And that's exactly what MSNBC's Chief Scumbag, Phil Griffin, did today:

07 Nov 2010 8:51 PM
STATEMENT REGARDING KEITH OLBERMANN - SUNDAY, NOV. 7

From Phil Griffin, President of MSNBC:

After several days of deliberation and discussion, I have determined that suspending Keith through and including Monday night's program is an appropriate punishment for his violation of our policy. We look forward to having him back on the air Tuesday night.

Oh, I'm sure he deliberated. Right here.

Labels: corporate assholes, Keith Olbermann, MSNBC, what liberal media

It's starting to look like Keith Olbermann has the biggest asshole in the known universe as his boss.

Turns out Olbermann wasn't suspended for the political donations, he was suspended for refusing to apologize ON THE AIR, in a form of ritual humiliation to be replayed endlessly on Fox News:

Politico’s Mike Allen added another layer of speculation to Keith Olbermann’s sudden and indefinite suspension on Friday: Olbermann was suspended for refusing to apologize on air. From Playbook:

Network sources tell Playbook that Keith Olbermann was suspended because he refused to deliver an on-camera mea culpa, which would have allowed him to continue anchoring “Countdown.” Olbermann told his bosses he didn’t know he was barred from making campaign contributions, although he is resisting saying that publicly. Olbermann may not hold as many cards as he thinks. He makes $7 million a year and MSNBC’s prime time is not as dependent on him as it was before the addition of Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell, who make considerably less.

MSNBC’s ratings certainly back up the last line about Olbermann not holding as many cards as he thinks, something Steve Krakauer pointed out on Friday: “Rachel Maddow is getting better ratings than Olbermann in the key A25-54 demographic, and Lawrence O’Donnell isn’t far behind. Olbermann is no longer the center of the strategy either – as the network has unveiled a vibrant, massive new campaign “Lean Forward” which focuses on half a dozen members of the MSNBC talent pool.”

As for whether a public apology would solved all of Olbermann’s problems at the network? History suggests otherwise. Back in 2008 David Shuster apologized on air for his “pimped out” remarks and still faced a two week suspension. So perhaps the likelier scenario is that Olbermann was offered a reduced suspension for an on air apology and turned it down. That said, Olbermann is no David Shuster and his absence on the network, despite any inner strife at MSNBC is huge.

Meanwhile, a thousand more people have signed the Progressive Change Committee's petition to restore Olbermann to the air in just the time it took me to write this, for a total of over 276,000 people.

If Phil Griffin thinks he's going to keep this audience in the 8 PM slot by putting Christine O'Donnell on the air with her lunatic delusions, he'll join Mr. Olbermann in exile very soon.

Labels: corporate assholes, Keith Olbermann, MSNBC

"...There's no intelligent life on Planet Wingnuttia."

The smackdown of the century to homophobes. Only George Takei can say the "D" word and make you think you've just been honored with a Nobel Peace Prize.

Imagine the shining country on a hill the U.S. will become under these few examples of Kevin Williamson's proposed Sarah Palin Administration:

Vice President of the United States
Mitt Romney
WHY: The strongest 2012 candidate right now is “Generic Republican,” and Mitt Romney is as close to a generic Republican as the world is apt to see: silver spoon, plain brown wrapper. He is the vanilla ice cream of American politics: nobody’s favorite, but nobody’s least favorite, either. Smart, decent, reliable. Good to have a guy around who knows how to read a balance sheet, and excellent to have one who has actually turned a profit as a profit-turning enterprise.

Secretary of State
John Bolton
WHY: Because he will strike fear into the hearts of our enemies. Our friends, too. Most awesome political mustache since Bismarck.

Secretary of the Treasury
Mitch Daniels
WHY: “The Knife” is the man you want standing athwart Treasury, yelling, Stop!

Secretary of Defense
David Petraeus
WHY: Somebody has to be good cop to Bolton’s bad cop. Also, General Petraeus has more credibility than just about anybody else on the scene. Unflappable.

[...]

Secretary of Agriculture
Pat Woertz
WHY: The Archer Daniels Midland CEO is steeped in the subtleties of the commodities markets and the real business of agriculture. Want to sell more stuff to China? How about we start with food? She’d be perfect, if we can afford her.

[...]

Secretary of Labor
Lincoln Diaz-Balart
WHY: Poetic to have Fidel Castro’s Republican nephew slugging it out with the labor unions that remain the last robust vestige of old-fashioned thug socialism in the United States.

[...]

Secretary of Health and Human Services
Bobby Jindal
WHY: Has actually fixed a health-care system. That’s saying something. Put him in charge of replacing Obamacare with a consumer-driven, market-based system.

[...]

Secretary of Homeland Security
Rudy Giuliani
WHY: Because we need some steel in our spine on everything from border-control to straightening out TSA. Also, why should Tina Fey dominate all the wig-and-dress action in a Palin administration? Also, Rudy owes the world an act of penance after failing to run for governor of New York, leaving the field to Carl Paladino.

You have to especially love the idea of John Bolton as Secretary of State. Because bullying worked so well when he was at the U.N.

Labels: idiocy, Sarah Palin, wingnuttia

New York Times May 11, 2010 article about Peter I. Chernin, former Murdoch #2, and a conversation he had with Comcast CEO and Bush fundraiser Brian Roberts:

Mr. Chernin, meanwhile, offered few hints at an unusual meeting on Tuesday with another media mogul, the Comcast chief executive Brian L. Roberts. The two men chatted during a brunch session at the Cable Show, an annual gathering of the cable television industry. One of the more powerful figures in media-as-it-is went toe to toe with a new player in media-as-it-might-be.

Comcast is in line to acquire control of NBC Universal, once regulators sign off on the $30 billion deal. Mr. Chernin asked Mr. Roberts how he planned to handle daily editorial control of such an immense news operation. “Are you saying that you’ll never interfere?” he asked.

Mr. Roberts blanched slightly at the question, which included a hypothetical situation that had Keith Olbermann, an MSNBC host, attacking a couple of Republican congressmen just as the approvals were being finished.

“Let’s have that conversation in six months or 12 months,” Mr. Roberts said.

OK, so it was 6 days short of 6 months. Can't say Roberts didn't warn us.

Does anyone still believe that the Comcast takeover of NBC/Universal won't happen?

(via)

Labels: Censorship, corporatism, Keith Olbermann, media consolidation

Driftglass explains why Barack Obama doesn't seem able to speak to the American people at the first-grade cognitive level where all too many of them reside.

Labels: Barack Obama

Today's honoree: Matt Taibbi, weighing in on the Olbermann foofarah.

Money quote:

We had a whole generation of journalists who sat by and did nothing while, for instance, George Bush led us into an idiotic war on a lie, plus thousands more who spent day after day collecting checks by covering Britney's hair and Tiger's text messages and other stupidities while the economy blew up and two bloody wars went on mostly unexamined... and it's Keith Olbermann who should "pay the price" for being unethical? Because, and let me get this straight, he donated money, privately, to politicians?

Labels: bloggers, double standards, Keith Olbermann

OK, once again I'll stray from the herd and say something that's likely to piss off my fellow "liberals" (like I give a bleeding shit): Keith Olbermann fucked up. What liberal bloggers seem to forget is the fact that Olbermann didn't get indefinitely suspended without pay because he donated a piddling $7,200 to Democratic candidates but because he didn't clear it with NBC executive management.

