Hilda Sollis Confirmation Hearing Re-Run Live Blog

That's right. It is Friday night. What's your point?

The meme that they deserve

Via dave, if this is the zombie frame that a kleptocratic GOP wants to keep running with for the forseeable future...

Bush’s grand achievement on the domestic side was the most recent turn of a triple play of tax cuts — John F. Kennedy’s, Ronald Reagan’s and his own — all of which prove the incredible economic wisdom of allowing people to keep more of the money they make [emphasis added]. It is unfortunately a lesson that is as quickly unlearned as it is productive when relearned. We are watching its unlearning now.

... then I says, "Let's talk about it, shall we?"





You were saying?

we now resume politico-theoretico-wonk programming!/around the horn, 2009!

I know, you missed the horn, didn't you? 'Always thought the old el Horn-0 was too disorganized, too acentric, huh? Until it was taken away from you, that is. Well, lemme tell you something. You cannot escape 'Around the Horn.'

[ And nobody should think I'm abandoning this here OG just because there's some signs of life over at the Prisonship. 'Seeing how writing is pretty much the only activity that doesn't make me want to fire myself out of a fucking cannon, lately, I think I can handle two blogs. Let alone twitter, which really and truly is the bonsai of the blog-realm.]

Anywho....

In Which Bowl Games Deliver Me Into the Hands of the Far Left - The Plank
"Sadly, all the Marxists are in academia rather than broadcast sports. That's the problem with Marxists. They're everywhere you don't want them to be and nowhere you really need them." I don't agree with this sentiment, necessarily, but I do think this here article is hilarious. And it's always satisfying to hear somebody voice an anthropological interest in the "Far Left." Somebody that isn't me, that is. [PS - Postmodernist grad unionists will be happy to hear that I kicked off 2009 decrying dialectical materialism - in front of a buncha sociologists, no less - in the name of my appropriation of the "slobs vs. snobs" rubric put forth in Caddyshack and by Tom Scharpling. That's right. It was over a champagne/bourbon toast. Slobs vs. snobs! ]

NW Republican: Oregon Public Employee Unions and "Pay to Play"
That's right. Blago from Chicago and our little ramshackle "influence" in Salem? Same fuckin' thing, dude. 'Just wanted to remind everybody that NW Republican is out there.

Caroline Kennedy Wins Friends with Salad: The New Yorker Blog: Online Only: The New Yorker
And now we arrive at the "you've gotta be bleeping kidding me?" entry. Oh wait, it's the New Yorker. Sy Hersch aside, it seems like this sort of thing is all these kids are capable of. Oh, and unfunny cartoons for snobs. Did I mention I'm wearing a denim workshirt right now (if I didn't, it's because I'm not.)? Anyway, what are we thinking about this Caroline Kennedy 'candidacy?'

1. I'm sure she'd vote my way most of the time, but
2. It is incorrigble and distasteful for the Dems to participate in the dynastic bullshit and the hero-worship bullshit and the all-powerful popular fascination with rich whites that this appointment would have to be based on.
   
3. More careerist: if I were a career pol in NY who'd worked my way up the system only to lose this appointment to an amateur...well, if I were a career pol from NY I'd probably expect no less (I'm not, and I still don't).

There's yr politico-wonk-horn for the Sabbath night, titans. Have at it.

2009 Hints for Living

1. Sure there's no god, but there actually are demons. Night demons, day demons, dog-demons, rake-demons. Visible or invisible, looking like The Thing or a phone or a kid. Demons.
2. Sure there are demons, but there are definitely not any faeries. This can be particularly hard to swallow in Eugene, where it seems like there are lavender scarves and jingling bells everywhere. But those aren't faeries, they're just graduates of some kind of outdoor leadership school who decided that "enchantment" is the only viable compliment to their newfound capacity for "survival." (This is reason #671 to leave town. There are still 800+ reasons to stay.)
   
3. Life is not like a blog. It's not a steady, collaborative, dialogical medium that rewards honest effort. Au contraire, life is more like a message board, on which you need to post 100 times before a new set of topics/features is revealed to you, and you're starting from scratch again. What are the new features, you ask? Demons.
   
4. Sure, the personal is the political or whatever, but personhood ain't reducible to politics. We can recklessly conflate our bodies and our lives with causes, but we cannot evaporate into these causes. Doing so just tangles up "me" with "the struggle" in pretentious and ineffective ways, such that you cannot separate your, say, libertarianism from your stocking fetish. And then you're not helping anybody or "taking your desire for reality because you believe in the reality of desires." [special note - French theory, let alone the anarchic whatevering of the Situationist International, is of no help whatsoever when it comes to boxing gate-demons]
   
5. Your friends (probably) don't secretly hate you. They (probably) want you to ask them to use their laundry machine or whatever. They (probably) aren't looking at you and thinking, "this guy looks like a bag of balloons and his entire being is smoldering beneath a foul, acrid, pus-like silence." You should try to convince them to cook for you or go to the movies. You shouldn't let them think you somehow are benefiting from being alone.
   
6. There is no such thing as 'being alone.' It's not that hell is other people or whatever. Purgatory (read: earth) is the place where you feel too sick or too embarrassed to seek out the people who can help, thus trading good company (friends) for bad company (raft-demons, turntable-demons).
   
7. Don't sit in a dive bar reading a book. You look like an asshole.