When Harry Met Crazy

"...and that’s how the Muslims and Socialists plan to use the Negroes to destroy Christian America.”

Once upon a time, millions of Americans -- drunk on the promise of ouchless prosperity and a McMansion in the exburbs of that Shining City on a Hill -- jumped into bed with an ex-B-movie actor.

It was gonna be sooo awesome!

When they woke up the next day, the actor, the City and the promises of mountains of pirate gold were all long gone. Instead they found themselves in a sticky day-bed in a shitty motel room, snuggling with Glenn Beck.

Horrified, broke and covered with sores and lice, they all immediately wanted to know the same thing: How can I blame this on the Liberals?

From HuffPo:

New Poll: Less Than Half Of Republicans Believe Obama Was Born In U.S.

Less than half of Republicans believe that Barack Obama was born in the United States of America, a new public opinion poll finds.

Only 42 percent of Republican respondents in a Research 2000 survey, conducted for the liberal website Daily Kos, said they thought Obama was a natural born citizen; 28 percent said they did not believe Obama was born in the United States; 30 percent said they were not sure.

The responses, which were gathered after several prominent conservative media personalities fed suspicion that Obama was unconstitutionally holding office, show the extent to which the conspiracy has taken hold in the GOP.

That only a plurality of Republicans were willing to acknowledge the president was born in America is nothing short of astounding, considering the preponderance of evidence that confirms his Hawaiian birth.
...

There is something freakishly reassuring in the childlike dementia of the "28%-ers"; that hardcore Conservative base on which the economic viability of Hate Radio and virtually every GOP electoral victory completely depends, and which the GOP would rather pull its own head off rather than admit exists.

For all of the ridiculous, provincial and bigoted drivel they believe with all their heart, the crazies that run the Party of Lincoln also have the refreshingly brazen honesty of saints and sociopaths. If you walked in on one of the 27%ers fucking the family dog, far from denying it, they'd brag about it. In fact they'd call you a dirty Socialist for not getting in on all the patriotic dog-fucking fun.

They are a straight-up cultural dead loss.

Most rest of what is left of the Conservative movement -- the weasely invertebrate wing of the Party -- are a little different. Bust in on them in the middle of a special, man-dog-love moment and they will:

• Frantically deny it was happening at all.
• Blame “the Liberal Media”.
• Swear that, however degenerate their behavior, the Imaginary Liberals who live in their head are far, far worse.

These are the Master Race-lite clowns who were perfectly happy to ride in the political carpool lane with the 27%ers as long as they got their tax cuts and got to blame everything from their little dicks to their hammer toe on the Evil Gummint and/or liberals…but who always sat near the exits at the Konservative Kristian Kulture rallies where they could scamper out the door once the cross burnings began and pretend they had just stumbled into the wrong venue while looking for the Josh Groban concert.

Of course in the end, they’re all nasty little pet-fuckers. It’s just that by their choice of punctuation --

“Obama is not a real American!”
vs.
“Obama is not a real American?”

-- you can tell whether or not they have the guts to march in the parade, of just cheer from the safety of the bleachers.

A Drowning Man Will Reach

even for the point of a sword in order to survive.

-- Yiddish saying.

From Crain's:

Wal-Mart backers rally for 2nd city store

By Samantha Sleevi and Monée Fields-White
July 29, 2009
(Crain’s) — Hundreds of Wal-Mart supporters rallied Wednesday morning across the street from City Hall as members of a City Council committee tossed around a controversial plan that would pave the way for the retailer’s second outpost in the city.

The City Council Finance Committee is expected to consider an amendment, introduced by Alderman Howard Brookins Jr. (21st) in April, that would alter a development proposal to allow Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to build a store at 83rd Street and Stewart Avenue.

Mr. Brookins, who has been fighting to add a Wal-Mart in his Chatham neighborhood ward since 2004, told supporters at Wednesday’s rally that the council needs to move on this issue.

“Now is the time for action,” Mr. Brookins said. “It is time to be mad. I have a plan that puts hundreds of people to work . . . without asking anybody for an increase in tax revenue. I have a plan that is going get people back to work now.”

Wal-Mart’s single store in the city, on the West Side, opened in September 2006 amid a political firestorm.
...

I happened to be at the Hall that day and, for a brief moment, it was best damn floor show for the price anywhere in town. Not that they behaved like a sober, deliberative governing body or anything (most of the ruckus consisted of the Old Bulls strutting and hectoring Alderman Brookins on his breach of clubby, aldermanic protocol in not getting their blessing first because "that's not how things work here") but it was just about the first time since the days of Harold Washington and Council Wars that the usually Recumbent Incumbents acted like something other than Da Mare’s hand-made hemorrhoid pillow.

That being said, this is one issue where both sides have a point.

Yes, the Wal-Mart business model is based on letting predatory douchbags use their commanding market position to drive wages down so low that no one can afford to shop anywhere but Wal-Mart.

Yes, they are a patient, persistent, opportunistic virus of a corporation.

But even though everyone knew this virus was lurking out there in the weeds waiting for the right moment to strike, the City still did far, far less than the minimum necessary to inoculate its poorer neighborhoods against it. Yawning food deserts still exist. Development is still maldistributed. City attention, resources and all of those lovely little sweeteners that attract businesses are still skewed towards the downtown.

Chatham is one of many Chicago neighborhoods that has been living for years on the promise that revitalization projects and good jobs in sustainable industries would be coming their way by and by.

But the cavalry never came, and they are tired of waiting.

Reminder: Please Don't Tell The Birthers

The real reason he doesn't have a birth certificate.



UPDATE: In the comments, Blue Gal says that she wants "...a birther to prove that Obama's mother's vagina was in Kenya in 1961."

BG, your confusion is understandable.

In fact anyone not familiar with the groundbreaking work that Michele Bachmann, Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs have been doing in little-known field of advanced wingnut wormhole theory would probably be unaware that it has clearly been shown to be theoretically possible for someone to start off in one place (say, Hawaii) and pop out of some extra terrestrial hoo-ha as a baby in a whole 'nother place (say, Kenya),

provided they have been exposed to some big, black, sinister alien thingie

that first appears in Africa!



Or that even under the more-obscure Birther "Theory Of Special Relatives", it has been proven that a less expensive and Kubricky, "Quantum Freep" timejump effect

is still possible.

They're on to us, people!

Reason #17 To Get a Full Time Job

To save up enough
dough

to hire

Bill

Shatner

to deliver my

aimless,

bewildering

free-verse

jeremiad
on the day

when I

suddenly
and

inexplicably

decide to

up

and quit.

