Dead Loss

— n
1. informal a person, thing, or situation that is completely useless or unprofitable
2. a complete loss for which no compensation is received

According to one of the human Q-Tips who writes for Andrew Breitbart's Big Mendacity site, this was the conference I attended this weekend:

...My friend Tupac Pelosi-Mumia, who lives with his parents Marge and Fred Bosley in Beverly Hills (“I kills me that they forced me to drive a Mercedes bought with his money made oppressing the workers at his department stores, but I do it for the sake of the struggle”), told me about a terrifying encounter he had with a couple of rampaging conservatives. All he did was throw a free range egg at them during a “No Free Speech for Fascists” demonstration there by Take Back the Mid-Day, his pro-civil liberties collective.

“They were going to give me a wedgie,” he reported, “But the surprise was on them — I don’t believe in wearing underwear! It’s part of the patriarchal paradigm!” The brutality of the wingnuts is truly terrifying. “Those conservatives are tough and mean and they will kick your ass,” Tupac said. “And that’s just the women.”

There were so many panels to choose from! I couldn’t decide on whether to go to “Gender Justice and Making Men Pay” or “Azatlan Now: Getting the US Out of North America,” so I just wandered around to see what superstars I could run into. It was awesome – I even got to shake Keith Olbermann’s hand, but he was kind of cold to me after I told him “I will totally watch your show as soon as I can find the Logo channel!” It is the Logo network, right? Or is it the Oprah one?

Plenty of petitions to sign too – I love getting involved in hand-on activism that makes a difference! I signed petitions about banning eating whales, tuna, beef, pigs, and chicken. I kind of drew the line at the super-vegan guys – call me a “bean curd criminal,” but as far as I’m concerned, you’ll have to pry my tofu out of my mom’s fridge.

I also signed some green energy petitions but had to stop to answer a call from United telling me my upgrade came through for the flight home – bingo! Finally, some guys dressed like pimps told me all about this deadly poison the capitalists are forcing on us called dihydrogen monoxide. I never took a science course at Berkeley since I didn’t have time as a double major in Womyn’s Literature and Oppression Studies...

It goes on and on like that.

Perhaps you can see why rarely bother trying to persuade Conservatives of anything anymore?

Between 9/10ths of the Conservative Movement who masturbate themselves blind in giggly, vicarious dread at the awful awfulness of the Cartoon Dirty Fucking Hippie Emmanuel Goldstein's their Brain Caste as created

to keep their tiny minds off of just how fucked Conservatism has left this country (from "Hating Goldstein")...

...
There is no Big Brother bestriding the Right, because there doesn't need to be: because the one, genuine innovation of the Right has been to spend 40 years carefully cultivating a dumbed-down Base which at this point are little more than reprogrammable Golem.

Whatever they are told today through the Right's trusted in-house organs, they will believe.

Whatever those in-house sources tell them tomorrow -- even if it is in 180 degree opposition to what they were told today -- they will believe.

Because the day-to-day ebb and flow of Conservative lies -- no matter how malevolent or jaw-droppingly ridiculous -- no longer matters to a Base that knows only two things: that Big Brother loves them and that Emmanuel Goldstein is to blame for all of their problems.
...

..and the remaining, Expatriate 1/10th of the Conservative Movement who lament the loss of the Glorious Imaginary Conservative Movement That Never Was, and strain their intellectual muscles extravagantly noticing -- finally and far-too-late -- just a fraction of what the Dirty Fucking Hippies have been trying to tell them for the last 30 years (Here, Andrew Sullivan actually has the balls to brag that his 2006 book finally taking note of the capture of the Right by the Fundamentalists was "a little ahead of its time"), I have no patience left for anyone on the Right.

They are the millstone around our cultural neck, and their continued, toxic influence is the single largest impediment to repairing the terrible damage they have inflicted on our nation.

Tell Me About The Liberals, George

Of Lies and Men

A strong contender for this weekend's "Most Pitiable Sight" award must go to Wall Street Journal sock puppet John Fund,

who I spotted skulking around the Netroots' conference room level of the Minneapolis Convention Center trailing eager-beaver, 3rd tier wingnut Warren Todd Huston

like some latter-day, Randite George and Lennie from "Of Mice and Men".

It is such a stark and pathetic reminder of the fundamentally peevish and parasitic nature of the Right that they would build an entire movement and schedule entire conferences around the act of hating people like me.

That they would shadow us from city to city just to do so.

That the barrenness of their ideological cupboard is now so complete that a Wall Street Journal douchbag from New York and a mid-level wingnut talking point Pez dispenser from Chicago would travel all the way to Minnesota just to slink around among the happy energetic Liberals to grub for crumbs of incipient socialism About Which They Can Be Loudly Outraged, and crib notes about what panels the Dirty Fucking Hippies had put together to destroy America.

As I have noted in the past, Mr. Huston has been hustling hard to climb into the second tier of wingnut apologists for some time now (From this September 2010 Anatomy of a Breitbartian Ratfucking):

Local Breitbart Clone

uses adulterated video to justify 20,568th consecutive unhinged rant against Those Evil Liberals Who Are Destroying America (this time the target was ThinkProgress.com.)
...

Future historians take note: This is what it looked like when the Right stopped merely drinking the Koolaid and started injecting it directly into their spines.

Perhaps here, in the land of Mary Richards, Mr. Huston can finally turn the world on with his smile and

make it after all.

Professional Left Podcast #80

Professional Left Podcast #79

The New-New Media.


Having been here a couple of days now with a big chunk of time admittedly taken up with other matters, two things I have noticed about this year's Netroots:

1. Buncha A-Listers are MIA.
2. Virtually no major media.

Granted, my previous experience was at NN Chicago, which drew every major Democratic candidate for president, and an assload of national and international media.

