Heh...

A tip o' the Brain to New Breed M.C.

Oh, the irony...

The guys at Ironic Times finally showed up for work...

Housing Sector Improves
As visiting relatives finally leave.

Study: Indoor Marijuana Production Responsible for 9% of California's Household Energy Use
And 90% of Sara Lee sales.

World's Longest High-Speed Rail Line Opens in China
Trip that normally takes a year and a half by ox cart now just two hours by train.

Predictions for 2013
...

Madame Blavinsky, psychic (Switzerland): “A Republican lawmaker will be caught committing the very thing he built a political career opposing, then apologize to his family and take full responsibility for his actions.”

Jeez, that's goin' out on a limb... Heh.

Rude Readers' Haiku Review of 2012

You know whom. Here's just a couple:

Texas: "Let's secede."
The rest of the nation says,
"Good idea. When?"

Rush called Fluke a slut.
No birth control needed with
Dominican boys.

Heh.

Dave Barry’s Year in Review 2012

If you've ever watched Gold Rush, you know that you need to move an awful lot of dirt to find a nugget. There are a lot of them in this piece and they're closer to the surface.

t was a cruel, cruel year — a year that kept raising our hopes, only to squash them flatter than a dead possum on the interstate.

Example: This year the “reality” show “Jersey Shore,” which for six hideous seasons has been a compelling argument in favor of a major Earth-asteroid collision, finally got canceled, and we dared to wonder if maybe, just maybe, we, as a society, were becoming slightly less stupid.

But then, WHAP, we were slapped in our national face by the cold hard frozen mackerel of reality in the form of the hugely popular new “reality” show “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo,” which, in terms of intellectual content, makes “Jersey Shore” look like “Hamlet.”
...

February

Tensions between the United States and Pakistan mount after eyewitnesses in Waziristan claim that an unmanned U.S. Predator drone robbed a convenience store.
...

March

In the Middle East, tensions rise between the United States and Pakistan after an unmanned Predator drone destroys the only working toilet in Waziristan.
...

May

... Newt Gingrich finally suspends his presidential campaign, despite an emotional plea to keep fighting from his base of supporters, namely Mrs. and Mrs. Elrod Pomfurter of Oklahoma City, who, after months of deliberation, had just invested in a bumper sticker.
...

In sports, Usain Bolt, running in his final tuneup race before the Olympics, wins the Kentucky Derby.
...

August

Closer to home, suspicions that the Mexican military may be involved with drug trafficking are heightened when a U.S. surveillance satellite photographs a Mexican army convoy transporting what appears to be a 200-foot doobie.
...

October

With polls showing a very tight race, the final weeks of the campaign are a textbook example of what this great experiment called “American democracy” is all about: two opposing political parties, each with valid positions, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on comically simplistic radio and TV ads designed by consultants to terrify ill-informed half-wits.

The good news there is the half-wits sorta lost.

Many more, and since I may not be the best judge of nuggets, go look for some yourself. Use of the pan and sluice box is free!

Happy New Year!

Headline of the Day

Al Qaeda Disbands; Says Job of Destroying U.S. Economy Now in Congress’s Hands

We're screwed. Congress is so incompetent it could fuck up a junkyard with a rubber hammer.

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

Us godless commie liberals know all about Satan's Jewel Crown. I'm wearing mine now.

Thanks to hussarII.

Light Blogging Today

This is Lexie. She's 5 years old and needs a home. She is currently being fostered by a nice lady at Golden Gate Springer Rescue, which is the same outfit we got our Maggie from 5 years ago.

We're going out to Oakland today to be interviewed by her to see if ours will do. There is competition. Several other people are being interviewed as well but I have a secret weapon - I will slather myself with bear poop to entice her and show her the fabulous life she will have in the mountains!

Oakland is a Dreaded Big City. Heady stuff for us simple hill folk!

Update:

We met Lexie at her foster home in East Oakland. The photo doesn't do her justice. She is drop dead gorgeous, very friendly, and a bubbly personality. We fell in love with her instantly and really hope we get her.

She licked ALL the bear poop off me!

Getting into the Bayarrhea over a high bridge across the ass end of Frisco Bay is free. Getting back out costs 5 bucks. Too cheap. I'da paid anything to get outta that traffic.


Update II:

Lexie went to her new home in Sausalito. I'm happy for her but waaaaaaah...

There'll be another come along soon. There are far too many dogs always needing a home and family.

Shrinkage

TRMS

Former Bush aide Mark McKinnon on the incredible shrinking Republican Party: "Increasingly, it is becoming clear that the party is against everything and for nothing.

"Nothing on taxes. Nothing on gun control. Nothing on climate change. Nothing on gay marriage. Nothing on immigration reform (or an incremental, piece-by-piece approach, which will result in nothing). It's a very odd situation when the losing party is the party refusing to negotiate. It may be how you disrupt, but it is not how you govern, or how you ever hope to regain a majority.

"And so, we have a Republican Party today willing to eliminate any prospect for a decent future for anyone, including itself, if it cannot be a future that is 100 percent in accordance with its core beliefs and principles. That's not governing. That's just lobbing hand grenades. If you're only standing on principle to appear taller, then you appear smaller. And the GOP is shrinking daily before our eyes."

Perhaps it will drown in the bathtub. Then we can add a little quicklime and pull the plug...

Illustrated Headline of the Day

2012: The year we all got high

Ahhhhhh...

6 Things Rich People Need to Stop Saying

You'll like this. From Cracked.

You're only being asked to pitch in because you have the resources. You're not a tall person who us dwarfs are jealously trying to cut down to size. You're a tall person being asked to get something down from a very tall shelf because nobody else can fucking reach it.
...

[...] Without society, all of your brave, individual talents and efforts won't buy you a bucket of farts.

So when somebody else asks for your help, in the form of charity or taxes, or because they need you to help them move a refrigerator, you can cite all sorts of reasons for not helping ("I think you're lying about needing help" or "I don't care" or "I'm too tied up with my own problems"), but the one thing you can't say is, "Why should you need help? I've never gotten help!" Not unless you're either shamefully oblivious, or a lying asshole.

Hell, if anybody could play the "I did this myself!" card, it's me. I mentioned earlier that I've made an unfair amount of money due to writing a novel about a zombie detective who only solves crimes of paranormal romance and then selling the film rights to said novel. If anything is a one-man show, it's writing a book. Nobody helped me with that. Well, I mean other than the friend who created the title character. And the publisher who spent the money to print up the copies and publicize it. And all of the previous novelists who established the medium and genre. And the public school system that taught me how to read and write, and that taught all of my readers how to read. And the people who built and maintain the Internet so that I would have a place to promote it, and the people who maintain the roads so that the books could be shipped from Amazon ...

You get the idea.

Yeah, I do, but a lot of people don't.

Chuck E. Jeez

A rare appearance on this page by Tom Friedman about Chuck Hagel's detractors. If you are concerned about Israel's rapid right-wing drift this is a 'must read'.

I am certain that the vast majority of U.S. senators and policy makers quietly believe exactly what Hagel believes on Israel — that it is surrounded by more implacable enemies than ever and needs and deserves America’s backing. But, at the same time, this Israeli government is so spoiled and has shifted so far to the right that it makes no effort to take U.S. interests into account by slowing its self-isolating settlement adventure. And it’s going to get worse. Israel’s friends need to understand that the center-left in Israel is dying. The Israeli election in January will bring to power Israeli rightists who never spoke at your local Israel Bonds dinner. These are people who want to annex the West Bank. Bibi Netanyahu is a dove in this crowd. The only thing standing between Israel and national suicide any more is America and its willingness to tell Israel the truth. But most U.S. senators, policy makers and Jews prefer to stick their heads in the sand, because confronting Israel is so unpleasant and politically dangerous. Hagel at least cares enough about Israel to be an exception.

Supplementary article at Think Progress.

Four former national security advisers in a letter to the editor in the Washington Post published on Tuesday denounced what New York TImes columnist Tom Friedman described as “disgusting” attacks on former Republican senator Chuck Hagel and praised Hagel’s prior service to the United States.
...

