Support PBS

Cuz this is a tiny little taste of what they can do.



Go ahead - try to feel shitty about something right now.

And btw - it's good to reflect and to try to recapture some small element of the simple joys of being alive; the unencumbered soaring spirit of youth.

But let's be smart about it - and let's try not to get too carried away, OK?

Two Guitars

hat tip = Little Green Footballs

Today's Eternal Sadness

(lifted wholesale from Balloon Juice):

You can have my metadata, but you will pry the projectile fired by my [firearm of choice] out of my cold, dead partner.

Not to mention this.

This is not to diminish the implications of Osama Bin Laden’s victory — his ability to terrify the US into surrendering willingly what we have long said was worth fighting for. That’s been coming a long time –see this ProPublica timeline (h/t TPM) for a quick overview of just how we’ve done it to ourselves over the last four decades. But, I can’t cease getting heart sick at each new anecdote, each new framing of the rolling massacre that takes Americans by the dozens every damn day of the year…every year.

So, for those who declare the 2nd amendment the one sure bulwark against tyranny, I have a question:
Where were you when the surveillance state was forming? What are you going to do about it now? What tree, exactly, has been watered by the blood of all the men, women, and children lost to suicide, to partner-murder, to bad luck, to whatever.

Feh.

Update: On tweeting this post I got a message from Chris Clarke, who made this chart and posted it to his Facebook pagealmost exactly a year ago. I’m glad to be able to make the acknowledgement here.

Today's Dismal-ness

For all the time we spend blathering on about how rotten the schools are; and for all the inked up dead trees that eventually serve no purpose except to keep our Christmas decorations safe - for all of that over-stated and under-informed rhetoric, we still seem not to have any good ideas about what we might do to keep 'our precious youth' from rising up and slaughtering us in our beds one night when they finally get hip to how bad we're fuckin' 'em over.

From Salon, by David Sirota (hat tip = Facebook friend DC):

Before getting to the big news, let’s review the dominant fairy tale: As embodied by New York City’s major education announcement this weekend, the “reform” fantasy pretends that a lack of teacher “accountability” is the major education problem and somehow wholly writes family economics out of the story (amazingly, this fantasy persists even in a place like the Big Apple where economic inequality is particularly crushing). That key — and deliberate — omission serves myriad political interests.

For education, technology and charter school companies and the Wall Streeters who back them, it lets them cite troubled public schools to argue that the current public education system is flawed, and to then argue that education can be improved if taxpayer money is funneled away from the public school system’s priorities (hiring teachers, training teachers, reducing class size, etc.) and into the private sector (replacing teachers with computers, replacing public schools with privately run charter schools, etc.). Likewise, for conservative politicians and activist-profiteers disproportionately bankrolled by these and other monied interests, the “reform” argument gives them a way to both talk about fixing education and to bash organized labor, all without having to mention an economic status quo that monied interests benefit from and thus do not want changed.

It's a big hot gnarly mess that doesn't get any better any time soon if we just continue to beat a starving mule, and while there is no solution for a big hot gnarly mess that fits neatly on a bumper sticker, this one thing is certain: you can't fix the schools if you don't fix the neighborhoods.

Todays' Pix

 

What Ya Don't Do

• You don't fight terrorism by becoming a terrorist.
• You don't improve a democratic system by squelching the voting franchise.
• You don't boost Demand in a struggling economy by making it harder for people to buy stuff.
• You don't make your Democratic Party brand stronger by acting just like the Republicans.
• You don't ensure our precious way of life here in God's US America™ by turning the joint into some bullshit parody of itself, as we actually become something more like Noriega's Panama if you look too close.

I'm thinking there's more to this than we know (as usual - it's not about what they tell us it's about).  And what we don't know could easily either mitigate or exacerbate the "scandal", but even if I'm willing to give TeamObama some wagon room on this, I still have a hard time not thinking somebody in Obama's administration - up to and including Obama himself - needs to get kicked right in the nuts.  (And BTW, that goes for the Diane Feinsteins and Lindsay Grahams in congress as well)

At the very least, the politics and the "optics" make this look a lot worse than it may actually be.

I do have to ask one question tho'.  This kind of abusable power has been legal - and has been applied inside the US - for a very long time now.  That doesn't make it OK, even after "9/11 changed everything", but still, why are we gettin' all spastic about it now?

John Mayer

From the Abbey Road sessions in about 2007(?)

--Never Gonna Win The War--

Is there anyone who
Ever remembers changing their mind from
The paint on a sign?
Is there anyone who really recalls
Ever breaking rank at all
For something someone yelled real loud one time

Everyone believes
In how they think it ought to be
Everyone believes
And they're not going easily

Belief is a beautiful armor
But makes for the heaviest sword
Like punching under water
You never can hit who you're trying for
Some need the exhibition
And some have to know they tried
It's the chemical weapon
For the war that's raging on inside

Everyone believes
From emptiness to everything
Everyone believes
And no one's going quietly

We're never gonna win the world
We're never gonna stop the war
We're never gonna beat this
If belief is what we're fighting for

What puts a hundred thousand children in the sand
Belief can
Belief can
What puts the folded flag inside his mother's hand
Belief can
Belief can

Today's Gaffe

It's well known that a 'gaffe' is when some politician accidentally tells the truth.

At a Dallas County GOP event last month, Bishop John Lawson asked Ken Emanuelson, a Tea Party activist, what the Republican Party was doing for African-American voters. The progressive group Battleground Texas posted audio from the event. "I'm going to be real honest with you," Emanuelson said. "The Republican Party doesn't want black people to vote if they are going to vote 9-to-1 for Democrats." In Emanuelson's view, in other words, the solution to lack of support from African-American voters is to have fewer of them show up at the polls. When the inevitable criticism ensued, Emanuelson backtracked. In a post on his Facebook page, the Tea Party activist acknowledged that he "misspoke" and tried to clarify what he was getting at. "What I meant, and should have said, is that it is not, in my personal opinion, in the interests of the Republican Party to spend its own time and energy working to generally increase the number of Democratic voters at the polls, and at this point in time, nine of every ten African-American voters cast their votes for the Democratic Party."

And Emanualson isn't the first Repub to say something like that.

1) It's not in the best interests of the GOP for everybody who's eligible to vote to go out and vote.
2) The GOP is working very hard in many places to pass laws that effectively keep people - the big majority of whom are likely not going to vote for Repubs - away from the polls.

Here's a slightly different angle:  When everybody who should vote gets to vote, we say yay, democracy - our system is healthy, and it's working the way it's supposed to work.  That's what America's all about.  But that's what the TeaParty Republicans are against; they're saying it's wrong for so many people to vote; they're saying there's too much democracy going on here.  They're saying democracy is bad for the GOP, and so the GOP is opposed to democracy.

It just seems pretty clear, and it's pretty fucked up.

Today's Quote

"I will continue to work vehemently and robustly to fight back against what most in the other party want to do to transform our country into becoming."
--Michelle Bachmann, announcing she won't run for a 5th term.

Seriously.  That's what she said.  I've checked it several times.  I've checked the actual quote; and I've checked my typing and my hearing and my willingness to keep trying to make sense of what these meatheads have to say.

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Indecision Political Humor,Video Archive

hat tip = Little Green Footballs

A Pretty Good Rant