The problem is that the lunatics will start believing this

Let the Countdown commence!

Huzzah:

Keith Olbermann formally announced the start date and the name for his new program on Current TV Tuesday – and it sounds a lot like the old program on MSNBC.

At least the title and the location on the prime-time schedule do. In a presentation on his Web site, FOK News Channel, Mr. Olbermann declared, with some fanfare, that the new show will be called “Countdown with Keith Olbermann,” just as his previous show on MSNBC was, and it will begin on June 20 at his old time of 8 p.m. eastern.

If expropriating the title was not enough of a tweak to his former employers at MSNBC, in the video of his announcement on the Web site (FOK stands for “Friends of Keith” but is also an obvious play on his old rivalry with the Fox News Channel,) Mr. Olbermann also declared that this show, which he several times labeled a “newscast,” will be a place where “journalistic integrity and analytical honesty would never be compromised by corporate synergy.”

An MSNBC spokesman said the network would not comment on Mr. Olbermann’s decision to import the “Countdown” title.

Good on Keith to have the foresight to keep ownership of his show's name. Having left MSNBC once before, he must have had a premonition.

I guess this is why Larry's been going full-on Howard Beale this week.

Anything interesting happen today?

I heard a couple of nice British kids got married.

OK, you've seen the dress. Now go about your business.

But if you simply must pay attention to those two nice kids in England, there's no better way to do it than with Sarah's liveblogging over at Balloon Juice. Just be careful, though: coffee and keyboard simply do not mix, dahling.

121 BC and PIzza e Birra, Surry Hills

Even when your best-laid plans go awry, sometimes you can end up with the most brilliant night anyway.

We hadn't meant to eat dinner at Pizza e Birra. Our sights (and stomachs) had been set on Vini and we'd arrived early to secure a table. Too early, we soon discover, and we're directed across the road for a quick drink while they finish setting up.


121 BC, Surry Hills

Arancini $3 each

We

Anything interesting happen today?

If there is one good thing that can be said about today, it's that thanks to Donald Trump, we're one step closer to what the REAL teabagger objection is to Barack Obama, and it has nothing to do with birth certificates or college transcripts or, as Orly Taitz tried to present tonight before Lawrence O'Donnell went all Howard Beale on her, Social Security numbers:

(You SURE it was such a great idea to shitcan Olbermann, guys?)

Either Trump is the most loathsome kind of narcissistic self-promoter on the planet (worse than we already know), or he's a mad genius. Because once you stop talking about legal birth certificates and open the door that allows known racist Pat Buchanan to start frothing at the mouth again about affirmative action, you're one step closer to talking about what the REAL problem is that the Tea Party has with Barack Obama, and it has nothing to do with policy or ideology.

Someone is setting a trap for Republicans and for the Tea Party. The question is whether Barack Obama is actually playing eleven-dimensional chess for real this time, waiting until the birth certificate nonsense reached Peak Wingnut (® John Cole and became part of accepted Republican doctrine to bring out the long-form certificate; or if Donald Trump is doing the kind of street theatre worthy of the late Andy Kaufman, getting Obama to release the birth certificate, moving on to affirmative action, and getting the racist Teabaggers to shout "Fuck Yeah!"

And I have absolutely no idea what it is. Occam's razor indicates that this was Obama simply once again trying to be the only adult in the room and Donald Trump is the same kind of famewhore that he's always been. But do we know for sure?

Of greater interest to me is what I heard on Randi Rhodes' show today about what happened to Nicole Sandler yesterday when she attempted to ask a question of her Congressman, Allen West, the psychopath that Teabaggers in Fort Lauderdale elected to Congress last November:

Got that? For the "crime" of daring to question the lies spewing from the mouth of a sadistic war criminal who claims that liberal women are neutering men and who IS SUPPOSED TO BE A PUBLIC SERVANT, an American citizen, Nicole Sandler, was jailed for 17 hours, held in solitary for three, and maced.

From the above link, Sandler spoke with Brad Friedman about what happened:

I just got out of jail. Just had a Five Guys burger and fries, my first meal in the last 24 hours or so. First thing I did, I had CBS meet me as I was leaving. They'll be running a story later today. We're heading home now.

You'll love this. You know that old 'presumed innocent until proven guilty' thing? They don't do that down here in Broward County.

Now I understand what Bradley Manning was going through because I was put in solitary confinement. After bitching about it, I was maced. After being stuck in jail after about 3 hours, it was lunchtime. I said "can I please come out now, I'm really really sorry".

I had been in the women's area, there must have been 25 or 30 women in there. All but 4 of us were eventually called this morning to go before a magistrate.

Even though $25 bond was posted last night at 2am, and it's 8am I'm still not released. They said the bond takes about 6 to 8 hours process.

So then they're coming in to clean the cells. So they stuck all 4 of us in this one cell where they store the mattresses. A 12 by 7 feet. So they put the 4 of us in this cell with the 50 mattresses being stored, no air circulation, for a few minutes while they cleaned. And then they forgot about us.

After a while I see the women sent to the magistrate returned. We're still stuck in there for at least an hour. I said to the guard, "You forgot about us." He said "Oh, well, that happens."

"That happens?!," I said, "I think you owe us an apology. "You want an apology?," he said. "You see that cell up there? #1? You can have all the air you want. There's your apology." And he put me in there for like three hours. Solitary.

After being in there for hours with nothing to do, your mind plays tricks on you. In fact, while in there, they called my name, and I'm screaming "I'm in here! I'm in here!" They didn't let me out. And another hour went by.

Lunch was then served, and I asked "can I come out?" The guard said "NO!" I said, "Well, do I get to eat?" He said yeah, he handed me some food and then the door opened again, and I sat on the top step outside the cell, and he said "GET BACK IN THEL CELL!" ... And before I knew it, they were spraying me with mace. Not just once, but sprayed and sprayed to where I'm like screaming.

I can't believe this happened. I said, "I'm in here because I tried to ask my Congressman a question at a town hall."

Here's the thing, Brad, it wasn't a town hall meeting. He gave a presentation, and then he gave a speech. If I had known that, I wouldn't have gone. But he billed it as a town hall meeting, where there are usually questions back and forth. It's amazing.

And these fuckers DARE to say that it's Barack Obama who's un-American?

Oh, and by the way? While the media were giving Trump more camera time, and O'Donnell made the foolish mistake of thinking a crazy woman was going to admit that she's crazy, the Supreme Court gave corporations another blowjob today.

But on the other hand, there's this.

Thanks to Derek at Cheek and Bluster for the last two links.

When they can't win the argument of ideas....

We've already seen what happens when Republicans can't win elections based on ideas. They send paid Congressional thugs to intimidate vote counters. They stiff minority neighborhoods on voting machines, so that thousands of people have to wait up to 10 hours to vote -- if they get in to vote at all. Their election officials buy easily-tampered-with electronic voting machines made by companies whose owners are openly partisan. Their candidates advocate a return to Jim Crow-era literacy tests.

And when they're called on these tactics, they do things like scream "ACORN! ACORN! ACORN!" -- an organization for which a very few people registered a very few fake names, but there is no evidence whatsoever that a single fake registration resulted in even a single actual fraudulent vote. In response to an irrational fear that someone who is here illegally would expose himself to officialdom to cast a vote he's not supposed to, Republicans have, ever since they got away with it in 2000, tried to put up roadblock after roadblock in front of efforts to get people to the polls -- particularly minorities and young people, who tend to vote Democratic.

