THIS MODERN WORLD

After a nine month absence, Tom Tomorrow’s House of Shopping Fun has returned. T-shirts, coffee mugs, thongs, and now even those inexplicably ubiquitous Sigg bottles. Remember — every dollar you spend keeps this site online for a few more precious minutes.

Apparently there are some Backspacer billboards around the city. If you see one, please snap a picture and send it in (and tell me the location).

For, like, the millionth time. But very impressively:

Von Drehle identified the boycott as “a boon” to Beck’s ratings; but he didn’t say that it now includes more than sixty corporations, including Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and Procter & Gamble.

FCP asked Von Dehele if sixty wasn’t a rather large number–one perhaps worth mentioning in his piece. “Well,” he replied. “There are millions of companies.”

Von Drehle also seems to think that the progressive hosts on MSNBC are really just like the right-wing crazies on Fox. But when FCP pressed him about that, he admitted that had no basis whatsoever for making any comparison:

“I haven’t seen Keith Olbermann for at least a year and a half,” the Time writer said. “And I’ve never seen Rachel Maddow. I have four children and a wife. I don’t sit around watching cable TV. I don’t understand why anybody watches any of these shows. I know what these opinions are based on: they’re based on nothing.”

I don’t expect a lot from Time magazine, but even I am astonished at this.

I did some art for this scrappy little band out west earlier in the year; the cd’s finally going on sale this weekend.

Target’s apparently selling a t-shirt featuring some portion of the album art as well, though I haven’t seen it yet. Now if only they’d stock the Mayor, my infiltration would be complete.

David Brooks was out jogging on the mall and saw some teabaggers interacting with actual black people, and because no one was literally shouting the n-word or fashioning a noose, he concludes that racism plays absolutely no part in whatever it is that drives this — well, I almost wrote “political movement” but I’m not sure you can dignify it as such. It’s really more of a mass temper tantrum.

At any rate, Brooks is in fine Mister McBobo form this morning. And the really sad thing is, the people he is implicitly defending, the fringers, the Limbaughs of his party — they hate him. They would happily and eagerly throw him under that metaphorical bus we hear so much about, at the first opportunity. The irony is, acknowledging and denouncing the vile elements that increasingly hold sway over his party would not only be the right thing to do for the sake of that elusive civil society to which people like David Brooks frequently claim to aspire — it would be in the best personal interests of David Brooks himself.

But instead, he claims that there’s no reason to believe that race played a role when a Confederate flag-defending congressman interrupted a black president discussing health care for illegal immigrants. (Irony number two: the only disagreement between the President and Joe Wilson being the vehemence with which said health care is denied.)

For a more reality-based take on the teabaggers, I recommend the video by Max Blumenthal, below, though I’ll warn you in advance, I found it depressing as hell.

(Also, because several decades have passed in internet time since I last posted this link: readers interested in a refresher course in the Unbearable Wrongness of Being David Brooks are directed to this classic article by Sasha Issenberg.)

(And: a modest proposal for Mister Brooks.)