NE - A Paradise To Live In Or See

[A big welcome to Crooks and Liars readers! Thanks, Mike! - F]

Fixer and Digby done set my ass off (I've got buttons. Push 'em. Stand back. Giggle.). Heh. Even though Californian (Yay!) John Steinbeck is one of my favorite authors (and a Chevy man. Yay!) I've never read the novel, but Grapes Of Wrath may be my favorite ever movie. Yes, I know the endings are different, but we could use a Hollywood ending right about now. One that doesn't include the words "post-apocalyptic". Once the Great Diaspora to Nebraska for minimum wage jobs begins, Nebraskans might not see it that way. More like locusts. Trust me, us Californians know about this shit.

Heres a virtual movie of the novelist John Steinbeck (1902 - 1968) discussing his reasons for writing his great novelThe Grapes of Wrath in a sound interview recorded in 1952. To my knowledge their is no surviving film recording of John Steinbeck discussing his work......

Thanks to poetryanimations, UK

Here's a Hollywood hype video of Steinbeck's novel being made into film and a description:

The Grapes of Wrath (1940) is an American drama film directed by Academy Award Winner Best Director, John Ford. It was based on the Pulitzer Prize winning The Grapes of Wrath (1939), written by John Steinbeck. The screenplay was written by Nunnally Johnson and the executive producer was Darryl F. Zanuck.[1]

The film tells the story of the Joads, an Oklahoma family, who, after losing their farm during the Great Depression in the 1930s, become migrant workers and end up in California. The motion picture details their arduous journey across the United States as they travel to California in search for work and opportunities for the family members.

In 1989, this film was one of the first 25 films to be selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

And a timely fairly recent New York Times review that puts Grapes Of Wrath in a modern perspective:

A. O. Scott reviews John Ford's 1940 film based on John Steinbeck's novel about the Great Depression.

To all you folks heading for Nebraska, just substitute 'Nebraska' for 'California' in the following tune by another champion of the common man. That oughta work. Heh. Note: Arlo's version is 'embedding disabled', but Nancy's is great.

Thanks to chikafaz, UK.

A final note to all those leaving California for The Promised Land in the Midwest: Best of luck. Don't let the door hit ya in the ass on the way out.

Reform?

We will never have true reform of any kind as long as we allow shit like this to go on:

HELENA — Liz Fowler, a key staffer for U.S. Sen. Max Baucus who helped draft the federal health reform bill enacted in March, is joining the Obama administration to help implement the new law.

Fowler, chief health counsel for the Senate Finance Committee, which Baucus chairs, will become deputy director of the Office of Consumer Information and Oversight at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

...

So far, so good? Good.

...

Fowler headed up a team of 20-some Senate Finance Committee staffers who helped draft the bill in the Senate. She was Baucus’ top health care aide from 2001-2005 and left that job in 2006 to become an executive at WellPoint, the nation’s largest private insurer.

She was vice president of public policy at WellPoint, helping develop public-policy positions for the company. In 2008, she rejoined Baucus to work on health reform legislation.

...

Am I the only one who's asking what exactly is getting protected here? Somehow, I think health insurers have nothing to fear.

Great thanks to Jill for the link.

Who knew ...

The Republicans read classic literature? No, not Ayn Rand, however their unemployment strategy sounds strikingly close to Steinbeck:

...

All the spoiled unemployed layabouts have to do is snap out of it and start doing the work the free market is providing. As this fine fellow from the Heritage Foundation indicated the other day on Hardball --- unemployment insurance is keeping people from piling their family in the jalopy and heading out to Nebraska where the jobs are:

...

Bastille Day!

We need to erect a gallows on the National Mall but I digress. Nothing revolutionary, just a happy little tune ... sorta. You don't need to understand French.

Benabar - Le Diner

Quote of the Day

That rude man:

... Ya gotta admire the phrase "entitlement people." It's the newest way to say, "Niggers." ...

Waltzing at the Doomsday Ball

Joe Bageant via YubaNet:

Capitalism is dead, but we still dance with the corpse

AJIJIC, Jalisco, Mexico, July 6, 2010 - As an Anglo European white guy from a very long line of white guys, I want to thank all the brown, black, yellow and red people for a marvelous three-century joy ride. During the past 300 years of the industrial age, as Europeans, and later as Americans, we have managed to consume infinitely more than we ever produced, thanks to colonialism, crooked deals with despotic potentates and good old gunboats and grapeshot. Yes, we have lived, and still live, extravagant lifestyles far above the rest of you. And so, my sincere thanks to all of you folks around the world working in sweatshops, or living on two bucks a day, even though you sit on vast oil deposits. And to those outside my window here in Mexico this morning, the two guys pruning the retired gringo's hedges with what look like pocket knives, I say, keep up the good work. It's the world's cheap labor guys like you -- the black, brown and yellow folks who take it up the shorts -- who make capitalism look like it actually works. So keep on humping. Remember: We've got predator drones.

Quite long, but worth a read.

Limpbawl uses Steinbrenner's death to race-bait

I don't follow stick-and-ball sports, but I've heard of Mr. Steinbrenner because he was controversial enough at times to make the news outside the sports page. I neither like him nor dislike him and couldn't care less, but this one makes my blood boil:

Raw Story

Conservative pundit Rush Limbaugh must have felt jealous that Mel Gibson was hogging the racially insensitive spotlight so he decided to "pay tribute" to Yankees owner George Steinbrenner on the day that he died by injecting race into the mix.

Media Matters caught Rush Limbaugh using George Steinbrenner's death as an occasion for race-baiting.

"That cracker made a lot of African-American millionaires," Limbaugh said Tuesday. "He fired a bunch of white guys as managers left and right."

Much more.

That racist bastard couldn't even wait to let the body get cold before he uses it to make racist remarks.

I take back my opening remark in part. There's one ball game I would dearly love to watch and cheer for right now: Motorcycle Polo with Limbaugh's head.

Taking that a step farther, there's enough wingnut racist bastards that Motorcycle Polo should have its own animal-friendly leatherless World Cup.

Mel Gibson's 10 tips for sexist monsters

If it's Wednesday, it must be Morford.

Herein, some tips for those looking to hone their own personal ranty hatemongering sexist jerkface skillset:

1. First, last and always: Make lots and lots of money. I mean, truckloads. Mountains. Even more than you are imagining right now. No, no, I mean even more than that. Look, take that amount, multiply it by 100, then smack yourself in the skull with a petrified copy of "Lethal Weapon 4" until swarms of that amount are swirling around your head like bees. We're talking giant, obscene piles of it, strewn about Mel's personal Holy Family Catholic cult compound like piles of James Caviezel's trashed career.

In the parlance of the rich and repellant, Mel's millions -- a large portion of which he made on the sick success of "Passion of the Christ" -- is called "f-- you" money. It completely inures you from the slings and arrows of outrageous bloggers, creditors, film investors and divorce attorneys. It's the kind of money that allows you to do whateverthehell you want, because no one can touch you. Even if the lawyers take half, you'll still have plenty left over to buy lots of Russian hookers, vodka and the femur bone of Michael Jackson.

I've got my 'Eff You' money. Not as much as Gibson, so I have to say it a little more quietly, as in 'barely audible' and then only on special occasions like in this blog.

True sexist prickmonsters know that to attain true monsterhood, you gotta combine various evils. Stack them high and proud. This is the only real path to lasting disrepute. Try this: Sexist racist anti-Semitic drunk wife-beating verbal abuser sadomasochistic misogynist extremist religious bonk job with a torture fetish. See? Much better. All that's missing is raging homophobe. Wait, it was there before. Hmm.

4. Remember all the countless thousands of fundamentalist Christians and confused old people who numbly trucked in by the busload to watch "Passion of the Bloodbath" over and over again, often hauling their bewildered, horrified children along with them to witness what is easily one of the most grisly, disgusting, masochistic slasher-porn flicks masquerading as a "true" religious tale in the history of film?

They're the ones who basically made #1 possible. Which in turn, enabled #2. So on the path to monsterhood, be sure to toss a big, juicy bone to the fundamentalists, for believing so blindly in your nightmare vision of what amounts to about two lines in the Bible. Remember: Fundamentalism is always an excellent foundation for monstrous madness.

I knew that.

