And So It Begins

This was not unexpected, but it did not have to be inevitable

New York City police in riot gear swept into a Lower Manhattan park early today to remove hundreds of Occupy Wall Street demonstrators who had been camping there for more than eight weeks to protest income inequality.

The action followed similar moves that shut camps in Oakland, California, and Portland, Oregon. New York police and the park’s owners told protesters at 1 a.m. local time to remove items including tents and sleeping bags, after which city workers cleared remaining belongings, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said. The park will remain closed until the city can review a judge’s restraining order seeking to allow protesters to return with their belongings, the mayor said.

“The First Amendment protects speech,” the mayor said in a press conference at City Hall. “It doesn’t protect the use of tents and sleeping bags to take over public space.”

Actually, Mayor Mike, the First Amendment right to assembly does precisely that, and it is not limited in the constitution. And Zuccotti Park, while a private place, was created in exchange for a zoning variance and therefore is quasi-public space. You've screwed the pooch, mayor.

But I digress...

It was inevitable that the protestors would be tested. Between the cold weather (which if I had been mayor and wanted this to die away, is what I would have waited for) and the anger of surrounding residents (sorry, there's a price for living near a stock exchange), something was bound to give. What was not inevitable was the forcible eviction of people who have been nothing but compliant to the concerns of officials and neighbors.

All kinds of excuses have been proffered: health risks (yes, because sooooooooo many of the protestors were being rushed to hospitals, and are uninsured...wait, that's the POINT!), security risks (crime at OWS is lower than the surrounding, still-well-patrolled neighborhood), sanitation (admittedly, hundreds of people create a mess over a period of time, no matter how well they clean up after themselves), community issues (all of which OWS was willing to address, and has always been willing to address), even inconvenience to the surrounding commuters and workers.

None of which is sufficient to justify tearing the thing down, destroying books and videos, throwing away food, clothing and shelter. None of which justifies debasing a peaceful protest that has done nothing but try to live within the law.

And now you leave them with fewer options than they started the protest with: jobs are harder to come by, housing is weaker than before, and no one will listen to the truth.

OWS scares the people who cheer on the dismantling of Occupy. The fact that young, bright people with college degrees-- people who should be higher on the ladder of success-- are forced to live for months in a park because they can't get jobs that pay them a living wage (nevermind allow them to pay off student loans) is a scar on the American conscience, and the people who oppose the OWS protests are terrified that, there but for the grace of God, go them. They want to be in denial of the facts because facts are scary things. Also, facts have a known liberal bias.

And they should be scared. There's 99% of Americans who, if they suffered a catastrophic illness or the loss of a job or a divorce or some humiliation of equivalent degree, would be in precisely the same position as these people are now. All 326.7 million of us.

 

This isn't a bunch of dirty smelly hippies. These folks represent the rest of us. They do not lie when they call themselves the 99%.

Pretty Decent Electoral Strategy, Mittens

 

Mitt Romney has decided, finally, to try to win the GOP nomination next year

Investigate Kevin Hiltunen

 

He's retired from the NYPD on a disability pension, but he seems able enough to throw a 33 year old man around like a sack.

 

Investigate, try, and then send his sorry ass up to SingSing where he can be a shower toy.

I Dunno

 

These folks sound like a right wing plant

This Week In Anthropomorphism

 

Spiders seem awfully human here, dontcha think?

Guess Who Else Railed About Tax Inequality?

 

Ronald Reagan

Another Quirk Of The Body

You can prevent heart attacks...by getting your teeth cleaned?

 

We've long known about the connection between tooth decay and any number of deadly illnesses, but this goes one step beyond.

Supercommittee Ain't

 

Rather than be courageous and act now, the Soopercommittee has decided to kick the can of the nitty gritty of deficit reduction down the road.

 

Next?

Another Another Cog In The Wheel

 

Congresscritters can avail themselves of insider trading information.

 

Apparently, this is legal. With all the campaign finance laws that actually DO exist, a Congresscritter's stock portfolion, even those held in trust, ought to be public knowledge.

Conservatives Get Butthurt Because They Have Boring Candidates

 

Don't blame CBS. Blame the fact you shop for candidates like a drunk sailor in a whorehouse with only $50.

Another Cog On The Wheel

 

Whether you support the Teabaggers or Occupy Wall Street, one thing is clear: so long as those who sit in power can benefit from the system, that system will never change.

AUSTIN, Texas—Rick Perry, who bashes federal spending everywhere he goes on the presidential campaign trail, has spent 11 years as Texas' governor asking Washington for money.

Perry sought and received $24.2 billion in stimulus funding for Texas while saying the program was bad federal policy. He helped secure more than $100 million to protect against drug violence and illegal immigration on the Mexican border. The governor also endorsed his state's request for money under President Barack Obama's new health care law, though he now promises to help repeal the measure should he win the White House.

