Goin' ridin'

Off today to ride the Donner Classic trial at the Auburn Ski Club property at Boreal Mountain Resort. See yas.

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

Emmylou Harris & The Nash Ramblers - Guitar Town (Live At The Ryman)
...

The Nash Ramblers:
Sam Bush -- Fiddle, mandolin and vocals
Roy Huskey, Jr. -- Double bass and vocals
Larry Atamanuik -- Drums
Al Perkins -- Banjo, guitar, resonator guitar and vocals
John Randall Stewart -- Guitar, mandolin and vocals

Thanks to worldwideweby

Headline of the Day

Romney 150-foot party yacht flies Cayman Islands flag

He must have gotten it as a premium when he opened his account.

Full Red Blue Moon

Tonight is the Full Red Moon which is also a Blue Moon. Must be an election year.

On Eastwood's speech

Tweet from Chris Rock:

Clint Eastwood on the phone with Obama now: "It all went according to plan,sir." #RNC #GOP2012

Heh.

Eastwood and McCain are now sharing the sobriquet "Grampa Walnuts". All the scared old white people who were already going to vote for Willard understood his speech perfectly.

I think for a generational shift away from rocking chairs, drool buckets, and rambling disjointed speech, Obama should get George Clooney to speak at the Democratic convention. That'll get da wimmens whose breasts are still up around their chests too, you know, the ones who can still make reproductive choices.

Trickle Down Economics is a Pyramid Scheme

Tina Dupuy

The classic multi-level marketing or pyramid scheme is where one guy at the top convinces people at the bottom to give the top money. The hope is the guys in the middle will recruit enough people under them to move from the middle to the top—hence the pyramid shape. The model is, clearly, and provably unsustainable. Only a couple of people (those at the top) do well. Everyone else gets ripped off.
...

Trickle down economics is a pyramid scheme: It’s the rich telling us if we just recruit others to believe in the con then we will become the rich too.

It’s a lie.

This exchange actually took place yesterday evening in The Seat Of World Power aka my couch:

Me: "How long will the Repugs keep doing the same thing over and over expecting different results before they realize that's the definition of insanity?"

Mrs. G: "'Til they've got all the money."

Simple and succinct.

Paul Ryan: The definitive fact-check

Salon

A comprehensive guide to the candidate's lies or misrepresentations from his big RNC speech

Quite a list.

Everyone lies. Ryan takes it to new levels.

No shit. On camera in prime time. On a whole lotta networks and channels, not just MSNBC, so people might have actually been watching.

I understand this. Besides having nothing besides talking points - lies in themselves - and a total throwback to a time-that-never-was-that-became-the-good-old-days platform, Rmoney hasn't actually been officially nominated yet, so the pandering to the Dead End Quarter will continue until he is. That's tonight. They have to keep lying so the Ron Paul people won't have a chance to throw a monkey wrench in the works and also so the boos from the 'baggers won't be on national TV. Besides, the truth would sink them. Despite their best efforts, the truth is starting to ooze under the door of people's consciousness.

Will they keep lying after Willard is the nominee? Oh hell yes.

From Borowitz:

In his speech to the Republican National Convention last night, Vice-Presidential nominee Paul Ryan test-drove what the Romney-Ryan campaign says will be a major theme for the 2012 Republican campaign: “lying about everything.”

“The question was, how many whoppers could you pack into one speech?” the campaign adviser Tracy Klugian said. “All I can say is, when Fox News accuses a Republican of lying, you know you’ve witnessed something historic.”

No shit. Everybody and their brother has called this lyin' sacka shit out. Think it matters to him? My money's on "nope".

Opening Nite - Lying Liars Lie And Lie Again

Charles P. Pierce on Opening Nite at the Repug liefest in Tampa, which opened with a speech by the governor of Oklahoma that cleverly omitted the fact that Oklahoma was a government program.

It was an entire evening based on a demonstrable lie. It was an entire evening based on demonstrable lies told in service to the overriding demonstrable lie. And there was only one real story for actual journalists to tell at the end of it.

The Republicans simply don't care.

They don't care that they lie. They don't care that their lies are obvious. They don't care that their lies wouldn't fool an underpaid substitute Social Studies teacher in a public middle school, who would then probably go out one night and get yelled at by Chris Christie. ("They believe in teacher's unions. We believe in teachers," he said in his speech. Yeah, you just don't believe in paying them.) They don't care that their history is a lie and that, by spreading it, they devalue the actual history of the country, which is something that belongs to us.
...

