clash, confute, carry on...

cyberspace rant to a Ron Paul lover

2012-01-25T00:45:00.002-05:00

my response to a cyber-dude who was claiming a conspiracy in the media and polling companies with regards to Ron Paul not being more popular, and ahead in polls. his argument is that on twitter he is BLOWIN' UP! - sj

"I appreciate and can relate to your passion, here, but a couple of quick things worth noting: 1) twitter is media. twitter is an awesome new medium and platform, doing things many other standard tv, print, and other entities cannot do. 2) Ron Paul uses that medium, and dozens of other mediums to get his message out. 3) retweets and mentions on twitter are incomparable to polling results. they have nothing to do with it. Most polls are conducted on the telephone. So the results you're seeing are coming from those calls. THEN, there are results you're seeing on twitter. Apples/Oranges. 4) There are PLENTY of unbiased polling entities in operation now, and there are many others that have some bias, for sure, but a) they are consistent, and b) it doesn't matter, because there are polling analyses that AVERAGE the wide spectrum of all of them! 5) Ron Paul would be more popular if some of his policies didn't suck ballz. His anti-gun control, anti-gay/lesbian marriage, being against a woman's right to choose, anti-civil rights stance, his anti universal healthcare, anti-public education, anti- EPA, are just some of his idiotic and anti-american views, thoughts and policies (not to mention, why he's a REPUBLICAN). Even his "states-rights" argument is utter bullshit, as most of those issues I mentioned shouldn't even be debated with that possibility in mind. 6) I have plenty I can argue is wrong with him, and I'll ALSO argue he is racist. If you've ACTUALLY read the Ron Paul Newsletters, you would be amazed at the litany of racist content and made up lies about african-americans (and other people) in them. And they were HIS newsletters. The fact that he plays the moron when pressed on this ("der... welp.. I never read 'em!") only makes him as much of an idiot as any other lying politician. 7) the many different media entities and mediums are HELPING Ron Paul's popularity; not hurting it. If not for them, he'd be just another crazy old loon from Texas, with a few good ideas, and dozens of terrible ones. Fuck Ron Paul"

Great week for America & Dems (bad, for everyone else)!

2012-01-06T16:29:00.003-05:00

Happy Friday, all! What a fantastic week for Americans - and a bad week for Republicans, Tea Partyers, and many Libertarians (the ones who just. can't. stand any government interfence and regulating bodies)! Let me take a brief moment to give you two examples - from this week alone - detailing the differences between the Democratic party and Republican party (of which Ron Paul is a devout member). *WARNING: includes facts!

1) Dems, let by Obama, Nancy, Harry and all the others, two years ago, created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). That means what it says: a body, that protects YOU, the consumer, from getting ripped the *&^% off by financial institutions. Republicans/Tea Partyers/many libertarians voted AGAINST this regulating body ...and since the bureau's been established, those same powers have made sure the President could not put someone in charge of it. Based on their actions, the GOP/others do not want YOU protected from predatory financial corps. Well, mercifcully, Obama decided to do some "fillibusting, baby!" and he put a leader - Richard Cordray - in place to start going about the business of protecting all Americans. This guy is an aggressive defender of consumer rights, having brought AIG to it's knees, with a $1,000,000,000 settlement, when he was prosecuting them for bad business practices, as Attorney General, earlier in his career. WINNING! GOP/tea partyers/many liberatarians be damned!

