Vegacura

Blue Monday, RL Burnside edition

2012-02-13T14:10:00.002-05:00

"Don't vote for anyone under 40"

2012-02-12T12:12:00.001-05:00

Ron Paul's supporters show up. And this guy's a pie thrower.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The Flint sit-down strike of 1936/37

2012-02-12T11:03:00.000-05:00

Eric Loomis, in another of his important series on the history of the labor movement in the U.S., notes that yesterday marked the anniversary of what is arguably the most important date in union history. I won't excerpt any of it because the whole thing...you know.

Sick Again

2012-02-11T15:22:00.001-05:00

Some tasty values

2012-02-11T15:18:00.000-05:00

Jesse Singal, subbing at the Political Animal beat, explains why the GOP simply can't resist The Imp of the Perverse.

Obviously, questions of whether and how and why the the Republican Party and the many independent actors that constitute it attempt to exhume certain “values” issues are complicated and multifaceted, especially during primary season.

But on some fundamental level, there have to be a lot of otherwise levelheaded people in the GOP who, when faced with the prospect of wading back into these waters, can’t help but react the same way Homer Simpson did to the Good Morning Burger. As long as you don’t take the time to actually understand public opinion and how it is changing, these issues just look so good, so tasty, so loaded with the rich creamery butter of cultural panic.

Counterpunching

2012-02-04T13:58:00.001-05:00

Some guy at Balloon Juice cautions against too much triumphalism in the wake of the Komen retreat.

But none of this will change the fact that the Republican party’s policy and message are increasingly alienating to everyone who’s not a white, straight, Tebow-fearing, older man. If anything, the Republicans’ ability to drive their message is only speeding the process up. Steve M:

This right-wing wealth machine is formidable. We won’t really have a democracy as long as such a thing can have the undue influence it has on our politics. I’m not sure our side can beat it—the best we can hope is that it beats itself. And, given the uglier nature of the GOP primaries, which really should be effectively over by now but aren’t, maybe that’s precisely what’s happening.

It doesn’t feel so good to admit that there is no chance to advance progressive policy at the national level for the foreseeable future (though as someone who thinks ACA is the most important progressive legislation of my lifetime, I don’t feel that bad about this). It would be great if Democrats could throw our country a life-line, but probably the best we can do right now is throw the Republicans an anvil.

Ben Gazzara

2012-02-04T13:44:00.002-05:00

RIP

Another sign of the impending collapse of Western Civilization

2012-02-04T10:35:00.000-05:00

The Super-Combined is in peril.

Known as the super combi, it is composed of one downhill run, usually held in the morning, followed by an afternoon slalom run. The event was introduced to the World Cup in 2006, but it might not exist beyond next season. The notion to scrap the super combined was initially raised last season but resurfaced at meetings last month at which World Cup ski racing’s governing body discussed eliminating the event over the next few years. The competition schedule for 2012-13 was released last spring, and it features only one super-combined race.

The proposed calendar for next season will be confirmed this spring.

Some skiers and coaches say the event offers an unfair advantage to slalom skiers, is boring to watch and diminishes the battle for the World Cup overall title, which measures a skier’s performance over the season and is the sport’s top prize.

Super-combined supporters, like Ivica Kostelic, a Croatian skier who leads the men’s World Cup super-combined and overall standings, argue otherwise. They also worry that if the World Cup eliminated the event, the Olympics might follow, taking away a medal event.

“Nowadays, the Olympics are getting bigger and bigger and we have more and more sports,” Kostelic said. “Soon there will be medals for snowman making and snowball fights. We must fight that we don’t lose this medal at the Olympics, and that’s why we need to have combined on the World Cup.”

Pink Ribbon Inc.

2012-02-02T17:01:00.000-05:00

Remarkable timing, I'd say.

Pink'd

2012-02-01T19:15:00.001-05:00

The Susan G. Komen foundation has been itching to box out Planned Parenthood for some time.

According to Jezebel's Erin Gloria Ryan, however, the influence of another key player in the Komen organization goes a long way in explaining its decision to defund: Karen Handel, who ran for governor of Georgia in 2010 and lost, despite an endorsement by none other than Sarah Palin, has been Komen's senior vice president for public policy since April 2011. On her campaign blog (fire up the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine because, curiously, these pages don't exist anymore), Handel wrote: "I will be a pro-life governor who will work tirelessly to promote a culture of life in Georgia. ... I believe that each and every unborn child has inherent dignity, that every abortion is a tragedy, and that government has a role, along with the faith community, in encouraging women to choose life in even the most difficult of circumstances. ...since I am pro-life, I do not support the mission of Planned Parenthood."

Handel even "promised to eliminate funding for breast and cervical cancer screenings provided by" Planned Parenthood, according to Jezebel.

What I find interesting is, what are they thinking? In all likelihood, very few anti-choice advocates were even aware of the relationship between Komen and Planned Prnthd, and very few pro-choice advocates were aware of the deep connection between Komen's leadership and anti-choice. Speaking for the latter, this long time supporter is now I am aware and can find other cancer research foundations that align more closely with my support for women's health.

Bain Man

2012-02-01T14:34:00.002-05:00

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Jonathan Macey

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

The Daily Show on Facebook

Watch the whole interview if you get a chance.

Justice Ginsburg will be 79 years young

2012-01-31T20:15:00.000-05:00

Another example of how vast the "dime's worth of difference" is in this election -- Dahlia Lithwick points out how crucial this election is. If a Republican wins, he will have the opportunity to turn a right-leaning Supreme Court into the most solidly conservative one in a hundred years. If you don't like corporations being equated with "people," if you think money is not the same thing as "speech," then this election should matter very much to you.

For anyone considering the 2012 election’s importance to the future of the American judiciary, one fact stands out: next November, Ruth Bader Ginsburg will be seventy-nine years old. If a Republican wins the presidential election, he or she may have an opportunity to seat Ginsburg’s successor, replacing the Supreme Court’s most reliably liberal jurist with a conservative. That would mean that the Court—currently balanced almost elegantly between four liberals, four conservatives, and the moderate conservative Anthony Kennedy—would finally tilt decisively to the right, thereby fulfilling Edwin Meese’s dream, laid out in his famous 1985 speech before the American Bar Association, of reshaping the Court around one coherent “jurisprudence of original intention.” Meese, who was then Ronald Reagan’s attorney general, wanted nine conservative constitutional originalists on the Court. He may soon get his wish. A 2008 study by Richard Posner, a federal appeals court judge, and William Landes, a law professor at the University of Chicago, examined the voting records of seventy years of Supreme Court justices in order to rank the forty-three justices who have served on the Court since 1937. They concluded that four of the five most conservative justices to serve on the Supreme Court since 1937 sit on the Supreme Court today. Justice Clarence Thomas ranked first.