At least that's the official story.

And it's hard to feel sorry for Olbermann because he's every bit as much of an egotistical blowhard as the guy he loves to lambaste on his show, Bill O'Reilly. The fact that O'Reilly often strays into Republican La La Land and Olbermann just as often finds himself on the right side of an issue doesn't make him seem any less of a pious, self-important, narciscistic bag o' wind.

That said, there's a subcontext to this whole Olbermann flap that perhaps ought to be elevated to that of a full context. And it's the MSM's role in how they present the news, offer commentary (which, as with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert at the Comedy Channel, is all Olbermann really does and he'd be the first to admit it) and how effectively they separate themselves from one political party or another.

And it doesn't matter that Fox donated $1,000,000 to the Republican Governor's Association and another $1,000,000 to the anti-American US Chamber of Commerce. It doesn't matter that last year Sean Hannity was the keynote speaker at an NRCC fundraiser in Cleveland that raised $7,000,000 for the Republican Party. It has nothing to do with Olbermann or MSNBC.

Phil Griffin, MSNBC's president, was the one who'd clipped Olbermann's wings while clinging to a technicality: Olbermann didn't clear his relatively minor donations with management. In doing so, Phil Griffin made the colossal mistake of trying to play by Marquis de Queensbury rules against the thugs and street fighters of Fox "News" by trying to maintain a higher journalistic standard. Fox News does not require its anchors and hosts to clear with management their unceasing and blatant agenda of promoting Republican candidates.

And Keith Olbermann was used as a sacrificial lamb to that disingenuous end.

Well, fuck you, Phil Griffin. The Family Guy's Peter Griffin would make a better network president than you.

Because when you bring a rubber knife to a gunfight where the other guy is Roger Ailes, you're going to get your ass shot off every time. I don't need linkage and sources to back me up when I say that since its start in 1996, Fox "News" had been nothing less than a cheerleading/fundraising arm of the Republican Party that's turned 80% of America into one gigantic Hooverville. MSNBC, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow aside, seems, like all too many of us, to shy away from the Liberal brand as if that big red, Hawthornian "L" stands for "Loser." Just try telling Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity or Glenn Beck that they're mere ventriloquist dummies for the GOP and you'll be shouted down and probably shot in the back as you leave the sound stage.

And, granted, when networks begin openly and shamelessly endorsing candidates of either party, there's a tremendous potential for abuse and an equally tremendous potential for the long-term corruption of the impartiality of the mainstream media (as if it isn't already corrupted and a huge beneficiary of political largesse every two years).

Yet MSNBC aspiring to be something they're not, which is non-partisan, is, at least in the short term, destructive because it effectively refuses to provide a necessary counterbalance to the blatant rah rah, sis boom bahing of the Republican Party that MSNBC sees every single day, 24/7, from across the street.

Phil Griffin could've used this opportunity to send a shot across Fox's pirate ship bow. When Politico and the HuffPo broke the news of Olbermann's contributions to three Democrats, Griffin could have told Fox when they inevitably began pewling about "partisanship", "When you people stop supporting the Republican Party, that's when we'll stop supporting the Democratic Party."

Of course, that wouldn't result in Fox doing the right thing but it would put those hyper-partisan propagandists on notice that turnabout is fair play.

But Phil Griffin would never do that because the boy's got no heart. Even as Olbermann was told he was for the time being persona non grata by management, Meredith Viera on that same network had on not the winner of the Delaware Senate race but Christine O'Donnell. Viera looked as if she was going to spontaneously film a lesbian porno movie (minus the masturbation, natch) with the loser.

And the results are immediate: When MSNBC hobbles itself with rules that Fox and who knows how many other networks don't have, that immediately wrenches your network toward one direction. In this case, Griffin's sandbagging has resulted in pushing MSNBC to the right, which is not what its growing viewership tunes in every day to see. In the act of avoiding partisanship by suspending Olbermann, it just leaves more opportunities for the right wing to present its case in addition to Fox "News."

So fuck you, Phil Griffin. And don't think for a minute we've forgotten Phil Donahue.

Say hello to Morning Remembrance, the great Jim Earl's resurrection of the Morning Sedition comedy bit of the same name. We're blogrolling Jim's creation in the -- where else? -- "In Memoriam" category.

Original clips can be found here. Look for the ones with "MR" in the file name.

Labels: comedy, Morning Sedition

(via Skippy)

Labels: John Boehner, Twitterati

We'll see if the fine line Rachel is trying to walk here is enough to save her. If not, I can't wait to see Phil Griffin get his ass kicked when the Fox News audience he covets so much refuses to leave its chosen church.

Say what you will about Fox News, but what it has is something marketers always covet: stickiness. Sticky content is a concept normally used in the context of web site traffic, but it applies to television, or consumer products, or anything. It's a kind of loyalty that transcends simple endorsement of a product, becoming almost a kind of cult.

Apple is the perfect example of this kind of marketing cult. Sure, Apple makes great products with cool designs, but when you have people camping out at night like people used to do for Grateful Dead concerts to be among the first to get an iPhone, you're talking about more than just cool products. I've just encountered iPads on two separate trips to visit family and both times have found myself drooling, "WANT. SRSLY. NOW."

Dish Network is another one. The Brilliant household has been a Dish customer for over a decade. Recently, following a basement remodel and the purchase of another flat-screen TV, we had a choice to make: Do we stay with Dish Network and get another connection and receiver for the basement, or do we succumb to the Evil Empire over at Verizon, where we could get TV, FiOS internet, AND phone -- for about half (well, for two years anyway) of what we pay now? We stuck with our current cobbled-together setup of Dish, a good old fashioned land line phone, and our Verizon DSL. Why? Mostly because we just like Dish Network as a company. Recently, Cablevision, the company which has a monopoly in my town and in the general area, was unable to broadcast any Fox channels due to a rates dispute with News Corp. This blacked out a good chunk of the World Series, Giants football, and the popular Glee. News Corp. wanted to extort DOUBLE the fees out of Cablevision. The problem is that Cablevision is so loathed by even its own customers that it was able to garner no sympathy from its customers, and ended up capitulating to News Corp.'s demands. And now Cablevision customers face yet another rate increase. It's interesting to note that while Cablevision was busy losing its battle with Rupert Murdoch, Charlie Ergen, the almost cult-worshipped CEO at Dish, was quietly negotiating a far better deal with Fox.

Fox News is also an entity that boasts this kind of devotion. CNN has completely destroyed its credibility in recent years by trying to be more Fox-like, and instead of pulling away viewers from Fox, it's simply ruined its own unique journalistic brand. Fox viewers are not going to leave Fox. It's their club, their cult, their religion, and they're not going to leave it just because Phil Griffin puts some wingnut in Keith Olbermann's chair and cries out, "Look! Shiny!"

In 2003, MSNBC yanked Phil Donahue off the air, even though he had the highest-rated show on the network. No, he didn't get the ratings Fox had, but it was MSNBC's highest rated show. An insider report revealed the network's view that Donahue presented a "difficult public face for NBC in a time of war." Donahue was replaced by the very same man whose fingerprints were all over the Olbermann suspension yesterday -- Joe Scarborough, and the network hired right-wing hatemonger Michael Savage for a Saturday program.