Most of all, Perry asked for emergency federal aid for victims of wildfires, tornadoes, hurricanes, droughts, flooding and crop-killing heat waves and freezes in his state's 254 counties. Texans hit by natural disasters "deserve a more immediate, compassionate response from their federal government," Perry wrote in a November 2009 letter complaining that the Housing and Urban Development Department was slow in aiding hurricane victims.

I'm not going to get into Rick Perry's psyche here. It's pretty obvious that he would do a disservice to his state by not seeking Federal aid, and while he may be the blazingly closeted hypocrite this article makes him out to be, we should remember that Barack Obama made a similar pledge (about accepting campaign contributions and lobbyists serving in his administration) but finds himself cozying up to special interests, lobbyists and the corporatocracy, all to get re-elected.

Similarly, tax breaks for the rich aren't about to go away so long as those rich can pony up more money than Croesus to serve to candidates and for "issue ads" and superpacs. Stephen Colbert's Colbert Superpac is one of the cleverest political satires I've ever seen, bringing to the forefront a vital issue while at the same time making a spectacle of it.

Government spending, campaign finance reform, inequitable taxation; none of these are likely to go away anytime soon barring a massive revolt from you and me, I'm afraid.

There's more. Much more: transparency in governance, election reform (to prevent the...to put it politely...pre-counting of votes), accountability, and the chance to be heard by your elected representatives. None of these are likely to change anytime in the near future.

The Occupy folks have it right. We as a people cannot sit idly by in private, becoming disgusted and dismayed at the direction our nation is taking. We must take action, even if that action is to sit idly by in public, demonstrating our disgust and dismay on national television night after night.

It's easy to mock OWS as a bunch of confused kids with no clue what they want or how to go about getting it, but you know what?

They're one step ahead of the rest of us. We're all confused. They're just admitting it.

 

That's No Woman

 

That's my wife!

 

Man, is the shit going to hit the fan in the Cain household after this story fully breaks.

Voting Rights? Revoked.

But gun rights? Oh hell yea.

Thank you, NRA and Teabaggers.

Nobody Asked Me, But....

1) NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! HE'S GONE! TO ELEVEN! (photo courtesy)

 

2) As well it should. Only five schools have ever gotten the NCAA death penalty, given for major felonies like accepting a slushee from a donor. Penn State ought to be six. LITTLE CHILDREN WERE RAPED!

 

3) Yes, the Occupy movement is just a bunch of lazy stoned hippies who don't want to work. Sure. 

 

4) Elitist New Yorker is elitist. 

 

5) I disagree with this sentence, but not the verdict. She killed her husband, but she also suffered two decades of physical abuse and finally snapped. Five years in jail for this incident is way too harsh. Five years in-house imprisonment sounds fairer.

 

6) It's a start. It's watered down and barely adequate, but it's a start.

 

7) On this Veteran's Day, we ought to start respecting our fighting men and women. Dontcha think?

 

8) Jim Romenesko resigning from Poynter is like Santa Claus resigning from Christmas. BRING HIM BACK! Over a quotation mark? Really????

 

9) Egypt needs a sense of humour.

 

10) Attention Rdenecks! Wear a condom...

Too Soon?

CAIN/PATERNO 2012

WE GOT YOUR FAMILY COVERED

Melancholia

This premiered last night on HD Movies, and was actually pretty good. It opens in theatres this Friday.

 

Written and directed by the controversial Hitler-wannabe Lars Von Trier, it focuses on two sisters (played by Kirsten Dunst, who really has evolved as an actress, and Charlotte Gainsbourg) and how they react to the end of the world in a collision with a rogue planet that looks suspicious Earth-like.

 

Visually, the film is stunning and it's really hard to balance the overall impending crisis on such a large scale with the small-scale claustrophobia of the family. Von Trier does a pretty spectacular job of it, especially as you know how the story must end. The isolation of these four people (Kiefer Sutherland plays a brother-in-law to Dunst, and Gainsbourg has a son), combined with the emotional instability of Dunst's character, Justine, make for a nice combination of "inner reflection, outer panic" that plays our beautifully.

Throwing The Tools Under The Bus

 

The Murdochs really are despicable

The Dam Breaks

 

More to come

You Know Those Gut Reactions You Have?

 

Better pay more attention to them: that's your back-up brain talking to you.

HamedaHamedaHameda

 

Jeesus! The guy can't even get his own SCRIPT right!

Buh-Bye! Don't Let The Door Hit You On The Way Out!

 

I suppose eventually Joe Paterno will reveal what he was thinking when confronted with allegations of child rape by a graduate assistant in 1998. He claims he was only told of fondling and horseplay, but Mike McQueary (who has his own complicity to answer for) testified that he specifically mentioned anal rape.

