Goin' ridin'

Off today to ride the Donner Classic trial at the Auburn Ski Club property at Boreal Mountain Resort. See yas.

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

Emmylou Harris & The Nash Ramblers - Guitar Town (Live At The Ryman)
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The Nash Ramblers:
Sam Bush -- Fiddle, mandolin and vocals
Roy Huskey, Jr. -- Double bass and vocals
Larry Atamanuik -- Drums
Al Perkins -- Banjo, guitar, resonator guitar and vocals
John Randall Stewart -- Guitar, mandolin and vocals

Thanks to worldwideweby

Headline of the Day

Romney 150-foot party yacht flies Cayman Islands flag

He must have gotten it as a premium when he opened his account.

Full Red Blue Moon

Tonight is the Full Red Moon which is also a Blue Moon. Must be an election year.

On Eastwood's speech

Tweet from Chris Rock:

Clint Eastwood on the phone with Obama now: "It all went according to plan,sir." #RNC #GOP2012

Heh.

Eastwood and McCain are now sharing the sobriquet "Grampa Walnuts". All the scared old white people who were already going to vote for Willard understood his speech perfectly.

I think for a generational shift away from rocking chairs, drool buckets, and rambling disjointed speech, Obama should get George Clooney to speak at the Democratic convention. That'll get da wimmens whose breasts are still up around their chests too, you know, the ones who can still make reproductive choices.

Trickle Down Economics is a Pyramid Scheme

Tina Dupuy

The classic multi-level marketing or pyramid scheme is where one guy at the top convinces people at the bottom to give the top money. The hope is the guys in the middle will recruit enough people under them to move from the middle to the top—hence the pyramid shape. The model is, clearly, and provably unsustainable. Only a couple of people (those at the top) do well. Everyone else gets ripped off.
...

Trickle down economics is a pyramid scheme: It’s the rich telling us if we just recruit others to believe in the con then we will become the rich too.

It’s a lie.

This exchange actually took place yesterday evening in The Seat Of World Power aka my couch:

Me: "How long will the Repugs keep doing the same thing over and over expecting different results before they realize that's the definition of insanity?"

Mrs. G: "'Til they've got all the money."

Simple and succinct.

Paul Ryan: The definitive fact-check

Salon

A comprehensive guide to the candidate's lies or misrepresentations from his big RNC speech

Quite a list.

Everyone lies. Ryan takes it to new levels.

No shit. On camera in prime time. On a whole lotta networks and channels, not just MSNBC, so people might have actually been watching.

I understand this. Besides having nothing besides talking points - lies in themselves - and a total throwback to a time-that-never-was-that-became-the-good-old-days platform, Rmoney hasn't actually been officially nominated yet, so the pandering to the Dead End Quarter will continue until he is. That's tonight. They have to keep lying so the Ron Paul people won't have a chance to throw a monkey wrench in the works and also so the boos from the 'baggers won't be on national TV. Besides, the truth would sink them. Despite their best efforts, the truth is starting to ooze under the door of people's consciousness.

Will they keep lying after Willard is the nominee? Oh hell yes.

From Borowitz:

In his speech to the Republican National Convention last night, Vice-Presidential nominee Paul Ryan test-drove what the Romney-Ryan campaign says will be a major theme for the 2012 Republican campaign: “lying about everything.”

“The question was, how many whoppers could you pack into one speech?” the campaign adviser Tracy Klugian said. “All I can say is, when Fox News accuses a Republican of lying, you know you’ve witnessed something historic.”

No shit. Everybody and their brother has called this lyin' sacka shit out. Think it matters to him? My money's on "nope".

Opening Nite - Lying Liars Lie And Lie Again

Charles P. Pierce on Opening Nite at the Repug liefest in Tampa, which opened with a speech by the governor of Oklahoma that cleverly omitted the fact that Oklahoma was a government program.

It was an entire evening based on a demonstrable lie. It was an entire evening based on demonstrable lies told in service to the overriding demonstrable lie. And there was only one real story for actual journalists to tell at the end of it.

The Republicans simply don't care.

They don't care that they lie. They don't care that their lies are obvious. They don't care that their lies wouldn't fool an underpaid substitute Social Studies teacher in a public middle school, who would then probably go out one night and get yelled at by Chris Christie. ("They believe in teacher's unions. We believe in teachers," he said in his speech. Yeah, you just don't believe in paying them.) They don't care that their history is a lie and that, by spreading it, they devalue the actual history of the country, which is something that belongs to us.
...

[...] The Republicans will just tell the lie again. And again. And once more, until people get tired of telling the truth in response.

Never. Or we're done.

The real Willard!

OMG! Bobo describes the "real" Willard! Do not miss this!

