Quote of the Day

Tengrain:

Well, now I've seen it all: born-again professional virgin and single mom living in sin in a "trial marriage" and the world's most important receptionist (maybe ever?) Brisket ® Palin is now being defended by the Xristian Xrazies for the backlash she is getting from criticizing President Carebear for his evolved decision for marriage equality, wherein she said that he needed to be a better role model for his daughters.

Bootstraps ...

If you're poor, the Republicans expect you to "pick yourself up by the bootstraps". When a Republican "job creator" loses his shirt, he expects the rest of us to bail him out. As our pal Montag says:

...

Small government, personal responsibility Republican, until he needs help.

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

Emmylou does a nice cover of Dolly Parton's "My Blue Ridge Mountain Boy".

Thanks to GuriMalla2010, Norway.

"I don't see how anybody but a goddam idiot could vote for a Republican!"

I love the way this guy thinks and his vids come in damn handy now that I'm so calloused by eight years of doing this shit that Repug outrages have to be way over the top to pop my cork enough to blog about them. He makes some damn good points as usual in this one and I have never heard him cuss like this. Heh.

Thanks to oldfartrants.

Figures ...

Dickface can't remember who he told what.

Pic stolen from Ari Melber.

White births in U.S. no longer in majority: census

This is EXACTLY why the racist wingnuts are against contraception and a woman's right to choose. Diversity scares the crap out of 'em. They think the "mud people" are gonna take over from the rightful White Christian Master Race. They forget, or choose to ignore which they do a lot of, a lotta their early religion in their pants-pissin' fear:

Red and yellow, black and white they are precious in His sight . . .

Benediction at Obama 's inauguration, Rev. Joseph Lowery: 'Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around... when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right. That all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen. Say Amen'. Can I get a witness?

Fuckin' A, Rev. Right here.

Former Mormon Explains Why Mitt Romney Should Never Be President

As if we needed another reason. I don't give a rat's ass what superstition people choose to follow but this is creepy. Addicting Info.

The first thing you need to know about Mitt Romney is that he is a Mormon, aka a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. They call themselves Christians, but they have so thoroughly brainwashed their members that anything the church says…goes. No matter how much Mitt Romney says he would keep his church separate from Government, and how he would never let the church come in and run Government, commands of the church come first and foremost in Mormon minds.

If the church wanted Mitt to let them come in (AND THEY WOULD) and help or direct the Government, that is how it would be. Why? Because the church leaders would supposedly have a “vision” that it is God’s will. The church is all about trying to prop up the image of its founder, Joseph Smith. Joseph Smith had a supposed vision (prophecy) that one day a Mormon would become President of the United States, FOR THE EXPRESS PURPOSE, of letting the Mormon Church take over the U.S. Government. You can take it to the bank, that if Romney were President, the church leaders would have another “vision,” that a church takeover must happen. By the way, that prophecy was simple revenge for perceived wrongs done to Joseph Smith by the government. Nevertheless they treat all his prophecies seriously, no matter how ridiculous they are.

The only other church I know of that elicits such obedience was The People’s Temple, and we all know what happened there, they drank the Kool-Aid. In other words, the Mormon religion is a cult of brainwashed souls.

Romney avoids mentioning it, but Joseph Smith ran for president in 1844 as an independent Commander in Chief of an “army of God” advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government in favor of a Mormon-ruled theocracy. Challenging Democrat, James Polk and Whig, Henry Clay – Smith prophesied that if the U.S. Congress did not accede to his demands that “they shall be broken up as a government and God shall damn them.” Smith viewed capturing the presidency as part of the mission of the church. Smith’s insertion of religion into politics and his call for a “theodemocracy where God and people hold the power to conduct the affairs of men in righteous matters” created a sensation and drew hostility from the outside world. But his candidacy was cut short when he was shot to death by an anti-Mormon vigilante mob. Out of Smith’s national political ambitions grew what would become known in Mormon circles as the “White Horse Prophecy” — a belief ingrained in Mormon culture and passed down through generations by church leaders that the day would come when the U.S. Constitution would “hang like a thread as fine as a silk fiber” and the Mormon priesthood would save it. Mitt Romney views the American presidency as a theological office.

