Moving Day

After a four month hiatus from blogging, I've decided to close the chapter on Broadway Carl. The blog has been a labor of love (Jebus knows I never got paid for it) but over the course of the six and a half years of its existence, I've gotten married, bought a house and had two beautiful children - the second just eleven weeks ago - and worked picked up in a more managerial sense. As life progressed spare time grew shorter and shorter. Something had to give and unfortunately the blog was it.

There were many times over these past four months that I felt a twinge to writing about something on my mind, whether it was about the faux Obama "scandals" or Edward Snowden or Trayvon Martin, but the feeling would pass and I'd let it go. I realized I was suffering blogger burnout and since there wasn't sufficient time to properly put my thoughts down, I avoided it altogether.

Then last week, my friend and contributor to the blog Desert Crone published a post that was thoughtful and thought provoking, enough for me to respond to it. And I realized I missed it. I missed expressing my opinion in this format and I let  her know that I'd reestablish the blog and try to start it up again. It was like trying to turn over an engine that hadn't run for a while.

So while this is the end of one blog, it's the beginning of a new chapter - and it started last night with Broadway Carl 2.0. After a 3am feeding, I couldn't sleep as my mind was racing about work, house projects and yes, Anthony Weiner. A few random thoughts popped into my head and I felt the need to express them. But since my blog has been dormant for months besides the one post from Desert Crone, I am starting anew. Broadway Carl 2.0 (broadwaycarl2point0.blogspot.com) was born and until I can straighten out the domain name redirect, there will be a transitional period.

If you've enjoyed what you've read here for over 6 years, please come visit us at

BROADWAY CARL 2.0

to continue the journey with me. I've grown a lot these last six years and I'm hoping that my writing will be less rage and more comical cynicism with a point and some humor (some of it inappropriate but that's how I roll). Yes, I'll still rant occasionally but that all becomes white noise after a while... sort of like Glenn Greenwald screaming about drones and how Obama is worse than Bush, even though he was a Bush supporter... still trying to wrap my head around that one.

Head on over!

The Reason for My Light Blogging

Zoe Angelica was born on May 26th at 11:19pm. Mother and daughter are great.

On This Date...

posted by Armadillo Joe

Two years ago, Steve "Gilly" Gilliard died. He was one of the mightiest of the early proto-bloggers, a New Yorker, a journalist and military historian and a die-hard Mets fan. I never met him, but the blinding, gotta-wear-shades intensity of his writing inspired me to start blogging myself and much of my blogging style continues to draw inspiration from -- but could never remotely hope to match -- his unapologetic incandescence. His blog was the first place I ever posted a comment or even got into an exchange with another commenter. No one in the lefty-blogosphere, except perhaps the dark, billowing, poetic clouds of electric prose of driftglass, comes even close to replicating Gilly's wit, ferocity and exacting historical detail.

To this day, his dismantling of Rudy "9/11" Ghoul-iani stands as one of my all-time favorite blog posts.

This is what I wrote over at my original old blog on the day I read of his death:

Steve Gilliard of The News Blog has died. He's been sick for a while, and I have thought for these last few months of his illness that he would be pulling out of it sometime soon, but today it got the better of him. As you can see on the left, The News Blog is on my blogroll. He's one of my online heroes, and his methods and style have been a guide and inspiration for this blog. His fierce tone and unapologetic argumentation have seemed to me for the three years I've been reading The News Blog the way liberals should be approaching discourse with a disingenuous and petty right wing. He gave no mercy and he expected none.

He was also a New Yorker. As Jane Hamsher of FireDogLake wrote this afternoon:

He was very much affected by the experience of 9/11 and resented those who wanted to appropriate it for their own purposes, and didn't think that anyone who wasn't there that day could ever understand what it was like to have their whole existence shaken in such a profound way. Like many New Yorkers, he felt quite proprietary about that day and it very much shaped who he was and fueled his passion for blogging. He'd spent most of the morning grumbling online at those he felt could not possibly know what they were talking about.

Steve was unique, and it struck me as odd how someone could be such a pragmatist and a purist at the same time. He was eloquent, fierce, irascible, passionate, brilliant and brave.