[...] The Republicans will just tell the lie again. And again. And once more, until people get tired of telling the truth in response.

Never. Or we're done.

The real Willard!

OMG! Bobo describes the "real" Willard! Do not miss this!

Mitt Romney was born on March 12, 1947, in Ohio, Florida, Michigan, Virginia and several other swing states. He emerged, hair first, believing in America, and especially its national parks. He was given the name Mitt, after the Roman god of mutual funds, and launched into the world with the lofty expectation that he would someday become the Arrow shirt man.
...

Romney was extremely detail oriented in his business life. He once canceled a corporate retreat at which Abba had been hired to play, saying he found the band’s music “too angry.”

Romney is also a passionately devoted family man. After streamlining his wife’s pregnancies down to six months each, Mitt helped Ann raise five perfect sons — Bip, Chip, Rip, Skip and Dip — who married identically tanned wives. Some have said that Romney’s lifestyle is overly privileged, pointing to the fact that he has an elevator for his cars in the garage of his San Diego home. This is not entirely fair. Romney owns many homes without garage elevators and the cars have to take the stairs.

A side of Mr. Brooks I have not seen before and good on 'im! And congrats, Bobo, for discovering whiskey for breakfast!

Poop-Down Economics

El Rude-o on Secaucus Fats' speech and the Repug convention.

2. Imagine you have a friend who a few years back heard that if you feed poodles money they will shit out gold bricks. So your friend starts feeding his hard-earned cash to all the pampered poodles he can find, and they gobble those bills down. But, surprise, surprise, despite what he heard, the dogs end up shitting shit. Still, he clings to this bizarre, completely disproven idea: poodles shit gold. Now, after some time, he's low on cash. You tell your friend to stop putting out plates of money for the goddamned poodles. No, your friend says. Instead, he must cut back on other things, like doctor visits and food and more, just so he'll have the spare money to give the fucking dogs. "One day, these little bitches are gonna pay off," he tells you, sounding completely crazy, "and I'll be on easy street." But until then, he's just got hands that stink like dog shit. And there's your lesson in Republican economics.

Vote Repug. You'll learn to love dog shit when you can't afford anything else to eat.

How to spot completely miserable women

If it's Wednesday, it must be Morford on Repug women.

You can see it in the eyes. Vacant, sort of glassy, dark and distant as if staring into a cave full of nails from a thousand miles – and a million joyful lifetimes – away.

It moves on to the skin, pale and ill-fitting like a mannequin in a human costume, like it’s not the slightest bit comfortable in there, closing around a sallow tightness of the mouth and lips, maybe a severity of haircut, the sweater buttoned a bit too tight and the collar cutting circulation to the vital organs, but most especially and obviously, to the heart.

Do you see it? Do you see it, most frequently and with a tragic sigh, in the women of the GOP, from the senseless female candidates themselves (Hi, Ms. Bachmann!) to the sallow wives and disoriented daughters of the ultraconservative males who fear and detest everything real women represent?

I call 'em "pinch-faced, dried-up, miserable harridans". Liberal gals, of course, are HOT!

Then he starts in on Todd Akin's wife and daughters.

Is she truly proud of her man? Is part of her thinking, “Oh please, rape ain’t so bad, most of those hussies probably deserved it”? Is she thinking, “Dear God, what has become of my life?” Or is she thinking, maybe, with a hint of abject sadness, of the terrible icepick of fear and misogyny she and her husband have drilled into their six children, and particularly their daughters?
...

It is impossible not to extrapolate, not to interpret those expressions as a kind of numbed-out revulsion. It’s clear they’ve been forced to get on stage with their father as a show of family “solidarity,” as if to prove that not all women detest Todd Akin, that, when it comes to the GOP, even a mildly powerful white man can still force women to do his bidding, even after insulting and demeaning them so horribly he should be ashamed to speak to his daughters for a solid year.
...

Which of those girls, would you wager, will soon break away from this nightmare? Which one will grab the first opportunity to travel to San Francisco or maybe Paris or Tokyo and have her mind blown open by art and sex and love, wine and yoga and the madhouse kaleidoscopic offerings of the world? Which one will hence run screaming from the bitter shell of a life the Akins’ have forced them to live? Both? Let’s hope it’s both.
...

