.-bound jetliner using a nearly undetectable underwear bomb.The moral of the story: Airport security works!Am I being facetious?  Not necessarily.  It depends on your definition of airport security.In my mind, the key to keeping airplanes safe is, and always has been, stopping acts of sabotage while they are still in the planning stages. Here in the age of the TSA checkpoint, with its toothpaste…

• Letter from Mumbai

  1 Mar 2012 | 7:00 pm

  Flying from Europe to India, we pass overhead Odessa, Ukraine. Odessa, they say, is home to the most beautiful women in the world. Then across the Black Sea to Azerbaijan and the gorgeous barren landscapes of Georgia. Next comes the ink-dark Caspian, and then the long desolate outback of northwestern Iran. (The controllers down in Tehran are courteous and professional, their English impeccable -- easier to understand than most Scottish controllers.)From there it's directly overhead the apocalypse of Karachi, followed by a turn southbound, out across the Arabian Sea toward Mumbai.It's true…

• Revere Beach reveries

  24 Feb 2012 | 10:00 am

  Sometimes when I hear the whine of jet engines, I think of the beach.I don't expect that to make sense to you -- unless, like me, your childhood was defined by an infatuation with jetliners and summers spent at a beach that sat directly below an approach course to a major airport.That would be Revere Beach, in my case, just north of Boston, in the mid- to late 1970s.Then as now, the city of Revere was a gritty, in many ways charmless place: rows of triple-deckers and block after block of ugly, two-story colonials garnished in gaudy wrought-iron. (Revere is a city so architecturally hopeless…

• Beware the “office” romance

  22 Feb 2012 | 10:00 am

  Why can’t commercial jets be fitted with an exclusive side entrance into the cockpit, making it impossible for a potential skyjacker to gain access?I am asked this all the time. It presents a number of complications.First, you can't simply cut a hole into the side of a plane and add an extra door. Doing so would require a large-scale and extremely expensive structural redesign. And in most cockpits there simply isn't room for such an addition.Presumably, too, you'd need to add a lavatory to the cockpit. And what about rest facilities? Long-haul flights carry augmented crews that work in…

• The things I carry

  14 Feb 2012 | 7:15 pm

  The scourges of modern-day air travel.I can think of a few: TSA, delayed flights, garbage in your seat pocket. Screaming kids and misdirected luggage. "CNN Airport News."Or, how about the blizzard of cardboard placards that hotel chains insist on littering their rooms with? I spend a quarter of my life in hotel rooms, and I resent having to spend the first five minutes of every stay gathering up an armful of this diabolical detritus and heaving it into a corner where it belongs. Attention, innkeepers: This is fundamentally bad business. One's first moments in a hotel room should be relaxing.

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  Salon.com > Andrew O'Hehir

• Sacha Baron Cohen’s dark political farce

  15 May 2012 | 7:00 pm

  What exactly is Sacha Baron Cohen up to? This question, stupid as it may appear on the surface, has intrigued me ever since "Da Ali G Show" began airing in the United States. It's a stupid question because Baron Cohen is a comedian; as "edgy" or "controversial" as his topics and material may sometimes be, his job is to make people laugh. But most comedians don't try to get laughs by interviewing Pat Buchanan or Boutros Boutros-Ghali ("Boutros Boutros Boutros-Ghali," as Ali G introduced him) under false pretenses, or by leading a group of unsuspecting Arizona nightclubbers in a rousing chorus…

• Global horror takes a new “Road”

  11 May 2012 | 3:15 pm

  Is there any country on earth -- at least any country with its own cinema tradition -- that doesn't produce its own homegrown horror films, spiced up with a little local gruesomeness? Every time I write about horror, I get at least a couple of letters from people who see the cruelty, bloodlust, misogyny and so forth found in many such movies as a symptom of contemporary culture's descent into depravity and brutality. On one hand, I always want to leave room for divergent tastes and opinions, but on the other -- that's just not true. The appetite for gore and terror that finds its modern…

• Pick of the week: Childhood adventure from a Japanese master

  10 May 2012 | 7:00 pm

  "I Wish" is an old-fashioned kind of movie about a subject that might sound, at first, both worn-out and a little retrograde: the dislocating and disorienting effects of a family breakup. It's also a movie whose principal actors and characters are children, that tries to view the world from a child's point of view -- and that's an enterprise so perilous, so prone to easy gags, cheap tears and nauseating sentimentality, that hardly anyone ever gets it right. But "I Wish" is a wonderful adventure film that's no less thrilling for its modest scale, and a film whose emotional power and…