Oh fucking swell. We need religious governance like we need another itchy asshole. Much, MUCH more. Read it. Odd ducks, them Saints.

Douglas Flint Dillard, 1937-2012

Doug Dillard passed away yesterday. He was the banjo picker di tutti banjo pickers. He played fast and accurately and could pick blind drunk and stoned and never miss a lick.

From an obituary, links at site:

Along with his brother Rodney, Doug soon formed the Dillards. Their folk-bluegrass blend became popular on college campuses and elsewhere, which led to their move to California and resulted in a recording contract and their stint on the hit CBS series starring Andy Griffith. After parting ways with the Dillards, Doug joined folk-rock group the Byrds on their first European tour. After the tour, Doug teamed up with former Byrds member Gene Clark, forming the influential Dillard & Clark, one of the first acts to popularize the country-rock sound that would include other artists such as Gram Parsons and the musicians who would later form the Eagles. Comedian and banjo player Steve Martin recently told The Boot that Doug Dillard was among the first influences on his banjo playing.

On the personal level, I became a fan of The Dillards fifty years ago when they first hit L.A.. Mrs. G was a huge fan as well, ten years before we met. She actually knew Doug as she went to see The Dillards perform every chance she got and spent many happy hours listening to them play live. Those were small venues and she got to know him. He had been to her place a couple of times for jam sessions with her favorite band, The Kentucky Colonels.

I met him once in the '70s. We went to a Dillards show at the Palomino Club and between sets he invited her (I got to tag along) into the back room for a visit where we promptly smoked a joint.

He was real nice, a down to earth guy, and I had a great time. He told me I had a nice grin. Doug's grin could light up a room, so that was like Jesus telling me I was a good boy!

Doug was also a Navy veteran, and spent his hitch plunging earthward whilst seated backwards as the rear gunner in a dive bomber. After that, nothing much ever scared him. Heh.

Doug Dillard was a major influence in both bluegrass and country rock for someone most people have never heard of. Here he is as most folks saw him:

Thanks to MikeB43.

And in later years:

Thanks to bannedjoe. Heh.

So long, pal. God'll enjoy the pickin'. We sure did.

Correction:

I had a "senior moment". Mr. Dillard was not in the Navy. That was Mitch Jayne, bass player for The Dillards. Quite a fellow in his own right.

A Fitting Resting Place

Visitors, at left, board the battleship Iowa at the Port of Richmond recently. The vessel is being prepared for its journey to Los Angeles, where it will be a floating museum. (Don Bartletti, Los Angeles Times / May 11, 2012)

The Iowa's ultimate destination is San Pedro, where on July 7 it will open to the public for tours and remain as a central attraction on the community's waterfront.

"In the last century, this was battleship country," said Robert Kent, director of the Pacific Battleship Center, the group that campaigned to win the Iowa for Los Angeles. "All of our battleships called it home in the period from 1920 to 1940, when Franklin D. Roosevelt sent them to Pearl Harbor to put pressure on the Japanese."

Actually, the Pacific Fleet was (and is) stationed from Bremerton WA to San Diego, including a former major presence at Long Beach, slightly south of "Pipas" as San Pedro is known to Angelenos. The gag here is that Long Beach real estate ads were so plentiful in Iowa and caused so many Iowans to move there that it was known as "Iowa By The Sea".

Note to the museum's curator and management: I know you will want to make a big splash with your new toy, but for God's sake point those popguns seaward
before you do this!


Even if you follow naval tradition and don't hit a damn thing, you could burn Southern California down to its fuckin' socks! Heh.

Ship museums are a good thing. Fair winds and following seas to all concerned with this.

