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I woke with the hum of Neko Case’s “Magpie to the Morning” in my head. Now after an unfortunate attempt at rebranding The Smiths, we at TAC–and @TAC for that matter–are leery of our tendency to claim for conservatism things that aren’t. Sometimes a poppy isn’t political; sometimes it’s just a poppy.
But I’ll risk sliding [...]
Filed under: Culture
Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, who is wired into the cabinet of “Bibi” Netanyahu, warns that if Iran’s nuclear program is not aborted by December, Israel will strike to obliterate it.
Defense Secretary Gates’ mission to Israel this week, says Bolton, to relay Obama’s red light, [...]
Online gambling has broken another glass ceiling. Are you a parent who chooses to stay at home to raise your kids? You can now get in on a poker game—and use your winnings to feed the kids.
The Poker Players Alliance is on Capitol Hill this week, lobbying for a regulatory scheme that online gamblers can [...]
Score one for Gutenberg. The New York Times reports that Amazon.com deleted books from Kindles that weren’t supposed to be sold. I am probably the millionth person to note the irony that the books deleted in such a Big Brother fashion are George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm. I checked, and I have copies of [...]
If you care about what you’re eating, you should see the new documentary Food Inc. Playing in major cities for the past few weeks, it’s a mostly even-handed examination of the industrialization and corporate domination of America’s food production. Between showing filthy chicken coops full of drugged birds that can barely move and cows packed in amongst [...]
I guess I don’t get it even though I was saddened when Elvis died. Two TAC blog items (admittedly Kara’s was somewhat scathing) attracting twenty comments on Michael Jackson the self-styled King of Pop. Is there a more bizarre figure in recent American pop culture? Dangling the baby out the window, a walking exhibit of plastic surgery [...]
Filed under: Culture
CBS reports, “The White House hasn’t yet decided whether President Obama should issue a statement on the death of Michael Jackson.”
A 1984 letter from Ronald Reagan to the singer makes a strong case for executive restraint. After Jackson’s hair caught fire while filming a Pepsi commercial, Reagan wrote, “All over America, millions of people look [...]
Filed under: Culture
But I am invented too for your entertainment and amusement. And you, poor creatures, who conjured you out of the clay? Is God in show business too?
–”Arthur Frayne”, Zardoz
We played the grooves off of that record. My girlfriend had Michael Jackson’s Off The Wall on vinyl. For a post-adolescent white trash burnout, steeped in [...]
Secession is in the air. In Texas, a Republican governor has dared breathe the word. Vermont has an active and growing secessionist movement. Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia already call themselves Cascadia. Last weekend’s Wall Street Journal led off with a piece on secession. The author, Paul Starobin, wrote that
The present-day American Goliath may [...]