Feeling Summery

On a cold Winter Solstice, looking forward to the warm.

Haley Barbour

...is a dick.  The guy is making a play for the Southern Dumb Ass bloc of Repubs - probably trying to get them away from Palin.

So he blows the dog whistle.  He makes overtly racist remarks, and then waits for the lefties  to attack him, and then he comes out to issue the wink-and-a-nod "apology/backtrack", so he can then go back later and claim to be the victim of those darned "librul media elitists".  The rubes eat it up, and the Press Poodles miss the real story, cuz Americans love a big pile of steaming racial tension - that's exciting.  All that other stuff; that's just politics.  That's all about who runs the country and who gives your tax dollars to whose brother-in-law.  It's boring.  Move along now - nuthin' to see here.

Works every time.

Yeesh

Why don't these guys ever see how closely they resemble the Taliban? I think it probably has something to do with their perverted understanding of American Exceptionalism.

I especially love the little homily that starts at about 3:30, and the disclaimer is classic contradiction. "We're against violence, so we used this violent demonstration to prove how abhorrent violence is to us."

Also, notice the Eliminationist subtext of their sweatshirts.

Silliness

When Kerry and the Dems say these things like this (paraphrasing) "We've bent over backwards to acommodate our friends across the aisle, blah blah blah" - I wonder if they can hear the Repubs laughing up their sleeves. The Dems get criticized a lot for being "appeasers" when the Repubs feel the need to demagogue some issue or another. Well, guess what? Appeasing is pretty much exactly what they do.

Two Party Voting Over Time

Fucking Over The First Responders

Here's a nice little screed from Shep Smith on Dumb Fux News about being outraged because Congress failed to get the votes to set up a special fund for addressing the healthcare issues of hundreds of first repsonders on and after 9/11.

He really gets into it, and he even gets Chris Wallace to go along with him (a bit), but notice that neither of them ever makes it plain that it's REPUBLICANS who are hanging it up. Both of these guys repeatedly say "they" or "politicians", but never "Republican". They know (because Frank Luntz has taught them so) that when they're talking about 'politicians doing bad things", the rubes are so well conditioned that they will always infer either "Democrat", or that the Dems are implicit in the evil deed, and so it's all the Dems' fault somehow anyway. No honor and no soul.

Attack On The SPLC

The Southern Poverty Law Center is a definitive source of information regarding organizations whose names and mission statements often sound innocuous or even righteous, but are actually intent on causing real harm to real people, usually in the name of some greater purity or higher calling.

SPLC recently added Family Research Council to their list of hate groups, citing FRC's slander against LGBT's and the language of violence. (see article)

FCR is trying to strike back.  One avenue is this ad posted at Politico:

Here's a quick tho't for somebody like Tony Perkins:  If you could stop being a bigoted asshole, people could stop calling you a bigoted asshole.

Sweet Redemption

When we were kids, my dad had a bunch of old 78's (some of which he'd acquired while stationed in Hawaii at the end of WWII). Anyway, the Spike Jones version of Hawaiian War Chant was a favorite. My older brother somehow got permission to take the record to school, and on his way home, he dropped it and it broke. I remember the icy scorn heaped upon him by the whole family for what seemed like months. It's possible my dad held that grudge for years.

After waiting a very long while and coming back to do the search many times on YouTube, I finally found it. And I gotta tell ya, listening to it now, I'm thinkin' we should've let my brother off the hook right from the start - for the obvious human reasons - but really, the thing just sucks. I guess I can smile at the sheer goofiness, and I can certainly relate to the feeling for the loss of an important memento, but damn. This was not worth makin' a fuss over.

Hawaiian War Chant --Spike Jones

The Tax Cut Fight

Austen Goolsby explains it all.

Look guys, I really wanna go along, and I really wanna believe the prez is worth the effort. So this is a pretty good pitch, but I'm still wondering if it's real or if it's just a pitch. Maybe I've been more affected by the 8 years of abuse under the Jr Bush administration than I'm ready to admit. Dunno.

I think the biggest flaw in the argument here is that Obama can make the case against the top 2% tax cut in 2012. If the economy gets better, the Repubs will have no problem saying it got better because they forced Obama to take their deal, and that we can't possibly raise taxes now that things are finally getting better. And remember, Repubs don't need facts - they'll just make shit up, and the rubes will happily follow.

Make A Joyful Noise

Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy with Will Ferrell & John C. Reilly from Will Ferrell

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, Over

One Smart Cookie

Fareed Zakaria is my kinda Conservstive - one with a living thinking brain in his head.

