Saturday Emmylou Blogging

Mostly Willie, but pretty new.

From the 2013 Legacy / Sony Legacy album, To All the Girls

Thanks to goodelady.

The U.S. shifts left

After 33 years of rightward and downward slide, it's about fuckin' time. E.J. Dionne.

The center of gravity in American politics moved left in Tuesday’s off-year elections.

Republicans took a big step back from the tea party. An ebullient progressive was elected mayor of New York City. And a Democrat was elected governor of Virginia after campaigning unapologetically as a supporter of gun control and a liberal on social issues.
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And in the one direct intraparty fight over the GOP’s future, a tea party candidate lost a primary in Alabama to a more traditional conservative. A telling distinction between the victor, Bradley Byrne, and the defeated Dean Young: Byrne said that Obama was born in the United States; Young suggested the president was born in Kenya.

Young’s persistent “birtherism” is a reminder of how far right the American political discussion veered after the elections of 2009 and the midterms of 2010. The pendulum is swinging back.

I hope it swings fast and seizes solid somewhat left of center.

Republicans would be wiser to pay attention to the fact that McAuliffe re-created the coalition that twice elected Obama. When Democrats lost Virginia in 2009, Obama supporters stayed home in large numbers. This time, the electorate was significantly more Democratic, and the African American share of the vote rose sharply. In next year’s midterms, Republicans cannot count on the sort of Democratic demobilization that was helpful to them in 2010.

To say that this election nudged the nation leftward is not to claim a sudden mandate for liberalism. But it is to insist that the center ground in American politics is a long way from where it was three years ago — and that if there is a new populism in the country, it is now speaking with a decidedly progressive accent.

Shorter: We're winning. Continue the march.

The Conservative March Toward a Society of Sociopaths

Forward Progressives

Last night when discussing Stan and some of what I refer to as his asinine political beliefs, it occurred to me—Stan is exactly how Republicans want Americans to behave.

And Stan is a sociopath.

He’s a white male, strongly opposed to most other races and immigrants. Believes every single far right-wing economic theory imaginable and actually cited Argentina as a “beacon for true capitalism.” He has no remorse for others, seems to live in a world where he’s the focal point but he presents himself as extremely charming and personable when you first meet him. He has no problem ignoring social ethics or morals if it benefits his self interest. He’s told my friend that people should only worry about themselves, and not care about the struggles of others. That in life, self interests should trump everything else.
...

See, Stan is exactly the kind of person Republicans want to create.
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Which leads us to the rapidly de-evolving Republican party. A party that doesn’t care about the environment, health care access for Americans, children, education, the well-being of our military or the poor.

They only care about themselves and how much they can possess. People who place value on inanimate objects like guns or money before human beings. Then nothing you can tell these people will convince them of anything, because your opinion doesn’t matter
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Because the sociopath isn’t concerned about what you, I or anyone else thinks of them—only what they think of themselves. Which is why any type of disgusting behavior they exhibit is perfectly acceptable. That behavior got them something that they wanted—and to a sociopath their own self interests are all that really matter.

And that’s exactly the type of society conservatives are trying to march us toward.

And that's exactly why we're here and what we're trying to prevent. I think after 30 years of right-wing bullshit, folks are catching on and we're gaining steam. They think they've won and are getting more and more egregious in trying to undo the societal gains of the last 75 years. They're not even trying to hide it any more. It's finally out in the light of day and people don't like it. Sunlight is a great cleanser.

I saw this somewhere the other day: "The next Republican President hasn't been born yet". Fine with me.

Heh...

Who knew Ken Cuccinelli had a secret plan to force oust Bob McDonnell?

WATCH The Rachel Maddow Show explain.

They promised it's there somewhere, but the photo was too good not to share. Heh.

How to die long before Christmas

If it's Wednesday it must be Morford on crass Christmas commercialism and Dia de los Muertos. I've been getting Christmas catalogs since August. Not so much as ONE Dia de los Muertos catalog.

