The 1,500th Post

1,500 posts ago the late and much-missed Steve Gilliard cruelly put me out on the street to fend for myself.

Bastard.

OK, that's not exactly true.

This from a long-ago 2005 post sums up the actual/factual of what Gilly's Place was like upon the occasion of my packing my bindle and getting a little joint of my own:

...
Through their Open 24/7 Blog Home Place, I know a little about their past(s), birthdays, family backgrounds, health and taste(s) in booze, food, sports, lovers and politics. Stuff I couldn’t tell you at knifepoint about cousins of mine, I could tell you about them. And they share those things freely with the world through the big front window of their capacious Addams’s Family Mansion.

I hung out there -- and still do and will -- for the same reason anybody hangs out anywhere. A lot of places serve a decent burger, but only a handful of them serve a good meal.

Steve and Jen serve a good meal, and only ask that if you have something to say, you speak up and put a little skin into it. Be too much of a smartass, and you’ll get smacked. Too much of a dumbass, same deal. You’ll learn, or smack back, or back off, of dig in your heels, or be vindicated, or whatever. But unless you go waaaay out of your way to be nothing but obnoxious, and at a 120-Decibel-Loud, Toxic, and set-your-head-on-fire Nuts level, and post repeated calls for the Violent Overthrow of Petting Zoos, you won’t get tossed.

You’ll get mocked. Oh Boy Howdy Yes! You’ll get your monkey skull hollowed out and serially shat in in front of God and Everybody by the cadre of smart, interesting, opinionated, musky-but-in-a-good-way, lunatics that Steve’s honest, muscular prose has drawn in.

You’ll be shown to be a fool...but not shown the door.
...

Gilly wanted lots of voices out here in the fields, raising hell.

Lots and lots and lots of voices.

And one small part of his legacy is that he now has blog grandkids: The estimable Physioprof has taken his Sharpie of Doom to the Politics of Dorian Gray, and enough kindly bootmarks were placed on Rehctaw's backside that he has up and started making eloquent mischief full-time here.

A pretty good legacy.

So instead of getting too soppy over dear and absent friends and exciting new voices, in celebration of my 1,500th I'm gonna have myself a quiet shot of very old Ardbeg, put on something bluesy and appropriate from Tom Waits' "Asylum Years"

allow myself one retroactive "Holy shit, that's a lot of writing!", and mediate over the fact that in addition to other fine attributes --

"You know, I love my friends, but I wouldn't leave them in my house with a couple of cases of beer to wait for the delivery of a grandfather clock."

-- Steve Gilliard

-- Gilly was also one funny son of a bitch.

The Boundless, Preening Asshattery

Of John Stossel.

OK, on the one hand this is kind of unfair. I mean, everybody knows Stossel is the Michael Medved of major network advocacy reporting and that scoring off of him is like beating up on a backwards child that’s been tranked into a coma.

Everyone knows that his “Porn Star Moustache of Quivering, Randite Indignation” schitck has grown so pathologically pro-corporate (best summed up here with this quote:

‘It's that government intervention that really gets to Stossel: "Governments, because they're monopolies, just tend not to do things very well. I thought we learned that watching the fall of the Soviet bloc, but apparently not."

Once, ABC anchor John Miller (7/19/02) asked Stossel a straight-forward question: "Has government ever, in the history of time, done something more effectively than a private outfit?" Stossel's response: "Not to my knowledge."’

that Stossel -- like all fanatically government-loathing wingnuts from any point along the Tom-DeLay-to-Tim McVeigh-spectrum -- will merrily discard whole mountains of inconvenient facts when they don’t fit the monomania of his tantrum du jour.

But on the other hand, Stossel is not merely a fucktard; he is a fucktard who dangerously misleads millions of teevee viewers on a regular basis. So unlike a thousand other shrieking pinheads calling into talk radio or falling off of skinhead tavern barstools across this great land of ours, Stossel collects a very juicy paycheck spreading his depraved world view over our airwaves.

He is a man who carves himself out a fine, fat living heroically and ferociously defending the predations of billion-dollar corporations against unarmed citizens, so I really can’t bring myself to feel too bad in making my small contribution in the direction of moving him towards a more hair-net-and-fry-vat-based career.

So let us consider what lengths Mr. “Give me a break!” went to over the weekend to sandbag limo-liberal Arianna Huffington on a variety of issues as she was beginning her book tour.

(Crooks & Liars has the video here.)

First, I should stipulate that this video was not Ms. Huffington finest hour. She looked weak and unprepared. And, for the record, I think her book – “Right is Wrong” -- looks kinda stupid in that Tom-Friedman-breathlessly- announcing-that-Circles-are-Round brand of stupid.

In other words, nothing that stapling together 20 random Left Blogistan
posts from any time in the last five year -- or 20 random paragraphs from any Harlan Ellison essay from the 1980s -- wouldn’t already have told you more succinctly.

(Brief driftglass aside: And WTF is it with Liberals, Progressives and Democrats suddenly getting all horny to go on these wingnut freak shows anyway? Stossel isn’t a journalist; he’s a stooge who hates anything that stands between the defenseless citizen and the unalloyed wonderfulness that is pure, Darwinian market capitalism.

Why is Huffington dignifying this hack by giving him the time of day, much less and interview?

Ah well; different questions for a different day.

End brief driftglass aside)

Now I have no way of knowing if she came across as weak because she was simply weak, or because (as I’d be willing to wager) Stossel ambushed her with a hail of arbitrary charts and statistic she had never seen before built out of data that Stossel had tortured into making false confessions, and then edited the film to put her in the feeblest possible light.

But Ms. Huffington did not come off well. Her answers came across as uncertain, anecdotal and equivocating: as a media creature she should have known better.

However, having stipulated that, there is also no doubt that Stossel was just as full of shit as a Port-O-Let after a marathon laxative-based-chili-eating-contest.

Which is a polite way of saying he lied, tacked his lies to some foam board to make them look official, and used them to beat up a guest he didn’t agree with.

So in the interest of time, lets look at just one of his assertions -- that we don’t need the government involved in workplace safety -- which he actually gets wrong in two excitingly different ways.

Holding up this chart

(which I have reproduced fairly faithfully here by hand as taking a screen capture of the original was getting to be an apparently insoluble pain in the ass) this is what Stossel says (in the video, at around the 6:20 mark):

“Your faith in OSHA is like a religious belief,” Stossel scoffs. “Look at this chart. This shows workplace injuries since OSHA was passed, yes, have gone down. But look at it before OSHA! Things were getting better anyway! It’s like government gets in front of the parade and pretends it’s leading the parade!”

First, hey dumbass, your own fucking chart does not show “Workplace Injuries”, it shows “Workplace Fatalities”.

So go fire an intern or something.

Second, note the key inferences:

1. OSHA = “the government”.

2. Since “Things were getting better anyway”, before “the government” intruded, the government is just stealing credit for what the Glorious Private Sector was doing anyway.

But let’s look at the whole graph, shall we?

The one Stossel

didn't show you.

Column 1 represents those events that took place before 1936. Events such as:

The establishment of the Evil Gummint Bureau of Mines by Congress in 1911 in response to the atrocious state of mining safety in the United States. At the time, mining was an occupation that had claimed 13,228 lives between 1906-1911.

And (from Wikipedia)

“The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City on March 25, 1911, was the largest industrial disaster in the history of the city of New York, causing the death of 148 garment workers who either died from the fire or jumped to their deaths.

“It was the worst workplace disaster in New York City until September 11th, 2001. The fire led to legislation requiring improved factory safety standards and helped spur the growth of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, which fought for better working conditions for sweatshop workers in that industry.”