The Max Baucus Anthem

From Crooks & Liars:

Max Baucus Is Ready to Sell Meaningful Reform Down the River. Let Him Know You Won't Stand for It.
By Susie Madrak Tuesday Jul 28, 2009 12:00pm

See, here's the thing about the very concept of "bipartisan" compromise: The only Republican officials left are from the far fringe of their party. So you really can't negotiate with them in any meaningful sense - you can only capitulate.

And that's pretty much what the members of Max Baucus's little private party have done. They've stripped anything resembling real competition from their secret healthcare proposal. I wonder why Republicans are running this process? {And please note: not one member of this cabal is a progressive, nor from an urban area. Not very representative of the rest of us, wouldn't you say?)

This would be a very good day to flood the offices of Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., Sens. Kent Conrad of North Dakota and Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, the Democrats slicing and dicing away our future, with PHONE CALLS (not emails) telling them you want a strong public option - unlike President Obama, apparently.
...

Call.
Write.
Lean on your car horn and bang pots.
But above all let the Party know that if they permit an already-weakened, already-compromised, already-remaindered health care bill to be completely fucked into the ground to mollify a handful of paid-whore fifth columnists, it will cost them.
Dearly.

Stuff Your Mother Never Taught You

Because life is so much more often about the way things are than the way they should be, this list should be printed on the reverse side of Miranda Cards and read to every goof whose life plan and/or alcohol consumption patterns is likely to intersect with the criminal justice system

From "The Beachwood Reporter":

What I Watched Last Night

By Scott Buckner

...
I'm not saying I'm brighter than the average street criminal, but there are 12 very important Lessons For Dummies I've learned from watching Cops that I'll forever carry with me:

1. Rule 1: Shut the hell up. Rule 2: Sit down and shut the hell up.
I've seen a surprising number of people not even involved with whatever the cops got called for end up in handcuffs because they thought the calendar said it was National Fuck With A Cop Day. ...

2. Guns always win. Don't even try.
...

3. Nobody outruns Motorola.
...


5. If you can't be good, be invisible.
The world is full of nosybodies. So if you're going to have public sex with someone who isn't your wife, the worst place to do it is parked behind a strip mall after closing time. The second-worst place is in the front seat while parked on a side street.
...

Go read the whole thing here.

It Used To Be Called "Scabbing"

An arcane term now seemingly all but lost to history which meant, among other things:

An employee who works while others are on strike; a strikebreaker.
A person hired to replace a striking worker.

A million years ago when there was an active worker's rights movement, scabbing used to be considered contemptible.

Now, it's a resume builder!

From the Chicago Tribune:

Chicago interns move up corporate ladder

By Tracy Swartz

Derek Moody came to Chicago prepared to make coffee.

A student at Brigham Young University in Utah, Moody moved to Chicago in May to intern at Grant Thornton, an accounting firm in the Loop. Moody had never had an internship before, so he came to Chicago ready to do anything and everything, including run errands and other expected "intern" tasks. But Moody, 24, said he has yet to ask his co-workers how they like their coffee. Instead, he said he verifies that clients' accounting records are accurate and sits in on important meetings.

"I've done some copying, but most weeks I'm given my own tasks," said Moody, who is renting an apartment in Logan Square. "I've actually been given quite a lot to do."

Call it the Revenge of the Intern. For years, "intern" has characterized the doe-eyed, ambitious twentysomethings willing to do anything to get the job done--from Monica Lewinsky to the gophers Diddy employed to satisfy his every cheesecake-loving whim.

But not this class--the summer 2009 internship class has, well, class. Thanks to the tanking economy, this year's crop no longer has the time to fetch salads for bosses because it is filling the void left by employee layoffs, hiring freezes and cutbacks.

Still, they're paying a price. Interns who talked to RedEye said they are gaining experience to prepare them for the workforce, but increased intern responsibilities typically don't come with increased pay or perks or even more respect. Yet businesses are relying more and more on cheap talent, HR professionals told RedEye, instead of paying for experienced or more trained workers.
...

Done right, internships are of value to both parties; interns gain professional contacts and exposure to the on-the-ground realities of their chosen profession, and employers get a primer in what's going on in the wider academic world, someone to temporarily pick up some of the slack that any organization accumulates, and some decent coffee for a damn change.

But that's not what this is.

This is displacing the cost of sacking experienced, trained workers onto the backs of cheap naifs without enough real-world experience to realize that they are being used as class war cannon fodder. This is just another iteration of the "race to the bottom" economic model which has dominated America for last 30 years.

What's new is that since the wholesale economic butchering of the Middle Class has now been going full blast since the Age of Reagan, at least some of this latest wave of wage-killing youngsters are probably the children are of the first generation of replacement workers. Men and women now in their 40s and 50s who have seen the sharp downward spiral towards wage slavery and corporate feudalism from the inside:

• Who were themselves hired in their summer years to displace the expensive old timers;

• Who grew into jobs based on an anti-union "trickle up" business model that massively enriched the very few at the very top, and which has not only left them far less secure and well-compensated than their predecessors, but also demands of them far more hours-per-week in unpaid overtime than their predecessors ever worked;

• And who have now lived long enough to see their own friends, family members and colleagues stamped "obsolete" and fired/laid-off/outsourced into poverty and oblivion in favor of the next generation of even-lower-paid suckers.

I wonder what they tell their kids?

Exit , Pursued By Errs

Mooselini Quits

From the WaPo:

With Act II Unwritten, Palin Can Define Her Role
Leaving Alaska Post Offers Opportunities on National Stage

By Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 27, 2009

Sarah Palin brought a tumultuous chapter of her life to a close on Sunday, voluntarily relinquishing power as governor of Alaska after a rise and fall almost unprecedented in modern politics.

She exited office in classic Palin style, with folksy picnics at which she bade farewell to her constituents and with a running series of Twitter reports as she made her way across the vast state. In one posted Saturday en route to Fairbanks, she wrote, "We remember all of AK is big/wild/good life; feel freedom here."
...

Planning for the Palin "Triumphant Return" world tour to begin in 3...2...1...

No Herb In Horto

Daley gets draconic over chronic.

A snip from Steve Rhodes at NBC Chicago:

Pot Makes Daley Crazy Stroger may veto ticket law

By STEVE RHODES

I am so not high!

As if Todd Stroger couldn't make himself any less popular, he's now making noises about vetoing an ordinance passed by the Cook County Board that would ticket pot possessors instead of putting them in jail.

Stroger told WGN-AM that he "didn't think it's such a great idea."