Read, ya know, the whole thing. If there is one thing both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have failed to do in their administrations, it is matching the focus on the courts -- both the Supreme and the Appellate courts -- that Reagan and the two Bushes exhibited. And we are a poorer, less equal, and less free as a result.

He'll drink Mitt's milkshake, or something

2012-01-31T09:49:00.001-05:00

Blue Monday, Sonny Boy Williamson edition

2012-01-30T09:21:00.002-05:00

In today's Bad Dirty Harry Sequel news...

2012-01-29T12:03:00.001-05:00

This is just very weird.

The officer was manning a DUI checkpoint when the shooting occurred shortly after 1 a.m. He was declared dead after emergency surgery at Marian Medical Center, Santa Maria police Chief Danny Macagni said in a statement.

The officer, a four-year Santa Maria department veteran, had just learned of the internal investigation of an alleged sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl, and it became necessary to arrest him immediately, Macagni said.

"We had no choice," Macagni said in video of an afternoon news conference posted by KCOY-TV. He said investigators had evidence "that demanded that we go out and take this officer off the street immediately."

Supervising officers were sent to make a felony arrest, but he struggled with them when they arrived, first putting up a physical fight, then firing his gun but hitting no one, Macagni said.

"He chose to resist, he drew his weapon, a fight ensued, he fired his weapon," the chief said.

Several officers came to help the police making the arrest, and one of them shot the suspected officer in the chest once, Macagni said.

Detectives had begun investigating the alleged relationship on Thursday night, and minutes before the shooting had confirmed that an "inappropriate" and "very explicit" relationship had been going on, Macagni said.

He said he could not give details because of the sensitivity of the investigation, but "there was some witness intimidation involved" and the arrest couldn't wait for a more proper time or place.

"The information that we had in hand demanded that we not let him leave that scene, get in a car, drive somewhere, it would put the public at risk," Macagni said at the news conference. "We just did not know what was going to happen, we did not expect him to react the way that he did."

The sand and the sea is the life for me

2012-01-27T08:12:00.002-05:00

It was a great, great run

2012-01-24T15:32:00.002-05:00

Me can has sad.

Your browser does not support iframes.

You wonder, watching that video, what Derek is thinking as even he must be contemplating his own speech. Somehow, I think Mariano Rivera, The Greatest Closer of All Time™, also in the audience, is probably more at peace with that inevitable future.

Jorge's career line: .273/.374/.474

More than anything, he can and should be mentioned among the legendary Yankee catchers: Berra, Dickie, and most of all, the late Thurmon Munson.

Don't be a stranger, Jorge.

Blue Monday, Joe Cocker edition

2012-01-23T19:30:00.001-05:00

Not very bluesy, but...whatever. Everything I know about dancing, I learned from Joe Cocker.

And Jesus walked with dinosaurs

2012-01-23T19:20:00.001-05:00

Seems Tennessee teahadists want to clean up our messy history.

Tennessee teabaggers are growing tired of being corrected by their fifth-grade relatives every darn time they get a notion to holler some about how Thomas Jefferson was human history’s inventor of freedom — maybe it’s time to LEVEL THE PLAYING FIELD, HMMM KIDS? The state’s tea party leadership made an indignant request to the state legislature demanding schools quit teaching children that the Founding Fathers owned slaves or killed Indians or made any mistakes whatsoever at any time, which they expressed with a statement notable firstly for its losing battle with grammar and syntax: “We seek to compel the teaching of students in Tennessee the truth regarding the history of our nation and the nature of its government.” It has sort of a drunk Yoda ring to it, no? “Compel to teach the truth the students we will!” And then it’s pretty much downhill from there.

From the Commercial Appeal:

Fayette County attorney Hal Rounds, the group’s lead spokesman during the news conference, said the group wants to address “an awful lot of made-up criticism about, for instance, the founders intruding on the Indians or having slaves or being hypocrites in one way or another.

“The thing we need to focus on about the founders is that, given the social structure of their time, they were revolutionaries who brought liberty into a world where it hadn’t existed, to everybody — not all equally instantly — and it was their progress that we need to look at,” said Rounds, whose website identifies him as a Vietnam War veteran of the Air Force and FedEx retiree who became a lawyer in 1995.

"Intruding on the Indians?" "Not all equally instantly?" It's a process, man, it's a process.

McCarthy's proud descendant

2012-01-22T13:39:00.001-05:00

I think Barney Frank gets it about right.

You recently said about Newt Gingrich: “He’s just one of the worst people I know of who didn’t commit violence on somebody.” Did he kill your dog?
He transformed American politics from one in which people presume the good will of their opponents, even as they disagreed, into one in which people treated the people with whom they disagreed as bad and immoral. He was a kind of McCarthy-ite who succeeded.

Yep.

Pretty sure Mittens can't do this

2012-01-20T16:23:00.000-05:00

Etta James

2012-01-20T12:32:00.001-05:00

It's a blue Friday. This should help you feel alright.

Yes, Virginia, there are racists

2012-01-19T20:11:00.002-05:00

Newt Gingrich is not employing a dog whistle, he's using an air raid siren.

Ta-Nehisi Coates provides the appropriate response.

When a professor of history calls Barack Obama a "Food Stamp President," it isn't a mistake to be remedied through clarification; it is a statement of aggresion [sic]. And when a crowd of his admirers cheer him on, they are neither deluded, nor in need of forgiveness, nor absolution, nor acting against their interest. Racism is their interest. They are not your misguided friends. They are your fully intelligent adversaries, sporting the broad range of virtue and vice we see in humankind. If you are a praying person, you should pray for their electoral destruction in November. Surely they are praying for yours:

Let his days be few; and let another take his office
May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow.
May his children be wandering beggars; may they be driven from their ruined homes.
May a creditor seize all he has; may strangers plunder the fruits of his labor.
May no one extend kindness to him or take pity on his fatherless children.

Newt Gingrich coined "The Moment" on Martin Luther King's birthday. Real racists do real things.

These people are scum. They have been for decades. It doesn't matter if it's Joe Wilson's "you lie" howl at the State of the Union address, Romney's waxing poetic for an era before women and brown people had rights, or Newt's sneering "food stamp president."* And if we are truly honest with ourselves, we will see that so too are the people to whom they pander, whether the panderer is George Wallace, Ronald Reagan, or Newt Leroy Gingrich. If that doesn't matter to you, then believe that Ron Paul is a greater believer in civil liberties than is Barack Obama or that a dime's difference between the two parties is a reason not to register and vote.