It was 81 degrees outside. It was still early October, not even yet time to set clocks back an hour or pay way too much for a pumpkin in the city. Nearly three months stood like a lump of crushed hopes between that particular moment and Christmas – and yet, there they were, rows of holiday fare awaiting their rotation in the cycle of commercial life, because, well, why the hell not? Does anyone even notice or care anymore? Drug stores churn through this sort of prefab holiday crap like crack anyway, and candy canes have the shelf life of nuclear fuel rods. Might as well just leave them out all year long.
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It’s almost enough to induce chronic bitterness. It’s almost enough to make you think there’s no other way. There is always another way.

Two days after Halloween, I stood, surrounded by walking skulls and candles, ritual and death, corrected.

It was Dia de los Muertos, of course, swarming through SF’s Mission district like a breath of fresh, funky, coffin-like air, a quirky, morbid, wonderful slap in the face to every American holiday ritual in existence, along with the ruthless machinery of capitalism that define them.

Talk about everything bland, oversold American culture is not – giddy, weird, moribund, playful, creepy, home-spun, solemn, completely noncommercial, no marketing and no major advertising and no noxious commercial jingles, no smarmy Coca Cola ads featuring diabetic polar bears sucking down toxic sugar water and not dying from global warming.

Also: Not a single megastore offering a special Day of the Dead deal on big-screen TVs. No tasteful, sweatshop-made ornaments from Pottery Barn. No special drinks, no immature misinterpretations of Jesus’ birth or death, no reindeer sweaters. It was sort of miraculous.

Instead, Dia de los Meurtos is, to my imperfect understanding, a time to honor the dead, respect your ancestors and pay homage to those loved ones you’ve lost, all during the few days when it’s believed the veil separating the living from the dead is thinnest. There are cacophonous processionals, offerings, marigolds galore (the Aztec flower of death, to which souls are drawn), photos of the deceased everywhere, altars and shrines from sublime to silly, mementos and trinkets and sugar skulls in abundance. It’s sacred, potent, playful, deeply moving. You know, just like Christmas never was.

But it’s also, if I understand it correctly, a day to sort of mock Death itself, that skinny, weak bag o’ bones who couldn’t possibly carry you away right now, and who doesn’t scare you not one bit, even though he totally does.

Is that not refreshing? No wonder American commerce hasn’t swarmed all over this idiosyncratic ritual. Unlike Mexico (and Brazil, Spain, and many others) we haven’t really developed the means to handle death or the afterlife with anything other than fear and denial. Halloween is as close as we get, and that’s become far more about kids gorging on candy and adults gorging on cocktails. The old pagan rituals? The Celtic harvest festivals? Not a clue.

My sentiment exactly. Dia de los Muertos makes more spiritual sense than Halloween, and is a better celebration than almost any of our commercially-driven "holidays".

Dick Dynasty II

TBogg via Raw Story.

When we last checked in on la famiglia Cheney, family patriarch and Undead Thing Dick Cheney was hitting the gasbag shows and flogging his heart surgery book The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter Who Shoots You In the Face. Grande dame and soft-core lesbian fan-fic author Lynn Cheney was going Full Metal Carrie on Alan Simpson at some Wyoming society event and, yes Wyoming does too have society events so stop laughing right this minute mister or be forever persona non grata at the annual Greater Laramie Sheepherder’s Embraceable Ewe Cotillion and Tractor Pull.

But what of daughter Liz’s campaign to return, Odysseus-like, to her ancestral home in McLean, VA. as well as join the Senate as the distaff version of Ted Cruz … but without the charm?

More.

Lizzie has gone from "Daddy's 5th Deferment" to "Serious Adult Daddy Issues". Looks like the Wyomingstanians ain't having it.

The TSA shootings at LAX highlight America’s real terror threat

From The Guardian via Raw Story.

So, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the first Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agent to be killed in the line of duty was not slain by an al-Qaida terrorist, but rather by an American with a gun.
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Now, of course, if the shooter had screamed “Allah Akbar” as he needlessly took the life of TSA agent Gerardo Hernandez, or if he had had links to an al-Qaida terror cell, there’d be no question about how to describe this incident.

As far as I'm concerned, the guy was a terrorist in a cell headed by the likes of Glenn Beck and Alex Jones. They should be up on charges as accessories before the fact.

Headline and Quote of the Day

Food stamp cuts are ideological, not fiscal: Republicans make the poor pay to balance the budget

“The capitalists can always buy themselves out of any crises, as long as they make the workers pay.”