2) Today's job report (just released): a net of 200,000 jobs were added last month, and the jobless rate fell to 8.5%, it's lowest level since Feb, 2009, which was just a couple of weeks after Obama took office, when began fixing the God-awful mess that 8 years of Bush and the republicans made, with their wholly-unnecessary Iraq war (which caused 5,000 unnecessary deaths to our american heroes, and unnecessary physical and mental wounds for life, to another 100,000 american heroes), and TWO failed tax cuts (which added over $1,000,000,000,000 to the deficit). The unemployment rate has dropped, consistently, for a nice clip now, and we're in a six-month stretch in which the economy generated 100,000 jobs or more in each month. That hasn’t happened since April 2006. April, 2006. For all of 2011, the economy added 1.6 million jobs, better than the 940,000 added in 2010. All of this is better than analysts expected. Why? Because the Dems, let by Obama, Nancy, Harry and all the others lead and legislated purposefully, with the goal of fixing the economy, implementing good ideas like the stimulus package (even FAUX news analsysts begrudingly admit the Stimulus/Recovery Act was successful), and the recent payroll tax cut, among other things (the GOP was against a tax CUT! ANYthing to ensure Obama's not re-elected)! ...policies and proposed legislation that the GOP, Conservatives and tea party (to a person!), voted AGAINST. Do not forget that.

In summary: Democrats good for America. Republican, Conservatives, Tea Party, many Libertarians, and some "Independents" bad for America.

"Enjoy your weekend, America!"

-sj

Why Innovation Can't Fix America's Classrooms

2011-12-10T23:07:00.005-05:00

Simple and Superb points in this piece from Marc Tucker at the Atlantic last week. Seriously. Our leaders have to get this notion out of their head that they/we know everything. We're losing on this one. Copy the countries that are winning. Like, "duh!" - sj

Forget charter schools and grade-by-grade testing. It's time to look at the best-performing countries and pragmatically adapt their solutions.

Why Innovation Can't Fix America's Classrooms
Dec 6 2011
by Marc Tucker

Most Atlantic readers know that, although the U.S. spends more per student on K-12 education than any other nation except Luxembourg, students in a growing number of nations outperform our own. But think about this: Among the consistent top performers are not only developed nations (Japan, Finland, Canada), but developing countries and mega-cities such as South Korea, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.

Even if we find a way to educate our future work force to the same standards as this latter group -- and we are a very long way from that now -- wages in the United States will continue to decline unless we outperform those countries enough to justify our higher wages. That is a very tall order.

You would think that, being far behind our competitors, we would be looking hard at how they are managing to outperform us. But many policymakers, business leaders, educators and advocates are not interested. Instead, they are confidently barreling down a path of American exceptionalism, insisting that America is so different from these other nations that we are better off embracing unique, unproven solutions that our foreign competitors find bizarre.

Some of these uniquely American solutions -- charter schools, private school vouchers, entrepreneurial innovations, grade-by-grade testing, diminished teachers' unions, and basing teachers' pay on how their students do on standardized tests -- may be appealing on their surface. To many in the financial community, these market-inspired reform ideas are very appealing.

Yet, these proposed solutions are nowhere to be found in the arsenal of strategies used by the top-performing nations. And almost everything these countries are doing to redesign their education systems, we're not doing.

The top-performing nations have followed paths that are remarkably similar and straightforward. Most start by putting more money behind their hardest-to-educate students than those who are easier to educate. In the U.S., we do the opposite.

They develop world-class academic standards for their students, a curriculum to match the standards, and high-quality exams and instructional materials based on that curriculum. In the U.S., most states have recently adopted Common Core State Standards in English and math, which is a good start. But we still have a long way to go to build a coherent, powerful instructional system that all teachers can use throughout the whole curriculum.

The top-performing nations boost the quality of their teaching forces by greatly raising entry standards for teacher education programs. They insist that all teachers have in-depth knowledge of the subjects they will teach, apprenticing new teachers to master teachers and raising teacher pay to that of other high-status professions. They then encourage these highly trained teachers to take the lead in improving classroom practices.

The result is a virtuous cycle: teaching ranks as one of the most attractive professions, which means no teacher shortages and no need to waive high licensing standards. That translates into top-notch teaching forces and the world's highest student achievement. All of this makes the teaching profession even more attractive, leading to higher salaries, even greater prestige, and even more professional autonomy. The end results are even better teachers and even higher student performance.

In the U.S., on the other hand, teaching remains a low-status profession. Our teacher colleges have minimal admission standards, and most teachers are educated in professional schools with very little prestige. Once they start working, they are paid substantially less than other professionals.

