Unknown photographs from when Adams was, if only for a few days, an urban photographer.
I don't recall what I was searching for when I came across the Ansel Adams photographs of Los Angeles at the beginning of World War II, but I don't think it was a handsome rendering of Half Dome or a Moonrise in New Mexico. It was something much more gritty. On reflection, it might have been photographs of my original elementary school, Benjamin Franklin in Glendale. In any case I was running a search in the Los Angeles Public Library's immense online collection of photographs when something in a record caught my eye, the name "Ansel Adams." The image attached to this record was of a parking lot with a cars jumbled together around a prominent No Parking sign.
I don't normally associate Ansel Adams with ironic snapshots of parking lots or small format urban photography at all. Like you, a photograph by Adams means the classic evocation of the great American wilderness. It never crossed my mind that he had photographed any of the cities of men, much less Los Angeles. But there it was. Maybe, I thought, there were more.
Continued...
But darlin', those days are gone
Oh yeah
Stop dreaming
And live on in the future
But darlin', a-don't look back
Whoa, no-no
Don't look back
-- John Lee Hooker
Ah, but we do, don't we? Seeing the shapes, getting the measure, going the distance and finding -- if only for a moment -- the safe harbors of your life requires a spiritual sextant sighting the fixed stars. It's a ghost's navigation with what is ahead a white blank screen, and what is behind fading into a fog. There are shallows, shoals and the lee shore. Times in irons, then storms, then stretches of clear open ocean on a broad reach, but always with the sense of hidden reefs and no known port. It helps to track other voyages, to follow similar arcs, to watch if they pass, or seem to pass, the same checkpoints. Some are siblings, others are friends and lovers, still others are artists that, at some point, strike us as sharing if not a life, at least a similar trajectory.
Everybody has a different set of charts, but some overlap. Among these are the singer-songwriter / poets of our era. These are our troubadours, the most influential of which in our time, is Bob Dylan. Indeed, I've often thought that it must gall the endless pile of disposable poets stashed in the academy that, for all their pallid effort, the greatest American poet of this era is Dylan. But Dylan, for all his protean output and achievement, misses the music as much as he hooks the mind.
For my money, the singer-songwriter-poet among my contemporaries, that both hooks the ear and brings the music is Van Morrison. Not only for his ability to play his voice like some transoceanic jazz choir, nor his manner of mining the blues and jazz traditions and his own life, but also because -- like Dylan -- he endures. Not only that, but he reports back. And like a few others in music, painting and writing, the arc of his life seems to resonate with mine. It may be just a fluke of years lived in the same unfolding history, but it seems like more. It seems, as it always seems with the great souls, that there's an emotional and spiritual concordance happening, as one bell might pick up the tone of another nearby even though it has not itself been struck.
"Take me back, there, take me way back there..."
Continued...
[Godwin says, in passing, this morning:The point is that almost all "news" is completely irrelevant, just a distraction that ultimately serves to obscure what I call The Eternals. It takes no intelligence whatsoever to be a producer or consumer of MSM "news." -- One Cosmos: And That's the Way It Isn't: News and Meta-NewsHe's right, you know. And he reminds me.... "Meantime life outside goes on all around you." ]
It is so silent here that the softest of noises can wake me. This morning it was the rush of wings and mutterings from the two doves that seem to have taken up residence in the foliage outside my bedroom window. In the half-life between dream and waking it seemed I was back in a bed chamber in that small town north of Paris where two doves had nested in the tree just beyond our balcony in that past, gone year.
It was just after first light, 5:45 by the red numerals on the coffee pot in the kitchen. I took the pot and filled it with water, put in the beans, and started the device. As it whirred and chuffled away, I walked out onto my deck that looks out over the brindle hills and down to the Pacific a mile or so away.
The sea seemed ruffled in large smooth circles, slate in the fading shadow of the hills but, as it rolled out towards the horizon, shading up into a charcoled blue, then to a gray blue haze at the horizon rising up into rose that gave off abruptly into clear and fresh blue.
Hanging just above the line of rose was the full moon gleaming gold in the exact center of all that I could see.
I watched it slide down the sky for some time, then I went back into the kitchen for coffee. When I came out to look again, it was gone.
Unexpected beauty rising in the center of all you can see. Take your eyes away and then look again and its gone. But the day goes on and the light rises around you and you know, with an abiding faith, that beauty will astonish you again when you least expect or deserve it; that it will come to you out of the dark on a rush of wings. There are many ways of this world and that one is not the least of them.
I thought for a moment about turning on the news to see what had transpired in the rest of the world while I slept. I decided against it. Held halfway between a death and a life, between Good Friday and Easter, I'd already learned the news of the day.
March, 2005And again here by Gary Snyder.
Left, Michael Crowley: Still a poster-boy after all these years.
As the dew dries to crusted smegma on the Obama rose, we need to find better metaphors for the Obamallationist media that's looking for a way to rinse the acrid taste out of their morning-after mouths.
Yes, with every passing day spin is getting more and more difficult and desperate for those that stapled their scrotums to the axles of Obama's juggernaut. To paraphrase their jug-eared idol,
Continued...
In which I discuss how I got from "there" to "here" back in April, 2006....
My Back Pages: Debating on the step of Sproul Hall, UC Berkeley, 1966. (Left to right:) Me (Somewhat younger but just as strident), An Iranian friend named "Jaz" -- worked with me in the UC library, a refugee from the Shah's Iran -- probably went back after the fall of the Shah, (foreground right) He lost his eye in the Hungarian Uprising and had to run for the border and on into the West to stay alive. In this picture he's attempting to convince me that Communism is an evil ideology. I'm not buying it then, but I buy it now. (Click to enlarge)
Well, I try my best
To be just like I am,
But everybody wants you
To be just like them.
They sing while you slave and I just get bored.
I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more.
-- Maggie's Farm
A friend with whom I have a daily correspondence takes great pleasure in needling me on my, shall we say, adamantine position that we need to start fighting the First Terrorist War to win it and not as if we are engaged in a game of patty-cake. In March of 2004, after the Madrid bombings, while I was trapped on a Cruise Ship somewhere deep inside the sixth circle of Hell, he decided it was an ideal time convert me to his policy of "reasonable accommodation." It was the moment in which, as he put it, "...the common citizens of Spain and France are saying 'Tell us again what this got us, other than lots of angry teenagers with bombs?' "
I replied that I'd lived for years in France, with months in and about Spain, and most of the 'common citizens' of those countries would surrender to anything and sell out anyone if it meant they could shop in peace for a few more years. Vichy and Franco came to mind as examples.
