The University of Parking Meters

has its first graduate.

From the Chicago Tribune (via Whet Moser)

ComEd offers $500 million to state in return for profit guarantee

Posted by Rick Pearson, Monique Garcia, Ray Long and Julie Wernau at 6:00 p.m.; last updated at 8:12 p.m.

SPRINGFIELD --- ComEd is offering cash-strapped state government leaders $500 million upfront in exchange for a profit guarantee in future years centered around electrical rates.

State lawmakers greeted the idea with skepticism today amid concerns the utility was trying to take advantage of the state’s growing budget deficit to lock in profits when the future cost of electricity to consumers is expected to decline.
The proposal is a last-minute addition to a legislature looking for an easy way for free money to help avoid deep cuts to a variety of social services. Yet lawmakers, who have ruled out a politically unpalatable election-year income-tax hike, said they saw little difference in voting for an electrical rate increase for Chicago-area customers when rates should decrease because of the economy.

Edison and its parent company, Exelon, offered the plan to Gov. Pat Quinn’s office, are offering $500 million to the state and a promise to commit $1 billion over 10 years to develop a more efficient “smart grid” for electrical transmission and other projects that would create 2,000 “green” jobs lasting between 2 and 10 years. A number of sources had earlier said Edison offer reached up to $1 billion, but other sources said later that they were confused by the company's offer to also invest $1 billion in infrastructure in exchange for the $500 million to the state.

In documents obtained by the Tribune, Edison called the plan a “public-private partnership” that would help ease “the brunt of the recession” on Illinois residents facing “the state’s low level of economic development, high unemployment and difficult budgetary challenges.” But the proposal also would largely render the work of the state’s utility-rate setting Illinois Commerce Commission moot by guaranteeing the firm a rate of return.

State Rep. John Fritchey, D-Chicago, echoed many of his colleagues by saying the proposal “raises a lot of red flags.”

“I think whenever the state finds itself in a situation where a private interest can put a price tag on favorable treatment, it’s a bad way to conduct business,” Fritchey said.

Officials in Quinn’s budget office said the proposal was presented to them by the utility but added the governor hadn’t seen it.

“We’ll review anything that comes our way,” said budget office spokeswoman Kelly Kraft. “It’s so new, I can’t even say whether it’s being embraced or not being embraced.”

The executive director of the Citizens Utility Board, David Kolata, said the trade off is bad for consumers.
...

I appreciate the fact that lawmakers seem to be bright enough to smell the reek coming off of this deal, but given the deadly embrace of cowardice and denial that the public and the government are locked into -- a public that fucking well knows that the Crash Is Here, but will not elect people who tell them the whole, ugly truth (beating up unions won't save us and just raising taxes won't save us)...creating a political class that knows they are absolutely required to lie to large numbers of fuckwits about nonexistent or Ponzi-based

magical,

Chicago Water For Sale?
Newstip Date: 10-20-2009

With Chicago facing a half-billion-dollar shortfall – and Mayor Daley ruling out increases in taxes, fees, and fines – could the city which has pioneered the leasing of major public assets be looking into a long-term lease of its water system?

“The City of Chicago Department of Water Management is said to be considering a lease of its water and wastewater system,” reported the Public Works Financing newsletter in April.

ouchless

Daley's new budget will drain meter sale reserves

December 3, 2009

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

Chicago’s 75-year, $1.15 billion parking meter windfall would be nearly drained in just one year to provide token property tax relief and stave off tax increases, thanks to a $6.1 billion 2010 budget approved Wednesday.

Despite complaints that Chicago’s future was being mortgaged, the City Council voted 38-to-12 to approve Mayor Daley’s plan to drain reserves generated by asset sales to solve the city’s worst budget crisis in modern history.
...

solutions in order to keep their jobs -- it is inevitable that, sooner or later, like the junkie who has already hocked the teevee and the family silver to feed the spike but who solemnly promises he'll never, ever pawn mom's prosthetic limb for dough...

...the Springpatch Tweaker Brigade will eventually end up, shivering and puking in the vestibule of the local cash shack with mom's robot leg in hand, negotiating out of panic while slapping invisible budget cut beetles out of their hair.

