Success

Seriously, desk calendar*? Again with the jokes?

*Different brand this year. It must be endemic.

Square

It is not people like the Abbie Hoffman of The Trial of the Chicago 7 — those who dare to memorialize the troops and celebrate our institutions while critiquing them within reason — who are most essential to a thriving democracy. It is people like the actual Abbie Hoffman, who could never have been the subject of an Aaron Sorkin film, because Sorkin would never have been able to get a square liberal audience to like him.

Apparently, but unsurprisingly, the new Chicago 10 flick isn't very good, taking place, as it does, in the alternative history magic pixie land that is Sorkinworld. These two are better, or you could just read the transcript.

Perversity

Still, let us genuflect before the superhuman perversity of the thing. Tax cuts, union busting, and deregulation - the historic achievements of right-wing populism - have led us straight back to the massively skewed economic arrangements of the 1890s. It takes a kind of hallucinatory bravado to call yourself a populist while cracking down on workers and ignoring antitrust laws, which the Reagan administration and its successors did. It's like a banker calling himself a freedom fighter because he likes Basque cuisine. It's like a slumlord signing his eviction notices, "Yours in solidarity."

- Thomas Frank, from "The People, No!", Chapter 7 (for what it's worth, my copy is the Scribe edition with the tiresome alternative title People Without Power)