Two of many examples from more that half a century before OSHA where catastrophically bad workplace conditions were not rectified until a pile of dead bodies finally forced the Evil Gummint to intervene.

In 1936 (Column 2), the Evil Federal Gummint again stuck its busybody nose in when it passed the Walsh-Healey Act, which

“passed…as part of the New Deal. [It] is a United States federal law which protects employees of government contractors whose contracts exceed USD 10,000. For these employees, it establishes overtime as hours worked in excess of 8 hours per day or 40 hours per week, sets the minimum wage equal to the prevailing wage in an area, and sets standards for child and convict labor, as well as job sanitation and safety standards.”

Bad Gummint! Bad, Bad Gummint!

Also as part of the Evil New Deal, Evil Organized Labor was given the muscle to collectively bargain virtually for the first time without the threat of being jailed, beaten to a pulp or worse. One of the things they demanded was safer working conditions; demands which would never have been possible or honored if the Evil Gummint hadn’t interceded.


In 1947, President Harry Truman convened the Evil Federal Gummint’s “Special Commission on Safety and Health.”

In 1958 (Column 4), the American Society of Safety Engineers (from whose fine website I am cribbing heavily) “conducted research with the Air Force, which led to advances in fall protection belts and harnesses that were later realized in American National Standards.”

Yes, that’s the Evil Gummint Air Force.

In 1964, the Evil Gummint Space Program also cruelly interfered in the marketplace by applying scientific principles to the field of workplace safety and making Systems Safety Management a field of intense research and application.

1964 (Column 5) was also the year the Evil Gummint revised the now-28-years-old Evil Walsh-Healey Act.

All of which only ever-so-lightly-and-for-demonstration-purpose-only touches on a few of the hundreds of instances in which the Evil Gummint -- in fits and starts, by legislation or by creating high standard procurement markets of its own and often over the howling objections of industry -- drove safety standards forward and fatalities down during most of the 20th Century.

It also demonstrates that there is no way even the briefest, honest reading of the facts could lead an impartial observer to conclude that OSHA somehow appeared unbidden and out of nowhere in 1971, or believe that OSHA was conceived as anything other than the culmination of decades of ever-evolving government regulations.

And given the “Global Resources of ABC” (that can spend several million dollars on enough eye-bleeding graphics to make “Nightline” look less like an embarrassing-irrelevant-dungheap-where-Koppel-used-to-be,

and more like a dungheap moving screamingly fast in some sort of Urgently Purposeful direction) there is no doubt that if Stossel and his flying monkeys had the slightest interest in conducting an honest debate they could have easily put together what it took me about 90 minutes of Googling to accomplish: a reasonably accurate set of graphics and narratives from which one could begin an honest conversation about American labor history vis-à-vis safety and government regulation.

Because sometimes regs are too restrictive. Sometimes they are too prescriptive. Sometimes they do go too far.

But of course that is not the conversation Stossel wants to have.

Instead, Stossel relentlessly preaches the Wingnut Fundamentalist's gospel of absolute certainty that Government is Always Wrong and Corporations are Always Right, and let the inconvenient facts be damned.

In a more genteel age, we used to call what Stossel does "shilling".

Or "whoring".

Or just plain "lying".

But in Age of Dubya, now we call it “journalism”.

Not One Of Us

From Newsweek:

Only in America

Barack Obama is a Niebuhr-reading ESPN watcher. The origins of his troubles with the 'other' tag.

Evan Thomas, Holly Bailey and Richard Wolffe
…
Following Hillary Clinton's lead, the McCain team sees an opportunity to paint Obama as an out-of-touch elitist, a Harvard toff who nibbles daintily at designer salads while the working man, worried about layoffs at the plant, belts another shot. Though the McCain advisers are divided about who would make the more beatable candidate in November, they see a chance to peel off Reagan Democrats—older working-class voters—in key swing states of the rust belt if Obama is the Democratic nominee. While McCain himself is publicly neutral on which Democrat he would prefer to oppose, in recent weeks he has noticeably gone easier on Clinton than Obama, perhaps out of hopes of winning over some of her working-class base.

…
But in Obama's failure to lock up the nomination, there may be something more disturbing going on as well.

Americans do not like to talk about class, and they want to believe racism is a thing of the past. Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, paragons of the people, were decidedly upper class in background, style and habit, and no one seemed to mind (except some other members of the upper class, who regarded the Roosevelts as "traitors" for wanting to tax and regulate the rich). JFK and Ronald Reagan were princely in their own ways (of Camelot and Hollywood) and yet could touch the hearts of common men and women.
…

The most successful presidents have always been open and hopeful, sunny and optimistic about the promise of American equality and opportunity. But there has long been a dark side to democratic politics, a willingness to play on prejudice, to get men and women to vote their fears and not their hopes. Those prejudices fade and seem to die down, but they never quite go away. They remain embers for cunning political operatives to fan into flames.

An exit poll of Pennsylvania voters included a chilling number that makes one wonder if Americans, or at least some groups in some parts of America, are ready to elect a black president. In the poll, 12 percent of whites said that race was a factor in deciding their votes. …In the NEWSWEEK Poll, more than half the voters said they think "most" (12 percent) or "some" (41 percent) of the voters will "have reservations about voting for a black candidate that they are not willing to express." In close elections, decided on the margins, it is discouraging to think that a small minority of racists could make the difference.

What is just weird is this: how can it be that a black man running for president is accused of being too elitist? For the first century of the nation's existence, blacks were kept in chains. For the next century, they were sent to the back of the bus and kept away from whites-only lunch counters and restrooms throughout the South—much less allowed to join the white elite in their schools and clubs and prestigious institutions. Then, starting in the 1960s, American society began to make a concerted effort to open up those doors. Barack Obama is not so much the beneficiary of that effort as the proof that blacks can make it on their own, if given the chance. He was, despite a modest upbringing, elected editor of the Harvard Law Review, a position at the very tip of the meritocratic ziggurat.

Yet to pockets of America, he still seems to be the "other." He seems a little strange, exotic; those cracked e-mails whispering about his middle name (Hussein) and declaring, fictitiously, that he is a Muslim who insisted on being sworn into office on the Qur'an rather than the Bible, keep buzzing around the Internet. To some, his manner is haughty; he is a bit of an egghead, one of those pointy-headed intellectuals whom George W. Bush liked to ridicule as a Deke brother at Yale and even later as president of the United States (and, long before him, demagogues like the anti-Semitic right-wing radio priest of the 1940s, Father Charles Coughlin; Red-baiter Sen. Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, and race-baiter Gov. George Wallace of Alabama).

Demagoguing, even in the subtle ways enabled by new media, can have an impact over time. In the NEWSWEEK Poll, 13 percent reported that Obama is Muslim. NEWSWEEK reporters on the campaign trail could hear the wariness, even fearfulness, of voters as they spoke about Obama.
…

Please understand, it’s Not a Racial Thing.

It’s not, not, not. We double-Blue-Dog-swear it's not.

It’s just that every Obama supporter is completely delusional.

So full of hate.

It’s like they’re so hypnotized or deranged they can’t even see how dangerous and unelectable their candidate is.

Take for example all this talk about “hope” this and “hope” that. We have real problems in this county! We’re at war for goodness sakes, and our economy is in real trouble, and we do not need some exotic Ivy-league elitist snob

who doesn’t understand our problems running our country.

We just need someone

more like us.

And these young people he’s bringing in?

Just kids, really.

No idea how the real world works, and what can you say except to agree with Bill Clinton that it's easy to be bamboozled by a slick operator with a lot of fine words when you are young and foolish.

No, we really need someone

a little more like us.

And he comes out of “Chicago”, with all of that scary, big city machine politics they have there.

So you know that means he was corrupt, even if we can't come up with some fancy lawyer "proof".