It wasn't until MSNBC recognized that Keith Olbermann's audience is "sticky" that the brass there decided to take the chance on left-leaning political talk in primetime. And it's worked for them; perhaps not as much as Fox, but certainly better than any of the Alan Keyes/Michael Savage/outer wingnuttia experiments they did in trying to strip off Fox News viewers.

Even Olbermann's biggest fans acknowledge that he's often bombastic and self-important. Only rarely, as with his on-air eulogy for his mother (for which he won the 2010 Edward R. Murrow award) and his sharing of his late father's journey through the health care system to which people with money have access in the context of health care reform, does he come across as someone you might conceivably want to, well, have a beer with. His Special Comments, while passionate and often on-the-money, are so easily turned into parody that it's difficult to watch them now without thinking of the Ben Affleck parody. But anyone who thinks that Olbermann is simply a knee-jerk cheerleader for Democrats is delusional. If he has not been as tough on the Obama Administration as he was on the Bush Administration, it's because despite the former's appalling embrace of some of the worst national faux-security excesses of the Bush Administration, the Obama Administration isn't as relentlessly destructive of American values. Obama has taken more crap from Olbermann than ANY officeholding Republican has EVER taken from Fox News.

Rachel has it right here. Keith Olbermann's personal political leanings are no secret to anyone. No one watches Olbermann to get passionless, so-called "objective news." And Keith Olbermann never claims to be "Fair and Balanced" -- as if saying so makes it so. What both Olbermann and Maddow do not do, however, is just pull stuff out of their asses (like claiming that President Obama's upcoming trip to India is going to cost $200 million a day) and push it out over the airwaves so that it can become the proverbial lie told often enough that it becomes truth. Both shows are COMMENTARY -- and are presented as such.

Yesterday on the Today show, Meredith Viera looked as if she was going to have hot girl-on-girl action with Christine O'Donnell any minute, so fawning was she over the loser of the Delaware Senate race. Funny how she didn't have Sharron Angle on. The whole thing smacked of an interview for a job on MSNBC -- perhaps in Keith Olbermann's spot. I can almost hear the MSNBC front office suits talking about having two people named O'Donnell on at night would be a sure winner.

Labels: corporatism, Fox News, MSNBC, opinion journalism

Whoever would have thought that a Cop's Wife would be so cool?

Labels: gay rights, sheer awesomeness

(Video courtesy of Banzai7-V)

"Despite all my rage / I'm still just a rat in a cage." - "Bullet With Butterfly Wings", Smashing Pumpkins

Oh, heavens, no, Constant Readers. I would never advocate blowing up the White House or Capitol Building or even a Port-O-Potty on the National Mall with a keg of dynamite. That is, like, so 2009 Tea Party. But it is, after all, the 5th of November and the country has obviously slid another several feet toward the edge of the cliff in the wake of last Tuesday's elections. So, let's all sit down at my little kitchen table and have a nice chat, shall we?

Now, I'm as anxious as the rest of you about the direction our country's been heading ever since Ronald Reagan doddered around his California ranch wondering what the fuck happened to his 2nd rate acting career. And I won't be impolitic enough to point out that while we share the angst of the Tea Baggers, our own particular stress arises from knowing actual facts and not feverishly imagining Socialist / Fascist conspiracy theories.

Nonetheless, enough of us were deluded enough to hand the rudder wheel back to the same psychopaths who'd confidently steered the ship of state straight into the iceberg. And the GOP majority in the House and their more numerous bretheren in the Senate are just two of the things we have to worry about just in the next two years.

Because instead of the corporation-gobbling Marxist a certain notorious number of us think we have in the White House, we have a Stepin Fetchit house nigger willing to dance a jig to Wall Street's tune and willing to go by the new name of Toby if they but so much as dangle the whip.

The proof is in the pudding that is the health care bill, that Obama says will be improved upon and tinkered with when this government of plutocrats already had almost a year and a half to get it right the first time with an historic "progressive" majority. What little good the bill will do anyone who doesn't work for the government or who is rich enough to not need health insurance won't kick in until two years after Obama (hopefully) gets voted out of office, or 2014.

Iraq and Afghanistan are little more than Bush-era bailout packages for hundreds of military industrial contractors except we're using more contractors than we ever did under Bush.

The filthy rich, thanks to the right wing Supreme Court, now have nothing to stand between them and buying seats for their slightly less filthy rich comrades in harm, making the voice of the people more redundant than ever. Many of these same corporations belong to Infragard, the cabal of Fortune 500 companies that have been deputized and immunized by the Justice Department to kill American civilians who are judged in the field to be a threat to the national infrastructure.

These same corporations have already gotten an admirable head start in their undeclared eugenics program by making health care and life-saving pharmaceuticals so conditional and prohibitively expensive that we die while waiting for them. Visits to their corporates offices results in tasing and having the police called on you.

Corporations like BP and Exxon slather our coastlines with oil they spilled then try to slough off culpability like a wet blanket, get out of paying fines that still do not benefit us, get out of cleanup costs then, if we're lucky, they'll hire us at substandard wages and using substandard PPE and no health insurance. Then, whatever we're fortunate enough to make when our livelihoods are destroyed then gets deducted from whatever piddling settlement we would've gotten from them.

Then they have the nerve to expect the government to let them do it all over again.

Corporations like Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and other scumbags are literally stealing our homes and our cars even when they're paid off and the courts let them even when they produced just shoddy, backdated documents. They're shanghaiing us in our homes and fooling us into thinking we're in real courtrooms before real judges and real sheriff's deputies.

They lay us off by the tens of thousands, ship our jobs overseas so they can save a bundle so they can buy for themselves corporate jets, yachts, mansions and amass billions then have the gall to spend up to $160,000,000 on one campaign (all but $20 million coming out of Meg Whitman's bottomless pockets) and expect us to vote for them on the strength of fiscal responsibility and permanent lower taxes.

These same gabardine-swaddled, jiggling swine are building ocean liners, not yachts, but billion dollar ocean liners so they can then serenely float off into the sunset while the mainland erupts into a smoking war zone while the craters fill up with human blood. Once again, if you're lucky, you may survive as a member of the servant class onboard these getaway ocean liners.

Every once in a great while in the interests of cathartic theater of the absurd, the government temp workers of these same corporations bark at them like irritable Pekingese overcompensating, jesters timidly mocking the monarchy of old before cartwheeling away back into obscurity.

The problem with this country is that the fraud, the corruption and the outright contempt for the average working-class family is so pervasive and widespread, so deeply entrenched into the fabric of government that it's possible there's no one person who can connect all the dots and have a perfect, all-encompassing overview of the rot that has taken this country into the third world.

It's no accident but by design that we are last in the world in math test scores, last in preventable death health care (the hated France is #1), our health care system is the most expensive in the world but dead last or next to last against other industrialized nations. Having slipped seven ranks in just three years, we are 49th in life expectancy at just over 78 years (the hated Socialist French are #12 with tiny Monaco topping the list, averaging almost 90 years.) When the WHO last did their national rankings of health care systems 10 years ago, once again France came in 1st out of 191 nations while we did a dismal 37th.

Because the last thing the power elite wants is a an actual Democratic citizenry that's educated, informed and healthy enough to take back their government whenever necessary.

