The Repubs' Closet

A Tea Party GOPer named Marilyn Davenport caused a ruckus over the weekend by forwarding an email featuring this picture:

And of course, the usual firestorm is in progress with local GOP officials calling for her to step down, while her supporters defend her.  And the comments sections of every story I've read so far are filled with righteous indignation and tit-for-tat name-calling, but also there's a shortage of the usual "both sides do it" bullshit, and I've seen only a couple of comments that try to rationalize Davenport's act.

So maybe there's something else at work too.

Scott Baugh (OC GOP Chair) says he thinks Davenport should resign despite her apologies, because "her presence on the committee would remain controversial and provide a distraction."  He goes on to acknowledge the email as "extremely racist", but somehow, the racism isn't why Davenport should resign?

Maybe the Repubs recognize they have a real problem with what their base has become - or at the very least that they have a huge PR problem when the actions of the Tea Partiers seem to confirm the Lefties' accusations that the GOP has been hijacked by a bunch of racist assholes.

I dunno, but the Repubs have to get a hold on this shit if they ever want a chance to win me back.  This is exactly what drove me away from the Dems when their fringey nutballs decided to challenge Carter in 1980, and then thought it was a good idea to nominate Fritz Mondale in '84.

A Poem

The Genius of the Crowd --Charles Bukowski

There is enough treachery, hatred,
           violence,
Absurdity in the average human
           being
To supply any given army on any given
   day.
AND The Best At Murder Are Those
   Who Preach Against It.
AND The Best At Hate Are Those
   Who Preach LOVE
AND THE BEST AT WAR
--FINALLY--ARE THOSE WHO
PREACH
               PEACE

Those Who Preach GOD
   NEED God
Those Who Preach PEACE
   Do Not Have Peace.
THOSE WHO PREACH LOVE
   DO NOT HAVE LOVE
BEWARE THE PREACHERS
Beware The Knowers.

           Beware
           Those Who
           Are ALWAYS
           READING
           BOOKS

Beware Those Who Either Detest
   Poverty Or Are Proud Of It

BEWARE Those Quick To Praise
For They Need PRAISE In Return

BEWARE Those Quick To Censure:
They Are Afraid Of What They Do
Not Know

Beware Those Who Seek Constant
Crowds; They Are Nothing
Alone

           Beware
           The Average Man
           The Average Woman
  BEWARE Their Love

Their Love Is Average, Seeks
Average
But There Is Genius In Their Hatred
There Is Enough Genius In Their
Hatred To Kill You, To Kill
Anybody.

Not Wanting Solitude
Not Understanding Solitude
They Will Attempt To Destroy
Anything
That Differs
From Their Own

           Not Being Able
           To Create Art
           They Will Not
           Understand Art

They Will Consider Their Failure
As Creators
Only As A Failure
Of The World

Not Being Able To Love Fully
They Will BELIEVE Your Love
Incomplete
AND THEN THEY WILL HATE
YOU

And Their Hatred Will Be Perfect
Like A Shining Diamond
Like A Knife
Like A Mountain
LIKE A TIGER
LIKE Hemlock

           Their Finest
           ART

from The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems 1946-1966, Black Sparrow Press

Try This One Out

I stumbled onto this blog today, and it seems worth a look.

A sample from one of the articles:

Humans can be an untrusting race. People are often very cynical about human nature, tending to think that strangers will happily lie to us if there is something in it for them.

We intuitive believe that being cynical is an advantage in detecting lies. Or so Nancy Carter and J. Mark Weber found when they asked a group of MBA students whether people high or low in trust would be better at detecting lies in others (Carter & Weber, 2010).

The results were as we'd expect: 85% thought low trusters are better than high trusters at lie detection.

Is this the right answer though? Are low-trusters really better at detecting lies?

Doing Well...

...by doing good.

My old friend Ed Freeman talking with Whole Foods CEO John Mackey about a lot of things, like reclaiming certain aspects of capitalism, and stripping away some common misperceptions of free markets and Adam Smith, and a bunch of other stuff.  I still don't agree with all of it, but I know Ed to be one of the good guys so I tend to give him the benefit of the doubt.

The suits at Darden School of Business don't allow embedding, so follow this link to YouTube.