Now, in Florida, back where it all began, legislation is winding its way through that would make it extremely difficult to hold voter registration drives. Rachel Maddow reported on it last night:

And it isn't just Florida. As more and more people who were duped by the Tea Party start to wake up and realize that the threat to their way of life isn't immigrants, or abortion, or Scary Muslims®, but Ayn Rand disciples like Rep. Paul Ryan and the other Teabag Congressman bought and paid for by the Koch Brothers. And they're making their dissatisfaction known to Reps. Ryan and Duffy and Webster.

With the Republican Party having no clear likely nominee, other than a famewhore circus clown and a guy who can't possibly win a Republican primary because he's not completely batshit crazy, the tables just might be turned in 2012 on the Republican Party, whose legislators have been foolish enough to believe that what happened in 2008 was a national adoption of Objectivism, rather than a simple case of voting-by-tantrum.

But since Republican legislators are ideologues above all else (including the good of the very people they're SUPPOSED to represent, as opposed to the corporations they do), and since the Twin Pillars of Republicanism are Ideology and Power, the thought that they might not win in 2012 is anathema to them. Democrats who lose elections to Republican election official shenanigans are starting to wake up and demand not that they be declared the winner, but that such shenanigans be investigated so that people can have confidence in their votes -- especially when Republican election officials are people like Katherine Harris and Ken Blackwell and Kathy Nickolaus.

So in statehouses all over the country, especially those with newly-minted Teabagger governors, they're not taking any chances. If minorities and young people -- who showed up in droves in 2008 to put a black man in the White House resulting in a full-out nervous breakdown by racists who are still looking down the socioeconomic ladder while the Koch Brothers and their equals and lackeys are stealing the few bits of spare change still in their back pockets while they're distracted -- might show up at the polls again, then they have to be stopped. And stop them the Republicans will:

Spreading fear of a nonexistent flood of voter fraud, they are demanding that citizens be required to show a government-issued identification before they are allowed to vote. Republicans have been pushing these changes for years, but now more than two-thirds of the states have adopted or are considering such laws. The Advancement Project, an advocacy group of civil rights lawyers, correctly describes the push as “the largest legislative effort to scale back voting rights in a century.”

Anyone who has stood on the long lines at a motor vehicle office knows that it isn’t easy to get such documents. For working people, it could mean giving up a day’s wages.

A survey by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law found that 11 percent of citizens, 21 million people, do not have a current photo ID. That fraction increases to 15 percent of low-income voting-age citizens, 18 percent of young eligible voters and 25 percent of black eligible voters. Those demographic groups tend to vote Democratic, and Republicans are imposing requirements that they know many will be unable to meet.

Kansas’ new law was drafted by its secretary of state, Kris Kobach, who also wrote Arizona’s anti-immigrant law. Voters will be required to show a photo ID at the polls. Before they can register, Kansans will have to produce a proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate.

Tough luck if you don’t happen to have one in your pocket when you’re at the county fair and you pass the voter registration booth. Or when the League of Women Voters brings its High School Registration Project to your school cafeteria. Or when you show up at your dorm at the University of Kansas without your birth certificate. Sorry, you won’t be voting in Lawrence, and probably not at all.

That’s fine with Gov. Sam Brownback, who said he signed the bill because it’s necessary to “ensure the sanctity of the vote.” Actually, Kansas has had only one prosecution for voter fraud in the last six years. But because of that vast threat to Kansas democracy, an estimated 620,000 Kansas residents who lack a government ID now stand to lose their right to vote.

Eight states already had photo ID laws. Now more than 30 other states are joining the bandwagon of disenfranchisement, as Republicans outdo each other to propose bills with new voting barriers. The Wisconsin bill refuses to recognize college photo ID cards, even if they are issued by a state university, thus cutting off many students at the University of Wisconsin and other campuses. The Texas bill, so vital that Gov. Rick Perry declared it emergency legislation, would also reject student IDs, but would allow anyone with a handgun license to vote.

A Florida bill would curtail early voting periods, which have proved popular and brought in new voters, and would limit address changes at the polls. “I’m going to call this bill for what it is, good-old-fashioned voter suppression,” Ben Wilcox of the League of Women Voters told The Florida Times-Union.

Here's the bottom line: When Americans show up at the polls in large numbers, right-wing extremists tend not to win. Republicans know on some level, despite the relentless talking point that the American people WANT endless tax cuts for billionaires under the false promise of "job creation" (and kudos to those getting up at town halls and noting that we've had 12 years of these tax cuts; so where are the jobs?), what we're seeing now is NOT what the American people want. They cannot win on the current Republican agenda. They cannot win the war of ideas. So they only way they will be able to retain power is by making sure that only THEIR people can vote.

Have you noticed that Republicans are no longer waving the flag and talking about patriotism? Perhaps it's because what they are doing right now is so fundamentally un-American.

Fooding from Penang and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to Phuket, Thailand

Oh Malaysia photos. I haven't forgotten about you. A five-day weekend (how great was the break?!) was the perfect opportunity to delve into the archives. Sure none of us want to be back at work at our desks today, but here's a photo-rich post to get you back into the swing of things...

My last Malaysia post left you in Penang, Malaysia. We woke up early the next morning to make the 350km drive

People are starting to wake up

Of course it's closing the barn door after the horse has escaped, but it's better than nothing. New tea bagger Congressman and former reality show contestant Sean Duffy held a town Hall recently and few were buying his Koch bros./Paul Ryan talking points:

More videos from thos town hall of informed Wisconsin citizens who recognize a line of crap when they hear it here.

Why do they have such a need for hell?

Just in time for Easter to be over, Ross Douchebag over at the New York Times makes himself an almost-too-easy punching bag in an essay in which he laments the decline of belief in Hell.

In part, hell’s weakening grip on the religious imagination is a consequence of growing pluralism. Bell’s book begins with a provocative question: Are Christians required to believe that Gandhi is in hell for being Hindu? The mahatma is a distinctive case, but swap in “my Hindu/Jewish/Buddhist neighbor” for Gandhi, and you can see why many religious Americans find the idea of eternal punishment for wrong belief increasingly unpalatable.

But the more important factor in hell’s eclipse, perhaps, is a peculiar paradox of modernity. As our lives have grown longer and more comfortable, our sense of outrage at human suffering — its scope, and its apparent randomness — has grown sharper as well. The argument that a good deity couldn’t have made a world so rife with cruelty is a staple of atheist polemic, and every natural disaster inspires a round of soul-searching over how to reconcile with God’s omnipotence with human anguish.

These debates ensure that earthly infernos get all the press. Hell means the Holocaust, the suffering in Haiti, and all the ordinary “hellmouths” (in the novelist Norman Rush’s resonant phrase) that can open up beneath our feet. And if it’s hard for the modern mind to understand why a good God would allow such misery on a temporal scale, imagining one who allows eternal suffering seems not only offensive but absurd.

Doing away with hell, then, is a natural way for pastors and theologians to make their God seem more humane. The problem is that this move also threatens to make human life less fully human.

Atheists have license to scoff at damnation, but to believe in God and not in hell is ultimately to disbelieve in the reality of human choices. If there’s no possibility of saying no to paradise then none of our no’s have any real meaning either. They’re like home runs or strikeouts in a children’s game where nobody’s keeping score.

I understand the need to feel that there's a reward for the tribulations we experience in life. Without the promise of goodies at the end of it all, it would have been difficult to do things like convert slaves to Christianity, but it's Douchebag's insistence that there be a Hell to go with Heaven that is so emblematic of the conservative mind.