Yet all these corporations have to do is say, "Uh uh" and countless tens of millions will believe them when they say socialized medicine is evil and unAmerican, counter-capitalistic and Communist, that the free market always has our best interests at heart and can always be counted on to be responsible stewards of the environment.

The problem is, the stock market on Wall Street and the corporations who trade on the market floor have less to do with the actual economy than ever before. There's not just a gap widening between rich and poor but between Wall Street and Main Street.

When Mikael Blomkvist of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo exposed a Swedish tycoon of having committed virtually every white collar crime known to Man, he was asked what responsibility he and the media bore for the collapse of the Swedish stock market. Blomkvist said, "The idea that the Swedish economy is headed for a crash is nonsense." The incredulous reporter pressed on with, ""We're experiencing the largest single drop in the history of the Swedish stock exchange- and you think that's nonsense?" These are the words that the late Steig Larsson put in his mouth (with some modest editing from me):

You have to distinguish between two things- the economy and the stock market. The economy is the sum of all the goods and services that are produced in this country every day. It's just as strong or weak today as it was a week ago.

The stock exchange is something very different. There's no economy and no productions of goods and services. There are only fantasies in which people from one hour to the next decide this or that company is worth so many billions, more or less. It doesn't have a thing to do with reality or with the economy.

All good and well and that may still be the case in Sweden, with a necessary separation between economy and stock market, one dealing in tangibles such as goods and services and the other dealing in intangibles such as run-of-the-mill speculation.

And that would've been the case in our own financial Ivory Towers were it not for one thing: They decided that the real money wasn't on Wall Street but Main Street. The real wealth of our country is in its real estate holdings, which numbers in the tens of trillions of dollars.

Then, thanks to economic slaughterhouses such as Magnatar and Goldman Sachs, they realized that not only could they and their buddies sell us subprime mortgages but to then foreclose on those homes when the APR literally doubled within a year and a half of home ownership. Then they realized that they could make a killing by bundling those toxic mortgages by the thousands and to then con banks into buying them knowing fully well they would go belly up.

Then they realized that if they could do this with mortgages,, well Hell's bells, they could bundle anything, including life insurance policies bought for pennies on the dollar from people on their death beds so they can throw that into the gaping maw of the health care racket.

Then they realized that all they had to do was wave their arms and pretend to turn blue and beg the government for a bailout when their craps game turned into its namesake and that they could get us, the very same people they've been victimizing for decades, to bail them out.

Then they realized that, with this massive 11 trillion cash infusion and with the repeal of Glass Steagall in 1999 (which allowed them to more than dabble in real estate), they no longer had any incentive to make their money the old fashioned way, which was loaning it to us at a modest interest rate.

"Loan money? To you, of all people? What are we, nuts? Times are tough!" Even though that was supposedly the rationale of the bank bailout, to loan money to those qualified to take out these loans and to get liquidity flowing again.

Then they realized, with no more incentive to do business the old fashioned way, they went back to lighting their Cubans with thousand dollar bills that came with their billions upon billions in bonuses.

And Section 6 of TARP gives the Treasury Secretary the discretion to foist on the taxpayer another $700,000,000,000 in toxic debt whenever s/he feels like it.

Our president is now archly reminding us of the need to pull together and preaching of the virtue of shared sacrifice. Criticism of the government is not leveled at the right wing who want even more destruction in the form of Social Security and Medicare put on the auction block but at us with a surliness and contempt that's characteristic of the Bush administration toward those same progressives.

So let's think of these few facts as Obama prepares to listen to the GOP in their impassioned pleas to keep tax cuts for the rich and perhaps even to raid Social Security's and Medicare's coffers. Because they want it all for themselves. It's really all quite elemental: They want to hoard as much money as they can, they will snarl with atavistic ferocity at anyone who wants even a fraction of it, they do not want to accept any criticism or accountability for their crimes and they will not rest until we're dead or fighting each other and everybody but them for whatever few scraps escaped their vulture eyes.

As I write this I'm sitting at a Chili's in the Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood airport in sunny Florida, waiting for a Continental flight that since I got here two hours early has already been delayed over an hour.

I wasn't quite prepared to have to deal with full-body scanners, since Terminal C at Newark doesn't have them yet. But since I get a mammogram and dental x-rays every year, administered by medically-trained professionals, I really don't want to get x-rayed by bored TSA staff, thank you very much. So I opted for "alternative screening."

It's clear that the TSA staff here doesn't deal with people like me very often -- short fat middle-aged Jewish ladies who refuse to follow conventional wisdom, and my decision to opt out of being essentially strip-searched in order to get on an airplane left them somewhat nonplussed. They read me the spiel, hoping I would change my mind. Other travelers looked at me curiously, perhaps thinking I'd been pulled aside for extra screening.

It took a while to get someone to do the pat-downfeel-up, but I have to admit that the process is highly impersonal, the screener tells you exactly what she's going to do, and if you treat her (or him, if you are male) like a human being, it is a far more civilized way to be screened than to have to put your arms behind your head and have someone who may or may not know what he's doing zap x-rays through you. Of course that being frisked by a stranger is preferable to a full-body scan tells you something about what air travel has become these days. It mostly just makes me wonder if the luggage being loaded into the cargo hold is scanned as thoroughly "for our safety" as the passengers are.

So here we are, nearly a decade after the 9/11 attacks, still scratching our heads trying to stay one step ahead of some highly resourceful people who find this level of reality so intolerable that they not only want to leave it, but take a few hundred people with them. And every time we take off our shoes, send our laptops through scanners being monitored by people who often don't seem to know what they're looking at, or undergo virtual strip searches, I have to wonder if a step ahead is really where we are.

It's surprising -- and appalling, actually -- to watch people blindly and unquestioningly go into these body scanners. When you get dental x-rays, the technician leaves the room. It's also appalling to think what risks the TSA staff incurs every day at work, because they don't get to leave the room, and the scanners are not enclosed. It may be easier to think of this here, where the TSA employees are largely pleasant and professional, unlike Newark, where they tend to be surly and largely inattentive.

UPDATED 11/10/10: The ACLU cites Jeffrey Golberg's account of HIS dealings with the TSA in the Atlantic, and also notes that the "safety" of the scanners is disputed.

Labels: air safety, personal musings

That didn't take long.

Phil Griffin, who heads up MSNBC, has suspended Keith Olbermann indefinitely without pay for donating his own money to political candidates.

As Kos points out, Pat Buchanan donated money to Republicans between 2005 and 2008 (not to mention what a virulent hatemonger he is) and he's still on Morning Schmoe on a regular basis.

This morning Meredith Viera had a cuddle with Christine O'Donnell, who in case anyone forgot, LOST her election bid on Tuesday, but is somehow still a more valuable commodity on television than the guy who actually WON.

I can add 2 + 2, can you?

Meanwhile, Faux Noise doesn't seem to care about its on-air talent advocating for candidates on their own time with their own money. Here's a list of Sean Hannity's donations.

UPDATE: I'm shocked, I tell you...shocked...SHOCKED...and APPALLED...that Joey the Intern Killer Scarborough donates to Republicans -- but Phil Griffin has no problem with that.

UPDATE #2: Greg Sargent calls bullshit.

Labels: double standards, Keith Olbermann, MSNBC, what liberal media

No, not the blog (and where IS Fact-esque, anyway?)

