Brilliant at Breakfast

And this happened on the day Gabrielle Giffords resigned from the House

2012-01-27T06:48:00.002-05:00

On the day Gabrielle Giffords resigned from Congress to continue to recover from being shot in the head, it looks like someone in Missouri has decided that the way to get rid of Democratic lawmakers is via a bun barrel:

Orange stickers with an image of rifle cross hairs were found yesterday on the office nameplates of several Democratic state senators, prompting an investigation by Missouri Capitol Police, Senate Administrator Jim Howerton said.

“We are taking all the precautions we can,” Howerton said.

One similar sticker was found on the nameplate outside the door of state Rep. Scott Dieckhaus, R-Washington. He was the only Republican and the only House member who found one of the stickers.

The stickers were near the doors of all four Democratic women in the Senate — Jolie Justus and Kiki Curls, both of Kansas City, and Maria Chapelle-Nadal and Robin Wright-Jones, both of St. Louis. A sticker also was found near the door of Sen. Victor Callahan, D-Kansas City and the Democrats’ floor leader.

“If anyone thinks this was a prank, it is not a prank,” Justus said after discussing the discovery of the stickers on the Senate floor. “You don’t joke about someone’s personal safety.”

There was no explanation of the significance of the stickers, and as of this morning, no leads had been reported to Senate leaders. Lawmakers yesterday were debating a Republican-sponsored bill to block implementation of the federal health care overhaul. Democrats were leading the opposition.

“It is unsettling, especially since we have no protection, no metal detectors in this building,” Curls said. Her staff found a small sticker, removed it and later found a much larger one in its place, she said.

“We don’t have any explanation,” Justus said on the Senate floor. “Many of us when we came back to our office this afternoon had gun targets on our nameplates. A few of the senators removed them, only to have them replaced by larger stickers later.”

Justus said Capitol Police and the Missouri State Highway Patrol had been contacted to conduct the investigation.

(via)

It's not just about abortion...OR birth control. They just hate women and want a legally-enforced patriarchy. Period.

2012-01-27T06:22:00.004-05:00

I've been saying for years that the minute the right is successful in having abortion made a capital crime, they'll go after birth control. I was right about that, but even I never dreamed that as much as the GOP wants to codify patriarchy and the subjugation of women through government, they'd stoop to this in ANY state, let alone New Hampshire:

Since the 1970s, New Hampshire police have operated under a progressive policy for handling domestic violence cases that has saved countless lives. Under current law the presumption is that an arrest will be made when police observe evidence of abuse. They have a large degree of discretion and don’t need to witness the assault firsthand or obtain a legal warrant before they can separate the alleged attacker from his victim.

All that will change if Republicans get their way. The state’s GOP legislators are pushing two bills that will reverse a half century of progress, the Concord Monitor reports:

Domestic violence is no longer taken lightly legally or by society. That’s the way it should be, but two bills under consideration by this most unusual of legislatures, would undo that progress and put lives in danger. Both deserve a speedy defeat.

House Bill 1581 would turn the clock back 40 years to an age when a police officer could not make an arrest in a domestic violence case without first getting a warrant unless he or she actually witnessed the crime. That’s an exceedingly dangerous change. Consider the following scenario, one outlined for lawmakers by retired Henniker police chief Tim Russell:

An officer is called to a home where she sees clear evidence that an assault has occurred. The furniture is overturned, the children are sobbing, and the face of the woman of the house is bruised and bleeding. It’s obvious who the assailant was, but the officer arrived after the assault occurred. It’s a small department, and no one else on the force is available to keep the peace until the officer finds a judge or justice of the peace to issue a warrant. The officer leaves, and the abuser renews his attack with even more ferocity, punishing his victim for having called for help. [...]
It’s impossible to say how many lives the policy, in place since the 1970s, has saved or how many injuries it’s prevented. If they adopt House Bill 1581, lawmakers might find out, but the price paid could be extraordinarily high.

The other bill Republicans have proposed, HB 1608, limits judges’ ability to order the arrest of someone who has violated a domestic violence restraining order by contacting or abusing the person named in the order. It would also prevent judges from ordering defendants to surrender their weapons or block them from buying guns.

Because as far as Republicans are concerned, if the bitch won't obey, you can slap her around. And if she still won't obey, you can shoot her to death. It's all good with them.

The bottom line: Republican primary voters WANT to be fed with the red meat of hate

2012-01-27T05:35:00.003-05:00

Perhaps we can stop pretending now that the reason for Newt Gingrich's support is because he's a smart fella who understands the plight of the working man and recognize that it's because he's the living, breathing talking id of the voter whose primary motivation is racial, ethnic, and religious hate.

Nate Silver notes (NYT link) that the more Newt Gingrich invokes poor {black} people with no work ethic and {black} food stamp recipients, the more support he has. And when he makes even a feeble attempt to be a "statesman", his support plummets:

At Monday’s debate in Tampa, Fla., it was Mr. Gingrich who pulled his punches, adopting a subdued approach and declining opportunities to attack the other candidates. His strategy, like Mr. Romney’s a week earlier, perhaps looked good in the playbook: the initial polls after South Carolina had shown Mr. Gingrich surging to a lead in Florida, and perhaps Mr. Gingrich thought he could look more like a front-runner by adopting a less combative and more magnanimous approach.

But Republican voters, once more, did not react well: Mr. Gingrich has since lost considerable ground in the polls and now trails Mr. Romney in Florida. It is not necessarily clear that the debate was the only cause of this. Nevertheless, Mr. Gingrich entered Thursday evening trailing Mr. Romney in the polls and needing a win in the second debate.

Instead, Mr. Gingrich seemed to be playing for a draw. He passed upon several opportunities to push back at Mr. Romney, despite being expressly presented with opportunities to do so — on health care, on Ronald Reagan’s legacy, on immigration, and on Mr. Romney’s personal finances among other issues. The only exception came when Mr. Gingrich alleged that Mr. Romney had invested in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — but this was met with a strong rebuttal by Mr. Romney, who seemed well prepared for the attack.

I strongly suspect that Mr. Gingrich will extend the losing streak for this passive debate strategy. There aren’t any post-debate polls yet, but the betting market Intrade might provide a preview of them. By the time the evening was done, Mr. Gingrich’s chances of winning Florida had plummeted to 10 percent from 25 percent in the market, and his chances of winning the Republican nomination had dropped to about 5 percent from 10 percent.

Of course there are four full days left before Tuesday's Florida primary, so Gingrich has plenty of time to toss out meat and bone and sinew to the hatemongers who are still so busy pointing down the ladder at those who are still further down than they are to notice the guys up above them hungrily eyeing the last two bucks in their pockets.

Caption This Photo

2012-01-26T06:11:00.005-05:00

Jan Brewer must be a real hero among wingnuts today for "putting the President in his place":

Oh fer cryin' out loud - Birther edition

2012-01-26T05:45:00.003-05:00

Can you imagine what these people will do if Obama gets a second term? Orly Taitz and her lunatic minions aren't giving up...and it could have repercussions in the November election:

In a decision that broke with every other judge to consider the issue, including at least one judge who effectively fined birther queen Orly Taiz $20,000 for pressing the absurd claim that President Obama is not a citizen eligible to serve as president, a Georgia administrative law judge sided Taitz and several of her clients’ in an effort to force President Obama to testify in a birther case:
In a surprising ruling Friday, a Georgia state administrative judge declined to quash a subpoena directing Obama to attend a hearing Thursday at the Fulton County courthouse on a challenge to strike him from the Georgia ballot this fall on claims he is not a U.S. citizen. [...]
Lawyers for those pursuing the challenges recently issued a subpoena for Obama to attend the upcoming hearing. Obama’s legal team filed a motion to quash the subpoena, but [Deputy Chief Judge Michael] Malihi declined. In his order, Malihi noted that Obama’s legal team had argued that no president should be compelled to attend a court hearing.
“This may be correct,” Malihi wrote. “But [Obama] has failed to enlighten the court with any legal authority.”
Obama’s court filings fail to show why his attendance would be “unreasonable or oppressive” or why his testimony would be “irrelevant, immaterial or cumulative,” the judge wrote.

The arrogance of Malihi’s decision is astounding. If he needs legal authority showing that the president cannot be simply commanded to present himself in court on a very specific date, he might start with the Supreme Court of the United States, which strongly implied in Clinton v. Jones that a court cannot “compel the attendance of the President at any specific time or place.” Likewise, if he needs proof that summoning the president of the United States to testify on a frivolous issue would be “cumulative” of existing evidence, he might consider discovering something called “Google.”

It doesn't matter if this particular case won't amount to anything. What it DOES do is put a judge on record of going along with this.

We learned in 2000 and 2004 the lengths to which the Republicans will go to "win" an election -- from mass disenfranchisement via ID laws and stiffing poor neighborhoods on voting machines, to inventing imaginary terrorist threats to justify "counting" votes in secret. Right now there are two likely Republican nominees -- a guy born on third base and thinks he hit a triple and one of the most corrupt Washington insiders of our time. And today we find out that confidence in the economy is at its highest level in nearly four years...which means that as hamstrung as the President has been by Congressions Republicans, what he HAS been able to get through has had an effect.

All this is a potential Republican nightmare, all while Callista is no doubt already formulating her plans to replace the bedding in the family quarters of the White House, lest she have to put her magic yellow helmet head on pillows that a black family used. For if economic conditions continue to improve, however slowly, Republicans may have no choice but to resort again to voter suppression, and more ominously, to "birther" lawsuits designed to keep the President off the ballot in important states, if they want to "win" in 2012. So keep your eyes open for hedging on the birther issue from both Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney -- or their surrogates. Because it may end up being all they have in their arsenal.

Around the Blogroll and Elsewhere: Greedy Bastards Putting the Uppity In Their Place edition

2012-01-25T05:29:00.002-05:00

If President Obama's tone last night was "feisty" and "defiant" enough to get Republican panties in a twist, then you really have to wonder how a group as delicate and fragile as Republicans can be trusted with the problems facing this nation. As expected, Mitt Romney, who attempted a pre-emptive strike against a speech that was clearly (and accurately) directed at him; Mitch Daniels, a midwest governor and presidential candidate manqué whose focus has been on ending collective bargaining in his state; and Herman Cain, trying to extend his fifteen minutes beyond what Stephen Colbert has given him; relied on the tried and true Republican tactic of projection ("HE's the one who's dividing us, not us").

The speech was feisty for Obama, who at least seemed to have started to have an idea that this bunch would hang him from the nearest tree if they thought they could get away with it. But it was hardly the sort of stuff to make anyone start to cry and say "No fair, I'm gonna tell Mom!" the way the Republican response would indicate.

I realize that a president can't come out and admit that the dice are loaded,the game is rigged, and the doctrine of Work Hard And Play By The Rules is a myth. But every time I hear that phrase, I tune out. Because the tens of millions of dollars that Mitt Romney rakes in every year as an unemployed man may fall within the rules as written by guys like him, but they certainly are not about working hard.

So what's going to come out of his announcements last night? Absolutely nothing. Because the Republicans have made very, very clear for three years that their aim is not just to make him a one-term president, but a dismally failed one at that. Three years into his term, he's done little to fight them and with the Republicans screaming bloody murder because he dared to stand up for himself and for the middle class for once, expect more of the same until someone they like can be elected. If this is "slamming the GOP", and they can't take it, then we really need to worry about the health of these fragile flowers and send them back to the sanitorium where they can get the rest they so clearly need.

Here's some reactions to the speech, to Mittens' highly selective release of one year's tax returns (and nothing from his years at Bain capital), and life in these United States in general these days.

John Cole is seduced by the speech.

Rick Ungar liveblogged it.

I want to form a band called "Bushian levels of verbal chaos".

Here's a proposed law that solves a problem which doesn't exist.

Southern Beale writes on a club that shows that no matter how much money the rich get, they're still so insecure that they need private treehouses where they can pick nits out of each other's hair.

Margaret and Helen are back!

Battochio: Tony Blankley, Civility and the State of Political Discourse.

Brad was impressed.

Karen Garcia was not.

I should have linked to this yesterday: Driftglass in another masterful smackdown of David Brooks.

And finally: Ramona seems to be the only one who celebrated the anniversary of Obama's inauguration. It's hard to remember what that day felt like.

Tuesday Big Blue Smurf Blogging: What They Said

2012-01-24T19:14:00.002-05:00

I know I should give someone else a turn, but Charles Pierce has been on such a roll lately that he's our first two-successive-time honoree for The State of the Union is Angry.

Money quote, and it's a long one:

We are not a great people. Not in the way we treat ourselves in our politics, anyway. We are frightened. We lash out. We kick the country as though it were a lawnmower that won't start. In 2010, just as the president and his administration managed to lift their heads above the brim of the ditch in which their predeceesors had dumped the country, We, The People elected the most retrograde, brick-stupid, poo-flinging monkeyhouse of a House of Representatives in the history of the Republic.

That anger could have been channelled better. It could have been channelled in the direction of the right targets. (That will remain my ultimate verdict on the Occupy movement: at least they yell at the correct buildings.) Obama could have trusted the greatness of the American people to accept a program to seek justice for the nation for the crimes perpetrated against the political commonwealth by a corporate class that would sell the United States for parts as long as it could overbill the people who were buying it. (It was a thoroughgoing masterpiece of political ineptitude that his administration handed the volatile issue of corporate greed over to Dick Fking Armey, and the lunatics in the three-cornered hats.) He could have trusted the greatness of the American people far enough to expose the constitutional heresies of the previous administration, not perpetuate them in law. (That's the one thing on which he will never get a pass from me. His Department of Justice has gone to court on the wrong side of too damn many of his predecessor's constitutional atrocities. Well, that and hiring Geithner.) And, at the very least, he could have trusted the greatness of the American people to understand why he could only do so much because of the rules of the United States Senate, the petulant treachery of some of the cowards in his own party, the complete barking madness of so much of the other one, and, frankly, the ongoing suckerhood of the American people to act and vote against their own interests as long as somebody flashes something sparkly in front of them. Obama did none of this. The greatness of the American people is little more than a rhetorical trope, and not something of value that can be drawn upon — or relied upon — at times of crisis.

The opening salvo of the 2016 Republican primary race

2012-01-24T19:09:00.002-05:00

Yes, you read correctly: 2016. For there's a little flame war going on between Evita Mooselini and that OTHER media attention whore, Chris Christie:

The New Jersey governor made headlines over the weekend by calling Newt Gingrich an “embarrassment” to the Republican Party, but this rhetoric, according to Palin, was nothing more than a “rookie mistake.”

“Poor Chris. This was a rookie mistake. He played right into the media’s hands,” Palin said on Fox Business Network late Monday. “The host had asked Chris, ‘Does Newt embarrass the party?’ I think he asked him twice, and there, Chris played right into it.”

She added, “You know, sometimes, if your candidate loses in just one step along this path, as was the case when Romney lost to Newt the other night — and, of course, Romney is Chris Christie’s guy — well, you kind of get your panties in a wad, and you may say things that you regret later. And I think that that’s what Chris Christie did.”

Palin charged that answering the question the way he did in response to the host’s question demonstrated a “lack of self-discipline” on Christie’s part — a mistake the former Alaska governor boasted she herself had already learned not to make.

Uh...yeah. Right.

All that needs to be said about Joe Paterno

2012-01-23T21:18:00.002-05:00

It's right here.

It's difficult to read, but send the link to everyone who's tempted to think that Joe Pa was such a great guy except for this ONE EENSY TEENSY MISTAKE.

Because yes, letting a pedophile use your football program to recruit kids to rape SHOULD taint a lifetime of alleged "good works."

OK, I was wrong. Maybe Santorum's organization isn't so bright after all.

2012-01-23T06:06:00.003-05:00

Update: Maybe I was wrong about Santorum's organization.

Yet further proof that the late, great Morning Sedition was ahead of its time:

When someone like Rick Santorum is running an ad titled "Rebellion", reality really HAS been inverted

2012-01-22T19:40:00.004-05:00

Rick Santorum is all about traditionalism, from his seven children, his obsession with the womb and Teh Gays, and his sweater vest. But in yet another example of how topsy-turvy his party has become, he's running a web add titled "Rebellion". And you know what? It's awesome. Derivative of Apple's infamous "1984" ad, but still awesome:

Far too many liberals are rubbing their hands together with glee at the thought of ANY of the Final Four Clowns being the Republican nominee. I'm the least worried about Romney, because his tin ear for the real concern about income inequality and his now-demonstrated short fuse have combined to remove him from the "most electable" category. It's Gingrich and to a lesser extent Santorum that have me worried.

Remember when Al Gore debated George W. Bush? Al Gore was sober, serious, and clearly annoyed at having to debate a numbskull like Bush. And the media all decided that Bush was the winner. Now imagine a debate between Newt Gingrich and Barack Obama. Obama will be his typical cool self, and Gingrich will be up there pontificating and name-dropping and throwing red meat at the racists -- and then calling Obama out as "playing the race card" if he responds...or weak if he doesn't. Gingrich's success in South Carolina seems to have largely come because he "put Juan Williams in his place", as Dave Weigel just pointed out on Up With Chris Hayes. Yesterday on the same show, Melissa Harris-Perry pointed out how Gingrich also put both women and the media in their place with his response to John King's question about his ex-wife Marianne's interview with ABC. Compared to the robotic Mitt Romney, Gingrich seems "real" by comparison. And for some reason, his pseudo-intellectual babbling about Saul Alinsky and Kenyan anti-colonialism is the kind of "smart-guy" stuff that the drooling masses like those who just went to the polls can accept -- because it feeds their pre-conceived ideas. A Gingrich nomination falls into the Wildean notion of there being two tragedies in life -- one is not getting what one wants; the other is getting it.

Santorum, who seems unlikely to get the nomination, is probably the "realest" of the bunch. Whereas Ron Paul, who is worshipped in some circles for his "consistency" has a libertarian doctrine that stops at the womb and the bedroom, Santorum is a true believer in even his most insane notions. He's not a babbling idiot like Rick Perry, nor does he sound like a zombie channelling Aimee McSemple Pherson the way Michele Bachmann did. He's the real deal, the channeller of Father Knows Best America, right down to the dorky sweater vest. I still think that in a head-to-head matchup, Obama could beat Santorum, but I think he'd be a tougher opponent than most of us would have thought when he first decided to run.

As I write this, the scrappy New York Giants have just tied it up against the 49ers, by not letting their guard down for a minute. The outcome of this game is still up for grabs, but you can bet Eli Manning has no illusions of a cakewalk. We can only hope that Barack Obama and those around him have the same realization.

Not A South Carolina Primary Post

2012-01-21T18:56:00.002-05:00

For those who don't give a rat's ass what the people who respond to dog whistling do today, here are some REAL dogs: Fifty Photos of Basset Hounds Running.

Saturday Big Blue Smurf Blogging: What They Said

2012-01-21T11:49:00.002-05:00

Today's honoree: The inimitable and indispensable Charles Pierce, for articulating perfectly why Teh Newt's dogwhistling is working so spectacularly for him in South Carolina.

Money quote:

It was always going to happen this way — Newt was going to go back into his wheelhouse, ripping the media and spouting in the general direction of the White House whatever pile of pejorative adjectives popped into his head at the moment. He tried, lamely, to be a statesman, and the party faithful ignored him. Once he became the vandal he was born to be, the political arsonist among the abandoned tenements of Republican thought, he was bound to take off again. The base doesn't want someone whose ideas on job creation will triumph because they are superior to the president's. They want somebody who can beat him bloody, vicariously, on their behalf, somebody who can "put him in his place." They want someone who will kill the administration just for the sheer fun of watching it die. That's why Newt's fortunes took off after he slapped around Juan Williams on Monday night, and that's why they went into hyper-drive on Thursday when he declared to be "despicable" any public mention of the chronic staff-banging that wrecked his second marriage and that helped wreck his speakership. Sooner or later, he was going to light the whole race on fire just to giggle over the flames, and that meant he had to come do it in South Carolina, and that meant he had to come do it in the upcountry around Greenville, where the base of the base always has been located, where people can be found who will gleefully join him around the bonfire, where is located the ancient home office of American treason.

Artists may die but art never does

2012-01-21T10:28:00.002-05:00

Etta James lives on...

At Last:

I'd Rather Go Blind

Lo unto the many generations....

What's Mitt Fudging?

2012-01-20T12:18:00.004-05:00

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

Bain, citing privacy reasons, declined to provide a list of the companies it invested in. - The WSJ, January 9, 2012

OK, we've all heard the stories about Mitt Romney's wooden attempts to resonate with the proletariat. For all the jokes about Al Gore's stiffness in 2000 and John Kerry's blue-blooded egalitarianism in 2004, Mitt Romney makes both Gore and Kerry look like the Isley Brothers on Ecstasy with Jimi Hendrix on accompaniment.

In fact, if Mitt Romney was any stiffer, he'd have a Y-shaped incision on his chest. His infrequent and invariably failed attempts to resonate with voters who have actually touched a snow shovel and have actually felt sweat on their skin are invariable disasters. The man worth up to $264,000,000 recently told unemployed people in Tampa, Florida that he was unemployed, bet Rick Perry $10,000 on national TV and thinks getting paid over $374,000 for a speech "isn't much." Hell, the only difference between Romney and Lenin's corpse is that Lenin is perpendicularly challenged and isn't afflicted with terminal avarice.

But Republicans and the mainstream media who love them and take their cues as readily as they do Matt Drudge's every half-baked fever dream are losing their focus. While it's perfectly acceptable for Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich to ask Romney to release his tax returns (albeit because they just don't think Romney can beat Obama toe-to-toe, which he can't. If by late this summer it comes down to Romney and Obama, it won't be a David vs Goliath matchup as much as one featuring a Ken doll vs Goliath.), there's an even bigger question that the corporate MSM are leaving out of the debate.

Instead of worrying over Romney paying 15% on some of his Bain Capital dividends and stock options, money he hasn't actually earned in 13 years, and perhaps none at all since much of his vast fortune is squirreled away in the Cayman Islands and elsewhere, we ought to focus, instead, on how many tens of thousands of American families Romney had ruined during his 15 year-long reign of terror since he'd founded Bain.

Even if the tax code was rolled back to the days of Eisenhower and Kennedy, in which the wealthiest paid up to 90% in taxes, Romney would still have over $25,000,000 in the bank, hardly an amount that would inspire much pity among many in the 99%. But little attention has been paid outside of Newt Gingrich's SuperPAC and the DNC to the countless rabble left to starve by the side of the road in Romney's locust-like agenda at Bain Capital.

Let's take a look at perhaps Romney's most infamous acquisition, Ampad (which, in a masterful piece of spin doctoring yesterday, the right wing American Enterprise Institute not only downplayed but tried to claim Romney's Bain actually created jobs. Forget the fact that a venture capital investment firm's primary if not sole focus is to make money for itself and its investors and that job creation is merely incidental to that very same end.).

"Last I saw her, she was still technically alive."

American Pad and Paper was one of 10 businesses into which Bain had either invested or acquired outright that made 70% of the money that stuffed the pockets of their investors and, out of those ten, one of four companies to file for bankruptcy within three years. But there's an ingenious way to spin that: Romney and other supporters of Bain Capital piss and moan that it's unfair to assign blame for failed companies after Bain had essentially bankrupted them with massive management and consulting fees and from which they'd subsequently divested themselves. In essence, Bain is taking the identical position of a serial killer who absolves himself of guilt after stabbing a woman and leaving her to die by the side of the road.

At the same they're doing the Pontius Pilate thing and washing their hands of blood or red ink from companies they'd bankrupted (approximately 22% of them), Bain and Romney are also taking credit for building jobs that perhaps ought to go, instead, to a robust Clinton-era economy and senior management at Staples, Domino's, etc.

Romney once said to Newt Gingrich during a debate, "Doesn't he understand how the economy works? In the real economy, some businesses succeed and some fail." What Romney's really saying is something that we all already know but that he just doesn't quite have the guts to say without the varnish: That in the "real economy", in "real" capitalism, in the "free market", a company's success is measured solely by the money it makes for shareholders and executive management, not by how many blue collar jobs it creates.

Ampad's notorious example is a case in point and is fast becoming a verbal Armageddon for both the right and the left to the point where both Romney's detractors and supporters stumble over themselves with their half-facts and contradictions (such as professional banshee Ann Coulter a few days ago ascribing Ampad's failure to unions and a mid-90's America going green while forgetting that around the same time, Staples, a Bain-owned paper store, was making billions at the expense of smaller manufacturing companies such as Ampad.).

The facts are that the union, represented by Romney gadfly Randy Johnson, went on strike when Bain swooped in and raised health care costs for the workers. The deserted hulk and weedy parking lot that used to be the Marion plant was bought by Ampad which was of course owned by Romney's Bain. Despite the workers being represented by a union, Bain and Ampad thought it was more profitable to just fire all the workers and part out the company.

Typical of corporate raider firms, Bain's strategy for making money at all costs was manifold: Charging obscene management and consulting fees, insinuating their own people on the board of directors, driving up debts, selling stocks, inflating the worth of its holdings, with preserving blue collar jobs not even at the bottom of their list of priorities. From a landmark seven part story published by the Boston Globe in 2007 (but no longer archived and available in part here):

Ampad couldn't pay its debts and plunged into bankruptcy. Workers lost jobs and stockholders were left with worthless shares.

Bain Capital, however, made money - and lots of it. The firm put just $5 million into the deal, but realized big returns in short order. In 1995, several months after shuttering a plant in Indiana and firing roughly 200 workers, Bain Capital borrowed more money to have Ampad buy yet another company, and pay Bain and its investors more than $60 million - in addition to fees for arranging the deal.