 

At 84, it's conceivable that Paterno has learned to filter that effectively, to hear ugly truths as less-ugly euphemisms. We all learn coping mechanisms and for someone who both lived his life in a regimented, authoritarian organization (and led it for most of that time) as well as being a man who clearly spent a lot of time in church, another authoritarian patriarchal hierarchy, perhaps he's trained himself to ignore the underside of both.

 

Whatever. He got what was coming to him last night. His reaction, stunned disbelief, speaks to so many things about the psyche of the privileged that it would take a book by a psychologist to fully probe this reaction.

 

I honestly think he believed that, by offering to fall on his sword-- at his convenience, of course-- he could save himself the embarrassment of a firing. After all, there's only three games left in the regular season schedule and no Bowl would dare give Penn State a post-season bid now. Imagine the shock.

 

The trustees really had no choice: they have to deal in the real world, not the insular world of the spoiled. Those are the folks who have to go out and fund raise, and look donors in the eye and explain how a man could go three decades and do the bare minimum to protect the community at large. By taking swift and decisive action, they at least restore a little faith that the entire university ain't broken.

 

Paterno, Graham Spanier, McQueary, former athletic director Tim Curley, and former university vice president Gary Schultz will likely face criminal charges for at least perjury until the entire story is sorted out. Absolutely, they should (the Pennsylvania and United States Departments of Education have already announced inquiries into the matter.)

 

There are no sympathetic figures here. The best you can say is that some people did the bare minimum to comply with the law, but not with morals and conscience, and they had every opportunity to do more, but for whatever failing-- loyalty to a friend, ambition to rise in an organization, fealty to a university, fear, repulsion, perhaps even stunned silence reliving old memories of his childhood-- it is outrageous that this little boy and at least a half dozen others suffered for their silences.

 

Live with that image, gentlemen.

NOTE to Right Wing Asshats

(photo courtesy)

 

THIS is what spoiled privileged college kids look like when they protest.

 

This is NOT Occupy Wall Street.

 

 

Poor "Job Creators"

 

They'll need to double down now.

Herman Cain Fails Geography

 

Thinks Mount Rushmore is in the Black Hills

 

Wait...what? It is???

This Stuff Is Blacker Than "Shaft"

 

NASA invents the darkest material known to man

This Is Not A Repeat From Three Years Ago

 

Toyota is recalling a half million cars.

That Was Only A Test

 

Don't sweat it, and come up out of the bunker.

Today In #OWS

 

Occupy Atlanta demonstrators surround the home of a police officer.

 

To save it from foreclosure.

Cain Is Able

 

He'd take a lie detector test. But he won't.

You've Heard Of Kitlers?

 

Cats (or kittens) who look like Hitler?

 

You know who else resembles an animal?

Not News: Healthcare Reform Upheld On Appeal

 

News: By a panel of conservative judges.

But There's No Global Warming!!!

 

Hurricane in Alaska.

Suck It, Teabaggers*

 

A really good off-year election for Democrats, who are normally the party of "I don't give a rat's ass," but this year showed motivation and commitment to the causes.

 

Collective bargaining was upheld in Ohio (because, really, who wants to vote against the guy who might save your life in a fire?), Mississippi's "personhood" initiative-- that basically says life begins at ovulation-- was defeated, and Dems held legislative majorities and office across the South.

 

But most important? Gov. Chris Christie (R-Obesity) was repudiated in his attempts to steal the New Jersey legislature for the Republicans. He put his personal reputation on the line for several candidates, appearing in television and radio commercials that were so expensive, many candidates pooled campaign resources to get them on the air...AND FAILED!

 

Every Democrat (indeed, every incumbent) was re-elected.

 

It was just one year ago that conservatives were crowing about the Teabaggers and a movement, and the long-sought permanent conservative majority. It was just one year ago that the fantasy of a Christie Presidency was floated.

 

And now, like a Macy's Thanksgiving balloon impaled on a spike of reality, that's gone. Deflated. The man couldn't even steal one seat in his own state where he allegedly has broad support of the voters. So much for being Mitt Romney's running mate. Indeed, so much for making campaign appearances for Romney in a general election.

 

The Sidney Greenstreet wannabe earned it. He's bullied, hectored and rancored his way to the governor's office, taking advantage of yet another incumbent NJ governor embroiled in scandal, and proven yet again that Republicans don't have the werewithal to lead without clubbing people. I have no doubt that, had Christie negotiated in good faith in the past ten months, he would have been more successful in accomplishing his goal yesterday.

 

In small, we've seen the evolution of the Teabagger movement play out in New Jersey: meteoric rise based on the "squeaky wheel" theory, only to find out that giving them a little grease didn't solve the problems, but only made them worse.

 

* I mean, of course, suck the teabag.

Absolutely Awful

 

Given my personal history with rape and abuse, I'm having a very hard time reading this story and not having a visceral, emotional and disturbing reaction.