Extremists and Enablers

In toto from Dr.Paul:

These two stories are related:

1. Republicans are getting ready to hold American hostage again, refusing to raise the debt ceiling unless spending is cut drastically; basically, never mind the old-fashioned idea of actually passing legislation, they’ll just blow up the country unless their demands are met.

2. Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, two highly respected Congressional analysts with a reputation for being nonpartisan, have a book documenting the fact that our political dysfunction is very one-sided — it’s Republican extremism, not “both sides do it”, that’s at fault. Sales of their book have been very good, and there’s a lot of public interest. But guess what? They can’t get on TV to promote their book.

When future historians write about the fall of the American Republic, they will of course lay primary blame on the extremists of the right, who set out deliberately to destroy it. But they will also lay heavy blame on all the “centrists” and Serious People who not only refused to admit what was happening, but ostracized and silenced anyone who tried to point it out.

There's a big difference between accurate reporting and the corporate so-wildly-inaccurately-called "liberal" media's false equivalence. They will never blame themselves for any part of it when the nation augers in partly because of it.

How to have your big gay moment

If it's Wednesday it must be Morford. He's in Frisco, where I imagine "big gay moments" are not at all uncommon...

You don't get many of them, really, in your lifetime. Two or three? Maybe a half dozen, if you're lucky? I suppose it largely depends on the era you get to live in, its energy and pulse, its surfeit or shortage of joie de vivre. Also, who you get as president. And if he or she has any real, you know, balls.

Shall we count Obama's sort of stunning, sort of overdue, sort of obvious, sort of shockingly open-throated support of gay marriage as one of those things? One of those turning points, a truly ballsy, pivotal moment in the culture, in politics, in the way we view ourselves? Is it not something that explodes the way we think and re-orients the nation in the same way his skin color already did, something that, a generation from now, will still be discussed as a watershed moment in the accepted meanings of love, sex and evolution of the human soul?

Damn right we should.

Please go read the inspiring rest.

I've had my "gay moment". Mrs. G will never ask me to hold her purse in the checkout line ever again!

Heh ...

I love this commercial:



Nothing like watching doggies get into mischief when they're someone else's doggies.

The Jukebox in my mind ...

And, since I'm so close to Broadway, we get commercials for all the shows and musicals currently playing. Seems someone thought it would be a good time to stage the 6 zillionth remake of Evita. So, it follows that this tune has been going through my head a lot lately. I give you the star of the best performance of the musical since it was introduced on Broadway when I was a kid.

Patti LuPone in Evita - Don't Cry For Me, Argentina

Get the net ...

The straitjackets, and the men in white suits. They've really gone over the edge this time:

“Birthers” are flipping their tinfoil hats over a new film that claims President Barack Obama’s father was not a Kenyan goat herder but rather a communist journalist nearly four decades older than his mother. The problem? It undermines a bedrock of birther lore: that the president is ineligible to be commander-in-chief.

...

I realize you're not supposed to make fun of people who are developmentally disabled but the 'birthers' should be publicly ridiculed until they crawl back under their rocks and never come back out.

Going for the Mitt ...

You know, when it comes to Romney's "job creator" image his campaign is trying to push, I'll just put this forward.

They point to Staples as one of his success stories, as opposed to running steel mills and manufacturing plants out of business and outsourcing the jobs. A few of my neighbors work for Staples and let me say they sure don't make enough there to support their families. Considering the pay scale in the manufacturing industry versus the discount retail business, and then including the difference in benefits, it's quite easy to see the idea behind Bain Capital was to destroy the good-paying jobs and replace them with low wage, low cost, low security positions. The places the Romney campaign points to as successes (a steel mill and the Utah Olympics) were only successes thanks to infusions of public funds. The instances where Romney was "successful" in creating good-paying jobs were only possible thanks to the handouts by the "big government" he and the rest of the GOP loathe so much.