Bain Capital took millions more out of Ampad by charging it $2 million a year in management fees, plus additional fees for each Ampad acquisition. In 1995 alone, Ampad paid Bain at least $7 million. The next year, when Ampad began selling shares on public stock exchanges, Bain Capital grabbed another $2 million fee for arranging the initial public offering - on top of the $45 million to $50 million Bain reaped by selling some of its shares.

Bain Capital didn't escape Ampad's eventual bankruptcy unscathed. It held about one-third of Ampad's shares, which became worthless. But while as many as 185 workers near Buffalo lost jobs in a 1999 plant closing, Bain Capital and its investors ultimately made more than $100 million on the deal.

To the folks at Bain Capital, that was all in a day's work, albeit an unusually lucrative day's work, and doesn't exactly paint a portrait of a venture capital firm dedicated to saving American jobs at all costs.

So the next time Romney tries to connect with the proles while pointedly and furtively refusing to release his tax records, instead of obsessing at how stiff and disingenuous Romney is, both political parties as well as the MSM ought to focus on those American workers who similarly don't pay much in taxes for the simple reason that Romney and Company put them out of work.

Everything you need to know about Mitt Romney in one sentence

2012-01-20T05:59:00.003-05:00

From last night's debate:

King>> Some of the questions about when do you release your taxes, his campaign has raised them, you're right on that. So has some of your rivals up here. Governor Perry made that point as well before he left the race. Why not should the people of South Carolina before this election see last year's return?

Romney>> Because I want to make sure that I beat President Obama.

Sort of like when he said this:

Mitt Romney is starting to remind me of a Bridezilla -- you know, those women whose lifelong ambition is to get married and who get so obsessed with their weddings that they can't see beyond the party and into the actual reality of marriage.

Goddess help us if this man actually becomes president (or any of these clowns, for that matter.)

Land of the Free Lunch, Home of the Brave New World

2012-01-19T10:08:00.002-05:00

How did we let this happen?

We, the moussed, Reeboked beneficiaries of the Great Experiment with cell phones plastered to our ears as we drive high performance, less fuel-efficient cars, have somehow let it all get away.

The "It" to which I'm referring is the now-risible, overarching rationale that guided the Declaration of Independence, the one that stated that all men are created equal. The mystery is not how and why we could let that principle be forgotten but how we could've been so gullible as to believe in it for going on three centuries.

Even a cursory look at American history, particularly labor and civil rights history, will inform one that far from being open to new ideas, championing labor and being spiritually vested with improving the quality of life for all Americans, the United States has consistently been a nation motivated by greed and maintaining the status quo even to the point of murdering our fellow Americans to that end.

The inequality and vicious attempts to maintain a tilted status quo began long before the Bread and Roses Strike that began exactly a century ago this month in nearby Lawrence, Massachusetts. Coming less than a year after the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in New York City that killed almost 150 men, women and children, the brutality of the mills toward its workers was eventually spotlighted by Congressional investigations, exposure from the press and increasing political pressure from trade unions.

Literally gallons of ink and blood have been respectively spilled by worthy minds and worthy bodies explicating causes and effects, pros and cons and ramifications of why things need or don't need to change. But this facet of human nature does not need too fine a point put on it. And when you fully unpack the whole messy argument it boils down to one simple, atavistic imperative: When people derive good fortune in one way or another, they #1 do not wish to share it with a segment of society they deem unworthy and #2 they wish to keep things that way. (It's no wonder that, according to a recent OECD finding, America ranks 27th overall out of 31 nations in social justice.)

This has been a hallmark of human civilization perhaps since the days we lived in caves and fought each other over prime hunting and watering grounds. And the infallible human instinct of equating social standing with ill-gotten wealth derived at the expense of the happiness, opportunity and wellbeing of others, wealth that cannot be taken through this vale of tears and imported to the next, is a timeless story.

And among the perennially greedy landed gentry, virtually the only way to penetrate that veneer of culture and ossified humanity and to get a primal, visceral reaction from these people, for want of a better word, is to threaten their wealth and status quo. Fascism, which is partly characterized by a complicity with private industry, will never be as controversial with the working class and especially not with the wealthy for the simple reason that it doesn't threaten the interests of those who have access to the military and paramilitary power that's needed to maintain a semblance of civil order. Socialism will always be controversial because it threatens to take all that away.

Greed and selfishness will always be defining characteristics of human society and as long as we keep reproducing, despite our best attempts at nurturing, we will always produce children that will grow up to be exactly the same kind of sociopaths and psychopaths that we now see running Wall Street and Capitol Hill.

But these past couple of years, we've seen a difference. Far from seeing the status quo merely defended with police and military intervention and through propaganda campaigns, we've actually witnessed an incalculably vicious reaction that has produced a regression in the policies, principles and laws that helped us emerge from a feudal state in the 19th century into the more equitable, civilized industrialized superpower that we'd become.

As with Europe in the Middle Ages, early 20th century America thrived under a middle class that was largely if not entirely enabled by trade unions both public and private. With unions (or guilds, as they were known in the Middle Ages) came more equitably shared wealth and political power that rivaled that of the church and state. And yet, despite the fact that the 80 year-odd experiment with an actual middle class was an unqualified success story, we've seen a very successful move to actually push the United States back into the feudal/serf state it was before the rise of the union movement about a century ago.

Now, for the first time in my 53 year-long life, we're hearing Republicans such as Newt Gingrich and Sen. Mike Lee of Utah actually calling for the repeal of child labor laws that got children out of dangerous mills and back in school where they belong. Just a couple of days ago in South Carolina, Gingrich renewed his call to turn children into janitors to approving hoots and hollers from the yahoos in attendance. The overarching and stupendously ignorant rationale among Southerners especially is, as long as we defeat liberalism at all costs, fuck the poor and fuck our own kids. It's an anti-Communist/Socialist mindset engineered by the right wing in a post-Cold War era.

And, rather than merely indemnifying Wall Street from its excesses and refusing to drag into court the titans who's made the meltdown of 2008 possible, the American public, under a surly simulacrum of representative government, was forced to bail out that same Wall Street despite tens of millions of us protesting that bailout to our elected officials. And, absurdly, the Republican Party that was largely responsible for laying the foundation for those excesses was for a time on our side.

Occupy Wall Street may be dead but it hasn't been forgotten. Instead, it's been ossified into history regardless of the best spinmeisters Wall Street and Capitol Hill can buy. OWS forced the corporate mainstream media to put under a microscope the world-consuming greed that nearly resulted in the collapse of our planet's financial system. For those who couldn't get away to occupy Zuccotti Park or Liberty Square or McPherson Sq. in Washington DC, the movement showed that, yes, you are not imagining things and, no, you are not alone and you are not crazy for coming to the same conclusions.

The problem is, fighting to save the American Dream is a battle that's doomed to failure because, except for one brief, shining moment, the American Dream never existed, As George Carlin once said, "it's called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe in it."

And when those without guns oppose those who do, we all know what the outcome will be. The only difference is, the police and militia have traded in their clubs, fire hoses and truncheons with automatic weapons, pepper spray and tasers, mobilized not with horses but in tanks thoughtfully provided to them by an increasingly paranoid federal government.

Our landed gentry's track record on civil rights is every bit as spattered with blood and yet considering White America consistently being on the wrong side of history, the attitude of maintaining a racist status quo remains in full effect. Difficult as it to believe that we had to labor for nearly a century to abolish the enslavement of our fellow humans, that is exactly what we're fighting now.

How and why have we let this happen? How could we stop building on the progress we'd made throughout the 20th century to the point where we're seeing the dismantling of unions, the defunding of Social Security, the deconstruction of Medicaid and Medicare, the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the outright theft of the voting rights of African Americans and calls to repeal child labor laws and even the Civil Rights Act of 1964?

Well, as the right wing has taught us, neglect of progress and infrastructure results in this very same thing: The flagging of the vigilance that progress requires and demands will inevitably produce a backslide that will land us back into the 19th century if not further. Under the dominance of the right wing that began under the union-busting Reagan, America is now like a once-champion body builder gone completely to flab.

And now we find ourselves in the absurd position of protesting rewarding corporations and banks for their corruption and malfeasance, to fight to keep our children out of the janitor's closet and in the classroom, for African Americans to merely secure the right to vote in the face of a sleazy, racist onslaught from an audacious right wing hoarsely screaming about voter fraud in the face of its much, much more massive electoral fraud.

If we couldn't take our very survival for granted in the nuclear age, at least we were able to take comfort in the fact that if you got up every morning, went to work, upgraded your skills, got a good education and a better job and lived within your means, you'd do OK. And that when the day came that you couldn't get out of bed due to old age or illness, the social safety net would take care of you and reward you for decades of hard work.

All that's being seriously threatened while we are, for the most part, allowing this to happen. But our forebears risked and gave their lives to hand us the freedoms and rights that we now no longer can take for granted. Then again, they didn't have cell phones, video games and Twitter to keep them happily distracted.

Leave Paula Alone!!!!!

2012-01-18T21:59:00.004-05:00

Sorry, but I just couldn't resist that headline.

Paula Deen's cooking show is not one I usually watch on Food Network. The few times I've seen parts of it, the food she was making was so nauseating I simply had to turn it off. As soon as the Crisco or the Cool Whip starts coming out, I'm done. It isn't that I'm only willing to use hand-rolled, hand-shaped macaroni and three types of reduced-fat artisanal cheese and truffle oil to make MY macaroni and cheese, but chemical-laden frankenfood just doesn't do it for me. That isn't to say that I won't eat anything that doesn't come from an organic garden in a pastoral landscape tended by golden-tressed earth mothers singing Big Yellow Taxi, but I do recognize the difficulties of being someone who has to be in a large building for eight-to-ten hours a day combined with a commute that can be an hour or more, and that unless you want to have dinner at eight PM and then go to bed an hour later, your weekday dinners are going to often consist of heating up something from Trader Joe's.

And then there's Paula Deen, who has made a fortune giving the people what they want -- dishes laden with butter and chocolate and sugar and shortening -- the kinds of food that perhaps were acceptable when everyone did hard physical labor on the farm all day but that are deadly in today's sedentary desk-job world. It's not surprising that people in the TV chef world such as Anthony Bourdain would get their high dudgeon on about the kind of crap Deen whips up on her cooking show. But let's not claim that haute cuisine chefs completely eschew the artery-clogging stuff either, not after the episode of Chopped I saw the other night in which the centerpiece of an appetizer was marrow bones.

Remember the episode of The Simpsons where Homer is drooling over a commercial that advertises something like "Two full pounds of ground beef, soaked in rich creamery butter. Topped with bacon, ham, cheese, and a fried egg"? Well, meet the "Lady's Brunch Burger."

The legitimate beef (so to speak) with Paula Deen is about the frankenfood more than even the fat content. Let's face it, folks -- anyone watching television who thinks that a cheeseburger topped with bacon and a fried egg and served on a glazed doughnut is a great idea has bigger problems than Paula Deen.

What's surprising is the schadenfreude coming from so-called progressives. At a time when discrimination on the basis of health risks is increasing, that a side of the political spectrum that's often (Dan Savage notwithstanding) associated with fighting discrimination based solely on girth. How can you attack the right for saying that women who get raped deserve it because they dressed provocatively and then say that Paula Deen deserves to be trashed because she ate a high-fat diet and developed Type 2 diabetes?

It seems to be at least somewhat about the diabetes drug endorsement deal she's received:

Deen knew she had diabetes for three years and still pushed doughnut burgers on her fans. Then she waited to tell people until she had an endorsement deal with a drug company. It’s hard to see that choice as anything but shabby. Deen could have spent three years talking about “moderation” without making any money off a pharmaceutical company. Like Bill Clinton, who slimmed down on a mostly vegan regimen, she had the potential as a Southerner and a food lover to teach her fans new strategies for eating and living — and she could have done it without shilling for the pharmaceutical industry. She looks like a calculated opportunist today — when, she could have, for those millions of fellow Americans with diabetes, been simply sweet.

First of all, how often do you hear Bill Clinton talk about veganism? Almost never. Bill Clinton doesn't travel the country talking about veganism, and nowhere in the mission statement of the Clinton Global Initiative does it talk about diabetes. It's something he did, and good for him. (It also helps that he can no doubt afford a spectacular vegan chef to prepare delicious vegan meals for him.) But the biggest problem with the paragraph above is its implication that there is no gray area at all between the Lady's Brunch Burger and a vegan diet, when in fact there's a great deal of gray area. To imply otherwise is enough to make your average overweight person just decide "The hell with it."

Amanda Marcotte, who blogs for a living and so doesn't have to sit in an office for eight-to-ten hours a day and then sit in traffic for an hour, joins the pile-on, though she makes some valid points about managing diseases after we have them rather than preventing them in the first place.

The problem is that there are no hard-and-fast rules about prevention. I come from two fat parents. Both have lost a bit of weight recently, but are still overweight by any objective standard. Both have health problems, one related to lifestyle (smoking), the other unrelated to lifestyle. Mom is 84 and Dad is 86. Neither one has diabetes, despite being overweight for as long as I can remember. I have a friend whose husband has high cholesterol, despite a diet of lean meats, fish, grains, and vegetables, and a two-mile run every morning. Sometimes smokers don't get lung cancer and nonsmokers do. Sometimes thin people get Type 2 diabetes and fat people don't. Christopher Hitchens smoked cigarettes and drank like a fish and died of esophageal cancer. Winston Churchill started each day with a cigar and a snifter of brandy and lived to be ninety. Julia Child was the queen of butter and was similarly bashed (NYT link) -- and lived to be ninety-two.

Look, I recognize that people who eat crap, and those, like Paula Deen, who glorify crap food make it more difficult for those of us who try to eat right to convince people that we don't sit around eating doughnuts and Chicken McNuggets (or Lady's Brunch Burgers, for that matter); that we eat egg white vegetable omelets with just a sprinkling of cheese (non-artisanal, alas) for breakfast and vegetable-laden soups with salad for lunch and a small bowl of chili for dinner -- and we're still fat. Tonight I am going to dinner with some colleagues who are in town from overseas. They love, love, love Cheesecake Factory. I hate, hate, hate chain restaurants like this because it's so difficult to find something to eat that isn't fried or covered with cheese. Yesterday I spent a full fifteen minutes perusing the menu in advance to try and find something I can eat that isn't huge, fried, covered with cheese, or drowning in dressing. This is what life is like every single fucking day for Your Humble Blogger, who is a 4'10" size sixteen anyway. And it doesn't involve doughnuts, fast food, or these days even chocolate, as I've mostly lost my taste for sweet stuff. I suspect I'm not the only one.

Mary Elizabeth Williams, who wrote the Salon article excerpted above, is battling Stage IV melanoma that started on her scalp. This happened despite wearing sunscreen all these years because who puts sunscreen on her scalp? So I suppose we should cut her a cetain amount of slack and not say she brought it on herself by spending too much time in the sun without a hat. Because even though lifestyle factors might bring on a serious disease, blaming sick people for their own plight after they're sick seems a little bit like blaming rape victims for being assaulted.

None of us is perfect, and there's no one in this country who hasn't deluded him/herself at one point or another that s/he is immortal and will never get sick and never die. Those of us who have seen parents live to what is old age by any measure are especially susceptible to this delusion. But you can do everything right and still get cancer. You can do everything right and get wiped out on the highway tomorrow. You can do everything wrong and outlive everyone you know. The universe is random like that. Of course it's better to eat a moderate portion of chicken sauteed with fresh organic vegetables over a bit of brown rice than it is to eat a Big Mac. I don't think even the most ardent red-stater would deny that.

Now, I'm not a Paula Deen fan, so I can't say for sure. But I can't imagine that she has been out there advocating eating two pounds of fried macaroni and cheese topped with butter at every meal, every day, for your entire life. If I'm wrong about that, let me know. But I suspect that Paula Deen is not that much different from most of us -- she never believed it would happen to her. So-called progressives who would never advocate discriminating against the 22-year-old who's paraplegic because he drank a six-pack and then drove his car into a tree because his disability is "lifestyle-related" have no business being selective about who they'll bash for having a life-threatening illness. Even if it did come from Velveeta and doughnuts.

The myth of "hard work"

2012-01-18T06:29:00.004-05:00

Throughout the Republican primary season, we've heard about "hard work." You know, the hard work that black people living in poverty don't do and their children should. They sit in a pile of their own inherited money and that gained through putting others out of work and talk about "a merit-based opportunity society." They give lip service to the long-standing American illusion that if you Just Work Hard Enough™, you too can sit at the club overlooking the 18th green with to Mitt and Shrub and Poppy and ponder over what the rabble are doing. We've heard that if you're not rich you have only yourself to blame. We've heard that a candidate worth a quarter of a billion dollars is "middle class" and "unemployed" just like you and advocate tax cuts .

Middle-class Republicans like those in the audience at the Republican debate the other night have fully bought into the myth of Just Work Hard Enough™. It's why they applaud Newt Gingrich when he talks about food stamps, even though their neighbors (or perhaps even they themselves) are on the SNAP program. They applaud the talk about Fannie and Freddie when they themselves are sitting in a house that's worth half what they paid for it and unable to pay a balloon mortgage because they themselves listened to the mortgage broker explain that they can afford it because real estate always appreciates in value. They applaud this kind of talk because as long as they can believe that the decline and fall of the middle class is due to the personal failings of someone else, they don't have to look at how they too are getting screwed. They believe Mexicans are taking their manufacturing jobs, instead of at executives with eight-figure pay packages sending them to the cheapest overseas sweatshop they can find. They believe black people who are having entirely too much sex are driving Cadillacs (sic) and eating steak on their tax dollars. They believe that if we could just get rid of abortion and birth control, our society would magically look like this:

The Just Work Hard Enough myth dies hard. We've always believed that hard work inevitably leads to success, and that the U.S. is the most socially mobile country in the world. Recent trends have shown this to be no longer the case. My father rose out of poverty into the middle class because of the G.I. bill and free tuition at CUNY. My mother's parents joined many other immigrant Jews and attained the middle class through the retail garment business. Today tuition is out of raech for most American families without saddling their children with six figures of debt by the time they graduate. The mom and pop dress shop no longer exists, except at the very high end. Today's veterans face mass unemployment. Social mobility is limited at best.

I would hope that Mitt Romney's disclosure that he pays a lower tax rate than most working Americans because his earnings come from dividend checks rather than as reward for hard work. serves to wake people up to the reality in this country that it's not about hard work, it's about who you know and who you're willing to screw over in order to make a buck. But it probably won't, because I've seen comments on news sites that because Mitt Romney has to hire people to expand his California house, it means he's a "job creator." That this is temporary work much of which is probably being done by day laborers picked up from a street corner and put to work with no benefits, no guarantee of their safety, and sometimes no pay escapes them. Because if the people in that South Carolina audience don't believe that hard work gets rewarded, they might just have to start fighting back.

Somewhere in L.A., James Cameron is rubbing his hands together and counting his money already

2012-01-16T18:43:00.006-05:00

Gregorio Borgia/AP

I don't know what it is about shipwrecks that we find so compelling. Our age is one of air travel, not sea travel. When planes crash, we are horrified, but the horror seems somehow mundane. Yes, we were all appalled when Air France Flight 447 crashed, and when EgyptAir Flight 990 crashed, and TWA Flight 800 crashed. But for those of us who didn't know anyone on those doomed flights, life returned to normal in a matter of days, and we stopped thinking about it.

Somehow I don't think that's going to be the case with the wreck of the Costa Concordia. And that's where James Cameron comes in.

The only thing that would have made this better for Cameron would be if this wreck had occurred next March, because his billion dollar shipwreck epic, Titanic, has been re-engineered for 3-D and re-released next April, just in time for the 100the anniversary of the most famous shipwreck in history.

The Concordia was no Titanic. No one made claims that it was the most luxurious cruise ship in the world, that it was some kind of quantum leap forward in technology. It didn't usher in a new age and mark the end of one. On the plus side, it didn't hide its lower-income passengers in the bowels of the ship, dining on lamb stew and rough bread while the toffs feast on aspic and quail. Today, steerage-type travel is reserved for air passengers.

Looking at photos of the Concordia in happier days, it was your pretty standard small city-at-sea, with pools, a glitzy lobby, and ornate dining rooms. And yet, the ghosts of the great White Star and Cunard liners pervade the design of all of these monuments to ongepotchket. Giant ships are now about vacationing, rather than getting from one place to another, but no one boards one of these behemoths without standing on deck thinking of all those passengers who came before them, and no one arrives in New York Harbor at seven in the morning, with the sun gleaming down on the Statue of Liberty as she beckons, "Come on in, there's plenty of room here" without thinking of the teeming hordes of people, some of them our own relatives, who saw that very same view a hundred years ago (give or take a few) and were filled with hope. Despite the relentless pop music and the 24-hour soft-serve and the neon lights and the open seating, there's still a sense of glamour about being on one of these giant ships.

Perhaps that's why when something like this happen, we can't tear ourselves away from it. And of course the granddaddy of all shipwrecks, the one the memory of which pervades everything, is still that giant White Star liner that hit an iceberg on its maiden voyage. The Titanic itself, but more vividly, and even more oddly, Cameron's film, hover over the Concordia wreck like an accusatory finger, invoked consistently by the survivors of the Concordia wreck.

Jonathan Paturi, a chef on the Concordia:

Looking back to that traumatic Friday evening, I wonder how much like the Titanic disaster it was. Just like the Titanic, the Costa Concordia was a luxury liner. We were hosting 4,200 holiday makers. And just like the Titanic, we were serving dinner to our guests when disaster struck. Only, the Titanic struck an iceberg and we ran into a reef.

It was 9.30 p.m. Friday evening. Friday, the 13th, I’m now told. Five of my mates -- chefs, all from Hyderabad -- and I were cooking dinner for the passengers. Suddenly we felt the ship tilt over. Such moments do occur on a ship, so we thought it was one of them. Then the crew-only alarm went off: Delta X-Ray. It meant the ship was taking in water. Then another alarm was sounded: India Victor. It meant there was a fire in the ship and that passengers had to be moved to safety.

The ship began to list even more, and I saw food sliding down the counter. Yes, just like in the Titanic movie. Then there was a complete blackout. I fought down the panic rising within me. I called my cousin and told him about the situation. He told me to be brave. I told him, “I’ll call you if I’m alive.” Tears welled up in my eyes as I felt that I might never see my loved ones again.

Photos taken of the evacuation and of huddled passengers on shore add to the eerie parallel effect, as do the reactions of passengers:

“We were having dinner aboard when we heard a loud noise, like that of the keel dragged over something. There were scenes of panic, glasses falling to the floor.” -- passenger Luciano Castro

We had to scream at the controllers to release the boats from the side.

“We were standing in the corridors and they weren’t allowing us to get onto the boats. It was a scramble, an absolute scramble.” -- passenger Mike van Dijk

"Have you seen 'Titanic'? That's exactly what it was," -- passenger Valeria Ananias (link)

Look hard enough, and you can find as many parallels as you want.

Of course there are differences. The class differences that made it perfectly acceptable for third-class passengers to have less access to lifeboats have largely been levelled, with inexpensive cabins now located on the same hallways as more expensive ones. And this time the villian role of Bruce Ismay, the White Star Line executive who hopped aboard a Titanic lifeboat in the midst of chaos is being played by Concordia captain himself, Francesco Schettino, who abandoned ship instead of standing nobly on the bridge as his ship sinks. The Concordia seems no have had no quasi-military men like Charles Lightoller, portrayed as brave and noble by Kenneth More in the 1956 film A Night to Remember and as a blithering idiot in Cameron's film. (Lightoller later recounted to family that a steering error by Quartermaster Robert Hitchins, similar to that which probably brought the Concordia aground, led to the Titanic's collision with the iceberg that took it to the bottom of the sea.) But the relentless comparisons to the wreck of the Titanic, despite the fortunately much smaller death toll, persist.

And all this just a little under three months before Titanic 3-D opens in theatres. You can't BUY that kind of publicity.

Republicans on the Civil Rights Movement (A Brilliant @ Breakfast Exclusive)

2012-01-16T12:50:00.004-05:00

"Did you see them? I mean, they looked like guys waiting to tee off at a restricted country club." - David Letterman on the 2008 GOP presidential field.

If there's any one consistent failure plaguing liberals, it's the inability to hold the jackbooted feet of Republicans to the fire of their consistent shunning and skeeving of minorities even on Martin Luther King Day.

It wasn't too long ago that the NAACP, bizarrely, agreed to host a Republican debate during their annual meeting and the turnout (Professional Xenophobe Rep. Steve King, of all people) was even more pathetic than the proposed clown show that would've taken place if Donald Trump had followed through on his promise to hold his own debate. A lot of hemming, hawing and throat-clearing had ensued about "scheduling conflicts" and the like.

But the fact is, Republicans are barely smart enough to know they have nothing to offer the most august assemblage of African Americans (Aside from Michael Moore loitering outside their offices or George Soros giving even a dime to a Democrat, do Republicans fear anything more than educated African Americans?). This was exactly the reason why George W. Bush waited until near the end of his "presidency" to address the NAACP and his boilerplate speech reminded everyone in attendance why he'd skeeved the NAACP all those years.

This year, they have even less to offer minorities and it's obvious that they've regressed. Not too long ago, Rick Santorum said to an all white audience in Iowa that he had no intention of making black peoples' lives easier while speaking of welfare reform (and don't even get me started on Santorum's risible insistence that he said "plives" and "blah people."). And yet Santorum finished just 8 votes behind Romney in the caucus despite not knowing that in Iowa, nine out of ten people on welfare are white and that the percentage nationwide isn't much different.