 

Y'know, you think you have your history sorted, and then you read about a ten year old boy being ass-raped...

This Day In Whoville

Who?

 

Who?

 

Who?

 

Who?

 

Who?

 

 

Hey, Bill? Stick To Keno

 

Spare us your poutrage.

 

Men have been the butt of jokes for milennia.

 

So have women.

Thanks For Pointing That Out, Captain Obvious!

(image courtesy)

 

No evidence aliens have contacted Earth or earthlings.

Take That, Critics!

 

One of the fair, if really nitpicky, criticisms of the Occupy Wall Street movement is the general whiteness of the protest.

 

As if the Teabaggers were the most racially diverse groups on the planet, but I digress.

 

Well, yesterday, that changed.

 

Eleven miles. Most Teabaggers couldn't walk eleven feet without sitting down to rest.

Stupid Activist Judge Is Stupid

 

Cigarette warning labels are on hold.

Hey! Weaker Boener!

 

WHERE ARE THE MOTHERFUCKING JOBS?

One Possible Outcome

 

With the controversy over Sarkozy's comments about Netanyahu, one should not overlook Israel's ace-in-the-hole to make the world forget about the insult.

 

Taking on Iran

I Pity The Fool

(photo courtesy)

 

Joe Frazier would have been The Greatest fighter of his generation, but for a man named Ali.

 

I mimicked Ali when I fought, because I was agile and quick, but deep down, I wanted to be feared like Joe Frazier was when push came to punch.

"Setting The Record Straight"

 

I think that metaphor might be inappropriate, Herman

Note To Sarko

 

Welcome to the party, pal!

The remarks were part of what the American and French leaders believed to be a private chat after a news conference in Cannes last week, during the G20 economic conference. The pair were still wearing microphones, and some journalists who still had their headphones on for translation caught the remarks, which were first reported by the French photo agency Arret Sur Images.

A Reuters news agency reporter who was also present has since confirmed the exchange.

As the two leaders discussion turns to Israel and the Palestinians, Sarkozy is first to express his distaste for the conservative Israeli Prime Minister.

"I cannot bear Netanyahu, he's a liar," the French president was heard to say.

In response, according to the account by Arret Sur Images, Mr. Obama sympathizes with Sarkozy's frustration, saying, "you're fed up, but I have to deal with him every day."

There is no immediate indication as to whether a recording of the private conversation exists.

I have no doubt it does. Journalists-- not the sheepish kind we have here in America who bleat whatever their corporatist overlords tell them, but the real ones that report overseas-- tend to be sticklers for on the record accuracy, and on-the-fly translations are not always the most accurate available. Someone's dictaphone was running.

Netanyahu seems to have an issue when it comes to honesty. At least once, he's had to drop out of politics due to a scandal involving corruption, including charges of infidelity. In 1997, Israeli police recommended his indictment for influence peddling, and again in 1999, on charges that he accepted $100,000 in free personal services from a government contractor. Neither time was an indictment handed up.

But it seems clear that Netanyahu has some familiarity with lying.

So now we have an influential European leader, president Sarkozy, calling Netanyahu out for his lies, and the most powerful leader in the free world, President Obama, sort of off-handedly agreeing with him.

I'm not completely convinced there isn't some political theatre involved here. As recently as September, Sarkozy offered up a proposal to grant the Palestinians observer status in the United Nations, a sort of half-hearted, ham-handed proposal that marked Sarkozy as the de facto mediator in that Middle East dispute.

It's conceivable that Obama has ceded the traditional American leadership role with respect to Israel to the French, and that Sarkozy was merely commenting on his frustrations with Netanyahu. It's also conceivable that Obama has Sarkozy acting as a figurehead in the dialogue to remove himself as a target of the right wing neo-con yammerheads for whom Israel = God.

After all, although raised strictly Catholic, Sarkozy can claim Jewish heritage (his mother is a Greek Jew by birth, which automatically confers Jewish status on Sarkozy by Talmudic law,) which gives him some credibility in these matters.

And as a conservative politician, for whatever that means in terms of French politics as opposed to American, he quiets the right wing who are too quick to defend him after his attempts to remake the French labor force more in the image of America.

So a part of me believes this was staged diplomatic theatre of the kind that Netanyahu cannot ignore but also cannot overreact to, which explains the mysterious silence with regards to the matter from Jerusalem. He's trying to figure out the correct response.

Cain't Touch This

 

Ohboy. Looks like ol' Hermanator is now Hermanover!

Myth America

 

Things you didn't know about our country, but thought you did.

 

I got 13 of 14. I'll let you guess which one I missed.

A Primer On

 

Mormonism.

 

Honestly, any "religion" that has at its heart an angel named Moron is giving a wink-and-a-nod.

I Wonder....

