Headline of the Day

The Top 4 Whoppers Norquist Tells To Keep Republicans From Defecting

Note to Gruber: You're gonna be the last rat on that ship when the deck is awash. How long can you tread water? Probably, hopefully, not long enough.

Run, Jeb, Run!

Yeah, run from your surname. Heh.

The National Memo

Another Bush, Another Target-Rich Presidential Campaign

The Jeb Bush boomlet that fascinated gullible pundits — and tantalized Republicans — during the dark days of last winter’s presidential primary is undergoing a swift revival. Less than three weeks after the defeat of Mitt Romney, a candidate who proved repellent to minority voters, Republicans are said to be yearning for Jeb, who speaks fluent Spanish and whose wife is from Mexico.
...

While some aspects of the Jeb story may sound uplifting, there are certainly other episodes that will make voters’ hair stand on end.

No shit. Go read.

So yes — run, Jeb, run! The fact is that almost any presidential candidate from Florida represents a full-employment program for investigative journalism — and the “smarter” Bush brother is no exception.

Note to Jebbie: The country would no doubt be better off if you had been President instead of your dumbshit brother, but that ship done sailed. He ruined the whole fucking world and your chances with it.

By all means, run. It'll make Hil work a little harder than she would running against the batcrap crazy wing but not much.

Your Prius will not save you now

If it's Wednesday it must be Morford on how to cope with the Earth augering in all around you.

You gotta take care of your own karma. You gotta nurture your own heart, take care of what’s around you and immerse yourself in those you love, calm the fearful and anxious mind and choose where to place your energy as wisely as possible, offering heaps of compassion to all needful things in your world but careful not to overload the psycho-emotional circuitry lest you blow out your nav system and die.

It’s all another way of saying, the karma of the world is not yours to solve. This is the great teaching, shared across any responsible tradition you can name. Shoulder all the illnesses, traumas, violence, abuses, pollutions of the planet, feel the suffering and pains of every living creature, along with the seemingly imminent doom of the earth herself, and watch yourself implode.
...

Put another way: Do you believe our science and technology will surely save us, because smart people and sheer luck have almost always kept total annihilation at bay, save for all those times and all those magnificent empires throughout history when they didn’t?

This much we know, and this much is sometimes all we can know. You gotta take care of your own karma, the love around you. As the terrific Tantra teacher Rod Stryker told me recently, you gotta calm the frenzied terrors of the mind enough that you can summon the bravery to act with full and clear conscience. This is the only way. This is all you can do.

Maybe Chicken Little was right all along.

Headline of the Day

Republican Senators Still “Troubled” After Meeting With Susan Rice

They'll never admit it of course, but they're probably "troubled" because it blew their bullshit political attack to smithereens and they're in danger of being made to look like the fools they are.

Note to Grampa Walnuts, Miss Lindsey, and Lapdog Ayotte: It's too late. It's done.

Question & Quote of the Day

From:

Michael Tomasky on How Obama Shouldn’t Back Down Vs. the GOP

Question:

Elections are supposed to have consequences. So why does the GOP think it can strong-arm the president into compromising on entitlements without first giving in on taxes?

Answer:

Because they're bullies and thugs and it's always worked for them so that's what they know how to do. I think the President has finally figured out that he has to stand up to them. I hope.

Quote:

It’s nice to see Norquist’s Maginot Line holding about as well as the real one did.

Heh. Gruber's a bully and thug too. It'll be very enjoyable to watch his ass get knocked down, particularly because it'll be done by his own side. A buncha bullies beating up on a bully lest they be beat down because of him. Very satisfying.

Upshot:

Obama will have to give to get. That’s how it goes. But he’d better not forget, and he’d better not let the Republicans forget, that he just won an election in which the American people were given a clear choice—and they made it. Republicans walking away from Norquist deserve a few brownie points for coming back to planet Earth, but that sure doesn’t entitle them to start calling any shots.

Sometimes you have to hit these mule-headed assholes with a 2x4 to get their attention. Swing away, Mr. President.