7. Do you know who else treats women like trash and blames them for being desirable, and claims that if they get raped, maimed, even killed, they probably deserved it for being so evil and enticing? The Taliban. Al Queda. Iraq. Most of Saudi Arabia, in fact. Radical Islam. Women are stoned to death, beaten and raped, and it's often their own fault, for being female, for being so tempting that weak, pathetic men can't control themselves.

I've said this before and I'll keep saying it: All right-wing fundies are the same the world over, from the Vatican to Mecca to you name it - pure evil. They cause most of the trouble in the world and we'd be a helluva lot better off without them.

Please read the rest.

Jon Kyl gives away the game on deficits

Ezra Klein, with video of Kyl defending the rich:

"[Y]ou should never raise taxes in order to cut taxes," Jon Kyl said on Fox News Sunday. "Surely Congress has the authority, and it would be right to -- if we decide we want to cut taxes to spur the economy, not to have to raise taxes in order to offset those costs. You do need to offset the cost of increased spending, and that's what Republicans object to. But you should never have to offset cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans."

What's remarkable about Kyl's position here is that it appears to be philosophical. "You should never have to offset cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans," he said. Never! This is much crazier than anything you hear from Democrats. Imagine if some Democrat -- and a member of the Senate Democratic leadership, no less -- said that as a matter of principle, spending should never be offset. He'd be laughed out of the room.

Back in the real world, tax cuts and spending increases have the exact same affect on the budget deficit. This sort of comment is how you tell people who care about the deficit apart from people who are interested in exploiting fears of the deficit to shrink the size of government. It's also the sort of comment that makes clear that the deficit commission's work is doomed, even if they do go with three-quarters spending cuts. Democrats won't accept an unbalanced product and Republicans won't accept a balanced product.

Shorter: We have to offset spending increases that do something for the great unwashed, but we don't have to offset tax cuts for the wealthy as that is simply their due.

All this 'deficit' talk from the Repugs is pure bullshit. Their hypocrisy is at least out in the open now.

Headline of the Day Zwei

The Attack of the Real Black Helicopter Gang: The IMF Is Coming for Your Social Security

They will get my Social Security when they pry my check from my cold dead hands...

Headline of the Day

From the Christian Science Monitor, of all places:

Could a $1.50 marijuana joint doom Prop. 19 in California?

Same theory as "Could 79¢ gas doom a coherent energy policy?"

Kabuki Despair

Here's a few ¶ out of a 'must read' by P.M. Carpenter quoting Alterman and Tomasky:

"America's most irresponsible, incompetent and ideologically obsessed presidency not only left most of these political and economic crises on its successor's plate, it often masked significant problems that received virtually no attention, so prominent were the crises it caused....

"The result of this malign neglect is that post-Bush America is one disaster waiting to happen after another, all of which—when they do—are laid at the feet of the current president, regardless of whether addressing them is consistent with his policy agenda. For if he does not find a way to do so, they will likely overwhelm it....

"Faced with countless challenges merely to restore some sensible equilibrium to US policy regarding say, long-term deficits or financial regulation, Obama faces the conundrum of a system that, as currently constructed, gives the minority party no strategic stake in sensible governance. [...]

"We grew up with a set of assumptions. If you were born in the United States between, say, 1945 and 1965, you were raised in a basically liberal political culture when liberalism was the default position....

"When Reagan came, you thought: aberration....

"Thirty years later–actually, about 27 years later, or three or so years ago – I started to ask myself: What if all these presumptions I grew up with were wrong? What if Reagan wasn’t an aberration? What if Roosevelt and Johnson were the aberrations?...

"Think of this: We’ve experienced the greatest economic crisis since the 1930s, and the only mass movement to emerge from that reality is a right-wing populist one. [...]

I think 'right-wing populist' is a cruel oxymoron. Get the loonies all stirred up by promising you'll give the fucking morons what they want and hope they are loud enough to suck in enough people to get you elected and then back to business as usual and try to get all the money for your real bosses. Fuck 'em and forget 'em.

"I say that a perhaps paradoxical comfort can be taken in these facts. If we insist on thinking of Obama–and in our personality-driven political culture, it’s so hard not to do this–as liberalism’s redeemer, he will always disappoint, as redeemers usually do. But if we think of him as one piece on a vexing historical chess board in a match that will take years to play out, we can exhale, and see the true shape of the tasks ahead of us."

Shorter: There was so much damage caused to this country in the Reagan-Bush years that we're screwed for the foreseeable future.

Did BP Free the Lockerbie Bomber?

Daily Beast

BP CEO Tony Hayward was taken by surprise Tuesday by several U.S. senators' call for an investigation into BP's role in seeking the premature release of Abdel Basset al Megrahi, convicted in 2001 for the bombing of a Pan Am flight over Lockerbie in Scotland. Beleaguered by the continuing Gulf oil spill caused in part by the legacy of John Browne, BP's former CEO, Hayward finds himself stuck with another poisoned inheritance from Browne—who personally flew to Libya several times with MI-6 officers to secretly negotiate access to Libya's oil. The deal, announced in 2004 by Tony Blair, was hailed as a breakthrough.

[...] Sen Frank Lautenberg has called for an investigation into whether BP lobbied the British government to prematurely release al Megrahi as part of a deal to get access to Libyan oil. The corporation admits mentioning al Megrahi's continued incarceration as a block to an oil deal.

Al Megrahi was released by the Scottish government under pressure from then-British prime minister Gordon Brown. Currently BP lacks the political clout in Washington to fight the senators’ campaign, but will urgently seek help from allies.

Apparently, letting the terrorist bastard die in jail like he should have stood in the way of a big money deal. After all, we can't let blowing a coupla hundred people out of the sky get in the way of the bottom line.

I hope someone at BP has to answer for this, but they probably won't.

Indeed!

Ol' Fez:

This is an outrage, if television shows can start saying "fuck", "rimjob", "bukkake" and even "Jonah Goldberg" without fear of penalty then one of the unique joys of blogging has indeed been diminished.

...

No doubt. When I start going on* with "fuck this", "fuck that", and "fuck them" in polite conversation, I can usually expect a kick in the shin from the Mrs. under the table. Blogging is safer. Heh ...

*Which usually means I shouldn'ta had that last drink. Heh ...

I never liked the guy ...

But the man was one of NYC's most interesting characters. I'll miss George Steinbrenner (not because of what he did for the Yankees, but for what he did for NYC) and so will a lot of people he helped out over the years. He brought "asshole" to an art form but he was also one of the most generous NYers.

...

Steinbrenner also had a soft side. He sometimes read about high school athletes who had been injured and sent them money to go to college. He paid for the medical school expenses of Ron Karnaugh after the swimmer's father died during the opening ceremony at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.

Steinbrenner kept older friends from his football days on the payroll, had a way of rehiring those he had once fired and liked to give second chances to those who had fallen from favor, such as Darryl Strawberry and Dwight Gooden.

...

Nevada Senate Candidate Sharron Angle Is a Fucking Retard, Too

As you know, I'm only a few miles from Nevada and am taking immense schadenfreude watching this idiot step on her dick. I'm convinced she's a Reid plant. All the way from Noo Yawk, The Rude Pundit is watching too. A good read, with links.

You can actually see the moment that Fox "news" host Neil Cavuto loses his will to live. It's at about the five minute mark in his interview with Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle. Cavuto can't get his mind around Angle's allegation that Senator Harry Reid somehow did something wrong by helping MGM Resorts not go bankrupt by making a few calls to banks to give the mega-employer in Vegas more leeway in its loans as it builds the massive City Center. Angle had previously said that federal stimulus funds were given to MGM, which was an ignorant lie.

And here she was, on Cavuto's show, and Cavuto told her it wasn't a stimulus, asking, "Were you not aware that the company did not receive any stimulus money, but that Harry Reid was just phoning lenders on behalf of a big employer in your state?"

To which Angle replied, "Well, truly, he was exercising his influence to do a bailout, if you will, of MGM, at the expense of others."

He was doing his job.

Angle is a less-evolved Sarah Palin, who knows to never say anything specific about anything unless you fill your speech with random buzzwords for obfuscation. But this is what you get, GOP, when you allow a power-hungry twit with cash run the joint: a bunch of teabagging nuts who are Team Palin, her "Mama Grizzlies" and others, men, who apparently aren't going to be called "Papa Grizzlies," since male grizzly bears are assholes. By the way, fun facts about grizzly bears: human hunters in places like Alaska are their greatest threat, and, unlike Sarah Palin, Mama Grizzlies have a low reproduction rate.

