If It's Friday...

Act like a man of thought.
Think like a man of action.

-- Thomas Mann

Today Is The Day

When the Wasilla Scintilla...


...got to publish her mash notes to Glenn Beck...


...in Time Magazine (The "Top 100" Issue. h/t Sadly, No!)

Glenn Beck

By Sarah Palin Thursday, Apr. 29, 2010

...
Glenn's like the high school government teacher so many wish they'd had, charting and connecting ideas with chalk-dusted fingers — kicking it old school — instead of becoming just another talking-heads show host. Self-taught, he's become America's professor of common sense...

His love of the Founding Fathers inspires others to learn and respect our nation's history. Best of all, Glenn delights in driving the self-proclaimed powers-that-be crazy. (The whole country awaits the red phone ringing!) Even his critics...have to admire his amazing ability to galvanize everyday Americans to better themselves...

Meanwhile in Totally Unrelated News, the Washington Pest Post would totally love it if you would, uh, like, work for free!

From the Maryland Politics Watch:

Why MPW Turned Down the Washington Post

Five weeks ago, I received an unsolicited offer from the Washington Post. They asked if they could post my picture and biography on their website and link to every new blog post appearing here if I agreed to produce regular original content for them at their request. I turned them down. Why?

Because they wanted me to work for them for nothing.

The Post is organizing a “local blogging network” linking to selected blogs from their website and asking bloggers to submit original content, which would be edited by them. The Post’s rights to that content would be enforceable under a written agreement. That agreement was written as follows...

I must go now and find many things to drink.

Many, many things.

1.21 gigawatts? 1.21 gigawatts!

A Tinkle In Time

I have no particular brief against David Brooks' column today ("American Power Act") in terms of its overall message:

"The road to energy innovation is sure to be messy, but the U.S. is going to have to develop energy sources that are plentiful and clean."

In fact it is nothing if not amusing as hell to see one Conservative expatriate after another adopt the rhetoric and share the broad vision of History's Greatest Villain -- James Earl Carter --


30 years after they shit all over him, and their beloved St. Ronald Reagan both literally and figuratively ripped the solar panels off the White House and sold our collective futures down the river to OPEC.

But in addition to poking around in his written and spoken midden piles for lies, fraud and bad writing, I have grown accustomed to listening and reading Bobo Brooks through a very specific filter: The Great Project that he and various other Conservatives are undertaking to frantically distance themselves as far as from the Modern Republican Party they created, while bending every, single media opening towards the goal of burnishing its glorious (and usually fictional) past.

Of course, in this case, Ronald Reagan (the usual target of fawning Conservative revisionist paean-age) has an energy and public works record that is simply too fucking radioactive to touch, which is why Bobo apparently felt he had to reach his Mighty Fondue Fork of Journalism back...back...waaaaaay back...clear past the 20th Century and back a full a 150 years to find a Republican who wasn't a complete chucklefuck:

"In 1860, Samuel Curtis, a Republican congressman of Iowa, sponsored a bill to create a transcontinental railroad. The debate over that public-private partnership was long and messy. Democrats said the proposal was unconstitutional. Others rightly argued that it meant huge giveaways to the rich.

But the railroad effort, backed by Abraham Lincoln, swept forward.
..."

Of course, to make his long, long stretch worth the effort, modern energy policy would have to actually have something more in common with the building of the transcontinental railroad that Bobo's blunt assertions:

"Energy innovation is the railroad legislation of today. This country is studded with venture capitalists, scientists, corporate executives and environmental activists atremble over the great opportunities they see ahead."

Which is, of course, nonsense; there simple are no more vast government holdings of public assets to give away to plutocrats, which at its core was what made the Age of Rail possible.

Instead, a modern public/private energy policy partnership will have to be modeled on massive public investment in building an entire public/private infrastructure from the grade-school level up capable of delivering products and talent on a national scale.

For which a much better, much more recent analogy is available:

I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important in the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.

—John F. Kennedy, May 25, 1961

Such a project would need to be capable of moving theory into practice with the priority and zeal of national security crash project.

For which a much better, much more recent analogy is available:

...The Manhattan Project began as a small research program in 1939, which eventually employed more than 130,000 people and cost nearly US$2 billion ($22 billion in present day value). It resulted in the creation of several research and production sites whose construction and operations were secret.

Project research took place at more than 30 sites, including universities, across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The three primary research and production sites of the project were the plutonium-production facility at what is now the Hanford Site in eastern Washington State; the uranium-enrichment facilities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee; and the weapons research and design laboratory now known as Los Alamos National Laboratory. The MED maintained control over U.S. weapons production until the formation of the Atomic Energy Commission in January 1947.

Any such undertaking would also need to be nation-wide and with a public-works charter focusing on helping the average American right where the live and work.

For which a much better, much more recent analogy is available:

The Roosevelt Administration believed that if private enterprise could not supply electric power to the people, then it was the duty of the government to do so. Most of the court cases involving TVA during the 1930s concerned the government's involvement in the public utilities industry.
...

And finally, to be successful, any national energy program would have to use the power and purse of the Gummint to frame the national goals and funds the hell out of them, picking winners and losers based on the best methods of delivery the private sector can competitively develop within those parameters.

For which, of course, a much better, much more recent analogy is available:

The earliest ideas for a computer network intended to allow general communications among computer users were formulated by the computer scientist J. C. R. Licklider, of the Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) company, in August 1962, in memoranda discussing his concept for an “Intergalactic Computer Network”. Those ideas contained almost everything that composes the contemporary Internet. In October 1963, at the United States Department of Defense, Licklider was appointed head of the Behavioral Sciences and Command and Control programs, at the Advanced Research Projects Agency — ARPA (the initial ARPANET acronym). He then convinced Ivan Sutherland and Bob Taylor that this computer network concept was very important, meriting development, although he left ARPANET before anyone worked on his concept.

ARPA and Bob Taylor continued their interest in creating such a computer communications network, in part, to allow ARPA-sponsored researchers at various corporate and academic locales to put to use the computers ARPA was providing them, and, in part, to make new software and other computer science results quickly and widely available.

So why not use any or all of these much better, clearer, more familiar and much more timely analogies? Why this call-back to the age of steam, the horse cavalry and the Maximilian Affair?

Because history remembers the ARPAnet, rural electrification, the race to the Moon and the Manhattan Project as the signature accomplishments of Democratic Presidents (unfairly, given Dwight Eisenhower's early backing of the space program, but then again, by Modern Conservative standards, Ike was a dirty Commie anyway.)

And that does not serve the Great Project.

A Tale of Two City Workers

Meet John Ardelean

A goof with a badge who got hammered and then ran down and killed two citizens.

Fury over cop DUI case
'07 CRASH | Officer filmed drinking before fatal accident, but judge throws out evidence

April 28, 2010

BY KIM JANSSEN Staff Reporter kjanssen@suntimes.com

A Chicago cop filmed drinking at least five shots of liquor minutes before he crashed his SUV, killing two young men, could walk free after a Cook County judge ruled that key evidence against him was illegally seized.

