Hey ...

They're building a new Ferrari/Maserati dealership on Long Island:

...

Right. This recession has hit everyone hard and you can't raise taxes during a recession. Of course, some people aren't actually in a recession:

...

Heaven forbid the rich might have to pay another percent or two.

Saturday Homemade Political Humor & Totally Unrelated Video Blogging

This is a good funny story that makes an excellent point. I put it to this video because dogs and snow and snow machines came up in the Brain yesterday and today and I have a warped sense of connection. Enjoy.

Utah Phillips tells a story about Will Rogers and Standard Oil from his wonderful storytelling CD "The Moscow Hold".

Headline of the Day

Jan Brewer Blames ‘Brain Freeze’ On Her Own Beheading

Heh. Reminds me of 'Nixon Under Glass' on Futurama.

Hatred and Stupidity, Lumps and Bumps and Bruises

I just love this by William Rivers Pitt!

So, yeah, not much to hang your hat on there. In the absence of anything substantive to give the American people, the right has gone home to their mothership: sowing discord, fear and hatred to distract people from the fact that, while Republicans are good at campaigning, they are walking cancer cells to the body politic if and when they actually win.

There's a joint in West Haven, Connecticut, called the Fire and Ice Hookah Lounge. By all reports (Click it! - G), it's a nifty little place; the theme is Middle Eastern, the hookah smoke is tasty, and the belly dancers are something to see indeed. Last Thursday, a fellow named Kevin Morris, also of West Haven, came ditty-bopping into Fire and Ice and staked his claim to first-ballot entry into the Dumbass Hall of Fame.

Mr. Morris, it seems, decided that any place with hookahs and belly dancers must be a festering nest of Muslims, and decided to give the patrons what-for. According to news reports, he barged through the door and started screaming racist and anti-Muslim epithets at everyone there. The crowd didn't really react until Morris tried to throttle the bartender...at which point, the patrons rose up righteous and basically beat the ever-loving Jesus out of him. Morris' mug shot looks like his face went through a wheat thresher, and as of now, he remains in police custody.

Hatred and stupidity, folks. When they ride in the same applecart, things can get truly dangerous. But sometimes, and only rarely, things can also get truly funny.

Thank you, Mr. Morris.

Indeed! That story was good for the soul and it should only happen more often. My sides, they hurt...

Now it's official ...

As you know, we had to say goodbye to our beautiful Shayna not long before we left for Europe.

Just before we got on the ship, I sent my pal Kathy from the Australian Cattle Dog Club of America an email letting her know about Shayna and asking if she knew any reputable breeders who were expecting a litter around the end of the year or spring next year (a little background, Kathy is the premier breeder of champion Cattle Dogs in the U.S. [Katwala Australian Cattle Dogs] and has her finger on the pulse). She wrote back immediately that one of hers just had a litter in July. The opportunity to get one of her pups was a pleasantly surprising twist of fate.

I asked if she had a blue girl and she replied that the puppies were all red (more background, Cattle Dogs generally come in two colors, blue and red). Okay, can't fool with Mother Nature, so I wrote back asking if she had two sisters in the litter (when Shayna was alive, we always said it would have been nice for Shayna to have someone to play with so getting two together was in the back of our minds).

Kathy then replied that she had an adolescent blue girl from a February 2009 litter whose purchase deal fell through. She was a half-sister to this current crop of puppies (same dad) and was great with the little ones. I couldn't say no.

So ... On Saturday, September 18th, we'll drive to Erie, Pennsylvania to meet Kathy and her husband to pick up Choo-Choo:

Katwala's Pardon Me Boys - "Choo-Choo"(r) with anonymous puppy.

And one of the female pups on this page.

I just received an email from Kathy yesterday confirming the date and we're ecstatic. The house has been too quiet. We are also a little nervous. One Cattle Dog pup can be a Tasmanian Devil, two will most likely make our lives ... interesting to say the least. Heh ...

And just a note: I never thought I'd have a dog with the name of "Choo-Choo". I won't change it, but I will "New York-ize" it to "Da Chooch". The name we chose for the pup is "Ziva".

