Steel Bar & Grill, Sydney

It quickly becomes obvious why Damien Head's latest retaurant is called Steel. It's everywhere.The open kitchen dominates the room, the chefs penned in by a floor-to-ceiling steel framework. There's a futuristic feel to the decor, with a molten mercury-look light fitting hanging over several tables. An illuminated all-glass elevator behind our table slowly and ominously descends back and forth

Around the blogroll and elsewhere

Last night I said to Mr. Brilliant, "Since Americans seem to have this fascination with royalty, I wonder if now they'll transfer their Kennedy love over to the Bush family." Of course the difference between the Kennedys and the Bushes is that once Old Joe made his money, the next generations haven't been about greed for themselves, whereas the Bushes and their ilk seek to line their pockets at every opportunity. But as further evidence that Great Minds Think Alike, along comes Glenn Greenwald to say that resistance is futile where American "royalty" is concerned. I simply HAVE to quote this part:

They should convene a panel for the next Meet the Press with Jenna Bush Hager, Luke Russert, Liz Cheney, Megan McCain and Jonah Goldberg, and they should have Chris Wallace moderate it.  They can all bash affirmative action and talk about how vitally important it is that the U.S. remain a Great Meritocracy because it's really unfair for anything other than merit to determine position and employment.  They can interview Lisa Murkowski, Evan Bayh, Jeb Bush, Bob Casey, Mark Pryor, Jay Rockefeller, Dan Lipinksi, and Harold Ford, Jr. about personal responsibility and the virtues of self-sufficiency.  Bill Kristol, Tucker Carlson and John Podhoretz can provide moving commentary on how America is so special because all that matters is merit, not who you know or where you come from.  There's a virtually endless list of politically well-placed guests equally qualified to talk on such matters.

Who better than DCap to memorialize Ellie Greenwich?

Drifty takes on the Sunday gasbags.

Hoffmania wonders who threatened Tom Ridge's family.

Lotsa Bang for the Blogroll Buck: Blue Girl's Nightowl Newswrap.

Eric Boehlert on the media still treating John McCain as if he won. I notice John Kerry was only on this weekend because he's a Democratic Senator from Massachusetts and Ted Kennedy just died. I'm surprised they were able to make even that connection.

I hope that voters in New York's 19th district don't get confused between John Hall (good progressive Democrat, forgiven for once being part of bad rock band) and Greg Ball (wingnut anti-health care reform zealot who has had government-provided health care his entire life and whose care was once paid for by, yes, the Kennedy family.

Digby remembers Hurricane Katrina. Just in case you were tempted to think that Republicans know how to do anything but be scumbags.

Zombie Reagan rises from the grave

So, Average Joe, now that you've lost your job, you can't find another one, your unemployment is about to run out, you're using your 401(k) which is worth half of what it used to be to put food on the table, and you're going to be kicked out of your house next month, do you still obsess about the undeserving, those who don't deserve a helping hand because they've squandered what little they had? Do you still think that the Rich Man™ is going to let you into his club if you Just Work Hard Enough? How hard do you think that is? Hmmmmm????

Are you realizing yet that YOU have become what you always hated?

Hardly:

After many months of conservative claims that Barack Obama and the Democratic Party are determined to engineer a "government takeover" of the private sector in order to "redistribute" income, Steele is upping the ante to suggest that Obama wants to redistribute healthcare – and perhaps even the opportunity to take another breath – as well.

This should be familiar to any political observer over the age of 30 as a new version of the old "welfare wedge": the emotionally powerful conservative argument that Democrats want to use Big Government to take away the good things of life from people who have earned them and give them to people who haven't.

The "welfare wedge" largely disappeared from national political life in the wake of the 1996 welfare reform initiative that eliminated any federal entitlement to cash assistance for families, imposed a work requirement for temporary assistance, and generated, for a while at least, a massive reduction in "welfare" caseloads.

It returned during the latter stages of the 2008 presidential campaign, when conservative gabbers and ultimately the McCain-Palin campaign attacked Barack Obama's tax proposals as a "redistributive" effort to offer "welfare" by boosting the refundable Earned Income Tax Credit – by definition eligible only to families with earned income and stiff payroll tax liability. This was interesting not only because the EITC had long been a staple of conservative social policy, but because previous efforts to call refundable EITC payments "welfare" had been denounced by George W. Bush and John McCain.

After the election, the "welfare" treatment of Obama's tax policies was echoed by similar conservative rhetoric about proposals to help homebuyers getting hammered by the mortgage and real estate collapse. Most famously, CNBC financial reporter Rick Santelli became a right-wing folk hero for a rant about the injustice of being asked to help the "losers" who took out mortgages they should have known they couldn't pay. This was at about the same time as Republican members of Congress began handing out copies of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged," with its prophecy of a dystopic society in which socialist "looters" and Christian "altruists" had brought the United States to its knees, and some conservative agitators began urging "productive" Americans to emulate Rand's plutocratic heroes by "going Galt" and refusing to contribute to the welfare state. The "tea party" movement that ramped up in opposition to Obama's economic stimulus proposals was heavily freighted with this sort of revolt-of-the-producers attitude.

Fucking idiots. These people remind me of the black-eyed yahoos of fictional Bon Temps, Louisiana -- the town on True Blood whose denizens have been driven so mad (and stupid) by an evil Maenad that they're duped into believing that one of the few still-sane townspeople is "the God that comes" with the help of a few flares, a gas mask, and some tree branches (watch it before YouTube takes it down):

This is what Republicans are so good at doing -- lifting your wallet out of your back pocket while pointing down the economic ladder and saying "Look! Down there! THERE'S the reason you're losing ground!" And the Charlie Browns who are captive to their racism, their fear of anyone who isn't white, and yes, their fear and recognition that they themselves are sliding down that ladder, fall for it every damn time.

Meanwhile, down in Texas, the Lone Star breed of yahoo is calling for secession again:

Rick Perry's talk of secession appears to have buoyed efforts by Texas secessionists who want the governor to follow through. At a rally Saturday on the Capitol steps, members of the of the Texas Nationalist Movement called on the governor and the Legislature to put a referendum on the state ballot on whether Texas should leave the union. At an anti-tax "tea party" protest in April, Perry touted states rights and raised the possibility of secession.

On Saturday, secessionist speakers denounced the federal government in general - and the Obama administration in particular. One speaker said, "We are aware that stepping off into secession may be a bloody war. We understand!" Another self-styled patriot invoked George Washington as an ally of secession (History lesson: Washington presided over creation of the union) and Sam Houston - "You go ask Sam Houston what he thought about secession. He did it anyway." (History lesson: Houston opposed secession. He ran for governor as an independent Unionist in 1859. Despite his efforts, the people of Texas voted to secede, and he was forced out of office in March 1861. )

I say let them secede. And I say let all these teabaggers voluntarily give up everything paid for by tax dollars. Let them give up the Federal money that they get which we in the blue states pay for. Let them give up maintenance of their interstate highways. And above all, let them give up their Social Security checks and their Medicare. Because once they become the Gun-Totin' Republic of Texas, they are no longer eligible.

A "Real American" Holiday

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

I've never linked to an open thread before but Blue Gal's open thread on Crooks and Liars last night is absolutely an exception I must make.

August 29th has proven to be a date of many anniversaries. Yesterday was the day we eulogized Ted Kennedy in Roxbury, Massachusetts. John McCain spent much of his 73rd birthday at his colleague's memorial service. And, of course, McCain four years ago found a way to get some partying time in with his ideological baton mate George W. Bush on the day Hurricane Katrina made landfall.