It was Big News.

Then -- wham -- the Age of the Blogosphere was over. Too bad you missed it. Very quickly the idea of several thousand Liberal members of the Reality Based community gathering under one roof to debate America's complex problems and propose some real solutions was once again of no interest to the Elite Media whatsoever. Just another wacky "water skiing squirrel" filler bit to have on-hand to pad out a loose half-hour. Instead, a handful of Bush Regime dead-enders in funny hats ranting about Big Gummint and Death Panels at a Ramada Inn in St. Reagandale, Florida could now command the attention of major news outlets.

Wall-to-wall.

Week after week after week.

It was Big News.

It was the new-new thing...despite the fact that it was overwhelmingly obvious to anyone with two functioning synapses to rub together that the Tea Baggers were nothing new at all: that they were just the same old wingnut gleeps with a new paint job and an unlimited line of credit from Koch Industries and Fox News.

But it was in no one's professional interest to look at the shiny new-new thing too closely. Or at all. Except of course those fucking Liberals, and by 2009, Liberals had once again ceased to exist anyway: not because we hadn't been proven right -- over and over and over again -- but because the moral consequences of what we were saying were too culturally and financially terrifying for our media to bear.

So where were the major networks? The powerhouse journals? Where was the Liberal New York Times? MSNBC?

Busy. Don't ask.

Instead bear-baiting freaks like Andrew Brietbart were once again handed a big wad of free air time to try to hustle his resume.

Here's how Politico headlined Netroots Nation:

Breitbart crashes Netroots Nation

Mic’d up and with a camera crew in tow, the Big Government blogger — and recent toppler of Rep. Anthony Weiner — came looking for a confrontation at this gathering of 2,500 progressive activists.

And he got one: Dozens of progressive activists and bloggers quickly surrounded him, yelling and shooting him with cameras of their own in a frenzy that quickly drew photographers to surround them.

And what were the Dirty Hippies up to at Netroots? Once again, Politico was on the fucking job, America!

Liberal activists booed an unpaid intern for Barack Obama’s campaign arm Thursday night after he defended the president’s record on gay rights during a Netroots Nation breakout session.

Even here in flyover country with no Senate filibuster showdown or election looming, there is content enough here for dozens of compelling stories waiting on silver platters to fill the content-starved maw of the Media Beast, so why the desertion-in-force?

Well these are not things we little people need to trouble our silly little heads about.

Because they're, y'know,

man-talk.

On another topic altogether, “This Week with Christiane Amanpour...” will once again hand over a massive slice of America's public airwaves to dyspeptic old ruin John McCain and blood-soaked hellspawn Liz Cheney.

Oh wait, I guess that's not another topic altogether, is it?

And Then Came Friday Evening

When the summer cold that BG and I have been carefully cultivating landed on me with both feet.

The downside: I'm going to be loopy from cold meds all day, so if you see me, discount about 17% of my weirdness.

The upside: It is possible that, loopy from cold meds, I snuck out of the Liberal Enclave last night and carefully pre-moistened and then coughed on every doorknob in the Right Online's Wingnut Enclave.

You're welcome.

Professional Left Podcast #78

The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.
-- Saint Augustine

On the road with the Professional Left.

Pictured above is Blue Gal editing the component parts of the podcast you are listening to into a confection that pleased our ears (her PC with all of her magic tricks took a hit before we arrived here, so we are making-do with a hand-held tape recorder and the software she downloaded onto my ancient...Old Timey... vintage machine.)

Pictured also are my giant feet nude body parts. Please feel free to tweet the hell out of them and send them along to Andrew Breitbart who can wax his little Pope to them to his heart's content and then use them as a Wang of Damocles to hold over my head, as is apparently the custom of our strange times.

With any luck, the Democratic Party will ask me politely to leave :-)



Having fun and meeting fellow travelers.

More later.


UPDATE: Off to the Alliance for American Manufacturing fashion show and party. Hope to see you there.

Democrats Allocate $2.2 Billion

for Ally-crushing Superbus.

They say "Boo".
DLC says "Run".

Boo.

Run.

Boo.

Run.

Quit waiting for the cavalry kids.

The cavalry ain't coming and

God's Away on Business.

There's just us.

And when they say "Boo" we say "Is that all you've got, fucko?"

From the late Steven Gilliard:

I'm a fighting liberal

...
It was the liberals who opposed the Nazis while the conservatives were plotting to get their brown shirts or fund Hitler. It was the liberals who warned about Spain and fought there, who joined the RAF to fight the Germans, who brought democracy to Germany and Japan. Let us not forget it was the conservatives who opposed defending America until the Germans sank our ships. They would have done nothing as Britain came under Nazi control. It was they who supported Joe McCarthy and his baseless, drink fueled claims.

Without liberals, there would be no modern America, just a Nazi sattlelite state. Liberals weak on defense? Liberals created America's defense. The conservatives only need vets at election time.

It is time to stop looking for an accomodation with the right. They want none for us. They want to win, at any price. So, you have a choice: be a fighting liberal or sit quietly. I know what I am, what are you?

With Doctor Dean among Teh Liberals

Pictured here are Fran / Blue Gal, former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, and DFA Communications Director Levana Leyendecker.

Behind the camera, me.

Herr Doktor Governor Mister Dean gave a fine speech, as did Russ Feingold.

We sat in the back, having a couple of beers, cracking wise with Dave Neiwert and meeting some fine people, including the Glitter Bandit Nick Espinosa

who is a fine young man who wears his values like a suit of armor, but who you may know from most your Elite Media either as "man", "gay man", "a protester" or "a gay protester".