Saturday Emmylou Blogging

From Later With Jools Holland, 1995

Published on Jan 27, 2014
BBC2, London, 26 November 1995.
RTP2 - Portuguese Public Televison, Lisbon.

Subtitled for your convenience.

Thanks to Jose Neves.

"Take Orders And Eat Crap"

Christian conservatives constantly skew facts to conform to their ideologies. And they get away with it because the people who listen to them are sheep who never learned skills in critical thinking. They just believe what they're told in their churches and on Fox News.
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So where are all the verses where Jesus endorses the bullshit conservatives are trying to sell today?

They're in the Bible they haven't read.

Thanks to oldfartrants.

Quote of the Day

From "The Republican Conspiracy Has Worked":

A flurry of executive orders is obviously better than nothing, but it’s hardly the kind of bold change this country needs to undo the destruction caused by thirty-three years of Reaganomics.

No, it's not. Please read the rest.

The myth of the Christian conservative

If it's Wednesday it must be Morford going on about phony christians.

I often wonder, given sufficient whisky and irony and time: Has there ever been a more delightfully inept, wince-inducing oxymoron in the tortured American lexicon than “conservative Christian?”

Speaking of the DeVos clan:

From Reagan to Bush 41, Bush 43 to Mitt, union-busting to anti-choicism, antediluvian “family values” advocacy to pro-corporate think tanks, Blackwater to the unutterably silly Left Behind books, this is the kind of power-hungry billionaire clan that has its tentacles in every right-wing movement, cause and devious conservative ploy since the early ‘60s.
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Ah, Christians. Always the last to understand irony.

I ponder: What must that be like? To believe you are something that you so very much are not? To hold a set of values that, in truth, have nothing whatsoever to do with the real source that supposedly inspires and defines it?

It’s a severe, almost laughable chasm between what Republicans define as “Christian conservative” values – isolationism, protectionism, love of fireams, suppression of alternative viewpoints, sexual dread, belief in strict gender roles and family structures, institution-as-guardian, and so on – and the teachings of the actual, messy historical Jesus who taught, well, the exact opposite.

Reading this piece, it struck me again, for the 1,000th time: As far as we can tell and if he actually existed, Jesus was a shaman. A seer. A radical. A wild and divinely possessed trickster and spiritual pathfinder. What’s more, it’s possible that he was frequently stoned. Hallucinating. Hey, lots of them were. Wouldn’t you be? Psychoactive plants have been used to commune with sacred realms since cavemen scribbled trippy hieroglyphs on the wall by moonlight. It’s just what gurus, mystics and saviors do.

Yes, yes we do. Heh.

So now it begins to make more sense. While conservative Christians of the DeVos variety aggressively despise everything the real Jesus stood for – nonviolence, aiding the poor, ministering to the sick, equal rights, spiritual autonomy, the anointing of lots of trippy holy oil to commune with sacred realms – they very much value what came next: the institutionalized church and all its megalomaniacal, sociopolitical success, perhaps the greatest, most oppressive corporation/political operation of all time. The GOP can only dream.

Well said, young Mark, but you left out "medieval criminal consortium".

El Rude-o on the SOTU

If You're Not Blaming the GOP for the Crappy State of the Union, You're Lying:
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We never got to see what an Obama presidency would be like because Republicans decided that there wouldn't be an Obama presidency.

One great experiment of the Obama administration, so far, was to attempt to reel the imperial presidency back in (yeah, we're leaving surveillance off the table here). It was to try to get Congress to do its fucking job. But Republicans changed the rules of the game on Obama. If they had been playing baseball, they'd have said, "Okay, we demand four outs, five strikes, and no foul balls, just for us." And Obama would have said, "Sure. Now can we play?" And they would have said, "And you have to play without shoes and gloves." And Obama would have said, "Sure. Can we start the game?" And they would have said, "And each of us gets to fuck your wife in the ass on the pitcher's mound while you watch." And when Obama said, "No, that's bullshit," they'd've said, "Why don't you want to play baseball?"

The shame is that Obama didn't say, early in his first term, "Fuck off. I'm heading to the batting cages." Now that he's announced he's finally going to use executive authority more broadly, and he's used it less than any president in the last century, the GOP is whining that Obama is doing something unconstitutional. These would be the same Republicans who lapped up President Bush's executive orders and signing statements like jizz-gobblers at a jack-off-a-thon.