All of which leads me to believe that maybe a Governor Pawnbroker is not the worst idea in the world.

Non-Coastal Resident Wins "Webby"

Roger Ebert (second right) and Tom Wolfe (center) drinking in O’Rourke’s. Photograph © Jack Lane

Fraud suspected/ National terror alert level raised from “Sea Breeze” to “Monkeyshines”.

From the Sun-Times:

Ebert 'raises bar,' lands Webby Award
Online work brings him joy, grateful critic says


May 4, 2010

Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert has won a Special Achievement Webby Award from the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences.

Ebert is being honored for his online journal, which "has raised the bar for the level of poignancy, thoughtfulness and critique one can achieve on the Web, while at the same time shining a light on the most important issues facing journalism," the academy said. "Roger's insights and his unparalleled level of engagement [have] made the Internet a more thoughtful, engaging and self-aware environment."

The Webby Awards are regarded as the Internet's highest honor. "The blog is the writer's medium for the 21st century, and mine has been an unalloyed joy," Ebert said. "Winning the Webby means the world to me."
…

Seriously, Roger is a hella good writer and richly, richly deserves all the ribbons and cups that anyone can put him in the running for.

As to the “writer’s medium for the 21st Century”?

Well, I Can Haz Seen the future of writing.

Vividly.

Which is why I have recently taken a keen interest in the burgeoning field of cosmetology.

Are You There Odin?

It's me, Bobo.

Today's airy, 800-word, anti-journalism ball of foam-peanut-punctuated cotton-candy ("The Limits of Policy") begins thusly:

"Roughly a century ago, many Swedes immigrated to America..."

Then I think a Knight plays Chess with Death

for awhile.

Then Bobo randomly hangs the terms "gigantic", "ethnic", "region" and "capital" here and there like pudding skin on a wire frame to illustrate the existential futility of all action.

Or something.

Because as we established long ago:

Whenever a David Brooks column commences way back in the worm-nibbled pages of some History 201 or Philosophy 310 textbook with something that sounds a lot like the lyrics of "Stonehenge"...you can absolutely bet your lunch money that what Bobo is giving himself is a good, long running start at trying to make some sad, sad point about These Gut-Stabbed Modern Times while jumping cleeeeeean over the fact that his Movement and his Party have put this country into emergency room, bleeding from thirty years of Conservative bayonet thrusts into its belly.

And this is because, as one of the Last Non-Shoutycracker Defenders of Conservatism's criminal ideology, Bobo is a bit like a Capulet stuck at a Montague funeral.

With Montague blood still wet on his hands.

And a dozen trophy Montague ears dangling from his bandoleer.

Wearing a "F*ck The Montagues!" tee-shirt.

In other words, in each column he must move Vewy Vewy Slowly towards the exit, making polite, meaningless journalism-like noises en route. Eventually, after bibbling enough unsourced studies and mawkish platitudes, he is near enough to his contractually-obligated word-count to toss a weak little Conservative establishmentarian stink bomb or two --

Bad policy can decimate the social fabric, but good policy can only modestly improve it.
...

Finally, we should all probably calm down about politics. Most of the proposals we argue about so ferociously will have only marginal effects on how we live, especially compared with the ethnic, regional and social differences that we so studiously ignore.

-- and scuttle away.

One could, of course, point out that Bobo is simply fucking lying and that there have been just scads of programs and policies -- big and small -- that have had enormously positive effects on life in America. But given that they all tend to have begun life or have evolved into Big Gummint Liberal Programs and screw up his ridiculous thesis (like the WPA, the Civilian Conversation Corps, the GI Bill, rural electrification, school lunches, Head Start, workplace safety and labor laws, environmental regulations, food inspections, Social Security, drug testing, Medicare, a progressive tax structure and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on)...I can see why Bobo chose to simply assert that they do not exist or that their effects have been trivial.

Also, as one who would be wearing a hair net and handing out sausage samples at Costco were it not for the privileges his class, money, political connections and year of birth have afforded him, I can understand why Bobo would be anxious to divert any conversation about what is broken in America the Hell away from those topics.

On the other hand, I agree that our politics could use a bit of calming down.