Both Rand and Ron Paul would love nothing more than to see the 1964 Civil Rights Act repealed under the equally risible rubric of fairness toward businesses and Ron Paul's old racist newsletters from the 80's and 90's are now pursuing him like the Hounds of the Baskervilles. And the closest any Republican has gotten to embracing the Civil Rights movement was in 2008 when Romney disingenuously insisted that he and his father marched with Dr. King when Mitt was more likely in France living in a palace on a Mormon missionary deferment during Vietnam.

And, in a direct subversion of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, there's a resurgent movement in the GOP machine to cage votes under the, once again, risible rubric of voter fraud, despite the fact that James O'Keefe in NH had committed more acts of voter fraud by accepting ballots under false names than all other cases of vote fraud combined that'd been prosecuted in the last several decades.

The Republican Party would love to forget that the Civil Rights Movement ever existed. Republicans seem to be as clueless as Ronald Reagan, who tactlessly kicked off his "states' rights"/racist dog whistle candidacy in 1980 in Philadelphia, Mississippi where three civil rights workers were murdered just 16 years prior.

The Southern Strategy engineered by Nixon and his CREEP creeps was based as much on racism as economic hardship, a strategy that was completely predicated on tearing down the record and credibility of the Other Guys without even coming close to offering real solutions to alleviate Appalachian misery (and it's safe to say they still haven't).

So when Republicans like Romney start mealy-mouthing Dr. King's legacy while others openly shun and target minorities while making racist statements, we really ought to be holding their cloven hooves to the fire and ripping the invisible hoods off their heads.

Maybe it's time to kill punditry once and for all and just leave it to the comedians

2012-01-15T12:15:00.002-05:00

This is all kinds of win:

video platform video management video solutions video player

The Bain of Our Existence

2012-01-14T17:27:00.002-05:00

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

"The reason is simple: Romney is not a conservative. He's not, folks. You can argue with me all day long on that, but he isn't. What he has going for him is that he's not Obama..." - Unconvicted child molester and drug addict Rush Limbaugh on Bain Capital-owned Clear Channel.

It would be understandable if liberals were tempted to take a break this winter or at least until Newt Gingrich finally gets smart and drops out of the race. After all, the 28+ minute-long movie unofficially made for and by Newt Gingrich through his SuperPAC, Winning Our Future, is seamlessly indistinguishable from what liberal icon Robert Greenwald would produce through his production company (in fact, it's virtually impossible to imagine the people Winning Our Future had hired to produce the spot not looking to Greenwald's Brave New Films for cues, if the thorough research replete with touching music is any indication.).

In fact, as long as the former House Speaker is in the race, he'll be doing a lot of President Obama's heavy lifting.

Yet while proper due and attention is being paid to Mr. Gingrich's unofficial spot, it's notable that other prominent conservatives such as Sarah Palin have piled on. Uniting with Winning Our Future, the former Alaska Governor and failed Vice Presidential nominee and proven tax cheat has demanded that Romney to release his tax records, which he has staunchly refused to do (at the end of the video, you'll see why: Most of Romney's estimated quarter of a billion dollar fortune that was hoarded at the expense of American jobs and companies has long since been squirreled away in not-so-blind trusts and offshore bank accounts far from the apathetic reach of the IRS.).

The entire video would be an indelibly searing indictment on any candidate with Mitt Romney's history of financial predation at Bain Capital were it not for the fact that among other conservative voters, Barack Obama, a man whose middling stimulus bill still created 3,000,000 jobs, is even more loathed and feared than Mitt Romney.

While the president's entire agenda on job creation has been underwhelming at best these past 35+ months, it's hard to imagine why and how even rock-ribbed Republicans primarily worried about the economy and job creation would fear Mr. Obama more than the elitist Romney, a mannequin of a game show host who'd cost America countless tens of thousands of jobs in his 17 years helming Bain (or created about 100,000 for communist China, depending on how one chooses to look at it).

Perhaps Limbaugh in my epigraph succinctly explained it all. As with Romney's repugnance among Republican voters until late, his newfound if middling appeal can be summed up as, "He's not Obama." When dealing with the one-dimensional, reactionarily reptilian Republican brain, one cannot introduce more complex logic than that without subjecting oneself to endless head banging on the brick wall of racially-motivated "reasoning."

But Romney's so-called appeal, much of which was bought prior to getting endorsements from federal, state and local right wing politicians, is more a direct benefit from running in a weak field of Republican contenders than anything else. Romney, like McCain before him, is like the 83 game-winning 2006 St. Louis Cardinals (who went on to win the World Series.): A mediocre entity that vultures a berth more through process of attrition than anything else.

But as ill-informed and reactionary as conservative voters tend to be, the repugnance to Romney that still almost cost him the Iowa caucus to one term Senator Rick Santorum can perhaps also be ascribed to reptilian reactivism. Say what you want about George W. Bush and John McCain and many Republican presidential candidates before them but at least those men had human traits and could resonate with voters across a broad spectrum of the electorate (McCain, despite his age and clearly incipient dementia, still got almost 60,000,000 people to vote for him against Obama).

Mitt Romney, even on those mercifully rare occasions when he tries to connect with the grass roots, cannot help but show what an elitist scum he truly is, whether it's telling largely out of work Floridians "I'm unemployed, too," betting Texas Governor Rick Perry $10,000 over a minor squabble over a book passage during a nationally televised debate, telling hecklers at the Iowa State Fair that corporations are people, that income inequality should be spoken of only in "quiet rooms" or four years ago seeking out a reporter for special abuse when he rightly called out Romney's lobbyist Ron Kaufman as running his campaign.

In fact, the only time one can get a human reaction from Romney is when someone accuses him of being a flip-flopper, insists that corporations are not, in fact, people or calling him out for his long history of vulturism with Bain Capital. Even then, Romney, will break into the most plastic and disingenuous grin since Ken and Barbie or what Charles Pierce at Esquire calls his "Flog the Butler" face.

Mitt Romney, scion of a wealthy family who escaped the Vietnam draft and instead spent a year at a palace in France during a Mormon mission, far from being a cool, even-tempered customer, is one of the most viciously defensive Republicans on the map on the rare occasions when someone from a crowd or the mainstream media calls him on his lies and constantly shifting positions. Even the mere suggestion that Romney may have come by his quarter billion dollar fortune under less than honorable means is enough to make him scramble for his emotional launch codes, if his shameful speech in Iowa last summer is any indication.

Much of Romney's divorce from reality and the facts can be gleaned from his very perversion of the definition of what Bain Capital's primary mission was. Bain, a world-eating entity that has created one weed-clogged parking lot after another from coast to coast, is a venture capital firm. Ask anyone at a venture capital firm who doesn't have a current or former alumnus running for president if their number one goal is job creation and they'll laugh you clear into the street.

The mission statement of a venture capital firm is to make money and if any jobs are created it's merely incidental. In nearly 25% of the cases in which Bain Capital bought a business, it filed for bankruptcy and was parted out like an old Chevy while hundreds got thrown out into the cold.

This is the picture that Mitt Romney would like you to forget, one that seems to perfectly illustrate the entire philosophy and agenda of the universally-despised Wall Street. Does that look like a portrait of people who are primarily interested in job creation or one of cash-stuffed scarecrow psychopaths in the heady 80's of Oliver Stone's Wall Street rubbing their unseemly wealth in our faces?

RomneyCare here in Massachusetts is but a mere microcosm of what he'd do to this country if he was ever allowed to sit behind the Resolute Desk. That abominable mutation of MassHealth, which used to provide for the health care needs of those on welfare and other public assistance, was co-opted by the half dozen largest health providers in the Commonwealth. The rechristened MassHealth Connector now offers rates too high for any unemployed or underemployed person to pay unless they meet a stringent hardship guideline. And if you're not that indigent but still too indigent to pay the premiums these HMOs demand, you'll wind up owing Massachusetts your $900+ personal exemption.

It's impossible to imagine anyone not on Wall Street or who doesn't work for Bain Capital or who hasn't been paid off by Romney ever voting for him except out of a reptilian revulsion toward a man of African American heritage running our country. It's quite obvious that prominent conservatives such as Mr. Gingrich and Ms. Palin are trying to take down Romney simply because they know that he's unelectable or because they themselves are revolted by the cult to which he belongs.

Whatever their motives, we should welcome their opposition to a Romney presidency because it marks the first time in a while that well-monied Republicans have ever gotten their facts straight.

It's Jesusmania Night!

2012-01-14T14:23:00.003-05:00

Can you smell the Te-mentum? Tonight is the big night, when Captain America goes up against the Second Coming of the Baby Jesus in a no-holds-barred steel cage match at Corporate Shill Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, just outside the Birthplace of the American Revolution, where our Founding Fathers, evangelical Christians all, set forth a new kind of country, one steeped in superstition, mandatory religious worship of one particular flavor, to be done as flamboyantly and in-your-face as possible.

Wait. You mean they didn't?

Here at Casa la Brilliant, it's FOOTBALL!!! this weekend, what with the Battle for America's Soul And Tim Tebow's Endorsement Value going on tonight amidst the cacophony of B.J. Raji, Green Bay nose tackle, Famous Local Kid Who Isn't James O'Keefe, and presumed financier of one Giant Bigass House to replace his childhood home on a through street barely a stones throw from Casa la Brilliant itself, trash-talking our own Giants, who go up against the Packers at Lambeau Field tomorrow.

Poor Eli Manning can't seem to get a break, this soft-spoken guy who looks like the Head Projector Geek on the high school Audio/Visual Squad and has played in the shadow of his now-injured and possible next-Jets-quarterback brother. The Giants haven't been great this year, but they're here -- in the second round of the playoffs, and hey, you never know.

And that's precisely the problem. The line on tonight's game is New England by 13-1/2, but if by some chance Denver does win, the 43 percent of people polled who think that the Great White Alpha Male in the Sky is personally coaching the Denver Broncos are going to believe their delusion has been vindicated, and they'll become even more insufferable than they are now. And that's not taking into account that there are actually people who believe that Tebow is the literal Second Coming. And there, my friends, is the problem with Tim Tebow. It isn't that he has strong religious beliefs, though why he feels he has to constantly and publicly trumpet them is a mystery to me. It's that his willingness to go along with such nonsense, instead of having the humility to tell these nimrods that his life is about proving worthy to his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, not claiming that he IS Jesus Christ, and that they should knock it off already, shows me that all this humility crap is just that -- crap.

But between Juicebox Jesus (™ Tbogg) and Rick Santorum, the U.S. is starting to look less like the beacon for the world, and more like some strange, backward third-world country where they worship fiddler crabs and lob coconuts at anyone who invades their land.

SUNDAY MORNING UPDATE: Heh.

This calls for a song:

This too.

And this.

And let's not forget this.

Everything that's wrong with today's journalism in one column

2012-01-12T18:49:00.004-05:00

I can't believe that the Public Editor of the New York Times even feels he has to ASK this:

I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.

One example mentioned recently by a reader: As cited in an Adam Liptak article on the Supreme Court, a court spokeswoman said Clarence Thomas had “misunderstood” a financial disclosure form when he failed to report his wife’s earnings from the Heritage Foundation. The reader thought it not likely that Mr. Thomas “misunderstood,” and instead that he simply chose not to report the information.

Another example: on the campaign trail, Mitt Romney often says President Obama has made speeches “apologizing for America,” a phrase to which Paul Krugman objected in a December 23 column arguing that politics has advanced to the “post-truth” stage.

As an Op-Ed columnist, Mr. Krugman clearly has the freedom to call out what he thinks is a lie. My question for readers is: should news reporters do the same?

If so, then perhaps the next time Mr. Romney says the president has a habit of apologizing for his country, the reporter should insert a paragraph saying, more or less:

“The president has never used the word ‘apologize’ in a speech about U.S. policy or history. Any assertion that he has apologized for U.S. actions rests on a misleading interpretation of the president’s words.”

That approach is what one reader was getting at in a recent message to the public editor. He wrote:

“My question is what role the paper’s hard-news coverage should play with regard to false statements – by candidates or by others. In general, the Times sets its documentation of falsehoods in articles apart from its primary coverage. If the newspaper’s overarching goal is truth, oughtn’t the truth be embedded in its principal stories? In other words, if a candidate repeatedly utters an outright falsehood (I leave aside ambiguous implications), shouldn’t the Times’s coverage nail it right at the point where the article quotes it?”

This message was typical of mail from some readers who, fed up with the distortions and evasions that are common in public life, look to The Times to set the record straight. They worry less about reporters imposing their judgment on what is false and what is true.

Is that the prevailing view? And if so, how can The Times do this in a way that is objective and fair? Is it possible to be objective and fair when the reporter is choosing to correct one fact over another? Are there other problems that The Times would face that I haven’t mentioned here?

Reading that made me want to stick an icepick in my own forehead. What Arthur Brisbane is asking is for validation of the idea that everything is spin, that nothing is demonstrable, and what Republicans and Fox News have done for the last decade -- demand that demonstrable facts and utter horseshit be given equal weight -- is the way respected news organizations should behave.

It tells you a great deal about the New York Times when its public editor even feels that this is a question that needs to be asked -- whether newspapers have an obligation to fact-check or to just regurgitate whatever crap is fed to them. Of course, this is the newspaper that employs Jodi Kantor, a loathsome woman whose obsession with the Obama's marriage goes back to the 2008 campaign and has reached fruition with a "tell-all" book in which she "recounts" the views of a bunch of unidentified third parties and sells it as fact. This is the newspaper that let Judith Miller spout Bush Administration lies until it became demonstrably untenable to do so. And who can forget the halcyon days of another Jodi, this one last-named Wilgoren, whose job it was to hack Howard Dean to bits in 2004?

The Times can't have it both ways. Either it's going to be the newspaper of record, the great Grey Lady, the last bastion of factual news in this country, or it's going to be just another Murdochian tabloid. That Brisbane saw fit to ask readers this question tells us what decision has already been made.

And kudos to the paper's readers for giving this horsepuckey the smackdown it deserves.

THURSDAY Cat Blogging (because I can cat blog anytime I want)

2012-01-12T05:51:00.003-05:00

Gay guys nothing. I do this too:

The truly coffee-spitting moment is at 1:43. That's where I completely lost it. (Hint for the uninitiated.)

Was Mitt Romney dogwhistling to racists in his New Hampshire victory speech?

2012-01-11T19:16:00.005-05:00

I heard him say this and the first thing that went through my mind was "Did he just call Barack Obama a lazy n-----r?"

You decide:

President Obama wants to put free enterprise on trial. In the last few days, we have seen some desperate Republicans join forces with him. This is such a mistake for our Party and for our nation. This country already has a leader who divides us with the bitter politics of envy. We must offer an alternative vision. I stand ready to lead us down a different path, where we are lifted up by our desire to succeed, not dragged down by a resentment of success. In these difficult times, we cannot abandon the core values that define us as unique -- We are One Nation, Under God.

Make no mistake, in this campaign, I will offer the American ideals of economic freedom a clear and unapologetic defense.

Our campaign is about more than replacing a President; it is about saving the soul of America. This election is a choice between two very different destinies.

President Obama wants to “fundamentally transform” America. We want to restore America to the founding principles that made this country great.

He wants to turn America into a European-style entitlement society. We want to ensure that we remain a free and prosperous land of opportunity.

Here's what "economic freedom" is under Mitt "Oh Dear God No Not Another Republican President Trying To Prove That His Dick Is Bigger Than His Daddy's" Romney:

At Dade Behring Inc., a medical-testing company based in Deerfield, Illinois, Bain cut at least 1,600 jobs during a series of acquisitions before the firm entered into bankruptcy in 2002. Romney foreshadowed those cuts in a speech to employees shortly after Bain acquired the firm.

DDi Corp., an electronics company in Anaheim, California, filed for bankruptcy in 2003 after Bain sold shares in the company generating at least $85.5 million and billed $10 million in management fees.

GS Industries Inc., a steel company in Charlotte, North Carolina, filed for bankruptcy in 2001 after workers said a chief executive hired under Bain made missteps, including installing managers who lacked industry expertise, former employees said.

When some politicians make promises, they mean them, even if they know in their hearts that they can't deliver. But when a guy like Mitt Romney, who was born at least on SECOND base and thinks he hit a double, whose "summer house" is over 6500 square feet, whose already $12 million home in La Jolla just isn't bit enough (the man DOES have an obsession with size, doesn't he?), who thinks that you can just fire your insurance company if they don't cover your cancer treatments, conveniently forgetting about those pesky pre-existing conditions exceptions, tells you that he's concerned about your job, just look at his record. The man is flat-out lying.

From 1989-1993 we had a president who made clear that he regarded the world as a fiefdom for his family and friends to plunder as they saw fit. From 2001-January 2009 we had another one. Why on earth would we give the keys to yet another soulless bastard for whom no amount of money can fill the black hole in his soul?

I just got home from yet another 12-hour day. I dare Mitt Romney to tell me he works harder than I do.

Charles Pierce. Also. Read. Now.

Looking Up, I Noticed I Was

2012-01-11T09:29:00.004-05:00

Mr. Bittman addresses the choir:

We’re Eating Less Meat. Why?

I love him, but he writes this column once a month.

Americans eat more meat than any other population in the world; about one-sixth of the total, though we’re less than one-twentieth of the population.

But that’s changing.

...

...we spend a smaller percentage of our money on food than any other country, and much of that goes toward the roughly half-pound of meat each of us eats, on average, every day.

But that’s changing...

I fear change. And vending machines. And meat-filled vending machines.

...[The Daily Livestock Report] blames the decline on growing exports, which make less meat available for Americans to buy. It blames it on ethanol, which has caused feed costs to rise, production to drop and prices to go up so producers can cover their increasing costs. It blames drought. It doesn’t blame recession, which is surprising, because that’s a factor also.

All of which makes some sense.

This is not Mr. Bittman's finest moment in prose. I suspect scriptwriters for David Caruso, enemy of all things word-based, hijacked this column and are perpetuating a vegetarian Malkovich Malkovich on the New York Times. No? Okay.

No. It’s not the non-existent federal War on Meat that’s making a difference. And even if availability is down, it’s not as if we’re going to the supermarket and finding empty meat cases and deli counters filled with coleslaw.

Note: deli coleslaw is icky. That is a technical term. Continuing -

The flaw in the report is that it treats American consumers as passive actors who are victims of diminishing supplies, rising costs and government bias against the meat industry. Nowhere does it mention that we’re eating less meat because we want to eat less meat.

Yet conscious decisions are being made by consumers. Even buying less meat because prices are high and times are tough is a choice; other "sacrifices" could be made. We could cut back on junk food, or shirts or iPhones, which have a very high meat-equivalent, to coin a term. Yet even though excess supply kept chicken prices lower than the year before, demand dropped.

Another note: Xcez Chikn Supli would make a great band name. In Iceland.

I can add, anecdotally, that when I ask audiences I speak to, “How many of you are eating less meat than you were 10 years ago?” at least two-thirds raise their hands. A self-selecting group to be sure, but nevertheless one that exists.

In fact, let’s ask this: is anyone in this country eating more meat than they used to?

Assuming we're not talking to teenage boys and Survivor contestants, Mr. Bittman is still talking to people who read Mr. Bittman.

I love him, but in America, we now have Man v. Food Nation problem. Anecdotally, my friend's friend just had visitors from Italy, where I assure you people can cook, who wanted to visit places in which Adam Richman had punished his gullet and the food supply system. The whole idea is disgusting in a time when food pantries are struggling and soup kitchens can't keep up. Perhaps Mr. Bittman could take his pulpit to the Travel Channel, where his message of moderation has yet to take root.

There are none so blind as those who will not see

2012-01-09T21:27:00.003-05:00

Especially those who think theocracy is a bad thing unless it involves worship of ~~Tim Tebow~~ Jesus.

Rick Santorum, yesterday, about why Iran is such a threat:

They're, they're a theocracy. They're a theocracy that has deeply embedded beliefs that the, the afterlife is better than this life. President Ahmadinejad has repeatedly said the principal virtue of the Islamic Republic of Iran is martyrdom. So when your principal virtue is to die for your--for Allah, then it's not a deterrent to have a nuclear threat if they would use a nuclear weapon. It is, in fact, an encouragement for them to use their nuclear weapon, and that's why there's a difference between the Soviet Union and China and others and Iran.

Deeply held beliefs that the afterlife is better than this life? You mean like this?

"God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with him, and made us sit with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus" (Eph 2:4-7).

That's from the New Testament. You know, the one that Christians like Rick Santorum regard as a holy book.

A principal virtue being to die for your deity? You mean like this:

According to the Vatican’s Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, the official martyrology contains the names of 132 Catholics who have died for the faith since 2001. But this is not a complete list. Its 2005 report acknowledges that there are “many more possible ‘unknown soldiers of the faith’ in remote corners of the planet whose deaths may never be reported.”

Dying for Christ seems almost surreal to most Westerners. We live in a part of the world where Christianity rarely makes the news unless it is to be mocked or defamed. Otherwise, the media is strangely silent about modern Christian martyrdom. “Three things distinguish anti-Christian persecution and discrimination around the world,” said Denver’s Archbishop Charles Chaput to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. “First, it’s ugly. Second, it’s growing. And third, the mass media generally ignore or downplay its gravity.”

The denizens of wingnuttia say that Iran's top leaders believe "that the end of days has come" and this makes Iran more likely to deploy a nuclear weapon against the United States. Rick Santorum is one of them. And yet, the US has nuclear weapons and also a sizable number of people who believe the end of days has come. So why is it OK for us? Because our religious nutballs worship someone different?

Downton! You're gonna be all right now.

2012-01-08T13:25:00.009-05:00

When you're alone
And life is making you lonely,
You can always go
Downton!
When you've got worries,
An Edwardian surrey
Seems to help, I know,
Downton!
Just listen to the music
of the wine glasses at dinner
Linger in the countryside
where Mary's still a sinner
How can you lose?
The lights are much softer there
You can forget all your troubles,
forget all your cares and go
Downton!
things'll be great when you're
Downton!
no finer place for sure
Downton!
Escape is waiting for you

(Apologies to Petula Clark and Tony Hatch for the above)

This afternoon at Casa la Brilliant may have belonged to the Giants (YAY!), but after 9 PM, when the football is over and Mr. Brilliant has turned in for the night, it's all going to be about sober-but-still-awesome clothes and fabulous hats and World War I and the denizens of Downton Abbey.

I remember when the original Forsyte Sage played on American TV for the first time, ushering in what would become Masterpiece Theatre. This was a sprawling, 26-episode, utterly faithful rendition of Jon Galsworthy's six novels. It had sex and intrigue and family strife lo unto succeeding generations. The Forsyte Saga was all about the upstairs and not at all about the downstairs. It had great costumes and British accents and rigid manners -- all the things we now take for granted about costume dramas. But in 1967, there had been nothing like it on American television:

Today this version has lost none of its power, though it does play a bit stagey. But at the time, Forsyte was so successful that it begat Upstairs Downstairs (from which co-creator Jean Marsh insists Downton Abbey was shamelessly stolen), Poldark, The First Churchills, The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Elizabeth R, Brideshead Revisited, and the greatest costume drama of all time, I, Claudius. The best of the Masterpiece dramas have two things in common: richly-drawn characters, and superlative production values.

As we are wont to do in our navel-gazing society, there is much hue and cry over why the very same people who support the Occupy movement are already assembling their tea and scones to enjoy over the premiere of season 2 of a drama that's all about inheritance of a huge English mansion -- the family that owns it and the many people whose purpose in life is to serve them. And let's face it, the people who have been screaming about defunding NPR and cheering Mitt Romney's assertion that Sesame Street is going to have to start advertising Froot Loops, are hardly likely to be planted in front of their local public television station tonight, for all that they have the delusion that if things were only just like they were in the pre- (and this season, current) World War I era, with everyone knowing exactly where s/he stands in the scheme of things, life would be a lot better.

But those of us who ARE glued in front of PBS tonight at 9 Eastern Time know what the attraction is. It isn't that we want to be waited on by people who have no lives other than serving the wealthy. It isn't that we want to, as Lady Mary said in Season I, have no life but going to socials and charity functions and wait around to marry. It isn't that we want to, as Maggie Smith's deliciously haughty Dowager Countess said last season, have no opinions until we marry and then our husbands tell us what to think.

No, the attraction is something far less profound.

It's all about the clothes. And the hats:

After Titanic came out in 1997, there was a rash of interest in Edwardian clothing -- the lace-up boots, the tea dresses, and yes, the corsets. I myself bought one, and while it would be horrifically uncomfortable to wear all the time, there's something about a corset that makes you carry yourself differently -- taller, straighter, and with a rack you could read Shakespeare from. Even among those of us who refuse to take any vacation where we have to dress up, there's something appealing about watching people wear gorgeous dresses to dinner, and outfits with matching hats to garden parties. Even Boardwalk Empire, with it's Scorsesean gangsters and graphic violence, had some of the most fabulous costuming we've seen in popular culture in recent years.

There's something about wearing the clothing of a particular time that gives us a vague sense of what it was like to be there -- the constriction of corsets and hobble skirts. The pointed toes of lace-up boots. The feel of a summer breeze blowing through the straw of a hat festooned with the better part of an entire florist's inventory

The darted sheath dresses, suits, and fedoras of Mad Men have never quite caught on, perhaps because there are far too many of us alive who still remember them from the first time, or because there is nothing about the lives of ANY of the characters on that show with whom we'd want to change places even for a day, for all that we find them so compelling. Nor would we want to trade places with Lady Mary Crawley either, for that matter, despite her gorgeous dresses, because Michelle Dockery so expertly portrays the despair of a woman born just a few years too early for the changes that will come after Season 2 of Downton Abbey ends.