I'm not necessarily an atheist, but I sure as hell don't believe in some Great White Alpha Male in the sky who micromanages people's lives, knocked up a girl and then told his son "I'm going to let them kill you so that 51-year-old John Ensign can screw around with his best friend's wife and then ask his parents for money to keep said best friend quiet," and who told Abraham to sacrifice his son to him and then just as the latter was about to do it, said "Kidding! Just wanted to see if you'd do it! Hahahahaha!" But I have about as strong a moral code as anyone I know. I would cite the Incident of the Bell Pepper at the Grand Union as evidence. I once found a bell pepper wedged in my shopping cart when I took it out to the parking lot. I found myself with three choices:

1) Put the pepper in my bag and go home;
2) Leave the pepper in the shopping cart;
3) Take the pepper back into the store and put it back;
4) Take the pepper back into the store and pay for it.

Almost everyone would agree that Option 1 would be the wrong thing to do, except those who believe that as long as I believed that Jesus died for my sins and that I was saved and forgiven, I could have taken the pepper, gone home, and had a clear conscience. It's arguable that option 2 might be a moral choice, because I wouldn't be taking something I didn't pay for. But the pepper would be out in the hot sun and wouldn't be saleable, which from the viewpoint of the store (if it were, say, a mom 'n' pop shop instead of a supermarket) is the same. To me, Options 3 and 4 were the only moral choices, so I took the pepper back into the store and paid for it.

It wasn't God who made me do it. It wasn't some Jewish guy getting nailed to a tree that allowed me to do it. It's simply being able to tell what is right and what is wrong.

Douchebag's insistence that "If there’s no possibility of saying no to paradise then none of our no’s have any real meaning either" may be the most profoundly twisted thing I've ever read. Are we simply infants who respond only to carrot or stick? Maybe Ross Douthat needs to have the threat of punishment hanging over his head to keep HIM on the straight and narrow (and given some of his columns, it wouldn't surprise me, as you can see from this Tbogg compendium of Doutiana), but some of us are capable of making moral choices on our own.

And that's what infuriates culture war conservatives, isn't it? This idea that someone might actually be able to navigate a path through life that involves honesty, hard work, fidelity, and truth, for its own sake rather than because of some punitive parent figure we conjure up who also offers unconditional forgiveness? What are we, five-year-olds?

It certainly explains their insistence on implementing laws to keep the rest of us on the straight and narrow -- because they can't do it without the threat of punishment, and the simply cannot understand how some of us can -- and do, every day.

Blogrolling In Our Time, Influence Schminfluence edition

Of course I'm delighted that Rachel Maddow came in at the #1 spot in Alternet's poll of most influential progressives. What I do not understand, however, is how the Big Blue Smurf made the list of most influential blogs. I mean, this is a guy who, if he's busy, instead of Just Not Blogging That Day, like normal people would do, puts up a post titled "Saturday", the text of which is "Busy day for me, so don't expect too much." And it gets 72 comments.

So this is why, when I encounter blogs with which I'm not already familiar, if they pass the test of Decent Writing and Heart In The Right Place, I'll always add them to the blogroll. It's all part of Blogroll Amnesty Day, which for me (as for most bloggers who celebrate it) is EVERY day, and it's my way of remembering the late, great Jon Swift (Al Weisel) more than once a year.

So tonight, please welcome Donkey Mountain to the fold.

The Eight, Haymarket

The Eight is the latest restaurant to take up residence on the third floor of Market City, undergoing a complete overhaul in interior design to match its modern Chinese fusion menu. A re-positioning of the entrance is the first thing that you'll notice on approach, no longer opposite the movie foyer but shifting around the corner to a more glamorous setting.

The restaurant name is no

And this is the teabaggers' choice for the Republican presidential nomination

Remember that video I posted the other day, in which one vapid, slack-jawed mouthbreathing teabagger after another said that they liked Trump for president? Here's the business genius they're supporting:

Trump has built an American empire from Las Vegas to New York with towering hotels and sparkling casinos. Forbes estimates he's worth $2.7 billion. But not all of Trump's business ventures have been constant money-makers. In 1991, 1992, 2004, and again in 2009, Trump branded companies or properties have sought Chapter 11 protection.

"I've used the laws of this country to pare debt. ... We'll have the company. We'll throw it into a chapter. We'll negotiate with the banks. We'll make a fantastic deal. You know, it's like on 'The Apprentice.' It's not personal. It's just business," Trump told ABC's George Stephanopoulos last Thursday.

A business declaring bankruptcy is nothing new in corporate America, where bankruptcy is often sugar-coated as "restructuring debt." But it might seem alarming to everyday Americans who can't get a bank to restructure their home loans. If you want to get Donald Trump hot under the collar, accuse him of declaring bankruptcy.

Read the whole sordid story here. It's as much about how the laws are rigged so that people like Donald Trump never have to accept the consequences of their own folly as it is about Trump's own multiple bankruptcies. So here we have a bunch of idiots, many of whom are probably underwater on their own houses if they haven't lost them already, whose own retirement accounts have lost much of their value, supporting a guy who's been able to game the system over and over again for his own advantage.

And they don't even see any irony in this.

While he's at it, let him pray for God to rain dollar bills on his state

I'm sorry, but since wingnuts get to pound their chests and say that they don't want their tax dollars paying for abortions (and have the government do their bidding), I think I should get to say that I don't want my tax dollars paying to rebuild the homes of citizens who elect governors who talk about secession and then beg for federal help to fight wildfires in their state.

Now Texas Governor Rick Perry is hedging his bets. In case the feds say no, he's going to a higher authority:

WHEREAS, the state of Texas is in the midst of an exceptional drought, with some parts of the state receiving no significant rainfall for almost three months, matching rainfall deficit records dating back to the 1930s; and

WHEREAS, a combination of higher than normal temperatures, low precipitation and low relative humidity has caused an extreme fire danger over most of the State, sparking more than 8,000 wildfires which have cost several lives, engulfed more than 1.8 million acres of land and destroyed almost 400 homes, causing me to issue an ongoing disaster declaration since December of last year; and

WHEREAS, these dire conditions have caused agricultural crops to fail, lake and reservoir levels to fall and cattle and livestock to struggle under intense stress, imposing a tremendous financial and emotional toll on our land and our people; and

WHEREAS, throughout our history, both as a state and as individuals, Texans have been strengthened, assured and lifted up through prayer; it seems right and fitting that the people of Texas should join together in prayer to humbly seek an end to this devastating drought and these dangerous wildfires;

NOW, THEREFORE, I, RICK PERRY, Governor of Texas, under the authority vested in me by the Constitution and Statutes of the State of Texas, do hereby proclaim the three-day period from Friday, April 22, 2011, to Sunday, April 24, 2011, as Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas. I urge Texans of all faiths and traditions to offer prayers on that day for the healing of our land, the rebuilding of our communities and the restoration of our normal way of life.

IN TESTIMONY WHEREOF, I have hereunto signed my name and have officially caused the Seal of State to be affixed at my Office in the City of Austin, Texas, this the 21st day of April, 2011.

Where's Burt Lancaster when you need him?

Does Perry ever think to ask his Great White Alpha Male in the Sky why, since Texas is such a God-fearin', gun-totin' state, wildfires and hurricanes even happen there?

Wouldn't it easier if we just let them call him the "N" word?

I'm serious.

Why don't we just call a one-month moratorium on the unacceptability of the "N" word? For one month, it is OK in polite company to use the "N" word to describe the current president of the United States. You don't have to call him "The Kenyan", or talk about him being born in Kenya, or hide behind this birth certificate crap. For one month, wingnuts get to call him the "N" word as loudly and as often as they want.

I can't be sure, but I'd be willing to bet twenty bucks that you wouldn't hear anything about birth certificates, or Kenya, for that matter, for that entire month.

(Tweety video via, and I'm still amazed that I'm able to do this, LGF.)

Where do you even START trying to counteract this level of Teh Stoopid?

