Leave Uly Alone

LATimes

Reporting from Washington - Ronald Reagan is honored by, among other things, an airport, a freeway, an aircraft carrier and -- ironically for a critic of big government -- one of the biggest federal buildings in Washington.

A 'critic of big government' who made it bigger. Sounds about right for the Repug hypocrite who started the country's slide.

Now, some of the late president's admirers are launching a new effort to add another honor: printing his likeness on a $50 bill in place of Ulysses S. Grant's.

But at least one Democrat who serves on the House Financial Services Committee, where the proposal has been sent, isn't ready to jettison Grant for "someone whose policies are still controversial."

"Our currency ought to be something that unites us," said Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Sherman Oaks).

I went to school and worked in Sherman Oaks. Good on ya, Brad!

I like $50 bills. I carry them when I travel because they're 2/3 thinner in my wallet than the equivalent in $20s and $10s and easier to change than Benjies. If they put that asshole Reagan's face on them, I will still carry them, and I will wipe my ass with them at the point of purchase so the merchant's cash register will smell like a Repug and remind all of the deep doodoo that sonofabitch got us into.

On the flip side, why not put his face on them? The money ain't worth shit these days anyway. Might as well put his shit face on it. Fuck it, cut to the chase. Reagan started us swirling the drain and Bush damn near finished it, so go all the way and put the Chimp's face on it.

Ride For The Ta-Ta's

Click to embiggen

Me and Mrs. G are big supporters of anything having to do with breast cancer research and helping women in treatment. Mrs. G's sister is a breast cancer survivor and I just like ta-tas.

I thought the graphic for this upcoming motorcycle run was kinda cute. I saw a poster for it at Mrs. G's oral surgeon's office yesterday while she was having some stitches out. Doctor Rafe's wife Linda is also a breast cancer survivor whose hair is just growing back. Check it out at Ride For The Ta-Ta's. The ride supports Moms on the Run and props to Pinocchio's Bar & Grill for being behind the effort to help local women for ten years.

Just as an aside, the second listing at Google was Reno Harley-Davidson's Twitter page and the third was about Goodrich All Terrain TAs. Kinky. Heh.

Reconciliation = Nuclear Option?

Not so much. Maru:

...

2010: Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-hurrrrr) says that using reconciliation to pass bills “would really be the end of the Senate[*]."
2003: Sen. Alexander uses reconciliation to pass a Bush bill.
2005: Sen. Alexander uses reconciliation.
2005 again: Sen. Alexander uses reconciliation.
2007: Sen. Alexander uses reconciliation.

...

The End Of The World As We Know It! Unless the Republicans do it. The GOP of the 21st Century, hypocrisy unbound.

[*] Not that it would be a bad thing.

Blame ...

Yeah, we all see our tax money wasted, but only conservatives think we should be in jihad against the IRS:

...

But in my wildest resentful nightmares I would never imagine that it's some clerk, some typist, some middle manager, some auditor, event, at the local IRS office would be to blame for my plight, and would go on the attack against a place where those people work. You know, this is what the "leaders" of the teabagger resentment fest don't get. To them, stirring up tax rage is a completely abstract thing they're doing. To the people listening to them, though, it's disturbingly concrete.

Indeed! There are just as many Christian Mujaheddin as there are Muslim ones willing to go blow themselves (and others) up at the behest of their leaders.

Moonbeam's in!

This is good news as far as I'm concerned. Click the link just below and read about him. Moonbeam knows what's going on in California better than anybody and he's a good Librul as well. He's also a Native Californian and not a carpetbagger like Whitman, Poizner, Reagan, and Schwarzenegger. I set store by that.

Of course, so was Nixon...

Attorney General Jerry Brown will announce his Democratic candidacy for governor this morning, launching what promises to be a hard-fought battle against a well-funded Republican rival.

"Well funded" is an understatement. Whitman will spend $140,000,000 of her own money in this campaign, according to reports.

Brown, 71, will make the announcement at 11 a.m. on his Web site www.jerrybrown.org and has no planned public events today. He's scheduled to speak to the media Wednesday and Thursday.

Brown will be the sole Democratic candidate for governor. In the general election, he'll likely face either Meg Whitman, the billionaire former CEO of the online auction firm eBay, or Steve Poizner, another wealthy former Silicon Valley CEO who officially filed for governor Monday.

California needs a megarich Repug CEO as governor like it needs another itchy asshole. We have enough of those already.

Go read what Jon Corzine has to say about this. Basically, you can tell people who work for you what to do. If they don't, not so much.