Yes, Downton Abbey may seem like just another Austen-esque thwarted romance story with a big house. But if you ask a fan to dig down deep and reveal what the appeal is, yes, it's about the house p0rn. But more than anything else it's about this:

and this:

So if you're inclined to shop for clothing inspired by this time period, Victorian Trading Company has some lovely garments and accessories.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go dress for dinner. Consider this an open thread for All Things Downton.

Last Night's NH Debate: Live Free or Die of Embarrassment

2012-01-08T12:10:00.003-05:00

Willard "Mitt" Romney practices sucking lobbyist cock before last night's debate.

By now, we've seen the six remaining GOP presidential contenders on TV more often than Madge the Manicurist and Josephine the Plumber combined. And the Republican Freakazoid, Willardpalooza, DSM IV Come to Life, Parade of Penises last night proved only one thing: Willard is the One. He is, in mob parlance, a "made man." He is untouchable, as Teflonic as Reagan and his own hair.

Willard, leader of the rat hordes, is da Man. Meet your new 2012 Republican Car to Nowhere.

There was no Night of Long Knives or even a Dusk of Apple Paring Knives. Newt and the others, save possibly for Jon Huntsman in this, his Brian's Song of a national appearance, went after Willard with about as much real zeal as so many crocodiles recently bloated with baby hippos would look at a full-grown hippo. Huntsman did channel Herbert Hoover by muttering something to Willard in Mandarin Chinese, which came off sounding like a chess nerd explaining the Sicilian trap to a bunch of football jocks just before they folded him six ways into a locker.

So, they did what Republicans do: They instead attacked each other and the President for entirely the wrong reasons (that would be the President who supposedly blamed George W. Bush for the Iraqi skeletons in all the WH closets, the reservoir of red ink pouring out of all the bathroom faucets and the Everest-sized pile of dirt under the rug he left behind in the Oval Office).

But the fact that Romney, a man with a first name that's onomatopoetic with "the chill that crawls up your spine when you feel something cold and clammy in the dark", was able to so easily deflect so many damning charges proves right then and there that this is the greatest fix since (pardon the pun) Jack Johnson/Jess Willard in 1915.

Forget the fact that, as Vulture Zero for Bain Capital, Willard did indeed create 100,000 jobs... for Communist China. Forget the fact that Willard has a position paper that looks as though it was written by a schizophrenic with multiple alter egos. Forget the fact that Willard is a psychopath that edges closer and closer to scratching out of that vinyl substance charitably referred to as skin every time someone challenges him or mentions an inconvenient truth about his past or present.

They've given up on waiting for the zombie Reagan to come shambling out of his grave, they've given up on Republican Jesus coming down from heaven in a golf cart made of light and attended to by cherubic caddies. This is their man, Mormon or no, even though, come November 6th, it would be a very good time to invest in clothespin manufacturers, which is about the only way Willard will create any manufacturing jobs for countries that don't limit couples to two children and a shot glass full of rice per day.

Forget the fact that Rick "Will You Fucking Stop Googling Me???" Santorum came in a virtual dead heat with Mitt Romney in the Slipknot Caucus last week. Santorum brought more people back down to earth than Harold Camping's failed Raptures last year by insisting that there were no classes and that even mentioning the word "class" was a nefarious liberal plot (sure, there are no classes. We'll all reap billions from not having to pay capital gains taxes under Willard's plan and routinely bet each other $10,000 over petty squabbles).

Santorum's eight vote deficit might as well have been 80,000 to judge by the fix that's obviously well in place thanks to Citizen's United and the Bilderberg Group who no doubt see Willard as their real-life Manchurian Candidate. Santorum's even more extreme than Israel regarding the settlements, is so Catholic he makes the Catholic League's Bill Donohue look like a goat's head-wearing pagan and, well, there is that Google/Dan Savage thing to live down.

The Powers That Be have already decided, rightly, that Santorum doesn't have what it takes to get people excited. He's the anti-Jon Huntsman on the other end of the spectrum of Republican lunacy: Whereas Huntsman isn't nearly crazy enough, Santorum's just a little too batshit. Willard, obviously, benefits more than anything else, as the one candidate who's the least embarrassing, the one who's fine-tuning that perfect balance between being a ho-hum conservative pragmatist and someone who paints elephants on walls with his own fecal matter.

The Republican field of nightmares, after the three horse race in Iowa, has now become Six Characters in Search of an Offer. With Cain and Bachmann now rightfully relegated to the shit pile, the GOP's offerings have now become what it's always been and likely always will be: a half dozen middle-aged to elderly, white, male Republican multimillionaires. The Bilderberg Group has very good reasons to be concerned, considering the heterogeneous makeup that requires looking at which lobbyists and corporates interests support whom in order to tell them apart.

Oh, and Rick "Fuck you, NH, I'm Gonna Leapfrog Over Ya'll on the Way to SC" Perry was also there like some pot head wandering in and auditing a college course on Hempology.

"Private sector guy" Mitt Romney, he of the job-creation skills, will do to the entire nation what Bain Capital did to Kansas City

2012-01-07T19:04:00.002-05:00

Smell the Mitt-mentum:

It was funny at first.

The young men in business suits, gingerly picking their way among the millwrights, machinists and pipefitters at Kansas City's Worldwide Grinding Systems steel mill. Gaping up at the cranes that swung 10-foot cast iron buckets through the air. Jumping at the thunder from the melt shop's electric-arc furnace as it turned scrap metal into lava.

"They looked like a bunch of high school kids to me. A bunch of Wall Street preppies," says Jim Linson, an electronics repairman who worked at the plant for 40 years. "They came in, they were in awe."

Apparently they liked what they saw. Soon after, in October 1993, Bain Capital, co-founded by Mitt Romney, became majority shareholder in a steel mill that had been operating since 1888.

It was a gamble. The old mill, renamed GS Technologies, needed expensive updating, and demand for its products was susceptible to cycles in the mining industry and commodities markets.

Less than a decade later, the mill was padlocked and some 750 people lost their jobs. Workers were denied the severance pay and health insurance they'd been promised, and their pension benefits were cut by as much as $400 a month.

What's more, a federal government insurance agency had to pony up $44 million to bail out the company's underfunded pension plan. Nevertheless, Bain profited on the deal, receiving $12 million on its $8 million initial investment and at least $4.5 million in consulting fees.

[snip]

Overall, Bain made at least $12 million on the steel company it created by merging the Kansas City mill with another in South Carolina before the new entity declared bankruptcy in 2001. Bain also collected an additional $900,000 a year through 1999 for management consulting services, public filings show.

Some analysts say Bain should not be blamed for the company's failure, noting that a wave of cheap imports forced nearly half of the U.S. steel industry into bankruptcy during that period. Another company set up around the same time, in which Bain took a minority stake, Steel Dynamics in Fort Wayne, Indiana, thrived.

"GS and Steel Dynamics were about as different as it gets," industry analyst Michelle Applebaum said. GS's core products were vulnerable to competition while Steel Dynamics became "one of the country's lowest-cost manufacturers of steel sheet," a product with more staying power. Steel Dynamics was also a non-union shop.

Former company executives say they were generally satisfied with Bain's leadership, but they say the firm would have been better equipped to weather tough times had it not been saddled with such a heavy debt load.

They also fault Bain for putting inexperienced managers in place and spurning a buyout offer from a competitor. Workers say efforts to cut corners often backfired, driving costs higher.

The Kansas City millworkers, meanwhile, are still fuming, after being left with no health benefits and a reduced pension check.

"Romney cost me lots and lots of sleepless nights and lots and lots of money," said Ed Stanger, who worked at the plant for nearly 30 years.

Yup. That's the kind of jobs miracle we can expect under President ~~Robot~~ Romney.

Yeah, but it's still going to be a Fiat

2012-01-07T12:58:00.004-05:00

I've always has a fondness for the Dodge Dart. My first three cars were Darts. The first one was a 1963 Dart with the push-button TorqueFlite automatic transmission. I bought it for $125 the day I graduated high school. Two weeks after I bought it, we had a bad rainstorm, our street was flooded, and the car, which was parked in the street, was completely flooded up to the windows. I was able to drive if afterward, but I had to have the heat on constantly. I guess today I would just replace the radiator core, but I couldn't afford it back then.

A year or so later, my mother bought a car and I took over her 1965 Dart, junking the '63. I drove that car until around 1978, when I bought a 1972 Dart. How I loved that car. With proper care, I could have still been driving it today, were it not for the problem of being rear-ended while stopped at a red light one night, thus bending the frame and totalling the car.

Every now and then, you still see those early 1970's Darts around. Sometimes it's the Swinger, sometimes it's the equivalent Plymouth Valiant. But they are still out there. That old Dodge slant-six engine was practically indestructable.

So of course I had to pay attention when I saw this the other day:

2013 Dodge Dart: This Is It

This is it — the 2013 Dodge Dart, the new Alfa Romeo-based compact car that'll say arrivederci to the Caliber when it's fully unveiled at the Detroit Auto Show in just two days. But we knew all that. What we didn't know is what it'd look like. Until now.

These images — leaked ahead of its official unveil — show the Dart in all its econobox glory.

Based on Alfa Romeo's Giulietta platform, this spawn of the Fiat-Chrysler merger's going to be Chrysler's first decent attempt at winning over the ever-expanding compact space since the Dodge Neon.

As with the Jeep Grand Cherokee, this "new" car owes its platform to the engineering of a European company. While the Jeep's based on the Mercedes ML platform, the new Dart is based on Alfa Romeo's Giulietta.

Wait. Alfa Romeo? Like the sports car?

A little reading around reveals that the Giulietta is a popular car in Europe. It's solid and well-built. But the other names associated with this have been nothing to write home about. After a brief burst of craetivity, Chrysler cars have returned to suckitude. And Fiat has been a joke in America for decades, and Consumer Reports' review of the 500 isn't exactly glowing. And then there's that matter of wanting a hatchback, which the Giulietta is and the Dart won't be.

But still....I know I'm not the only nostalgic boomer who's going to be keeping an eye on this new car model...and hoping it can match the reliability of the ones we remember so fondly (and the gas mileage relevant to today).

Your Daily Douche

2012-01-07T12:41:00.000-05:00

Your Republican douchebaggery of the week, culled from all over the internets, the Twitter box and Facebook machine.

Heading off the always-active Republican police blotter is yet another embarrassment for South Carolina, this time State Representative Thad Viers, who was arrested recently for stalking and harassing his ex-girlfriend. This made Viers drop out of the race for the newly-created 7th District as well as resign from his current post. In his press release, the poor man was able to put aside his personal problems with his love life to ~~address bigger problems~~ take some parting partisan shots:

While I had hoped to join South Carolina's conservative congressional delegation in fighting back against Washington's out-of-control spending spree, now is not the time. Instead, I will focus on building my law practice and advocating free market principles here in Horry County.

Oh, and this wasn't the first time this has happened. Viers has a well-established pattern of obsessive/compulsive behavior toward former flames. Back in 2007, "Viers' arrest came nearly four years after he pleaded no contest to threatening to beat and sexually assault a man dating his estranged wife." And this guy wanted to run for Congress? Sadly enough, he would've fit right in with the other psychopaths the Republican Party has fielded.

Covering himself with glory on the Presidential campaign trail, Rick "Damn You, Dan Savage, Damn You to Hell!" Santorum recently told the mother of a cancer survivor that people with pre-existing conditions are to blame for their conditions and that they should pay more for health care despite having their earning capacity crippled due to an illness they probably weren't too crazy about contracting.

Yeah, like Thomas Franks we've all asked ourselves what the fuck is with Kansas. The latest WTF moment came from none other than racist Republican Kansas House Speaker Mike O'Neal who forwarded a cartoon to his fellow racist Republican lawmakers comparing the First Lady to the Grinch and calling her "Mrs. YoMama." The message from O'Neal read, “I’m sure you’ll join me in wishing Mrs. YoMama a wonderful, long Hawaii Christmas vacation — at our expense, of course.”

The backlash resulted in the typical Republican non-apology, which basically boils down to, "I was just funnin' on her. Sorry if ya'll are too thinskinned to get Republican humor." Just two days ago,

O’Neal had defended the email, contending that he was only making fun of his own bad hair days. In a statement, the speaker’s office said that “political cartoons are a part of American culture.”

Sure. And this isn't indicative of a pattern of racist behavior by fat, pasty old white Republican men who must be consumed daily with frustration that they can't put on those pure white robes with the pointy hoods (Limbaugh, Sensenbrenner, et al).

Common Dreams tells us of a study by the Center For Responsive Politics informing us that Republicans in the Tea Party Caucus, who comprise almost exactly a quarter of all Republicans in the House, elected by Tea Baggers to represent the middle class, are actually wealthier on average than even their fellow Republican lawmakers (which is saying a lot).

The median average net worth of a member of the House Tea Party Caucus was $1.8 million in 2010. (Financial disclosure forms require lawmakers to value their assets and liabilities only in ranges, so it's impossible to know exactly how wealthy a particular elected official is. However, it's possible to calculate an average net worth for each member of Congress.)

That's significantly higher than the comparable number for the median House member: $755,000. It's also more than 130 percent above the $774,280 average net worth of the median, non-Tea Party Caucus House Republican.

Furthermore, the caucus, a group of 60 House members founded by Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), includes 33 millionaires and six members worth more than $20 million, according to the Center's research...

So remind me again what those lunatic Tea Baggers were thinking when they elected dozens of psychopaths who plainly don't represent the middle class and have time and again threatened to shut down the government in their quest to cut taxes for their own kind while slashing programs and unemployment benefits for millions of middle-class and lower income folks?

Apparently, Voter ID should only be made mandatory where black, red and brown Democratic voters are concerned, not white, Republican Iowans voting in last week's caucus.

Just when you think Creationism and global warming denialists represent the nadir of scientific head-up-the-ass ramming, along comes Peter Duesberg who recently published in an Italian journal that HIV does not cause AIDS. Doucheberg's ideas are thought to result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people since the AIDS/HIV retrovirus was identified in the 80's. Doubling down on his, er, remarkable theory, Duesberg also claimed that there was no AIDS epidemic in Africa.

By the end of the year we'll be hearing things like, "Now, so-called experts and elitist eggheads will tell ya'll the earth is round, that's gravity's not a theory and that we revolve around the sun but don't you go believin' 'em..."

Duesberg actually writes for Scientific American, if you can believe that.

Just when you thought Deadbeat dad Joe Wilson and Don Young were two of the surliest, nastiest cocksuckers this 112th Congress has to offer, then take a gander at Arkansas Congressman Steve Womack screaming at one of his constituents. And why was he screaming at her? Let's let Blue Arkansas field this one:

Kelly (Eubanks) works two jobs to support her two kids and is trying to finish up her degree, going to UofA in Fayetteville full time in addition to taking care of her family and working. She went to her Congressman’s town hall (something Womack rarely holds) to ask why he voted to cut the Pell grants she depends on to go to school but wouldn’t cut oil subsidies.

During the town hall, Eubanks got hissed at Womack's other constituents to "get a job" despite the fact she'd said she had two and they tried to take the mic away from her. After the Town Hall, she was cornered by Womack's constituent service representative, Pam Forester, "to inform (Eubanks) that if she wanted to talk with the Congressman again she needed to go through her and set up an appointment (which is to say, no way in Hell you're getting to him ever again.)."

This is what you get when you elect Republican plutocrats to represent you. If you challenge them on their corruption and hypocrisy and put their feet to the fire, they'll act like a Town Hall is a Spanish Inquisition and bellow and bully you into submission.

Rick "Fecal Anal Lube" Santorum pulled double-duty this week at a recent stump speech in which he said gays don't deserve the "privilege" of serving in the military and getting married within their own gender, while saying he didn't want to discriminate against any Americans' rights. Because, according to former Sen. Man on Dog, these are privileges, not rights. And privileges, as we all know, ought to be earned. So, if you're gay, you have to earn the right to defend your country (despite DADT's repeal) and to marry within your gender.

When an AP reporter held Mitt Romney's happy, dancing feet to the fire by telling him it was obvious that lobbyists were running his campaign, Romney had a Norman Bates moment and confronted the AP reporter. After informing the reporter he'd like to speak with him later, he was inevitably confronted with Romney aide Eric Fehrnstrom who told the reporter he was acting unprofessionally and was "argumentative with the candidate". Oh, and his easily provable facts were downgraded to mere "opinion".

Ron Kaufman has a long and storied history as a big time lobbyist and it all devolved into Romney's personal semantic interpretation of what "running" his campaign really means. Even Romney admitted that Kaufman was present at "debate strategy meetings" but not "senior level strategy meetings", which, I guess, never involves something as unimportant as debate strategy.

If it turns out that the GOP fixed the Iowa Caucus for Romney, imagine what they'll do on a national level

2012-01-07T06:38:00.004-05:00

It just goes to show you, never, ever, ever bet against the money guys, because once the money guys anoint a GOP candidate, everyone else is wasting his/her time.

I sure hope that the White House is paying attention to this, instead of planning to go the John Kerry route of solemnly asserting that the process works so let's take our leftover campaign cash and go home.

The GOP's hypocrisy about who should be allowed to vote has already been conclusively demonstrated in Iowa. At the caucus, there are no rules about photo IDs, nor are there rules against same-day voter registration. But then, this is all about Republicans, and they only want to have such laws where groups such as students, people whose dermal pigmentation they regard as unseemly, and the elderly, are likely to vote for someone they haven't anointed.

But now, looking at Brad Friedman's report, it looks like even the Iowa caucus ~~was~~ may have fixed for Romney:

Thanks to the transparent, open counting process at Tuesday's night's Iowa GOP Caucuses, and a Ron Paul supporter who was paying close attention to the results, we may now be learning that Rick Santorum, not Mitt Romney, actually won the "First-in-the-Nation" Iowa Caucuses this week.

According to a report tonight from television station KCCI NewsChannel 8 in Des Moines, Edward True, a supporter of Paul's says he participated in the counting at the Washington Wells caucus in Appanoose County and wrote down the results he witnessed there on a piece of paper which he posted to Facebook that night. Later, in comparing his totals to the precinct results made available on the Iowa GOP website [CSV version here], he noticed that Romney is shown as receiving 22 votes at that precinct, rather than the 2 that True recorded him as receiving that night at the caucus.

If True is correct, and if no other anomalies are discovered in the coming days, it would mean that Santorum will have won the Iowa Caucuses by 12 votes, rather than lost it to Romney by 8, as reported by the GOP in the early morning hours on Wednesday...

According to KCCI:

Edward True, 28, of Moulton, said he helped count the votes and jotted the results down on a piece of paper to post to his Facebook page. He said when he checked to make sure the Republican Party of Iowa got the count right, he said he was shocked to find they hadn't.

True said at his 53-person caucus at the Garrett Memorial Library, Romney received two votes. According to the Iowa Republican Party's website, True's precinct cast 22 votes for Romney.

"This is huge," True said. "It essentially changes who won."

...

True --- who said he's a Ron Paul supporter --- hopes it was a simple mistake.

"I imagine it's a good possibility that somebody instead of hitting 2 might have hit 22 by accident," True said. "I hope so."

But he said he won't stop talking about it until the state --- by his count --- gets the numbers right.

"Numbers that I personally witnessed being counted and assisted in counting and am certain are right," he said.

"The story on Romney getting extra votes as a result of a typo looks credible IMO," tweeted The New York Times' statistical wunderkind Nate Silver tonight. "Romney did very badly in other precincts in that county."

Indeed, according to the Iowa GOP's posted results, out of 13 caucuses in Appanoose County, Romney received double-digits at only one other caucus beside Washington Wells. He is said to have received 20 votes at Vermillion Douglas Sharon, but other than those two sites, Romney received just 45 at the other 11 caucus sites combined...

As the report indicates, it will be about a week and half before the results are certified. The question is this: Will anyone still remember this then, now that the "Ooh, shiny!" crowd has decamped for New Hampshire? And perhaps more importantly, will Iowa GOP voters demand that their votes be counted correctly? We already know that no one, not even the Democratic candidates, ever cares about accurate vote counts. Perhaps GOP voters in Iowa, most of whom no doubt support making it harder for people they don't like to vote, similarly don't care about accurate vote counting either.

UPDATED for clarification from Brad, received via e-mail:

In this case, we have what appears to be a misreported tally. The public hand-count of the paper ballots was done exceedingly transparently and, apparently, accurately at the polling place (or caucus site in this case).

The caucus site reported Romney's 2 votes to the GOP, as far as I can tell, but that 2 became 22 when it was put into the main GOP database. Also, from the same precinct, Buddy Roemer received 6 votes for some reason (odd, since he only received a total of 31 across the entire state, and the folks at the caucus site in question seem to confirm that he received NO VOTES at that site.

So -- until we find a broader pattern of this happening elsewhere -- this smells very much like a book-keeping error rather than either a counting error or an attempt to "fix" the results for Romney. At least at this time.

Rachel Maddow, by the way, got it similarly wrong (though much more so!) last night on her show, and I'm likely gonna have take time to take her to task today as well, as much as I hate doing that, since she's usually right on the money. In her case, she slammed the GOP for their inability to count. But that's neither accurate nor even productive here.

In this case, it was the most transparent type of election that we can have! And the fact that citizens have stepped forward to demonstrate minor book-keeping errors and those errors have been almost instantly confirmed by others who were also able to oversee the transparent public process, is a tribute to that process!

In other words, even if the GOP wants to fix the results for anybody, it will be next to impossible for them to do so, because we've got thousands of witnesses to what the real count really is, and any error (or, worse, attempt to manipulate) can and will be noticed by the public, and independently confirmed by many others who are able to verify that error. That's a great counting process! Not a bad one, or a failure, as Maddow painted it last night, unfortunately. It's the process that we should be fighting for EVERYWHERE in nation! And in favor of appears to be a fairly lazy partisan shot last night, that's the way more important picture that Rachel missed in her analysis.

Similarly, you may have misread my own in coming to your framing of it. Where that may have been my fault -- where I was unclear or misleading -- I certainly apologize! And, if you decide to clarify, please feel free to use, quote from, any of the above as helpful -- and/or let me know if you have any questions on any of this.

I stand corrected. By I'm keeping my tinfoil hat on the nightstand, just in case.

But the larger issue that affects everyone even outside of Iowa, is the double standard about the voting process and how accuracy doesn't seem to matter unless there are Democrats voting. Zandar over at Balloon Juice put it perfectly:

Republicans keep screaming how the voting process is inherently corrupt if it ever produces a Democrat as the winner because they always steal elections, therefore we must have strict voting laws in every state for every election that makes it as difficult as possible for people to vote in order to protect the integrity of the election system. We have to pass laws to immediately protect the sacred process from the evils of those people who may try to vote 4812 times. It’s the only way one of them could end up President you know, and if you don’t agree you’re evil vote-stealing scum anyway.

But that election system apparently doesn’t matter when it comes to the coronation of Mitt Romney as nominee as fast as possible. Strange how that works. Democrats aren’t even American as far as most Republicans are concerned, but it’s all good if Republicans fiddle with the election system. It’s just a caucus, right? Besides, ACORN ACORN ACORN BLAH BLOOGITY BLAH CHICAGO WAY.

Now Zandar is making the same mistake I did in seeing rigging where there may be just a typo. But to not make a correction and declare the actual winner is highly suspect, especially for a party that would rather disenfranchise a million people than allow one person to vote in error (unless that person is named "Ann Coulter" or "Newt Gingrich" or for that matter, "Rick Santorum."

Another Republican sociopath

2012-01-06T18:33:00.002-05:00

What the hell is wrong with these guys? Here's Rick Santorum, the pro-lifiest of all the fetophiles, telling the mother of a child who had cancer at age 5 that despite the fact that he's not "to blame" for his own illness, he should pay more for health insurance:

Have I mentioned today how much I hate these people?

Dear Keith,

2012-01-06T05:59:00.004-05:00

I hope you don't take this the wrong way. No, maybe I do. Or maybe I don't care. Because that Howard Beale thing that used to make you a lone voice in the wilderness is spiraling completely out of control, and we don't want to lose you to your own lack of perspective.

I'm not sure you realize how important you were at one time to those of us out here who knew that there were no WMD in Iraq but had no voice other than yours in the media affirming what we already knew. At a time when outrage at what the Bush Administration was doing. You hit the air on MSNBC on March 31, 2003 -- just a year before The O'Franken Factor had its first broadcast on the now-defunct Air America Radio, thus giving us more hope for progressive media. And for nearly eight years, you were the voice of sanity, the person we could rely on to get the experts, to get the facts. Yes, you were bombastic, and that bombast had a style so idiosyncratic that Ben Affleck of all people was able to do a spot-on parody of you on SNL. But at a time when there was so little passion in the media about what the Bush Administration was doing, YOU were out there, almost literally reaching out of the TV set to grab the lapels of America and shouting, "Open your eyes! See what they are doing to you? What they are doing in YOUR NAME!"

Those young adults out in Zuccotti Park and elsewhere may not even remember what it was like then, back when only you were out in the mainstream media making the case for truth. Yes, a year later, Air America went on the air, but that company's continuous financial problems, lack of airwaves, and mismanagement hardly made it an alternative to cable news for most people.