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KeaR0G-DxU)

Rand Of The Day

FIght The Power

The Sound Of Nausea

This is one of those times I wish I could spell the sound I make when I puke.

Matt Taibbi has another great piece in Rolling Stone.

...with an upfront investment of $15 million, they quickly received $220 million in cash from the Fed, most of which they used to purchase student loans and commercial mortgages. The loans were set up so that Christy and Susan would keep 100 percent of any gains on the deals, while the Fed and the Treasury (read: the taxpayer) would eat 90 percent of the losses. Given out as part of a bailout program ostensibly designed to help ordinary people by kick-starting consumer lending, the deals were a classic heads-I-win, tails-you-lose investment.

-and-

This is the deal of a lifetime. Think about it: You borrow millions, buy a bunch of crap securities and stash them on the Fed's books. If the securities lose money, you leave them on the Fed's lap and the public eats the loss. But if they make money, you take them back, cash them in and repay the funds you borrowed from the Fed. "Remember that crazy guy in the commercials who ran around covered in dollar bills shouting, 'The government is giving out free money!' " says Black. "As crazy as he was, this is making it real."

Get Obama

Lots of talk about a primary challenge of Obama for the 2012 nomination.  I guess I kinda see what it's about - trying to get Obama's attention; trying to move him to the left a little; trying to get him to act like the guy everybody thought he was promising he'd be way back in 2008.  But it's a little weird.  In one way, a primary challenge is exactly what the Repubs would do, so it brings up the question: Why do the Dems keep insisting on acting just like the Repubs?  But the other side of it is that the supporters of a challenge are saying their point is to get Obama to stop acting like a Republican.

So it's all pretty convoluted and Judo-ey.

I've read some posts and comments saying it might be a good thing just to send the message to Obama that Bush Lite sucks as bad as Bush Regular did, and he needs to get on with making the changes we think he promised.  I'm thinking the last time they tried this, Carter got run over by Reagan and we all fell for a bunch of horse shit happy talk.

There's even a certain thread running thru some of the blogs that says we should let the Repubs get their way, and when the whole system collapses just like the lefties say it will, well that's OK - that'll show 'em.  It's tempting to go along with that, but I'm just not feeling up to the whole Armageddon thing right now.  And isn't the notion of some huge final struggle of good vs evil pretty much a Republican thing?  If you wanna beat these guys, ya gotta stop letting them set the parameters for the fight.

Little Education Is Required

We can kill public education all together now - we have the good people at Home Depot going out of their way to learn us up on the essentials.

Real Differences?

Here's a story about how "Liberals" are wired differently from "Conservatives".

Individuals who call themselves liberal tend to have larger anterior cingulate cortexes, while those who call themselves conservative have larger amygdalas. Based on what is known about the functions of those two brain regions, the structural differences are consistent with reports showing a greater ability of liberals to cope with conflicting information and a greater ability of conservatives to recognize a threat, the researchers say.

Notice how careful the wording is.  I'm thinking the author wanted to avoid inviting the inference that somehow liberal people are better equipped to cope with the world; that libs are operating at a higher level of consciousness in some way.

Not only am I willing to infer exactly that, I'll take it a step or two farther (big surprise) and say that many of the so-called conservatives in politics and punditry are working on a level low enough to qualify for a subsidy from Purina.

The amygdalae are where your fear lives (emotions are mainly centered in the amygdalae).  That 'emotions center' helps in threat situations (eg) by telling your renal glands to give you a quick shot of adrenalin - fight or flight reactions and all that.  But that emotional response can also become a real problem if you fixate on the fear.  You get anxious or neurotic or even paranoid.  Starting to sound familiar?  Do you think politicians don't know about these things?  Do you think a politician wouldn't try to take advantage of this knowledge by deliberately spurring those fear reactions?

I've wondered about the ridiculous lengths we've been going to as we try to cope with the crazy changes we've been through - especially since 9/11.  I think some of this nonsense is getting clearer now.  It seems we've been in the grips of a full-blown National Anxiety Attack for almost 10 years.

All of this also fits nicely with Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine too.  I've had that book for a while; maybe I should actually read it(?)

Larnin'

What A Dope

Sarah Palin really is a dumbbell sometimes.

"It's not America's role not to be out and about nation building and telling other countries how to live."