No privacy, no mas

Andy Sullivan

In the wake of the Petraeus scandal, Melik Kaylan sounds the alarm over the loss of privacy in the Internet age:

This is a huge loss that accompanies the huge gain of the Internet. Non-saints all need some zone of privacy if they are to remain sane. And yet no one can really avoid the tools of email and texting and tweeting and Tumblring and Instagramming if they want to be part of society - and any single image or text or email can be instantly communicated to everyone on the planet by almost anyone. Anthony Weiner will therefore always live with the image of his fruit-of-the-loom chubby as if it were stamped to his forehead like a Scarlet Letter of old. Yes, there are great advantages to transparency - we would never have grasped the full extent of the torture under Bush and Cheney if some hadn't taken digital photos of the Cheney-authorized techniques in use at Abu Ghraib. But there is also great human cost.

He goes into more detail but the caution is simple: every time you hit "enter" or "send" or now apparently "save as draft", it is there for all the world to see if someone really wants to. Be careful.

Or more narrowly, clandestine business is best carried out clandestinely. If it isn't written down, it didn't happen, thank you Tom Clancy. This is nothing new. Carrier pigeons fell into the wrong hands sometimes too.

Ahhhhh, yesssss...

From Shrummy:

The GOP Faces Years in the Wilderness After 2012 Election Losses

Sensible Republicans seeking to renew the viability of a conservative party that seems out of touch after a stinging defeat at the polls are being denounced as ‘heretics.’ Robert Shrum on why the party might never find its way back.

Sensible Republicans?! Perhaps it's simply that abject defeat begets a semblance of thought.

[...] Outside the South, President Obama defeated his opponent 55 to 45 percent, winning a landslide there as well as in the Electoral College. The bottom line: Romney got elected president of the old confederacy.

That's good. When the mouthbreathers secede, they can call him. He'll answer the phone. Hasn't got much else to do these days. He can take over another failure, put it deep in debt, and sell it for pennies on the dollar and further enrich himself in the process. One caveat: whoever buys the South has to tow it away. Far, far away. I would suggest the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean. Then sink it.

Obama pollster Joel Benenson responded that such shifts may require two or three more cycles of presidential loss. [...]
...

That’s not where realistic Republican strategists want their party to be. But four overriding realities militate against a GOP return to the White House in 2016 and perhaps for several campaigns beyond.
...

Second, the nature of the Republican primary electorate hamstrings the party’s capacity to adapt. The religious right and the true believers who dominate the nominating process have their own explanations or rationalizations for 2012. Romney wasn’t conservative enough. [...]

Schmidt recommended that Republicans dispense with the Iowa caucuses, where the litmus test is who’s most for Jesus, according to the narrow measures of right-wing fundamentalists. That change won’t happen, not yet; religious and movement forces on the far right won’t yield their hold on the primary process and their veto power over the nominee. In the last two elections, they sacrificed at least five Senate seats for the sake of ideological ultra-orthodoxy. So why won’t they demand their kind of presidential candidate—no doubts, no flip-flops, always there with them? And they believe the country will come around to them. Former Moral Majoritarian Ralph Reed smoothly explained how. Yes, there has to be change, to “combine core principles with outreach.” But outreach to whom, if the core principles are reaction and intolerance?

Outreach to fewer and fewer scared old white hypocrite Christers, that's who. Continue the march, Repugs!

Instead, in the throes of their self-proclaimed reexamination, many Republicans remind me of a scene in Theodore H. White’s classic The Making of the President 1960. JFK spoke in the Boston garden on the last night of the campaign, with politicians and ward heelers smoking cigars arranged in rows behind him. As the crowd cheered, White wrote, a look passed across their faces. You could see what the pols were thinking: Kennedy has a trick; if only I could figure it out, I could be president.

It was a false and easy conceit. And if what the GOP looks for now is a trick, what it will find is a way deeper into the wilderness.

The GOP has missed the point entirely. They pimped off the fringe right for votes and the tables got turned and now the GOP is the trick. Deep, deep, deep in the wilderness is a good place for them. They could only be improved by being turned into bear scat.

Yes, I'm enjoying the, er, scat outta all this. We sure as scat had it coming.