And another note: We did cosider a rescue or two, but after 12 years with Shayna and all her health problems (Cattle Dogs are prone to hip, eye, and other congenital problems and rescues generally aren't tested for them), we wanted sound dogs. The only way to assure that was to buy from a reputable breeder. While I wouldn't trade the time and expense for anything, the sleepless nights, administering medications several times a day, and the emotional drain were wearying. It'll be tiring enough chasing after two young ones without the added dimension.

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

Classic Emmylou.

From 1980 German TV

Emmylou Harris ~ To Daddy

Thanks to 1000Magicians, UK.

Home ...

Just finishing up the unpacking, then calling the pizza guy to deliver. I'll be back later ...

Update:

Pics you'll never see in a cruise line commercial. Heh ...

On Moosebreath

We gotta go out and do our shopping for the weekend before the locusts descend on our grocery store, so I'll leave you with a recommendation to read the big story about Moosebreath in Vanity Fair.

The woman is a vengeful, petty, self-centered, hot tempered unhappy shrew, but whether she's blowing hot or cold, one thing is for certain - she blows. This quote sums it up pretty good:

[...] “You’re just putting on a show. You’re so fake,” one of the children said when Palin made a point of praying in front of other people. “This is not who you are. Why are you pretending to be something you’re not?”

Money and power, child, money and power. She's gotta get it before her fake little world collapses around her and her gullible public. Soon, let us pray.

Update:

We got to the market at 11:30. Waaaay too late. They're already here.

I scored a free snowmobile yesterday that had been abandoned at a house a coupla doors down that's in foreclosure. The Realtor-In-Charge was happy that I would get it outta there. All I know so far is that it's a Yamaha Phazer, probably of 1984-'89 vintage, worth maybe $300, started easy and ran well enough to get it the few hundred feet to home. Must investigate my new toy further, so see yas later.

Headline of the Day

Major human trafficker is huge GOP donor who fought illegal immigration

Why doesn't this surprise me...?

In Case You Missed It

Raw Story

Countdown: Olbermann, Scahill thank Bush for the ‘success’ of the Iraq war

Yes, thanks a great steaming pile, Georgie. You want 'credit' for the worst foreign policy blunder in American history and its attendant war crimes? It's all yours. Asshole.

'They' say that it really isn't healthy to keep things bottled up inside. On Wed. evening's MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann, the liberal host and his guest, The Nation's Jeremy Scahill went the healthy route and let it rip.

"These people have a Ph.D in lying and a master's degree in manipulating intelligence," Scahill says of the neocons, "And it is, it's really sobering to see this kind of brash historical revisionism happening in real time. The idea that these people want to post some kind of false flag of victory on the corpses of all who have died in Iraq because of their decisions. These people destabilized Iraq, they destabilized the Middle East, with their neo-con vision of redrawing maps, and they didn't even succeed in their own stated mission. This is a special kind of pathological sickness that these individuals are plagued with."

Thanks to PoliticsNewsNews.

The Cry for Democratic Moral Leadership and Effective Communication

If you don't read anything else today, read these:

George Lakoff at Truthout:

If you have not read Drew Westin's outstanding piece "What Created the Populist Explosion and How Democrats Can Avoid the Shrapnel in November" on The Huffington Post, AlterNet, and other venues, read it immediately. Westin states as eloquently and forcefully as anyone what he, I, and other progressives have been saying from the beginning of the Obama administration. I agree fully with everything he says. But ...

Westin's piece is incomplete in crucial ways. His piece can be read as saying that this election is about kitchen table economics (right) and only kitchen table economics (wrong).

This election is about more than just jobs and mortgages and adequate health care. All politics is moral. All political leaders say to do what they propose because it is right. No political leaders say to do what they say because it is wrong. Morality is behind everything in politics - and progressives and conservatives have different moral systems.

In the conservative moral system, the highest value is preserving and extending the moral system itself. That is why they keep saying no to Obama's proposals, even voting against their own ideas when Obama accepts them. To give Obama any victory at all would be a blow to their moral system. Their moral system requires non-cooperation. That is a major thing the Obama administration has not understood.