I never met him. I had hoped that at some point I could build enough street cred as a blogger to eventually meet up with one of my fellow New York bloggers, even though he is the King of All New York City Blogosphere and I have a readership of about three (and a half). Now I won't get the chance to invite him to a Mets game to talk about politics and military history. That makes me sad.

He was even, to my knowledge, the first blogger to be profiled in the New York Times -- albeit posthumously -- as part of their end-of-year wrap-up for 2007. I reprint it here in its entirety:

Steven Gilliard Jr. | b. 1964
Invisible Blogger
By MATT BAI
Published: December 30, 2007

The sidewalks of Harlem’s main thoroughfares are wide and inviting, and in the 1960s the kids playing “boxball” shared the asphalt squares with some of the greatest orators in creation. The most famous spot for speechifying was the “Speakers’ Corner” outside Lewis Michaux’s bookstore on 125th Street, where Malcolm X delivered his lectures on race and politics. On weekends or after work, fathers took their boys down to the corners in Harlem to watch any number of would-be firebrands engaged in emotional debate over Vietnam or the state of race relations or Bobby Kennedy’s political future.

Steve Gilliard was born into this Harlem and took it all in, but he wouldn’t find his voice on the corners. He was quiet, bookish, overweight. He won entrance to an elite high school, where he passed his time reading obscure military histories, then studied history and journalism at New York University. He found his true calling, though, on the Internet. In 1998, when he was 34, Gilliard joined a new site called NetSlaves.com, whose blogger-reporters chronicled the misadventures of the new high-tech work force, and there he discovered his own kind of incendiary oration. It was by the dim light of a computer screen, rather than on the sunlit corners of Harlem, that Gilliard took to expertly excoriating the moneyed establishment.

By 2003, Gilliard had become one of the first official “guest bloggers” on Daily Kos, then on its way to becoming the most influential of the new liberal political blogs, where he informed his indictments of the Iraq war with detailed references to the British occupation of Mesopotamia. Eventually he created his own site — “Steve was a big personality, and it was clear he needed his own stage,” Daily Kos’s creator, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, later wrote — and became one of a small group of early political bloggers with his own devoted following (and a self-sustaining, if modest, income from ads). On Gilliard’s “News Blog,” along with the partisan attacks on Republicans that made him a hated figure on the conservative blogs, he specialized in applying history to the present day, which made him an unusual and distinctive voice. In 2004, he banged out a remarkable 37-part series, the equivalent of about 200 typed pages, chronicling the foibles of European colonialism.

Though Gilliard, unlike many bloggers, always used his real name, few readers knew much about him. They didn’t know, for instance, that at age 39 he had open-heart surgery to repair an infected valve. They didn’t know he lived alone in a small apartment in East Harlem. And, although Gilliard often wrote about race and alluded to his own perspective, a lot of readers never realized he was black. In the incident that brought him the most infamy, Gilliard acidly attacked Michael Steele, the black Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Maryland in 2006, as a traitor to his race. Black conservatives like Steele infuriated Gilliard, who couldn’t understand how any African-American could support a party that exploited racial prejudice. “I’s Simple Sambo and I’s Running for the Big House,” read Gilliard’s caption, below a doctored photo of Steele as a minstrel. Only after the post earned him headlines in major newspapers and recriminations from politicians of both parties did a lot of readers come to understand that a white man hadn’t written it — although, for Gilliard’s critics, that hardly made it less offensive.

The paradox of Gilliard’s existence is a familiar story on the blogs, where people often adapt avatars that are more like the selves they imagine being. Online, he was vicious and uncompromising. In person, Gilly, as his close friends called him, was reserved and enigmatic. His writing at times betrayed a sense of loneliness and dislocation. In 2000, after seeing the movie “High Fidelity,” he posted on NetSlaves.com a melancholy reflection on life as a geek. “Geeks live in an eternal conflict between their love of topic and love of people,” he wrote. “I wonder if people substitute fascination with things they can control over things they can’t — other people. You start to wonder if you’ve created a world so limited that you can’t really reach beyond it.” He lamented that he didn’t know what it was to “wake up naked in a strange bed,” but, he wrote, “at 35, I’ve figured out that this is it, at least for now. Anything I do, any life I make, is going to revolve around words and computers and strange, bright people.”

