Brilliant at Breakfast: Where no one cashes in on unpaid writers

"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast"
-Oscar Wilde

"The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself."
-- Proverbs 11:25

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Sunday, March 07, 2010

Since I can't stay up, why not hang with the best?

Posted by Jill | 10:12 PM

Ebert is livetweeting the Academy Awards. And I finally understand the awesomeness that is Mo'nique.

Labels: Academy Awards, movies, Roger Ebert

0 comments

Enormous Progress

Posted by jurassicpork | 10:15 AM

"Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose." - Jean Baptiste Alphonse Karr

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

In terms of brainless, election day optimism, only one nation stands head and shoulders above the American people and that's the Iraqi people. After ridiculing the posturing by their own candidates, Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish Iraqis have nonetheless poured out of their houses to vote for 6200 candidates to fill 325 positions in the new Iraqi parliament. Hope and purple fingers are, once again, in the air. "Surely this election will be the one in which we get it right," they convince themselves.

But as a certain blogger once said after the 2005 Iraqi elections in one of his first blog posts, "An election is not a democracy any more than the wedding is the marriage."

After a war and brutal occupation that is now almost exactly seven years-old, when the average Baghdad resident still gets, on average, only 12 hours a day of electricity (as compared to the 16-24 a day they got under Saddam, in direct contradiction to a blatantly propagandistic Army.mil article last month that claimed they had only 2-4 under Saddam), workable sewers are little more than, no pun intended, pipe dreams, families are cramped together because of a chronic housing shortage and even a basic biological necessity such as safe, potable drinking water is in short supply, Iraqis still think they will elect that Magnificent 325 that will set the country back on its right course.

Yet when one looks at the death toll during this election one sees eerie similarities to 2005's elections. In fact, if you compare today's AP article to the CNN article written in late January 2005, you'll note that even the body count is virtually identical.

26 voters, defying intimidation, were killed during yesterday's voting. At least 23 were killed in 2005's election if one adds up the isolated incidents involving fatalities. (An interesting sidebar, literally and figuratively, asked CNN readers in a poll if they "expect[ed] violence in Iraq to decline following the elections" and a resounding 68% said no.)

Close to a million Iraqis, according to the figures of some humanitarian organizations, have been killed with countless hundreds of thousands more injured and millions displaced, including a particularly bloody ethnic cleansing that necessitated Bush's surge in early 2007.

With a Republican-dominated Congress and freshly re-inaugurated to his second and final term, Bush had nothing to lose and everything to gain from a successful Iraqi election in 2005 but the same cannot be said for President Barack Obama. Of course, Bush tried to sell 2005's "successful" election that resulted in his buddy Chalabi getting a thumpin' (in the Dec. 2005 election, Chalabi got a whopping one half of 1% of the vote from a corruption-weary electorate), dozens of Iraqis killed and hundreds more maimed from grenades, mortars and bullets and people denied their food ration coupons unless they voted, not knowing who they were voting for because candidates had to campaign in secret for fear of their lives and the installation of corrupt power brokers who would lead some of Iraq's largest death squads straight out of the government's own ministries.

Bush trotted down that red carpet in the White House with that peculiarly self-satisfied but self-conscious DT walk of his to declare the Iraqi elections of 2005 successful. But this was before the votes had to be carted away under heavy security to be counted in Jordan, where the results would take months to come out, and the whole sham had the appearance of Preston Tucker proudly showing off his glistening but dysfunctional prototype that was really propped up and leaking oil by the pint.

Then, as now, American troops had a large footprint but light footstep, preferring to let the Iraqi security forces handle their own security but the insurgents are still fanning out across the country and targeting minority Sunnis still sympathetic to Saddam's Baathist party driven out of power by Bush and Bremer and only recently de-de-Baathified in a quiet reconciliation.

US troop levels are lower now (96,000) than in 2005 but that still amounts to an unavoidably apparent occupation that still has the tiger of the insurgency by its tail and doesn't know whether to hold on for dear life or to let go, cut and run.

