Yes, please ...

Roger Ailes the Good:

Could everyone please stop saying game changer?

That phrase is working my last nerve like people who use the phrase working my last nerve.

Thank you for your consideration.

Been there ...

Dude, politics aside, as a fellow GI who's dealt with PTSD, you gotta get some help. Steve Benen:

...

John McCain today referred to Americans as "my fellow prisoners." How odd.

...

Seriously.

Palin’s Kind of Patriotism

Tom Friedman, who sometimes Sees the Light:

Criticizing Sarah Palin is truly shooting fish in a barrel. But given the huge attention she is getting, you can’t just ignore what she has to say. And there was one thing she said in the debate with Joe Biden that really sticks in my craw. It was when she turned to Biden and declared: “You said recently that higher taxes or asking for higher taxes or paying higher taxes is patriotic. In the middle class of America, which is where Todd and I have been all of our lives, that’s not patriotic.”

"We all have to ... pay our fair share, but we must insist that our government be wise and honest in spending our money."

What an awful statement. Palin defended the government’s $700 billion rescue plan. She defended the surge in Iraq, where her own son is now serving. She defended sending more troops to Afghanistan. And yet, at the same time, she declared that Americans who pay their fair share of taxes to support all those government-led endeavors should not be considered patriotic.

I only wish she had been asked: “Governor Palin, if paying taxes is not considered patriotic in your neighborhood, who is going to pay for the body armor that will protect your son in Iraq? Who is going to pay for the bailout you endorsed? If it isn’t from tax revenues, there are only two ways to pay for those big projects — printing more money or borrowing more money. Do you think borrowing money from China is more patriotic than raising it in taxes from Americans?” That is not putting America first. That is selling America first.

As long as the rich get richer, I think she's fine with it.

I've been paying taxes since before McBimbo was born. I don't particularly like it, but it's the Federal equivalent of buying a lunch room pass from bullies - pay up or get beat up - to wit, cough it up or lose everything you've got and go to jail.

So how d'ya think all them back taxes you owe is gonna work out for ya, Moosebreath?

My taxes seldom go for very much that I would like them to but that's the way it is and I have no say in it. All I hope in return for myself is that the fire department will show up if I need them.

America's Cocktail Waitress

With apologies to all you gals out there serving drinks, stereotypes are almost always wrong, but occasionally useful. So, what's the difference between a cocktail waitress and a '55 Chevy? Not everyone's had a '55 Chevy.

Raw Story

However, CNN may now have found the ultimate Palin comparison -- a 1932 cartoon titled "Betty Boop for President," in which Betty winks broadly while singing, "Some of you have money, while some are poor, you know. If you send me to Washington, I'll just divide the dough, oh!"

No doubt Palin, who insisted at the debate that paying taxes is "not patriotic," would consider Boop's plans for income redistribution -- along with her promises that "we will get things for nothing, movies, cabarets and jazz!" -- to mark her as a wild-eyed radical and probable associate of the Weather Underground.

Go see the CNN video. The post led me to the one below as well as the title of this post. From Heptune:

Betty Boop's 36th cartoon is rich with political references. Leslie Cabarga gives the copyright date as November 4, 1932. We don't know how closely that date corresponds with the release date, when people would have actually seen it in the movie theater, but in November 1932 was the presidential election in which Franklin Roosevelt defeated the incumbent Herbert Hoover. Prohibition, which began in 1919, was still in place but was soon to end. The Depression was well underway following the stock market crash in 1929.

During the credits, we hear an instrumental version of the Civil War song, "The Battle Cry of Freedom." Then we join Betty Boop at a political rally, where she is addressing an enthusiastic crowd:

Bush, Press, Lies, Truth, Beat McCain Twice

MoDo's snark is coming in handy these days:

Some of John McCain’s friends, from the good old days when he talked straight, feared that his Greek tragedy would be that he would be defeated by George Bush twice: once in 2000, because of W.’s no-conscience campaigning, and again in 2008, because of W.’s no-brains governing.

Excellent! McLame's no-brains campaigning is helping as well.