Yesterday, in Tel Aviv, the angry teenager with a bomb on his body came again, as he has so many times over the last few years, and as he will in the years to come. Maybe Spain was right to see the effort as futile. Maybe Europe as a whole should just roll over and not just play dead, but be dead. Perhaps Israel should just shrug and say, "Okay, you win. We'll move or we'll die. You tell us."
After all, what's really in all this fighting and dying for anyone? None of the countries that are engaged in this war against terror seems to be ready to do the terrible things necessary to end terror. ("Don't you see? That would make us just like them!" "Perhaps, but we would be alive to repent and reform.")
I once admired the subtle thought, the careful parsing, the diplomatic pas-de-deux of policy, but lately I seem to have gotten a taste for straight talk. It seems to me that if you don't go to war ready to achieve victory by any means necessary -- by any means necessary -- why would you bother to go at all? And of late, I'm only hearing the weasel word "win." I'm not hearing a lot about "victory," which is quite a different thing.
It seems to me that if you are actually "in" a war, victories, big and small, are what you seek to achieve. Once you have the final victory, and that means that the enemy and all that supports the enemy, is so destroyed and laid waste that there's no fight left in him, then and only then can you say you have "won." Absent a drive for victory, there seems to be nothing in this war for any one fighting terror on any front other than pain and death -- and the added insult of an unremitting disparagement from many of the citizens for whom they fight.
That's certainly true when it comes to the United States of late. We seem stalled at the stage of the struggle that brings to mind Churchill's proclamation that he had nothing to offer except, "blood, sweat and tears." We've had those three things constantly for years -- as our media are so keen to remind us every three minutes of every day.
Another factor in the dumb-show called "Bringing Democracy to the Middle East" seems to be that our leadership has become, shall we say, less than inspiring and more like Monty Hall emceeing "Let's Make A Deal" with contestants and a studio audience packed with crazed and crapulous mullahs. Finally, we're seeing a host of our fellow citizens so immersed in their hatred of George Bush that the impression we are hip-deep in demented traitors is getting hard to shake.
All of these things conspire, on a daily basis, to shake our belief in ourselves, our institutions and our commitment to rid the world of the scourge of terrorism. Lately we seem to be living on a daily drip-feed of despair for our future and estrangement from our past. It's not a new diet in this country, but it is starting to assume the proportions of a runaway fad diet, a political Pritikins. And yet this thin gruel is what's being poured into us from Seattle, Washington to Washington, D.C.
Continued...Obamallatio ™ I'm just putting this up to stake the claim for future generations of wordsmiths. Obviously a subset of fellatio involving the media, the credulous, the brain dead, the foolishly optimistic, and Andrew Sullivan. Let's work on the definition together, okay?
Googling about I see that the oddly named Swampthing in Korea@ Fark comments typed the term out on 2009-01-22 @ 07:34:20 AM
Okay, now the Obamallatio is getting creepy....I'm putting that down to the "million farkers typing randomly write obamallatio sooner or later" theory. I, however, have trademarked the term for use on extra-small condoms and dental dams.
[With the arrival of summer in Seattle (some actually hot days -- except, of course, this one.) the murder of crows in the pines next door has returned and, at times, their cries shred the air. The cacophony reminds me of this observation from a few years back in southern California.]
When I lived in Manhattan, I never needed to know when winter officially arrived. I could count on one particular coworker to announce it. The official date changed every year, but he never failed to signify it by dropping by my office first thing in the morning, a Starbucks commuting coffee mug in his hand, and saying, "Boy, oh, boy, do you believe how cold it is? Damn!"
Having just peeled off watch cap, ear muffs, scarf, gloves, and a ten pound top coat, I could -- while watching the sleet moving horizontally across the windows -- say with some conviction, "Yes, as a matter of fact, I do believe how cold it is."
With this exchange, the first of a daily ritual that would be repeated between us for months without variation, I knew that winter had been declared open.
In New York City, there are really only two seasons -- "Winter" and "Road Work." Winter was cold and inconvenient. "Road Work" was hot and inconvenient. My coworker wasn't happy with either. Yet he never failed to announce the beginning of "Road Work." The official date changed every year, but he never failed to signify it by dropping by my office first thing in the morning, his Starbucks commuting coffee mug in his hand, and saying, "Boy, oh, boy, do you believe how hot it is? Damn!"
He was a living, breathing, mind-numbing example of why the number two fantasy of people who work in offices is the ruthless slaughter of one or more of their coworkers. (The number one fantasy? I don't have to tell you. You know. And you should be ashamed of yourself.)
When I moved to southern California, this was one little daily irritation I was happy to leave behind along with "Winter" and "Road Work." Instead, I got only one season, "Traffic," but since you have to go to "Traffic" in order to be in that was okay. I no longer needed to kill my coworker, so that was a win.
In the hills above Laguna, however, I discovered another two seasons -- "No birds" and "Birds." That's otherwise known as "Not Spring" and "Spring." When the birds leave sometime around the Christmas holidays, you don't really notice it. At least I didn't until I passed a neighbor, a Starbucks commuting coffee mug in his hand, on his daily constitutional and he said, "Boy, oh, boy, do you believe how quiet it is? Damn! Sure wish the birds would come back."
He walked on but I stopped and turned slowly to look at him. Brief memories of fantasized mayhem washed over my mind until I shook my head and thought, "No. Can't be. Just your imagination," and went on my way.
But, of course, what couldn't be, was. Over the course of the next few months, I'd pass this neighbor on our overlapping walks and he'd invariably say, just to be neighborly, "Boy, oh, boy, do you believe how quiet it is? Damn! Sure wish the birds would come back."
In time, of course, the birds, as birds will, did come back. I noticed it one day when, just at dawn, a bird woke me with a Bachesque series of trills and calls. A day or so later, when passing my neighbor on the hill, he said, "Boy, oh, boy, did you hear that bird this morning? Terrific!"
But nature is not decorative no matter how much we might wish it would be. Where you have one bird, you get two. When you have two, you get ten. And ten is just the prelude to a hundred or even more, as Alfred Hitchcock knew.