• Johnny Depp’s delirious “Dark Shadows”

  9 May 2012 | 7:00 pm

  Early in Tim Burton's "Dark Shadows," Victoria Winters, the proper-looking aspiring governess played by lovely young Australian actress Bella Heathcote, arrives at the gates of Collinwood, a decaying family mansion in rural Maine. (She's gotten there by riding Amtrak, while we listen to "Nights in White Satin," which is somehow exactly right.) Vicky, whose real name is something else entirely, has always been a strange girl who sees things, and who is dramatically out of step with the pot-smoking, rock 'n' roll youth culture of today (and by today I mean 1972). A strange force has drawn her…

• Bobcat Goldthwait: Let’s kill all the mean people!

  8 May 2012 | 6:40 pm

  Bobcat Goldthwait is something like the id underbelly of Michael Moore, with every pretense of journalistic objectivity and reasonableness stripped away. While Moore has a background as a reporter and editor, Goldthwait has always been an entertainer, who began doing stand-up comedy as a teenager in the late 1970s. Both guys present as rumpled, middle-aged heartland Americans with blue-collar roots -- Goldthwait is from Syracuse, N.Y., where his dad was a sheet-metal worker -- who are angry about the debasement of political life and public dialogue in their beloved country.But I feel pretty…

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  Salon.com > Laura Miller

• “The Aleppo Codex”: The bizarre history of a precious book

  13 May 2012 | 4:00 pm

  An ancient and priceless book, a murky history of evasions and coverups, an underground of sinister and possibly violent dealers, a former spy who drops tantalizing hints and a wily 84-year-old millionaire who says stuff like, "The problem with this story is that it could damage your health": Are these the ingredients for a cheesy, improbable historical thriller? Yet "The Aleppo Codex," Matti Friedman's account of his attempts to learn the history of one of the world's most precious books, sports all of these assets, and it's nonfiction. If reporting this story damaged Friedman's health, it…

• “Bring Up the Bodies”: Hilary Mantel’s power play

  6 May 2012 | 7:00 pm

  "Bring Up the Bodies," Hilary Mantel's follow-up to her Man Booker Prize-winning 2009 novel, "Wolf Hall," is a high-wire act, a feat of novelistic derring-do. Mantel makes bold not with form -- by now meaningful experimentation in that area seems exhausted -- but with the very material that brings most readers to novels in the first place: our imaginative identification with fictional characters and the experiences we feel we're sharing with them.As with "Wolf Hall," the central character in "Bring Up the Bodies" is Thomas Cromwell, master secretary to King Henry VIII of England. The son of a…

• Recipe for a bestselling book

  1 May 2012 | 4:00 pm

  Remember the time you picked up a copy of that big bestseller and tore through the book in a couple of days, marveling at the bad writing, ridiculous plot twists and paper-thin characters? "Is drivel all it takes to sell a gazillion copies and retire to a sleekly spacious modern house in the woods?" you probably asked yourself. "I could crank out better crap than this! How hard can it be?"The better question is: How easy? For if smart people who have spent their entire careers calculating how to write or publish bestsellers find it impossible to produce a surefire winner -- and they do --…

• “Frankenstein” remixed

  30 Apr 2012 | 2:00 pm

  Whatever interactive fiction is (and we’re still figuring that out) it suffers from all the problems of traditional fiction and then some. The vast majority of novels and short stories aren’t much good, but when a branching fiction — along the lines of the old “Choose Your Own Adventure” children’s books — fails to engage, the first impulse is to blame the form rather than the content. Let “Frankenstein,” just released by Inkle Studios and Profile Books, serve as a reproach to that reflex. The app is a creative, subtle and sensitive adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic…

• “Words Like Loaded Pistols”: The not-so-lost art of rhetoric

  29 Apr 2012 | 7:00 pm

  When people use the term "rhetoric" these days, they usually mean empty language -- be it high-flown or spoken in high dudgeon. A few may think of rhetoric as a deadly classical discipline devoted to the exhaustive parsing and labeling of figures of speech: zeugma, anyone? Yet as Sam Leith points out in his delightful and illuminating "Words Like Loaded Pistols: Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama," we live in the most rhetorical era in human history, surrounded by and embroiled in argument, enticement, invective and panegyric wherever we turn.The Greeks and Romans studied and scrutinized…