Angle, though, is a very special bear, indeed. And you could see the despair in Neil Cavuto's eyes and hear the doubt in his voice when he said to the candidate, "[T]his wasn't a bailout, right? This was simply just having its loans extended. No federal money was involved." You could tell he was saying, "Please, please, take my hand on this one or Rupert will make me blow his dog for his amusement again."

Film at 11? Wheeeee!

Weakly, he continued in desperation, "MGM Mirage is very big employer, if not the biggest, in your fine state. So, U.S. senator, if you were duly elected, wouldn't do that? You wouldn't be doing everything possible to keep that big employer employing people?" Angle said, essentially, "Nope."

Ahh, Neil Cavuto, being Sarah Palin's bitch is not as fun as you were led to believe, is it?

Probably be more fun if she took the nails outta her whip and quit lending it to morons.

Bored Tuesday Weird Repug Shit

TPM must have a guy who just looks for weird Repug shit. I think I found him.

GOP Candidate: Obama And Carnahan Want To Take Away Your Chance To Find The Lord (AUDIO)

Un-fucking-believable, but people'll fall for it.

And this jewel:

Palin Spent Almost $4K On Supporters' Sausages

Normally I wouldn't touch that line (much less Moosebreath!) with your sausage, but I liked this photo that was in the piece:



That's a beautiful Winchester Model 94 (I think) she's holding. It's some kind of commemorative edition, way too pretty to beat up in a saddle scabbard. Probably in .30-30, reputedly one of the best and most rugged short range brushpoppers ever. I had one of those that I had to send back to the factory because I couldn't hit jack shit with it. I think they straightened the barrel or something. I sold it to a buddy for what I had in it and he filled his freezer with it every year up in Idaho. Probly still does. If it was still as inaccurate as it was when I had it, he'da had to hold up liquor stores with it to eat...

Maybe they use the bad barrels for commemorative editions, probably rightly figuring folks'll hang 'em on the wall and never shoot them.

Absolutely fitting for Palin: a tarted up plain jane, symbol over substance, costs more than it's worth, and inerringly shoots wide of the mark. They should get her nips hard, then freeze her and hang her on the wall. Best use.

I don't know what that is right behind her. Coffin fulla reindeer jerky, maybe.

Bizarro Headline of the Day

Shrimps 'becoming hooked on Prozac that is flushed into the sea'

I get this awful visual of a stoned shrimp saying the shrimp equivalent of "'Sup, duuuuude?" as he climbs into my shrimp cocktail...

Headline of the Day

I think our theme so far today is low- and mis-information pols and people without whom the Repug party could not exist.

From BuzzFlash:

"Republican Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana says he supports conservative organizations challenging President Barack Obama's citizenship in court." What do you expect from a guy who wears diapers when patronizing prostitutes?

I expect he pays extra for poopy drawers sex.

We don't need no stinking facts ... el segundo

Tony Peyser

GOP Insists Boehner’s Recent Streak Of Blunders Are Part Of A Cunning Plan To Regain Power

In related news, Mel Gibson’s latest tirades

Are not something one would call pretty

But were cleverly aimed to gain attention

From the Nobel Peace Prize committee.

Also see "'Speaker Boehner'? GOP Leader Steps It Up While Stepping In It" at TPM.

It's Repug Opposite World - it doesn't matter what any of 'em say or do. What's important is what they tell their unbending low information base what to think (for lack of a better word) about what they say he said.

See "We don't need no stinking facts ..." just below.

We don't need no stinking facts ...

We know we're right. A troubling post by Digby sorta confirms what I've been feeling for a while.

...

In the end, truth will out. Won’t it?

Maybe not. Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

...

We will have a Republican House (at the least) come January.

A man of the people ...

Now, get the fuck out ... finally:

A year after railing about the high tax burden on wealthy New Yorkers, Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio talk-show host, is severing one more tie with New York, selling his lushly decorated Fifth Avenue penthouse to an undisclosed buyer.

Mr. Limbaugh's 10-room condominium, which features a 30-foot-wide living room with fireplace and four terraces overlooking Central Park at East 86th Street, went into contract Thursday for a bit under the final $12.95 million asking price, brokers said.

...

Yeah, just a regular guy with a $13mln condo overlooking the Park. At least he's finally leaving.

Great thanks to Watertiger for the link.

Update:

Heh ... Res Ipsa:

...

That's one less jerk roaming our streets. Now if we could just send Joe Scarborough packing.

...

Holy Foreskin!

Sometimes I run across stuff on topics that make me wonder if everybody but me is crazy and then I remove all doubt and go crazy too.

Bad Latitude @ EssEffChron

If you've ever wondered what it took to make mild-mannered travel guru Rick Steves utter the phrase "Jesus' penis" (and seriously, who among us hasn't wondered that?), author Dave Farley knows.

The answer: Spend five years in Rome and an odd-ball nearby village writing a book about, among other things, "the Holy Foreskin." (Steves, who has whimsy to spare, featured Farley, a New York-based travel writer, on his radio show, managing to hit almost every euphemism possible for the topic.)

Farley's book, "An Irreverent Curiosity: In Search of the Church's Strangest Relic in Italy's Oddest Town," answers every question you might have had about "the only piece of flesh (Jesus) would have left on Earth when he ascended into Heaven."

Oy. There's more and even funnier. Apparently this is a huge item of discussion in the Vatican, experts on penises to a man. The part that makes the most sense:

(Editor's note: Under new Federal Trade Commission guidelines, it should subtly be disclosed that Farley gave me a free copy of the book -- and that we discussed the topic over Guinness and tequila shots in a New York nightclub before the discussion turned to finding a bar that had a mechanical bull. I think.)

Alcohol and bull. Now that I believe.

BTW, I almost titled this post "Tip of the Day", but I restrained myself.

Addendum:

I actually got to thinking about circumcision yesterday. I was trying to do an end run around the (very) high cost of a spark arrestor for my trials bike by making one myself. I was using parts from different things I had laying around - old Hodaka motorcycle, a shovel with no handle, and a tea strainer - and I was cutting one part off a little at a time to get an inside diameter that would fit over the muffler end. I was being careful and trying to avoid having to say the one thing you don't want to hear from a mohel: "Oops. Sorry, Shorty!"

Ask? Do tell!

El Rude-o:

Five Questions Deleted from the Pentagon's Survey of Soldiers on Don't Ask, Don't Tell:

3. If you are at war and under fire and the only service member who can assist you is gay, do you:

A. Just let yourself get killed.
B. Allow yourself to be assisted and then call the service member, "Fag" or "Dyke."
C. Are you fucking kidding? Straight, gay, I'd go down on him/her all night if he/she saved my ass.

4. If you were to have anal relations with a service member of the same sex (which may or may not involve a dildo), would you be:

A. Pitching
B. Catching

5. Can we watch?

Fox legal analyst: Bush should have been indicted

Raw Story

Fox News' senior judicial analyst made some surprising remarks Saturday that may go against the grain at his conservative network.

In a interview with Ralph Nader on C-SPAN's Book TV to promote his book Lies the Government Told You, Judge Andrew Napolitano said that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney should have been indicted for "torturing, for spying, for arresting without warrant."

There's a sane person at F**Noise. Imagine that. I bet he won't be there much longer.

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

In Last Decade, Extreme Weather Deaths in U.S. Outnumbered American War Casualties
Despite government's best efforts.

Glenn Beck Starts Own University
Offers graduate degree in Paranoid Studies.

Early Humans Settled in England 800,000 Years Ago
Evidence: fossilized overcooked vegetables.

Study: Rich More Likely to Default on Their Mortgage
And move into their beach house.

Vocabulary Builders

Victory n. hanging around until nobody is paying attention anymore and you can go home.

Post it!

Avedon:

...

You worked hard and played by the rules, and now people in expensive suits who sat in offices recklessly gambling with other people's money want to stop you from being able to retire.

They exported jobs to other countries and made it harder to start new businesses to create new jobs. They slashed government spending to the point where even schools are closing. They failed to honor contracts that said they would put money into your pension fund, and now there is no pension fund. And now they want your unemployment insurance so they can gamble that away, too.

They say you need to tighten your belt to pay for their mistakes.

Well, why should you?

You paid for insurance to protect you from this. Demand what you paid for.

