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Catotonic History
October 08, 2013
If you glance at the names of conservative think tanks, you may notice a touching solicitude for the past. This species of head-piece heritage is, alas, a foreign country. The U.K.-based Adam Smith Institute, for example, is dedicated to the kind of free-market thinking you may ...

Heritage Hearts Shutdowns
October 07, 2013
Nearly every time Tea Party conservatives make a move, we read some version of a particular opening sentence. The latest is from the New York Times: “Shortly after President Obama started his second term, a loose-knit coalition of conservative activists led by former ...

Pennsylvania’s Master of Analogy
October 04, 2013
Same-sex marriage is all the rage in Pennsylvania politics these days, as it is in many places. Now that New Jersey appears to be on its way to legalizing same-sex marriage via their superior courts, the Keystone state will have the distinction of being the only Northeastern ...

Still Busting Up
October 04, 2013
“If one more person tells me this is just like old times, I swear I’ll jump out the window.” —Buster Keaton as Calvero’s partner in Charlie Chaplin’s 1952 film, Limelight. Today marks 118 years since the Great Stone Face, actor/director Buster ...

Throwdown at the Memorial
October 03, 2013
As The Baffler’s Zero Tolerance blog noted Wednesday, a full 95 percent of the news coverage of the 2013 government shutdown, days one and two, was devoted to our Greatest Generation not being able to visit the World War II memorial in Washington, D.C. For a little while, at ...

Commodify Your Dissent with VISA
October 03, 2013
Commodify your dissent for real with the Occupy prepaid debit card, a new financial product still in the planning stages. “To make the card widely accepted,” reports ABC News, “the [Occupy Money] Cooperative has forged a relationship with VISA.” With ...

A Modest Proposal for the Twenty-First Century
October 02, 2013
There is something to be said for having a strong voting bloc, the power to organize, a grumpy scrappiness, and a golden opportunity. On Tuesday, a group of World War II veterans, visiting Washington as part of the Honor Flight network, were kept from visiting their memorial and ...

The Beltway Media Shuck-Down
October 01, 2013
The Beltway media’s standard accounts of how governing and politics operate in the American republic are as oversimplified as patty-cake. And, as the great Guignol show known as Shutdown ’13 amply demonstrates, the end results are about as edifying. The audience for this ...

CNBC Treasures Jamie Dimon’s Enormous Bank
September 30, 2013
For some reason, Alex Pareene was booked on the CNBC Friday afternoon program, Closing Bell. It is baffling why Pareene, a senior writer at Salon, was asked to come on the show–though his appearance does, so far as we know, mark the only time a Baffler contributor has ...

All Hail the Shutdown Circle Jerk
September 27, 2013
On Monday at midnight, funding for the federal government is set to expire. As they stand now, here are each party’s negotiating postures: the Republicans, who control the House of Representatives, insist they will not fund the government so long as the new health care reform ...

Save Us from the Welfare Surfers
September 25, 2013
Ahh, the Dignity of Work. It is time, once again, to consider those old standbys, Work and Dignity. According to the House of Representatives, it seems that many a wayward American soul has lost sight of that most cherished ideal: the workday. These Americans have come up with ...

The Ted Cruz Show
September 25, 2013
Perhaps a bizarre Twitter account doesn’t rise to the level of high art, but there is something of the Ziegfeld Follies in the kind of political posturing that Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, rolled out this week on the Senate floor. For twenty-one hours and change, the senator ...