Saturday Emmylou Blogging

Woody Guthrie & Emmylou Harris ~ "Hobo's Lullaby"

Thanks to jasabet2.

Revealed!

Palin and Bachmann are a lesbian couple and somehow they spawned ... Ozzy?

The Psycho Sisters in 2012

Thanks to Jed & Barb at Kos

'Toons

There are always good 'toons at YubaNet along with news of general interest and some of particular interest to my neck of the woods.

Here's a couple. This one's funny:

Click to embiggen

This one's not at all funny:

Doubleplus Ungood Palinspeak

TrueSlant

In an academically rich yet entertaining post, linguist John McWhorter explains what exactly it is about Sarah Palin’s speaking abilities that gives some people pause:

Social scientists and historians could probably spend lifetimes studying how a woman barely capable of stringing together a noun and a verb — let alone possessing meaningful understanding of the complex issues facing us — is also such a remarkably skilled politician as to stake out as her own territory the entire landscape of troubled and dreary right-wing America.

From McWhorter. Worth a read.

It’s not quite Bushspeak, which, with the likes of “I know what it’s like to put food on my family,” was replete with flagrantly misplaced words with a frequency that made for guesses, not completely in jest, that he might suffer from a mild form of Wernicke’s aphasia, interfering with matching word shapes to meanings. (Bush the father wasn’t much better in this regard—there just wasn’t an internet to make collecting the slips and spreading them around so easy.)

Rather, Palin is given to meandering phraseology of a kind suggesting someone more commenting on impressions as they enter and leave her head rather than constructing insights about them. Or at least, insights that go beyond the bare-bones essentials of human cognition — an entity (i.e. something) and a predicate (i.e. something about it).

The easy score is to flag this speech style as a sign of moronism. [..]

Yep. Sure is. Next case...

Palinspeak is a flashlight panning over thoughts, rather than thoughts given light via considered expression. [...]

A flashlight with a dim bulb and low batteries panning over not much thought. It works for her given her audience. A strong light on her thoughts would reveal a vast wasteland into which she happily leads others for money. The difference between her and the Pied Piper is that she wants the rats to take over Hamelin. And if they don't pay her, she'll leave the children there and just make them as stupid as their parents.

FauxNews poll finds Americans favor ‘IRS’ over ‘Tea Party’

Don't worry. F**Noise will no doubt protect their viewers from this startling news by suppressing the results of their own poll. Heh.

Raw Story, lotsa links.

After months upon months of enthusiastic, cheer-leading coverage of any rally that involved tea, tea bagging or tea partying, the Fox News network has miraculously disproved itself by producing a new poll that finds Americans think more highly of the Internal Revenue Service than they do the vocal conservative minority.

Note to the teabaggers (there must be some of you who can read well enough to slowly read this): If the IRS is more popular than you are, you should shoot yourself.

There are some other poll results from this and other polls that will make you feel all warm and fuzzy, but buried way down the piece is this jewel:

Because of her recent speech to the 67th annual Wine and Spirits Wholesalers of America expo (which received rather bitter reviews), Palin was offered $25,000 by Nevadans for Sensible Marijuana Laws to give a short pep talk to their group. ​"There's no reason why former Governor Palin should reject our offer," a spokesman jokingly said, citing how much safer cannabis is than alcohol.

One possible reason why she'd decline: according to The New York Times, Palin charges up to $100,000 per appearance -- something that even tea partiers have chided her for and a fee the alcohol purveyors presumably paid.

Though she did not address any issues specific to the wine and spirits industries, Palin did emphasize one term in particular during her speech to the conference. According to Tom Wark's wine blog, she was all about "deregulation" in a fuzzy, non-specific sense: likely the wrong theme to employ while speaking to a room of professionals who serve an industry that strongly supports special regulations springing from the 21st Amendment to the Constitution, which Palin would now appear to be against, just on general principle.