* With the trifecta of attacking the working poor, African Americans, and the current POTUS, all in one "intellectual" phrase. If he could have ~~beaten up~~ made fun of a gay veteran on stage, he'd be the GOP nominee already.

Blue Monday, Papa Staples edition

2012-01-16T10:27:00.002-05:00

Grand Ol' Wingnuttery

2012-01-13T19:32:00.000-05:00

Think the venom Obama has to deal with is new? Think again.

So Crow was insane. But he was also by no means atypical of the venom spewing Republicans of the 1940s. We think of Obama facing some uniquely crazy Republican opposition but it’s not so original. This kind of hackery goes back a long ways. Of course, the Republican Party of the 1940s had more than just crazies, and that’s why Crow hated Morse so much. But add a little geographical realignment to the mix and it’s not hard to see how complete wingnuttery would come to take over the entire Republican Party.

The Republican party of the 1940s had been completely out of power for more than a decade, feeding the frenzy of their impotent hatred. But that rising bile would eventually weaken the Democratic party in ways we're still feeling today. It started with Yalta where FDR "lost Europe" to Stalin, and reached it's apotheosis when Truman and the "China hands lost China," when China was not ours to lose. There was a direct line from there to Joe McCarthy and disastrous foreign policy decisions in Asia by administrations terrified of "losing" first Korea than Vietnam.

For Mittens

2012-01-12T19:55:00.002-05:00

A room of one's own

2012-01-12T19:49:00.002-05:00

Ssssshhh. Quiet, please.

Blue Monday, Death of Sonny Boy Williamson edition

2012-01-09T08:23:00.001-05:00

Whiskey Bar

2012-01-06T19:57:00.000-05:00

A dime's worth of difference

2012-01-06T19:42:00.001-05:00

I don't subscribe to the notion, but if you believe in the Nadarite (or, perhaps, Paulite) view of the two parties, then this is an absolutely must-read post from Digby. In it, that partisan apologist for the Democratic party, Noam Chomsky, explains that even a small difference between the two parties makes a huge difference -- for civil rights, for the environment, for a modicum of economic justice -- over time.

About that dime? Well, as Einstein was said to have replied when asked to name the greatest invention of mankind, "compound interest."

Amber waves of greed

2012-01-03T19:38:00.002-05:00

Irony is dead. We know that, don't we, Dear Reader? So it will be no surprise that Romney is using "America the Beautiful" as his latest campaign prop.

Lynn Sherr, the ABC News correspondent and the author of a book about the song, wrote that Bates “wanted to purify America’s great wealth, to channel what she had originally called ‘selfish gain’ into more noble causes.” Bates later rewrote the stanza into its current version, unrecited by Mr. Romney today:
America! America!
May God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness
And every gain divine!
Bates’ revulsion at the inequality and corruption she saw around her was shared by many others who became the core of the Progressive Movement. President Obama has lately begun to channel that movement, invoking the spirit of its greatest champion, Theodore Roosevelt. Given his positions, he has a better claim to the spirit of the song than does Mr. Romney, who appears to have no problem with inequality.

Ya think?

2012-01-03T19:34:00.000-05:00

Who could've predicted the reaction to the nation's first brown president?

As Charles Piarce would say, "This is your democracy. Cherish it."

Reality bites

2012-01-02T15:40:00.000-05:00

Watching Eric Cantor ooze unctuousness on "60 Minutes" last night was hard to take, but this exchange was fascinating:

Stahl: But you know, your idol, as I’ve read anyway, was Ronald Reagan. And he compromised.

Cantor: He never compromised his principles.

Stahl: Well, he raised taxes and it was one of his principles not to raise taxes.

Cantor: Well, he — he also cut taxes.

Stahl: But he did compromise —

Cantor: Well I —

Steve Benen explains what happens next.

At that point, Cantor’s press secretary, off camera, interrupted the interview, yelling that Stahl was lying when she said Reagan raised taxes. As Stahl told “60 Minutes” viewers, “There seemed to be some difficulty accepting the fact that even though Ronald Reagan cut taxes, he also pushed through several tax increases, including one in 1982 during a recession.”

Let’s call “some difficulty” a dramatic understatement.

Unfortunately for Cantor and his press secretary, reality is stubborn. The facts are indisputable: in Ronald Reagan’s first term, he signed off on a series of tax increases — even when unemployment was nearing 11% — and proceeded to raise taxes seven out of the eight years he was in office. The truth is, “no peacetime president has raised taxes so much on so many people” as Reagan.

SOPA what?

2012-01-02T11:26:00.001-05:00

David Carr explains SOPA legislation, why it matters, and why legislators shouldn't legislate things of which they're proud of their ignorance.

The debate has highlighted how little Congress knows about the Internet they are proposing to re-tool. In a piece often cited on the Web, the computer culture journalist Joshua Kopstein watched the debate in Congress in which members bragged about their online ignorance, and he wrote an open letter on the technology Web site Motherboard titled, “Dear Congress, It’s No Longer O.K. to Not Know How the Internet Works.”

Whether they know what they are doing or not, lawmakers seem intent on moving forward.
Congressional supporters of piracy legislation have been in a big hurry because the Web is starting to come alive with opposition — nearly 90,000 Tumblr users have phoned members of Congress and more than a million people have signed an online petition protesting the legislation.

Last week, in a much talked about blog post, Declan McCullagh of CNet speculated that even though big Web companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook are outgunned in terms of political connections, they have the capability to turn their sites into billboards denouncing SOPA and utilizing their close, constant relationship with consumers.

I like my movies (and music and television) as much as the next couch potato, probably more. And I wouldn’t steal content for any reason, in part because I make a living generating a fair amount of it. But it’s worth remembering that the film industry initially opposed the video cassette recorder and the introduction of DVDs, platforms that became very lucrative businesses for them and remarkable conveniences for the rest of us.

It's worth a read.

Blue Monday, Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash edition

2012-01-02T11:12:00.000-05:00

Just auld

2011-12-30T11:36:00.002-05:00

It wasn't new years until Bill Graham said it was new years.

Voting rights

2011-12-29T11:48:00.002-05:00

Jeffrey Toobin praises Eric Holder's defense of the right to vote for all Americans, including non-Republicans.