Later. Gotta get my bumpersticker toot de sweet!

Rainbow Stew

Garrison Keillor on unreality:

Unreality remains pretty much the same, and its appeal in politics is as strong as ever. Look at the recent powwow of the conservative choir in Washington. Their goal is to reduce government to where it was in Coolidge's time. They are sticking to this, though their presidents, Reagan and Bush II, only succeeded in enlarging government.

As for their foreign policy, it's the old Flag In Your Face, Nuke The Whales, Talk Loud, Walk Tall, Proud To Be Dumb & Who Gives A Rip Anyway, Republican bravado that's all for domestic consumption and makes perfect sense if you're a shut-in and your TV is locked on Fox News but not if you are ambulatory and able to read English.

Meanwhile, our president, who is more or less forced to live in the real world, has seen his numbers drop alarmingly because unreality is so beautiful to so many people, such as the tea baggers.

To be fair, there's a certain unreality on the left as well that's contributing to his drop in numbers: where are the unicorns and free Bubble-Up and rainbow stew they think he promised o those ages and ages ago?

The conservatives should, in all decency, lie low for a few years. When you've driven the car into the swamp -- up to our eyeballs in debt, fighting two wars in behalf of shaky regimes, trying to keep a lid on Iran, Congress in a frozen stupor -- and then you throw mudballs at the tow-truck driver, you are betting on the electorate having the memory of a guppy.

There's no decency to Repugs. Period.

Just as an aside, I like the tow truck reference. I've been on backcountry retrieves with a couple of our local hookers and if any fool ever gave those guys any shit like throwin' frozen mudballs at 'em, they might as well send for their stuff and live right there because every tow truck driver in radio range will know about it in about one minute and will just be too busy to come help.

State of the Union: A Status Report on the Far Right

A very interesting 'must read' piece at Cognitive Policy Works.

“There’s another group of people that are actually more interesting right now,” Chip explained. Dr. Robert Altemeyer, who did the original research on right-wing authoritarian followers, found that there’s a second slice of the American populace—about the same size as the first one, or slightly bigger—who are conservative by temperament, but don’t live full-time in that same overwrought, hyper-vigilant, paranoid space that the ultra-right wing authoritarian 10 percent do. This group, Chip said, usually hews closer to the political center-right, keeping themselves at some distance from the really wild-eyed True Believers in the next cohort farther out.

But according to Altemeyer, I pointed out, these people tend to move away from the center and embrace hard-line conservatism if they’re under extreme social or economic stress, right? Exactly right, said Chip. It’s happened several times before in American history. (One example: In Nixonland, Rick Perlstein documented how, back in the mid-1960s, conservative suburban homeowners were driven into the arms of the far right by their fear of neighborhood integration in the wake of fair housing laws. The political careers of both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan where launched on the resulting tide of rage). And it’s precisely what’s happening again now.

I could quote from this piece 'til the cows come home. Go read.

The writing ...

On the wall.

I'll give Harold Ford this; he's got someone on his staff who can read it:

ALBANY - Former Tennessee Rep. Harold Ford Jr. has decided against mounting a primary challenge to Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand.

Ford announced his decision Monday in a New York Times Op-Ed piece after spending about two months on a "listening tour" of the state. His move is a relief for Democrats worried a bitter primary would harm the winner and possibly give the seat to Republicans.

...

There was rejoicing throughout the land.

Harold Ford is welcome to visit my beautiful state any time he wants, but we'll never consider him a New Yorker.

The Hurt Locker

I seem to be on about movies today. There must be something coming up in Hollywood.

Paul Clarke

Indeed, the Hurt Locker does have a message of the impact on the individuals involved. The movie opens with the quote "war is a drug" from Chris Hedges book War is a Force That Gives US Meaning. Hedges suggests that war seduces societies, a concept echoed in the writings of retired Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich, who fears that America has fallen in love with militarism. And certainly, some members of the team are seduced by war, but the canvas of this film is much broader.

The film depicts the human cost of this conflict. We see the physical cost on the team members, and we see the toll on their families. While Iraq has largely fallen of the front page, the conflict continues and 100,000 US servicemembers remain in country. Because of the nature of our all-volunteer military, most Americans are immune to the war's real impact. In the Vietnam conflict, a whole generation of American males were subject to the draft and more than 8 million men and women served during the Vietnam Era. It was this commonality of experience that made the opposition to the war so powerful.