....how many Republicans look at this matrix and say "If only Huntsman was running."

Why Occupy Wall Street Will Ultimately Win

 

It's not just income inequality between rich and poor.

 

It's also income inequality between young and old.

50 Million

 

Thank you, Republican party and Bush presidency. Could you have been bigger dooshes?

It's Getting Nasty Out There

 

I think the OWS folks are going to have to amp up the volume now.

It's One Thing To Be Electable

 

It's quite another to be likable. Mitt, you ain't that likable.

First It Was Virginia

 

Now it's Oklahoma.

 

God must really hate them conservatives.

Skeptically Mournful

 

Cold fusion has been a topic of conversation for decades, ever since the disgraced Fleischmann/Pons experiments.

 

Italian researchers seem to have duplicated the experiment, but...

 

There is still no peer-review that duplicates the results, because the basic protocols behind the process have been deliberately hidden, as the scientists plan to go straight to the market with a device based on their work.

 

Long gone are the days iof Jonas Salk and free polio vaccines, I guess.

Cutting Off Your Nose To Spite Your Face

When Teabaggers talk about the high price of public employees, I wonder if this is who they mean?

Ginny Townsend, 41, took a job in January as a nursing assistant in the state-run home for veterans here. Technically, she works for a private company that supplies some employees to the veterans home under a [Michigan] state contract. She makes $10 an hour, about half the wage of the public employees working at the facility.

“I love my job, and I appreciate the opportunity to be here,” Ms. Townsend, a former home health care aide, said on a recent afternoon as she cheerfully delivered fruit and a newspaper to an 85-year-old resident in a sun-drenched solarium.

With the national unemployment rate at roughly 9 percent, Ms. Townsend says she feels lucky just to have a job. But on her low wages, she is barely scraping by. She said she was raising four grandchildren under 11 with her unemployed sister and could not support them without the $300 in food stamps she collects every month.

Do a little math here: $10 an hour works out to less than $23,000 a year, so $20 an hour works out to a little over $45,000 a year. Undoubtedly, with benefits and insurance costs, and of course profit, her employer is being paid about $20 an hour for each full-time equivalent (not all employees would work a full time shift). The average private care worker in Michigan is paid $12.25 per hour.

On top of this, she takes down $300 in food assistance each month or $3,600.

In other words, the state pays $55,000 or so for a $50,000 employee. OK, the state incurs other expenditures like pension contributions and other benefits mandated by collective bargaining, but the differential is clearly not as grand as Teabaggers would have you believe. call it $55,000 for a private contractor's employee versus $60,000 for a public worker.

But Townsend's case highlights the real danger in offsourcing jobs to contractors: Contractors are going to hire the cheapest, underpaid workers, which means they will hire less qualified workers, since even average workers will earn $12.25 per hour, which means that the quality of care will diminish while also draining state resources in other ways (unemployment benefits, food assistance, and so on.)

The savings, in other words, is minimal at best and likely a real waste of state resources.

 

This is not to say that the state should never outsource work. There are some jobs the private sector will do better than the public sector, and if the area is non-critical, it seems to be those are areas where outsourcing might commence. But no one wants to see the public security and health risked for a false profit.

Options Include Comic Sans

 

Test drive your fonts

Hey! Rick Scott!

 

Where's the MOTHERFUCKING jobs, Governor?

Hey! Weaker Boener! (II)

 

WHERE'S THE MOTHERFUCKING JOBS?

So How Much Does The Internet Weigh?

 

About this much

So I'm Guessing The Entire Nineties, Limbaugh Was A Leftist

 

Sexual harassment: A tool of liberals.

 

(jeez, I can't believe I just linked to Little Green Footballs...)

This Is Your Governor, Florida

 

Hell, even I know there's a Tampa Bay!

News Of The Werld

 

Mickey Kaus (google it) has unveiled his Christmas tree.

Having Been Thwarted On Debit Card Fees....

 

 

....Bank of America gets a bit more serious about ATM fees.

Did FOX News Conspire To Cause A Terror Attack?

 

It's unlikely, but it is possible.

Hey! Weaker Boener!

 

WHERE ARE THE MOTHERFUCKING JOBS????

Prediction

 

Wholesale dismissals

Answer Peace With Teargas

 

What are the Oakland PD thinking?!?!?!??!

That Depends On What The Meaning Of "Is" Is

 

I sort of see Herman Cain "Canegate" going down the twists and turns of legalese in short order.

 

I mean, really, when FOX's best defenses of the candidate are to point out that two of the accusers work for the government-- like tens of millions Americans nationwide and around the world do--  and also what words were exchanged, things are pained in Cain's campaign.

 

This, ahead of new allegations, admittedly even more unsubstantiated and hearsay than the original two, that Cain's straining cane plain changed the game for him in this campaign.

