Recommended Reading VI

1. Politics

• Sara Robinson (the same one who posts at Orcinus?) connects the dots from Watergate to Bush's many impeachable crimes in a marvelous essay, "Rehab Nation". Here's a snippet:

America is a family that's been living with a bunch of reckless, unchecked power addicts for the past 35 years. They've bankrupted us, trashed the house, taken a toll on our mental and physical health, abused the kids, run the car into the ditch, and pissed off the neighbors so thoroughly that some of them won't even talk to us any more. Like all addicts, they refuse to acknowledge anything they've done -- let alone accept any responsibility for it. And every time we say, "Hey, no problem. Let's just forget about it and move on as a family," they figure they've gotten away with it again.

We cannot afford to let that happen this time. Our country is too far gone, our economy too unstable, our reputation too damaged, our Constitution too tattered to survive another round of this. It's time for a massive national intervention that forces the GOP into full accountability for what they've done, and removes their ability to do us any more harm. Nothing less than a full and honest reckoning of the damage will do. It is our ONLY insurance that the demons unleashed in 1972 will finally be put to rest...

Read the rest. No, seriously: read the rest.

• On a related (but not, I think, identical) note, Rick Perlstein -- whose blog, The Big Con, is climbing its way up my must-read list towards the "daily" slot -- hits the key political point of the next year or two: "Goldwaterism isn't the solution to our problems. Goldwaterism is the problem.". We simply must connect the dots in order to get out from the disaster we're in. Rick's discussion starts here, and then continues here (quote from the latter.) See also Digby's follow-up to Rick's first post.

• Two things that should be done, and done now: subpoena Cheney (via); and make them actually perform their filibusters. Update: Looks like the latter will happen. (But why only one night? They should do it until the war !@#$% ends.) On to subpoenaing Cheney!

2. Miscellany

• Patrick Nielsen Hayden on why the Harry Potter books are so popular. (I'd love to see him spell this out at greater length, but it's fascinating as is.)

• John Crowley gives us a...

New Grammar Whiz [typo for Quiz, I presume]: Add words to either the beginning or end of the following bit (quoted from TLS) to make a good English sentence. No adding of punctuation, no "thinking outside the box" (e.g. puns, treating words as themselves subjects, etc.)
against that satirical vein they both share that one

Various answers in the thread here.

• Sam Harris replies to his critics. As you can imagine, he is conciliatory and inclined to give ground.

• Update: via Making Light, this is the coolest !@#$%ing thing ever (at least since the last coolest !@#$%ing thing ever). "Fight spam and help digitize world literature simultaneously". Wow. Now I just need to figure out how to add it to a blogspot site...