Many of our teachers also have a very weak background in the subjects they are assigned to teach, and increasingly, they're allowed to become teachers after only weeks of training. When we are short on teachers, we waive our already-low standards, something the high-performing countries would never dream of doing.

All this leads to poor student achievement, which leads to even shriller attacks on the profession and more calls for stricter accountability -- and that makes it even less likely that our best and brightest will become teachers. And that leads to low student achievement.

Thirty years ago, Japan was eating the lunch of some of America's greatest corporations. Those U.S. companies who survived figured out how the Japanese were doing it--and did it even better. The most effective way to greatly improve student performance in the U.S. is to figure out what the top-performing countries are doing and then, by capitalizing on our unique strengths, develop a strategy to do it even better.

The apostles of exceptionalism say we need more innovation. But our problem is not lack of innovation. Our problem is that we lack what the most successful countries have: coherent, well-designed state systems of education that would allow us to scale up our many pockets of innovation and deliver a high-quality education to all our students.

Playing to our strengths makes sense. Ignoring what works, simply because it was invented elsewhere, does not.

It's Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers

2011-11-16T00:21:00.007-05:00

Wow. This will never ever never get old. - sj

It's Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers
by Colin Nissan

I don't know about you, but I can't wait to get my hands on some fucking gourds and arrange them in a horn-shaped basket on my dining room table. That shit is going to look so seasonal. I'm about to head up to the attic right now to find that wicker fucker, dust it off, and jam it with an insanely ornate assortment of shellacked vegetables. When my guests come over it's gonna be like, BLAMMO! Check out my shellacked decorative vegetables, assholes. Guess what season it is—fucking fall. There's a nip in the air and my house is full of mutant fucking squash.

I may even throw some multi-colored leaves into the mix, all haphazard like a crisp October breeze just blew through and fucked that shit up. Then I'm going to get to work on making a beautiful fucking gourd necklace for myself. People are going to be like, "Aren't those gourds straining your neck?" And I'm just going to thread another gourd onto my necklace without breaking their gaze and quietly reply, "It's fall, fuckfaces. You're either ready to reap this freaky-assed harvest or you're not."

Carving orange pumpkins sounds like a pretty fitting way to ring in the season. You know what else does? Performing a all-gourd reenactment of an episode of Different Strokes—specifically the one when Arnold and Dudley experience a disturbing brush with sexual molestation. Well, this shit just got real, didn't it? Felonies and gourds have one very important commonality: they're both extremely fucking real. Sorry if that's upsetting, but I'm not doing you any favors by shielding you from this anymore.

The next thing I'm going to do is carve one of the longer gourds into a perfect replica of the Mayflower as a shout-out to our Pilgrim forefathers. Then I'm going to do lines of blow off its hull with a hooker. Why? Because it's not summer, it's not winter, and it's not spring. Grab a calendar and pull your fucking heads out of your asses; it's fall, fuckers.

Have you ever been in an Italian deli with salamis hanging from their ceiling? Well then you're going to fucking love my house. Just look where you're walking or you'll get KO'd by the gauntlet of misshapen, zucchini-descendant bastards swinging from above. And when you do, you're going to hear a very loud, very stereotypical Italian laugh coming from me. Consider yourself warned.

For now, all I plan to do is to throw on a flannel shirt, some tattered overalls, and a floppy fucking hat and stand in the middle of a cornfield for a few days. The first crow that tries to land on me is going to get his avian ass bitch-slapped all the way back to summer.

Welcome to autumn, fuckheads!

(click here for original post on McSWEENEY'S website)

First the Creation Museum, now this: Ark Encounters Theme Park

2011-08-11T09:43:00.004-04:00

Megan Carpentier's take on this is ... well, not sure what it is. All I know is, I couldn't stop laughing for a while. Check it out. Click on title of this post for the original Raw Story piece (and corresponding links). And next time you're in Kentucky, you can enocunter it in person! sj

Top 5 suggested attractions for the Ark Encounters Theme Park
By Megan Carpentier
Wednesday, August 10th, 2001

Between a 30-year property tax break, a county development grant and a 10-year package of state tax incentives, the Ark Encounters theme park seems set to open on time and under budget in 2014. The project, which is partially owned by the same people that brought us the Creation Museum, promises visitors a full size ark, a replica of the Tower of Babel (no word as to whether it will be felled regularly) and a petting zoo.