This is a chance for Holder to define his legacy as Attorney General—as something more than the guy who tried, and failed, to have Guantánamo Bay detainees tried in federal court in New York. There is a purity, a simplicity, about the voting-rights fight that is sadly absent from many modern civil-rights battles. This is not about special privileges, or quotas, or even complex mathematical formulae. It’s about a basic right of American citizenship, which is being taken from large numbers of people for the most cynical of reasons. The laws are, quite literally, indefensible—so Holder ought to make the states that have them try to defend them. That would be a legacy that would make any Attorney General, and any American, proud.

Read, as they say on the Intubes, the whole thing.

Ron Paul cares about some civil liberties for some people

2011-12-29T10:25:00.000-05:00

Yes, Glenn Greenwald has just pushed it to 11 on his amp of assholeness.

And, yeah, this just depresses the shit out of me.

Oppel’s suggests these “clean-up” rules were inspired by the recent experience of Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign, whose youthful orange-hatted pierced-and-tatted volunteers allegedly freaked out Iowans. But the best precedent actually goes a lot further back: the “Clean for Gene” slogan of student volunteers for Eugene McCarthy in New Hampshire in 1968.

If I were advising the Paul campaign, I’d suggest a few other rules for their kiddie corps, such as hiding their dog-eared copies of Atlas Shrugged and learning to change the subject when voters ask about the candidate’s views on foreign policy. But in any event, it’s interesting, and a bit depressing, too see the experience of yesterday’s youthful lefties being put to the service of a cause in which both McCarthy and Dean would be thought of as among the Slavedrivers of Collectivism.

I know, Dear Reader, you know this, but just in case someone came in here via the Google: In Ron Paul's world, pot should be legalized, vaginas should not, and slaveholding is just ok as long as The State isn't involved.

Please go back to what you were doing. Over.

Pity our gaultian overlords

2011-12-28T15:13:00.000-05:00

A new feature we're considering for this arid wasteland of a blog: The weekly "Those Who Should be Shunned."

This week's nominees -- The Mortgage Bankers Association.

Paying your debts is, as a rule, a good thing. But the double standard here is obvious and offensive. Homeowners are getting lambasted for doing what companies do on a regular basis. Walking away from real-estate obligations in particular is common in the corporate world, and real-estate developers are notorious for abandoning properties that no longer make economic sense. Sometimes the hypocrisy is staggering: last winter, the Mortgage Bankers Association—the very body whose president attacked defaulters for betraying their families and their communities—got its creditors to let it do a short sale of its headquarters, dumping it for thirty-four million dollars less than the value of the building’s mortgage.

The unbearable lightness of the 1%

2011-12-27T09:57:00.000-05:00

Doesn't Vlad Putin sound familiar?

MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin said Tuesday that the protest movement mobilized this month by angry voters is directionless and lacks competent leaders, summing up the protesters’ mindset with a phrase coined by squabbling Marxists: “The movement is everything, the ultimate goal is nothing.”

Maybe he should link up with the "pinstriped Pinochet of Zuccotti Park" and form a third party.

Calling Mittens on it

2011-12-23T18:36:00.000-05:00

We all have seen just how easily lying comes to Mitt Romney. It is nice to see the Obama campaign call him on it. Take it away, Joe.

Romney appears satisfied to settle for an economy in which fewer people succeed, while the majority of Americans are left to tread water or fall behind. His proposal would actually double down on the policies that caused the greatest economic calamity since the Great Depression and accelerated a decades-long assault on the middle class.

Romney also misleadingly suggests that the president and I are creating an “Entitlement Society,” whereby government provides everything for its people without regard to merit, as opposed to what he calls an “Opportunity Society,” where everything is merit-based and every man is left to fend for himself.

The only entitlement we believe in is an America where if you work hard, you can get ahead.

Cheers

2011-12-23T11:28:00.002-05:00

I dunno. Seemed festive.

Things I learned today listening to NPR

2011-12-20T21:36:00.004-05:00

House Republicans take their marching orders from President Obama and they are very concerned that we've hurt the feelings of the Prime Minister of Canada.

Blue Monday, Tom Waits edition

2011-12-19T20:00:00.000-05:00

The great gig in the sky

2011-12-16T13:03:00.002-05:00

Christopher Hitchens, RIP.

And Paul Campos captures the irony beautifully.

That Christopher Hitchens died on the very day that marked the official end of the U.S. war in Iraq is the kind of coincidence that would have led the ever-ironical Argentine to remark upon the mysterious ways of the God with whom Hitchens so famously quarreled.

Read the whole thing about Hitchens' meeting with Jorge Luis Borges.

Charlie Savage contracts a case of journamalism

2011-12-14T10:01:00.000-05:00

I generally admire Charlie Savage's reporting, but this is a classic -- and egregious -- example of "he said/she said" false equivalency.

This year, more than a dozen states enacted new voting restrictions. For example, eight — Alabama, Kansas, Mississippi, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin — imposed new laws requiring voters to present state-issued photo identification cards. Previously voters were able to use other forms of identification, like bank statements, utility bills and Social Security cards.

Proponents of such restrictions — mostly Republicans — say they are necessary to prevent voter fraud that could cancel out the choices of legitimate participants. Opponents — mostly Democrats — say there is no evidence of meaningful levels of fraud and contend that the measures are a veiled effort to suppress participation by hundreds of thousands of eligible voters who lack a driver’s license.

My emphasis.

Really, Charlie. You couldn't have done a little bit of reporting to see whose claims are actually borne out by the evidence. Perhaps you could have looked to your own newspaper for some help on this.

Willard "Mitt" Romney takes a stand!

2011-12-13T10:06:00.004-05:00

Two, in fact. Channeling the KKK. Offending a Vietnam War vet.

Blue Monday, Jerry and Sara Garcia edition

2011-12-12T18:03:00.002-05:00

The panic of the "GOP elites"

2011-12-10T16:13:00.001-05:00

Charles "national treasure" Pearce explains the sudden loathing for Newton Leroy Gingrich.