Under the plan, those caught with 10 grams or less would pay a $200 fine and be done with it.

"I'm not really an advocate of trying to decriminalize the drug that people start before they move on to the higher stuff," Stroger said.

Like Scotch?

Meanwhile, Mayor Richard M. Daley appeared to be on acid while reacting to the idea.

"People say you cannot smoke . . . they said, ‘Please don’t smoke.’ Now, everybody’s saying, ‘Let’s all smoke marijuana'."

Dude! Chill.

“Pretty soon, the headline [will be], ‘Let’s bring cigarettes back. It makes people feel calmer, quieter, relaxing' . . . We said you cannot smoke cigarettes. Cigarette smoking is bad for you. Now all the sudden, marijuana smoking is good for you. Can we take Lucky Strikes, mix ‘em together and say, ‘Smoking is coming back in the United States?’”

Um, okay . . .

While it may seem odd that the Mayor of a city with a name derived from a term for "skunk"

The name “Chicago” derives from a word in the language spoken by the Miami and Illinois peoples meaning “striped skunk, ” a word they also applied to the wild leek (known to later botanists as Allium tricoccum).

and whose former chief of staff's last name is pronounced "stash" would get so bug-eyed over something as harmless and progressive as decriminalizing pot, what ace reporter Steve Rhodes conveniently forgets it was the devil weed of marijuana that made the evil hippie anarchists go crazy during four days in late August of 1968 and violently smash their heads against the innocent billy clubs of Richard the First's peace loving Chicago cops on national teevee in 1968, leaving Da Mare's national reputation in tatters.

Mr. Rhodes also manages to overlook all the secondary damage caused by the contact high Da Mare got from the clouds of Satan Smoke caused when it floated in from the parks; a shattering hallucinogenic experience that addled Old Man Daley so badly that when he tried to explain his enlightened and diplomatic offer to ease tensions and serve supper to all those bestial, hirsute hippy ingrates --

"The police would like to take your order. Would you like hors d'oeuvres for starters?"

-- it came out horribly garbled and mistranslated s the now-infamous,

"Da police are not here to create disorder. Dey are here to preserve disorder."

But R2D2 remembers. Remembers all too well. He was at his father's side all through the dark days of the 1968 Apotalypse and it was very rude of reporters to mention a subject which is so triggering for Hizzoner.

Of course all of this would evaporate like early morning dew if Da Mare found out this afternoon that legalizing chronic would increase his chances of scoring the 2016 Olympics by 2%.

Were that to happen -- as everyone here knows -- by Monday morning, 8:00 AM, this would be the view from the

City Hall roof garden.

This would be the new

Chicago City flag.

And Da Mare himself would be cutting PSAs on the safe and proper use of a

"chickaga 'lympic torch".

A Little Light Housekeeping.

Some odds and ends that fit nowhere else and needed some attention.

1. Gibber Buggy Blogger Dumper.

Regarding the many kind people who have pointed out the problems with this blogger template, all I can say is, when I switched to it many months ago (for several features I liked, and of course the free subscription to Modern Blogger magazine) the few, very irritating problems that also came along with it were not exactly bold-faced in the prospectus. Among other things, with FireFox, comments collided with each other in the raw (in their own pop-out window they look OK), and it does not play nice with Safari. Over time, I've tinkered with the HTML line, section, comment and spacing code to no avail, and finally decided I'd have to junk it and try another mortal coil if I wanted to fix everything.

The problem there is time and effort. It turns out the template also doesn't convert/export nicely, and with so many other exciting things to obsess over now clamoring for my attention, the prospect of spending dozens of hours tweaking new code ("Only to find the New!Cool!Template has as many infuriating new bugs as the old one has old bugs," my inner-cynic whispers to me) has lost a lot of its charm.

2. Content stuff.

As some of you have noticed and written me about, I’ve started throwing a portion of the C-list candlepower this blog generates in the direction of the squirmy political goings on in my city and state.

Is this going to continue?

Yes.

Will it necessarily take away from other stuff?

Until I get one of those cool, Arc Reactor-powered hearts

and can give up sleep forever, yes.

For a couple of reasons.

First, the national media you and I have known all our lives is busy dying right before our eyes. Hell, it’s been dying of multiple gunshot wounds for 20 years (by the time "Broadcast News" hit the theaters in 1987, the disease that was eating the the bones of Murrow Journalism had already visibly metastasized enough that James L. Brooks could build an entire movie around it):

And as this very long, brutal drought brought on by a lethal obeisance to Wall Street values continues to parch the Old Media Savanna to dust (he said, awkwardly shifting metaphors) the once mighty lakes and rivers of revenue that power the entire enterprise will continue to shrink into muddy, toxic Fox New-ish infotainment pest holes dominated by gators, jackals and carrion birds.

Within that shrinking ecosystem, all Villagers have Big Media Golden Tickets, which means however breathtakingly God-awful, wrong and inept their work may be, for the foreseeable future, their parent companies will continue to underwrite their pernicious brand of piffle at the expense of real journalism and real analysis . Shit, their whole business model is based on it.

They ain't exactly taking applications, so no joy there.

Second, the blogosphere’s Big Bang phase is over. Its undifferentiated cloud of superheated plasma has cooled, congealed and consolidated, and its wild, spacetime-boiling energy has been mostly harness and channeled into something calm and predictable enough for Arianna Huffinton to plug her Kindle into

without risking blowing it to atoms.

From Politico:

...
That the eponymous creation of the Greek-born motivational book author and former political wife has been one of the biggest success stories of web journalism is indisputable. Founded just over four years ago as a sort of liberal Drudge Report, the site now includes over 60 full-time staffers and offers at least a dozen verticals (from business to entertainment to “green” issues). In December, Huffington Post was infused with $25 million from venture capitalists, and a new CEO took the reins last month promising increased growth and profitability; in May, it had 6.7 million unique visitors. Rivals in the media business have taken note.

...

But if political coverage gets the most attention in Washington, more than half Huffington Post’s traffic is driven by gossip and entertainment stories. The day the Froomkin news broke, for example, the site’s most popular story wasn’t about health care - it was “American Flag Bikini Moments: What’s YOUR Favorite?” Indeed, the Washington City Paper’s Amanda Hess called attention to the sometimes schizophrenic nature of the site in a recent piece: “Liberal Politics, Sexist Entertainment.” Similarly, columnist Simon Dumenco, last month in AdAge, wrote that the Huffington Post “likes to pretend that it's a respectable voice in the mediasphere, but it shamelessly pumps up its traffic by being just as trashy as, say, Maxim.
...