Today, progressive cable news is not only alive, but thriving -- largely thanks to you. It was YOU who pushed for Rachel Maddow to have her own show, making her the first out lesbian and truly outspoken and unabashed progressive to sit on front of a camera on a cable news channel. Today it is Rachel, not you, who anchors the weeknight political coverage. It is Rachel who has displaced the hacktacular Chris Matthews as the center of MSNBC's primary coverage. And in true Biblical fashion, The Rachel Maddow Show begat Up With Chris Hayes, which has become the smartest Sunday morning panel show on TV. And now Chris Hayes has begat not only his own actual daughter (about whom he waxed adorably rhapsodic after her birth), but also a new show for Melissa Harris-Perry to follow his own, starting next month. Devotés of Lockdown may moan, but fans of smart, progressive news and commentary that tells the TRUTH rejoice.

And where are you?

You couldn't get along with the suits at MSNBC. OK, MSNBC is owned by two odious companies, GE and Comcast. So maybe you didn't want to work for those guys. But when you can no longer say you're selling out to The Man, when you become the public face of an emergent news organization, when you're given practically the whole enchilada to build as you see fit, and you STILL can't get along, well, you have two variables and a constant, and the constant is YOU.

You've been difficult to watch lately. What used to be justifiable outrage at the injustices being perpetrated by the corporate/Republican Axis of Evil is turning into the strange rantings we usually associate with crazy people on street corners. Every night, you seem determined to do whatever you can to piss off the people you now work for. You aren't even entertaining anymore. Now what I see when I watch Countdown is a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Your audience isn't the frothing masses of Network. We're smart, we're aware, and what we see is someone falling apart before our very eyes.

I know you had a bad year. I know you were close to both your parents (and let us get close to them too), and you lost them both in fairly rapid succession. I know the debacle at MSNBC couldn't have been easy. I even know that watching Rachel eclipse you must have hurt. But you had a chance to really build something at Current -- and you're blowing that too. What do you think happens next? Do you think CBS dumps Bob Schieffer and gives you Face the Nation? Maybe ABC jettisons Stephanopoulos after he can't revive the ghastly This Week? On the contrary. Your next step is webcasting from your garage. Now, if you're a stand-up comic like Marc Maron, for whom a podcast becomes a means of apologizing to everyone to whom you've been an asshole over the years, it can be a great career move, as it's been for him. But where you're headed is as if Marlon Brando in his fat, declining years had re-enacted that scene from The Wild One, answering the question "What are you rebelling against, Johnny?" with "Whaddya got?" -- while glimpses of belly emerged from under the now-far-too-tight leather jacket.

A 50+-year-old man's trajectory from anchoring prime-time at MSNBC, to acting out at Current the minute you yourself bring in the younger Cenk Uygur, to podcasting from your garage, is not going to be seen as fighting the power and it's not going to be a springboard for a revived career and peace with oneself, as it's done for Maron. On the contrary, it's going to be seen as the pathetic end of a once-great career.

I'm sure you're hurting. But there's help out there. For God's sake, GET SOME.

Best regards,

Jill

And just how does making women bear children they don't want bring your son back?

2012-01-05T05:54:00.003-05:00

Here in the New York area, there's been almost nonstop coverage of the terrible Christmas Day house fire in Stamford, Connecticut, in which three young children and their grandparents died when a family friend staying at the house threw out a bag of fireplace ashes and either left them in a mud room or put it outside too close to the house. Mostly I find myself wondering about the children's parents, and how you go on after something like this.

A friend of mine is approaching the sixthanniversary of her own young adult daughter's passing and it is always a difficult time for her. When this happened, another colleague of ours said to me, "You can't possibly know what it's like because you don't have children." And I replied, "Neither can you, because you're going to go home tonight and tuck your children into bed, alive and well." I don't think anyone can know what it's like to lose a child unless you've experienced it. Those of us who can empathize with the feelings of others can get a sense of the helplessness and the gaping hole in one's life that occurs, and we can help by just being there and let the person who experienced the loss talk -- or not talk -- and take our cues from them. But one thing my friend never expected anyone to do was have more children just because she lost one.

Another friend had three miscarriages before she finally got a dog -- and then carried her first child to term. She desperately wanted children, but not once while she was going through all this did she demand that I have a baby because she had lost three pregnancies.

And yet, Rick Santorum wants to be president so that he can turn women into baby factories -- because he once lost an infant son (NYT link):

Then, in 1996, when he was a freshman senator, his wife, Karen, delivered a child when she was just 20 weeks pregnant. The baby, a boy they named Gabriel, died after two hours.

“That’s when I noticed a marked difference in Rick,” said Robert Traynham, who spent 10 years as a Santorum aide. “He became much more philosophical, much more deeply religious. You could tell; he was walking with his faith.”

That experience helped deepen Mr. Santorum’s opposition to abortion, and he went on to become one of Washington’s most outspoken cultural warriors. He prodded Congress to outlaw the procedure known as partial-birth abortion, broke with a Republican president, George W. Bush, over embryonic stem cell research and pushed for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, insisting that it is “right for children to have moms and dads.”

This 1998 article by Joe Klein in The New Yorker tells you what this Oh Poor Ricky article doesn't about this event in the Santorums' life. Unfortunately, the magazine digitizes the actual pages, and I'm not able to transcribe the relevant passages, but here's an abstract of what happened:

His wife Karen was at that time 18 weeks pregnant and they were concerned about the health of the fetus. When they went for a routine 5-month sonogram, they discovered that their baby was suffering from a minuscule but almost invariably fatal condition; the baby's posterior urethral valve was malfunctioning and his bladder wasn't emptying. The Santorums went to Philadelphia to undergo a procedure where a plastic shunt was inserted into the baby's bladder and used to channel the fetal urine into the womb. Initially the outcome looked good, but Karen soon suffered an infection from the operation, and she went into premature labor. The Santorums decided against aborting their baby. For Rick and Karen Santorum, the birth of their premature son, Gabriel Michael, on October 11, 1996, confirmed their beliefs about partial-birth abortion; the idea that the state might condone violence against this tiny but undeniably human creature seemed impossibly barbaric. Their baby died 2 hours after birth.

What ISN'T in the abstract is the following:

The Santorums, and especially the Senator, have difficulty talking about what they would have done if Karen hadn't gone into labor -- if her life had been threatened. "There are cases where, for the life of the mother, you have to end a pregnancy early," Santorum said, steering away from the particular. "But that does not necessarily mean having an abortion. You can induce labor, using a drug like pitocin. After twenty weeks, doctors say, abortion is twice as risky as childbirth. If there's a real emergency, you can do a caesarean section. But in no case is it necessary to kill the baby and then deliver it."

Forget for a moment about the idea that Rick Santorum should be able to tell not just women, but also doctors, what is necessary and what isn't from a medical standpoint. The reality is that the Santorums experienced a highly traumatic incident in their lives -- the end of a much-wanted pregnancy -- and ever since Rick Santorum has been trying to deal with his loss by trying to force women to have children they don't want. I can empathize with the Santorums' sense of loss, but that doesn't give them the right to enact policy based on their own narrow experience.

Our last three presidents have all had flawed administrations because of primal childhood issues. Bill Clinton dealt with the sense of abandonment caused by his biological father's death by wanting to be loved by everyone. George W. Bush wanted both his father's approval and to emerge from the older man's shadow by proving that he's a bigger man (in every sense) than his father. Barack Obama deals with a life spent trying to be nonthreatening in his white grandparents' world by attempting to placata racists and bigots who will never, ever accept him. The last thing we need is yet another president attempting to resolve his emotional issues on a national stage.

Oh fer God's sake

2012-01-04T19:55:00.003-05:00

And you thought that we'd have a break from Teh Crayzee now that the GOP has left Iowa for New Hampshire.

Screw the Constitution: Long live the Magna Carta!

New Hampshire Republicans are taking textual originalism to a whole new level: three lawmakers have proposed a bill that requires that all legislation find its origin not in the U.S. constitution, but an English document crafted in 1215.

When the legislature reconvenes this month, Republicans want their colleagues to justify many new bills with a direct quote from the 800-year-old Magna Carta:

House Bill 1580 is the product of such a brainstorming session this summer between three freshman House Republicans: Bob Kingsbury of Laconia, Tim Twombly of Nashua and Lucien Vita of Middleton. The eyebrow-raiser, set to be introduced when the Legislature reconvenes next month, requires legislation to find its origin in an English document crafted in 1215.

“All members of the general court proposing bills and resolutions addressing individual rights or liberties shall include a direct quote from the Magna Carta which sets forth the article from which the individual right or liberty is derived,” is the bill’s one sentence.

The Magna Carta, while famed as the first major declaration of rights under English monarchy, is a bit outdated in its actual prose.

The Magna Carta is indisputably an important historical document, with ideas about liberty that inspired America’s founders. But as the Concord Monitor points out, the substance of the document is fixated on the tedium of feudal times, and has little if any relevance to modern American life.

Maybe now it doesn't. But once the Republicans get through with us, it will be perfectly relevant.

Is Mitt Romney going to get a free pass to the White House

2012-01-04T19:17:00.004-05:00

It sure looks that way, given that despite his record of outsourcing and killing jobs here in the US, no one is questioning his claim of having created 100,000 jobs.

Greg Sargent:

I don’t know how to be any clearer about this, but here goes. It is now beyond doubt that Mitt Romney will be resting his case against Obama on two core claims.

The Romney campaign is triumphantly circulating a quote that Romney gave to Fox News today. Asked about the Dem criticism of his Bain years, Romney replied:
“This is a president who lost more jobs during his tenure than any president since Hoover. This is 2 million jobs that he lost as President. And by the way, when he was overseeing General Motors and Chrysler, how many factories did he close? How many dealerships? How many thousands upon thousands of Americans had to be let go in an effort to try and save those businesses? That’s what we did in our business. And I’m very happy in my former life; we helped create over 100,000 new jobs. By the way, we created more jobs in Massachusetts than this president’s created in the entire country.
So if the President wants to talk about jobs, and I hope he does, we’ll be comparing my record with his record and he comes up very, very short.”

It’s obviously too much to expect Fox to challenge these claims. But Romney has made this assertion about 100,000 new jobs in various other settings, too. As Steve Benen noted, his Super PAC is also making a very similar claim in ads. And as far as I can tell, only two lonely fact checking operations — one at the Post, the other at FactCheck.org — have scrutinized it. They have found that the assertion is at best unsubstantiated and that there may have been more layoffs than jobs created by Bain; there’s no way to tell for sure. When will reporters push Romney on this?

I'll tell you when: The twelfth of never, that's when. In Mittens the money guys have their perfect candidate: He's white, handsome, rich, from a storied famly, white, rich, 1%-friendly, white, and rich. And who owns the media? Money guys.

So I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the so-called liberal media to ask him this question. It wouldn't be seemly. And besides, as Viacom head Sumner Redstone said in 2004, explaining why as a liberal Democrat himself he was supporting George W. Bush's re-election, "from a Viacom standpoint, we believe the election of a Republican administration is better for our company."

Update: Romney campaign admits it's horsepuckey.

It Was a Good Life

2012-01-04T10:50:00.005-05:00

Now that the Billy Mumy caucus has finally ended and the bad people have, alas, escaped the cornfield to metastasize across the nation, let's take stock of what we learned or should've learned last night from the Iowa Caucus.

An 8 vote victory for Mitt Romney (R,D,I- ~~Utah~~, ~~Massachusetts~~, whereever) in a caucus in which barely over 30,000 voters across all of Iowa turned out to vote for both him and Rick "All Black People Are on Welfare So I Don't Want to Help Them" Santorum, is not a victory. That's pretty much how many people voted for last year's Typhoid Mary of the publishing industry, Christine O'Donnell, in Delaware's Senate primary. In other words, if Mitt Romney's entire immediate family had turned on him, it would've been a virtual dead heat with a guy named after scatalogical leftover anal lube. So please let's stop proclaiming this a victory for Gov. Dog on Car over Sen. Man on Dog.

2nd, only half the Republicans who won this glorified popularity contest in Iowa went on to win the GOP presidential nomination, according to CBS. For those of you who needed a calculator during high school math, that comes out to 50/50, meaning that the networks and their sponsors could've saved a shitload of money and spared us the needless, misleading hype by simply televising a coin flip like they do before every NFL game.

3rd, despite conveniently forgetting that she now represents the 6th District in the Land of a Thousand Lakes and trumpeting her John Wayne/Gacy Iowa roots, Michele Bachmann couldn't muster better than a distant 6th with 5% of the vote. In fact, only 6,073 corn farmers could hold their nose long enough to vote for a hometown girl who thinks slaves were better under slavery than Obama and that the eight year-old John Quincy Adams was a Founding Father.

4th, Newt Gingrich is politically deader than Ronald Reagan, who still has vaster amounts of appeal than a guy who received $1.6 million from Freddie Mac as a lobbyist and would like to turn our schoolchildren into so many chimney sweeps. Since the Lizard King is now 65, that means he won't be able to run for President at age 69 unless every other Republican in the land is delivered their comeuppance and dies of septic shock after biting their forked tongues. Hopefully, after last night, we won't be seeing Newt on TV again except for the occasional Goldline or juicer infomercial on QVC, or the usual talking head gig on Sunday morning while Sean Hannity rests his massive chin in his hand in a pose of seriousness while Newt's hoarsely screaming about Sharia Law.

5th, when are we going to realize that straw polls right before a caucus, primary or election are more volatile than alcohol and seemingly inspired by it? In the months leading up to Iowa, every single GOP contender save for Jon Huntsman was, at some point, leading in at least some of the polls, including the Rick James of homemade politics, Herman Cain.

6th, the only way in which Iowa represents "real" America is in its fickleness, susceptibility to hype and general apathy. With over 99% of the polls reporting, only 122,255 Republican voters came out last night to vote for one Not Reagan or another. Iowa is a state with an estimated 3,062,309 people. Assuming about two thirds are of voting age, that leaves roughly 2,000,000 people. Assuming, generously, that only half of them lean Republican (although we all know the percentage is much higher), that leaves one million registered Republican voters. Yet Iowa saw just barely over 120,000 and no one candidate could capture more than a quarter of that vote.

That means both Romney and Santorum each garnered just 30,000 out of a potential 1,000,000+ Republican votes, or less than 3%. That's hardly a political bellwether of any type. And they're the big winners from last night.

7th, Maybe this meathead or your spiritual Godfather Adolph Hitler would agree but no, Ron, we are not all Austrians.

8th, All the rest, especially Rick Perry, are good for nothing but Letterman and Jon Stewart fun fodder. So, Rick, you can go back to Niggerhead and continue executing innocent people.

So please let's stop pretending that Iowa is America's crystal ball for deciding who the next president is. Neither Romney nor Santorum, literally, could get enough people to vote for them to fill Fenway Park even with the centerfield bleachers closed for a day game. The Iowa caucus is a joke just as every Republican contender is a joke.

Billy Mumy fucked up and the psychopaths have already fled the cornfields until the primaries this summer.

Around the Blogroll and Elsewhere: Never Second-Guess the Money Guys edition

2012-01-04T05:45:00.002-05:00

Was there ever any doubt? The minute the money guys sensed that Mittens the Chosen One might be in trouble, a no-holds-barred push in Iowa began for the "unemployed", "middle-class" quarter-billionaire.

I could only stand so much of the coverage and ended up watching an old American Masters on the Warner Brothers on WLIW instead, but my cousin says on Facebook that Rachel Maddow managed to slip in a comment that Rick Santorum "came from behind", which is of course all kinds of win and why we adore her so. Of course said cousin couldn't leave well enough alone and also snarked " Rick Santorum has come from behind, pushed past #2 and finished first with another man in the end." But that's another story, Iowa is over, and it looks like we'll have Rick Santorum to kick around for a while longer, something for which we should all thank Dan Savage every day from now until Mittens' coronation, even if Dan DOES hate fat people.

Instaputz had not just Iowa but the nomination called by 8:26 PM.

We have been badly remiss in not linking to Doghouse Riley in a long time, but yesterday he got into the Dan Savage spirit quite nicely in putting Iowa in context.

Smell the Chris-mentum!! Hopeful over at Blue Jersey notes that the good looks, charm, and charisma Blue Collar Messiah from Joisey brought Mittens six fewer votes than in 2008.

I know that Newt is blustering his way to utter irrelevance,but his golf-ball-through-a-garden-hose spouse provides so much comedy gold that Princess Sparkle Pony can't resist. (Note in particular the photo accompanying the December 29 entry. I half-expected Christian Camargo to appear in it.)

BadTux sings "Heigh-ho" about the final placement.

Not Iowa-related, but this entry by Southern Beale is so good, and we are SO going to get Sally Quinn (who was golfball-through-a-garden-hose before it was cool) all over the place today punditizing alongside the equally idiotic David Brooks, that we should remind ourselves just how awful the Villagers are.

Speaking of Callista, Ken reassures us that we're going to have her (and her husband, the Pillsbury Doughboy), around to kick around for a while longer.

Laffy on the Jon Huntsman/Ron Paul trash-talkin'.

Rick Ungar on how Frothy wants you to have your baby so it can inhale a whole bunch of mercury.

And finally...if you aren't reading Charles Pierce during this ridiculous charade of a primary season, you should be.

Turn off the Iowa caucus coverage and nobody gets hurt

2012-01-03T21:33:00.002-05:00

Some diversion for you; a sure cure for Overdose of Republicans:

It's a new year...and here we go again

2012-01-03T05:25:00.004-05:00

It's only January 3, and already I feel that if I see one more paid celebrity shilling for diets I'm going to throw something at the TV. Every year, Americans make the same two resolutions: 1) I'm going to lose weight; and 2) I'm going to really hit the gym this year.

I've even succumbed to it this year, now that I've realized that even cookies don't appeal to me the way they used to, and that when they do, it's about one or two, not a dozen...and commercial cookies not at all. I don't expect to ever be the size six that I was for about five minutes in 1983, but a twelve would be nice.

See? There I go again.

It isn't the celebrity spokesmodels that make me think somehow this year will be different, not even Jennifer Hudson, who went on Weight Watchers can't seem to stop; rapidly turning into Thin-Era Oprah, with a tiny body and a huge head. Of course what no one admits is that Jennifer Hudson had a great voice and an Academy Award under her belt before she lost a pound, so it isn't as if doors were closed to her just because she was overweight. Not even Carrie Fisher, who is at least close to my age and has every bit as much emotional baggage. In fact, when I see a celebrity spokesperson for a diet, all I can think of is the personal chef that these people have, whipping up delicious meals with the appropriate number of points, or luscious salads and vegetable dishes to supplement all that inedible Nutra-System food. All I can think of is the personal trainers that these people can hire, and the workout time they can spend while not on a movie set (and sometimes, when they are) -- and the seven-figure fees that these people get to shill for programs that may work for those who have to live up to these fees and can afford the personal chef and trainer.

It's all part of the culture that gives us In Style magazine and other supermarket eye-catchers that show air-brushed photos of celebrities and tell us that yes, we too can look like them if we just follow their secret formulas. Of course those celebrities whose bodies (and minds) are like those of real people, and who end up failing again and again to keep the weight off, are treated brutally by the press -- see also Kirstie Alley, who has to dance two hours a day to keep her extra weight off and no doubt has a personal chef creating her "portion-controlled, organic diet".

And yet every year, women in particular make the resolution to lose weight and hit the gym. And every year, they fail, to the tune of the ka-CHING of cash registers at the companies that profit off of futility (NYT link):

Like many Americans who’ve made resolutions for 2012, I made these very same New Year’s promises about this time last year.

Which, it turns out, is great for business. Our collective failure to keep our resolutions represents an annuity of sorts for health clubs, weight-loss centers and other enterprises that make up what you might call the self-improvement industry. It’s an industry that thrives on our failure to change: recidivism is good for the bottom line

Americans spend many tens of billions every year in the hope of keeping resolutions to lose weight, get fit, quit smoking, fix their finances, organize their closets — on and on. Last year, we spent $62 billion on health club memberships, weight-loss programs, exercise tapes, diet soda and the like, according to projections from Marketdata Enterprises, a market research firm.

We start with good intentions. Memberships for health clubs and weight-loss programs spike each January, says John LaRosa, the president of Marketdata. But by March, the lines thin at the treadmills and many dieters relapse. So the next year, we try — and pay up — again.

“If I try one quick fix and it doesn’t work, I may be more likely to try the next quick fix,” says Lisa Lahey, the co-founder of Minds at Work, a consulting firm in Cambridge, Mass., which coaches executives and educators in sustained behavior change.

Supposed easy remedies like celebrity diets hold a powerful allure, but they rarely work in the long term, she says. After all, it’s hard for people to shake the underlying conditions — like stress or anxiety — that cause unwanted habits. If exercise tapes, dietetic meals, nicotine lozenges and personal finance apps worked by themselves, we’d all be fit, thin, smoke-free and rich.

The hard work of changing a lifestyle isn’t as alluring as dropping 30 pounds in 30 days. But some stop-smoking and weight-loss programs, as well as gyms, are trying to help for the long haul, a strategy that can improve customers’ chances of success and, for companies like Weight Watchers International, build brand loyalty and revenue.

JANUARY is the most important month of the year in the health club industry. At many gyms, new memberships double. Given that about a third of all members tend to turn over every year, the resolution crowd is crucial.

“The resolutioners always pop up,” says Scott Hamann, an analyst at KeyBanc Capital Markets covering the fitness industry.

But you probably know what happens next. Only a fraction of members work out twice a week or more, despite all those monthly dues. Health clubs in the United States had more than 50 million members and revenue of $20.3 billion in 2010, according to the latest data from the International Health, Racquet and Sportsclub Association, an industry trade group. But clubs reported that members typically visit only 54 times, or slightly more than once a week.

Here's the reality for those of us lucky enough to still have a job: We're simply too stressed out and too damn tired to hit the gym. And when we get home at 7 PM, we're too damn tired to start cooking delicious healthy meals. And there's no personal chef waiting there with a lovely plate of field greens and organic vegetables topped with a perfectly-sized portion of honey-lacquered salmon and a one-once wedge of artisanal cheese in a light citrus vinaigrette made with $25/bottle extra virgin olive oil from a perfect mountaintop in Italy. If you're lucky, there's a spouse who gets home before you who can throw some chicken burgers in a pan, and heat up some Trader Joe's side dishes.

As for the gym? Yes, there's a gym right on site where I work. But what's it to be, then, eh? I have to leave the house by 7:15 AM most mornings; 6:15 on mornings when I have a 7 AM teleconference. On a GOOD night I'm home at 6:15 PM, but usually it's closer to 7 PM. So when should I use this gym? Should I skip lunch, which is not good for you either? Should I leave the house an hour earlier so I can do a half-hour on the treadmill? Should I stay after work and get home at 8 PM, then have dinner and take all the calories to bed an hour and a half later? Those options don't seem particularly healthy either.

OR, I can give up this blog and other writing, which is the only thing I still have in my life that I enjoy doing? Perhaps I should just become this machine that does nothing but work, eat quick, frozen, unsatisfying "diet" meals, exercise, and try to get some sleep amidst the chaos. Because after all, what is personal satisfaction and getting some pleasure out of life when compared to the pressure to lose weight and be as fit as a 25-year-old, no matter what your age or the reality of your life?

There's a reason Weight Watchers is a billion dollar business. There's a reason they recommend that you continue to attend meetings for the rest of your life. Every day I see women at work heating up their 8-ounce frozen meals from Jenny Craig or Weight Watchers or Lean Cuisine. I see them digging the last morsel out of the two-ounce can of Jenny's chicken salad. And when the leftover sandwiches and cookies come out of a meeting at around 3 PM, they're the first ones hitting the stuff -- because they're hungry. And yet, they keep going back to the meetings and ordering the food.

Take a look at the comments section of any article that is even remotely related to food or diets or exercise, and you'll see at least five bozos telling people who are overweight to lay off the fast food and doughnuts and get off the sofa. You know what I have to say to them? Fuck you. I don't eat fast food and doughnuts, and if I want to hit the sofa at 8 PM so I can wind down enough to be able to fall asleep by 9:30, who are these people to demand that I jump around the basement for an hour and then try to fall asleep? Especially when unless you make weight maintenance the entire focus of your life, your efforts are pretty much doomed anyway?

Last Sunday, the Times' Magazine section had an article about how those of us who have fought this battle our whole lives continue to fight with our own bodies even when we lose weight:

For years, the advice to the overweight and obese has been that we simply need to eat less and exercise more. While there is truth to this guidance, it fails to take into account that the human body continues to fight against weight loss long after dieting has stopped. This translates into a sobering reality: once we become fat, most of us, despite our best efforts, will probably stay fat.

[snip]

Janice Bridge, a registry member who has successfully maintained a 135-pound weight loss for about five years, is a perfect example. “It’s one of the hardest things there is,” she says. “It’s something that has to be focused on every minute. I’m not always thinking about food, but I am always aware of food.”

Bridge, who is 66 and lives in Davis, Calif., was overweight as a child and remembers going on her first diet of 1,400 calories a day at 14. At the time, her slow pace of weight loss prompted her doctor to accuse her of cheating. Friends told her she must not be paying attention to what she was eating. “No one would believe me that I was doing everything I was told,” she says. “You can imagine how tremendously depressing it was and what a feeling of rebellion and anger was building up.”

After peaking at 330 pounds in 2004, she tried again to lose weight. She managed to drop 30 pounds, but then her weight loss stalled. In 2006, at age 60, she joined a medically supervised weight-loss program with her husband, Adam, who weighed 310 pounds. After nine months on an 800-calorie diet, she slimmed down to 165 pounds. Adam lost about 110 pounds and now weighs about 200.