Remember when Stephen Colbert was still on The Daily Show and did a "Mean Dean" sketch in 2004 in which he backed up his ridiculous claims about Howard Dean by saying "It's been widely reported, Jon. That makes it fact-esque"?

How about the birth of "truthiness":

Well, Michele Bachmann is repeating the right-wing echo chamber claim of Barack Obama as some kind of modern-day Hannibal with the contemporary equivalent of the thirty-seven elephants, claiming that the President's upcoming trip to India will cost taxpayers $200 million a day. How does she know this? Because it's been widely reported, as Rachel Maddow pointed out last night:


Politifact debunks. Not that it will matter to the crazies.

And THAT, Jon Stewart, is why it's disingenuous to compare even the bombast of Keith Olbermann to the right-wing echo chamber. Olbermann at least bases his opinions on decisions reached at by thought and evaluation of empirical facts. The right just pulls stuff out of its collective ass, repeats it in its echo chamber on radio and the internet, and then says it must be true because it's on the internet. Sorry, but that's NOT the same.

Labels: batshit crazies, Teh Stoopid, wingnuttia

So George W. Bush has admitted that he is a war criminal.

Peter Daou:

This story should be as big as the midterms, but it won’t be. The U.S. media long ago determined that George W. Bush’s transgressions have ceased to be newsworthy. One of the reasons is that the Obama administration made the disastrous choice not to investigate Bush. That cop-out allows Bush to freely admit he approved torture:

Human rights experts have long pressed the administration of former president George W. Bush for details of who bore ultimate responsibility for approving the simulated drownings of CIA detainees, a practice that many international legal experts say was illicit torture. In a memoir due out Tuesday, Bush makes clear that he personally approved the use of that coercive technique against alleged Sept. 11 plotter Khalid Sheik Mohammed, an admission the human rights experts say could one day have legal consequences for him.

In his book, titled “Decision Points,” Bush recounts being asked by the CIA whether it could proceed with waterboarding Mohammed, who Bush said was suspected of knowing about still-pending terrorist plots against the United States. Bush writes that his reply was “Damn right” and states that he would make the same decision again to save lives, according to a someone close to Bush who has read the book.

Tom Malinowski, the Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, said, “Waterboarding is broadly seen by legal experts around the world as torture, and it is universally prosecutable as a crime. The fact that none of us expect any serious consequences from this admission is what is most interesting.”

M. Cherif Boussiani, an emeritus law professor at DePaul University who co-chaired the U.N. experts committee that drafted the torture convention, said that Bush’s admission could theoretically expose him to prosecution. But he also said Bush must have presumed that he would have the government’s backing in any confrontation with others’ courts.

So, President Obama...you agreed not to pursue any action against your predecessor. He's now admitted to being an international criminal, and Mitch McConnell says the only thing he wants to do over the next two years is make sure you don't get a second term.

How's that bipartisanship thing working out for ya?

Labels: Bush Administration crimes, war crimes, wussy-ass Democrats

Cheer up, teachers of New Jersey...it could be worse. Your governor could be John Kasich:

Kasich also had a direct message for the teacher's union, who blasted him during the campaign for his stance on the merit pay and holding teachers accountable.

"I am waiting for the teachers union to take out full page ads in all of the newspapers apologizing for what they had to say about me during this campaign," said Kasich.

And if they do, he'll bitch that they're squandering money.

Oh, and by the way, he's also declared that "creating jobs, halting the statewide passenger rail project and reining in labor unions are his top priorities."

I guess the jobs he wants to create are maid, cook, gardener, and pool boy for himself. Because the statewide passenger rail project he just killed would have generated up to 8000 jobs. He must have a different definition of "jobs" than the rest of us do.

Labels: arrogance, pompous asses, Republicans, scumbaggery

After Tuesday's election, pundits and other morons (see also: Evan Bayh) have been insisting that the key to Democratic electoral success is to tack even further to the right. As this graphic from Great Orange Satan shows, that would be the DUMBEST thing to do:

The "moderates" that the pundits seem to think left the Democrats in fact voted for Democrats by a 16 percentage point margin. Yes, this is down from a 60%/38% split in 2006, but it still belies the notion that moderates support teabagger policies. I suspect that the moderates who stayed home said "A pox on both your houses" -- not because the Democrats were too liberal, but because the Democrats don't seem to stand for anything and can't even sell their own policies -- perhaps because by the time they get done capitulating to Republicans, ther's nothing to sell. Yes, there are moderates who respond to "Look! Shiny!". But there are those who simply don't have time to dig into the minutiae of a healthcare bill with giveways to the insurance industry -- even if it DOES turn out to be a boon to them in 2014 (which yet remains to be seen). They call themselves moderate for a reason -- they aren't doctrinaire on either side of the spectrum. Whoever convinces them gets their vote. By selling out to the looney right, the Republicans didn't get their votes, and by appearing weak and spineless, Democrats didn't give them reason to vote.

The answer isn't for Democrats to be more like what Republicans used to be. The answer is for Democrats to be proud of being Democrats -- instead of hiding under the table and hiring Alan Simpson to destroy Social Security so you can call yourself "fiscally responsible" and "bipartisan."

(UPDATE: Krugman does a nice job of smacking Evan Bayh around here.)

Labels: framing, wussy-ass Democrats

Recently, former President George W. Bush cited rapper Kanye West calling him a racist in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina as the worst moment of his presidency. The 43rd president also told NBC's Matt Lauer that there were other rough patches in his memoir, Decision Points. But Mr. Bush also cited other bad moments during his administration in his autobiography. What were they?

10) Having to buff out Dick Cheney's heel marks on the resolute desk with torn swatches of the original US Constitution.

9) CIA Director George Tenet telling him after 9/11 that Osama bin Laden had hidden in Camp David for three days.

8) That in July of 2003 Bob Novak was outed by the Wilsons as a GOP operative.

7) The only Thursday night the White House kitchen couldn't serve pork rinds.

6) That Ted Kennedy couldn't die sooner so he could tell at his funeral alcoholism jokes originally told at a Dean Martin roast 32 years ago.

5) Cindy Sheehan "pissing and moaning about some dead feller named Casey" during his vacation.

4) The eight temporary lobotomies he'd suffered through every time Karl "Bush's Brain" Rove went on vacation.

3) Seeing the twins reach their 20's without either of them having killed a gay person.

2) When Brent Scowcroft gave him on his 60th birthday a beanie with "41½ " on it.

1) When a panel of historians determined by late 2008 that he'd had been less effective than William Henry Harrison, who died one month into office.

Labels: George W. Bush

In recent months, we've started to see little tiny tiny tiny signs that the economic conditions in this country HAVE been improving. It's barely perceptible, and certainly not perceptible at all to the millions of people who lost their jobs in 2008, voted for Barack Obama in the hope that he could help their situations improve, and are still out of work two years later. But the signs ARE there:

How's this for some perverse, twisted irony? On Tuesday, voters cited worry about the economy as their primary concern. Throw away the conflicting ideologies battling for supremacy: The simplest explanation for yesterday's results is that incumbent parties always suffer when the economy is down.

But on Wednesday, a batch of new economic indicators offered more scope for optimism than we've seen all year.

• Reports from car manufacturers indicate that October was the best month for auto sales since August 2009 -- when sales were goosed by the Cash for Clunkers program. If you skip Cash for Clunkers, it's the best performance in more than two years.