 

And amid countercharges, further unsubstantiated, that Rick Perry and Mitt Romney may have each independently (or worse, in collusion) planted these stories. Ironic that Cain's initial attempts to smooth the ruffles down amounted to "these tales are unsubstantiated," yet he had no problem flinging poo.

 

It really does come down to "he said, she said." Which is bad news for Cain, since he's running for an actual office, no matter how fictitious his campaign may be. He will really need to make some decisions here: run or quit, reveal or cover-up, confront or deflect.

 

If history is any guide, and in these matters, it should be, Cain's best move is to either quit, or reveal. The truth will out, even if that truth looks nothing like the original question made public. As an example, Bill Clinton was originally investigated for an affair with Gennifer Flowers, confronted that, and still ended up in court over Paula Jones, who ended up the person most exploited in her own law suit.

 

In politics, the cover-up is almost always worse than the crime. Had Clinton fessed up to serial affairs, gotten them out of the way, he probably would have gotten a pass in office on any future affairs, and the whole Lewinski matter probably doesn't come up (pardon the pun.)

 

 

Holy Shit!

 

An *adult* deer???

Stopped Dead In Its Tracks

 

Ageing.

Playing The Victim Card

 

Welp, you had to know Cain would go here sometime!

This Day IN Republican Fellation

 

Reagan National Airport now has a new pigeon potty.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

 

In a good faith effort to help male shoppers who buy lingerie for their wives and girlfriends, a shop in Sweden had its employees wear tags which stated cup and bra size.

 

What could possibly go wrong?

What Bush Got Wrong, What Obama Gets Right

 

The old grey America, she ain't what she used to be.

You Know Who Else Named His Son "Adolf Hitler"?

 

Should that be cause enough to take a child away from his parents?

Sex Scandals Are Good News

 

Especially if you're a black Republican

On The One Hand...

 

...I can understand why Greece President George Papandreou put the EU bailout of his country up for a popular referendum: you might as well make sure the people understand the terms of the arrangement, and whether they want to accept it or drop out of the EU. Too, you disable your opposition from calling the deal unpopular or rushed through without the support of the people.

 

On the other, the timing seems a little off to me. He's already survived a confidence vote this year, so this measure merely opens up that can of worms again.

 

However, he has a couple of things going for him. His party holds a slim two-seat majority in the Greek legislature.A vote of no confidence means a general election would be forced, which would likely see his party lose seats and therefore, power. Likely, the votes would go along party lines, and Papandreou would live on to fight another day.

 

Also, the call for a referendum has been coyly raised so nebulously that it almost forces the EU, particularly the Germans, to take another look at the deal with an eye towards sweetening the pot a little. After all, a Greek collapse and pull-out of the EU would trigger a cascade effect of defaults and write-downs that would impact the fragile recovery the west is enduring.

Doubling Down On The Silly

 

Well, Rick Perry said he "felt great" when he gave the already infamous Cornerstone Action speech over the weekend.

 

Psychoactive drugs can do that.

 

Errrr, so I've heard.

 

Seriously, if your excuse for putting on that kind of performance is simply that you "feel great," this raises all kinds of questions about your emotional and mental state.

 

It seems more likely that he ingested something that took him off his feed, in which case, the easier solution is simply to fess up and move on. Hell, President Obama admitted to doing cocaine, so it's not like prescription meds or even marijuana is going to put people off by now.

 

My guess is he smoked a doob, probably for the first time since high school (maybe college in his case. Or with his last hooker. Or last week.)

 

Hell, I half expected to see him demand Twinkies, a bag of Cheetos and some Gatorade.

 

So now we get down to the nitty gritty about this candidate: is he a stoner or a psycho? Either way, he and his staff have opened a door they may wanted to keep shut. Whichever of his handlers let him get out on stage like that, who couldn't come up with a "I'm sorry, the governor is under the weather," deserves to be fired.

 

Look at this from a realist perspective: here's a man who stood a snowball's chance in New Hampshire. He might have placed third (could still do that, by the way,) but fourth is a more likely finish for him. He didn't need to give this speech, particularly in light of his inability to come up with a coherent sentence at the past debates he has participated in.

 

Indeed, he's now set a standard where he pretty much has to recreate this behavior each and every time he appears in front of an audience or camera, else how will he explain to those voters why he's not in such a "feel great" state of mind.

 

People notice these things. Cornerstone is a family values organization, you see, so if you felt comfortable cutting it up in front of those bluenoses, why won't you poke some fun at yourself at, say, the Manchester Guardian or on the stump? Rick Perry hasn't exactly established his comedic or even his sardonic credentials. It's not like this is Robin Williams doing twenty at a steamfitters' convention.

Herman Cain Is My Name, And I Rode On The Scandal Train

 

Uh oh. Looks like ol' Hermie's wormie was busy wizzy

Is It Just Me?

