So it turns out that, as of today, I've been running this little pie wagon of mine for half a decade.
That's longer than I stayed in any one school since I was 12. Longer than most of my relationships or paying jobs have lasted. Longer than Sarah McQuitter was governor of Alaska, or Barack Obama has served in the U.S. Senate and White House combined. And begun in the Ye Olde Timey Days before Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and iPhones. Before The Huffington Post and The Daily Beast.
Back when the Death of Journalism was a vicious Liberal rumor instead of a daily obit in the online editions of what remains of America's newspapers, Blogger 1.0 crashed oftener than a student driver wasted on cough syrup, and Gilly and Billmon were two of the few bright lights shining in the dark.
Yeesh, no wonder I'm sleepy.
That averages out to about 1.3 posts a day, every day. Still mostly my own stuff. Still with handmade graphics. Still longer than two sentences and a link.
In other words, still doing it all wrong :-)
My heartfelt thanks to the support I get every day from all my readers, lurkers, commenters, emailers, contributors, honest critics, well-wishers, peers and colleagues.
Now I'm gonna record a podcast, sleep for 12 hours and then go see what Bobo is up to.
Hugs, handshakes and ass grabs all around.
driftglass
P.S. While I know George Soros and many of his minions read this blog every day, Mr. Soros' donation counter still sits at zero. Which means that everyone who has ever contributed anything to this blog has kicked in more than George Soros has.
Also more than Arianna Huffington, Pinch Sulzberger and Tina Brown.
Combined.
So, realizing that George is a very busy man, I thought I would do my level best to help the poor guy by making it as easy as possible for him to
...and the one week anniversary of the passage of the historic and brutally compromised health care bill against which the Republican Party and their poo-flinging Base bet every single chip they had left after the Best. Suicide. Note. Ever. [and which has, in turn, prompted this from Conservative Euro-darling, Nicolas Sarkozy (via The Washington Monthly)]:
SARKOZY ON HEALTH CARE DEBATE: 'IT'S DIFFICULT TO BELIEVE'.... French President Nicolas Sarkozy, once a European darling to American conservatives, has been keeping an eye on the U.S. debate over health care. Speaking at Columbia University yesterday, the French leader expressed some astonishment at what he saw. (via Kevin Drum)
"Welcome to the club of states who don't turn their back on the sick and the poor," Sarkozy said, referring to the U.S. health care overhaul signed by President Barack Obama last week.
From the European perspective, he said, "when we look at the American debate on reforming health care, it's difficult to believe."
"The very fact that there should have been such a violent debate simply on the fact that the poorest of Americans should not be left out in the streets without a cent to look after them ... is something astonishing to us."
I cannot help but be reminded once again of Voltaire's one, short prayer:
Would you take that [an Academy Award in exchange for finding out your spouse is an adulterous asshole] as a deal? Would you exchange a tremendous professional triumph for a severe personal blow?
Mr. Brooks concludes that 821-word column thusly:
Governments keep initiating policies they think will produce prosperity, only to get sacked, time and again, from their spiritual blind side.
And at no point during the intervening 743 words does he in any way bother to connect his predicating question to his broad, dumb, government-indicting conclusion.
Bobo burns through most of those 743 words regurgitating a lot of common pop-culture wisdom which most people know -- married people are generally happier than unmarried people; a rising income usually only makes you happier if it comes though interesting, rewarding work; good neighbors are important, and so forth -- dawdles around a little whining that schools teach the wrong stuff and gummints study the wrong stuff...
…and then takes this Hella Great Leap which is in no way justified by the 743-word-long ramp up which he’d been rambling.
It’s not that this is a good or bad column; this threadbare lump cannot muster enough of a spark to justify either of those words, or any description that suggests passion or purpose. This is a wholly unnecessary and lazy column. Not something that clawed to get out of the writer’s pen -- something that fervor or perspective or history insisted come into existence -- but instead something tepid and puddingish. A loose bowel movement of syllables, basted together because it was Tuesday, and the contract says you owe 800 words.
A hurried, half-assed book report (Money’s OK, but sometimes not. Clubs are fun. Also too maybe people shouldn’t stress so much about stuff.) done about a novel barely skimmed, with a couple of creedal Conservative clichés bolted to the end.
And given that this particular column was hacked together in the lengthening shadows of the Republican Great Recession it is also a remarkably thoughtless and swinish piece of creative typing, written with the jarringly “flies to wanton boys” inflection of a smugly self-satisfied plantation owner observing how how happy and fulfilled his darkies look just a'sittin' on their porches and a'singin' their spirituals.
I mean, who but a carelessly cruel prick of the First Water would have the amazingly poor taste to crap out sentences like this --
“Most people vastly overestimate the extent to which more money would improve our lives.”
-- at literally the exact moment when tens of millions of American men and women are watching their tomorrows being obliterated in a brutal tsunami of lost homes, lost jobs, lost savings, lost health care, lost retirement, lost marriages and lost futures.
