Transcript:

“Hello, my name is Elbert Lee Guillory, and I’m the senator for the twenty-fourth district right here in beautiful Louisiana. Recently I made what many are referring to as a ‘bold decision’ to switch my party affiliation to the Republican Party. I wanted to take a moment to explain why I became a Republican, and also to explain why I don’t think it was a bold decision at all. It is the right decision — not only for me — but for all my brothers and sisters in the black community.

“You see, in recent history the Democrat Party has created the illusion that their agenda and their policies are what’s best for black people. Somehow it’s been forgotten that the Republican Party was founded in 1854 as an abolitionist movement with one simple creed: that slavery is a violation of the rights of man.

“Frederick Douglass called Republicans the ‘Party of freedom and progress,’ and the first Republican president was Abraham Lincoln, the author of the Emancipation Proclamation. It was the Republicans in Congress who authored the thirtheenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments giving former slaves citizenship, voting rights, and due process of law.

“The Democrats on the other hand were the Party of Jim Crow. It was Democrats who defended the rights of slave owners. It was the Republican President Dwight Eisenhower who championed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, but it was Democrats in the Senate who filibustered the bill.

“You see, at the heart of liberalism is the idea that only a great and powerful big government can be the benefactor of social justice for all Americans. But the left is only concerned with one thing — control. And they disguise this control as charity. Programs such as welfare, food stamps, these programs aren’t designed to lift black Americans out of poverty, they were always intended as a mechanism for politicians to control black the black community.

“The idea that blacks, or anyone for that matter, need the the government to get ahead in life is despicable. And even more important, this idea is a failure. Our commnunities are just as poor as they’ve always been. Our schools continue to fail children. Our prisons are filled with young black men who should be at home being fathers. Our self-initiative and our self-reliance have been sacrificed in exchange for allegiance to our overseers who control us by making us dependent on them.

“Sometimes I wonder if the word freedom is tossed around so frequently in our society that it has become a cliché.

“The idea of freedom is complex and it is all-encompassing. It’s the idea that the economy must remain free of government persuasion. It’s the idea that the press must operate without government intrusion. And it’s the idea that the emails and phone records of Americans should remain free from government search and siezure. It’s the idea that parents must be the decision makers in regards to their childrens education — not some government bureaucrat.

“But most importantly, it is the idea that the individual must be free to pursue his or her own happiness free from government dependence and free from government control. Because to be truly free is to be reliant on no one other than the author of our destiny. These are the ideas at the core of the Republican Party, and it is why I am a Republican.

“So my brothers and sisters of the American community, please join with me today in abandoning the government plantation and the Party of dissapointment. So that we may all echo the words of one Republican leader who famously said, ‘free at last, free at last, thank God Almight, we are free at last.’”

In the afterglow of the last week I have come to realize that what is deeply wrong with this country is that so far we have neither heard enough nor seen enough of President Obama.

I now think we need to see more. Much more. We need to bask in his warm visage and be lulled with the hum of his valved voice. We need to have a morning message from the President every day on all cable news channel. Indeed, we need to have it broadcast on all TV channels, especially ESPN and other places where citizens dodge their need to know the truth and their duty to look up from their coffee and upon the wonderful latte-tanned visage that is Obama.

We need to see his face with his honeyed message oozing out of his mouth in the lead-in to Good Morning America and Fox and Friends both without fear or favoritism.

Weather Channel too.

We need to have Barack Obama’s message, whatever it might be on whatever day, delivered dripping from his lips to all of us on the front page of whatever newspaper we are still reading online with a video-embed set on autoplay.

We need to have Obama's dulcet tones crooning his soothing message as the lead-in to NPR’s Morning Edition and that thing most considered among All Things Considered.

We need to have Obama's lilting phrases replace the bumper music at the top of Rush Limbaugh’s show.

In short, we cannot have enough of listening to the President tell us what he’s thinking and what the right way to think about what he’s thinking is.

We need to hear his inspiring words and see his craggy and indomitable face every day. We need to look and look again upon that clear eye, square jaw, and firm forehead leaning ever "Forward" and asking for our spare five bucks. We need this every single day.

I am in ernest about this. I will even pay higher taxes to make this so. We need, in the most urgent and important way, to see the wonder that is Barack Obama.... All. The. Time.

I hope that his coming testimony to the Congress, and to the special prosecutor, and to a grateful nation of church ladies in wild hats is only the beginning of this program of all Obama all the time!

This then is my solemn prayer. in the words of that most holy and revered of Presidents, George W. Bush, "LORD, MAKE OBAMA APPEAR IN THE FACE OF ALL. BRING. IT. ON. 'Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die'."

This work was awarded the 16th Grand Prize if the Japan Media Arts Festival.

I must have been sleeping when this became an "official" national holiday. Of course,the question of which nation is still, sort of, open.

Marriage 

Continued...

"Hey, who here still thinks that trusting that North Korea can't lob a missile past, say, Denver is a viable long, mid, or even short-term national security strategy? Anybody? Hello?" -- Moe Lane Boston Marathon aftermath

Huffpo? Check. "Jaweed Kaleem?" Check and double check.Boston Bombing Suspects' Muslim Identity Provides Few Clues To Motivation For Bombing

Whenever I think I've come to the bottom of the media's ability to snorkel deep inside the holding tanks of overheated Port-O-Sans, I find there are always previously unseen depths where they lurk.

Think about it. Not only does some insect life form have to think up and write that headline, other insects have to review, approve, and put it up. At Huffpo it's nothing but cockroaches all the way down.

---

Elsewhere....BREAKING: Has The Word ‘Breaking’ Lost All Its Meaning?

WATERTOWN, MA—Citing exhaustive use of the word “breaking” to preface media coverage of today’s ongoing manhunt for one of the alleged Boston Marathon bombers, The Onion is now questioning whether the word “breaking” has lost all its meaning. According to sources, the word ‘breaking’ has been used over 4,000 times across a variety of media platforms in the past 24 hours and has been repeatedly used to categorize news items related to the Boston Marathon bomber suspect that are not, in fact, substantively different from earlier reports, and thus not truly “breaking” by any traditional definition of that term. Acknowledging that 700 separate “breaking” news bulletins have been published since the beginning of this breaking news article, The Onion continues to wonder whether this word can ever be taken seriously again.

"Fools rush in where fools have been before."

I'm with Dorothy Sayers on this one:

As I grow older and older
And totter toward the tomb
I find that I care less and less
Who goes to bed with whom

We've got a lot of problems with marriage in this country, but can't we take a step back and draw a deep breath, smell the winds of change and admit that Gay Marriage is a done deal?

It's here. It's queer. So what?

Enough with all the whining and carping and running about with one's hair on fire screaming, "Oh! Gay Marriage. I got the fear!" If a couple of normally insane Americans want to get a bunch of friends or Elvis impersonators together, seek out a whompingly liberal priest, rabbi, minister, or Marryin' Sam to hitch them up... so what?

Yes, so what? If yet another brain-damaged, oh-so-victimized minority wants to move into another white, heterosexual fantasyland after white heterosexuals are finished with it, so be it. Nothing like inhabiting the ruins of a dream to make dreams come true.

Speaking as a twice married, twice disappointed, compulsively heterosexual male, I have heard the arguments and seen the yearning and felt the love of gay and lesbian couples from sea to shining sea. And I have felt their gay pain and now wish only that they share my straight pain. It will bring us together faster than Obama explaining economics to stoners everywhere on the Daily Show.

Deep down all our fellow gay Americans want is to be allowed their right, at long last, to enter the, ahem, Holy Realms of Sanctified and Blissful Matrimony. I take them at their word.

And I say: "Bring.... It.... On! Get... Down! Let it be, at long last, Mission Accomplished!" It is the morning of a decade of fabulous parties in America, and not a moment too soon.

As someone with not a little experience inside the obsessions, the compulsions, the addictions, the rages and the long-term quiet desperation of marriage, let me say that I cannot wait to welcome my gay brothers and sisters to the Holy Realm of Sanctified Bliss. I believe with every drop of rain that falls that any two or three or four or more of gay, straight, quadrogendered, pawed or tentacled Americas that want to get into a marriage should not only be encouraged, but tossed headlong into the institution.... before they sober up and snap out of it!

Looked at in the right light, there's a lot of upside in this Gay rush-to-nup for everyone in this country.

• Going in there's a major boost to the retail clothing and footwear industries.
  
• Our financially floundering churches ( It ain't no real weddin' lessen it be a church weddin'! ) are going to get enough in donations to morph themselves into cathedrals.
  
• Cathedrals are going to have a five year waiting list.
  
• Forget about getting any caterers above the level of the Second Avenue Deli for the duration. They will be either baking enough caviar canapes to drain the Black Sea, or out shopping for Gulfstreams.
  
• Salmon will become an endangered species, as will wedding singers.
  
• Wedding planners will charge more than Bill Gates' estate lawyers and they'll get it.
  
• You want any Spode china, 500-count Egyptian cotton sheets, or monogramed towels? Better snap them up now.
  
• Ditto the booking of weeks at any spa resort that offers in-room jacuzzis.
  
• Vacations to anywhere other than Bike Week at Daytona are right out too. And even there you'll probably have to sleep on the beach.
  
• Don't even mention the word "Disneyland" to your kids for a decade. (See, you just saved about $7,000 right there.)

Then there's the immediate after effects.

• Have you been thinking about redoing your window treatments, and perhaps junking that Santa Fe look for something crypto-modern you saw in Dwell? Forget it. Every decent interior decorator in the hemisphere is going on a honeymoon, and not taking on new clients until his or her own window treatments are made new. Relax. With a few push-pins and your worn beach towels, you should be able to weather the storm.

Speaking of storms, brace yourself and do not be fooled by the return of peace and quiet to these states. Once the initial tsunami of coast-to-coast gay marriage scours this fair land down to a series of moral nubs, a period of calm normality can only be enjoyed for, well, anywhere from 18 to 36 months before.... the Aftermath.

The Aftermath is when the millions of gay believers who have thrust themselves into the sylvan dream of wedded bliss.... wake up to find out that they are, Aieeeee!, married. And when they do, they will want what nearly every clear sighted heterosexual couple wants out of marriage these days.... a divorce.

And since gays lust after not tolerance but "approval," they are determined to inhabit every burnt-out fantasy of straight life. Hence, it will be a "traditional" divorce. Not a good new-fashioned no-fault divorce, but a brimming-with-blame, spite-spitted Prozac-popping divorce American style. Full of fights, slights, sullen silences, and a craving from the spouse for "my own space."

About half of the gay Americans getting in the long, long lines at divorce court will discover that the "craving from the spouse for 'my own space'" has a very special meaning. It usually means either your space, or a space you will pay for one way or another.

Because make no mistake about it. Whether it is a gay professionals' divorce, or a gay crackers' divorce, somebody's losing a beach house or a double-wide.

Children adopted by gay male couples will probably be treated in a kindly and caring manner during the divorce, but when it comes to the pets, get ready for the mother of all cat-fights over the puppy or the pussy.

Children born to lesbian couples will probably fare less well. Besides a lifelong predilection for comfortable shoes, the best they can hope for is for the courts to okay that they can, should they elect to do so, live with their sperm donor.

To be a classic American divorce a gay divorce has to come complete with that must-have divorce fashion accessory -- the gob-stoppingly expensive lawyer. (Make that two. Three if kids or pets are in the mix.) This is not really the lawyers' fault. The lawyers have to be expensive since it is the only way the lawyers (gay or straight) can continue to pay off their ex-spouse or spouses or farm animals.

Alas, not only is marriage due to be a downer for hundreds of thousands of gays in the same way it is a downer for millions of straights, the non-stop depression generator of divorce is going to weave its old black magic without remorse or regard to sexual orientation or good intentions. And the moralists are "afraid" that all gay marriage will do is to open the door to polygamy?

Dear moralists,
Be not downcast. Do not despair. You are simply failing to see the entertainment value for tens of millions of your fellow divorced heterosexual Americans. Instead, picture your deep and abiding pleasure when you get to unfold a comfy lawn chair, pop a cold one and kick back to watch a stream of four-cornered gay divorces carom through the "family justice system" like drag-queens on steroids trapped in God's Foosball court.

There may be a lot of fuming and fussing and fighting and hissy-fits down in the old Family courthouse, but let them roll on! Out on the lawn we'll just be kicking it, betting on which one of sixteen snarling coon dogs comes out of the pack with all four legs still on.

Do you doubt that these little contretemps will make for big box office on all 40 screens in the vast multiplex of the American mind?

As hinted above, I have three little words that make one big pitch: "Gay Divorce Court!"

"Gay Divorce Court!" would be a reality show with more legs than a queer centipede. "Gay Divorce Court!" is appointment television that could launch a million office pools, and probably some Vegas-sized lines for the inevitable Brad Pitt vs. Tom Cruise de-fornication fiasco.

It is time we all switched from boxers to Speedos in keen anticipation of the gay decade ahead. Gay marriage is a done deal. It's time our gay brothers and sisters stopped having the ACLU pay for their legal battles, and started to pay for some of their own.

And pay they will. I here prophesy that, verily, via "Gay Divorce Court!" they shall be cleaned, reamed, fucked, plucked and hosed through the nose.

Gay Americans say that without marriage they are, like the slaves of yesteryear, only half-a-person. Let us remove from the marriage of true minds all impediments to their assumption of whole-person-hood. How else can at least half of them can learn that special feeling that comes to a whole person when half one's net worth is lopped off by the courts like some robed Loreena Bobbit on crack? Yum!

Gentlemen, start your vows!

Me? I'm out front on the church lawn. I'm making the popcorn, getting out the lawn chair, and popping a cold one. Y'all come too.

---

[Republished from March, 2006 and November, 2008]
And I'm still right.]