This is not surprising -- just about any movement or upheaval you can think of tends to begin groping around for titles, organization charts and some kind homeostasis almost immediately -- but as Malcolm Gladwell argues a little too silkily in “Outliers”, it does mean that if you didn’t happen to be at the right place at just the right time with the right tools in-hand when The New New Thing reached escape velocity, you miss a critical window and your chances of future success in that field drop like a stone.

So at the macro level, the Frontier Age of the independent operator has ended, and the age of empire -- of the bloggy city/state -- is upon us. The Shirts and Skins have divvied things up -- sometimes making the extra effort to build with an inclusive, progressive blueprint in hand, and sometimes not -- and if you weren’t on the playground taking shots in, say, 2002 and/or have a truckload of dough, time, team members and/or expertise to buy yourself a seat at the table, the Big Game is closed to you.

Message received.

This is not a tragedy, and not exactly a new phenomenon (in the early 1800s, one of the most influential newspapers -- read by the likes of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson -- wasn't a hard-charging, muckraking broadsheet, but the "Niles Register"; a news aggregator that took national and international news from other sources and reprinted them under one roof [Source: "Mark Twain: A Life" by Ron Powers]) but it is a fact to be factored.

And because this particular New Thing was cultured in the Progressive/grassroots petri dish and not in B-school, the rise of a fairly rigid velvet-rope hierarchy so soon after we were all up on the barricades singing "La Marseillaise" together it is also a little sad.

But…

3. Da Chicago stuff.

Chicago is not only the third largest city in the American Empire, but in the Age of Obama it has also become the front porch of the center of the political Universe (D.C. is filling up with Chicago pols and folkways so fast that there’s talk of opening a Superdawg inside the Lincoln Memorial.)

And while the national media and blogger arenas have gone largely and predictably bi-coastal and “Members Only”, here at the Center of the America that Still Builds, Grows and Moves Stuff, at this moment in history, everything is in wild ferment:

Consider that at this very minute…

…both of Chicago’s major daily newspapers are deeply – possibly mortally –wounded. And as they teeter on the brink on some form of extinction, a dozen small, fast, adaptable little rodents are all now scrambling to evolve fast!fast!fast! to take advantage of this suddenly available, once-in-a-generation media niche.

…big government players and their bit player bag men are headed to the House of Many Doors, and those left behind are facing city, county and state and governments that are so broke that, if they were Greek restaurants, by tomorrow they’dve been insured for a fortune and mysteriously burned to the ground.

…Da Mare of Chicago is within a hair of hocking the Picasso and the Art Institute Lions to bankroll one, last, massive and massively risky real-estate scheme – at the very moment he is swearing that we’re so fucking church-mouse po’ that by the middle of August city pigeons will have to take unpaid furlough days (leaving Ira Couch mausoleum un-shat upon 12 weeks a year), and elevators at City Hall will all go coin-op and get sold off to some shell company which will turn out to have been created six weeks before by Da Mare’s cousin’s kid’s second wife.

It’s a big, stanky cultural metaphor tur-duck-en, playing itself out in real time right outside my front door and it occurs to me that there is some value in refracting some of its more jaw-dropping elements through a storyteller's lens .

I know I stayed with Mike Royko (and came to Pete Hamill, Hunter Thompson, Harlan Ellison and Isaac Babel for that matter) for the writing; writing that intersected with issues that mattered to me.

Come for the pie; stay for the sermonette.

Now I just passed another anniversary of day I moved to Chicago. It has been...many years, but when people ask me where I’m from, there is always that nanosecond of hesitation, because like Ellen Brody in “Jaws” found out:

Ellen: All I want to know, I just want to know one simple thing. When do I get to become an islander?

Councilwoman: Ellen, never! Never! You're not born here -- you're not an islander.

Jeff Ruby (well, ok, his wife) explains it all in greater depth in Chicago Magazine here.

I’m also from elsewhere -- from a lot of elsewheres, actually. I do not naturally process geographical or biographical information in terms of “parishes”, I do not have a discernible accent, and as much as I like a glorious afternoon at Wrigley drinking a beer in the sun with friends, I could not care less about the Cubs/Sox “rivalry” that defines the social orbits of so many of my neighbors.

But I believe I have “learned” Chicago in somewhat the same way Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski learned English: as a second and magical language. I’ve tilled many fields here, met many interesting and, on occasion, relatively powerful people, and have seen a thing or two. And in the great, raucous symphony that is the Windy City, I know enough about the members of the orchestra to pick out the embarrassing dissonances between what the government here preaches in public and what it practices in private.

And it turns out I can write, and have a knack for graphics.

So as much as I enjoy running my greedy, little keyboard over the whoreflesh of our national leaders and media, expect to see more Chicago stories in the mix.

4. Fundraising.

Underemployed but still gotta eat, so expect a sudden spate of pictures of sad puppies sometime in the near future.

Acres of them.

It will go on for days and days and days...

Crazy Never Sleeps

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

The one point that Matthews misses in his otherwise commendable performance -- the most important point for my money -- is his faulting Representative Gigglepants for "playing to the nut wing".

Sorry, Chris: that was the problem in 1980.

By 1994 these same fucks had been whipped into their predictable hysterics by an equally bughouse nuts concatenation of GOP Der Stürmer-grade hateprop the gist of which was that Bill Clinton had not been legitimately elected. Later they wet their pants on cue as Hate Radio and Jerry Falwell screamed into their furry little ears Every!Fucking!Day! that Vince Foster had been assassinated, that Hillary Clinton was a lesbian, that the Clintons had made a fortune dealing drug in Arkansas, that they had murdered scores of people to cover it all up.

And on.

And on.

And on.

It was in Clinton's second term that Tom "We're in charge. We don't have to negotiate with the Senate. We don't have to negotiate with the Democrats" DeLay became the wingnut's leading political plague-vector, building on earlier Orwellian, delegitimizing work by the likes of Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey and Lee Atwater and adding steel plating to the by-now concreteized core GOP belief that all opposition to them was, by definition, inherently evil.

From "The American Prospect":

...it's worth remembering just how virulent the opposition to Clinton's presidency was. Republicans began plotting to impeach Clinton long before anyone had ever heard the name "Lewinsky," and many on the right simply refused to accept that he legitimately occupied the office he held. Then-House Majority Leader Dick Armey, when talking to Democrats, used to refer to Clinton as "your president."