Social Security: You paid for it. We have the money. You earned it. You deserve it. And they don't.

...

Remember when?

The health care debate was going on and we heard all the bogus horror stories about the European and Canadian systems?

... To hear some folks tell it, you could imagine every third European dropping dead in the streets on a regular basis and the rest languishing in pain for months at a time.

...

And the taxes they pay over there, everybody's broke, right? Not:

...

Remember all that right wing trashing of Canada and its health care system during the debate in this country? We were told that the Canadian health care system and their resulting taxation were crushing their economy. Then why is their economy rebounding better than ours and adding jobs that our tax cut dogma hasn’t? If Canada can add back all of the jobs they’ve lost since 2008 and have universal health care at the same time, can we please dispense with the tea party nonsense?

...

Whatever tax cuts the middle class got were minimal compared to what the rich (and corporations) walked away with. A sweetener, or shiny shit for us to look at, so we didn't notice the taste. How are ya doing with that ... what was it ... $600 you got back from Bush? How long did that last when you lost your job and your health care? A Canadian or European loses his job, he doesn't have to worry about being able to take his kids to the doctor when they need it.

If you'll notice, the Canadian banks didn't take as bad a hit, and there wasn't a "bailout" north of the border, when our economy tanked. It's because they have real regulation, not whatever you'd call the bullshit system we have here. It's about time for people to realize we've gotten too used to irresponsible government and stop voting against their own interest.

But wait ... this is America.

Update:

And here's something else you're gonna have to pay for:

...

They walked away from their massive banking debts and unloaded them on you. They sc-r-ree-eeched about the poor and middle class walking away from the homes. And now they, themselves, are walking away from their even bigger mortgage disasters that they, themselves, built.

...

The only thing 'socialist' in this country is that we're all covering the losses of the wealthy.

America: Of, by, and for the rich.

Mopar Dreamin'

I wonder if they're dreamin' of a tall cool Plymouth gin...

The Dirt Band ~ An American Dream (with Linda Ronstadt)

Thanks to MogipbobAnimation, Canada.

Ya can't make this shit up...

The Amazing Mr Smith - Mull of Kintyre on the condom bagpipe, at Clennell Hall Folk Festival May 2010.

Thanks to banjostead, UK.

The 'S' Word

YubaNet

DONNER SUMMIT, July 10, 2010 - Boreal Mountain Resort is spinning a chairlift in July 10th and 11th for skiers and snowboarders to enjoy summer snow.

This weekend Boreal Mountain Resort will run the Castle Peak Quad chairlift granting access to a ribbon of snow left behind after the record setting snowfall Boreal saw this spring. "Almost 500 inches of snow fell this winter, with several feet falling after Boreal closed. We decided since all this snow was on the mountain, it would be fun to enjoy it for a couple days in July," said Jon Slaughter, Boreal Marketing Director. "It's a novelty to be able to ski in the summer. Something worth celebrating," Slaughter added. Boreal will provide a terrain park on one trail. Barbeque and beverages are available. Bring sunscreen and a hearty appetite for snow.

If you could see through the mountain in the photo, you'd see where I participated in the motorcycle trial last weekend. You can plainly see the snow on the next mountain range south in this video. Nobody bulldozed it into a strip for publicity, though. It worked for Boreal. Quite a few people showed up yesterday, most of 'em in T-shirts and shorts. Or TV satellite trucks.

Donner Summit has the highest average annual snowfall of any year 'round inhabited place in the United States. A lot of the homes up there have exterior doors on the second floor with no stairways to them. Heh.

A last gasp for last winter. 80° and snow on the ground. Winter will start again on August 1st when Orion begins to appear on the eastern horizon at dawn.

Ya might call this crazy. I call it home.

Quote of the Day

Fez:

Mel Gibson and Bill O'Reilly have a common philosophy...except amazingly, Gibson is a bigger douchebag ...

Exactly!

Comrade Misfit on immigration enforcement that works:

...

Arresting and deporting illegal migrants does not work, but it gives lots of jobs to law enforcement and those who run the private prisons that have become ICE's black sites. trying the idea of "maybe they won't come if there is no work for them to do" apparently really upsets the party of Hoover, not to mention their donors from industries that use undocumented workers.

...

The status quo works out well for the Republicans. Their Big Ag donors who hire undocumented workers continue to have a workforce and their Big Prison donors get to lock up the ones they catch. Hey, there's 12 million of 'em.

It's sorta like the defense budget:

...

If anything disqualifies Sarah Palin as a serious candidate for national office, it ought to be that statement, that she cannot fathom a situation where we have to reduce the defense budget from $700 billion a year back down into the $300-400 billion a year range. She must have no understanding about the need for defense acquisition reform or to develop a defense budget while recognizing the need to fund the rest of the federal government, because no one who has seriously examined defense issues would make such an idiotic statement.

...

Another place where Republican donors make their money. We spend more on defense than all of the world's armies combined. What the fuck are we supposed to be protecting ourselves from?

The Republicans are all about separating us from what little money we have left. I wonder when Wal-Mart will bring back the concept of "company towns".

Genuine Negro Jig

I've posted tunes by this group before, and I was reminded of them the other night when they appeared on the Tavis Smiley show.

I like old time string band music, which we tend to think of as a white musical tradition. It's not really, as these kids show. I think they have a certain "tongue-in-cheekiness" about them too. Enjoy.

Just a personal observation - Dom, on the left, looks like the most confused Orthodox Jew ever, and I think I detected a slight Klezmer undertone at one point. Heh.

The Carolina Chocolate Drops (Wiki - G) offer a preview of their Nonesuch debut album, Genuine Negro Jig, capturing live performances, interviews with all three band members—Dom Flemons, Rhiannon Giddens, and Justin Robinson — and a few words from the album's producer, Joe Henry.

Thanks to nonesuchrecords.

Headline of the Day

Biden on spy swap: ‘I thought they’d take Rush Limbaugh’

Another missed opportunity for sure.

Seven Reasons Why We Can’t Stop Making War

Excellent Tomgram.

Our political leaders, the media, and the military interpret enduring war as a measure of our national fitness, our global power, our grit in the face of eternal danger, and our seriousness. A desire to de-escalate and withdraw, on the other hand, is invariably seen as cut-and-run appeasement and discounted as weakness. Withdrawal options are, in a pet phrase of Washington elites, invariably “off the table” when global policy is at stake, as was true during the Obama administration’s full-scale reconsideration of the Afghan war in the fall of 2009. Viewed in this light, the president’s ultimate decision to surge in Afghanistan was not only predictable, but the only course considered suitable for an American war leader. Rather than the tough choice, it was the path of least resistance.

Why do our elites so readily and regularly give war, not peace, a chance? What exactly are the wellsprings of Washington’s (and America’s) behavior when it comes to war and preparations for more of the same?

Consider these seven:

3. We’ve managed to isolate war’s physical and emotional costs, leaving them on the shoulders of a tiny minority of Americans. By eliminating the draft and relying ever more on for-profit private military contractors, we’ve made war a distant abstraction for most Americans, who can choose to consume it as spectacle or simply tune it out as so much background noise.

7. And don’t forget the seductive power of beyond-worse-case, doomsday scenarios, of the prophecies of pundits and so-called experts, who regularly tell us that, bad as our wars may be, doing anything to end them would be far worse. A typical scenario goes like this: If we withdraw from Afghanistan, the government of Hamid Karzai will collapse, the Taliban will surge to victory, al-Qaeda will pour into Afghan safe havens, and Pakistan will be further destabilized, its atomic bombs falling into the hands of terrorists out to destroy Peoria and Orlando.

Such fevered nightmares, impossible to disprove, may be conjured at any moment to scare critics into silence. They are a convenient bogeyman, leaving us cowering as we send our superman military out to save us (and the world as well), while preserving our right to visit the mall and travel to Disney World without being nuked

Yes, kill all the brown scum foreigners you want to in my name but don't make me think about in in my little plastic bubble of denial.

Capping the Wellsprings of War

Each one of these seven wellsprings feeding our enduring wars must be capped. So here are seven suggestions for the sort of “caps” -- hopefully more effective than BP’s flailing improvisations -- we need to install:

There you have it: my seven “caps” to contain our gushing support for permanent war. No one said it would be easy. Just ask BP how easy it is to cap one out-of-control gusher.

Nonetheless, if we as a society aren’t willing to work hard for actual change -- indeed, to demand it -- we’ll be on that military escalatory curve until we implode. And that way madness lies.