The high-level support for Hagel comes after the “neocon smear machine” recently began a campaign to tar Hagel as an anti-Semite and anti-Israel and not sufficiently militaristic toward Iran after news reports that he is President Obama’s top choice to succeed Leon Panetta.

It seems to me that Israel's only chance of survival is if we get rid of the neocons, or at least get their influence out of Israel policy, and start telling the Israeli government what it really needs to hear, i.e. they're fuckin' up by the numbers.

We're taking our country back!

From the Teatards. About fuckin' time. Via Raw Story.

Illustrated Headline of the Day

Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: The NRA shoots its mouth off edition

Hopefully, Lalala Pee-air done shot both of the NRA's feet and its ass off too. Good wrap-up.

The War On Christmas

CounterPunch

Israel’s large Palestinian minority is often spoken of in terms of the threat it poses to the Jewish majority. Palestinian citizens’ reproductive rate constitutes a “demographic timebomb”, while their main political programme – Israel’s reform into “a state of all its citizens” – is proof for most Israeli Jews that their compatriots are really a “fifth column”.

But who would imagine that Israeli Jews could be so intimidated by the innocuous Christmas tree?

This issue first came to public attention two years ago when it was revealed that Shimon Gapso, the mayor of Upper Nazareth, had banned Christmas trees from all public buildings in his northern Israeli city.

“Upper Nazareth is a Jewish town and all its symbols are Jewish,” Gapso said. “As long as I hold office, no non-Jewish symbol will be presented in the city.”
...

But Gapso is not alone in his trenchant opposition to making even the most cursory nod towards multiculturalism. The city’s chief rabbi, Isaiah Herzl, has refused to countenance a single Christmas tree in Upper Nazareth, arguing that it would be “offensive to Jewish eyes”.
...

But the image hides a dirtier reality. A recent letter from Haifa’s rabbinate came to light in which the city’s hotels and events halls were reminded that they must not host New Year’s parties at the end of this month (the Jewish New Year happens at a different time of year). The hotels and halls were warned that they would be denied their kashrut licences if they did so.

“It is a seriously forbidden to hold any event at the end of the calendar year that is connected with or displays anything from the non-Jewish festivals,” the letter states....

But what is clear is that there is plenty of religious intolerance verging on hatred being quietly exercised against non-Jews, mostly behind the scenes so as not to disturb Israel’s “Jewish and democratic” image or outrage the millions of Christian tourists and pilgrims who visit Israel each year.

This poses a great problem for FOXNews. How do they present it as part of "The War On Christmas" when it's actually being done by far-right-wing Jews instead of not actually being done by godless commie American Liberals? Nothing outta Bill O'Rally yet as far as I know. Heh.

A Holiday Letter from John Boehner

Borowitz via Seniors for a Democratic Society

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Today, Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) released the following holiday letter to the American people:

Dear American People:

It’s Speaker Boehner here, writing my first and last ever holiday letter to you. Why am I doing this after all of these years, you might ask? Well, I won’t mince words. I’ve started drinking a little early this Christmas.

Yes, I’m sitting here in my man-cave, panelled in mahogany the color of me, doing a rack of Canadian Club shooters and smoking my way through a carton of Lucky Strikes as if they were the last Twinkies in creation. If my chief of staff knew that I was writing to you while I was this polluted, he’d shit a phone book. But guess what? I don’t fucking care anymore.

You see, this will be my last Christmas as Speaker of the House, all because a cabal of Tea Party miscreants in the House of Representatives doesn’t think I’m a ginormous enough asshole for their taste. Who’s more to their liking? Virginia’s own Eric Cantor. As a waiter might say at an all-you-can-eat shit buffet, “Excellent choice.” How odious is Eric Cantor? Let me put it this way: when we have to speak to the press, I actually prefer to stand next to Mitch McConnell.

What will life be like under Speaker of the House Eric Cantor? Well, he’s the guy who recommended cuts in disaster funding just hours after tornadoes hit Joplin, Missouri. Nice. And it was his “never met a dick-measuring contest I didn’t like” pathology that helped create last year’s debt-ceiling crisis. You can’t put a price tag on a performance like that. Well, actually you can: it cost the country nineteen billion dollars. Starting to miss me already, aren’t you? Fuck you.

So have a very Eric Cantor Christmas, America, and as that smug four-eyed sociopath drives the entire nation off the cliff, don’t say I didn’t warn you. Now leave me alone, God damn you. Damn you all to hell.

Happy Holidays,

Speaker Boehner

Heh.

Question of the Day

Did The NRA Faceplant After Newtown?

The answer is hopefully and we will see.

I was an NRA member since my service days, back when you needed a sponsor to join. My Company Commander signed for me. I quit when they went so godawful loony right-wing. I still have a silver bullet keychain with Charlton Heston's signature on it.

The NRA can kiss my ass. At gunpoint if need be.

Grow A Pair, Mr President

Andy Sullivan

After the neocon chorus on the Sunday talk-shows, with Butters and Lieberman doing their usual Likudnik dance, there's word that Obama might be wavering in picking the realist, candid Republican, Chuck Hagel, as defense secretary. Let's just say that if Obama allows Bill Kristol to scalp a Purple Heart veteran for defense - then he will be betraying the core base that got him the nomination and the presidency twice. People didn't vote for Obama to get a neoconservative-dictated foreign policy.

First the smearing and scalping of Rice; now the brutal AIPAC-led campaign against Hagel. I say: let the hearings begin, and let Hagel debate the wisdom of the Iraq war with those who campaigned so ferociously for it. Let a Purple Heart veteran Republican take on Bill Kristol and Dick Cheney. It would do the GOP a world of good as well.

So we'll see if, once again, Obama is rolled on the Middle East. If he is, we will know for sure he is not the change we believed in.

He could have left that last line out. Shovelling shit, and I mean that pretty literally, against the tide is a long, arduous, thankless task. Change comes over time and we're starting to see it.

He's certainly right about not letting the draft-dodging warmongers prevail over Hagel. His less-than-fawning approach to Israel is a good thing IMNSHO and would be a refreshing and necessary change.

Also, from Peter Beinart:

We’ve seen this before. From the 2009 settlement freeze fight to the 2011 call for a Palestinian state along the 1967 lines plus swaps, the Obama administration has a history of picking fights with the “pro-Israel” establishment and then backing down, which is worse than never picking the fight at all. When it comes to Israel policy, diverging from Washington orthodoxy requires genuine political conviction. In selecting Chuck Hagel, the Obama administration has found someone who has it. Whether the same can be said of the President himself remains to be seen.

Let me put it this way: if the draft-dodging, warmongering, right-wing, Israel-sucking, Likudnik, neocon bastards are against Hagel, then the President made the right choice and I'm for him and Obama better fight for him.

'Twas the night before Christmas in Boehnerville

Via Kos.

Has "Idiot America" Become More Idiotic?

Short answer: Yes. Not so short is this interview with Charles Pierce.

MK: Do you believe that FOX "News" is helping to create an alternative universe Idiot America bubble? You discuss the inanity of being Sean Hannity in your book, for instance.

CP: The bubble exists, and it is goddamn dangerous. It clearly was dangerous to Mitt Romney as a politician because it kept him from believing he was in trouble, right up to the moment they called the election the other way. The bubble is created when we go into denial that there are consequences to believing nonsense. It seems right now that the mother of the Newtown shooter may have been living partly in the bubble of survivalist paranoia. FOX has contributed to both of these bubbles.

MK: Let's look at the rabid denial that global warming exists. More than 80 percent of Republicans in Congress appear to believe that it does not exist - and many Democrats don't seem to see any imperative in resolving it. Here we see a climate change denial propaganda machine - in large part financed by the fossil fuel industry and polluting companies - having, it appears, successfully debunked the growing degradation of our planet. Are we in an age when there are simply no facts; only, as you have noted, falsehoods turned into realties by those who scream the loudest and get the most coverage on television?

CP: Again, the real danger is that we’re in an era where we think there are no consequences to believing nonsense. That’s the reason I went to Shishmaref in Alaska for the book. The people there think the whole “debate” is goddamn crazy.