Everyone is offering their useless suggestions for "What the President Should Say Tonight." So let the Rude Pundit play Fantasy SOTU. What Obama oughta say to the United States is "Vote these Republican motherfuckers out of here. They have hurt the nation and will continue to do so. You know the deal. You reelected me to get shit done. That ain't gonna happen until these assholes who keep hurting the poor and hungry are fuckin' gone. It's up to you, America. 2014 could be the year you make this a sane country again. You gotta put a hurt on the GOP. Let's hurt them until Ted Cruz is begging to kiss my black ass."

Fuckin' A.

Headline of the Day

Pete Seeger Outlasted the Bastards

So long, Pete. You made a difference.

Stop Beating A Dead FOX

Daddy Frank's latest feature.

The conservative news channel’s only real power is in riling up liberals, who by this point should know better.

The most interesting news about Fox News is that for some years now it has been damaging the right far more than the left. As a pair of political analysts wrote at Reuters last year, “When the mainstream media reigned supreme, between 1952 and 1988, Republicans won seven out of the ten presidential elections,” but since 1992, when “conservative media began to flourish” (first with Rush Limbaugh’s ascendancy, then with Fox), Democrats have won the popular vote five out of six times. You’d think they’d be well advised to leave Fox News to its own devices so that it can continue to shoot its own party in the foot.
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[...] With a median viewer age now at 68 according to Nielsen data through mid-January (compared with 60 for MSNBC and CNN, and 62 to 64 for the broadcast networks), Fox is in essence a retirement community.

The million or so viewers who remain fiercely loyal to the network are not, for the most part, and as some liberals still imagine, naïve swing voters who stumble onto Fox News under the delusion it’s a bona fide news channel and then are brainwashed by Ailes’s talking points into becoming climate-change deniers. They arrive at the channel as proud, self-selected citizens of Fox Nation and are unlikely to defect from the channel or its politics until death do them part. (As Sherman writes, “Ailes’s audience seldom watches anything” on television but Fox News.) Hard as it may be to fathom, Fox Nation is even more monochromatically white than the GOP is, let alone the American nation. Two percent of Mitt Romney’s voters were black. According to new Nielsen data, only 1.1 percent of Fox News’s prime-time viewership is (as opposed to 25 percent for MSNBC, 14 percent for CNN, and an average of roughly 12 percent for the three broadcast networks’ evening news programs).

The Fox News membership is more than happy to be cocooned in an echo chamber where its own hopes and fears will be reinforced by other old white “people like us.” [...]

I'm 68 and white and I don't watch FOXNoise. I see enough clips from it on the channels I do watch that I don't have to. Heh.

Rather than waste time bemoaning Fox’s bogus journalism, liberals should encourage it. The more that Fox News viewers are duped into believing that the misinformation they are fed by Ailes is fair and balanced, the more easily they can be ambushed by reality as they were on Election Night 2012.

My sentiments exactly. As we used to say (probably still do) in the Corps, "Ambush is murder and murder is fun."

Fox News’s theoretical political power is further compromised by the internal crisis it shares with the GOP: its inability to navigate the conflict between the party Establishment and the radical base that is dividing the conservative ranks. The network has veered all over the place to try to placate both camps, only to end up wounded in the crossfire.

Perfect! When your enemies are shooting at each other and catching their propagandista in the middle and you don't have to do a thing, it's a "couch and popcorn" ambush. The best kind! More butter, please!

Paradoxically enough, the most powerful right-wing movement in the country, the insurgency in the Republican grassroots, loathes the Boehner-Christie-Rove-centric Fox News nearly as much as the left does.

Also paradoxically, this disproves the old adage that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend".

Please go read this.

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

Pentagon Considers Replacing Thousands of Troops With Robots
Soldiers would be retrained as lobbyists.

Study: Chinese Factories Cause Nearly 25% of California's Pollution
And almost a quarter of its gorgeous sunsets.

JP Morgan's Dimon Receives 74% Raise to $20 Million a Year
Bank's board of directors rewards him for keeping them out of jail.

NFL May Drop Extra Point, Allow Pot to Treat Concussions
According to new league rules voted on by fans.