In a ruling greeted with fury and anguish by the families of victims Miguel Flores, 22, and Erick Lagunas, 21, Judge Thomas Gainer Jr. found there was "no conspiracy" among Officer John Ardelean's fellow officers to protect him.

It prompted ugly scenes and arrests outside his courtroom as the families clashed with Cook County sheriff's deputies. And it may have fatally damaged the case against 35-year-old Ardelean, who's charged with four counts of aggravated DUI and two counts of reckless homicide in the Thanksgiving Day 2007 deaths.

Video footage from the Martini Ranch Bar showed the officer downing shots just minutes before the crash between Ardelean's SUV and a sedan carrying Flores and Lagunas at the intersection of Damen and Wellington in Roscoe Village.

But Ardelean's attorney, Tom Needham, challenged his arrest because two fellow officers and a sergeant from the Belmont district station where he works and a paramedic said he didn't appear intoxicated at the accident scene.

Prosecutors implied that the officers turned a blind eye.

Ardelean wasn't arrested or given a Breathalyzer test until seven hours after the crash, when the officers' supervisor, Lt. John Magruder, said he noticed Ardelean had bloodshot eyes, smelled of booze and "was walking kind of funny with a limp or something.''

Based on the 0.032 blood alcohol level Ardelean recorded, an expert prosecution witness was due to testify that the officer would have been nearly twice the legal limit of 0.08 at the time of the crash.

But Gainer ruled Magruder did not have probable cause to arrest Ardelean, meaning the Breathalyzer results and expert testimony can't be used.
...

(For those of you keeping score at home, you might remember that Gainer's meaty thumb has shown up on the scales of justice on behalf of dirty cops before [from almost exactly one year ago...h/t to the award-winning Beachwood Reporter]

"Some legal experts are questioning a judge's invocation of the 'fighting words' doctrine to acquit three police officers charged with beating businessmen in a bar," Abdon Pallasch wrote in the Sun-Times.

"'Their use of 'fighting words' does not allow police officers or anyone else to beat them up. Police officers confronted by fighting words have a duty to control themselves,' said Indiana University Law Professor Patrick Baude, who argued a 'fighting words' case before the U.S. Supreme Court.

"Criminal Court Judge Thomas Gainer noted in his opinion Tuesday that the police officers claimed one of the businessmen called one of the officers a 'p - - - -' and another of the bus

Now meet James Lobianco

A city employee who got hammered and slammed into a parked car. but who is not a cop:

Official out after alleged DUI in city car
Refused test after rear-ending vehicle at red light

April 22, 2010

BY FRAN SPIELMAN City Hall Reporter/fspielman@suntimes.com

A $119,184-a-year deputy commissioner charged with providing shelter and emergency services for Chicago's homeless has resigned after getting into an accident in a city car while allegedly driving drunk.

On April 15, James V. Lobianco was charged with driving under the influence and failure to reduce speed after rear-ending a car waiting for a red light to change at Broadway and Ainslie.

James V. Lobianco resigned as deputy commissioner in charge of providing shelter and emergency services for Chicago's homeless following an April 15 crash in which he was charged with driving drunk.

No one was injured in the chain-reaction accident. Lobianco was driving a Toyota Prius registered to the city when he hit the car in front of him, causing that vehicle to rear-end another car.

Chicago Police Department spokesman Roderick Drew said responding officers "detected alcohol," but Lobianco "refused the field sobriety test and the Breathalyzer test." He was taken into custody and released the next morning. He is scheduled to appear in court in June.

Lobianco could not be reached for comment.

Got that? Lobianco piles into another car, and CPD have no problem remembering phrases like "field sobriety" and "Breathalyzer". But after pounding 'em down at the Martini Ranch all night long:

"Before the crash, Ardelean had spent hours in a River North bar, the Martini Ranch. According to the bartender at the preliminary hearing, Ardelean drank two beers, a rum and coke and a shot of tequila. There were several other shots, but the bartender said they were plain shots of water."

It must have been Plain Shots of Water Night. Dare to drink one, get a second for free...

Ardelean mows down and kills two people, and suddenly on all matters related to checking a suspect's sobriety, the cops come down with a vicious case of whatever is was that Guy Pearce had in "Memento".



The inability to form new political memories after Angelo Torres found his way onto the front page of the Sun Times.

Or was it after Jon Burge skipped town for Florida?

I always forget.

And of course it helps to have a friendly judge available to wipe off any shit that might have dribbled down your chin.

Not much to add except this.

Inside parts of Cityguv, there is a cop culture. It has its own mores and rituals and powerful, protective mechanisms.

Inside parts of Cityguv, there is also a booze culture; places where, if you want to get ahead, you're often much better off tossing back a few with the boss or other Department insiders than you are being, say, really well qualified.

And then tossing back a few more.

And then maybe a few more.

You see, at the City, there are all kinds of places where not-very-bright, not-very-competent people have a lot of power, and if you are in doubt about whether or not you're working inside such a place, look around and ask yourself the following:

• In your workplace, do eager, stupid flatterers get ahead, or do the competent and able?
• Are excellence and creativity welcomed, or driven out with pointed sticks like a rabid dog made of mercury fulminate?
• Are relationships and personal information are the coin of the realm?

Well, if you find yourself inside one such confederacy of mediocrity, you will often find that booze is the lubricant that makes the clout engine hum, because it always has been, and for some very practical reasons. People can end up end up doing or saying very stupid things when they're drunk, and that can end up being very useful to the young executive on the make, or the low-wattage boss who needs leverage.

And if you end up knee-walking drunk and behind the wheel of a car?

Well let's just say that if you wanna go boozing and you're not po-lice or otherwise a member of the Chicago alpha-male political club, but just have one of those regular, overpaid, nobody-at-the-Hall-gives-a-shit-about-you-unless-you-land-your-happy-ass-in-the-Sun-Times city middle-management jobs...

...and you decide to take your vehicle for a walk up on the curb, or up the ass of the stopped car in front of you...

...then you'd better make damned sure you actually have a "chinaman" and that you have his number on speed-dial.

Because, in Chicago, there is a club.

And woe betide the dumbass who thinks he's in it, fronts like he's in it, walks like he's in it, and finds out, too late, that he ain't.

Here, Kurt Russell explains what happens when cop culture goes fatally wrong in the underrated "Deep Blue" "Dark Blue":

Big Shiny Thing Goes "Boom"

Many upset; some secretly think it's kinda cool.

From Yahoo news:

Huge NASA Science Balloon Crashes in Australian Outback

This story was updated at 10:51 a.m. EDT.

A huge NASA balloon loaded with a telescope painstakingly built to scan the sky at wavelengths invisible to the human eye crashed in the Australian outback Thursday, destroying the astronomy experiment and just missing nearby onlookers, according to Australian media reports.