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  Salon.com

• SPIN METER: Rivals airbrush anti-Romney words

  16 May 2012 | 12:30 pm

  WASHINGTON (AP) — Remember Newt Gingrich calling Mitt Romney a liar? Michele Bachmann saying Romney's unelectable? Rick Santorum calling Romney "the worst Republican in the country" to run against President Barack Obama?They're hoping you don't. And acting like it never happened (even though most of their words are just clicks away online.)One by one — with the exception of holdout Ron Paul — the GOP also-rans have coughed up endorsements of their onetime rival. And as they do, they're pulling rhetorical backflips to distance themselves from their former harsh assessments of…

• Ron Paul sets up Rand for 2016

  16 May 2012 | 11:50 am

  So Ron Paul says he is going to stop actively campaigning, but his supporters will continue to rack up delegates by storming state conventions. What will he do with these delegates? That is still unclear. (Barter them for gold?) What is the point of this strategy, exactly? Also unclear, but the Daily Beast's Ben Jacobs today says it's part of a "sneaky maneuver" to help his son Rand out. Ron will continue to consolidate power but will not appear to be actively sabotaging the party's nominee. Dave Weigel says the maneuver is less sneaky and barely a maneuver: He doesn't want it to be a huge…

• Next Tea Party targets

  16 May 2012 | 11:36 am

  What may be most notable about the surprise triumph yesterday of a Sarah Palin-backed insurgent in Nebraska’s Republican Senate primary is how routine these sorts of things are becoming.Deb Fischer’s late charge to victory wasn’t really rooted in ideology. As Hotline’s Reid Wilson points out, she’s actually racked up a (somewhat) moderate record in the Nebraska legislature, and has some personal connections to the state’s leading GOP establishment figures.But most GOP primary voters probably didn’t know this. Fischer came to the race with little money or name recognition and…

• Susana Martinez’s veep suicide

  16 May 2012 | 11:04 am

  While Newsweek touted New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez as a possible running mate for Mitt Romney, the erstwhile beneficiary of the hype all but killed her chances of getting the job by opening her mouth.“I absolutely advocate for comprehensive immigration reform,” Martinez  told reporter Andrew Romano. “Republicans want to be tough and say, ‘Illegals, you’re gone.’ But the answer is a lot more complex than that.”With those words, Martinez inflicted multiple wounds on whatever slender chance she had to join the national ticket. First, she indicated support for the immigration…

• Romney’s human shield

  16 May 2012 | 11:00 am

  The only honest line in "Inside the Circus," the recent Politico e-book in which millions of nauseating Republican operatives lacerate each other anonymously during primary season, should be mounted on the computers of all "political news readers": "It is sometimes unclear whether political campaigns are run for the benefit of the voters and office seekers or for the professional consultants who earn their living from politics." Every other line in the book mostly goes like, and then the RNC flack whispered that the campaign flack didn't know what he was doing, but that one sentence about…

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  Salon.com > Bank Reform

• Jamie Dimon falls to earth

  10 May 2012 | 6:02 pm

  It was a quiet Thursday afternoon, and then Twitter exploded with the frenzy of a zillion financial pundits snarking all at once.At 4:30 p.m. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon convened an impromptu conference call in which he admitted that a spectacularly bad bet by a London-based trader had resulted in at least $2 billion of trading losses over the last six weeks. And the numbers could get even worse, Dimon warned, depending on how the market behaved in upcoming days. Another $1 billion in losses could happen.A big bet gone wrong is hardly unusual on Wall Street. It's the nature of the beast, the…

• In praise of crowdfunding

  9 Apr 2012 | 6:00 pm

  Judging by the left's response to the passage of the JOBS Act last week, the United States is now once again safe for fraud, Wall Street shenanigans, and old-school '90s style dot-com flim-flam. The basic take is that the bill signed into law by President Obama on April 5 proves that we've learned nothing since reckless financial "innovation" plunged the world into a massive recession. Instead of tightening the screws, we're loosening them. A bill that is supposed to make it easier for startups to get funded and grow (and create jobs) is actually just an invitation for Big Capital to be as…