It was a life both short and loud. What began with a bad cough just after Valentine’s Day became a spiraling infection that ravaged Gilliard’s vulnerable heart and kidneys, and he spent most of his last four months hospitalized. The identities he kept separate for most of his 42 years collided in the days after he died; the few dozen mostly white bloggers who came to Harlem for the funeral saw for the first time the stark urban setting of Gilliard’s childhood, while his parents and relatives groped to understand what kind of work he had been doing at that computer and why scores of people had come so far to see him off. They must have been confused when Gilly’s online pals, sickened by the way some right-wing bloggers were gloating over his death, advised them not to disclose where he was buried, out of fear that someone might deface the site. The grave, like Gilliard himself, is known only to a few.

I was glad he didn't live to see the Mets collapse in September of 2007. And 2008. I can only wonder what he would have made of the new stadium and the new stadium for that other team from New York. I wonder what he would have made of Michael Steele's rise to prominence. I wonder what he would have made of Barack Hussein Obama.

The obit failed to mention that he hated the Yankees even more than he loved the Mets. So, as driftglass writes in his memorium of Steve at C&L: "...of course, Eff the Effing Yankees. Now and forever."

Disillusionment

by Armadillo Joe

Atrios is a master of the infectious catch-phrase which, in just a few choice words, can circumscribe a whole larger issue and create a useful shorthand for people who are tuned-in to the discussion over the long haul, basically an internal slang or jargon. My latest favorite is, as many of you know, SUPERTRAINS!, but he has others that also become more humorous by repetition. "Document the Atrocities" as a heading for his weekly run-down of the lineups of each Sunday morning's bobblehead shoutfests is funny by (slight) overstatement and "Deep Thought" -- while obviously lifted from the old 90's era SNL skit -- is still funny in that what he posts under it is almost never very deep at first glance, but is always revealing of a darker reality in that snarky way that makes one reconsider their own underlying assumptions and also sneer at the foolish who made the mistake of adopting such assumptions in the first place. Which is what good political (and polemical) humor should do.

The most recent phrase of his that is catching on with all the wannabe Kewl Kidz -- or with me, at least, and soon with others I have no doubt -- is "Hopey, Changey", a riff on Colbert's "Truthiness" and a direct attack on the image of Obama that we all voted for versus the grim reality becoming clearer with every centrist, capitulating, accomodationist move he makes. Whether the banks, the Pentagon or the recent Justice Department decision, just to name a few, he has not yet taken any of the really bold steps we progressives hoped he would when we came to support him, but he has certainly made some very clear moves to make us question who's side he's really on. Some of his defenders will chalk up his concessions to The Reich-Wing as yet another stealthy move in an orante clash of political gamesmanship, a chess-match, his Kung-Fu being unorthodox, but effective. They will argue that he is a victim of Bismark's old saw about politics being the art of the possible, and that he is doing the best he can under extremely difficult circumstances with mighty forces of epic greed and entrenched power ranged against him and that at the end of the day he is just one man and one man can only do so much.

I cannot abide such excuses, though. So far, this is not what I voted for.

However, I cannot align myself with the Washington chattering classes who seem so quick to condemn his presidency as already having failed because he hasn't cured cancer, solved the riddle of the sphinx and brought about world peace forever and ever within his first 100 Days, amen. Those clucking tongues on the Sunday morning talk shows are little more than historical blips, mere gossips hardly consequential to present day much less humankind or The Ages, and history will soon forget them as completely as it forgets the poison tongues of the scolds in the king's court at Versailles, who -- when they are remembered at all -- are recalled only as the height of daft frivolity.