It's not very far off either.

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

This song, of course, does not apply to Repuglicants.

Emmylou Harris ~ All That You Have Is Your Soul

Thanks to JasonKT.

Big hearted hard guys ...

I know I bust on the Jarheads a lot (they deserve it, heh ...), but this is just excellent:

Kitties Rescued by US Marine Soldiers in Afghanistan

Great pics of the softer side of Marines you generally don't see in a war zone. Good on yas, brothers.

Thanks to Mr. Aravosis for the link.

Getting it ...

Mr. Philadelphia does:

One tremendous problem we have in this country is that too many who run in whitecollarish circles get absolutely enraged at the idea that some people working in blue collar or service industry jobs might actually be making a few bucks. It doesn't matter how hard those jobs are, that the jobs might actually require a high level of skills, or how many years people have been in those jobs, they're somehow seen as lesser jobs.

...

Throughout my career as a mechanic, I've had white collar folks look down their nose at me - I call it the "grease monkey look" - not realizing that to master my profession and get to the level I am now, I've had as much schooling as a Master's Degree candidate in addition to the loss of blood, breakage of body parts, and 3rd degree burns over the years. Guys like me are alumni of the School of Hard Knocks and have invested as much as an MBA has in their careers. We have to work in freezing cold, scorching heat, rain, snow, and every other type of precipitation. And, in addition, we have to put up with these 'elitist' assholes' attitudes every time they drop their cars off for repair. Why shouldn't we get paid on the same scale they are?

It's bad enough ...

Giving people the option of left, right, back, or forward and they're clueless. I don't like adding up and down to that list.

Next year, those of you with a sport pilot license and $194,000 to burn will be able to buy an honest-to-Doc-Brown flying car. Sadly, the demo vehicle is not remotely as cool looking as a DeLorean. (Pesco says the production model is much slicker, and we'll feature an interview with the industrial designers behind the production vehicle in the coming weeks!)

...

It's summer on Long Island and, beginning Friday afternoons, the Stupidometer is pegged when it comes to people driving (the exodus out to the East End/Hamptons by people who don't drive during the week). You gotta keep your eyes peeled constantly for stupid shit happening around you. Now you have to worry about looking up as well.

And, being cynical about human nature like I am, I know a lot of people won't bother maintaining them as well as they should. I wonder when we'll have to start ducking for cover when one of them 'stalls'.

Thanks to Watertiger for the link.

"...a hundred thousand vuvuzelas, an instrument that gives cacophony a bad name."

Will Durst on the World Cup. Fair and balanced. Not.

Now let me get this straight. The World Cup is the most exciting sporting event on the face of the planet, right? Okay, then. What's second place -- the New England Spinsters Knitting Circle Seniors Tour? Which would make Supermodels Filling In Crossword Puzzles With Leaky Ink Pens a close third. Let's not forget those scintillating Midnight Coastal Colombian Tarantula Crawl-Offs.

My God. It's so European. Like a Bergman Film. [...]

Grown men egregiously flopping is just one reason the sport will never catch on in the USA, no matter how many soccer moms drive minivans. Americans can't get it up for any sport that doesn't involve eighth of a ton, no-neck, brain-dead pieces of premium beef tearing each other apart like the last sack of powdered milk at a United Nations relief tent in Kandahar. And in soccer, that's the fans' job.

Part of it has to do with the lack of commercials. We don't have the attention span. The same reason why a Royal Family wouldn't work here. Of course, next year is the Womens' World Cup which men WILL tune in to just on the off chance that some competitor will pull a Brandi Chastain and rip off her shirt. Next time around the guys might want to try that. Or more head butting.

The above is Mr. Durst's opinion, not mine. My opinion of just about everything including soccer is: whatever blows yer skirt up.

CA Prop 19 poll

YubaNet

Voter sentiment on Prop. 19 is closely divided, with more voters now opposing it (48%) than in favor (44%). Prop. 19 would allow people 21 years or older to possess, cultivate or transport marijuana for personal use and permit local governments to regulate and tax its commercial production and sales.

The three-fourths majority of voters who had some awareness of the measure prior to being surveyed are narrowly favoring its passage – 48% to 44%. However, Prop. 19 is opposed nearly two-to-one among the 23% of voters who had no prior awareness of the initiative.

There are large partisan differences in voting preferences on Prop. 19. While Democrats are backing it 53% to 38%, a two-to-one majority of Republicans (63% to 31%) are opposed. Non-partisans are evenly divided 46% to 46%.

There is majority support for Prop. 19's passage (53% Yes vs. 38% No) among voters in the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area. Los Angeles County voters are about evenly divided (46% Yes vs. 47% No). However, in all other regions of the state sentiment is running against Prop. 19 by margins ranging from six to eighteen percentage points.

Men are split on the measure (48% Yes vs. 47% No), while women are on the No side 50% to 41%.

A small plurality of white non-Hispanics (48% to 43%) favors Prop. 19's passage. However, each of the racial/ethnic subgroups measured in the survey – Latinos, African-Americans and Asian-Americans – are opposed to Prop. 19 by double-digit margins.

Voters age 18 – 29 age are supporting the marijuana initiative 52% to 39%. However, the survey finds that there are significant preference differences between younger voters who are white non-Hispanic and ethnic voters. While younger white non-Hispanic voters favor the initiative 53% to 35, younger ethnic voters oppose it five to four (52% to 45%).

Voters between ages 30-64 are generally divided in their preferences. However, voters age 65 and older are opposing the initiative by a big margin (57% to 33%).

Looks like we'll have to vote on it.

Other ballot measures in the poll as well.

Ho-hum...

Gallbladder removed through mouth in new surgical technique

So what's new? Fixer's been taking wingnuts' heads out through their asses for years. Of course, their heads are right there anyway...

3 so far!

Follow-up to yesterday's post on job opportunities in the agricultural, er, field. From last night's Colbert Report:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Arturo Rodriguez
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes 2010 Election Fox News

Go be a farm worker! From the job app:

Job may include using hand tools such as knives, hoes, shovels, etc. Duties may include tilling the soil, transplanting, weeding, thinning, picking, cutting, sorting & packing of harvested produce. May set up & operate irrigation equip. Work is performed outside in all weather conditions (Summertime 90+ degree weather) & is physically demanding requiring workers to bend, stoop, lift & carry up to 50 lbs on a regular basis.

Man, that'd be livin' the dream! And you don't even have to say "Want fries with that?" for your low pay, no benefits, bad back, and cancer!

I'm goin' for a career in agricultural aviation. I wanta be the guy in the hazmat suit on a 100+° day who gets to stand at the edge of a field waving a flag at the crop duster plane to show him where to make his next pass and dump pesticide on me each time by. I love airplanes!

Headline of the Day

Report: Poor People Pretty Much Fucked

Yes, Georgie and BP, thanks a great steaming pile

Friday Morford:

Let us now, just for a paragraph or three, recall the sad and soiled era of one George W. Bush, AKA the Dark Times, the Era of Lost Souls, when all felt calamitous and miserable and not a single day went by without some nefarious scandal, abuse, global humiliation, blunder, illegal war or Creationist kiddiebabble to molest your heart, scar your soul and humiliate your finer sensibilities.

Do you remember? I know, I'm very sorry to make you do it. But it just might save us all.

See, there are those who tentatively argue -- I've done so myself, more or less, in this very space -- that we actually owe Dubya a huge dose of (reluctant, teeth-gritted, soul-clenched) gratitude.

There are those who say that, had it not been for The Worst President of the Modern Era, his epic blunderstorm of war, environmental abuse and a deep suckling love for/from the deeply disturbed fundamentalist right, well, the potent groundswell for change and upheaval would not have occurred, the GOP might not have collapsed so violently under the weight of its own repellant misprision, and Obama might never have succeeded as well as he did.

So we come to the great BP spill of 2010, the most gruesomely epic man-made disaster of our age. How do we parse? Through what lens do we observe? Using the Dark Days as a model, I'm here to suggest the possibility that we look at BP, its horrible disaster, its slimy executives, its Republican apologists, its roots in pure evil -- and actually, by short extension, its direct ties to the Bush Administration itself -- and set our sour fatalism aside for a moment, and instead offer up a perverse sort of gratitude.

I would dearly love to express gratitude to Georgie et al for testing the breaking strength of a hangman's rope.