I won't go too deep into Repug "morals" except to say they're mean-spirited racist throwback bastards who lie and fearmonger. The end justifies the means, no matter what. All they want at the top is power and obeisance from the bottom. 'Top' and 'bottom' are carefully chosen words.

From the link:

Following the conventional wisdom, Democrats return to their all-too-familiar defensive crouch, and conclude that when in trouble, tack right. [...]
...

The White House starts adopting failed conservative policies and talking points that leave the public utterly confused about where the president, and by extension, his party, stands on the central issues of the day. [...]
...

The underlying psychological assumption of these moves is that if you mix policies from the right and left in equal parts, you win the center. In fact, no one has ever won the center that way. It appears weak, opportunistic, and incoherent to the average swing voter, which is particularly problematic at a time when people in the center desperately want to know that their leaders have a vision and a coherent plan for what to do (which is why both FDR and Ronald Reagan were so effective in moving voters in the center). It doesn't win any votes on the right. But it does have one predictable effect: It sucks the motivation out of your base, who feel demoralized and betrayed (if they're part of the "professional left") or less likely to vote (if they're average voters who don't follow politics carefully but just don't feel very enthusiastic anymore, even if they don't really know why).

Much, much more in both pieces.

VI

Six years at this pop stand. Holy crap.

Glenn Beck's liberation theology obsession

Tim Rutten in the LATimes. Sub-head:

The Fox News personality is strangely bent on linking the president -- and race -- to liberation theology, evidence to the contrary be damned.

Op-ed follows, and its last line:

Perhaps Beck should go back to peddling misinformation about the Founding Fathers, who have been dead too long to complain.

They're spinning in their graves too fast to comment as well. Heh.

Sharron Angle’s Plan For Education: Eliminate All Of It

Think Progress

Speaking at a forum for the right-wing Steamboat Institute last week, Nevada GOP Senate candidate Sharron Angle effectively declared that public schools should cease to exist. [...]

Oh, indeed! Church- and home-schooled kids without even the minimal secular education they now receive will be much more ignorant and thus better indoctrinated right-wing apparatchiks.

Kudos, Harry! Planting her was your best idea ever!

Funny story: I watch Reno TV for a half hour on weeknights because I like to watch Jeopardy! There are NO commercials these days besides Reid and Angle. I take that back - there's usually one for a muffler shop or a personal injury shyster, but the campaign ads predominate.

Here's the funny part: one ad goes through all of Angle's negatives - well, as many as they can squeeze into one ad - and the voice-over ends with "Sharron Angle - wrong for Nevada" and out and immediately, not a split second later, into the next ad beginning "I'm Sharron Angle and I approve this message".

Heh. They knocked off running those two ads in that order after a coupla times, but just for a minute there it sounded like Angle was admitting she's a Reid plant.

Things the President Left Out of His Big Speech

In italics, from Michael Collins at The Agonist:

THE PRESIDENT: Good evening. Tonight, I’d like to talk to you about the end of our combat mission in Iraq, the ongoing security challenges we face, and the need to rebuild our nation here at home. But before I do that, we need a moment of truth. The Iraq war was based on a deliberate lie involving the White House distorting the National intelligence estimate on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). The report got it wrong on WMD. There were none. But it concluded that the only way the nonexistent WMD would be used against the United States was in retaliation for a US attack on Iraq that threatened Saddam Hussein. By deleting this information, the Bush-Cheney White House justified a preemptive invasion without any basis, a crime under international law that our nation helped establish after World War II.

We’re treating the signature wounds of today’s wars -- post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury -- while providing the health care and benefits that all of our veterans have earned. These veterans and all those lost and injured would be here today, never have needed treatment were it not for the illegal invasion. As a result, I'm appointing one of the nation's greatest prosecutors, Vincent Bugliosi, to prosecute those responsible for the injuries and deaths of all U.S. soldiers who served in Iraq.