During the first years after her weight loss, Bridge tried to test the limits of how much she could eat. She used exercise to justify eating more. The death of her mother in 2009 consumed her attention; she lost focus and slowly regained 30 pounds. She has decided to try to maintain this higher weight of 195, which is still 135 pounds fewer than her heaviest weight.

“It doesn’t take a lot of variance from my current maintenance for me to pop on another two or three pounds,” she says. “It’s been a real struggle to stay at this weight, but it’s worth it, it’s good for me, it makes me feel better. But my body would put on weight almost instantaneously if I ever let up.”

So she never lets up. Since October 2006 she has weighed herself every morning and recorded the result in a weight diary. She even carries a scale with her when she travels. In the past six years, she made only one exception to this routine: a two-week, no-weigh vacation in Hawaii.

She also weighs everything in the kitchen. She knows that lettuce is about 5 calories a cup, while flour is about 400. If she goes out to dinner, she conducts a Web search first to look at the menu and calculate calories to help her decide what to order. She avoids anything with sugar or white flour, which she calls her “gateway drugs” for cravings and overeating. She has also found that drinking copious amounts of water seems to help; she carries a 20-ounce water bottle and fills it five times a day. She writes down everything she eats. At night, she transfers all the information to an electronic record. Adam also keeps track but prefers to keep his record with pencil and paper.

“That transfer process is really important; it’s my accountability,” she says. “It comes up with the total number of calories I’ve eaten today and the amount of protein. I do a little bit of self-analysis every night.”

Click over and read the entire article, if you haven't already done so. Note especially the "Before" and "After" photos of Adam and Janice Bridge. In the "Before" photo, they're happy and smiling and enjoying themselves despite being overweight. In the "After" photo, they're grim and unsmiling. Perhaps they are just hungry.

They are also retired, which gives them hours a day to exercise. And still, they burn less while exercising then people who have never been overweight:

Scientists are still learning why a weight-reduced body behaves so differently from a similar-size body that has not dieted. Muscle biopsies taken before, during and after weight loss show that once a person drops weight, their muscle fibers undergo a transformation, making them more like highly efficient “slow twitch” muscle fibers. A result is that after losing weight, your muscles burn 20 to 25 percent fewer calories during everyday activity and moderate aerobic exercise than those of a person who is naturally at the same weight. That means a dieter who thinks she is burning 200 calories during a brisk half-hour walk is probably using closer to 150 to 160 calories.

Last year I resolved to dramatically reduce consumption of "white foods" -- white pasta, white potatoes and the like. I was pretty successful with that one. During the year I gave up diet soda and substituted water with meals, and it still took me a month to get used to not having that sweet taste with dinner. This year I think it's going to be sugar -- fewer desserts, protein snacks like nuts nstead of cookies or granola bars to address the 2:30 PM crash. These are things that are do-able.

But live like Janice and Adam Bridge? Yes, it might help me live longer...or maybe it'll just SEEM longer. Besides, who's going to have enough money to live that long anyway?

Insert your own "finishing up with a bang" joke here.

2012-01-02T12:17:00.003-05:00

According to TPM, the Iowa Caucus of Ricks Perry and Santorum is all about Teh Sodomy.

I don't think even gay ninteen-year-olds think about gay sex as much as the Two Ricks do.

It Was a Good Run While it Lasted

2012-01-02T10:56:00.001-05:00

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

Astute readers will also notice that Obama's signing statement has no legal binding whatsoever and only refers to Obama's momentary intentions on how he "wishes" to interpret the law. It does not place any limits whatsoever on how a future President might use the law as written. - Mike Adams, Natural News

RIP Bill of Rights, 12/15/1791-12/31/2011.

It's pretty telling that Barack Obama signed the NDAA into law on New Year's Eve, one of the many days of the year when Americans are dedicated to the proposition of getting as drunk as possible as quickly as possible.

The bill was a necessary one, the biggest and most immediate one being the continuation of the paychecks of our servicemen and servicewomen. Of all the possible government shutdowns, the Republican Party is all too well aware that, in this paranoid, post-9/11 nation, most intolerable would be one of our national defense. The GOP, true to their sweaty, gun-to-the-head style of legislative hostage-taking, were already making noises to the effect that they were quite willing to let this happen if Obama didn't give them what they wanted. After all, they were still smarting over having to give Obama the two month payroll tax cut extension while the liberal media was declaring this a major victory for the Democrats and the administration. Somehow, the GOP needed to save face.

And if this was simply a matter of Obama being painted with red ink into a corner and being forced into a lose-lose situation, then his limousine liberal constituency who think he's the greatest thing to come out of Chicago since the World's Fair of 1893 might be able to make a case that he was once again forced to make an unpalatable decision. After all, the Supreme Court had already stated at least twice that the President of the United States should not have line item veto powers.

But the operative word of the phrase "the lesser of two evils" is still "evil." And that doesn't explain everything in the National Defense Authorization Act. And it also doesn't explain Obama's use of signing statements, used heavily by Bush and several of his predecessors for decades, a homemade Presidential style of line item vetoing that essentially gives the executive branch the unofficial ability to create, water down, alter or nullify laws, provisions and amendments in a bill (and, don't forget, on the campaign trail three years ago, Mr. Obama came out swinging forcefully against signing statements in a populist response to liberals pissing and moaning about Bush's excessive use of them).

The most notorious provision in this military funding bill is Obama essentially giving himself the power to accuse, arrest, detain, prosecute, torture and even execute any American citizen that he or his pogrom arbitrarily designates as an enemy combatant or even just a dangerous critic of the administration and its policies.

In spite of the fascist psychopaths that made up much of the Bush administration, one that allowed faith-based initiatives to guide Bush's policies, one that basically redefined hence legalized and implemented torture, one that invaded two sovereign nations that had nothing to do with 9/11 and made us more vulnerable to terrorist attacks than we were in 2001, one that outed a covert CIA agent and purged part of the Justice Department in the interests of simple, vicious partisan politics then thumbed its nose at congressional subpoenas...

...in spite of the consistently ruinous and ultra right wing agenda of what had been judged, until now, as the worst presidential administration in history, even Bush didn't dare give himself the power to assassinate American citizens and their children without due process and to arrest and detain American citizens in the dead of night with as little due process and transparency.

What Obama's strangely silent supporters seem to forget is that the Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments to the United States Constitution, was written and ratified by the Founding Fathers for the express purpose of preventing future federal governments like Obama's administration and the 112th Congress (also, arguably, the worst legislative body on record) from running roughshod over the basic, inalienable rights given to us in the 18th century. Recognizing the potential for abuse, the Founding Fathers were not content to merely not give the government the right to abridge basic freedoms. The Bill of Rights, in many clear ways, actually prohibits the government from making power grabs such as those seen since 2001.

And, indeed, one could ask where all the liberal outrage is. If Bush had made such a power grab, liberals would be screaming loud enough to make God reach for his earplugs about impeachment. Oddly enough, or perhaps not, limousine liberals who'd voted for Obama over three years ago aren't even whispering the "I" word because, well, think of the alternative.

Well, I'm here to say that Barack Obama is the alternative. In many ways more fascistic than George W. Bush and every Republican before him, Barack Obama had at the end of last year proven once and for all to be a traitor and an enemy of the people. And calling for impeachment wouldn't even be a viable option. That would require two major Acts of Congress. And, as dearly as the Jim Crow GOP would love to legislatively lynch Mr. Obama, they certainly will not do it over the purging powers of the NDAA. And what does this mean for anyone suddenly stripped of their first, fourth and God only knows how many amendment rights?

If it wasn't for liberal blogs such as Firedoglake, accused Wikileaks source Bradley Manning's name wouldn't even be an asterisk (and it hasn't even been close to proven that Manning even leaked classified material to Wikileaks much less than he was even the official conduit). Imagine a whole nation of Bradley Mannings, silent and invisible victims of the USA PATRIOT Act and this new encroachment of the civil liberties of any dissident American. Bush left behind a completely altered government of which Hitler would've been proud and, as predicted years ago in this very forum, Obama was all too eager to exploit those sweeping Unitary Executive powers given to him by his predecessor. What indications has Obama given his base that the next guy wouldn't be as exploitative if not moreso?

You know what's sad? I understand this thought process

2011-12-31T17:15:00.003-05:00

Maron on Conan, December 22, 2011:

The gift part, not the prostate part.

Friday Cat Blogging

2011-12-30T19:17:00.005-05:00

This is dedicated to Miss Maggie, who has been utterly and irresistably kittenishly adorable since she's started recovering from her own upper respiratory infection:

And here she is, for the uninitiated:

Profiles in Cravenness

2011-12-30T13:13:00.001-05:00

There's an old saying, "Treason is a matter of timing." Same thing goes for statesmanship and patriotism, especially at the beginning of an election cycle.

Much has been made about Obama's "tough stance" on not caving in to the Republicans, especially the ones in the House who found themselves in the absurd position of saying "No" to Obama's stopgap payroll tax cut plan. Republicans saying "No" to tax cuts??? Say it ain't so, Joe McCarthy!

But here's how it really down on the seedier side of the aisle:

While Obama was posturing like the Lion King and publicly calling out the Republicans for what we already knew they are (racist refugees from the DSM IV), the House Republicans realized they'd painted themselves into a corner, Tea Party caucus or no Tea Party caucus. It was a lose-lose situation for the House Repukes, especially since the tax cut measure sailed through the Senate by a pretty wide bipartisan consensus.

So House Speaker John Boehner did what Boehner usually does when he saw his troops tip-toeing off into the sunset of the Great Experiment: Boehner waited until virtually everyone left for their home districts or the nearest golf course, put up the bill under "unanimous consent" (which he should've done in the beginning while everyone was still in town) so that any lone Tea Bagger could do the House's version of the filibuster and oppose it. Naturally, none of them did and Boenher got the bill passed without expending any political capital (or so he thought). When the president signed the bill into law on the 23rd, it was even billed as a Christmas present to the American people! Scrooge caved just like the story goes. Dickens couldn't have penned it better!

Even Alan Grayson, in his latest fundraising email, is hailing this as a great victory for President Obama and the Democratic Party, for standing tall like Bo Svenson or The Rock and just saying, "No!" to the House Republicans who were all too willing to shut the government down just so they themselves could say No to a Democratic President who wanted to extend tax cuts to middle class families for another two months. This, at the very least, enabled unemployed Americans to keep living considerably below the poverty line instead of at the very bottom of the graph.

But even Grayson's usually dead-on cynicism missed the point. Because given his track record these past three years, it's tough to imagine President Barack Chamberlain standing up to the Republican Party in any other but an election year. This is about the most far left Obama will ever allow himself to lean even as the 2012 election year looms closer. Insisting that the House GOP pass a pitifully stopgap measure that will last only until the end of February when the 113th Congress convenes is hardly what a shrewd and perspicacious political observer would call "courageous."

We'll see if this victory will embolden the President to continue taking a firm stand against the congressional GOP just as Obama's every appeasement has emboldened the right side of the aisle to ask for more and more. It was a stalemate in which there were no real winners. The Democrats squeezed a two month payroll tax break out of the Republicans and the Republicans can always say to their lunatic fringe (and they will) that they played ball with the Commie Muslim Kenyan just long enough to keep the money spigots on until Congress reconvenes, see how much we love you out of work folks?

It's still possible that Obama will continue to eyeball the GOP. But even if he does throughout 2012, how do we know that this so-called populist position isn't just basic election year political gamesmanship? And how do we know the GOP won't pull their same old bullshit, with the same old results, when the fight begins over a longer payroll tax cut that will put more of their political capital on the line?

Around the Blogroll and Elsewhere: I Swear It's Not the Flu edition

2011-12-30T05:58:00.002-05:00

I've never gotten a flu shot, even though they provide them free at work, and every Walgreen's or Rite-Aid or urgent care center in the area provides them for under thirty bucks. Part of it is terror of needles, part of it is my tinfoil tendency to wonder exactly what they're injecting into me, and part of it is that since I don't ride on public conveyances and don't go out all that much, I'm at less risk than some.

So when my throat started feeling scratchy last Saturday, I popped a Hall's Ice Blue and tried to will it out of existence. But the next five days have turned out to be Bad Cold trajectory. Sore throat turned into congestion, which turned into faucet-nose, which turned into crushing fatigue, until only now am I starting to feel somewhat better. Perhaps the homemade chicken soup had something to do with that.

I still say it's not the flu, though. I've had no fever, and I haven't been crouched in a fetal position wishing I was dead. That's my story, and I'm sticking with it.

I've been too heartsick about the unfolding story of the Christmas Day fire in Stamford that killed three children and their grandparents to care much about anything else, least of all the clown show in Iowa, where it's clear that the fix is in for Mitt Romney, no matter what happens.

So here's what's going on out there.

A must-read from The New York Crank about police brutality against war veterans in the Occupy movement.

Driftglass: Resistance is fictile.

Andy Ostroy: Don't kid yourselves, Ron Paul is not Howard Dean.

Sherry explains Embracing the Crazy in Iowa.

Southern Beale on the moron who thought that the open-carry law introduced in the House that would force states without open-carry provisions to adhere to the laws in the states where visitors come from had been passed already. (Funny how the gun nuts' reciprocity enthusiasm does not extend to abortion or gay marriage.)

The Wifely Person on Socioeconomics (don't miss this one.)

Karen Garcia: In Mitt Romney's corporatist utopia, Big Bird, Bert, and Ernie will be selling Froot Loops and Happy Meals to your children.

And finally, Monique Morrissey: 10 Lies About Social Security.

Robert Ballard wept.

2011-12-29T18:05:00.002-05:00

I'm sorry, but this is just so wrong:

The owner of the largest trove of artifacts salvaged from the Titanic is putting the vast collection up for auction as a single lot in 2012, the 100th anniversary of the world's most famous shipwreck.

More than 5,500 items including fine china, ship fittings and portions of hull that were recovered from the ocean liner have an estimated value of $189 million, according to Premier Exhibitions Inc., parent of RMS Titanic Inc., the Titanic's court-approved salvor. That value was based on a 2007 appraisal and doesn't include intellectual property gathered from a 2010 scientific expedition that mapped the wreck site.

The auction is scheduled for April 1 by Guernsey's, a New York City auction house, according to filings by Premier Exhibitions with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Results of the auction won't be announced until April 15, the date a century ago the Titanic sank on its maiden voyage after striking an iceberg.

In 90 years, will the 9/11 memorial also be sold off piecemeal?

Or what, the state GOP will send a large man to break their kneecaps?

2011-12-29T18:00:00.002-05:00

Why on earth would anyone support a political party that does this:

RICHMOND, Va. --
The state Republican Party will require voters to sign a loyalty oath in order to participate in the March 6 presidential primary.

Anyone who wants to vote must sign a form at the polling place pledging to support the eventual Republican nominee for president. Anyone who refuses to sign the pledge will be barred from voting.

[snip]

Signs for polling places and the pledge form will advise voters that “Section 24.2-545 of the Code of Virginia allows the political party holding a primary to determine requirements for voting in the primary, including ‘the signing of a pledge by the voter of his intention to support the party’s candidate when offering to vote in the primary.’ ”

The pledge will require the voter to sign and to print his name beneath a line that says: “I, the undersigned, pledge that I intend to support the nominee of the Republican Party for president.”

I don't understand why there are still Republican dead-enders who cite Communism and the Soviet Union all the time. It seems to me that they LOVE the Stalinist tactics of their old so-called enemy.

headdesk

2011-12-29T13:08:00.003-05:00

I have nothing to add to What David Dayen said.

(In case you thought "He's Not Like Us" journalism died with David Broder.)

On a more positive note, there's always Germany.

The GOP's concern about "voter fraud" is highly selective

2011-12-29T07:45:00.004-05:00

Isn't it funny how unconcerned the GOP is about "voter fraud" in the Iowa caucuses?

Brad Friedman:

despite onerous polling place Photo ID requirements now passed into law in about a dozen states where the GOP controls both the legislative and executive branches, voters will be able to cast their ballot in next Tuesday's "First-in-the-Nation" Republican Iowa Caucuses without bothering to show a Photo ID --- even though the Republican Party itself sets their own rules for voting there.

Unlike most primary elections where an official state election board or agency sets the rules and runs the registration and balloting processes, the Iowa Republican Party runs its own state caucuses, determines the rules, tabulates all the votes and announces the results to the public and media themselves. They have complete control over the entire process, and yet they don't bother to ask their own voters to show a state-issued Photo ID before casting their ballot.

I wonder why that would be?

Actually, I don't. I know exactly why that's the case. Polling place photo ID laws, passed in states where Republicans took control in the wave election of 2010, are instituted for one purpose and one purpose only: to suppress the votes of voters such as the elderly, minorities and students, all of whom have a dastardly tendency to vote for Democratic candidates rather than Republicans. Since only Republicans are on the IA Republican Caucus ballot, unlike general elections, the GOP has no interest in disenfranchising their own voters.

While the GOP likes to claim they're attempting to institute these laws to curb "voter fraud", they're unable to show evidence of virtually any polling place impersonation that would supposedly be prevented by such laws. For example, in rejecting the South Carolina GOP's new Photo ID restriction last Friday, finding that that the state's own statistics showed the law would be racially discriminatory, the U.S. Dept. of Justice noted [PDF] that the state failed to point to "any evidence or instance of either in-person voter impersonation or any other type of fraud that is not already addressed by the state's existing voter identification requirement and that arguably could be deterred by requiring voters to present only photo identification at the polls."

That, even as independent study after study have documented how hundreds of thousands of perfectly legal voters are likely to be disenfranchised by such laws.

Of course, if "voter fraud" was truly a concern of the Republican Party, surely they would require that Iowa caucus goers present a Photo ID before casting their vote. But, because such laws have never been about "voter fraud", once again this year, the Party will not bother to require Iowa Republicans to present any such ID before voting in the all-important caucuses next week.

[snip]

It's almost as if they realize that risking disenfranchisement of any of their own voters in their own caucus would be monumentally stupid --- not to mention potentially illegal and/or unconstitutional to boot, though that has yet to stop them from doing the same in general elections where Democrats may be on the ballot.

Go figure.

If you're not reading Bradblog on a regular basis, it's time to start. The GOP has made it very clear that disenfranchisement of those who they believe are not going to vote for the party's candidates is part of their plan, and Brad his been front and center on voting shenanigans for the better part of a decade.

Also, this.

An end-of-year wrapup worth your time

2011-12-28T12:58:00.002-05:00

For some reason, the end of the year always brings with it, along with the obligatory 'best of" lists (and I'm still mulling over whether to do one), the "Who We Lost" recaps. This year's "Lives They Led" in the New York Times magazine section is more interesting than usual, compiled as it is by Ira Glass and focusing on some people who left us this year of whom many of us had never heard. The Times does this sometimes; there was a lovely remembrane of Steve Gilliard a few years ago -- a surprising inclusion of a blogger in a publication that was back then still clinging to its Gray Lady status. But in reading about the contributions of some of the less-heralded people, these people become part of the collective memory by becoming part of ours. It's actually kind of refreshing. I mean, do we really need yet another remembrance of Steve Jobs?

But some people warrant more than a one-shot remembrance, and one of these is Al Wiesel, a.k.a. Jon Swift, who left us in 2010 at the too-early age of 46 and whose loss is still keenly felt. Two bloggers have taken it upon themselves to assume the mantle of generosity that Al demonstrated towards his fellow bloggren. Skippy coordinates Blogroll Amnesty Day, which is coming up in Februrary, and Batocchio has taken on the Herculean task of compiling the The Best Posts of the Year, Chosen by the Bloggers Themselves.

Here's what Al/Jon said in 2007 about this project, remarks that perfectly encapsulate his wit and his generosity:

Just as nobody anticipated the levees breaking in New Orleans, according to President Bush, I don't think anybody anticipated the overwhelming response I would get when I asked the members of my very extensive and eclectic blogroll to send me links to their best posts of the year. Not even Condoleeza Rice could have predicted the shock and awe you will feel at the sheer magnitude of the talent out there, of which this is just a small sampling. These posts were not chosen by a panel of experts or TV viewers, but by the bloggers themselves as each blog's best work of 2007. There are posts on politics by liberals, conservatives and moderates, posts on movies, music, television, books, economics, health care, science, sports, religion and history, personal stories and slices of life, poetry, prose, pictures and video. Some are very funny, some are quite serious, some will make you angry and some will make you say "Huh?" Go ahead and click on a link that sounds intriguing or from a blog you haven't read before or check in with an old favorite. You may not agree with what someone has written, but contrary to popular belief, there hasn't been a single documented case of anyone's head exploding from reading a post he or she disagrees with. I certainly don't agree with everything that is linked to here, but I do believe, like a real conservative, in the marketplace of ideas, in letting 1,000 flowers bloom (as Chiang Kai-shek once said), that more discussion is better than less, and every one of these posts is worth reading. So come back anytime and check out what these bloggers have to offer because they all deserve your support. I think this round-up reflects what is best about the blogosphere -- that it gives so many talented people a chance to express themselves and makes it so much easier for the government to know who to arrest first in case of a national emergency.

And here is the 2011 list, in memory of and in honor of the man who started it all, and with thanks to Batocchio for taking on this massive endeavor. Now grab a cup of tea or cocoa and, as Christy Hardin Smith used to say over at FDL, pull up a chair...

I want to live long enough to see this child become Chief Justice of the Supreme Court

2011-12-28T11:16:00.001-05:00

Right on, Riley:

A Melody Played In A Penny Arcade

2011-12-27T23:06:00.002-05:00

It's a quiet night at B@B. In the blink of an eye, we'll see the sun again.

Sayeth the Lord: "Because day after day after day, all you do is mutsche me."

2011-12-25T07:35:00.002-05:00

If God himself was behind the Denver Bronco's recent run, then He sent Tim Tebow a little message about humility yesterday.

Merry War On Christmas, everyone.

Friday Cranium Combustingly Cute Blogging

2011-12-22T19:13:00.002-05:00

Another one:

After the unfortunate saga of Knut at the Berlin Zoo, it seems that zoos have learned that these hand-raised Eisbären need to be raised by a staff, so as not to bond too closely with any one person.

Seriously...how cute is that. The only thing cuter may be my neighbors' new Maltese puppy.

Exactly.

2011-12-22T06:01:00.002-05:00

Why I don't have Google Ads or any other ad aggregators on this blog...this ad appeared on Americablog this morning:

(Don't bother clicking through, it's just an image.)

At first I thought it was a parody: "The ONLY magazine for the middle-market C-level executive"? But it isn't. And that's what makes it funny.

Maybe George Allen should just stay away from cameras

2011-12-22T05:44:00.003-05:00

No macaca moments in this one, and there IS something kind of cool about seeing a politician (or a would-be one) show his true colors after he thinks the camera has been turned off. But if this goes viral, George Allen's attempted comeback could find itself in trouble:

Every time I see George Allen, I think of Bob Roberts:

Putting the Fun Back in Dysfunctional

2011-12-21T12:23:00.001-05:00

Go to NewtGingrich.com for the latest on the most dysfunctional presidential campaign ever. Go back often, report the results (My personal favorite is the Tiffany's ad). How, after all this time and after collecting millions from well-heeled millionaires, Newt never thought to buy this domain is simply beyond me.

The natural order of things will not be tampered with

2011-12-20T05:41:00.003-05:00

It's been interesting to watch the Republican clown car over the last couple of weeks, as lunatic after lunatic has risen to the top of the cable news feeding frenzy (and as a result, in the Pavolvian response of GOP voters), then crashed and burned after each one's lunacy and idiocy has been so out there for the world to see, that not even a 24/7 news-o-tainment cycle could save them.

For a while there, it seemed as if Newt Gingrich would be the Big Winner™ of the Iowa caucuses, thus demonstrating what a foolish and ridiculous country we are that we allow a bunch of people who get paid to go to meetings to essentially pick our presidential nominees. But whether it's his party turning against him, or Gingrich's own socipathic narcissistic self-aggrandizing musings on The World According to Newt, his own meteoric rise seems to be over. Claiming that low-income children in cities have no role models other than pimps and hos and crack dealers so they should become school janitors after school didn't quite do it in the Party of Mean (perhaps even THAT wasn't quite mean enough), but the Money Wing of the party is concerned enough about this loose cannon that they've been pulling out the stops (NYT link):

Attack ads are blanketing Iowa, fueled by millions of dollars from his rivals and a group supporting Mitt Romney. Mailboxes are filling up with anti-Gingrich leaflets. And on the stump, his rivals have stepped up their assault on Mr. Gingrich’s time in Congress and his commitment to conservative causes.

Mr. Gingrich, the former House speaker, emerged in early December with a strong lead in some national polls and with commanding leads in Iowa and South Carolina. But new surveys suggest that political gravity could be dragging him down, opening the race up again and highlighting once more the fickle search among conservatives for an alternative to Mr. Romney.

“It’s definitely a full frontal assault,” said John Stineman, a Republican strategist who managed the 2000 presidential campaign of Steve Forbes in Iowa. He said the criticism of Mr. Gingrich has been impossible to avoid in Iowa. “The fact is, he’s getting killed,” he said.

For most of December, Mr. Gingrich has refused to push back aggressively against the attacks, promising a positive approach and pursuing a relatively limited schedule of traditional campaigning. He spent last weekend largely off the trail, attending a concert in Virginia where his wife, Callista, played the French horn.

Perhaps because not attending would have required another half-million in Tiffany's jewelry to placate the former bent-over-the-desk Newtie plaything.

A daily tracking poll by Gallup released on Monday showed that Mr. Gingrich’s lead has all but evaporated, leaving him in a dead heat with Mr. Romney, the former Massachusetts governor. A new CNN survey also showed the race tied nationally. And an automated poll of Iowa voters showed an even steeper drop for Mr. Gingrich, though many news organizations have reservations about its methodology.