You just know that while he claims he was (allegedly) a "community organizer", he was probably really one of those back-room, city fixer pols.

Instead of someone

more like us.

Plus we hear he has some kinda shady dealings with the mob maybe. Some Arab named “Rezko”. We don’t know all the details, but there are rumors, and "Where There's Smoke, There's Fire" we say.

Like we said, it’s not a racial thing.

It’s just that he is obviously con artist with a lot of shady friends, and we don’t need that in the White House.

We need someone

more like us.

And can you believe that church he goes to?

All of those bizarre rituals? And the weird music they play? The language they use? And that they obviously hated America so much they felt they had to go set up their own, separate church?

It just chills the blood to think that someone who follows those crazy teachings would be in charge of our country!

Sure his followers says that one, 30-second snip taken out of context and from a 40-year-ministry is not a fair way to judge, but as we have already proven with iron logic, they are all obviously delusional.

And we say, why take that chance?

And, sure, he says his pastor won’t be giving him Secret Orders – maybe even Secret Foreign Orders! -- but you just never know with those people and their alien religion.

Like we said, it’s not a racial thing at all, so quit saying that has anything to do with anything!

If only he wasn’t some fringe church whacko.

Sigh.

If only he was

more like us.

And he consorts with radicals. 60s radicals. Did you know that?

And his resume is too thin.

And don’t even get us started on the weird, highfalutin way he talks.

So, just to be crystal clear, this has nothing to do with the color of his skin.

No, no, no!

It is simply that this Party -- especially during a time of crisis -- would never, ever embrace some hope-peddler who reeks of

Ivy-league elitism, suspect religion and inexperience.

So quit harping on the racial thing.

It's obviously not a racial thing.

It's obvious that the millions of people who voted for him are all insane, and that Barack Obama is simply

not one of us.

"They took the idols and smashed them."

"The Fairbankses, the Gilberts, the Valentinos!
And who've we got now?
Some nobodies!"

From "Sunset Boulevard":

MAX
...That is my job.
It has been for a long time. You
must understand I discovered her
when she was eighteen. I made her
a star. I cannot let her be destroyed.

GILLIS
You made her a star?

MAX
I directed all her early pictures.
There were three young directors
who showed promise in those days:
D.W. Grirrith, C.B. deMille, and
Max von Mayerling.

GILLIS
And she's turned you into a
servant.

MAX
It was I who asked to come back,
humiliating as it may seem. I
could have gone on with my career,
only I found everything unendur-
able after she divorced me.

You see, I was her first husband.

Things do not end well for Joe Gillis when he chooses to give up his career and ideals to become Norma Desmond's clever, kept man.

Because in Norma's house, Max pulls all the important strings. Max -- this other man who was both her director and her husband -- runs the estate and Norma's affairs from the shadows.

The analogy is flawed of course; in the Clinton house, it has always been Bill who was both star and director. Who believed that the light of distant suns had traveled millions of light years just to fall on him.

And the transformation from the leader of the Free World to Hillary's dutiful ward heeler has been anything but smooth. In fact, as Ryan Lizza writes in "The New Yorker" here:

...
Now the constant fear is that he [Bill Clinton] will embarrass her. When he makes news, it is rarely a good day for his spouse. Whether he was publicly comparing Barack Obama’s primary victory in South Carolina to Jesse Jackson’s campaigns in the eighties or privately, and apoplectically, complaining that Bill Richardson broke his word by endorsing Obama, every story has seemed to reinforce an image of Clinton as a sort of ill-tempered coot driven a little mad by Obama’s success. “I think this campaign has enraged him,” the adviser told me. “He doesn’t like Obama.” In private conversations, he has been dismissive of his wife’s rival. James Clyburn, an African-American congressman from South Carolina, told me that Clinton called him in the middle of the night after Obama won that state’s primary and raged at him for fifty minutes. “It’s pretty widespread now that African-Americans have lost a whole lot of respect for Bill Clinton,” Clyburn said.
...

it has clearly been a wrenching and unnatural Brundlefly-like mutation.

Some days it's gotta feel to the Big Dog like he was unfairly and prematurely booted out of Xanadu, then forced to take up residence in a glorified refrigerator box on Lower Wacker Drive. And on those days the impulse to stand up and remind everyone that they are fucking well addressing the once upon a time King of the Universe is obviously overwhelming.

So this comes by way of a warning to anyone who thinks that a Clinton White House will be an inclusive place that warmly welcomes, embraces and offers any real power to anyone who ever stood athwart their plans: In Norma's huge house, there is really only room for the gargantuan egos of the Star and her Director.

In Norma's house, everyone else is an adornment.

A disposable adornment.

McSame Discovers New Orleans

"I come in peace, for all sham-kind," daring explorer tells natives.


From the NYT:

McCain Says He Would Have Responded Differently to Hurricane Katrina

By Elisabeth Bumiller

NEW ORLEANS — ­Senator John McCain took direct aim at the Bush administration on Thursday as he stood in the lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, the area hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and declared that “never again will a disaster of this nature be handled in the terrible and disgraceful way that it was handled.’’

Mr. McCain, who was on the fourth day of a tour of America’s “forgotten places” to try to prove that he is a kinder, gentler Republican, ticked off a long list of mistakes: “There was unqualified people in charge, there was a total misreading of the dimensions of the disaster, there was a failure of communications.’’

Asked at an outdoor news conference if he traced the failure of leadership straight to the top, Mr. McCain, who has vowed to campaign with President Bush, said, emphatically, “yes.’’

...

Is is fascinating to watch McSame serially divorce and remarry Dubya five times a week, depending on which group he needs to appease. But then again, perhaps he figures that anyone still meatheaded enough to be a Republican has got to be imbecile enough to fall for any happy horseshit anyone with an (R) after their name slings.

And, to be fair, three years ago -- when it might have actually made a difference -- Chris Matthews' favorite maverick was intensely preoccupied with other,

more pressing matters.

Schmuck. On. This.

Captain Obvious gets pied.

From HuffPo:

Thomas Friedman Gets A Pie In The Face During Speech At Brown

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman was attacked with pies in the face by environmental activists during a speech about energy at Brown University yesterday.

The Providence Journal reports that Friedman's message — that responding to climate change will make America "stronger, more innovative, [and] more energy secure" — was greeted by protesters:

Not everyone agrees with Friedman's vision that innovation is the path to climate and energy salvation. Just seconds into his speech, he was interrupted by two environmental activists, who stormed the stage shortly after Friedman stepped up to the microphone, tossing two paper plates loaded with shamrock-colored whipped cream at him.

Friedman ducked, and was left with only minor streams of the sugary green goo on his black pants and turtleneck.

He stood in bewilderment and mild disgust as the young man and woman bolted from the stage and out the side door, throwing a handful of fliers into the air to relay the message they apparently were not going to deliver personally.
…

Oh, noooes! Oh the fucking humanity.

“But why?” weep the wee ones.

“Why?” asks a whole world of imaginary cab-driving expository devices.

“Why?” implore the ziti cherubim and lasagna seraphim in the Pasta Heaven of a Merciful Flying Spaghetti Monster. “Why?”

A world where Tom Friedman can take a meringue fragging to his billion-dollar punim is a world too terrible for my beautiful to contemplate, so to unlace this Gordonian lattice of morality gone wild we turn to…

Really?

You sure?

OK then.

Uh, for an answer to this vexing question we turn to… Tom Friedman,

Accompanied by this video of Tom Friedman

from many, many friedman units ago.

…
And what we have learned these last seven years on the Mouse Circus, in a gut way, was that the Miserably Incompetent Punditocracy bubble is a fundamental threat to our open society because there is no teevee network sane enough, no newspaper honorable enough, no bullshit scrubber efficient enough, to protect an open society from the Miserably Incompetent Punditocracy.