One more in a long list of reasons the GOP needs to die.

Couldn'ta said it better myself...

A tip o' the Brain to Being Liberal.

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

Republicans Outraged That Obamacare Is Destroying America
And isn't rolling out smoothly enough.

Rand Paul Accused of Plagiarizing Entire Section of His Latest Book
Even titled it “The Fountainhead”.

Marijuana Likely to Be Decriminalized In Washington, D.C. by February
Just in time for Choom Gang reunion at White House.

Man Drives From New York to LA in Under Twenty-Nine Hours
Then drives from Brentwood to West Hollywood in an hour and forty minutes.

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

An old favorite.

Thanks to AlexPap48.

The simple meaning of Dia de los Muertos

Please watch this beautifully animated, and heart felt, short film about a little girl who visits the land of the dead, where she learns the true meaning of the Mexican holiday, Dia de los Muertos.
Student Academy Award Gold Medal winner, 2013!!

Muchas gracias to The Cgbros.

Uh ... yup...

A tip o' the Brain to Crooks and Liars on Facebook.

The War On The Poor

Paul Krugman

So what’s this all about? One reason, the sociologist Daniel Little suggested in a recent essay, is market ideology: If the market is always right, then people who end up poor must deserve to be poor. I’d add that some leading Republicans are, in their minds, acting out adolescent libertarian fantasies. “It’s as if we’re living in an Ayn Rand novel right now,” declared Paul Ryan in 2009.

But there’s also, as Mr. Little says, the stain that won’t go away: race.

In a much-cited recent memo, Democracy Corps, a Democratic-leaning public opinion research organization, reported on the results of focus groups held with members of various Republican factions. They found the Republican base “very conscious of being white in a country that is increasingly minority” — and seeing the social safety net both as something that helps Those People, not people like themselves, and binds the rising nonwhite population to the Democratic Party. And, yes, the Medicaid expansion many states are rejecting would disproportionately have helped poor blacks.

So there is indeed a war on the poor, coinciding with and deepening the pain from a troubled economy. And that war is now the central, defining issue of American politics.

Shorter: The blacks and browns are no longer subservient to the white ruling class and tend to vote Democratic. They're uppity and must be punished. Makes no difference that most of the poor are white.

Teabaggers are safe from zombies!

A tip o' the Brain to Being Liberal.

Quote of the Day

Paul Krugman

And Republicans still dream of dismantling Medicare as we know it, instead giving seniors vouchers to buy private insurance. In effect, although they never say this, they want to convert Medicare into Obamacare.

Heh. Somebody oughta 'splain "irony" to those clowns, not that they'd get it.

Crashing Glitching Bores

Will Durst on the Obamacare rollout mess hearings.

The sight of these grandfatherly types who couldn't tell a glitch from a Sneetch pretending to speak conversantly about something they have the same familiarity with as a calico cat does with calculus makes keeping a straight face difficult. Especially considering their extreme remonstrations of concern, which sound similar to cobras worrying that the mouse door is often unlocked.

Thing is, they're perfectly right. The rollout went less smooth than a 40 foot square steel donut rumbling down a pressed tin bridge. Democrats agree the website technology for Obamacare is so outdated it looks like Health and Human Services rescued it from Compuserve's trash using a dial-up modem. There are at least six or 17 areas of this country where a class of fifth graders could have constructed a more navigable site during study hall.

The ultimate techie nightmare. More crashes than Windows Vista through 27 stories of skylights. A health care portal with all the compassion and efficiency of the DMV. Coming soon: leeches. Although many claim that plenty of licensed barbers are already caucusing with the House majority. Face it, if the government created the Cloud, it would be called the Smog and leak antifreeze.
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But by focusing their attention on the website, the GOP seems to be signaling they've accepted Obamacare, at least in theory. After trying to repeal it 50 times then shutting down the government in an attempt to defund it, they are finally, reluctantly, on board. And just want to straighten things out by letting the American people know this is the worst legislation in the history of ever.

In other words, they've graduated to complaining about the choice of the font on the menu and not the ingredients of the feast.

More.

If ya can't beat 'em, threaten 'em

From Kos in toto.

