Other Articles

San Francisco Chronicle

Since the taxpayer-supported “Wings” won the first Academy Award in 1927, the U.S. government has worked closely with Hollywood to promote, glorify and celebrate the armed forces. In the 1980s, this partnership became a highly political Military-Entertainment Complex, which today grants and denies filmmakers access to military hardware on the basis of filmmakers’ ideology and message.

The result is that many pro-war films are supported by huge public subsidies that underwrite studios’ use of military planes, boats and hardware – as long as those studios promise to produce a film that Pentagon spinmeisters approve of. Antimilitarist filmmakers, by contrast, are often barred by the government from even photographing the same hardware.

Wired.com

I’m guessing that my fellow first-time dads have a lot of epiphanies about kids in the weeks right after their children are born. And I’m guessing that veteran dads who have already experienced the fog of fatherhood find most of these “epiphanies” more akin to tired cliches. Yes, yes, the old-timers sigh, infants love being rocked, they hate being cold, and they occasionally make a diaper-changing session into an exercise in projectile urine. The vets know all this, despite us first-timers and our safari-like wonderment during the early child-rearing experience.

Salon.com

Even in as chaotic and random a world as we live in now, Americans have come to rely on a few rock-solid inevitabilities during the Christmas/New Years season. We know jingle-bell muzak will fill our department stores. We know Fox News will provide breathless dispatches from the frontlines of the War on Christmas. We can bank on Dick Clark (with an assist from Ryan Seacrest) counting down the seconds as the ball drops in Times Square. And, even more so than at any other time of year, we can count on the cable rerun-o-sphere teleporting us back to the child-focused Spielberg-Lucas productions of our youth.

New York Times Magazine

Nearly two decades ago, Republicans won the West by linking Democrats to environmentalists, who supposedly cared more for the spotted owl and other favored species than they did for the jobs of loggers or miners. But now, as a boom in natural-gas drilling reshapes the region, Western Democrats have found success recasting environmentalism as a defense of threatened water supplies, fishing spots and hunting grounds. As a result, the party may hold the advantage this fall in the region’s key Congressional races. The simultaneous rise of Western energy production and the Western Democrat is no coincidence.

The Nation

As I was writing this speech late a few nights ago, the movie The Shawshank Redemption came on TV. Knee-deep in economic data and stories about the recent legislative session, I heard Morgan Freeman’s distinct baritone voice utter that haunting phrase: “Get busy living, or get busy dying.”

The Oregonian

Ah, beer,” says Homer Simpson. “The source of, and the solution to, all of life’s problems.” The same kind of thing can be said of politics. So it’s worth asking why our experience with the political process has been so negative of late, and if there are simple reforms that could help us have the thrill without the nasty hangover.

San Francisco Chronicle

When most non-Montanans think of Montana, they think of “A River Runs Through It” — they don’t think of the central front in the war on anything (except, maybe trout, if you consider fly fishermen “warriors”). But for the last week, this sparsely populated state has been the central front in the war on the middle class, and the onslaught Big Sky country experienced shows that this fight could be coming to a town near you.

San Francisco Chronicle

A rule of thumb for understanding American politics: The federal government only reacts to popular will when the upper-middle professional class starts making noise. Everyone else’s voice falls on deaf ears. This is an unfortunate reality, but it is reality.