Via Randi:

=sound of forehead hitting desk=

Jour de la Terre 2011 Earth Day 2011

La Journée de la Terre ("Earth Day" en anglais) est un mouvement environnemental populaire aujourd’hui mondialement reconnu. La journée de la Terre 2009, intitulée " Votre planète a besoin de vous - unis pour combattre le changement climatique " sera animée par le
Mexique.

Célébré pour la première fois le 22 avril 1970, le Jour de la Terre est l’occasion de nombreuses manifestations et activités de sensibilisation face aux enjeux environnementaux.

Le fondateur de la Journée de la Terre est le sénateur américain Gaylord Nelson. Ce politicien avait encouragé les étudiants à mettre sur pied des projets de sensibilisation à l'environnement dans leurs communautés. En 1995, il a d’ailleurs reçu la médaille présidentielle de la liberté en hommage à son travail en faveur de l'environnement.

Le Jour de la Terre est aujourd’hui célébré par plus de 500 millions de personnes dans 184 pays. Ces dernières années, cet évènement environnemental est devenu l’un des plus populaires et des plus participatifs de la planète.

En effet la situation a bien changé depuis 1970. Le changement climatique se fait de plus en plus préoccupant et l’écologie devient le centre des priorités gouvernementales. Avec les déforestations, les raz-de-marée, les ouragans de plus en plus violents, les extinctions de certaines espèces animales ; l’homme prend peu à peu conscience de son empreinte environnementale. Aussi, la Journée de la Terre est devenue une façon de montrer à chacun l’impact écologique de nos actes et de sensibiliser la population au développement durable.

La journée de la TerreLe Jour de la Terre est souvent l’occasion pour les éco-citoyens de se retrouver et de manifester leur engagement environnemental. C’est aussi le jour où certaines grandes enseignes se mobilisent en faveur de la planète, à l’image de Disney Store avec son sac réutilisable Journée de la Terre.

Le Jour de la Terre est aussi célébré par de nombreuses chaînes télévisées comme Gulli ou encore National Geographic Channel. Ce 22 avril 2009, n’hésitez donc pas à montrer votre engagement environnemental en participant à des évènements culturels écolos. Vous pouvez aussi regarder des programmes écologiques à la télévision.

N’oublions pas que l’avenir de notre planète se tient entre nos mains.

Around the Blogroll and Elsewhere: Is there ANY good news ANYWHERE?

Sorry about no good pearls of widsom from me this week, just crazy busy with work and too dispirited to come up with anything readable. So you might as well catch up on those who have been able to at least catch their breath. I have a day off tomorrow, only part of which will be spent working, so I'll try to catch up then.

Meanwhile, not all of this is from bloggers, but worth reading just the same.

Gaius Publius on the wholesale turning over of entire towns to corporations.

Gail Collins on Texas: Ground Zero for the Work Force of Tomorrow. (God help us. And by the way, why is Texas Governor Rick Perry, who wanted to secede, now looking for FEMA help when they hate the federal government? Fucking parasite.)

Mike Stark on Alaska Sen. Don Young actively participating in a rally supporting right wing militia leader Schaeffer Cox, who was arrested on March 10, 2011 for plotting to kill state police and a federal judge, and for possession of illegal weapons.

Rick Ungar is keeping an eye on Scott Walker, who hasn't actually DENIED that he's planning the kind of "financial martial law" that's taking place in Michigan.

I knew what I was doing when I added Tom Degan to the blogroll. Enjoy his look at the late, great Ernie Kovacs.

And finally....Roger Ebert reviews At Last, Drugged, a.k.a. P0rn for Paul Ryan.

I'm going to try to pull some thoughts together about the senseless and pointless death of Restrepo director Tim Hetherington.

Death by Misadventurism

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

"It's important that I don't get too knowledgeable about the past." - Wallace Booth, on becoming president of United Brands in 1975

At first, the title will make one think that I’ve taken a dog-eared page out of Sarah Palin’s version of Hooked on Phonics. But I decided to coin a new word because “misadventurism” is essentially the only word that distills the perennial lunacy that ensues no matter which party controls the White House.

American foreign policy, whether guided by the White House, the State Department, the Council on Foreign Relations, US corporations or a hybrid of all, has always had a bifurcated, Jekyll and Hyde quality to it. The nation that gave the world the post-war Marshall Plan and Japan with an all-inclusive yet unique constitution courtesy of Gen. Douglas MacArthur has also given it the Bush Doctrine and Cheney’s scorched earth 1% Doctrine. The nation that has come to the aid of literally dozens of countries in their direst hours of need has also ignored the crippling poverty of nations such as Haiti, Afghanistan and others in the 3rd world while invading others for disingenuous or transparently pro-corporate purposes. For every Camp David Accord that brought peace to Israel and Egypt, there have surely been dozens of Bay of Pigs and Gulf of Tonkin resolutions.

Until now, the Reagan years were regarded by pacifists and liberals as the heyday of American adventurism. While shaking a rusty saber at Communists both real and imagined, Reagan got us involved where we didn’t belong, namely in Lebanon, El Salvador, Grenada and other nations including some that haven’t even made the official record. During his eight years in office, the Great Communicator snuggled up to more tyrants than gaudy sashes, one of the most notorious being the right wing dictator Augusto Pinochet who was aided on another September 11th by the Kissinger-hatched plot to overthrow the democratically-elected Salvador Allende.

And, to prove what a pathetically hopeless product he was of his own generation, when Islamic Jihad terrorists killed 242 Marines (and 57 French) in two suicide truck bombings, Reagan cut and ran. He was great at shaking his wrinkled, liver-spotted fist at Communists real or imagined but when it came to the more relevant and unconventional threat of Islamic terrorism, he was utterly clueless and worthless.

Reagan merely continued a long, proud tradition of making tacit alliances and enemies of onetime allies while helping to create monsters that we later couldn’t control. It’s a ruinous policy of imperial American adventurism that immediately turns into misadventurism and the only ones who benefit, it seems, are the corporations that invariably wait in the wings for the US military to finish mopping up for their grand but silent entrance.

And if Barack Obama is sincere about restoring America’s integrity and credibility in the Muslim world in the wake of the arrogant, unilateral and lawless Bush years, he couldn’t have chosen a worse way to do it.

After a hiatus of several months, Wikileaks, through its new mouthpiece, the Washington Post, tells us that the Obama administration has continued a Bush-era propaganda scheme of using the State Department to funnel millions into the funding of an anti-government TV station run by Syrian dissidents. Its signal is beamed into Damascus and beyond by satellite and, as with Bush and Rice State Department, this propaganda program is continuing with Obama and the Clinton State Department.

This cynical piggy-backing of popular sentiment in order to legitimize and make nobler our adventurism is something you’d expect from warhawk Republicans intent on regime change in nations whose own domestic policy isn’t in line with American corporate interests. Many of the 72,000,000 who’d voted for Obama two and a half years ago (if they cared enough about it to learn of this latest disclosure) wouldn’t have expected it of a man who’d promised us “hope and change” when all he’s done is continue one failed Bush policy after another while dreaming up new ones of his own.

Blowback to the Future

Most, if not all, blowbacks are unintentional. For instance, when one remembers Charlie Wilson’s war, you rarely hear anyone include a footnote that a large part of the hundreds of millions he got in funding and training for the Afghan mujahedin to fight the occupying Soviets also gave rise to the terrorist network that would become an American household word after 9/11. Osama bin Laden, as we all know, used to be the good guy, a simple freedom fighter who shared with us a common enemy of the Reagan administration: The Soviet Union.

And, to be fair to those in power back then, the Soviets at the start of their own crusade into Afghanistan still looked pretty formidable and capable of taking on the United States and quite a few of its allies. Little did we know the USSR would only have about twelve years left before beginning a half-hearted slouch toward a pseudo-democracy.