Of course, now we have a professional fight force and embedded journalists, so we turn away from what the war is doing to us as individuals. While we honor our servicemembers, we rarely have to look at the brutality of multiple deployments, of broken bodies and spirits and families pushed to brink. The Hurt Locker believes it is its mission to take you there. We see something of the Iraqi populace too, and their portrayal is nuanced, for while there are insurgents, the more common sense is that they are victims of the circumstances of war.

We like our heroes to be two-dimensional, and our military members have in recent years been given the same treatment. We salute their service, have a parade and close the door to the details. For five years, news about Iraq occupied our national conscious. But it has faded into the background, prematurely I think. The Hurt Locker returns us to the point where we need to be -- examining the impact upon those we ask to serve.

I have nothing to add to that other than the biggest Hurt Locker our troops will have to endure is apathy here at home for where they've been and what they've been through in an ignoble cause that was not their fault.

Dude...

If you're a fan of my homeboy Jeff Bridges, you'll want to read this.

Bridges captured the transitional spirit of the '70s in films like John Huston's Fat City, the whimsical Rancho Deluxe and Hearts of the West, Stay Hungry and the conspiratorial Winter Kills, with John Huston playing Bridges' big business father in a cautionary tale about the danger of health care conglomerates made three decades ago. In 1980s, Bridges broad range went from dark in Cutter's Way to light in his lovable Starman. Jeff, his brother Beau and Michelle Pfeiffer were intimate, delightful and delicious in The Fabulous Baker Boys.

In the last decade of the 20th century, Bridges contends with Robin Williams' Holy Fool in Terry Gilliam's wild and extraordinary The Fisher King, does some of the best acting of his career in Peter Weir's Fearless and gets a lot of laughs in The Big Lebowski while telling it like it is. In the new millennium he has played a president in The Contender, Kevin Spacey's shrink in K-Pax and Seabiscuit's dedicated owner, who helps the equine hero restore hope to America during the Great Depression. Crazy Heart ties the room together with Jeff's nuanced and powerful performance, which Los Angeles Times critic Kenneth Turan calls "the capstone role of his career." Even if you are turned off by hard-drinking country musicians, don't miss Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart, which will fire up your heart and soul.

How could the author, a supposed Big Deal Hollywood Insider, have managed to leave The Last American Hero and Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, amongst a gazillion others, off that list? Yeesh.

The Enthusiasm Gap

Robert Reich with a recommended read:

The Democratic base is lethargic because congressional Democrats continue to compromise on everything the base cares about. [...]

These waffles and wiggle rooms have drained the Democratic base of all passion. "Why should I care?" are words I hear over and over again from stalwart Democrats who worked their hearts out in the last election.

The Republican base, meanwhile, is on a rampage. It's more and more energized by its mad-as-hell populists. Tea partiers, libertarians, Birchers, birthers, and Dick Armey astro-turfers are channeling the economic anxieties of millions of Americans against "big government."

Anyone with an ounce of sanity understands government is the only effective countervailing force against the forces that got us into this mess: Against Goldman Sachs and the rest of the big banks that plunged the economy into crisis, got our bailout money, and are now back at their old games, dispensing huge bonuses to themselves. Against WellPoint and the rest of the giant health insurers who are at this moment robbing us of the care we need by raising their rates by double digits. Against giant corporations that are showing big profits by continuing to lay off millions of Americans and cutting the wages of millions of more, by shifting jobs abroad and substituting software. Against big oil and big utilities that are raising prices and rates, and continue to ravage the atmosphere.

If there was ever a time to connect the dots and make the case for government as the singular means of protecting the public from these forces it is now. Yet the White House and the congressional Democrats' ongoing refusal to blame big business and Wall Street has created the biggest irony in modern political history. A growing portion of the public, fed by the right, blames our problems on "big government."

What the Big Business Right has successfully managed to do is to convince a very loud minority of mouth-breathers that regulation of Big Biz's thieving ways is exactly the same as government intrusion into their own bedrooms where Big Biz is busy fucking them like crazed weasels.

Please God, let there be, and how I hate this term, a Silent Majority that will not be swayed by ignorance come election time and put the rapists, pillagers, and plunderers back in power.

The Democrats are weak, but they are our only defense. God help us.

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

NATIONAL ARCHIVES BANS PHOTOGRAPHING DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
Fears its ideals could fall into wrong hands.

Navy to Put Women in Submarines
And sell it as reality series.

"20,000 Jersey Shores Under The Sea"?

Microsoft, Yahoo Team Up To Fight Google
As predicted in Revelations.

