Quote of the Day

Oliver Willis:

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Only in Washington would a resume that says “consumer advocate” be considered a negative for someone running a Consumer Protection Agency.

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Perverting For Profit

Everything is up for grabs even if it makes no sense and nothing is sacred if there might be money to be made. It's the American Way.

Common Dreams

Target and LL Bean Butcher Progressive Musical Legacy

We all remember Nike using The Beatles' Revolution in a commercial, or when Wrangler used Creedence Clearwater's Fortunate Son (to make it look like a patriotic song, not the antiwar ballad it is). Now Target and L.L. Bean have co-opted 2 more progressive classics.

Possibly worse is the new L.L. Bean TV Ad which plays a Smithsonian recording of Wobbly Haywire Mac McClintock singing his original version of The Big Rock Candy Mountain. A member of the radical Union The Industrial Workers of the World during it's height during the early 20th century. He was a contemporary of song writer and organizer Joe Hill, and among the first to publicly sing Hill's The Preacher and the Slave. The recording of McClintock Singing was taken from an interview with him at the end of his life. He talks of the Wobblies and that the original meaning of "The Big Rock Candy Mountain" (the more commercial version was rewritten by Burl Ives). It was a ballad of how older Hobos would trick younger ones to help them survive with stories of the Candy Mountain where there are cigarette trees and alcohol springs. These stories were based in part on springs with lemon flavored carbonated water in the Western United States. Haywire Mac is also known for Hallelujah I'm a Bum. These songs humanized the homeless, now The Big Rock Candy Mountain is being used to sell expensive, yuppie, camping equipment; in Haywire Mac's own voice. He must be rolling in his grave.

How the hell will this help to sell high end camping gear? I shoulda finished college, I guess.



Shit, using this logic, here's Amtrak's next ad:

The Country Gentlemen ~ Joe's Last Train

Another blow for freedom!

First the good decision on Prop 8, then the confirmation of Elena Kagan, and now this:

It's OK to tell police officers to 'f*ck off' *

Now they gotta tell the po-leecemen...

Pretty good coupla days, I'd say.

*Legal perhaps, not recommended.

Headline of the Day

Red Bike Scare: Republican Candidate Warns Bicycle Rentals Will Lead to UN Take-Over

Yeesh.

Yesterday' centrist is today's left winger

Great 'recommended read' by The New York Crank.

The curse of John Mitchell: How a middle of the road guy like me became a raving leftist — without changing any of my political opinions

I still favor almost exactly the same things today. So how come I'm suddenly considered a raving leftist in my dotage?

I haven't found support for this during a quick dive into Google, but I distinctly remember John N. Mitchell, who was Nixon's attorney general, venomously telling a TV interviewer, "This country is going so far to the right you're not going to believe it." I'm pretty sure I'm not imagining that I saw the old sourpuss says this, some time before he did time for his participation in the Watergate scandal.

Well, the vindictive SOB was right. We moved so far to the right that we're even to the right of John N. Mitchell, who while a New York State official tried to borrow money in defiance of the voters with something called "moral obligation bonds."

Mitchell's dead. But his
evil curse lives on.

What's happened is, a huge chunk of Americans have gone so far to the right that they're now voting to destroy themselves.

And they want to take the rest of us down with them.

What is now "centrist" — like Barack Obama — used to be considered conservative Republicans. What are now right wing Republicans used to be considered batshit crazy lunatics. And today's batshit crazy lunatics like the "Tea Party" party-goers, Michelle Bachmann, Sharron Angle, and Mitch McConnell, and John Boehner, and this week's version of John McCain would have been locked up in mental institutions because they're a danger to themselves and others.

I can relate to this post. Up until the right wing curse fell on the land, I was only called a communist once and that was by a good friend because I don't care much for baseball. Now it happens all the time, at least in the media. I used to be more to the right side of left of center, but I like to think I've gotten wiser and more fair over the years.

It's pretty far left these days to think the Constitution means equal treatment under the law for all, ain't it?

Gay marriage makes the world shrug

Friday Morford on how gay marriage has not collapsed the nations that have recognized it so far.

What the hell is wrong with them? Didn't they get the newsletter? Don't they know how very wrong, sinful, sick and perverted they all so obviously are? Haven't they heard the hoarse wails of the terrified Mormon elders, the raspy screams of the obsolete Vatican, the tightened bowels of confused fundamentalists of nearly every major religion worldwide, all of them absolutely positive that allowing certain kinds of consenting adults who love each other to get married will spell the end of civilization, families, innocence, the military, God's bitter and judgmental love as we know it? Someone should send them a pamphlet.

