Cluster flip

This ain't no shit!

Another one stolen from YubaNet.

Stumblebumble Rumble

Stolen from YubaNet.

Saturday Kumi-daiko Blogging

I love this shit! More about Taiko here.

Japanese Taiko Drumming by Auckland's Haere Mai Taiko.

Hit it, boys!

Thanks to mikew7, NZ.

The Married Men

This goes out to Repug pols everywhere and especially the residents of (Hypocri)C Street:

Linda Ronstadt and Phoebe Snow perform "The Married Men" on SNL May 19, 1979

Thanks to PhillysVideoVault.

Pat Buchanan and the Long Goodbye

A 'must read' from Mark Karlin:

In retropsect, it was an iconic showdown: a lesbian new media superstar smacks down the open racism and gender bias of one of the most enduring and brazen defenders of white male entitlement.

So it was when Rachel Maddow -- pushed to the limits of her cordiality -- swatted down Buchanan's pugilistic assertions of white male mental superiority for the Supreme Court.

It's the Alamo for white male affirmative action, and Buchanan (and his media counterparts such as Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity) know that if they don't start a rebellion of white guys (who will be even more armed thanks to the NRA soon), the sheer demographics of America are facilitating a long goodbye to white males having absolute power over the destiny of the nation.

The psyche of the white male yearning for the patriarchal hierarachy was reassured by Bush as president -- who proved that any idiot white male could rise to the top of the pyramid (my em), even if his strings were being pulled by two other white males: Cheney and Rove. But then the psychic crack-up happened: an African-American male was elected to the highest office in the land by a landslide.

So for the Pat Buchanans of the world who saw Clinton as a Bubba who had betrayed them, Bush gave hope that the ante-bellum order of white male plantation dominance would be restored.

And then it all came crashing down and now is manifesting itself in demagogic outbursts of forcefully overtaking the government and restoring the white man on top.

That's Pat Buchanan and the long goodbye in a nutshell, because the tide of American demographics is wresting power from the white male, forcing a power sharing agreement that they don't want any part of.

Note to Pat O'Saurus: Want in one hand and shit in the other. See which one fills up first.

Please read the rest.

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

Have I mentioned that I ♥ Emmylou?

Emmylou Harris ~ Someday My Ship Will Sail

Thanks to clydeclark.

More Pat ...

"White people built this country."

Oliver Willis has examples.

Triple Banjo Brain Bleach!

A comment on Fixer's post:

Before you go for the ice cream, think of Limbaugh in a Speedo.

Gee, thanks David for that visual!

Sorry this took so long, but I ran screaming into the woods when I saw that one! Had to wait out there a while because I didn't have any pants on at the time and had to wait for my neighbor to finish mowing her lawn before I could come back. Then I looked for the brain bleach. Found several empty bottles, but no luck. I was looking for some rifle cleaning patches to attach to a length of stainless steel safety wire so I could floss through my ears when I remembered this video. Should be an acceptable substitute.

Tony Trischka appears on Late Night with David Letterman. Guests include Steve Martin, Bela Fleck, Michael Daves on guitar, Skip Ward on bass and Britanny Haas on fiddle.

Song is "The Crow" by Steve Martin.

Thanks to gbtexas for the video and toddspire for the description.

Afterthought:

I think it's telling that Fixer and I both posted music videos at about the same time. The 'Speedo' comment must have affected us both in a similar fashion and we needed some serious musical soothing.

Friday Contemporary Jazz Blogging ...

To quote a commenter at YouTube:

The rippingtons make me want to make love with several monkies until I get a monkey crabs. I love it ...

Either you love it or don't.

The Rippingtons - Aspen

Enjoy your Friday evening!

Got a lot to say now ...

Assholes. Where were you two clowns when you were rubber stamping Bush's idiocy? The time to speak up was then, instead of pandering to the mouth-breathing 'base' of your party. Fucking whores.

Two former Republican members of Congress have accused their GOP colleagues of putting party politics over the Constitution during the Bush years, arguing that they failed dramatically to check the White House's use of executive powers.