In dramatic video released by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), the giant 400-foot (121-meter) balloon is seen just beginning to lift its payload, then the telescope gondola appears to unexpectedly come loose from its carriage. The telescope crashes through a fence and overturn a nearby parked sport utility vehicle before finally stopping.
...

Needless to say I am very disappointed the hardware was lost, and glad nobody got hurt.

This has been Episode 74 of...

Prepare To Be Awesomed

A clean coal breakthrough that produces only harmless, pizza-flavored tofu-ingots?

No.

The Fed finally listens to me and immediately pegs a new American monetary unit to plutonium (The "Plute")?

No.

Jesus returns long enough to tell Glenn Beck to STFU on national teevee. Then he stabs him in the arm with a skate key.

No

The AP Stylebook finally updates its list of acceptable words to move "web site" out of the two separate word ghetto when it clearly should be oneword?

Yes! Yes! Yes!

From the Associated Press site:

View Ask the Editor Questions

Ask the Editor provides answers, clarification and guidance on style issues that go beyond the pages of the AP Stylebook. Before posing a question to AP editor David Minthorn, search the accompanying style archives for your topic. With thousands of questions and answers on file, your topic has very likely been covered. For typical style questions and responses, visit Ask the Editor FAQ.
...

Q. In re the recent style update on Web, website, Web feed --- my colleagues and I do not understand the difference between terms like website, webcam and webmaster being downcase and 1 word, and terms like Web feed and Web page being uppercase and 2 words. Can you please explain the logic here? Seems to us that all common "web" terms should be the same, but ... Thanks in advance. – from Escondido,, CA on Wed, Apr 21, 2010

A. Compounds are lowercase: website, webcam, webmaster, webinar, etc. Certain other terms remain two words, cap-W for the proper noun, in AP usage: the Web and Web page.
...

In other words, suck it Chicago Manual of Style!

Epistemic Closure Poseur Epidemic

Ragnarok comes to Clown College.

From the New York Times:

‘Epistemic Closure’? Those Are Fighting Words
By PATRICIA COHEN

It is hard to believe that a phrase as dry as “epistemic closure” could get anyone excited, but the term has sparked a heated argument among conservatives in recent weeks about their movement’s intellectual health.

The phrase is being used as shorthand by some prominent conservatives for a kind of closed-mindedness in the movement, a development they see as debasing modern conservatism’s proud intellectual history. First used in this context by Julian Sanchez of the libertarian Cato Institute, the phrase “epistemic closure” has been richocheting among conservative publications and blogs as a high-toned abbreviation for ideological intolerance and misinformation.

Conservative media, Mr. Sanchez wrote at juliansanchez.com — referring to outlets like Fox News and National Review and to talk-show stars like Rush Limbaugh, Mark R. Levin and Glenn Beck — have “become worryingly untethered from reality as the impetus to satisfy the demand for red meat overtakes any motivation to report accurately.” (Mr. Sanchez said he probably fished “epistemic closure” out of his subconscious from an undergraduate course in philosophy, where it has a technical meaning in the realm of logic.)

As a result, he complained, many conservatives have developed a distorted sense of priorities and a tendency to engage in fantasy, like the belief that President Obama was not born in the United States or that the health care bill proposed establishing “death panels.”
...

Or that George W, Bush was the greatest President in the history of the Universe?

Or that activist judges are a greater danger to Murrica than a few, bearded terrorists?

Or that gays and the ACLU were responsible for 9/11?

Or that senior citizens hated the military (but loved Teh Gay)

just because they objected to the Bush Administration handing Social Security over to Wall Street.

Or that the "Ozone Man" wanted to frivolously destroy American jobs to save a few hoot owls?

Or that Bill Clinton was a rapist, drug-dealing assassin?

And Hillary was his murdering, lesbian moll?

Would you like ten more? Or a hundred? Or a thousand?

Bwahahaha!

There is so much less here than meets the eye, it is hardly worth the candle, but basically what the tattered remnants of the Respected Conservative Public Intellectuals are praying like hell for is that they be allowed to continue to pretend that this all just...somehow...happened -- and all very recently -- and that certainly no one could have ever predicted it or warned against it.

Except of course that's just one more lie the Conservatives tell themselves: Liberals have been desperately warning for decades that the Right's premeditated decision to climb into bed with the scum of America for partisan, electoral gain and then spend 30 years pandering, encouraging and cultivating their imbecile rage and paranoia would end in tears.

And now that the Devil has come for His due, this is what the End of Days looks like at the wingnut hobo camp; a mad scramble as the higher-end waterheads over on the Shiraz side of the tracks fight it out over the last tin of stale Reagan Jelly Beans.

"Epistemic Closure" is just the latest another feverishly pseudointellectual masturbatory attempt by what remains of the Respected Conservative Public Intellectuals to reconcile four irreconcilable and hideously embarrassing facts:

1. It turns out that they have been wrong about almost everything for most of their adult lives.

2. Even worse, it turns out that the Evil Liberals on whom they declared total, no-defeat/no-surrender war decades ago have been right for most of their adult lives.

3. Realizing that three decades of playing drum major for the shoutycracker brigade has left them with no marketable skills, these staunch champions of rugged individualism and ruthless meritocracy really, really, really want to hang onto their cushy sinecures as Respected Conservative Public Intellectuals despite the fact that facts 1 and 2 prove them to be almost uniquely incompetent to hold those positions. Their situation takes on an extra patina of panicky urgency when you consider the utter shambles that the Conservative Great Recession has made of the job market.

Ironic, no?

4. They obviously lied on their Respected Conservative Public Intellectuals resume, answering "yes" to the question about whether they had seen and comprehended "Fantasia", when obviously they had not.

Epistemic Closure: The Musical

The View from the Kuiper Belt

Above I have tried to do graphic justice to Matt Taibbi’s famous description of Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money."

Of course, one basic flaw in Taibbi’s ongoing, panoramic, detailed and prodigious analysis of the horrors Goldman Sachs has visited on humanity is that Taibbi himself is human, and therefore would necessarily be biased against a great big, world-crushing succubus whose mindless, rapacious pursuit of profit threatens to smash civilization into a never-ending Dark Age of corporate feudal masters reigning forever over universal peonage.

Rest assured, David Fucking Brooks

harbors no such biases.

As an eager and tireless handmaiden to power, the Uriah Heep of the Conservative Movement, for one, welcomes our new, plutocratic overlords and would like to remind them that as a trusted Villager pundit, he can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground Credit Default Swap caves.

And so, in lieu of an explanation suitable for human beings living in the real world, Conservative David Brooks provides yet another of his signature Texas-4th-grade-history-book-Sparknotes overviews of These United States

...as seen by an alien...

...squinting into the glare of a receding Sun...

...as it zooms past on its way back to Ophiuchus.

Brooks mentions dryly that the financial problems that are currently wracking the Earth were caused by a group called “everybody” and were not noticed until it was too late -- over and over and over again -- by another group called “the establishment.”