John McCain has long been torn between wanting to succeed and serving a higher cause. Right now, the drive to succeed is trumping any loftier aspirations. He cynically picked a running mate with less care than theater directors give to picking a leading actor’s understudy. [...]

She left out 'in a high school play', but I forgive her.

Certainly, at some level, John McCain must be disgusted with himself for using the tactics perfected by the same crowd that used these tactics to derail him in 2000. He’s now curmudgeonly, even hostile, toward the press — the group he used to spend hours with every day and jokingly describe as his base.

They were fine until they belatedly started telling the truth about him. To the press's credit (everlasting shame to us), they held out as long as they could before it became so obvious what an asshole he is that even they couldn't ignore it any longer.

Palin Appeals to Mob Instincts During Her Rallies

Trish at Pensito Review, obviously a regular reader of the Brain, picked up on my Klan reference yesterday with a lovely photo in a post that closed with this:

What next? Dousing a big cross on the stage with gasoline, tossing on a match, and claiming Obama raped her?

The way you tell the average IQ of a mob is by dividing its actual average IQ by the number of people in it. McCain/Palin is working it like a rented mule.

KKK, Nazis, McCain/Palin. Everything this country is against. Or should be. Or was.

Update:

Also at Pensito:

Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi’s depiction of Sarah Palin at the GOP Convention as “Gidget addressing the Reichstag” is becoming more apt by the minute. Earlier, Trish wrote about Palin’s incitement of verbal violence at a rally in Clearwater, Fla., when a Republican voter in the crowd shouted, “Kill him,” apparently in reference to Barack Obama.

Now the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank says the anger among the GOP rank and file in Clearwater was also directed toward reporters covering the event generally, and an African American sound man in particular:

Palin’s routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric’s questions for her “less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media.” At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, “Sit down, boy.”

Given the racist bent of their base, and leaving aside their constant lying about Barack Obama, his associations and his record, John McCain and Sarah Palin are playing with rhetorical fire.

As in "going down in flames"? Crash and burn? Well OK then!

Desperate and despicable. Ugly.

Heh ...

Mary:

Tonight's joke: What's the difference between a Lehman Brothers investment banker and a pigeon? A pigeon still can make a deposit on a Ferrari.

...

All the money guys I know are shitting their pants. One in particular, a freind of Mrs. F's from college, is in the middle of a huge remodel of his house (on the scale we're doing). Unfortunately, he has to pay for labor and he doesn't know if he'll have a job from week to week.

Off to the Sons of Italy work ...

Why I have little faith ...

In the common sense of the American public. Greenwald:

...

That Dick Morris is a buffoon is hardly news, but he was one of Bill Clinton's closest advisers and, for people who watch Fox News and read The New York Post, he's considered to be one of America's foremost political analysts ...

Don't know about Faux News, but I know a lot of people who read the New York Post.

So am I ...

Me thinks McLame put his foot in it big time:



Get yours here.

Quote of the Day

His Rudeness:

...

"You really think people give a fat rat's fuck about William Ayers and what he did 40 years ago? Goddamn, Johnny Maverick, you must be shitting yourself so much that Cindy's gotta change them Depends every hour or you'll smell like you're rotting from the inside. You know what it means when all you got to throw at a candidate is people he's met? It means you're fuckin' frightened, man, and it means that you've maxed out your bullshit card - no one's buyin' what you're sellin', Johnny Maverick; just send that worthless shit back to the Republican warehouse of lies next to trickle-down and WMDs and commie spies in Hollywood.

"So you can have your Muppet-sounding idiot VP bitch out there in front of crowds, talkin' smack about me and gettin' people to yell, 'Kill him,' and you can try to convince everyone I'm a terrorist. Fuck, talk about Tony Rezko and Reverend Wright. Drag those corpses up there and cut new holes in 'em to try to show you can fuck 'em different than others have. But you know and I know that you're desperate. Motherfucker, you tied yourself to Reagan and Bush and now that ideology is sinkin' like cement shoes on a mob snitch. Drown, motherfucker, drown.