In the years between the first days of Reagan and the last days of Clinton, it had become received wingnut wisdom that Democrats -- all Democrats -- were gay commie monsters who needed to be destroyed at any cost, by any means, and screw the consequences. And as election strategies and results ever since show with absolute clarity, GOP officeholders like Representative Gigglepants know perfectly well the truth that dare speak its name: that the “nut wing” is the Party.

Which brings us to the present day, idiocy like the Conservative birther twaddle, and the "debate" over health care.

Republicans want to kill health care reform dead -- regardless of the scale of the crisis or the timidity of the Administration's proposal -- not because they know enough about the subject to intelligently rub two adverbs together about it (beyond whatever ridiculous lies and demagogy their corporate puppeteers pay them to parrot on any given day) but because it offers them their first, early-inning opportunity to "break" and destroy Barack Obama.

And, as always, fuck the cost, because hey, they've already got their gold-plated evil gummint supported health care, and if you were stupid enough to be born poor, or lose a job, or have your DNA turn against you, or fall down in the shower, or trip over a crack, or have your kid get sick at just the wrong time, or didn't take enough accounting and pre-law to fully understand the acres of legal gibberish on page 322 of your insurance policy, or just don't have the time and energy to fight an army of lawyers who get paid by the hour to screw you, it's your own damn fault. Loser.

And so the three, central realities around which the entire political and media class orbit continue to be these:

1. On issue after issue, the reason things get and stay so completely broken in this country is that Republicans can only get ahead in the Modern GOP by doing the political equivalent of standing on our cultural overpasses and lobbing cinderblocks into rush hour traffic.

2. The more havoc Republicans wreak, the more their base rewards them because the GOP is now mostly made up of zealot Christopaths, bigots, moral imbeciles, gun nuts and the generally cactus-fuck-crazy scum of the nation.

3. Every major media outlet knows the minute they acknowledge the incredibly dangerous reality that 1/3 of the American electorate are zealot Christopaths, bigots, moral imbeciles, gun nuts and the generally cactus-fuck-crazy scum of the nation – and that they are not evenly or randomly distributed across the political spectrum, but instead have been carefully and deliberate recruited en masse by the Right for the last 30 years – they will instantly lose millions of readers, listeners and viewers – along with the billions of dollars in ad revenue that come with them – and will instead be subjected to an around-the-clock cry for their blood by the orc armies of the Right that would make the Kill Bill havoc of the anti-Clinton crusade look like a friendly round of nude Stratego.

For Republicans like Tom DeLay, politics was no-holds-barred, Hate Radio-driven jihad, 24/7/365, and what Chris Matthews misses in his comment about "playing to the nut wing" is that after 30 years of brutal winnowing, the war for the soul of the GOP is long since over.

DeLay won.

Glad To See

The boys and girls at "The Daily Show" (From TDS, July 15 and July 20 2009 respectively)

Are fans of the blog



From "Sunday Morning Comin' Down", June 15, 2009 and this post from July 19, 2008 [w/ graphic recycled from previous post] respectively ) :-)

Dear Mr. President

As every proud Liberal who voted for you damn well knows, if you're really, heart-attack-serious about real health care reform, among other problems you will have to deal with are the seven Blue Dog members of your own Party who are trying to sink your flagship program with a thousand tiny icebergs.

And as someone who very much wants to see you succeed, let me be clear that when I say "deal with" I mean "break a foot off in their ass".

Because while the Congress somehow managed to blast through the most radical subversion of American legal rights and democratic traditions in living memory -- the 342-page USA Patriot Act -- a scant 45 days after September 11, 2001 with virtually no review or debate because they were bulldozed into believing every, stinking paragraph of it was "urgent"...when it comes to a subject the nation has been ruminating over for more than 60 years --

Health reform under President Harry S. Truman (1945-1953) was inspired by former President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Truman supported a national health insurance program and made his stance clear during his presidency; in 1945, he addressed the nation and recommended an establishment of universal health insurance program, federal funding to propel medical education and the construction of hospitals, as well as increased monetary aid for maternal and child health services.

Truman's adamant support for health care reform, established early in his presidential term, continued to be expressed throughout his time in office. In his 1947 State of the Union, Truman stated "[o]f all our national resources, none is of more basic value than the health of our people." In his 1948 address, he said "[t]he greatest gap in our social security structure is the lack of adequate provision for the Nation's health.".
...

for some reason the Blue Dogs in your own party need just a liiiiiittle more time to ponder it. Just a little more time to hem and haw. Just a little more time to stall it to death playing this game (From "The Lion in Winter"):

Henry: You know me well enough to know I can't be stopped.

Eleanor: I don't have to stop you. I have only to delay you. Every enemy you have has friends in Rome. We'll cost you time.

And as every single Liberal knows from years of bitter experience, the only way you are ever going to budge these fuckers off the dime is to stand on their political necks

until they pop.

Fortunately, I believe you've got a guy tailor-made

for the job.

So either cry "Rahm-bo!" and let slip the Dogs of War already, or quit asking the Liberals who spent their precious time and money getting you elected to take you seriously on any other issue again.

I Remember Something About "Peace"

I remember something about "All Mankind".

RIP Walter Cronkite

Watch CBS Videos Online
Great as he was, it's not that there will never be another Walter Cronkite because he was somehow genetically unique; we shall not see his like again because our Big Media Keiretsu will no longer allow Cronkites to exist. With the death of Walter Cronkite we see the very end of the ethos that made Walter Cronkite possible.

And we are the poorer for it.

40 Years Ago Today

We launched the rocket that took a living being from the Earth to the Moon, landed them there, and then brought them safely back again for the first time.

And when I say "for the first time", I mean that during the entire 4.6 billion year history of the Solar System, such a thing had never happened before. We forget that context far too often. Hell, as unlikely as it is, for all we know such a thing had never happened in the entire 14 billion years that had elapsed between the Big Bang at July 16, 1969.

Of course, while science fiction geeks had been predicting spaceflight long before NASA existed, nobody foresaw we'd see it on teevee, or that the lunar landing module would be conned by two men with names (Neil Armstrong and his trusty sidekick Buzz) that would have gotten them laughed out of John W. Cambell's office as too impossibly hackneyed to be taken seriously.

Or that we'd have to wait 30 years for "The Onion" to be brought into existence so that we could finally, finally get

the headline right.

40 years ago we were a nation that spent billions of dollars on the crap shoot of putting three men on top of 3,200 tons of hellfire wrapped in an aluminum skin and firing the whole thing at a dead rock 240,000 miles away because our destiny demanded it.

40 years later we are a nation that will not spend billions to keep its 300 million citizens alive, healthy and productive because the insurance industry lobbyists who own our politicians forbid it.