Yet August 29th marks yet another anniversary and it has nothing to do with the late Sen. Kennedy or John McCain's birthday or Hurricane Katrina. Our colleagues on the other side of the Grand Canyonesque Great Divide have chosen to commemorate not just August 29th, to not merely celebrate it with hoopla and heartfelt Huzzahs but to even give it a name:

Sarah Palin Day.

Huh? Was yesterday also the former Alaska Governor's birthday? Nopers. August 29th was the first anniversary of John McCain officially announcing Sarah Palin as his Dick Cheney.

Liberals and conservatives both commemorate August 29th. The former (this year excepted because of Sen. Kennedy's passing) solemnly remember the day Katrina began tearing apart the Gulf Coast. The latter celebrate the day Sarah Palin was introduced as John McCain's running mate. Aside from the date, the only other thing our two sides have in common is observing the beginning of a catastrophic defeat for the Republican Party.

Yet, in an absurd way, Sarah Palin's 9 week-long whirlwind tour of America actually won back some votes that the GOP had surely lost during the previous 36 months. Sarah Palin had actually energized a base, bringing back into the campaign of a man who cut a cake with a still-vacationing George W. Bush the day the deadliest hurricane in 36 years slammed into the Gulf Coast.

One with reasonable cognitive functions will surely wonder why Sarah Palin's elevation to the national stage rates commemoration over that of the most horrendous natural national catastrophe since Galveston. Citing skewed priorities only addresses the disconnect but as xenobiologists struggling to understand a new alien life form, some of us can grope toward theories.

Palin's Gidget on PCP charm resonated with a disturbingly large percentage of shrieking, gun-toting, Old Testament-slapping racist gargoyles who were artificially validated and fooled into thinking they constituted "the Real America." It was the demented glee glub of McCain's incomplete and reluctant base and their hatred of McCain's opponent actually took him aback.

Sarah Palin, a product of a novel that could have been co-authored by Horatio Alger and Stephen King, was the Pied Piper of Wasilla, a charmer of bipedaled vermin who were willing to follow her siren song back onto a ship that had already hit the iceberg.

Mustering such massive amounts of willful ignorance and sheer, ineducable stupidity that endures one year later is an impossible task for us to imagine. Yet it was obvious from the gitgo that McCain was really the doddering old fool to her Anna Nicole Smith. At best, McCain was regarded as a broken down Trojan Horse whose primary function was to infiltrate the White House with their millenarian matriarch in tow and then have the courtesy and consideration to drop dead on Inauguration Day.

It didn't matter to them and still doesn't matter now how comically unfit she was for even the glorified sinecure of the vice presidency. It never occurs to our colleagues on the right that we would've seen a political marriage made in hell, that Palin would've co-opted, contradicted and otherwise undermined practically every doddering step of a McCain presidency.

It didn't matter to them and still doesn't matter now that she pals around with terrorist witch hunters or that she drained the dwindling coffers of the McCain campaign with clothes shopping sprees that were exceeded only by Imelda Marcos or the corrupt former President of Zambia.

It didn't matter to them and still doesn't matter now to our opponents that she chose to cut and run from token criticism and a lame duck administration when she was perfectly able to run for a second gubernatorial term or that she'd used in Hezbollah/Hamas/al Qaeda fashion at least three of her kids and her grandson as human shields for cheap political points.

The ones trying to create this extra-Hallmark holiday based on a rushed, coerced and astoundingly ignorant choice on McCain's part are very likely the same ones who were short-stroking to the words of people such as Neal Boortz, Rush Limbaugh and several of our most hateful Republican legislators who'd more or less succeeded in transforming the Gulf Coast's 1800 fatalities from victims to self-euthanizing underachievers and fuckups.

In the end, it can only be theorized that these apocalyptic, End of Days yahoos voted not their informed conscience but Sarah Palin's reactionary, uninformed one. Setting up her little tent under the much larger big top of McCain's and fooling these born again fans of revelations (You can call them either rebirthers or Revelers) into thinking that they were under the real Big Top is one of the biggest con jobs in presidential electoral history. They were swindled into thinking they were "the Real America" by an anti-American separatist just as the poor blacks of New Orleans were swindled into thinking they, too, were part of real America. It's a real America that will never quite divest itself of the urge to make itself a little bit whiter, a little bit more like Palin's fabled "Real America."

Hippopotamus Restaurant at the Museum Hotel, Wellington, New Zealand

Have you ever dined alone at dinner?It always feels a little disarming dining without company, and often the biggest barrier is the self-conscious worry about what other people will think about you, the Nigel No Mates in the corner.Presumably this is why room service exists, so business travellers (and yes, cooped-in couples) can order food to be eaten in bed in front of a flickering television.

The best eulogy yesterday was not delivered by Barack Obama

Unfortunately I've been too busy trying to get this project that ate my life out the door in two weeks to watch the nonstop coverage of the Kennedy funeral. In a way it's been a relief to have an excuse not to, what with all the blathering by people like Peggy Noonan about how Ted Kennedy would have given up the public option because he was about bipartisanship (funny how conservatives have already appropriated Kennedy's corpse, as if to hijack it from Arlington). But I did want to watch the eulogies, and while the same blatherers were once again making noises about how this had to be the best speech of Barack Obama's career, the President fell a bit flat (not surprisingly, given his annoying tendency to internalize even the dumbest messages from right-leaning television talking heads). Instead, the eulogy that reduced me to a sobbing heap on the sofa, with those hiccuppy sobs that one ordinarily doesn't have simply by crying at funerals unless one is very close to the departed, was that of Ted Kennedy, Jr.

At first I almost thought it was James Spader giving the eulogy, so much did Ted Jr. resemble the randy lawyer from Boston Legal. After he started speaking with a vocal quality similar to the freshman Senator from the state of Minnesota, he even started to LOOK like Al Franken in a blond wig. But I've rarely heard a eulogy like this that so perfectly brought us into just what it was about this man that made people love him so, despite his flaws:

Poor Patrick. The one Kennedy who is an active legislator, a grief etched across his face (4:50 into the first video) that seems deeper and more profound than the normal grief and loss that comes with the loss of a parent, especially when that parent is such a larger-than-life figure; the one with the Kennedy substance abuse problems. -- it was he who had to follow his more glamorous and more articulate older brother in saying goodbye to their father. I would say this to Patrick J. Kennedy: Look at your father's life. Look at the ghastly mistakes he too made in his life. And look at how he turned it all around. You too can do this. You too can become a great statesman. Every family has a "lesser" -- a child that isn't as pretty as the others, isn't as smart or musical or charismatic as the others. It's up to us to transcend all that and find their own way. There would be no better tribute you could pay to your father than to find yours.

Seniors who are shrieking at tea bag rallies and town halls are in for a rude awakening

You've got to love the "Don't let the government get its hands on my Medicare" crowd. That's the kind of sound bite that so beautifully encapsulates the willful ignorance of people who think with their jerking knees. Republicans, with their "pull the plug on Grandma" rhetoric, are making some headway in convincing seniors that it's they who are the guardians of Medicare while the Obama Administration and the Democrats want to destroy it. This is what happens when we forget history, or never learn history, or are too incurious to take history and place it in context as part of a continuum leading to the present day.

Sometimes I wonder what my late father-in-law would have made of all this. He was a son of Italian immigrants, and as wingnutty a wingnut, as racist a racist as you'll find. This was a guy who had a photograph of Ronald and Nancy Reagan sitting on top of the TV on which he watched Fox News.

DougJ over at Balloon Juice wrote yesterday about the syndrome of people who were discriminated against when they first came over aspiring to reach the point of finding someone else to shit on. My father-in-law was one of these guys. A funny thing happened to him, though, after his health started to go and he spent more time in hospitals: He began to realize that Medicare was not a Communist plot to turn us into the Soviet Union, but a vital service on which he could rely when he became ill. Some of his mellowing was because he moved to the Jersey shore, where he squired around the widows of his friends who had predeceased him instead of spending ALL his time feeding Fox Hate Network into his head. But some of it is the realization that perhaps something run by the government isn't so bad that for many people only comes when they need it. It didn't hurt either that for the first time in his life, he was actually interacting with people who were from groups he'd always hated -- Black and Hispanic and Filipino nurses. I remember seeing him joking and flirting with a black nurse in a way he never would have when he was well.