And in the face of such widespread fear and pain, who but an utterly oblivious and insufferably privileged asshole would have dared to print such drivel in the New York Times, reminding us yet again that, as millions of hardworking citizens go broke, David Fucking Brooks -- for reasons that passeth all understanding -- continues to be inexplicably and lavishly remunerated, year after year, for cranking out what are essentially two, perfunctory, 800-word, C-minus high school book reports a week.
Daley's embattled ethics aide resigns in power struggle
UPDATE 3:18 p.m. by Todd Lighty and Hal Dardick; originally posted at 2:52 p.m.
Mayor Richard Daley’s embattled compliance officer abruptly resigned today amid a power struggle that pitted two City Hall watchdogs against each other.
Anthony Boswell, executive director of the Office of Compliance, informed Daley that he plans to leave city employment at the end of May, said Boswell’s lawyer, Jamie Wareham. He said Boswell’s future plans were unclear.
“He’s leaving because of the stress and strain on his family and because of all of the unfairness,” Wareham
Boswell has been embroiled in controversy since Daley suspended him for 30 days earlier this year for allegedly mishandling a sexual harassment investigation. ...
In the meantime, Daley has moved to strip Boswell’s office of much of its authority. He recently shifted the responsibility for overseeing city hiring from the compliance office to the inspector general.
Daley created the compliance office in 2007 to ensure city government complies with legal and ethical guidelines and grew the department to include a budget of $3.5 million and 39 employees. The City Council plans to hold hearings on the mayor's proposal to realign the powers between compliance office and the inspector general, including giving the inspector general the authority to investigate aldermen. ...
For those of you who are not from here and might --
Be shocked to learn that the City of Chicago has something called the "Office of Compliance", and,
Accidentally mistake the existence of that office as an indicator of some larger, vital, aggressive commitment on the part of the City to have an actual "office" that insures "compliance" with "ethics thingies"
-- let me assure you that The Chicago Machine has not died and gone to Minnesota.
First, while it is rare to see it spill into the newspapers, such power struggles are incredibly common within city gummint. They are -- and always have been -- part of careful and deliberate strategy of investing separate and competing city offices and departments with overlapping, ambiguous and mutually-hostile mandates. This keeps everybody but Da Mare perpetually off-balance and makes sure that the dukes and earls of power are kept so busy fighting each other that none of them can ever mount a serious challenge.
This is why Chiefs of Staff are rotated in and out of office faster than "Precious" opened and closed at Teabagger Movie Night. Why there are 50 aldermen instead of a more rational and cost-effective 10-15. And why the gummint is kept pumped full of transient interns and private-sector-based consultants who Da Mare uses as his personal Janissaries, and who wield godlike powers on Hizzonner's behalf.
Second, while the City really does have an extensive array of ethics regulations (about which it makes a Great Big Show; knowledge of which every manager-and-above is tested on at least twice a year; and fidelity to which every manager-and-above is required to attest to in writing at least twice a year on pain of a substantial fine) when it comes to the City actually enforcing those regulations fairly and uniformly -- as I have previously and extensively written about here -- the Two Commandments are, as always, in full effect:
Commandment One: There is a Club. Commandment Two: You are not in it.
House votes to deny funds for Blagojevich's portrait
March 27, 2010 BY STEVE CONTORNO Sun-Times Springfield Bureau
SPRINGFIELD -- If ex-Gov. Rod Blagojevich wants his portrait to hang in the "Hall of Governors" at the state Capitol, he may have to pay for it himself.
Oil paintings of every Blagojevich predecessor from Shadrach Bond to George Ryan occupy a wing of the statehouse and are viewed by thousands of visitors every year.
The Illinois House voted Friday to forbid the state from allocating funds toward a portrait of impeached ex-Gov. Rod Blagojevich. The bill would prohibit the state from funding the portrait of any impeached governor.
But the slot awaiting Blagojevich's painting may stay empty for a while after the House voted 85-23 Friday to forbid the state from allocating funds toward a portrait of an impeached governor.
The Senate-bound bill does not ban an ousted governor from bankrolling the project out of pocket, which could cost as much as $25,000, the bill's top backer said.
"I have no desire nor intent to revise history. I also have no desire nor intent to see to it that someone who is impeached and convicted of impeachable offenses gets into the taxpayers' purse for anything," said Rep. Bill Black (R-Danville), the bill's chief sponsor. ...
Given his crackhead-grade addiction to spotlights and microphones coupled with his non-stop, coast-to-coast "Blago Reputation Rehabipalooza" road show, we living in the here-and-now are in no immediate danger of forgetting Illinois' Corrupt Ex-Governor
But for the sake of future generations -- who may well only remember this period as the time when Illinois went from Prairie State to Pauper State -- I think it is important that we bequeath to history an honest artistic rendering of just exactly what kind of mercenary sociopathic goofs the voters of Illinois routinely elected to high office.