• Factory orders rose 2.1 percent in October, the sharpest rise since January


• Service companies expanded at the fastest rate in three months.


• ADP Employer Services, the largest private sector payroll processor in the U.S., reported that private companies added 43,000 new jobs in October, more than double what economists had been expecting.

It's not enough, but it's real. Whether this is just the proverbial dead cat bounce or if this is really the glimmer of a beginning of a recovery remains to be seen, but it's definitely there.

The problem that the Democrats face now, and it's hard to have any confidence in their ability to frame it to their advantage, is that if the economy continues to improve, the Rand Paulite teabaggers who now control the Republican Party will take the credit and say it's because of THEIR policies -- despite the fact that for the last three decades, pee-on-the-poor economics have never, ever been shown to result in economic growth over the long term.

We are a nation of babies: id-dominated creatures who want everything we want and we want it now, and when we don't get everything we want RIGHT NOW we scream bloody murder and throw a tantrum. However, we're highly selective about the things for which we demand instant gratification. We gave George W. Bush eight years of war and demanded nothing in terms of resolution -- or how much it cost. We gave him the ability to squander the surplus that was left to him by Bill Clinton and turn it into a deficit of over a trillion dollars. We arguably allowed him to steal not one but two elections. Americans looked the other way because the media told us he was a great guy, one of us, the guy you'd like to have a beer with, the guy who did the equivalent of puttering around his lawn when he went on vacation. He was the war president; the guy who stuffed the crotch of his flightsuit and strutted around like he was the biggest swingiest dick in the universe. He made Chris Matthews go all weak in the knees. But it was OK, because ENOUGH of us were OK.

Then in the fall of 2008, it all fell apart, and Barack Obama was swept into office. Had John McCain chosen one of the colorless white men he wanted, he might very well have been elected, but he didn't, and when push came to shove, the smiling black guy seemed like a better chance to take than the aging high school mean girl who couldn't put together a coherent sentence. We'd already had eight years of that. Too many people pinned a paper suit on Barack Obama and turned him into something he never was. He was the guy who DIDN'T feel "icky" about Teh Gays...except that he did, but he just never said it (until recently). He was the smart guy, the anti-Bush, the guy who pushed all our buttons and promised that he would make it all go away. The problem was that he was never what anyone thought he was.

He was never the progressive champion. This was a guy who chose Joe Lieberman to be his senior mentor in the Senate. This is a guy who as a new Senator sat on his hands when Stephanie Tubbs-Jones asked for a Senator to stand up with her and protest the vote in Ohio in 2004. But he's not a secret Musliim terrorist communist either. This is a very cautious, centrist guy, who is the living embodiment of Wanda Sykes' comedy bit about her mother always telling them as kids, "White folks are looking at you." The problem is that he was elected and ran straight-on into the brick wall that is today's Republican Party -- so-called "patriots" who would rather see this country die a slow, painful death rather than work together with those who don't see the world the way they do.

I've been in Florida this week -- a state that went about as hard to the right on Tuesday that it's possible to go. Florida has been the receipient of a shitload of Federal stimulus funds, but not one Democratic candidate in this state made note of that. And Florida is just one example. Fox News has shown that you can sell people a shit sandwich through fear. Apple shows that you can sell people products they don't need though sheer coolness. I see an iPad, and despite the fact that I have a desktop PC, two notebooks and a netbook, all I can thing of is WANT. SRSLY. NOW.

Marketing is everything, and the Democrats have shown absolutely no ability to do it. We have an awful health care reform bill that for most Americans who already have insurance is resulting in huge premium increases NOW -- no matter how it helps later on. And it has the Democrats' name on it because they capitulated to Republicans and the insurance industry in an effort to be "bipartisan." We have a defanged Wall Street reform bill. And now we have a just-maybe recovering economy -- but it's going to have the Republicans' name on it. Not because of their policies, which will cause collapse in the long term but keep them in power in the short, but because the Democrats were too damn lame, too damn lazy, too damn afraid of Glenn Beck, or too damn inept, to even tell Americans about their own achievements.

Labels: economic stimulus, wussy-ass Democrats

I know the Giants won the World Series. Anything else interesting happen while I was offline?

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

I suppose I should be a gracious loser and express the usual pious platitudes about how great it is to be in a free country, a democracy where every person has one vote. I suppose it's also incumbent on me to respect that democracy, accept last night's brutal results and say, "The people have spoken."

But the people have not spoken.

Most of them don't during your typical midterm, largely because the presidency isn't at stake. Typically, a midterm will bring out anywhere from 30-40% of the vote and last night wasn't much of an exception. The final national numbers aren't in, yet, but I think it would be safe to say that voter turnout last night still didn't get above 45%, if that.

So, no, the people have not spoken. They are the biennial, post-Nixonian Silent Majority.

And these people who'd decided to stay home have nothing to complain about because they forfeited their right to do so by saying home and pissing and moaning about attack ads, dead-catting, mud-slinging and name-calling. At the bottom of all that filth there were still the issues and they didn't dissolve beneath all the muck and mire. The issues, like our unpaid bills and terminal disease, stubbornly remain.

So let's take a look at what we will have come New Year's: With all but 10 House races decided, our only bright spot in the country is that southern New England (RI, CT and MA) made a clean sweep. Add to that Blumenthal's victory over Linda McMahon in the CT Senate race, former liberal Republican Lincoln Chafee winning his Dad's old Governor's seat and Deval Patrick easily winning re-election as Massachusetts' chief executive. We did our part but the same can't be said for the rest of the country.

At this moment, Republicans now have 240 House seats and almost took the majority in the Senate. And, most disheartening, while we lost liberal icons Russ Feingold and Alan Grayson, not one Republican incumbent of any consequence lost their seat in either chamber. Even Lisa Murkowski, as one of 1600 qualified write-in candidates in Alaska, beat Joe Miller by 7 points. Yes, Joe Miller was so repulsive to even right-leaning Alaska, that "One of the 1600 above" was preferable to him.

Meanwhile, we now have psychopaths like Marco Rubio and Rand Paul about to enter the Senate and we were treated to presumptive House Speaker John Boehner weeping before a plexiglass podium like a bi-polar Oompa-Loompa.

Here's an idea: We ought to make an Act of Congress that permanently rescinds your right to vote if you sit out two elections in a row. How one can call oneself an American while refusing to vote yet whining about who gets in, who gets tossed out while accepting federal benefits in a countless variety of ways is loathsome, despicable and ought to be grounds for a recission in citizenship or at least some of its benefits.

And while the will of the people who did vote ought to be respected, since voting is the very heart of a democracy, one must nonetheless marvel at the sheer disconnect, the panic and the absolute fingers-in-the-ears, head-shaking, stubborn ignorance that went with sweeping back into power the Republicans, the very same people who'd gotten us into this mess, the very same party whose entire strategy boils down to, "Less regulations, less taxes and No to everything Obama wants."

And when the inevitable gridlock get us even less reform and protection over the next two years, we're going to take it out on Obama twice as mercilessly as we did last night. And, like the last midterms in '06, voter dissatisfaction had victimized the President's party as if the legislative and executive branches were the one and the same.

Except in '06, we at least had a point. This time around, we didn't. And many of us chose to stay home.