The other difference is that nowadays, Iraq no longer occupies the headlines quite like it used to. That's not because we've made Cheneyesque "enormous progress" or because, as Bush said in his GI Joe moment aboard the USS Abe Lincoln, "Mission Accomplished" but because we're tired of Iraq and wish it would simply go away. We don't bother following the American casualty figures as assiduously as we used to because the death toll has dropped dramatically with our more laissez faire military posture (which alone ought to serve as a convincing argument for a complete and immediate withdrawal).

Yet, nothing significant had changed except that the Green Zone is more vulnerable to insurgent and terrorist mortar attacks than it was five years ago. And several Anglo-American oil companies are jockeying for position to resume sucking Iraq dry of its only one real resource before Saddam nationalized the industry.

Iraq and the massive fuckups and galactic-level greed never took down the Bush administration that was a lame duck one from January 20, 2005 on. Through endless spin doctoring, executive privilege, a cowed, wet-legged, corporate mainstream media and absolute contempt for Congress and its toothless subpeonas, the Bush administration managed to keep itself afloat like the political Titanic it was. They had nothing to lose after Election Day 2004 and they knew it.

The same can't be said for the current president who has never had a honeymoon period with a Congress packed with his own party, is embattled at every turn and is still barely more than 13 months in office. Obama is vastly more vulnerable to any fallout from Baghdad than Bush ever was and fingerpointing and history lessons will do little unless this new president can somehow salvage the political Tucker jalopy left in Iraq that was bequeathed to him.

Update: The death toll, according to this revised AP article, is now up to 36, making it bloodier than the first two elections during the Bush administration.

1 comments

Saturday, March 06, 2010

That was a lot of trouble to go to just to leave a comment on someone's blog

Posted by Jill | 10:10 PM

Happy blogiversary to Bustednuckles, still crazy after four years of this.

Labels: bloggers

1 comments

Blogrolling in our time

Posted by Jill | 1:02 PM

Say hello to Konagod, a fellow new convert to enthusiasm for the sport(?) of curling. (h/t to Maggie.)

Labels: bloggers

1 comments

Saturday Linkasaurus

Posted by Jill | 12:30 PM

This juxtaposition struck me as funny. Click through and then stick icepick into forehead.

Digby.

Driftglass.

Yup. Bill Maher is right.

UPDATE: Then of course there are realms of Stoopid that most of us can't even fathom.

Labels: bloggers, hypocrisy, icepick meet forehead, religion

1 comments

Around the Blogroll and Elsewhere

Posted by Jill | 7:33 AM

Just because.

Bob Cesca pulls the curtain aside and shows what the Tea Party is really all about.

When I read stuff like this from The Complaint Department, I'm glad I don't have asshole relatives. And I've finally managed to convince my friends who have asshole relatives to stop forwarding me their lunatic e-mails.

Another glimpse of what the Christian theocratic nation advocated by Tea Partiers and other right-wing nuts will look at, courtesy of Vyckie at No Longer Quivering.

Our own jurassicpork finds something buried in the AP coverage of the Pentagon shooter which proves Cesca's point.

Jed remixed Blanche Lincoln's latest ad, which makes me wonder: Why on earth did Tim Kaine say last week that the DNC is supporting her re-election? (Show Tim Kaine that we will not sit down and take this. Donate to Bill Halter here.)

This post is a month old, but no less relevant than it was last month, from Margaret and Helen. I'm scratching my head about the kangaroo reference, though, because I don't see any links to Skippy.

At Mudflats: Sarah Palin's greed makes for strange bedfellows.

Sam Seder has video of Chris Matthews' head exploding in Alan Grayson's face. Really.

The solution to this is easy: Invite them in and tell them you want to spread the Word about YOUR religion.

And because you are an intelligent, curious person with a thirst for knowledge, the True Story Behind the Norwegian Curling Pants.

And finally....Puppehs!!

Labels: bloggers

3 comments

Friday, March 05, 2010

Unreality TV: The Redemption of Boston Rob

Posted by Jill | 5:48 AM

The other night I was channel surfing, and landed on an absolutely gorgeous, sweeping, aerial shot of St. Lucia. Now I'm a sucker for just about anything that has the Caribbean in it, so I landed there, only to discover to my horror that what I was watching was The Bachelor. Now, one of my co-workers had told me last week that his wife watches this show, and since he is an intelligent fellow with presumably an intelligent wife, I decided to hunker down with this mess and see what the fuss is about.

