After 39 days, with only two brief visits back to D.C., I’m temporarily off the campaign trail. My office at Slate HQ is a mess of papers and unread books – which, being perfectly honest, is how I left it. During my exile, some kitch coffee mugs had been thrown out before the civilizations growing within them could reach their renaissances. A kind reader, Kim Boyd, made it up to me:
Anyway: This Monday is an uncharacteristic time of battery re-charging, and stuff-that-got-lost-relocating.* Back in full tomorrow for Decision 2012: Colorado and Minnesota (and sort of Missouri).
In the meantime…
Sarah Kliff answers Ross Douthat on whether the media’s “abortion blinders” queered the Komen story.
Chris Hedges, a journalist and academic who’s taken a sort of leadership role in the Occupy movement, spits hot fire at the ruinous, violent Black Bloc.
Black Bloc adherents detest those of us on the organized left and seek, quite consciously, to take away our tools of empowerment. They confuse acts of petty vandalism and a repellent cynicism with revolution. The real enemies, they argue, are not the corporate capitalists, but their collaborators among the unions, workers’ movements, radical intellectuals, environmental activists and populist movements such as the Zapatistas. Any group that seeks to rebuild social structures, especially through nonviolent acts of civil disobedience, rather than physically destroy, becomes, in the eyes of Black Bloc anarchists, the enemy. Black Bloc anarchists spend most of their fury not on the architects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or globalism, but on those, such as the Zapatistas, who respond to the problem. It is a grotesque inversion of value systems.Newt Gingrich’s message of the moment (and I literally mean “moment”): Romeny is a tool of Goldman Sachs and Soros. And the Game Change trailer is here.