About a month after the first return of the birds, I was awakened by a cacophony of bird calls hooting and screeching at the first crack of light. I shrugged it off and went outside to get the paper from the drive way. My bird-loving neighbor lives diagonally across the intersection. I picked up the paper to go inside when I heard the sliding door to his deck open. I looked across and saw him in his underwear stagger sleepily out into the rising and falling cloud of colorful bird calls, wipe the sleep from his sad eyes, and shout out into the pristine morning, "Shut... UP!"
Even in paradise it seems that some people are never really happy. Must be the traffic.
-- for Apollo
The moon marked out the edge of heaven.
On this, our scriptures all agreed.
The moon was fixed, it could not fall.
The moon would fill our final needs.
[Archival from 2006 but still, in light of recent events, worth repeating.]
If your life on the web is running too s l o w, if your browsing and grazing at this site or that is just b o g g i n g d o w n, what do you do?
Like any good cybernaut, you look for the "techno-fix."
There are, of course, many fixes to find. New connections, new computers, new hard drives, new browsers, new plugins, and more. But the first thing everyone should do is to take the cure common to all cyberspace slowdowns. You click on your browser menus and tell it to "Clear History."
"Clear History" works wonders for your cyberlife. As you move within the web, your History grows, and the more History you hold the slower your web brain, your browser, thinks and acts. Thinking slowly and acting slowly may be wise in life, but it takes the zip out of your online drive.
When you "Clear History" your browser forgets all the places it has been, all the things that it has seen, all of what it has learned. All that bitsludge is wiped away and your browser's internal brain is made as smooth as a baby's bottom, as blank as a goldfish's brain. Things run faster, you get loaded more quickly and will probably stay loaded longer. You flash but you don't crash. Why would you? You've "cleared your history."
I probably didn't have to tell you to "Clear History." You knew it. Pretty much everyone knows it. But this better browsing tip seems, like many other dubious cyberspace insights, to have oozed out into the real world, into the world dimensional.
And when 2D goes 3D there's always a problem.
Continued...
No longer a problem in the way-new America.
We are a "Can-Do! Yes, we can." society. One of the really amazing upticks in American society, as I noticed in a brief walk around various neighborhoods in sodden Seattle, is that we have almost completely cleaned up the streets of our cities.
How well I remember those tours through the various skid roads** of the cities I have lived in -- Los Angeles, New York, Boston, and San Francisco --in days of yore. Gone now. All gone. And their wretched refuse along with them.
Take a walk yourself and you will see that it is true.
Nowhere in today's brighter and more-caring American cities will you see those terrible social wrecks on the streets. Yes, no longer will you find "Bums," "Junkies," "Drunks," "Bull-Goose Raving Lunatics," or "The Hard Core Unemployed" on our sidewalks. They are all gone, a fading memory.
Indeed all that are left, strangely rising up from the background noise of the streets, are the blameless and harmless "Homeless."
They are the last social class to be saved by our loving and caring society and their continuing expansion in our cities is a mystery which yearns for a caring social solution.
My own is simple and solves two lingering social problems at once: "Feed the homeless to the hungry."
Problem solved and it is a two-fer. Paging Dr. Swift!
**The first skid row was Skid Road (Yesler Way) in Seattle, where logs were skidded into the water on a corduroy road for delivery to Henry Yesler's lumber mills.
The faux-conservative's answer to both Paris and Perez Hilton, Meghan McCain, showed up for an interview with that clarion tuba of Gay media, Out Magazine looking a bit more, er, "fulfilled" than she has of late.
We note the glow in the cheeks. The Mona Lisa "knowing" in the eyes. The tell-tale swelling of the breasts that literally bends the pink triangle out of space and time. The thickening of the abdomen that no "SILENCE=DEATH" slogan can quite obliterate.
In the spirit and tradition of Andrew Sullivan, I feel it is my DUTY to ask if she is with child or with cheeseburger. And if the former, is there proof that the father is not Levi Johnston?
And if true, when will we get to see THE BIRTH CERTIFICATE?
Like Sullivan, I'm just asking.
Lift-off of the Saturn V rocket, carrying astronauts Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin Jr, along with 6,700,000 pounds (3,039,000 kg) of fuel and equipment into the Florida sky, bound for the Moon, on July 16th, 1969.
The rocket was rising faster, slanting a little, its tense white flame leaving a long, thin spiral of bluish smoke behind it. It had risen into the open blue sky, and the dark red fire had turned into enormous billows of brown smoke, when the sound reached us: it was a long, violent crack, not a rolling sound, but specifically a cracking, grinding sound, as if space were breaking apart, but it seemed irrelevant and unimportant, because it was a sound from the past and the rocket was long since speeding safely out of its reach—though it was strange to realize that only a few seconds had passed. I found myself waving to the rocket involuntarily, I heard people applauding and joined them, grasping our common motive; it was impossible to watch passively, one had to express, by some physical action, a feeling that was not triumph, but more: the feeling that that white object’s unobstructed streak of motion was the only thing that mattered in the universe.
What we had seen, in naked essentials—but in reality, not in a work of art—was the concretized abstraction of man's greatness. -- Ayn Rand
Velociman writes for me when he says,
Once upon a time we were a great nation that strived for the stars. No more. Now we are ashamed of glory, because some fucking crackhead might feel neglected if we don't dote upon her, and slather her with our largesse at the expense of the Great Things. -- Velociworld: We Choose To Go To The Moon
I'm still hoping we don't get to the point where Charlton Heston will speak for all of us: You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!
... but every so often I gets my doubtins'.
-or- The Pre-Launch Abort Ritual
[Note: I get nervous when NASA seems to be trying too hard: NASA fuels space shuttle for 6th launch try. Time is running out. If Endeavour is not flying by Thursday, it will have to wait until July 26 so the Russians can squeeze in a space station supply run. A Thursday attempt, however, would result in the elimination of one of five planned spacewalks and a shortened mission.
I hope all will be Go and go well. But just in case, here's something I learned last January at the Kennedy Space Center. UPDATE: Safe liftoff and reached orbit. Godspeed Endeavor.]
Discovery on launching pad
Two M113 Armored Personnel Carriers (Remember these, they'll come in later)
A couple of weeks ago I was on a bus tour of the space shuttle launch area at the Kennedy Space Center Florida. For $58 you can ride a bus past some of the outlying security barriers and get within about a mile of the Discovery on the pad. This is about as close as an ordinary citizen can get without being asked serious questions by men with automatic weapons.