But what else might be in store? We had some ideas.

1. Can You Spot Your Daughter-In-Law?
Fun for the extended family! Inspired by the story of Judah, Tamar and Onan in Genesis 38, female visitors are invited into a room and given historically-accurate prostitutes' clothes. Once veiled, they are placed with similarly-dressed re-enactors by a shrine and encouraged to hit on their male relatives. Those who manage to escape with their father-in-laws' belts win (a.k.a., avoid a public burning)! In a comedic note, any men caught masturbating are struck by God's Lightning (TM).

2. Die Like An Egyptian
Inspired by the plagues God sent to torment the Egyptians in Exodus 7-11, visitors must make their way through an obstacle course that includes: swimming a river of "blood"; traversing a range filled with frogs, flies, lice, locusts and dead livestock; being sprayed with a substance designed to induce hives in all that encounter it (lancing the boils at the end got too messy!); a trail on which they are pelted with balls of ice as thunder crashes overhead; and a pitch-black room the leads to the exit. Eldest sons are then chloroformed to simulate death and the entire family is de-loused before exiting into a "desert paradise." (Please note: Jewish guests will be led straight to the desert after a brief wading excursion.)

3. When Is It Rape?
In this girl's-only exhibit, women are schooled on the finer points of Deuteronomy 22. After surviving ritualistic shaming for the sin of wearing pants (Deuteronomy 22:5), ladies are offered a range of dresses and skirts for purchase before continuing on to the Two Doors Of Decision. Women who choose one door are led to a field (22:25); those who choose the other are led onto a historically accurate street (22:23 and 28); all women are then "discovered" by a strange man who will attempt to put them in sleeper holds. Those who scream get to advance to the "wedding chapel" with their assailants, where they are reunited with male relatives; those who don't are pelted with rubber "stones" and forced to exit the park. Childcare services will be provided to families whose daughters don't pass, so they can continue enjoying the attractions while their daughters think about what they've done.

4. Wrestling With Angels
One of the most popular attractions at Ark Encounters, male guests are encouraged to doff their clothing to wrestle with the park's "angels" in a secluded room, away from friends and family, to experience the joy that Jacob did while wrestling an angel in Genesis 32:24-30. In order to preserve the verisimilitude of the experience, guests are paired exclusively with superhumanly attractive young men in the best physical condition, oiled so as to make it more difficult to win the wrestling match, and led to darkened rooms designed to look like a riverfront beaches. The match is ended when the "angel" touches the hollow of each guests' thigh: guests are encouraged to limp back to their families as Jacob himself did.

5. Cast Away
As Ark Encounters is no common theme park, the exit itself is an encounter with our Biblical past. Like Adam and Even before us, guests -- because who among us is not a sinner? -- are cast out from the park at the end of each day, as recounted in Genesis 3. Forced to walk over super-heated pavement three miles over a field filled with thorns and thistles, with dust and dirt whipped into the air with industrial fans, our guests will finally reach the parking lot three miles from the gate.

without question, a clusterfuck.

2011-07-07T00:09:00.005-04:00

Saw this recently on Greg Hagin's tumblr blog, Blisstortion (which is awesome), a quote from a Mother Jones piece. Sums it up quite nicely. - sj

"Republicans got the tax cuts they wanted. They got the financial deregulation they wanted. They got the wars they wanted. They got the unfunded spending increases they wanted. And the results were completely, unrelentingly disastrous. A decade of sluggish growth and near-zero wage increases. A massive housing bubble. Trillions of dollars in war spending and thousands of American lives lost. A financial collapse. A soaring long-term deficit. Sky-high unemployment. All on their watch and all due to policies they eagerly supported. And worse: ever since the predictable results of their recklessness came crashing down, they’ve rabidly and nearly unanimously opposed every single attempt to dig ourselves out of the hole they created for us."