And what we needed to do was to go over to that part of the media, I’m afraid, and burst that bubble.

We needed to go over here basically and take out a very big pie right in the heart of that feculent fiefdom and burst that bubble.

And there was only one way to do it. Because part of that bubble said: “We've got you. We control the fucking media and you will open wide and swallow out adolescent, Beltway-centric, Right-slanted drivel because you have no other choice. Quit whining about the truth. Nobody gives a shit about the truth at the Big Boy Table. Fuck the truth; all we care about are our seven-figure salaries, power-whoring and our sweet speaking-and-book deals.”

And what they needed to see was American boys and girls going from podium to podium from Berkley to Brown and basically saying: 'Which part of this sentence don't you understand? You don't think, you know, we care about our open society? You think this Miserably Incompetent Punditocracy bubble fantasy, we're just going to let it grow?

Well. Suck. On. This.

OK? That was what this pieing was about.

We could have hit Bobo. He is part of that bubble.

Could have hit Stephanopoulos.

We hit Flathead Tom.

Because we could.

Of course, I’m not saying I agree.

In fact, I’m not saying it at all.

It's been cold in my city.

Or it rains.

And for what seems like the last 100 years, if it's not either/or, it's both.

And now, of course, come the earthquakes:

Scientists: Even Bigger Quake Could Hit Midwest

Robin Lloyd
LiveScience Senior Editor
LiveScience.com

The magnitude 5.2 earthquake that rocked the Midwest on Friday was felt from Kansas to Georgia, and aftershocks could continue for months at this strange seismic zone at the nation's center and even trigger another big quake, a geophysicist said.

The quake occurred on a northern extension of the New Madrid fault, about 6 miles north of Mt. Carmel, Ill. The New Madrid fault was responsible for devastating quakes in the Mississippi Valley in 1811 and 1812. So the Friday quake and its aftershocks likely are raising the blood pressure of some residents and scientists.

For decades, scientists have debated whether and when the underlying fault could generate another temblor of similar and deadly strength.

"I think we saw a window to this possibility today in the Wabash Valley," said geophysicist Allessandro Forte of the Universite du Quebec à Montreal, who has studied the region's seismicity. "It's to the north of the New Madrid seismic zone, but given the strength of crust, the stress can be distributed great distances. It's not clear if we could see something in the next few years or even next few months, I would say."

"The $64,000 question is what this earthquake portends for the future," Forte said. "The answer is I'm afraid it can go either way."
...

Being bandied around using disturbingly masturbatory language...

Stress relief or hair trigger?

One scenario predicts that some stress is relieved on the local faults where this earthquake occurred and will cool things down for a few decades. The other scenario is not so happy.

...

Also there is a certain feline now on my shit list who felt compelled to awaken me before dawn to remind that Catz Gotta Eat, decided I wasn’t taking her seriously enough and climbed up on my laptop keyboard like she was a Wobblie taking to her crate in Bughouse Square.

And (like a Wobblie) dug in her claws when I tried to move her along, so when I picked her up she sent a tiny spray of itsy, bitsy plastic thingies everywhere.

I’ve fixed a lot of computer problems, but never had to recreate a Ctrl key from its constituent molecules. Nothing on the web quite explained it well enough, so quite the little thought-experiment ensued. Do I have all the bits? Did they use glue? Why are my fingers so frakking huge? Do I cut the red wire or the blue wire? Do I shoot the hostage? Take the last train to Clarksville? Risk breaking another key to figure out how this one should fit together?

Such a maddening, ridiculous problem that was so clearly being exacerbated by lack of sleep and coffee that I had to laugh; like trying to thread a needle, drunk, with a croquet mallet.

(Oh, and in my After Action Report I did give a hearty “hat’s off” to all makers of eensy-weensy extruded, stamped and mold-injected plastic things that can be clicked together with a jeweler’s loupe and a patient hour of yoga breathing (with a break at the 15 minute mark to search the area for one more part that mustmustmust exist and be of a certain shape if my theory of the component is correct. It did; a cat’s-toenail-sliver of white plastic hiding in a crease in a white cloth) into an ingenious scissor-like hinge that holds itself in place using nothing more than the Weak Force and nostalgia.)

And lastly, today is exciting Lap #388 of the Democratic Primary 500, which, around Lap #244, was already getting about as cramped and seething and uncomfortable as being stuck on a cross-country bus trip

seated between George and Martha.

All of which, taken in the aggregate, screams one thing:

Time to turn down the world for a minute

And turn up something loud and goofy.

Captain Helpful Strikes Again

“Don’t worry, Hillary. I’ll saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaave you! "

Because what Senator Clinton (away from whom so many people have flocked in no small part because of her and her husband's triangulating, throw-"Mother Jones"-from-the-train, GOP-Lite brand of politics) needs now more than anything else is to have her husband manacle the words "Hillary" and "Republican" together even more tightly they already are.

From ABC News (emphasis added.)

Bill Clinton: Under GOP Primary System, Hillary Would Be Winning

Oh my Lord..

April 21, 2008

ABC News' Eloise Harper reports: Former President Bill Clinton, speaking to reporters after his wife’s event in Pittsburgh, PA Monday, said that under the republican primary system –- his wife would be ahead by hundreds of delegates.

"I did not actually get the delegates necessary to have a first power of the nomination under the crazy system the democrats have," Clinton said.

Please note that former Democratic President Clinton does not refer to "we" Democrats.

But to "the" Democrats. As if the party in which he has been a leading member his entire adult life were just some weird little political drive-up window, the rituals of which the Clinton's have to abide by, but to which they have no actual attachment.

He continues...

"If we were under the republican system which is more like the electoral college, she would have a 300 delegate lead ...It's an eternity 'til the general election, an eternity."

ABC News' Political Unit did some quick math and added up all the pledged delegate counts for the winner-take-all Democratic contest. As of the most recent count on the eve of the Pennsylvania state primary, Senator Hillary Clinton has won 15 state contests and was awarded 1430 delegates, not including unpledged (a.k.a. "superdelegates"). Barack Obama has won 29, and has 1257 delegates.

According to ABC's math -- Clinton would hold more like a 173 delegate-lead if her and Obama were competing in the Republican primary system given the GOP system doesn't have superdelegates. President Clinton was correct, but overestimated what his wife's lead would be by about half.

The former president also said that he thinks the people of Pennsylvania think his wife is "their girl."

Clinton said, “I've been to 45 communities, 46. In Pennsylvania alone. I think shell bring a change out there, they like her out here they know she's their girl.”

Wheeee!

Captain Helpful also added helpfully:

"They were dancing on her grave in Texas and she won anyway..."

OK, for the sake of simple, human kindness, please nobody tell the Big Dog that Hillary, uh, kinda already lost Texas by the only count that counts: D-E-L-E-G-A-T-E-S.

Obama Wins Most Texas Delegates

Mar 31, 2008

WASHINGTON (AP) — Sen. Barack Obama has won the overall delegate race in Texas thanks to a strong showing in Democratic county conventions this past weekend.

Obama picked up seven of nine outstanding delegates, giving him a total of 99 Texas delegates to the party's national convention this summer. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton won the other two, giving her a total of 94 Texas delegates, according to an analysis of returns by The Associated Press.

Texas Democrats held both a presidential primary and caucus. Clinton narrowly won the popular vote in the state's primary March 4, earning her 65 national convention delegates to Obama's 61.
...

Elsewhere, in what I am sure is completely unrelated news, the Obama Campaign temporarily changed its campaign song from "Better Way" by Ben Harper, to this little retro number


by The Sweets.