Probably of interest only to us Californicators

California faces cuts to fill huge budget hole

Thanks to YubaNet.

Personal note: Every desert rider whose sled ever flamed out thirty miles from his truck has had the same vision as the 'toon. Heh.

Schadenfreude of the Day

Gay top Romney donor pulls support and backs Obama over same sex marriage

Three or four more of these motorcycle kidney belts oughta stop my sides from hurtin'...

Willard's Bain

El Rude-o

See, as the Obama campaign and its SuperPAC tear into the Bain jugular, which is as Rovean as it gets by going right at your opponent's perceived strength and turning it into a weakness (see "Truth, Swift Boat Veterans for" in the index of campaign horrors perpetrated on Democrats), they need to remember that not only was Bain Capital itself an entity that destroyed some companies in the name of investor profits, but that Mitt Romney couldn't even bother to get his hands dirty.

He wasn't a vulture capitalist. He was a pussy capitalist. It's like having your friends hold down a gay classmate while you cut his hair. No, wait. It's like paying someone to do the cutting while you watch and jack off at the sight.

And from the post below that one:

The Obama campaign has gone after Romney's lie of a business record with a Rovean savagery that's kind of boner-causing. More on that later this week.

Not sure I wanta know more about yer boner, Rude-o, but I'll take one for the team. Heh.

Headline of the Day

The New Right-Wing Meme – Obama Is Gay

It must follow that Michelle is transgender and they found two kids who look like them alongside the road. Must be some Kenyan tradition. Yeesh.

Why do conservatives hate freedom?

Salon

Why do conservatives hate freedom? The question may be startling. After all, don’t conservatives claim they are protecting liberty in America against liberal statism, which they compare to communism or fascism? But the conservative idea of “freedom” is a very peculiar one, which excludes virtually every kind of liberty that ordinary Americans take for granted.

The conservative campaign against gay rights is equally impossible to justify, in terms of America’s Founding philosophy of natural rights. Unable to come up with any Lockean liberal reason why citizens of a democratic republic should be discriminated against, on the basis of their sexual orientations, conservatives are forced to cite the Bible or thousands of years of tradition. The whole point of the American Founding, however, was to establish a regime that was not based, like the premodern monarchies of Europe, on revealed religion or ancient custom. In the words of General George Washington in his circular to the states, shortly after victory in the American war of independence:

The foundation of our Empire was not laid in the gloomy age of Ignorance and Superstition, but at an Epocha when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined, than at any former period, the researches of the human mind, after social happiness, have been carried to a great extent, the Treasures of knowledge, acquired by the labours of Philosophers, Sages and Legislatures, through a long succession of years, are laid open for our use, and their collected wisdom may be happily applied in the Establishment of our forms of Government…” A theocratic or tribalist Right that argues for public policies by invoking divine revelation to some ancient prophet or immemorial custom dating back to “the gloomy age of Ignorance and Superstition,” is profoundly, radically un-American.

Un-American? Absolutely. Getting to be all too common as well. Desperate measures by desperate throwbacks.

They will ultimately lose if we keep our eyes on the ball.

RNC PR BS sticks head up ass. Again.

The Political Carnival, with video if it won't make you throw up.

RNC Chair Reince Priebus*: Gay Americans who want marriage equality don’t deserve civil rights, dignity, or respect.

*Take away the vowels, that's RNC PR BS.

No civil rights, dignity, or respect is what we get with those throwbacks for being right when they're wrong if we let them take over like they are desperately trying to.

Priebus is just another ideological idiot and an old crony of Goobernor Scott Walker. Perfect for the head of the RNC.

In other news, the impending murder of the Repuglican't Party by the far right is being celebrated by everybody with any smarts and going entirely unnoticed by the soon-to-be deadee.

When I think of the despicable and last ditch tactics of the Repugs all over the country I am reminded of the old gearhead saying, "They always run best just before they blow". If the Repugs are runnin' so good, Lord please let 'em keep their foot in the fuel pump until there is a loud noise and a hot mist of oil followed by the sound of metal hitting the deck and then blessed silence!