MK: Are there any regional differences in Idiot America as far as numbers of people living in alternative realities?

CP: Living in them? No. Demanding that other people live in them? Yes. We have actual laws being passed in the South and West enshrining nonsense into law.

MK: One of your final chapters is entitled, "The Principles of Automatic Pilot." In it, you discuss how those who objected to the lies that were created to justify invading Iraq either didn't speak up or weren't listened to. You talk about those who understood terrorists better than anyone, but were ignored. How does this apply to "the principles of automatic pilot"?

CP: The metaphor was based on accounts from airplane crashes in which the pilots forgot to disengage the autopilot until too late. The actual human expert was defeated by the machine. The Iraq war was a bloodier example of what’s going on with the climate crisis. The more you knew, the easier you were to dismiss.

The corollary to which, seems to me, is the less you know and the louder you are, the harder you are to ignore. That esplains a lot.

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

NRA: Place Volunteer Armed Guards at Every School in Nation
Says there are millions of out-of-work gun-toting middle-aged men available.

Queen Becomes First Monarch in Over a Century to Attend Prime Minister's Cabinet Meeting
Without jokes about royal family, meeting lasts less than five minutes.

Iran: Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khanenei Has Own Facebook Page
Best not to unfriend him.

Stores Quickly Sell Out Last Batch of Hostess Twinkies
Lucky buyers will keep them for their grandchildren to enjoy.

Half of Americans Own Guns
To protect themselves from other half.

Besides being ironic, that may be the most illogical statement Ironic Times has ever made.

Here's-What's-Wrong-With-Our-Country Headline of the Day

Mosque arsonist tells court: ‘I only know what I hear on Fox News’

Fuckin' yeesh...

Neocons' Last Stand

Robert Parry on the neocons' view of Hagel as SecDef due largely to his stance on the Israel lobby. Worth a read.

The neocons were as stunned as Karl Rove and other GOP operatives when their predictions of a Romney landslide evaporated as the actual votes of the American people were counted. Instead of cashing in their chits with President Romney, the neocons were facing four more years on the outside-looking-in under President Obama.

Then, just days after Obama’s reelection, a second shoe dropped. One of the neocons’ last senior allies in the U.S. government, CIA Director Petraeus, was forced to resign as a result of a humiliating sex scandal.

The stunned neocons suddenly looked out over a Washington where they no longer held key government positions and few possessed top-secret security clearances. They still held lucrative jobs at think tanks and had prominent space on op-ed pages but their direct control of U.S. foreign policy was ending.

Thus, the significance of the neocon counteroffensive against Chuck Hagel, a generally popular Republican who served with distinction as a soldier during the Vietnam War. To demonstrate their continued clout in Washington, the neocons must show they can still claim some important scalps and can still frighten President Obama into retreat.

But the risk the neocons run is that their bold march in pursuit of Sen. Hagel’s scalp may turn out instead to be something of the Neocons’ Last Stand.

I'm down wid dat! Wishing the neocons a speedy demise, here's a little song for them.

Thanks to gypsytwo.

Enough!

Andy Sullivan goes off on the Repugs big time. 1st and last ¶:

Between the humiliating and chaotic collapse of Speaker Boehner's already ludicrously extreme Plan B and Wayne La Pierre's deranged proposal to put government agents in schools with guns, the Republican slide into total epistemic closure and political marginalization has now become a free-fall. This party, not to mince words, is unfit for government. There is no conservative party in the West - except for minor anti-immigrant neo-fascist ones in Europe - anywhere close to this level of far right extremism. And now the damage these fanatics can do is not just to their own country - was the debt ceiling debacle of 2011 not enough for them? - but to the entire world.
...

Enough. This faction and its unhinged fanaticism has no place in any advanced democracy. They must be broken. But the current irony is that no one has managed to expose their extremism more clearly than their own Speaker. His career is over. As is the current Republican party. We need a new governing coalition in the House - Democrats and those few sane Republicans willing to put country before ideology. But even that may be impossible.

Couldn'ta said it better myself.

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

Assuming there is a Saturday, of course. Emmylou and Buddy "Stingy Brim" Miller.

"Wide River to Cross" at the Miracle on Music Row concert in Nashville TN, December 15, 2012

Thanks to JWarrickVideos.

Ah'm ready fer them black hella-co-peters now, you betcha!

I bought a firearm yesterday.

Backstory is, I got my Wednesday Sierra Sun and in amongst the advertising supplements was one from Cabela's Reno store like there is every week.

A word about Cabela's if you're not familiar with them - a huge store, what we used to call a "sporting goods" store, now called "outfitters", which in actual fact can outfit you for every kind of outdoor activity from a short hike to a year in your bunker. Fishin', huntin', hikin', campin', shootin', boatin', ATV-in', blastin', an' grillin' barely begin to cover it. Mrs. G bought some delicious fudge too!

Anyway, they had an item on sale that I've wanted one of for thirty years. I wasn't actively pursuing said burning desire but it leaped off the page at me and off I went.

The store has a firearms counter about a hundred feet long with three full time staff. Enough rifles, pistols, and assault weapons to equip a small nation's army. Or make a gun nut pop serious wood. There were several of those there, but I took a number and got right up, serious buyer that I was.

I bought one of these. If you click the link you can "add to cart" and buy one at the sale price right there. It's called the "Model 1851 Confederate Navy .44 Caliber Revolver". I don't care for the Confederacy very much so it's just the "1851 Navy" to me, and that is how the manufacturer refers to it everywhere except when it comes in a Cabela's box.

It is made by Pietta in Italy. Them Eye-ties is a-catchin' right up in the field of modern weaponry! It's well made and quite heavy. A good looking piece too, to my eye, and it's in my favorite caliber.

Keep in mind that this thing is no toy. It's a .44 caliber revolver that is perfectly capable of killing a human being, not that I have any plans to do so. Perish the thought.

I bring that up because there are several anomalies in our firearms laws regarding black powder firearms. There is no background check required. I am a California resident and was able to buy it across the counter in Nevada, which I could not have done with a "normal" firearm. Hell, they didn't even ask my name. If I had paid cash, there would have been no record of the transaction. Which I was going to do, except they offered me an additional $25 off my purchase if I got a Cabela's Visa card, which, thrifty sort that I am, I did. Then they wanted to know my name! Heh. I filled out a very short form. The clerk handed me a complete finalized credit card about a minute later and I headed for the cashier and that was it.

Note: I had a choice of 5" or 7" barrels. I opted for the 5" barrel on the logical assumption that the extra 2" would slow down my draw when the Blue Helmets/black helicopters/revenooers/guys with the big butterfly nets/whomever come for me.

I also bought some Pyrodex, percussion caps, and a "starter kit" so I can shoot the damn thing, which I probably won't be able to do until spring because the road to our local firing range is closed due to snow. I don't dare even load it because I haven't the faintest idea of how to unload it except by pulling the trigger which is a bozo-no-no in town. I'm looking forward to it though. Should be big fun!

The following video shows one reason perhaps why there are so few restrictions on buying these - they take more time to reload than you would have at a mass shooting spree before the cops come. Not exactly a weapon of mass destruction. The one in the video is purported to be a Colt but it looks exactly like mine.

Thanks to Lylea876.

Afterthought:

The only other firearm I ever bought over the counter (at our local Longs Drug of all places) without a background check was a perfectly functional M1 Garand. One of the finest mankillers ever devised, it's considered an antique and thus no check is required. Since I carried one of those in the Marine Corps for a while, I guess I'm an antique too. Sigh.

Plan B - Over The Top

Plan B fiasco leaves GOP lost, divided, and weak

Nothing wrong with that!

I used to think Orange Boner was just so weak a leader that he couldn't throw a beer party in a brewery if someone else brought the nachos.

Today I'm more inclined to think of him as a character in a WWI movie. Picture him as Sub-Leftenant Pugsley-Codswallop waving his Webley revolver, on a lanyard of course, over his head and exhorting the grizzled veterans of Her Majesty's Involuntary Rifles to "Over the top, lads! Follow me!". The men, played by Reps. Cantor and McCarthy, simply wait until his machine-gun-bullet-riddled corpse falls back in the trench and continue with their bully beef and tea and hope he doesn't have so much lead in him that he'll be too heavy to carry off before he starts to stink.