It did not begin with Newt, god knows. Edmund Burke is a couple of centuries astern, boys. Modern American conservative intellectual history began in the 1964 presidential election and in the organized white-supremacist resistance to the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement. It is western and southern, not Oxbridgian, and it is the love child of Barry Goldwater and George Wallace. Small wonder that one of its presiding characteristics has been a decidedly un-Burkean nastiness, and a proud anti-intellectualism that would have made Richard Hofstadter wish he died as a trial. I'm old enough to remember the NCPAC campaigns, run by a vicious closet case named Terry Dolan. Will and Krauthammer were just coming into their glory then, and I don't remember them being particularly critical of the campaigns that rid the Senate of George McGovern and Frank Church. This was the precursor protein in the brain that eventually would become inflamed with Gingrichitis. It progressed through the work Lee Atwater did for the first George Bush and the work Karl Rove did for the second one, the former just as Newt was coming to power and the latter after he'd slunk away from it for a spell. It was all there, waiting for someone to put it all together in one place — namely, his wallet. Finally, the Hour of the Newt was at hand.

Where were the complaints about his intellectual shortcomings in 1994? Where was the concern that he was leading the Republicans down a dark and lonely road where monsters be? My god, go back and read the coverage of his ascension to the Speakership. Read what "the Republican establishment" said about his political savvy and his mighty intellect. Most of it makes the Gospel of John read like H.L. Mencken.

"This was going green 1949-style, bitch, believe that"

2011-12-10T15:50:00.001-05:00

Ice Cube gives us a tour of Eames House in L.A.

Via LGM.

This is the end

2011-12-09T10:34:00.001-05:00

Re-internment camps

2011-12-07T16:19:00.001-05:00

It's a day to Nevah Fuget that 70 years ago infamous Asians attacked us at Pearl Harbor.

Howlin' for my darlin

2011-12-06T09:49:00.001-05:00

Oh, why the hell not?

Hubert Sumlin, 1931-2011

2011-12-06T09:38:00.001-05:00

Very few have been as influential.

Mr. Sumlin began appearing on Howlin’ Wolf’s recordings in 1953, first as a rhythm guitarist and then, beginning in 1955, on lead guitar. Mr. Sumlin’s eerie guitar counterpart to Howlin’ Wolf’s unearthly moaning on the 1956 hit “Smokestack Lightnin’ ” has lately been featured in a television commercial for Viagra. He also played lead on “Back Door Man,” “Spoonful” and “The Red Rooster,” all written and arranged by the Chicago blues trailblazer Willie Dixon.

“Dixon’s often astute novelty lyrics and shrewd arrangements were topped off by Sumlin’s imaginative, angular, taut attack, frequent glisses, maniacally wide vibrato and percussive chords, all drawn with an exaggerated brush,” the producer Dick Shurman observed of Mr. Sumlin’s relentlessly inventive playing in his liner notes to a 1991 boxed set of Howlin’ Wolf’s work for Chess Records.

“Back Door Man,” “Spoonful” and “The Red Rooster” were later made even more famous in versions released, respectively, by the Doors, Cream and the Rolling Stones. All three originally appeared on Howlin’ Wolf’s 1962 LP “Howlin’ Wolf,” which the critic Greil Marcus called “the finest of all Chicago blues albums,” largely because of Mr. Sumlin’s contribution.
Though at times tempestuous, Mr. Sumlin’s partnership with Howlin’ Wolf lasted until the singer’s death in 1976. Mr. Sumlin’s intuitive, empathetic accompaniment typically spurred his mentor to unpredictable and frenzied heights.

Speaking of their collaborations in a 1989 interview with Living Blues magazine, Mr. Sumlin said: “Hubert was Wolf, Wolf was Hubert. I got to where I knew what he wanted before he asked for it, because I could feel the man.”

Blue Monday, Neil Young edition

2011-12-05T10:39:00.001-05:00

2012 stupid

2011-12-02T11:18:00.001-05:00

We are obviously starting the informed discussion for 2012.

Blue Monday, Rev. Gary Davis edition

2011-11-28T09:27:00.001-05:00

Fear and self-loathing

2011-11-23T18:55:00.002-05:00

Progressives probably won't be giving thanks to the most successful Democratic administration in a decade, one that led the passage of universal health care, the Dodd-Frank reform of Wall St. (not totally toothless, despite the best effort of Republicans and a Blue Dog or two), the Lily Ledbetter act, and on and on. All of this against a tidal wave of Republican opposition.

Jon Chait explains why liberal dissatisfaction with their very own is nothing new.

Why are liberals so desperately unhappy with the Obama presidency?

There are any number of arguments about things Obama did wrong. Some of them are completely misplaced, like blaming Obama for compromises that senators forced him to make. Many of them demand Obama do something he can’t do, like Maddow’s urging the administration to pass an energy bill through a special process called budget reconciliation—a great-sounding idea except for the fact that it’s against the rules of the Senate. Others castigate Obama for doing something he did not actually do at all (i.e., Drew Westen’s attention-grabbing, anguished New York Times essay assailing Obama for signing a budget deal with cuts to Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid that were not actually in the budget in question).

I spend a lot of time rebutting these arguments, and their proponents spend a lot of time calling me an Obama apologist.

Some of the complaints are right, and despite being an Obama apologist, I’ve made quite a few of them myself. (The debt-ceiling hostage negotiations drove me to distraction.) But I don’t think any of the complaints—right, wrong, or otherwise—really explain why liberals are so depressed.

Here is my explanation: Liberals are dissatisfied with Obama because liberals, on the whole, are incapable of feeling satisfied with a Democratic president. They can be happy with the idea of a Democratic president—indeed, dancing-in-the-streets delirious—but not with the real thing. The various theories of disconsolate liberals all suffer from a failure to compare Obama with any plausible baseline. Instead they compare Obama with an imaginary president—either an imaginary Obama or a fantasy version of a past president.

So, what if we compare Obama with a real alternative? Not to Republicans—that’s too easy—but to Democratic presidents as they lived and breathed?

Read the whole...ahem...thing.

Something to be thankful for

2011-11-23T15:35:00.002-05:00

People like Seanna Sharpe and Savage Skinner!

Aerialist Seanna Sharpe 285 Feet Over The Williamsburg Bridge from Ronen V on Vimeo.

This is an example of how the Beautiful can evoke an unbelievably emotional response, at least for me. Doesn't happen very often.

Via TNC.

"Thank God for the rain to wash the trash off the sidewalk.."

2011-11-22T11:44:00.003-05:00

Bobo finds his inner Travis Bickle.

Oye Como Va

2011-11-18T09:54:00.000-05:00

Lose, Lions, lose

2011-11-18T09:25:00.002-05:00

They can get away with a lot, but making fun of their own team just won't do.