More.

I think we learned something very valuable from Bush's Criminal War: If you're going to lie the nation into an an unnecessary war of criminal aggression, it's important to fearmonger the citizenry into a stinky lather, yes, but it's much more important to scare the crap outta the politicians whom they vote for, very few of whom will do the right thing when their seat on the gravy train might be put at risk.

One question for President Obama about something else that was noticeably not in his speech: Besides staggering debt, the deaths and suffering of hundreds of thousands of people, and the unbridled scorn of the rest of the world, what did we GAIN from the Iraq clusterfuck?

[Crickets]

Update:

A word about the final outcome of the monumental neocon blunder of Iraq as I see it.

The 50,000 American troops still in theater are there ostensibly to 'advise and assist' and will no doubt do that to the best of their considerable ability, but they remain there as a tripwire to try to keep Iran from waltzing into Iraq right now as the victor claiming its spoils, much the same function as our troops in South Korea have had for 57 years.

Once they are gone at the end of next year, the best we can hope for is that Iran will wait a decent interval so that the fall of Iraq will not be blamed directly on us, though it will be and rightly so. The mostly Sunni Arab world will not be happy when the Persian Shiites are strengthened by 20-something-million more Shiites. Your guess is as good as mine about what may happen next. It will not be pleasant.

Note to the American embassy in Baghdad: build more helipads in anticipation of the final comparison of Iraq to Vietnam. See Fall of Saigon.

‘Why Has He Fallen Short?’

Daddy Frank in The New York Review of Books with a review of Jonathan Alter's The Promise and some comments on Obama's Presidency, leans toward the economic side. Worth a read. A coupla ¶:

His achievements so far have been accomplished in spite of obstacles that would fell most mortals—the almost uncountable messes he inherited from Bush-Cheney, a cratered economy, a sclerotic Congress in thrall to lobbyists and special-interest money, and a rabid opposition underwritten by a media empire that owns both America’s most-watched cable news channel and its most highly circulated newspaper. Indeed it could be argued that the matrix of crises facing Obama would have outmatched any Bush successor, no matter how talented. (They certainly would have drowned John McCain, whose utter cluelessness about the economic crisis alarmed even his Republican allies in 2008.) But Obama knew what he was getting into when he ran for president, and the question that matters now is how he can do the job better.

Can Obama self-correct? He remains the same driven, smart, psychologically balanced leader we saw in the campaign, and to these familiar attributes, Alter adds another quality that is less frequently displayed in public—an utter lack of sentimentality. He’s “the most unsentimental man I’ve ever met,” says one aide, summing up for many of his peers. That trait may be the most useful of all if Obama undertakes the ruthless course corrections that are essential to the realization of his promise.

I think Obama's biggest mistakes so far are a) trying to achieve bipartisanship with pols who want him to fail at all costs so they can regain power, and b) putting people in charge of the economy who helped cause the problem in the first place.

Lack of sentimentality? Who the fuck cares? Ruthless? He'd better.

And she said "yes" ... again!

For our 20th Wedding Anniversary, we retook our wedding vows aboard Queen Mary 2. We're 2 days out from New York and it looks we'll meet up with hurricane Earl just as we reach the Ambrose Lightship. We had great fun for the past three weeks, but it will be good to get home.

The Speech Glenn Beck Meant to Give

Arthur Blaustein

I have a dream that the Yalie son of a Houston oil magnate can walk hand in hand with the daughter of a Wall Street hedge fund operator on the white sands of Southampton while evading inheritance taxes.

I have a dream that the young white guys playing with rifles at survivalist retreats in northern Michigan, that the middle-aged white guys playing Minuteman with guns at the Arizona border, and the older white guys frolicking at the Bohemian Grove, playing with whatever they play with, will keep people of different races or religions in their place.

I have a dream that the Supreme Court will vote 5 to 4 to revoke the statehood of Hawaii—but not Alaska—vindicating you Birthers out there.

May corporations get the American people and “government of the people, by the people and for the people” (Lincoln had it wrong) off our backs.

