Santa Claus is dead! At least, the charity Santa who was born during the first Gilded Age, and whose fantasies about the poor fueled Operation Santa Claus, an enormous, Victorian-mentality welfare program run for decades from the giant Post Office at 33rd Street and 8th Avenue in New York City. Yesterday, three months after the [...]
Read MoreHere’s a must-read from the wonderful writer Judith Levine, about how Wall Street is as irresistible to Americans as wife beaters are to women: For a girl who grew up in a communist family, this month’s events should be cause for fireworks. As Marx predicted, the self-sown seeds of capitalism’s own destruction are spreading tendrils [...]
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Joann Wypijewski has a fine piece in The Nation’s Sept. 29 issue, about McCain’s political exploitation of Sarah P.’s MILFy, B&D, Book of Daniel sex vibe. This reminds me of how Sarah’s trotted her kids out. Not just their bodies and faces but their names, which Mom flashes like medals (go to CafePress.com and you’ll [...]
Read MoreAh yes, children and porn. Children consuming porn, I mean: a venerable American past time. Did you know you can check out its history for free, next time you visit our nation’s capital? I did and here’s what I learned. Exactly a century ago, in 1908, a middle-aged storekeeper named Pasquale Eliseo, of 119th Street [...]
Read More(ALL IMAGES IN THIS POST ARE COMPUTER GENERATED) To go right to the “real or virtual” article, skip all the emo in italics. I won’t be offended! A funny thing happened to me this weekend in Huntington, Long Island. I’d taken a commuter train there from Manhattan, to interview someone in a neighborhood that’s walking [...]
Read More(originally posted March 03rd 2008; reposted due to technical difficulties) Calling all serious civil libertarians! News you can use: The first political protest against sex offender civil commitment took place March 2. It happened in Coalinga, Calif., outside the grounds of a 1,500-bed state facility – the biggest sex offender civil commitment lockup in the [...]
Read MoreLarry Mathews in the Washington, DC area. Kurt Eichenwald in Dallas and New York. Bernie Ward in San Francisco. All involved in child porn scandals while working in the media. And now there’s Dennis Melanson, in Canada. His story has been covered extensively but superficially by the Canadian press, including the CBC. The clip I’m [...]
Read MoreI’ve been too busy the last month to blog much, but developments in the Bernie Ward case prompt this post: Bernie Ward may have spent a generation in the news and media biz, but three years ago, it now appears, he was just a messed up guy with a computer and too much time on [...]
Read MoreHey New York City! This Saturday, January 26 at 7 p.m. at the feminist Bluestockings bookstore on the Lower East Side. I’m presenting my new book Pornography. It was published late last year by Groundwood, a Canadian children’s press. Children’s press? Porn for Kids?? Officially, Pornography is part of a “social issues” series for older [...]
Read MoreThis post has also been published as an article in the January 4, 2008 issue of El Paso’s Newspapertree.com. A version also appears in the Jan. 1-15 issue of CounterPunch. Lots of Americans have heard about the Mexican city Juarez, just across the river from El Paso, Texas, and the 400 or so female murders [...]
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