Hello, two young daughters of Todd Akin up there on that stage. I see you. We see you. And we here in the land of the messy and the free-spirited, the progressive and the open-souled, we hereby band together and offer up a prayer, a dirty, wonderful, wild, unfettered blessing to you. Ready?

It goes like this: We hereby hope you will soon find a away to escape, ignite your hearts and minds (and bodies), to blast it all wide open as you realize women are far more juicily, beautifully powerful than you’ve been taught, and that the world is not as small and terrifying as the Republican party would have you to believe.

That may be the worst thing about the Repugs. The fearmongering. It's bullshit but a useful tool. Keep the rubes scared of made-up stuff and tell 'em only you can save 'em. They're much easier to control that way.

The only thing I'm a little scared of is Repug rule.

Headline of the Day

Boehner Says Out Loud He Hopes Blacks and Latinos 'Won't Show Up' This Election

Saying what they think out loud is kinda the Repug's biggest problem. Heh.

Note to Boner: hope in one hand and shit in the other and see which one fills up first.

UN says no Texas invasion is in the works

Well, the U.N. has answered the charges, according to Reuters:

“It’s absolutely ridiculous,” said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s spokesman, Martin Nesirky, when asked if the United Nations had any plans to invade Texas.

Whew! Judge Headcase down there in Lubbock had me worried. It took him eight minutes of video to clean up after his one minute warning of the dire threat. It's at the EssEffChron along with this one if you care which you don't.

Sign Condemning Romney Draws Criticism

This guy's a registered Republican. If a Democrat had done this, his house would have magically caught fire and burned down by now.

LATimes

Same old, same old...

The Grey Matter sums the 'Baggers/GOP up nicely.

Those behind the Tea Party movement -- namely big-name, right-wing figures like Dick Armey and the Koch brothers -- have always tried their best to distinguish Tea Partiers from your typical, everyday Republican. The goal was to fabricate the rise of an organic, grass-roots "revolution" led by people who were fed-up with the status quo and desired real change with regards to our growing deficit.

Of course, it didn't take long for us to learn it was all a scam, a faux movement heavily backed by Republican big wigs. Established Republicans simply tried to repackage a large portion of their party as something new and different, and yet in the end it was just the same old stuff: intolerance and ignorance fueled by anger and fear -- the bedrock of the modern-day GOP.
...

It's not the first time Republican voters have been used by their own party and it certainly won't be the last time. To the likes of Karl Rove and Mitt Romney, gullible stupidity is the gift that just keeps on giving.

The suckers are starting to catch on. I'm still hoping for a gun battle at the Repug convention that will make the gunfight at the OK corral look like a firecracker went off. I'm not nice when it comes to these assholes.

Oh, the irony...

If it's Tuesday, it shoulda been Ironic Times on Monday.

Republicans Blast Akin for His Extreme Views on Rape, Abortion
Which also happen to be party's platform on rape, abortion.

Romney Tells Michigan Crowd Nobody Ever Asked Him to Produce His Birth Certificate
Except once in the Cayman Islands, and the man was whipped for impertinence.

New Super PAC App Fact-Checks Political Ads to See if They're Truthful
App comes with warning that some ads cause phone to catch fire.

Good News: Fewer Workplace Murders
Bad news: fewer workplaces.

Dam it's fun ...

Had a little time before dinner so I figured I'd post a few pics. It's been a fun 3 days. Heh ...

Dam it ...

Hey, I'm in Amsterdam. Things were crazy the day we left and I haven't had time since. Catching the ship tomorrow so I'l post pics and shit then. See yas!

An "Order Confirmation" To Share

I'm sure we've all ordered stuff online and filed away the order confirmation until it gets to us. Ho-hum. This is the best one yet:

Gordon-

Thanks for your order with CD Baby!

USPS

(1) Rita Hosking: Burn

Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing. Our world-renowned packing specialist lit a local artisan candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved "Bon Voyage!" to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, August 27, 2012.

We hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. In commemoration, we have placed your picture on our wall as "Customer of the Year." We're all exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Sigh...
We miss you already. We'll be right here at http://cdbaby.com/, patiently awaiting your return.
--
CD Baby
The little store with the best new independent music

I told them that was a pretty cool way to do it even though I know it ain't true. Heh.

The Republican Strategy: The Niggerization of the Democratic Party

I think mayhap El Rude-o is taking off the velvet gloves of political correctness...