"McCain & the RINO losers are a symptom of "Passive-Every-Other-November-Voterosis." If Boehner and McConnell agreed to carpet bomb elementary schools in the country Talk Radio would be on fire... with talk. The blogs would erupt... in more talk. One Conservative after another would explain to every other Conservative why bombing elementary schools would be inconvenient, wasteful of resources, unfair, "maybe not as polite as we would all like to be," but it would all amount... to talk.

"Gerald Ford, GHW Bush, Bob Dole, McCain, Romney, and the next several unmotivaed chumps didn't grab hostages and take over the Party. We sat on our rears and explained why would prefer other candidates or other policies, but we did zilch to make that happen.

"When politics has become trying to dodge the sh*t-storm of this or that group and one remaining group threatens, at their most angry, to bus to DC and stand well away from government offices after hours or on a weekend, who do you think will be sold out? If you fear a beating from union thugs or an agnry email and you can't make everyone happy, which one of those will you make sure doesn't happen?

"STOP PLAYING NICE. You don't have to beat up people, but you had sure better make them think that's the price they will pay for p*ssing you off. Being nice means you will be taken advantage of.

"Stop explaining to nice people the benefits of being nice.

"Stop trying to justify yourself to liberals and their media.

"Our options are to engage in routine civil disobedience, surrender, or wait for the violence to begin.

"The Left & RINOs will not stop molesting you because you and your friends agree they shouldn't do it. They will stop when The Left & RINOs fear molesting you. Retreating to ideological, political, or physical gated-communities is just surrender. You have no right to surrender on behalf of the rest of us." -- Posted by Scott M as a comment to Eviscerate Gut the GOP!

"They're just stealing the money They're getting billions and billions and billions and billions and billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, billions, and billions and it ain't fuckin' enough! These bankers, they are like pedophiles. They won't stop until they're locked up!"

Vast Effin' Warning: A London Cabbie Explains The Great EU Bank Robbery And Much Much More

"You will lose your f##king money in your bank," is how this English gentleman cabbie begins his caustic diatribe against all that is wrong with European (and in fact) the world of bankers and elites. The so-called 'artist taxi driver' has a spit-flying hand-smashing epic rant while sitting in his taxi. "They did a stress test on the banks in Cyprus 18 months ago and said it's f##king great" and now this; "this is some f##king crooked shit." "They're off their f##king nuts mate," he explains as he asks rhetorically of the bankers getting the bailouts, "how many f##king ponies do their daughters' need?"

Hey, he's an East Ender and "effin'" is just his way to taking a breath.

Continued...

Day in and day out -- and now moving into a 24/7/365 news cycle -- that annoying mosquito whine in your political ear is the argument over cutting.

Cutting back. Cutting the budget. Cutting the government down to size.

Reducing the size. Of the budget. Of the spending. Of the entitlements.

Cutting this department here. Cutting that entitlement there. Cutting out the White House tours. Cutting out the duffer's awful golf games. Cutting the Pentagon. Cutting the Food Stamps.

Cutting them off. Cutting in line. Cutting line by line. Prime cuts. Always and forever the argument over the "cuts" blathers on from Rand Paul to Ayn Rand; from Obama to Yo Momma.

It's all just arrant nonsense, drooling blather, and a stone waste of time. Any fool with two eyes that have not had their pupils poked out with red hot needles can see that the only way this particular government is ever going to be cut is when somebody or something cuts its throat.

Absent that final cut, cut it out.

Continued...

Twenty-second Amendment: "Section 1. No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice...."

Yes, I know, I know .... but it would almost be worth it just to watch the Cintons' heads explode.

[Or as someone once said (and I appropriated): "I try to become more cynical every day, but lately I just can't keep up."]

Of course nitpicking Constitutional scholars might hold that something called the 12th Amendment stands in the way, but these are the Obamas for goodness sake and a Constitutional quibble has never stopped them before. [Details]

Continued...

August 1942.

"Training in marksmanship helps girls at Roosevelt High School in Los Angeles develop into responsible women. Part of Victory Corps activities there, rifle practice encourages girls to be accurate in handling firearms. Practicing on the rifle range in the school's basement." -- -- Shorpy Historical Photo Archive

He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before his chariots.

12 And he will appoint him captains over thousands, and captains over fifties; and will set them to ear his ground, and to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and instruments of his chariots.

13 And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers.

14 And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants.

15 And he will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his servants.

16 And he will take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work.

17 He will take the tenth of your sheep: and ye shall be his servants.

18 And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the Lord will not hear you in that day.

1 Samuel 8 KJV - And it came to pass

Howso' great their clamour, whatsoe'er their claim,
Suffer not the old King under any name!
Here is naught unproven--here is naught to learn.
It is written what shall fall if the King return.

He shall mark our goings, question whence we came,
Set his guards about us, as in Freedom's name.
He shall take a tribute, toll of all our ware;
He shall change our gold for arms--arms we may not bear.

-- orkut - Rudyard Kipling "The Old Issue"
HT: Bobbye

1. We admitted we were powerless over spending—that our deficit had become unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that increasing taxes two times greater than all those currently levied could restore us to solvency.

3. Made a decision to turn our nation and our lives over to the care of Socialism as we understood it.

4. Made a searching and fearless inventory of all the gold actually left in the vaults of the Fed and Fort Knox and found two nuggets worth $325.99.

5. Admitted to voters, to the Federal Reserve, and to all eternal Government bureaucracies the exact nature of our bankruptcy and appeared in a barrel on The View.

6. Were entirely ready to have the Fed print infinite money on whatever paper they could get at a case discount down at Staples.

7. Humbly asked the voters to give us all their money, their IRAs, and title to their vacation homes.

8. Made a list of all persons that still had something squirreled away, and became willing to make send in the National Guard to dig up their backyards and basements.

9. Made direct promises to replace any precious metals or gems found with paper money, ten cents on the dollar, to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would require a cash award of more than $49.98.

10. Continued to search for hidden assets and when we found them promptly seized them.

11. Sought through Universal Health Care and reducing the military to improve our nation until it resembled Great Britain in real power and influence, and confiscated all guns and ammunition we could lay our hands on to keep pesky disagreements with the National Guard on a name-calling basis, praying only for a disarmed, dispirited, depressed and Universally Medicated citizenry and for the power to rule over them.

12. Having had a rebirth of the Soviet Union under Stalin as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to any remaining free societies, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

For all you do / This bud's for you.

On sale in Seattle something that will lower your information, voter:

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"First they came for the blacks, and I spoke up because it was wrong, even though I'm not black.

"Then they came for the gays, and I spoke up, even though I'm not gay.

"Then they came for the Muslims, and I spoke up, because it was wrong, even though I'm an atheist.

"When they came for illegal aliens, I spoke up, even though I'm a legal immigrant.

"Then they came for the pornographers, rebels and dissenters and their speech and flag burning, and I spoke up, because rights are not only for the establishment.

"Then they came for the gun owners, and you liberal shitbags threw me under the bus, even though I'd done nothing wrong. So when they come to put you on the train, you can fucking choke and die.

"Or you can commit seppuku with a chainsaw. I really don't care anymore. This is the end of my support for any liberal cause, because liberals have become anything but."

[Written by The Sacred Cow Slaughterhouse ｻ The Post in Which I Piss Off EVERYBODY.]

"I wonder if at some point, those who get things done just get tired of all this and give all of the idiots a sort of separate, but parallel world where they can spend valueless money on worthless crap, compete with each other for meaningless honors, and attempt to impose preposterous narratives on one another through an unending parade of news shows, talking points, and blog posts. Meanwhile, the doers build and repair the infrastructure, pioneer innovations, bear and raise kids with a good shot at becoming perfectly decent human beings, and run the real financial system according to sound principles.

"Perhaps Kornbluth's Marching Morons [FullText] already covers this ground, but today we don't have to worry about the idiots out-reproducing the doers. Sufficient access to birth control, abortion on demand, not-especially socially costly diversions, inflated credentials and titles, food, and a few hundred square feet of living space in a "cool" urban setting will keep them content for a lifetime. In a few generations they will have chatted and partied themselves out of existence. The solution need need not have a eugenic dimension. Those children of idiots who show a strong desire to create (in the real, material sense), who like children, who want to raise them responsibly, and who believe that wealth is to be earned through toil could always be invited to the other side.

"Contempt is an important part of the scheme. Not of the doers for the idiots, but for the idiots for the doers. As the last idiot couple pops the last viagra and copulates for the last time to some life desecrating lyrics played on a sound system they could never understand, and as they die of simultaneous orgasms/strokes, they must die with contempt on their wrinkled lips for the doers. They must always be absolutely convinced of their superiority (that sound system would never have been built without us... you didn't build it... we did!). Given their hubris, I don't think that is a hard goal to achieve.

"And to be honest, I really don't think that we are that far from being able to put this plan into practice. Not that far at all."

Posted by: el baboso as a comment on Modern Love

There is no "Mastermind."

Contrail at 1:40.

"Same old tales ain't nothing new
What the hell's a soul to do
But maybe you can help me through
Giving me one dance with you
One dance with you
One dance with you
One dance with you
One dance with you...."

"Woody Guthrie carves a sign into his guitar
'This machine kills fascists', Ani Difranco says
'Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right'
I say, 'Here's a monkey wrench
Bop me on the head long enough....
Maybe I'll wake up for a second.'"

-- Dan Bern - One Dance

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books.

What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.

Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information.

Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism.

Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us.

Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.

Orwell feared we would become a captive culture.

Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.

As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.”

In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain.

In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.

In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.” – Neil Postman – Amusing Ourselves to Death

Continued...

Obama Supporter Interviews Her 2008 Self....

Continued...

File under: "Moon Landing. Yeah, right."

1.

2.

Here endeth the lesson.

The age demanded an image
Of its accelerated grimace,
Something for the modern stage,
Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;

Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries
Of the inward gaze;
Better mendacities
Than the classics in paraphrase!

The "age demanded" chiefly a mould in plaster,
Made with no loss of time,
A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster
Or the "sculpture" of rhyme....

All men, in law, are equals.
Free of Peisistratus,
We choose a knave or an eunuch
To rule over us.
-- Hugh Selwyn Mauberly -- Ezra Pound

It's chill but I've been down the hill looking for a couple of items I don't really need and failing to find them. Fine by me. Back at the house I'm relieved to discover that the postman seems to have had no junk mail to bring me today. Fine by me. The stores are full but traffic seems strangely light.

Later at Ken's, the market up the block and around the corner, I am buying a few modest items for a modest Monday dinner when the checker asks me, "Are you having a nice long weekend?"

Without thinking I reply, "Well, all my weekends are long these days."

"Good for you," she says and then it hits me.

"I'm sorry. Today was a holiday, wasn't it?"

She nods. I try to think of something to say to recover from what must be, to the clueless young, a clear gaffe, but I've got nothing. Since the morning I'd completely forgotten the status of this new holy day in America. I guess I was overwhelmed with the second immaculation taking place somewhere very far off to much more muffled praise than the first immaculation. In addition, being in Seattle you just don't get a lot of notice about MLK regardless of the media's breathless litany of adulation and rotund hosannas of praise. Seattle is, after all, the very whitest city or town I've ever had to endure. That is, however, no excuse -- at least to the ever sensitive and always guilty white folks that yabble and clatter about the town.

Early in the day the holiday was brought to my attention by the always slavish Joshua Rothman at The New Yorker who confidently opined: "Today, on Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, a lot of us will be watching King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, on YouTube or elsewhere." A bit later on another page I read a more realistic assessment of the day which went, "We have "progressed" from 'I have a dream...' to 'I have a drone...'." My range of reaction was measured between a muttered "Yeah right" and a rueful but passing smirk.

And then I just forgot about it. Seattle's just too white to pull together a convincing MLK Day parade.

Reflecting on The Day after my grocery store reminder I have to say that I'm sticking with that rueful but passing smirk as I consider the distance we've come since King's speech at the Lincoln Memorial 50 years ago in 1963. Then we struggled, with men like King, to come together as a people, to move beyond our past, to be one nation. Now, under the cynical manipulation and malicious policies of one who would cast himself as the inheritor of the King mantle, we find the current occupent of the White House doing his best, day after day, to drive the races apart once again.

How strange that someone who has attained the presidency in this day and age should not only hate citizens because of the color of their skin and the cut of their bitter and clinging class, but be lauded for it. Stranger still that he should be half-black and be inaugurated on the day set aside to honor Martin Luther King. Once I would have remembered and honored this day and felt we were at last getting beyond race hate in America. When exactly that was I now forget. I guess we've still a reckoning ahead of us.

Continued...

Money, money, money. That's all you hear these days. Hundreds of billions, working on a trillion. Banks need a bailout. Cars need a bailout. Housing needs a bailout. You need a bailout. I need a bailout. Even President Obama needs a bailout from his bailout. Everywhere you go we're tapped out, busted, broke. Let's face it, we need money. It's time for tough choices and tougher love.

Where, oh where, shall this money be found? It is to be found, it would seem, far out on the ocean of the future dead center in the Sargasso Sea of debt. But why borrow from the future when you can simply liquidate under-performing assets in the present? Isn't it better to turn useless stuff you've got just lying around into cash than to take on new debt? Especially if a lot of the new debt is going to pay off the old debt? Of course it is.

The rush to borrow from the future ignores some very tangible assets here at home that could be used to give us all, citizens and government alike, a very nice hit from the money machine.

Traveling through Florida, as I have been for some weeks, you see these underutilized assets all about you. They are everywhere, like rich, virgin topsoil ready to be planted and then harvested. What's more, harvesting these assets to put some real money into circulation does not go against the core values of the ruling Democratic majority. It merely extends them to the logical conclusion. Like the culling of the herd before birth through the use of abortion to get the nonproductive out of the way before they can consume resources, it is time our older citizens -- far past their usefulness, their productive years, but likely to consume lots of resources for decades to come -- were, quite simply, liquidated.