From the newsroom of Fox to the boardrooms of our corporate masters, let freedom ring.

Thanks to Justice Roberts Almighty, the tea party and the GOP, we’ll be free at last!

That would be "straight, non-immigrant, rich white christians will be free at last, thank the Blessed Dollar Almighty and activist wingnut judges".

Christians put out welcome mat for new mosque

The Commercial Appeal (Memphis TN)

When pastor Steve Stone initially heard of the mosque and Islamic center being erected on the sprawling land adjacent his church, his stomach tightened.

Then he raised a 6-foot sign reading, "Welcome to the Neighborhood."

The issue for Stone and the 550-person Heartsong Church in Cordova, came down to one question:

"What would Jesus do if He were us? He would welcome the neighbor," Stone said.

While the 4,000-square-foot worship hall is being completed, Heartsong has opened its doors to its neighbors throughout the monthlong observance of Ramadan.

Under a gigantic cross constructed of salvaged wood, nearly 200 area Muslims have been gathering each night to pray.

I think religion causes most of the trouble in the world. Bad people's agendas pervert the Word of the sky monster of their choice and innocents suffer. As it was and as it will be, forever and ever. Amen.

That said, the people who walk the walk and actually live by their chosen Word aren't the problem. Too bad there aren't more of them who speak out like this preacher.

The right-wing congressman made for the Obama age

Will Bunch in Salon shows us a prime example of what we're up against.

Paul Broun is the perfect embodiment of the right-wing backlash that has greeted Barack Obama's presidency

Except that the gala was held to celebrate the notorious, conspiracy-minded right-wing political group the John Birch Society, the band of Commie hunters made famous in the early 1960s, who’d seemingly vanished, only to burst back onto into the newly mainstreamed paranoid fringe within months after the election of Barack Obama as president. Rather than back away from its divisive views -- most notably that popular U.S. president and World War II hero Dwight Eisenhower was somehow an agent of international Communism -- the Birchers were doubling down in the age of Obama, still maintaining that a planet-wide conspiracy hatched some 200 years ago by the ultra-secret Illuminati in search of a so-called "New World Order" continues to flourish today.

The rise of cable TV-friendly-but-governing-averse pols like Broun and Bachmann has become a hallmark of the backlash against the Obama presidency. After the GOP lost control of the government over the second half of the 2000s, the party’s direction and indeed its very life force has been seized by a new breed of political huckster -- who saw that the paranoia and anger of the extreme political right is the only thing passing for a pulse in the modern conservative movement these days (my em). This cynical ambition of high-ranking elected officials not to tamp down the paranoid style but to adopt its latest fashions was a successful strategy ... for the politicians who might have been unknown back-benchers if they had acted more responsibly. Their mainstreaming of the political fringes made them into darlings of cable television and helped ensure reelection within their deep-red conservative districts.

A family doctor who treated Jimmy Carter’s relatives in South Georgia for a number of years, Broun declared bankruptcy in the early 1980s. A federal judge ruled -- according to news accounts in Athens -- that Broun "falsified financial documents in an effort to obtain a loan and misrepresented his assets and debts during bankruptcy proceedings" and ordered him to pay nearly $70,000 to an Americus bank. According to a bankruptcy complaint, the young family doctor "has a reputation of having an extravagant lifestyle evidenced by the acquisition of a number of expensive rare hunting books, expensive rare ceramic items related to hunting, safari to Africa, expensive gun collection and the acquisition of the very best in everything purchased." He had to pay more than $61,000 in back taxes to the IRS, and one of his ex-wives even took him to court for alimony and child support. There was a time when that kind of résumé would have sunk a would-be politician, but the 21st century has proven to be remarkably kind to past sinners who adopt the language of 12-step recovery -- just ask Glenn Beck how that works -- and even awards bonus points when Christianity is involved.

Another dry drunk like Bush, and a Tali-born again phony christian who can't handle his money or his life and is against taxes because the IRS caught him and made him pay. Another miserably failed human being who turned to right-wing politics.

There are more of these on the way this November unless WE sober up.