But partly because of our blindly pro-Israel policies bin Laden had already been grinding an axe against his temporary benefactors and became the ultimate blowback. This was brought about by a persistent naïvete and ignorance of the Muslim world that persisted in 2003 when Bush didn't know soon-to-be-invaded Iraq was largely divided along Sunni and Shia lines, when Deputy Undersecretary of State Paul Wolfowitz insisted that all Muslims in Iraq were secular and when Cheney insisted we’d all be greeted as liberators.

And this willful ignorance and naïvete regarding Muslim matters continues throughout the administration of a man whom the far right wing has demonized as a Muslim himself. This errant stupidity is vividly delineated by Obama extra-Congressionally getting US forces involved in aiding Libyan insurgents who’d previously enjoyed an insurgent status in Iraq by attacking and killing American troops. (In light of the Obama administration’s risible insistence that we’re not at war with Libya, it’ll be interesting to say the least how the White House will spin it when the first US ground troops from Libya start arriving horizontally on the transports at Dover AFB.)

The problem with (mis)adventurism abroad is we wind up alienating more hearts and minds than we win. It’s a long-since proven truism that home invasions, wanton slaughter of civilians and cowardly, unmanned drone air strikes controlled by joystick jockeys on military bases in Nevada wind up radicalizing and nationalizing a civilian population that previously was more concerned with simple day to day survival. Yet right wingers, especially, still audaciously say time and again on Fox “News” that the indigenous peoples whose nations we’ve invaded and occupied, the people whom we’ve detained, beaten, tortured, impoverished, raped and maimed ought to show some gratitude!

To cite just Afghanistan, the American military has done more to destroy homes, families and entire villages than the regional terrorist network known as the Taliban. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Afghanistan, nearly a decade after the US invasion of 2001, is still allowing the opium crops to flourish at the insistence of our puppet Hamid Karzai and his drug-dealing brother while ignoring Afghanistan’s eternal poverty (as of 2006, they were still the 6th-poorest country in the world, according to the CIA Factbook.). Under American involvement, women’s rights have taken a large step or two backward as the Taliban has taken back key cities and provinces.

The ironic thing is that Afghanistan is, in theory, one of the richest nations on earth in terms of undeveloped oil and natural gas fields. Their undeveloped mineral resources are alone valued at roughly a trillion dollars.

But Afghanistan will never have the leisure of developing its natural resources and assuming its rightful place in the global economy as long as there’s a state of perpetual war any more than Iraq will achieve a stable, democratic government and free and fair elections as long as they’re in a state of perpetual war. If Afghanis are beginning to view our unending involvement and propping up of an obviously corrupt regime with circumspection, can anyone really blame them? On a rare quiet night in Kabul, an Afghani farmer will be able to hear Halliburton and Bechtel licking their chops and rubbing their cloven hooves.

Whose Bottom Line is it, Anyway?

Our entry into World War II forever ended America’s policy of isolationism. From the time of Truman on down, every single US president without exception has funded or otherwise gotten involved with civil wars, revolutions, coups, vest pocket wars and every class of incursion. But in Latin America and the Middle East during the early 50’s, we saw a disturbing element in the mix: The protection and enrichment of Anglo-American corporate interests. In Latin America it was United Fruit (eventually renamed Chiquita Brand). In Iran, it was BP.

From time to time it’s convenient and even incumbent on the incumbent President or Secretary of State to denounce certain tyrants for human rights abuses and while technically these denunciations are often unassailably true, what you’ll never hear is any American administration making similar denunciations of human rights abuses at the hands of American corporations. Whether it be Chiquita or Coca Cola or Halliburton or Chevron, there has never been a single recorded instance of the United States government stepping in to end, curb or even criticize a corporation that hires mercenary thugs to kill the indigenous people for simply protesting their collective rape.

We all know the reason for this. It’s the most open secret in the world. After his homeowner relief bill was defeated, Sen. Dick Durbin alluded to it when he said of the banksters, “they frankly own the place.” Corporations have bankrolled candidates for countless decades and the minute a candidate grows a spine and opposes his contributors’ agenda is the second their grip on incumbency begins to slip. As freelance journalist Michael Collins says time and again, there’s no Republican or Democratic party but one: The Money Party.

But corporations began bankrolling candidates then entering political activism decades before Citizen’s United vs the FEC was ruled on by the SCOTUS January last year. And while the Supreme Court insisted on using the false and dangerous argument that corporations are people, too, they seemingly forgot to invest ordinary biological entities with the same rights they gave to corporations: Namely the power to contribute unlimited sums of money to candidates without disclosing how much and, in doing so, even keeping their name from being publicly mentioned.

If you think corporations are twisting and subverting American foreign policy now, just wait and see what they do to this planet of ours when Citizen’s United gets fully entrenched in the electoral process if it hasn’t already. We’ve already proved time and again we’ll go to war and overturn democracies over oil and fruit and to keep the military industrial complex well-fed. What will it be tomorrow? Will we go to war with Canada at the behest of Johnson & Johnson over prescription drugs? Will Google send us into Red China so they can take over the last great frontier of internet access? Don’t stay tuned. Coming up next, another thrilling episode of American Idol.

And reckless, deadly pro-corporate adventurism and diplomatic hugger mugger only helps to create contradictory, tacit alliances that fall apart the moment these entities realize they no longer need American financing, training and political and diplomatic support.

One has to wonder what opportunistic Osama bin Laden of the future currently receiving US aid is waiting in the wings, what other monsters with which we’ll have to contend when they seize the moment to come screaming out of the closet and into America on a bright, sunny Tuesday morning. And what monsters will we have to create or cultivate in order to combat them?

And one is also permitted to wonder when we’ll at last return to the isolationism that served us well between the beginning of the 20th century and World War I.

Around the blogroll and elsewhere: What's the point? edition

Brad writes about the whitewash of an "investigation" into the Wisconsin Supreme Court election -- a so-called investigation that looked neither at the paper ballots cast, nor at the computer tabulators used. And the manipulation of the actual conduct of elections continues while teabaggers rant about ACORN and six guys calling themselves the New Black Panthers.

Meanwhile, also in Wisconsin, Raw Story reports that a state Senator who lives outside the district with his mistress lists as his office phone number an adult chat line. I shit you not.

And now let's visit Louisiana, where at Outside the Beltway, they're reporting that former Great Republican Hope and national joke Bobby Jindal is champing at the bit to sign a "birther bill" similar to one that was deemed too wingnutty even for Arizona governor Jan Brewer.

DCap throws Leni Riefenstahl and the new Atlas Shrugged movie into a blender and comes up with The Trump of the Will.

Over at Dagblog, enjoy the veiled threat contained in Open Letter To My Daughter the Culture Voter.

Southern Beale: In case you were still in doubt that the Iraq War really WAS all about oil and had NOTHING to do with terrorism.

This is a bad sign: Dylan Ratigan fawning all over Andrew Breitbart. I guess AOL is going to buy MSNBC, too. And also at C&L, Steve Weinstein reprints the best help wanted ad ever.

And finally....

I happen to be lucky enough to have a good mechanic right in town. It's one of those old-fashioned gas stations that does car repairs instead of selling corn syrup flavored with coffee and stale sandwiches. Ted is the kind of guy who if I go in saying I need tires, will say "You don't need tires yet...come back in six months." He's the kind of guy who when he does the brakes and finds a rusted out wheel bearing, apologizes for the additional $350 it's going to cost. Now the new brakes feel a bit grabby, but Ted didn't find $1500 in other work that Has To Be Done Now, the way the Honda dealer near where I work did did when I had to take the car there to fix the air conditioner fan last summer during a heat wave (no, I didn't bite).