Meanwhile, back here in the land of fear and rainbow flags and rivers of fundamentalist misinformation flowing like Coors Light at a NASCAR rally, we still can't seem to figure anything out. The stillborn bastard troll known as Prop 8 has finally been overturned by a fine federal judge, deemed unconstitutional by a mile, not to mention unconscionable, unrealistic, not a little bit hateful, and just plain dumb.

This is what we are learning: The U.S. matters less and less in the grand public debate, the global shift, the Great Understanding. In the past few decades we've seen nation after nation fly right by us in many a happy category, from humanitarianism to education, health care to drugs, sexuality to the arts, prison systems to pollution, transportation to spiritual awareness. What a sad, strange trip it's been.

Trip on the rest of it.

Thank you ...

My wife and I would like to thank you all for your comments and good thoughts on the loss of our Shayna. You've made this time a bit easier to get through. Our readers and commenters are truly the best.

Geezers ...

A friend of mine on Facebook, and also a fellow blogger, said Gord and I reminded her of Statler and Waldorf:

Statler and Waldorf are a pair of Muppet characters. They are two ornery, disagreeable old men who first appeared in the television series The Muppet Show heckling the rest of the cast from their balcony seats ...

That works. Heh ...

Grand plans aside ...

The "Human Factor" is always an equalizer. Gordon found a clip of a "crash-proof" motorcycle. Heh ...

Pic of the Day

Via UL:

Click = Big

There is much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth in the Repug camp today. Heh.

Following up on Fixer's post, the whining from the never-right has commenced, as we knew it would.

Raw Story

UPDATE: Right wing groups slam 'tyrannical, abusive' California gay marriage ruling

Yes, any time they don't get their way is 'tyrannical' and 'abusive'.

Hey, fuck you, ya whiny ass tittie babies. Shit, every time they do get their bullying way, it's t & a to the rest of us.

AFA: Judge should have recused himself because he's gay

Heh. Joke's on you! Didn't know G.H.W. had a sense of humor that'd come back and bite ya on the ass, didja?

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich called the decision "an outrageous disrespect for our Constitution"

Au contraire, mon petit batcrap crazy chou. It is extremely respectful of the Constitution. Thank God and some wise old-timers for the goddamned piece of paper that tries to protect us from the likes of him.

If you believe in parts of the Bible or the Constitution, that's fine. Say so. But if you only believe in certain parts, don't say you believe in the whole goddam things and then bitch when one of the parts you only believe in when it suits you is upheld in favor of the greater good that you don't believe in ever. That's the very definition of hypocrisy, and thy name is Repuglicant.

Just as an aside, I use Service Manuals every day of my working life and I don't believe 100% of them, but they're a good place to start. Sometimes they're wrong and have Amendments, just like the Constitution. Sometimes they need to be interpreted creatively, like the living documents they and the Constitution are. God gave us brains to outsmart the wrong things other people tell us.

Update:

A comment on one of several articles about the Prop 8 ruling in the EssEffChron:

"The important point here is that U.S. law cannot be legitimately based solely on moral disapproval. ” by Ornot

This ain't as over as we'd like it to be, but right now fairness is on "top", so to speak. Take that up to the nuts, forces of darkness!

Headline of the Day and then some

LV Sun

Angle: “What’s happening (in America)..is a violation of the 1st Commandment,” entitlements “make government our God.”

Much more, praise the Lord!

Between this and her 'friendly questions from the press' stance, come ta think of it, every time she opens her mouth, she's diggin' herself into a deeper hole.

Sharpen that shovel for ya, hon? With my, er, Angle grinder...

This woman is the absolute embodiment of everything that's wrong with the right-wing that is trying to reshape our country into what it never was, or worse, what it really was that we're trying desperately day in and day out to defend against. That said, I'll give her this - she's the only one of her ilk honest or naive enough to say what she really thinks. Or maybe Harry told her to.