Apparently this was the finale, which involved some lantern-jawed guy with pec implants deciding between a pretty, sort-of-normal looking girl with lovely honey-colored hair, and a vapid-faced bleached blond with the gaping mouth of an inflatable sex doll and huge pneumatic fake hooters. That anyone still thinks reality TV is the way to find a life partner is appalling, no matter how gorgeous the location shooting is. But to make a long story short, I'm watching Mr. Fake Pecs describe Pretty Girl as "perfect...warm...loving...would make a great wife", and Big Boobs Blondie as "fun...I feel like a kid when I'm with her", and I immediately knew that Pretty Girl didn't have a snowball's chance in hell with this guy. I had to turn it off when Pretty Girl was driven away from Perfect Location, tears beginning to stain her golden gown, babbling about true love while the cameras were rolling.

It's enough to make you realize what a smart show Survivor is by comparison, even if it IS the show that started all this crap in the first place.

This season, Mark Burnett and the other Powers That Be couldn't resist another "All-Stars" show to celebrate Survivor's 20th season. This was a big mistake the last time, and it's an even bigger one now, because it's becoming more difficult to recruit ordinary people who want to do this, and the show over the last few seasons has been dominated by Los Angeles famewhores that the casting people pick up in bars. That was one of the reasons why the Tocantins season, with its odd and endearing bromance between the wide-eyed and adorable Alabamian James (J.T.) Thomas and the nerdy, anxious New Yorker Stephen Fischbach, was one of the best -- it reminded us of what can happen on this show when the compelling narratives involve people who wanted to play the game, not get into show business. Today, everyone who goes on this show knows the score, and it culminated with the Gollum-like troll Russell Hantz, who sucked up all the oxygen on Samoa (and all the memory in the cameras) by being outrageous last season.

This season needed a different twist, so the theme is "Heroes vs. Villains". The problem with yet another "All-Stars" is that you tend to get the famewhores rather than people you'd actually want to see again. There's no Bob Crowley here, or Yul Kwon. Instead we get a THIRD viewing of Parvati Shallow's vamping and a fourth of Stephenie LaGrossa's scary Jersey Shore eyebrows. And even the players who originally landed on the show by accident have a knowing quality they lacked before. Cirie Fields was the woman who was afraid of leaves, but by her third crack at the show, she was now regarded as one of the game's great strategists. J.T. has clearly found that a million bucks and killer eyelashes are good for getting laid a lot. Instead of endearing, he's now coming across more like John Edwards: The Early Days.

And then there's "Boston" Rob Mariano. No one in the history of reality television, not even Elisabeth Filarski Hasselbeck, has been able to parlay Survivor into a career and a nice little nest egg in quite the same way. For someone who's never won, Mariano is regarded as some kind of evil genius. His real genius is being able to get CBS to pay a guy who's not all that attractive and talks funny to pay him huge sums of money and provide him with all kinds of goodies. This is a guy who met his now-wife, Amber, on the LAST "All-Stars", and got to share in the million bucks by marrying her. This is a guy who got CBS to give them a big wedding at the Atlantis in the Bahamas, complete with bachelor and bachelorette parties, and then a honeymoon someplace else. "Romber" has been on The Amazing Race twice and now, with Amber at home with a new baby, "Boston" Rob is back on Survivor.

Maybe it's because Hantz is as odious as he is, or because Ben "Coach" Wade is such a self-important New Age buffoon, or because at this point I'm seriously thinking Parvati would do well with a few less teeth. Maybe it's because Tom Westman is taking this "hero" crap seriously, and J.T.'s smile has become a smirk, and what the hell is the bland Amanda doing back again, and what show was Danielle on again? -- but this season, Rob Mariano comes across as -- dare I say it? -- likeable. He's hardworking, he's playing nicely with others, he's a strategic player without seeming like a scumbag. When he collapsed last week from a combination of flu and dehydration, I wanted him to recover instead of past seasons, when most viewers would have wanted to watch him expire right there in the jungle.