It was an impressive tour in all respects, but this story today brought back a part of the tour related by the guide: NASA Delays Discovery Launch Fourth Time
An all-day review of the craft's readiness for launch left managers still under-confident about the operations of three hydrogen control valves thatchannel gaseous hydrogen from the main engines to the external fuel tank. Engineering teams have been working to identify what caused damage to a flow control valve on shuttle Endeavour during its November 2008 flight. NASA managers decided Friday more data and possible testing are required before launch can proceed.That's a good call. We can all remember what happens to a shuttle when damage to the surface of the shuttle reacts to the incredible heat and stress of re-entry: it becomes a very unpleasant low-earth orbit comet, kills everyone on board, and litters a vast swath of the southwest.
But what happens when something goes wrong while the crew is in the shuttle but the shuttle has not yet been launched?
When a shuttle is fueled up and ready to go it is essentially a large semi-truck with a couple of solid fuel rockets strapped to the sides, each one containing 1,100,000 pounds of propellant, and one giant tank containing 535,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen and oxygen bolted onto the belly. Not a truck you want to be in should anything go amiss.
Fear not, NASA is on the job. NASA has a plan for getting you out (Assuming there is time to get out, of course.) Here, according to our tour guide who had been working at NASA for several decades, is how you "exit the vehicle" should disaster warning bells start to ring before lift-off.
First, consider your situation inside the shuttle before launch. There you are in your seat inside the shuttle all dressed up and ready to go. This means you are sealed in your bright orange space suit, boots, gloves, helmet and all. This is known, optimistically, as the Advanced Crew Escape Suit. It weighs about 80 pounds. The suit comes complete with a "survival backpack, which includes a personal life raft, that is donned before entering the orbiter." In addition there is your "undersuit:"
Underneath the suits, astronauts wear "Maximum Absorbency Garment" (MAGs) urine-containment trunks (resembling "Depends" incontinence shorts) and blue-colored thermal underwear, which has plastic tubing woven into the garments allowing for liquid cooling and ventilation, the latter being handled by a connector located on the astronaut's left waist.Comfy, right?
You are also strapped into your seat. Various oxygen hoses and other attachments connect you to the shuttle. Did I mention you are sitting in a chair, but since the shuttle is in the vertical you are lying on your back in this rig with your knees kipped up like some bizarre Pilates exercise? Well, you are.
The main hatch through which you came into the crew area is somewhere behind you. It is dogged down and sealed to keep air and pressure in and the vacuum of space out. A good idea if you are going into orbit I'm sure you will agree. And so there you are sitting in the shuttle and in, say, final countdown mode waiting for lift off.
"Final countdown mode" means that everybody not inside the shuttle who wants to live (or at least keep their ears functioning) has long since left the area around the shuttle and gone several miles away. Several long miles away. And they're still going to put ear protection on when the shuttle blasts off. They would very much like to not come back to the launch area until the shuttle is long gone.
There you are, you and your crew mates, all by your lonesomes. Space bound at last. Final countdown and all that sort of thing leading up to lift off.
And then something goes wrong.
I know, I know, you are asking yourself, "What could possibly go wrong?" But suppose, just suppose, something does go wrong and Mission Control informs you that according to their best estimates the chances of the whole thing blowing up are tending towards the highly probable and you would be well advised to get the fuck out.
Okay.
Here's, according to our guide, is all you have to do to save your butt.
1) Unplug everything and get the straps off you.
2) Get to the sealed hatch and unseal and open it.
3) Leave the shuttle and stand up on the gantry. Then cross the gantry, avoiding the elevator that brought you up.
4) On the far side of the gantry is an open platform with slots in the floor below and a lot of cables slanting down and away from the whole shebang. These cables are called "Zip lines."
5) Suspended underneath these zip lines at floor level are wicker baskets. You will climb into these. (Tick, tock, tick, tock... time's a wastin'.)
6) Did I mention you will get into these wicker baskets backwards? You will. Then you will release the basket.
7) Upon releasing the basket you will be propelled backwards and downwards at a very high velocity along the long slanting cable for some distance towards a massive pile of sandbags.
8) Assuming everything's been calibrated properly your basket will shoot through an opening in the sandbags and come to a stop next to the entrance to a highly armored and sealable bunker at the bottom.
9) You will then haul your space-suited self out of the basket, open the door to the bunker and go inside. You will close the door leaving it to any of your more tardy fellow astronauts to open and enter the bunker if their "slide for life" has worked out.
10) Once inside the bunker, which is still relatively close to the now about to explode Space Shuttle, you have to ask yourself one question, "Do I feel lucky?"
11) If you do or do not feel lucky, you can either sit in the bunker and hope for the best, or decide to take Option B.
12) Remember those armored personnel carriers above? They are Option B.
13) Should you select to "move away from the vehicle" you, and any other fellow astronauts who have gotten this far, will go out the back door of the bunker and jump into one of two M113 Armored Personnel Vehicles (Vintage 1960s models, low milage). These are buttoned-up, fully-fueled, keys-in-the-ignition, and engine-running set ups. First astronaut in is the driver.
14) Throw it into gear, pedal to the metal, and you are out of there at a top speed of around 40 miles an hour.
And that's all there is to it. What could possibly go wrong?
Or, "Gosh, he has rediscovered the 20's and Hugo Gernsback." -- Chuck
Sixteen provocative minutes with "the man who helped usher in the environmental movement in the 1960s and '70s has been rethinking his positions on cities, nuclear power, genetic modification and geo-engineering. This talk at the US State Department is a foretaste of his major new book, sure to provoke widespread debate." -- Stewart Brand proclaims 4 environmental 'heresies' | Video on TED.com Recorded June 2009.
"Check out this image: see that tiny speck of light, inside the blue circle? That's Earth, as seen from the vantage point of Saturn. We are so much smaller even than that." -- Discovery Space: Twisted Physics: In Praise of Insignificance
Continued...
Provincetown's "Fresh Sea Clams," 1940.
"Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded." -- Yogi
Summer's at last heating up and so it's time for the cool to get cool by the shore. This will be especially cool this year because, so we hear, the coolest president in history may cool out on Martha's Vineyard. How cool is that?
It's even cooler when you consider that the cool One is sure to take the last final shred of whatever may have once, long ago, been cool about the Vineyard and grind it into fishmeal. When that's done, the Vineyard will look and feel, at last, pretty much like Provincetown, but without the Gay Pride floats and speedos. People worry about the coming fall and the heating up of swine flu, but I don't worry about fevers when I see that the all-consuming chill of "cool" is likely to get us first.
