Quote of the Day

Michelle Bachmann:

I’ve been a part of the real world for all throughout my life.

[wipes lemonade from monitor and keyboard]

Can't be good ...

Folks around here know I have no love for Israel's policy toward Palestine, but I think the Turks are just poking Israel with a sharp stick:

Turkey's naval forces would escort Turkish humanitarian aid ships bound for the Gaza Strip, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister has said, following Israel's refusal to apologise for its deadly raid on an aid flotilla heading to the besieged Palestinian territory in May 2010.

"We have humanitarian aid to be sent there. And our humanitarian aid will not be attacked anymore, as happened to the Mavi Marmara," he told the Al Jazeera on Thursday.

"Turkish warships will be tasked with protecting the Turkish boats bringing humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip."

...

Too many people with fingers-on-triggers in too small a space under high stress. In that tense environment, the margin for error is very small. I hope level heads will be in command on both sides and it goes off without incident.

Wah-wah-wah ...

A circus? Personally, calling Congress a circus is an understatement. It's a fucking asylum:

...

Bachmann gave an unsanctioned rebuttal to President Obama’s job speech in a Capitol Hill TV studio Thursday night in which she dismissed the address as so much warmed-over Obama rhetoric with little or no chance of success. She called it “just a retread of everything he’s put forward before that’s failed.”

But what really grinds her gears was what she called his blatant "insulting of Members of Congress" that came "almost right out of the gate" in his speech.

...

Were I King of the World, I'd have the lot of them dragged out and put up against the wall (I wouldn't even bother with the blindfold and cigarette). Start fresh and advise the new bunch that they could easily end up the same way. Now that's an incentive.

I'm so sick of these assholes.

Update:

Our buddy 'Nucks (in toto):

Political Circus

That is what our president actually called what the fuck has been going on with our elected representatives.

My question is, who the fuck is the Ring Leader?

Good question.

And no ...

The Mrs. and I will not be celebrating the "9/11 Gala Weekend". In fact, we're hoping to avoid as much of it as we can. Instead, we will be remembering our lost friends and neighbors* privately.

We feel** it is long past time to move on.

*And the soldiers and civilians who've given their lives under the auspices of the lie that they were fighting to protect us from another attack.

**For those who don't know, my wife is a survivor of both World Trade Center attacks.

Good speech ...

Last night but if Barry can do anything, it's bring the oratory when he needs to. I generally like what he had to say (outline of the American Jobs Act), but I can't see this getting through the House without a lot of whining and crying by the Republicans. I can't see it getting through the Senate without enough votes to break a Republican filibuster. Obama is gonna have to shove it up their asses.

Going to Cantor and Boner's districts over the next few days is a way to do it, but if he wants this to go through, he's gonna have to lead from the front on it. If he leaves it in Congress' hands (like he did with health care 'reform'), it will die by a thousand cuts.

Live-blogging the Dead End Quarter Batcrap Crazy Lie-and-Pander-Fest Debate

A few more minutes of insanity is a drop in the bucket and won't hurt you unless this shit comes true. The more exposure these whackos get, the better.

Think Progress

10:20: Get the federal government out of health care. End the minimum wage. Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. Obama is a liar. Watch a ThinkProgress video compilation of the craziest moments from tonight’s debate:

Much more. Worth a read.

Tamale Wagons: Nurseries of Crime?!

Nice article in the LATimes

L.A.'s original street food

The downtown food-truck scene of today was preceded by more than a century by the horse-drawn tamale carts of the late 1800s.

This is the one that comes by my house

Tamales were a natural to become L.A.'s first street-food fad, given their utilitarianism, cheap pricing and irresistible taste. The origins of the city's tamale sellers remain murky, although newspaper accounts place them as far back as the 1870s, and by 1880, a Los Angeles Herald article commented, "The experience of our Eastern visitors will be incomplete unless they sample" a Los Angeles street tamale.

Note to our Eastern visitors: Your 'experience' with street tamales only begins with the eating. Heh. But I digress...

Not everyone appreciated those first loncheras. L.A.'s press sensationalized any fight, quarrel or theft committed around the eateries, leading to a perception in polite circles that they weren't safe (typical headline: "Says the Tamale Wagon is a Nursery of Crime"). As early as 1892, officials tried to ban them; in 1897, the City Council proposed to not allow tamale wagons to open until nine at night at the behest of restaurant owners who didn't like their crowds. Four years later, Police Chief Charles Elton recommended they close at 1 a.m. because they offered "a refuge for drunks who seek the streets when the saloons are closed for the night."