His decline highlighted the unsettled nature of a contest in which many Republican voters say they are still open minded about whom they will vote for; a New York Times/CBS News poll this month found that two-thirds of likely Republican caucus-goers in Iowa were still willing to change their minds. On Monday, Sarah Palin said on Fox Business Network that “it’s not too late” for “folks” to jump into the Republican contest.

Just in case you thought that Evita Mooselini had disappeared.

But you needn't fear that we're going to have another media love affair with Sarah Palin. What this GOP race shows is that when the rubber meets the road, the Money Wing of the Republican Party trumps the God Wing every single time. And right now, Mitt Romney, he of the millions of dollars flowing into his pockets from Bain Capital every year who is and the planned $167/year tax cut for the middle class that he claims will help because "It's not nothing", barring a surge by the Ron Paulites, should do well enough in Iowa to hit New Hampshire in pretty good shape.

Except for one thing. Jeb Bush had an op-ed in the Murdoch Street Journal the other day that sure reads both like like a cri de coeur of the Money Wing of the GOP and a campaign speech.

Let's face it: A Jeb Bush/Paul Ryan ticket is the Money Wing's dream team. Utterly committed to corporate power, huge tax cuts for the richest Americans, and a complete and radical dismantling of the social safety net, combined with a family history of complete and utter loyalty to the haves and the have-mores, and without all that Mormon baggage, it's been clear from the beginning, long before George W. Bush and Dick Cheney managed to steal the executive branch of the United States government and begin their appointed task of wrecking the nation in just eight years, that Jeb Bush has always been the one they wanted. Jeb is smarter than his brother, but every bit as heartless and committed to the destruction of the middle class -- and he's one of THEM in a way Mitt Romney, despite his second-generation money made by putting thousands of middle-class Americans out of work, just isn't -- because of all this stuff about golden plates and Jesus living here in the U.S....and that pesky governor of Massachusetts thing.

But whether Jeb decides to be a late entry, swatting the Grifter Palin away with one hand and riding in on his valiant steed to be Savior of the GOP, or the Paulie Walnuts of Bain Capital prevails, one thing is certain: The Money Wing of the Republican Party always, always, always gets its way.

Even when the Democrat wins.

A Republican Christmas Carol

2011-12-18T12:30:00.001-05:00

(With grave apologies to Charles Dickens.)

Lay was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that, unless one believed in liberal conspiracy theories. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner (pay no attention to the fact that his best friend did the autopsy and the cremation was carried out without even a viewing). Richard B. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Lay was as dead as a door-nail.

Lay was really dead? Just ask old Richard B., his partner in crimes across the energy industry, Ken Lay in electricity, Richard Scrooge in oil services. Richard was his sole friend and mourner but didn't seem terribly cut up by the rather sudden event, but that he was an excellent man of business on the very day of the funeral (witness the California wildfires), and solemnised it with an undoubted bargain.

Oh! But Richard B. was a tight-fisted hand at the grind- stone! When Katrina knocked out power up and down the Gulf Coast, old Scrooge demanded that power be diverted from the hospitals so the refineries could get back to work.

Once upon a time, long after Scrooge had left the White House, Richard B. Scrooge sat in his counting house counting his stock options that had split during the late war in Iraq that had just concluded. His counting house door is ajar and we can see the fire beside him is so very small but not as small as that of his clerk, "Scooter" Crachitt, who had only a much smaller fire to warm him.

Libby had had the temerity to ask for Christmas day off so he could go skiing with his lobbyist friends. "Bah humbug and go fuck yourself!", Scrooge was tempted to bellow at his sole clerk but realized he could use this opportunity get out of paying Crachitt a day and to make him come in all the earlier the day after the ridiculous holiday. The fool had already broken his leg just before the Plame trial. Let him break it again.

Presently, two cheerful men of middle age walked into Scrooge's counting house, loudly exclaiming, "Merry Christmas! This is Scrooge and Lay, I presume?"

"You presume correctly, sirs," Scrooge said. "And what can I do for you today?"

"Sir, we are making our yearly rounds soliciting for donations for the poor. How much can we put you down for?" The gentleman with the greater moustache put his pen to his pad, quivering with anticipation.

"Nothing."

"N-nothing? But, sir, surely you realize Christmas is coming and there are a great many people in want, those without food or adequate shelter, affordable health care or heat for the encroaching winter."

"They can go fuck themselves," Richard B. thundered. "Are not the debtor's prisons and repo men still in business? Nor high finance rates for scofflaws?"

"Well, yes, sir, they are, but..."

"Then begone with you! Everyone who celebrates Christmas should be boiled in boiling oil, with their heart impaled with the shin bone of an Iraqi child. Begone and go fuck yourselves!"

"But, sir..."

"I said go fuck yourselves!"

Richard B. Scrooge looked at the clock and realized with regret the trading day was coming to an end. So he trudged home in the dark gloom and frigid weather, praying he wouldn't meet up with his lesbian wife with whom he'd managed to avoid sleeping since his little Vietnam deferment was conceived in the 60's. He was tired, so very tired! that the poor old chap fell atop his four poster bed and fell fast asleep.

Presently, there came a clanking in the hallway, like the sound of a hundred chains abusing the hardwood floor. Then Scrooge's chamber door opened with a loud creak. It was Lay.

"Kenny boy! How can this be? You are dead! I had you cremated myself immediately after your conviction!"

Lay's chains were laden with lock boxes and bundles of worthless shares of Enron stock and 401(k) plans. "Oooooh, Dick," he replied in a hoarse whisper, "you and I did fabulous business together in life but there is comeuppance in the afterlife. Clarence Darrow is God's Attorney General and I am condemned to roam the world and telling all who would listen about the error of my ways."

"Error? But Kenny boy, we made a mint fucking over the poor and powerless!"

"Oooooh, Dick, I am here to tell you that money isn't everything."

"Bullshit."

"Tonight, you will be visited by three special prosecutors..."

(Part Two will resume tomorrow.)

Now we know the apocalypse is nigh

2011-12-17T06:59:00.004-05:00

I would say hell has frozen over, but the Eagles already did that.

The on-again-off-again Beach Boys reunion to commemorate the 50th anniversary of one of America's most enduring contributions to the history of rock and roll is on again.

Brian Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine, Bruce Johnston and David Marks (a rhythm guitarist who played on their first four albums) are recording together and hitting the road on a 50-date tour set to kick off in April with a headlining performance at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.

The anniversary will also be commemorated with reissues from the Beach Boys catalog, another greatest hits collection and a box set.

Oh. THAT's why.

Wilson says, "This anniversary is special to me because I miss the boys and it will be a thrill for me to make a new record and be on stage with them again."
wU

Really?

What if they ended a war -- and nobody cared?

2011-12-17T05:21:00.003-05:00

There's something very, very, very wrong when a war that has gone on for nearly a decade ends, and nobody pays attention -- not even the media, who are too busy sucking up to the dead corpse of their fellow Iraq warflogger Christopher Hitchens to notice.

We may want to forget how this country, still stinging from he 9/11 attacks, were willing to lash out at someone....anyone...in order to make ourselves feel better. Afghanistan didn't satisfy the blood lust, and Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton both had been flogging the Saddam-as-boogeyman for over a decade leading up to George W. Bush's gleeful decision to both gain his father's favor by avenging an alleged death plot against the old man and simultaneously prove once and for all that his dick was even bigger than Daddy. I mean seriously...if you're going to do that silly Oedipal thing in the context of a war, at least go full-out Jimmy Darmody and be a REAL thug.

Yes, we want to forget. I'm sure Thomas Friedman wishes that this wasn't still out there on YouTube for everyone to see in perpetuity. I'm sure Bill Keller wants to forget all about Judith Miller. I'm sure every pundit that painted this as some kind of noble venture to both avenge our wound and create Jeffersonian democracy in the Middle East wants to forget. Even now, it's painful to watch George W. Bush's blink-blink-blink-sure-sign-of-a-liar announcement of the start of the war.

The one person who never wanted to forget was Christopher Hitchens, who while he might have wished that Iraq hadn't been the clusterfuck that it was, was unrepentant about it until the end. Stabler over at Hitchens Watch has a summary of exactly what it waas that Hitchens was supporting.

Perhaps the outpouring for Christopher Hitchens is designed to give people like Friedman and Keller and all the other warfloggers at the time some cover, as his death gives them a reason to engage in verbal diarrhea over his passing instead of having to answer for their failure to engage in journalistic skepticism at the time. We're long past the realization that the talking heads of Washington and the gasbags of the Sunday morning network TV Mouse Circus (™ Driftglass) are a bunch of hacks who'll sell their souls for cocktail weenies and pinot noir at Sally Quinn and Ben Bradlee's place. We expect them to want to walk back all their armchair braggadocio. But what of the rest of us? What about all the people still sporting mouldering "Support Our Troops" ribbon magnets on their SUVs and still voting for Republicans who want to slash veterans benefits? What about 54-60% who supported the war before it began? Should millions of people be able to get off the hook so easily, when we have the blood of thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis on our hands? And what of the families of the dead? What of the mothers, siblings, children and spouses of those who died in this misadventure? How can we make sense of their loss without forgetting the lies that took their loved ones away from them?

Lessons learned? What has been learned, when Newt Gingrich is out there calling for regime change in Iran and announcing that the insane John Bolton would be his Secretary of State? What has been learned when Mitt Romney, a man involved in his own penis size with daddy dilemma, throws red meat to Wall Street Journal editorial page readers and says that unlike that pussy Obama, I won't let Iran get nuclear weapons, and I'll do it by surrounding Iran with military ships, throwing more money at Israel (which has the side benefit of maybe getting me some Jewish votes in Florida), and I'll talk really, really, really tough.

All the GOP candidates are saber-rattling about Iran. It's what Republicans do -- create wars to serve the military contractors that help fill their coffers. And wars in the Middle East also make the oil men who are another sizable source of Republican cash happy. But what you will never hear from any of them is how George W. Bush's misadventure in Iraq has made the very same Iran about which they are saber-rattling now that much more of a concern.

Loren Thompson at Forbes.com:

The one local government run by Shiites that Maliki can turn to for help when the Americans are gone is that of Iran, which is essentially a Shiite theocracy. In other words, what looks like a fledgling democracy in Iraq to some U.S. policymakers looks to the governments in surrounding states more like a huge opportunity for radical leaders in Teheran to expand their influence. I won’t get into how resentful many Sunni Arabs are about the role America played in giving Shiites — a distinct minority in the Arab world — political power in Iraq, but that is likely to be a potent factor in future regional relations.

Concerns about Iranian influence in one of the Arab world’s premier oil-producing states explains why some of the U.S. troops departing Iraq aren’t going any farther away than neighboring Kuwait. Until Washington has a better understanding of Maliki’s intentions and his ability to control Iraq’s many political factions, it is likely to keep a sizable military presence nearby.

[snip]

Local troublemakers know the U.S. electorate has had enough of Iraq, and that our threats to deal forcefully with them if they try to destabilize Maliki’s regime probably are empty (it might de-legitimize him to invite us back).

But it isn’t just perceptions of weakening resolve that have undermined Washington’s ability to influence developments in the region. America’s uneven performance in the Iraq war prior to the removal of Donald Rumsfeld from the Pentagon’s top post in 2006 eliminated any residual sense of U.S. military omnipotence that survived the 9-11 attacks. CIA analysts turned out to be ignorant about what was happening in Iraq. American soldiers had a devilish time coping with improvised explosive devices and other relatively simple tactics employed by a poorly-equipped and under-resourced adversary. The success of insurgents in pushing America’s vast military machine to the verge of defeat three years into the conflict will undoubtedly inform the efforts of future enemies.

Iran doesn't care about the saber-rattling of armchair quarterbacks like Newt Gingrich, because they've seen what happens when pasty American Republicans talk tough -- they rush into military adventures for the sound bites and the preening alone, without concern for the actual mission. Paradoxically, that makes this group of GOP candidates that much more dangerous, because with George W. Bush having demonstrated that all the money we spend on weaponry doesn't make us competent to wage the 21st century's wars, this bunch of bellicose warwhores won't hesitate to up the ante by dropping nukes on Iran. And then we're all done for.

Perhaps that's why no one wants to look at what we've left in Iraq.

The Real Intent of the Right Wing War on Culture

2011-12-16T13:01:00.002-05:00

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

It's extremely important to distinguish the difference between a mere culture war, which suggests some parity, from an actual War on Culture. If what's going on here in the United States doesn't clue you in as to why, then perhaps you need an objective look at what's going on in Hungary, for instance.

Every now and then, I'll read an article that changes my entire belief system or at least one that allows me to sharpen my focus on a particular topic. This article by Philipp Oehmke in Der Speigel, one ironically translated from the original German, on the right wing war on culture in Hungary is one such example.

It stresses the need for a nation to have a national identity and a thriving, free-thinking culture in order to guard itself from outside influences such as the homophobic and anti-Semitic Jobbick Party in Hungary. One needn't squint too hard or pull a muscle stretching to draw parallels between the extreme right wing Jobbick Party, which is now the third largest in the Hungarian Parliament, and the National Socialist Party of 1930's Germany.

Budapest, as with Berlin 80 years ago, is a sophisticated cosmopolitan city with a thriving culture and a strong theatrical tradition. It's no less tolerant of its gay community than any other major city and, being the epicenter for cultural and political thought, it's an accurate barometer for what's going on in the rest of the country. Hungarians are renowned for their leftist leanings and liberalism, which makes it all the more mysterious why they'd vote in so many right wing bigots from the Jobbick Party so that now they're in roughly the same position as the Nazi Party was before the 1932 elections that saw the ascendance of Adolph Hitler.

Hungary currently has a conservative government in place, one that saw the ouster of the 20 year-long administration of the former liberal Budapest mayor's office and replaced with István Tarlós, described by one of his critics as being, "a reptile of Hungarian politics, muscular and well-fed."

I have a dear friend in Budapest, a young gay man, who's the victim of near-constant bullying from homophobic classmates. The school administration turns a blind eye to his victimization and when I recommended he go over their heads and air his grievances to the mayor of Budapest, he said that his letter was met with stony silence. Given Tarlós' track record, I no longer wonder about the apathy.

The leadership of the New Theater, the closest thing Hungary has to a national theater, was handed over to György Dörner, a right wing activist and sympathizer, by Mayor Tarlós after receiving a sloppy 20 page proposal essentially asking for control of the theater. The governing board, consisting of eight members, had no taste for any leadership change. Of the eight, six voted down the change and the other two abstained from voting. Despite the virtually unanimous consensus to maintain the status quo, Tarlós gave the reins to Dörner, who condemned the theater in his proposal for its "degenerate, sick, liberal hegemony." (He also wanted to rename it the "Home Front Theater", which even the rabidly right wing Budapest mayor found beyond the pale.).

Nonetheless, the soup sandwich of a proposal was approved by the mayor with absolutely no regard for the recommendations of the theater's board members and the new director will obviously use the theater as a propaganda tool. The outgoing director, István Márta, seems to be a capable one, providing Budapest's theater-going community with an eclectic range of well-reviewed plays spanning different countries, different eras and from different playwrights from Shakespeare to (believe it or not) our own Tom Waits. The theater is making money and doing more than its fair share that Budapest maintains its all-important if all too elusive cultural identity. One gets the feeling that when the new guy takes over, feeding the bottom line in the interest of a right wing hegemony won't be so important.

I do not agree with the author when he says, "Hungary today is a country trying to awaken a sense of national identity that never actually existed," although he contradicts himself earlier by writing, "In Hungary, culture is leftist and liberal, as it is in many other European countries." (Sidebar: How a nation can have a thriving, open-minded culture while not being possessed of a national identity mystifies me. Were it not for Hungary's proud national identity, the Uprising of 1956 couldn't have happened. But that's immaterial.) Yet culture is at the bottom of this issue, this Speigel article and my own.

Hungary for Change

The purge and rewriting of the laws, part and parcel to Hitler's extreme right wing agenda, has long since begun. Márta's been given the bum's rush despite the voice of the board and his counterpart in the National Opera in Budapest has since also been 86'd. There's this:

The government is investigating 82-year-old Agnes Heller, Hungary's most famous philosopher, a former dissident, Marxist and student of the Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács. The government, with massive support from the right-wing press, claims that she squandered European Union grant money.

And this:

A monument to the poet Attila József on a square in front of the parliament building is expected to be taken down soon. József, whose works are classics of proletarian poetry, was a humanist with a Marxist worldview. He threw himself in front of a freight train in 1937. The new government does not believe that a monument to this sort of a person ought to be standing in front of the parliament. It's as if the Germans were to remove a statue of Friedrich Schiller because the poet had long hair.

The cracking down on dissidents with show investigations and trials, the disappearance of monuments honoring proletarian heroes (echoed most recently in Paul LaPage's Maine) and the purging of secular, humanist liberals and potential enemies of the state are just beginning, right out of the dog-eared playbook of right wing dictatorships.

Then there's this, perhaps the most chilling revelation of all:

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's Fidesz Party controls the country with a two-thirds majority in parliament -- enough, in other words, to reconfigure a parliamentary democracy or even reshape an entire country. A new constitution takes effect on Jan. 1, 2012, and a new press law designed to prevent unwanted criticism of conditions in Hungary has been in place for the last few months.

The Fidesz Party, as far as I understand it, is the mainstream conservative government which is bad enough. But even they're being challenged by the Jobbick Party, Hungary's answer to the Druz Party of Lebanon, Israel's Likud, Germany's NPD neonazis and our own Tea Party Republicans currently infesting Congress like so many ideological heartworms.

For a minute, let's shelve the speculation as to why a famously leftist nation such as Hungary would give a nearly 80% majority to right wingers and make the Jobbick Party the third largest in the nation and focus, instead, on where this is leading.

Oehmke's contention (one that may partially explain the political shift of the electorate) is that, bereft of a national identity, Hungary is weakened and made susceptible to political change no matter how radical and intolerant. Hitler's National Socialist Party was able to transform cosmopolitan, sophisticated Germany into a totalitarian state within a few short years by exploiting the peoples' dissatisfaction with the Weimar Republic of Bismark that to this day is closely associated with hyperinflation and rampant unemployment.

Hungary at this moment is a relatively stable democracy (at least in name) that never gets listed with the usual suspects in doom and gloom prognostications of the fall of the European Union. But even if Oehmke's assertions about Hungary's lack of a sense of national awareness and identity can be taken at face value, one cannot deny he has a point where he writes,

But a country's culture can't be changed that easily. In Hungary, culture is leftist and liberal, as it is in many other European countries. Culture does what it pleases and what it thinks. But to gain complete control over a country, one has to control what people think. This is precisely the issue on many people's minds in Hungary today: a battle for people's thoughts.

And this, as Frank Zappa once said, is the crux of the biscuit. This explains in a nutshell the wearisome Republican mantra of defunding the NEA, calling Bert and Ernie gay, slinging mud at the Teletubbies, calling for the abolition of NPR and PBS, waging a war on science, calling the mainstream media and Hollywood liberal, in essence, literally embracing ignorance. It would be all too easy to assume they're trying to clamp down on dissident or potentially dissident thought but it would be all too easy.

If you want to undermine a country and get a toehold, tapping into mere dissatisfaction with the establishment isn't enough if you want to change a nation's thought and win over hearts and minds. Because the electorate has to be bereft of a culture and/or a national identity. And I've been saying for years that the United States has no culture other than what it's borrowed from others and that the closest thing we have to culture is hyperactive consumption that even this economic downturn can only slow down.

This goes a long way toward explaining why some of the stupidest carbon-based life forms in the solar system get elected to public office virtually every year. We're the type of nation that tweets about National Cupcake Day exponentially more times than the long-overdue drawdown in Iraq, one that shrugs at reports that global warming is worse than we'd been told and that we have only a five year-long window to correct potentially world-ending trends while obsessing over the Kardashian divorce. When you give electoral power to a people such as this, it's only inevitable that we're going to elect to public office ex-wrestlers and action stars as governors and dummies like Fred Grandy and Sonny Bono to Congress.

That's not to say we're illegitimately dissatisfied with the road our government is taking our Republic. However, since we are a solipsistic, selfish nation, our criticism of any administration seems to be largely predicated on what suits or doesn't suit us, as this now-notorious op-ed reminds us. As long as we can pay our bills and hang on to our jobs and can afford cable so we can watch the new season of Mad Men, the rest of the country can go fuck itself in the fieldstone square that was the foundation of where our homes used to sit.

The extreme right wing, fascist elements of the Republican Party had only partially or imperfectly tapped into this dissatisfaction with the current government but that dissatisfaction is largely squandered. It'd since been refocused and refined with a vengeance in the form of Occupy Wall Street, which isn't getting so much press anymore.

But if early 1930's Germany proved one thing, it's that all an extremist party needs is widespread dissatisfaction with the current government (which also explains the success of the Russian Revolution of 1917) and a promise of, well, hope and change to get a toehold. Once that toehold is established, anything's possible.

And right wingers are (until recently) very adept at recognizing that weakness. Dissatisfaction and polarization robs a people of whatever national identity left to them and they're susceptible to any political movement that at least promises to break the status quo.

Russia began its march toward Communist hegemony through a revolution. Germany's own paradigm shift was through a Democratic process that rendered revolution redundant and enabled by populist dissatisfaction. And when our own history begins to get too blurred by right wingers to read, we'll all too soon forget our identity, that our own Republic was founded on a thirst for liberty and a refusal to live in fear. If you want to see where America's headed in 2012, look no further than Hungary.

Friday Cat (etc.) Blogging

2011-12-16T05:27:00.003-05:00

I don't know about you, but I've had a tough week. So if you too need your heart warmed, here you go: Two cat ladies and some monkey wranglers (with links, for those who'd like to make an for end-of-year donation):

Siglinda Scarpa of The Goathouse Refuge in Pittsboro, NC:

Lynea Lattanzio of Cat House on the Kings in Parlier, CA:

It's important to note that these women are not hoarders. These are not cats kept in filth, there's no dead cats in freezers. Cats at these facilities, if they are healthy and adoptable, are all up for adoption. If they aren't, they have a clean place to live where they can live out their days I haven't been to Cat House on the Kings, but I have been to the Goathouse Refuge, and it is not just a refuge for cats, but a place of calm. It's also immaculately clean. If you think you're going to walk around these fenced enclosures and step in cat poop, guess again. It takes an army of volunteers to keep these places clean and the cats healthy -- and a ton of money.

"But what about people? Isn't it better to help people in this economy?"

I'm not sure that one precludes the other. When I worked in New York City in the 1980's, I went through the World Trade Center every day for eight years. There was a homeless woman who always parked herself near the token booth at the E train terminus. Her name was Sharon. Sharon had a cat that she carried with her in her shopping cart wherever she went. On most days, you could see Sharon sitting on a blanket at that token booth, feeding that cat, often as not from a tin of Fancy Feast. The cat was always sleek and healthy-looking. I still think about her sometimes and wonder whatever happened to this woman who despite her own circumstances, always made sure that the one being that she could rely on to not torment her was cared for.

And now for something completely different: The Nosara Wildlife Rescue:

I would hope that those inclined to give to animal organizations at this time of year would eschew the envelopes full of address labels, holiday cards, and slick photos of sad-faced tragic animals -- organizations with millions of dollars in endowments and enough money to send these mailings, and focus on groups like these -- smaller rescues that put their donations towards care of the animals instead of fat executive salaries and payments to direct mail houses.

This is the Way the War Ends...

2011-12-15T13:38:00.002-05:00

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

“Shall Life renew these bodies? Of a truth
All death will he annul, all tears assuage?
Or fill these void veins full again with youth
And wash with an immortal water age?” - Wilfred Owen, (1893-1918), "The End", inscribed on his tombstone.

...not with a bang but a whimper.

Something interesting happened today about 6000 miles away. Our major combat operations in Iraq ended... for the third time. Yawn. If you missed it, you'll be given a free pass. After all, how can the ending of a nearly nine year-long war that cost nearly 5000 American lives, over 1,000,000 Iraqi lives, displacing four million more and nearly a trillion dollars compare to other news items such as Herman Cain wanting to be Defense Secretary, the upcoming Golden Globes and, thank you, Tweeps for saving this for top honors, #Nationalcupcakeday. (Just to be fair, at press time, #Iraq has barely broken through the top ten trending topics in the US.)

So why the muted trumpets and drums? Where are the headlines bellowing in 60 point bold as a necessary counterpoint to those of nine years ago when Dan Rather, Geraldo, Judith Miller and every single talking head on Fox "News" was screaming about smoking guns, mushroom clouds, Freedom Fries and Rah Rah, Sis Boom Bah-ing us into a plainly illegal war contrary to the UN Security Council's Resolution 1441 and every single pertinent international law despite a complete lack of evidence of WMD, Saddam's complicity with al Qaida and the slightest shred of proof of his involvement with 9/11?

Where are the randy sailors at Times Square grabbing and kissing random nurses and immortalized for posterity by Alfred Eisenstaedt's successor before melting into the NYC subway system, where's the Victory Day ticker tape parades for the returning troops, the booming postwar economy that naturally followed and continued well into the 70's? Where are the grateful, liberated Iraqis offering their daughters as thanks for liberating them from a dictator who'd killed tens of thousands to an occupying force that had killed hundreds of thousands?

Yeah, where's the gratitude for we, the liberators, the flower petals showered on our departing tanks, the new, shining Iraq filled with shiny, happy people that, according to the Geneva convention, is mandated to be rebuilt by the occupying and victorious country? Surely, Iraq will become the next West Berlin and the economic superpower that Germany became, no?

