TGIF

Goddammit, them's fightin' words

But, as a rule, if you’re really in the mood to see blood spilled, take advantage of your right to free speech by taking a position on the first amendment. For instance, there are those who argue there should be absolutely no limits on free speech, even when it comes to pornography, blasphemy or sedition.

Do you have to ask?

I think Jonah Goldberg nails it here.. The one overriding feature of the Obama presidency has been arrogance. The left, lead by the Obamessiah and his wife, Mary, thinks they own the world, but as the totally un-orchestrated Tea Parties show, there is a revolution a'brewin'. A revolution inspired and supported, but in no way organized or funded, by many groups that Jonah Goldberg works for and/or his mom owns. Please, whatever you do, do not notice the fact that Goldberg supports his assertion that Obama's arrogance is breathtaking with one quote from Charles Schumer and...well, the Schumer quote.

100 Days and Life to Go -- Thoughts?

We should be mindful, and critical, of even the best-written of the leading liberal fantasy-'profiles' of Obama.

Also: whatever their imbrication w/i a vast, world-statist conspiracy may be...the Politico's done us a service by compiling these 165 vids of the first 100 days.

BHO at 100 Days: C/NC? Step to it.

Another Idea That's Time Has Come

Fuck yeah! Andy Stern!

and/or

Perez Stern!

Go figure, huh....?

I'll admit it, we're complete and total hypocrites

Speaking, as I often do, for "the left," I'd like to take a moment to criticize President Obama for golfing this weekend instead of staying at the White House to monitor the developing swine flu epidemic.

The comparison between the swine flu outbreak which has devastated approximately 20 Americans in five states and Hurricane Katrina, which wiped out an entire American city, left approximately 2000 people dead, and tens of thousands homeless is in no way specious. The comparison between Obama golfing (golfing!) during this crisis and the (some say) criminal disregard for life shown by President Bush is so strikingly similar as to be shocking. The whole Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln thing is done after this. Also comparable is the fact that Obama has not even bothered to appoint someone to the position of Director of Homeland Security Health and Human Services Secretary who is acceptable to the extreme anti-abortion crowd, while all President Bush did was publicly praise the guy who fucked the whole Katrina thing up. I'd like also to note that it took 20 people getting sick before the Obama administration declared a public emergency, while Bush was savaged for waiting only two days after the hurricane struck to do anything about it.

When are we on the left finally going to admit that this Obama guy is exactly the same as Bush? Hypocrites all, we are.

Wings

Lex has been repping the Wings for awhile now and I have been listening. I gotta ask though, is Wings what happens when there is no one to say "no"? That's my take on it. Not that I don't dig the whatever goes approach to music, but I'm just wondering if that's the general take on it.

The New Ellroy is Coming, 9/22

Dear Booksellers,

In all its mellifluous and macho-maimed magnificence: my new novel, Blood's A Rover.

Knopf will drop this atom bomb of a book on you September 22. Your job is to groove it and grok its groin-grabbing gravity between now and then. From that point on: you handsell it to the book-buying public; I appear at your store and drive legions of my fans and your customers nuts; we all make out and give publishing a cash-cascading and profit-pronging boost in a bum marketplace!!!

Dig it!!!!!

The novel covers 1968-1972. It's a baaaaaad-ass historical romance -- huge in scope, deep in its exploration of the era, filled with my trademark craaaaazy shit, and suffused with a heightened sense of belief and the corollaries of political conversation and revolution. Oh, yeah -- this is a book for these times!

You've got Howard "Dracula" Hughes, Gay Edgar Hoover, and Tricky Dick Nixon. You've got the mob's evil eyes scoping the Dominican Republic. You've got voodoo in Haiti, a vicisiou armored-car heist, and the Feds out to deep-sixi the black militant movement. More than anything else, you've got three obsessed right-wing toadies grapping with the horror of their misdeeds - and seeking redemption in the peron of my greatest female character: The Red Goddess Joan.

Read this book.

Grab its greatness.

Find me on Facebook and let me know what you think (post on my wall!)

Yours truly,

James Ellroy

(h/t: Sarah Weinman)

Ya think?

A checker at the local grocery store was just speculating that Cheech and Chong may, may, have been stoned while making the movie Up in Smoke. He doesn't know for sure, but you gotta think maybe they were.

Frame Talk is Frivolous, Frame Talk is Fun

The Politico has really nice dish - or mebbe it's navel-gazing tripe - about the official BHO semiotics of the Frst Hndrd Days.

ps - No, I have not abandoned the for(u)m of weblogs ("blogs"), I'm just caught in a move-in bind.

pps - And how about unconditional endorsee - and example of all that is righteous in the 20-something blog-wonk matrix - Ezra Klein getting hired by the MotherfuckingWashington MotherfuckingPost?!?

Bigger by the second

Over at NW Republican wingnut Coyote is having a fun time with numbers. In a post titled "An Obama rock concert?" - reference to the 75,000 people that turned out in Portland to see Obama The Decemberists - he posts picture of roughly 5,000 people in Lansing to see Joe "the Plumber" Plumber. No one said math was Coyote's strong suit.