No, despite their carping, I think Obama still has promise simply because, well, I have to. The crystal ball is cloudy, though, and I do think Obama guilty of willfully allowing a mis-perception of his commitment to our lefty vision of America to aid his rise to prominence. I have had a gnawing fear from the time he became the anti-war candidate of choice that he was playing us, "us" being the dyed-in-the-wool lefties and assorted DFH's who hated George W. Bush with the searing passion of a thousand suns because Dubya symbolized everything we hated about our country: the gleeful and willful ignorance, the faux-cowboy "common-man" swagger disguising a true East Coast blue-blood's contempt for "The People", the frat-boy bravado marketed as "charm", the mean-spirited jingoistic stupidity passed off as the One True God of Patriotism, the haughty assumption of American exceptionalism used to sell to the rubes the idea of a protected status for a Ruling Class accustomed to inherited wealth and privilege and the abuses of power that flourish in that rancid culture, the inbred and self-absorbed obtuseness of that privileged class, the brittle Christopathic sanctimony parading as moral superiority...

I could go on, but you get the idea.

Barack Hussein Obama was supposed to be the opposite of all that, the antidote to all that ugliness in the American soul, a one-man redemption tale for a vast and powerful nation both sacred and profane from her humble, violent origins to her highest, most sublime ambitions. He was walking, talking proof to the world -- non-white, urbane, educated and eloquent proof -- that we are not all those people (and you know what I mean) that we are not all those gun-toting, Bible-thumping, inbred, hairy-knuckled, toothless, Dixie flag-waving NASCAR goobers stupid enough to vote for an alcoholic chimpanzee who thinks he talks to god and his Evil Uncle Dick(head)...

...on purpose.

TWICE.

...and yet...

...and yet...

And yet, it is hard not to have that gnawing fear bubble up to the surface of having been suckered by a charming chameleon, the sense that all that Hope and Change stuff was really more Hopey and Changey because he looked so different and sounded so different (straight out of Liberal Central Casting), that maybe, just maybe (I can't believe I'm even typing this) over here on the left side of the dial, our popular image of Barack Obama is as much a projection of our own bleeding heart dreams, our own collective moon-bat aspirations for the country we live in, as unrooted in the reality of the man as were the drooling jebus-freaks' collective washing of the sins of George W. Bush.

If Barack Obama were white and named Barney Oswalt from Illinois and running for office twenty years ago, espousing the exact same positions he does now, he would have been a nameless, vaguely right-of-center Republican with a smattering of liberal positions to assuage his urban constituency and otherwise mired in the anonymous middle of the Reagan coalition.

His casting as a Left Wing Matinee Idol reveals both just how far to the right our nation has devolved since the dark days of Saint Ronnie's Reign of Terror and just how obsessed we have been and remain to this very day with pigmentation vis a vis ancestry. He's black with a funny name, therefore -- in our popularly defined bounds of public discourse -- any pronounced position by Mr. Obama to the left of Attila the Hun makes him a DFH, or sympathetic to the DFH's, which is worse because it means he's willing to turn Jesus' America over to the queers and the uppity wimmin-folk and the nigras and the mooz-luhms and all those scary hippies. Which is why anybody in the GOP with skin slightly darker than week-old milk has to take social and political positions that make Marie Antoinette look like a bleeding-heart.

This DFH can't truck with all of that, though. I like Barack Obama, sometimes I truly love him in a teary-eyed, almost worshipful way -- for instance this past week as he and Michelle represented my country, MY country on the global stage -- because he is the image I want to project to the world; he is a living, breathing symbol of that miscengenating, multi-culti, caramel-colored America I believe in, that American ideal I believe we should and could achieve, or I wouldn't be a liberal. Except that I also see that Obama is frail and human and as much as I hope we are witnessing Obama Kung-Fu with his bank bailout end-runs on behalf of the banksters, his expansion of the Pentagon budget (not the reduction that got sold to the press) and -- worst of all -- his reluctance (and, frankly, I predict his eventual failure) to not only not pursue the Bush Administration for its crimes, but his Justice Department's continuation of the crimes themselves makes me realize that we have in him not only an eloquent, handsome and charming symbol of the promise of America, but of her essential corruption, too.

I'll get over it, I'm sure. Today, however, I am sad.