The shrieking of nothing is killing

Just pictures of Jap girls in synthesis and I
Ain't got no money and I ain't got no hair...

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

"The Return of Senator Moondoggie" Edition

"Like, tax cuts, Daddy-O"


This Sunday marked the 733,285th time 2008 Republican standard bearer Senator John McSame showed up on “Meet the Press” , this time treading the boards to beg forgiveness of the Pig People who now completely own his party by touting two of the GOP’s signal failures – recession tax cuts and Sarah Palin – as wildly brilliant national salvifics that we po’ dumb Liberals were just too hateful and Socialistic-y to embrace.

Dick Gregory: Knowing everything you know now, would you still have picked Caribou Barbie?

McSame: Ab-so-lute-ly. If the stock market hadn’ta crashed, we coulda won!

Gregory: What about the stimulus? It’s all of four month old now and the same frantic wingnut economic anarchists who spent all winter trying to kill it, have spent all Spring declaring it a failure.

McSame: The stimulus is Generational Theft. And who said we wanted to do nothing? The GOP had an awesome stimulus program.

driftglass: Ah, yes. Those 18-pages of fact-free GOP glory!

Trust me, Moondoggie, we all remember it very well.

McSame: We were gonna to cut taxes to small businesses. Big businesses. Giant businesses. Pan-dimensional consortia. The House Harkonnen. Also to moderately rich people, very rich people, the super-rich and the often-overlooked, preposterously “Diamond as Big as The Ritz” rich. It woulda been soooo cool!

Gregory: But 40% of Obama’s stimulus package is tax cuts.

McSame: Fuck you, hairpiece.

Gregory: Could you support another stimulus?

McSame: No. We need to focus on tax cuts. Every problem can be solved with tax cuts. Like with health care: we need to figure out how to combine cutting taxes for someone somewhere with making sure that insurance companies continue to make obscene profits by denying care to sick people.

McSame: Also what’s with bailing out those lazy fucking union-wrecked auto companies? GM doesn’t generate jobs. Chrysler doesn’t generate jobs. Small businesses generate jobs!

driftglass (all AZ labor statistics taken from this site): I’m sure it will come as a shock to the 2,800 Arizonans who work in the small business of auto body and repair that their Senator thinks the existence of companies like GM and Chrysler don’t have anything to do with the fact that they have jobs.

I would imagine Arizona’s 311 auto glass installers would also be pretty stunned by Senator McSame’s defiantly ignorant and ideologically-blinkered 18th century grasp of the 21st century economic networks that make their jobs possible. As would Arizona’s 15,547 automotive service technicians and mechanics. The thousands who make their living as bus and truck mechanics and diesel engine specialists. The thousands more who work as welders, cutters, solderers, and brazers. The 3,700 Arizona voters who keep a roof over their head working as machinists The machine setters, operators, and tenders. The 28,000 Grand Canyon Staters who go out every day and try to make their mortgage selling the machines that the specialists use.

In one, cavalier paragraph, Senator McSame also manages to forget about the hundreds of thousands of hardworking Americans nationwide who are directly employed by the auto industry, the millions of parts makers and suppliers the industry employs indirectly:

In the world’s biggest auto market, United States employs more than 8,50,000 people were employed in the manufacturing sector till the end of 2008.
...

and the tens of millions of our fellow citizens who have jobs because the machinist or punch press operator down the street has enough dough in his or her pocket to eat out, take in a show, take a cab and buy their kid a bicycle.

Or vacation in the Grand Canyon State.

Gregory: Afghanistan roadside bombings are way, way up. What about that?

McSame: We need to learn the lessons of Iraq and send in more troops.

driftglass: Why don’t we just we just cut their taxes?


Over on “This Week” that other laughably ridiculous gasbag from Arizona– Senator Jon "Crazy Legs" Kyl – took up the “Tax Cuts 4 Evah/Health Care Nevah!” banner and ran it right over the horizon.

Kyl: Health care is a job killah! No on taxes. No on mandates. No on “rationing”. No on government-run health care. Republicans are for reform, just not reform that changes anything in any way whatsoever.

Kyl: It has now been generally acknowledged that the stimulus hasn’t worked. We’re still losing jobs and stuff!

Not it hasn’t, and Senator Dick Durbin from my state gently corrected his colleague's bullshit.

Durbin: We’re four months into a two year plan. What Kyl doesn’t acknowledge is we’ve written checks for 57 billion dollars. We included tax cuts for work class people. Is Senator Kyl against that? Stimulus-funded Transportation projects, getting people working and rebuilding our infrastructure. Is Senator Kyl against those?

And although Kyl’s next tired, wingnut talking point – “Gummint doesn’t create job! Only the private sector creates jobs!” – has been taken apart like a two dollar watch and repeatedly exposed as the ridiculous, despicable lie that it is on this site among others (from February, 2009):

Wow. So this is now the official policy of the Party of God.

That cops don’t have “jobs”.

Neither do teachers.

Or firemen. Or sewer workers. Road construction crews. Bridge builders. Snow plow drivers. Bus drivers. Train conductors. Coast guard.

The United States Army.

has no "jobs".

Neither does

the United States Navy

The Peace Corps?


Nuh-uh.

Neither does the Marine Corps.

No "jobs" for state-funded nursing care. Doctors. Foster care workers.

Consultants and contract employees working the private sector aren’t really really working at “jobs” either, since their contracts eventually end.

The lady who delivers your mail doesn’t have a “job”.

The lifeguard who saved your uncle from drowning at a public beach doesn’t have a “job”.

The public defender that got your kid a little justice doesn’t have a “job”.

The judge who put the drug dealer who was terrorizing your neighborhood away doesn’t have a “job”.

The auditor who makes hedge fund managers pay their fucking taxes doesn’t have a “job”.

The tech guy who makes sure the computer lab at your daughter’s school can take a beating and still run the next day doesn’t have a “job”.

The hematologist at the county blood bank doesn’t have a “job”.

The gearheads and welders who make sure the buses and garbage trucks run, rain or shine don’t have “jobs”.
…

at the Mouse Circus it just saaaaailed right on by unrebutted.

Then talk turned to “Cheney? WTF?”

Stephanopoulis: Hey, turns out Cheney might be an even bigger lying traitor than we thought he was. Should we hold hearings?

Kyl: Let’s not jump to conclusions.

Stephanopoulis: Even if the Vice President ordered the CIA lie to congress?

Kyl: Well, maybe it wasn’t a big program. Maybe it was secret. Maybe it was imaginary. Maybe Jebus told him to.