...

I'm not watching the debate. I like this version better.

Great Googly Moogly!!!!!

McCain is beholden to a lot of folks. PC has a list of lobbyists (and who they work for) associated with McLame and the list is fucking extensive. Guess what? Your interests and mine ain't represented.

How cool ...

Is this? Being an Afriqueophile (you know what I mean), this really blows my skirt up. Seen in Nairobi, Kenya:

Pic stolen from Oliver Willis.

Update:

And in more cool Kenya news, it seems Jerome Corsi, the dirtbag 'author' and 'journalist' has received his comeuppance ... in Kenya:

The American author of a bestselling critical biography of Barack Obama containing the false allegation he was raised a Muslim has been detained in Kenya.

...

Police picked Corsi up from his hotel today because he did not have the temporary work permit needed to conduct business in Kenya, according to Carlos Maluta, a senior immigration official. "We still haven't decided what to do with him," he said.

...

Somehow, I really don't want to experience 'detainment' in Kenya. I think it's awful fitting for ol' Jerry:

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Obama is a popular figure in Kenya, where his father was a government economist. Several of his extended family still live there.

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Hmmm, I'll bet the Kenyans must take exception to what Corsi wrote about a native son.

...

The US press has accused Corsi of being anti-Islamic, anti-Catholic, anti-semitic and homophobic, and of exploiting racial prejudices in an attempt to ''scare white America".

...

Maybe Darkest Africa might put the fear of God into the lowlife white American. I love Karma.

Link thanks to Res at Ol' Fez-head's place.

There were better choices ...

Than Sarah Palin. Via Jill, RedDan at Fighting Liberals points out that there are Republican women who would be better at taking the 'Hillary vote' away from Barry than VP Barbie:

...

I consider my self a progressive feminist: women should have equal pay for equal work, are an integral part of the political, economic, business, family, social and cultural fabric of every part of every society. Women should be accorded the same treatment and respect as every and any other person out there. There are many, many conservative republican women out there who, while I might detest them for their political views and actions, have orders of magnitude more credibility and cachet than this bubbleheaded loser. Women like Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Condoleezza Rice, Kay Bailey Hutchison, and so many others – they may be abhorrent politically, but hey – women have every right to be stupid and wrong as men, so why not, right?

On the Democratic side, we have women like Clinton, Sebelius, Granholm, Lee, and so many more across the spectrum from progressive to moderate to blue dog to whatever.

But Sarah Palin??

...

And had he chosen Snowe or Collins, I'd really be worried he might get the votes of women who admire Hillary. I'm married to one and I'll tell ya, I won't repeat what Mrs. F says when she hears Palin on the TV.

The Palins' Un-American Activities

Salon

Imagine if the Obamas had hooked up with a violently anti-American group in league with the government of Iran.

Oct. 7, 2008 | "My government is my worst enemy. I'm going to fight them with any means at hand."

This was former revolutionary terrorist Bill Ayers back in his old Weather Underground days, right? Imagine what Sarah Palin is going to do with this incendiary quote as she tears into Barack Obama this week.

Only one problem. The quote is from Joe Vogler, the raging anti-American who founded the Alaska Independence Party. Inconveniently for Palin, that's the very same secessionist party that her husband, Todd, belonged to for seven years and that she sent a shout-out to as Alaska governor earlier this year. ("Keep up the good work," Palin told AIP members. "And God bless you.")

AIP chairwoman Lynette Clark told me recently that Sarah Palin is her kind of gal. "She's Alaskan to the bone ... she sounds just like Joe Vogler."

Vogler's greatest moment of glory was to be his 1993 appearance before the United Nations to denounce United States "tyranny" before the entire world and to demand Alaska's freedom. The Alaska secessionist had persuaded the government of Iran to sponsor his anti-American harangue (my em).

That's right ... Iran. The Islamic dictatorship. The taker of American hostages. The rogue nation that McCain and Palin have excoriated Obama for suggesting we diplomatically engage. That Iran.