Update:

If you have as strange a sense of humor as I do, go read Numbers 14, which is the story of the wandering Israelites and an eerily uncanny parallel to the plight of the Repugs. Their plight, our schadenfreude. Heh.

The Country that Cannabis Built

A fun read from YubaNet. Lotsa links.

My, how times have changed. In the 1760's, you could be jailed in this country for not growing hemp! Cannabis was so highly prized that King George III made growing hemp mandatory. Tensions that arose from England's demand for raw hemp fibers from the New World were partially responsible for events that led to the American Revolutionary.

As industrial use for hemp declined, a new market developed. Medical uses for cannabis were almost unknown in Western Europe and the Americas due to the suppression of information from "heathen" cultures by the Catholic church. Medicinal Cannabis wasn't introduced to the West until 1839 by a 30-year old British physician, W. B. O'Shaugnessy, who had observed doctors in the Indian province of Bengal treating all manner of illnesses with concoctions made from hemp extracts. (Bengal means Bhang Land, which literally translates to Cannabis Land.)

One company, Gunjah Wallah, made a highly popular maple sugar hashish candy for over forty years that was advertised in the Sears Roebuck catalog as a "totally harmless, delicious, fun candy."

There ya go! Installs the munchies and takes care of them in one swell foop! I'm trying to order some of that from Sears for Christmas presents. I have some uptight Repug friends who could benefit from it spiritually as well as having their eyes opened.

Next week we will examine how every drug prohibition has its roots in racism aided by yellow journalists who promoted "Reefer Madness" hysteria for their own financial gain.

Enjoy.

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

STRONG SALES REPORTED ON BLACK FRIDAY
Based on higher-than-expected number of people trampled per store.

Pope: Jesus Born Years Earlier Than Thought
Long before God even met Mary.

Cat'lick Choich, meet John McCain. Two irrelevant anachronisms that ought to go rock on the porch.

Romney Visits Disneyland
After long campaign, says he's glad to “get back to reality.”

Pundits: Jeb Bush Could Win GOP Nomination in 2016
If he changes his name.

Fine. He can be the next Repug loser.

How John McCain Humiliated Himself on Susan Rice

The Daily Beast

We don’t yet really know as a society what a person has to do to completely and utterly cancel out a record of war heroism, but we may be about to find out. [...]

Grampa Walnuts will be the last to know.

Just as conservatives couldn’t see that Romney was losing because they believed their own propaganda, I think McCain probably isn’t aware right now of what a joke he’s become.

This is good! Go read.

Feel sumthin' tuggin' atcher lip, Fox & Friends?

Raw Story, with video.

In a bizarre interview aired Friday morning, “Fox & Friends” apparently got punked by an author who declared that society absolutely has every reason to “destroy the imaginations of our children.”
...

Asked about the premise of his book, Esolen flipped the conversation on its head. “First of all, we do want to destroy the imaginations of our children,” he said. “Otherwise our economy would collapse and people would stop buying things they don’t need and don’t really even enjoy.”


“You can’t let your kid be outside, because a single blade of grass out there is a more wondrous object than anything a kid will see on a screen in a month’s time of viewing television and video games,” Esolen continued. “So, absolutely, you’ve got to keep them indoors.”

He added that fairy tales are also not advisable because “they are based on what every culture really knows about human beings.

“It’s archetypal, it’s natural human knowledge,” Esolen said. “And we don’t want that because that really taps in the imagination. So, instead we’ve to replace it with stories about who ever happens to be politically favored at the moment. This trains the child away from participation in politics.”
...

If Esolen was in fact punking Fox News, it wouldn’t be the first time this particular show has gotten fooled. [...]

Too easy. Those morons are dumber'n a bag o' hammers. Heh.