"Suck it."

I hope that you, Constant Reader, will forgive me my unpatriotic snark. However, in my defense, I was hoping for something a little more substantial, something more closely resembling the red, white and blue cock-wanding that celebrates American arrogance than the way we slunk out of Iraq earlier today with barely more dignity than our back door lover's exit from a roof in Saigon almost 37 years ago.

Let's take a closer look and see what we're leaving behind and what our uncharacteristic modesty prevented us from saying:

~~Ultimate chair-warming bureaucrat~~ Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta and other top civilian and military officials flew in to Baghdad to mark the formal end of the U.S. military effort, one of most divisive wars in American history.

Instead of addressing the deep questions about the war, Panetta paid tribute to U.S. troops, arguing that the combat losses and the enormous expenditure of resources since 2003 had not been wasted.

"To be sure, the cost was high -- in blood and treasure for the United States and for the Iraqi people," he told the audience of around 200 troops and a few Iraqi officials. "But those lives were not lost in vain -- they gave birth to an independent, free and sovereign Iraq."

But, but... if Iraq is now truly free and purged of all destabilizing, destructive influences, then how do we explain leaving this in our deflowered wake?

Yet an atmosphere of uncertainty permeates the U.S. exit.

Though security has improved dramatically since the insurgency's height in 2006 and 2007, Iraq remains riven by ethnic and sectarian divisions and beset by fears that the U.S. departure will cause violence to increase once again.

But fear not, Constant Reader, ~~Blackwater~~ Academi is trying to save the day. The murder artist formerly known as Blackwater is trying to worm its way back into the same country that had kicked them out over four years ago after a frenzied bloodbath in Nisour Sq. that had claimed the lives of 17 innocent Iraqi civilians. After all, the hated Eric Prince is out and Blackwater can now be trusted again because they have a new smart-sounding name like Academi (although, by that rubric, that means we can also trust British Petroleum again after Tony Hayward was shown the door so he could get back his life racing yachts again.).

No doubt, the first thing the newly-collegial mercenaries will focus on is building the nearly 6000 schools that Iraq's Education Ministry says it needs to meet the school building shortage. Perhaps Eric's band of merry mercenaries can also address the problem of why Iraqis, after over eight years of American occupation, are still getting just a few hours of electricity a day after a particularly brutal summer a few months ago that killed more Iraqis who desperately needed relief from the Middle Eastern sun.

And maybe, just maybe, if Blackwater has its hands full building all those state-of-the-art schools and rebuilding a once-functional electrical infrastructure, we can talk the British and American oil companies that have resumed their permanent residence there to look into the water problems that had plagued Iraq since our March 19, 2003 invasion (pdf file). Yeah, maybe they can take some of the burden from those NGO's such as UNESCO, burdens from which we'd decided years ago to quietly divest ourselves years before it broke that we couldn't account for almost 100% of the Pentagon's funding for their reconstruction.

And then, once they get a handle on the ongoing water problem, perhaps those petroleum giants can start building the hospitals for which we'd contracted Bechtel, a shortage that has received virtually no attention from the liberal mainstream media, if this Google search is any indication (although, in the interests of fairness, the children's cancer hospital in Basra much touted over seven years ago by Laura Bush finally opened last year when the Army Corps of Engineers completed it.).

No doubt, it'll be a special Christmas for the thousands of Iraq veterans who will be reunited with their families and loved ones in the coming days. Well, not all of them are coming home right away. First, we have to make a diversion through eastern and southern Asia.

Mission (Almost) Accomplished

2011-12-15T06:27:00.003-05:00

And no, it's not about the endiing of George W. Bush's My Dick Is Bigger Than Daddy's war in Iraq.

It's about the deliberate and systematic demolition of the American middle class.

They aren't quite there yet, but there is definitely significant progress:

Squeezed by rising living costs, a record number of Americans — nearly 1 in 2 — have fallen into poverty or are scraping by on earnings that classify them as low income.

The latest census data depict a middle class that's shrinking as unemployment stays high and the government's safety net frays. The new numbers follow years of stagnating wages for the middle class that have hurt millions of workers and families.

"Safety net programs such as food stamps and tax credits kept poverty from rising even higher in 2010, but for many low-income families with work-related and medical expenses, they are considered too 'rich' to qualify," said Sheldon Danziger, a University of Michigan public policy professor who specializes in poverty.

"The reality is that prospects for the poor and the near poor are dismal," he said. "If Congress and the states make further cuts, we can expect the number of poor and low-income families to rise for the next several years."

But don't worry. I'm sure a Kardashian is up to something, and there's a woman in a hijab at the Publix to worry about, and gee that Newt Gingrich sounds like a smart fella and he's from the south so I know we can trust him. And after all, the Rapture is coming and we good God-fearin' folk won't have to worry about poverty anyway, so let's just keep on keepin' on. And oh yeah, those dirty hippies protesting should just STFU.

Because poverty can't happen to those who love Jesus, right?

The forgotten ones

2011-12-13T05:41:00.003-05:00

The nearly 14 million unemployed people in this country are a constant reproach to the Republican economic doctrine of shoveling as much money as you can into the pockets of a few already ridiculously wealthy people. For all that the GOP is trying mightily to restrict voting so that those without automobiles or a stable address, or those whose skin pigmentation or age indicates a possible vote against their party, cannot vote; there's still this stubborn reality that there's only so much you can steal an election when a majority of Americans have had enough of waiting until corporate CEOs think they are finally rich enough to trickle some largesse down to the peons by deigning to hire them to do something at their companies. What that something would be when no one other than the 1% can afford to buy anything remains to be seen, but that's the Republican doctrine and they're sticking with it.

I keep thinking of that notion put forth on Up With Chris Hayes last weekend, that this is now a nation of wasted resources -- 13.3 million of them, in fact. But rather than blame the GOP (and to a lesser degres, the Democrats, who are willing to be bought more cheaply), and the people who finance them and turn Congressmen from rural backwaters into multimillionaires simply by demanding legislation in exchange for campaign contributions, it's so much easier to demonize those who are unemployed due to outsourcing, appeasing Wall Street through massive job cuts, changes in technology, or simple obsolescence. After all, if they can just keep those of us who still have jobs separate from those who don't, perhaps enough votes can be squeezed out of the middle class to elect enough Republicans to completely demolish our way of life more quickly than the piecemeal efforts we've seen over the last thirty years.

The easiest way to do this is to paint the unemployed as somehow different from those of us lucky enough to still have jobs. So what the GOP is trying to do is turn all of the unemployed, no matter what their age or race or work history, into "the new n----rs" -- lazy, shiftless, drug-addicted leeches on society. Newt Gingrich advocates that anyone receiving any kind of federal aid (such as extended unemployment benefits) be drug tested. So does Congressman Jack Kingston.

All this brings us to word this morning of a "compromise" that may be reached today in the budget stalemate that threatens to shut down the government on the 16th of this month. When I hear "compromise" in the context of negotiations on Capitol Hill, what that means is "Democratic Capitulation", because the Democrats have shown again and again that there is no Republican plan to which they won't eventually capitulate, because if they don't, Chuck Todd and Bob Shieffer will paint them as obstructionist. Of course history has shown that capitulation doesn't change the media spin one iota, but that doesn't stop them from doing it. And of course there might be some trickle-down largesse from lobbyists as a consolation prize as well.

Today an editorial from the New York Times breaks down the Republican plan, just so you know what's coming when the Democrats blink, as we all know they will:

At last count, 13.3 million people were officially unemployed and 5.7 million of them had been out of work for more than six months. At no time in the last 60 years has long-term unemployment been so high for so long.

But Republican lawmakers would have you believe that the nation cannot afford jobless benefits and that many recipients are not so much needy, as lazy, disinclined to work as long as benefits are available. When was the last time any Republican lawmaker tried to live on $289 a week, the amount of the average benefit?

Under current policy, federal benefits kick in when state-provided benefits run out, typically after 26 weeks. The duration of the federal payouts depends on the level of unemployment in a given state. Currently, workers in 22 of the hardest-hit states — including California, New Jersey and Connecticut — qualify for up to 73 more weeks of aid. In five other states — including New York — up to 67 more weeks are available. In the remaining 23 states, maximum federal benefits range from 34 weeks to 60 weeks. The cost to continue the program for another year would be about $45 billion.

The Republican plan would cut $11 billion of that in 2012 by slashing up to 40 weeks from the program, reducing by more than half the maximum 73 weeks now available. Because of the way the program is structured, the biggest cuts would come in the states with the highest unemployment. Millions of jobless workers would be quickly left without subsistence, and the weak economy would be weakened further by the drop in consumer spending.

The bill would also impose onerous — and gratuitous — requirements on people who apply for jobless benefits. It would allow states to drug test applicants and would require recipients to be high-school graduates or working toward an equivalency degree

Don't look at your neighbor who does construction and hasn't worked in a year. Don't look at your spouse who can only get contract work for half the pay he used to get and no benefits, paid holidays, or vacation time. Don't look at the sixty-year-old down the street who's spent his own money on courses to keep his skills up to date and can't find a tech job because the industry is "too fast-paced" for him. Don't look at the machinist on the next block who would be happy to retrain for something if he only knew what kind of training would net him a job where he could supplement his wife's pay as a waitress at iHOP and maybe get their home out of foreclosure. Just convince people that all of those people are lazy, shiftless drug addicts -- just like those black people the GOP used to demonize when it was OK to do so (and if you're Newt Gingrich, you think it still is) and that unemployment can't happen to them.

This tactic of pointing people's attention down the economic ladder to the boogeyman of choice while the people up the ladder take the last few bucks out of our back pockets has worked for thirty years, convincing Americans that THEY are somehow different, that poverty will NEVER affect THEM, because THEY aren't LIKE those OTHER PEOPLE.

Except that in the Great Recession of the Oughts, yes, they are. The only question is how many of them know it, and how long it will be before they join them.

Meet the Yahoos

2011-12-11T09:42:00.003-05:00

Now that Herman Cain has "suspended" his campaign so he can spend more time with his attorneys and the GOP field once again bleached to its usual levels, the differences between the candidates become less obvious (four of the five men taking part in the debate wore red ties). Minus Jon Huntsman, last night's ABC News-Yahoo debate looked like the 19th Hole at Augusta with Michele Bachmann as the barfly at 1:59 AM hoping to get noticed.

Obeying the laws of campaign politics, the other nominees played Capture the Flag, taking turns taking swipes at Grand Old Philanderer Newt Gingrich. At 68, this is obviously Newt's last hurrah in his quest for the Oval Office. By process of attrition and running against a clearly mentally unbalanced field consisting of non-entities, morons and psychopaths, Newt is currently on the top of the dunghill even while crowing about making children janitors. And Mitt Romney, Newt's closest competitor and in a process straight out of Last Action Hero or The Purple Rose of Cairo is playing Gordon Gecko to the hilt, proving, as always, to be about as popular as Pat Buchanan in the Castro.

As usual, the punches and counter-punches were done under the guise of civility, with Mitt stiffly laughing as only a possessed Gentleman's Wearhouse mannequin can at Newt Gingrich's jibe that the only thing that kept him from being a career politician was getting his uptight ass slapped over his well-coiffed head by Ted Kennedy, which is true (One can only imagine Romney after the debate, seething with fury and looking for someone's dog to strap on a car roof). But it hardly made Gingrich any less of an insider, an image that he's trying to belie in the current wave of anti-incumbency that was powerful enough to make even Barney Frank retire.

Rick Perry's neurons fired together just long enough to note that the American electorate is quite justified in factoring in a man's infidelity to his wife and to extrapolate from that a suspicion about his moral turpitude in general. Gingrich got points in the always-supine MSM for "smoothly" parrying Perry's thrust. Yet it's notable that while agreeing the American public has a right to ask any questions of any presidential candidate, he also referred to his own serial adultery as if talking about some other Newt Gingrich or a ne'er do well kid brother. Never once in his agreement with Perry did Gingrich admit to any wrongdoing except to say in the abstract, "I've made some mistakes". Nor did giving the American public a blank check to ask any questions it saw fit jibe with the typical Republican surliness and thuggery that comes with trying to hold the candidates' feet to the fire.

Despite currently leading in three of the four early primary states. Gingrich will not survive the holiday season and will be put on a shelf with the other fruitcakes so we can start all over again. Romney is running away from his "liberal" past and flip-flopping about as successfully as a three legged elephant. Romney's detested for that and two other reasons: His Mormonism and the fact that he's just not nasty enough. Republican voters, I think, have come to the consensus that Romney intends to do what's best for Wall Street and purging the nation of unions, gays and liberals may be just an afterthought.

Huntsman and Paul, who are more adroit at hiding their own particular lunacy, are the two scrawny kids always picked last for the kickball game and will never even get to be the flavor of the day. And even among a demographic that revels in watching traffic at NASCAR tracks and WWE wrestling, Bachmann and Perry are just too stupid for even these people to elect (although, how George W. Bush slipped by them 12 years ago is still anyone's guess).

Santorum can forget having any political future ever again thanks to Dan Savage and Google. Plus, as the field's only other Catholic, he'll never pass muster with the evangelical vote that's still waiting for Republican Jesus to come down in a golf cart made of light and wearing a Brooks Brothers suit. Santorum is the worst of both worlds: He's simply crazy and stupid, a shithouse rat that's been clonked on the head too many times with a pipe wrench.

That leaves Romney, a guy who could name his campaign "Bridesmaid Revisited" and who changes positions more often than a double-jointed porn star with ADHD. But the truth is, Romney and Gingrich both have one thing handicapping them: They both present an appearance of being career politicians at least in ambition while being miserable failures at it. Year after year, after getting hounded out of the House when his Contract With America crashed and burned on the Lakehurst, New Jersey part of the political landscape, the Lizard King has spent his time forming exploratory committees that told him every fours that no one wanted him as President.

Romney, when he wasn't taking over weakened companies in hostile takeovers with Bain Capital and throwing American workers on the streets, has only a failed single term as Massachusetts' Governor to point to and otherwise has failed like he's failing now to secure any other position. Because even the mouth-breathing electorate that make up Crazy Base World know the difference between someone who wants to do something (even if it's destroying our social safety net and making unions a quaint thing of the past) and someone who just wants to be something.

Romney and Gingrich, moreso than the also-rans, are coldly ambitious. Beneath that transparently disingenuous veneer of affability and reasonableness squirms two wannabes who would literally cut the tendons above their grandmothers' heels if they thought it would augment by one iota their chances of getting into the Oval Office.

And, as always, the biggest thing they have going for them is the "R" after their names and their dedication to getting that Muslim, Kenyan, Commie nigger out of the White House. And Gingrich has the edge simply because he's not Mitt.

Maybe it's time to just call it "Occupy" -- and trademark it

2011-12-11T06:05:00.004-05:00

I'm not kidding. Because Occupy Wall Street/Portland/Boston/everywhere even the bizarroland that is Naples, Florida is now branching off into other ways of taking back our country from banks and their Congressional shills, perhaps it's time to just trademark the name "Occupy" and start thinking about the many ways the movement is going to work.

One of the most heartening is Occupy Our Homes, which is not only helping people hold onto the homes they have, but also to put homeless families into the boarded-up, decaying properties that are already bank-owned, sitting and rotting both in reality and on bank balance sheets, benefitting no one.

Yesterday on Up With Chris Hayes, Esther Amrah made the point that this country is not suffering from an absence of wealth, it's suffering from the waste of resources -- homes sitting empty, peple sitting idle without work. The panel discussed the meaning and work of Occupy Our Homes:

So I got to thinking.

A few weeks ago, my department at work participated in a project for Habitat for Humanity's "Brush with Kindness" program, helping to rehab a home that had been flooded by Hurricane Irene. We sent teams every day for a week, where we hung sheetrock, spackled, and laid floor tile. Habitat primarily builds new homes for lower and middle-income working families who work in the community but cannot afford market-rate housing. Habitat families put at least 400 hours of sweat equity into their build, and then buy the home using a no-interest mortgage provided by Habitat. These homes remain Habitat homes upon sale; families cannot flip the house at market rate. It's not a "free house" and it's not Section 8. Habitat has been terrifically successful at what it does, and whether it's out of a desire to do community service, or simply to learn how to do something you can use in your own home, volunteering for Habitat can be a really rewarding experience.

What the panel discussed yesterday isn't the Habitat model. Right now it's more like squatting, and it remains to be seen just how long the family portrayed in the video will be allowed to stay. Something tells me that after this property is rehabbed using the sweat of volunteers, Bank of America will try to turn around and sell it right out from under them. So perhaps it's time for Occupy Our Homes to get into the real estate business.

Here's how it would work (and this assumes that Bank of America and other companies holding foreclosed properties would be able to recognize the potential for rehabilitating their reputations and go along with it): Occupy would purchase empty foreclosed homes for pennies on the dollar. Bank of America (or whatever bank) would get a tax break for the difference between the amount owed on the foreclosed mortgage and the token dollar amount for which they sell the house to Occupy. Then Occupy starts working the way Habitat does, rehabbing these houses and either selling them or renting them to homeless families or low-income working people. How the details would work remains to be seen, and Occupy would at some point have to become far more organized and perhaps hierarchical than it is today -- and with far more funding. But I have to believe that getting these properties off the banks' books, reducing or eliminating the amount of rotting housing stock, and the work skills gained by those rehabbing these houses, just might go along way towards ameliorating a number of problems in this country.

Yes, there would be resistance. I ran into it at work while working on the team coordinating our participation in Habitat. "No one gave ME a house!" "I have to pay MY mortgage, if they couldn't do theirs, the hell with them." It's the "I got mine and fuck you" mentality that is keeping the 99% squabbling amongst each other while the 1% takes an ever-increasing piece of the pie.

On my street there's a foreclosed house. It's a cute little thing; a cape with two shed dormers and an attached garage. The photographs accompanying the listing of the realtor the bank hired to sell the property make it look to be in not bad shape for a foreclosed property. Some new carpet or refinished floors, a good powerwashing of the siding, and it would be as good as new. There's just one problem and her name is Irene. She came slamming through here in the fall, and I'm told this cute little property now has water in the basement that no one is addressing because the bank doesn't give a shit. So this once-cute house is now a moldy mess-in-progress. And this is on a nice little street in suburbia. Repeat all over the country. Now what good are these houses doing the banks, other than helping fulfill the conservative dream of a nation of a few billionaires, a government doing their bidding, and the rest of us killing each other for scraps?

Perhaps the banks won't go along with it. Perhaps they'd rather bring down entire neighborhoods with their criminality and their neglect. But if an organization could go in there with a real solution to the problem of toxic assets and and equally real problem of homelessness, at least if the banks refused they'd have nowhere to hide from what they really are.

I am SO glad I don't actually watch this show

2011-12-09T20:57:00.004-05:00

I realize that if you're going to be part of the zeitgeist in America today, you have to watch all of these competition shows. The problem is, I'm over here still listening to the Allman Bros. Band and even Green day; and I also like Railroad Earth and Leftover Salmon and the Flecktones (four of the best damn musicians you will ever hear) and Hot Tuna (who are playing at the Beacon Theatre this weekend, and if you didn't get to see any of last winter's shows with Charlie Musselwhite and G.E. Smith, and you're in the New York area, GO!). I like swing. I like bluegrass until they start singing "I'm going to heaven and you're not because I love Jesus and you don't" through their noses. I love black gospel music because it feels like praise and joy and not like smugness and elitism the way white gospel does. I love Motown. I love 1920's jazz as rendered by Bix and Tram and Satchmo and Sidney Bechet. I love acoustic blues and electric blues and the blues shouting of Wynonie Harris. I love the music from Tin Pan Alley that collectors are thankfully digitizing from old 78s and Edison cylinders. My musical taste is far and wide and eclectic. And if it doesn't include hip-hop, well, I'm 56 years old and I guess that's just going to have to be my excuse.

What I don't care for is what I think of as current pop music -- the stuff purveyed on talent shows like American Idol and Simon Cowell's Fall 2011 entry which I keep thinking of as the Rollerball of talent shows, The X Factor. I would have had ZERO interest in this show were it not for a promo that ran during The Simpsons one night in which a girl who was just a kid was belting out "Mercy", sounding like the love child of Janis Joplin and Axl Rose. And I was utterly blown away. This must be what it must have been like for the people at Island Records hearing Amy Winehouse for the first time, long before she became a hot mess.

Of course I have my pride, so it's not like I was going to sit there for two hours a week watching a parade of cookie-cutter shrei-ing pop divas trying to be the next Mariah or Whitney or Britney or Beyonce or Rihanna -- those overproduced divas who to my aged ears are completely and utterly interchangeable. But as little Rachel Crow, the chubby Betty Boop-faced kid with the infectious grin, the heartwarming backstory, and the ferocious confidence, charmed her way through this weekly mess of American decadence, growing as a singer even while we watched, it was hard not to get sucked in.

And I'm so glad I didn't (well, not too much). Because for all that Rachel Crow has the heart and soul and voice of a long-downtrodden blues singer, I'm not sure I could have watched her be eliminated this week.

The entertainment industry is littered with kids who starred early and flamed out quickly. For every Leonardo DiCaprio there are twenty River Phoenixes and Corey Haims. For every Justin Timberlake there are twenty Britney Spearses. And the trainwreck that was Michael Jackson is in a league by himself. So it's probably a blessing in disguise to not score a $5 million record constract at thirteen, I don't care how centered and sane her family seems to be. But while Rachel Crow may be able to sing like Etta James, this image:

...drives home that this is still a very little girl. The talent is there. The opportunities will come. There's too much money to be made off this kid for them not to.

Dogwhistling to oblivion

2011-12-09T05:33:00.007-05:00

Nobody is better at dogwhistling than Republicans. When Newt Gingrich calls Barack Obama "The Food Stamp King", it's clear what word he wants to use. When Sarah Palin puts targets on a map to denote elected Democrats, it's clear what she's saying. Republicans know how to send signals to their followers that give them what they want.

So it makes us wonder exactly what Rick Perry is saying in his recent anti-gay ad:

I mean, there's Rick Perry...with his great hair intact, walking up a mountain...wearing Heath Ledger's jacket....

OK, it's not EXACTLY the same:

Perry's jacket has seaming across the upper chest and Ledger's doesn't. Ledger's jacket has flap pockets, Perry's has just patch pockets. Ledger's is probably vintage from the time period portrayed in the movie, and Perry's is your standard garden-variety Carhartt Sandstone Thermal Jac. And Carhartt uses similar "cowboy" imagery to sell its products:

And maybe the people Rick Perry is trying to reach won't make the connection, because they too wear Carhartt jackets. Maybe it's just that weird Republican cowboy drag thing that Texan men do to try to demonstrate that they are manly-men. But when you're Rick Perry, and gay rumors have been swirling around you for years, and this particular jacket also comes in Moss, Midnight, and a lovely chocolate brown, you'd think someone on Perry's staff would have made the connection.

Unless it isn't evangelicals to whom Perry is really dogwhistling.

(lifted unashamedly from here.)

A.N.S.W.E.R is going to have to come up with new signs

2011-12-08T05:47:00.002-05:00

Mumia Abu-Jamal is no longer on Death Row.

Short cuts

2011-12-07T05:29:00.002-05:00

A lot going on today....

Living well is the best revenge. I may have been wrong about Barack Obama selling out the middle class one iota less than Hillary Clinton would have, but when the book is written, instead of Vince Foster conspiracies and Hillary nutcracker dolls, Mrs. Clinton will be known for speeches like this:

And speaking of Obama, if he can find the nuts to actually follow through on this (NYT link), we might be able to find some enthusiasm to re-elect him: "But in the long term, we have to rethink our tax system more fundamentally. We have to ask ourselves: Do we want to make the investments we need in things like education, and research, and high-tech manufacturing? Or do we want to keep in place the tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans in our country? Because we can’t afford to do both. That’s not politics. That’s just math." Of course Republicans don't believe in things like math and science, so that's going to fall on deaf ears.

And speaking of science, if you thought Jon Huntsman was the sane Republican because he refused to join the Flat Earth Society and deny that climate change was real, guess again: “The scientific community owes us more in terms of a better description of explanation about what might lie beneath all of this. But there’s not information right now to formulate policies in terms of addressing it over all, primarily because it’s a global issue.” So let's keep burning them fossil fuels in perpetuity, shall we? After all, Jesus is coming and only them goddamn heathen commie homosexual Jews will have to deal with it, right? And by the way, it's snowed in New Mexico and Texas already.

Closers won't matter if you don't score any runs. Furthering speculation that Sandy Alderson has been charged by Bud Selig with making the Mets so bad that the Wilpons will have to sell, yesterday Alderson signed two aging relief pitchers and jettisoned the team's best overall player not named "José Reyes". One of the relievers is 6'11" hothead reliever Jon Rauch, best known for going all Incredible Hulk on an umpire. Alderson also traded Angel Pagan to the Giants for another reliever and an outfielder with a sizzling .221 average, after talking about Pagan yesterday as possibly the Mets' new leadoff hitter. All this after refusing to trade José Reyes and actually GETTING something for him, then refusing to even tender an offer. Head, desk, etc.

I'm SHOCKED that Halliburton is accused of destroying evidence in the BP oil spill disaster. Maybe BP and Halliburton can go all Mutually Assured Destruction on each other and kill each other off.

And finally...

There go Alec Baldwin's mayoral aspirations. Look, Dude...I play Words with Friends too, but when you hold up hundreds of other people because you're trying to make a word containing both "J" and "X", it's time to put down the iPhone and seek help. Seriously. I mean it.