Stephanopoulis: C’mon, Kyl; even you can’t believe the bullshit you’re slinging here.

Kyl: Let’s not jump to conclusions.



After that scintillating exchange, The Panel toddled out in front of the cameras, led by George Will, whose seething contempt for working people continues to stick out all over like a coat hanger in a condom.

Will (direct quote):

I rise in defense of the stimulus because its accomplished one thing, and that is its sent so much money to state and local governments to prevent unionized public employees – which ware the base of your Party, Donna [Brazille] – from suffering the same kinds of sacrifices that private sector employees (garbled.)

First, Will is, of course, talking straight out of his ass: the Great Republican Recession has crippled hundreds of programs and already cost tens thousands of people their jobs providing services for our most vulnerable fellow citizens are precisely the moment when such services are most in demand. Progress Illinois has an excellent site here that is tracking the brutal effects of social service shutdowns and layoffs across my state. Here is a tiny, tiny fraction of that list:

- Chicago's Carole Robertson Center, which provides early childhood care and education, laid off 20 of its 170 employees on July 2 and gave the rest a 25 percent pay cut. (Crain's, 7/4/09)

- Foster care and education services organization Children Home + Aid, based in Chicago, has cut 86 of its 750 employees. The group provides services for over 40,000 children and families across the state. (Crain's, 7/4/09)

- Aurora's Mutual Ground Inc., which counsels victims of domestic abuse and sexual assault, is closing its emergency shelter. (Crain's, 7/4/09)

- Planned Parenthood of Illinois laid off 19 employees. (State Journal-Register, 7/4/09)

- In its Chicago, Dixon and Peoria offices, Lutheran Social Services of Illinois laid off 32 workers who provided children’s services. (State Journal-Register, 7/4/09)

- On July 1, Community Counseling Centers of Chicago laid off 14 workers, affecting over 250 Chicagoans who depend on their services. By July 6, the number of layoffs had reached 32, with services terminated for 1,200 individuals. (WBEZ, 7/1/09; Verified by PI, 7/6/09)

- The Mattoon Area Adult Education Center laid off eight employees and shut down its facility for the first time in 44 years. (Journal-Gazette/Times-Courier, 7/1/09)

- The Occupational Development Center in Bloomington has discontinued a program that provides job training for the developmentally disabled. (Pantagraph, 7/1/09)

- The Association for Individual Development in Aurora has cut 80 jobs and "told 1,100 clients with developmental and mental health disabilities that they would lose services." (Daily Herald, 7/1/09)
...

Second, since no one else is bothering to ask the obvious question, I’ll do it:

Hey George, do you have a contract? Was it negotiated by professionals? Did you use the perceived value of your labor in the marketplace as leverage to extract the very best deal for yourself? Is your contract tricked out with penalties that will kick in if your employer tries to unilaterally fuck with you?

Because when you boil it all down, that is all unions do, George: use the power of contracts to temper both the market pressures of unchecked capitalism and the autocratic whimsy of owners, which will both inexorably bend in the direction of WalMart feudalism if not balanced out with a countervailing force.

Of course when it's banksters floating on a sea of taxpayer-bailout money demanding that their contracts be honored and their pockets be filled regardless of abysmal performance, from Washington to Wall Street, Armani-clad shoulders are shrugged; like it or not, we are told, that’s just how the free market operates.

A snip from this fine essay over at Tom Dispatch:

...
As it happens, thanks largely to that taxpayer-funded bailout, bank stocks have risen since last fall's meltdown. Selling those warrants, then, should mean a tidy profit for taxpayers. But no such luck, it seems. Almost a dozen small banks have already bought back their warrants, and for a considerable discount -- a mere 66% of their value -- costing taxpayers upwards of $10 million. If this were to continue when giant firms like JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley come up to bat, taxpayers could be out up to $2.1 billion. Think of that as a small potential thank-you note from the banking business to Americans for helping it out of a jam.

Right behind that bit of sprightly news was a report from the Associated Press that the giant insurance firm AIG, almost 80% owned by taxpayers, was now back in consultation with the Obama administration over just how much more it should pay out in further retention bonuses -- this after multi-millions in such bonuses were already paid -- including "about $235 million for employees at AIG's financial products unit." AIG's near collapse, added the AP, "was not due to its traditional insurance operations, but instead risky derivatives contracts written by the financial products division." In addition to those traders, for 40 top execs of the dismally failed company, there is to be a payout of a mere $9 million in further bonuses for 2008. What a comedown!
...

Ah, but when working men and women wield exactly the same tools to achieve some meager measure of financial security, suddenly Socialism is threatening to put its commie-clad jackboot up Lady Liberty’s ass.

And why?

Because working people enrage conservatives most when they most behave like capitalists.

Lastly, if you looked quickly and at just the right moment yesterday, you might have noticed a rare example of how Cokie Roberts’ baked-on carapace of privileged Washington insider barfly cynicism occasionally pays a wee dividend.

Yes, you had to wade through her gassing unbearably on about “what Murricans really believe” – one of the many, many subjects about which she has not one fucking clue. And, yes, one had to scamper through the minefield of her mindless filtering of every issue on Earth through the lens of how successful/unpleasant it’s discussion will make her lawn parties (This week she was grousing that a torture investigation might make the Villagers cranky and spoil the newly restored atmosphere of cloying clubbiness at Georgetown Mojito-and-Brooks-groping parties.)

But crammed between commercials for ABC’s umpteenth consecutive Michael Jackson Dead Celebrity special – with the panel alternating between George Will rolling his eyes and Bob Woodward maundered pompously in his bizarre, eight-syllables-then-stop-then-eight-more-syllables-then-stop cadence about the Price of Celebrity and the Meaning Of It All -- Cokie, to her credit, delivered the goods about the one subject about which she knows a great deal: how debased and pornographic her chosen profession of teevee news has become.


Cokie (as processed through the driftglass truthification babelfish engine):

It’s about the money bitches. Everybody’s making Big Cake off of Michael Jackson’s corpse. Look, we all know the news business is in the crapper, and into our laps drops this story that every mush-headed rube with enough disposable income to meet his sudden need to buy a special “nostalgia” copy of “Thriller” is interested in. Dead MJ is Big Media’s stimulus package. He’s our Soylent Fucking Green, and because everybody here damn well knows it, we’re gonna be on this like pyroclast on Herculaneum until out bosses have mined every single action-figure-with-coffin nickel. Its got everything; the tearful farewells of children; spotlight-starved politicians and influence hustlers fighting to out-bombast each other; killer soundtrack; Joe Jackson crawling out of the shadows like Wolf-Larson-turned-pimp to exploit his child for one more payday.