Marijuana Use on the Rise Among Seniors
“It helps me remember where I hid the stash,” explains one.

I fail to see the irony...

MY TURN
Rahm Emanuel
White House Chief of Staff

To pass meaningful healthcare reform it was always assumed bipartisan support would be necessary. And, to that end, we at the White House, along with Democrats in the House and Senate, extended our hands across the aisle to the Republicans to join us in this collaborative effort. Instead, time and time again, we were rebuffed.

As a result, we've decided to stop trying to appease these stubborn, sanctimonious, self-serving schmucks and instead shove whatever fucking bill we want down their scum-sucking throats.

Thank you.

Note to Rahmbo: If you'll actually say that, you can stay a while longer.

Attention spans ...

How many times have I said that Americans have the attention spans of 3 year olds? Digby hit's it on the head:

... It's an article of faith among the Villagers that Bush will eventually be vindicated as Truman was ...

I know people who look at the Nixon administration with nostalgia. Bush will be a hero in 10 years.

We don't need ...

No stinking bipartisanship. Greenwald:

One of the strangest prongs of conventional Beltway wisdom is the lament that there is not enough bipartisanship. The opposite is true: many of the most damaging acts inflicted on the country by Washington are enacted on a fully bipartisan basis -- the most destructive political act of this generation, the invasion of Iraq, was fully bipartisan, as were most of the post-9/11 civil liberties abuses and other Bush-era initiatives-- and, at least in certain areas, the harmonious joining together of Republicans and Democrats continues unabated:

...

One day, the Dems will realize that being afraid the Republicans will call you names is no reason to support bad legislation and water down the good.

Whoa, sonny ...

We ain't as young as we used to be. If ya can't do the job, get the fuck out!

Olympic Drinking Games: Why Vancouver Gets the Gold

Time via Yahoo!News

The city of Vancouver, and the ski village of Whistler, are terrific hosts for these Olympic Games. In Vancouver, the air is clean, the public transit is scarily efficient, and the harbors, with the snow-capped mountains in the backdrop, are picturesque. Whistler, two hours to the north and home of the skiing, sliding, and Nordic events, is a winter wonderland. But let's face it: if public intoxication was an Olympic sport, Vancouver and Whistler would own the podium.

I'm not saying this because of the photographs of a few Canadian women's hockey players sipping champagne (and chugging Molsons) on the ice after winning the gold medal. Those images, however, seem to encapsulate the spirit of the host country. Throughout the Olympics, drunken revelers have overrun the streets of Vancouver. Local hospitals are reporting spikes in emergency room visits for alcohol-related sicknesses and injuries; most of the intoxicated patients are males between the ages of 15 and 24. In Whistler, the partiers have turned what should be a cozy village into rows of frat houses in need of soundproofing.

Yes, the mood is festive. And for the most part, law and order is being maintained. In Whistler, police have said arrests are lower than they would typically be during New Year's Eve or, for that matter, during your average, rambunctious summer weekend. Still, while walking through downtown Vancouver after a long day's work, you can't help but think to yourself: "These must be the drunkest Olympics ever."

Bonnie D. Ford, who is covering the Games for espn.com, has been to every Winter Olympics since 1998 in Nagano. "There's no second place," she said when asked where Vancouver ranks on the booze barometer. (In fairness, you can pretty much strike from this debate Salt Lake City, the abstemious host of the 2002 Olympics.) Her hotel is near Granville Street, close enough to hear the "Can-a-da, Can-a-da" shouts at 3 am. "It's been a two-week tailgate," she said. "I've covered a lot of college football, and this is like the Dante's Inferno version of tailgating."

When I asked one reveler if there's too much public intoxication in Vancouver, he responded: "There should be more." A roofer by day, he told me he had just consumed eight to ten beers - and he looked like it. "The police are too strict," he said. "One of them poured out my beer - and I wasn't even drunk yet." At 2 a.m., Granville Street was still packed, and there were plenty of drunks wandering about. Vancouver appeared to have more morons per square foot than the Jersey Shore house.

Impossible! If true, that's definitely some Gold Medal-worthy moronics!

More.

The Biggest Bordertown

This one's for Fixer.

Thanks to jlnoames, France.

Good News About The WSJ

Paul Krugman

Brad DeLong and Felix Salmon both point to evidence that the Murdoch effect is degrading the Journal’s news coverage. Indeed.