The teabagger core argument: Takers, makers and the violent end of democracy

Yeah, this is a mid-week nutpick, but it's a nutpick with a mission: To help explain the current conservative mindset.

It's a comment on a thread on Breitbart which is literally trying to unskew yesterday's Washington Post poll of the Virginia governor's race.

A veteran Virginia pollster, Breitbart News has learned, this the results of the poll are "at least" 6 points off, and notes that the Post polls ordinarily overestimate Democrat performance in the Commonwealth.

Ha ha ha! I never tire of the unskewers! But that's not what I want to focus on. Rather, it's this comment:

no amount of economic or cultural chaos and disaster will ever incite those people to turn on their democrat masters. However, considering Obamacare's devastation..should Virginia choose to drink the kool-aid too...and elect McAuliffe ...it will all but convince me that the country has totally surrendered to a communist future....and there won't be any turning the tide in 2014....

There are simply too many takers extracting from a shrinking class of makers in this country. The intricate web of taxation and regulation has imprisoned the economy....guaranteeing that the Cloward and Piven blueprint will succeed.

After that...it could be anarchy....insurrection...or revolution.....who knows?

The entire conservative mindset is encapsulated in those three short paragraphs—the sense that everything has gone to shit, but people stick with Democrats because they're takers while conservatives are makers, and that if it continues much longer ... violence! All wrapped up in a nice bundle of f'd up punctuation. (At least it was run through a spell checker.)

That whole "makers" vs "takers" was the basis of Mitt Romney's 47 percent nonsense. And it's also the modern formulation of the racists' lament, in case you were wondering why race was missing in the comment above. It's not good white people doing the taking, you know?

But that comment also hints at the desperation and resignation coursing through today's conservatives: The notion that they've lost the battle. Sure, 2008 and 2012 were big blows, but they were softened by 2010's GOP wave. They want to believe those two presidential years were anomalies, but they know better. Once Virginia goes Blue, bucking a 40-year trend in which the party in the White House lost the governor's race, it'll confirm their worst fears. They will have lost the country and 2014 will only ratify the nation's new direction.

Thus, the final appeal to violence—because if democracy fails them, then what is left? The question will be whether that violence will remain a fantasy as they politically disengage, or whether they'll begin to act on it.

The "skewed" polls show the top three spots - gov, lt gov, and AG - in VA will go to Dems. I certainly hope so. The Repug candidates are fucking crazy. Why is Breitfart trying to gin up violence?

Other than it's Breitbart (he's still dead), because the 'baggers/wingnuts/fundies/haters are starting to lose big time and they're sore losers and whiny little bitches. They talk a big game, but they're all flaps and no throttle and when all is said and done, more will have been said than done, as usual.

GOP Still Worried About "Those People"

Paul Krugman

Lots of commentators have been referencing a report from Democracy Corps about focus-group meetings with Republicans, and with good reason: Stanley Greenberg, the organization's co-founder, has basically provided a unified theory of the craziness that has enveloped American politics in the last few years.

What the report makes clear is that the current Republican obsession with attacking programs that benefit Americans in need, ranging from food stamps to health care reform, isn't about some philosophical commitment to small government. It's about anxiety over a changing America - the multiracial, multicultural society we're becoming - and anger that Democrats are taking Their Money and giving it to Those People. In other words, it's still race after all these years.

One irony here is that at this point it's the liberals who believe in America, while the conservatives don't (my em). I believe in our ability to change while retaining our essential nature; I believe that today's immigrants will be incorporated into the fabric of our society, just as Italian and Jewish immigrants - once regarded as fundamentally incompatible with American ways - became "white" by the middle of the 20th century.

Another irony is that the great right-wing fear that social insurance programs will in effect buy minority votes for Democrats, leading to further change, is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. The G.O.P. could have tried to reach out to immigrants, moderated its stances on Obamacare, and staked out a position as the restrained, sensible party. Instead, it's alienating all the people it needs to win over, and quite possibly setting the stage for the very liberal dominance it fears.

Good.

Headline and Quote of the Day

Britney Spears's Music Is Used to Fight Off Somali Pirates (Stop Laughing)

“I’d imagine using Justin Bieber would be against the Geneva Convention.” Heh.

Heh.