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
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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!