Maybe it's the wrong way to look at it. Of course, the BP spill is nowhere near as traumatic, nation-scarring and historically destructive as a decade of Bush. His reach was wide and deep, the damage decades in the unraveling and recovery, the innocent lives lost counted in the hundreds of thousands; Dubya was a whole-body cancer.

But it's still worth recalling. Because sometimes the gifts come in hideous packages. Sometimes the enlightenment, the higher consciousness only comes after you've been beaten over the head with the oily baseball bat of what the f-- is wrong with you. Thanks for the brutal, nightmarish beating, BP. We'll see if we regain consciousness.

A hideous gift indeed, worthy of regifting to Bush, BP, and the Repugs.

Quote of the Day

The first line of a post by Bill Boyarsky at Truthdig:

Death wish isn’t too extreme a phrase to describe the Republicans’ recent conduct.

Most people who have a death wish eventually connect. I wish the Repugs speedy success.

And if you think ...

I was extreme in my rants about the car industry:

...

Car Dealership Service Departments:

You, single-handedly, have done more to destroy the reputation of mechanics than any other cause. It's called "upsell" and you all do it so well. It's a dictum that no one leaves a dealership service department without buying something. Take your car in for warranty or recall work and see what happens. You get a laundry list of things wrong with your car, from the brakes to some kind of service, to a cooling system flush, to a tire rotation, that "you really should have done now before something bad happens". And they get you for a thousand bucks. And people wonder why everybody thinks most mechanics are crooks. Rotten fucking scumbags.

...

Go read this and then tell me if you think so.

...

So imagine my surprise when my fiance dropped it off and called me to say that they gave her an estimate of $450-$500. Same car. Same windshield. 24 hours apart. Now, I'm not quick to assume bad faith or nefarious motive, but I'm pretty damn sure some pig in the service department thinks it's ok to try to rip off women.

...

I wouldn't take my car to a dealership service department unless it's for warranty or recall work. This shit is more the norm than the exception.

Take my advice, find a good local independent shop (ask your friends and neighbors) and stick with him, give him your business (stay away from the "oil change places") regularly, and tell your friends about him. Good, honest, independent mechanics can only turn wrenches if customers keep them in business.

Happy Friday!

Update:

Just an anecdotal story.

The Mrs. had to bring her Escape in for a recall (transmission cooler) about a month ago (Ford wouldn't give me the parts and let me replace it myself even though I'm an ASE certified Master Mechanic, Ford Certified Master Mechanic and a licensed New York State Motor Vehicle Inspector). She dropped it off one day in the afternoon and I picked her up at the dealership. The next day they called her and told her she needed a service (oil change, check fluids, lube) - I serviced the car the week before and they couldn't bother to look up at the service sticker on the windshield and figure out that the car had only gone 150 miles - tire rotation - I rotated the tires when I did the service - brake job - 20K miles and I checked those when I did the service the week before - and a coolant system flush - 20K miles for "permanent anti-freeze"? Also, it's a lease car that's going back in October. They gave her the "stoplight spiel"; "the brakes are 'yellow', the tires are 'red'", etc. Then she let them know who I was and what I did for a living.

Now, we love the dealership and the sales staff. When they have a deal, they'll call us, even if it's 6 months before the end of the lease (and they'll eat the last 6 months - they ate the last 3 months of my old Escape) and offer to take the old car back and give us a new one. We strike a good deal and they give me professional courtesy because I'm in the business and we live locally. Their service department, on the other hand, are slimy, no good crooks. It's always amazing to us how such a dichotomy (not that I have any love for car salesmen) can exist in one business. It sure wouldn't happen if I ran the show.

And just a note, this isn't about the mechanics. Some of the best mechanics I ever met worked at Ford Motorsport with me. This is about the service manager and that peculiar species of lowlife called the "service writer" who get paid to pad bills as thickly as possible and pray the customer doesn't kvetch too loudly.

Ya just raised my taxes ...

On a pack of smokes, why not legalize my other fucking habit and tax me for that too? I'll gladly pay a sales tax on my reefer (and not have to put my freedom on the line every time I go pick up a bag) if it'll help get us off the balls of our ass.

Yawn ...

Me and Ol' Fez:

...

I, of course, won't be watching (I'll be sleeping), I'm too good of a person (actually, no, I'd just be sleeping) to put up with this kind of bullshit (but, other varieties I'll entertain obviously, when I'm not sleeping).

...

Dark Age, mark my words ...

Eating the messenger, part deux

Following up on Fixer's post, he ain't the only one. Heh.

HuffPo, links at site.

The psychic octopus known for his amazingly accurate World Cup predictions has received death threats, the Telegraph reports. Paul, the oracle octopus whose prescient premonitions perfectly predicted the outcome of all six German World Cup games, first generated anger from Argentinian fans who believe his percipient pick doomed Argentina in the quarterfinals.

Paul's keeper in Oberhausen, Germany said "there are always people who want to eat our octopus but he is not shy and we are here to protect him as well. He will survive."

Paul's powers reached a new level on Wednesday, when his bold pick against his current home country proved correct, bringing his World Cup record to a jaw-dropping six for six.

To update a comment I made on Fixer's post, "Will you be having un periquito on your tacos de pulpa, Señor?"

A little silly shit like this is good for the soul.

The Repug Walk - Backing Into The Past

"If you fuck with me, I'll kill you all."

Slate

Gen. James Mattis has been joking recently that after 41 years in the Marines, he was going to return to his home of Walla Walla, Wash., to become an onion farmer. He'll have to wait. The four-star general is going to Tampa, Fla., to take over for Army Gen. David Petraeus as commander of the U.S. Central Command, overseeing combat in both Afghanistan and Iraq. The news will be announced by Defense Secretary Robert Gates at a press conference later today.

[...] He commanded Marines as a brigadier general in Afghanistan in 2001. In 2003, he was the Marine ground commander in Iraq, leading the 20,000 troops of the 1st Marine Division for 500 miles over 17 days, the longest sustained march in Marine Corps history. [...]

Holy shit...

It was a disappointment for Mattis. With few spots for someone of his rank, his only real option was to retire. Still, it was inconceivable to those around the energetic 59-year-old that after a lifetime in the service he would be leaving. Then Gen. Stanley McChrystal's career abruptly ended, and Mattis' fortunes were reversed.

It's heartwarming to know that the Corps fucks over Generals just like they do PFCs and Lance Corporals. On the other hand, I guess the way you get to be a four-star General is to like getting fucked over until you can be the one that gets to do it. There's always someone higher though...

[...] In the spring of 2003, in the first of his meetings with recently defeated Iraqi military leaders he famously said: "I come in peace. I didn't bring artillery. But I'm pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you fuck with me, I'll kill you all." [...]

I like this guy.

Semper Fi, General Mattis. Best of luck.

Shut up and pick faster, you lazy white good-for-nothing

EssEffChron

Lost your job in Silicon Valley?
...

Tonight, United Farm Workers of America president Arturo Rodriguez will join the deadpan host of "The Colbert Report" to talk about the UFW's "Take Our Jobs" campaign, which encourages American citizens and legal residents to take jobs in the agriculture sector.

According to the UFW, most agriculture laborers are undocumented workers. But if you — a bona fide U.S. citizen — want to relocate to California's Central Valley or Texas' onion fields, they're all for it.

They're assuming that you don't. Rodriguez will be trying to talk up a UFW-backed bill in Congress that would give currently illegal agriculture laborers the opportunity to earn legal residency by continuing to work in agriculture. The proposal has bipartisan support in both chambers.

Heh. I have watched my produce getting harvested from the comfort of my air-conditioned pickup in the Salinas and Santa Maria Valleys, and they are very mild in climate compared to the hothothot San Joaquin and Sacramento Valleys.

Somebody's got to pick the crops. There's a lotta money in produce. If you wanta see these morons who want all the Meskins rounded up and sent home really snivel, hand 'em a celery knife and have 'em spend a day bent over with their noses in the pesticide in the lovely Mediterranean climate in Guadalupe.

They might last an hour. It'd be good for a laugh.

If you wanta kill the same snivelling bastards, have 'em pick onions in Mettler in August. They'd drop like flies from the heat.

The truth of the matter is the Anglos'd get fired after ten minutes and the growers'd be clamoring to get their hard-working Meskins back.

Morning Schmoe ...