Perhaps Mariano just needed to grow up. Perhaps he's one of those guys George Gilder used to talk about who need marriage in order to keep him from being completely id-dominated. Or maybe so-called reality TV has become so populated with the loathsome and the outrageous that a mere opportunist looks good by comparison.

Labels: pop culture, television

4 comments

Thursday, March 04, 2010

Quick Dispatch from the Department of Great Ideas

Posted by Jill | 9:39 PM

DougJ over at Balloon Juice has an interesting idea for an award to honor and remember "Jon Swift". Even if, as one commenter pointed out, it means Driftglass and Tbogg win every year.

And back when I and my online movie reviewer compatriots were forming and then running Cinemarati, our stated goal was to have online film criticism gain the same prestige as print criticism. I therefore find it oddly funny that a decade later, Roger Ebert is musing on how to monetize a blog. What does it say about the world when Roger Friggin' Ebert is saying this:

I'm not part of the usual "studio buy" for purposes like that. For the better films, I should be. I am the most-read movie critic on the web. I don't think the studios give a shit about critics. Their online budgets gravitate toward sites with celeb photos, downloadable wallpaper, gossip,"exclusive" trailers, that stuff. My readers actually buy tickets and go to movies at a much higher rate than the national average; just read one of the comment threads here. But for the big tentpole movies, you know what? The marketing people aren't looking for readers. They're looking for buzz.

I mean, Mary Ann Johansen sounded like this eight years ago. This is ROGER EBERT, folks; the one critic that even people who don't read critics read. Maybe online criticism does finally have the same prestige as print -- except that print went the other way instead.

So Ebert and has therefore formed an online club at a cheap price to offer film geeks and Ebertians some Special Stuff in exchange for five bucks. I think that's a pretty good deal. I paid more than that for Randi Rhodes podcasts.

Labels: bloggers, I Am Aware of All Internet Traditions, Roger Ebert

1 comments

Blogrolling In Our Time

Posted by Jill | 6:07 AM

SPECIAL EDITION

For those who don't get the reference in the title when I add to the blogroll, it refers to "Logrolling in our time", a feature in the now-long-defunct Spy magazine, which cited the mutual blurbs authors provide each other in the incestuous world of book publishing.

Sadly, No got the ball rolling with a special Blogroll Amnesty Day, in which we're happy to participate. I only have a few minutes before I have to get ready to go to TJTAML, but I'm adding a few blogs today that I found in the comments over there. So go pay a visit to the sites in the right-hand sidebar, particularly those towards the bottom, who, like me, got started after the Alpha Dogs at the top had long forgotten where they came from. You might laugh a bit, and you might learn something.

Labels: bloggers

0 comments

Wednesday, March 03, 2010

A terrible loss to the blogosphere

Posted by Jill | 7:59 PM

Sometimes when I think of what my circle of friends would be without the many, many people I've met online, some of whom have moved into "meat world" and others who are still just virtuous, I realize what a Godsend the Intartoobz are to those of us who have tended to be shy, or awkward, or uncomfortable around other people. But then there are those we know only through their writing, and when they disappear, it's hard to describe the grief we feel when they are gone, because these aren't people we know. They aren't our friends, they aren't people we have coffee with or exchange voluminous e-mails with, furiously brainstorming novel plots or sharing family nuttiness. They're people whose writing enriches our lives, they are kindred spirits, and in that kinship we have allowed room for them in our lives.

It's in that spirit that I pass on the terrible news of the passing of "Jon Swift", whom we now know courtesy of Tom Watson was really one Al Weisel:

The great Jon Swift has died. That's the "blogging" angle to a personal tragedy. In reality, the voice of Jon Swift - the hilarious faux conservative blogger whose talent and passion were evident in every post - belonged to Al Weisel, a sweet and good-natured journalist who happened to be the college roommate of my once-and-future collaborator Jason Chervokas.

I didn't know him well, but Al graciously agreed to be part of my little newcritics experiment of a couple of years back and his presence at some of our New York gatherings was generous, friendly, and low key - though the humor could sometimes be appropriately biting.