Oh fuckin' A! Nothin' like a coupla 2AM soggy tamales outta the back of a truck ta let ya see whatcha was drinkin'!

They also found an ally in Councilman Fred Wheeler. In 1920, he offered an impassioned defense in council chambers when tamale wagons once again faced the ax. "The tamale put Los Angeles on the map," he thundered. "These wagons are almost an institution of our city. Cabrillo and his sailors are said to have found them here when they landed. Drive these wagons from our streets? Never!"

On Cabrillo, who got here in 1542:

The next morning, October 8, Cabrillo came to San Pedro Bay, which was named "Baya de los Fumos" (English: the Bay of Smoke), after the burning chapperal that raised thick clouds of smoke.

Sure it wasn't smoke from burning tamales? In any case, he got that one right.

But tamaleros, of course, never disappeared. They've continued in Southern California's barrios ever since the tamale wagon's heyday, clandestinely hawking their masa miracle from coolers, car trunks, even pushcarts, to the masses, the deliverers of our eternal sacrament — our birthright — of cheap, glorious street food.

Arellano is the author of "Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America," which will be published in April.

I will be pre-ordering that one!

If there ain't Meskin food in heaven, then Dear Jesus, I don't wanta go.

Quote of the Day II

TPM live-blogging whatever that GOP thing last night was:

9:35 PM: Jon Huntsman defending science on stage at GOP event and the crowd goes silent like a candidate were forced to explain a NAMBLA membership.

The pitch ...

To ban religion. Two ad men from Aus make commercials about banning religion. I'm down with it.

Stolen from here.

Quote of the Day

Athenae:

... DICK CHENEY is giving advice to future politicians, which is kind of like the Manson family taking over for Dr. Phil ...

Honorable Mention:

Digby:

... And for some odd reason Newt Gingrich is trying to look like Justin Bieber.

ugh.

...

And ... speaking of horrible pictures ... did you see Voldemort Darth Dick Cheney's interview with Jon Karl when he took his battery out? All I could think of was this post from the Rude One. Were I in Karl's position, I'da grabbed that battery and threw it out the window.

So ...

We're led by a coward. Why in Hell did he bother running to begin with?

President-Elect Obama's advisers feared in 2008 that authorities would oust him in a coup and that Republicans would block his policy agenda if he prosecuted Bush-era war crimes, according to a law school dean who served as one of Obama's top transition advisers.

University of California at Berkeley Law School Dean Christopher Edley, Jr., above, the sixth highest-ranking member of the 2008 post-election transition team preparing Obama's administration, revealed the team's thinking on Sept. 2 in moderating a forum on 9/11 held by his law school (also known as Boalt Hall). Edley was seeking to explain Obama's "look forward" policy on suspected Bush-era law-breaking that the president-elect announced on a TV talk show in January 2009.

But Edley's rationale implies that Obama, or at least his team, feared the military/national security forces that the president is supposed be commanding -- and that Republicans have intimidated him right from the start of his presidency even after voters in 2008 rejected Republicans by the largest combined presidential-congressional mandate in recent U.S. history.

...

Unbelievable. Time for him to pull an LBJ and let somebody who's not scared of the job run for it. Fucking jerks.

The Rethugs have blocked any policy agenda he had anyway, just a coup by another name. I'm so tired of Obama and the incompetents he's surrounded himself with.

And an addendum: If you don't see the Weimar - Nazi dynamic going on here, you're blind.

Strange bedfellows

Robert Reich and Andy Borowitz. Reality IS satire now.

Borowitz:

Perry Outlines Bold Proposal to Repeal Twentieth Century

Gov. Perry said that at an appointed time, he would ask every American to pray to God to send the country back to the nineteenth century: "Basically you just need to click your heels together and say ‘There's no place like home.'"
...

Shortly after his speech, rival candidate Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn) blasted Gov. Perry for borrowing from her own plan to take the country back to the Middle Ages.

But in a positive piece of news for the Texas Governor, a new poll shows him leading the pack among voters who describe themselves as delusional.