In fact, just as soon as Bobo turns his fire-hoses on the bigots and demagogues who have completely captured his Party and have spent the last 30 years accumulating power and wrecking the country with hideously toxic policies by deliberately whipping imbeciles and wingnuts into a perpetually low-boiling blood-frenzy about Liberals, impeaching Democratic Presidents, and generally screaming at a million decibels that anyone Left of Joe McCarthy is an America-hating Commie rat...

...I will happily stop pointing out that David Brooks is a towering mediocrity who makes his daily bread wiping the asses of oligarchs with comforting lies wrapped in $100-bills.

Conservatives Talk To American Teens

About

Immigration




Policy

I must have fallen asleep during the intermission, but weren't the absolutely unfettered and unregulated forces of greed, selfishness and Darwinism supposed to solve all of our problems by now?

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

"Then, with an hour or so to kill before he had to catch the plane, we spread his drawings out on the table and pondered them for a while, wondering if he'd caught the proper spirit of the thing...but we couldn't make up our minds. His hands were shaking so badly that he had trouble holding the paper, and my vision was so blurred that I could barely see what he'd drawn.

"Shit," I said. "We both look worse than anything you've drawn here."

He smiled. "You know--I've been thinking about that," he said. "We came down here to see this teddible scene: people all pissed out of their minds and vomiting on themselves and all that...and now, you know what? It's us..."

**********
Huge Pontiac Ballbuster blowing through traffic on the expressway.

A radio news bulletin says the National Guard is massacring students at Kent State and Nixon is still bombing Cambodia. The journalist is driving, ignoring his passenger who is now nearly naked after taking off most of his clothing, which he holds out the window, trying to wind-wash the Mace out of it.
...

Hunter Thompson -- "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved" (1970)

On “Face the Nation” Bob Schieffer sat around the tack room shooting the shit with Representative Charlie Melancon (D-La), Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla), Representative Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill) and Arizona GOP Senate Candidate Kookbar J.D. Hayworth.

Since the local CBS signal sucks, I can only assume they spent the half hour talking about hunch bettors vs. odds bettors.


On “Meet the Press” ...

Exclusive! Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
Exclusive! Governor Charlie Crist
Exclusive! Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano
Exclusive! Interior Secretary Ken Salazar
Exclusive! Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN)
Exclusive! Governor Jennifer Granholm (D-MI)
Exclusive! Representative Mike Pence (R-IN)
Exclusive! Governor Bill Richardson (D-NM)

David Gregory: Look at my kickass new studio. Dig those crazy, high def wall sconces!


On “Fox News Sunday” Chris Wallace asks the musical question: Some people are saying…this is Obama’s Katrina?

driftglass: No, you’re saying it.

Wallace: But isn’t this…Obama’s Katrina?

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano: No. There is no comparison. Douche.

Wallace: So...Obama’s Katrina?

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar: Not even close. WTF are you even talking about?

Wallace: Obama’s Katrina: a personal failure, or the final proof that Socialism never works? The controversy continues.

Next...

Marco Rubio: Teabagger Conservatism = mainstream American thought!

Wallace: But according to your previous comments, you’re against a police state in Arizona. How can you claim to be a mainstream American and not hunger deep in your manly soul for a nice, tidy, Red, White and Blue Conservative feudalism?

Rubio: Mmmm. Tidy.

Wallace: What about the terrible situation down in the Gulf; that leak, and all those pollutants now spilling to the surface?

Rubio: I told you, I only used that credit card for legitimate political reasons.


On “This Week”

George Stephanopoulos

Terry Moran

Christiane Amanpour

Jake Tapper invited Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar do their thing. As the did on every other station, they did an admirable job of explaining what is happening in the Gulf.

Then Katrina vanden Heuvel, Bill Maher and Al Sharpton beat the crap out of an old man and his whiny political catamite.

Poor George Will -- he got hit high, middle and low, tossing up “examples” of citizens being asked for ID (entering a secure building) which Sharpton just stuffed right back down his throat...and scuttling left and right, in an eerily rodentlike desperation to avoid answering legitimate questions.