Trailer Trash Barbie hasn't got a fuckin' clue about anything other than gullible people will pay to hear her shit, nor does she have much in the way of 'principles', but she sure has a big screechy mouth and at a hunnert large a time she'll do whatever you want, sailor.

The Double Down Death Bomb

Mark Morford is on today about the most disgusting fast food yet.

Behold, the KFC Double Down sandwich. It is, if you really want to know, two slabs of fried chicken intersliced with two pieces of bacon, two slabs of cheese, and the Colonel's "special sauce." It comes in the form of a sandwich, with the fried chicken where the bread used to be. It's sort of hilarious. It's sort of perfect. And then it'll probably make you vomit.

I like fried chicken, bacon, and cheese, but not like that. Yuck.

Of course, it's sort of a foregone conclusion, a rigged game. This vile meatwich is crammed like a grenade with sodium, sugar, fat and chemicals. Ergo, the testers, presumably people with taste buds devastated by years of cramming similar compost into their guts, thought it was pure nirvana. And then their colons exploded.

I love a good fast food burger once in a while, but I haven't eaten any KFC for years, ever since I found out they use Tyson chicken. Tyson is a big Repug donor and treats his employees poorly. I don't even wanta think about what he does to the chickens.

It's war I tell ya ...

Whaddya mean we can only drink beer at lunch?

...

Warehouse workers at Danish brewing giant Carlsberg are striking because management has decided that the employees may no longer have their customary three free bottled beers a day at the workplace, reports Business.dk.

Carlsberg has implemented a new workplace alcohol policy that now limits employees to one bottle of beer a day at lunchtime.
That move resulted in employees at the brewer’s Fredericia facility to strike yesterday. This morning, workers at Carlsberg’s Terminal East morning shift in suburban Høje Taastrup also left the worksite prior to their shifts in protest of the new policy.

...

Quote of the Day

El Rude-o:

... The whole of the interview was like watching three wildebeests fuck each other - awkward, stupid-looking, and mostly goddamned funny ...

Addendums ...

To my post the other day:

...

You know what it feels like to be in the middle of it? Well, combat is the Great Equalizer. It is a time where abstract thought takes its leave, when the words "moral" and "compassion" meaningless until it's over. You are in touch with your basic instincts, kill or be killed, fight or flight, and nothing much else matters. You are as wild as the rest of God's creatures, humanity be damned. All that matters is what all of your senses, heightened to the sharpness of a razor thanks to the adrenaline rush, are telling you and what animal instinct and the training you've received are causing you to act. And you can't turn it on and off like flipping a switch.

...

Our friend Comrade Misfit relates "The Story of the Green Flare":

...

The Navy conducts exercises at sea from time to time, operations that civilians refer to as "war games." The goal is to train the ships' crews to deal with the operational tempo, lack of sleep and some of the stresses of being in fluid and uncertain situations at sea.

I was one of the OODs of one of the ships in the exercise. My ship had a modest AAW defensive capability. That was simulated by the firing of a green flare from a Very pistol. For the duration of the exercise, the OODs wore a holster with the Very pistol and several flares.

...

Fortunately, nobody took .50 caliber that night but it reinforces my point that when the pucker factor is high, constantly, your frame of mind changes. You see what you want to see, be it reporters, jihadis, or unfriendly helicopters. Misfit captures this well in her post, and her CO understood what goes on when it's tense. It's the situation, and we have to be careful what situations we put our troops in. It's time to hang the assholes who decided this misbegotten war would be a good thing.

“Treason in Defense of Slavery” month

Blue Texan at FDL, many links.

Group that Lobbied Republican Governor to Honor Confederacy Tied to White Supremacists

The interwebs are buzzing today with the news that GOP Gov. Robert McDonnell of Virginia has declared April “Treason in Defense of Slavery” month.

But what’s not getting enough attention is the fact that the group that convinced McDonnell to sign the declaration are a bunch of neo-Confederates.

This year’s proclamation was requested by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. [...]