The Republican ticket is working hard this week to make Barack Obama's tenuous connection to graying, '60s revolutionary Bill Ayers a major campaign issue. But the Palins' connection to anti-American extremism is much more central to their political biographies.

Imagine the uproar if Michelle Obama was revealed to have joined a black nationalist party whose founder preached armed secession from the United States and who enlisted the government of Iran in his cause? The Obama campaign would probably not have survived such an explosive revelation. Particularly if Barack Obama himself was videotaped giving the anti-American secessionists his wholehearted support just months ago.

Where's the outrage, Sarah Palin has been asking this week, in her attacks on Obama's fuzzy ties to Ayers? The question is more appropriate when applied to her own disturbing associations.

Note to Obama: use this.

Too bad the Alaska secesh didn't succeed. The Repugs would have been denied their white trash bimbo and we could have just invaded them and stolen their oil.

Good Gravy, Obama! Git This Here Ad On The Radio!

Christy Hardin Smith

Bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley is playing in Virginia. The Obama campaign should get this on the airwaves all over Appalachia...now.

Ralph Stanley sounds cuter than a speckled pup under a red wagon. Just listen.

Folks here in WV, and also KY, PA, OH, TN, NC, MD, and VA would connect with this. Because Ralph Stanley isn't just a bluegrass legend, he sounds like "one of us."

Dr. Stanley's voice was used at this McCain-Palin rally as well:

"What do you mean?

We have to follow rules?"

You see, we were supposed to give them $700 bln with no strings attached:

Fears are mounting that many Wall Street banks and financial firms will refuse to participate in the US government's $700bn bail-out package, leaving global markets and world economies in a perilous state for months to come.

'There is a growing feeling that banks ... might instead decide to tough it out,' said Thomas Caldwell, chairman and CEO of Caldwell Financial, a $1bn-plus fund manager.

...

One of the least attractive elements is a section designed to curb executive pay at banks that participate in the bail-out package. These include limiting stock-related pay and banning 'golden parachutes' for executives.

'I think this hodge-podge of regulations and rules will be enough to put many [chief executives] off participating,' Caldwell said.

Sources close to Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch indicated the banks might choose not to participate in the bail-out as there is a growing view on Wall Street that the market may be bottoming out.

...

Good. Don't take the bailout money. Barry can do something for the good of the people with your share once he's elected.

Great thanks to our pal Montag for the link.

Pissing it away ...

One of the best ranters on the Tubes (that's because she's so smart); Athenae on what's been wasted over the past 8 years:

...

Eight years, they had. Eight years, bookended by wars and national tragedies and approval ratings of which George Washington could not boast. Two Supreme Court justices, both alike in loathesomeness, a Congress that bent over backwards and kissed its own ass for anything and everything the administration said it needed, I mean, Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson are sitting around in the afterlife going, "Dude, could you just imagine what we could have done with this sitch?" and John Adams, puffing on a cigar, is going, "Dude, I KNOW. Where was this deference to a brother's every whim when I could have used it?" They had everything. They had everything they told people they would need in order to run the world right. They had everything, and they pissed it away.

...

On 12 September 2001, "everybody was an American". Could you imagine what someone like Bill Clinton, or Al Gore, could have done with all that goodwill?

[Mc]Trainspotting ...

My neighbor-to-the-north, Stephen makes some comparisons.

Pals ...

Maru:

John McCain has been "palling around" with Jew-hating, bigoted crackpots John Hagee and Rod Parsley, indicted felon G Gordon Liddy, noted tax-cheat/Jew-hater and secessionist Sarah Palin, drug-stealing plagiarist Cindy McCain, and George W Bush, under whose watch saw the Sept 11th attacks, Hurrican Katrina, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the current economic crisis. And wait, there's more:

...

And we should be worried about Obama "palling around" with a man who "turned himself in for his crimes, ready to go to be punished. It just so happened that the FBI fucked up the case against him, so he walked"?