Matthew Dowd: Both sides do it! Both sides do it! Why didn’t you damn Democrats love George Bush more!? (Breaks down sobbing.)

Like most Conservatives, Dowd's memory is either so short and hilariously selective that he should seek medical attention immediately (from three of literally hundreds of articles written during the period during which Dowd is all cranky about Democrats being insufficiently supportive of Dubya's immigration plan, with emphasis added here and there by me to catch the morning light)...

From the USA Today:

Bush, Kennedy join forces on immigration
Updated 5/16/2007 10:30 AM

By Kathy Kiely
WASHINGTON — As he presses for legacy-building immigration legislation, President Bush finds himself aligned with the same unlikely ally who helped enact his first major domestic initiative.

That would be Sen. Edward Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat who played a crucial role in crafting and passing the No Child Left Behind Act, the president's massive effort to overhaul education policy.

In a speech to the Associated General Contractors of America on May 2, Bush acknowledged Kennedy as a key player in the talks that are culminating this week, when the Senate opens an immigration debate. "I appreciate the leadership he's taken," Bush said.
...

From Peggington Noonington at the Wall Street Journal:

Open borders? Mass deportations? How about some common sense instead?

Friday, May 25, 2007 12:01 A.M. EDT

...
Naturally I hope the new immigration bill fails. It is less a bill than a big dirty ball of mischief, malfeasance and mendacity, with a touch of class malice, and it's being pushed by a White House that is at once cynical and inept. The bill's Capitol Hill supporters have a great vain popinjay's pride in their own higher compassion. They are inclusive and you're not, you cur, you gun-totin' truckdriver's-hat-wearin' yahoo. It's all so complex, and you'd understand this if you weren't sort of dumb.
...

Oh, Peggington! How that sweet-sweet nectar of Wingnut box wine forgetfulness has soured for you these last couple of decades.

And the New York Times:

President’s Push on Immigration Tests G.O.P. Base
By JIM RUTENBERG and CARL HULSE

June 3, 2007

WASHINGTON, June 2 — President Bush’s advocacy of an immigration overhaul and his attacks on critics of the plan are provoking an unusually intense backlash from conservatives who form the bulwark of his remaining support, splintering his base and laying bare divisions within a party whose unity has been the envy of Democrats.

It has pitted some of Mr. Bush’s most stalwart Congressional and grass-roots backers against him, inciting a vitriol that has at times exceeded anything seen yet between Mr. Bush and his supporters, who have generally stood with him through the toughest patches of his presidency. Those supporters now view him as pursuing amnesty for foreign lawbreakers when he should be focusing on border security.

Postings on conservative Web sites this week have gone so far as to call for Mr. Bush’s impeachment, and usually friendly radio hosts, commentators and Congressional allies are warning that he stands to lose supporters — a potentially damaging development, they say, when he needs all the backing he can get on other vital matters like the war in Iraq.

“I think President Bush hurts himself every time he says it is not amnesty,” said Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, referring to the bill’s legalization process for immigrants. “We are not all that stupid.”

This week, after Mr. Bush’s suggestion that those opposing the Congressional plan “don’t want to do what’s right for America” inflamed conservative passions, Rush Limbaugh told listeners, “I just wish he hadn’t done it because he’s not going to lose me on Iraq, and he’s not going to lose me on national security.” He added, “But he might lose some of you.”

Such sentiments have reverberated through talk radio, conservative publications like National Review and Fox News. They have also appeared on Web sites including RedState.com and FreeRepublic.com, where postings reflect a feeling that Mr. Bush is smiting his own coalition in pursuit of a badly needed domestic accomplishment, and working in league with the likes of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, a co-author of the legislation.

White House officials said it had led them to engage the blogosphere in a concerted way for the first time, posting defenses on liberal and conservative sites.

The tensions, which have rippled through the Republican presidential field, are intensifying just as the Senate is preparing to renew debate on the measure next week. Opponents are seeking significant changes — or outright defeat of the legislation — and raising the specter of a filibuster. The battle has pitted the White House against a group that includes even Mr. Bush’s reliable supporters from his home state of Texas, Senators Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn, both Republicans.
...

...or he's just lying.