Earth Hour

guest-posted by Armadillo Joe

I've often said before that being a Rethugli-tard (or a conserva-doofus, generally) is the manifestation of some kind of personality disorder, likely of the sociopathic variety. Something about subscribing to a political philosophy that tells people that they don't have to give a shit about the well-being of other people, especially people who look different or talk different than you -- those people you can actively root for harm to befall them -- but also that you can be as selfish an asshole as you want, drive like a dickhead, act like a glutton and a waste and otherwise simply never, ever sign on for anything that requires group action, because cooperation is wimpy. Hollywood has provided a raft of action flicks to naturally prove this point, because Chuck Norris and Rambo can provide oh so many helpful hints about how to deal with neighbors and co-workers for these arrested adolescents.

You know the type, right? He was that dickhead at the back of the class who, when the poor, beleagured English teacher finally got the class to see past the arcane words into some of the beauty in the poetry of Shakespeare, would rip a fart. He was that piece of shit who, in science class when the teacher finally got some students to understand the basics of reproductive theory, would snicker about penis' and vaginas. He's the douchebag who, when a bunch of people within earshot express how much they liked a particular - say - talky European film, loudly declares that it didn't have enough gun fights in it.

You know the type.

Well, those assholes behave this way when the rest of us try to do something about our global energy predicament (via Bob Cesca):

Last night at 8:30 was Earth Hour when everyone around the world was supposed to turn out their lights for one hour in order to raise awareness of the climate crisis.

But throughout the wingnut blogotubes, they decided to turn on all of their lights as a too-clever way of canceling out Earth Hour. Here's another wingnut who's offering a list of suggestions for how to go about doing this. Utterly brilliant suggestions like:

8. Burn tires

Smart! Your neighbors will enjoy the fumes and odor coming from your hillbilly bonfire.

24. Leave your oven open

And maybe climb in.

34. Turn on your air purifier

An Old Idea

guest posted by Armadillo Joe

I believe very few things are wrong with this current economic situation that can't be solved by installing a guillotine at the corner of Wall Street and Broad.

Because I'm sick of hearing that we're all just supposed to take it. That these overblown payments may be unseemly, but we have to pay them because.... um...

The ugly, unvarnished truth is that we have to pay them because our corporate overlords have said that we have to pay them. We have to pay them because if we don't pay them, the current financial & economic structure will crash to a close because some rich fuck will have to sell one of his houses and maybe his yacht while his bitch of a wife won't get her vacation to the French Riviera this summer and his sociopathic kids might have to hold on to the old Ferrari for an extra year. And the threat of that means that the world's economy must grind to a halt to prevent it.

Especially considering that for many people, the economy has already ground to a halt, that seems like an OK outcome to this dirty fucking hippie. But I find that The Editors have put it rather succinctly, as well:

The problem with close-reading back-and-forths about the fine points of the AIG bonuses is that, however well-intentioned, the AIG bonuses are not The Point. These bonuses, Dubya’s speaking fees, Paris Hilton’s diamond-encrusted dashboard are rounding errors on the $10+ trillion economic clusterfuck, and poor Paris really didn’t help cause it. The Point is that these situations exemplify, for a great many regular people, a fundamental unfairness in American life, which is that the rich get over on everybody else. When times are good, the rich benefit disproportionally. When times are bad, and it’s entirely their fault, they get bailed out by the rest of us. So it goes.

I’m a liberal. I don’t believe in Fairness. Some people are luckier than others, the powerful will get what they want (that’s a fair definition of “power”), none of these asymmetries ever seem to work out in my favor, and I’m pretty sure I’m getting a cold sore. That said, there are degrees of economic inequality, and the last ten years has seen this inequality deliberately exacerbated. It is past time for a pushback. If the AIG outrage is where it starts, then I guess it can start there. I’m not getting bogged down in the details.

We can't make those people be nice or generous or even vaguely human -- no matter how many whiny, self-absorbed editorials they write for the New York Times -- but we don't have to give them our money. Any of it. I would think 80% ownership of AIG would give us some say in who gets paid and who doesn't and, besides, we wouldn't be having this conversation is these assholes were just some low-down, greasy, blue-collar unionized autoworkers. They'd be on their asses, no matter what they'd been promised. Like all the people who no longer have a life's savings because of these guys and guys like these guys. Hey, dudes. Shit happens. "Creative destruction" and "It'll all work out in the long run" and all that other business school claptrap you've been shoveling down our throats for decades. Welcome to the other end of the equation, motherfuckers.

