o + btw

fuck andy stern.

Frown-Horn

ABC News: 'Zero' Arrests, Secured Obama Inauguration Rolls On
Props to my friend from FEMA and all the personnel who managed not to find any "anarchists" to arrest.

Obama's Secret Record Collection : Rolling Stone
I'm sending him Spiderland, Vampire on Titus, Evol (he needs "Green Light") and Trace. You?

Nando on Kasama: Engagement and Audience « Kasama
This article calls for US Maoists and Trotskyists to look past their doctrinal divergences and join forces for whatever. Imagine, the coalition of hundreds that could emerge from such a hatchet-burial!

The Dialectics of Marx, Althusser & Mao: That Lonely Hour of Last Instance « Kasama
Fuck yeah. Kasama's the best marxist blog, period. God bless this ex-RCP undertaking for having a) the intellectual will to tackle Althusser (a wife-strangling, personal thought-hero of mine) and, b) the political honesty necessary to tell a buncha commies that 'economic determinism' of a certain prevailing "marxism" is a red herring.

Ben Smith's Blog: An Obama-McCain alliance? - Politico.com
'Been thinking about this since I read it weeks ago. If BHO were to keep the stimulus bill a) loaded with the relatively un-stimulative tax cuts that turn on congressional Republicans and, b) free of earmarks and "pork"... McCain might come out in favor, and leave only the marginal House Repubs. to wave their snob-flag.

Caroline, No

The next time I get all denim-workshirt-y and start gabbing about the mean streets of whatever-the-crap, remind me that I read every damned word of this piece of rich-person porno. Very well-written rich-person porno, mind you.

Coming soon, I promise

Very tiring week, this week, but I promise you, details on Barry's Big Day and our adventures therein, with pictures!, will be forthcoming.

This might explain Wobs' experience...

According to McClatchy: Porta-potties went largely unused

WASHINGTON — Among other things, the inauguration of President Barack Obama was "the largest temporary toilet event in the history of the United States," an official of Don's Johns, the firm that provided most of them, said Wednesday.

Here's the mystery, however: Did it have to be? According to Conrad Harrell, vice president of Don's Johns in Chantilly, Va., most portables were about a quarter full Wednesday morning. Harrell had thought they'd be half full, as they are after most events.

Adam Carter, the operations manager for Alpine Portable Restrooms of Round Hill, Va., was puzzled, too. He said Wednesday that he'd "found whole rolls of unused toilet paper in some."

Here are the possibilities: The planners overestimated demand. The crowd was so dense that people couldn't get to them.

I heard Jesse Jackson, and other bigwigs were unable to even make it to their VIP seats...makes ya wanna break down and cryyyyy.....(although it is actually sad that Jesse was unable to see the event live)

hard-hitting, embedded reportage

you wanna know how l'inauguration was? it was cold.

wobs and i are in agreement that the definitive microcosm, the single vignette that contains vast and diverse universes, was surely this televised Al Roker blowout.

other highlights included Barry's shout-out to the "non-believers" and the beginning of the U.S. of A.'s love affair with the dashing Joe Biden. (and how about Jill Biden's short skirt and Jane Fonda, 1983-ish boots, btw?)

Bush's legacy

John Roberts...

Hearsay....
from thinkprogress blog:
On CNN, Wolf Blitzer said, "John Roberts had one job to do today and he sort of screwed up." Jeffrey Toobin replied, "I almost fell out of my chair."

odyssey

"Can opener to top of beer can makes a great ashtray!" - kyle m'ccaterbear.

we will now begin our odyssey, jetting to Jersey and then training to the capitol of our united nation of fifty states and countless territories and bona fide bombing areas.

we will be encountering Wobs. sunday i will hold in my hands the tickets that will take the Wobs family and I to see Barry Obama inaugurated as top guy.

alarms

this is the way a world could end.
so help me cripes. if one more shoe drops, i'm moving to Birmingham faster n' you can say 'emo kid.'

Headline: Heavy coffee drinkers 'more likely to hallucinate

Drinking my morning cup a joe, I was perusing the star trib, looking for new tidbits on the Franken/Coleman contest, and I saw this article:

Heavy coffee drinkers are more likely to have hallucinations or feel "the presence of dead people," according to new research.

A UK-based study quizzed 200 students on their caffeine intake and found those with the highest consumption were also more prone to report seeing, or hearing, things that were not there.