It's a heartwarming visual, isn't it?

Update:

The humiliation of John Boehner

He's powerless, and his own party continues to make him look like a fool. Maybe he'll just walk away

Better than being carried. Heh.

The End Is Here...

Headline of the Day

The 50 Worst Columns of 2012

Just ... go.

Update:

It was brought to my attention that the above link was broken. Thank you. It's fixed now.

A Post on Gun Laws That Will Piss Off Guntards

El Rude-o. Not too off the mark, but this part is right on the money:

You own a weapon. You own a thing that is meant to kill people. Respect that. Respect that society has a stake in making sure that your mechanism of death isn't used stupidly or criminally. Statistically, you will never get the chance to be a hero. You will never stop a mass shooting. In fact, pretty much everyone who ever did stop one was a trained police or security officer or ex-military.

You might hate speed limits because you know you can drive fast safely. But all it takes is one person not as skilled as you believe you are to spin out and kill a whole bunch of us. If you speed a lot and get caught, you get your license taken away. All you gotta do is respect the speed limit, and you can drive as much as you want.

Gun laws exist not to deny you anything, but to protect the rest of us.

He failed to add "from you".

A Message To The NRA From Robert E. Lee

From One Who Knows. Heh. Goblinbooks.

What do you think the Confederacy was? It was the largest, most well-organized American militia group that ever tried to take on the US military. And they went after us like a pack of pitbulls going through an old folks home. It was not pretty. And when your time comes, you and your camping buddies from the real estate firm are not going to last anywhere near as long as we did, okay? You'll get a million views on YouTube, they'll pop you into a federal prison, and nothing will be any different.

Why does this matter? Because a main argument you gun nuts use to fend off regulation is that you act as a powerful check on tyranny. You do not. I know it, the feds know it, and even you know it, deep down.
...

Stop playing soldier, stop preventing common sense gun control laws, and take some responsibility for your government.

And by the way, NASCAR sucks, Carolina barbecue is overrated, and Lynrd Skynyrd are from Florida, which isn't even part of the South. I'm done here.

OMG, dissing NASCAR and Carolina BBQ?! Two of the very few things that are good about the South? No wonder he lost. He's right about Florida. Two outta three ain't bad if yer tryin' ta piss people off.

Firefighters, Bikers, Block Haters

New Civil Rights Movement. Links and photos at site.

Newtown: Police, Fire, Motorcycle Group, Among Do-Gooders Preventing Westboro Funeral Picket
...

Westboro Baptist Church had posted to their picket schedule that they would be on hand for the funeral of Sandy hook Elementary School Principal Dawn Hochsprung. Reports from Twitter, and Anonymous, the Internet hacktivist group, state the Westboro Baptist Church members were in town but apparently didn’t venture out of their hotel.
...

“I can’t put you through to those rooms,” a desk clerk at the motel told Examiner. “I wish those people weren’t staying here. I hate them and what they stand for.”

So, besides being hateful, obnoxious, and disgusting, the bastards are chickenshit as well.

Why isn't WBC paying taxes? They're more of a tax evasion group than a church.

The Right’s ‘Limited Government’ Scam

A good read by Robert Parry.

A favorite line from the American Right – both well-educated libertarians and know-nothing Tea Partiers – is that the Founders believed in “limited government” and the United States must return to that constitutional principle. But the argument is both nonsensical and insulting.

Everyone believes in “limited government” – unless you’re a totalitarian or a fan of absolute monarchies. Liberals, conservatives, socialists, free-market ideologues and pretty much everyone in between believe in limitations of government power. The point of having a constitution is to set the limits and rules for a government.
...

Today’s Right doesn’t want to acknowledge this history because it destroys the right-wing narrative by revealing the Framers to be advocates of a strong central government and opponents of states’ rights.
...

Indeed, this current right-wing attack on “federal overreach” has been around since the 1950s and the civil rights movement, which put an end to Jim Crow laws in the South. The Right’s claim is essentially neo-Confederate and harkens back to the South’s efforts prior to the Civil War to insist that slave-states had the right to nullify federal laws and ultimately to secede from the Union.
...

As part of that propaganda effort, wealthy right-wingers, like the Koch Brothers, invested heavily in think tanks and academic institutions where “scholars” cherry-picked quotes from key Framers, particularly Madison, to distort the history surrounding the Constitution. This false history was then packaged and sold to ill-informed Tea Party types who fancied themselves as channeling the anti-government passions of the Founders.

For instance, one right-wing canard about the Second Amendment is that the Framers wanted an armed citizenry so the people could go to war with the government to protect individual liberties. The reality, of course, was entirely different. Aristocrats like Madison and Washington wanted armed militias so the government could maintain order in the face of disruptions like Shays’ Rebellion as well as to resist Native Americans on the frontiers and to put down slave revolts.

The real reason for 'limited government', of course, is to let the 1% roll over the rest of us unimpeded. The money boys mask their desire with all that other shit so the 'tards will buy into it.

GOP Leaders Finally Ready to Cave on Taxing the Rich

The Daily Beast

Like those Japanese soldiers holed up in caves on Pacific islands in 1945, the House Republicans don’t seem to grasp that the war over higher taxes on the rich is effectively over. This war ended, of course, with the election.

In case there's any doubt that I'm a little off, I had a hilarious visual of the House GOP sneaking out in the middle of the night in their underwear to steal food...

Tactical Reality

Very interesting explanation of the modern gun "culture".

From TPM Reader SS …

I’m a pretty left-of-center liberal. Read TPM regularly. Donated nearly $1,000 to BHO’s re-election campaign. But I was raised with guns. More to the point, my childhood was steeped in gun lore: I learned to hand-load ammunition when I was 10 and 11, and - by the time I was 14 - my dad was trusting me to prepare my own handloads. I could (and to some extent, still can) recite chapter and verse of firearms arcana, from muzzle velocities - a product of the type of gunpowder used in one’s handloads; of the weight (in grains) of a projectile; of the length of a gun’s barrel (the longer, the faster); of the temperature and elevation at which one is shooting - to impact energy (measured in footpounds), to trajectories (flatter for heavier bullets; some calibers have an innate advantage over others), and so on.
I bring this up to establish my bona-fides.

The gun culture that we have today in the U.S. is not the gun culture, so to speak, that I remember from my youth. It’s too simple to say that it’s “sick;” it’s more accurately an absurd fetishization. I suppose that the American Gunfighter, in all of his avatars, is inescapably fetishistic, but (to my point) somewhere along the way - maybe in, uh, 1994? - we crossed over into Something Else: let’s call it Gonzo Fetishization. The American Gunfighter as caricature.
...

The “tactical” turn is what I want to flag here. It has what I take to be a very specific use-case, but it’s used - liberally - by gun owners outside of the military, outside of law enforcement, outside (if you’ll indulge me) of any conceivable reality-based community: these folks talk in terms of “tactical” weapons, “tactical” scenarios, “tactical applications,” and so on. It’s the lingua franca of gun shops, gun ranges, gun forums, and gun-oriented Youtube videos. (My god, you should see what’s out there on You Tube!) Which begs my question: in precisely which “tactical” scenarios do all of these lunatics imagine that they’re going to use their matte-black, suppressor-fitted, flashlight-ready tactical weapons? They tend to speak of the “tactical” as if it were a fait accompli; as a kind of apodeictic fact: as something that everyone - their customers, interlocutors, fellow forum members, or YouTube viewers - experiences on a regular basis, in everyday life. They tend to speak of the tactical as reality.

And I think there’s a sense in which they’ve constructured their own (batshit insane) reality.

One in which we have to live.

Gun Shy

AlterNet

There’s no disputing that the Democratic Party has regressed dramatically on the issue of gun violence over the past two decades. [...]
...

It can be hard to remember now, but well into the 1990s, national Democrats proudly associated themselves with gun control, championing laws that restricted access to deadly weapons. [...]