Al was on the way to his father's funeral in Virginia when he suffered a sudden aortic aneurysm and underwent several surgeries in an attempt to save his life. Sadly, they did not succeed.

Heartbreakingly, Al's mother has posted this comment to the Jon Swift blog, unmasking the true identify of her brilliant son - and yes, he was a blogging super-hero to many of us.
I don't know how else to tell you all who love this blog. I am Jon
Swift's Mom and I guess I'm going to OUT him. He was Al Weisel, my
beloved son. Al was on his way to his father's funeral in VA when he
suffered 2 aortic aneurysms, a leaky aortic valve and an aortic artery
dissection from his heart to his pelvis. He had 3 major surgeries
within 24 hours and sometime during those surgeries also suffered a
severe stroke. We, his 2 sisters, his brother, his partner and his best
friend since he was 9 years old were with him as he took his last
breath. We have all lost a shining start who warmed our hearts,
tormented us and made us laugh as he giggled at our pulling something
over on us. He passed away on February 27, 2010. My beloved child will
live on in so many hearts. I miss him more than I can say. If you are
on Facebook, go to organizations and join "Friends of Al Weisel,
Unite!" It will give you just a taste of how special he was. Farewell,
Jon (Al)

Al Weisel was the political poser's worst enemy as Jon Swift, but he was also a good guy to hang around the pub with and commiserate over New York's shrinking freelance rates. Gone all too soon, he'll be truly missed by many.

Not a week goes by that I don't hear about some outrage and wish that Steve Gilliard were still around to write about it. I've checked back at Jon Swift regularly over the last year wondering where he's disappeared to and wishing, longing for him to return with his razor-sharp takedown of conservative phonies and liberal wusses. There are bloggers, and then there are the Great Wits of Blogtopia (™ Skippy) -- people like TBogg and Driftglass -- and Jon Swift; those modern-day Thurbers and Wodehouses, satirists who sharpen their knives on the preposterousness of modern life. There are damn few of them and today there is one less. And on top of everything else, and all the despair I feel in general lately, this just makes me so fucking sad.

More from Skippy, who's also linking to other tributes. They're worth your time, because that's how much the "Swiftian" humor meant to us.

Labels: a real mensch, bloggers, obituaries

2 comments

Top 10 Items Left Behind in Rush Limbaugh's Apartment

Posted by jurassicpork | 7:01 PM

Rush Limbaugh is selling his 5th Avenue NYC penthouse apartment for $13.95 million.

What are the ten most noteworthy items accidentally left behind in the apartment by Rush Limbaugh?

13 empty Viagra bottles prescribed to someone else in bathroom wastebasket.

The charred remains of over 200 $100 dollar bills in the fireplace.

Flintstones underwear stuck in chandelier.

A copy of the Contract With America clogging the toilet.

First edition of Going Rogue left in end table beside bed with the pages of photoset stuck together.

Body of last interior decorator behind false wall.

Tooth left embedded in bathroom's gold leaf molding after last Oxycontin withdrawal episode.

Phyllis Schlafly's underwear covering entire King-sized bed.

Boarding pass to the Dominican Republic inserted in copy of Little Women.

Ronald Reagan's skeleton in broom closet.

2 comments

New Jersey Nets Offer Bizarre Promos

Posted by jurassicpork | 8:22 AM

The New Jersey Nets have the NBA's worst record at 6-53 and, understandably, they're having a tough time filling the stands. In past seasons, they've had promos from giving away tickets to the unemployed, offering opposing players' jerseys and even free tax preparation. What other promotions have the Nets recently tried?

Rookie center Brook Lopez will play a game of H-O-R-S-E at your child's school on your signing a legal agreement that your child will not defeat him.

Mobster's and Parole Officer's Night.

Courtside ticket holders will get to be the starting point guard at their next game, a strategy accounting for all 6 of their wins.

A layup contest with the actual New Jersey Nets, pending a signed legal agreement not to defeat anyone on the team.

National Anthem sung by reunited cast of The Sopranos.

Free decontamination at the gate for ticket holders arriving from Ocean Point.

A promise to really, really try to win one for a change.