Mitt Romney was born on March 12, 1947, in Ohio, Florida, Michigan, Virginia and several other swing states. He emerged, hair first, believing in America, and especially its national parks. He was given the name Mitt, after the Roman god of mutual funds, and launched into the world with the lofty expectation that he would someday become the Arrow shirt man.
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Romney was extremely detail oriented in his business life. He once canceled a corporate retreat at which Abba had been hired to play, saying he found the band’s music “too angry.”

Romney is also a passionately devoted family man. After streamlining his wife’s pregnancies down to six months each, Mitt helped Ann raise five perfect sons — Bip, Chip, Rip, Skip and Dip — who married identically tanned wives. Some have said that Romney’s lifestyle is overly privileged, pointing to the fact that he has an elevator for his cars in the garage of his San Diego home. This is not entirely fair. Romney owns many homes without garage elevators and the cars have to take the stairs.

A side of Mr. Brooks I have not seen before and good on 'im! And congrats, Bobo, for discovering whiskey for breakfast!

Poop-Down Economics

El Rude-o on Secaucus Fats' speech and the Repug convention.

2. Imagine you have a friend who a few years back heard that if you feed poodles money they will shit out gold bricks. So your friend starts feeding his hard-earned cash to all the pampered poodles he can find, and they gobble those bills down. But, surprise, surprise, despite what he heard, the dogs end up shitting shit. Still, he clings to this bizarre, completely disproven idea: poodles shit gold. Now, after some time, he's low on cash. You tell your friend to stop putting out plates of money for the goddamned poodles. No, your friend says. Instead, he must cut back on other things, like doctor visits and food and more, just so he'll have the spare money to give the fucking dogs. "One day, these little bitches are gonna pay off," he tells you, sounding completely crazy, "and I'll be on easy street." But until then, he's just got hands that stink like dog shit. And there's your lesson in Republican economics.

Vote Repug. You'll learn to love dog shit when you can't afford anything else to eat.

How to spot completely miserable women

If it's Wednesday, it must be Morford on Repug women.

You can see it in the eyes. Vacant, sort of glassy, dark and distant as if staring into a cave full of nails from a thousand miles – and a million joyful lifetimes – away.

It moves on to the skin, pale and ill-fitting like a mannequin in a human costume, like it’s not the slightest bit comfortable in there, closing around a sallow tightness of the mouth and lips, maybe a severity of haircut, the sweater buttoned a bit too tight and the collar cutting circulation to the vital organs, but most especially and obviously, to the heart.

Do you see it? Do you see it, most frequently and with a tragic sigh, in the women of the GOP, from the senseless female candidates themselves (Hi, Ms. Bachmann!) to the sallow wives and disoriented daughters of the ultraconservative males who fear and detest everything real women represent?

I call 'em "pinch-faced, dried-up, miserable harridans". Liberal gals, of course, are HOT!

Then he starts in on Todd Akin's wife and daughters.

Is she truly proud of her man? Is part of her thinking, “Oh please, rape ain’t so bad, most of those hussies probably deserved it”? Is she thinking, “Dear God, what has become of my life?” Or is she thinking, maybe, with a hint of abject sadness, of the terrible icepick of fear and misogyny she and her husband have drilled into their six children, and particularly their daughters?
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It is impossible not to extrapolate, not to interpret those expressions as a kind of numbed-out revulsion. It’s clear they’ve been forced to get on stage with their father as a show of family “solidarity,” as if to prove that not all women detest Todd Akin, that, when it comes to the GOP, even a mildly powerful white man can still force women to do his bidding, even after insulting and demeaning them so horribly he should be ashamed to speak to his daughters for a solid year.
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Which of those girls, would you wager, will soon break away from this nightmare? Which one will grab the first opportunity to travel to San Francisco or maybe Paris or Tokyo and have her mind blown open by art and sex and love, wine and yoga and the madhouse kaleidoscopic offerings of the world? Which one will hence run screaming from the bitter shell of a life the Akins’ have forced them to live? Both? Let’s hope it’s both.
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Hello, two young daughters of Todd Akin up there on that stage. I see you. We see you. And we here in the land of the messy and the free-spirited, the progressive and the open-souled, we hereby band together and offer up a prayer, a dirty, wonderful, wild, unfettered blessing to you. Ready?

It goes like this: We hereby hope you will soon find a away to escape, ignite your hearts and minds (and bodies), to blast it all wide open as you realize women are far more juicily, beautifully powerful than you’ve been taught, and that the world is not as small and terrifying as the Republican party would have you to believe.

That may be the worst thing about the Repugs. The fearmongering. It's bullshit but a useful tool. Keep the rubes scared of made-up stuff and tell 'em only you can save 'em. They're much easier to control that way.

The only thing I'm a little scared of is Repug rule.

Headline of the Day

Boehner Says Out Loud He Hopes Blacks and Latinos 'Won't Show Up' This Election

Saying what they think out loud is kinda the Repug's biggest problem. Heh.

Note to Boner: hope in one hand and shit in the other and see which one fills up first.