So, as a public service, I would be more than happy to donate whichever of my original and highly collectible pieces of Blagobilia that capture many of the awesome colors in our Corrupt Ex-Governor's palate...
Blago the self-styled Militant Counterculture Leader.
Blago the Beloved Emperor.
The Flamboyant Nutjob Autocrat.
The Pure and Holy.
Illinois' Agent of Chaos.
The Inner Blago.
Or perhaps just a still-life reminder of the culture he left behind.
Let me know, legislators: I've got a million of 'em.
Muqtada's star on the rise again By Abeer Mohammed
BAGHDAD - The movement led by anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr is poised to make a dramatic return to the forefront of Iraq's Shi'ite politics, combining its success in recent elections with the anticipated elevation of its leader's religious status.
The Sadrists are the main faction in the Iraqi National Alliance, which is projected to have won 68 seats in the new parliament. The bloc was the main challenger for the Shi'ite vote against Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who has been regarded with suspicion by the Sadrists since the Iraqi military led a crackdown on their militia in 2008.
Full results from the elections were due late Friday. After 95% of votes were counted ex-premier Iyad Allawi's Iraqiya bloc and Maliki's State of Law Alliance were on course to win 91 seats each, with protracted coalition building the likely outcome.
Alongside growing leverage over their political rivals, the Sadrists are expected to enjoy greater spiritual authority among their supporters as Muqtada continues his studies to become an eminent Shi'ite scholar, or ayatollah. ...
When Liberals said that it would take a generation to clean up the serial catastrophes and pay down the political, economic, environmental, cultural and karmic debts incurred by 30 years of crackpot Conservative policies that reached their apotheosis under the Bush Administration, we weren't being hyperbolic.
If Catholic Cult Leaders want the family of nations to continue to let them fill the coffers of their Fake Country with money extorted from ignorant peasants with fairy tales of eternal lakes of fire, then the very minimum they need to do is perp-walk every child rapists, every child rape enabler and every child rape co-conspirators out of the Vatican and every other child rapist safe house in the world.
In irons.
If instead the clergy chooses to stand on the side of the child rapists and against civilization, we have all the modern tools we need -- from tanks to attack helicopters to Predator drones -- to take down their global criminal networks.
Up to and including wiping their global child rape cult headquarters off face of the Earth once and for all. Because after centuries of unchecked authoritarian rule and officially sanctioned depravity, in the end it may be
the only way to be sure.
UPDATE: For Loretta, I'll settle for converting it all into a "Vaticanland" amusement park (tm), with animatronic Cardinals singing "It's A Flat World After All..." as you glide past in air-conditioned, priest-proof comfort.
This Week In Bobo. Slant Drilling History: Episode 187 -- The Willke Years.
This week, David Brooks stitched together another couple of columns out of Ronald Reagan's old urinal cakes and the rotting limbs of older columns, and then animated them into a brief simulation of life with the last, few volts of credibility the New York Times still has stuttering around in its attic.
Oh goody!
There is, as usual, far, far too much impacted verbal fecal matter jammed into Mr. Brooks’ 800-word-embarrassments to do them proper, filleting justice without a fully-equipped, federally-funded drivel-spelunking team armed with the latest in digression drilling and tangent torching technologies.
"Parties come to embody causes. For the past 90 years or so, the Republican Party has, at its best, come to embody the cause of personal freedom and economic dynamism. For a similar period, the Democratic Party has, at its best, come to embody the cause of fairness and family security. Over the past century, they have built a welfare system, brick by brick, to guard against the injuries of fate. ..."
Gracious me, what fucking nonsense.
First, except as a historical curiosity and cautionary tale on the subject of what happens when you let Republicans run in the corridors of power with scissors, the GOP as it existed 90 years ago -- in the days when the likes of Charles Evans Hughes, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover and Wendell Wilkie walked the Earth -- is so bewilderingly irrelevant to anything happening here and now, that understanding why David Brooks would even mention it is almost impossible.
In fact, it only seems to be a hilariously irrelevant waste of precious column inches until you understand the Great Work in which David F. Brooks and others are engaged.
In the face of the mile-high tsunami of evidence that the Conservative Movement and the Republican Party have been going like 60 down a wide and well-marked road to fascism and demagoguery for 30 years, Mr. Brooks must continually conjure up New and Self-Absolving reasons for his complicity in said degeneracy for most of this adult life.
(Other than the obvious answer – “They paid me real good!” – which, while pretty blatantly true, doesn’t go down so smooth with white Grenache-swilling Centrists who want to believe that Bobo keeps his various jobs by virtue of his ability to swaddle them in thick layers of smug, comforting, self-righteous Republican Reasonableness which he conjures out of thin air twice a week.)
And as this realization dawns, one comes to understand that that every single David Brooks is about the same damned thing: Trying -– week after week, year after year –- to exonerate the occupants of his Panic Room inside the rapidly disintegrating Republican Party of any special responsibility for the wingnut mobs that are burning the place down.