I often wonder what he would have made of what's going on now, whether his mellowing would have continued or if he would have remained stuck in right-wing ideology about health care. I wonder if he would have been one of those people screaming "Keep the government's hands off my Medicare!" at Congressional town halls. It's hard to imagine he would; the man wasn't stupid. But I wonder what kind of hoops he WOULD have jumped through to protect his Reaganite worldview.

Reality is going to smack them hard across the face, should these people decide to turn Congress over to the Republicans in 2010. Because Republicans may be playing to their fears about Medicare now in an effort to keep health care in the hands of for-profit insurance companies, but once they succeed in that, Medicare will have outlived its usefulness to them.

Jacob Weisberg, in Newsweek:

The republicans charge that Democratic health care reform would, in Sen. Charles Grassley's words, "pull the plug on Grandma." According to Sen. Jon Kyl, the bills before Congress would ration medical treatment by age. Rep. John Boehner says they promote euthanasia. Sarah Palin has raised the specter of "death panels." Such fears are understandable. It's not preposterous to imagine laws that would try to save money by encouraging the inconvenient elderly to make an early exit. After all, that's been the Republican policy for years.

It was Grassley himself who devised the "Throw Mama From the Train" provision of the GOP's 2001 tax cut. The estate-tax revision he championed will reduce the estate tax to zero next year. But when it expires at year's end, the tax will jump back up to its previous level of 55 percent. Grassley's exploding tax break has an entirely foreseeable, if unintended, consequence: it incentivizes ailing, elderly rich people to end their lives—paging Dr. Kevorkian—before midnight on Dec. 31, 2010. It also gives their children an incentive to sign DNR orders and switch off respirators in time for the deadline. This would be a great plot for a P. D. James novel if it weren't an actual piece of legislation.

[snip]

Other GOP policies promote death for senior citizens with more modest incomes. Take George W. Bush's failed plan to privatize Social Security—a program that has driven life expectancy up and death rates down since it was instituted. It has an especially pronounced impact on suicide rates for the elderly, which have declined 56 percent since 1930. Had Bush prevailed, those who gambled on the stock market and lost would be less able to afford medicine, food, and heating for their homes. In aggregate, they'd likely die younger and commit suicide more often.

Republicans continue working to short-en and sadden the lives of the elderly in more oblique ways, too. One of President Obama's first official acts was to reverse Bush's executive order limiting government funding for stem-cell research, which remains the most promising avenue for new treatments of diseases that afflict the aged, including Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Clean-air legislation, which the Republicans defeated in 2002, has the potential to save 23,000 lives per year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Many of those victims are elderly people, who suffer disproportionately from cardiovascular and respiratory illnesses exacerbated by air pollution. Because emissions of carbon monoxide and such are merely a contributing factor, you can't name the individuals who have died because of this policy choice. But it's reasonable to deduce that there are tens of thousands of people who would still be elderly today if Republicans didn't value the rights and campaign contributions of polluters more highly than their lives.

If the Democrats were even a tenth as savvy about the reptilian brain as Republicans, they'd use this reality. But because they are gutless, lazy, AND as much in the pocket of the insurers as the Republicans, they won't. And all those elderly people and the near-elderly screaming about socialism are going to find themselves living their own nightmare very soon.

The evil "Christian" heart of Mike Huckabee

Perhaps it's unseemly to post this during Senator Kennedy's funeral, but I think it's important to keep in mind the kind of vile, mean-spirited people that populate the Republican political establishment...and to vow to never, ever, ever let these pieces of shit ever gain power over our lives again.

Today's "honoree": Mike Huckabee:

The 2008 Republican presidential candidate suggested during his radio show, "The Huckabee Report," on Thursday that, under President Obama's health care plan, Kennedy would have been told to "go home to take pain pills and die" during his last year of life.

"[I]t was President Obama himself who suggested that seniors who don't have as long to live might want to consider just taking a pain pill instead of getting an expensive operation to cure them," said Huckabee. "Yet when Sen. Kennedy was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer at 77, did he give up on life and go home to take pain pills and die? Of course not. He freely did what most of us would do. He choose an expensive operation and painful follow up treatments. He saw his work as vitally important and so he fought for every minute he could stay on this earth doing it. He would be a very fortunate man if his heroic last few months were what future generations remember him most for."

That's the Republican meme now: Barack Obama would have killed Ted Kennedy.

There are no words for these people.

UPDATE: Let's not forget the maverickyness of John McCain, as he snubs Sen. Kennedy's widow last night:

Schoc Chocolates at Ciocco Chocolaterie, Wellington, New Zealand

"I'm going to Wellington!" I told Divemummy."So you're going to Schoc?" she'd replied at once.The last time I'd visited Wellington, my Schoc Chocolate tablet souvenirs had been a huge hit. It's not just the pleasant bitter cocoa of the dark chocolate, or the smooth sweetness of the milk, but the fact that the tablets comes in 60 different flavour varieties sends the mind boggling and excites the

Four Years Ago

This is your nation on "conservatism":

Any questions?

And American Idiots will respond by electing Sarah Palin

There are actually two third rails of politics -- Social Security and taxes. Income tax hikes have been off-limits ever since Ronald Reagan convinced a sizable chunk of the population that ALL Federal spending goes to welfare queens in Cadillacs. Ask your non-blogger friends about taxes and what they go for. You'll hear a litany of scapegoats -- shiftless black people. Hospital care for pregnant illegal immigrants. And of course, welfare mothers. They'll never mention the 9 billion dollars that mysteriously disappeared in Iraq, or the huge sums of money paid to KBR to poison American soldiers, or the bonus they got for electrocuting them. They'll never mention the trillions of dollars we will have squandered in Iraq because George W. Bush had penis issues relative to his daddy and Dick Cheney needed lots of corpses to feed into the black hole where most of us have souls.

They'll never mention public education or food safety or any of the other things government does. Perhaps that's because under Republicans, government does these things so badly. I recall growing up in the 1960's under two Democratic presidents, and the hamburgers at your backyard barbecue could be relied upon not to kill you, enough schools had been built to accommodate the huge generation that entered them, and my mother was a neighborhood oddity because she worked outside the home at a time when comfortable suburban life could be had on one income. No one really talked much about taxes then.

Funny how after nearly three decades since of Republican dominance (or a brief interregnum of a Democratic president who often acted like the kind of Republicans we used to call "Rockefeller Republicans"), Americans no longer feel they get any bang for their buck.

It's like the town in which I live, which is a microcosm of the natonal Republican Party. It's been a one-party town for the same nearly three decades, mirroring the nation as a whole. We have no trash collection (we pay for private haulers that contract with the town). In a town characterized by old-growth oak trees, leaves are collected only twice, so that at times in the fall the streets are nearly impassable. Snow removal is a joke. The DPW employees sit around smoking cigarettes while private landscapers who are friends with council members are hired to maintain the town's fields and parks. One of these landscapers recently "mistakenly" sprayed Roundup over one of the sports fields. Funny how the Council had been wanting to spend $1.5 million on artificial turf before this conveniently happened. We had a big nor'easter a couple of years ago, and piles of carpeting appeared in front of people's houses, often sitting for weeks until the next monthly household debris pickup. We shlepped bags of ruined carpet and floor tile to the DPW yard three times a week instead, where the workers stood around smoking cigarettes and occasionally flipping the switch in the truck. This is what Republican rule looks like. They say government doesn't work because they are unable or unwilling to make it work.