Former Reps. Mickey Edwards (R-Okla.) and Chris Shays (R-Conn.) made the argument that if the Republican-controlled Congress had exhibited greater oversight during former President George W. Bush's time in office, they could have prevented some of the most calamitous results of that administration and even saved thousands of lives.

...

That's why you two morons are former congressmen. Assholes.

Thanks to Maru for the link.

Kyl Rejects, Guv Protests, McCain Blows Stack

From Daily Kos:

So...John McCain supports Senator Kyl's demand that the Obama administration cancel the stimulus...but when the Obama administration asks state officials whether or not they agree with Senator Kyl's demand, McCain calls it a "threat against the citizens of Arizona."

Put another way, John McCain's message is this: "Don't do what I say I want you to do, because if you do what I say I want you to do, then you're doing nothing but threatening me. AND GET OFF MY LAWN! DAMMIT!"

And they wonder why we think they are a bunch of lunatics.

Heh. I'd like ta sneak up on McLame while he's noddin' off in his rocker on his front porch in between his bouts of semi-lucidity when he waves at passing cars, and wire his blow-off valves (his ears - you old boiler operators know what I'm talkin' about) shut so the excess steam couldn't get out and then back off a safe distance and watch his head explode the next time he spouts some talking points.

Governor Secesh Goodhair is doing something similar. First he rejected $555M in federal stimulus for unemployment, and now he's trying to get a $170M "loan" (yeah, like "loaning" money to yer brother-in-law) for the same unemployment fund and is expected to ask for $650M for it this year. No stimulus, please, but give me the money.

Where's my dog clippers? I wonder if he naps...

What a bunch of fuckin' hypocrites.

Heh ...

Swiped from our pal, and fellow New Yorker, D-cap:

Harry Potter & The Senate Judiciary Committee

Tony Peyser

Our Hogwarts hero has a skill
(One of the charms of being him)
Where his dad's magical cloak
Can make others stop seeing him.

Southern Republicans, of whom
The rest of us should be wary,
Think that their expensive suits
Make them invisible like Harry.

But regardless who their tailor is
The truth is that anyone could
Give them a glance and still see
They're wearing sheets & a hood.

Progress ...

Drifty:

...

40 years ago we were a nation that spent billions of dollars on the crap shoot of putting three men on top of 3,200 tons of hellfire wrapped in an aluminum skin and firing the whole thing at a dead rock 240,000 miles away because our destiny demanded it.

40 years later we are a nation that will not spend billions to keep its 300 million citizens alive, healthy and productive because the insurance industry lobbyists who own our politicians forbid it.

...

Welcome to America of the 21st Century.

It's Pat!

And I'll bet Buchanan still doesn't get the SNL reference. Heh.

Here's Rachel trying to talk sense to Pat Buchanan. She does her best, but I hope she learned from this exchange that reason and facts mean absolutely nothing when dealing with old white racist, anti-semitic, misogynist throwbacks.

Just as an aside, there's a minute or so of President Obama's speech in front of the NAACP yesterday. He has an entirely different persona in front of a black audience and it's terrific! If he hadn't gone into politics, he'da made a damn fine hellfire shoutin' preacher! Shit, I'd go to church to listen to him. Then I'd throw a little offering in the plate to help pay for the roof that got hit by lightning and caved in because I was there...

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

And from a long article at Media Matters about Buchanan, long because it has to be to crowd in a good sampling of his racist, anti-semitic, and he-man-woman-haters comments over the years:

Incredibly, MSNBC trots him out to discuss race and gender issues, as though the views he represents are needed for "balance." And so MSNBC viewers are treated to the bizarre spectacle of Pat Buchanan loudly insisting that everyone else is a racist. Sonia Sotomayor? Racist. Harry Reid? Racist. Eric Holder? Displays "almost paralyzing stupidity" in talking about race.

If there is a consistent theme to Buchanan's rhetoric over the past four decades, it is that the real bigotry is displayed by women and minorities, and bigotry's real victims are white males. At this point, it would be surprising if he didn't call Sonia Sotomayor a racist.

But the most extraordinary thing about MSNBC's continued employment of Pat Buchanan is that all of this barely scratches the surface. Anyone willing to devote a few minutes can easily find dozens, if not hundreds, more examples of flagrantly over-the-top rhetoric targeting racial and ethnic minorities, women, gays, and immigrants, among others -- from the '60s through the present day.