So what could it possibly be that Bobo is frantically trying to direct our attention away from this time?
Could it be that, 50 years ago, the ascendant face of Republican Party was Dwight David Eisenhower. And what was Republican President Ike enduringly famous for? Massive federal works programs. Massive federal investments in technology and education. High taxes. A unionized workforce. Foreign aid. Using federal troops to desegregate a public institution. And dire fucking warnings against letting the corporations run the government.
Does this sound like any Republican you know? Any Republican that has existed outside of a laboratory at any point during David Fucking Brooks’ decades as an apologist for the GOP?
50 years later, does David Fucking Brooks have any doubt whatsoever that such a man would be run out of his GOP as an Islamofascist commie fag by the Party he helped humanize?
40 years ago, the man casting his long shadow over the Republican Party was Richard Nixon. And when you listen to the Nixon Rehabbers out there, notice that once you get past the treason and the war crimes and Southern Strategy and the rest of poisons that Tricky Dick spent his life peeing into the public well, all of the “Yeah but”’s they cite Filthy Liberal Stuff like this:
Noam Chomsky remarked that, in many respects, Nixon was "the last liberal president."[92] Indeed, Nixon believed in using government wisely to benefit all and supported the idea of practical liberalism.[93]
Nixon initiated the Environmental Decade by signing the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act of 1970 and the Federal Water Pollution Control Act amendments of 1972, as well as establishing many government agencies. These included the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)[80], and the Council on Environmental Quality.[94] The Clean Air Act was noted as one of the most significant pieces of environmental legislation ever signed.[95]
And let us not forget that Nixon also was a serial committer of that Very Worst of all Liberal Sins: meeting with Foreign Tyrants!
Also too, the Democratic Party of 90 years ago was a Party ruled by the Jim Crow south and big city political machines. The machines are mostly long dead, and the White Citizens Councils of Dixieland have long since picked up stakes and taken over the Party of Lincoln.
So what about the last 30 years or so? You know, the period that covers virtually all of David Brooks’ adult life and professional career as a Conservative Water Boy. The period that saw the wholesale abandonment of anything that looks remotely like Eisenhower Conservatism?
The period that exposed Reaganism as the hollow fraud we on the Left always knew it was?
The period that saw the Rise of Limbaugh, Gingrich, Falwell, Rove, Atwater, Cheney, Robertson, the NRA, Focus on the Family, the Militia Movement, and hundreds and hundreds of other wingnut causes and celebrities?
The period that culminated in a happy goose-stepping parade into the New Dark Age of the Bush Era?
Where were you then, Bobo? Where were you when it could have mattered?
Well, suffice it to say, Brooks would rather not talk about the boring old “facts” and “history” and “trends” of those last three Inconvenient Decades, and instead fills up column inches by stares frantically into the poster of Hubert Humphrey that he allegedly had hanging on the wall of his nursery as if it were a Romper Room Magic Mirror, and through which he can make clearly see the size and shape of Barack Obama’s soul.
Another delusional fairy tale about the Good Old Conservative Days conveniently located in a far-away, half-remembered, accountability-free zone in the days before the WalkMan was invented or man’s first round of golf on the Moon, and trotted out – week after fucking week -- for exactly the same reason the killdeer will feign a broken wing:
To decoy you away from that which it desperately does not want you to find.
Column The Second was also a drunken gavotte through gauzy fiction designed to dance you away-away-away from from simple truths through the artful deployment of Big Words and Names and begins thus:
"Some brilliant scholar has to write a comprehensive history of modern economics because the evolution of this field is clearly one of the most consequential things happening in the world today.
"Act I in this history would be set in the era of economic scientism: the period when economists based their work on a crude vision of human nature (the perfectly rational, utility-maximizing autonomous individual) and then built elaborate models based on that creature.
"Act II would occur over the past few decades, as a few brave economists tried to move beyond this stick-figure view of humanity..."
And so forth.
I find this sort of thing hilarious; like a junkie caught by the narcs with the needle hanging out of his arm arguing -- and he sidles toward the exit -- that problem isn’t the needle hanging out of his arm but the larger sociohistorical impact of currency devaluation vis-à-vis education reform.
And what with the situation in Uzbekistan.
And the rain forests.
And...look over there!
And stuff.
Look, the depth charge that blew a hole in the economy and created the Republican Great Recession isn’t all that hard to understand: a bunch of criminals got themselves into a position to rip us all off blind. Then they did so. Then they sent their front men out to tell us to fuck off.
Also that they needed Moar Munnie!
Or as New York Times commenter Darrell Hampton of Dayton Ohio eloquently put it:
March 26th, 2010 12:10 am Mr. Brooks if I go to my grave with any regrets it will be that I never took the time to get a formal education. I’m a self-educated man, some would argue that I didn’t do too good of a job. One of the reasons I shied away from formal education is because all of the so-called scholars and teachers think like you do. As a younger man I could never reconcile how people so educated could be so naïve and lacking commonsense.