Christie Todd Whitman

A Repub worth considering. Considering for what I don't know exactly, but she was way too "liberal" to survive in Jr Bush's administration, so she qualifies for a little love at least.

Saturday Nite Music

A song for Mr Obama - just feelin' pretty low down and high smellin' I guess.

Now I'm Really Confused

Somehow, Obama's "total cave" on the tax cut deal is being spun as a win for him because it's touted as a huge new stimulus thingie.  Hard to imagine just how much of this I don't get.

But maybe there's some element of truth in it.  15 years ago, we figured Clinton must be doing something right because everybody was pissed at him for practically everything he did.  Of course, a good bunch of the things he did came back around to bite us all in the ass, but that's another rant altogether.

So, I guess if even Chuckles Krauthammer says the Repubs are the ones who got rolled, we're just supposed to believe, shut up  and go on about our business.

I try to pay pretty close attention, and I think I'm a fair hand at picking my way thru the sales pitch to find the difference between what a politician says and what actually happens, but like I said, I just don't seem to be gettin' it lately.  Our little experiment in self-governing has gotten so twisted and complicated, that it's nigh on to impossible for anybody on the outside to know what's really going on.  And I'm not convinced that more than a handful of people on the inside know a lot more than the rest of us.

I'm still waiting.

Craven

Repubs in the Senate piss and moan about $7.4 Billion to provide healthcare bennies for First Responders and Cleanup Crews at Ground Zero, and at the same time they'll add $700-900 Billion in tax cuts to the deficit and the debt without so much as blinking an eye.

These people have no honor and no soul.

From NYT.

Yo - Democrats

Get your shit together.  Everybody seems to be itchin' for a fight.  Lotsa talk about filibusters on the Tax Cut package heading thru Congress, and lots of talk about Obama dealing away practically everything in order to get "concessions" from the Repubs that they  wanted all along anyway.  So of course, the question is: how will the Dems fold this time?

Here's another question: are you really ready for an all-out partisan war?

In that light, I think I may be able to see for the first time, that Obama is doing the things he's doing in an attempt to avoid that war.  He could be saying that while he really does want to get things done according to the progressive agenda of his campaign, he still has to figure out how to keep his branch of the government going.  If he picks a fight every time out, then maybe everything grinds to a halt and not even the less-than-fully-satisfying things  he's been able to push thru would have any chance at all.  Maybe.

Maybe also: appeasement only encourages the adversary.

And in the meantime, there seems to be a bad disconnect between Washington politics and the problems way too many Americans are facing every day.  The joint may not be on fire yet, but it's too close for anybody's comfort.

I'm still waiting.

Kitten On The Keys

When I was a kid, we had an old Edison phonograph, and this was one of the records.

I seem to recall there was at least 1 Rachmaninoff piece, and a Caruso as well.

A Certain Justice

A for-profit startup "College" - based on Free Market principles, with the expressed intention to teach a kind of Ayn Randian Objectivism - has failed due to...wait for it...an inability to access Federal Student Loan money.  There were other reasons as well, but still.  The irony - it burns!

I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time, but really, this whole Privatizing Education thing has to stop.  It's just another way to siphon tax dollars into corporate pockets.

Read about it here.

The New Tax Deal

I don't know the details, and so I'm trying to judge slowly.  But from what I've seen so far, the thing just kinda smells.  It may well be that by extending the Rich Guy Benefits, Obama thinks he's set the stage for a winning argument in the 2012 campaign.  I don't see it.  There's been lots of political strategy that I've missed before, but I just don't get this one at all.  Maybe we'll see something worth watching when it comes up in the Senate.  Dunno.

Just try to remember that Republicans are NOT going to say nice things about you, Mr Obama.  No matter what you do. And even if you've put something together that trades the Billionaire's Bonus for lots of great progressive things down the road, not a lot of your base is gonna feel less betrayed any time soon.  The chess master thing, for most people, is way too subtle.  You may have staked out the perfect positions; you may have all the leverage you think you need to make better deals with a grumpy Congress; you may have the best possible approach to governing a divided nation.  But here's the thing:  Dumb Fux News is gonna hammer you with their bumper sticker rhetoric anyway. Nuthin' new about that of course, but the problem is that you keep refusing to give your supporters any real points to fight back with.

That lady in the town hall meeting - the one who said she was exhausted trying to defend you - she had it exactly right.  She may have gotten her second wind, but after a while, most people who stand up for you, and who know they have to stand up against the bullies; they just get beat down.  And when their perception is that you give in time after time after time; when it seems you NEVER come away with a clear cut win - well then, why am I beatin' my head against this wall?

It doesn't look like I can go back to voting Republican any time soon, but you'll have to work awfully hard to get me to vote for you again.