Better, in the same post, he estimates that the crowd in Salem was 2,000. Now, one expects that a wingnut website is going to double the size of the crowd that actually shows up. Just as the cops automatically double the number of beers Coyote estimates he drank when they pull him over. Maybe he realized that in a state of 3.7 million, pulling in 2,000 people is not so impressive. What is that 5/ten-thousandths of a percent? I'm going to be honest with you, I'm not used to dealing with numbers that small, so I may be off, correct me. Or maybe Coyote remembers that Obama drew 10,000 people in Eugene - twice - so he updated his post and his number to reflect that some people were estimating there were 3,000 people there. Seconds later it was 3,200, but you know the libural media, right?

Six hours later, Coyote had that number up to 4,000. I am imagining that by this afternoon 8,000 people will have been at the Capitol yesterday loudly protesting the policies of the Bush Obama administration and calling for an end to the War tax cuts for the wealthy an increase to the capital gains tax an end to government as we know it.

Really when was the last time liberals were able to draw such a crowd? Huh? Huh? Oh yeah, that Obama rock concert.

Lex and George Will in a tree

I see that George Will has come out strong and insanely against people wearing jeans. If memory serves, and believe me it does, George is also on record opposed to men wearing shorts. I believe this makes two - count 'em TWO! - fashion policies shared by George Will and our own Lex Dexter. If Will ever comes out against men wearing sandals, then Lex will have found his soul mate.

Oh, I know that Lex is going to protest that he is not against jeans, but rather than he can't find any to fit is scrawny ass, to which I retort that none of his other pants fit him either, so I'm not sure why jeans wouldn't make the cut.

Tea Party Placards

The following slogans and screeds appeared in placard form during my ethnographic travels into le Right yesterday:

• My President Would Be Legal
• President Obama, Show Us Your Birth Certificate
• Revivetherevolution.com
• Suicide By Stimulus
• Stop Borrowing/Start Budget-Cutting
• Terminate Expanding Authority
• Taxation Erodes American (dream)
• Heil Hope
• Billions for the Bankers/Debts for the People
• Stop Raiding Our Piggy Bank
• Let Capitalism Work
• Less Government = Freedom
• Flat Tax 10%! Make It Do!
  
• Somalia Pirates = US Congress
• FairTax.org
• Comrade Obama
  
• Wake Up America, Before Your Liberty is Gone
• The Problem with Socialism is Eventually You Run Out of Other People's Money
• Democracy is Slowly Being Eroded
  
• We Hate Porky Little Amendments
  
• No Nanny State: Leave Us Home in Our Sovereign State of Jefferson
  
• More Common Sense/Less $ and Cents
• Obama: the Next Chavez
• No Taxation Without Representation
• My Tax Dollars Go To Illegal Aliens
  
• Punish Success/Reward Failure: What's Up With That?
  
• Taking Everyone's Assets
• NO to Socialism
• Tired, Enraged American
  
• Free Markets Not Freeloaders!
  
• If You're Not Outraged/You're Not Paying Taxes
  
• Freedom Is Not Just Another Word
• Abortion Kills Children
  
• Our Government Stole My Paycheck
  
• Separation of Powers, Buckos: Big God/Small Government
• Expensive Health Care: Michelle Obama made $350k for sitting on her a$$
• Obama, You of All People Should Know that Pork Defiles
• Ron Paul for President

What, you need a chaser? This knocked 'em dead in Medford.

Exactly

When a right-wing blog posts a commentary with the headline "The American Gorbachev" can expectations be so high that they are impossible to realize? No.

This piece is less of a critique and more of a comparison of two leaders of two big countries. Again, this comparison is not entirely accurate and/or scientific. I mean you can compare Bush to Brezhnev using the same template. Both invaded Afghanistan and stayed home more than they traveled. There was even a theory that the reason Brezhnev stayed home and Gorbachev traveled so much is because Brezhnev was fed from the outlet and Gorbachev worked on batteries. So, in this light, the real purpose of this comparison is more in the line of Plutarch’s ‘Parallel Lives’ of let’s say,“Alexander the king, and of Caesar, by whom Pompey was destroyed.”

Oh, and, in conclusion:

If Obama is the post American captain destined to bring our spaceship down from the position of superpower to “a normal UN sanctioned operational mode” let’s hope for a smoother landing and a sharp difference from Gorbachev who neglected the fact that one can make a nuclear submarine feel like a raw boat for only as long as it is facing an iceberg.

Fuck the police and the New York Yankees

H/t: LGM

The NYCLU is on the case.

Campeau-Laurion, the director of Web productions for a media company, attended the Aug. 26 Yankees-Red Sox game with a friend, who had a ticket package for 11 games at Yankee Stadium during the 2008 season. Campeau-Laurion had attended several of these games with his friend.