Yes, it's time for mom and pop and granny and grandpop to go. All 37 million of them must be transformed from codger to compost if the American dream is not to become a new-age nightmare. It's time for a government program from coast to coast to make sure that every American over the age of 65 takes one for the team -- in the form of a government approved and delivered .22 bullet in the back of the head.

Continued...

Scene:
FALSTAFF, sitting upon the ground telling sad stories of the deaths of kings
.... some poison'd by their wives.

Enter FOOL.

FOOL: Good Sir John, how fare thee.

FALSTAFF: I fare well but soon must fare thee well.

FOOL: Nay. Take thy shadow off thyself.
Do but drink this bottle down and we shall merry be.

FALSTAFF: Merry? Me? Falstaff shall no more merry be.

FOOL: But thou art known from Land's End to John O'Groats
as the merriest of Harry’s merry band.
And I stand witness from our revels past
that all such tales are true.

FALSTAFF: Oh, fine Fool, if you seek one
who would be merry with you
you seek not old Sir John.

FOOL: Posh and bother, good Sir John,
with these sweet cakes
and this good ale
how can you not merry be?

FALSTAFF: I may not now make merry
because I have made myself marry.

Continued...

.... THE CHRISTIANS

.... THE DARWINS

GETTING OFF ON THE CLUB FOOT: SPIEGEL Interview with Evolution Philosopher Daniel Dennett

SPIEGEL: Professor Dennett, more than 120 million Americans believe that God created Adam our of mud some 10,000 years ago and made Eve from his rib. Do you personally know any of these 120 million?
DENNETT: Yes.

Really? Let's see, there are currently 311,591,917 Americans. The Spiegel's blunt assertion to which Dennet utterly agrees would mean that one in three American men, women, and children hold to the literal story of Creation -- mud, 10,000 years, case closed. One would assume that everyone would know someone at that ratio. But the number itself seems more opportunistic than true.

I suppose that if you looked mostly at children who were still of the age when the Tooth Fairy is their own personal cash machine, and added them to hard-core evangelicals you might be able to bump the real number up, but I still don't think you get even a sizable portion of 120 million. At any rate, I'd hope the discussion would only cite the beliefs of adults, but maybe the Darwins are so threatened they have to pour in some kids to get to Scary Numberland.

The bald assertion certainly gets the interview off to a big bang, but I for one find it hard to credit it as the cold, hard statistical fact these two want to pound on in their paranoia.

Indeed, if there is any basis for this number at all it would seem to be derived by lumping together young Earth creationism, old-Earth creationism, day-age creationism, theistic evolution, neo-creationism, Jewish creationism, and a few others. Creationism, it would seem, is a house of many mansions, and I suppose the could all add up in the mind of a Darwin to a big, bad threat.

While I accept that a few Christian denominations require their members to swear to the Biblical Creation story on, well, a stack of Bibles, the last time I checked there were any number of churches that had no such requirement, Catholic and Protestant. It is my impression that for most Christian faiths you need to believe in one God and Jesus Christ as His only son to belong. The Unitarians are a bit sketchy on those two things, but hey what's a heaven without some Unitarians in the mix to spend eternity telling everyone else they're still not quite sure?

Of late, I've been attending a wide variety of Christian Services around the greater Seattle area, and there doesn't (so far) seem to be a great deal of rancor within the various denominations. Neither have I stumbled across one that insists on believing in Biblical creation stories or getting out, but I suppose that could come up on any Sunday. I'm sure there are a goodly number of Christians that do believe in the literal truth of the Bible and who handle doubters and snakes with equal aplomb. But 120 million?

I think that says much more about the rigid belief set of Dennett and the Spiegel than American Christians. Of course, I could be wrong. But then again so could Dennett. For while Christians firmly believe they have been touched by the Spirit of God in Christ, Dennett just as clearly believes he has been "touched by some noodly appendage."
----
UPDATE: AN email alerts me to this Dennett sighting --Darwin. Destroyer of God , which reminded me he'd made a previous appearance on this site in 2003 with The "Brights:" Smug, Self-satisfied and Stupid.

Commenter John Flemming takes issue with Solzhenitsyn's vision of Soviet repression in "How we burned in the camps later". Fleming says, persuasively, that the Soviet way will not be 'the American Way:'

"It's not gonna be like that. It'll be more subtle, like the LAPD arresting the harmless Moroccan filmmaker for daring to make a crappy movie that disses He Who Must Not Be Dissed [HWMNBD].

"You're a maker. You'll do something... like not pay your ObamaTax on time. Maybe deliberately.

"Or maybe you're paying for things in cash too often.

"Or nobody has a right to make fun of HWMNBD, and you told a joke.

"They'll come and evict you. A moocher family will quickly move in. They'll have lists: takers and moochers. Don't you know, it's payback time? He promised them Revenge, remember? It's somebody else's turn to enjoy that home you have created.

"Will your neighbors defend you and chase the deputy sheriffs away when the come for you at 10PM? Not likely, they'll look out, see the police cars, and close their blinds and wait for their turn with a growing sense of dread.

"Once a week, the cops show up late at night, no flashing lights, and the neighborhood slowly changes.

Continued...

Meanwhile... Mitt Romney continued to take his sweet revenge!

Meanwhile.... Better Than Beer: Two weeks after designer Allan Alcorn installed the 1972 video game Pong in Andy Capp's bar in Sunnyvale, Calif., it stopped functioning. Nothing had gone awry with the completely analog electronics inside the table-tennis game. Too many quarters in the machine's coin acceptor were to blame. The easily fixed problem was a sign of the game's popularity and Atari's financial success to come.

Meanwhile... in Afghanistan A M249 machine gunner runs directly towards a hail of Taliban PKM machine gun fire and RPGs, laying down suppressing fire once he makes it to cover.

Meanwhile... Pizza Hut gives back with pizza-scented perfume

Meanwhile.... here are some Thoughts about Consciousness while Cutting in the Brain

Meanwhile... Science robot ends Guinness record-breaking ocean journey After 9,000 miles, the autonomous robot Papa Mau completed its trip across the ocean.

Meanwhile.... Newspapers as Luxury Goods: Murdoch and Sulzberger Have More in Common Than It Appears : The New Yorker

Meanwhile... Japanese Rent-a-Boyfriend Service Caters to Lonely Women in Need of Cuddling

Meanwhile.... The Zapruder Film dissected: The Other Shooter: The Saddest and Most Expensive 26 Seconds of Amateur Film Ever Made

Meanwhile.... When Jackie Kennedy learned the unwelcome truth, she lamented, “He didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. It had to be some silly little communist. It robs his death of any meaning.”

The Fable of the Final Hour by Dan Propper

Murder in America @ WSJ.com Explore an interactive database of killings committed in the U.S. from 2000 to 2010. You can sort by the race and sex of killer and victim, the circumstances of the killing, and many more variables.

A few caveats:

"The FBI collects this data from the states, except for Florida. Florida doesn't use the FBI's guidelines when reporting additional information about homicides. The FBI data don't capture all homicides. The states' reporting is voluntary, and the country's thousands of police agencies aren't consistent in how they report. Some states, including New York, reported no justifiable homicides at all for some years. In recording the circumstances of a murder, the information recorded in the FBI data may capture only the relationship of the killer to one of the victims -- but not other victims -- in a given situation. Because of the unlimited number of scenarios in which a homicide can occur, the coding used in the FBI database may not explain the full set of circumstances involved."

HT Links ｫ Gucci Little Piggy

"They vary one from the other not by the value of the life that was cut short but by column inches of copy they generate. The principal metric of the tragedy of a modern death is its news value. If the death serves a narrative it is tragic. If not, who gives a damn? Here is how it works.

Black Africans killing black Africans with machetes has no news value. White Europeans killing black Africans with machetes has a big news value. Anyone killing anyone with bladed weapons generally has little news value. Anyone killing anyone with a handgun has front page news value, especially where the Second Amendment is concerned. Arabs killing Arabs is page 10 news. A Jew killing anyone is the headline story. Babies dying in their millions from abortion does not even qualify as a story. The IDF killing a stone killer from Hamas  is a horror of unimaginable international proportions. Arabs rocketing Israelis is not even reported. Israelis shooting back -- €” well how dare they." -- Belmont Club » The Assassin'€™s Creed

IDF Pinpoint Strike on Ahmed Jabari, Head of Hamas Military Wing.

Standing Ovation!

The people keep a comin', but the train done gone.

HT: El Captain @ small dead animals

If Mitt Romney could think like this and speak like this he'd be the president elect.

So good you'll listen to it twice.

1.Start drinking early.

2. Make sure your oven is on.

3. "Just Put the F*cking Turkey in the Oven"

4. Go for a walk.

And now, to make this item even more useful: The Butcher Carves a Turkey

Ray Venezia, the manager of the meat department at New York's Fairway Market, shows his technique for effectively carving a turkey.

"Look out kid / They keep it all hid" -- Subterranean Homesick Blues

Some companies try to bluff their way past shoppers’ rip-off radar.

Mueller’s 25 percent downsize of its spaghetti packages, from a pound to 12 ounces, features a box design that flags its “NEW — 6 servings” quantity. Of course, that’s two fewer servings than the old box contained. Those classic stacks of Premium saltine crackers proved too easy to count when Nabisco tried marketing smaller packages, and consumers protested. So the company rolled out a line of round saltines, packed loose in a bag. -- Package size changes mask product price increases

"Sugar lost the fifth pound at least ten years ago. Hubby just now noticed this.

"Cereal boxes with less cereal, but packaged in taller---but narrower---cartons to make it look like we're getting more.

"And Kleenexes! Over a year ago, I noted that the small box that goes in our craft fair holder seemed smaller. Because I stockpile, I could go to the closet and compare it to a box purchased months before: yup . . . old one had 110 tissues, now we get 100. And the lotion ones went down to 70 count! But price is the same.

"Oh, and each Kleenex is also about 1/4" narrower all the way around; don't even get me started on how thin they've become.

"Tuna dropped two ounces about two years ago. And almost anything else in a 16-ounce package has shed 1-2 ounces and now weighs 14-15.2 oz." -- Comment Posted by: NeeNee toSide-Lines: "And what to my wondering eyes should appear but a 4 lb bag of sugar. "

Continued...

"Old Glory doesn’t mean anything, simply because you woke up last Wednesday to a measly 4 millions popular votes difference?

A battle of nearly 121 million voters finds you outnumbered by four and hear, hear: the Republic is dead and the war is lost?

"Try and tell that to those Americans who found themselves outnumbered and outgunned by far more disadvantageous enemy ratios, whether in a forest in the Ardennes, a hill in Korea, a valley in Vietnam or a mountain in Afghanistan. Try and tell them you’re considering giving up and burning the flag in despair.

"Even though I am just a French, I am quite certain I can predict their reaction.

"Once again, you don’t need a lecture from this Frenchman, but it seems to me that some of you, in the emotion of that unexpected electoral defeat, forgot this simple fact: America is always outnumbered....

"Yet it doesn’t matter: America’s strength isn’t in numbers, it’s in her soul.

"Hear this final prophecy America: only one man can kill the Republic, and it isn’t Barack Obama. The one man who will kill your Republic is the one man who will last give up and renounce it.

"Don’t you dare be that man.

Continued...

Pump Up the Hate

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds.... Abraham Lincoln's 2nd Inaugural Address

As the policies, plans and promises of both parties fade, the supreme theme of this election remains, to no one’s surprise, race. One side asserts that, policies and ability aside, it would be, as they asserted in 2008, racist not to elect the current president. The opposition denies the race is about race at all but is instead about the ability to govern and the need for more effective policies. Hence the current president, lacking both, must go. Both sides promulgate their lie of choice. The nation is not fooled. Tuesday will determine which lie the nation will tolerate for the next four years.

Both positions are lies because while the defeat of Obama would not be racist, his defeat would indeed turn on his race. Every advantage taken by Obama during his rise depended on his race. This continues to this day. His promoters deny this but we have had enough peeks behind their curtains of political prevarication to know that their denials, while useful and soothing to the masses, are lies and are known by them to be so.

Without his African-American veneer Obama would never have risen above a minor ward-heeler, if that. Without his race is doubtful whether or not his matriculation to Occidental college would have been assured. Harvard Law would have been only a dream in a rising plume of reefer smoke. If Obama has just been another white kid with a deep tan on the beaches of Hawaii some today might vote him the best bong maker on Maui, but nobody would be voting for him as president of the United States. It was because of his race and, quite literally, by hook and by crook that he rose to be the right man in the right place at the right time with the right advisors and the right supporters and the right opponents to be able to step, as he did, into history.

Continued...

A video riff on this classic by John Hawkins:

20 Only In America Ironies

1) Only in America could politicians talk about the greed of the rich at a $35,000 a plate campaign fund raising event.

2) Only in America could people claim that the government still discriminates against black Americans when we have a black President, a black Attorney General, and roughly 18% of the federal workforce is black.

3) Only in America could we have had the two people most responsible for our tax code, Timothy Geithner, the head of the Treasury Department and Charles Rangel who once ran the Ways and Means Committee, BOTH turn out to be tax cheats who are in favor of higher taxes.

4) Only in America will you find people who burn the American flag and call America an "imperialist nation," but who get offended if you say they're not patriotic.

5) Only in America can we have terrorists kill people in the name of Allah and have the media primarily react by fretting that Muslims might be harmed by the backlash.

6) Only in America could someone drinking a $5 latte and texting to his friends on an iPhone 4 complain that the government allows some people to make too much money.

7) Only in America would people take rappers who brag about shooting people and selling drugs seriously when they complain the police are targeting them unfairly.

8) Only in America would we make people who want to legally become American citizens wait for years in their home countries and pay tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege while we discuss letting anyone who sneaks into the country illegally just become American citizens.

9) Only in America could the people who believe in balancing the budget and sticking by the country's Constitution be thought of as "extremists."

10) Only in America could the most vicious foes of successful conservative women be self-proclaimed feminists and the National Organization for Women.