I didn't find anything new on Franken...but I am fairly confident that he has won and will be seated, but I could be hallucinating...

Hilary Hearing (not very live) Comment Zone...

I am not able to live blog the hearing, but watching the hearing so far... it has been a snoozer...

Did hear some serious crap re: defense of Israel's recent war crimes....not surprised...

anyone else have a comment that must be voiced? Have at it...will check in periodically to update...

BHO from Pres-Elect to Pres

John Nichols has a darling piece for the Progressive that joins works by Adolph Reed and Doug Henwood in the canon of the left-Obama-critics. Nichols falls out with the latter two - if only as a matter of tone - with his insistence that Obama is at heart - if not in deed - "a progressive.*" Due to the ideological vagaries of American political culture, and the slings and arrows of electoral politics, Nichols believes Obama will gravitate towards centrism (maybe re-frame it as "post-political" or plain "pragmatism") and carry out what some have called "compensatory neoliberalism," or a plodding, market-based liberal reformism. But, but...Nichols contends that Obama, thinking as he does (progressively) and being who he is (a progressive), could be leveraged into behaving "progressively" by the Left - were the Left to mobilize, enunciate, get its shit together, etc.

Does this sound like an obvious point, one that you've made in your own heads 1,000 times? Absolutely. But sometimes it's nice to see your thoughts grafted onto someone else's voice. Well, it is for me at least. Great artcl, but given its 'self-evident' nature there's no blurb I can find that doesn't seem almost redundant, given the OG demographic. Anyway, it's bigger than the sum of its pieces and joints.

*In light of this blurbless link and my blurb about it, a question?

1) Does the term "progressive" denote a discrete set of ideologies/practices/texts in Barack Obama's USA 2009? If so, can we isolate some of those keystones?

2) Bonus question: how does the socialist wing of the Democratic Party feel about the Progressive Democrats of America? Do we get into Trot-style# ideologiko-rumbles? Or are we chums just like Lucy and Ethel? Obviously we know where the Trots for Romney come down on this one.

# Let me apologize. That link is horrid. 'Looks like a Maoist critique of les Trots, but it feels like an anthropological curiosity if you're me, which you aren't, so that link is unfair. Avoid it.

Hillary

Too bad I'm not in a place where I can live-blog tomorrow's Clinton confirmation hearings. Le politico reminds us to pay particular attention to the Kerry/Clinton interface:

While unlikely to be acrimonious, this exchange – tinged with the awkwardness most familiar to the high school prom court – is on the list for reasons of pure spectacle.

To wit: Kerry wanted to be president. Then Clinton wanted to be president. Then Kerry wanted Obama to be president. Then Obama became president. Then Kerry wanted to be secretary of state. But Obama wanted Clinton to be secretary of state. This all sets the stage for Tuesday’s confirmation hearing, where the back-and-forth will be finely parsed for any evidence of recriminations.

Or maybe Kerry will eliminate the need for such parsing by asking, “Why you and not me?”

More Solis

More reason for optimism that "greening"/stimulus/EFCA might could be integrated into a whole, big, New Deal 2-ish package: green Jobs jedi (and Ginger endorsee) Van Jones says, Hilda Solis = "not crap."

I'll See Yr Right-Wing HateJob and Raise You a Gay Whiskeypalian

Ezra Klein on the president-elect's decision to include the openly gay Rev. Gene Robinson in the Rick Warren-laced inaugural pageant:

This is, incidentally, why it's useful for progressives to criticize the president. Politicians respond to incentives. To noise. To anger. Warren, on some level, was a response to the loud protestations of evangelicals who believed the Democratic Party had no place for them. It's hard to see Robinson is anything but a response to progressive activists who sense that Obama was more willing to risk cross those who supported him than those who opposed him. Erase the anger from either side and it's not worth Obama -- or any president -- taking the risk to placate them. But this is a step in the right direction. This is genuinely inclusive. If it was the plan all along, the Obama administration sure did a good job keeping the secret. And if it wasn't, then equality activists have something to be proud of this morning. They changed the incentives.

Overheard on Twitter

Fantasy Island had that crap right: "careful what you wish for" is the ultimate frame for the Revenge Movie that is this life.

[micro-blogging is like blog-bonsai. and twitter is off the chain if you know the right people.]

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.