The Democrats’ cowardice on guns traces back to the fateful election of 2000. Clinton, despite his aggressive pursuit of gun control measures, fared relatively well with rural gun-owning populations in his 1996 reelection campaign. But those same voters turned hard on Al Gore in ’00, shifting Kentucky, Missouri, West Virginia, Arkansas and Tennessee to the Republican column. A victory in any one of those states – all of which Clinton carried twice – would have made Gore president. Democrats concluded that they’d scared off rural, lower-income white voters who had traditionally supported them – and that guns were the big reason why. A new consensus emerged: Gun control could no longer be a central component of Democratic messaging. So it was that John Kerry in 2004 and Obama in 2008 and 2012 did their best to ignore the issue. Kerry went so far as to embark on a goose hunt in rural Ohio just before Election Day.

I firmly believe that Al Gore's stance on "gun control" saddled us with The Bush Years, which will be a stain on the nation for generations to come.

"Gun control" needs to be re-messaged as "common sense firearms safety regulation", even if the NRA and its guntards (a tip o' the Brain to The Rude Pundit) have trouble with that many words of more than one syllable.

We don't need so-called "assault weapons". When it comes to defending the nation from the government, I'll be able to not shoot down the drone that fires the Hellfire that vaporizes me just as well with one of these.

Assault weapons are mainly used to try to convince people that the owner actually has a dick anyway.

Plea For Repug Sanity? Bwahahahaha!

Truthout

The OxyContin and Viagra-soaked brain of Rush Limbaugh is warning of the coming self-destruction of the Republican Party. But, former Republican insider and Reagan staffer Bruce Bartlett knows the grim truth: The Republican Party has already destroyed itself.

Halle-fuckin'-lujah!

Yes, by raising taxes, Rush Limbaugh’s Republican Party – that Party that’s denied thirty years of economic reality, attempted to set up an Ayn Randian paradise in America, and fear mongered everything from Muslims to socialists to gays to women – will indeed destroy itself.
...

As Eisenhower wrote to his brother Edgar, in 1954, “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things…a few Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

Ike knew.These days, their number may still be negligible, but their money is not and they are worse than stupid.

“As long as you've got crazy Tea Party people who for some reason vote against their own direct economic interest and support the billionaires against themselves, we’re kind of stuck,” he lamented.

Unfortunately, it’s not just the Republican Party that’s stuck. As long as those “crazy people” are running the people’s House of Representatives, the American people are stuck, too, watching helplessly as our nation unravels, and waiting anxiously for Bartlett’s “Reality-Based Community” of Republicans to rise again.

Yes, I just linked to The American Conservative. So sue me.

The nation needs more than one political party, but the current Repug party is not one of them. They can keep waiting 'til I'm long gone.

I'm-Sorry-I-Couldn't-Resist-I'll-Pay-For-The-Bleach Update:

Republican leaders let Rush Limbaugh dominate their party

Worse-Than-Unhelpful Headline of the Day

Tennessee pastor: Mass shootings because schools teach evolution and ‘how to be a homo’

I wish these ignorant god-squadders would STFU. I think that crap is worse than saying teachers should be armed in the classroom.

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

Obama: Prosecution of Pot Smokers Not “Top Priority”
Impact: if you and a bunch of guys drive around getting stoned and calling yourselves the Choom Gang, don't expect to be brought up on federal charges.

U.S. Military Judge Rules That No Mention of Torture of Accused May Be Permitted in Trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed
Citing Sharia law.

Heh.

Mitch McConnell Filibusters His Own Proposal
Then punches himself in the nose, shoots himself in the foot.

Bwahahahaha!

Whites No Longer Majority In U.S. by 2043
Americans can look forward to better food, better music, better sports.

Now that, folks, is no shit!

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

'Tis the season.

Emmylou Harris with Pam Rose, Mary Ann Kennedy, and Ashley Cleveland at the Bluebird Cafe, Nashville Tn on December 6, 2012

Thanks to nashvillehigh.

The G.O.P.’s Existential Crisis

A 'recommended read' by Dr. Paul.

We are not having a debt crisis.
...

No, what we’re having is a political crisis, born of the fact that one of our two great political parties has reached the end of a 30-year road. The modern Republican Party’s grand, radical agenda lies in ruins — but the party doesn’t know how to deal with that failure, and it retains enough power to do immense damage as it strikes out in frustration.

Like the "scorched earth" policy when the Nazis got their ass kicked and retreated from Russia after thinking conquest was a slam dunk.

It’s a very peculiar situation. In effect, Republicans are saying to President Obama, “Come up with something that will make us happy.” He is, understandably, not willing to play that game. And so the talks are stuck.

I think it's funny. The Repugs are in effect saying to him, "Come up with Ryan's budget plan". Heh. Fat chance, white boy. Heh.

Since the 1970s, the Republican Party has fallen increasingly under the influence of radical ideologues, whose goal is nothing less than the elimination of the welfare state — that is, the whole legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society. From the beginning, however, these ideologues have had a big problem: The programs they want to kill are very popular. Americans may nod their heads when you attack big government in the abstract, but they strongly support Social Security, Medicare, and even Medicaid. So what’s a radical to do?
...

Arguably more important in conservative thinking, however, was the notion that the G.O.P. could exploit other sources of strength — white resentment, working-class dislike of social change, tough talk on national security — to build overwhelming political dominance, at which point the dismantling of the welfare state could proceed freely. Just eight years ago, Grover Norquist, the antitax activist, looked forward cheerfully to the days when Democrats would be politically neutered: “Any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are unpleasant, but when they’ve been fixed, then they are happy and sedate.”

O.K., you see the problem: Democrats didn’t go along with the program, and refused to give up. [...]

Shit, Paul, the Dems have pussied out for thirty years. Enough's enough.

So Republicans have suffered more than an election defeat, they’ve seen the collapse of a decades-long project. And with their grandiose goals now out of reach, they literally have no idea what they want — hence their inability to make specific demands.

It’s a dangerous situation. The G.O.P. is lost and rudderless, bitter and angry, but it still controls the House and, therefore, retains the ability to do a lot of harm, as it lashes out in the death throes of the conservative dream.

As long as it dies. We can fix the damage.

"Fox News so desperate they’re breaking out their ‘emergency Muslims’ "

Complete with Muslim vuvuzela! Heh. Via Raw Story.

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Quote of the Day

Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon via Raw Story:

(getting to hit women is apparently the new getting to say “n*gger” for the right)

The crux of the biscuit - if you can't bully someone, what's the point of being a wingnut asshat?

Headline of the Day

McConnell suggests Obama ‘manufactured’ poll to make him ‘most unpopular’ senator

Nah, you did that all by yourself, Turtle Man. You didn't need any help at all.

On Fat Tony

First and last ¶ from El Rude-o:

There are few things in this world that are surely going to happen, but one that you can make book on is that Supreme Court Judge Antonin Scalia will die, probably in the next few years, statistics being what they are and Scalia being 76 years old and so overstuffed with anger and hatred - sorry, "animus," as he would say in the dickiest way possible - that his poisoned heart will probably explode. Hopefully while he's sodomizing his hand while watching morbidly obese ass spank porn, something titled Five-Hundred Pounds of Grey, perhaps.

Didja ever see his wife? Rosie Palm and her Five Sisters is a lot more appealing.

Yeah, Scalia will die someday. He'll never retire because what the fuck would he do with all the anger he has towards this nation? Take it out on his begonias? On the kids on his lawn? But the nation has sped by Antonin Scalia. As he wheezes his rage into the setting sun, everything he has done will surely be undone.

We can only hope. Sooner rather than later.

Something you should read while banging your head on the table

Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

Outside, several of them stopped to be interviewed by a video crew. They had come from Indiana, one woman said, two impatient toddlers pulling at her arms, because they had been homeschooling their children and they'd given them this adventure as a field trip. The whole group then bustled into the lobby of the building, where they were greeted by the long neck of a huge, herbivorous dinosaur. The kids ran past it and around the corner, where stood another, smaller dinosaur.

Which was wearing a saddle.

It was an English saddle, hornless and battered. Apparently, this was a dinosaur that performed in dressage competitions and stakes races. Any dinosaur accustomed to the rigors of ranch work and herding other dinosaurs along the dusty trail almost certainly would have worn a sturdy western saddle. This, obviously, was very much a show dinosaur.

