Brain Dump

POSTED BY JHW22

OK, so I've been away for a while and that last post felt good. But I need to get a few things out that aren't really post-worthy. More reflection and curiosity than anything deep and thoughtful:

I fear I am inadvertently raising a Republican. My child hates change. He likes the Christmas tree but is mad that I moved a bookshelf to put the tree up. He hates when I change throw pillows. He hates the new toothpaste. He falls apart over transitions. He falls into ritualistic OCD. SEE! He's a Republican. What am I doing wrong? ;)

Why did Bristol Palin drive to LA for DWTS? Her mom flies all over the country on private jets and she can't bother to send her kid to LA on a plane? Is it so she could have a "truck" in LA? Or was it just for a story? And really, a truck? Who is she? Scott Brown?

Did people call Laura Bush a fascist for encouraging parents to read to their children? No. So why can't Michelle Obama encourage healthy eating and *gasp* exercise without being labeled a Nazi? I have a friend in a small red-state town who seriously fell into the trap of blaming Michelle Obama for the cafeteria menu changing to things her kid hates. The whole town is in an uproar over Michelle Obama personally changing every elementary school menu in the country. Yet, I don't hear them yelling at Rachel Ray for doing the same thing. Shame on that hyperactive speed-cooker for trying to discourage crappy eating habits. Personal freedom means being able to raise an obese child if a parent chooses. Don't tread on them and don't make them use a treadmill, damn it.

Wikileaks: Someone needs to plug that leak. Transparency is one thing. Theft is another. And really, it pisses me off that it's not even an American who has single-handedly decided what to do with our documents.

I cheer each time a judge determines that the health care law isn't unconstitutional.

The DADT study is exactly what I thought it was going to be: a review of what the effects of repeal will be and how to move forward. I wish people like Rachel Maddow and Bill Press, etc, etc, would have realized that sooner rather than acting as if it were a survey about whether to repeal. They really ranted about a lot of nonsense. Much Ado About Nada.

I like Secretary Gates.

I think I'll be writing another Palin post soon. Trying to figure out how to write something thorough and organized. I tend to lose my mind when thinking about her and I want to be clear and linear and make relevant connections. Trying to manage that when discussing the walking chaos factory is hard.

Something To Be Thankful For

While we've been losing out collective shit over health care refrom these last few weeks, something interesting happened that I have yet to hear from the "liberal" mainstream media.

Washington Post:  Lobbyists pushed off advisory panels

...Under the policy, which is being phased in over the coming months, none of the more than 13,000 lobbyists in Washington would be able to hold seats on the committees, which advise agencies on trade rules, troop levels, environmental regulations, consumer protections and thousands of other government policies.

"Some folks have developed a comfortable Beltway perch sitting on these boards while at the same time working as lobbyists to influence the government," said White House ethics counsel Norm Eisen, who disclosed the policy in a September blog posting on the White House Web site. "That is just the kind of special interest access that the president objects to."

(H/T Bob Cesca)

Selling Shit To The Shitheads

posted by Armadillo Joe

Following up on Broadway Carl's post about the violence in Washington D.C. today, I want to highlight a quote from digby's rundown of the same situation:

It's pretty clear that the right wing has lost whatever restraint it had and that the ongoing paroxysms of violent, extreme rhetoric are having their effect. The crocodile tears of the anti-abortion forces after the Tiller assassination notwithstanding, it's also pretty clear that they know this violence is effective. If you want to paralyze a society and force people to capitulate out of fear of random violence, nothing beats terrorism.

And once the right gets everybody looking over their shoulders, they'll misdirect the citizenry and run to the rescue with calls for "law and order." (Recall that the violence of the 60s didn't originate with the left --- it originated with racist cops unleashing hell on non-violent protesters.)

This situation is nothing new in American history. Whenever the right loses political power, they start shooting people. Something ugly and thuggish and authoritarian in the wingnut mindset drives them to it every single time. They are stupid enough and mean enough to be as predictable as a trained seal.

Naturally, the same things would happen with the right-wings in other countries as well -- and they do so frequently in poorer countries, though such collections of thugs are called "armies" and are usually commanded by dictators who are propped up by some American intelligence service or other -- but we have a peculiar confluence of factors here in these fifty states that afflicts us with considerably more right-wing violence than any other civilized nation on earth. Those causes include, but are not limited to, first and foremost: guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns.