Woody Guthrie at 100

By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! Interview and Video

Guthrie’s most famous song, “This Land Is Your Land,” was written in 1940 in response to Kate Smith’s "God Bless America.” "Woody saw ['God Bless America'] as a strident, jingoistic, complacent, tub-thumping anthem to American greatness,” Kaufman says. “And now, he had just come from the Dust Bowl. He’d just come from the barbed-wire gates of California’s Eden there. He’d seen the Hoovervilles. He’d seen the bread lines. He’d seen labor activists getting their heads busted. And so, he’s thinking, what — God bless — what America, you know, is Kate Smith singing of?” In 2009, Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen performed “This Land Is Your Land” for the inauguration of President Obama.

Over the next hour, we’ll hear from folk singer Pete Seeger, the British musician Billy Bragg and the historian Will Kaufman. But first, Woody Guthrie, in his own words, being interviewed by the musicologist Alan Lomax

ALAN LOMAX: What did your family do? What kind of people were they, and where did they come from?

WOODY GUTHRIE: Well, they come in there from Texas in the early day. My dad got to Oklahoma right after statehood. He was the first clerk of the county court in Okemah, Oklahoma, after statehood, as he is known as one of them old, hard-hitting, fist-fighting Democrats, you know, that run for office down there, and they used to miscount the votes all the time. So every time that my dad went to town, it was common the first question that I ask him when he come riding in on a horse that evening, I’d say, "Well, how many fights did you have today?" And then he’d take me up on his knee, and he’d proceed to tell me who he is fighting and why and all about it. "Put her there, boy. We’ll show these fascists what a couple hillbillies can do."

There ye go! Enjoy.

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

Here's the differentest one yet! Here's all you need to know:

Unsere Rubrik "Pop Secret" geht den bizarren, lustigen, tragischen und skurrilen Legenden und Mythen der Rock- und Popgeschichte auf den Grund. Sie sehen eine kurze Episode aus der Welt des Rock und Pop, die später zur Legendenbildung geführt hat. Und am Ende fragen wir nach einem Detail, das mit der Geschichte zu tun hat.

Finden Sie die Lösung, können Sie gewinnen!

Unter allen richtigen Lösungsvorschlägen verlosen wir ein Comic aus dem Kreuzberger Comicladen Modern Graphics.

Thanks to RBBradioeins, Guessenziewhere.

Ain't it amazin', Macy...

Yesterday was the big Macy's Thanksgiving parade in Noo Yawk City. I couldn't care less about that shit, but Mrs. G likes to watch it so I caught a little bit of it on one of the all-day reruns. I think forty years as a motorcycle mechanic gave me a slightly odd take on things.

Go see this copyright protected photo of an NYC motor cop. Take note of the cop's left hand.

There were about a dozen of these NYPD motor cops leading the parade, every last one of them slipping his clutch in unison with ballet-like precision so they could go that slow and maintain perfect formation.

I saw that and lost my mind just for a second and wished I had the contract for NYPD's motorcycle service business. I'm better now... Heh.

Heh...

Thanks to YubaNet.

Grand Old Planet

Paul Krugman gets to the heart of one of the cruxes of the biscuit about Repugs. Links at site.

Earlier this week, GQ magazine published an interview with Senator Marco Rubio, whom many consider a contender for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, in which Mr. Rubio was asked how old the earth is. After declaring “I’m not a scientist, man,” the senator went into desperate evasive action, ending with the declaration that “it’s one of the great mysteries.”

It’s funny stuff, and conservatives would like us to forget about it as soon as possible. Hey, they say, he was just pandering to likely voters in the 2016 Republican primaries — a claim that for some reason is supposed to comfort us.
...

By the way, that question didn’t come out of the blue. As speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, Mr. Rubio provided powerful aid to creationists trying to water down science education. In one interview, he compared the teaching of evolution to Communist indoctrination tactics — although he graciously added that “I’m not equating the evolution people with Fidel Castro.” Gee, thanks.

What was Mr. Rubio’s complaint about science teaching? That it might undermine children’s faith in what their parents told them to believe. And right there you have the modern G.O.P.’s attitude, not just toward biology, but toward everything: If evidence seems to contradict faith, suppress the evidence (my em).
...