For games with 25% or greater turnout, New Jersey Nets will wear Washington Generals jerseys while being thoroughly humiliated by visiting team.

Concessions served by New Jersey natives Bruce Willis, Queen Latifah, Jon Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen.

Instead of jerseys fired into the stands from an air cannon, new season ticket holders given chance to fire real cannon at head coach Kiki Vandeweghe.

1 comments

There's a special place in heaven for the people who did this

Posted by Jill | 5:08 AM

Some of the people who used to fancy themselves as cinéastes and posted condescending missives on the old Cinemarati messageboards might disagree, but for me the most treasured voice in the area of movie reviewing has always been Roger Ebert. There's this idea that being a film critic means you have to turn up your nose at anything not made in Eastern Europe in the 1960's, but what Ebert has always been able to do is to evaluate a movie within its own genre. He's not expecting Iron Man to be like Belle du Jour, and aside from an unfortunate tendency to give any movie featuring Angelina Jolie in a tight sweater a pass, he's usually right on the money.

It's one of those cruel ironies of life that a series of cancer recurrences has robbed Ebert of his actual voice. A not-so-cruel irony is that what is coming out of the pen of Roger Ebert of late has more to do with life than movies, and he's arguably doing the best writing of his career in his online journal.

The latest Esquire has an article about Ebert's cancer battle, and about his life today, and while I'm sure most of us had the same response to the photograph accompanying the article, which shows the full ravages of the disease, the article is riveting, even if you, like me, will find yourself crying buckets after you finish reading it. And yet, crying seems in some ways like an inappropriate response, because the reality of Ebert not having to hide behind photographs of himself before he lost much of the lower half of his face gives him a new freedom to speak out. And yesterday he spoke out, in person, on Oprah Winfrey's show. He now speaks by typing out on a keyboard and having his thoughts spoken by a computer-generated voice not much different from that used by Stephen Hawking. But a company in Scotland called Cereproc is painstakingly dissecting hours of Ebert's DVD commentary tracks to reconstruct his actual voice. Here's a sample, and it is truly amazing:

Labels: Roger Ebert

1 comments

A glimpse of what the "Christian nation" so beloved of Republicans would look like

Posted by Jill | 4:40 AM

Here's a taste of what the Christian theocracy that's the goal of so many conservatives would look like:

Nineteen-year-old Keshia Canter handed three burgers, fries and milkshakes to a car-load of Tuesday afternoon customers at the Hi-Lo Burger’s drive-though window. A lady sitting in the backseat leaned forward, between the two men in front, and handed her a leaflet: “Women & Girls” it said across the top.

“Even though nothing is showing, you’re being ungodly,” Canter recalled the woman telling her. “You make men want to be sinful.”

[snip]

“You may have been given this leaflet because of the way you are dressed,” it begins. “Have you thought about standing before the true and living God to be judged?”

It continues with one essential theme: The sins of men are, in part, the fault of women, specifically women in tight-fitting clothing. Yates was annoyed. Then she got to a section on page two:

“Scripture tells us that when a man looks on a woman to lust for her he has already committed adultery in his heart. If you are dressed in a way that tempts a men to do this secret (or not so secret) sin, you are a participant in the sin,” the leaflet states. “By the way, some rape victims would not have been raped if they had dressed properly. So can we really say they were innocent victims?”

In Theocratic America, women are by their very nature evil, even criminals. This pamphlet was being distributed in Bristol, Virginia -- a state where now you can carry a gun into a bar. This is so that when the drunk at the end of the bar starts making disparaging remarks about your mother, you can shoot to kill.

Meanwhile, out in Utah, the nightmare scenario of women who miscarry having to prove they weren't trying to self-abort is just waiting for the governor's signature. And in Florida, which always seems to be doing everything it can to become more Alabama than Alabama is, new legislation would punish doctors who perform abortions with up to life sentences in prison.

Isn't it funny how efforts to create a "moral, Christian America" focus on the genitalia of women and what women do with those? Isn't it funny how the legislatures that come up with stuff like this are ALWAYS dominated by men? And isn't it funny how the ENTIRE burden of making "moral" choices always falls on women in their world? For decades we've heard about baby boomers and hedonism and self-indulgence, and yet these guys are not only terrified of themselves, but also seemingly completely unable to keep it in their pants unless all women dress like the Warren Jeffs polygamy cult women and are punished severely for exercising any kind of sexual self-determination.