When I was in my 20's, I worked weekends at a gas station on Route 1 in Linden, right across from what was then the General Motors plant. I was making $8500 a year as a secretary in an ad agency and needed extra money to pay the rent on my apartment and put gas into my 1965 Dodge Dart. I used to get tips occasionally, especially on rainy days. I don't tip the kids at Ted's place (but I do send Cheryl's Cookies at Christmas), mostly because they let me pump my own gas when it's crowded because they know (and are amused by) my checkered past as a gasoline jockey. But I do try to avoid making them pump gas in the rain. I realize this is a moot point outside of New Jersey, where it's self-serve gas everywhere, but all this is really just an intro to Bustednuckles telling you Why You Should Not Diss Your Mechanic.

I'm not sure that people app

Tuesday Big Blue Smurf Blogging: What They Said

Today's honoree is The New York Crank, whose valuable voice is back with us after a hiatus following a terrible, tragic loss. It's no compensation, but we're happy he's back, especially with this post about the world in which the super-rich will find themselves living after they succeed in amassing ALL the country's wealth for themselves.

Money quote:

The future of super wealth in this country will be a future filled with fear of kidnapping. Fear that gangsters will surround your car and shoot your driver, drag you into a truck, chop off your thumb and send it to your family to show that they are truly sincere about wanting all the cash your relatives can put their hands on.

If it's not you who gets kidnapped, then it will be your son. Or your daughter. Or your wife.

Believe me, the “kidnapping tax” rate will be higher than any income tax that any Democrat has ever called for.

Decapitated heads at your front door

Expect to see decapitated private policemen among those who you hired to protect you. Dead guards lying in pools of blood in front of your bullet-riddled front door. Expect to take your daily drive to the office by a different route each day, preferably in a different automobile each day, to confuse those hoping to kidnap you and torture you.

It boils down to often-repeated history: those who sow unreasonably acquisitive greed will reap a whirlpool of blood.

Thumbtack observations

Since losing my internet access at home a week ago, I just don't have the time or the resources to do the necessary research that a typical post requires. Still, I'd like to keep my hand in and not totally disappear into that not-so-good night.

What follows is mainly commentary off the top of my head, moreso of an opinion piece than usual.

Firstly, it bothers me that Obama is cynically jumping on this pro-democracy bandwagon that's caught fire and sent barreling toward presidential palaces all over the Middle East and Northern Africa. What's especially galling is that the Obama administration has found another way to continue the Bush administration's ruinous foreign policy by continuing to fund, according to Wikileaks, through the State Department anti-government propaganda in Syria.

On the face of it, opposing the autocratic rule of a tyrant such as Bashar al-Assad, whose thugs have killed scores of Syrian protesters, may look like a valiant, proper and moral position. But let's remember that the right wing of our government has always had a throbbing, oozing hardon for al-Assad ever since the Iraq War began. The GOP's erection for regime change just got harder when the false meme started circulating that Saddam's phantom menace of WMD were never found because they'd been spirited away to Syria.

And let's not forget how berserk the Republican White House went when Nancy Pelosi went with a bipartisan delegation in 2007 to talk to Bashar al-Assad (despite the GOP meeting with the same man at around the same time.).

Obama secretly supporting this, until now, underreported pro-democracy movement in Syria is infinitely more dangerous because now our latest round of rash adventurism is brilliantly masqueraded by popular consensus and makes the US look like the democracy-givers that the Bush administration could never be.

So why the continuance of secret financing? And doesn't the current junta in the White House reads its history? If they did, they'll know that, our own history aside, it's always better to let the indigenous people bring about their own regime change without cynical ulterior motives by larger, more powerful countries meddling in their affairs.

Besides, financing TV stations to disseminate propaganda is one of the many things the Bush administration did in both Iraq and here at home and continued by the Obama administration.

This propaganda continues regarding our so-called success in Afghanistan and alleged non-involvement in Libya even as we're openly bombing their country and supporting anti-government forces that just happen to be largely made up of Libyan insurgents who had engaged and killed our troops in Iraq four years ago.

It seems to me that one of the biggest failings today of the MSM not to mention the liberal movement (such as it is) is the unwillingness and/or the inability to clearly and forcefully articulate a return to our isolationist policy of a century ago.

Rowda Ya Habibi, Newtown

My favourite topic of conversation at breakfast? Lunch. I'm not a morning person at the best of times, but the promise of lunch - and the eating opportunities it brings - is usually enough to put a sparkle in my eyes.

Talk turned to fafafel and the fresh zing of tabbouleh, and by the time the clock strikes twelve, we find ourselves heading to Rowda Ya Habibi, Newtown for a much-needed Lebanese

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Maybe it was ALWAYS a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing

It's always seemed odd to me that when hundreds of thousands of people marched in the streets in early 2003 against going to war in Iraq, we were dismissed by the press as a "fringe element", out of touch with "mainstream America." But when hundred people started yelling at legislators' town hall meetings and adopted a name that has connotations of patriotism, the press and the media fell immediately in love and decided that the teabaggers were a formidable political force. Their adoration of this bunch of ignorant, out-of-work fools fighting for the rights of corporations to screw them over even more, is one of the great hoodwinks of the modern era. That much of this so-called "grassroots energy was (and still is) fueled by Koch Industries money didn't faze them one bit. Chris Matthews and others branded this bunch of lickspittles as the next wave in America, and without asking questions, allowed the Koch brothers to buy themselves elections nationwide, recruiting armies of the dissatisfied to give them cover.

With the spectacular fall in teabagger support since the 2010 election showed us a taste of what Teabag America is REALLY going to look like, perhaps it's time to re-evaluate whether it was ever what the media turned it into. When even the MILF-du-jour can't pack a house in the heart of anti-Obama America, perhaps it's over already:

Michele Bachmann’s much-anticipated Tax Day rally on Monday was a "dud" that drew a paltry 300 people in Columbia, S.C., according to reports.
Continue Reading

Bachmann met privately with South Carolina GOP Gov. Nikki Haley ahead of her speech to the small crowd in the Palmetto state’s capital.

The Minnesota congressman rallied the tea party supporters with a call to block Washington from raising the debt ceiling and an attack on President Barack Obama for being too close to Wall Street.

She told reporters after the rally that while she has yet to make an announcement on a run for president, she is looking forward to the opportunity to take on Obama, The Associated Press reported.

The rally's sparse attendance is attracing nearly as much attention as Bachmann's remarks.

Except thanks to the gullibility of these people, we're now stuck with the likes of Scott Walker and John Kasich, and Michigan and Florida are being Rickrolled by Ricks Snyder and Scott.

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Attention DNC: Hire this blogger to write your talking points

Best explanation I've seen of how the stock market recovery doesn't mean full recovery for 401(k) balances:

Say you had $100,000 in your retirement account and it lost 40% ($40,000) in 2008, but gained 40% in 2009. You did not regain your lost $40,000, you regained $24,000, which is 40% of the $60,000 that was left in your account.

See? THAT is how it's done.

Dictatorship in the heartland

It appears that Scott Walker, otherwise known as The Man With No Soul (and you can see it in his cold, dead eyes), is planning to run the state of Wisconsin like a complete and utter totalitarian dictatorship under his control (emphasis mine):

Following the lead of Michigan GOP Governor Rick Snyder, Walker is said to be preparing a plan that would allow him to force local governments to submit to a financial stress test with an eye towards permitting the governor to take over municipalities that fail to meet with Walker’s approval.

According to the reports, should a locality’s financial position come up short, the Walker legislation would empower the governor to insert a financial manager of his choosing into local government with the ability to cancel union contracts, push aside duly elected local government officials and school board members and take control of Wisconsin cities and towns whenever he sees fit to do so.

