"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast"
-Oscar Wilde		 Brilliant at Breakfast title banner "The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself."
-- Proverbs 11:25
"...you have a choice: be a fighting liberal or sit quietly. I know what I am, what are you?" -- Steve Gilliard, 1964 - 2007

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"...the best bleacher bum since Pete Axthelm" -- Randy K.

"I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum." -- "Rowdy" Roddy Piper (1954-2015), They Live
Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Probably because his petzele is the size of a pretzel
Posted by Jill | 6:44 PM
Looks like Paul Ryan has been lying about his Übermenschhood again:

In case you haven’t heard, Paul Ryan works out. A lot, apparently; he’s so much of a “fitness guy,” as he’s said, that for days after Mitt Romney chose him as his vice-presidential candidate, the media could talk about little else but the fact that Ryan leads a group of congressmen in a daily workout called P90X, a hugely popular, high-intensity workout routine with a cultlike following.

The legend of Paul Ryan’s physical fitness got even crazier when the boy-wonder V.P. candidate bragged to Hugh Hewitt about his marathon running, claiming he’d run the 26.2-mile race in “under three [hours], high twos. I had a two hour and fifty-something. … I was fast when I was younger, yeah.”

Of course, we now know that was a lie. As Runner’s World discovered, Ryan’s time was 4:01:25, and as a Ryan spokesman admitted, it was his one and only marathon. He was 20 when he ran it, and yet he still would have lost to a 40-ish Sarah Palin. Whoops. Diehard runners were ticked off, of course, and the Ryan marathon soon became a punch line.

Left unexamined, however, was another, equally outrageous claim: That Ryan has 6 percent body fat. This was endlessly repeated at the time of his selection—trumpeted in headlines (both here and abroad) and even in editorial-page cartoons. “Oh, to be a pair of calipers,” swooned Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. “Paul Ryan shirtless” became one of the most popular Internet searches—despite yielding only one softish vacation photo—which makes it all the more strange that nobody has taken a closer look.


But the more you look at Paul Ryan, the less he looks like Francisco D'Anconia and the more he looks like the guy who got sand kicked in his face in 1950's Charles Atlas ads:



Turns out that just about the only people with body fat this low are Olympic 100-meter sprinters and Tour de France cyclists. Now if Paul Ryan really is this fit, we have to wonder just how much time he spends representing the constituents in his Congressional district, which may be why Rob Zerban is presenting a very real threat to Ryan's re-election (and you can help make Zerban an even bigger threat here). You just have to wonder just why Paul Ryan feels he has to lie about his physical prowess so much. I for one think the same thing that I think when I see some guy tailgating me in a Hummer: "Do you really want to advertise what a pencil-dick you are?"

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Friday, April 01, 2011

Actual photo of the "massive" Tea Party rally yesterday in Washington DC
Posted by Jill | 5:33 AM
Just look at these tens of thousands of hundreds of Teabaggers converging in Washington DC yesterday:

only a few hundred pwople showed up at the 'big' Tea Party rally in Washington DC on March 31


I saw more people than this gather for a Peter Karp concert in Tenafly a few years ago.

Jed Lewison braved Faux Noise for coverage, where the meme was that the bad weather kept people away. Remember, these so-called tea party patriots are the same guys who dress up in three-cornered hats and invoke the Founding Fathers; they give lip service to worship of Our Brave Military, yet they are too wussy to get a little bit wet and a little bit cold in the service of their Noble Cause.

Frauds. Every last one of them.

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Wednesday, June 03, 2009

The symbol of American faux-macho is now Chinese
Posted by Jill | 5:11 AM
Remember after the 9/11 attacks, when the Hummer became the must-have vehicle, the tough guy symbol to end tough guy symbols? It was one thing to slap a photo of Osama Bin Laden in crosshairs and a bumper sticker reading "These colors don't run" on the back of your Ford Expedition. But to do that on a Hummer meant you were REALLY an American patriot. You were Protecting. Your. Family.™ Never mind that you lived in Nebraska and had about as much chance of being hit by terrorists as you had of stepping out of bed and falling into the ocean. After all, the Hummer was Ah-nuld's vehicle of choice. It was big, it was badass, and in a Hummer you owned the road, your dick became bigger, and you could bully all those pussy-asses in their Civics.