And then there’s the matter of using evidence to shape economic policy. You may have read about the recent study from the Congressional Research Service finding no empirical support for the dogma that cutting taxes on the wealthy leads to higher economic growth. How did Republicans respond? By suppressing the report. On economics, as in hard science, modern conservatives don’t want to hear anything challenging their preconceptions — and they don’t want anyone else to hear about it, either.

So don’t shrug off Mr. Rubio’s awkward moment. His inability to deal with geological evidence was symptomatic of a much broader problem — one that may, in the end, set America on a path of inexorable decline.

Shorter: Mustn't say anything that contradicts the stupid beliefs of the ignoramuses who vote for them.

They are, after all, the ones who believe that Willard lost because he wasn't conservative enough!

Denialists, Whiners, and Wackjobs

Paul Begala

I used to think Republicans were a monochromatic monolith specializing in Group Think, though without the Think part. The Republicans’ reaction to the reelection of Barack Obama, however, has shown a surprising diversity in GOP thought. At least five distinct -approaches have emerged.

The Vince Lombardi Republicans. Political parties exist to win, this group says. If you don’t win, you can’t enact your agenda, can’t protect your values, can’t advance your cause. The Lombardi Republicans are pragmatic. They saw President Obama win 72 percent of the Latino vote—the fastest-growing segment of the -electorate—and they had a “Ven a Jesús” moment. [...]
...

I happen to think the Vince Lombardi types are right. But, let’s face it, they’re outnumbered by less admirable Republicans.

The Sour Grapes Republicans. For a movement that aspires to macho stoicism, there sure are a lot of whiny wusses in the GOP these days. I hate whiners. I coach my kids in baseball and basketball, and I have two inviolable rules when they lose: don’t blame the other team and don’t complain about the officials. Sour Grapes Republicans do both. Donald Trump, the village idiot of a city of 8 million (my em. Heh.), took to Twitter to call President Obama’s reelection “a total sham and a travesty,” to propose a “revolution in this country,” and to allege (falsely) that Obama had lost the popular vote. Clearly, Trump is living proof that hair spray causes brain damage.
...

The Flat-Earthers. When you listen to Flat Earth Republicans, you’d think they actually won. Karl Rove, the legendary Republican bogeyman, led groups that spent $300 million in opposition to the president and congressional Democrats. Ninety-four percent of that money was spent supporting candidates who lost. Rove’s analysis after the election: “We did good things this year.” Really? It’s not like they spent the money trying to do something truly good, like artificially inseminating zoo pandas or inventing untraceable email so Army generals can make love as well as war. No, Rove spent hundreds of millions and lost bad. That’s an abysmal year. But you wouldn’t know it listening to Flat Earth Karl.
...

The Crazies. An Arizona woman allegedly ran over her husband with her SUV when she learned he hadn’t -voted. She was apparently upset that Obamacare wouldn’t be repealed. Let’s hope her poor husband gets all the health care he needs. Lord knows he’s suffered enough.
...

The Blame America Firsters. On a conference call with his major donors a week after the election, Mitt Romney blamed his loss not on his painfully lame campaign style, his unfocused advertising strategy, or his multiple gaffes and insults. No, he blamed the American people. President Obama, he told his fellow millionaires, followed “the old playbook” of giving “gifts” to special-interest groups, “especially the -African--American community, the Hispanic community, and young people.” First, Mitt, if it was an old playbook, why weren’t you ready for the plays? [...]

I believe Lincoln got re-elected for the same reason. "Gifts" to African-Americans. Like the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment. Even if said African-Americans couldn't quite vote for him. Heh.

The real “gift” of 2012 is that, in the toughest economy of our lifetime, the American people had the good sense to turn away from a party that holds them in such contempt.

Give thanks.

A holiday guide to arguing with your right-wing relatives

Article here, but since facts don't matter to them and you don't feel like pissin' into the wind, fuck 'em. Tell 'em if they don't STFU they're gonna be damned uncomfortable eating pumpkin pie with a turkey carcass shoved up their ass.

Give thanks

GOP's Domination Was Only Temporary

Headline of the Day

Would You Like Some Crow With That Rice, Senator McCain?

Wherein McCain is described as an "irascible douche". A little high-toned but it works for me. Heh.