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Incredible Exploding Contracted Government Stuff
October 10, 2013
Before they try to hear a mouse fart in Abbottabad, those clever government hacks should first run down to the breakroom and unplug the toaster. The National Security Agency is building a massive new data center in Utah, all the better to store your weekly phone call to grandma ...

Cheney and His Clowns
October 09, 2013
Quick! Think of the worst possible event to attend ever. What? They make you do what with a fishing pole? Yeah, that sounds pretty bad, but still not as bad as this. On Monday, October 7, the conservative muckety-mucks came together at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan to roast the ...

The Eau de Politic
October 08, 2013
A federal shutdown closes government, and a staggering 800,000 employees are sent home. A tiny skeleton crew of just three or four million struggles to keep the machine going, as the Washington Post explains: “That leaves about 1.3 million ‘essential’ federal ...

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 ...