Put a pillow on the table helps.

New Theory of PTS

I'm not calling it 'PTSD' any more. 'Disorder' has negative connotations. It's a condition, not a failing. Accompanying article here. A 'must read' on this issue.

Also, this theory isn't new. It's beginning to be recognized. Any Veteran who has PTS could have told them this, but at least they're starting to realize it on an official level.

Headline of the Day

Americans For Prosperity Fake an Attack On Their Tent at Michigan Right to Work Rally

A faked attempt to make union supporters look bad. Well, I'm glad someone trashed their shit.

The Ideological Bankruptcy of the Republican Party

The Rude One takes Doughy Pantload to the cleaners when he drags Asian-Americans into the fray.

As conservatives continue to lick their wounded asses and try to figure out just how they got so badly chewed in the November elections, one thing has come into clear relief, like Brigadoon emerging from the foggy moors: these are profoundly stupid people. Their version of self-reflection goes like this: "Huh, I tried to fuck this weasel, but it didn't want to be fucked, so it bit me on the balls. Maybe next time I'll put on different colored underwear." It simply doesn't occur to them that perhaps the problem is they shouldn't try to fuck weasels.

Aw dude, that would be so much fun to watch! And the pukes can't interbreed with real weasels and would die out.

Which, of course, is the best lead-in to discussing conservative writer Jonah "Lucianne Makes Me Lick the Sweat Off Her Tits" Goldberg's latest "column" (if by "column," you mean, "words waterboarded into sounding like an approximation of an idea"). Goldberg knows the problem: "The GOP is not a Christian club," but it seems that way to those who are not Christian, specifically Asian Americans.

You just wanna grab Goldberg by his sweaty collar, smack his greasy face a couple of times, and say, "No, you pampered twat, it's not the messaging. It's the underlying ideology." Goldberg and most of the right are stunningly blind to this. They are betting that Americans are too stupid to know what the GOP actually believes and wants to do.

I think they should keep betting that way. A generation or two oughta be enough.

Your own personal 2012 apocalypse

If it's Wednesday it must be Morford on how you can have an apocalypse of your own if you want to.

What, you think it’s not happening? You think it’s all bogus silly New Age bubblegum fluff with a side of hippie wishful thinking?

Uhhh ... yup.

Anyone with any serious training in such matters agrees: that beloved, grisly zombie apocalypse thing? The traditional doomsday cataclysm scenario with the epic earthquakes, exploding stars and fiery, unhinged doom that inhales oceans, swallows nations and spits out the bloody bones of ditzy virgins and false gods? Not what the 2012 prophecy is really all about. Sorry.

Nor is it about some sort of childish Christian Rapture hootenanny, where hordes of baffled true believers in bad jeans and worse marriages get whisked off to the fluffy, sex-free clouds in giant minivans that smell like stale Doritos and closeted homosexuality. I know! You wish.

I do. That's kinda too bad.

A whole buncha stuff, and then:

I know what you’re thinking. Every age likes to believe it’s the special one, the “greatest generation,” the enlightened era blessed with special insights and cosmic intuitions never before known. And why not? It’s a deep comfort to religious and non-religious alike to think there’s some sort of goal, that we’re headed toward something grand and greater than what we have right now, call it “heaven” or “enlightenment” or “afterlife,” doesn’t matter. It’s all the same impulse.

Good news, bad news: It doesn’t quite work like that. Cataclysm is mostly about shattering old patterns and numb beliefs, apocalypse is about blasting apart concrete ignorance and sneering solipsism and embracing the idea that we are all in this together. The great shift is merely to stop thinking you are alone, separate, lesser than, not a perfectly formed part of the hum and pulse of everything, and that most certainly includes God. What, you prefer zombies? What a shame.

God, zombies, whatever. We need to hear a cosmic "Fire in the hole!" and watch that shit get blasted to kingdom come. Too bad it ain't gonna happen. But then, you never know...

Headline and Quote of the Day

Ed Asner: Fox News host Sean Hannity ‘behind on his rabies shots’

Heh. Video too!

The Fireman Ed of Politics

Meaning no offense to Jets fans, I'm sure. Very entertaining piece by Matt Taibbi on Teatard DeMint leaving the Senate. Many links!

In the minds of those Tea Party conservatives DeMint represents, they debased themselves in supporting an ultimate-RINO type like Romney, and all they got for their trouble was four more years of Black Satan lounging around on the couches of the White House.

Not to stretch too far to bring a football analogy in, but DeMint is sort of the Fireman Ed of the conservative movement. The upcoming fiscal cliff cave is the political equivalent of that amazing ass-to-face fumble by Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez on Thanksgiving night.

The instant famed Jets fan Fireman Ed saw that play, he decided he didn't want to be the guy in the stands the networks panned to for the next five years every time Sanchez threw a pick six or fumbled the ball off his face – so Ed picked up his little face-paint kit, went home, and penned a completely serious formal resignation. DeMint just did exactly the same thing, only now he's going to make seven figures at the Heritage Foundation just to not go to the games.

DeMint's departure was not exactly mourned on the Hill. ("He's the biggest douchebag in Washington," is how one congressional aide explained it to me, "and this is the douchebag capital of the world.") The writing was on the wall for DeMint and his Tea Party cronies when Boehner whacked four Tea Party-aligned Republicans from committee assignments earlier this week.

But in the meantime, this split in the Republican Party is a crazy and highly entertaining mess. DeMint sniping at Boehner through Rush Limbaugh is probably only the beginning. This is going to get ugly, like Atlanta Housewives-catfight ugly, before all is said and done. Can't you see it? Boehner comes guiltily slithering out of a back room meeting with Reid and Pelosi with an $800 tax hike deal, and DeMint will be there just waiting for him with a camera crew, screaming, "I know what you did! F%^$K you, bitch!" over and over again while the boom mic swings over Boehner's head. It's going to happen. How can this not be a good thing?

I think it's fuckin' wonderful!

Quote of the Day

From El Rude-o in a post entitled "Sen. Lindsey Graham Unironically Tells the President to Man Up":

"Manning up"? Lindsey Graham sounds like a drag queen Loretta Lynn after sucking cock for quarters in the men's room at Club Pantheon. His calling on someone to man up is like a baboon telling someone his ass is too red.

They've got drag queen Loretta Lynns? Holy cow!

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

Harry Reid Compares Republicans to New York Jets
A bunch of dysfunctional losers who've been hit in the head too many times.

Fox Drops Karl Rove, Dick Morris
They're immediately signed by Satan News Service.

Also owned by Rupert Murdock.

Icebergs Scoured Florida During Ice Age
Say some long-time residents.

Better known as "Romney voters". Heh.

Congress Bans Use of Word “Lunatic” in Federal Legislation
Suggests “Santorum” as suitable alternative.

Heh.

A Lost Civilization

MoDo on the GOP. Good read.

The Mayans were right, as it turns out, when they predicted the world would end in 2012. It was just a select world: the G.O.P. universe of arrogant, uptight, entitled, bossy, retrogressive white guys.

Just another vanishing tribe that fought the cultural and demographic tides of history.

Someday, it will be the subject of a National Geographic special, or a Mel Gibson movie, where archaeologists piece together who the lost tribe was, where it came from, and what happened to it. The experts will sift through the ruins of the Reagan Presidential Library, Dick Cheney’s shotgun casings, Orca poll monitoring hieroglyphics, remnants of triumphal rants by Dick Morris on Fox News, faded photos of Clint Eastwood and an empty chair, and scraps of ancient tape in which a tall, stiff man, his name long forgotten, gnashes his teeth about the 47 percent of moochers and the “gifts” they got.

Instead of smallpox, plagues, drought and Conquistadors, the Republican decline will be traced to a stubborn refusal to adapt to a world where poor people and sick people and black people and brown people and female people and gay people count.

Republicans know they’re in trouble when W. emerges as the moral voice of the party.

No shit. That's like Satan telling you to tone your excesses down a little.