UN says no Texas invasion is in the works

Well, the U.N. has answered the charges, according to Reuters:

“It’s absolutely ridiculous,” said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s spokesman, Martin Nesirky, when asked if the United Nations had any plans to invade Texas.

Whew! Judge Headcase down there in Lubbock had me worried. It took him eight minutes of video to clean up after his one minute warning of the dire threat. It's at the EssEffChron along with this one if you care which you don't.

Sign Condemning Romney Draws Criticism

This guy's a registered Republican. If a Democrat had done this, his house would have magically caught fire and burned down by now.

LATimes

Same old, same old...

The Grey Matter sums the 'Baggers/GOP up nicely.

Those behind the Tea Party movement -- namely big-name, right-wing figures like Dick Armey and the Koch brothers -- have always tried their best to distinguish Tea Partiers from your typical, everyday Republican. The goal was to fabricate the rise of an organic, grass-roots "revolution" led by people who were fed-up with the status quo and desired real change with regards to our growing deficit.

Of course, it didn't take long for us to learn it was all a scam, a faux movement heavily backed by Republican big wigs. Established Republicans simply tried to repackage a large portion of their party as something new and different, and yet in the end it was just the same old stuff: intolerance and ignorance fueled by anger and fear -- the bedrock of the modern-day GOP.
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It's not the first time Republican voters have been used by their own party and it certainly won't be the last time. To the likes of Karl Rove and Mitt Romney, gullible stupidity is the gift that just keeps on giving.

The suckers are starting to catch on. I'm still hoping for a gun battle at the Repug convention that will make the gunfight at the OK corral look like a firecracker went off. I'm not nice when it comes to these assholes.

Oh, the irony...

If it's Tuesday, it shoulda been Ironic Times on Monday.

Republicans Blast Akin for His Extreme Views on Rape, Abortion
Which also happen to be party's platform on rape, abortion.

Romney Tells Michigan Crowd Nobody Ever Asked Him to Produce His Birth Certificate
Except once in the Cayman Islands, and the man was whipped for impertinence.

New Super PAC App Fact-Checks Political Ads to See if They're Truthful
App comes with warning that some ads cause phone to catch fire.

Good News: Fewer Workplace Murders
Bad news: fewer workplaces.

Dam it's fun ...

Had a little time before dinner so I figured I'd post a few pics. It's been a fun 3 days. Heh ...

Dam it ...

Hey, I'm in Amsterdam. Things were crazy the day we left and I haven't had time since. Catching the ship tomorrow so I'l post pics and shit then. See yas!

An "Order Confirmation" To Share

I'm sure we've all ordered stuff online and filed away the order confirmation until it gets to us. Ho-hum. This is the best one yet:

Gordon-

Thanks for your order with CD Baby!

USPS

(1) Rita Hosking: Burn

Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing. Our world-renowned packing specialist lit a local artisan candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved "Bon Voyage!" to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, August 27, 2012.

We hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. In commemoration, we have placed your picture on our wall as "Customer of the Year." We're all exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Sigh...
We miss you already. We'll be right here at http://cdbaby.com/, patiently awaiting your return.
--
CD Baby
The little store with the best new independent music

I told them that was a pretty cool way to do it even though I know it ain't true. Heh.

The Republican Strategy: The Niggerization of the Democratic Party

I think mayhap El Rude-o is taking off the velvet gloves of political correctness...

Let's cut through the bullshit here, much like Chris Matthews did on Morning Starbucks with Joe today. The GOP strategy right now is simple: The Democratic Party is a bunch of niggers, with a nigger leading them. Do you want to be a nigger lover or, even worse, a nigger yourself?"

Sure, if the only other choice is being a Repug.

With this being an incredibly white ticket of an incredibly white political party (90% of Republicans are white), what the GOP is doing in this election is to make a last stand for the innate good of the white male, the white patriarchy, if you will, as knowing best how everyone should behave. When they say, as Romney has, that they are what's best for women and non-whites, the not-so-subtle message is the same as every pasty European who ever confronted the natives after walking off a boat: "We may want to strip you of all your natural resources and enslave you, but you can put your trust in us. As long as you don't try to stop us, we won't hurt you."

In other words, it's not the rage of Barack Obama that's driving this election. It's the rage of the white colonizers who are afraid of losing any of their power over the colonized.

They are scared shitless of the changing demographic in America and can't do a damn thing about it except lie, cheat, and steal the vote to keep everybody who doesn't not-think like them under their heel.

Liberals, Progressives, Democrats, white, black, brown, red, whatever, we're ALL niggers to them.

All those so-called "good" Christians seem to have forgotten, or choose to ignore, this too:

Jesus loves the little children
All the children of the world
Red and yellow, black and white
They're all precious in his sight
Jesus loves the little children of the world

I can hear them now: "What do you mean Jesus gives a shit about them after they're born?! You must be some kinda commie!"

I know that had nothing to do with the first part of the post but I threw it in anyway. It's all part of the wingnut mindset they want to impose on us.