11) Only in America could you need to present a driver's license to cash a check or buy alcohol, but not to vote.

12) Only in America can we have terrorists fly planes into our buildings and have some people’s first thought be "what did we do to make them hate us?"

13) Only in America would we think teaching kids at college is an appropriate job for communists, terrorists, and other dregs of humanity.

14) Only in America could people demand the government investigate whether the oil companies are gouging the public because the price of gas went up when for every penny of profit the oil companies make, the government tacks on roughly 24 cents’ worth of taxes.

15) Only in America could the first people asked to weigh in on the seriousness of a racial incident by the media be professional race hustlers like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Ben Jealous. In other words, it's like calling in a car dealer as a neutral source on whether or not you need to get a new car.

16) Only in America does airport security put its hands on your underwear....while you're wearing it.

17) Only in America could the government force a skating rink to have handicapped parking spots and Braille on the ATM machines.

18) Only in America could the government collect more tax dollars from the people than any nation ever has before in all of recorded history, still spend a trillion dollars more that it has per year, and complain that it doesn't have nearly enough money.

19) Only in America could the rich people who pay 86% of all income taxes be accused of not paying their "fair share" by people who don't pay any income taxes at all.

20) Only in America could the people who approve of slaughtering 25 million females babies via abortion accuse OTHER PEOPLE of waging a "war on women."

Undecided Voter: someone who parades their stupidity as proof of their morality. -- David Burge ‏@iowahawkblog

The DRUDGE REPORT 2012 reveals this afternoon: TV RATINGS FOR VP DEBATE DOWN -27% FROM '08...

FOXNEWS 10,019,827
CBS 8,308,421
ABC 8,287,610
NBC 7,851,757
MSNBC 4,378,671
CNN 4,145,951

What does it mean? It means two things. First, Sarah Palin is a babe and without her many don't care to dial in on 90 minutes of an old geezer with bad plugs and windshield glare teeth grunting around an ernest young fellow with a predilection for putting a rutting rhino to sleep with a single spreadsheet. Absent a close race it just wasn't appointment television. The race, in case you haven't been paying attention, is no longer close.

The ratings confirm this. The drooping Veep debate ratings mean that, by and large, everyone that is really going to vote has decided who they are voting for and doesn't need to "evaluate" the Veep selections. They are irrelevant to the main business of 2012. After all, it is not called "The Vice-Presidential Election."

Yes, yes, we know all about these "undecided voters," but -- seriously -- fuck all five of them especially the four living in DC. Nobody, but nobody, is really undecided now.

Right now, today, I know, you know, we know and they know. Everybody knows. And the truth is that there are more, many more, of us in 2012 than there were in 2008. And we are all going to the polls whereas many of them are not. I know that they all say that they are, but you know how deeply and compulsively they lie so why would we believe them about this.

Our army appeared from out of nowhere back in 2010 and our army has only gotten bigger since then. It's not a standing army. We don't like standing armies. But it is an army and it knows that, come November, it has to march on the polls and eradicate this disease that has been infecting the body politic. It knows that November is the time to do it and elections are the way to do it.

If the army couldn't do it that way it would have to burn the disease out and nobody wants that. Not even Joe Biden and his rollicking sidekick. Especially not them.

Relax. We got this.

With this endorsement I know, finally and without a single scintilla of a doubt, that we got this thing.... and I'm putting her forward for Ambassatrix to the Bahamas.

Telling the truth about terror:"Our way of life is under attack. We've only killed all the slow and stupid ones." An important speech. A very important speech.

Lara Logan 2012 BGA Annual Luncheon Keynote Speech - YouTube

Lara Logan's 2012 BGA Annual Luncheon Keynote Speech:

“I chose this subject because, one, I can’t stand, that there is a major lie being propagated . . . The lie is that America’s military might has tamed the Taliban. There is this narrative coming out of Washington for the last two years,” Logan said. It is driven in part by “Taliban apologists,” who claim “they are just the poor moderate, gentler, kinder Taliban,” she added sarcastically. “It’s such nonsense!” She made a passionate case that our government is downplaying the strength of our enemies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as a rationale of getting us out of the longest war. We have been lulled into believing that the perils are in the past: “You’re not listening to what the people who are fighting you say about this fight. In your arrogance, you think you write the script.” Our enemies are writing the story, she suggests, and there’s no happy ending for us.

Some excerpts:

"Your deadliest enemies on the Afghan battlefield have completely freedom of movement inside Pakistan with the blessing of the Pakistanis. And every commander that's sat in your shoes has had to try and build a relationship and go through the same motions time and time again. And the effect on the battlefield remains exactly the same: American soldiers continue to die because of the support Pakistan gives to America's enemies.

[...]

Continued...

This is the Amazon Election Heat Map 2012. Click it out for a state by state interactive experience.

It would seem that, in reading tastes at the very least, this Fall is a landslide for red.

You may recall many of the Obamtrons in the MSM mocking Clint Eastwood's "empty chair" bit at the Republican Convention. I certainly do. And yet, and yet.... that "empty chair" seems to have had legs.

UPDATE: Elsewhere....

[Note: This is an extended comment by Scott M to Suppress the Vote! Technique # 1 @ AMERICAN DIGEST]

There is no sense in listening to the polls, following the polls, or trying to guess the outcome of the election.

First, the election is settled state by state. The national accumulated popular vote, which is what the polls attempt to anticipate, is meaningless. Each state will have its vote go to Obama or Romney, whether the candidate wins/loses by one or one million votes. A few states with large populations easily distort reality. Even if everybody in NY and CA vote for Obama, which would distort national popular vote counts, they still account for the same number of Electoral votes.

Second, nobody will know until the Democrats voters show up on Wed Nov. 7 to cast their vote which of these polls turns out to be right. Why let a false conclusion of a poll influence you now? Last time Rasmussen's pre-election polling turned out to be closest to the actual outcome. Before that I think Zogby turned out to be closest to the mark. We won't know which of these polls was right until after the fact. We do know right now that many of these polls will be wrong. We just don't know which will be wrong.

Third, as the news business has gotten more and more dishonest, or at least unmoored from professional standards, polling has used tricks to shade the outcome toward the intended direction. Do you care what 19 people in a Whole Food grocery store parking lot pick for POTUS? Do you know how many people make up the poll you are hearing about? Do you know if these people have ever voted before? It matters a great deal if the poll is sampling people who technically might vote or people that actually did vote last time. Do you know if the polling sampled far more Dems than Reps or Inds? Do you know if the answer has been adjusted to account for a distortion of the sample?

Fourth, the media routinely use reports of polling results, however accurate or not, to signal their audience what they should think. Most people want to be included with the larger group and the media reports are always careful suggest whether their audience should ignore the poll or incorporate the poll data personally.

Michael Medved makes the point no POTUS has ever been reelected to a second term unless his support increased over the support he had in his first election. That's to say, every POTUS reelected gets more votes the second time than the first time or they lose. There is no second term exception in US history. Does anyone think Obama has more support from college kids, black voters, working class voters now than during the Hopeandchange Hurricane of 2008? This doesn't decide who will be the winner in November but it should settle some fears.

Fifth, it will be what it will be. No amount of happiness or despair now will decide anything. It's like worrying if it will rain on your future wedding date. It will or it won't and you can't know in advance. You should prepare for both possibilities.

Lastly, stop watching the media, including Fox. They have 24/7 to fill. That doesn't mean what they put on air is worth knowing. You are in charge of you and you should not let them make decisions for you and your time. Talk to the people around you, don't miss an opportunity for that, but ignore what The Media sends your way. Their job is to convince you that you need to worry and to tune it to get answers. They never provide the answers except to tune in after their 98th commercial of the hour to see if they've answered the concern they've been hawking all day.

The media can't know what it is you probably want to know. They will get the answer about a minute before the rest of on election night. Until then they are guessing.

Now is a good time to note who is claiming what so you can judge their accuracy after the election.

Remember, FOX news is using Karl Rove and Dick Morris as their experts on this matter. Dick Morris of "the election will be between Condi and Hillary" and Rove of "ignore the media GWB, the people will to." Both men have their particular segment of the party they are working for/against. They don't turn that off when they go on Fox. Rove's career will be over if TEA Party types control the party. Morris' vendetta is against the Clinton wing of the Dems. Be wary of anything either man says in those directions.

Overall it's much simpler to just stop watching the media. They don't know any more than you. They just read the same sources you could read and then retell the story on camera. Read it for yourself. That's what a citizen would do.

Posted by: Scott M at September 22, 2012 3:02 PM

Some see an insane muslim burning the American flag. I see an oppressed, bonfire-challenged muslim begging for a live, on-site, fly-by demo of American napalm.

There's a widow in sleepy Chester
Who weeps for her only son;
There's a grave on the Pabeng River,
A grave that the Burmans shun,
And there's Subadar Prag Tewarri
Who tells how the work was done.

A Snider squibbed in the jungle,
Somebody laughed and fled,
And the men of the First Shikaris
Picked up their Subaltern dead,
With a big blue mark in his forehead
And the back blown out of his head.

Subadar Prag Tewarri,
Jemadar Hira Lal,
Took command of the party,
Twenty rifles in all,
Marched them down to the river
As the day was beginning to fall.

They buried the boy by the river,
A blanket over his face--
They wept for their dead Lieutenant,
The men of an alien race--
They made a samadh in his honor,
A mark for his resting-place.

For they swore by the Holy Water,
They swore by the salt they ate,
That the soul of Lieutenant Eshmitt Sahib
Should go to his God in state;
With fifty file of Burman
To open him Heaven's gate.

Continued...

I love to contemplate the hours of takes that O had to perform to get this "right."

Continued...

Just pay the money and put this on heavy rotation on all channels for the next 60 days and... mission accomplished

Continued...

"National Significance"

"One thing that always stuck me as odd on my various trips to Dealey Plaza over the years is that there is a plaque at the side of the road where Kennedy as assassinated that reads: “This site possesses national significance in commemorating the history of the United States of America”. Why not say what actually happened?" -- Laughing Squid

Why not indeed? And also, what's with the "allegedly"? Did the city fathers of Dallas just get tired of beating back the whackos?

"Allegedly shot"

Population shaking in their boots. Frozen with fear. Paralyzed with panic. It's Armageddon for New Orleans in 5, 4, 3, 2....

SUMMERTIME BLUES FOR DRIVERS: GAS AT AUGUST RECORD

Across the U.S., prices range from a low of $3.43 per gallon in South Carolina to $4.32 in Hawaii. Arizona, Mississippi and New Mexico also have average prices below $3.50 per gallon, while California and Illinois are up above the $4 mark.

So, Grasshopper, are you driving more or less than you did four years ago?

[Graph via The Ulsterman Report]

How's the Sooper Genius Executive Talent Due to Take Over America's Health Care Working for Veterans?

Let's review: VA office stacked 37,000 files on cabinets after running out of storage - U.S. News

At the VA's Winston-Salem Regional Office in North Carolina, an estimated 37,000 claims folders had been stored on top of file cabinets, according to the Inspector General's report released last week. Those piles had been stacked two feet high and two rows deep. The file cabinets were so close to each other that drawers could not be opened completely. More files had been stored in boxes on the floor and stacked along the wall.

A load-bearing study found that the weight of the files exceeded the floor's capacity by 39 pounds per square foot.
"The excess weight of the stored files has the potential to compromise the structural integrity of the sixth floor of the facility," said the Inspector General report. "We noticed floors bowing under the excess weight to the extent that the tops of file cabinets were noticeably unlevel throughout the storage area."

[More grisly DETAILS HERE.]

This particular office handles a mere 770,000 veterans' various disability and medical claims and records. Just imagine what it and other offices like it across the nation are going to be able to do with the records and needs of 320 MILL-I-ON! citizens.

Birddog @ Maggie's Farm see this spiffy new stimulus-money bought truck parked at the beach and asks, "What the heck?"

Me? I see them and go back to my car for:

Caltrop used by the US Office of Strategic Services. The hollow spikes puncture self-sealing rubber tires. The hole in the center allows air to escape even if the other end of the tube is sealed by soft ground.

At least 4. This crap's gotta stop somewhere. Time to fight them bitches on the beaches.

It looks friendly so it probably won't bite you.
Soak the coal in gasoline first and then light it.
Let's cut down that really tall tree ourselves & save some money.
It won't hurt the mower if you go over some rocks.
My tire is low but I can still make it home without any problems.
You can point that laser anywhere as long as you don't hit them in the eye.
It's fine.... cops know the difference between real and fake guns.
Let's put some gasoline in the carburetor to get it to start....

Continued...

Obama: "We're sending this one out to John Roberts and the Supremes!"

Deep Background:

"George Harrison said, "'Taxman' was when I first realised that even though we had started earning money, we were actually giving most of it away in taxes. It was and still is typical." The Beatles' large earnings placed them in the top tax bracket in the United Kingdom, liable to a 95% supertax introduced by Harold Wilson's Labour government. In a 1984 interview with Playboy magazine, Paul McCartney agreed: "George wrote that and I played guitar on it. He wrote it in anger at finding out what the taxman did. He had never known before then what he'll do with your money."

"Taxman" was included in Harrison's concert repertoire during his solo career; on his tour of Japan in 1991 with Eric Clapton, "Taxman" was on the set list. "It's a song that goes regardless if it's the sixties, seventies, eighties or nineties," Harrison declared. "There's always a taxman." Harrison added more lyrics on that tour, such as "If you're overweight, I'll tax your fat." -- La Wik"

I'm unclear on how I can be "taxed" on something I don't buy; something I don't do. I understand how I can be fined or forced to pay a penalty for failing to do something, but it seems to me that "taxation" is a different kind of pocket picking by the state.

If I earn nothing I pay no income tax. If I buy nothing I pay no sales tax. If I own nothing I pay no property tax. If, however, I do nothing I pay an Obamacare "tax" which is not part of the general pool of tax revenue. So is the new deal that I can be taxed simply for being born in America, just for existing as an American, for just standing around breathing? I guess so.