 

Or is this a bald-faced lie?

Fighting Fire With Fire

 

I was watching a re-run of Stephen Colbert last night, the one where he consults with Republican strategist Frank Luntz regarding the message that Colbert Super-Pac wants to sell to the American people: Corporations are people, too.

 

Luntz is a master of the summing up complex concepts into sound bites.

 

Let me rephrase that: he's the master of summing up noxious concepts into palatable sound bites and vice versa (for example, he came up with "death taxes" for estate taxes.)

 

His phrasing evokes emotional responses. He's very good at that.

 

We have to get better. And here's where this ties in to the current situation in this country.

 

Occupy Wall Street terrifies the people in charge. After all, there are tens of thousands of people nationwide who are camping, day in and day out, to protest the inherent inequality of income and the inherent unfairness of the US tax code.

 

I've been straining to recall when a Teabagger rally on similar topics lasted for more than a few hours, and that was in clement weather in the spring and summer. These kids have made it through a freak snowstorm and are still hanging in there.

 

How could the powers that be not be afraid?

 

Think about that imagery: the right, via their useful idiots and tools, has tried to cast OWS as a bunch of spoiled white lefty brats who's mommies and daddies cut them out of the will because they were dope-addled and sexually promiscuous (itself, a pretty powerful trope: the scary hippy.)

 

That imagery, which had some legs at first because of the way the news reported the story (up until the pepper-spray incident,) as a bunch of disgruntled interns and low-level clerical workers with English degrees getting fired and thrown out of their apartments, sort of falls apart after the first week of camp-outs, much less the subsequent brute force by the police, the cooling temperatures, the world-wide solidarity, and the general genial mien taken by the protestors.

 

The right couldn't just mash this into the dirt and cover it over, is what I'm saying.

 

The imagery the OWS folks have out there is now too powerful, and although the colder weather will likely lessen in its impact, it can always be picked up again in the spring. It's an emotional, gut protest, and people have responded to it.

 

This is the kind of imagery and argument we need to raise elsewhere. Right now, the craftsmen of the right, like Luntz, have co-opted the dialogue. We need to get it back. But how?

 

We need to look to marry language to logic, but also to emotions. We need arguments that are so simple and so powerful that they defy rebuttal.

 

Let's take the abortion argument for a moment. The single biggest protest in America is the annual March For Life. March for Life attracts upwards of a quarter-million people consistently. 

 

Abortion is an emotional matter for them. We can cite statistics until we're blue in the face, like how the US birth rate has not declined one bit despite all these "millions of dead babies" (their term,) or we can talk about the improvement in the quality of living the babies which are eventually born not to teenage mothers but to women with jobs and careers and long-term partners will have. Not one second of these arguments will sway a single mind on the right.

 

And those are perfectly logical arguments. But why not tie those to the alternative: women who spend twenty years in servitude (slavery even) because they've made a mistake.

 

Why not provide imagery, in the form of a counter-protest: get five thousand women to march in torn dirty muslin smocks, chained at the neck and feet with dolls dangling from the other end of those chains?

 

After all, if the scare tactic of showing photos of an aborted fetus is within bounds for the religious right, then equally alarming and disturbing imagery ought to be utilized in response.  

 

We need to make an emotional case to the American people about the progressive agenda. We don't have much time and there is much to be done. The nation is heading down a bleak path, even if we can all pull together and we must all pull together or things will get dire, indeed.

Is "Anonymous" Crazy?

 

I sure hope so.

That'll Be One Lonely Dog

 

Rick Santorum promises to die.

Keep Wall Street Occupied

 

I used to do this with all those subscription cards that keep falling out of magazines that I already subscribed to, but this guy's on the right track.

Things That Make You Go "Hmmm"

 

What if the entire housing bubble was designed to keep America (the government) in debt?

Lemme See....

 

We're older, poorer, and much much more crowded now.

 

Nope. Nothing bad could possibly come of this!

A Sensible Solution

 

It's so smart, it'll never pass.

ZOMBIES ISREAL!

 

Well....sort of

 

There are plenty of parallels between a mythical zombie outbreak and any number of possible natural disasters, from floods (relentlessly swarming over barricades) to earthquakes (causing people to flee in mass panic.)

 

Ohio is smart to take advantage of this theme on Halloween.

Next Friday

 

It will be National Corduroy Appreciation day.

 

Wait. What?

But There's No Real Poverty Or Hunger!

 

True, the Post article makes it sound like just a bunch of wacky hipsters trying to spare their ramen noodles for a rainy day, but this goes on in less afluent neighborhoods with less fussy stores than Trader Joe's or Whole Foods, and a lot more frequently.

So Just How Much Trouble Is The GOP In?

 

Herman Cain leads polling in Iowa...and he hasn't even shown up yet!

It's Only October!