We also have a political culture which elevates the outward expression of supposedly simple and "homespun" values to the level of litmus test, which usually amounts in practice to elaborate kabuki ruses intended to get the votes of the racist yahoos and toothless goobers in the hinterlands, which in truth means validating their racist, jingoistic, nativist, xenophobic, bigoted impulses and soothing their deepest, most rancid and repulsively sociopathic urges.

All of which remains necessary even in the dawning of the 21st Century because of the Electoral College.

Thus, myriad apparatchiks, on behalf of the wealthy Ruling Elites who sign their paychecks, can mutter their paraphrased reiterations and reinterpretations and reinventions of the age-old "will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest" laments, all from the safety of their radio microphones and newspaper columns and wingnut-welfare magazines and TV "news" desks and then can pretend to be completely and totally surprised when someone goes ahead and, well, does it because no one could have predicted that calling for the (violent, if necessary) elimination of whole groups and classes of people might encourage some people to actually start killing with whatever is at hand.

Which in These'n Here Yew-Nawted Staytes means a fucking G-U-N.

And then the media whores get to pretend to be shocked! shocked! that someone out there in the world could be so callous and mean and could come up with such an idea all by themselves with no external input. They will all express their deep sadness at this completely isolated and totally unconnected to any external causes or larger narratives "event" at the hands of some lone nut, some completely random act by a disconnected freak who mysteriously lept, fully formed, into existence as a roiling cauldron of hate and violent retribution with no discernible precursors or legitimizing forces in the culture at large. Oooh look! Shiny blonde teenage girl gone missing!

And we'll all move on. Because the smiling news models on the Tee-Vee machine told us to do so. They told us that this particular form of very real, very personal violence has no predicates and thus is totally random and you may as well worry about meteors or lightning strikes because they all come from the same vast and unpredictable fog. 'Tis a pity we can't figure out where this stuff is coming from, now go buy a bigger television set.

But the seed of fear has been planted. One more thing to ensure a meek and pliant electorate of consumers whose survival instinct has been triggered so that they'll close up, turn inward and disengage from the public sphere out of worry and uncertainty and instead do as they are fucking told or else a uniformed cop will Taser'em like a 72 year-old grandma well before the evil, brown-skinned terr'st killers can come and murder all the little (white) children in their beds.

Because selling shit to the shitheads of the GOP has never, ever really been about getting votes. No sir. The Ruling Elites have never really been on-board with this whole "democracy" thing, anyway. Sure, they need votes to seize control of the machinery of governance (Rove's infamous "50%+1" strategy), but they really couldn't give two shits about any one person's actual vote, much less a whole group collected into a "party" like the Dems or the Rethugs.

No, selling shit to the shitheads isn't even about about opposing nigras and uppity wimmin-folk and spics and faggots and dirty fucking hippies, per se. It's about seeming to for long enough to attract the necessary fellow-travelers and mold them into a mongrel horde of poo-flinging monkeys frightful enough to dissuade do-gooders and mushy idealists from ever trying to CHANGE anything ever.

Because CHANGE costs them money.

Anyone who values things like progress and civic engagement and The Arts and beauty and the greater health of the public sphere just hasn't had a big-enough hole gnawed in their soul by Teh Fear to be a compliant consumer of hole-filling goodies like iPods and shoddily R&D'd pharmaceuticals and probably thinks that CHANGE is a good thing and might vote that way and, in fact, largely did in the last election. And CHANGE always means costing the plutocrats of the Ruling Elite more money.

And that means time to release the hounds, the flying monkeys, the goon squads, the un-recompensed adopters of the Faith of the Old Order who will bring down violence on the heads of all of Those Others.

On those people.

More violence is coming, folks, because these freaks are just the comets to circle 'round within sight of our unaided media eye. An entire Oort Cloud of Dirty Fucking Hippie haters stands ready and waiting and well-financed by an unholy alliance of industrial interests and Old Money pining for the days of monarchy to hurl as many of these dirty snowballs our way as necessary to get us to back the fuck off and shut the fuck up and do as we are fucking told.

They did it once before in recent memory, in the 1960's, and even though they started it, even though while the cameras rolled they beat the shit out of peaceful idealists who just wanted a better world (and brutally murdered them when those cameras were off), even though they gunned down our leaders like ducks in a shooting gallery throughout the decade, our collective memory is now that the "Turbulent 60's" were the fault of all those Dirty Fucking Hippies acting up and being disrespectful and shit. Then we got Nixon and then Reaganism and then Clintonian "third-way" capitulation and then President Cheney.

Scott Roeder and James Von Brunn are warning shots.

Editor's note (6/11 09 9:40am): I wanted to add this video I saw this morning on Bob Cesca's blog.

