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.