Big dumbass crybaby:

...

I'm not sure this is the kind of attention MSNBC and Joe Scarborough were expecting to garner after Scarborough had his hissy fit. But, again, they're the ones who decided to turn a couple of tweets into a major battle.

...

Eating the messenger ...

I love octopus.

Paul is not a normal octopus. He is a psychic one. He has managed to predict every Germany game correct through out this years tournament.

...

Cured and served in a salad would be fine with me.

Chutzpah ...

It was okay for George Bush to appoint a reckless asshole (John Bolton) during a congressional recess, yet heaven forbid a Dem does it.

In April, President Obama nominated Dr. Donald Berwick to serve as Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Many Republicans in Congress have made it clear in recent weeks that they were going to stall the nomination as long as they could, solely to score political points.

But with the agency facing new responsibilities to protect seniors’ care under the Affordable Care Act, there’s no time to waste with Washington game-playing. That’s why tomorrow the President will use a recess appointment to put Dr. Berwick at the agency’s helm and provide strong leadership for the Medicare program without delay.

...

The Republicans have blocked more of Obama's appointments than those of any President in recent history. If the GOP can't run the government, they're gonna make sure nobody else can either.

Great thanks to Oliver Willis for the link.

Facing the Future as a Media Felon on the Gulf Coast

LA Progressive, links and photos:

The United States Coast Guard considers me a felon now, because I “willfully” want to obtain more photos like these to show you the utter devastation occurring in Barataria Bay, Louisiana, as a result of the BP oil catastrophe. If the Coast Guard has its way, all media, not just independent writers and photographers like myself and Jerry Moran, will be fined $40,000 and receive Class D felony convictions for providing the truth about oiled birds and dolphins, in addition to broken, filthy, unmanned boom material that is trapping oil in the marshlands and estuaries. We don’t have $40,000 to spare, and have had to scrape the bottoms of our checkbooks as is to hire boats to take us to the devastation the Coast Guard, under the direction of BP, does not want you to see.

The chilling money line is "the Coast Guard, under the direction of BP".

Working and reporting from American Gulf Coast is starting to remind me of working in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where photos and recordings must be hidden on secreted flash drives at border crossings, and where interrogation by drunken border patrols certainly follows if one does not provide a proper “explanation” for visits to certain regions. In 2007, I was accused of being a “spy” and held by the secret police in Goma, DRC, for having video of illicit “conservation” activities. Now the same sick feelings of fear, anger, and helplessness is stalking my mind as I try to plan for the next round in south Louisiana. Never in my lifetime could I imagine that a foreign company could dictate my ability to move freely and openly in American territorial waters (my em).

What’s next? Will media be totally shut down? Will we face assassinations like journalists do in Rwanda? I realize assassination is over-the-top, but when it crosses your mind, even for a moment, you know something is terribly wrong.

No shit. Go read the rest of this. BP is such a powerful entity in the Gulf (and Congress) that it thinks it can get away with anything, and it may be right.

Livin' the iLife

Apple aficionados will love Morford today.

Sweet Jesus in minimalist design heaven, the iPad. No mouse, no extra cables, no mandatory hookups, no startup times, installation DVDs, RAM guides, accelerators, system folders, font drivers, extensions, launch daemons, Kerberos plug-ins, jpg helpers or compression schemes, no diphthong upslingers pongo hurling goober kerfuffling flipblasters.

Just a devastatingly simple, utterly gorgeous sheet of glass and aluminum that does almost everything your average computer user needs it to do, with a couple finger taps and a happy sigh, sans roughly 500 of the usual steps, clicks, guides, installations, file extensions and so on. It's understandable at a glance, intuitive as candy, enjoyable as a porn star in summertime. You know, just like the Mac has always been, except not really.

Enjoy.

Headline of the Day

Hot Dog Eating Champ Kobayashi Charged With ‘Breaking and Vomiting’

Ullllppp...

Quote of the Day

Michael Stickings:

...

Sign already, LeBron. Somewhere. Please.

...

And if you think ...

We have a problem now, just wait a while:

More than 27,000 abandoned oil and gas wells lurk in the hard rock beneath the Gulf of Mexico, an environmental minefield that has been ignored for decades. No one – not industry, not government – is checking to see if they are leaking, an Associated Press investigation shows.

...

If Big Oil's previous commitments to the environment are any indication, let alone their safety record, this will almost certainly come back to bite us in the ass.

Climate change ...

I tell ya, just anecdotally, in the last 6 months, we've had the worst blizzards in decades this winter and record shattering heat this week (I just love working on a hot car in 110 degree heat). Our storms last longer and are more intense, and tornadoes (though not many) make regular appearances where, when I was a kid, the suggestion of a tornado on Long Island would have men in white suits chasing you with a butterfly net.

While I probably know as much about climate science as the average politician and take the word of the experts (real scientists as opposed to conservative loudmouths), a lot of deniers believe the way to fix the problem is to kill the scientists.

...

A sobering new report warns that oceans face a "fundamental and irreversible ecological transformation" not seen in millions of years as greenhouse gases and climate change already have affected temperature, acidity, sea and oxygen levels, the food chain and possibly major currents that could alter global weather.

...

As Philippe Cousteau said not long ago:

... So it’s not a question of can the oceans can take any more. The ocean can’t take any more. They couldn’t take any more fifty years ago. The question is, when are we going to stop?

...

The way it looks to me, and I see no change of opinion coming anytime soon, the environment will always come in a distant second next to making a buck.

Go laugh yer asses off...

The story of the trial I rode on Saturday is up at Fixer & Gordon. Enjoy.

¡Cuba Sí!

The Hill

A bipartisan pair of senators said Thursday they have the votes in the Senate to lift the longstanding U.S. ban on travel to Cuba.

Sens. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) and Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) said they believe they have the 60 votes necessary to overcome a filibuster and lift the travel ban to the communist-held nation south of Florida.

“It makes no sense to punish the American people by restricting their right to travel simply because our country is trying to punish the Cuban government,” Dorgan said in a statement.

"Decades of the same policy will get you the same result. We're hopefully about to change that and open up a new world for the people of Cuba," said Enzi.

'Bout fuckin' time. The sanctions against Cuba haven't made sense for decades except to woo a bloc of (now) older voters in Florida.

Best of luck with this bill, Senators, and pick me up a '59 El Camino or a '57 Ranchero while yer down there.

Who's winning in Afghanistan?

Hint: Not the U.S.

Antiwar Newswire

As US fights, China spends billions to build a footprint in Afghanistan

As the U.S. and its NATO allies fight to stabilize Afghanistan, China has expanded its economic footprint with several high-profile investments and reconstruction projects. In 2007, it became the country's largest foreign investor when it won a $3.5 billion contract to develop copper mines at Aynak, southeast of Kabul.

For China, the reward is not only expanded trade and access to natural resources, it's also security for its western flank, the vast Xinjiang region that is home to a separatist movement of minority Uighurs, said Liu Xuecheng of the China Institute of International Studies, the Chinese Foreign Ministry's think tank.

Afghanistan is "well aware that the U.S. is likely to only be a temporary ally so it's looking for a longer-term partner in the region. China would be an obvious choice," said security analyst Christian Le Miere, editor of Jane's Intelligence Review.

China has also benefited by focusing its investments on Afghanistan's relatively safer north, while much of the U.S.-funded effort is in the more violent south and east regions. The Taliban is not known to have made threats against Chinese involved in Afghanistan.

They know better. Threaten the Chinese today, expect a million troops tomorrow. No quarter, no rules of engagement, and soon no Taliban. Or much of anyone else. Think 'locusts' and 'wheat field'.

"The Afghan people prefer this gift from China. The Chinese side has done streets, roads and clinics in Afghanistan," Karimi said. "They didn't bring their troops here."

Liu, the Beijing think tank analyst, said he doubted China would ever send troops. "The war is not China's war," he said. "... But economically and socially, we can try to help."

For Afghans such as Akbar the merchant, China is an example to be emulated.

Clever, these Chinese. Smooth sailing for them while the U.S. and the West dashes its blood and treasure on the rocks.

Who's the fool?

What is this "work"?

I know my productivity has been down:

BERLIN - Told they couldn't watch the World Cup on the job, Italian autoworkers went on strike - conveniently, a half-hour before game time. German companies set up office viewing areas to keep employees from defecting on game days.

...