And so here we find ourselves, drowning in a debt that the Bush Administration left us, in a recession which, while it may be bottoming out, is not going to see a significant rise in incomes or job opportunities for a long time to come, if ever. And the "T"-word is being mentioned:

During last year's campaign, President Obama vowed to enact a bold agenda without raising taxes for the middle class, a pledge budget experts viewed with skepticism. Since then, a severe recession, massive deficits and a national debt that is swelling toward a 50-year high have only made his promise harder to keep.

The Obama administration has insisted that the pledge will stand. But the president's top economic advisers have refused to rule out broad-based tax increases to close the yawning gap between federal revenue and government spending and are warning of tough choices ahead.

Republicans are already on the attack, accusing Obama of plotting to break his no-tax vow, the same political transgression that cost Democrats control of Congress under former president Bill Clinton and may have cost president George H.W. Bush his job. Democrats say Obama is highly unlikely to break the pledge before next year's congressional election and observe that it would be safer to wait until his second term if a tax increase becomes unavoidable.

"If you rule out inflating our way out of the problem and defaulting on the debt, there are two ways: Cut spending or raise taxes," said William G. Gale, an expert on fiscal policy at the Brookings Institution. With more than 80 percent of federal spending devoted to politically untouchable programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, he said, "it's going to be really hard to make significant headway on the spending side. So that means you've got to think about taxes."

Spending cuts were a big part of the solution the last time the nation faced such a towering debt. In the aftermath of World War II, with the debt exceeding the country's entire economic output, the government slashed military expenditures. Within two years, Washington was spending less than it took in. Fifteen percent inflation also helped by reducing the real value of the debt. When the country went to war again in Korea and then Vietnam, tax increases helped keep the budget largely in balance and the debt continued to fall.

Today's problem is more complex. Obama not only faces the fallout from the worst economic downturn in 30 years, but also inherited the debt piled up by his predecessor, Republican George W. Bush. Bush invaded Iraq and approved an expensive new prescription drug benefit for the elderly while pushing through one of the biggest tax cuts of the post-war era -- worth an estimated $1.6 trillion in foregone revenue by the time the provisions expire next year. This was the first time the United States had not adjusted its fiscal policy to meet its wartime needs, according to "The Price of Liberty," a book on war financing by Goldman Sachs vice chairman Robert D. Hormats.

After running surpluses in the late 1990s, the government began spending far more than it took in, forcing the Treasury to increase borrowing from China and other creditors. During the Bush administration, the portion of the debt held by the public jumped from just over $3 trillion to nearly $6 trillion. Federal rescue efforts in the face of last fall's financial meltdown have rapidly driven the debt higher. Today it stands at nearly $7.4 trillion, or about 52 percent of the overall U.S. economy.

"There's no question in my view that Bush was the most fiscally irresponsible president in the history of the republic," said David M. Walker, the comptroller general under Bush who now advocates for deficit reduction. Obama "was handed a bad deck," he said. "But the question is, are you making it better or not? And so far the answer is no."

Supply-side economics was sold to the American people as a kind of free lunch: You could cut taxes, increase military spending, and balance the budget. Forgotten is that the balance the budget thing never quite worked out the way Reagan said it would. But tax increases have been anathema ever since.

Ask Americans what they want to see cut, and they'll say "welfare." Ask them what they mean by welfare. Ask which of the following programs that comprise eleven percent of the Federal budget they want to eliminate:

1. the refundable portion of the earned-income and child tax credits, which assist low- and moderate-income working families through the tax code;
   
2. programs that provide cash payments to eligible individuals or households, including Supplemental Security Income for the elderly or disabled poor and unemployment insurance;
   
3. various forms of in-kind assistance for low-income families and individuals, including food stamps, school meals, low-income housing assistance, child-care assistance, and assistance in meeting home energy bills; and various other programs such as those that aid abused and neglected children.
   

You already know what the answer is: It's #3. Because after the zygotes and fetii become actual children, no one gives a shit about them. But what percentage of the budget does that actually comprise? If the earned income and child tax credits and SSI are part of it, we're looking at perhaps 5-6%? That's not going to make much of a difference.

How about Social Security? That's 21% of the budget right there. Young people would love to see it eliminated. They feel they're going to get screwed. Well, guess what: So do we boomers, and we always have, ever since the FICA withholding increased in 1986 and it was used to finance debt spending. Medicare's another 20%. That's over 40% right there? Let's just elminiate these. Tomorrow. Right?
Ask these young people if they're willing to support their parents in their old age -- you know, the ones who did everything right in putting money into 401(k) plans (because we were only a few years into the workplace when pensions were largely replaced by 401(k) plans) and lost 20-40% of it when the bubble burst in the waning years of the Bush Administration. Or perhaps they want to put those parents out on the street. That'd sure take care of the need for Medicare too, then, right -- if Grandma is living on a subway grate?

How about defense? That's 21%. After all, what's the point of defending a country with no jobs and old people and the poor (which will comprise a sizable portion of the population that that point) living on the street, starving and dying of exposure? Oh yes, I forgot -- it's because the Bush family and their friends will still have plenty of money, as will the Chairmen of AIG, UnitedHealth, Citicorp, and other giant corporations that make their money out of sucking cash from the rest of us and giving nothing in return.

(Source of figures: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities)

It's all worked perfectly for them, hasn't it, these three decades of Republican dominance? They've wanted to dismantle programs that help anyone other than corporations, and now their latest hero, George W. Bush, put us in eight short years into a position in which the New Deal and the Great Society will have to be dismantled, because there's no money to pay for them. The middle-class is going to scream bloody murder at paying more taxes, partially because they are struggling themselves, but also because they were told by Ronald Reagan and others that if they just worked hard enough, they too could enter the Kingdom of Rich Men, when said Kings knew full well that they had no intention of letting even the hardest-working schmoe into their little club. These men begrudge even the existence of a middle class, and so they set out to dismantle it -- and have largely succeeded.

Perhaps this is why George W. Bush decided maybe he wouldn't rather be a dictator after all -- because he didn't want to hang around to clean up the mess he made. Instead, he allowed the black guy to come in and do it. And while I have significant issues with the Obama presidency so far, I will at least give him credit for trying. But it will all be for naught, because by doing what may have to be done, he will open the door for a flame-fanner like Sarah Palin to succeed him.

And then God help us all.

I was right about the Chappaquiddick trolls, now let the Wellstoning begin

And it already has:

Hannity on
Kennedy's death: "a lot of this was the politicizing of -- remember Paul Wellstone's
death?" Discussing Kennedy's death during his radio program, Sean Hannity asserted, "We've got The Wall Street Journal reporting -- and by the way, a
lot of this was the politicizing of -- remember Paul Wellstone's death? You know,
'Let's do everything for Paul.' And we're now being implored to get behind Obamacare because it's what Ted Kennedy would have wanted." [The Sean Hannity Show,
8/26/09]

Savage fill-in Markowski on possible naming of health care bill after Kennedy: "It's political theater" like the "Wellstone memorial." Chris Markowski, filling in for Michael Savage on his radio program, took a caller who said that "if Ted Kennedy had wanted his name on this health care bill, I think that he would -- I would want to see where he said that in writing before he died. He had plenty of time." Markowski responded, in part, by asserting: "I don't think he's requested -- you got to understand, it's a show. OK? It's political theater. Like the Democrats thought that whole Wellstone memorial was going to -- it was going to force them to -- it was going to allow them to win the Senate race in Minnesota. This is political theater. It's a show." [The Savage Nation, 8/26/09]

Lopez on Kennedy's death: Wellstone service "turned into a political rally." The National Review Online's Kathyrn Jean Lopez wrote in an August 26 post to the blog The Corner titled "Re: The Politics of Ted Kennedy's Passing": "All politicos need to remember the Wellstone funeral when a well-known politician dies. Instead of memorializing his life, his service turned into a political rally. Some of the MSNBC coverage today I'm catching looks like a [sic] Obamacare convocation. Human life is about more than poltics. And politics isn't American Idol. Or, even, The Lion of the Senate."