…
Hey down,
stay down,
stay down down

'Cause little Willy, Willy won't go home
But you can't push Willy round
Willy won't go!

A Sunday Morning Comin’ Down Special

Tim, Davey, George and Chris

Hey, Hey We're the Manques

3..2..1...

Here we come,
Shlockin' up yer tubes.
Dirty Hippies all hate us
So we pitch to the rubes.

Hey, hey, we're the Manques
And people say we dumb it all down.
We're all too busy poo flinging
To ever get out of Georgetown.

...

It's a helluva racket,
This opining really badly for pay,
We're the Kings of Pundit Nation,
With absolutely nothing to say.

...

Hey, hey, we're the Manques,
The Apocalypse's smirking emcees
so you'd better get ready,
We're gonna get you through your teevees.

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

Early short/short version.

Probably a longer cut later, but for now, this quick-n-dirty on what was happening on “This Week” as Villager Squirtgun


Lil' George Stephanopoulos

interviewed the world's oldest Top Gun.

McCain really did just ping-pong wildly around with the most ghastly leer Jack-O-Lanterned into his face; hopefully C&L will have some video up because you really have to see it to appreciate how unhinged he came across. Chuckling, getting shit just flat out wrong, all but saying that government-run health care sucks because...uh...I was tortured by the North Vietnamese 40 years ago.

My friend. hehehe.

Sample:

McCain: I’ll find you a hundred billion dollars tomorrow. Is there any American who doesn’t believe that you can save hundreds of billions of dollars from Waste, Fraud and Abuse.

Stephanopoulos: Yes but by every estimate the waste/fraud stuff adds up to 12-16 billion. All the rest are earmarks for things like aid to Israel and Military Housing.

McCain: So?

Stephanopoulos: So are you cutting aid to Israel?

McCain: Of course not.

Stephanopoulos: Military housing?

McCain: No.

Stephanopoulos: The math dictates that you would have to cut 30% across the board to make your numbers. Are you going to cut 30% across the board?

McCain: No. Instead I’m going to “change the way we do business” in Washington in a mystical, unexplainable way that will cause government to magically shrink!

No kidding. I really had no idea of the scale of McCain's crackpottery until I saw grandpa mix his meds this morning and come on charging at every question like a coke-horny aluminum-siding-salesman frantic to close that fucking deal!

Then, from her privileged perch high atop the Secrets of the Human Heart, Cokie Roberts lead the panel in defending 'Lil George showing his ass back-hair-to-knee-dimple on national teevee last week by striking up a rousing chorus of

"What Do the Simple Folk Do?"

Explaining that, "People are fucking morons. They don’t understand the “Constitution”. The people don’t vote for President on issues. They vote for President on a gut check. These questions were fair because that’s what people want!"

You shall not crucify us

upon a Cross Of Bling.

(With all respect to William Jennings Bryan, from whom I pilfered and inappropriately fondled his most famous speech in order to write this post.)

…

We come to speak for a better class of citizen.

My friends, you can have your ignorant shitkickers from Sisterfuck Arkansas who squat in the least fragrant remnants of the century gone by whining about queers and strong women and swarthy people; give me those instead who demand that more perfect union —those Lefties out here who inveigh against Teh Stoopid, rearing their children to believe those who work to tear out our national rot, drain our cultural poisons and rebuild with clean hands are better, finer people than those that celebrate and wallow in the filth — are as deserving of the consideration of this party as any people in this country.

It is for these that we speak.

We did not come as aggressors. Ours was not a war of conquest. We were fighting in the defense of our homes, our families, and posterity.

But we have petitioned, and our petitions have been scorned.

We have entreated, and our entreaties have been disregarded.

We have begged, and they have mocked when our calamity came; when Iraq became a conflagration and when New Orleans washed away.

We beg no longer; we entreat no more; we petition no more.

We defy them!

The Elders of the Mainstream Media Village – the fucknozzle Broderites and the FoxNews fascists -- bark and cringe in fear of the “vituperative, foul-mouthed bloggers on the left.”

But in this land of the free, no one need fear that a Thomas Fucking Friedman

will spring up from among the citizen activist and journalists.

What we need is a Steven Gilliard to stand as Gilly stood, against the encroachments of evil men and aggregated horseshit.

Mr. Carlisle said in 1878 that this was a struggle between the idle holders of idle capital and the struggling masses who produce the wealth and pay the taxes of the country; and my friends, today it is also a struggle between the dishonest slingers of divisive Right-slanted trivia who masquerade as journalisms, and the angry, honest citizens who demand meaningful discussions on matters of life and death.

It is simply a question that we shall decide upon which side shall the Democratic Party fight. Upon the side of the idle holders of idle capital and their media stooges, or upon the side of the struggling masses whose nation is dying all around them for want of a honorable reportage that advocates first and foremost on their behalf. That is the question that the party must answer first; and then it must be answered by each individual hereafter. The sympathies of the Democratic Party, as described by the platform, are on the side of the struggling masses, who have ever been the foundation of the Democratic Party.

There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it.

You come to us and tell us that the Average American is in favor of the Flag Bling Standard. I tell you that the greatness of America rests upon a thoughtful and the well-informed citizenry. Burn down the MSM and leave the Digbys and "Crooks and Liars", and your “America Idol” will spring up again as if by magic.

But destroy our Digbys and the Crooks, and no one will be left to stand against the flag-upholstered McCarthyist darkness that bears down on us from all sides.

My friends, we shall declare that this nation is able to legislate for its grown ups on every question without waiting for the consent of the Pig People and their pandering, H. Huntsman-suited media trollops, and upon that issue we expect to carry every single state in the Union.

It is the issue of 1776 over again. Our ancestors, when but 3 million, had the courage to declare their political independence of every other monarchical, authoritarian, propaganda-mill upon earth. Shall we, their descendants, when we have grown to 300 million, declare that we are less independent than our forefathers?

No, my friends, it will never be the judgment of this people. Therefore, we care not upon what lines the battle is fought.

If they dare to come out in the open field and defend the Flag Pin and guilt-by-association are good things -- vastly more important things than health care, war, the economy or the environment -- we shall whip them to bits and bury their ideology like Chernobyl, having behind us the thinking, furious majority who know that something has gone terribly wrong in the Land of the Free.

Having behind us the true interests of the nation and not the False Flag distractions foisted upon us by the lapdog media, we shall answer their demands for a Divisive Drivel standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of Liberty this dunce-cap of Stoopid.

You shall not crucify us upon a Cross Of Bling.

I Had To

On Tom Waits Friday

Joe Cocker steps in to cry us a river.

The highway's jammed with broken heroes

on a last chance power drive...

The Boss weights in.

From the Huffington Post

The Boss Picks A Boss: Bruce Springsteen Endorses Obama

Legendary all-American rocker Bruce Springsteen has thrown his red bandanna into the political ring, today endorsing Barack Obama for President on his website. Wrote Bruce:

Like most of you, I've been following the campaign and I have now seen and heard enough to know where I stand. Senator Obama, in my view, is head and shoulders above the rest.

He has the depth, the reflectiveness, and the resilience to be our next President. He speaks to the America I've envisioned in my music for the past 35 years, a generous nation with a citizenry willing to tackle nuanced and complex problems, a country that's interested in its collective destiny and in the potential of its gathered spirit. A place where "...nobody crowds you, and nobody goes it alone."

The endorsement seems to have been prompted by Obama's recent comments about Pennsylvanians being "bitter" and "clinging" to guns and various prejudices, first reported by the Huffington Post — and seems to take a swipe at Hillary Clinton in his endorsement
...

On the one hand, celebrity endorsements are kinda "Meh".