I wonder how all those super-patriot Hummer owners feel now that the brand of the vehicle they love has been sold to a Chinese company:
The buyer is the Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Company, based in Chengdu, G.M. said Tuesday. The price was not disclosed, but industry analysts had estimated that the Hummer division would sell for less than $500 million.

The deal, expected to close in the third quarter, would make Tengzhong the first Chinese company to sell vehicles in North America, though Hummer’s operations would remain in the United States.

“The Hummer brand is synonymous with adventure, freedom and exhilaration, and we plan to continue that heritage by investing in the business, allowing Hummer to innovate and grow in exciting new ways under the leadership and continuity of its current management team,” Yang Yi, the chief executive of Tengzhong, said in a statement released by G.M. “We will be investing in the Hummer brand and its research and development capabilities, which will allow Hummer to better meet demand for new products such as more fuel-efficient vehicles in the U.S.”

[snip]

Tengzhong is a privately owned company, but Tuesday’s deal required preliminary vetting by Beijing officials, who retain the right to veto any effort at an overseas acquisition by a Chinese company and who give special attention to deals of more than $100 million.

Tengzhong is known in China for making a wide range of road equipment, from bridge piers to highway construction and maintenance machinery. But even before the Hummer deal, the company had been moving more into heavy-duty trucks, including tow trucks and oil tankers.

“Over all, we’re pretty pleased,” said a Hummer spokesman, Nick Richards. “If you think about the qualities we’d want in a new owner for the brand, this buyer really met all the criteria. They’ve got a proven track record in international business, and they’ve got a long-term vision for the brand. They’ve got the capital to invest in more efficient vehicles, which is what’s necessary to grow the brand.”

If the deal is completed, it would be the first acquisition of a well-known American auto brand by a Chinese company, after many months of speculation about such a deal. Chinese automakers have already purchased the MG and Rover brands, two of the most famous names in British automotive history.

As a Chinese company, Tengzhong could face a challenge in presenting the deal to American Hummer owners. The brand has long sought to emphasize patriotism, stressing that the Hummer H1 was essentially the same vehicle built in the same factory as the Humvee that carries American soldiers into battle in Iraq and elsewhere.

It should be noted that the Hummer that we see on American streets is no longer the one that was made for the U.S. military, so there's no need for wingnuts to have the vapors about the capacity for manufacture of American military vehicles being sold to the Chinese. But the symbolism of the vehicle that more than any other embodied the faux masculinity and toughness of the Bush years is now just so much detritus to be sold off to China for a relative pittance.

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Thursday, December 04, 2008

The cowboy imagery has outlived its usefulness
Posted by Jill | 6:26 AM
It looks like George W. Bush's big shows of clearing brush are over. He and Queen Thorazine are looking for a house in Dallas:
First lady Laura Bush showed off the White House on Wednesday in all its Christmas finery and let slip that the family’s Christmas present was going to be a new home in Dallas.

While prefacing her remarks by saying she "wasn’t making an announcement today," Bush sort of did make one: "We will be moving to Dallas in January. There might be a new house coming along, so that’s where we’re going to be spending our Christmas money."


I wonder how all the people who deluded themselves for eight years that this rhinestone cowboy was some kind of throwback to the macho old west think about this? More importantly, I wonder if they've learned anything from their eight years of self-delusion?

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Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Protecting John McCain from himself -- since when is this the media's job?
Posted by Jill | 6:59 AM
Last night Keith Olbermann reported on how CBS News tried to protect John McCain from his own ignorance about the timeframe in which events in Iraq took place:




As of then, only Olbermann had called both CBS News and McCain to task about yet another demonstration that John McCain is either willfully ignorant or not in possession of all his faculties. But now the story is starting to be picked up by other news outlets:

Asked about Obama's contention that a Sunni revolt against al-Qaida combined with the addition of thousands of U.S. combat troops that were sent to Iraq contributed to the improved security situation there, McCain scoffed.

"I don't know how you respond to something that is such a false depiction of what actually happened," McCain told "CBS Evening News," adding that Col. Sean MacFarland was contacted by a major Sunni sheik.

"Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others. And it began the Anbar awakening," McCain said, referring to the U.S.-backed revolt of Sunni sheiks against al-Qaida in Anbar province. "I mean, that's just a matter of history."

The problem with McCain's statement — as Obama's campaign quickly noted — was that the awakening got under way before President Bush announced in January 2007 his decision to flood Iraq with tens of thousands of additional U.S. troops to help combat violence.