Let's cut through the bullshit here, much like Chris Matthews did on Morning Starbucks with Joe today. The GOP strategy right now is simple: The Democratic Party is a bunch of niggers, with a nigger leading them. Do you want to be a nigger lover or, even worse, a nigger yourself?"

Sure, if the only other choice is being a Repug.

With this being an incredibly white ticket of an incredibly white political party (90% of Republicans are white), what the GOP is doing in this election is to make a last stand for the innate good of the white male, the white patriarchy, if you will, as knowing best how everyone should behave. When they say, as Romney has, that they are what's best for women and non-whites, the not-so-subtle message is the same as every pasty European who ever confronted the natives after walking off a boat: "We may want to strip you of all your natural resources and enslave you, but you can put your trust in us. As long as you don't try to stop us, we won't hurt you."

In other words, it's not the rage of Barack Obama that's driving this election. It's the rage of the white colonizers who are afraid of losing any of their power over the colonized.

They are scared shitless of the changing demographic in America and can't do a damn thing about it except lie, cheat, and steal the vote to keep everybody who doesn't not-think like them under their heel.

Liberals, Progressives, Democrats, white, black, brown, red, whatever, we're ALL niggers to them.

All those so-called "good" Christians seem to have forgotten, or choose to ignore, this too:

Jesus loves the little children
All the children of the world
Red and yellow, black and white
They're all precious in his sight
Jesus loves the little children of the world

I can hear them now: "What do you mean Jesus gives a shit about them after they're born?! You must be some kinda commie!"

I know that had nothing to do with the first part of the post but I threw it in anyway. It's all part of the wingnut mindset they want to impose on us.

Hard Travelin' With Henry Rollins

A quite extensive interview with Henry Rollins on his new book and Afghanistan, Iran, Grampa Walnuts, Occupy, and our lame-ass media and lazy culture. A 'recommended read'.

The merest taste:

JL: So you believe oil is at the heart of all of the rhetoric regarding threats of war?

HR: I don't think that I know more then a guy like John McCain who gets classified reports but there is a real push on the right, I mean you see how lonely they are without a war. And to hear, like, John McCain, who I have such a dislike for ... I used to not dislike him and then I read a really good book on him. He's just a flip flopping windsack. He's just ... he'll say anything to stay in office. He's just one of those guys, a company man. He's getting weird in his old age. Can you imagine McCain as president!! It would have been maybe the biggest disaster, worse than Bush because at least Bush wasn't senile. McCain was ripping Obama for bringing the troops home from Iraq like, "it'll be seen as a disaster in American history and I hope he [Obama] gets scolded appropriately" and I'm like "shut ...!!" I wrote a thing about it on my website and I said, "man it's time for you to shuffle off, cause now you're just, you're talking crazy." And those guys without a war ... They are flipping! They don't know what to do with themselves. And guys like McCain, he's all cattywampus now. And it just shows you how much they need that because it will be harder and harder for them to justify that ridiculous cold war era budget. And if you make your economy a war economy, you know, I'm no expert, but it seems to me you're going to fail. 'Cause you're not part of the future, you're part of this thing that just destroys and after a while you run out of shit to destroy and then ultimately, hundreds of years from now, you really have to invade Canada to give them democracy! Next we'll invade Belgium. Because you run out of enemies and so you just make up fake enemies. Like Iran is not our enemy, we're making them that way, we're poking them and they'll poke back. Then we'll have to go in there and take care of their democracy for them. The next Republican president, and it might be 2016 ,and it might be a good long run after Obama. I hope I'm wrong but I could be right about that. But you never know, I'm all, you know, I'm signing off on a lot of my ... I get a lot of hate mail so I always sign off "Elizabeth Warren 2016." It makes them froth at the mouth! For the next Republican president, Iran is going to be the first thing out of that guy's mouth. They want it.

I have nothing much to add to this other than we need tens of thousands more like Henry Rollins.

10 Things the GOP’s New Platform Hates About You

Jezebel

Coupla excerpts:

Translation: This country has devolved into a nation of fat drug addicts who smoke like chimneys. If you worked on the wait staff of a bar or restaurant that allowed smoking, it's your fault when you get lung cancer. And if you develop Type II diabetes as an adult, it's because you're weak. You shouldn't have grown up in that town next to a coal mine and gotten cancer when you were 7, you bad lifestyle choice maker.