These are just a few tastes of the Christian utopia envisioned in those states where a preponderance of people are simply unable to make behavioral without some punitive big white alpha male daddy figure in the sky. And it's interesting how that big white alpha male seems to forgive an awful lot of male transgressions, and none of the female.

Labels: Christofascist Zombie Brigade, insanity, sexism, theocracy, Women's bodies, womens rights

4 comments

Monday, March 01, 2010

Meanwhile, back at the Outrage Corral

Posted by Jill | 10:30 PM

I can't believe that people who are out of work, scared about their jobs, on the bring of foreclosure, and terrified about their future, are eager to give the keys to the kingdom back to guys like John Kyl:

Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona, the Republican whip, argued that unemployment benefits dissuade people from job-hunting "because people are being paid even though they're not working."

Unemployment insurance "doesn't create new jobs. In fact, if anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work," Kyl said during debate over whether unemployment insurance and other benefits that expired amid GOP objections Sunday should be extended.

"I'm sure most of them would like work and probably have tried to seek it, but you can't argue that it's a job enhancer. If anything, as I said, it's a disincentive. And the same thing with the COBRA extension and the other extensions here," said Kyl.

Maybe it's time for Arizona to start thinking about "rightsizing" John Kyl. Tonight on Countdown, Chris Hayes, looking like a Delta pledge after a particularly rough night, said it all:

We are all lazy, shiftless welfare queens now.

Labels: cruelty, Greedy Republican Bastards, just another outrage, soullessness

3 comments

Hey, Evan Lysacek! You've just won an Olympic Gold Medal! What're you going to do now?

Posted by Jill | 10:24 PM

It's enough to make you long for the days of Disneyland. Unless they partner him with Niecy Nash, I say the hell with it.

Labels: crap, television, The Decline and Fall of America

1 comments

You know things are at a sorry pass when....

Posted by Jill | 10:17 PM

...the only thing that lifts you from your state of vague malaise is looking at photos of the pets of people you don't even know.

Labels: dogs

0 comments

Paranoid Delusion of the Week

Posted by SPIIDERWEB™ | 9:27 PM

The above is the new NASA logo. Pretty, but subversive to goopers. It seems the fucking Islamists are invading us like crazy.

Note: This is a cross post from the profanity infused SPIIDERWEB™. So please substitute cleaner words for the potty mouth adjectives posted here. Thanx, and have a nice day.

Now, thanks to an astute observation by Christopher Logan of the Logans Warning blog, we have another possible explanation for behavior that — in the face of rapidly growing threats posed by North Korean, Iranian, Russian, Chinese and others’ ballistic missiles — can only be described as treacherous and malfeasant: Team Obama’s anti-anti-missile initiatives are not simply acts of unilateral disarmament of the sort to be expected from an Alinsky acolyte. They seem to fit an increasingly obvious and worrying pattern of official U.S. submission to Islam and the theo-political-legal program the latter’s authorities call Shariah. What could be code-breaking evidence of the latter explanation is to be found in the newly-disclosed redesign of the Missile Defense Agency logo (above). As Logan helpfully shows, the new MDA shield appears ominously to reflect a morphing of the Islamic crescent and star with the Obama campaign logo [ed- which the fucker excluded].

Obama logo

OK, I'll give this asshole points for similar colors. But I kick his balls on any other comparison. He's a fucking idiot and only morons would agree with his 'linking' of these two logos. I'll also give props for 'roundness.'

However, it is clear the nearest link between Obama's logo and any other organization, troubling as it may be, is Pepsi® .

And we can all ignore this shit:

Hey idiots. I have a fucking revelation for you. The crescent and the star are natural phenomenon. To use them in any God damn logo is perfectly reasonable. They're attractive signs and are not necessarily connected to Islam in common usage. Even though it's no foul.