Cool's a funny thing. Before it was cool to be cool, being cool was actually sorta cool. But now that being cool is as required as a tramp-stamp at age 14 in order to gain admittence to a U2 Concert, cool's just not cool. Once "cool" is codified it's kaput. And since cool's not cool, there is no way to really be cool. Once you have a bunch of media lapdogs actually lapping on the lap of the President of the United States, even media's uncool. That would be okay since nothing cool is cool forever. After all, the groove must move to keep from becoming a rut.
Aikido is performed by blending with the motion of the attacker and redirecting the force of the attack rather than opposing it head-on. -- Wikipedia
"I can't fight for what's right when I'm shackled to the governor's seat." -- Palin
In the last week Sarah Palin has moved herself from the periphery to the center of power in the Republican party. The Party just doesn't seem to know it yet.
By resigning as the Governor of Alaska, Palin has positioned herself as the single most valuable power broker for the GOP in the 2010 elections. Simply put, in close primaries pitting Republican against Republican, and in close general elections for the Senate or Congress, Sarah Palin's endorsement and/or campaigning for a candidate can get that person elected. In addition, Palin can also raise money for a party and for candidates who would otherwise be strapped for cash. These are formidable political powers and only by freeing herself from Alaska will she be able to exercise them.
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
-- Longfellow
Rasmussen Presidential Approval Ratings since the Inauguration taken on the 9's of the month:
01/22/2009 +30
02/09/2009 +14
03/09/2009 +6
04/09/2009 +5
05/09/2009 +7
06/09/2009 +8
07/09/2009 -8
Interesting that on 6/9 it stood at +8 and now one month later it stands at -8.
But what, you ask... what, Uncle Gerard, does it mean?
What does it mean? As one Johnny Worthington says when you google "It don't mean shit,"
"Seriously... It don't mean shit... It's all in the marinade and spices bitches!!!"
A colorful man that Johnny Worthington, who seems to be a fellow off in Brisbane, Australia more than half in love with beer, but he does have a clue to the strange world of the polling universe.
A little night music from my channel at Blip.
Set List:
♫ Bob Dylan – Forever Young
♫ Van Morrison – Queen Of The Slipstream
♫ Bob Dylan – What Was It You Wanted
♫ Gretchen Peters – American Tune (live)
♫ Nitty Gritty Dirt Band – Grandpa Was a Carpenter
♫ Eva Cassidy – People Get Ready
♫ The Band – Ophelia
♫ Bryan Ferry – A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall
♫ Yardbirds – Stroll On
♫ You Got Another Thing Coming
♫ Talking Heads – Life During Wartime
♫ Natalie Merchant – Carnival (LP Version)
♫ Richie Havens – I Was Educated by Myself
♫ Ben E. King – Stand by Me (Single/LP Version)
♫ David Bowie – Heroes (1999 Digital Remaster)
♫ America – A Horse With No Name
♫ Roll Me Away-Bob Seger-(Lyrics and Song)
♫ Linda Ronstadt – Life Is Like a Mountain Railway (2006 Digital Remaster)
♫ Van Morrison – You Don't Pull No Punches, but You Don't Push the River
"A man's got to have a code, a creed to live by, no matter his job." -- John Wayne
Once upon a time, there was "The Code of the West." [Original here] That was long ago, far away and in another country. Now there is only, "The Code of the Left." I've compared the two here. The Code of the West is in plain text. The Code of the Left is in italics because, well, it is just so damned important!
* Don't inquire into a person's past. Take the measure of a man for what he is today.
* There are no "people," only "social policies." Don't inquire into a social policy's past or that policy's likely consequences for the future. Take the measure of a policy by how closely it maps to the Socialist Utopia that has already killed and crippled hundreds of millions of people. Dream big nightmares.
* Never steal another man's horse. A horse thief pays with his life.
* Always look to steal another man's money with a "tax." Always ask your fellow citizen to reach for his wallet. All tax thieves are rewarded with a fat government pension and fatter health plan.
* Defend yourself whenever necessary.
* Do not defend yourself or the country under any circumstances. Killers are just grown-up kids who were abused. Terrorists are just people who haven't had their issues listened to with compassion. Make sure nobody else can defend themselves. Use only diplomacy to defend your country. Armies are raised only to place sandbags around towns about to be flooded for the fifth time. When that happens use government money to enable the fools who built them to rebuild them.
* Look out for your own.
* Look out, first, last and always, for any other people numerous enough to declare themselves an oppressed group (The minimum number is 3) - except if the group is an actual family, in which case seek to disband it by any means necessary.
* Remove your guns before sitting at the dining table.
* Ban guns. Anytime, anywhere. The Second Amendment is a misprint. Erase it in the original. Burn all copies.
* Never order anything weaker than whiskey.
* Never order anything stronger than a decaf double latte made with soy milk. Yes, that drink will shrink your testicles and/or ovaries to the size of peas, but you weren't using them anyway. Make it a double.
Continued...A friend told me about this, but I thought I'd go see for myself. It's a bench above a grave in Seattle's Lakeview Cemetary. It's just about 20 yards above the graves of Bruce Lee and Brandon Lee. In this age of vapid celebrity those graves still receive a constant flow of visitors immersed in vanity. The remains of these celluloid heroes, these men whose life's work was mere pretending, still have tokens, incense, flowers and other offerings heaped upon them. It's as if the people who come, not knowing these men in life, seek a deeper unknowing of them in death. It's not about who they were but who their long trail of mourners were not.
It seems to me that the hundreds of millions now addicted to "celebrity" are like those addicted to a heroin of the soul. Like heroin, "celebrity" must be taken in ever increasing doses to fill a hole in the user's soul. And just like heroin, "celebrity" doesn't fill anything but only increases the emptiness. Which, of course, only increases the need and requires an ever larger dose of the illusion; of the shrieking unquiet voices. Standing above those graves you can watch them come and go, leaving their tokens and standing in groups beside the stones for one last photograph of their brush with dead celebrity.
This grave, on a rise above, is quieter but bears a simple poem on the sides of the bench as you walk around it. There's no name on the bench itself. That marker is off to the side a few feet. The bench itself is not a monument to vanity, but a simple gift left behind for any who may chance upon it. If you like you can sit down and rest for awhile on the poem cut into the stone. It's in sun and shade; a pleasant spot to watch the clouds scud across the sound and shred themselves into rain and vapor on the tops of the mountains to the west and to the east.
You might even bring a book to read and opening it to a remembered passage see,
.... For within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear'd and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable, and humour'd thus
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!