On the other hand, if this causes an uptick in people fearing my Awesome Delphic Powers, well that's all to the good.

They Say It There

And in come out here.

If you’ve been paying any attention at all to the "short bus" side of the blogosphere, you have probably noticed that a couple of new words have come lumbering into the Christopath vocabulary.

“Socialist” and “Communist”.

Well, technically they're not “new” words, but ones that have been passed through the bowels of Wingnuttia, mutated and molested to serve new and ugly masters, and have now made it in their new infernal incarnations into the New York Fucking Times.

Because more than universal health care, job security or a habitable planet...what the wingtards need more than anything else is a New Bad Word.

See, “queer” got stolen long ago by Teh Gay. Along with “gay”.

Lesbians put “dyke” up on blocks one night and stripped it of its power.

“Moonbat” was fun for awhile in a crazy-old-chain-smoking-batshit-nuts-lady-screaming-out- her-screen-door-at-imaginary-Negroes kind of way, but it had no staying power once the Dirty Fucking Hippes starting putting it on tee-shirts.

(And let’s face it. like some marketer’s idiotic made-up fast food name for a fish sandwich -- “Lord Fishington’s Seagoing Spice Island Heaven-Meat” – people felt enough like a pinheaded nine-year-old just saying “moonbat” to ruin the product.)

And, worst of all, Liberals finally figured out that, no matter how many times degenerates like Limbaugh, or perverts like O’Reilly or racist scum like Falwell spat it out, “Liberal” isn’t actually a bad word after all.

As laughable as calling someone a “Fucking patriot!”, “liberal” is, in fact, something to be damn proud of. Whereas after seeing it running full bore amok for 30 years now, “conservative” clearly belongs in the social designation lexicon right between “well-poisoner” and “puppy-fucker”.

But while the fascist legions of the Right had billionaire underwriters, think tanks, a million AM radio outlets, their own Brand Name Jebus, satellites, churches, and a news network all their own, for a long time all we we had was “Mother Jones”, the “Utne Reader”, 16% of NPR, 9% of PBS, seven tin cans, 4,000 yards of string and a router.

And in the face of such a hurricane of bullshit it was sometimes easy to forget simple truths.

And so almost exactly five years ago – just as the Best Fucking War Evah was beginning its plummet into the abyss – a semi-prominent wingnut writer named Gary Schneider penned a an odious slab of Red-baiting trash entitled (sorry but no links to authoritarian enablers here):

“Neo-Socialism: A Decomposition of the Liberal Mind”

Which comes with this yummy goodness as the salad course:

… an understanding can be developed that begins to decode their seeming day to day defiance of logic, history and common sense … thereby mitigating, albeit just a little, the extreme and frustrating befuddlement most mainstream Americans inherently feel when confronted with the illogical output of a Liberal mind. You see, to the Left, history, fact and logic are secondary to the defense and promotion of its philosophy…

Ruh Roh!

Cue ominous, Hitchcock-Psycho-Shower-Music...

A philosophy that is rooted in

Music. Getting. Louder. This is gonna be bad; I just know it!

Socialism

Oh noooooes!!

And then Our Mister Schneider serves up – hot and stinky – one steaming slice of ratshit loaf after another that all boil down to this:

1. Socialism was evil!evil!evil! And a failure. And has been definitively proven thus and so has gone where all bad things go; into the Great Woodchipper of History. So shut up!

2. Liberals are Socialists. Because, uh, I say so.

And I quote, directly from Our Mister Schneider:

” Socialism (and its younger cousin Liberalism)…”

“Now, many suggest that Liberalism is not Socialism; However, I submit that Liberalism is Socialism by other means. So, in order to understand the Liberal mindset, you must understand Socialism.”

“Nearly all contemporary liberal causes and policy can now be traced back to any one or more of these…basic tenets of Socialism, or “Neo-Socialism”.

3. Therefore Liberals are evil!evil!evil!

This laughable piping bag full of hysterical Randite cranky was, of course, greeted breathlessly as a Great Freep Forward in Wingtard Scholasticism by such stalwarts of the basement patriot bedwetter set as Frei Republic and “Stop the ACLU”.

(Some even dared whisper that Our Mister Schneider’s little tantrum might perhaps one day even rival in wonderfulness that greatest breakthrough for The Cause ever: the discovery of the Cap+Lock/Bold Key Combo by “RIGHTEOUSCHRISTIANPATRIOTEAGLEOFLIBERTY1776” on January 21st 1998!)

And what was the first comment Our Mister Schneider got right out of the box (emphasis mine)?

‘We might make some progress by calling them "socialists" rather than "liberals."’

Because in April of 2003 you had this odd mix of strutting "Boo-Ya! We Got Our Fucking War You Pussies!" wingnut triumphalism combined with the growing yet-still-almost-subliminal sense (shouted down louder and louder, year after year) that history and reality were about to start coming inexorably down on their soft, little heads.

An urgent, feverish feeling that they’d better fucking well celebrate Loud and Right Now because everything they believed in – everything they had fought and lied and screamed and impeached for – was just starting to curl up at the corners.

Just beginning to turn to radioactive shit right before their eyes.

And as things got progressively worse, the Pig People coped with the encroaching horror of the damning, final, bloody, catastrophic proof of their own epic stupidity, gullibility, incompetence and failures the same cowardly way they always have and always will: by blaming the Dirty Fucking Hippies, and by inventing a new/old Bad Word to yell at them.

So, did it work?

Well, you be the judge.

Let’s watch 59 pages fly off the calendar from the moment Our Mister Schneider first put crayon to paper and land our time machine on this lovely post by Devilstower over at Barsoom:

I'm Trying to Scare You to Death!
by Devilstower
Mon Mar 24, 2008 at 08:11:07 AM PDT

Not me, actually. But Virginia Foxx, Republican Congresswoman from the 5th Congressional District of North Carolina, doesn't believe you're scared enough.

Rep. Virginia Foxx says she believes God will judge people for sins of omission as well as commission, so the Banner Elk Republican had a message she couldn't keep to herself.

"You should fear for your country," Foxx told a gathering of members of the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce.

The Democratic majority in Congress has become "bolder and bolder" with tax dollars and the rules of the House, she told the business leaders at their annual Washington meeting.

"I am trying to scare you to death," she said.

God will judge our country for its sins, and we should fear for our country? Wait a second, the Congresswoman can't really think that God should damn America. Otherwise, the story would be running 24/7 on her namesake network, right?

As for the two Democratic presidential candidates, Foxx pulled out her reserve can of fear.

"I believe they are socialists, and if you look at their platforms you will see their plan is to take money from part of the population and give it to other people in the population," she said later, referring to their universal health care plans.

"I don't know the dictionary definition of socialism, but most people would see that as socialism."
…

And just last night as I was plowing through the NYT early-bird special, I caught a whiff of Bill Kristol's latest pile of pissy old cat litter entitled “The Mask Slips"

Which, believe it or not, actually begins thusly --

“I haven’t read much Karl Marx since the early 1980…”

and caused me to wonder not for the first time why on Earth this smirking, talent-free, elitist warpimp is sopping up gravy at the Times?

Because like congressional embarrassment Virginia Foxx, Kristol has decided to embrace the new Bad Word for Liberals and dump a big ol’ bucket of Dirty Commie on Barack Obama’s head.

If you want you can read all about it here and here.

Honestly, I read it and I yawned.

It’s not that Kristol is a bad writer, but that he is a painfully bad writer. A painfully bad writer with his own little cabin “of clay and wattles made” smack in the middle of the NYT.

A painfully bad writer because, at the end of the day, Kristol fails in the first and most important job of a writer of opinions; to filter parts of the world through the complex glass of his or her own persona in a way that tells us -- whether we ultimately agree with it or not -- something new or real or revealing.