Russ Feingold stood up to Obama and his excesses in Afghanistan and foot-dragging in Iraq. So did Alan Grayson, who also stood up to the evil banks and the Fed. But Russ Feingold and Alan Grayson didn't lose to other men: They lost to ultra right wing corporations too ashamed and cowardly to admit who they were financing. They lost to the US Chamber of Commerce that openly champions hollowing out the American workforce by outsourcing jobs to foreign countries that pay pay them "dues". They lost to the US Supreme Court and their stupendously brazen and pro-corporate decision named, ironically, Citizens United vs the FEC. Consider last night's results a test drive for Citizen's United in 2012.

The citizens of this country have been anything but united since 9/11 and the SCOTUS's decision only proves that even 45% of our citizens united with the common desire to vote is no match for a handful of corporations and their political arm in the Chamber of Commerce.

You have only yourselves to blame and I have nothing but withering contempt for every single last one of you.

You just put back in power a party that is largely if not entirely responsible for everything that is wrong with this country, as if the GOP learned their lessons from their "thumpin'" of four years ago and will finally get things right this time, as if this wasn't the party that also voted for the bailout that allowed executives to resume handing each other billions of our tax dollars as bonuses, the GOP that called you a bum for needing UI extensions because your job was outsourced by them to Asia or Mexico, as if the GOP actually has a plan to help you keep your house after that same party repealed Glass-Steagall (with new Senator-elect Pat Toomey's help) and took away your right to file for bankruptcy.

The same party that started needless and illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to no appreciable benefit to either of our three countries and eventually cost us trillions bloating the military-industrial complex, the party that wanted to deport over 11,000,000 hard-working brown people, wanted to spy on you without FISA court warrants, that strive to make our children more ignorant in schools, to make abortion illegal even in cases of incest or rape, the same party that is bound and determined to remove the very last sinew of regulation on any industry even as they're polluting our ecosystem and killing us. The same party that demonized African Americans after Katrina, wounded veterans when their neglect was revealed and the newly unemployed and homeless when they understandably looked to our government for help.

These are the people to whom you've handed back the keys to our seat of government. We took a half a step in the right direction away from the Bush-era fireball of failure and are now about to take ten steps back into the Low Dark Ages. They have learned nothing, never will learn anything and months ago were already vowing to impeach our president for spurious reasons and to block his every objective that isn't named after Afghanistan.

Bravo. Well done. And I hope you all rot in the hell you've just accelerated. Because if you thought this midterm election was brutish, long and nasty, imagine what things will be like in two years.

If you're here, of all places, then you don't need me to stress to you the importance of voting. Michael Moore said it pretty eloquently at HuffPo and elsewhere and between Moore and Rachel Maddow, they make a pretty good case as to why Democrats and liberals especially have to both vote and to get out the vote.

But no matter how eloquent, persuasive and right these arguments are, this time around they come off as sounding pretty desperate, don't they? Too many of us are listening to pundits like Karl Rove and the always-wrong Dick "The Ultimate Political Blowback" Morris, people whose prognostications have been telling us for a year or more that the Democrats are doomed, that they'll certainly lose the House and perhaps even the Senate.

Well, the only way that's going to happen is if you sit on your keisters during this election and not vote your conscience. And if you have a conscience, then you'll know what you have to do. As I said, if you're here, then you don't need ole JP to tell you about how wonderful and important it is to have the right to vote for the person and ballot measure of your choice. But if you know any left-leaning people who plan on staying home until the polls close, it's your moral responsibility to get them up and at the polls if they're registered to vote. And if they're not registered, it's also your moral responsibility to get them to register for 2012.

Because you know what'll happen if we treat this like any other midterm, where a good turnout is something approaching 40%. This particular midterm is, if anything, more important than most. We've seen open rebellion against a tepid, mainstream, middle of the road, centrist president who's helped give us a faint whiff of actual reform and a Congress that's hardly any more committed.

But that's a damn sight more than what you'll get with a Republican-dominated Congress. With a Republican Congress, you'll see the endless extension of the Bush tax cuts that have helped bankrupt us so the wealthy can get even more bloated. We'll see the last of any regulation of the corporate sector that's also bankrupted us as well as polluted our southern shoreline for decades.

Don't believe me? Remember what things were like when the GOP dominated Congress during those four crucial years between 2003-2007? We saw our nation go to war with a much smaller sovereign country that had nothing to do with 9/11. We saw the disappearance of a major American city due to shocking federal neglect. We lost the right to file for bankruptcy, the economy was ready to burst, and innocent Iraqis and disabled American servicemen were suddenly the villains when news surfaced that we were abusing and neglecting them.

"Liberal" became a four letter word more than ever and a grieving war mother named Cindy Sheehan had to remind us of our humanity and how wrong the Iraq war was by taking a lonely stand in a ditch in Crawford, Texas.

Yeah, you remember. Remember how the 2006 midterms couldn't come fast enough and we all said out loud or to ourselves, "When, O when are the midterms coming so we can vote these bums out?" And you did the right thing.

Well, we're about to do the same thing but to the wrong party. I don't believe for a minute that the GOP will take either chamber of Congress and I think by late tonight I'll be proven right again. But the Tea Baggers, thanks to the MSM, think they have the upper hand. They're hopped up like crystal meth freaks on Viagra and Spanish Fly.

Let me make one thing perfectly clear: If the GOP takes either chamber of Congress, it won't be because of a tide of Red Republican votes but through the dam of backed-up votes denied the Democrats by lazy faux liberals and other moderates. Remember the words of that inestimable friend of Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, when he wrote, "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."

You all know what you gotta do.

Maybe we can all take a lesson from Gen. George S. Patton in his famous speech to the 3rd Army. Here's Patton's speech, slightly revised in bold for Election Day:

"People, this stuff that some sources sling around about America wanting out of this election, not wanting to vote, is a crock of bullshit. Americans love to fight, traditionally. All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle. You are here today for three reasons. First, because you are here to defend your homes and your loved ones. Second, you are here for your own self respect, because you would not want to be anywhere else. Third, you are here because you are real Americans and all real Americans like to fight.

Well, despite what Jon Stewart told us at the rally, this election is a fight because the other side has made it a fight. Unlike us, Mr. Stewart, the GOP and its Tea Bagger overseers are resorting to threats, intimidation and outright disinformation, such as in Kansas.

And if the GOP somehow gains either chamber of the legislative branch, the new majority party, drunk on its Koolaid-fueled power, will suddenly remember all about the impeachment process and we'll see one set of articles of impeachment after another against President Obama, only without Monica Lewinsky. God help us if those sick cocksuckers take over the Senate, also. That will make even whatever tepid and middling reforms we'd ever get out of this White House over the next two years harder to bring about if the President has to needlessly fend off one silly article of impeachment after another.

Because to the Other Side that Jon Stewart insists on calling passionate Americans with real convictions, it's about preventing gay people from marrying, it's about deporting hardworking, taxpaying brown people, it's about putting a white guy back in the White House, it's about extending tax cuts for the wealthiest 1%, it's about abortion, it's about allowing corporations like BP to continue fucking up our ecosystem. It's about everything but what really counts because the last thing the Republican Party needs or wants is a government that actually fucking works.

To quote Patton one more time: "Alright now, you sons-of-bitches, you know how I feel."

