The Nature of Things

Mad magazine gets it right and speaks (screams) for all of us.

Have you heard the latest from New Hampshire? No, not the primary they'll be having there next week. This time it is the state legislature that is making news. A state legislature, like so many this year, dominated by Republicans. It seems that three Republican members of the legislature are proposing a law that would require that any new bill proposed in New Hampshire cite a passage from the Magna Carta as its basis and reason for being. The Magna Carta, as you will no doubt recall from your history lessons, was a charter forced upon King John of England by feudal barons in the year 1215 ! Yes, as I've long suspected, the Republicans don't just want to repeal the twentieth century and the modern era; they want to take us all the way back to medieval times. To quote from Wikipedia's information about the Magna Carta: The 1215 Charter required King  John of England  to proclaim certain liberties, and accept that his will was not  arbitrary , for example by explicitly ac...

For years, I've listened to Garrison Keillor on the radio talking about his hometown in Minnesota where "all the womean are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average" and I guess I had bought the fiction that somehow Minnesotans are special and "above average". We now have living proof that that is not true. We have Michele Bachmann. The Republican congresswoman from Minnesota is following in the footsteps of her idol, Sarah Palin. (I fully expect that any day now she will be announcing that she is running for president in 2012.) Her grasp of history is certainly on a par with Palin. An article in Salon.com today makes that perfectly clear. The article outlines one of Bachmann's latest fictionalized autobiographical accounts. (There have been many.) It tells how she had a Damascus Road style conversion from being a flaming liberal to being an enlightened Republican. Strangely enough, it is all Gore Vidal's fau...