• Wells Fargo is not your amigo

  28 Oct 2011 | 1:00 pm

  After allegations of racially based predatory lending tarnished its image, Wells Fargo is making renewed efforts to increase its customer base among Latinos, the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population. The San Franciso-based banking giant, which has long touted its support for the Hispanic community, is now embarked on a new "educational campaign" that it says will help Latino customers enter into the financial mainstream.As part of its push for “under banked” customers, Wells Fargo has partnered with a firm called SABEResPODER ("Knowledge is Power"). In April, the two companies…

• Mayor Bloomberg, partner diagnose what's wrong with America: You

  30 Sep 2011 | 3:30 pm

  The 90,000 New Yorkers who control 99% of the city's wealth are completely segregated, geographically and intellectually, from everyone else in the city and the nation at large, so its no surprise that they tend to be tone-deaf and blind to the inequities and frustrations and resentments of Regular Folk, but billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his charming and powerful partner Diana Taylor are really out-doing themselves in terms of blinkered elite thickheadedness these days.Let's start with Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is at the moment clearly struggling with his natural impulse to throw…

• Sensitive banker Jamie Dimon comforted by Mitt Romney

  28 Sep 2011 | 11:01 am

  Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, is not supposed to endorse a presidential candidate, because he sits on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, but he is out partying and attending fundraisers with former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. (Of course, Dimon also probably shouldn't have accepted billions of dollars from the Fed while sitting on the New York Fed board either, but that happened.)Dimon is a Democrat and former BFF of President Barack Obama, but one day Obama said "fat cat bankers" and everyone on Wall Street threw a tremendous tantrum. The president has gone on to…

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  Salon.com > Barack Obama

• First NATO protest targets Obama

  15 May 2012 | 11:47 am

  In the first week of November 2008, tens of thousands of people gathered in Chicago to watch dewy-eyed as Barack Obama won the presidential election, believing, as the then-president-elect said in his victory speech, that "this time must be different." This week, the Windy City is welcoming large crowds again -- but as was made clear by a small protest action Monday -- the president is not the sweetheart of these Chicago masses, which are assembling for a week of actions and protests surrounding the NATO summit.Eight people were arrested Monday during a protest at Obama's 2012 campaign…

• Culture war commencements

  14 May 2012 | 5:20 pm

  It's come to this: “An incredibly boring white guy.” That was how a “Republican official familiar with the campaign officials” described the “prized pick” for Mitt Romney’s vice presidential candidate. Framed as the Romney campaign’s desire not to make John McCain's mistakes, it distills something fundamental about this election -- how it's become a culture war in the most profound sense, one way of looking at the world diametrically opposed to the other.This is not supposed to be the “change” election, and yet somehow we have an incumbent who, at a commencement address at…

• America’s drone exceptionalism

  14 May 2012 | 12:26 pm

  Here’s the essence of it: you can trust America’s crème de la crème, the most elevated, responsible people, no matter what weapons, what powers, you put in their hands.  No need to constantly look over their shoulders.Placed in the hands of evildoers, those weapons and powers could create a living nightmare; controlled by the best of people, they lead to measured, thoughtful, precise decisions in which bad things are (with rare and understandable exceptions) done only to truly terrible types.  In the process, you simply couldn’t be better protected.And in case you were wondering,…

• Using Bush’s playbook

  11 May 2012 | 10:06 am

  Barack Obama’s presidency was born from nothing so much as his repudiation of George W. Bush’s administration — its policies and politics, its style and tone. One of Obama’s most effective 2008 stump speech refrains was his promise to end the era of “Scooter Libby justice, ‘Brownie’ incompetence and Karl Rove politics.”But the political dynamics for winning a second presidential term often differ markedly from winning the first. So don’t be surprised by many eerie parallels between Obama’s 2012 reelection bid and Bush’s 2004 campaign. The president may not rely upon…

• Obama’s next moves on marriage

  10 May 2012 | 1:12 pm

  President Obama's support for same-sex marriage is a huge victory for the gay rights movement, but it's also a qualified one. Obama said he still supports the right of states to deny couples same-sex marriage rights, but "personally," he thinks that's wrong. In addition to making Obama's stance on gay rights a bit less incoherent — how much sense did it make for him to oppose both gay-marriage and the gay-marriage ban in North Carolina, which passed on Tuesday? — the president's much-anticipated "evolution" opens the door for him to be a more fierce advocate for gay rights.I don't mean…