Campeau-Laurion quietly watched the game, ate a bag of peanuts and drank two beers. He decided to use the restroom at the start of the seventh-inning stretch – a period when fans often choose to use the restroom. He got up and made his way down the aisle as “God Bless America” began playing. A police officer blocked his path and indicated that he could not leave during the song. Campeau-Laurion explained that he needed to use the restroom and was not concerned about “God Bless America.” Then he attempted to walk past the officer.

Before Campeau-Laurion could take a step, the police officer grabbed his right arm and twisted it behind his back. A second officer twisted Campeau-Laurion’s left arm behind his back, and the two officers then marched him down several ramps to the stadium’s exit with his arms pinned behind his back. The officers refused to ease their grip, even though Campeau-Laurion was not resisting them.

The encounter ended with one of the officers telling Campeau-Laurion to leave the country if he didn’t like it.

What makes this worse - much, much, much worse - is that this is, apparently, the official policy of the NY Yankees.

The Yankees began playing “God Bless America” during games following 9/11, as did all Major League Baseball teams. Unlike most teams, the Yankees also instituted a policy of seeking to prevent fans from moving during the playing of the song. It did so to promote patriotism amongst those attending Yankees games.

They are evil. And so are their fans.

A moral dilema

Is it wrong that I just spent a decent amount of time wondering which would upset me more - the death of one of my cats or the breaking of my favorite hammer?

Is it wronger that I still don't know. I mean cats are cats, but the perfect pipe is something special.

Health care, statistics, and vadge

In my last newsletter I gave you some statistics. I did not do this to attempt to set a hard base line, rather to point out the fact there is no “silver bullet” solution to our current health care situation. A few years ago a person testifying before a committee said “statistics are like a bikini, what they reveal is enticing but what they conceal is critical”. One should view any numbers under deliberation from such a perspective, as they often don’t tell the whole story.

-- Jeff Kruse, OR-1 (R)

TGIF

Listen To Her Heart 1978 Tom Petty


If this isn't working for you, you can watch it here.

You know, I don't get the Petty hate out there. Maybe if you're only knowledge of him was Full Moon Fever, which is middling rock over-played to the point of annoyance, then maybe. Then again, it could be just me. It could be that you needed to be a ten-year-old Solid and watching MTV in 1982 and have "Refugee" be the most interesting thing you had seen on the box. Although how you could deny "You think you're gonna take her away, with your money and your cocaine" is beyond me. Give Tom three minutes, you got nothing better to do on a Friday.

Isn't Jolie French?

I know all of you have been getting excited about the possibility of an Atlas Shrugged movie coming out soon. I mean it doesn't have a writer, or director or anything, but with just about everyone going Galt and attending tea parties and whatnot, you just know it is going to happen soon.

Our good friends over at Big Hollywood, perhaps America's best website for wingnut discussion of popular culture, are already speculating on who should be cast in the lead roles, especially that of Dagny Taggart. She is not only the heart of the book, but she has been the main source of wingnut masturbation fantasies since 1952. As such, it is crucial that the actress be hotter than the proverbial baker's oven. But does she also have to be ideologically pure? The answer, at least from the comments I read, is no. Actually, the answer seems to be that one Angelina Jolie, who is hotter than the proverbial baker's oven, would be so awesome there is some effort to rehabilitate her.

Actually Ms Jolie is a pretty good choice for the role. She is nowhere near as far left as her fellow actors, gave a fairly good interview in '08 about McCain and the good he might bring (apostasy!) and from what we've gathered is a serious woman that the world takes seriously- she supposedly holds her own quite well in cabinet level meetings and knows more than her UN counterparts about Darfur and whatnot.

Scrolling through the comments, I see no objections to her on the grounds that she is twice divorced, a home wrecker, and/or living in sin with children. My how the wingnut opinion of single mothers has changed over the last year.

Anyway, the biggest fear, of course, would be that "Hollywood" would destroy the story because they don't "get it." This has been my biggest fear for some years. It also serves as a ready-made excuse for the all-too-predictable failure of the movie at the box office. I mean, we all know that Americans are dying to see a movie in which the richer/betters in our society laugh as civilization disintegrates. Especially if the last half-hour of the movie features a twenty-five minute radio address from a character who has only briefly appeared in the film up to that point. Can you imagine the cuts to all of our heroes listening intently to their radios while John Galt explains to the word that they will all die unless they cede complete control of the world to him and his chosen few? Riveting film going to be sure. America is ready, but Hollywood couldn't handle it.

Of course, it has been suggested that the book would work better as a seven-part miniseries a la John Adams, which is, of courser, even more true. Then, Galt's speech could take up a whole episode and we wouldn't have to cut any of the brilliance. That way we could spend an hour watching scenes of bridges collapsing and roving bands of marauders killing each other and rich people packing for the big get away all while listening to a disembodied voice tell us that all of that was a result of taxes. Obama would never let it happen.

Anyway, you buy the tickets, I'll buy the popcorn, and we'll laugh and laugh and laugh.

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