You spend an entire column ruminating about the cause of the recent financial collapse and you conclude that nobody really knows what happened.
I do!
Another self-educated man named Willie Sutton could tell you what happened. When the infamous bank robber was arrested, some dumb scholarly reporter asked him “Willie, why do you rob banks”? Mr. Sutton’s reply was simple “Ain’t that where the money is?” Why is it so difficult for the Masters of The Universe to simply admit that these people simply stole all the money?
That Ronald Reagan began a mind numbing school of thought that government and regulations were holding progress back and provided the road to thievery that we all witnessed the past two years? What is so wrong with admitting “We made a mistake”? It is hard to expect anyone to give you any respect or credence for your thoughts if you can’t even recognize a simple bank robbery when you see one. They stole the money from Wall Street and the pension plans and the mortgages because regulations had been removed and “That’s where the money was”!
And they need to be prosecuted. That’s simple too!
To which nothing more needs to be added.
Except perhaps this, which should be require by law to be shown in every business or econ course from now until the end of time:
A dog-eared, tenth generation photocopy of every other Mouse Circus.
On “Fox News Sunday” the preternaturally tidy Republican Charlie “Charlie Crist” Crist battled it out with Republican Vampire Diaries Heartthrob Marco Rubio over which of them would get to cast the Sunshine State’s symbolic Republican “No” vote on everything President Obama proposes for the next six years.
Michele Bachmann was supposed to be doing her thing on “Face the Nation”.
I could not attest to it myself, as I have already seen that movie before
and had no desire to see it again.
On “Meet the Press” Lindsey Graham tried to simultaneously pitch a fit and call for the Evil Democrats to stop being mean and work with the Imaginary Reasonable Wing of the GOP.
Sorta like tap dancing when you’re chin-deep in cow shit: your technique might be excellent and your exertions might be real buy, y'know, you’re chin-deep in cow shit, so who could possibly tell or care?
Terry Moran watched Obama Senior Adviser, Valerie Jarrett, recite laundry lists of talking points in an almost perfectly flat monotone.
Later, Peggington Noonington bitched that Republican ideas were not welcome at the Big Commie Takeover Party.
Which I guess is why they had to tie them to bricks and heave them through windows.
Paul Krugman wondered aloud what planet she lives on.
George Will whined about the rejection of fictional bills that never would have passed in a million years and how much better and bipartisan-y that would have been.
In other words, Loser Talk.
Finally, Peggington Noonington moans that nobody pays enough attention to the Great Center: that Big Bunch in the Middle that never pays attention to Politics, or Media, or What Country They’re Living In, or Geography, or any Recent History that doesn’t involve the word “Kardashian”.
Because FCC Title 47, Part 22, Section B, Subsection 112.2 clearly states that somebody has to.
Health Care passed because the ghost of Ted Kennedy animated a Neil Simon play.
Or something.
Andrew Sullivan noted with great alarm that there is no Conservative Establishment anymore to keep the Christopaths and the Klansmen locked in the basement, and that Fox News is now the GOP.
In other words, what Liberals have been saying since the 1960s (from me, here):
From Rod Serling writing in an editorial in the (then very right-wing) Los Angeles Times in 1964, in response to a series of articles by wingnut-apologist Morrie Ryskind:
… What Mr. Ryskind seems constitutionally unable to understand is that there is a vast difference between the criticism of a man or a party, and the setting up of criteria or patriotism which equates differences of opinion with disloyalty.
We have need in the country for an enlightened, watchful and articulate opposition. We have no need for semi-secret societies who are absolutist, dictatorial, and would substitute for a rule of law and reason an indiscriminate assault on the institutions of this republic that should and must be held sacrosanct. …
“[The far right cannot] discount the fact that sitting it their parlor is the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party, every racist group in the United States and not a few of some Fascist orders that have scrambled their way up from the sewers to a position of new respectability.”
The Right has been getting away with playing Gingrich chicken -- dressing up what are basically wonkish policy differences in the threads of Revelation and Armageddon -- for far too long now to know how to rule any other way.
They are now -- as they were amply and repeatedly warned by Liberals would happen -- entirely hostage to a breed of crazies of their own making; locked into the Branch Reaganian ompound with lunatics who rant night and day about Fire, Purity and the End Times while their minions soak every surface in kerosene, and stuff every pillow with napalm.
I for one have given up trying to talk these hate junkies out of the furnace even as they call people like me "Traitor!" and bite the hand we extend to them over and over again.
Instead, I've got me a bag of marshmallows.
A looooong stick.
And a copy of "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" to read in the firelight.
For no reason other than nobody talking on teevee today is even half so interesting as Hayden and Snyder shooting the shit about every-damned-thing 30 years ago.