Kiss our puckered white asses, young people who weren't going to vote for us anyway.

Part of the GOP plan is to replace Medicare with that coupon voucher program all the Elderlies will hate. But if you were worrying that the GOP was going to alienate an important part of its voting base, relax — cuts won't apply to current senior citizens; just future senior citizens. People who weren't going to vote Republican anyway.

Go to hell, immigrants (and "immigrants" means "Mexicans").

The new GOP platform loves states' except when it suspects that if left to their druthers, states would choose to do things that the GOP would not like.

"Religious freedom" is always code for "enforced Christian dominance," which doesn't sound as good in sound bytes.

The GOP of 2012 is a big tent. Especially if you're a white, wealthy, currently elderly, heterosexual, Christian, non-DC resident who plans on living forever. Otherwise, fuck you.

There ya go!

Read the 'comments' too. Heh.

It's Raining Romneys

Raw Story, with video.

Fox News introduces Romney sons with gay anthem ‘It’s Raining Men’
...

Fox News co-host Brian Kilmeade teased an upcoming segment with the Republican presidential candidate’s offspring as the music began to play and the camera panned over to the guests: “For the first time in history / It’s gonna start raining men!”

“It’s Raining Men! Hallelujah! – It’s Raining Men! Amen! / I’m gonna go out to run and let myself get / Absolutely soaking wet!”

Remember when the Teabaggers named themselves and got all huffy when they found out what teabagging is? When it comes to 'culture' I got a bag o' hammers that's more with it than F**Noise. Those fuckers are dumber'n dirt. It's funny, though.

Unless the Rmoney boys are a little light in the loafers. That would be even funnier. Heh.

Election Special

From Ry Cooder's CD Election Special.

Some images of OWS on music Ry Cooder. Dedicated to protesters worldwide, soon more on www.tvekkergem.be. In spring also live coverage of the big revolutions in 2012, from New York to Ekkergem (on the new channel TV Ekkergem revolution)

Wall Street Part of Town - Ry Cooder. (images by TV Ekkergem)

Thanks to TVekkergem, Belgium.

A Video Tribute

I don't think we even had YouTube or could put up videos in '04. Thank you, technology. Better late than never.

By the HappyTones (?!!!! - G). It was good in 2004, it's even better now

Thanks to DrBones666, includes recipes for hash oil. Heh.

A tip o' the Brain to deuddersun.

New Rule for Todd Akin and the Republican Party

From a 'must read' by Bill Maher on the "magical thinking" of the religious whackjobs who want to impose American Sharia on us:

Evangelicals might like to pretend that the magical thinking that they indulge in at home doesn't affect what they do at the office, but it absolutely does. The brain that believes in angels and miracles and Jesus riding a dinosaur is trained to see the world not as it is, but as you want it to be.

Republicans would like to pretend like Congressman Akin's substitution of superstition for science is a lone problem but it's not: they're all magical thinkers, on nearly every issue. They don't get their answers on climate change from climatologists, they get them from the Book of Genesis. Hence Sharia Law in America is a dire threat, and global warming a hoax.
...

How do they get away with it? They know that, because we're already such a religious country, our minds are primed for magical, fantasy thinking. The gullibility comes factory-installed. They've learned that you appeal not to an American's head, but to his gut -- it's a much bigger target. But here's the problem: life is complicated. I mean, I know we know some things for sure, like why Jesus put us here on Earth: to watch Here Comes Honey Boo Boo on a 50-inch TV screen. But what about the Chinese slaves who made the TV? What about carbon from the coal that generated the electricity? What about the Walmart where we bought it, where the workers don't have health insurance? What about racism, or the oceans turning into nail polish remover? The grown-up answer is: identify problems scientifically, prioritize and solve. The Republican answer is: there isn't a problem. And anyone who tells you different is a liar who hates America. We don't have to make hard choices. We just have to ignore the science and the math -- that's why God gave us values.

The last ¶ sums the Repugs up nicely:

Next week in Tampa the Republicans must admit that the difference between a GOP convention and Comic-Con is that the people at Comic-Con have a much firmer grasp of reality.

The difference being that comic books, pardon me, "graphic novels", heh, do us no harm.

I think the majority of "magical thinking" aka "fantasy" amongst Repugs and christowhackos actually occurs while they're watching porn, but that's just me.