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  Salon.com > Healthcare Reform

• “Birth control doesn’t matter”

  11 May 2012 | 1:42 pm

  When it comes to sex and reproduction, even the most mind-numbingly intuitive conclusions can be politicized or disbelieved. So they bear repeating and resubstantiation. Take this recent Guttmacher study on contraceptive knowledge. Surveying 1,800 men and women ages 18–29, the authors “found that the lower the level of contraceptive knowledge among young women, the greater the likelihood that they expected to have unprotected sex in the next three months, behavior that puts them at risk for an unplanned pregnancy.” In other words, access to factual information helps prevent risky…

• Healthcare’s foreign invasion

  28 Apr 2012 | 2:00 pm

  Approximately 15 percent of all healthcare workers and 25 percent of all physicians in the United States were born and educated elsewhere. This means that 1.5 million healthcare jobs are “insourced,” occupied by foreign-born, foreign-trained workers brought into the United States on special visas earmarked for healthcare jobs. This number is 50 percent greater than the total number of jobs in the U.S. auto-manufacturing industry. It’s amazing to consider that in 2008 and 2009, the auto industry, which makes up just 3.6 percent of the U.S. economy, received a $97 billion bailout. If we…

• Obama destroys Constitution with mild Supreme Court criticism

  3 Apr 2012 | 1:42 pm

  Ruth Marcus is unsettled. Maybe even queasy. There is probably some light nausea. What has her worried for the future of the nation, today? President Obama's shameful, horrific, vicious attacks on those nice people in the Supreme Court.Obama said that the court overturning Congress' healthcare reform law would be a textbook example of "judicial activism" as "conservative commentators" define it: "that an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law." And hey, that seems like an eminently defensible and not particularly unsettling point! Conservatives made…

• My son’s healthcare battle

  3 Apr 2012 | 7:00 am

  Mason is my 14-year-old son, who is adorable and funny, and happens to have a very stubborn and large brain tumor. We discovered the tumor four years ago, and we have been monitoring and treating it with the help of some of the finest doctors around. Mason has lived a somewhat “normal” life, despite frequent MRIs and even chemotherapy. He did his homework and hung out with friends until the fall of 2010 when his headaches became debilitating. Scans revealed that Mason’s tumor had grown for the first time since we had discovered it. Then days before we were scheduled to meet with the…

• Why I need Obamacare

  2 Apr 2012 | 7:30 am

  Dear healthy people,It’s great that you’re deriving intellectual pleasure from debating Obamacare. I love that this theoretical dance you’re engaged in has no repercussions to you, a healthy individual. I would love to join you some evening for a spirited discussion on the pros and cons of healthcare reform. Maybe over a glass of wine? Heck -- over two or three glasses of wine. I’d love to lean forward, my arched brows furrowed, my full lips purple with the stain of a good Zinfandel, and throw out statistics and well-crafted one-liners about the plight of the uninsured, the…

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  Salon.com > Sex

• Mother-daughter sexperts

  15 May 2012 | 7:00 pm

  Most parents loathe talking to their kids about the birds and the bees, let alone pubic hair grooming, faked orgasms and "water sports" -- but most parents are not legendary "sexpert" Susie Bright.Better than talking about these things, she penned an advice column in 2009 with her daughter, Aretha, then 19, for the ladyblog Jezebel. Their answers to questions about everything from porn to Paxil were unflinching but playful, and at times controversial. Now the pair have collected those columns into a new e-book, "Mother/Daughter Sex Advice." Together, they read as an irreverent version of "Our…

• On the rack: A cultural history of breasts

  9 May 2012 | 7:00 pm

  It's hard to be boobs. Sure, breasts are cherished as givers of milk and the pinnacle of sex appeal, but the modern world hasn't been good to mammaries.As Florence Williams writes in "Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History," they're the most tumor-prone organ in the human body. They "soak up pollution like a pair of soft sponges," and transmit environmental toxins to babies through breast milk. "Breasts are bellwethers for the changing health of people," she says. While we've "genetically modified our crops to be able to protect them from the ill effects of pesticides," Williams writes, "we…