Brooks notes that:

“People who make it into the establishment work and play well with others. They are part of the same overlapping social networks, and inevitably begin to perceive the world in similar, conventional ways. They thrive in institutions where people are not rewarded for being cantankerous…”

Also too, if this were a Hollywood movie, the contrarians who saw it coming wouldn’t be a tiny minority of hairy-eared, urine-smelling knee-biters who live in mud huts and eat bugs, because…

“In this drama, in other words, the establishment was pleasant, respectable and stupid, while the contrarians were smart but hard to love, and sometimes sleazy.”

For some reason, the David Brooks makes no mention of ideological provenance of the orgy of radical deregulation that caused our long-stable financial system to suddenly become as prone to being ripped to pieces by packs of jackals as a hobbled goat staked out at a watering hole.

Or as prone to heart attacks as Dick Cheney.

David Brooks also makes no mention of political provenance of those who are getting their pockets stuffed in exchange for making sure the damage is never repaired, and that the same depraved slugs who brought us to tears to begin with are kept supplies with fresh victims until the end of time.

But I guess when you’re the royal scribe carefully parsing together the history texts for your new overlord’s crowned princelings, you have to keep it simple and comforting.

So instead of reading something awkward about Goldman Sachs and

Vampire Squids, future generations of Wall Street royalty will get,

Goldman Sachs:

Mostly Harmless.

America, America

God shed his grace on thee
Till selfish gain no longer stain
The banner of the free!

(From the all-but-forgotten original third stanza of our alternate national anthem, "America the Beautiful")

A Lot Of Words Gave Their Lives

Here (deep inside the Conservative Waring Blender which is, as always, set to "Purify!") to relate this simple truth: the anti-science, global climate change-denying Right are solipsistic nihilists who want nothing more than to live and die in material opulence even at the cost of laying waste to the world.

In fact, if anything, the Godlike idea that they could actually annihilate Mother Earth as a yummy digestif seems to add savor to their global biocide feast.

They view gobbling up the only planet in the known Universe which we know can support biological life and sucking out its marrow as some kind of hilarious, cosmic dine-and-dash; a clever Final Exit which sticks someone else with the tab for their meal, and torches the place on the way out a last "fuck you" to life itself.

And if they're not a member of the Right's Ruling Caste, but are instead just another of slab of Party of God no-neck cannon fodder and can't afford to meet the end positively drowning in excess, then at least they can meet it in the dignified way that Conservative Jebus preached about: hunkered down in the double-wide in your "Death to Liberals!" tee-shirt with a Bible in one hand, an Uzi in the other, screaming out your imbecile rage against the Kenyan Usurper.

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

Delinquency Edition.

On your Mouse Circus today...

The Neoconservative Uri Geller comes to “Face the Nation”

to bend reality with the power of his pornstache.

John Cole puts the boot in here:

The Mustache of Understanding:

I’ve been trying to understand the Tea Party Movement. Sounds like a lot of angry people who want to get the government out of their lives and cut both taxes and the deficit. Nothing wrong with that — although one does wonder where they were in the Bush years. Never mind. I’m sure like all such protest movements the Tea Partiers will get their 10 to 20 percent of the vote. But should the Tea Partiers actually aspire to break out of that range, attract lots of young people and become something more than just entertainment for Fox News, I have a suggestion:

Become the Green Tea Party.

I’d be happy to design the T-shirt logo and write the manifesto. The logo is easy. It would show young Americans throwing barrels of oil imported from Venezuela and Saudi Arabia into Boston Harbor.

The manifesto is easy, too: “We, the Green Tea Party, believe that the most effective way to advance America’s national security and economic vitality would be to impose a $10 “Patriot Fee” on every barrel of imported oil, with all proceeds going to pay down our national debt.”

They weren’t around protesting during the Bush years BECAUSE THE TEA PARTY IS REPUBLICANS. They don’t care about the deficit. They care that a Democrat (and a black “Muslim,” to boot), is in the White House. They don’t care about fiscal restraint, they care that a Democrat is in the White House.
...

Andy "Ronstalgia" Sullivan dances onto the hearts of ”The Chris Matthews Show”

panel by declaring that he is tired of people making excuses for Right Wing nutjobs, and letting them off the hook because they’re “entertainers”. Who is pushing back against this within the GOP? Nobody. Look, Fox News is the Republican Party.

And so forth.

I must say I am always just fracking delighted to see a Conservative racking up both substantial personal income and edgy insightfulness teevee street cred by boldly catching up to where Liberals were 20 years ago.

Chris Matthews, (bless his heart) sticks the knife in.

Kelly O'Donnell: I think people have a different standard for political entertainment – people who get rich being outrageous -- and political office holders.

Matthews: What about Sarah Palin?

Ruh roh.

O'Donnell: Uh…uh….she’s moving towards the entertainment side.

The Pig People have been taught by years of repetition and electoral success that slathering their degenerate ideology in scripture, or flags, or funny entertainer hats was some clever magic trick that would forever fool the Hated Liberals. A Golden Ticket that gave them unlimited and unassailable license to vomit up one paranoid, bigoted or just-plain-bugfuck-insane farrago of lies after another.

And as long as it won them elections and made scum like Rush Limbaugh immensely rich, the Villagers -- who cravenly cater only money and power -- were willing to go along with the lies, which is why the Pig People got it into their tiny, inbred skulls that being raving, delusional thugs squatting in moral squalor and blaming their problems on Imaginary Hippies was a Valid Lifestyle Choice.

Because for most of my adult life, there has been no one on the Right or in the Center who was willing to drag these scum out into the light just keep kicking them over and over and over again until they stopped behaving like the spoiled, whiny imbeciles...or crawled back into their double-wides and left us civilized people the Hell alone.

For virtually all of that time -- as the Right's berserk recklessness escalated through the crimes of Reagan, the racism of Atwater, the mutilation of Christianity by Falwell, the Orwellian codification of Hate by Gingrich, the War on Clinton, the crimes of DeLay, and the serial treasonage of the Cheney Administration -- it was only the Left who were sounding the alarm about the Great Wingnut Fucksturm that was coming.

The Great Wingnut Fucksturm that has now arrived.

And the fact that the Left has now been proven unambiguously correct about the vicious fraud that Conservatism has always been -- and that we are no longer willing to be polite about it, or let them hide behind flags and bibles and the title of "entertainer" -- is why the Riders of that Fucksturm hate the Left more than ever, and with a rabid, unhinged fury that is at long last really starting the scare the crap out of the ringmasters of the Mouse Circus.

Lastly, the Monsters were Due

on Fluffy Gregory Street


Everyone was really, really sad that John McSame has become the absolute whore that the Left always knew him to be.

Bobo Brooks is now dimly aware that the Right has become every bit the freakshow that the Left has been warning about for a generation, but still somehow manages to leave the impression that he has no idea where all these orcs are coming from, and that maybe if the Left would just compromise a little more.

Bobo: Seeing as how I've never seen a rich man's dick that didn't make my mouth water, I’d like to defend Goldman Sachs. Everyone thought the housing market would go up forever. Goldman Sachs are scuzzballs, but they were smart to bet against it.