Hell, the only way this story could get any more perfect is if Al Cowlings throws the body into a white Bronco and low-speed chases it across Southern California under a canopy of news helicopters.

Shortly after that I bailed out of the Mouse Circus and over on the nostalgia station, where the Hardy Boys were rushing to bring down the Feathered Hair Hammer of Teen Sleuth Justice on some evil doers.

I suspect Old Man Will.

You Shore Got A Purdy Column

File uncomfortably between: "This one time, at band camp..." and "What happened in the green kitchen?"

From Think Progress via Crooks & Liars:

David Brooks Recounts GOP Senator Who "Had His Hand On My Inner Thigh" At Dinner Party

...
BROOKS: You know, all three of us spend a lot of time covering politicians and I don’t know about you guys, but in my view, they’re all emotional freaks of one sort or another. They’re guaranteed to invade your personal space, touch you. I sat next to a Republican senator once at dinner and he had his hand on my inner thigh the whole time. I was like, ehh, get me out of here.

Brooks said that he has “spoken to a lot of young women who are Senate staffers and they’ll have these middle age guys who are sort of in the middle of a mid-life crisis. Emotionally needy, they don’t know how to do it and sort of like these St. Bernards drooling everywhere.”
...

First comes the sparkly shock that "Wow, this guy really does have his hand up near my junk." Now, as every gentleman knows, protocol dictates that if the grabass is unwanted, you arch one eyebrow, say "Dude!" clearly and unambiguously, and move his nasty, earmark-fondling paw away from your bikini area. Usually that's enough.

But Bobo -- being an uptight, itchily-uncomfortable-in-his-own-skin power-groupie to begin with -- clearly didn't recognize a male-dominance power play when it literally crawled right up his leg. And so instead of asserting himself, in a moment of fight-or-flight/carnal-panic-versus-suckup-to-authority freakout, Bobo clenched up and tried to play the entire incident off by getting giggly, ignoring the hand between his legs and pretending it amounted to nothing.

What happens next is sadly predictable...

In the days or weeks to come the pure, primate alpha-male transgressive reality of what happened to him will start to sink in, and no matter how much hot water and Roger & Gallet Gentle Nature Lettuce Soap he uses, he won't be able to scrub away the dirty-dirty feeling that Senator Anonymous is

still...back...there.

From then on -- as the blowback from Bobo's unfortunate and powerful submissive-male reflex begins to burrow its way into his waking life -- this will haunt him. It will affect his work, haunt his dreams and skulk over his days like an ever-darkening cloud. It will grow from a distant whisper to an unbearable din until, hopefully, some wise therapist shoves a pair of dolls into his hands and insists that Bobo show him

"Where the bad Republican Senator touched you!"

Then, at last, the healing can begin.

3...2...1...


UPDATE: Welcome Open Left readers.

Only Blago

Can Go To Washington.

Dear Illinois Republicans,

I know that in the upcoming race for the United States Senate, it is tempting to revert to old political habits and just panic-run the first gun-strokin', Bible-smackin', science-hatin', gay-fearin', commie-screamin' ambulatory freak show to amble down the pike. (Like, say, this steaming bucket of "break-glass-in-case-the-other-side-runs-a-black-guy" batshit nuts

you dumped on the voters of Illinois last time.)

But if you have had enough of being humiliated by your own stupidity on election day and yet still can't bring yourself to support a "moderate" because he voted on an energy policy in a way that that angried up your anti-Gummint blood, then it's time to consider giving Blago a serious look.

Think about it.

First of all, let's face it, there really isn't much left of the Party of Lincoln but a reflexive impulse to cut taxes for rich people rain or shine, and a burning, irrational hatred of anyone to the Left of Ann Coulter. So embrace your crazy and find the one candidate who would most baffle and infuriate Liberal Devils like me.

Second, he'd switch parties at the flick of a comb. His political hero was Nixon, for chrissake, and y'all were perfectly content to embrace St. Reagan after he defected. And he'd come cheap; hell, he'd run as Commie, Natural Law Bimetallist or a Cannabis Liberation Phalangist if one of those mostly-imaginary parties would agree to cover his monthly mortgage-and-mousse expenses.

Third, sure there's the whole "impeachment" thing (and, more importantly, the vote that immediately followed impeachment banning Blago from holding statewide office forever and ever) but really, since when has the Right been dainty about letting known

criminals, traitors and crazy people run barefoot through the corridors of power? Just let Blago campaign on "Let the People Decide!" and give him a dozen lawyers to tangle up the definitions of "public office" (anybody elected to anything) and "statewide office" (Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, Secretary of State, Comptroller and Treasurer), then sit back and watch the fireworks.

Third, just imagine how lively the debates would be:

Candidate X: I cannot believe this corrupt douchbag is even in this race.

Blago: Funny, that's not what you said back when you were sucking my dick and offering me Cubs season tickets in exchange funding your stupid "Candidate X public library and water park".

Candidate X: That's a lie.

Blago: It's all on tape baby! Let's play 'em all back right here, right now and see who's zoomin' who.

So since your Party has lost all interest in the grubby, tedious business of actual governance, why not go with your all-purpose, Limbaugh/Palin/O'Reilly Plan B: Sowing confusion and fear and hoping to revive your political fortunes on the very disasters you help to create.

And who better to advance your Politics of Pandemonium than

Illinois' #1 Agent of Chaos?

So Illinois Republicans, as a Devil Liberal I'm begging you; whatever you do, please, please don't throw Brer Blago into that briar patch!

UPDATE: Welcome "Chicago Reader" readers and thanks to one of my city's most tenacious reporters for the link.

Cloutputting

After all, a Chicago Olympics should have at least a few Chicago events.

Such as...

...The Hop-Skip-Indictment: All eyes will be on the feisty Team Blago newcomer, John Harris, as he takes on second-generation grifter, Ike Carothers.

...The 100 meter Whosentya: Participants all start at the same place, but no matter how fast you run, if nobody sent ya, ya don't get to finish.

...Synchronized Skimming: Ward against ward in an all-day, pocket-stuffing, battle royale.

...Poll vaulting: Event will be held in early March in a field house or church basement near you.

...Softball: A grueling 15-minute deference-to-power contest pitting local media againt national media,

...The 440 Furlough: Runners spend the day at home because there's no money to pay 'em (Aldermen exempted.)

...Equestrian: Fifty aldermen,

one rider.