• Right-wing sexual pathos

  5 May 2012 | 5:00 pm

  Imagine a high school teacher having to separate a smooching pair outside the classroom door to protect herself from being sued for condoning "gateway sexual activity." Envision a sex education class where the mention of homosexuality is forbidden by law and discussion of contraception, or even puberty, is deemed unnecessary.That's the world that would be created by a recent raft of abstinence education bills in Tennessee, Utah and Wisconsin. These initiatives are frightening -- but, viewed the right way, they shine light on extreme conservatives' deepest, darkest fears about sex. They're…

• The prudes are winning

  30 Apr 2012 | 7:00 pm

  The explosion of government-funded abstinence-only education, extreme assaults on reproductive rights, crackdowns on "indecency" and "obscenity": This is but a small sampling of what spurred sex therapist Marty Klein to publish "America's War on Sex: The Attack on Law, Lust and Liberty" in 2006, midway through George W. Bush's second term. Six years later, under a Democratic presidency, many of the same problems exist -- in fact, in some regards, things have gotten worse.That's why Klein has updated the book in a new edition published this week to detail the ways that sexual rights have…

• “Fifty Shades of Grey”: Dominatrixes take on Roiphe

  19 Apr 2012 | 7:00 pm

  What about men? That was the first thought that came to mind after reading Katie Roiphe's Newsweek cover story on the BDSM-themed "Fifty Shades of Grey" phenomenon, in which she controversially speculated that women's current fascination with the book's story line of female submission was the result of the "pressure of economic participation" and the "hard work" of striving for equality. The desire for submission is hardly something unique to women.Who understands this better than professional dominatrixes? With so many speculating this week on Roiphe's article, I decided to hand the…

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  Salon.com > LGBT

• Manny Pacquiao doesn’t want you dead

  16 May 2012 | 10:25 am

  Let's get something straight, so to speak, right off the bat. There's no disputing that Manny Pacquiao is not the most enlightened guy to ever put on gloves and fight for a belt. In a story for Examiner.com this past weekend, blogger Granville Ampong wrote of how the boxing champ takes issue with Barack Obama's recent groundbreaking declaration of support for same-sex unions. "God's words first ... obey God's law first before considering the laws of man," Pacquiao told Ampong, in what the writer described as "an exclusive interview." Pacquiao was further quoted explaining that "God only…

• Obama goes viral, wins Twitter

  10 May 2012 | 11:00 am

  When Barack Obama blew America's mind by declaring his support for same-sex marriage Wednesday, he explained that his views on the subject had long been "evolving." But while evolution is a process that can take millennia, social media moves with considerably more swiftness. However long it took the White House (nudged though it was by Joe Biden's Sunday blurt that he was "absolutely comfortable" with marriage equality) to get to that place, it took no time at all for Obama's sentiments to become a meme.It's no accident that the president's change of heart happened to make for a perfect…

• A Catholic school’s anti-gay snub

  8 May 2012 | 3:45 pm

  Remember last month, when the Vatican issued a smackdown to American nuns for their "radical feminist themes," like not being vocal enough about opposing same-sex marriage? Now, just to really hammer home how divisive the issue has become, a bishop in Davenport, Iowa, has vetoed Catholic school officials and said he would not permit the Eychaner Foundation to present its Matthew Shepard Scholarship to a gay senior at his high school graduation.Bishop Martin Amos alerted the Prince of Peace school staff last week that "We cannot allow any one or any organization which promotes a position that…

• My Scientology excommunication

  5 May 2012 | 2:00 pm

  They made a lovely couple, my parents. Mildred was as gracious as she was elegant and beautiful. Paul was as gallant as he was rugged and handsome. My mom thought she was the luckiest girl in the world. My dad never got it, how a class act like Mildred could fall for a palooka like him.Around the time that my teenaged mom-to-be was making googly eyes at my dad-to-be, L. Ron Hubbard — like my father — was in his early twenties. While my father was setting up a medical practice on the Jersey Shore, Ron Hubbard was reportedly off tramping through Asia, learning Eastern religions and customs.

• Republicans: Wired for homophobia

  5 May 2012 | 8:00 am

  On May 8, North Carolinians will vote on a constitutional amendment that defines a marriage between a man and a woman as the “only domestic legal union” the state will recognize -- thereby barring LGBT marriage equality. The amendment would also ban civil unions and end domestic partner benefits like prescription drug and health care coverage for the partners and children of public employees. At its deepest level, this issue is about fairness for everyone under the law. But less mentioned is that it is also about science, and about what’s factually true.Many voters who go to the polls…

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  Open Salon - Editor Picks

• Writer's Block

  16 May 2012 | 9:53 am

  I have a good friend in New York whom I once asked about writer's block. Why does it happen? Does it happen to you? What can be done about it? I received a thoughtful response, which you'll find below. I hope his advice is as useful to you, if you are writing something,/… Read full post »

• This war is nuts! What am I missing?