Now get out and do the right thing.

Need inspiration today? Forget for just a moment that Mel Gibson is a crazy-ass, abusive anti-Semite. Check out these 40 Inspirational Speeches in Two Minutes:

Now get out there and vote for sanity.

Labels: elections, movies

Anyone who's ever known me for even a day knows that I hate interstate travel. The last time I drove for more than a couple of hours was in 1989 when my ex-girlfriend and I drove from western MA to Mississippi. Then, a few months later, we had to drive back when the glorious family reunion with her two grown kids didn't turn out so glorious, after all. Eight days after we arrived, she was whining about missing MA. In my paranoid state of mind, highways are built expressly to kill people and over the course of a 500 mile road trip and back, there are literally countless possibilities for becoming road kill.

As Mike Flannigan says in American Zen:

The ride to Connecticut was thankfully uneventful. I don’t know why a man my age, with three decades of safe driving under his belt, can’t take a safe little trip from Rhode Island to Connecticut for granted but the fact is I don’t. If I have to go some place that’s further away than the convenience store down the street, I think it’s somewhat surprising that I get to my destination. If it involves swinging onto a highway onramp, I think a safe trip is like a Biblical miracle.

That’s my biggest failing, if I have to pick one: My occasional obsessive/compulsive need to analyze shit down to its atomic structure. It may serve me in good stead as a political journalist/blogger since looking at things from differing viewpoints is crucial to understanding and explicating a thorny issue. However, it can be cumbersome for me and others when my OCD is applied to real life.

Take, for instance, my fear of driving. While other people zip by me at 70-75 mph, I’m thinking of how fast I could get killed, at how absurdly easy it would be to not have a death-free and satisfactory journey. And, to be fair to me, think about it for a minute:

Consider all the perfectly-timed, impeccably executed decisions that one has to make, a flawless string of pearls that one has to make to get to where they’re going in one piece. Don’t tailgate, look before you switch lanes, get in the proper lane before turning off, look out for erratic drivers, pay attention to strange sounds that your or someone’s car may make, keep an eye out for signs, be alert for people who legally and especially illegally pass you…

There’s so much to think about, it freaks me out when do I think about it. I envy those who can brainlessly take their safety for granted.

Mike and I differ in several ways but that's pure JP talking.

Ergo, when Mrs. JP and I got sucked into the Stewart/Colbert rally hype like a pair of over-the-hill lemmings and debated whether to take Arianna's buses from Boston, we'd decided the best way to go in the interests of freedom was to take our new/used '98 Ford Taurus to Arlington, VA where she had a friend who'd put us up for the w/e.

So we packed the Ford Friday morning and began an 11 hour odyssey that Mapquest told us would take a mere eight hours and three minutes. What Mapquest can't anticipate is bottlenecks in traffic for no earthly reason. At least six times just on the way down, traffic had slowed to a crawl or standstill even when there wasn't an accident, major exit, lane merge, toll booth, construction or for any other reason. It was as if one driver in each of the three lanes just decided, "Fuck it. I'm going to stop here and jerk off all over my windshield."

But toll booths certainly were the most egregious reasons for the parking lots we had to sit in, especially in Manhattan at the George Washington Bridge (aptly shortened to the GWB). On the way back home last night, we sat in traffic for literally an hour while apathetic toll booth drones extracted $8 from each of us. With a dozen toll lanes open, only four were dedicated to those with cash. It's inconceivable that so many thousands of people would find themselves trapped on I-95 in Manhattan at 7 o'clock on Halloween night but there we were.

(A word of caution for those of you on the east coast who may be planning a long road trip involving I-95- Avoid Delaware like the plague that it is. Reader Diva Dillon texted me on the way down to get out of Delaware ASAP and I found out the hard way what she meant. The entire state is a mere 10 square miles but they have more toll booths than they do papers of incorporation and will charge you top dollar for the privilege of crawling along their miserable little roadways at 15 miles an hour. I was barely aware that Delaware was a state and, after importing Joe Biden and Christine O'Donnell (whose campaign signs we had to endure along the roadway), we ought to have a Act of Congress that officially allows us to forget Delaware's statehood. As it is, it's barely fit to be a suburb of fucking Trenton, NJ.)

So even though we left around 9 AM, we didn't roll into Arlington until about 8 that night. The next day, thinking that the rally would last until 6 PM, we left the house around noon and tried to get on the DC Metro. Once again, incredulity reigned. We paid $14 for round trip tickets for the privilege of standing on the platform for (I shit you not) almost an hour and a half. A total of five trains stopped at Ballston MU and, even though we were at the edge of the platform, we couldn't get on. The people on them were packed in like cigarettes and every time the doors opened, they'd scream, "No!" It didn't make sense for the trains to stop because literally 2-5% of us on the platform could squeeze in. Meanwhile, the platform got more and more crowded as people kept streaming down the escalator.


I can;t believe the Metro authoreities didn't plan on there being an extra 200,000 people in the Metro area because of the rally (Read Joe of Joe. My. God. for his own account of the DC Metro.).

So, while I was having Charles Bronson fantasies and watching one train after another take off without us, I just grabbed Mrs. JP's hand and practically dragged her up the disabled escalator. We stopped at an IHOP next door for a quick pancake breakfast while I loudly railed for anyone to hear about the benefits of eugenics. Afterward, we took a cab in front of the Hilton to the rally. It cost us $20 plus the tip but it was worth it (or so we thought). I was not going to drive nearly 24 hours to get to a rally that we'd miss.

Well, as else anyone who was actually there can tell you, you'll know the rally ended after Tony Bennett sang at about 2:30. The cabbie dropped us off a few blocks from where the rally was between 3rd and 7th streets and it took us until after 2:30 to get to the head of the cordoned-off area. I got a glimpse of Jon Stewart and Tony Bennett on the Jumbotron and by the time we got to the cordon, the event staff was already breaking down the massive stage.

Luckily, we were able to get a Capitol cop to kindly give us directions to the nearest Metro station on 3rd street and we took a thankfully uneventful and comfortable train ride back to Ballston where out friend took us home.

The timing on the 30th was our fault but it can't be said that the DC Metro did anyone any great favors by not factoring in what turned out to be an extra 200,000 people (according to the CBC) in the DC area. They sold well over 800,000 tickets but who knows how many were worthless because of the crowding? And idiotic drivers and rapacious and mobbed-up Turnpike authorities needlessly holding up traffic was also beyond our control. Thank the Powers That Be that our 12 year-old girl faithfully navigated us through nearly 1000 miles of hostile highway without a single hitch.

As you can see from the pictures I'd already posted, we saw some great signs, met some really laid-back and nice fellow liberals and one incredible guy in a dress made up entirely of candy bracelets (to his mortification, I stuffed a dollar into it but failed to save the picture I took). Cigarettes are literally half the price, it being tobacco country, and it was nice meeting my SO's best friend from Rhode Island.

But with the 11 hour trip back last night, that meant we drove just over 22 hours to attend the final hour of the rally without actually seeing any of it. 22 hours, almost $50 in tolls and about $120 in gasoline. No, it was so incredibly not worth it. Therefore, for the foreseeable future, Mrs. JP and I will be homebodies regardless what Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and our overlord Markos cook up. It was a needlessly expensive, frustrating, infuriating and exhausting road trip.