Allahpundit "sure" Kennedy "eulogies won't be politicized at all." Hot Air blogger Allahpundit wrote in an August 26 tweet: "Looking forward to the Democratic line-up at TK's memorial service. I'm sure the eulogies won't be politicized at all."

Instapundit: "A Wellstone Memorial on steroids?" An August 26 post on Instapundit.com linked to a post by JammieWearingFool with the headline "A Wellstone Memorial on steroids? And how did that work out?" JammieWearingFool asserted in the post, written the same day, "While we have no doubt the Democrats will do all they can to exploit his death and will probably have a Wellstone memorial on steroids, we'll stay above that." The link on the words "Wellstone memorial" were to an October 30,
2002, Slate.com article describing Wellstone's memorial services as a "pep
rally."

Noting "conservative talking point," Politico's Smith says "[i]t would seem odd to bar politics" from Kennedy's funeral. In an August 26 post, Politico's Ben Smith referred to the comments by Allahpundit and Instapundit as "a conservative talking point [that] is emerging to counter the the hope on the left that Kennedy's death will advance his cause of health care reform," and commented:

More...

I'll say this for them, they are disciplined. The hate all flows exactly the same way from every last one of them. They are really good at goose-stepping together. It's that authoritarian thing they have.

But while the right is terrified that the Kennedy memorials may serve to underscore just how much this man did for the have-nots and the have-lesses and how much the Republicans take pride in screwing over the average working American (see also: Tom Coburn:)

...let's look at what Al Franken wrote in 2006, talking about the Coretta Scott King memorial and setting the record straight on the Wellstone funeral:

To this day, there are still a lot of people, including Democrats, who've bought the right wing line on the Wellstone Memorial. Specifically, that it was a cynical, premeditated political event that included endless booing of Republican politicians who came to pay their respects to their fallen colleague. I wrote a pretty detailed account of the Wellstone Memorial in my book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, and nothing could be further from the truth. I did write that "reasonable people of good will were genuinely offended." The memorial was raucous and a couple of speakers said some things that were inappropriate - basically, let's win this (upcoming Senate) election for Paul.

There were also honest Republicans of good will, including Jim Ramstad - the Congressman from the Minneapolis suburban district I grew up in - who acted like human beings and cut the speakers who offended (Rick Kahn and, to a lesser degree, Mark Wellstone) a little slack because they understood that Rick had lost six very close friends and Mark had lost his father, mother, and sister.

The chapter was mainly about how cynically Republicans used the memorial politically as they complained that the Democrats had used it politically. And how the mainstream media, many of whom had neither attended the memorial nor seen it on TV, bought into the Republican spin.

Mainly, there was a lot of lying. Rush Limbaugh claimed that the audience was "planted," when, in fact, Twin Cities' radio and TV had to tell people to stay away because Williams Arena was jammed to capacity three hours before the Memorial was scheduled to begin. Thousands were crowded into an overflow gym to watch on a screen and thousands watched outside on a cold, late October night.

A pained Limbaugh asked his audience the day after the memorial: "Where was the grief? Where were the tears? Where was the memorial service? There wasn't any of this!"

This was a lie. I was there. Along with everyone else, I cried, I laughed, I cheered. It was, to my mind, a beautiful four-hour memorial.

I didn't boo. Neither did 22,800 of the some 23,000 people there. This has been a much discussed, much lied about aspect of the memorial. A number of Republicans, like Peggy Noonan and Weekly Standard writer Chris Caldwell claimed that 20,000 people had booed Trent Lott. (Caldwell claimed that 20,000 people booed a whole litany of people who weren't booed at all.) We'll never get an actual count - but I'd say about two hundred people booed Trent Lott when his face came on the Jumbotron. This was about a minute after 23,000 people cheered for Bill Clinton when his face appeared on the Jumbotron.

The Jumbotron was carrying the C-SPAN feed, and unless you were watching live, you almost certainly have never seen the moment that Trent Lott was booed. That's because none of the cable news shows repeated it. That's because you can't hear him being booed. And that's because so few people booed him. Also, I swear, it was a good-natured "kill the umpire" boo, (and Lott actually grinned) but I could never prove that. What I have proven is that you couldn't hear the boos on TV because on my book-on-tape I played the audio of the C-SPAN video to compare the 23,000 cheering for Clinton with the smattering of boos for Lott, and you CANNOT hear the boos.

Caldwell, who never saw the memorial, also wrote that there was almost no mention of the others who died on the plane. That was complete bull. There were beautiful eulogies for Will, Tom, and Mary.

Kellyanne (Fitzpatrick) Conway went on TV the day after the memorial and told a nationwide audience that the Jumbotron instructed the crowd "when to cheer and when to jeer." (The speeches were close-captioned and would indicate when there was LAUGHTER and APPLAUSE.)

Even though the words on the closed captioning followed the speaker's words by five or so seconds and were often misspelled, Sara Janecek, a Minnesota Republican lobbyist, said the speeches on the Jumbotron were proof that the speeches had been written and vetted by the cynically politically motivated Democrat who ran the event. Actually, the people who spoke at the Wellstone memorial were all chosen by the families of those who died. No one's speech was vetted. The Wellstone people had all spent the previous five days going to funerals. It never occurred to them to vet the speeches. The irony is that because they weren't thinking politically, they opened themselves to being accused of staging a political event..

It was the Republicans that tried to cheapen Paul Wellstone's life by dishonoring his death. It was the right-wing media, not the friends and family who spoke at the memorial or the people who came to it, that seized an opportunity to use a tragedy for political gain.

But as we know, with conservatives reality is immaterial. For the Republicans EVERYTHING is about scoring cheap political points with the very same frightened, down-sliding Americans they've spent the last nearly thirty years trying to push down into abject poverty so that they and their buddies can reap ALL the rewards of living in this country. If you liked feudal Europe, you'll LOVE Republican America. And we're well on their way there. It's only because of the efforts of people like Paul Wellstone and Ted Kennedy and Bernie Sanders and, we can only hope, Al Franken, that we aren't there yet.

But the wingnuts won't give up. The Republicans in Washington know who they're dealing with. They know that they are already reaping the fruits of the war on public education that they've been fighting since the 1960's:

American children aren't necessarily getting smarter or dumber, but that might not be good enough to compete globally, according to numbers cited Tuesday by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

He noted a special analysis put out last week by the National Center for Education Statistics that compares 15-year-old U.S. students with students from other countries in the Organization for Economic Development.

It found the U.S. students placed below average in math and science. In math, U.S. high schoolers were in the bottom quarter of the countries that participated, trailing countries including Finland, China and Estonia.

According to the report, the U.S. math scores were not measurably different in 2006 from the previous scores in 2003. But while other countries have improved, the United States has remained stagnant.

In science, the United States falls behind countries such as Canada, Japan and the Czech Republic.

Duncan told a room full of science and math experts of the National Science Board on Tuesday morning that this will hurt the United States as it competes internationally. "We are lagging the rest of the world, and we are lagging it in pretty substantial ways," he said.

I don't know how, when the media are willing to treat utter horsepuckey and demonstrable facts as two sides of an issue, we are supposed to fight back. It is beginning to dawn on me that perhaps the Great Experiement has failed after all.