Somebody needs to be made an example of here.

The overlords need to once again become afraid of the people they exploit.

The Great Twitter Experiment

You'll notice a new widget on the right side of my page I've titled, "Tweeting Thoughts." I don't know what can of worms I'm opening with this Twitter thing, and I'm not expecting people to follow my every move, nor am I using Twitter for that purpose. My main intent is to use this application to quickly jot down a thought electronically when the thought just isn't big enough for a fully expanded post. It'll also give me access to my blog when I'm not near my laptop or desktop.

Of course, if you choose to follow me on Twitter, I won't mind.

In the meantime, the look might change occasionally as I experiment with The Twitter. Right now, I have no idea what I'm doing since I'm the type to rip open the box and start playing with gadgets before actually reading instructions.

Tweet! Tweet!

Who the hell is this Fraulein person?

Guest-posted by Fraulein

It was the winter of 2004, and my full-time job was taking care of my newborn baby girl. This was disorienting on many levels, partly because I had been working in a fairly high-stress legal marketing job practically up until the day the nice people at the hospital managed to break my water. I had worked as a professional writer--first as a newspaper and magazine reporter, then later as a corporate communications and marketing writer--nearly non-stop since graduating from college in the early 1990s. Then, suddenly, with the arrival of this new little person, it all came to a screeching halt.

The days of hanging out with my lovely and enchanting Peanut (as I call her on my blog, Purple Ink) were amazingly satisfying in so many ways, but I really missed writing. I especially missed the push and pull of conversation with individuals who did not spend much of the day spitting up on my shoulder. And George W. Bush was giving me nightmares of epic proportions. There's nothing like new parenthood to bring the ills of the world into sharp relief. In those cold, dark days, when many of my fellow Americans still thought the Iraq war was just awesome, I needed people to commiserate with. Even if said commiserating was purely virtual.

And with that, Purple Ink was born. I proposed to write purely what I liked, and to tackle, in no particular order, the topics I was most interested in: motherhood; the sorry state of journalism; literature and pop culture; and the horror that was the Bush regime. Given that I've had to simultaneously juggle parenthood and wife-hood, along with, in the last couple of years, a new full-time job, I've never managed to post on my blog as often as I would if, say, I won the lottery tomorrow. But I keep trying. As with most things in life, I think it's the effort that counts.

Since Carl and I stumbled across each other's thoughts on the Intertubes, we decided we would try a little experiment in cross-posting. I'll be hosting some of his excellent posts on Purple Ink, and some of my stuff will show up here. If you like what you see, give us a shout and let us know!

New Contributors

Blogging is a hard thing. I initially started writing to get things off my chest when my wife refused to listen to what I had to say for fear of being blinded by my rant spittle. It was an outlet; a place where I could relieve my blood pressure.

As time went on, I realized that some people came across my blog, liked what I had to say and started returning on a regular basis. Now there was this added pressure of keeping things fresh. Returning customers are the lifeblood of any establishment, and if patrons stop by for a drink, they're more likely to make their new found watering hole a regular stop as long as my doors are open and I haven't put a "Gone Fishin'" sign in the window every few days.

Over the past two years I have also become accustomed to stopping by for a shot and beer at a couple of sites and have been inspired by the talented barkeeps. Sometimes I got the urge to mix a variation of the drink I had at their place, but they've made the best possible concoction, so there's no need to mess with the ingredients. That is why I've decided to invite a couple of these word mixologists over to my place and serve up a drink or two on occasion. If you like what I serve, I'm sure you'll like what they have to offer.

Look for them soon. But please, no karaoke. That's where I draw the line.

The Addictive Internet

Sorry for the non-blogging day. I was working on this and had internet access problems at work all day. It's amazing how you rely on something and when it's missing the functionality of your day just flies out the window. The tubes are an addiction! I am amazed at how people got along without the internet for so long!

Maybe I'll have more as I catch up on what I've missed today. I did hear about the F-18 crash in San Diego. Holy crap! I wonder what happened? No disrespect to the three people that died in the accident, but could the pilot be the future Republican presidential nominee in 2044?