Bill Maher: I would never say or imply that all Republicans are racists. That would be silly and wrong. I am saying that, these days, if you’re a racist, you’re probably a Republican.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: It would be nice if the media would pay the same kind of attention to the massive immigration and Wall Street protests that they lavish on six people on a street corner in pantaloons yelling about fucking Socialism.

On ”The Chris Matthews Show”

Everybody gibbers meaninglessly about the Supremes for awhile and then it becomes That 70s Show.



Amazing how little Conservatives have changed in 40 years.

I Haven't Watched Him in Years

So having just seen him pave the White House Correspondents' Dinner wall-to-wall with ancient Borscht Belt Stinkum, I guess I had sorta forgotten how screamingly unfunny Jay Leno really is.

It was half, creaking, awful mother-in-law, lawyers-are-bad, Gee-ain't-Sarah-Palin-dumb anti-humor schtick

and half doing what David Gregory already does poorly every Sunday: showing one video after another and going "Huh! Huh!".

A quarter of the way through, all I could think was: "Is this guy being paid to take a dive?"

Halfway through all I could think was: "No, nobody could pretend to be this bad. Subtle as a steam hammer. Funny as a sewer collapse. Our Crown Prince of American mass media comedy really is just plain fucking dreadful."

Je-sus. People really laugh at this boiled gray tripe?

Next year, if I could have just one Big White House Correspondents' Dinner Comedy Wish...

Dear Santa, Please Bring Me...

(Hard core PKD fans will understand why this image.)

From the NYT:

Philip K. Dick’s ‘Exegesis’ Will Receive Two-Volume Release
By DAVE ITZKOFF

After a lifetime’s worth of literature that explored the future, the farthest regions of space and the afterlife, a posthumous work by Philip K. Dick will take readers to a different alien terrain: the inside of the author’s mind.

Mr. Dick, who died in 1982, was best known for existential science-fiction novels like “The Man in the High Castle,” “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch” and “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” He also spent years of his life wrestling with what he considered religious visions that he began experiencing in the 1970s. He recorded his reactions to and attempts at deciphering these spiritual visions in a work he called the “Exegesis,” reputed to be 8,000 pages - or longer.

Though few have read the work and fewer still have fully understood it, the publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt plans to release “The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick” in two consolidated volumes edited by Jonathan Lethem and Pamela Jackson, a Philip K. Dick scholar, with the first to be released next year.

Mr. Lethem, the author of novels like “Chronic City” and “The Fortress of Solitude,” and who has written frequently on Mr. Dick, said Thursday in a telephone interview that he hesitated to describe ”Exegesis” as a work.

“The title he gave it, ‘Exegesis,’ alludes to the fact that what it really was, was a personal laboratory for philosophical inquiry,” Mr. Lethem said. “It’s not even a single manuscript, in a sense – it’s an amassing or a compilation of late-night all-night sessions of him taking on the universe, mano-a-mano, with the tools of the English language and his own paranoiac investigations.”
...

Dick is the hottest, most fecund dead author not named "Shakespeare" I know.

He has more movies made from his novels than almost any living writer, and more movies made based on his very specific blend of hallucinatory magic realist and science fiction than anybody ("The Matrix" was, for example, simply the best PKD movie that he never wrote.) Here is a list of the films that have, are, and will-soon-be been made out of selections from his body of work.

From a whole world marching backwards in time, ingesting shit, upchucking fresh peaches, and burning all knowledge in an orderly fashion...to the near-dead living inside of consensual hallucinations and being vampirized in their comas...to the one of the first* and very best Alternate History novels...to a carefully constructed simulacra of a 1950s-style suburb designed to keep one man hoodwinked into fighting a real war...to the fabrication of a fake drug war to slam the fascist lid down on humanity once and for all...Dick turned out one amazing, disturbing, polished piece of high, weird art after another, making just enough to die poor and living just long enough to see one of his lesser works made into what would become one of the all-time iconic film masterpieces.

Other great science fiction authors have certainly produced more wordage, but almost none have aged as well, growing somehow more rather than less accessible and relate-able over time, because Dick wasn't bedazzled by the science first and foremost: he was interested in paranoia, alienation, the slipperiness of Reality and the great pain and comedy of being human.