Sachs was rigging up insanely complicated black boxes full of nitro, rat shit, crack, 12-page formulas on the theoretical topography of n-dimensional financial hyperspace, eye of Newt, toe of frog and the strongest brand of industrial strength hooker perfume money can buy.

Then paid the rating agencies to label them “Baby Food”.

Then they paid off the cops to look the other way.

Then they sold them to normal humans and institutional investors.

Then made side-bets that their black boxes would explode.

Then they made a fortune when their black boxes went “Boom” and took down the global economy controlled-demolition-style.

The are, in other words, Conservatism Incarnate, so you can see why they make Little Bobo stand up and salute.

David Gregory: I will now sycophantically read aloud from David Brooks’ hideously dishonest “big gummint vs. small gummint” column and ask David Brooks to comment on it.

Reads column.

Brooks: This guy is awesome.

Michele Norris: This could be an opportunity for Republicans.

Because it always is.

Erin Burnett: People are buying stuff! We’re saved!

Evan Thomas: The long term numbers suck. We’re doomed.

Michele Norris: And the Boomers are fucking locusts.

Gregory: Is there a more Centrist vs. Big Gummint argument?

So...Centrism if the new Republicanism, Big Gummint is still Evil Liberalism...and somewhere in between those two...something...is supposed to happen?

Maybe Fluffy should pick two other semantically-meaningless and unrelated words to arbitrarily compare in order to avoid discussion the fact that the Right is the Problem. Perhaps "penguin" and "bar graph"?

Or "muppet" and "quanta"?

Brooks: Obama has lost Independents! People are mad about stuff, although I’d rather not talk about “Why” because then I’d be forced to mention my Party’s bloody fingerprints all over every problem. But the disgust is amazing!

Thomas: Obama is drifting. In a time when everybody is loud and dramatic, no one is paying attention.

Gregory: We’ll be back next week in high definition.

And low fact.

Elsewhere, George Will was a tool and Mitch McConnell was a lying douchbag.


De·lin·quen·cy.

Noun:

1. Failure in or neglect of duty or obligation; dereliction; default: delinquency in payment of dues.

2. Wrongful, illegal, or antisocial behavior.

3. Something, as a debt, that is past due or otherwise delinquent.

Rogue Nation

Small country.

Secretive, anti-democratic, cult-like government.

Weird, costumed leader who claims special divine powers.

Followers who are brainwashed from birth to believe a laughably absurd cosmology and a highly fictional, self-aggrandizing version of their own history.

No natural resources.

Major export: Fear.

Major import: Money.

Routinely violates the human rights of those within its sphere of influence and protects the violators.

Routinely pauperizes the peasants under its control for the enrichment of its heads of state.

Refuses to respect or obey international laws.


If you're this guy

that laundry list is enough to make you International Public Enemy #1

But it you're this guy

every day is IOKIYABOR (It's OK If You're a Bishop of Rome) Day.

Driftglass and Blue Gal's Friday Podcast

Strategy without tactics
Is the slowest route to victory.
Tactics without strategy
Is the noise before defeat.

-- Sun Tzu

Still Born In East L.A.

This novelty song is a quarter of a century old.

Only a nation that no longer believes in the future refuses to solve it's biggest problems.

David Brooks Loses His Mind

You mean I have to kill them all?

Standing in an empty bar, surrounded by Imaginary Centrists, talking to an Imaginary Reasonable Conservative Bartender who echos back to Bobo his every fraudulent fantasy, David Brooks reveals that he has finally decided to abandon reality altogether, crawl back into Ronald Reagan’s leathery, cowboy man-uterus and seal the entrance behind him.

Snippets lifted from "The Government War" in the NYT:

"In these columns I try to give voice to a philosophy you might call progressive conservatism. "
...

"This general philosophy puts me to the left of where the Republican Party is now, and to the right of the Democratic Party. It puts me in that silly spot on the political map, the center, or a step to the right of it."
...

"One of the odd features of the Democratic Party is its inability to learn what politics is about. It’s not about winning arguments. It’s about deciding which arguments you are going to have. In the first year of the Obama administration, the Democrats, either wittingly or unwittingly, decided to put the big government-versus-small government debate at the center of American life.

"Just as America was leaving the culture war and the war war, the Democrats thrust it back into the government war, only this time nastier and with higher stakes."
...

"This produced the Tea Party Movement — a characteristically raw but authentically American revolt led by members of the yeoman enterprising class."
...

"The Democrats have become the government party and the Republicans are the small government party. The stale, old debate is back with a fury."

See, things were finally starting to get better, but those Liberal bastards had to get their Big Gummint spoo all over everything and fuck it all up.

I have no idea what political system or history he is writing about, but whatever it is, it has nothing whatsoever to do with America here-and-now.

Needless to say, Andrew Sullivan approves-with-reservations:

I find myself in agreement with David Brooks' column this morning on how - unwittingly - the Obama administration was forced into the kind of big government action required to cope with several huge crises, after years of negligence and drift. I can see how easy it was for the FNC-RNC to wheel out their exhausted tropes of anti-government rhetoric and for Paul Krugman, say, to wheel out his own pro-government radicalism.
...

And thus does all dialogue on the Right descend ever further into Farce.

One faction living on a garbage island of wholly imaginary, fact-free Conservative ideological purity. On that island, the last two generations of Conservative treason, corruption and catastrophic failure never happened. On that floating septic tank, Rush Limbaugh, Bill Kristol, Karl Rove, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin rule over an army Pig People. And now that anyone with a conscience has long ago abandoned the GOP, it is the swinish inhabitants of this island that make up the margin of victory in virtually every Republican election in America.

They rule the Party of Lincoln, and every Republican elected official knows it.

The other faction lives on the equally imaginary, equally fact-free garbage island of Centrism. Its small number of well-heeled refugees from Pigsville live high atop the island's lone mountain: a flimsy mound made entire out of the paper mache remnants of maundering, self-congratulatory, self-referential newspaper columns by Andrew Sullivan, "Ross Douthat, David Brooks, Jim Manzi, Conor Friedersdorf, Fareed Zakaria, Bruce Bartlett, Jon Rauch, and... Ramesh Ponnuru".

The inhabitants of Centrism Island are just as certain as any die-hard Commie that their ideology never failed, but was instead betrayed by...somebody. Enemies within? A failure in the dialectic? The flux capacitor? Considering that, say, a typical Sullivan post now reads something like this:

Ross reax here to D-wayne's synthesis of the NRO's depiction of Junebug's analysis of the latest epistemic hairball coughed up by Ambers to my response to K-Lo's crybaby post on the Zak-meister's latest take-down of ...

it is difficult to unwind the smothering insiderhood and suss out anything useful other than...

A) It is one, monumental, self-indulgent, self-absolving circle-jerk and,

B) No matter how far Right the whole circus has traveled in the last 30 years, somehow, the Vile Liberals are still Big Gummint villains and are still always, miraculously responsible for more than half of any given problem.