[snip]

Should these reports prove accurate, Walker’s plan would resemble-if not directly mirror- the legislation signed into law by Gov. Snyder of Michigan which gives Snyder extraordinary powers to take over municipalities when he determines them to be in financial trouble, further permitting him to actually fire locally elected public officials when he deems it desirable.

Gov. Snyder’s extraordinary law became all too real this week when Emergency Financial Manager, Joseph Harris, appointed by the Governor to take charge of Benton Harbor, Michigan, issued an order which took away all powers of the city’s elected officials.

Yes, this has really happened right here in the United States of America.

Walker’s plans give further credence to the notion that the efforts of the GOP governors with Republican majorities in their state legislative bodies are part of a coordinated plan to enforce a right-wing agenda designed to not only destroy state, county and municipal employee unions, but to take control of local governments by replacing elected officials with appointees, both corporate and individual, of the state’s highest executive officer.

Such a law would additionally give Walker unchallenged power to end municipal services of which he disapproves, including safety net assistance to those in need.

According to my sources, the plan is being written by the legal offices of Foley & Lardner, the largest law firm in the state, and is scheduled to be introduced to the legislature in May of this year.

NOW can we say that the right-wing Republican Koch brothers agenda is NOT about any kind of freedom, other than for corporations to run roughshod over our lives and our ability to function as a democracy?

Will we tolerate this?

I'm afraid it's too late to do anything but. The only tool we have is at the ballot box, and Americans proved themselves last year to be too stupid, ignorant, and gullible to be trusted with something as important as the vote. Perhaps there is a small hard core that still believes in the Teabagger agenda, at least until it hits them personally (as it will). But most people who voted-by-tantrum last year had no idea what they were actually voting for. Republican governors overturning local elections by fiat, Republican legislatures passing stupid legislation codifying debunked claims into law about a President into law for the sole purpose of keeping him off the ballot, partisan Republican election officials possibly rigging election results -- these are all evidence that it is already too late to prevent the relentless march towards complete corporate oligarchy.

I hope you enjoyed America. Because you don't have it anymore.

The Bay of Pigs II

Today is the 50th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs invasion that was the first major setback of the Kennedy administration. The actual bombing of the airfields and diversionary sorties had actually started on April 15th but the ground invasion itself began on April 17th.

At least in the popular mind, the Bay of Pigs was the brainchild of a brash and immature President Kennedy, who had just been installed in office less than three months prior. What escapes perhaps all but astute historians is that the Bay of Pigs invasion was actually hatched by the outgoing Eisenhower administration with the help of the likes of E. Howard Hunt, CIA Chief John Foster Dulles and, after Eisenhower suffered medical setbacks, even Vice President Richard Nixon. The understanding is that Nixon would ride Eisenhower's coattails into the White House and the invasion would go off as planned.

But Kennedy won the presidency by the narrowest of margins. However, under pressure from warhawk Republicans and the still-powerful anti-Communist sentiment in America, Kennedy was forced to go with an invasion of Cuba that served as a prescient example that sometimes invading a country and engaging in conventional warfare against Communist forces was not a good idea. After all, the Domino Theory regarding Southeast Asia had fallen apart the minute we withdrew our forces from Saigon in late April 1975. Communism did not sweep across SE Asia any more than it metastasized across the water from Cuba to Miami in the wake of the failure of the CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion. Not only that, it perhaps served as a reminder to President Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis the following year of the folly of hurling the country headlong into an even more dangerous gambit with Communist forces.

You don't have to be a geopolitical savant to know that we now live in a much different world but as the saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Dirty tricks and politics will always go hand in grubby hand, false flag operations are always on the table. The major difference is that neither Kennedy nor the press had to be overly concerned about domestic issues more pressing than the bait and switch scumbaggery pulled off by the steel industry.

Obviously, that much is different. Kennedy had inherited an economically stable United States thanks to the steady and pragmatic stewardship of his predecessor. There was no talk, none that has survived posterity, anyway, of defunding then privatizing Social Security. Unemployment hit an uncomfortable 6.6% the month before Kennedy's inauguration. But that's still a far cry from the 9.5-10% rates we're seeing today.

OsborneInk summed it up with elegant simplicity when s/he said Republicans "would spend the 21st Century undoing the 20th Century." Indeed, on top of supporting reckless military adventurism (except when waged by a black guy), Republicans have also embraced birther conspiracy theories (while denouncing 9/11 conspiracy theories), smashing public and private unions, repealing child labor laws, waged an all-out assault on any government regulation on corporations, have shown as much contempt for the planet earth as the non-millionaires living on it and have more than hinted they'd love nothing more than to repeal "ObamaCare" as well as the 1964 Civil Rights and 1965 Voting Rights Acts.

In short, any regressive measure, whether it be one that strips rights from workers and even working children, anything that pollutes and destroys the earth, anything that widens the gulf between rich and poor, you can be sure the Republican Party will champion to their last raspy breath.

It's hard to believe any of this would've happened or taken a toehold if JFK was running the country today. Kennedy knew when to work and compromise with Republicans but he also knew how to pick his battles, unlike the current steward. Obama has rarely stood his ground with Republicans, war-crazed generals in the Pentagon and certainly against corporations. Kennedy would've been smarter than to go out of his way to alienate his base by snapping at them for exercising their first amendment rights while giving one free pass after another to Bircher Tea Baggers openly calling for his assassination.

The Bay of Pigs we're seeing today is a domestic one. Indeed, the pigs have taken over Animal Farm and Obama and the American public at large is just as powerless to stop the occupation as Farmer Jones and friends. We're at war and while our egotistical Chief Executive is posing next to busts of Lincoln and jogging to his memorial to show the government is still open, he ought to be taking cues from a more contemporary example, a more courageous president, one who wasn't cowed by and didn't capitulate to Republicans and corporations.

Cafecito, Sydney

You will have walked past Cafecito hundreds of times. This busy cafe in Town Hall Arcade looks like any other sandwich shop until you step in a little closer and notice the Brazilian flag on the ceiling.



A handwritten menu behind the counter lists the usual sandwiches and salads, but buried on the far right is a listing of Brazilian options, most of it written in Portuguese. It can be a

Chris Christie is watching me

Probably not. But it IS strange that I mailed my tax returns for both New York and New Jersey last Saturday, via certified mail with return receipt requested, and New York has already cashed the check while New Jersey's seems to have been lost in the mail -- and I can't find the certified mail receipt now.

Anyone ever have this happen? What did you do? Send a duplicate? I owe them money, too.

More Democratic Congressional Awesomeness

And on the other side of the "powerful delivery" spectrum, we have Rep. Joe Crowley:

(h/t)

Millions of kids all over the country whose last name is "Weiner" owe a debt of gratitude to this guy

Thanks to Rep. Anthony Weiner for single-handedly changing the connotation of the name "Weiner" to mean "badass."

Piss off Fox. Buy something from J. Crew

I'm not a J. Crew shopper. Frankly, I don't think much of their stuff, at least not from what I've seen on their web site; I don't care that Laurent Hutton DOES model for them. Usually you'll find me on the sale pages of J. Jill or the 30% off all clearance pages at Coldwater Creek. But tonight, I'm making a statement against idiocy by buying a shirt from J. Crew. In fact, I'm buying two. Want to know why? Here's why:

Use code MUSTHAVE to get 30% off all clearance through tomorrow night.

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Charlie Chaplin 122 E Anniversaire

Charlie Chaplin, nom usuel de sir Charles Spencer Chaplin, Jr., est un acteur, réalisateur, producteur, scénariste, écrivain et compositeur britannique né à Londres le 16 avril 1889, et mort le 25 décembre 1977 à Vevey, en Suisse. Par son jeu de mime et de clownerie, il a su se
faire remarquer, et devenir l'un des plus célèbres acteurs d'Hollywood.