I have a co-worker from China, who is raising a child here in this country. In China, parents are very strict with their children. My co-worker's parents, when they visit from China, are appalled at how permissive she is. And yet her daughter is already in rebellious teenager mode and she's not even ten yet -- because HER friends get to do whatever they want. This Chinese woman is stuck raising an American child, and American children are asked to do nothing they don't want to do. These are the adults of tomorrow. Their parents are the ones who can't be bothered to know what's going on in the world beyond the soccer team; the parents for whom Good Morning America constitutes news; the ones in my district who think Marge Roukema is still in Congress.

Republicans are reaping the rewards of the dumbing-down of America, and I'm not sure there is a damn thing we can do to reverse it.

VEGAS, BABY, VEGAS

The vegas tradeshow, Project, is next week. I am going with my boyfriend, our PR girl Kristom, and 2 of our friends/ models. I'm SO excited because Erin is going and she is simply the best. My boyfriend is gonna shoot a ton of photos there so we can post a little story when we get back. Hopefully we don't get kicked out this time for hula hooping and face painting (lighten up project!!) I guess we will just have to face paint back in the room.

We are gonna hand out gift shirts, toy water guns and bags! So fun.

Wish us luck!

XO

Kim





Erin








Previous Vegas!

The Weta Cave and Cafe Polo, Miramar, Wellington, New Zealand

Precioussss...... my precioussssIt's hard to think about New Zealand without remembering the dramatic scenery from The Lord of the Rings. And whilst downtown Wellington is perfectly compact and flat for the tourist on foot, you will need wheels to take in the more dramatic ocean views and ascend the steep hills around the city.The Plate-mobileEnter the Plate-mobile. After completing the

Sen. Ted Kennedy and the Miracle of Moral Relativism

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari)

"I'm more than willing to go off decorum to ensure THIS MAN is not beatified. Sorry, he destroyed lives. And he knew it." - Moonie Times scribbler Andrew "Not so" Breitbart on Twitter

The death last Tuesday night of Senator Ted Kennedy has unleashed a lot of pent-up hatred of not just the late senator and his historic legacy but against all victories hard-won by the liberal lawmaker over nearly a half a century in the Senate. In the last day and a half, we've heard it all: Leftists clinging to Kennedy's bloated corpse in order to keep the health care bill afloat; Teddy's daddy being a bootlegger; and, of course, Chappaquiddick.

How soon right wingers forget about the blood- and shit-stained legacies of the forebears of their own heroes. Thank the Good Lord for moral relativism! Huzza!

While it may be true that Edward Kennedy's father was a bootlegger, what they seem to forget was that, A) it still has nothing to do with Kennedy's legacy in the Senate, B) Ted Kennedy was less than two years old by the time Prohibition was repealed C) Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. was a lifelong Republican.

The biggest point that ought to be brought up is D.

Personally, I'd rather have a senator representing my state whose father was a bootlegger than a chief executive who used Daddy's money to steal an election and whose father's father was a Nazi financier who made enough money for Adolph Hitler to buy and make armaments that would go on to kill American soldiers. I'd also rather have in the Senate a man who spent a lifetime in public service to make amends for one tragic mistake than have as a president an incurious intellectual bulimic whose grandfather made money off concentration camp slave labor, tried to overthrow the government in a fascist coup and later lined his pockets with that slave labor money when his trust fund kicked in and would never find the cajones to decry his grandfather's seditious shortcomings.

Prescott Bush was the kind of villain you'd see in a Robert Ludlum or Ian Fleming novel. Like Kennedy's father, he would later bury his criminal past in public honors and public service, eventually becoming a United States Senator himself while the press dutifully never once mentioned his attempted fascist coup in 1933 that would've involved right wing industrialist buddies like Remington (who would've supplied the arms to millions of disaffected WW I veterans).

The press's silence was understandable. After all, part of the coup's strategy was to bribe the editors of 25 of the biggest newspapers in America and one can only assume that during Bush's candidacy the bribe money kept flowing.

Prescott Bush, despite being named by Gen. Smedley Butler, the man who would've led this ragtag army to help depose Franklin Delano Roosevelt, never once saw the inside of a federal courtroom nor ever had to testify before a Congress of which he would in less than 20 years time become a large part.

Accountability, or the lack of it, is a two-edged sword, and these right wing shit smears beneath Rush Limbaugh's and Andrew Breitbart's tortured BVD's ought to heed that lesson.

The rage, rage coming from the right that we're hearing against Kennedy really has nothing to do with Chappaquiddick. It has more to do with Kennedy successfully defeating losing, hateful, spiteful GOP agendas and policies and showing them up for the evil that they were. In voting on historic civil rights, immigration, educational, national security and health care issues, to name but a few, Senator Kennedy wasn't merely a man who had lived in history but one who made history as someone always near the very center of power in Washington, a man to whom Richard M. Nixon would personally extend a health care compromise.

But red-lensed moral relativism makes all the difference to those who weren't even alive or old enough to follow the news when Kennedy walked away from the scene of an accident that left a young woman dead. It may be true that perhaps Kennedy should've been impeached and thrown out of the Senate as a result of his crime. But if that had happened, who knows who would've succeeded him and Head Start perhaps wouldn't exist. Edward M. Kennedy, instead of being regarded an unpunished villain, ought to serve as a example of the value of giving a person a second chance.

The Bush clan had plenty of chances to make good, to make amends, to right the wrongs of their forebears. Ted Kennedy took his second chance and remained, with the ongoing blessings of the grateful voters of Massachusetts, in the Senate for another 40 years, justifying the second chance that fate gave him. The Bushes, far from making amends, entered public service to enrich themselves, to add a superficial patina of glitz and respectability to hide a subversive, corrupt, seditious past and present that merely served to shield them from accountability for their own crimes.

Mary Jo Kopechne's name is more famous than the names of any soldier that has died in Iraq or Afghanistan, even more of a household name than NFL safety Pat Tillman. Yet when George W. Bush's time comes, no one will bring up the names of some of the first casualties of his successful invasion and occupation but failed war in Iraq that was built on a dog-eared house of cards made up entirely of jokers. No one even on the left will bring up the names of Staff Sgt. Donald C. May, Jr., Lance Cpl. Patrick T. O'Day and Pfc. Francisco A. Martinez-Flores. Those three Marines died in exactly the same way Mary Jo Kopechne died when their tank drove off a bridge and plunged into the Euphrates less than a week after the invasion.

In the balance, I'd rather have a man like Ted Kennedy representing me and my interests than the scion of a long line of war criminals and profiteers who combined never had to face one tenth the accountability that Ted Kennedy still endures even in death.

Shit My Dad Says: The Collected Verse of Justin's Dad

From Hoffmania we found out about Justin, whose Twitter profile reads: "I'm 28. I live with my 73-year-old dad. He is awesome. I just write down shit that he says".

Marc Maron isn't the only Twitter poet around:

Don't touch the bacon,
it's not done yet.
You let me handle the bacon, and i'll let you handle..
what ever it is you do.
I guess nothing.

Your mother made a batch of meatballs last night.
Some are for you, some are for me,
but more are for me.
Remember that.
More. Me.

Your brother brought his baby over this morning.
He told me it could stand.
It couldn't stand for shit.
Just sat there.
Big let down.

The dog is not bored,
it's a fucking dog.
It's not like he's waiting for me to give him a fucking rubix cube.
He's a god damned dog.

Why would i want to check a voicemail on my cell phone?
People want to talk to me, call again.
If i want to talk to you, I'll answer.

I think Justin's dad deserves to go viral.