Frankly, there was a time when I thought the Journal was better on business/economic news than the Times. But no longer; and it’s not just things like referring to the estate tax as the “death tax” in news stories. Overall, coverage is getting cruder, with more tendency to report opinions as if they were news, and substitute prejudices for real analysis.

And this bad news is good news. There’s a pretty good chance that we will end up with only one great national newspaper. And I know which paper that should be …

Update: I suppose I should explain that a single national paper isn’t what I want — but it’s the way things seem to be going, so it matters who ends up as the last paper standing.

The NYT is no day at the beach sometimes, but it beats the pants off anything controlled by Murdoch.

The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged

Daddy Frank on CPAC, the Teabaggers, and the batcrap crazy far right's exhortations to violence in the wake of the Stack attack. A recommended read, many links.

What made that kamikaze mission eventful was less the deranged act itself than the curious reaction of politicians on the right who gave it a pass — or, worse, flirted with condoning it. Stack was a lone madman, and it would be both glib and inaccurate to call him a card-carrying Tea Partier or a “Tea Party terrorist.” But he did leave behind a manifesto whose frothing anti-government, anti-tax rage overlaps with some of those marching under the Tea Party banner. That rant inspired like-minded Americans to create instant Facebook shrines to his martyrdom. Soon enough, some cowed politicians, including the newly minted Tea Party hero Scott Brown, were publicly empathizing with Stack’s credo — rather than risk crossing the most unforgiving brigade in their base.

The leaders embraced by the new grass roots right are a different slate entirely: Glenn Beck, Ron Paul and Sarah Palin. Simple math dictates that none of this trio can be elected president. As George F. Will recently pointed out, Palin will not even be the G.O.P. nominee “unless the party wants to lose at least 44 states” (as it did in Barry Goldwater’s 1964 Waterloo). But these leaders do have a consistent ideology, and that ideology plays to the lock-and-load nutcases out there, not just to the peaceable (if riled up) populist conservatives also attracted to Tea Partyism. This ideology is far more troubling than the boilerplate corporate conservatism and knee-jerk obstructionism of the anti-Obama G.O.P. Congressional minority.

A co-sponsor of CPAC was the John Birch Society, another far-right organization that has re-emerged after years of hibernation. Its views, which William F. Buckley Jr. decried in the 1960s as an “idiotic” and “irrational” threat to true conservatism, remain unchanged. At the conference’s conclusion, a presidential straw poll was won by Congressman Paul, ending a three-year Romney winning streak. No less an establishment conservative observer than the Wall Street Journal editorialist Dorothy Rabinowitz describes Paul’s followers as “conspiracy theorists, anti-government zealots, 9/11 truthers, and assorted other cadres of the obsessed and deranged.”

Such violent imagery and invective, once largely confined to blogs and talk radio, is now spreading among Republicans in public office or aspiring to it. Last year Michele Bachmann, the redoubtable Tea Party hero and Minnesota congresswoman, set the pace by announcing that she wanted “people in Minnesota armed and dangerous” to oppose Obama administration climate change initiatives. In Texas, the Tea Party favorite for governor, Debra Medina, is positioning herself to the right of the incumbent, Rick Perry — no mean feat given that Perry has suggested that Texas could secede from the union. A state sovereignty zealot, Medina reminded those at a rally that “the tree of freedom is occasionally watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots.”

In the heyday of 1960s left-wing radicalism, no liberal Democratic politicians in Washington could be found endorsing groups preaching violent revolution. The right has a different history. In the months before McVeigh’s mass murder, Helen Chenoweth and Steve Stockman, then representing Idaho and Texas in Congress, publicly empathized with the conspiracy theories of the far right that fueled his anti-government obsessions.

In his Times article on the Tea Party right, Barstow profiled Pam Stout, a once apolitical Idaho retiree who cast her lot with a Tea Party group allied with Beck’s 9/12 Project, the Birch Society and the Oath Keepers, a rising militia group of veterans and former law enforcement officers who champion disregarding laws they oppose. She frets that “another civil war” may be in the offing. “I don’t see us being the ones to start it,” she told Barstow, “but I would give up my life for my country.”

Whether consciously or coincidentally, Stout was echoing Palin’s memorable final declaration during her appearance at the National Tea Party Convention earlier this month: “I will live, I will die for the people of America, whatever I can do to help.” It’s enough to make you wonder who is palling around with terrorists now.

Much more.

Sunday morning ...

Frogophile music blogging. A beautiful song and a video from my favorite French city next to Paris.

Patrick Fiori and Jacques Venaruso - Marseille