I just had to take a little time away from ruining American to express how very exciting it was to see the hip Cats and Kittens at "The Nation" (From "The Mad Tea Party", March 25, 2010)...
Not to worry that it took a year. Or two. Because on Teh Liberal Internets, everyone is a winner!
Still, if you find yourself haunted by wholly baseless and irrational feelings of remorse, don't risk madness! Instead remember that you can always avail yourself of a quick and very reasonably-priced form of therapy -- any time, day or night -- guaranteed to make those bad thoughts
Robert Culp dies at 79; actor starred in 'I Spy' TV series 'He was the big brother that all of us wish for,' said his co-star on the show, Bill Cosby. The Emmy-nominated Culp also won plaudits for his role in the 1969 movie 'Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
By Dennis McLellan
March 24, 2010
Robert Culp, the veteran actor best known for starring with Bill Cosby in the classic 1960s espionage-adventure series "I Spy" and for playing Bob in the 1969 movie "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice," died Wednesday morning. He was 79.
Culp fell and hit his head while taking a walk outside his Hollywood Hills home. He was found by a jogger who called 911 and was pronounced dead at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles, said Lt. Bob Binder of the Los Angeles Police Department. An autopsy is pending. ...
Before he was Kelly Robinson -- a role for which he will be rightly be remembered -- Culp was "Trent":
Immortal, amnesiac savior of the human race fighting Kyben time travelers in Harlan Ellison's "Demon with a Glass Hand".
Later, Maxwell, a Right-of-Reagan good guy paired with a hippie with a magic suit who saved the world once a week.
He was athletic, and could play a convincing tough guy, but Robert Culp was a ball to watch in almost anything he did because he had that Bogart ability to gracefully play tough and funny and very smart all at once.
As most of you no doubt already know, American Dad over at TPM has performed a profound public service by provided us with what may be the ultimate BFG in the ongoing Liberal-vs-Conservative, Truth-vs-Lies arms race (My thanks to the Demon Barrister who gave me the head's up).
It is the Bayeux Tapestry of lists.
The Louvre of Links.
In other words, guns.
Lots of guns.
Because it goes on like this – category by category --
To which I can only add my strong recommendation that you go over to American Dad's post, read it, thank him, bookmark it, and keep it in your holster all the time.
And this, by Mother Jones:
I am not afraid of the pen, or the scaffold, or the sword.
I will tell the truth wherever I please.
UPDATE: Based on an unscientific stroll through the comment section of this post, it seems that, with the utter predictability of a slab of concrete stubbornly refusing to see reason and stop being a slab of concrete, American Dad's herculean effort in marshaling seemingly the entire modern history the Conservative Movement in order to save it's soul hasn't raised so much as a crease in the fact-proof ablative shielding which two decades of listening to Rush Limbaugh has built around their little anthracite hearts.
No change at all, except for the inevitable increase in outbreaks of SUDDEN ONSET CONSERVATIVE CAPS+LOCKOSIS.
OK, I'm a reasonably bright guy with an affection-bordering-on-fetish for the English language. Which is why I was so humbled when Matt Yglesias turned the following sentence --
"My guess is that the brighter minds on the right will recognize that their determination to turn health-care reform into Obama’s Waterloo sowed the seeds of their own destruction."
Despite what you may have heard, in no way did Karl Rove “lose it” or “melt down” Sunday. Instead, he simply deployed for political advantage a tactic with which every public transit rider has long been familiar: strategic craziness. To wit, making such an unbearably loud, shrieking nuisance of oneself on the train or bus that everyone will leave you the Hell alone rather than risk a rabies bite or shiv in the kidney.
And, as every pub trans rider also knows, there are only a few ways of dealing with the situation without bloodshed.
You can whip out your “Minority Report” .44 Frenum puffgun...
(I know what you're thinking. "Did he fire six gusts or only five?" Well, to tell you the truth, in all this CGI I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Frenum, the most powerful puffgun in the world, and would blow your shirt clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?)
Or, if you think you’re The One
you can take it outside...
Or, if you have one handy,
you can throw a Vulcan at the problem.
But what you don’t do with a yammering shitwhistle is put him on-camera, unchaperoned, in front of millions of people.
Unless of course you’re ABC, and you got skunked last week when Fox News Contributor and Unindicted War Criminal Karl Rove zipped through the express interview lane over at rival NBC to pimp his new book and speed-lie through 240 seconds of Tom Brokaw’s slow-ball interviewing.
And speaking of NBC, the unctuous David Gregory was back from his Rove-Avoidance-Vacation this week on “Meet the Press” meting out what, in the Fluffyland locker-room, I’m sure he describes as ruthless verbal beat-downs administered to anyone who dares to step into his house and lie to the American people.
Of course, what he did in fact was piddle around with House Republican Leader Rep. John Boehner and House Democratic Leader Rep. Steny Hoyer for awhile, pausing only long enough to bust out the occasional LOLCAT to make some stupid point or another.