According to Michael Samuels, a Stanford senior who plays the tree in that school’s infamous band, the song ridiculing the team was a breach of band etiquette. “I’m glad Columbia’s band found a way to make going to football games more enjoyable for themselves — I sure know I wouldn’t want to go watch my team give up 62 points to Cornell — but have some pride in your school and respect for your players,” Samuels said in an e-mail.
“Also, if you are going to be ‘irreverent,’ at least be funny. Our band would never come up with such profoundly obvious and uninspired lyrics like ‘We always lose, lose, lose; by a lot, and sometimes by a little.’ ”

Ooh, snap.

Negotiating with ourselves

2011-11-05T15:44:00.004-04:00

From the annals of "Who could have ever predicted?"

WASHINGTON — As pessimism mounted this week over the ability of a bipartisan Congressional committee to agree on a deficit-reduction plan, lawmakers began taking steps to head off the large cuts in Pentagon spending that would automatically result from the panel’s failure.

Members of both parties and both chambers said they increasingly feared that the 12-member committee would be unable to bridge deep partisan divisions and find $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction as required under the law that raised the debt ceiling and created the committee in the summer.

As talks sputtered, one panel member publicly lamented that the process was not working, and the group was chastised by a bipartisan group of budget experts at a public hearing for failing to show progress. Several members of Congress, especially Republicans on the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, are readying legislation that would undo the automatic across-the-board cuts totaling nearly $500 billion for military programs, or exchange them for cuts in other areas of the federal budget.

Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, has drafted a bill that would replace the military reductions that would occur under a process known in Congress as sequestration with 5 percent cuts to other, unspecified parts of the federal budget, and a 10 percent decrease in pay for members of Congress. In the House, similar measures are being assembled.

“If the joint select committee does not do what it needs to do,” said Representative K. Michael Conaway, a Texas Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, “most of us will move heaven and earth to find an alternative that prevents a sequester from happening.”

After listening to dire predictions by the Joint Chiefs of Staff about the effects of automatic cuts, Representative John Garamendi, Democrat of California, was even more blunt. “The sequester will never take place,” he said. “It’s not going to happen.”

The richest Americans and the Pentagon brass need not worry. Nothing can be asked of them. In fact, should a Republican win the election, they will be showered with even more largesse.

Beryl Davis, 1924-2011

2011-11-04T09:18:00.001-04:00

When the German air force began its blitz in 1940, Ms. Davis’s clear, pure singing style at the front of a jazz group that included the pianist George Shearing and the violinist Stéphane Grappelli, was already familiar to BBC listeners, and to London clubgoers.
She later said leaving the city had never occurred to her. “We just learned to handle the pressure,” she told Richard Grudens for “Jukebox Saturday Night,” his 1999 book about the big-band era. “I would have to be down at the BBC, who had me under contract, at odd hours of the night. Bombs would be dropping, and you just did your best to dodge them.”
She added, “If you didn’t dodge them, well, that was that, you know.”

7 years of lean

2011-11-02T19:26:00.001-04:00

Um, oh shit. PIMCO co-founder Bill Gross goes all Biblical on us.

Herman Cains economic plan covers everything!

2011-11-02T19:07:00.004-04:00

Madame Cura tells me that when asked if allegations of "inappropriate conduct" were true, he replied,

"Nein, nein, nein!"

All that said, the fact that Cain's "travails" have resurrected Ann Man Coulter from whatever mouldering grave she's been lying in for the past few years is just too damn cool.

Charles Pearce understands why Coulter may consider certain "blacks" to be "hers."

Bllue Monday, Merle Haggard edition

2011-10-31T09:12:00.001-04:00

December? Hell...October's bad enough.

Swift boat rising

2011-10-29T14:06:00.002-04:00

Charles Pearce wonders where the "serious Republicans were in 2004.

In 2004, as part of the general campaign to re-elect George W. Bush, there was an organized campaign to cast doubt upon — and, ultimately, to smear recklessly — the undeniable heroism shown by Democratic candidate John Kerry during his time as a Naval officer in Vietnam. Entire books were written promoting this slander. Prominent pundits — most notably, the execrable Michelle Malkin's visit to Hardball — went on television to mainstream vicious nonsense. At the Republican National Convention, delegates wore cute little Purple Heart band-aids to mock Kerry's wounds. The whole thing was despicable, and that's being enormously kind.

Make no mistake. Swift Boatism is different from birtherism only in two ways. First, the target is obviously different. But, second, and most important, there was serious money behind Swift Boatism and there is little behind birtherism. (In Republican campaigns, the difference between an "issue" and a "distraction" is whether the Koch Brothers have busted out the checkbook yet.) And those are the only two differences between the two. They are equally nasty. They are equally truthless calumnies. They are equally the product of the fevered hive mind of the conservative Republican base.

"Serious Republicans" have been slinging this shit for half a century. Calling birtherism a "distraction" now is a typical Republican habit of denying the facts of their very existence.

Via Balloon Juice.

Wildwood flower

2011-10-28T09:42:00.001-04:00

Blood and teeth on the floor

2011-10-28T09:35:00.003-04:00

Best comment to the latest Mass GOP video:

Also too: Leave it to the GOP to make their opponents sound really cool. Matriach of Mayhem? She should get a cape.

Elizabeth Warren should be paying her opponents for these fantastic videos.

Blue Monday, Ray Charles edition

2011-10-24T09:24:00.001-04:00

With bonus psychedelics.

It's Ted Kennedy's fault

2011-10-22T16:00:00.003-04:00

As John Cole points out, Joe Nocero (following his epic performance in snarking those who think fracking may not be a great thing for the environment), has officially become a villager in good standing.

The rejection of a Supreme Court nominee is unusual but not unheard of (see Clement Haynsworth Jr.). But rarely has a failed nominee had the pedigree — and intellectual firepower — of Bork. He had been a law professor at Yale, the solicitor general of the United States and, at the time Ronald Reagan tapped him for the court, a federal appeals court judge.
Moreover, Bork was a legal intellectual, a proponent of original intent and judicial restraint. The task of the judge, he once wrote, is “to discern how the framers’ values, defined in the context of the world they knew, apply to the world we know.” He said that Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion, was a “wholly unjustifiable judicial usurpation” of authority that belonged to the states, that the court’s recent rulings on affirmative action were problematic and that the First Amendment didn’t apply to pornography.

Whatever you think of these views, they cannot be fairly characterized as extreme; Ruth Bader Ginsburg, among many others, has questioned the rationale offered by the court to justify Roe v. Wade. Nor was Bork himself an extremist. He was a strongly opinionated, somewhat pugnacious, deeply conservative judge. (At 84 today, he hasn’t mellowed much either, to judge from an interview he recently gave Newsweek.)