"Don't mourn. Organize." -- Joe Hill

"Reason will not decide at last; the sword will decide.
The sword: an obsolete instrument of bronze or steel,
       formerly used to kill men, but here
In the sense of a symbol. The sword: that is: the storms
       and counter-storms of general destruction; killing of men,
Destruction of all goods and materials; massacre, more or
       less intentional, of children and women;
Destruction poured down from wings, the air made accomplice,
       the innocent air
Perverted into assasin and poisoner.

"The sword: that is: treachery and cowardice, incredible
       baseness, incredible courage, loyalties, insanities.
The sword: weeping and despair, mass-enslavement,
       mass-torture, frustration of all hopes
That starred man's forhead. Tyranny for freedom, horror for
       happiness, famine for bread, carrion for children.
Reason will not decide at last, the sword will decide."

-- Robinson Jeffers

It's just a continuing fornication festival for the PhotoBlog boys working their way up at the traitors' network this week. First it was the creative editing of the Romney speech by Andrea "I'm lying as fast as I can" Mitchell and now they round out Friday with one of their classic pro-Palestinian bias jobs.

Step one: Take a photo of an Isreal/Palestinian land dispute (hardly rare, what?), and whip it out to the net with the thoughtful courageous headline:

Continued...

Papuan tribal warriors armed with bows and arrows and improvised shields move into position as clashes erupted anew between two tribes in Kwamki Lama village in Mimikaa, a district located in Indonesia's restive Papua province, on June 18, 2012. -- Arrows fly as tribal clashes break out in Indonesia's Papua

And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places. -- Matthew 24:7

Seen (unfortunately) at PhotoBlog - Former President George W. Bush and family join President Obama for portrait unveiling at White House

Meanwhile, the two presidents exchange quiet confidences:

Continued...

'The thing about heroes, they don't brag' -- John McCain on Bin Laden raid

I've always been a physical coward. At least as far as I know. My own physical courage hasn't really been called upon or tested since the early years of high school, but I did not distinguish myself and have no reason to think I've changed. I've never been one of those who believed in "running away to live to fight another day." Instead I'm more like those who believe in "running away to live to run away another day."

When it comes to performing valorous acts my totem is "The Cowardly Lion:"

Continued...

Today the New York Times cribs catches up with me in 2006 [sort of]: The Book of the Future - Graphic - NYTimes.com

Previously....

Continued...

Soon to be starring in the remake of Boyz n the Hood, Boyz n the Hoodie

In the spirit of racial harmony, I have, for several days now, been thinking that I have to stop dressing like a white man and get with the Hoodie program. After all, isn't it better that we all learn, like Reginald Denny to "just get along?" (Or was it Rodney King? So hard to remember all the post-racial celebrities, isn't it?) Isn't it also safer for WASPs to Africanize now that we live in a nation where very marginal, very demented, and very repulsive groups such as the "New" Black Panthers can offer bounties on the head of anyone they dislike because of the color of his skin? Do I really need a weatherman to know which way their skin blows?

But how best to do that? At first I tried skin-tinting, or as my dermatologist likes to say, "reverse Jacksoning." Alas I quickly discovered, as millions of my fellow Americans of the African persuasion have discovered, that it just isn't that easy to change my hue. The other night I steeped in a bathtub I'd filled with hot water and 496 Black Teabags. I was hoping for some sort of mahogany tint by midnight but all I got was a transdermal caffine rush.

Yesterday morning I briefly applied a gallon of walnut body paint but one glance in the mirror and I recalled that running around in blackface, or even walnutface, was frowned on from every official African American from Lewis Farrakhan to Rachael Maddow and that albino president Bill Clinton. Hence body paint was right out. Following that I considered a full body tattoo using India Ink but the process of covering half of one cuticle was so painful I backed out of that one too.

It was clear to me that the only thing I could do was to dress like a brother. Fortunately I've had a lot of help with over the past few days from a gazillion white folks who also want to "African-American up" in the ever-popular hoodie. The hoodie, of course, is a perfect marker for African-Americaness because -- as we have been taught assiduously by glorious television shows such as the Wire and endless rap videos -- to wear a hoodie is to take on the aspect of the clean-cut and honest African American without any criminal overtones attached to such a garment at all. All those black hoods and thugs in hoodies you've been seeing and hearing about for years you did not, it turns out, see at all. Your eyes and ears were lying to you the whole time.

Of course, dressing in a hoodie in support of my African-American non-hood hoodie wearing fellow citizens was hard for me since I was, I am deeply ashamed to say, born white. Not just white but worse, WASP. As such I can't just boogie down with my bad self to the half-block ghetto of Seattle and grab me a genuine hoodie. As a WASP I not only don't know where the Hood Hoodie Store is, I am not allowed to know. Hell, I don't even know where to find the stores that sell those special baseball caps that have the bill sewn onto the side. The bottom line is that I am just too, too white to wear a brother's hoodie. It's not my fault. I was born this way.

But this morning, thanks to Rodger the Real King of France at Curmudgeonly & Skeptical I found an answer. I found a hoodie that was a compromise between the Hood Hoodie and the Neighborhood Watch Hoodie; a hoodie that, like our current president, brings us together at last: The NRA Concealed Carry Hooded Sweatshirt!

We want concealed carry to fit around your lifestyle --€“ not the other way around. That's why we developed the NRAstore's exclusive Concealed Carry Hooded Sweatshirt. It's the only garment of its kind we know of! .... Inside the sweatshirt you'€™ll find left and right concealment pockets. The included Velcro®-backed holster and double mag pouch can be repositioned inside the pockets for optimum draw. Ideal for carrying your favorite compact to mid-size pistol, the NRA Concealed Carry Hooded Sweatshirt gives you an extra tactical edge, because its unstructured, casual design appears incapable of concealing a heavy firearm -- but it does so with ease! Colors: Black, Navy. Made in USA

Sounds just great, doesn't it? Sounds like something that can be worn with pride by every American from the Klu Klux Klan to the New Black Panthers! Sounds like something that will, like our half-white, half-black president, really bring us together at last. At least until we have to reload.

I'm thinking of ordering seven. One for every day I get to wear one in Barack Obama's new "post-racial" America. How about you?

I try to keep my special and intimate relationship with Michelle Obama on the down low. The thing Michelle and I have is too precious to be cheapened by and tossed about in the grubby paws of Andrew Sullivan and other gossips. What we have is pure and unsullied. It is first and last about my respect for her massive pride in her massive intellect that is supported by my dusky dreamboat's massive back.

MO and I first met in an eHarmony chat room long long before she was elevated to her current position as First Nanny of the United States. At that time we were both lonely souls in need of the kind of soul soothing solace with which such sites seethe. We found it in each other, extra batteries, and lots of Kleenex. I understood her long-distance loneliness at being a political wife whose husband was a vote-humping horndog. She, seeing that I was from Seattle, initially confused me with Tom Hanks.

The hot chat between us soon grew to a deeper and more soulful sharing of our innermost secrets. Mine was to someday help elect a man of an indeterminate and chameleonesque racial and sexual background to the presidency. Hers was to own her very own Cheesecake Factory franchise with 24 hour access to the test kitchens. Needless to say, I achieved my dream while Michelle's was not to be.

Still, after her rise in the world we continued to correspond, albeit rather casually. She would pretend to write me as yet another in the Democrats' endless stack of useful idiots. I would pretend not to answer. It was a relationship we both treasured even if we could not unleash the inner beasts of our lustful natures as we had once in the Ponygirl Chat Rooms of FurryFockers.com.

Lately however it would seem that a shadow has been cast over the sunlit meadows of Michelle's life.

I have to be blunt. It's her husband. He just can't seem to handle money.

At first I ignored her pleas to help him out. After all, I figured, he gets free rent, free food, free gas, and free airplane and David Axelrod mustache rides whenever he wants. Why should I help him? But then came this truly touching letter from MO sharing his pain, and I started to weaken; I started to pull out my wallet. After all, three dollars meant so little to me and it seemed to mean the world to the teeterer I loved. How could I not pay?

There you have it. Straight from the horse's, or Michelle's, mouth.And yet... and yet...still I hesitate. What do you say loyal readers? Should I give him three bucks for working hard late into the night to spend three trillion bucks? And if I don't what kind of a man am I? And will Michelle hold it against me?

Signed,
Sleepless but Not Tom Hanks in Seattle

The PRPS NOIR Collection is not about black denim. Noir utilizes the best selvedge denim fabrics available anywhere in the world– with incredibly extensive washes and old school wear, tear & repair details that are authentic to genuine vintage jeans painstakingly collected over the years worn by real miners, mechanics, and laborers alike. Each jean is handmade and can take up to a week to produce. [Price: $300 -- $500]-- The Selvedge Yard

One of the small economies about living in New York City for years and relocating to the West Coast is to be had in clothing costs. If one of your jobs in New York was being a men's fashion editor for a magazine, you find that you don't buy clothes so much as have them.

In any case, I dumped clothes by the cartload before I moved, and I still had far too many when I arrived. Since I don't ski, the usefulness of items that would put Nanook of the North into a sweat during January in Greenland are pretty dubious. As a result, I've been pretty much out of the clothing shopping cycle for years and I find it, to say the least, refreshing.

In Seattle if you hold some fleece jackets, a couple of hooded sweatshirts, a few work shirts and two pairs of jeans for "formal occasions," you're pretty much done. But "wear happens" and I've noted that my Levis have been getting -- even for Levis -- fairly grotty in the last couple of months. Yesterday, I decided they about to be redefined as "rags," and I so set off to purchase my first new pair of jeans in at least six years.

Since I'm a hit-and-run shopper I did what any American male in search of jeans-to-go would do, I turned left into the parking lot of the first Gap I saw and sauntered inside confident of my mission. Unlike women of my acquaintance who practice "catch and release shopping" in order to increase their collection of designer shopping bags, I knew what I wanted. I also knew how much I was going to spend. This was in sharp contrast to many women who never really spend any money on clothes, but only "save" money on clothes. [ Me: "You look great in that new outfit with the shoes and the hat. How much did they cost?" Her: "Would you believe I saved over $800 on this? How great is that?" Me: "That's really great."]

I firmly believe that if you have to spend more than 15 minutes in a clothing store, you don't need what you think you need. My list was short. I wanted one pair of five pocket denim jeans, blue, crisp, and coming in at no more than $50. The Gap was the place for me.

Fool. Yes, fool. For if you want to find a pair of crisp, new blue jeans in trendy grunge Seattle, you'd better pack a lunch, because you are about to find yourself trapped inside an episode of "Shop Trek."

It's not that you can't buy some new jeans at the Gap, it is just that you can't buy any new new jeans.

Yes, it would seem that sometime in the last decade, the American people have become so fat and so happy and so inordinately lazy that they no longer want to put their own wear, sweat and stress into their Levis. Nope, it seems that the entire country will only buy jeans that have already been worn into a shambles, reduced, as new, to the rags I already had at home.

You've got new jeans at the Gap that look like they've had non-union and unlucky sweatshop employees of Sri Lanka of all shapes and sizes stuffed into them and then dragged for miles along country roads. They've got jeans with the off -the-rack look as if they've been sandblasted at a construction site in Tijuana -- after Happy Hour.

You've got jeans that look as if the person inside them was persuaded to run through a scene of "Dirty Dancing" with a belt-sander .

You've got jeans that seem to have been stolen out of a wedding reception in Afghanistan after a predator strike went terribly wrong.

And you've got jeans that I swear have the finish and light golden color stained deep into the blue that you could only get if you buried them in a Chicago feedlot and let several herds of cattle rain down on them for a month.

Pre-shredded, pre-torn, pre-raveled at the seams, pre-faded, pre-pissed upon and a dozen other industrial or inhuman processes all combined to give me a section of men's jeans at the Gap that looked like the changing room right next to a mass grave. All displayed proudly and marked and priced as "New."

I'd long been aware of a certain market on eBay, Eastern Europe, and Japan among the tragically hip for vintage worn Levis. I'd accepted that as one accepts the fact that there will always be a market real and facsimile shrunken heads. I'd been vaguely conscious of the "stone-washed" process in denim, but thought that was only popular among Suburban housewives of the expanding midriff. But I'd just not caught up with the fact that it was no longer necessary, or fashionable, to break-in your own Levis when you could have a process or a prisoner or a refugee do it for you.

It was once the case that when you bought a pair of Levis they were not only board stiff, they were two sizes large so you could "shrink to fit." The other miracle about them was that they could turn any laundry within two blocks of your house blue for the first five washings. Wear? Wear happened -- slowly, over years, like the mellowing of a fine Bordeaux. Long gone. Where are the Levis of yesteryear? In the Ginzo district in Tokyo selling for $1,110 a pair.

Where are the Levis and Gap jeans of next year? Probably on the ass of some hapless bastards in lock-down at a prison in either Arizona or Bangladesh. After all, if my web host can outsource his service calls to India, surely it is only a matter of time before our Levi pre-wearing is outsourced as well.

Did I buy any new jeans? Of course not. I came home and looked at the two half-rotten pair I own, frayed at the cuff, a hole in one knee, and stained from five years hard-riding. I slipped a pair on, chose an Hawaiian shirt that would be ashamed if it was a tie, slapped a fleece hoody over that, and took a turn in front of the mirror.

Ah, that Tropical-Balkan-Refugee-Gansta look. The very glass of fashion.

"Christof Wallner, 23, from Austria, the first buyer of the new iPad in Germany, poses after purchasing the tablet in front of the Apple store in Munich, March 16, 2012. Apple's new iPad went on a sale in Germany on Friday and more than 500 people waited on the line to purchase the new device in front of the shop prior to its opening." -- Waiting to score the newest iPad from Apple

To update Andy Warhol, "In the future everyone will be famous for 15 nanoseconds for doing nothing." And indeed they are.