Pat Buchanan's bigoted comments are not merely an aspect of his public persona; if they are not what he is best known for, they should be. MSNBC needs to explain why they are not disqualifying.

I think they keep him around for about the same reason the CDC keeps a smallpox sample, in case there's a breakout and they need to study it again. He needs to be in a museum, perhaps at the Creation museum in Kentucky next to the dinosaurs Jesus buried 6000 years ago. Or maybe at the Holocaust Museum as an example of what to look out for.

Buchanan seems to be longing for the old days, when women were all about Kinder, Küche, Kirche, and unquestioning submission to white males, which is what God made them for, of course. A time when the 'good' 'colored' 'knew their place' and were thus a 'credit to their race', and when 'uppity' ones could be dealt with with a rope. When Jews were baggy pants comedians and caricatures of evil and the Nazis knew how to deal with them, by God.

Heaven to him will be a place with all angry, bitter old white men carping about how they were so beset upon when the world went mad and the people they had oppressed wised up and talked back. I hope he finds it. Soon.

She'd be eminently qualified ...

If she weren't a fat broad*:

Since President Obama announced his pick for the nation’s Top Doc, Internet message boards have been atwitter with the observation that Dr. Regina Benjamin is fat.

...

Just shut the fuck up. I suppose everybody mistook C. Everett Koop for Kate Moss? It really pisses me off that when these assholes have nothing to pick on about a person, they turn to their weight, which is somehow a disqualifier for everything.

Listen to me. Peoples' body shape is dictated by genetics. Everybody in my family puts weight on easily. I've had a problem with my weight since I was a little kid. If I don't watch everything I eat, I start growing. When I was in the military, I worked out more than most in order to keep in shape. Since I've been out (and getting older) I have to watch it even closer because I don't get the same amount of exercise I did back then. It really pisses me off when people pick on things about others they have no control over, be it weight, color, ethnicity, looks, whatever.

That said, if you don't see a beautiful woman in the picture below, you need to get your eyes checked.



I wish her all the best of luck in her new job and I commend her tenacity in the face of overwhelming odds (on many levels).

Regina Benjamin is a rural family physician forging an inspiring model of compassionate and effective medical care in one of the most underserved regions of the United States. In 1990, she founded the Bayou La Batre Rural Health Clinic to serve the Gulf Coast fishing community of Bayou La Batre, Alabama, a village of approximately 2,500 residents devastated twice in the past decade by Hurricanes Georges, in 1998, and Katrina, in 2005. Despite scarce resources, Benjamin has painstakingly rebuilt her clinic after each disaster and set up networks to maintain contact with patients scattered across multiple evacuation sites. She has established a family practice that allows her to treat all incoming patients, many of whom are uninsured, and frequently travels by pickup truck to care for the most isolated and immobile in her region ...

If you're hurting, I'm certain her weight would be the farthest thing from your mind if they brought you to her emergency room. You'd be thanking whatever you worship she was your physician. Idiots.

*Great thanks to Athenae for the link.

Quote of the Effin' Week!

HuffPo, with video:

"...we're going to do that crack cocaine thing that you and I have talked about before." - Senator Sessions (R(acist) - Alabigotama) at the Sotomayor hearings.

Context be damned, Jeffie-Beau, it would do you a world of good ta puff one up. It would do us a world of good if you got caught at it.

Global Gas Pump

Iraq was always about the oil. Still is. And ever will be. Tom Klare at TomDispatch. Take a lunch.

Has it all come to this? The wars and invasions, the death and destruction, the exile and torture, the resistance and collapse? In a world of shrinking energy reserves, is Iraq finally fated to become what it was going to be anyway, even before the chaos and catastrophe set in: a giant gas pump for an energy-starved planet? Will it all end not with a bang, but with a gusher? The latest oil news out of that country offers at least a hint of Iraq's fate.

For modern Iraq, oil has always been at the heart of everything. Its very existence as a unified state is largely the product of oil.