Boehner: The President gave many speeches. Despite that, Republicans are still assholes. Therefore we should kill the bill.
David Gregory: Here’s a cute LOLCAT that sums up everything better than I can.
Boehner Oooh! Oooh! Lookit the Kitteh! It will be so sad for them when the Evil Gummint takes over of the Health Care system with munnies stolen – stolen! – from Medicare!
Hoyer: This is such bullshit.
Boehner And then ruins our economy.
Hoyer: Double bullshit.
Boehner: It is a Gummint Takeover! It is! It is!
Gregory: What about the mobs of teabaggers who are chanting Republican-trademarked anti-gummint slogans, while they spit on Congressmen and call them fags and n*ggers?
Boehner: I would like to take a moment away from trying to claw my way into the teabagger’s pants to emphasize that these are few, isolated incidents. And that we’ve got the best health care system in the world.
Hoyer: The tone of the debate has been driven into the sewer by douchbags like this guy sitting next to me.
Boehner: Fluffy, make him stop swearing in front of the L-O-L-C-A-T.
Gregory: There is a cost for inaction. (Reads likely doomsday scenario of doing nothing).
Boehner: There’s nobody in Washington that’s talking about inaction. Greatest health care system in the world! Gummint takeover! Danger! Danger!
Boehner: Never have we made such a big decision on partisan lines.
Really? Because it sure seems like I can remember one or two or three or eleven times when the Dregs of Dixie have tried to kick over the checkerboard rather the play nice with the hated Yankee/Negro/Liberal/Feminist/Hippie/Union/Gay/Whatever aggressors.
Saturday night, outlining the likely course the Mouse Circus would take, I noted to myself that Christiane Amanpour would apparently be starring in the pilot episode of the "Amanpour and the Six White Guys" Show.
Turns out I got a couple of things wrong.
First, it ended up being Nine White Guys: six scheduled and in real time, Mitch McConnell on tape, and Republican Eric Cantor and Democrat John Larson tacked on at the last minute to round out some face-time quota.
Also there was no Christiane Amanpour on the Christiane Amanpour Show: Despite a week of advertising her Triumphant Ascension at the last minute they plugged in Generic White Guy to host this mess.
So...Ten White Guys.
A Deciwhitey.
Also last night, as I paced to and fro in front of the Great Castle 3DBB
carefully flowcharting out every possible combination and permutation of what might happen, I also assumed, in the main, things would unfold like so:
Karl Rove and David Plouffe would have a dork-off about ward-level micro-political-marketing and process while carefully avoiding mentioning the fact that Rove should really be doing this interview on Skype from the exercise pen of the ADX Florence federal supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.
George Will would not avoid mentioning Herbert Hoover since every good Conservative knows that it was Franklin Roosevelt caused the Great Depression. The filthy class-traitor.
Sam Donaldson would avoid moving his head violently enough dislodge what appears to be a hirsute flounder glued to the top of his skull.
So imagine my surprise when, as my eyes slowly adjusted to the Mighty Caucasian Glare blasting out of my teevee set, I caught a glimpse of what I initially took to be a nature film of a grubworm fighting with a matchbook.
With the Lords of Acid’s “I Must Increase My Bust”
for a soundtrack for some reason (Not safe for work).
Turns out it was Karl Rove, playing it all shoutycrackers and pointing frantically at a little white board.
Plouffe: I think…
Rove: Economic disaster!
Plouffe: Could I…
Rove: Destroy America!
Plouffe: If I could just get a word…
Rove: Doc fix! Doc fix! Doc fix!
Plouffe: Politics is about comparisons…
Rove: Touch my monkey! Love it!
Plouffe: Look, the fact of the matter is…
Rove: George W. Bush was the greatest President in American history!
Plouffe: Here are the actual…
Rove: Move On dot Org! Democrats bribing people. Violating federal law.
Plouffe: Karl Rove also said that the stimulus program was a failure. But in truth, the economy has grown by…
Rove: Gummint jobs! Those are all gummint jobs!
Rove absolutelywould not shut the fuck up while Plouffe kept on smiling and looking to the Ineffectual Host for some hint that he was going to referee.
Of course, the hosts of the Mouse Circus aren’t referees at all. They’re fight promoters, doing for politics exactly what Don King used to do for boxing. And the uglier and bloodier things get, the better their corporate masters like it.
Ineffectual Host Who We Will Never See Again: People think the process is fucked up. And as anyone who listens to this conversation could see, it kinda is. Isn’t it President Obama’s fault that Karl Rove is a lying shitbag?
Rove: Yes. The fact that the GOP has spent an entire year obstructing every single thing the Kenyan Usurper is trying to do is absolutely Obama’s fault. I’d also like to take this opportunity to dump another wheelbarrow of meaningless Frank Luntz-certified fear-words into the middle of this pig fight: Kabuki! Aloof! Distant! Detached! Bernie Maddoff!