I bring up Bork not only because Sunday is a convenient anniversary. His nomination battle is also a reminder that our poisoned politics is not just about Republicans behaving badly, as many Democrats and their liberal allies have convinced themselves. Democrats can be — and have been — every bit as obstructionist, mean-spirited and unfair.

I’ll take it one step further. The Bork fight, in some ways, was the beginning of the end of civil discourse in politics. For years afterward, conservatives seethed at the “systematic demonization” of Bork, recalls Clint Bolick, a longtime conservative legal activist. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution coined the angry verb “to bork,” which meant to destroy a nominee by whatever means necessary. When Republicans borked the Democratic House Speaker Jim Wright less than two years later, there wasn’t a trace of remorse, not after what the Democrats had done to Bork. The anger between Democrats and Republicans, the unwillingness to work together, the profound mistrust — the line from Bork to today’s ugly politics is a straight one.
[...]
The character assassination began the day Bork was nominated, when Ted Kennedy gave a fiery speech describing “Robert Bork’s America” as a place “in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters,” and so on. It continued until the day the nomination was voted down; one ad, for instance, claimed, absurdly, that Bork wanted to give “women workers the choice between sterilization and their job.”

Never mind that character assassination has been a convenient staple of Republican tactics for seven decades, Kennedy's speech was based on Bork's own history and writings.

This argument would seem to turn on how to interpret the phrase “Robert Bork’s America.” Nieporent seems to think that it means, in at least some cases, “actions that Bork would personally perform or implement.” I interpret it as “the consequences that would flow from Robert Bork being the median vote on the Supreme Court.” The first reading is transparently wrong, and we know this because of the obscure fact that Kennedy’s speech was delivered on the occasion of Robert Bork being nominated to the Supreme Court.

Once we understand this, everything Kennedy said is fair and based on Bork’s public writings and/or jurisprudence. Bork did argue (and not in obscurity: he helped to persuade the 1964 Republican presidential candidate to adopt this position) that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was both unconstitutional and bad public policy (and, indeed, was based on a principle of “unsurpassed ugliness.”) He clearly favored the overruling of Roe v. Wade (and, as he revealed in a subsequent book, the criminalization of abortion as a policy matter), and it’s uncontroversial that under a criminalization regime many women who lack the connections to obtain safe gray market abortions will be compelled to obtain unsafe black market abortions. He explicitly advocated an extremely narrow conception of First Amendment rights limited to certain kinds of political speech. He advocated a narrow reading of Fourth Amendment rights and disdained any right to privacy altogether. And — like most contemporary conservatives — he believed that (at least for litigants he disfavored) the rules of standing should be made more stringent.

Kenendy’s speech was tough and uncharitable, but every claim in it was based on Bork’s public writings.

Indeed, if it all "started with Bork," it started when Reagan nominated him.

Blue Monday, Little Milton edition

2011-10-17T08:41:00.001-04:00

This is not the Tea Party

2011-10-13T19:48:00.002-04:00

If you're looking up from the pages of the Wall Street Journal editing page, and wondering what all the kerfuffle is about, this may help to enlighten you.

Via TNC.

Liberal icon

2011-10-12T09:49:00.001-04:00

*&^% *&$@ up.

Blue Monday, Roy Buchanana & Albert Collins edition

2011-10-10T08:21:00.003-04:00

Nothing left to do, but smile, smile, smile

2011-10-07T13:50:00.000-04:00

A game of inches

2011-10-05T14:24:00.001-04:00

Blue Monday, Jimmie Rodgers by way of Merle Haggard edition

2011-09-26T13:07:00.001-04:00

Texas is sick

2011-09-25T12:24:00.002-04:00

Rick Perry and his hatred for "Obamacare" looks inviting.

Other doctors tell of uninsured children dying from vaccine-preventable diseases such as influenza and hepatitis A, and patients being admitted into the emergency room for uncontrolled asthma and diabetes. Doctors here routinely see untreated infections of the ear, sinus, or tooth spreading to the brain, requiring surgery, and bone infections that result in permanent disability.

“This is an everyday occurrence,’’ said Dr. Claire Bocchini, another Houston pediatrician who specializes in infectious diseases and is president of Doctors for Change.

As underfunded as the state’s health safety net has been, conditions stand to worsen. In the last legislative session that ended in May, the state cut two thirds of the funding for women’s health clinics and underfunded Medicaid by almost $4 billion, in addition to cutting hospital reimbursements. This follows other health cuts in the Perry years.

Perry vetoed a bill in 2001 that would have expanded Medicaid services and added cancer screenings such as Pap smears to women’s health services. In 2003, Texas tightened the eligibility requirements for the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and as a result, 237,000 children were kicked off its rolls, said Garnet Coleman, a Democratic state representative from Houston who has served in the Texas Legislature for 20 years and is a member of the House Public Health Committee.

The Perry campaign declined a request to interview the governor, saying Perry would work to free states from federal mandates and empower them to come up with their own solutions.

Catherine Frazier, a campaign spokeswoman, said that because there are so many Texas children eligible for Medicaid who are not enrolled, Perry - rather than widen eligibility to more low-income families - focused on increasing funding for public awareness campaigns to encourage the neediest parents to enroll their children.

“The governor has made considerable effort throughout his tenure to make insurance more affordable so people can afford to purchase it if they choose to,’’ Frazier said. “His goal is to create an environment of independence from the government, not dependence.’’

In a recent debate, Perry said conditions would be better in Texas if the federal government had granted the state a waiver, which would have allowed it to redirect Medicaid money into subsidies for private or employer-based insurance. The Bush administration never approved the 2008 request.

The burden of the Texas health care crisis falls largely on the working poor. Most of the state’s uninsured adults have jobs and are US citizens or legal residents, according to the nonpartisan Center for Public Policy Priorities. Working adults account for nearly two out of three uninsured Texans between ages 19 and 64, though most of them make less than $25,000 a year.

An example is Joyce Jones, a 60-year-old yoga instructor earning $20,000 a year who said she cannot afford private health insurance because she has Parkinson’s disease, a preexisting condition that would increase her premiums.

Jones has maxed out three of her credit cards paying for health care and has more than $30,000 in credit card debt. She is in the process of signing up for a high-deductible plan for people with preexisting conditions, made possible through the new federal health overhaul law - “Obamacare,’’ as Perry and other GOP candidates call it.

Which would be boo'd by audiences at Republican debates.

One way or another

2011-09-23T09:59:00.002-04:00

Professor Warren, who lost China?

2011-09-22T11:04:00.002-04:00

Mark Halperin really is a douchebag.