When President George W. Bush launched the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, his overarching goals all revolved around the geopolitics of oil. He and his top officials were intent on replacing Saddam Hussein's regime with one that would prove friendly to American oil interests. They also imagined that, greeted as liberators by a grateful population, they would preside over a radical upgrading of Iraq's petroleum capacity, thereby ensuring adequate supplies for American consumers at an affordable price. Finally, by building and manning a constellation of major military bases in a grateful Iraq, they saw themselves ensuring continued American dominance over the oil-soaked Persian Gulf region, and so the energy heartland of the planet.

All of this, of course, proved to be a mirage. [...]

More of a 'pipe dream'.

[..] The Bush administration, which looked with alarm at Saddam Hussein's growing ties to Russia and China, invaded the country in part to reassert American dominance in the Persian Gulf region and diminish the role played by Moscow and Beijing. Today, Washington appears to welcome the growing role of Chinese and Russian firms in the rehabilitation of Iraq's dilapidated energy infrastructure.

Yeah, ya fucked that one up good, Georgie boy.

For devastated Iraq, of course, these last years were a disaster and real reconstruction of the country still remains a long way off. For the United States, gone are expectations of converting Iraq into a model Middle Eastern democracy, or of inserting a Western-trained, pro-U.S. regime in Baghdad. Nor is there any expectation that the state-owned Iraq National Oil Company will be completely privatized -- once the dream of Bush-era neocons. Nonetheless, the (re)emergence of a functioning Iraqi petro-state working closely with foreign energy firms to boost global oil supplies (with American troops, whether based in Iraq or neighboring countries, providing ultimate security) would be an outcome that could be sold to Congress and, presumably, a majority of the American public.

So it has finally come to this dismal possible end point: after all the blood and tears, all the death and destruction, almost all interested parties seem to be returning to the only vision of the country, however depressing, that has demonstrated any viability. In the future, Iraq is likely to be an oil-fueled petro-state with no function other than to service global markets and enrich local elites as well as the technocrats that assist them. This may be not be an inspiring vision -- especially for Iraqis who have suffered so much -- but it might possibly be the only reality available that will circumvent the horrific bloodletting of the past 30 years.

Instead of lying us into that clusterfuck with all the 'WMD' and 'mushroom cloud' bullshit, what if Bush had just come right out and said, "We're going to invade Iraq for its oil. We're going to get thousands of your sons and daughters killed, not to mention hundreds of thousands of sand niggers who aren't really human beings anyway and exist only to serve white folks, their betters, so you can drive your SUVs and thus further enrich the corporate ruling elite. We're going to have a permanent military presence there for generations to come in order to protect your God-given American right to live the sybaritic (If he'da known such a word. The speechwriters coulda made him practice it.) lifestyle of spoiled rich white people that you've become accustomed to, but on the cheap because you're not as rich as you think you are and live on borrowed money anyway. We're going to spend trillions of dollars, but we're going to borrow the money from China and run our criminal imperialistic war of agression off the books so you'll never see the cost until we can't pay the mortgage and the Chinks come to foreclose. Your kids and grandkids will get stuck with the bill, but I don't care because me and my peeps are rich and won't be affected by it, and you'll be dead and fuck the goddam next generation anyway, the ingrateful little bastards who'll bitch about what we did to them just so we could avoid seeing the writing on the wall. The oil is going to run out someday and we'd better be the ones to get it. Let's go get what's ours even if it puts the lie to everything we claim to believe in! Besides, you people are all suckers and I'm doing what my corporate and neocon masters want."

It wouldn't have made a bit of difference. With the Repug Congress, the corporate Bush-suckin' media, and half our country being ignorant wingtards at the time, we'd be exactly where we are now.

Bush coulda saved himself a lot of trouble just by being out front about his big oil grab. Too bad he doesn't know how to tell the truth, and it's not Repug and neocon policy anyway.

Quote of the Day

Seymour Hersh in "The Man Who Knew Cheney's Secret" at The Daily Beast:

"The last time they said the government doesn’t torture; this time it's the government doesn’t assassinate."

The next shoe to drop...

Quote of the Day

Jill:

... I suppose it's to Sotomayor's credit that she's able to sit through all the manure being thrown around the Judiciary Committee without telling these gasbags just how full of shit they are ...

Late for work. See yas ...