They must be pretty old by now...

The Southern Poverty Law Center has a dossier on the SCV.

Although the 31,400-member SCV has always billed itself as a “non-political” and “non-racial” heritage organization devoted merely to preserving the legacy of Confederate soldiers, SCV leaders have long been tied to segregation and white supremacy.

But you’ve got to see this quote from an article in the May/June, 2008 edition of the SCV’s newsletter, The Southern Mercury.

It is very clear to me that if Barack Obama should be elected President, he would be extremely anti-white and would demand reparations for slavery and press hard for affirmative action to the degree that it would hurt young whites who were seeking jobs or admission to College and Graduate Schools. Even if he were elected, I would think he would be a one term President and the Congressional Republicans with a “corporal’s guard’ of Democrats would stop most of the radical and unjust laws he would propose. However, I believe that his rhetoric and anti-white legislative proposals would stir up racial riots. If he were running for re-election, these riots would turn into an extremely violent nature that would seriously damage race relations in America, and leave entire sections of some of our cities in ruins.

Real nice people you’re keeping company with, Bob.

From Raw Story:

Virginia's Confederate History Month debuted under Governor George ("Macaca" - G) Allen, a Republican, in 1997, causing "a national uproar," the Post notes. Allen's proclamation made no mention of slavery, but his successor, Republican James. S. Gilmore, added language referencing slavery in his own proclamation.

The month-long historic event was then dropped entirely by two subsequent Democratic governors, and had been absent from Virginia for the past eight years.

There are a lot of fine people in Virginia and The South. Unfortunately for them and for us, none of them are in charge right now.

A coupla personal anecdotes. I spent about two years in North Carolina in '65 and '66. They had odd drinking laws there, and to get a beer on Sunday we had to go to a town called Swansboro. 'Town' mighta been pushin' it a little bit, but it had a saloon that was open on Sunday.

The black Marines who were from The South wouldn't go there with us, they went to black bars in black towns, but the splibs from Up North didn't have the Jim Crow upbringing and would. Once. There were usually a couple of locals in the joint and they weren't down with Civil Rights just yet and didn't like blacks in "their" bar. They didn't have quite the lack of common sense to take on a bunch of young Marines, so there wasn't much they could do about it.

What they could do was put nickels (yes, I'm that old) in the jukebox. They played such songs as "Cajun Ku Klux Klan" and "NAACP Flight 105" which was about an airport flight controller directing a plane carrying Freedom Riders to crash in a swamp. Nice, huh? Both of these songs, and there were others I am sure, were on Rebel Records although I don't think they are still in the catalog. That they were probably on jukeboxes in "white" bars all over The South is indicative of the times.

The black Marines wanted to kick the crackers' asses for playing these race records, but we convinced 'em that a) they weren't in Chi town or Philly, and b) they were stickin' their fingers in whitey's eye just by being there and that they didn't want to rot in some redneck lockup and neither did we for backin' 'em up. It kept them from doing something that would have felt good but would have gotten us all in trouble.

Switchin' gears here. I got transferred from electronics school at MCRD San Diego to Camp Lejeune in March 1965. I drove my car and as luck would have it, my route went right through Selma, Alabama. I had heard, of course, about the Freedom Marches across the Edmund Pettus bridge there earlier that month, but when I blazed through Selma it was very quiet and peaceful. Deader'n a carp, actually. I decided to send a postcard home and stopped at a store to buy one.

I was driving a 1948 Plymouth with California plates and a Loyola University sticker in the back window. To the casual observer in Alabama it must have looked like another commie agitator was in town. I wasn't in the store one minute before the biggest fuckin' cop I've ever seen was right in there taking a look at me. The cop had a state Alcohol & Beverage Control patch on his uniform shoulder and was mighty well armed for a booze cop! He saw my haircut, and maybe the base sticker on my bumper, and put two and two together and decided I wasn't a problem and left. Those Alabama cops were on it, though. If there was any more civil rights trouble, they were gonna nip it, nip it in the bud! (Thanks to Barney Fife. Heh.)