Headline of the Day

Angry opponents of N.C. amendment call for moving Democratic convention from Charlotte

Gee, maybe they could move it to Liberty U!

ALEC Act Would Give Legislatures Power Over AGs

NPR, text and audio.

The conservative group that helped spread Florida's Stand Your Ground gun law across the country holds a closed-door issues conference in Charlotte on Friday. On its agenda is legislation that would prevent a state's attorney general from pursuing lawsuits except as authorized by the state legislature. Peter Overby is at the conference and talks with Audie Cornish.
...

OVERBY: Yeah, one proposal is called the ALEC Attorney General Authority Act. And to really boil it down, it would give state legislatures more power to tell attorneys general when they can and cannot file lawsuits. Just for example, it says the attorneys general's client is the state, not necessarily the people of the state.

This bill comes from a law firm in Mississippi. One of the firm's clients is a big utility company, Entergy. And in Mississippi the Democratic attorney general has a three-year lawsuit going against Entergy. His question is whether Entergy manipulated prices and overcharged consumers. So this seems like the kind of case that could be reined in by the ALEC Attorney General Authority Act.

Gee, Repug legislatures would never do that, would they?

Of course they would, and the rest of us would be the worse for it.

The right wing's state-by-state power grab is proceeding apace.

A dead and dismembered ALEC needs to be found alongside the road like the narcotraficantes do in Mexico.

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

Greene County Virginia Republican Party Calls for “Armed Revolution Should We Fail With the Power of the Vote in November”
Secret Service, FBI: hello?

Report: Romney Bullied Gay Student While in Prep School
Burnishing his image with conservatives.

Long-Range Sonic Weapons Emitting Painfully Loud Beams to Be Deployed at London Olympics
They will be used on anyone caught blowing a vuvuzela.

Heh...

U.S. Leads All Developed Nations in Percentage of Low-Wage Workers
We're the model others aspire to.

Cleaned out ...

Got the last of the stuff out of dad-in-law's house this weekend and the last load of clothing donations delivered. Getting it ready for an estate sale for everything else and then it'll go on the market. Anybody wanna buy a house in Levittown/North Wantagh, Long Island? Heh ...

And this is what I did yesterday afternoon. I got a TV app for the laptop so I can watch football (soccer) outside now!

Conservatives: Always On The Wrong Side Of History

Addicting Info, links at site.

My friends over at Americans Against the Tea Party put it best when they said, “What does it say about a movement whose brightest “stars” are the dimmest bulbs?” It says, laugh at them, pity them, but if you want to live in a modern nation of laws which evolves with the rest of the globe, for Heaven’s sake, DON’T look to them for ideas on how to operate a functioning society, since the only thing conservatives have been successful at is proving that everything they stand for is wrong.

Let’s imagine this scenario: You have an uncle…a loud, opinionated, uncle who’s thinly veiled racism and misogyny is only superseded by his not-so-thinly veiled hatred of gays. He says he’s a Christian, but never misses the opportunity to cheer for war and bloviate proudly about how merciless he is. He fights anything that has a hint of challenging his perceived position in the straight/white/male catbird seat, even if that seat came from the fact that the Liberals he hates fought for the Social Security, Medicare, etc. that allows him to live in dignity. He regales you with factually incorrect tales of American history, despite having never read a book in his life. He disdains “intellectuals,” and perceives science as a “liberal plot.” For as far back as you remember – and as far back as the family tree goes – he has been wrong about everything.
...

Yes. It is exhausting to live among whiny children sporting “Made in China” American flag lapel pins, working incessantly to devolve this nation into the antithesis of a free society – simply because they can’t handle the “freedom” they pretend to love.
...

We all must continue to evolve – without them.

We evolve, they do not. Stuck in an imaginary past and scared of the future.