It started when somebody on DumFux News asked her about Bill Maher taking a shot at her, and of course, she then gets a chance to enlighten us all with her foreign policy acumen. (here's a report from CNN)

I'd be willing to take her a bit more seriously if she could actually string a coherent sentence together.  We had 8 long years of this kind of dolt in office -  as muddled and as flummoxed as Obama can seem sometimes, he's a damn sight better'n anybody the Repubs have shown us so far.

Tax Season

We've been conditioned to feel bad about paying our taxes, so this is the time of year when everybody is supposed to piss and moan about what a horrendous burden we're all carrying.

Maybe it's just my contrarian nature, but I kinda like it.  I think it's a good thing to add it all up once a year to see where you stand.  And when I take a close look at it, I think I'm gettin' a pretty good deal here.

I live in a great part of a great country; I can go where I wanna go, and I can do what I wanna do, and I really don't have to worry a lot about the basics.  There's a lot I'd like to see improved.  There's plenty to be done to get some balance back into the power structure, etc - that's all a given.  If you want democracy, you have to practice at it.  My point is that when I'm in the "28% Bracket", and I actually pay less than 16% of my total income for both Federal and State taxes, I find it hard to complain about the "burden".  We had a boatload of deductions last year, but still, 16% total?  That's cheap.

Random thought: with all the wacky shit that goes on in Congress, how long before some knucklehead stands up and proposes that what I pay in taxes this year should be allowed as a deduction on my taxes next year?  Just wonderin'.

Drought

When we moved to Virginia 23 years ago, we were amazed at how lush it was. Of course, that could've been due simply to having grown up in the west where it's amazingly dry and airy, so by comparison, just about anywhere is going to seem wetter.  But over the years, it's gotten drier - until it seems like we're always under some kind of drought condition now.

Take a look at February vs April 2011 via Drought Monitor, Univ of Nebraska:

They caution against reading these things "too literally", but this doesn't look like a happy trend, especially for the South Central states.

Fab Faux

No excuses - if you're a Beatles fan in any way, and you're near the east coast, you MUST go see these guys. You won't find much in the way of recordings - you'll have to see it live.

The Fab Faux - Abbey Road Side 2 (mostly) from The Fab Faux on Vimeo.

On The Attack

Dodge This, Bitch

Nicky mugs a Tribesman.

Fools' Play

Terry Jones is a straight up asshole.  He makes a show of his "faith" so you have to know he's a fuckin' phony right off.  Anyway, he sets up his little Burn-a-Quran day and then sits back and collects the accolades and (most important) the dollars that start flowing in as soon as certain other straight up assholes react in a totally and predictably asshole-ish way to his being an asshole.

Here's a question: why is this news to anybody?

Make no mistake; there are no good guys in this.  The Muslimist assholes who react violently are no better than the Christianist assholes who deliberately foment Muslim rage; and anybody who sits around worrying about the politics instead of standing up and shouting a full-on gut-level condemnation of the whole sorry mess is an asshole too.

A Little (re-)Education - updated

If you control the story of your country's history, you have a much better chance to mold its future.

One of the things Ayn Rand warned us about is what she called "the amputation of history".  She was talking about how power structures manipulate us through propaganda - and one of the main points they rely on is that most of us don't remember our history lessons from school.  Of course, the Right Radicals have been telling us for 30 years that all the schools suck; that they never taught us anything straight.  So we're open to the suggestion that what we learned wasn't the true story, and we're also open to accept a substitute version that The Party is more than happy to supply.

Think about some of the ridiculous things we've heard from Haley Barbour and Michelle Bachman lately.  Barbour made claims that race hatred in Mississippi wasn't really all that bad; and Bachman spun a whopper about how the founding fathers worked so hard to end slavery.

Now think about what they're telling us about the Boston Tea Party - how it was a revolt against taxes.  It wasn't anything of the sort.  It was actually a rebellion against the tyranny of a government that was being used by a mega-corporation to impose croney capitalism on people who simply wanted a chance to compete on a level field.

BTW: in case you're some kind of bone-head Libertarian who insists that this is just an example of 'counter-propaganda' and you can't trust anything you hear; go blow a rock.  There are actually ways of discovering the truth about things, and there's this little matter of critical thinking that requires you to accept facts when they present themselves in some reasonable way.

I love this kinda shit (assuming I haven't been April-Fooled of course).

The Shock Doctrine