End of life directives are also about attempting to have the kind of last days Ted Kennedy had

The greatest fear most of us have is not even of death itself, but of the process of dying -- the image we have of being strapped to a bed in a hospital, covered with bedsores, in constant pain from the illness that's devouring us alive, unable to obtain relief because doctors are under orders not to turn us into opiate junkies, with tubes shoved into every orifice, unable even to scream. The whole point of end of life directives and living wills (full disclosure: I don't have one yet) is to make sure that our wishes for what we want are granted. Without such directives, it's up to our families to make such decisions, or in the absence of family, it's up to the medical profession to do whatever will be paid or whatever will avoid investigations and lawsuits.

People like Betsy McCaughey will have you believe that once you create such a directive, it is etched onto stone tablets and put in a vault locked from the inside, never to be changed ever again. On the contrary, If you change your mind after a diagnosis, and decide you WANT everything but the kitchen sink thrown at you, you WANT to try treatment after treatment, even if it's futile, because you're not ready to face death, you can still do so.

It is to the eternal shame of the Obama Administration, Democrats in the Senate and House, and the broadcast media, that they have allowed the McCaughey/Palin "death panel" smear to gain traction and credibility.

And in the middle of this foofarah comes Ted Kennedy one last time, to show us what the end can be when we decide how we want to live our last days:

As recently as a few days ago, Mr. Kennedy was still digging into big bowls of mocha chip and butter crunch ice creams, all smushed together (as he liked it). He and his wife, Vicki, had been watching every James Bond movie and episode of “24” on DVD.

He began each morning with a sacred rite of reading his newspapers, drinking coffee and scratching the bellies of his beloved Portuguese water dogs, Sunny and Splash, on the front porch of his Cape Cod house overlooking Nantucket Sound.

If he was feeling up to it, he would end his evenings with family dinner parties around the same mahogany table where he used to eat lobster with his brothers.

He took phone calls from President Obama, house calls from his priest and — just a few weeks ago — crooned after-dinner duets of “You Are My Sunshine” (with his son Patrick) and “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” (with Vicki).

“There were a lot of joyous moments at the end,” said Dr. Lawrence C. Horowitz, Mr. Kennedy’s former Senate chief of staff, who oversaw his medical care. “There was a lot of frankness, a lot of hugging, a lot of emotion.”

Obviously, Dr. Horowitz added, there were difficult times. By this spring, according to friends, it was clear that the tumor had not been contained; new treatments proved ineffective and Mr. Kennedy’s comfort became the priority.

But interviews with close friends and family members yield a portrait of a man who in his final months was at peace with the end of his life and grateful for the chance to savor the salty air and the company of loved ones.

Even as Mr. Kennedy’s physical condition worsened over the summer, he still got out of bed every day until Tuesday, when he died in the evening, said Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut and one of Mr. Kennedy’s closest friends in the Senate.

“I’m still here,” Mr. Kennedy would call colleagues out of the blue to say, as if to refute suggestions to the contrary. “Every day is a gift,” was his mantra to begin conversations, said Peter Meade, a friend who met Mr. Kennedy as a 14-year-old volunteer on Mr. Kennedy’s first Senate campaign.

Some patients given a fatal diagnosis succumb to bitterness and self-pity; others try to cram in everything they have always wanted to do (sky-diving, a trip to China). Mr. Kennedy wanted to project vigor and a determination tokeep on going. He chose what he called “prudently aggressive” treatments.

[snip]

While Mr. Kennedy typically told people he felt well and vigorous, by spring it was becoming clear that his disease was advancing to where he could not spend his remaining months as he had hoped, helping push a health care plan through the Senate.

He left Washington in May, after nearly a half-century in the capital, and decamped to Cape Cod, where he would contribute what he could to the health care debate via phone and C-Span. He would sail as much as possible, with as little pain and discomfort as his caretakers could manage.

He also told friends that he wanted to take stock of his life and enjoy the gift of his remaining days with the people he loved most.

“I’ve had a wonderful life,” he said repeatedly, friends recalled.

Ted Kennedy's finest hour

When you think of Senate Democrats these days, you think of people like Max Baucus, pocketing the cash of insurance companies as he works hard against any public option that would compete with companies that take our money and deny our claims. You think of Harry Reid, mewling first about how the Democrats are a minority, then about how they don't have 60 votes, then about how he doesn't have the Blue Dogs. Gutless. Absolutely gutless.

Who in the Senate, other than perhaps Bernie Sanders, will stand up now and do things like this:

Who will stand up like this for ordinary Americans now?

To our fans

I wanted to say thank you to all of you who are devoted to us and repost our pictures and are so supportive!! It is a hard industry to work in and it is great to hear your enthusiasm it really keeps us going!

I know our clothes are something you have to save up for, since we don't make anything in China (by choice!) or anywhere overseas (it's all made in Los Angeles) the price for us of creating a garment from scratch is very high and a lot of work and $$. Fortunately you can wear the T shirts every day, so they're really worth it.

I thank those of you who see that and support us and love wearing the clothes!!

XOXOXO

Floriditas, Wellington, New Zealand

Rolling out chocolate pastry"See, it's really easy."Emily Keshav, head baker at Floriditas Bakery, is rolling out chocolate pastry with the casual confidence of a kid with play-doh."The trick is to make sure you always work with it when its cold," she says, folding over her perfect circle onto the rolling pin and transferring it to the waiting fluted tin.We cluster around the stainless steel work

RIP The Liberal Lion

About the only good thing that could be said about Ted Kennedy's cancer was that he was too ill to preside over a Town Hall meeting without having to be harassed by wingnuts screaming about death panels and euthanizing Grandma.

A major chapter in American politics closed last night when, exactly one year after his rousing appearance at last year's Democratic National Convention, Ted Kennedy succumbed to his glioma brain cancer.

If you have a small child or have ever had a small child who went to Head Start, you have Ted Kennedy to thank for that. Whatever small progressive reforms the Senate let him have for your health care plan, you have Ted Kennedy to thank for that, too. Any help that ever came out of the Senate for working class families had Ted Kennedy's fingerprints and DNA on it.

Senator Edward Kennedy was like Mother Teresa, Walter Cronkite, Queen Elizabeth II and Fidel Castro. No matter how old you are, chances are pretty good that these people have been around and still calling the shots your entire life. After a while, you begin to take their immortality for granted.

Yet Kennedy's 77 year-long life span cannot nor should not be measured in purely political terms. He remembered meeting FDR as a child, forging that tenuous link uniting one liberal champion to another. The third longest-serving Senator of all time had seen it all: The Cuban Missile crisis; the assassination of both his brothers; Martin Luther King's assassination; two major recessions; four wars and was right in the middle of the health care debate up until almost the very end.

Kennedy and his family were forged as much by tragedy as any family had a right to be. Having lived through the deaths of both parents, three brothers and three nephews and, just recently, his sister Eunice, Senator Kennedy's life was a large slice of American history. He had lived center stage in it for almost exactly the last third of the history of our republic.


Few will forget Ted Kennedy coming out after his cancer was diagnosed and heartily endorsing Barack Obama at the Democratic convention with strong but failing voice, his shirt collar and tie hanging loosely about his neck. It evoked in its own way, the dying Lou Gehrig's legendary farewell to baseball. And even in the twilight of his career, when he must have known he was fighting a losing battle with cancer, the senior senator from Massachusetts vowed to be back on the floor on the Senate come January to fight for health care reform. Instead, Ted Kennedy collapsed after suffering a seizure during Barack Obama's inauguration day luncheon. That same day, Sen. Robert Byrd, the longest-serving incumbent senator, was also taken to the hospital on hearing the news.

It's up for speculation who Governor Deval Patrick will appoint as Kennedy's successor or if he will honor the Senator's final wish and to rewrite the law so that he could appoint a temporary successor so as not to interrupt Massachusetts' representation during the health care debate.

But whoever the Bay State's governor appoints, one thing is obvious: The history that Ted Kennedy, a man who'd cast nearly 15,000 votes in the Senate, had both lived and made will not be repeated, reproduced nor relived and his successor will have unusually large expectations to honor.