He wrote about people suddenly losing everything, including their identities. About figuratively turning sharp corners just quick enough to catch a glimpse of genuinely alien creatures loping away and hurriedly camouflaging behind them a Real Reality over which our absurd world is only loosely and fitfully draped. He wrote about the daily struggle to pin down True Things and to find a way to let God's Love slide in between life's dime store demiurges, false idols and fast food commercials.

Dick's work throbs like a wild, feverish documentary of our own lives five minutes from now because we live in a PK Dick Universe: a place where lunatics get away with vast and improbable crimes, where monsters hide in the open under a welter of jangly jargon...and where we are also perpetually tormented by the distant harmonies of a Better Universe where we know we should be living.

Which is why I look forward to snatching up a copy of the book(s) and reading at least some of the man's final thoughts, crazy or not.

After I've given it all a spritz of Ubik of course :-)




* UPDATE: Prof Fate is quite correct:

"Sorry to nitpick, drifty, but Dick did not write the first Alternate History novel (although I agree The Man in the High Castle is one of the best of the genre).

Though I can't say for sure he deserves the honor of first out the gate, Ward Moore published his "If the South had won" novel Bring the Jubilee in 1953, nine years before MitHC came out.

And seeing as how I have a copy on my shelf, I really ought to have been more careful. Must've been that damn butterfly I stepped on when I was out hunting this weekend :-)

Must Hate Unions

Wanted: Cheap, pliable, particle-board copy of what an executive used to be for junior-assistant management cannon fodder.

Applicant must be minimally-competent-but-not-scary-smart, gullible enough to work themselves to death for scraps and promises,

be willing to do unspeakably cruel things to others in ways that keep the boss' skirts clean, and not even realize they've been screwed when they finally find themselves kicked to the curb, used up, with two weeks pay and a hollow 401K.

Degree and five years experience a plus; more than that and you'd never put up with the crap we're going to put you through.

From Yahoo News:

Older Jobseekers Face An Uphill Climb
Laura Bassett Laura Bassett Tue Apr 27, 5:26 pm ET

Since Eamonn Coughlan, 57, was laid off from his job managing a Jaguar dealership over two years ago, he has sent out over 2,000 resumés but still hasn't landed a job. He is convinced that his age is to blame for his inability to get back into the workforce.

"I had one head-hunter tell me that I will never again find a full-time job," Coughlan said. "She was very pleasant about it. She said they're looking for someone 30 or 35 that they think will work for another 20 years. They look at you and think you'll work for another 7 or 8 years, and that's it. Depressing is hardly the word."

Coughlan, who has over 25 years of management experience, said he rarely gets called for an interview but when he does, he is immediately written off because of his age.

"One guy that was supposed to interview me saw me in the waiting area through the window of his office. Minutes later, his secretary came out and told me he needed to cancel the interview but didn't specify the reason. He must have been expecting someone a bit younger."
...

Meanwhile, in Totally Unrelated News...

All the Obama 20-Somethings


By ASHLEY PARKER

“This party,” Herbie Ziskend announced, “is in honor of John Quincy Adams.” The dirty-blond, blue-eyed 24-year-old, who once handled luggage for Barack Obama’s campaign and now works in the vice president’s office as a staff assistant, stood in the living room of a red-brick row house in Washington and flung his arms in the air as if to pay tribute to America’s sixth president. Then he paused, deflated: “But the police are here.”

Blue lights flashed through a window as Ziskend and a housemate, Jake Levine, went onto the porch to talk with the cops and promise to quiet things down. Levine, who is now 26, is a policy analyst in the energy-and-climate-change office of the White House. He and Ziskend, along with their other two housemates — Eric Lesser, 25, and Josh Lipsky, 24, who were then both White House staff assistants — were giving a party last July in their group house in Logan Circle, a neighborhood just east of Dupont Circle. People shifted nervously as they checked their BlackBerries and cellphones and talked about heading out. Ziskend reappeared. “Everybody, it’s O.K.,” he said, grinning. “Party is on.”
...

There is a Club.
You are not in it.