Elizabeth Warren is a wonderful candidate.

Mo!

2011-09-19T16:35:00.004-04:00

From a kid in a Panamanian fishing village using a milk carton for a glove, to 602 regular season saves (42 in the post-season). Congratulations to the greatest closer of all time. And he sure didn't limp to it, going 1-2-3 in the ninth and getting the final out on three straight strikes.

Blue Monday, Hound Dog Taylor, Little Walter edition

2011-09-19T09:16:00.001-04:00

I live by the river

2011-09-16T11:39:00.000-04:00

Blue Monday, Yardbirds edition

2011-09-12T10:30:00.002-04:00

Ten years after

2011-09-11T09:21:00.002-04:00

Mostly, I remember the "Missing" flyers. Taped to seemingly every vertical surface, from Grand Central Station to Union Square, they made the sadness real to those, like me, who didn't lose a friend or loved one.

Maximalist, magical thinking

2011-09-05T10:53:00.001-04:00

Jonathan Chait on the historical revisionism of Obama's liberal critics.

On two subsequent occasions, Obama faced this same choice. Last December, he could have refused to extend any of the Bush tax cuts on income over $250,000. Republicans vowed to let all the tax cuts expire if he did so. If Obama let this happen, it would have almost fully solved the long-term deficit problem, while at the same time setting back the recovery by raising taxes on middle-class and low-income workers. Obama decided to make a deal, extending all the Bush tax cuts and also securing a progressive payroll tax cut and an extension of unemployment benefits, both forms of stimulus that Republicans would never have allowed without an extension of upper-bracket tax cuts in return.
There is a decent argument that the president should have refused this deal. But if you make that argument, you have to accept the likelihood that nearly a million fewer jobs would have been created and that we would have been at risk of a double-dip recession back then. Yet the liberal critics most exercised about Obama’s failure to secure more stimulus were, for the most part, enraged when he did exactly that. Take Robert Reich, the former secretary of labor under President Clinton. Last November, Reich pleaded for an extension of unemployment benefits, calling the plight of the jobless our “single newest and biggest social problem.” When Obama made his bargain, Reich called it “an abomination,” complaining that “the bits and pieces the president got in return” — including the unemployment benefits previously deemed vital — amounted to “peanuts.”
And then, this summer, Obama let the G.O.P. hold the debt-ceiling vote hostage to extract spending cuts. I think he should have called the Republicans’ bluff and let them accept the risk of a financial meltdown. But the reason Obama chose to cut a deal is that calling their bluff might have resulted in catastrophe. And Obama made a point of back-loading the G.O.P.’s budget cuts so as not to contract the economy. He may have chosen wrongly, but he chose exactly the priorities liberals now insist he ignored — favoring economic recovery over long-term goals.

Blue Monday, Pops Staples edition

2011-09-05T10:43:00.001-04:00

Amassakoul

2011-09-02T11:18:00.001-04:00

Tinariwen and Carlos Santana.

Tinariwen has a new album recorded in an interesting place.

Blue Monday, Stevie Ray Vaughan edition

2011-08-29T18:59:00.003-04:00

Well, 'cause there ain't no songs called "New England Flood."

And, a'course, they sure could use some rain in Texas.

Cheney's dog

2011-08-28T12:46:00.002-04:00

If he could, he probably would have shot Barney in the face.

Among the head-bursting revelations in Dick Cheney’s new book is the news that the former Vice President’s Labrador Retriever, Dave, once got into big trouble for an unprovoked attack. The incident in question took place at Camp David, where the canine companions of the president and vice president were accompanying their masters on retreat. Apparently, Cheney’s dog caught sight of the president’s treasured terrier Barney and immediately launched into a “hot pursuit.” The chase got so out of hand that President Bush was moved to demonstrate a rare demand for accountability, appearing during the fracas to ask, “What’s going on here?” The mad dog could only be calmed with a pastry from the breakfast buffet. Soon after, Cheney was told that his dog was no longer welcome at Camp David. But what could have driven the beast to such aggression in the first place?

Don't expect no help at all

2011-08-26T10:47:00.001-04:00

As we await Irene

Yakity Yak

2011-08-24T13:37:00.002-04:00

Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller interviewed in 2010. RIP.

Nowadays it’s hard to imagine how shocked and offended a large segment of middle-class America, not to mention the traditional songwriting establishment, was by Jerry Leiber’s slangy, ungrammatical lyric to his writing partner Mike Stoller’s rough-hewn blues melody. In a Rodgers and Hammerstein world, this wasn’t polished songwriting, sniffed the guardians of polite pop culture; it was musical barbarism, its sinister, possibly lewd hidden meanings flaunted by a gyrating star who in 1956 seemed as dangerously compelling as a sexy alien who had just dropped down to Earth from outer space.

Another Republican shields his children from their mother

2011-08-23T11:07:00.003-04:00

I don't want to say she thinks Carl Lewis -- the greatest Olympic athlete of all time -- is "uppity," but...well...yes, I will.

Burlington County Republican Chairman Bill Layton acknowledged Monday that Pat Delany stepped down from the Assembly this month because of his wife's missive to Lewis' campaign.

The Delanys are white. Lewis is black.
Jennifer Delany's email said, "Imagine having dark skin and name recognition and the nerve to think that equalled knowing something about politics."
Layton says Pat Delany decided to leave office to shield his children from "a hurtful and embarrassing public spectacle involving their mother." Delaney says he's sorry.

"Sorry" for what, he did not say, apparently.

UPDATED: Thanks "Tom"

Today in the Republican "Theater of Ideas"

2011-08-18T19:33:00.005-04:00

Hey, if they want to be the candidates of smoke-choked skies, water that makes your kid's hair fall out, and leaden toy paint, I say, more power to them.

And meanwhile, the similarities between Palin and Perry (and I'm not just talking hair here) are just too damned savory not to relish.

All of which raises the question: is Romney brilliantly ensuring that he doesn't have to swerve too far "to the center (i.e., somewhere west of Crazy Town)" if he wins the nomination or is he ensuring that he can't win the Republican nomination?

Blue Monday, The Who edition

2011-08-15T11:33:00.000-04:00

Bananas!

2011-08-12T10:37:00.001-04:00

Wharf Rat

2011-08-10T09:17:00.001-04:00

Well, yesterday got out of hand and I didn't post anything. In any case, John Cole does a much better job than I would have done. 16 years. Shit.

Blue Monday, Neil Young edition

2011-08-08T14:54:00.001-04:00