In March 2007, before the first of the additional troops began arriving in Iraq, Col. John W. Charlton, the American commander responsible for Ramadi, a city in Anbar province, said the newly friendly sheiks, combined with an aggressive counterinsurgency strategy and the presence of thousands of new Sunni police on the streets, had helped cut attacks in the city by half in recent months.


You'd think by now that the McCain camp would be aware of not just the Google but the YouTube as well -- and that now a nation of citizen journalists is out there recording McCain's appearances as they actually occur, not just in the heavily edited mode that appears on the evening news. And yet every time McCain gets caught in one of his lies/mistakes/gaffes/whatever you choose to call them, he embarks on a two-prong attack: impugn Obama's patriotism, to the point of nearly accusing him of sedition, and then whine that the media -- the very same media that have hammered the expressions "maverick" and "war hero" to the point that it's become practically treason to point out any of the myriad sleazy dealings and horrific votes that have peppered McCain's Senate career -- are being mean to him.

Much of the news media's love affair with John McCain has been a function of that same thrall they had to George w. Bush in the flightsuit. It's a peculiar fixation on the Tough Authoritarian Daddy Figure; on the American Male Mythos of the soldier, the cowboy, the policeman -- indeed, all of the archetypes skewered by the Village People.

The entire framing of Barack Obama as "elitist" is a function of the latter's command of language, his natty appearance in a suit, his aura of self-confidence that doesn't rely on stereotypical, cartoonish images of maleness. That kind of confidence obviously causes a cognitive dissonance in an industry of male reporters whose knee-jerk response is to laud the external trappings of mythological maleness.

As with George W. Bush, another man well under six feet tall who wears his Napoleon complex on his sleeve by swaggering around like a bantam rooster, John McCain seems always trying to prove he's a real man, whether through his philandering or his relentless hammering of his military experience. It seems strange that this kind of self-promotion of his military experience is regarded by the media as laudable.

My late father-in-law fought in the Battle of the Bulge -- and from what Mr. Brilliant told me, he never talked about it. Oh, he would do the standard lecture of "You kids just don't appreciate what we did for you in World War II...." -- but he never hammered the idea that he was a hero, even though it's next to impossible to define anyone who fought in that battle and emerged with his body intact as anything but. This article in the Montpelier Times-Argus from the other day describes another silent war hero of WWII. This country is full of them. They are now elderly men, standing at intersections on Memorial Day selling poppies, shaking cans for the VFW, marching in sparsely-attended parades. And most of them don't talk much about their war experience.

But John McCain isn't like these men. John McCain wants you to wake up every day of your life and know that because he spent five years in a POW camp, that experience entitles him to not just the presidency, but to complete acquiescence and complete acceptance of every word out of his mouth, no matter how ignorant, clueless, or preposterous it may be.

Army Pfc. Joseph Dwyer, made famous because of a photograph in which he carried an Iraqi child to safety, didn't think he was entitled to the presidency. Instead he died from an overdose on Dust-Off after battling PTSD for years.

Tomas Young, not even out of his twenties yet and the subject of the documentary film Body of War, doesn't feel entitled to the presidency, even though he was catastrophically injured while riding in an unarmored truck, provided by a Pentagon determined to fight a war on the cheap.

Tammy Duckworth doesn't feel entitled to the presidency, even though she lost both legs in Iraq and put up with attack ads accusing her of wanting to "cut and run" during her failed 2004 Congressional race.

Ty Ziegel doesn't feel entitled to the presidency, even though he lost most of his face in Iraq and had to fight like hell to get his disability benefits.

These are just four of the many, many catastrophically injured men and women who are casualties of the Bush/McCain war of lies; veterans who have had to fight for benefits, who have been largely forgotten by a population that no longer wants to think about this war. You don't see these people whining on television that they're somehow entitled to the presidency because they have to live the rest of their lives with these injuries.

But John McCain, whose life since returning from Vietnam has been one of power, privilege, wealth, a trophy chickie wife and God knows how many mistresses, thinks that he alone of all veterans is entitled to the presidency because he suffered in war. Perhaps he should ask Ty Ziegel or Tomas Young about suffering. He at least has his face and he can walk.

Funny how John McCain, the chosen candidate of the Worshippers of Male Toughness, is so weak that he can't handle anyone asking questions.

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