With a real writer, mixed in with the ink you should find a pipette of blood. At least a few sentences taken out of the arena where the writer goes to slug it out with his demons and his beliefs.

The problem with Kristol is that what he genuinely believes is both execrable and ossified to the point that he has becomes a self-parody: a bile dispenser with a permanent, death’s-head-rictus grin lacquered to the front of his skull.

He’s a fascist -- out-and-out -- in a country that fought a World War to eradicate the diseased, degenerate ideology that is at the dead, dark heart of NeoConservatism. Kristol is a True Believer in something truly evil, and so outside of the damp fastness of the Fox News locker room or the safety of whatever Mad Hatter NeoCon Tea Parties get thrown up at the House of Kristol, Bloody Billy cannot – dare not – take to the massive NYT pulpit and speak from the heart about what he genuinely, deeply believes or values.

Because like Virginia Foxx or the bedwetters at Frie Republic, what Kristol genuinely values is horrifying.

And so like the entire Right Wing Noise Machine, outside of some cold, lumpy, boiler-plate pabulum about “Luvin Murrica!” the bulk of Kristol’s words are always devoted to lashing acidly out.

With him – as with the rest of the the Noise Machine – it is all-attacking-all-the-time. And in that world, a piece of oratory or page of writing is judged not by how well it advances an argument or cogently and persuasively is debates policy, but instead is measured almost exclusively by how much it offends, irritates and mocks the Dirty Fucking Hippies.

It is hatespeech-as-genre; a genre in which Kristol is so saturated that he cannot go more than a paragraph or two without reflexively trying to shiv a Liberal somewhichway. Kristol and his ilk remind me of nothing so much as a German National Socialist from, say, 1931; so steeped in hateful ideology that they literally cannot resist slipping “…and because of the Dirty Jews” into every argument.

Kristol’s writing fails in its first duty because he shows us nothing.

He risks nothing.

He illuminates nothing.

Instead he has built himself a toasty little sniper's nest on the roof of the New York Times and merrily pot-shots anything to the left of Mussolini.

Except now that his Conservative Movement has been shown to be the blood-drunk fascist whorehouse that the Dirty Fucking Hippies have been warning us all about, the word “Liberal” has lost its pejorative currency.

So, late to the party as usual, Kristol now does what the rest of the Pig People Peerage have been doing for five years: switching from screaming “Liberal!” at 100 decibels to screaming “Commie!” at 150.

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

Uppity Negro Edition.

I’ve got reams and reams of notes here, but honestly today really was just about as much of a teevee wasteland as I have ever seen.

Frankly, given a choice between

A. Watching today’s Mouse Circus again

B. Eating a fistful of Flintstone’s Chewable Anti-coagulants, pummeled my kidneys with a truncheon, and peeing blood for an hour into a dumpster fire. Or,

C. Getting drunk and passing out at an all night, no-limit organlegger poker party.

I would have a hard time deciding which would leave me feeling more drained and sore and awful for the experience.

But innocent of this knowledge, I woke up early to get the vacuum tubes and telex machine that drive my in-home electronified difference engine

all warmed and ready for the watching of the Mouse Circus.

And then sat through what felt like 1,000 hours of drivel in which neither the name “John Yoo”, nor the designation of “The Principles”, nor the word T-O-R-T-U-R-E was mentioned anywhere.

Not a peep. Not a whisper.

From anyone.

Anywhere.

Instead it was mostly about how a black man running for President shouldna oughtna be using the word “bitter” to describe the mood of a certain segment of the American electorate.

'Cause that'd be "elitist".

Which is spelled e-l-i-t-i-s-t, but pronounced like so

Instead the pattern which the Media will continue to follow vis-à-vis Senator Obama came into full, clear relief:

Stage 1: Someone finds something controversial that either the candidate said or someone he knows said. Thirty seconds -- scratchy, context-free -- snatched from here or there.

Stage 2: The pearl-clutching begins in earnest, usually on FoxNews (“Your 24 hours Reverend Wright Station.”).

Stage 3: The Villagers toupees, weaves and comb-overs burst collectively into flame from the meteor-grade atmospheric friction generated by running in every direction at once and screaming about how, yes, these comments will probably be received by The Average American as an affront and a tragedy worse than the Hindenburg.

Crashing into The Manger!

On Christmas!

Stage 4: The hunt begins by The Villagers for an Average American to actually interview. Finding none (and realizing it has been something 20 years since any of them had the slightest inking what “average” people do, say, sound like or believe) The Villagers instead devote the vast resources of the Mouse Circus to interviewing each other.

Stage 5: Having spent the Lord’s Day vigorously circle-jerking their peers, The Villagers somberly confirm that very Serious People all agree that whatever-it-was was worse than seven Hitlers.

Stage 6a: Obama makes a speech that is longer than 30 seconds that turns the lead weights they were tying to his ankles into solid gold. Or;

Stage 6b: Someone dirty fucking hippy finds a speech from Bill Clinton from, say, 1991 that says exactly the same thing, and which no one at the time (certainly not Team Clinton) found to be in the least bit controversial. Or;

Stage 6c: Someone remembers that the powerful, leading Conservatives routinely do and say things orders of magnitude more deliberately divisive and hateful every damned day.

(And don’t you get tired of these “Hate America First” Conservatives that people like McCain relentlessly fellate for the privilege of giving the United States a third Bush term, good and hard, right up the ass?)

It took me a full day to realize that the MSM and camp Clinton were actually trying to making a Big Frakking Deal over the fact that Senator Obama thought that some people who have been left behind as they watched American Dream drive away in a Hummer with a "W" sticker on the left bumper and a faded yellow ribbon on the right are bitter about it.

That this observation and its corollaries are somehow wildly controversial or condescending.

Because if Middle America weren’t exhausted and frustrated and furious and, yes, bitter about have their children’s futures carved up and sold off by the job-lot by vast, heartless, moneyed interests, then this guy


wouldn’t have a career.

Hell, that's the easy truth.

The harder truth is this: if a whole lotta people weren’t also as gullible and terrified and, yes, dumb-as-five-pounds-of-Play-Doh enough to let homophobia, Hispanophobia, Bible-thumpery, flag-swaddling and other baubles hyp-mo-tize them into stepping off a cliff, then this guy

would never, ever have been elected anything.



For me, the fact that the Reagan Campaign – not the Mondale Campaign, but the fucking Reagan campaign – used this in 1984 as a GOP Call to Arms

told anyone who was paying the slightest bit of attention to life in these United States everything they needed to know about “Reagan Democrats”

Because anyone who actually bothered to listened to the lyrics heard some very scary things.

Like this:

Sent me off to a foreign land
To go and kill the yellow man

Born in the USA....

Come back home to the refinery
Hiring man said son if it was up to me
Went down to see my V.A. man
He said son, don’t you understand

Which, in retrospect I now realize probably makes it the perfect Republican Anthem


A ballad about the tragic life of the vet and the working man who have gotten fucked over…

Sung by those who were getting fucked over…

As a worshipful paean to those
who were doing the fucking over.

Amazing. Just, a--mazing.

And so the Conservative revolution reached its apotheosis, powered by a generation of aggrieved idiots who could be kept forever distracted by guns and Jebus and bright, shiny queers into slitting open their own bellies and offering up their livers to feed Republican house pets.

Who couldn’t be bothered to understand how their own country works.

Couldn’t be bothered to read their own Constitution, or a newspaper, or even the lyrics to the song that they themselves are screaming at the tops of their lungs.

Instead, they went to the polls and voted Republican time after time after time because, y’know, that’s what guy’s like this told them

Sweet Baby Jebus wanted them to do.