Plouffe: If Republicans want to run on this, maybe they want to break out that awesome fucking “Mission Accomplished” banner again.
Rove: That banner was to honor the men and women who served on the USS Abraham Lincoln. Why does David Plouffe hate our troops?
On close observation, Rove’s red-faced, bulldozing act here reminded me of his softer, slower, labyrinthine, word-parsing turn on “Fresh Air”, in that (as was noted on Friday’s Driftglass and Bluegal Podcast ) Rove’s specialty is calibrating his lie-delivery-system to exploit the bad habits of the host of whatever program he gets booked on.
On the more temperate medium of “Fresh Air” radio, he used endless parsing wordplay to dupe Terry Gross into chasing her tail until every question was a meaningless gruel of vowels and consonants on which he imposed his own interpretation, and then gave long, winding answers to his own questions.
On the more aggressive medium of Mouse Circus teevee, four important factors worked heavily in favor of Rove getting away with his ranting and blustering virtually unchallanged:
1. A weak and inept substitute teacher was running the show.
2. A numbers-geek opponent who was clearly unprepared to deal with a crazy person, and who kept looking to the weak and inept substitute teacher to regain control over the situation.
3. Rove was off-site, making it impossible to use traditional kinds of physical interaction (arm grab, pointing, leaning in, etc.) to change the rhythm of the exchange.
4. Job security. Rove can say and do whatever he fucking well pleases and still have a happy home to go back to at Fox.
The minute it was permitted to become a pig fight, the King of the Pig People was going to win it.
Finally, some of the more interesting exchanges took place on the down-market ”The Chris Matthews Show”, where Matthews was honest enough to ask the question:
How come Republicans aren’t paying any price for blocking everything?
Good question.
Michele Norris: Because Obama never framed it that way.
Good answer. Incomplete, but correct.
Also Michael Duffy was candid enough to mention that, when he talks to Republicans off the record, they say they’re not ready to govern. That they don’t want to actually run anything. Sure, they’re more that willing to lead the pitchfork-and-torches mobs and burn the country down for partisan gain, but privately they’ll admit their leaders suck, they have no ideas, and they really don’t disagree on the basic stuff Obama is trying to do.
In other words, they’re just scumbags, and among the pig-ignorant Confederate dregs left sloshing around at the bottom of the Republican Barrel, there is absolutely no downside to being that kind of !Hulk!Smash! scumbag.
Howard Fineman laid out one of the less visible but very real consequences to the GOP’s strategy of just blocking everything: there are now a couple of hundred critical appointments in the pipeline and the fact the Senate won’t act on them is really gumming up the works.
Matthews: Why?
Fineman: Because any Senator can hold up anything for any reason. And a bunch of Senators – mostly Republican, but some Democrats – have decided to do just that.
First, this is a situation that has been going on for a long, long time
Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) announced Monday evening that he will support a Republican-led filibuster over President Barack Obama's nominee to serve on the National Labor Relations Board.
The move is likely to infuriate labor groups who have fought hard for Craig Becker's nomination to serve on the five-member NLRB - and will likely give Republicans enough support to sustain a filibuster Tuesday. ...
Nelson, a conservative Democrat up for reelection in 2012, has seen his approval ratings drop sharply since he lent his support for Obama's health care bill in December and secured deals for Nebraska's Medicaid payments. ...
...the emotional core of opposition to reform was blatant fear-mongering, unconstrained either by the facts or by any sense of decency.
It wasn’t just the death panel smear. It was racial hate-mongering, like a piece in Investor’s Business Daily declaring that health reform is “affirmative action on steroids, deciding everything from who becomes a doctor to who gets treatment on the basis of skin color.” It was wild claims about abortion funding. It was the insistence that there is something tyrannical about giving young working Americans the assurance that health care will be available when they need it, an assurance that older Americans have enjoyed ever since Lyndon Johnson — whom Mr. Gingrich considers a failed president — pushed Medicare through over the howls of conservatives.
And let’s be clear: the campaign of fear hasn’t been carried out by a radical fringe, unconnected to the Republican establishment. On the contrary, that establishment has been involved and approving all the way. Politicians like Sarah Palin — who was, let us remember, the G.O.P.’s vice-presidential candidate — eagerly spread the death panel lie, and supposedly reasonable, moderate politicians like Senator Chuck Grassley refused to say that it was untrue. On the eve of the big vote, Republican members of Congress warned that “freedom dies a little bit today” and accused Democrats of “totalitarian tactics,” which I believe means the process known as “voting.” ...
From torpedoing Administration nominations en masse, to whipping the Pig People into ever higher states of frenzy, the goal of the Republican Party has always been simple and has never changed: To cripple, bankrupt, lie, terrorize and by any other means necessary render the United States of America ungovernable.
And then whine their way back to power complaining about how mean everyone is and how nothing gets done.