Above we see an all too typical moment where the largest company in history in terms of perceived market value is celebrated by having a skinny chestless European male of dubious sexuality emerge from a doorway holding a mass-market object above his head in a gesture of triumph. Such photos were previously spread throughout the world as the result of some sort of measurable genuine achievement. Now it would seem you are awarded global recognition for just showing up very, very early with about $500 in your pocket. Color me massively unimpressed.

What I am marginally impressed by is that although this is happening in Munich, today's photo editors seem to be blissfully unaware of the subtext seen in the upraised saluting hands on the right. Oh well, so it goes. You can't expect a people whose grand-parents and great grandparents ended up burned to ash by Brits and Americans and gang-raped by Russians to retain my interest in history.

We've been seeing these "nerds line-up early for tech goodies and nerd myths" stories for decades now. I think the first "newsworthy" stories centered around early line-squatters for "Star Wars," but they surely have lost their allure by this point. And they are not, by any stretch of the imagination, "news." Indeed, the only time they seem to become news is when people are beaten and/or killed during the line-up and subsequent swarming. That of course usually has to do with toys or shoes. If all you want to do is note that a nerd swiped his card and entered his PIN and got a box first, please pass the coke spoon and hold the Sominex.

If Nike's newest sneaker is causing dropping bodies at the mall, that's news. As for the newest nerd-swarm over a techtoy, wake me when they start setting themselves on fire as the doors open.

U.S. Unemployment Up in February | Underemployment is 19.1%, up from 18.7% in January

PRINCETON, NJ -- U.S. unemployment, as measured by Gallup without seasonal adjustment, increased to 9.1% in February from 8.6% in January and 8.5% in December.

COSTELLO: I want to talk about the unemployment rate in America .
ABBOTT: Good Subject. Terrible times. It's 9%.

COSTELLO: That many people are out of work?
ABBOTT: No, that's 16%.

COSTELLO: You just said 9%.
ABBOTT: 9% Unemployed.

COSTELLO: Right 9% out of work.
ABBOTT: No, that's 16%.

COSTELLO: Okay, so it's 16% unemployed.
ABBOTT: No, that's 9%...

COSTELLO: Wait a minute. Is it 9% or 16%?
ABBOTT: 9% are unemployed. 16% are out of work.

COSTELLO: IF you are out of work you are unemployed.
ABBOTT: No, you can't count the "Out of Work" as the unemployed. You have to look for work to be unemployed.

COSTELLO: BUT THEY ARE OUT OF WORK!
ABBOTT: No, you miss my point.

COSTELLO: What point?
ABBOTT: Someone who doesn't look for work, can't be counted with those who look for work. It wouldn't be fair.

COSTELLO: To whom?
ABBOTT: The unemployed.

COSTELLO: But they are ALL out of work.
ABBOTT: No, the unemployed are actively looking for work. Those who are out of work stopped looking. They gave up. And, if you give up, you are no longer in the ranks of the unemployed.

COSTELLO: So if you're off the unemployment roles, that would count as less unemployment?
ABBOTT: Unemployment would go down. Absolutely!

COSTELLO: The unemployment just goes down because you don't look for work?
ABBOTT: Absolutely it goes down. That's how you get to 9%. Otherwise it would be 16%. You don't want to read about 16% unemployment do ya?

COSTELLO: That would be frightening.
ABBOTT: Absolutely.

COSTELLO: Wait, I got a question for you. That means they're two ways to bring down the unemployment number?
ABBOTT: Two ways is correct.

COSTELLO: Unemployment can go down if someone gets a job?
ABBOTT: Correct.
OSTELLO: And unemployment can also go down if you stop looking for a job?
ABBOTT: Bingo.

COSTELLO: So there are two ways to bring unemployment down, and the easier of the two is to just stop looking for work.
ABBOTT: Now you're thinking like an economist.

[Via Free Republic]

Ms Fluke testifies on problems discovered during her participation in last year's slutwalks.

In which conservatives and Republicans are played once again:

"Rather belatedly, we are becoming aware that this supposedly typical Georgetown coed is not very typical at all:

[B]irth control is not all that Ms. Fluke believes private health insurance must cover. She also, apparently, believes that it is discrimination deserving of legal action if “gender reassignment” surgeries are not covered by employer provided health insurance. She makes these views clear in an article she co-edited with Karen Hu in the Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law.The title of the article . . . is "Employment Discrimination Against LGBTQ Persons"€ and was published in the Journal's 2011 Annual Review. Here’s one brief quote from the article:

Transgender persons wishing to undergo the gender reassignment process frequently face heterosexist employer health insurance policies that label the surgery as cosmetic or medically unnecessary and therefore uncovered.

-- Sandra Fluke Argued for Mandatory Coverage for Sex-Change Surgery : The Other McCain

And now.... this...

---

ANDREA MITCHELL: So, a phone call from the President of the United States!

SANDRA FLUKE: I know!

ANDREA MITCHELL: What was that like, Sandra?

Continued...

"In the midst of life we are in death. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust." -- Book of Common Prayer

The conspiracy theories began, like dubious mushrooms, to pop up around the death of Andrew Breitbart before the portable defibrillators that tried to save his life could be recharged. There's a segment of our population that wouldn't have it any other way; a segment that seeks to always explain the unfair, mystical randomness of the world as the outcome of some vast, dark plan. Breitbart is, to this group, only the latest victim; a man struck in the neck by a poison dart fired from a silenced black helicopter hovering high above a midnight street in Brentwood.

After all, our conspiracists point out, Bretibart had the goods on Obama! He had the videotapes! He had the proof! Positive! At long last! They HAD to get him before he released them!

Always remember: "The Alamo The Maine The Grassy Knoll The Moon Landing Vince Foster!"

Never forget: "Breitbart was too young to die. He was too good to die. He was too essential to our cause to die. THEY did it. AGAIN!"

Really? Well, let me assure one and all as a person who has done it and has been returned to life to tell you: It is actually possible TO JUST DROP DEAD. Yes, strange as it may seem, a man can be just going along in life -- having a drink, talking with friends, making plans, walking home at night along a street in Brentwood -- and simply and quickly fall out of the world. It doesn't take any special powers of the Federal Government or shadowy agents firing poison tipped darts from the shadows. It doesn't take that at all. It only takes a blockage in an artery, it only takes something breaking loose from the wall of an artery and lodging somewhere it is not supposed to be.

It doesn't take long. And, as one who did survive, I know that even with a rapid response of men skilled in saving lives on the street, not very many so stricken have a happy outcome. Nationwide, for every 100 people admitted to the hospital after coronary arrest, only 7 emerge alive from the experience. Only seven. A sobering number indeed.

Like the ad says, "The first sign of heart disease is often sudden death."

I am deeply saddened by the death of Andrew Breitbart. I am concerned with the future of his wife and four (4!) children. I wonder what will happen to his fledgling empire without his charismatic personality and abilities. I am distressed and angered by the insects of the left that celebrate his death. None of that compels me, however, to surrender to the dark and constipated gods of conspiracy theory.

Unless and until some substantial mass of actual evidence is found that confirm, far beyond an unreasonable doubt, that Andrew Breitbart was offed by the sinister secret agents of Barack Obama hovering above Brentwood in their invisibility cloaks, then I'm just going to have to believe that it was, sadly, simply his time. We all, as I know well, have one:

Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.

Reacting to [The Cowardly] US President Barack Obama has apologised for the Koran-burning incident, Sherlock brings us up to speed on his advanced foreign policy for Muslim countries:

The Shit List. Ah yes. I put forward the idea several years ago in these pages and in others. Here's how I would explain it to the world.

First, the way you initially get on the Shit List is by having your society based on the inherently xenophobic and violent Muslim law. Unfair? Yes indeed, and I am sorry for you, I really am - you have drawn the short straw of history. Tough titty.

But good news - there is an easy way to get off the Shit List! You just have to renounce the parts of Muslim law that make it easy for you to do bad things to me and mine. Those would be the parts where I am considered no more than an animal because I am not a Muslim like you, and also the parts where even your own women aren't either. Free and educated women could exert a calming and civilizing influence over the hordes of sexually frustrated young men your societies seem uniquely adept at producing. Oh, and adopt democracy - that helps too. Democracies (real ones) don't tend to attack each other. Do I hear you say there are exceptions to that? Sure - but you see, it is no longer our job to be perfect, slick. No, siree.

So there is an Easy Way of getting off the Shit List, but there is also a Hard Way. Imagine for example the FBI's "10 Most Wanted" list. The Easy Way to get off it is to turn yourself in, serve your time, and then stay out of trouble. Simple - maybe not so easy if you are a habitual, addicted, criminal, but at least easy to understand, no?

The Hard Way to get off the FBI's List is like how Bonnie and Clyde got off it. Think of it as the way where there is zero recidivism.

Getting off our Shit List the Hard Way is similar. Say you don't clean up your act, and then somebody busts a cap on us. We trace them to you, bingo, you're off the Shit List the Hard Way. Or say we can't trace them, but we are so pissed, we just guess. You could get off that way too.

So I think we should offer this deal to every Muslim country in the world. It's a fair deal - we aren't dictating to them what to do. We are just telling them the new rules, just like they have been in the habit of doing unto others for thousands of years.

Rule 1: Play nice, or enter the big lottery where becoming the world's largest expanse of glass is the prize, and the odds are good.

Rule 2: Avoid breaking Rule 1.

My life, the short form: "If my thought-dreams could be seen / They’d probably put my head in a guillotine"

Continued...

ScottM notes in a comment to: Humiliation was, in fact, their only aim, and malice, their motive.

"This is the point of commie-lib politics. They will use their power to take your power. The commie-libs make demands, not because of the facts and the "progress" toward their utopia, but because if you do what they want you will be weaker and vulnerable to the next demand. Yet, the guileless Conservatives debate the merits of the details of the commie-lib demand, or they'll point out this latest demand is inconsistent with some past demand. The details and the consistency matter only to the Conservatives, yet that is what they spend 98% of their energy discussing. You might as well tell the con-men running the Three Card Monte you've detected the card switch or that taking someone's money isn't nice.

"When you debate the details with a commie-lib you are putting the "kick me" sign on your chest and back. You are signalling you still haven't cought on and you are still an easy target. Just because you prefer to discuss the details and the rules and the underlying principle doesn't mean that's effective. It's only when you recognize the commie-libs are engaged in a naked power grab and this fight is about power, not the details of their latest charge, can you effectively resist their tactic.

"Stop being willfully naive and be an effective soldier for your views. Stop rushing to talk radio so the conservative host can try and convince you not to raise taxes in a recession, not interfere in children's lunches, not break up families, not advance the goals of America's enemies. I know this is lost on most Conservatives because the world around the one characteristic of the Conservatives is a determined avoidance of conflict with the liberals. Better to discuss what the commie-libs are doing than to risk a fight with the commie-libs. It's Conservatives students and employees that hide their views in school or at work. You can't win while on defense. Commie-lilbs are always on offense, that's why they control so much. If our tactic was working we would run their institutions, we don't.

"You can return to Mayberry Rules when we win the fight. Right now we must play by Prison Rules, or lose."

American conservatives during the run-up to elections love to diddle themselves silly with all sorts of waking hallucinations about just what, for once, a really, really conservative candidate could do when finally elected president. These silly, silly people actually think that conservatism as a dreamscape can reverse the reality of decades of hard work on the part of the American left. One of the most cherished hallucinations of these couch dwelling conservatives is the idea that a pure conservative president can actually stop and then somehow reverse illegal immigration. To this proposition the most concise, rational response is, "Har-de-har-har."

I know that, like visions of sugarplums, visions of some sort of "fence" protecting America from the hordes of marching Mexicans dance in the heads of Americans who just want them all to turn around and march back. Alas, that thought can just be filed under, "It Ain't Gonna Happen."

As a rabid reactionary who is sometimes mistaken for a conservative, I know, believe me, all the designs for a kinder and gentler fence that will have hi-tech detectors and some sort of ready interdiction corps sitting on helicopter scramble pads across the southern border. I know all the arguments for expanding the ever-so-effective techniques used to stop the flow of illegal drugs to stop the flow of illegal aliens. None of these will prove any more effective than "The War on Some Drugs" we've be squandering billions on over the decades.

What would work would be some sort of East German wall 1,969 miles long. This monstrosity would have guard towers, mine fields, attack Dobermans, armored cars, and about 100,000 armed border guards with a shoot on sight policy (3 shifts of 17 guards per mile). After around 3,000 Mexican civilians were shot dead, this might have some effect on reducing the flow. I'm not quite ready for this draconian a solution. Are you?

Then there is the extended policy of finding those illegals already here and then, well, "Just deport them!"

Another 25-watt idea.

Deportation? Okay let's follow that concept home with the vision of hundreds of buses chock full of thousands of illegals (rounded up in armed swoops through the US barrios) departing daily for Juarez, Tijuana and all points south. To begin this process you actually have to get the said illegal Mexicans on the fleets of buses. Right? Right.

The first problem is finding and then imprisoning said illegals. That would mean raids into homes and apartment buildings around the country as well as stop and frisk identity checks on the street for the freshly minted crime of "looking Mexican." Then you'll have to refurbish those Japanese internment camps in the Owens valley and elsewhere as holding pens. Think the Manzanar Concentration Camp to the 10th power on the outskirts of every major American city. You start opening those up and the actual deportation Mexicans are going to be the least of your problems.

Your more immediate problem is going to be armed resistance in most of your major cities. Unlike cowed white people, Mexicans will not go gentle into that old blight. Male members of La Raza are not known for their submissiveness. The females are pretty tough too. No, not many of official armed roundups would be met with a tug of the forelock submission. This assumes that in said cities where you'd want the 'roundups' to take place you can get a trust-worthy fraction of the police departments (notable fraction is Hispanic) or a trust-worthy fraction of the Army and National Guard (notable fraction is Hispanic) to go along with the policy.