The inhabitants of Centrism Island rule nothing.

Instead they all seem to make a really good living sitting around together in the same mossy bar, listening to ghosts and phantoms, feeding each other drinks, getting hammered on "Real Conservatism" and sneering at how coo-coo crazy everyone else has gotten:


Honest to White Sidewall Tire Jesus, what is there left to say but what I already said four years ago ("Hey? What's that poo-smell?"):

...
These are the same people who have told us to our faces for three decades that Government Is The Problem. That everything from health to food to oil to torture to coal mines needs to be completely deregulated. That Social Security needs to be eliminated.

That government must be annihilated.

So, BoBo, why in the fuck would a party of looters be interested in oiling the hinges on the vault door?

But that isn’t what’s interesting here.

What’s interesting is, yet again, the Dog that Didn’t Bark in the Night.

What BoBo is NOT suggesting.

The farrago of moral decomposition and indefensibly wretched excess that is the woof and warp of the GOP has been allowed to metastasize to such a scope and scale and worm into the belly of the body politic to a deeper level than the likes of Jim Wright and Dan Rostenkowski ever fucking dreamed of for one reason.

Because your criminals hide behind Christ, Bobo.

It is no accident that shoulder-to-shoulder with a mob-wannabe thug like Abramoff stood pillars of the Christian Right like Tom DeLay and Ralph “Satan’s Babyfaced Fingerfood” Reed.

In the past, Democrats -- like anyone else -- can and have become corrupt, and can and have been punished for it.

Severely.

The thing that makes the Republican Party different is not the rot in their hearts – which is capacious – and their seething hatred of the Brown Poor – which they rationalize away into the mists of market theory.

No what makes them worse – lethally worse – is their Fundamentalist Ideology.

Period.

Because when you are lining your pockets with House postage stamps, you’re just a crook and we’re all sinners here. But when you believe that God Has Chosen Your Party…you can justify any excesses.

When you have grown besotted on the grotesque perversion of the teachings of Jesus that is Conservative Christian Fundamentalism – when you cast yourself as the righteous Christian Soldiers at war with the Evil Liberal Humanists – then all things are permitted.

When you wrap your dick in the Flag and the Bible, then you can fuck anyone and anything any way you like because you believe that God is on your side.

You can justify an illegal war.

You can justify torture.

You can justify murder.

You can justify shredding the Constitution.

You can justify demanding your fucktard superstition trump science.

You can justify impeaching my President for trivia and letting your President skate over treason.

You can justify blaming Columbine on condoms and teaching evolution.

You can justify bombing Family Planning Clinics.

You can justify lynching.

You can justify blaming 9/11 on gays and feminists and the ACLU.

You can justify blaming hurricanes on liberals.

You can justify assassination.

You can justify calling liberal judges a greater threat to America than Nazis and terrorists.

You can justify turning women back into the reproductive chattel of men.

And having swallowed all of those camels, you certainly won’t strain at a few gnats like graft, corruption, extortion, blackmail and all the rest…because all of these things are simply means to the ends of the Greater Glory of the Prince of Peace!

And your Party is the one that is so fucking Blessed and Highly Favored in His eyes, right?

Mr. Brooks, these people are the problem and these people run your party. And what the fuck kind of congenital cerebral malfunction do you have that you cannot see that?
...

Oh, and one other thing.

Crazy doesn't end well for those closest to it...



so if I were Thomas Friedman

I'd want to be sleeping with one eye open from now on.

A Noted Academic Explains

The Chicken Lady of Nevada's Health Care Plan.

Just Trying Out

Some new family crest material.

Also, attention Stephanie Miller Show producers.

I listened to the thunderbolt-lobbing Rep. Alan Grayson on your show today, and was delighted to hear that chatting with him will now be a regular feature. However, the naming contest for the segment was less than inspiring. Sure "Gray Matter(s)" would be terrif if you're program were framed by cellos and flute and led into Teri Gross talking with the ghost of Spaulding Gray. And "Gabbin' With Alan" (or some variation of that) would be a perfect fit if you were shooting the shit with Bob Collins and Mal Bellairs at 5:00 between the hog reports and ads for Chock-Full-O-Nuts coffee.

But if you need something reflective of your guest, your demographic and your format, you need to call it "Crockpunch!".

I know.

And you're welcome.

Big Revisionist Fail

Andrew Sullivan explains here in "Big Lie Fail" that even he

"...was a little gob-smacked when Mitch McConnell simply said that the financial regulation bill was another bank bailout. But I found it fascinating as a glimpse into the RNC-FNC mojo. The idea is simply to lie about legislation and hope that FNC and the system designed for epistemic closure on the right would carry the day. Even if it is untrue - death panels, etc - it can become true for one half of the political system that has abandoned any relationship to the reality of hard choices, as opposed to the fantasy of some kind of 1950s nirvana."

When I listen to these newly-minted Conservative ex-pats as they hold the hymnals of their recently-renounced cults up to the light and remark in Very Loud Amazement and Horror at how the whole shitty wingnut Ponzi scheme is held together by nothing but the paranoia, rage, racism and imbecility of the Base, coupled with the absolutely sociopathic willingness to Lie All The Time About Everything by Movement leaders...

...I must admit that I am reminded precisely of the unpleasantly loud braying noises that brand new Windows 95 users used to make as they discovered the joys of using a thingie called a Mouse to "click" on Pictures of stuff to make other stuff happen.

And how incredibly fucking annoying that unpleasantly loud braying sounded to their Dirty Hippie Apple-using friends and neighbors who,

A) Had already been using a vastly superior and vastly more elegantly integrated version of the same technology for years and years...

B) Had already wasted endless, fruitless hours of their lives at show-and-tell-and-shout trying to convince their dull-witted DOS-addicted fellow citizens of the supremacy of the graphical user interface.

And thus we watch one Conservative ex-pat after another bolt some frantically cobbled together, third-rate ripoff of the Liberal Interface onto their shitty Conservative operating system

and calling the dim, flickering truths that unholy marriage produces (and that Liberals have been observing and warning about for a generation) a fucking Revelation.

Hey, Sully? Lying to bigots and imbeciles to get their votes wasn't a bug in Conservatism; it was a fucking feature.

Also too, Palin isn't some trailer park Athena sprung fully formed and feel-good-gibberish-spewing from the head of Bill Kristol; she's Reagan XP.

You want Civil Rights?

Open-mindedness?

Vigorous debate?

Diversity?

Privacy?

Science?

Genuine Christian values?

Compassionate domestic policy?

Sane foreign policy?

Thoughtful environmental policy?

Fiscal responsibility?

Liberals have an app for that.

And we always have.

The Other "L" Word

As a full-service blog, I occasionally like to help acclimate the wayfarer who washes up on my City's fair shores the our local folkways and customs. So in the spirit of that sort of top-notch service provision, today let me offer a little bit of Chicagoese-to-English Rosetta Stonage in order to understanding the single most important word in a local news item

But first, to settle you into the right frame of mind, a bit Sout’ Side poesy from local artist Tony Fitzpatrick's fine book, "Bum Town":

The Dead Still Walk
...