And I would be willing to bet all the money in my PayPal account that at least some of the very volatile, very destructive "Take my county back!" rage abroad in the land has something to do with the day-to-day professional histories of a lot of capable, experienced, hard-working, middle-class Americans of a certain age who were forced to eat a lot of this kind of shit for a lot of years

on the promise that, in exchange for being humiliated a little more every day, they'd at least be able to salvage some kind of future for themselves and their families.

Americans for whom that last, fragile economic compact has been brutally and unilaterally revoked, and who are now staring straight into the very abyss they crawled -- smiling -- through so much dung for so long to avoid.

And now they are looking for someone to blame.


So happy International Workers' Day, citizen:

The ‘Labour Day’ begins with the United States labour movement in 19th century. The labour movement was started on May 1, 1886 in United States. Some labour organizations in the country called on strike because they wanted 8-hour working days. There was carnage in Haymarket Square in Chicago on May 4th. A rebel threw a bomb into that area. Nearly 12 people including a few police officers died. About 100 people were wounded.

The rebels did not find an urgent result. But they gained a successful result slowly. When 8-hour working days became a reality, it became a standard in many countries around the world. ‘Labour Day’ was therefore selected as a day for rallies, processions and speeches. ‘Labour Day’ is a most important holiday in United States, Russia and other socialist nations.

‘Labour Day’ is an event observed on May 1 in many countries around the globe. ‘Labour Day’ is now frequently a day for processions and parades. Nevertheless, in current years, the commemoration of this day has obtained a new roll, where the workers and trade organizations claim for safety and give the financial growth a humane countenance.

Break out the soapbox, crack a beer and sing, sing, sing!

Maggie's Farm. Written by Bob Dylan. Covered here by "Rage Against the Machine".


Also too, Susie Bright reminds us that...

You can't start your Derby Day right without reading Louisville Son Hunter Thompson's seminal essay on the subject, first published in 1970 in Scanlan's Monthly.

Do take a sip— don't stop until you get to the bottom of the glass.

I sure miss my old comrade— who the fuck writes like this anymore?

The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved

by Hunter S. Thompson

"I got off the plane around midnight and no one spoke as I crossed the dark runway to the terminal. The air was thick and hot, like wandering into a steam bath. Inside, people hugged each other and shook hands...big grins and a whoop here and there: "By God! You old bastard! Good to see you, boy! Damn good...and I mean it!"

In the air-conditioned lounge I met a man from Houston who said his name was something or other— "but just call me Jimbo"— and he was here to get it on. "I'm ready for anything, by God! Anything at all. Yeah, what are you drinkin?"

I ordered a Margarita with ice, but he wouldn't hear of it: "Naw, naw... what the hell kind of drink is that for Kentucky Derby time? What's wrong with you, boy?" He grinned and winked at the bartender. "Goddam, we gotta educate this boy. Get him some good whiskey..."

I shrugged. "Okay, a double Old Fitz on ice."

Jimbo nodded his approval.

"Look." He tapped me on the arm to make sure I was listening. "I know this Derby crowd, I come here every year, and let me tell you one thing I've learned--this is no town to be giving people the impression you're some kind of faggot. Not in public, anyway. Shit, they'll roll you in a minute, knock you in the head and take every goddam cent you have."

I thanked him and fitted a Marlboro into my cigarette holder. "Say," he said, "you look like you might be in the horse business...am I right?"

"No," I said. "I'm a photographer."

"Oh yeah?" He eyed my ragged leather bag with new interest. "Is that what you got there— cameras? Who you work for?"

"Playboy," I said.

He laughed. "Well, goddam! What are you gonna take pictures of—necked horses? Haw! I guess you'll be workin' pretty hard when they run the Kentucky Oaks. That's a race just for fillies." He was laughing wildly. "Hell yes! And they'll all be nekkid too!"

I shook my head and said nothing; just stared at him for a moment, trying to look grim. "There's going to be trouble," I said. "My assignment is to take pictures of the riot."

"What riot?"

I hesitated, twirling the ice in my drink. "At the track. On Derby Day. The Black Panthers." I stared at him again. "Don't you read the newspapers?"
...

The remainder of the Good Doctor's Derby Day goodness is to be found here.

Thanks Susie!