That was 45 years ago, at the very dawn of the attempt at equality in this country. Some people have not accepted it and are not over it to this day. The old ways die hard, but they were and are pure evil, and die they must even if they have to be helped along their way to hell by the rest of us.

Numbers to Die For

From a Tomgram that will make your jaw drop:

U.S. War-Fighting Numbers to Knock Your Socks Off

It’s striking, of course, that all this is happening at a moment when, domestically, small businesses can’t get loans and close to 10% of the population is officially out of work, while state governments are desperately scrabbling for every available dollar (and some that aren’t), even as they cut what would once have been considered basic services. In contrast, the Pentagon is fighting its distant wars as if American pockets had no bottoms, the national treasury had no limits, and there was quite literally no tomorrow.

And there’s one more small contrast to be made when it comes to the finest military in the history of the world: for all the private security guards, mountains of burgers, lakes of gasoline, miles of blast walls, and satchels of cash to pass out to the locals, it’s been remarkably unsuccessful in its pacification campaigns against some of the motliest forces of our time. The U.S. military has been fought to something like a draw by relatively modest-sized, relatively lightly armed minority insurgencies that don’t even pass muster when it comes to shooting straight.

Vast piles of money and vast quantities of materiel have been squandered; equipment by the boatload has been used up; lives have been wasted in profusion; and yet the winners of our wars might turn out to be Iran and China. The American way of war, unfortunately, has the numbers to die for, just not to live by.

All of this yet to be paid for, and the upshot is that Iraq will have the civil war it longs for and a strongman will emerge to take control, and Afghanistan will return to the 13th century with cell phones and Kalashnikovs to coordinate the opium trade.

Thanks again, George.

Keep yer hands off my ...

Government subsidized apartment.

Seems the guy who wanted to kill the Speaker of the House for giving him government subsidized health care already lives in government subsidized housing.

...

Sister Lorna Walsh, community operations manager of the Mercy Housing complex where Giusti lives, said he had lived in the subsidized housing for almost 10 years. She would not comment further

...

People like this are the same type that Osama et. al. talk into blowing themselves up on buses and in train stations.

It ain't 'teabagging' anymore ...

It's called terrorism:

...

"Let me tell you what you've got to do," said Florida GOP terrorist Allen West. "You've got to make the fellow scared to come out of his house. That's the only way that you're going to win. That's the only way you're going to get these people's attention."

...

Video at Maru's place.

And stay down ...

My contribution to Confederate History Month:

The Band - The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down

Captain Obvious ...

Glenn Beck is a prolapsed rectum.

Confederate History Month Is for Losers

WaPo

RICHMOND -- Gov. Robert F. McDonnell, reviving a controversy that had been dormant for eight years, has declared that April will be Confederate History Month in Virginia, a move that angered civil rights leaders Tuesday but that political observers said would strengthen his position with his conservative base.

McDonnell's crackerass proclamation here.

The Rude Pundit, links at site.

Let's get this straight, oh, dear people of the South: the North kicked your cracker ass. You begged them to stop. You bent over and said, "No, c'mon, if we let you fuck us in the ass, will you end this?" You thought you were so fucking tough, seceding and daring the North to fuck with you. And when you ended up with your cities burned, your slaves freed, and your fake government in ruins, you never got over it, not since Appomattox. So you fetishize this shit. You build monuments to traitors, you parade around with your shirts and your yards and your pick-ups sporting the flag of your defeated pseudo-country, jacking off to the idea that one day...oh, god, shit, smack it, one day, Dixie will rise again.

Except it won't. And as much as you prance around and pretend that the good ol' days are anything but ol' and gone, you'll wallow in the mud pit of ignorance with the rest of the pigs of history.