Charlie Chaplin fut l'une des personnes les plus créatives de l'ère du cinéma muet. Réalisateur, scénariste, producteur, monteur, et même compositeur de ses films, sa carrière durera plus de soixante-cinq ans, du music-hall en Angleterre, jusqu’à sa mort, en Suisse.

Son personnage Charlot, pour les francophones, The Tramp (le vagabond) dans les pays anglo-saxons, apparaît pour la première fois dans Charlot est content de lui (Kid Auto Races at Venice), le 7 février 1914. C'est un sans domicile fixe qui a des manières raffinées dignes d'un gentleman, muni d'une canne de bambou, coiffé d'un chapeau melon, vêtu d'une veste étriquée et d'un pantalon qui tombe sur des chaussures trop grandes. Cette allure lui vaudra la réputation de « vagabond » misérable et roué, asocial et obstiné, révolté et sentimental.


Il fut fortement inspiré par l'acteur burlesque français Max Linder[2] : tous deux choisiront un costume bien à eux. Mais Max Linder, au contraire de Charlie Chaplin, ne se fera pas représenter comme une victime de la société. La vie publique et privée de Charlie Chaplin fera l'objet d'adulation, comme de controverse[4].

Né à Est Lans dans le quartier de Walworth, un quartier très pauvre de Londres, le 16 avril 1889, quatre jours avant Adolf Hitler[5], Charles Spencer Chaplin est le fils de Charles Chaplin et de Hannah Hill (connue sous le nom de scène Lili Harley), tous deux artistes de music-hall. Il fut baptisé à l'Église anglicane, mais il sera plus tard agnostique. Il n'a qu'un an lorsque son père part en tournée aux États-Unis. Il a alors plusieurs demi-frères, l’un plus vieux que lui (Sydney Chaplin, né en 1885 d’une relation de sa mère avec Sydney Hawkes), l’autre plus jeune (Wheeler Dryden né en 1892 et ayant pour père Léo Dryden et lui-même père du musicien Spencer Dryden). Lorsqu'il revient des États-Unis, Chaplin senior découvre la nouvelle situation conjugale et abandonne sa famille, Charles Spencer n'avait alors que trois ans. La misère s'installe au foyer : Hannah, atteinte d'une maladie mentale, est internée dans un hôpital psychiatrique en juin 1894. Charlie et ses frères sont alors placés dans un orphelinat, à Hanwell. Deux mois plus tard, la mère de Chaplin obtient son congé de l'hôpital. Quelques années plus tard, Hannah sera de nouveau admise à l'hôpital et y restera, cette fois, huit mois. Pendant ce temps, Charlie vécut avec son père et sa belle-mère alcoolique, dans un environnement intenable pour un enfant, dont les souvenirs inspireront Le Kid.

À cinq ans, Chaplin monte sur scène pour remplacer au pied levé sa mère qui ne peut plus chanter, victime d'une extinction de voix. C'est sa première apparition sur scène. Puis, en 1896, son père, ne trouvant plus d'engagement, sombre dans l'alcoolisme avant de mourir à l'âge de 37 ans, d'une cirrhose du foie.

Le frère de Charlie, Sydney, quitte le foyer parental pour travailler dans la marine. Charles Spencer est alors seul avec sa mère. Entre neuf et douze ans, c'est grâce à son frère que Charlie entame une carrière d'enfant de la balle dans la troupe des Eight Lancashire Lads[9]. Puis, il obtient à partir de 1903 une succession de contrats au théâtre, et en 1908, il est engagé dans la troupe de Fred Karno, alors le plus important impresario de spectacles avec des sketches. Il y rencontre le futur Stan Laurel. Au cours d'une tournée de la troupe en Amérique, les studios Keystone lui adressent une proposition de contrat qu’il accepte : l'aventure cinématographique commence.

Kathy Nickolaus may have been fixing elections for years

Wisconsin's Government Accountability Board is looking into the Katherine Harris of the North (from Bradblog):

As per our story published a few hours ago on the still-unexplained anomalies found in past Waukesha County, WI elections, it looks like the state's Government Accountability Board (the body which oversees elections in the state) can't understand County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus' explanations for the anomalous 2006 results either, where some 20,000 more votes were tallied than "ballots cast", according to her own reports.

Just in tonight from the Wisconsin State Journal: "State investigating vote irregularities in Waukesha County going back 5 years"

Our report from earlier this evening offers a great deal more detail on the anomalies in question, and includes explanation (of a sort) and comment from Nickolaus who, the Journal reports, "was unavailable for comment Wednesday and Thursday." She did, for whatever reason, manage to offer The BRAD BLOG comment on these concerns both yesterday and today, terse as it was. FWIW.

WTF?????

In a country gone completely, utterly, batshit crazy, Arizona is even crazier than the rest of it:

The Arizona Senate formally passed the "Birther Bill" today, but not in its original version.

Apparently, requiring presidential candidates to provide a long-form birth certificate before allowing their names on the ballot in Arizona -- despite it already being a federal requirement to run for president -- was a bit too much for a few GOP lawmakers. So they made some amendments: if you can't find your birth certificate, and you have a penis, a document describing your lack of foreskin will suffice.

A circumcision certificate -- a document given to the parents of a male Jewish child after his foreskin is snipped off during a circumcision ceremony --  is not a legal document (see an example of one here)
but if you have one, under the amended bill, it's apparently enough to prove you're a U.S. citizen and your name can be permitted on the ballot in Arizona.

Pulling out your penis in front of election officials, however, will not prove citizenship -- and, in the worst case scenario, could get you labeled a sex offender.

Some other ways to prove that you're not a Kenyan version of the
Manchurian Candidate, as spelled out in the ridiculous bill, could be to provide a hospital birth record, a postpartum medical record, or an early census record.

The above is NOT from The Onion.

So a state government-issued birth certificate from the state of Hawaii won't suffice, but an easily-forged medical record or certificate from a mohel will? Why don't they don't just come out and pass a bill saying "Black Democrats may not be on the ballot in Arizona"? It would be a lot less complicated and a lot closer to the true spirit of this ridiculous law.

All the Outrage You Can Eat

In case you haven't had your fill of Republican horseshit today....

At ThinkProgress, read how during the Bush years, the current leaders of the House GOP voted 19 times in favor of increasing the debt limit -- to the tune of $4 trillion. But let a black Democrat be elected, and suddenly it's OK to risk global economic collapse just to score cheap political points with a bunch of uneducated mouth-breathers.

And speaking of uneducated mouth breathers (you know, the guys with emphysema and cirrhosis of the liver whose spouses have cancer from working in toxic factories, who are diabetic and have macular degeneration and need knee replacements), when the Tea Party revolution reaches fruition, they're going to be the first casualties.

Lindsey Graham is playing "Mine's Bigger" with Paul Ryan by demanding that Social Security be cut too!

New Jersey governor, thug, and mainstream media mancrush Chris Christie advocates taking a bat to 76-year-old state Senator Loretta Weinberg.

Alan Simpson is still an asshole, but he smacked around Rick "Man On Dog" Santorum (who thinks he can become president and force women to make lots of babies to pay Social Security taxes) pretty good this week.

And you morons couldn't see this last November? Sheesh.

I think Matt Taibbi has been attending the Driftglass school of Refined Rantin'.

Never believe a guy who promises it'll be different this time, baby.

OK, now my head really exploded.

Enough of that.

Fortunately, it's Thursday night, so I can put my cranium back together with the one thing that always restores my sanity. Bassets.

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