They weren’t being persuaded to do it. Reasoned into it. PowerPointed.

Instead they’re being

bred to it.

The problem is, our politicians suck and our media is a joke because a great number of our fellow citizens are just too fucking meatheaded to properly steward the democracy that better men and women bequeathed to them.

An army of rubes who can be endlessly flim-flammed into stepping in front of the same bus the same way over and over and over again. And who only get angry when some “elite” gingerly suggests that, after two generations of stepping in front of that bus, maybe…uh…the bus is not the problem.

Maybe it’s them.

The simple truth is that way too many of our problems come down to the fact that our nation is barnacled with Stoopid.

And they vote.

And from now until the end of time, that is one subject no one at the Mouse Circus dares to even hint at while the cameras are rolling.

Mean Old Billionaire

Won’t Wind Freedom’s Watch.

Wingnut Welfare kings and queens freak out en masse over maybe having to get real work in George Bush’s Prosperity Doctrine America.

Film at 11.

From the NYT.

Great Expectations for a Conservative Group Seem All but Dashed

By MICHAEL LUO

The conservative group Freedom’s Watch, headlined by two former senior White House officials, had been expected to be a deep-pocketed juggernaut in this year’s presidential election, heralded by supporters on the right as an aggressive counterweight to MoveOn.org, George Soros and the like.

But after a splashy debut last summer, in which it spent $15 million in a nationwide advertising blitz supporting President Bush’s troop escalation in Iraq, the group has been mostly quiet, beset by internal problems that have paralyzed it and raised questions about what kind of role, if any, it will actually play this fall.

The group was conspicuously absent this week as Gen. David H. Petraeus, the United States commander in Iraq, returned to Congress to testify. Moreover, the troubles at Freedom’s Watch come as some Democratic-aligned groups are seeking to take the offensive, with one group, Progressive Media USA, planning to raise $40 million to spend on advertisements and other efforts to undermine Senator John McCain of Arizona, the presumptive Republican nominee.

Independent groups not constrained by the limits placed on campaign contributions to candidates and parties have increasingly become major players in races for federal offices. Those known as 527s, named for the section in the tax code they fall under, raised more than $400 million in the 2004 election cycle alone, according to the Campaign Finance Institute. Such efforts could be especially beneficial for Mr. McCain, who has badly trailed his Democratic counterparts in fund-raising.

Backers of Freedom’s Watch once talked about spending some $200 million, a figure that officials now say was exaggerated. Lending to the aura of ambition, the organization moved into a state-of-the-art 10,000-square-foot office in Washington and hired a staff of about 20, with talk of bringing in scores more for a vigorous campaign to promote conservative issues.

Behind the scenes, however, Freedom’s Watch has been plagued by gridlock and infighting, leaving it struggling for direction, according to several Republican operatives familiar with the organization who were granted anonymity so they could be candid about the group’s problems.

Although the organization was founded by a coterie of prominent conservative donors last year, the roughly $30 million the group has spent so far has come almost entirely from the casino mogul Sheldon G. Adelson, the chairman and chief executive of the Sands Corporation, who was recently listed as the third-richest person in the country by Forbes magazine.

Mr. Adelson has insisted on parceling out his money project by project, as opposed to setting an overall budget, limiting the group’s ability to plan and be nimble, the Republican operatives said. Mr. Adelson, who has a reputation for being combative, has rejected almost all of the staff’s proposals that have been brought to him, leaving the organization moribund for long stretches, the operatives said.

“What has happened here is pretty much you had a single donor who essentially dictates the way things occur or do not occur,” said one of the Republican operatives.

…

In an example of the false starts at Freedom’s Watch, the group had planned to turn its attention to the threat of Iran, convening a private gathering for Mr. Adelson and a group of experts on Iran and radical Islam in October at the Four Seasons in Washington.

Afterward, the attendees were asked to put together proposals for projects to be financed, leading many of them to scramble over the course of a week to pull together their applications, with the promise they would hear back by the end of November, according to one participant, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. Since then, however, no financing has materialized.

…

Mr. Adelson, who is aggressively expanding his business in China and was recently appointed to a presidential advisory position on trade issues, has been a prolific donor to Republican candidates and committees, as well as independent conservative 527 groups, contributing more than $2 million last year alone. He also established a foundation last year to support Israel and Jewish causes and pledged $200 million to it.

…

In another example of fumbling, staff members at Freedom’s Watch spent weeks working on an ambitious package for the presidential campaign that included message testing, polling and advertising, only for it to go nowhere earlier this year.

…

/Pause for piteous weeping at the sad, sad sight of a rich guy using his fiscal leverage to just completely fuck with his minions/

/End pause/


If you have ever mowed the lawn of some loud, peevish, old douchebag who thinks that parting with his pocket change after you have sweated off 15 pounds to make his yard sparkle is more unfair than slavery and worse than seven Hitlers…then you can probably understand how fucked-over the wingnut heroes of Freedom’s Watch feel right about now.

Which I find to be redolent with the minty fresh flavor of irony goodness because those exact circumstances writ large – capital holding labor hostage, unprotected and unmediated by any rules -- are exactly what the wingnut heroes of Freedom’s Watch have in store for you and your children.

Just like they said they would, the Wingnut Movement really did take over the United States government.

And just like they said they would, they wrecked it.

‘Cause it was evil.

Eeeeeevil.

And so, over the last couple of decades, the United Serfs of America have gotten a good, full pour of exactly what the world looks like when Evil Gummint is gutted, and the corporate shills, liars, fascists and the assorted other Rapture-Ready lunatics who make up the Right Wing A-Team move into the vacuum and are actually allowed to run things.

The planet melts. Whole cities and counties get smashed to rubble. The economy stampedes every last pfennig that can be begged or borrowed into the pockets of the filthy rich and leaves everyone else to fight for crusts and crumbs. Children’s toys are made out of poison.

The media sells its organs to butchers.

The dollar starts cutting itself with razors just to feel alive.

The military is ground into powder.

And your Conservative Movement’s solution?

More war.

More tax cuts.

More deregulation.

Of course, as any real American knows, “government” in a democracy is really nothing more than a non-guillotine-based means available to citizens to allow to them to act for their common good and in the national interest.

But of course the core tenets of the Glorious Conservative Revolution dictate that there are no higher interests than those that are immediate, personal and selfish.

That the “common good” is just code for “Communism”.

And that is you happen to die under in the gears of the Great Capitalist Machine, that just proves you were unfit to live in the first place.

So no big surprise that one of the early casualties of this relentless mocking and bulldozing of the very idea of sacrificing for a cause greater than oneself might be that the Feudal Overlords of the Glorious Conservative Revolution would, y’know, not believe in dipping into their boodle for the good of The Cause.

Or for anything that does not benefit them directly and personally.

So while it utterly delights me to see Conservative Movement parasites reaping what they have sown, longer term, if you want a clear look at how America will be run after Conservatives finally smash the Evil Gummint and turn all of us over to our new Feudal Overlords, take a peek at the dynamics at work inside the meltdown at Freedom’s Watch.

A nation where everything – schools, roads, courts, the food you eat, the water you drink and the air you breathe – have all been defunded, deregulated and privatized.

A nation stratified into billionaires, poor house servants, poorer soldiers and starving field hands.

A nation where the “common good” is an antique concept barely even mentioned in history classes at the universities that your children will never be able to afford to attend anyway.

Where anything that moves is a boutique project funded by the private largesse of billionaire wingnuts who dictate terms to suit themselves, and fuck with you just because they can.

Where we are finally the nation Conservatives always wanted us to be: a money monarchy, ruled entirely by the whims of wealth, where justice is doled out like piñata candy to the most supplicalicious, and victory in war is measured solely in percentage of shareholder value added.