Quit jerking off over these logos. They aren't indicative of 'hidden meanings' any more than McDonald's golden arches are connected to porn. Well, to the best of my fucking knowledge. Get it you stupid goopers?

...
Note: Headline links to source. Clicking on image will enlarge it (usually).

Labels: Coke, Cornell, Crescent, GOP, Islam, McDonald's®, Star, stars, Wizards

4 comments

Why it's so hard to blog these days

Posted by Jill | 5:10 AM

Sometimes I wish I'd made a conscious choice to blog about being middle-aged in America, or about cooking, or about cats, or something else pop-cultural and relatively insignificant in the larger sphere of things. Perhaps I'd feel somewhat less like I'm carrying a boulder on my back all the time. But doing this seems like a chore most of the time of late -- a chore and an exercise in futility. It's not that much different from when I managed to bang out a review of Unleashed in 2005 and realized "This just isn't fun anymore."

Part of it is that instead of being able to get my necessary 7-1/2 hours of sleep every night I'm up at 5 AM in order to leave the house by 7:15 for the Job That Ate My Life. It isn't that I don't LIKE said job; and I'm damn lucky to have it. It's challenging, it pays decently, and I work with great people. But when the reality is that you are out of the house from 7:15 (6:15 some mornings) and most nights don't get home till 6:30 PM (or later if you manage to squeeze in a half-hour at the gym), and then have more work to do in the evening, you end up with a house that you'd be ashamed to have anyone enter, and a spouse whose patience with the fact that all you do is work makes him damn close to a saint and who deserves more of your attention than he gets, how do you even breathe, let alone do insightful articles about the Important Issues of the Day?

This is why you've seen little here from me lately but in-depth articles about Olympic figure skating and funny videos. Because when I sit down at 5 AM, and start looking at various news sites and other blogs, I'm so horrified by what I see that I go into a kind of paralysis. I'm not the only one getting to this point. Our good friend DCap, one of the best bloggers down here among the rabble (as opposed to the Big Boys and Girls, for whom this is What They Do instead of something they do in stolen moments), threw in the towel at the beginning of February. Richard Blair gave up at the beginning of the year. Carrie of Carrie's Nation, who used to contribute here, just up and disappeared one day, going so far as to delete her blog.

I'm not about to go that route, even if only because I have no idea what I'd do with myself without it. Going into my home office after pouring a cup of coffee, turning on the monitor, and starting to read is something I do on autopilot at this point. On the other hand, it would probably take the rest of my expected life to just clean up this house. (And no, don't tell me to hire someone, because this house has to be purged of effluvia before anyone can effectively clean it, and after last week's snowpocalypse, all of my shrubbery is pretty much destroyed, which is going to require huge expenditures of cash to have it all dug up and replaced in the spring.) But when I read stuff like this, and this, and Cookie Jill's Sunday environmental news, and when Driftglass has to hold a fundraiser in order to continue, well, you know things are at a sorry pass indeed.

It was one thing when we had an inept boob as President, a soulless ghoul as Vice President, combined with ruthless bought-and-paid-for Republicans in Congress for whom ideology trumps EVERYTHING, including the good of the country and feckless Democrats, bought for usually less money, who are scared of their own shadows. But now we have the same Congressional Republicans and Democrats, combined with yet another President playing out his childhood baggage on a national stage, one who's smart enough to know better, but just as inept, and a Vice President who ought to be better able to help him navigate the morass known as Capitol Hill. And what do we have? Continued war, continued mass surveillance of Americans, continued worship of Wall Street to the exclusion of everyone else, and an impending huge transfer of workers' wages to insurance company executives. So what's the difference? Democrats aren't trying to create an evangelical Christian theocracy designed to bring about the Rapture and they aren't trying to jail women for having miscarriages? Because Jesus and female sexuality are about the only playing fields on which there's any difference anymore.

So if you don't see daily posts from me for a while, don't fret. I'm just trying to regain some equilibrium here.

UPDATE: DCap is dipping his toes in the water again. But for the most part, the only ones of us who aren't just plain exhausted are guys like Bustednuckles, who in a parallel reality, are the Tea Party -- only with rage pointed in the right places and minus the stoopid.

Labels: bloggers, despair

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