Reich:

Tonight's Republican Debate: The 19th Century or the Stone Age?

Nonetheless, listen tonight, if you can bear it, for anything other than standard Republican boilerplate since the 1920s — a wistful desire to return to the era of William McKinley, when the federal government was small, the Fed and the IRS had yet to be invented, state laws determined worker safety and hours, evolution was still considered contentious, immigrants were almost all European, big corporations and robber barons ran the government, the poor were desperate, and the rich were lived like old-world aristocrats.

But the Republican Party that emerged in the 1970s began its march back to the 19th century. By the time Newt Gingrich and his regressive followers took over the House of Representatives in 1995, social conservatives, isolationists, libertarians, and corporatists had taken over once again.

Some Democrats are quietly rooting for Perry or Bachmann, on the theory that they're so extreme that they'll bolster Obama's chances for a second term and make it easier for congressional Democrats to scare Independents into voting for a Democratic House and maybe even Senate.

I understand the logic but I'd rather not take the chance. A Perry or Bachmann wouldn't just take us back to the 19th century. They'd take us back to the stone age.

We are so screwed...

Happy fun cloud will kill you now

If it's Wednesday, it must be Morford...

Have you seen the future? Have you felt its hot, Wi-Fi enabled breath on your nervous and sweaty neck? Don't worry: You will.

Have you heard about the cloud? I bet you have. The cloud is the new oxygen. The cloud is the new Bieber. The cloud is the Next Supreme Step toward a gloriously sanitized uber-paradise where all worries vanish, all wires come unplugged and the cackling world government manipulates the whole thing very, very carefully.

Does it not, furthermore, remind us that we are nothing if not the balls-out most ridiculous and megalomaniacal species this side of the GOP inbreeding with the cast of "Jersey Shore"? You bet it does.

I get this awful visual of Snooki hollering "ride 'em, cowboy!" to Goodhair...

Or worse. Crazy Eyes and The Situation...

Must stop there. Brain is melting.

Quote of the Day

Abraham Lincoln via Steve Hynd:

"If any man tells you he loves America, yet hates labor, he is a liar. If any man tells you he trusts America, yet fears labor, he is a fool."

"All that harms labor is treason to America."

Euro-peein' ...

I touched on this about a month ago, the question about why the EU was created in the first place and on its longevity. Mr. Aravosis joined an interview of economist Joseph Stiglitz who echoes the sentiment:

...

RYAN: Quick Question, since we're here in Europe, the euro, a lot of people are stressed - the French are stressed, the Italians, the Spaniards, people are really worried about the future of the euro. What's your take on where things are going?

STIGLITZ: Well, I think they should be worried about the future of the euro. When the euro was created there was a general recognition that it was not, what we call, an optimal currency area. It was going to be difficult. If one part of Europe faced, you might say, a greater shock than other parts, it wouldn't be any problem if everything is going well. But it was in a period of economic downturn -- we are now facing that, and the problems that were anticipated have now come to the fore.

...

Indeed. Europe is a conglomeration of nation states, each with a different culture and government with relatively weak central control from Brussels/Strasbourg. Stiglitz continues:

...

ARAVOSIS: A three-front war instead of a one-front war.

STIGLITZ: Exactly. And the hope was, I think on the part of some, that when the further actions that were needed to make the euro work, that they would be taken, and that would require the creation of a European solidarity fund for stabilization. Those actions, the framework has now been taken, but the concern is the magnitude of what is required may not be up to what they are willing to do, and the political process in Europe is very slow. It has to be ratified by each of the parliaments. So, the question is, given the speed with which the economic events are unfolding, whether Europe will be able to respond fast enough. And, I think there is a resolve among the political leaders of most of the countries to make it work. But that may not be enough, given the turbulence in financial markets.... [my em]

...

The Euro, and the Eurozone, will always be at the mercy of the weaker economies and legislative sloth. Until revenue control and financial regulation become the sole purview of the central government, the future of the Euro will always be up for debate. As long as the client states are able to control their monetary policy as if they still used a national currency, there will be undue stress on the Union in hard times. As I said a month ago, the individual European states have to go all in or there was no point in creating the EU in the first place.

Why am I concerned over the future of the Euro, aside from the fact I have family and friends in Europe who would be hurt by the breakup of the Eurozone? Stiglitz again:

...