When attempting to implement fascist policies, it is best to remember that America is, first and foremost, a heavily armed country -- especially in the barrios. Are you ready for gun fights in cities across the US? I'm not sure I am. But that's what we'd get since many illegals, faced with internment and deportation on a mass scale, would decide they "don't got to show you no steenking badges."

Next, let's suppose that somehow the "roundups" succeeded but only after countless "regrettable" deaths (Each one of which is given the full "Pobre Maria Treatment" on NPR and in the New York Times. Yes, your head will explode.). Then let's suppose that after these deaths hundreds of thousands of Mexicans did indeed show up at the border one fine day in surplus Greyhound buses. (Don't kid yourself, we're going to need a lot of buses.) What if Mexico decided, "Hey, we don't recognize any of these people as ours, and just what do you mean 'looks' Mexican? We're the Mexican government/oligarchy and we've looked Castilian Caucasian Spanish for over three centuries."

Are we then going to use the armed forces to force Mexico to take back their huddled masses? And even if they did, do we really want a country as corrupt and unstable as Mexico to become even more unstable?

If you want to see a wall come up on the southern border overnight, just wait until a full-scale revolution breaks out in Mexico. Think "American Civil War" X 2 with automatic weapons and plastique explosives. If one side wins you get Nazi Germany to the south. If the other side wins you get Communist China during "The Great Leap Forward." Neither is what you'd call a "desirable outcome."

Either will make you wish for the status quo ante when decent yard work and tasty tacos everywhere were a staple of American life.

"In that Obama has rendered no act of contrition or repentance, and is at the moment, at liberty in the land, we do, here and now, separate him from the precious body and blood of Christ, and from the society of all Christians. We exclude him from our Holy Mother Church and all her sacraments, in heaven, or on Earth. We declare him excommunicate and anathema. We cast him into the outer darkness. We judge him damned with the devil and his fallen angels and all the reprobate, to eternal fire and everlasting pain!"

HT: Mabuse

First we shall see the Rise of the Newter. This will be the naturual result of a simple qwest for a more nutritious conservative food than Romney burgers.

Then we shall hear of the disaster of nominating Mitt: In a word "Biblical."

And then.... finally we shall hear of the final prophecy of Gingrich the Traveller fulfilled:

"Gingrich the Traveler. He will come in one of the pre-chosen forms. During the rectification of the Vuldrini, the traveler came as a large and moving Torg! Then, during the third reconciliation of the last of the McKetrick supplicants, they chose a new form for him: that of a giant Slor! Many Shuvs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Slor that day, I can tell you!"

All of which will continue until the Republican Keymaster finds the Republican Gatekeeper, which in 2012 can only mean a Palin Paul ticket:

With the magic of the Palin | Paul ticket launched into the American mainstream, it will be time to go forth and confront the waiting Democrat monster:

"I tried to think of the most harmless thing... something from my childhood.... something that could never, ever possibly destroy us...."

What could possibly go wrong?

Last night, because he's infected, Juan Willliams indulged himself in, as Morgan puts it, GoodPerson Fever;

["an obsessive-compulsive disorder involving the demonstration of certain positive attributes to strangers, for purposes of self-validation. It becomes a self-perpetuating cycle if these positive attributes don’t really exist, or if there is a great need to achieve this validation for purposes of acquiring social status, contrasted with a much lower level of confidence that these attributes really exist."].

Williams did this by whipping out the extra-large race card he carries in and trying to lay it on Newt Gingrich. Morgan notes:

"We’ve got all these ninnies just like Juan Williams, running around everywhere, and even worse still they are disproportionately represented in the hallways of power. Every decision made has to be absolutely non-offensive, and that includes the decisions of others, about matters well outside of their purview, and so they end up excoriating strangers for violating the Could Be Construed As standard. In other words, they get offended on behalf of other people, people who exist only in theory and might very well not exist at all in reality."

Unlike previous uses of the race card, last night didn't work out for Williams in the manner he's used to. Here's Williams being used like a hand puppet by Newt last night:

Elements of both sides will note this is "the playing of the race card" by Williams followed by the playing of it "right-back-at-cha" by Gingrich. Those elements and others will, from time to time, bemoan the fact that race is playing a role in the election. This ritual "bemoanment" is, to my mind, nothing more than the standard beclownment that both sides indulge in these days.

I suppose that the politically correct stance, one that you will see the president and his critics take at every moment they are not busy playing the race card, is that race has nothing to do with the election of 2012. This is, as everyone knows in their secret lives, utter nonsense. Besides the fact that race seeps into every substantive political issue in America (Hey, that's just how we roll.), it is going to be honed especially keen in the 2012 presidential run. Whether it will be used as a rapier or a machete has yet to be determined.

In the baldest possible terms you are going to be seeing a contest that will pit black against white. Since one hue is already decided the only remaining question is "how white?" Both sides will, officially, be doing all they can to insist that this is not an issue and both will not mind terribly if it is.

On the Obama side, he needs to cling, bitterly it may be, to a phalanx of voters who are not African-American in order to win. He can do this with love, with agreement, with fanaticism, and/or with guilt. Of these, the largest segment he can call on would be that powered by guilt. Knowing this the Obama machine can be counted on never to really let up on the "they hate him not because of the content of his character but because of the color of his skin." This will only get them so far, but combined with other factions, it may get them just far enough for Obama 2.0.

The reason white guilt may still be enough to drag Obama over the goal line is because the Obama Administration for these last few years has not been just about Obama and Progressivism. It has been about the entire African-American Affirmative Equality Project [AAAEP].The AAAEP has been a looming part of the American landscape for over 50 years and is a multi-billion dollar industry.

Put simply, as the leader of the AAAEP brand Obama -- no matter how much his ideas and policies fail and fail utterly -- is, himself, too black to fail. A failure on Obama's part implies, irrevocably, a failure on the part of AAAEP even though that would not be, by any stretch of the imagination, true. In a very real sense, since this is politics, the truth is irrelevant to the impression. The impression would be all that matters. Needless to say, a lot of white people -- as well as nearly all African Americans -- would be quite upset by such a verdict from history. Upset enough to be willing to say and do almost anything to keep it from happening.

A very small sign that this is the case is present above in the behavior of Juan Williams, an African-American with a Hispanic name, who --regardless of how shabbily the progressives have treated him in the last few years -- seems compelled to use the racial ugly stick upside Newt Gingrich's albino head. Poor Juan can do nothing other. He's a captive of his race and his time. As are the rest of the elements of the 2012 Presidential Race.

When it comes to Mitt Romney we already have seen the beginning of the coming tsunami of articles and opinions about his overwhelming whiteness. The opening salvo came a few days ago in an extended New York Times meditation on the whiteness of the Mitt. In a very real sense, Romney's the Moby Dick of Republican candidates and the whiteness of the Mitt will launch a thousand whaleboats with ten thousand tattooed Maori harpooners in the bows.

At the end of the day it's going to be Moby Mitt vs. Too-Black-To-Fail. Any way you look at it, it's going to be a wild ride and civility is going to have nothing to do with it. The only civil thing about the whole uncivil process will be how closely the principles stay to the first principle about the 2012 election: No matter how much it may be about race, you aren't allowed to say it has anything at all to do with race.

Got that. Good. On with the show.

"You know how you can tell that "everyone wants freedom" is baloney?....

Continued...

Gallup has some news that should be reassuring -- Conservatives Remain the Largest Ideological Group in U.S.

Political ideology in the U.S. held steady in 2011, with 40% of Americans continuing to describe their views as conservative, 35% as moderate, and 21% as liberal.

It "should be reassuring" if only many of those online that pass themselves off as "conservative" weren't currently demonstrating to all and sundry that, like too much perfectionism, too much conservatism is a mistake.

Yes, nothing is damaging the "Conservative Brand" lately more than the rolling stupidity that is lumping itself around the failure of the Republicans to come up with a viable candidate that is more "Conservative" than Mitt Romney. This "failure", which was predictable as long as four years ago, is causing many online 'conservatives to drop into premature political menopause with whining, hot flashes of anger, and the grinding of dull, old, axes. They are pissed, it would seem, because nobody other than Romney can carry the fight to Obama in the coming election. The more demented among them are declaring, shades of McCain/2008, that they will take their retracted balls and go home on election day rather than vote against Obama.

These people are deeply stupefied and confused. Ideology will do that to you. They seem to think, to actually believe, that this coming election is about only voting if you can vote for a candidate you like. Let me disabuse these kids of this silly notion right away. The election of 2012 ain't a conservative popularity contest. It's a war to, first, last, and always, destroy any possibility of a second term for Barack Hussain Obama.

This is not a "Vote-For" election. This is a "Vote-Against" election. This is not a "Sit-It-Out-And-Pout" election. This is a "Get-Obama-Out" election. That is what it is about and that is all it is about.

If people can't understand, at this point, that very simple concept their minds are much too simple to be conservatives and they might as well go off and sit at the kiddy table and write in "Vermin Supreme" with a blunt pink crayon.

If true conservatives want to have a truly conservative candidate in a truly conservative party they will have to commit to the long march. You know, "the long march" like the one the left took through out political, academic, religious, and media institutions. The one they spent decades on. The long hard road to political supremacy. The one that takes work and money.

That's the one thing I don't see erstwhile conservatives actually doing from election to election. Instead they run their lives and their businesses off on the side and they show up every three years or so to watch the little red hens of politics take the nomination away from their conservative flavor of the week.

The way the Republican party is set up in the primary system means that to even have a shot at winning it you have to be running for it years and years and years before the actual elections. That's what Romney's been doing. That's the game and he's got the pieces in place to win it. You may not like it, but, hey, change it or play it.

But if you're beat because your "choices" are late to the party like Perry, or not really in it to win it like Newt, don't start blaming Romney the little red hen.

It's just not dignified to hold your breath, stamp your feet, and threaten to take your retracted balls and go home.

So suck it up and remember this: This is not a "Sit-It-Out-And-Pout" election. This is a "Get-Obama-Out" election.

Go now, my conservative friends, and sin no more.

[Greetings InstaPunditeers! Check out the vast elsewhere here so that we can put a quake in your quaker, some shake in your shaker, and a rock in your sock!]

Yeah. Right.: "As a Reagan Republican it frankly never occurred to me..." Newt is now out-Mitting Mitt

Control: We have a rotten apple, Mitt.

Control: [to Romney] There's a mole, right at the top of the Republican Circus. And he's been there for years.

If you've seen the new remake of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in the last few weeks, you've seen the last few weeks of the Republican Party's endless quest to shoot itself. After all, the party has not just nurtured a single spy but a whole festering nest of spies and turncoats in its upper reaches for decades. Indeed if you have any position at all in the Republican Party you are, in essence, a stealth Democrat.

Proof? Cast your eyes on the survivors of the run for the presidential nomination. Got it?

Continued...

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)"The Anti-Communist." 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.

Lately Americans seem to be slimming 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. This thin gruel is what's being poured into us from Seattle, Washington to Washington, D.C.

If you look closely at this diet for a diminished America you see a familiar list of "ingredients." The list is composed of the ideological stock and trade of a significant segment of Americans to whom this nation, as conceived by our founders, and struggled for for more than 200 years is merely one long, large joke; the Baby Boomers.

And I should know. After all, that boy in the picture up there -- that boy that thought Communism was "something we could live with" -- that young boy was me.

In my small way, I took part in the crafting of The Boomers’ Big Joke on America. For years I thought there was nothing funnier. Conceived during the waning months of World War II, I had no idea I was a Baby Boomer, but that, in the end, was what I was. And being a member of this large and fortunate generation gave me the leisure to develop quite a sense of humor when it came to basic human values. It even gave one woman of my cohort, Stanley Ann Dunham, the opportunity to actually conceive the punch line to our joke, her emasculate conception, the current clone passing as “President.”

When I was a student at the University of California at Berkeley in the late 1960s, we were the Brave New World's social engineers driving our little red choo-choo round the bend. We were the innovators, and we were busy innovating the brave new world wherein everything about the old world of our parents seemed either hilarious or evil.

Our program was quite clear early on and it hasn't changed a jot since those years, it has simply gotten more pervasive and elaborate. After all, we're older now and we're in control. We can finally fund these things. With your money.

Here’s how things went in our Brave New Whirled:

• God, if he didn't emerge from 500 mikes of pure Sandoz LSD, was just a funny old guy a little bit like Santa Claus but with less of a user base.
  
• The Bill of Rights was okay as long as you could figure out someway to erase a few of the amendments involving guns and add a host of new ones involving groups.
  
• The Constitution? Too long and too arcane to really read with care. It was a given so what did we care?
  
• History? The only really happening history was the future, man. Ours.
  
• The United States? They were really "AmeriKKKa" -- Satan incarnate.
  
• The US Military? Baby killers and agents of Satan.
  
• The Police? Pigs.
  
• The Viet Cong, Ho Chi Minh, Chairman Mao, Fidel Castro, and a host of other evil dictators and fascists? Heroes of "The People."
  
• The People? Really wonderful as long as you didn't really have to hang out with them.
  
• Voting in political parties? Stupid. We were into "participatory democracy" which involved really long meetings. ( This is now known as "emergent democracy" and involves really long online discussion threads.)
  
• We believed in sex and drugs and rock and roll.
  
• We were determined to resist "the man" on all levels.
  
• We were young.

Continued...

Presented for your consideration, a two minute slice of what listening to poets who meant what they said and said what they meant must have been like over 1,000 years ago.

These are the opening lines of the oldest English epic poem*, Beowulf, declaimed in the style popular at the time of their origins. Beowulf, written in England, but set in Scandinavia has variously been dated to between the 8th and the early 11th centuries. Take two minutes to listen to this vanished art brought back to fitful life.