One study suggests the German economy, Europe's largest, loses more than $8 billion in productivity, about 0.27 percent of gross domestic product, during the monthlong tournament. Surveys in Britain predict output losses there of $1.5 billion to $2.3 billion.

...

Hey, everybody's got their priorities. Heh ...

Dark Age ...

I said, somewhat in jest, in my last post that we are at the dawn of a Dark Age. D-cap sees it too:

...

What these very well paid talking heads (who probably couldn't tell a florence flask from Florence Henderson) failed to bring up during their lament on the state of American ingenuity is that our lack of innovation, creativity and scientific leadership is a deeply endemic problem that cannot be fixed by a bunch of suggestions or changes in policy. Our plunge in to the abyss of stagnancy has been years in the making. And this drop off the cliff is constantly being reinforced by long-term neglect to our education system, the rise and loud voice of evangelical religious dogma (which generally hates science), an obsessive fixation on money, a youth culture which values fame above everything else and the media's need to sell soap as opposed to selling development.

...

We couldn't get to the Moon if we wanted to anymore. We're breeding a race of morons and mystics who believe America is still a great nation just because Hannity, or Beck, or Lintball, told them so. We believe only what we want to hear and anyone who speaks fact or reality is labeled a traitor, a socialist, a communist, or a fascist. We're more interested in some stupid 'reality' show (How much time have so-called 'news' organizations spent on the latest Bachelorette dustup, Lebron James, or Kobayashi?) than we are in how we got into this mess and how to fix it.

When news and entertainment inhabit the same wide, gray area, when mysticism is put on the same level as science fact, when a good chunk of the nation believes we should coddle the rich and powerful at the expense of the poor, and when we look for scapegoats to pin our problems on instead of looking in the mirror, we can consider ourselves finished as a great nation.

TMI ...

Like Lebron, I know far too much about Kobayashi. Professional competitive eating? We are truly at the beginning of a Dark Age of Humankind.

Thank god ...

We'll be in Scandinavia next month. It's fucking hot in NY and it's gonna get worse.

Headline of the Day

More than one-quarter don’t know who US gained independence from

Swell. The Dead End Quarter, self-proclaimed "patriots" to a man, strikes again. I guess it doesn't really matter if they know even a smidgen of our history as long as their ideology is, er, right.

Yeesh.

Clean up. Die. Hurry!

Business Insider, links and videos:

Are you sure that you want to help clean up the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? In a previous article we documented a number of the health dangers from this oil spill that many scientists are warning us of, and now it has been reported on CNN that the vast majority of those who worked to clean up the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska are now dead. Yes, you read that correctly. Almost all of them are dead.

In fact, the expert that CNN had on said that the life expectancy for those who worked to clean up the Exxon Valdez oil spill is only about 51 years. Considering the fact that the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is now many times worse than the Exxon Valdez disaster, are you sure you want to volunteer to be on a cleanup crew down there? After all, the American Dream is not to make big bucks for a few months helping BP clean up their mess and then drop dead 20 or 30 years early.

Perhaps BP CEO Tony Heyward and other high ranking BP executives could roll up their sleeves and go down there and start cleaning up all of that toxic sludge.

It's their mess, so let them clean it.

Fat chance. There are plenty of peasants who can die early in the service of BP's bottom line.

Quote of the Day

From a good rant on the Supremes by Mark Karlin:

Being a GOP senator who denounces Supreme Court "judicial activism" is like being a vegetarian who owns a slaughterhouse.

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

Afghanistan: Deal With Taliban Reportedly in Works
They would help government locate Al Qaeda; in exchange government would destroy all art, jail all women and burn down all schools.

Democratic Party Field-Testing Mid-Term Election Slogans
Best so far:

1. It could have been a lot worse.
2. Standing up to the GOP, except for those who aren’t.
3. Not crazy about the war, but....
4. BP: totally not our fault.
5. Sweeping financial reform, sort of.

New Research: Jesus May Not Have Died on Cross
Christians will be advised what changes, if any, to expect.

"Entitlements" ...

"Incentives" when it comes to the rich; "handouts" when it comes to anyone else:

Corporate socialism is alive and well. Isn't it interesting to see the Republicans do their best to provide a very small safety net to help average Americans who are unemployed yet so willingly go along with massive handouts to Big Oil? Politicians are always so quick to pull out the rug on those most in need yet the richest of the rich are always being supported with handouts that dwarf the social safety net. How does this possibly pass the smell test? Big Oil is the most profitable industry on the planet yet they still need help? Let them make their own money on their own dime instead of freeloading from everyone else.

...

The only thing that isn't "socialized" are the profits. We all pony up for the losses.

If the Dems were smart ...

I could believe he's a 'Manchurian' plant of some type or another but we'll just chalk it up to them being lucky:

...

But leaving aside Steele's utterly blatant lies, having the head of the Republican Party say that the war in Afghanistan is a failure and that it should never have been fought in the first place is undoubtedly news to the rest of his party.

...

God what an idiot. Mikey Steele is the gift that keeps on giving. It'll be a shame to lose him but I think the Republicans are gonna find a way to get him out soon.

Thanks to our pal Creature for the link.

Experts ...

Susie pegs McCain:

On This Week with Jake Tapper, John McCain explains how important it is not to have deadlines for leaving Afghanistan. I've often thought that his alleged "expertise" on war, which seems to be grounded only in his personal experience as a prisoner of war, is sort of akin to pronouncing someone who was hit by a car as an expert on automotive engineering. But maybe that's just me!

...

Maybe he slept in a Holiday Inn ...

A good 4th of July to all

I hope everybody has a good time on our country's birthday, and I repeat Will Durst's comment from my post of a coupla days ago:

Aahh. The 4th of July. Let's drink a lot of beer and handle explosives. The day many nicknames like "Lefty" and "Patch" are christened.

I know none of our readers are that stupid, but listen for the ambulances. Heh.

We're going back up to the trial at Donner Ski Ranch to spectate. I will have a recount of my adventures as a competitor (Ha!) yesterday up at Fixer & Gordon in a day or so, to include some of the most embarrassing video of me you are ever likely to see. I am rethinking the wisdom of showing Mrs. G how to work the camera. Can't shove toothpaste back into the tube, I guess.

The day went very well, considering how it went. Let's just say for now that what didn't kill me can only make me stronger, if not much smarter. I hope you are all having as much fun as we are on this weekend.

Fourth of July 1776, 1964, 2010

Here's a little of Daddy Frank's column about the 4th of July in the context of of the Civil Rights Act of July 4, 1964.

Even before last week’s ceremonial hazing of Kagan, the G.O.P.’s only national black political figure, Michael Steele, attacked her for writing approvingly of a speech Marshall had given calling the original text of the Constitution “defective” — a restrained adjective, actually, for a document that countenanced slavery. On the first day of the Kagan hearings, Marshall received many more mentions (35) than even that other Republican archenemy, President Obama, in the accounting of Talking Points Memo. Orrin Hatch of Utah and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma said they weren’t sure they could have voted to confirm Marshall to the court. Jon Kyl of Arizona, a state that suffered years of economic boycotts because of its opposition to the King holiday, faulted Marshall’s jurisprudence for advancing “the agenda of certain classes of litigants” (wonder who?) and for being out of the “mainstream.”

“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” wrote our current Supreme Court chief justice, John Roberts, in a smug majority opinion nibbling away at Brown v. Board of Education in 2007. His conservative self-righteousness, a product of his time, is as delusional as L.B.J.’s liberal faith in the efficacy of a federal “Community Relations Service” was in 1964. On this Fourth, as on the 233 that preceded it, America is still very much a work in progress.

Sometimes I wonder if "progress" is the right word.

Please read the rest.

Happy 4th!

Be safe (already had some idiot here blow his arm off) and enjoy the day!

This is also our 6th Birthday here at the Brain and we've put up over 15,000 posts in that time (#15,000). If that proves anything, it's that me and the old man are stubborn. Heh ...

Thanks to all the readers, commenters, and contributors for making it interesting. If you would have asked me, 6 years ago, if I'd still be blogging, I would have given you and unequivocal "no". I'd hoped we'd have gotten most of the bad shit fixed by now, but when I started here, I didn't think George Bush would 'win' a second term. I figured people would have come to their senses after 4 years of that idiot. If there were any lessons for me in the last 6 years, the one that stands out is that I've come to realize just how ignorant and stupid most Americans really are.