History

In case you missed it.




And doing it in the house that will host the Republican Convention in September... classic!

Favorite lines:

11:43 "We honor the service of John McCain and I respect his many accomplishments even if he chooses to deny mine."

21:55 "What you don't deserve is another election governed by fear and innuendo and division. What you won't hear from this campaign or this party is the kind of politics that uses religion as a wedge and patriotism as a bludgeon."

Does This Look Familiar?

Sam Stein: On Wednesday, the McCain campaign put out a new homepage, featuring his new, Obama-like slogan, and an image that seems uncannily similar to Obama's trademark campaign logo - the red and white stripped valley under what appears to be a blue sun (or in McCain's case, blue sun rays).

This looks awfully familiar. Maybe because it looks (albeit badly) something like this:

Or perhaps McCain's "new" slogan, "A Leader We Can Believe In" sounds a little something like this.

It's really an amazing thing when a substantial part of the electorate doesn't have an original bone in their collective body. But what do you expect? The GOP has always been about fooling the rubes to vote against their own best interests. They're stuck in it. They're mired in their old ways, apparently not realizing that it didn't work in 2006 and it's not going to work in 2008.

Soon McCain, in an attempt to confuse voters in November, will change his name to Jarack Sidney Hussein McBama on the ballot.

Hillary Explodes With Mockery - Shows True Self

How do you really feel, Hillary? Hillary Clinton mocked Barack Obama in her latest rally.

Clinton: "You are not going to wave a magic wand and have the special interests disappear."

Thank you Hillary Clinton for finally being honest and confirming what I suspected you believed the whole time while claiming to be the real change candidate.

Democratic Debate No.19

Watching the Democratic debate tonight, I was very proud of both candidates. Either Obama or Clinton will kick McCain's wrinkled ass come November.

I personally thought Hillary's plagiarism attack and the horrible "lifting whole passages... is not change you can believe in, it's change you can xerox" line is where she lost the debate. It fell flat and the audience booed. Ironic that she would challenge Obama on plagiarism with a bad joke that obviously was written for her.

But then a funny thing happened. In wrapping up the end of the debate, the candidates were asked what moment in their life did they feel most tested. Obama went first and gave a decent answer.

Then it was Clinton's turn. She stated that most people already know what she's been through (although she didn't specifically mention the "vast right wing conspiracy" or Bill & Monica, but we knew what she meant). Then she went into a story about visiting with injured soldiers and that nothing she's been through can compare with what Joe Average people go through every day. Great line and lovely sentiment. And she ended with "You know, whatever happens, we're going to be fine. You know, we have strong support from our families and our friends. I just hope that we'll be able to say the same thing about the American people. And that's what this election should be about."

The audience got up to its feet for a standing ovation, one of a few during the evening. But in watching every pundit afterwards, they all had the impression that although it sounded conciliatory she won the debate with that last line. People were cheering, she got a standing ovation, it was great.

How did I see it? She got a standing ovation because the audience knew the thing was over. It was the last answer to the last question at the end of the night and they were applauding both candidates. So when I heard that it was her best moment (it was) but that she won on points, I did a double take.

So there I am flipping from station to station looking for the one pundit that would bring it up, just say it was the standard standing ovation at the end of all these things, and nobody did! They all got the impression that Hillary had won the crowd over. They were booing her 30 minutes earlier and now they love her? Jeebus! Okay... whatever.

I still think Obama won this debate, on his Cuba answer, on his rebuttal with the plagiarism scuffle, his thoughts on immigration and border security, flipping around the "ready on Day One" Hillary standard line with "having the right judgement" on Day One, etc.

It was a fun debate to watch. The next debate is scheduled for February 26th in Cleveland, Ohio on MSNBC.

By the way, Obama's winning streak has now hit 11.

Barack Obama has won the Democrats Abroad global primary, giving him 11 straight victories in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

The Illinois senator won the primary in which Democrats living in more than 30 countries voted by Internet, mail and in person. The voting took place over the course of a week, beginning Feb. 5.

Oh, and one more thing regarding Hillary's plagiarism attack. Keith Olbermann reported that Politico.com had this to say about Clinton's final lines.

From Ben Smith at Politico:

Clinton Tonight:
You know, whatever happens, we're going to be fine. You know, we have strong support from our families and our friends. I just hope that we'll be able to say the same thing about the American people. And that's what this election should be about.

Edwards the December 13 debate:
What's not at stake are any of us. All of us are going to be just fine no matter what happens in this election. But what's at stake is whether America is going to be fine.

And boy, those YouTubers are fast!