But history will no doubt record that withering Republicans were finally wiped from the earth in 2016 when the relentless (and rested) Conquistadora Hillary marched in, General Bill on a horse behind her, and finished them off.

Ahhhhhh....

Top Ten Gobsmacking Politically Humorous News Stories of 2012

Will Durst

8. The entire GOP primary campaign. Party plays Candidate Whack-A-Mole for five months. Everybody takes turns beating Romney like a red headed stepchild, including some folks who aren’t even running.

7. London Olympics. Ann Romney’s horse Rafalca competes in Dressage. Event where the horse and the rider perform predetermined movements. Like interspecies dancing. Which you would think would be illegal in Utah.

Actually more widespread, you should pardon the expression, over there than you would think, if gangnam style whilst balancing on a stump or milk crate is your idea of "dancing".

1. Mitt Romney. All the charisma of a plastic picnic fork with three of the tines snapped off. May have run the worst campaign ever. And that includes New Coke, McCain/Palin and France in 39.

Go.

This week in the War on Workers

Kos

This California Federation of Teachers video narrated by Ed Asner explaining how the 1 percent influence the economy and politics, created the big crash, and should pay more taxes has outraged Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh. Enough said?

Fuck them. Good work!

Old Shep

For Tami.

Old Shep he knew he was going to go
for he reached out and licked at my hand
He looked up at me just as much as to say
We're parting but you'll understand

She looked at me like that with her last breath. So long, sweetheart.

Thanks to billbilladaada.

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

Posted on YouTube Dec. 5. As new as it gets!

Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell perform "Hanging Up My Heart" by Hank DeVito, off their new album, "Old Yellow Moon," due out February 26, 2013, on Nonesuch Records. Download the track now when you pre-order the album at http://www.nonesuch.com/albums/old-yellow-moon.

International release date: March 4.

Thanks to nonesuchrecords.

No blogging for a coupla days

Our darling Springer Spaniel Tami died last night at home in my arms after a short illness and I just don't want to deal with blogging. She was 7 1/2 years old. I'll be back.

Droppin' trou is illegal?!

There's nothing unusual about this in my world but someone wrote an article about it...

All your heroes are perverts

If it's Wednesday it must be Morford on the human condition.

One by one they fall, one by one they fail to live up to ridiculous or impossible standards, fall prey to undue pressure and temptation, are revealed to have kinkier tendencies, human frailty, addiction to fame or money, are too easily drunk on lust or power or culturally frowned-upon deviance in inelegant or sometimes illegal proportions.

Who is immune? You? The president? The pope? The dorky Christian NFL quarterback who thinks Jesus really gives a damn about his pass completion percentage? Nuns? Trees? Dogs?

Answer: No one. Not now, not ever, not even close. You know, just like Jesus intended.
...

God, what BS. What ignoble and harmful idiocy, this “sin” gibberish. Was there ever a more disastrous concept foisted upon humanity? A more oppressive and tragic propaganda?

Shorter: If someone can dream it up, no matter how bizarre, someone is doing it. Someone dreamed up religion after all.

Headline and Question of the Day

‘Fox & Friends’ hosts: Why weren’t we invited to the White House with MSNBC?

This is the easiest question to answer I am likely to see all week: because you're wingnut morons is why. Yeesh. Rocket science it ain't.

Village Idiot In A City Of 8,000,000

In toto and for what it's worth and just for fun from Salon. Links at site.

Perennial loser Donald Trump is still a loser. This time, though, it’s not a media company or a non-announcement announcement that makes him look bad. Instead, it is a small-town, 60-year-old Scottish farmer, Michael Forbes, who has quietly shown up the Donald.

Forbes gained fame after appearing in “You’ve Been Trumped,” a documentary that chronicled Trump’s attempt to steamroll a Scottish community in order to build a golf course. Forbes emerged as one of the movie’s unlikely heroes when he refused to sell his farm or succumb to Trump’s bullying. Of course, this incited the always-incited Trump, who resorted to calling Forbes’ farm “disgusting.”

The New York Times reports that last week Forbes earned the “Top Scot” award, honoring him as Scotsman of the year in a poll sponsored by whiskey maker Glenfiddich and the newspaper the Scotsman. The award’s previous recipients include the likes of “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling and viral singing sensation Susan Boyle. Forbes, who was “a real people’s choice,” beat out contenders like tennis star Andy Murray and cyclist Sir Chris Hoy.

Of Trump, Forbes told the Scotsman, “I took an instant dislike to him. He called me a village idiot and accused me of living in a pigsty, but I think everyone knows by now that he’s the clown of New York.”

And all of Scotland, it seems, agrees.

Oh aye!

Armey Jumps Ship

Exclusive from David Corn and Andy Kroll at MoJo:

Dick Armey Quits Tea Party Group in Split Over Direction

In a move not publicly announced, former Rep. Dick Armey, the folksy conservative leader, has resigned as chairman of FreedomWorks, one of the main political outfits of the conservative movement and an instrumental force within the tea party.

Armey, the former House majority leader who helped develop and promote the GOP's Contract with America in the 1990s, tendered his resignation in an memo sent to Matt Kibbe, president and CEO of FreedomWorks, on November 30. Mother Jones obtained the email on Monday, and Armey has confirmed he sent it. The tone of the memo suggests that this was not an amicable separation. (See Armey's email below.) Armey demanded that he be paid until his contract ended on December 31; that FreedomWorks remove his name, image, or signature "from all its letters, print media, postings, web sites, videos, testimonials, endorsements, fund raising materials, and social media, including but not limited to Facebook and Twitter"; and that FreedomWorks deliver the copy of his official congressional portrait to his home in Texas.

FreedomWorks, as you know, is the Koch Bros astroturf imitation of grassroots that has sucked in a lot of people now known as Teatards to act on behalf of the 1% whilst not thinking they're doing so.

I can pretty much say without fear of contradiction that Armey hasn't seen the light or grown a conscience. Either they didn't pay him or renew his contract after the election losses, or they're up to something actually criminal and he doesn't want to be their spokesperson from prison. It will be interesting to see what develops here.

Maybe Gruber Norquist's "Tea Party Two"?

Update:

Top FreedomWorks Staffers Depart in Wake of Armey's Resignation

I get a lovely visual of multiple rats fighting over one little rat-sized life jacket. Heh.

Quote of the Day

El Rude-o on Orange Boner's "counteroffer", aka "the Ryan budget", to Obama's fiscal plan:

In otherer words, we're not getting a goddamned thing done with these preening bastards whose idea of compromise is to say, "Tell you what: you cut off your balls and then we'll fuck your wife in the ass. Deal?" At some point, it's not just stubborn. It's evil.

Mumble and Whine

Paul Krugman

In the ongoing battle of the budget, President Obama has done something very cruel. Declaring that this time he won’t negotiate with himself, he has refused to lay out a proposal reflecting what he thinks Republicans want. Instead, he has demanded that Republicans themselves say, explicitly, what they want. And guess what: They can’t or won’t do it.

No, really. While there has been a lot of bluster from the G.O.P. about how we should reduce the deficit with spending cuts, not tax increases, no leading figures on the Republican side have been able or willing to specify what, exactly, they want to cut.

And there’s a reason for this reticence. The fact is that Republican posturing on the deficit has always been a con game, a play on the innumeracy of voters and reporters. Now Mr. Obama has demanded that the G.O.P. put up or shut up — and the response is an aggrieved mumble.
...

The point is that when you put Republicans on the spot and demand specifics about how they’re going to make good on their posturing about spending and deficits, they come up empty. There’s no there there.

And there never was. Republicans claim to be for much smaller government, but as a political matter they have always attacked government spending in the abstract, never coming clean with voters about the reality that big cuts in government spending can happen only if we sharply curtail very popular programs. In fact, less than a month ago the Romney/Ryan campaign was attacking Mr. Obama for, yes, cutting Medicare.

Now Republicans find themselves boxed in. With taxes scheduled to rise on Jan. 1 in the absence of an agreement, they can’t play their usual game of just saying no to tax increases and pretending that they have a deficit reduction plan. And the president, by refusing to help them out by proposing G.O.P.-friendly spending cuts, has deprived them of political cover. If Republicans really want to slash popular programs, they will have to propose those cuts themselves.