Update:

Barbara's Buzz

If you ever wondered exactly why the Founding Fathers of the United States of America felt the necessity of separating church and state, it most certainly was because they had to know that someday the radical right fundamentalist Sharon Angle would be running for office in order to shove her brand of extreme religious ideology down the throats of Americans nationwide! Keep in mind the convoluted thinking, of this women Angle, is what came up with this fanatical projection---"'...a violation of the 1st Commandment,' entitlements 'make government our God.'” Surely Ms. Angle has lost somewhere in the deep dark recesses of her mind and soul that biblical phrase, "whatever you do for the lest of them, you do for me" (Matthew 25:35-40 - G), surely she has forgotten God's call to administer to the sick, the hungry, and to all those in need!

I'm sure she thinks that's all well and good as long as nobody is asked to pay for it.

It just came to me that the real violation of the 1st Commandment in this country is Wall Street and the Repugs' worship of money. 1 Timothy 6:10 KJV. It has pierced the rest of us with many sorrows too.

Yes!

On a night when some good news was sorely needed, this was very good to hear:

We won! The federal court has handed the American Foundation for Equal Rights and all Americans a major civil rights victory by ruling to strike down Proposition 8. Though this is a tremendous moment in the battle for equality, the court’s ruling is already being challenged by Prop 8’s proponents.

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Good Night, Sweet Princess ...

At 7:45 pm EDT, our beautiful girl passed on painlessly, quietly, in our arms.

Princess Shayna
October 1998 - August 2010

We are heartbroken.

Newt Gingrich's Lost Marbles Speech

Some days I think we're living in a loony bin and the loonies figure they know best, being loony and all, and are trying to stage a coup. Other days, I know it.

The Nation

Jay Bookman, writing in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, says that Newt Gingrich's speech last week at the American Enterprise Institute was full of "hateful, vile garbage [that] makes Joe McCarthy look measured and responsible." Joe Klein, in Time, notes wryly: "Newt Gingrich is clearly running for President. How do I know? He gets dumb and angry when running for office [and] pander[s[ to the yahoos." Amy Sullivan, also in Time, suggests that Gingrich might be encouraged by the "Burn a Koran Day" organized by a kooky, right-wing church in Florida.
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[...] Widely touted as a major address on the failings of the Obama administration on national security, Gingrich's remarks in fact veered weirdly into outright craziness and near-drooling paranoia.

So what's new? Well, it looks like Neutie is trying to be the Bull Goose Loony. Have no fear, someone's bound to top him - "I'm crazier than you are!" "Oh yeah? Watch this!":

Stripped to its basics, Gingrich sounded like a psychotic Paul Revere as he warned his listeners—who, it seemed, watching the tape, applauded only sporadically and politely—that "sharia" is on the verge of taking over America. Yes, sharia. "I believe sharia is a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States," Gingrich thundered. Not only Obama, but the entire American establishment, is "willfully blind" to the existential threat unfolding right before our eyes. To Gingrich, it's so obvious that it's like saying "two plus two is four," yet the Orwellian monsters who control our government insist that the answer is five, or three, or something else! The threat is so dire that Gingrich even proposed a new law to protect Americans who are one-step away from having full-bearded, scimitar-waving, Koran-thumping Taliban jurists ordering their very limbs to be chopped off and their women stoned. Gingrich, warning that the "fight against sharia" is the defining struggle of our time, intends to propose a law "that no court anywhere in the United States will be allowed to substitute sharia for American law."

Above all, he warned, it's the American left that doesn't get it. It's the left, he said, under the "destructive influence of a secular, socialist system," that sympathizes with radical Islamists and "prefers our opponents to us." It is the left, said Gingrich, which inexplicably fails to understand that sharia "is a direct, mortal threat to every value that the left has." Doesn't the left get it, that women shouldn't be stoned to death? Gingrich wondered. Luckily, we on the left have Gingrich to remind us of the values we hold dear.

Neutie's right about one thing - the American left doesn't get it. We don't get why anybody that batcrap crazy was ever in a position of power. Of course he fucked up everything he touched, but I guess he figures he can be President Of The Tiny-Brained if he doubles down the crazy over non-existent crises. He may know his audience all too well.

I say we get copies of sharia law (if there is such a thing) and carry them around instead of our little red copies of the Constitution and whip 'em out and quote from them every time we get around wingnuts. If we don't tell 'em what it is, I bet the American Taliban'd agree with most of it. Hey, people really like the tasty canapés on the silver platter with the colored toothpicks in 'em if you don't tell 'em they're Snausages smothered in jalapeño ranch. Heh. Don't ask how I know that, let's just say I'm a thrifty host.