Now, as an expatriate from the South, the Rude Pundit has had more than his fair share of discussions with knuckleheads pretending to be smart over the cause of the Civil War, usually ending with his question to said knucklehead, "Would it have happened if it the South hadn't had slaves?" Because whatever other "grievances" the South had with the North, go fuck yourself if you think, at the end of the day, there was any other reason for the war.

But, hey, go ahead, Virginia, and celebrate your slave-owning exploiters of the poor, white, racist yeoman farmers who made up the bulk of the Confederate Army. Celebrate how the wealthy plantation owners and politicians manipulated a bunch of undereducated tools into doing their bidding. It's fuckin' par for the course for conservatives, you know.

Remember, though: the Confederacy was a criminal enterprise and its defense was massive thuggery. Polish that horse turd, if you want, but it took two fucking presidential pardons to clean the slate of the huge act of treason that occurred. Congratulations, Virginia, for honoring a violent conspiracy to keep human beings enslaved without even mentioning it in the proclamation.

Historical revisionism is a beautiful thing for, as we learn from the Governor, after they had their asses handed to them by the North, "the surviving, imprisoned and injured Confederate soldiers gave their word and allegiance to the United States of America, and returned to their homes and families to rebuild their communities in peace." Yes, we all remember the century of peace and harmony that existed in the South after the Civil War, until, you know, it was fucked up by the civil rights movement. You can't give an inch, man.

Fuck the South. The next time they want to secede, soon I hope, let's save ourselves all the trouble from the last time and just wave goodbye. We can use the tax money we save by not having to support the bastards to put people to work building a fence around them.

Donohue defends pedophile priests

Well of course he does.

Raw Story, with links and video.

In another coup for the seemingly part-time political pundit Bill Donohue, CNN broadcast on Tuesday a conversation about the Catholic church's thousands of pedophilia scandals that would be awkward to even over-hear in public, let alone broadcast nation-wide.

Objecting to the term "pedophilia" being used to describe the rampant claims of children being sexually abused by priests and nuns, Donohue instead called the acts "homosexuality," later suggesting "that's what gays do."

What Donohue is saying is that the priests who carried out such horrendous offenses against children did not have a psychological fixation on children: they were simply attracted to people of the same sex, and that's just what homosexuals do. His own bar for limiting use of the term "pedophilia," according to his CNN interview, is, "I dunno, 12, 13 years of age?"

Well, there ya go. So you go from being a 'pedophile' to being a 'child molester' when the victim hits puberty. Mox fuckin' nix. They should be in prison.

In this instance, Donohue simply parrots an occasional meme of the rightwing press, no more true in present day America than it was when similar charges were commonly leveled against other minority groups.

The Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance take a differing perspective on the definitions, classifying "homosexuals" as individuals who are solely attracted to adults of the same sex. Pedophilia, they note, "is now generally used to describe an adult who sexually abuses children; a child molester. Some pedophiles are attracted to both boys and girls; some are attracted to children of only one gender."

Meaning: it does not matter the gender of the child, sexual abuse by an adult makes the perpetrator into a pedophile in the eyes of society. Mr. Donohue's argument that "homosexuality" is to blame for the Catholic Church's problems would seem to be misplaced.

'Misplaced' is way too kind a word. Donohue needs to be taken out and horsewhipped. Maybe he can find a priest who likes to do that and isn't turned off by his being a nominal adult.

Porn star likes GOP 'values', switches parties

Raw Story

Former porn star and lifelong Democrat Stormy Daniels (may not be work safe depending on where you work - G) has found a new home in the GOP after its notorious expenditures at a bondage-themed strip club in Los Angeles.

Wholeheartedly embracing what has been a damaging scandal for the party, Daniels added, "While this decision has not been an easy one, recent events regarding Republican National Committee fundraising at Voyeur, an LA based lesbian bondage themed nightclub finally tipped the scales."

"As someone who has worked extensively in both the club and film side of the Adult Entertainment Industry, I know from experience that a mere $1,900 outlay at a club with the reputation of Voyeur is a clear indication of a frugal investment with a keen eye toward maximum return," she remarked.