The Irish dead still talk
A lot in this city.
The fog is like cigar smoke
At the foot of the lake,
And Richard J. Daley
Could always see through
The smoke.
Every wink, every nod,
Every smirk
Turned into highways,
Skyscrapers and bridges.
"I'm a kid from the stockyards--
I'll stand with you."
And he did.

Then the Irish
Licked the frosting,
Ate the cake
And sold the
Plate.

Who built the pyramids?
Mayor Daley built the pyramids.
(Everybody knows dat.)

OK, so now that you're good and lubed, see if you can spot the Key Word in this snip from the Sun Times:

FOP president: Mayor Daley lacks loyalty, respect for cops

April 19, 2010

BY FRAN SPIELMAN City Hall Reporter

Fraternal Order of Police President Mark Donahue accused Mayor Daley today of demonstrating a “lack of loyalty and respect” for Chicago Police officers with his “flippant and erratic” response to an arbitrator’s ruling on the new police contract.

“Those advising the mayor on what he should or should not do or say need to step up and tell the Emperor he is truly naked,” Donahue wrote in a Letter to the Editor of the Chicago Sun-Times.

“His statements demonstrate his lack of integrity in labor relations, his woeful misunderstanding of the negotiations for this contract, as well as his lack of loyalty and respect for Chicago Police officers. … This mayor has once again driven a wedge between himself and organized labor with his flippant and erratic remarks.”

Chicago taxpayers dodged a fiscal bullet last week when rank-and-file police officers were awarded a ten percent pay hike over five years, their smallest increase in nearly three decades.

The pay raise fell short of the 16.1 percent Daley once offered and even shorter of the 24 percent the FOP initially demanded.

Daley responded to the city’s victory by urging officers bitterly disappointed in their pay raise not to blame him for the 16.1 percent their union leaders left on the table.

“If I agreed to 16 percent, they had my word on 16 percent. But, union officials must have not trusted [it]. I’m their kicking boy. In order to make their members mad at me, they have to kick me around. I understand that. That’s how it works. They make me the bad guy. But, I’m not the bad guy in this situation,” the mayor said Friday.

On Monday, Donahue fired back with verbal guns blazing.

He argued that the mayor’s “incoherent words” demonstrated his “total ignorance” of what actually happened in the negotiations.

Donahue maintained that it was Daley who pulled the offer off the table in March, 2009 “before it had even been discussed,” arguing that taxpayers could no longer afford the increase at a time when the city was hemorrhaging revenue.

The decision so infuriated the rank-and-file, 4,000 officers marched around City Hall chanting, “Daley sucks.”

“To say that the union didn’t let their members know of the offer defies the fact that all city offers were posted on the union website,” Donahue wrote.
...

In Chicago, everybody knows what makes the sun to shine and the grass to grow. What makes our trees blue

and our rivers green.

In Chicago, the magic word is “Loyalty”. It is the only true coin of the realm, and there is almost no way to overstate how much everything else is, in the end, some form of fiat currency based on it. Blind, fierce, dog loyalty, that flows up the stairs and through the door of the man on the Fifth Floor of City Hall.

Loyalty...and everything else is everything else is jabba jabba.

Of course, in some ways, catching City Hall’s fancy is better than winning the lottery, but it comes with a heavy price tag; in exchange for material security you may at any moment find yourself being used as footstool or a prop or a whipping boy or a flotation device. Sure that day may never come, but there it hangs, over your head, every day, and the loyalty that binds people to those arrangements is the enchanted ingredient that gets people onto the few Clout Lists you know about (like this, and this and this), and the many that you don't.

It’s what lands one no-neck ward heeler after another into comfortable, six-figure jobs that they somehow keep, rain or shine.

It’s what makes sure that, if you get caught and take your whippin’ like a man -- protect the Machine and don't say nuthin' -- there'll be a little something waiting for you when you breathe free again.

It’s what permitted "Whispering Vic" Reyes to quietly slip the noose, and ride his City Hall Rolodex into opulent prosperity in the private sector, and Jon "The Torturer" Burge to slither away to live out the rest of his days down in Florida -- fat and happy on his city pension -- instead rotting behind the walls of a federal prison.

Loyalty is what insures that if the particular mud puddle you’re stomping in gets too splashy and you have to leave the Magic Kingdom before you track it into Hizzoner’s office, you'll land someplace soft...while the lack of it insures that, no matter how bright you shine, come hard times, under the bus you'll go-go-go.

And hard times have come at last -- much harder than expected now that there will be no Magic Olympic Gelt to paper over the city’s deepening financial problems -- and Da Mare has run out of fiscal card tricks to play and public assets to sell off. Chicago was not tagged in Forbes “Smack Ten” list of cities in free fall, but it might well have made the Top 20: City Gummint is broke -– massive layoff-broke, furlough-broke, service cutback broke – and considering that it bought a lot of its newer, shinier toys and amenities with what amounts to borrowed money, everyone believes the cutbacks and belt-tightening is only going to get much, much worse.

Which leaves Hizzoner with a problem that Abraham Lincoln once colorfully described as “Too Many Pigs For the Teats”. And the problem with a system based on clout and fealty to power is that it begins to fall apart when there’s not enough to go around anymore.

Thus the outburst in the newspaper from the head of the FOP.

To be sure, Da Mare has been knocking heads with the police and fire unions since the day he took office.

Back in the Late Cretaceous Era.

But whatever the bad feelings, in the end cops have always had a place at Hizzoner’s right hand, usually literally

as well as figuratively.

But the Clout Machine has no “off” switch, and Chicago’s unofficial motto isn’t “Where’s Mine?” for nothing. And so when, Da Mare goes to negotiate with a bunch of cops to whom he has made a lot of promises…

…and he tries to cry poormouth after everyone in the room has read this over their morning coffee:

Suspended Daley aide lands new six-figure gig at police department

Posted by John Byrne at 5:22 p.m.

Ex-city Fleet Commissioner Michael Picardi, suspended by City Hall this year after an embarrassing contracting mistake, has landed a new $129,000-a-year job with the Chicago Police Department.

As a deputy director, Picardi will oversee the police department's general support division, which includes the city auto pound, equipment and supply, and document services and graphics, according to police department spokesman Roderick Drew.

The new gig comes after Mayor Richard Daley suspended Picardi without pay for three months in January for contracts involving Central Auto Body in the Logan Square neighborhood. The shop's owner, John Szybkowski, was convicted nearly 30 years ago of faking work orders on police department vehicles and giving kickbacks to city workers. Yet that didn't stop him from getting a new city contract.
…

This isn't the first time Picardi has switched city jobs amid criticism.
…

It doesn’t feel like just another negotiating tactic.