 

It's not unheard of for NYC and the northeast to get snow in October. Usually, indeed the vast majority of times apart from the higher elevations and latitudes, it's a trace, just enough to sugar frost the mums.

 

This weekend was pretty icky. At least a million and a half without power, hundreds of thousands unable to commute to work, tens of thousands more suffering with no heat or hot water (cheap landlords + early freezing = bad situation)

The Destruction Of The Republican Party

 

OK, the 2012 election will be a watershed, not because Barack Obama will win re-election, but because we will witness the destruction of the Republican party as we know it.

 

David Frum lays out the various scenarios here.

 

You'll notice that, even the positions where he has Republicans winning, the road is much tougher than it is for Obama. For example, assume Mitt Romney is nominated. He has a hard time corraling 30% of the GOP vote now in the primaries. That lack of enthusiasm will work against him, as it did McCain, in 2012. It's unlikely that a candidate who can't pull a third of his own party a year out will win an election against a popular center-right Democrat.

 

If Romney is nominated and loses the general (the most likely scenario,) the Tea Party could bolt the Republican party completely. "See? We told you. Nominate someone we don't like, and he loses. It's happened twice now!"

 

And if by some dint of luck, a Teabagger like Perry or Palin is nominated, and loses, the establishment Republicans will throw their hands up in disgust. It will be a cold day in hell before the moneymen start ponying up for the party, prefering to sit it out and wait for a better crop of candidate to pop up.

 

But who? Marco Rubio, the Senator from Florida has his own "birther" issues, and if the Teabaggers do succeed in getting one of their own in, they will effectively gain control of the machinery. Rubio will be dead in the water. Rick "Lex Luthor" Scott? Not particularly popular even in his own state, and a similar problem faces Scott Walker.

 

They'd have to dig very very deep to find a plausible candidate in 2016. It's possible that Jeb Bush could make a run at rehabilitating the Bush name in time for that election, and there's always the Chris Christie card (but then, Christie will have had another four years to alienate his own state, yet again.)

 

And if you think on the final possibility, the impossible possibility of a Teabagger winning the election, we'll be stuck with four years of internal bickering that makes the battle between Democrats and Republicans look like a sandbox squabble.

 

While the nation burns.

 

The backdrop to all these machinations is the very collapse of American society, something Niall Ferguson gets into in his Daily Beast column. I rarely agree with his conclusions, but I think his analysis has some merit. It's very likely that we are watching the destruction of America as a society as we knew it. Not in the Roman fashion, with Vandal and Visigoth invaders, but in the manner of the Soviet Union, crushed under the weight of its own hubris and inability to understand jus thow devastated its citizenry was.

 

Complete with our own Solidarity movement, the Occupy Wall Streeters.

 

Ferguson breaks down the rise of western society around the 1500s into five separate sectors (what he clumsily calls "killer apps".) How many of these still apply to America, much less the west?

COMPETITION
Western societies divided into competing factions, leading to progressive improvements.

THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION
Breakthroughs in mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology.

THE RULE OF LAW
Representative government based on private-property rights and democratic elections.

MODERN MEDICINE
19th- and 20th-century advances in germ theory, antibiotics, and anesthesia.

THE CONSUMER SOCIETY
Leaps in productivity combined with widespread demand for more, better, and cheaper goods.

THE WORK ETHIC
Combination of intensive labor with higher savings rates, permitting sustained capital accumulation.

We no longer have competition that grows us, ours divides us. Competition towards growth has been stifled by the very "capitalist system" we espouse. We no longer lead the world in scientific breakthroughs, altho this is less true in Europe than it is here. Law in America is a joke, as it can be bought and malleated by corporate money. Medicine, we may still lead the way in terms of quality of care, but that care is all but unaffordable and our research labs are dry as a bone for medical advances, having lost most of our good doctors back to the nations they came from (China, Korea, India.)

Consumer society speaks for itself. We've borrowed ourselves, at the behest of our corporate overlords, into bankruptcy.

And the work ethic is a sham. Americans work longer hours and are more productive not because they want to be competitive. They do that just to keep up the standard of living they've had for the past thirty years-- in other words, paying off that massive debt. They aren't earning more money for their efforts and there's no incentive to work any harder or more efficiently beyond that.

This, too, will impact the Republican party, the one most visibly tied to the failed capitalist system that we claim to espouse, the party with the closest ties to the corporatocracy that has killed America.

 

A Good Cain-ing

 

Well, looks like the ugly head of Lewinski has reared up to confront the Republicans, finally.

 

Here's the thing: it didn't matter to me if Clinton was getting it from any number of women. It doesn't matter to me if Cain has the local little shop of whorers on speed dial.

 

But when you sexually harass a subordinate, that speaks volumes about your managerial style.

 

So I guess the question to ask about Cain is, "Where the white women at?"