  16 May 2012 | 9:50 am

  About a year ago, I wrote a published piece with this same headline; now a year later I am reprising it, because my conviction is only greater, and Congress is currently engaged in new funding discussions for the military. The facts have not changed: this war is nuts! So, what am… Read full post »

• Our Real Great American Novelist

  16 May 2012 | 9:41 am

    We've been reading a great deal lately about the issue of gender preference in the publishing world. More than anything, the proclamation a few years back that Jonathan Franzen had written the new Great American Novel (complete with JonnieFranz's appearance on the cover of Time magaz/… Read full post »

• No advertising or lobbying expenses without representation

  16 May 2012 | 9:36 am

  Additional free speech photos from Google Previously I asked for suggestions for Ballot questions that you think should be asked; and I came up with ten Ballot questions of my own. the first one on that list was related to free/… Read full post »

• Seriously, Is Mitt Really Qualified?

  16 May 2012 | 9:28 am

  I suspect that, for a lot of Americans, watching Mitt Romney as he has campaigned himself into the Republican nomination for the presidency, it's been bemusing to study this man's seemingly endless number of gaffes - not to mention his high degree of truth telling problems - in his… Read full post »

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  Salon.com > Since You Asked

• Should I nail the sexy prof?

  15 May 2012 | 7:00 pm

  Dear Cary,There is a lecturer in my faculty whom I find devastatingly attractive. I find him so attractive that I have to actively control myself in his presence. I think about him nonstop. I am a graduate student and he is a lecturer. He is probably about double my age, and I am 22. I took one of his classes a few semesters back but won't be in any of his classes in the future. I am sure I have made my attraction as painfully obvious as possible. Should I try to proposition him? What do you think of this sort of age gap? And how do I handle the possible (probable) rejection? I am aware of…

• Baby sitter’s got a rap sheet

  14 May 2012 | 7:00 pm

  Dear Cary,This problem has been eating away at my brain and heart for a while. I cannot decide what to do. I know your answer will help me, even if you also don't see a clear answer.One of my children was recently diagnosed with a rare disease. That is not the problem, but helps to explain how I developed a close, trusting friendship with the mother of a child with the same disease. She has helped us so much and has given good medical advice and emotional support. She also works as a baby sitter. For us, the arrangement was perfect: this kind, well-informed person needs money and we need her…

• I’m addicted to sexting

  10 May 2012 | 7:00 pm

  Dear Cary,This is a hard letter to write but I will try anyway. I am now married for a little more than a year to the kindest, gentlest, most understanding wife any man can ever dream of. She is an angel in every sense of the word and this is not influenced by any guilt that I am feeling.She is a foreigner from another country and we both met studying Mandarin in China and subsequently fell in love. Three years of long-distance relationship later, I proposed to her and we decided to get married on the basis that we both felt our relationship was special and our expectations in life were very…

• I’m too smart for this job

  9 May 2012 | 7:00 pm

  Dear Cary,Though my "problem" (which may not be seen as a problem for some) has been on my mind for a long time, I was triggered to write after seeing the "I get paid to do nothing" letter from a professional who was in a decent position, making decent money, but really not doing much. I feel very similarly, and wonder if there is more to it than your recommendation to "give money away and enjoy the low-stress."For years, I was told how smart I was, over and over again. Not genius-level, mind you, but "very bright" and "advanced." Parents, teachers, other students all echoed the same thing.

• How do I tell her I like her?

  8 May 2012 | 7:00 pm

  Dear Salon,I'm a 17-year-old guy and I'm a junior in high school, and I've had this friend, this girl, that I've known since our freshman year. I've liked her since freshman year and I've just now this year become really great friends with her. My best friend moved to Missouri last year and he just moved back. Him and this girl that I've liked forever started going out (they have only known each other for four or five months). This made me wonder what I've done wrong for the past three years of my life with her, but that's not the end of the story. They went out for three weeks and then she…