Support Ted’s Work

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Murder by Prosecutor

•
Ted Rall
Time to Roll Back Excessive Prison Sentences If you’re looking for sympathy, it helps to be white, male and media-savvy. Throw in charm and brains—especially if your smarts tend toward the tech geek variety—and your online petitions will soon collect more petitions than campaigns against kitten cancer. These advantages weren’t enough to save Aaron Swartz, a 26-year-old “technology wunderkind” who hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment on January 11. But they did elevate his suicide from that of a mere “data crusader,” as The New York Times put it, to “a cause” driven by millennial “information wants to be free” bloggers and sympathetic writers (whose corporate media overlords would go broke if people like Swartz got their way). Swartz, who helped invent RSS feeds as a teenager and cofounded the link-posting social networking site Reddit, was a militant believer in online libertarianism, the idea that everything—data, cultural products like books and movies, news—ought to be available online for free. Sometimes…
Read More

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Men of Dishonor

•
Ted Rall
A Congress of 21st Century Cynics Dodges 19th Century Rules People are calling the recently adjourned 112th Congress “the most dysfunctional ever” and the least productive since the infamous “do-nothing Congress” of the 1940s. There’s lots of blame to go around, but one cause for congressional gridlock has gone unnoticed and unremarked upon: we no longer have a sense of honor. Back in the late 18th and 19th centuries, when our bicameral legislature and its rules were conceived of by a bunch of land-owning white males, a gentleman’s word was his most precious asset. Integrity and the lack thereof were literally a matter of life and death; consider the matter of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. As Thomas Jefferson and his de facto wife Sally Hemings could attest, civility was far from guaranteed under this old system. It certainly could have worked better for Charles Sumner, the abolitionist Massachusetts senator who was nearly beaten to death by a proslavery colleague…
Read More

SYNDICATED COLUMN: How I’d Spend My Powerball Winnings

•
Ted Rall
Musings of a Wannabe Newspaper Warlord Asked how they’d spend the $293.7 million they won in November’s record Powerball lottery, a Missouri couple told reporters they planned to buy a Camaro. They plan to travel to China. They might adopt a second daughter. They’ll up their grandkids’ college tuition. OK, so that leaves $293.6 million. They obviously have absolutely no idea how much money $293.7 million is. Mark and Cindy Hill seem like an average couple in their early 50s. Working class. Salt of the earth. But man, what a waste of money to give all that loot to them! $200,000 would have been more than enough to change their lives. Not really knowing what to do with such a massive sum, the Hills will likely waste most of it on America’s self-perpetuating charity industry, which says that spending up to 35% of donor money on six-figure executive salaries and other luxuries is perfectly acceptable. It is, of course, the…
Read More

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Fooled Again

•
Ted Rall
Six Weeks After Reelection, Obama Sells Out Liberal Democrats After the election Kerry Eleveld wrote a piece for The Atlantic titled “Why Barack Obama Will Be a More Effective Liberal in His Second Term.” “In response to their initial disappointment with the president’s early performance, many progressives speculated that Obama was just waiting for a second term to be more liberal,” he said. That was true. They were. Eleveld continued: “A more likely explanation is that Obama was still finding his groove, figuring out which levers worked best for him in the context of governing the nation. And in some ways, he was still developing the courage of his convictions.” That, it turns out, was false. He wasn’t. You can’t develop convictions that you don’t have in the first place. It’s hard to remember now, more than six weeks later, but there was once a time (six long weeks ago) when liberal Democrats who naïvely chose to ignore Obama’s consistently…
Read More

SYNDICATED COLUMN: We Don’t Have the Right to Care

•
Ted Rall
U.S. Drone Strikes Equivalent of Dozens of Newtown Massacres We don’t have the right to be sad. We don’t have the right to be angry. We don’t have the right to care about the 20 dead kids, much less the six dead adults or the one deranged shooter. Our newspapers don’t have the right to pretend that we are a nation stricken by grief. Our television networks don’t have the right to put the Newtown shootings at the top of the news. We don’t have the right to gather around the water cooler and talk about how terrible it all is. Our president doesn’t have the right to express grief or remorse or pretend to be a human being or reference the fact that he is a parent or wipe his eye (assuming he was crying). Our pundits don’t have the right to use this massacre as a reason to call for gun control. Our Congress doesn’t have the right…
Read More