Hardly Strictly

The Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, held the first weekend in October, in Baghdad By The Bay (the Repugs wish! They'd love to bomb it flat. Heh.) is a huge deal. I watched the PBS show (thanks, Wordsmith) about last year's festival just last night on KQED.

Here's the write-up in the EssEffChron about this past weekend's festival. Photos here.

When Elvis Costello launched "Friend of the Devil" during his performance Sunday at Lindley Meadow, the ghost of the Grateful Dead hovered over the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in Golden Gate Park.

A sea of people overflowed the shady gully into John F. Kennedy Drive and sang along. The Dead memorably played that same glen with the Jefferson Starship about a million years ago - in 1975 - but there is something of the Dead in the air anytime anybody plays music for free in the park.

"This is amazing," said Emmylou Harris, closing the festival, as always, as the sun went down and the crowd thinned out. "This is like the eighth wonder of the world."

Pretty good article, but it gets a little dicey:

There certainly is nothing remotely like the sprawling free concert anywhere else in the music world. The star of the show is Golden Gate Park itself, a world-class park second to none - not Central Park, Hyde Park, nor the Bois de Boulogne. The experience of listening to music on a beautiful day like Sunday in Golden Gate Park is incomparable.

The Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival has also isolated and identified a segment of American music that doesn't comfortably fit under convenient umbrellas such as "acoustic music" or "Americana," a phrase of recent currency that fortunately seems to be falling by the wayside. But any festival that can encompass the frenetic Gypsy punk-rock of Gogol Bordello, the unvarnished backwoods sound of Ralph Stanley, the mordant wit of songwriter Loudon Wainwright III and the electric rock improvisations of Tea Leaf Green has staked out a territory all its own.

If this festival depended on ticket sales, the programming would be entirely different. But because of Hellman's largess, Hardly Strictly booker Dawn Holliday can build a festival around an imaginary demographic of discerning, tasteful and adventuresome music fans willing to swim in the feeder streams of mainstream American music. It is a realm where Texas troubadour Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Nashville rebel Steve Earle loom large. Only in the world of Hardly Strictly Bluegrass is Emmylou Harris a queen.

Now just a goddam minute here, you elitist ying-yang! Yeah, GGP is a nice park, but the star of the show? I don't think so.

"If this festival depended on ticket sales" and "an imaginary demographic...willing to swim in the feeder streams of mainstream American music" show you where this clown's head is at. Billed as 'Senior Pop Music', he's obviously addicted to the free booze and shrimp at the 'mainstream' music companies' promotion parties, which are all about the bottom line from record sales, which rip off the artists left and right. To my understanding, the performers make their living from concert ticket sales, which they don't have to do at Hardly Strictly because they get paid to be there.

As to "an imaginary demographic...willing to swim in the feeder streams of mainstream American music", boy did he get it wrong! It's actually "a very real demographic unwilling to swim in the muck of 'mainstream' American music". Dude, mainstream American music, i.e. 'gets played on the radio and sells millions of albums even though it has absolutely no redeeming social value', TOTALLY SUCKS! The music may be a little eclectic, even arcane, but it's a lot better than the pap offered to and sucked up by the masses.

Besides, 'feeder streams' are a lot cleaner than the muddy mainstream, and it's where we go to spawn. Heh. Mr. Selvin oughta try it...

The thing that really got me, though, was "Only in the world of Hardly Strictly Bluegrass is Emmylou Harris a queen". Horsepuckey, you ignorant fuck! Ms. Harris not only is perhaps the best singer in a very broad genre a little to the left of the mainstream, she has sung with nearly anybody you can think of, well, not with Celine Dion so far, although you never know, the day is young, and has a body of work second to none.

Mr. Selvin, Emmylou is THE queen.

O be still my pounding heart! Click to emmyloubiggen

I guess they're short on help at the Chron. They shouldn't have had to let a guy write about alt music whose only experience has been skewed by the view as seen through the lens of big-money commercial mainstream swill. He just doesn't get it.

Note to the Chron: Don't send this guy to cover the Sacramento Jazz Jubilee. Those folks'll cut him!

Please pardon my rant and go enjoy the article and photos anyway.