Why the Feds Fear Thinkers Like Howard Zinn

An 'absolutely must read' by Chris Hedges.

First coupla ¶s:

On Monday I will teach my final American history class of the semester to prison inmates. We have spent five weeks reading Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States.” The class is taught in a small room in the basement of the prison. I pass through a metal detector, am patted down by a guard and walk through three pairs of iron gates to get to my students. We have covered Spain’s genocide of the native inhabitants in the Caribbean and the Americas, the war for independence in the United States and the disgraceful slaughter of Native Americans. We have examined slavery, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, the occupations of Cuba and the Philippines, the New Deal, two world wars and the legacy of racism, capitalist exploitation and imperialism that continue to infect American society.

We have looked at these issues, as Zinn did, through the eyes of Native Americans, immigrants, slaves, women, union leaders, persecuted socialists, anarchists and communists, abolitionists, anti-war activists, civil rights leaders and the poor. As I was reading out loud a passage by Sojourner Truth, Chief Joseph, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B Du Bois, Randolph Bourne, Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, I have heard students mutter “Damn” or “We been lied to.”

And the next to last one:

Zinn’s book is revered in my cramped classroom. It is revered because these men intimately know racism, manipulation, poverty, abuse and the lies peddled by the powerful. Zinn recorded their voices and the voices of their ancestors. They respect him for this. Zinn knew that if we do not listen to the stories of those without power, those who suffer discrimination and abuse, those who struggle for justice, we are left parroting the manufactured myths that serve the interests of the privileged. Zinn set out to write history, not myth. And he knew that when these myths implode it is the beginning of hope.

In between those quotes is why we are Liberals, Progressives, and godless commie anti-right-wing pinkos. Go.

K Street bets on Harry Reid

Oy. As much as I would like to see Fixer call in the 8th Air Force to lay waste to the lobbyists and then the 14th to make the rubble bounce, they're the smart money in this case, as in 'duh'.

I'm not particularly fond of Harry Reid either, but Sharron Angle makes him look almost good.

I predict Reid will keep his job in a landslide unless it leaks out that Angle is a Reid plant. Even then he'll win over that teabagger uber-moron.

Why I Was Angry

Anthony Weiner, finally a Congressman who's got a pair and went off on the Repug bastards, in the NYTimes:

LAST week I got angry on the floor of the House. In this age of cable and YouTube, millions of people evidently saw the one-minute-plus clip. But there has been relatively little focus on why the substantive debate that sparked it matters.

More broadly, while I appreciate the concern over the future of civility in politics, I believe a little raw anger right now is justified. Democrats make a mistake by pretending there is a bipartisan spirit in Congress these days, and would be better served by calling out Republican shams.

Instead of engaging in a real debate about how to address the challenges we face, Republicans have turned to obstruction, no matter the issue, and then cry foul after the fact. They claim to want an open legislative process with more consultation and debate, but the truth is they simply don’t want to pass anything.

Meanwhile, conservative television and talk radio programs are full of false anger, intended to scare Americans. I think some genuine frustration at this misleading tactic is overdue.

That’s why I got mad last week. That’s also why I’m going to fight for this bill when we come back in session in September. I’m still angry. Playing politics on important issues is never right. But on health care for 9/11 responders, it’s an outrage.

The Repugs have their marching orders, which I call Project Obama Fail. They've pulled the same stunt before and will again. They don't care about the 9/11 responders, your kids, working folks, etc., etc., or the good of the nation or anything beyond the upcoming election. They think obstructionism is the Glory Road to regaining power.

I do not, but it depends on their behavior becoming so outrageous and egregious that reg'lar folks who aren't immersed in politics finally notice it and get the message and reject them at the polls. The 9/11 Responders bill was a big straw in the pile they.ve already loaded on the camel's back. I'm hoping for the one that collapses the camel very soon.

Keep up the cheap shit, Repugs. We'll test your theory come November.

Quote of the Day

Mayor Bloomberg:

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"Let us not forget that Muslims were among those murdered on 9/11 and that our Muslim neighbors grieved with us as New Yorkers and as Americans. We would betray our values - and play into our enemies' hands - if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else. In fact, to cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists - and we should not stand for that."

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Quote of the Day

Taken totally out of context from Doughy Pantload hisself:

The best conservatives are always dead; the worst are always alive and influential.

Once they're dead, Jonah ol' buddy, we don't have to worry about them quite as much.