SYNDICATED COLUMN: The Self-Censoring of America

•
Ted Rall
How Sellouts Are Killing Growth Are you a sellout? If you came of age during the 1960s, whether or not to sell out was the existential question of your generation. Which to choose? Reckless youthful abandon or corporate “adult” obeisance? Films that dealt with that quandary, from “The Graduate” to Bertolucci’s “The Conformist” launched a million rap sessions, yet Baby Boomers are sure to leave this ethical dilemma unresolved. My fellow travelers, we of unlucky, witty Generation X, have lived constrained careers with fewer options. Coupled with shrinking financial aid for college, the dismal job market made the choice between Wall Street and the Peace Corps depressingly simple. So we Gen Xers projected the debate onto practitioners of pop culture. Vanilla Ice, Milli Vanilli and The Knack, judged all commerce no art, were shunned. Artists who cashed in could be deemed genuine, but only if they took chances and/or made decisions that were bad for business: The Clash, Elvis Costello,…
Read More

SYNDICATED COLUMN: The Malicious Mallard and Me

•
Ted Rall
How Online Popularity Contests Are Killing Politics Luddite? Not me. I like tech. Played Pong, loved Space Invaders. Was obsessed with the TRS-80, Commodore 64 and Apple II. One of my first jobs, as a traffic engineer for an Ohio suburb, had me programming a Honeywell 77 computer the size of a small car; I loved those crazy punchcards (“do not fold, spindle or mutilate”), FORTRAN and the green glow of the LED terminal. I was among the first cartoonists to put my email address on my work; I loved the instant audience feedback. Still do.  So I blog and I’ve embraced social networking. I tweet. I post to Facebook. And Google Plus, though I’m not sure why. LinkedIn has the dumbest business model ever–in the middle of a Depression, it’s where jobseekers meet nonexistent would-be employers—but I use it anyway (to connect to other underemployed losers). So. Note to people who are reading this online: I’m one of you.…
Read More

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Shoot First, Justify Later

•
Ted Rall
Our Police State Does What It Wants, Then Writes a Memo Imagine that you were the president of United States. Now think what you would do if you or one of your advisers proposed an idea—a great idea, one that solved a big problem—that was radical to the point of possibly crossing the legal line into unconstitutionality. You’d want to lawyer that sucker, right? After all, the last thing you would want to do is break the law. You wouldn’t want to be accused of running off half-cocked in violation of your inaugural oath to preserve and protect the Constitution. You wouldn’t want to risk a scandal, an investigation, or even impeachment. Now imagine that you were a chief of police. Again, imagine that you or one of your officers came up with a great new approach for tracking down bad guys, but that the idea was so novel that you couldn’t be sure that arrests made using your new…
Read More

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Awaiting a Slut Moment

•
Ted Rall
Everybody Cheats. When Will We Admit It? We need a Slut Moment. As CIA director, David Petraeus led an organization that carries out extrajudicial assassinations, overthrows foreign heads of state and fires drone missiles at innocent civilians. For his performance as a leading state terrorist, General Petraeus received four stars, 28 motorcycle policemen to escort him to a girlfriend’s house, and nearly universal acclaim. For cheating on his wife, he was forced to resign in disgrace. (Since his lover, a West Point graduate, was not a spy, national security was not at issue.) What is wrong with our values? I wouldn’t lay it on quite as thickly as John Prados, senior research fellow at the National Security Archive did in The Washington Post: “Because of an affair that had already ended, the nation this month lost the services of a highly skilled public servant. The hysterical reaction to the news of then-CIA Director David Petraeus’s liaison with his biographer, Paula…
Read More

SYNDICATED COLUMN: The Leftist Republican Party of the Future

•
Ted Rall
To Survive, GOP Should Out-Democrat the Democrats Republicans, engaging in the traditional losing party’s post-election wound-licking, blame-flinging and anger-at-the-dumb-voters ritual, are facing the awful truth: The American people just aren’t into their gay-bashing, race-baiting, woman-hating, Eisenhower-era positions on social issues. “It’s not that our message–we think abortion is wrong, we think same-sex marriage is wrong–didn’t get out. It did get out,” R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville told The New York Times. “It’s that the entire moral landscape has changed. An increasingly secularized America understands our positions, and has rejected them.” Exasperated radio blowhard Rush Limbaugh asks: “Condoleeza Rice…is a pinnacle of achievement, and intelligent, and well-spoken…You can’t find a more accomplished person. Marco Rubio. And really, speaking in street lingo, we’re not getting credit for it…Are these people perceived as tokens?” Yes. Uncle Toms are easy to spot. “In order to get the Hispanic or Latino vote, does that mean open the…
Read More
keyboard_arrow_up
css.php