RIP Teddy

I grew up in a house that was steeped in the beauty of democratic politics.
My mother, sitting in her rocking chair in the dark dining room, set into the streets of Brooklyn. With windows at sidewalk height framing feet passing by, and through the iron bars set in place for protection, the late day sun slanting thru the dusty air there; she sat, slung across the chair with her legs curled to the side looking at the radio from which came the liberal voices of my generation ...and country music icons, (and a young Don Imus.)

Up above her on the wall were pictures and quotes torn from the magazines and newspapers that she was always reading. Some she copied down in ink on the kitchen door, or painted around the top of the bathroom up by the ceiling; many of these clips were from the brothers who had already been killed on those days when everyone in the neighborhood seemed to sit down on the nearest stoop and weep; those days when even in the pall of scandal and darkness, there were still those who stood up and stared into the face of their murderer, regardless of the effects on their careers and lives, for what was right and moral for all people. There was a kind of hope in those days, and underlying it all was this feeling that even though we spoke of alternativesas we negotiated through checks and balances, humanity prevailed.





When I remember Teddy it will always be as part of that dark, cool house in Cobble Hill, full of hope and love for the process...before it all went bad...and standing as a little girl seeing America's royalty go by in the back of big old convertible cars, with police in white gloves holding back a crowd, and them waving, all tanned and full of possibility...and my mother, a good Massachusetts girl, who believed in the rights of others and care of the poor. What is there left to believe in?

"What is it about (this) that drives you Republicans crazy?..." he asked. Why do you hate the working class so much?
What has become of us? What will become of us now?
Godspeed Teddy...






c/p RIP Coco

Perhaps he couldn't bear to watch his own party finish selling out health care to the insurance companies

NYT:

Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, a son of one of the most storied families in American politics, a man who knew triumph and tragedy in near-equal measure and who will be remembered as one of the most effective lawmakers in the history of the Senate, died late Tuesday night. He was 77.

The death of Mr. Kennedy, who had been battling brain cancer, was announced Wednesday morning in a statement by the Kennedy family, which was already mourning the death of the Senator’s sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver two weeks earlier.

“Edward M. Kennedy – the husband, father, grandfather, brother and uncle we loved so deeply – died late Tuesday night at home in Hyannis Port,” the statement said. “We’ve lost the irreplaceable center of our family and joyous light in our lives, but the inspiration of his faith, optimism, and perseverance will live on in our hearts forever.”

Mr. Kennedy had been in precarious health since he suffered a seizure in May 2008. His doctors determined the cause had been a malignant glioma, a brain tumor that often carries a grim prognosis.

As he underwent cancer treatment, Mr. Kennedy was little seen in Washington, appearing most recently at the White House in April as Mr. Obama signed a national service bill that bears the Kennedy name. Last week Mr. Kennedy urged Massachusetts lawmakers to change state law and let Gov. Deval Patrick appoint a temporary replacement upon his death, to assure that the state’s representation in Congress would not be interrupted by a special election.

While Mr. Kennedy had been physically absent from the capital in recent months, his presence had been deeply felt as Congress weighed the most sweeping revisions to America’s health care system in decades, an effort Mr. Kennedy called “the cause of my life.”

Health care "reform" that's going to require buying junk insurance that covers less than your policy, if you have one, does now aside, for those of us born in the 1950's, the death of Senator Kennedy is truly a knock on the ghoulish door that tells us we're next.

I'm sure that we're going to see the Usual Suspects popping up in the comments talking about Chappaquiddick, the incident that ruined Ted Kennedy's presidential aspirations forever. Funny, isn't it, how the narrative of sin and redemption comes into play when Republican politicians fall from grace, but where Ted Kennedy is concerned, thirty years of redemption isn't enough for them.

As the last of the Kennedy brothers leaves us, it's useful to note how different the Kennedys were from the Bushes. Old Joe Kennedy was as nasty a piece of work as any robber baron, but somewhere along the lines his sons got the idea that a career in public political life was about public service, not about getting the keys to the kingdom so that you can plunder the treasury to make your friends richer. I think that John Kennedy is sainted far beyond what is appropriate by virtue of being cut down before he had a chance to really screw up, and Bobby Kennedy too has joined the ranks of the mythologized, his assassination being the first real inkling that baby boomers had that the dice were loaded.

But Ted Kennedy, who seemed to me to be the Lesser Brother, the Designated Family Shithead of the Kennedy clan, the also-ran, carried the family baggage -- the drinking and the womanizing -- with far less aplomb than his brothers. And yet after their deaths, and especially the horrific wake-up call that took place in Chappaquiddick, Ted Kennedy became arguably the greatest of the Kennedy brothers.

Kennedy was an unabashed liberal from a wealthy family; something you rarely see today in this age of "I've got mine and fuck you" coming from all income levels. His causes were those that make the lives of ordinary Americans better: Civil rights. Health care. Labor and work. Education. Today, politicians from wealthy families (see also: George W. Bush, Mitt Romney) represent the interests of their cronies and friends. Ted Kennedy, older than Bush and Romney, recognized that Americans born without his advantages should have a piece of the pie too. You never heard of corporations buying Teddy Kennedy's vote. Perhaps they knew they couldn't.

Much has been made of the long friendship between Kennedy and Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch. This is a friendship that could never happen in the Senate today without the Democratic Senator being a Blue Dog or a Joe Lieberman, willing to expose his belly to the Republican bully in the duo. With Kennedy's death, Orrin Hatch is now free to join the frothing, sweating, screeching wingnuts of his party in assuming that those on the other side of the aisle are not intelligent people of goodwill who disagree, but are unworthy of even being called Americans. That's why Kennedy's death is yet another nail in the coffin of the nation in which I grew up. The Senate used to be a place in which those in opposition would actually sit together and compromise, not the capitulation by Democrats that constitutes "bipartisanship" these days. Perhaps neither party was completely ecstatic with what resulted, but by and large Americans were reasonably content with their lot. Then in 1980, it all changed, and we got the Reagan legacy of pummelling the opposition into the ground and then defecating on it while it's spitting dirt out of its mouth and wiping its bloody nose. This is what politics have become in the post-Kennedy era which began long before the Lion of the Senate's death.

We've all known that this day was coming ever since we heard the words "malignant glioma" last year. Those of us born in the 1950's read Death Be Not Proud as kids and knew what "glioma" meant. But even so, and especially after Kennedy's rousing speech (which turned out to be his farewell to his party) at last year's Democratic convention, we still sort of thought he'd go on forever, because, well, in some ways he WAS the Senate.

The next generation of Kennedys has dabbled in politics a bit, but with the exception of Ted's son Patrick, none are currently on the national political stage, thereby proving that at least for the Kennedy family (Caroline Kennedy's ill-fated toe-dip into the waters of Hillary Clinton's Senate seat notwithstanding), the sense of dynastic entitlement runs nowhere near as strong as it does in the Bush family, where Poppy is looking at Jeb's son George P. and salivating over what he thinks are guaranteed Latino votes for one of his son's "little brown ones". The younger (now middle-aged themselves) Kennedys are still involved in public service, albeit in a quieter way.

Edward M. Kennedy lived a good and full life, even with all its flaws and and the tragic, fatal mistake of Chappaquiddick. It's about all any of us can ask. But when we look at the state of politics today as compared to his family's heyday, as we look at Barack Obama, his community organizing years long behind him as he hobnobs on the golf course with the president of a bank being investigated for running illegal tax shelters, the death of Senator Kennedy just whacks us over the head with the knowledge that the days of statesmanship are over for good.

More from Bustednuckles, who pre-emptively kneecaps the "What about Chappaquiddick?" crowd far more effectively than I do.

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