So while the fiscal cliff — still a bad name for the looming austerity bomb, but I guess we’re stuck with it — is a bad thing from an economic point of view, it has had at least one salutary political effect. For it has finally laid bare the con that has always been at the core of the G.O.P.’s political strategy.

And from Krugman at HuffPo:

The next couple of years "seem likely to be one long Republican tantrum," Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, wrote on his New York Times blog on Sunday. "This is going to be nightmarish."

So what's new?

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

OBAMA WELCOMES MITT ROMNEY TO LUNCH AT WHITE HOUSE
Serves crow smothered in sour grapes.

Washington: Republicans Smith, Jones, Doe Renounce Grover Norquist Pledge
Note: those are their new names.

Heh.

Rolling Stones Two Years Older, on Average, Than Supreme Court Justices
“My older brother liked them,” says Justice Ginsburg.

Marco Rubio Still Not Sure if Earth Was Created in 7 Days or 7 Eras, Since He’s “Not a Scientist”
Doesn't know his ass from his elbow since he's “not a doctor.”

Got that one right.

Just when you think you've heard it all...

When it comes to crazy, Fischer is at the top of the pile of batcrap so he can be closer to his "God". Yeesh.

Bryan Fischer: ‘Enormously insensitive’ to hurt God’s feelings by not using oil (via Raw Story )

Bryan Fischer, the director of issues analysis of the conservative fundamentalist American Family Association, on Thursday told a so-called “expert” who denies climate change that not using God’s fossil fuels would be like “crushing” someone’s feelings by rejecting their birthday present…

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

A song about Northern Ireland and anywhere else people teach their kids to hate which is everywhere.

Song by Nanci Griffith; Kentucky Educational Television's "The Lonesome Pine Specials"; recorded at the Kentucky Center for the Arts; producer Richard Van Kleeck; director Clark Santee; copyright 1992, KET

Thanks to foxfireman188.

Seeing the Light in Chasing Ice

Via The Rude Pundit and Digby. Chasing Ice website here.

Witness Fox News cult deprogramming in action:

Revenge of the Reality-Based Community

It's hard to believe I'm about to link you to The American Conservative but...

Kudos to DailyKos diarist(s) Roosevelt Institute for spotting the article this morning, and succinctly summarizing it, as follows:

Bruce Bartlett explains how he got shunned and excommunicated from the mainstream conservative movement after decades of toeing the party line because he dared to point out that observable economic reality seems to have a strong Keynesian bias.
...

For more than 30 years, I was very comfortable within the conservative wing of the Republican Party. [I worked for or with: Goldwater, Nixon, Young Republicans (during Vietnam), Ron Paul in 1976, Jack Kemp, supply-side economists, Jude Wanniski, Heritage Fdn, Reagan's White House, Gary Bauer, James Baker, Nick Brady, Glenn Hubbard, Cato Institute and NCPA; and wrote conservative editorials for: WSJ, Washington (Moonie) Times, Investor's Business Daily, NY Sun, etc.]

In November 2003, I had an intellectual crisis... The [2004] article is best remembered for his quote from an anonymous White House official dismissing critics like me for being “the reality-based community.” ... I was banned from Fox News... extended throughout Rupert Murdoch’s empire. After careful research [in 2007-08], I came to the annoying conclusion that Keynes had been 100% right in the 1930s. Previously, I had thought the opposite. ... I had previously viewed Krugman as an intellectual enemy and attacked him... For the record, no one has been more correct in his analysis and prescriptions for the economy’s problems than Paul Krugman. The blind hatred for him on the right simply pushed me further away from my old allies and comrades.

The final line for me to cross in complete alienation from the right was my recognition that Obama is not a leftist. In fact, he’s barely a liberal—and only because the political spectrum has moved so far to the right that moderate Republicans from the past are now considered hardcore leftists by right-wing standards today."

Any farther to the right and they'll fall off the edge of the Earth. Happy landings.

Headline of the Day

The Latest Right-Wing Conspiracy Theory: Obama's Third Term

Geez, they say it like that'd be a bad thing!

Note to the whacko sore losers: You guys would be a lot happier if you came up with fun fantasies like the rest of us do! Then again, what you do with your pants around your ankles is your business.

Top Romney Adviser Brags About Losing Poor, Minority Voters To Obama

Oh, my stars and garters! This takes "denial" to a heretofore unimagined level!

TPM

Mitt Romney can take some solace in his devastating loss on Nov. 6: at least he won the voters who really count.

That’s the thesis anyway of top adviser Stuart Stevens, who penned an op-ed in the Washington Post on Wednesday arguing that by winning wealthier and whiter voters, Romney secured the moral victory over Obama.

I am so fine with this! They can have all the deluded "moral victories" they want.

Scarborough to Republicans:

Start attacking Susan Rice for her ‘temperament’

This is getting so good! Raw Story.

“How did they pull Kelly Ayotte in?” Scarborough wondered. “They pulled Kelly Ayotte into this trifecta after [Sen. Joe] Lieberman starts running for the doors.”

“They need a third amigo,” New York magazine’s John Heilemann explained. “And now two of the three are women — at least one of the three are women. They both think they are trying to recover from the war on women.”

The Rude Pundit calls Ayotte "Lieberman-with-smaller-tits" and McWalnuts "America's angriest leprechaun". Heh.

Someone else, and I can't remember who, is calling all three of them "the three pendejos". Pretty close.

“As apparently the only liberal with no interest in helping Republicans repair their political flux capacitor so they can get out of 1957 (My em. Heh.), I wholeheartedly agree with Joe Scarborough, and then some,” Christopher wrote. “Instead of ignoring Ambassador Susan Rice’s impressive qualifications in favor of a ginned-up controversy, Republicans should ignore Susan Rice’s qualifications in favor of a ginned-up controversy and her ‘temperament,’ and maybe they could also wonder how Rice will perform as Secretary of State and get dinner on the table at a reasonable hour.”

¡Mas popcorn! ¡Mucho mas mantequilla!

Over? Who says it's over? The hell it is!

Filthy Mitt Romney Delivers Campaign Speech To Audience Of Confused Shoppers In Ohio Safeway

Do not miss this one! From America's Finest News Source.

CANTON, OH—According to eyewitnesses at the scene, an unkempt and thoroughly disheveled Mitt Romney gave an impassioned campaign speech Monday to a group of bewildered shoppers inside a local Safeway.

Sources confirmed the filth-covered former presidential candidate walked into the store unannounced early yesterday evening, went to the store’s cereal aisle, and started to play Kid Rock’s “Born Free” on a portable boom box, enthusiastically waving and pointing to no one in particular.
...

Witnesses told reporters that Romney walked around the store barefoot as he gave his speech, wearing only a pair of dirt-caked jeans and a wrinkled dress shirt covered in food stains.

Safeway patrons also said the former Massachusetts governor gave off an incredibly strong odor and appeared to have gone “days, possibly weeks” without bathing.
...

Sources said a weeping Ann Romney at one point attempted to pull her husband out of the store by his arm but was angrily rebuffed, with the 65-year-old retired businessman yelling that he was “trying to do [his] job here.”
...

According to reports, Safeway employees finally called local authorities when Romney attempted to grab an infant from the arms of her mother “for a quick photo op.”

After three police officers managed, with some effort, to subdue Romney in the produce section, he could be heard shrieking incoherently at the top of his lungs for several moments before he finally trailed off, muttering about a plan to “create 12 million jobs by the end of [his] first term.”

“We’re going all the way to the White House!” Romney loudly proclaimed in the parking lot as he was gently guided into the back of a police car. “Thank you, God bless you, and God bless the United States of America!”

Yes, he's the last one to know. Derangement and delusion are probably no help. If I had any sympathy for the sonofabitch, which I don't, I'd feel sorry for him forever after being known as "Poor Willard. The loss unhinged him".

Willard's OK and so are the Obama Deranged, who are moving through the 5 stages of grief. They're already up to "anger" but I'm not sure they'll make it to "acceptance". The human life span is only so long, less in the states Willard won. Heh.