Mondays are for Makin’ Trouble!

It’s been a while since I threw a bunch of links up here, and with Spidercat’s protection, all of you will be too terrified to stop me! Huzzah, Spidercat! Ack, get it away, get it away!

Anyway, everything I’ve got this time is political or semi-political. Completely unexpected and definitely unusual, but that’s how it turned out this time. No crazy videos this time, so sorry, just stuff to make some of you guys rant at the ceiling.

• The Last Republican in the Texas Lege
• Republican David Frum — George W. Bush’s former speechwriter, no less — on how Republican extremists and pundits are killing the GOP.
• And one of Frum’s readers says the GOP’s current love for extremists and whackjobs has run him off. This stuff really is weird to me. The crazy building-bombing militia movement wasn’t that long ago — it’s weird to see people getting suckered by violent nutbars again after only a couple decades. I know there are tons and tons of people like this dude who know that you can’t run a healthy political movement on a strict diet of crazysauce and locoweed, but the sensible folks are getting completely ignored because the crackpots are so much better for ratings…
• Kevin Church’s domestic terrorism linkblog
• This says a lot of stuff I’ve been thinking lately about the lack of empathy shown for people having a rough time economically and about the way we seem to devalue our fellow man and over-value megacorps. We like to think of ourselves as an unusually giving and empathetic country, but these days, it seems like everyone’s competing to be the cruelest and most hard-hearted.
• David Brooks thinks he’s better than you. Let’s see a show of hands — anybody here think David Brooks could handle more than five minutes of ditch-digging, waiting tables, or scrubbing toilets? Nah, I didn’t think so. Everything I’ve ever read from this guy makes me amazed that he can make it through the day without getting beat up by angry mobs.
• Dallas sports anchor Dale Hansen tees off on his station’s management for what he believes are poor news decisions. I agree with a lot of what he says (but not all) — I think it’s worth watching just to enjoy the bracing slap-in-the-face awesomeness of a guy telling his bosses he really, really disagrees with them (though Hansen is a Dallas sports broadcasting mainstay, so his job is absolutely safe).
• I’m not normally a fan of these TED talks — they tend to be a bit too buzzword-heavy and detail-vague to be really useful, but I enjoyed the talk by Mike Rowe (from the Discovery Channel’s wonderfully gross “Dirty Jobs” series) about why dirty and unglamorous jobs are so important. It’s 20 minutes long, though, so make sure you’ve got a half-hour or so to watch it…
• These Teach the Controversy T-shirts are awesome.
• And to drag comics, at least briefly, into the conversation, while still sticking with the political theme, here’s Paul Cornell, writer of the fantastically awesome “Captain Britain and MI-13” series from last year, on the question of why Christianity always seems to equal homophobe.

And that’s what I got this time. Hopefully, my next linkdump will have a lot more goofy stuff…