An elaborate thought and true enough. But somehow, in this place, the simpler poem on which you rest seems better and more apt even as, below you, the still living fans of Bruce and Brandon Lee pull up in their cars, leave their offerings, and drive away.
go straight to Reclusive Leftist's "Feminists and the mystery of Sarah Palin."
Read the whole thing and that includes the comments. It will give you insight, food for thought, and genuine UnObamabranded Hope.
What? Are you still here rather than THERE?
Click to enlarge
"This starry night sky sparkles above the Black Hills of South Dakota and the United States' Mount Rushmore National Park. The historic site features enormous sculptures of four US presidents; George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, carved into the southeast face of granite cliffs. Above the monumental symbols of the country's independence and early history, the night features stars of a familiar constellation to northern skygazers around the world, an asterism known as the Big Dipper in the constellation Ursa Major."
Takes your breath away, doesn't it? It should.
A short list. In no particular order.
We told our children that any child could grow up to be President. And then we made it come true.
We had car shows, boat shows, beauty shows and dog shows.
We ran robots on the surface of Mars by remote control.
Our women came from all over the world in all shapes and sizes hues and scents.
We actually believed that all men are created equal and tried to make it come true.
Everybody liked our movies and loved our television shows.
More and more Gibbs, as can certainly be seen here, is proving to be the very model of that modern Obama apparatchik; a model updated for our era into the very glass and form of a Little Hitler reigning secure in the White House Dwarf Cavern.
We all know the contemporary type of "Little Hitlers." We meet them whenever we have to interact with people whose positions do not rest upon doing a good job but upon pleasing some master above them. Most often we see them in Government bureaucracies where rules are not announced to you until you break them. At which point you are instructed, in the patient smarmy tones reserved for pre-schoolers, to "fill out the proper form" or "obtain the proper documents," and then come back to wait in the longer line in the next building.
This is essentially what we see oozing out of the Gibbs creature in this clip. The same sort of small bureaucrat smarm packaged in one who has ascended to a status far beyond anything he hoped for while pleasuring himself to pictures of Janet and/or Michael Jackson in his adolescence. Instead he can now pleasure himself by
Continued...
Click to enlarge
In a land where neuters, unicorn riders, and moonwalking molesters are deified and canonized, we can forget that there are real men still walking the American earth. Here's one. Do you think she was glad to see him?
"A construction worker, suspended from a crane, rescued a woman who fell into the Des Moines River in downtown Des Moines Tuesday. A man who also fell into the water died." -- Photo Journal
And then, for the man reaching out his hand, Jason Oglesbee, and the others involved in the rescue, it was back to work on Wednesday, "We have a bridge to build here," the supervisor said as his men went about their business. -- Des Moines Register
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Protest!
ZZMike: "One of these day's I'll join a Wal-Mart protest. I'll carry a sign reading "Down With Low Prices!!! Down with Wide Selections!!!" -- AMERICAN DIGEST: Comment on The Enduring Greatness of Walmart
PermaLink"Hell, I even dislike their dislike of dogs."
I find myself increasingly repulsed by Muslim practices and beliefs. Middle Eastern, African, Asian, American, the country of origin makes no difference. Women and children treated as chattel, genital mutilation, child brides, honor killings, culturally accepted pedophilia, the black drapes and head coverings, no rights, no votes, little to non-existent educational opportunities, no voice, no choices, no recourse. Persecution of homosexuals. Imprisonment, stoning and whipping for morality crimes. Lack of free speech. The foul treatment of non-Muslims in Islamic countries. The demented hatred of Jews. Sharia Law. Wahhabism. Madrasas. Blind obedience to Mullahs. Praying towards Mecca -- a place on the map few will ever see. Individuality is shut down, originality and freedom of the mind discouraged. Islam pisses on human talents that fall outside the dark walls of its faith. Hell, I even dislike their dislike of dogs. -- Scheherazade Needs A New Tale « Jaded Haven
Dean Koontz on Frankenstein
s professors twist Mary Shelley’s themes—and even turn them upside down—to endorse this or that modern attitude or political viewpoint. Of the several reasons why the book is a classic, perhaps the most important is the portrayal of Victor Frankenstein as a compassionate utopian destroyed by hubris. The history of humanity is soaked in blood precisely because we throw ourselves into the pursuit of one utopia after another, determined to perfect this world that cannot be perfected.
Of all centuries, the 20th was the bloodiest because of Hitler’s National Socialism, Lenin’s and Stalin’s and Mao’s and Pol Pot’s and Castro’s versions of Communism; as many as 200 million were murdered or killed in war because of these utopian schemes. Victor Frankenstein, utopian of the first order, hoped to perfect God’s creation, to reanimate the deceased and thus defeat death, and his project could result only in calamity, for it was against the natural law and common sense.
Via KA-CHING!
Guess Who
The French think he’s rude. The Germans want him to stop spending. The Indians want him to mix his nose out of their environmental business. The North Koreans think he’s a joke. The Iranians won’t acknowledge his calls. And the British can’t even come up with a comprehensive opinion of him.
As for the Chinese, he’s too frightened to even glance their way. -- Editorial: I Told You So – Yes I Did - Galganov.com
Charles Johnson's Drool-Cup Runneth Over Even as His Site Empties
Lawrence Auster had Johnson's number 2 years ago:
"Basically LGF seems to consist of Charles Johnson consigning people to oblivion on the basis of no facts and no arguments, followed by Johnson's followers crying, "Yes, Charles, yes! LGF is the greatest website! I'm so proud to be at LGF!", along with various other grunts and one-line ejaculations that convey no intelligible ideas but only assent. So there is the marginalization of the Outsider by the Leader, and the mindless banding together of followers around the Leader based on such marginalization of the Outsider. Sound familiar? I can't say I have ever seen anything remotely resembling this kind of behavior at Brussels Journal. I have, however, seen it in abundance every time I've read "Little Green Footballs" in the few days that I've been perusing the site. Take a look at the current LGF thread, "The Mask Comes Off," and see the mindless, mob quality of it." -- The method of Charles Johnson
Cool Hats and Hollywood Communists
Dalton Trumbo wore very cool hats.