The clip begins in an intentionally disarming fashion which, I think, helps us to make a leap of imagination from the present day to the night gatherings around bonfires and flickering torches in which these tales of love and death were told. Attending what can only be a recreation of these arcane styles of declamation seems an effete ritual these days. I'd submit it seems so only because we have grown so used to "all-entertainment all-the-time everywhere," we cannot imagine the impact of these original entertainments when they were the rarest thing in a human life bounded by works and days.

Part story, part panegyric, part worship, the reciting of an epic was an event that could span days, even weeks. How the earliest bards held all of the poem in memory is still somewhat of a mystery, but the rhetorical structure of the poem, known set-pieces played much as jazz would be played centuries later, and various methods of loci, or "Memory Palaces" probably all played a role. No matter how it was done, the fact that it could be done with Beowulf, which runs to nearly 3,200 lines remains impressive. Other epics loom larger than that.

And it wasn't enough to declaim the epic, you had to provide a few musical bridges, many voices, and a lot of acting. For this reason, as well as their rarity, Bards were held in high esteem. Later poets would try, on paper at least, to recapture this sort of esteem but, except for a period in Soviet Russia, poets and poetry have fallen on hard times in recent centuries, becoming an art esteemed slightly above slip mold ceramics.

"I don't get no respect" is a common plaint of our contemporary "poetic" poets attached to their various academic sinecures like stunted embryos on withering umbilicals. About once every twenty years, you'll hear the barbaric yawps of spoken word poets try to cut their way through the petrified forests of the groves of academe, but most are quickly subsumed back into the dusty compost of poetasters and poet poseurs.

The Beats had a run at it in the 1950s, but slumped back into their own comfy berths in the spiritual opium dens of what used to be the "counter-culture." Now the well-codified hipster poet is content with his underwritten "job for life." The Beats went on the road with a Howl but have ended in the cul-de-sac of Maya Angelou.

The "singer-songwriter" poets of the late 1960s / early 1970s had their run powered by the advent of Bob Dylan, who still can impress when he comes to work. But money changes everything and most of them soon vanished into Hotel California.

Currently, there's a craze for Poetry Slams that manages to produce some arresting, if forgettable, work in an environment more conducive to what was once "a battle of the bands." At this time, Slams are touted as "bigger than ever," a sure sign this phenomenon, famous for having fewer formal rules than Rap, has passed its peak.

Ah, but then there is Rap, you say. And in a sense you'd be right since Rap certainly fulfills the aspect of declamation and can even gesture towards length. It is also energetic in terms of its heavy reliance of percussion and a vocal range from shouting to shrill. Rap also benefits from scenting itself with Eau de Hood and delivers a simulacrum of the real. But Rap has been heavily ossified for well over a decade and may soon find itself with more than its share of petrified forests and post-mortum effects. It's hard to imagine people in more than a thousand years gathering to hear some android with an attitude running the changes of Wu-Tang Clan's Forever.

You'd think -- with the advent of the Internet and the much heralded (Global) (Hive) Mind -- it would be easy to jump start epic poetry again as a major art form, but you'd be wrong. One element is missing from the mix of low barriers to entry, cheap recording and distribution, and an audience in the millions for any sort of dreck that manages to be cranked out from the star-making machinery. Poetry today has everything it needs for an epic to bloom except the ability to declaim in the affirmative voice.

Poetry today is, for the most part, deeply embedded in the secular culture, and there is no affirmative available to that culture, since the affirmative depends on a belief in something other than, larger than, the self. Today's denial of the spirit and celebration of the now and the now alone blocks any ability to sound the affirmative, to strike the strings that soul sing, and higher sing. It's the solution that Wallace Stephens sought but could never attain, as he notes in The Man with the Blue Guitar

I cannot bring a world quite round,
Although I patch it as I can.

I sing a hero’s head, large eye
And bearded bronze, but not a man,

Although I patch him as I can
And reach through him almost to man.

If to serenade almost to man
Is to miss, by that, things as they are,

Say it is the serenade
Of a man that plays a blue guitar.

Poetry can't matter as it once mattered because the base ground of being has been yanked out from under the culture, leaving it stranded in mid-air, unable to ascend, having only the fall before it.

Still, we can hear the echoes of what that more heroic and poetic age must have been like, at least at festival time, in the brief two minutes in the clip above. In a way, it's a good thing that it is only two minutes. Most can spare that but would find themselves at sea if anything much longer would be required of them.

As the poet says, "Humankind cannot bear / very much reality."

---

(HT: Myth & True Myth @ Belmont Club)
*Oldest in the sense of an epic poem, not a collection of songs as in The Book of Taliesin.

Republished from May 2009 because "All the news just repeats itself / Like some forgotten dream that we've both seen"

As they did the Christmas season last year, they’ve come twice in the last day. They’re kids out running “a raise money for NARAL” scam. They get a cut of anything they pull in, and they use any info they get to sell to Planned Parenthood or other death mills.

They’re pleasant and they are enthusiastic (I love the painting! I really admire the tree!) and they hand you the clipboard expecting you to sign in your enthusiasm to support their “work.”

I listen and then I tell them, “No, I don’t support what you’re doing or the people and causes that you represent. I think it’s evil for you to do this, and worse still to do it for money.”

Here in Seattle's Queen Anne, where smiles, nods and signups for their scam are their usual rewards, they seem genuinely surprised and taken aback.

“You mean you’re not pro-choice?”

I assure them that I am not even if though, long ago, I was.

Continued...

It's rightly called by the clumsy and unattractive term "Blogosphere," a word that does not trip lightly off the tongue. It has, as usual, no sense of proportion and less sense of shame. This has been particularly evident in the last few days with the passing of two men, Vaclav Havel and Christopher Hitchens.

Along with untold hundreds of other's I had my pass at Hitchens soon after his death foretold was announced as a fait accompli. I was saddened by his passing as much as I am saddened by the passing of many whom I do not know except via their work but for whom I come to have more than a passing interest if not a bit of respect. I wrote what I had to say about Hitchens fairly early on the day his death was announced but was unprepared for the tsunami of comment that came along on the heels of my own marginally interesting reflections and continued..... and continued.... and continued... until one would have thought that the revealed author of the New Testament had passed on without finishing the Book of Revelations.

Continued...

MAP FROM THE CREATOR @ Mythbusters’ Cannonball Map - PerceptionBuilder.com via Cannonball Run via Neatorama

My favorite, laff-riot story of the week has to be the Mythbusters' cannonball that went a bit beyond its range. It began with something seemingly simple to accomplish; firing a cannonball at a bunch of water tanks. "No problem," say the Mythbusters' hosts, "Nada problema. We've done this THOUSANDS of time." (Or words to that effect)

In my experience, any time human beings start to mess around with explosives, flammable substances, fireworks, or artillery with the attitude of "No problem we've done this THOUSANDS of times," that's the time you should start digging a deep hole to hide in.

Continued...

They'll tell you we are running out. They lie.

From North American Energy Inventory, December 2011

You can get as uptight and concerned about Newt, Mitt, Herman, Rick, Ron, Michelle, and all the others that you want. I’m taking a nap. You can follow the up-trend, the down-trend, the around-the-bend-trend, or the down and out and flushed away trend. I’m kicking back on the beach. You can follow the come back, the back down, the buck up and the suck up to your heart’s content. I’m rolling into the hammock for the duration. You can get uptight, out of sight, bent out of -- or bent into -- shape. I’m taking the seventh inning stretch for months. You can be pissed off, pissed on, or just pissed. I’m staying high and dry.

The long or the short of it all is that between now and the elections almost one year from now the frantic antics and the doings and undoings of whomever the Republicans nominate for president can be spun until you come all undone.... and it won’t make one thin dime’s worth of difference to me. You know right now if you’ve got a smidgen of a scintilla of the sense God gave a goober that you will vote for that candidate and against Barack Obama come hell or high water. And if you know that, knowing who is really just a detail. Vlad the Impaler? Sounds like he's got just the accessory those Occupiers need.

Me? I know I am voting for NotO. It came over me today like a thunderclap. And now that I know it I also know that I can relax about this whole circus that’s currently being spun around the “nominating” “process.” Why? Because now that I know I’m voting for the candidate no matter who -- or even what -- it is, I don’t care who -- or what -- it is. As long as it can be categorized as “Not Obama,” I’m for it. That’s a very relaxing thought. All I need to do now is just kick back and wait for election day. All this other stuff is simply postmortem effects and the noise made by beating cold dead horses on dull old anvils. Wake me when it’s time to vote. Until then just refill my pina colada from time to time. Thanks.

Sorry but I’m not sold by this morning’s autofornication festival among the pundit Republicans. They’ll have to try much harder to convince me they are anything other than blood simple and bone stupid. From a glance around the sphere I take it that because Rick Perry didn’t have bad Fed agency number 3 dripping off the tip of his tongue that he’s out of the game. Is that the deal? Is that the requirement? Is that the one item that undoes the incontrovertible success of years of successful governance? Really? If that's what you think join the ever lengthening Republican line to tongue kiss Barack Obama.

I don’t think the end of the Perry candidacy has been reached for one single solitary rooten-tooten moment. Indeed I think that those who are whipping out their “He’s Toast” fork are only competing for the Drool Cup awards of 2011. To my mind, not being able to come up with the necessary smooth palaver 99.9999% of the time is a positive recommendation to the office of President. Indeed I don’t know why the current field of Repubs subject themselves to these “anything but debates” debates time after time. I don’t notice the current resident doing so and, if anyone is unfit to be president, it’s the current resident.

Or have we some how all forgotten how clueless Obama actually is when it comes to things like basic arithmetic, the history of the United States of America, the history of Europe, the state of Israel, capitalism, and a dozen other items he knows zip, zero, nada about? Is that it? Do we think that the his three years of being in the job has actually made him less stupid? Is that how stupid we've become?

In the past week death loving Republicans and those who would kill Republicans have worked together hand in glove to damage at least two of those running in this mug’s game leading up to Iowa. They’ve done a great job repeating and magnifying slander when it comes to Herman Cain, and now a similar host seem to want to make people believe that Rick Perry is also somehow “unfit.”

Really? All I can see are a bunch of bozos who don’t belong on the conservative bus spending a lot of time free-riding everyone towards certain defeat. Excuse me if I don’t buy into the blather this AM. It’s beyond stupid. It’s vintage DUMBTH. It’s typical Republican. You know, the losers.

SCOTT M COMMENTING IN "Liberals barely glance at the black conservative hanging in the courthouse square. Nothing new to see here," writes:

"Conservatives are confused and charge liberals of hypocrisy because conservatives are looking at the world from their internal perspective. Once you understand and ACT as if you recognize liberals act in furtherance of their power, and use all situations toward that goal, it's much easier to understand the liberal world. NOW, NAACP, PETA, etc, they will each demand destruction of their constituents if that is what advances liberal hegemony.

"When conservatives charge liberals with being hypocrites it's exactly like the rural goobers from Dirtpatch, Indiana charging the Three Card Monty players with dishonesty. YEH, that's the point of the game. Why didn't you know that before you started playing with them? Are you going to lecture the TCM players on good sportsmanship? Don't you think the TCM players are laughing at you while you tell them to give up the money from the game so they can win the admiration of those with middle-class values?

"If recognizing liberals as rank hypocrites was the way to victory, why are they still occupying civil society and all levers of power? Maybe "discovering" liberal are hypocrites and trying to convince conservative-minded people that acting in a conservative manner is consistent isn't a winning strategy? Maybe occupying liberal seats of power with disruptive behavior and hounding them at every waking moment works better? It sure worked to take over the culture.

"We outnumber liberals 2-1. But liberals get off their rears and do things. We tell each other our behavior and ideas are more pleasant and successful, and then ignore the fight until election day. We pretend if we win the election, we've won the argument and it's safe to go home. We are almost as weak and useless as our RINO officeholders. When you hide from liberals you surrender to liberals. Every moment of peace and comfort you allow liberals is a refuge liberals use to continue to ruin the country. Conservatives seem more interested in being right than achieving a victory. The people we are fighting with and the people we hope to win over are not logic and fact driven. If they were they would already be on our side. The moderates and independents, not to mention the Democrats, are the people that saw the 20th century and still aren't sure if big government statism is the answer to all of our problems. They don't lack for facts. They've avoided the facts. That's why they aren't conservative.

"You can't pick a candidate that will preempt liberal smears, so pick a candidate that will fight and win. Romney isn't electable. Romney is the man that lost to the man that lost to Obama. Conservatives are so afraid of a fight they hope to find a candidate that hits all the check marks so nobody will attack him. The desire for a candidate the libs can't attack should be proof your worldview is dysfunctional.

There might have been sex or there might have been autofondling, or fondling in an auto. It was a he or a she or an it that the unsourced source might have seen being fondled or spoken to or otherwise sexually bareassed or harassed or something fondling. The source or the non-source or the source of the source said he, she -- or even it -- was getting into a cab or a rickshaw or a refrigerator box that was hanging around Herman Cain sometime in the mid to late 1990s. Some say it was a Herman Cain branded cab. Some say Cain was driving it, or in the trunk, or making weird statements about the person that may or may not have been getting into the cab after Cain slipped them the sekrit sex sign which would be a chin wag with the hand.

Others say it was an unsourced cab aka a TAXI. Pa-Yammas Media was reporting something about something about someone who might have seen or said something sometime somehow that included Herman Cain in the deep background playing a harmonica. The Pa-Yammas story required corrections and retractions but it only got corrections which were, in the final analysis, inncorrect.

Bottom line: Herman Cain was a Republican and a black man which made him fit for immediate deblacking. Something or someone got into some cab somewhere at some time in the late 1990s and went back to Herman Cains’ home, apartment, condo, mansion, pizza parlor, Airstream trailer, neighborhood, city, state, region, or planet. He, she or it stayed there for a minute, an hour, overnight, or perhaps longer or shorter, and was seen at work the next day looking like he, she or it was at work. Of all this our reporters are absolutely sure except when we are not and need to issue a correction. And another correction. And another. Stay tuned. This just in...

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