It feels like having your face rubbed in horse byproduct. Like you’re being playing for chump. Like something as unspoken and vital as a major bone has been broken, way down deep.

In Chicago, there are a hundred ways to throw a hundred insults around and not leave a scar.

Calling a man’s loyalty directly into question on the front page of the paper ain't one of them.

One Ringy Dingy...

Excuse me while I whip this out.

From Forbes:

The End Of The BlackBerry Elite

Dan Woods

In many companies, smartphones are status symbols. Senior executives and key staff are armed with BlackBerrys or other premium smartphones to accelerate communication.

But when the "BlackBerry elite" started years ago, most companies did not allow executives to use their BlackBerrys for personal calls and e-mails as well, and this forced executives to carry two phones.

In recent years companies have extended mobile phone privileges to rank-and-file workers, but the two-phone scenario has been unappealing to most. The solution: Let workers use one phone for both company and personal business. And now that smartphones are relatively inexpensive and many workers own one, companies are encouraging employees to use their personal phones for work. One retail executive told me that most of his employees were eager to use their personal phones to stay in touch with work e-mail, and some workers could be reimbursed for their phone and texting charges.

Increasingly, companies are attempting to bring personally owned smartphones into the fold of corporate IT, which in practice usually means providing access to MS Exchange or Lotus Notes. This fits into the vision of Organic IT in which corporate IT is delivered through personal technology.
...

In a previous job, I was an early adopter. Honest. I had everything first, including an old-old, text-only Blackberry with a black-print-on-river-algae-green-screen and a thumbwheel.

It was fucking perfect; like the best knife I've ever owned, I used it all the time for everything, and it saved me endless labor. It was cheap, cost-effective and actually made my job easier.

Then one day they took the transmitters down (or so the local tel-com providers told us) and stopped supporting the poor old thing.

Nine minutes later there were suddenly new Blackberry's abroad in the land. They were sleek and shiny beasts, with full voice-and-text, a hundred apps and vivid 256-color plumage.

Cool.

This was followed almost immediately by an Organization-wide Blackberry Policy in which the job classifications of people who were now eligible to use one were Very Clearly spelled out.

Ruh-roh.

And, like that, a genuinely useful tool had become a Status Signifier. Another Senior Executive Penis Substitute, to be extravagantly whipped out in front of lesser mortals and used to decisively resolve urgent issues like "Where u at?" and "Do we get Sammin Cream Cheese or Reglr 4 the staff meeting?"

Organizations bang their heads on these stupid policies over and over again and almost always for the same reason; because eventually the toxic corporate fetish for turning every labor-saving device into another way to slant-drill into your few remaining hours of personal life and steal a little more of your precious time runs bang into people actually still have something resembling a personal life and want to keep it.

The Lacklusterhood of The Traveling Rants

Apparently designed for the good-mouth-feel of his large audience of Digital Shut-Ins, today's David Brooks column ("Riders on the Storm") is yet another in Bobo's long, long line of tedious Thesis-Antithesis-Pseudosynthesis exercises. So let me once again save you the risk of possible optical injury caused by driving your eyes over its mushy, uneven surface by summarizing it for you in thirds.

The First Third: Cass Sunstein once said that people's internet clicky habits would probably lead to a more insular and self-referential electorate. Which considering that, like the real world, the internet is 99.3% porn, sports, kittehs, Nigerian banker frauds, pitches for penis creams and unguents of various pedigrees, people looking for work, people looking to get laid and Lindsay Lohan rumors...seems a little grandiose. It does, however, reflect Bobo's personal experience, by which I can only assume he means those occasions when he and Bob Herbert find themselves uncomfortably side-by-side at the Judith Miller Memorial Urinal Trough and Herbert "accidentally" pees on Bobo's loafers.

Or when Ross Douthat (The NYT's other Prometheus of Conservative Thinking) rubs Times' cafeteria Brussels sprouts in Bobo's comb-over for being a Movement traitor.

But such is the dangerous life of the Reasonable Centrist.

The Second Third: But wait just a damn minute! If it please the court, we have a surprise last-minute witness that might be able to show that Sunstein is -- wait for it...wait ... for ... it... -- wrong! Maybe, instead, "Internet users are a bunch of ideological Jack Kerouacs."

The Third Third: Oh, but maybe not. Or maybe so, but maybe the causes and effects I've built my column around have nothing to do with each other. Or something.


Of course, analyzing traffic flow stripped of content or intent (Quote: "The study measures the people who visit sites, not the content inside") to determine...anything...strikes me as worse than useless; like trying to draw some tourism and cross-cultural inferences from the fact that, for reasons the researchers were unable to ascertain, incidents of Americans visiting Europe and the South Pacific spiked Way Up during WWII.

But by staying aggressively focused on data from studies you'll almost certainly never read, Bobo can once again shift the readers' attention away from the fact that political groups can and do coalesce for entirely different reasons. For example, in a frantic attempt to avoid taking any responsibility for (or even making any acknowledgment of) its utter capitulation to its nutjob, racist Base and the spectacular failure of virtually every one of its core economic, foreign policy, domestic policy and political tenets...the Right has retreated into a kind of belligerent insularity that borders on catatonia (A tiny, Eastern European country which broke away from the Soviet Union in 1986 by hiding behind Estonia and then sneaking out when the Commies were busy in Afghanistan.)

The Left, on the other hand, is more or less organized around the difficult task of Solving Actual Problems, one of which is the fact that Conservatives broke the country, and another of which is the fact that the Conservative Movement has lost its fucking mind.

Unsurprisingly, the vital distinction between the single-mindedness of the Conservative arsonists and the single-mindedness of the Liberal fire department is skipped rather flamboyantly over by the Conservative David Brooks, who instead favors looking at our crippled and looted nation through the distant, passionless and self-absolving eyes of an alien observing the comings and goings of red and black ants. "We" are all one, scuttling, dopey, biased mass to poor, Reasonable David Fucking Brooks; "...people who live in partisan ghettoes, ignorant about the other side."

Except, of course, that is just a huge fucking lie. And by reiterating this Big Centrist Lie in column after column for year after year, Bobo has come to define the absolute cutting edge of lazy; the state-of-the-art in phoning it in.

Because in tepidly tapping other people's seemingly-opposing-but-maybe-not ideas together, reaching no apparently conclusion, and then shrugging and walking away -- in padding out the phrase "There's something happening here / What it is ain't exactly clear" with enough lard and breadcrumbs to fill a hundred New York Times columns -- Bobo has truly found his Philosopher's Stone.

Of course, room-temperature tapioca pudding in a pastel tie oozing forever back, down and to the Right is not how our public discourse must inevitably be, and to prove it, instead of gumming your way through another bowl of lukewarm Centrist tripe, take a look at what happened when two very smart people passionately debated exactly these same issues.

Over 40 years ago...

Enjoy

UPDATE: Welcome "Bill in Exile" readers (link Not Safe for Work).

Norman Mailer and Marshall McLuhan on "The Summer Way"


Part One



Part Two



Part Three