Dalton Trumbo may have been a good screen-writer. Dalton Trumbo may have been screwed by HUAC. Dalton Trumbo may still be a Hollywood darling and the subject of a recent hagiographic offering by PBS. But I am here to tell you that Dalton Trumbo was also a Communist acolyte of Joseph Stalin, a denier of the gulag, and a maligner of truth-tellers like Koestler and Kravchenko. He was in short a useful idiot member of the American Communist Party. -- Gladly Lerne, Gladly Teche: Inbound, from the Internet
Gorism
Al Gore as our soon-to-be, first carbon billionaire.
Accounts included both his earlier and contemporary angry denials that he was greedy, or had used his vast network of government contacts to influence public loans, contracts, and regulations, in parlaying a 2001 net worth of $2 million apparently into a green empire of several hundred million....
To distill Gorism is to live in a 1,000 sq. ft. solar house, bike to work, and take the train on long distances; but to promote Gorism, one lives in a mansion, jets on private planes, and is chauffeured from airport to conference center—a rather heavy carbon footprint indeed. I mention that because this week he has insisted that he only invested in what he believes in and is thus not a hypocrite—sort of like a 1990s Fannie or Freddie director saying he is only taking mega-bonuses because he believes in public support for housing.
Works and Days » The Discreet Charm of the Left-wing Plutocracy
Rush Limbaugh: The Interview
Worth listening to. Just click play and listen in the background. You'll come back to the foreground often.
Headslap
At their Monday night poker game in hell, I’ll bet Stalin, Hitler and Mao are kicking themselves: “ ‘It’s about leaving a better planet to our children?’ Why didn’t I think of that?” This is Two-Ply Totalitarianism—no jackboots, no goose steps, just soft and gentle all the way. Nevertheless, occasionally the mask drops and the totalitarian underpinnings become explicit. Take Elizabeth May’s latest promotional poster: “Your parents f*cked up the planet. It’s time to do something about it. Live Green. Vote Green.” As Saskatchewan blogger Kate McMillan pointed out, the tactic of “convincing youth to reject their parents in favour of The Party” is a time-honoured tradition. -- Gullible eager-beaver planet savers - Mark Steyn - Macleans.ca
Dr. Johnson on the dangers of drinking kool-aid on command
"Yes, Sir; and from what I have heard of him, one would not wish to sacrifice himself to such a man. If he must always have somebody to drink with him, he should buy a slave, and then he would be sure to have it. They who submit to drink as another pleases, make themselves his slaves."Paging Newt Gingrich.
In Real Times
The Tea Party world
is still that of genuinely funny things -- not the sour mordancy of Letterman; it is still one of basic fears and simple joys, of aching feet and a welcome ice-cream soda at the end of the day. Some people spend their whole lives trying to get away from it; to forget the memory of people sitting around a sunny porch eating peanuts, to try with various expensive unguents to wash the smell of new-mown grass and two stroke gasoline fumes from their hair. That is what "success" all too often means in certain circles. That and a line of white powder across a table. In the end they may arrive at a palace of chrome and glass, all cold air and ice at some dizzying height above the world. But they must always remember, or forget at their peril, that it is all upborne by truth and human love. -- Belmont Club » Bows and Flows
No PROBLEM. We've Done This Thousands of Times
of the old inboard motors in these vintage wooden boats you'll know what I mean when I say heads all over the marina snapped 'round when the twin Chrysler Hemi V-8's caught a spark and roared to life. Idling out and clearing the end of the marina, there was a small voice on one shoulder telling me to start slow and take it easy as the old power plants probably hadn't been run hard in who knows how long. On the other shoulder however was the slightly more insistent voice of "Old Vatted Demerara Rum" saying "Pour the coals to her!" Throwing caution to the wind, I pushed the throttles forward as far as they would go and the old wooden boat surged out of the water and was at top speed as I passed the last dock in the marina and burst into the open water of Lake Washington.
When something of a mechanical nature goes sideways on a boat running at speed.... -- The Demon Rum: « WESTSOUND MODERN
Another Burning Question of Life
"When was the last time you sat on a couch upside down and looked about the house? Kids do that all the time, and I have done it again and thought, "Whoa - I seriously need to vacuum." And "So that's where that [object/thing] went." -- Mikey commenting on Side-Lines: One of the Burning Questions of Life
Know When to Hold Them. Know When to Fold Them.
What happens next?
The President took a lot of the nation's hopes as political capital into the Big Casino. Now, after sitting at the tables for 9 months, there's only a small pile left of what was once a mountain of chips. Is the next hand going to win him big? Is he going to double down again? Or get up and catch a cab home, in case what's left in his pocket will cover it. Or will he write out a check on the basis of the family farm and spin the wheel of fortune again on the basis of his faith in the fundamental goodness of America's enemies? Order another round of drinks for everybody on the house? Go watch a play on Broadway and keep being Diamond Jim long after all the real diamonds have been hocked for paste? Is there a point where betting on hope means stuck on stupid? -- Belmont Club ｻ Another turn of the wheel
Great Question
Exurban Jon asks:
With all the advances in scientific knowledge why has no one designed a manlier Kleenex box?
One of the Burning Questions of Life
Here's a burning question I was reminded of by the video: do you eat your candy corn in sections? And, if so, do you consider the top to be the yellow part or the white part? I've always seen the little white triangle as the "foot" of the candy corn, but I learned when I designed my costume years ago that most people see it the other way. -- neo-neocon » Blog Archive » Get ready for Candy Corn Day
The Haywood Jablome Memorial Quote of the Day
Image via Wikipedia
Would Larry David Piss On an Image of Obama?
Image via Wikipedia
"Northwest Nap"
Urban DictionaryA very deep sleep where you are unable to hear telephones, text messages, and even the Air Force. Named to honor the two fine pilots from Northwest Airlines and there little "in flight snooze"
A Cow Is Born
Ms. McCain's failure to grasp that her prominence as a "writer," rather than as a Paris Hilton-style reality show performer, is owed first to her famous father, and second, to the fact that this is the Age of the Idiot.