ARAVOSIS: And why should we care as Americans what happens, so the euro doesn't do so well?

STIGLITZ: The breakup in the euro, or even turbulence in the euro, is going to mean that the European economies, one of our major trading partners, will be doing badly.

...

And if the Europeans do badly, so will we.

Just wait ...

The Republicans will put the kibosh on this*:

The number of businesses approved to accept food stamps grew by a third from 2005 to 2010, U.S. Department of Agriculture records show, as vendors from convenience and dollar discount stores to gas stations and pharmacies increasingly joined the growing entitlement program.

Now, restaurants, which typically have not participated in the program, are lobbying for a piece of the action.

...

What? People using government money to actually eat in a restaurant? That will never do. If they can afford to eat in a restaurant, they don't need food stamps. Bad enough they have TVs and cell phones.

It's the same thing with drug testing public assistance recipients and putting a time limit on benefits. Anything that makes poor folks' lives a little more bearable is completely out of bounds for the Republicans.

*Thanks to our pal Lambert for the link.

What's the point?

If you listen to the NRA, you'd think the answer to crime prevention would be for everyone to be armed. Fine. Then how come people, when in a position to maybe stop a crime, don't? If you have the time to watch him reload, you have the time to take a shot - only takes one. Ain't no point in having it if you don't use it when you need to, pussy.

So ...

The status quo will be maintained.

...

"I think putting money back in the pockets of working families is the best way to get demand rising, because that then means business is hiring, and that means the economy is growing. So I'm going to propose ways to get America back to work that both parties can agree to," [President Barack Obama] said. [my em]

...

If "both parties can agree to" it, it probably ain't worth a shit to regular folks, let alone the paper it's printed on.

Link stolen from David Atkins.

Howzat workin' out for ya, Ricky Boy?

Following up a little on Fixer's post.

Texas cut fire department funding by 75 percent this year

The majority of Texas is protected by volunteer fire departments. There are 879 volunteer fire departments in Texas and only 114 paid fire departments. Another 187 departments are a combination of volunteer and paid.

For that reason, aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) could be more important than ever to the state where wildfires have recently been raging.

Smooth move, Ex-Lax. YOU slash state funding for the Texas cellar-savers and WE get to pay for it with that federal gummint money you claim not to like.

A word about wildfires in the west. One time, I was driving south through Nevada from Oregon on US 95 through a series of thunderstorms. There were 33 - I counted - lightning-caused fires on either side of the road for about fifty miles. A coupla acres each and the entire firefighting effort that I saw was half a dozen blanketasses with shovels in the back of a Ford pickup.

It was sufficient. None of the fires came within ten miles of a structure. I think the Indians were just there to respond in case any of them did.

A minimal effort like that is fine out in the middle of nowhere. Not so fine where people live.

I live in the middle of a pine forest that stretches for hundreds of miles. Just here around my town, there are more fire departments than you can shake a stick at. My town has gone from a volunteer fire department (motto: "We haven't lost a foundation yet!") with a coupla paid firefighters who drove the trucks to where the volunteers would hopefully show up, to a professional paid fire department with four fire stations and all kinds of modern equipment. They put out fires and save lives and God bless 'em.

All the little towns and even some of the ski areas around here have their own fire departments. They all have mutual assistance pacts. A forest fire is no respecter of city limit signs. We have CalFire, BLM, and the Forest Service. We have access to air tankers, water-dropping helicopters, hotshot (wiki) and jail inmate hand crews from anywhere in the state or other states if we need them. Shit, I think we've called on Mexican bomberos to come help on occasion.

In short, when there's a fire, the idea is to PILE ON.

Cuts are happening and they're killing people and destroying property. The point is that every last dime for all this is from our tax money and I don't begrudge one damn penny of it. It's something we do for ourselves and one another as a society where we give a damn about others.

Oh, that's right, current Repug policy is "I got mine and fuck you", never mind if some people get terribly hurt. After all, low taxes and services are what people want, right? Right? I hope the current awful conditions in Texass bite Ricky Boy right on the ass.

I hope they're a lesson to other governors etc. as well. There's such a thing as false economy where saving money now will cost a hundred times as much later.

Headline of the Day

Rabid Dog Briefly Mistaken for Tea Party Candidate

Receives Standing Ovation at Missouri Rally