Daniels added:

"And I firmly believe that it is precisely this type of creative and calculated investing that we, as taxpaying Americans, should expect not only from our political parties but from our government. The American taxpayer deserves consistent conservatives who reject wasteful spending and unwarranted government intervention in the private sector.

"As is the case with so many of my fellow Louisianans, I have been a registered Democrat throughout my life. But now I cannot help but recognize that over time my libertarian values regarding both money and sex and the legal use of one for the other is now best espoused by the Republican Party."

I can dig it! Besides, whatever she has to do to get ahead in the Repug party won't hurt or gag her like it did with Democrats, and won't take near as long.

That said, I agree with her that prostitution should be legalized and can't wait to hear Steele or Boner say so. Heh.

The anti-pedophile coloring book

If it's Wednesday, it must be Morford, and today we get a twofer. Today's column is about sex rehab. Here's a taste:

Like licking? Favor fantasy? Stoked about stroking? Unable to resist turning, staring and drooling like a whimpering dog/feral cat whenever something callipygian and curvy or firm and sinewy walks by and winks in your general direction, and then invites you to forget your marriage vows for a few days and come identify every bone in the naked human hardbody with your tongue in a giant vulva-shaped bathtub at the MGM Grand with someone named Brandi or Rocco or "Mistress Midori"?

Sailor, have we got the latest trend for you.

Come join Jesse James, Tiger Woods, David Duchovny and many more slut-tastic humans you've never really given a damn about and only recognize because of the endless tabloid headlines assaulting your eyeballs lo these past many months, in the latest spurious rehab trend to hit your internal bulls--t detector since the Catholic Church said it would "look into" the problem of all those priests molesting thousands of children and then lying about it for the past 2,000 years.

In light of the recent exposure of the bloody papists' 2000-year-old pedophilic tradition and the cover-up that goes all the way to the top, this line caught my eye:

...the Catholic Church's heartwarming coloring books that instruct young boys to always be near an open door or another adult when a priest is nearby...

Which led to a column from a coupla years ago.

Take the Archdiocese of New York. It has apparently just released new coloring book for kids, all about how to be safe in an age of fear and predation. It is full of nice pictures of kids being sweet and virginal and right, engaging in happy activities that praise Almighty God while protecting themselves from, say, online predators and vegans and atheists. It is about awareness, about listening to your parents and saying your prayers and never, ever being alone with a priest and being nice to animals and never hitting your sister and ...

Wait, what? What was that, about the priests? Oh right. Um, the pedophilia. The sexual molestation and the lawsuits and the hints of deep ongoing perversion for the past, oh, 2,000 years. Yes.

(Of course, to really make amends they'd have to fire pope Benedict XVI and hold a Vatican III conference and abolish the silly celibacy law and the abhorrent "no female priests" law and also the homophobia law and the "sex is bad for you" law and, well, pretty much all the laws restricting spirit and sex and gender and love. But, you know, that might be asking a bit much. So instead: Coloring book. Yep, that oughtta do it).

Then he shifts gears:

But it does bring up a rather fascinating question: Is the very existence of this weird little book another odd but undeniable sign (there are many others) that something a bit more spiritually rich, more karmically grand is at hand? A raised awareness? A deeper spiritual awakening? Is this the church essentially telegraphing its own imminent demise? Maybe a little?

It's a slightly mushy notion I carry over to the bizarre parallel universe of conservative Christian megachurches, those giant ultra-bland heavily shellacked stadium-sized fluorescent nightmare warehouses that are still flourishing, more or less, simply because many of them are now dramatically diluting the fire-and-brimstone religion stuff, muting all that thorny theology and eschatology and even the right-wing intolerance (or rather, carefully burying it, to be fed to you slowly, bit by bit, especially around election time) and replacing it with something resembling, well, a giant, cheesy self-help seminar.

More. Links. Enjoy.