Idiots have come into their own in a big way, courtesy of depraved consumers, and complicit TV producers and publishers, of pixel and paper alike. The duller you are and the louder you crow in contemporary America, the better you do. Clearly, Meghan McCain is not working with much ─ and is eminently qualified to dim debate in the Age of the Idiot. A familial predisposition, it would seem. John McCain finished 894th out of 899 at the Naval Academy and lost five jets. As IQ ace Steve Sailer once quipped, "To lose one plane over Vietnam may be regarded as a heroic tragedy; to lose five planes here and there looks like carelessness." -- By ILANA MERCER
Steve Jobs Hates Halloween
The next year, I get a bunch of guys from Pixar to come over and we make the most amazing Halloween lawn you've ever seen, with shitloads of stupid coffins and ghosts and a skeleton playing the piano. We have music, and lights, the whole works. Meanwhile, Larry comes over and brings a bunch of Navy SEAL type guys that he knows. In addition to all the stupid Halloween decorations, we rig up water cannons on the perimeter of the yard and up in the trees, loaded with a mixture of water, bleach and gasoline. We plant IEDs in the lawn, loaded with rock salt, and at each corner we put a dispenser that blasts pepper gel. We lay exposed wires across the lawn carrying enough current to knock you out, but not kill you. Then we put on our black commando outfits, and blacken our faces, and we wait. -- The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs
Hand me the gun. No, the bigger one.
Watching this will be either the funniest or most disgusting 2-minutes of your day.
Gearslamming Candidate Grabs Coveted Iowahawk Endorsement
"Canuck reader Maryann Crabtree forwards this photo of the candidate posing proudly in front of his Two Lane Blacktop - worthy 1955 Chevy 210 2-door sedan. Note missing rear bumper. Note radiused rear wheel well. Note nose-up gasser stance. Note the all-bidness custom paint, which appears to be a blend of Hugger Orange and Riverside Red. An educated guess tells me that lurking under the hood is a high winding destroked 301 small block, mating a 2-bolt main 327 with a 283 crank, with a set of Doug Thorley or Hooker headers huffing through glass packs. White ball Hurst shifter atop a Muncie 4-speed, natch. Visual cues indicate this photo was taken circa 1969; thus, while his Congressional cohort was tripping on brown acid in the mud at Max Yasgur's farm, Mr. Hoffman was gearslamming down the quarter mile at Fulton Speedway. (via iowahawk: Iowahawk Endorses ) @ Van der Leun
“Hey boys, We’re from Seattle and we’re lost…Can you help us out?”
filmed in and around these counties, understand that the foul mouthed, hot tempered, illiterate rednecks featured on this show are the creme de la creme of mossback society. Supported mostly by what is left of the logging industry in these parts, they live largely in dilapidated singlewides surrounded by clearcut woodlands and collections of the rusted remains of every car, truck, motor, transmission, and assorted piece of machinery or scrap metal that have been handed down through generations from father to son. To a city boy like I was at the time, they were suspect in every way. Which leads me to the proverbial hole in the donut of this tale. -- WESTSOUND MODERN
I'm slowly becoming convinced I have Attention Deficit Diso-look-a-puppy!
The Spirit Of Ecstasy
is the name of the hood ornament on Rolls-Royce cars. It is in the form of a woman leaning forwards with her arms outstretched behind and above her. The Spirit of Ecstasy carries with it a story about a secret passion between John Walter Edward Scott-Montagu and his secret love Eleanor Velasco Thornton, his secretary. -- Best of Wikipedia
Peggy Noonan Still Doesn't Get It...
What Noonan is so far refusing to understand is that, although Obama is narcissistic and likes adulation, he's not primarily interested in popularity -- except as a tool to policy. Policy is paramount, and his goal is not to be responsive to what the American people want, nor to hear their actual concerns and then to shape policy around them. His goal is to tell them what they want, to lie if required, to silence and ridicule and chastise and threaten the opposition, and if necessary to pull every political trick he can get away with in order to ram his agenda down our recalcitrant throats.Why neo-neocon is not writing a column for the Wall Street Journal is a mystery that passeth all understanding.
The Four Rules of Lying
That way even those who know he is lying will think he is lying in a “good” cause. If the last refuge of scoundrels is the flag, the ultimate protective banner is the Red Flag. Hannah Arendt once wrote “Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear.” Find the hole in your audience’s brain and drive your truck of manure through it.The second rule is to put forward the most extravagant claims.
Don’t be half-assed about lying. The more extravagant the fib the better. A sufficiently resourceful fraud clears his path of unbelievers by sheer audacity alone. Tell a big enough lie and no one would believe you could be so bold. As the fictional Rudolf Rassendyl proved in the Prisoner of Zenda that it is better to pass yourself off as King of Ruritania rather than a minor noble. A minor noble may be questioned, but the King will not be. It is all or nothing. And given that no one wants to tug at the Royal Robe to see if it is real ermine, the fraudster often gets it “all”.The third rule is that when questioned, destroy the questioner.
When impersonating the King be determined to have everyone who doubts your identity thrown in the tower for treason. Once you succeed in beheading the first challenger there will be no second challenges.The fourth rule is the most important. Avoid trying to bluff those who are too big to be faced down.
What undid both Fairey and Ward Churchill was that they didn’t know when to stop their imposture. They finally took it too far. Fairey, who had been successful up to that point tried to bluff his way past a major news organization and failed. Ward Churchill was already a professor when he made his “little Eichmanns” speech after 9/11 unleashed a tide of outrage he couldn’t outface. If Fairey had not launched his poster and Churchill had not made his “little Eichmanns” speech, they might still be intellectuals in good standing.
WH: 'If we've lost Anderson Cooper, we've lost one of our best tea-baggers."
I have an uneasy feeling only 10 months into the new administration that we're beginning to see the symptoms of this same kind of animus developing in the Obama administration. And as those of use who served in the Nixon administration know, that can get you in a lot of trouble... Don't create an enemies list." -- Anderson Cooper Compares Obama to Nixon, Spotlights Declining Approval Ratings | NewsBusters.org
You must remember this....
- Ansel Adams' Lost Los Angeles
- The Great Souls of Our Time: Van Morrison
- Waking at Dawn
- Gatesgate Moves MSM From the Tank to the Toilet
- "Presidents was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get."
- Goodbye to the Way We Were
- American Digest Word Mint: Obamallatio ™
- "I support the President but I am against all his policies." At Last, A Bumpersticker to Bring Us Together!
- Never Happy
- Moonrise
- Clear History
- No More Bums in America: Noted in Passing on the Streets
- Is there a blessed event in Meghan McCain and Levi Johnston's Future?
- Ad Astra Per Aspera
- How to Get Out of a Space Shuttle on the Pad in an Emergency
- We Need Nukes, Poor Cities, Genetically Modified Plants, and Terra Forming and We Need Them Now: Stewart Brand proclaims 4 environmental 'heresies'
- Backfill for the News Hole
- Cooling Out: From Spare Change to No Change
- American Twilight
- How Sarah Palin Will Become the Most Powerful Republican