Here's the whole/short piece, from Mother Jones: What if You Held a Class War and No One Showed Up?

"Can't we all get along?"

2011-06-30T09:57:00.003-04:00

I couldn't have said it better myself - although I sure have tried lately! ..click on title of story for original piece and additional links. - sj

LeBron James, the Most Hated Athlete in America
by Buzz Bissinger
June 14, 2011

I was listening to the press conference of Miami Heat coach Erik Spoelstra Sunday night after the team’s humiliating loss to the Dallas Mavericks in the National Basketball Association finals. I knew of the media’s perverse obsession not only with the dismal play of LeBron James but also with James himself. I still thought the first question at least would have something to do with the Mavericks and how well they had played.

Wrong.

The first question was about James. The second question was about James. The third question was about James, all of them in the same vein of what went wrong with him and why had he been so lousy in the Heat’s six-game losing effort. The Mavericks? The who?

It was like that all through the finals for James, constant and withering criticism of his play, constant dissection of every comment and every body movement. Anthony Weiner’s sexting? James made him do it. The crumbling economy? Bankers were only taking James’ advice. Rick Santorum running for president? It came to him in a dream where James said, “You’re the chosen one, Rick. Not me.”

Starvation. Drought. War.

James. James. James.

He truly is the most hated athlete in all of sports.

Which is absurd.

In the 24-hour news cycle that brings out the starving rats feasting on instant analysis, everything James did was a portent of his being an arrogant assoholic.

Did you see that smile? What about the way he bent down to tie his shoelace? And how about guzzling from the water bottle during a timeout as if he was the only one who was thirsty? What a selfish bastard.

The rats ate up every crumb, regardless of the significance. The goal was to maliciously condemn him, and to that extent the media rats got their wish:

He is Public Enemy No. 1 of the tear-down culture in which human foible,

click here for rest or article

Cold Cave's new record

2011-03-25T13:35:00.005-04:00

Cold Cave's new record, "Cherish the Light Years" will be released in a couple of weeks (April 5th), but band/label was/is cool enough to email those following them on various social networking sites/blogs, songs from the record (if not all) to stream on their respective sites, blogs and share on facebook. A few weeks ago I heard what I believe to be the first single from this record, "The Great Pan is Dead" and I like it a lot. Haven't heard another note off the record yet, however. If you haven't heard what these men & women are capable of yet, check out this song/video from their last record, "Love Comes Close." Positively fabulous. - sj

It's a Tea Party World - You Just Live In It!

2011-03-04T20:39:00.003-05:00

clik on title of this post to take you to original post (if cliking on this pic isn't big enough). Tom Tomorrow is STILL the man!

Scott Walker's War on Equality

2011-03-04T19:41:00.005-05:00

This is a must read. This might be the best article I've read recently, regarding what's going on in various states throughout this country, and what the Republican/Conservative/Tea Bag voters, and city/state and congressional legislator's master plan really is (and it's in full effect, as we speak, brothers and sisters - just ask a teacher!). Schweber is obviously well-informed and his analysis deadly accurate. Take FIVE minutes and read this. If you click on the title of this entry, you will see the original post, along with the 2 or 3 links he has in article, and also (by clicking on his name) the rest of the blog posts he writes regularly for HuffPo. Every one is awesome! (oh, the post directly after this one on this blog is just as awesome!) - sj

Scott Walker's War on Equality
by Howard Schweber, Associate Professor of Political Science and Law, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Originally posted on Huffington Post: March 2nd, 2011 11:07 AM

"The American system of public education is the greatest mechanism for social and economic mobility in the history of the world." I wish I had said that. Actually, it was my friend Tim. Tim is a conservative Republican. Let me clarify that. At various points in his life Tim has been a professional conservative Republican, with credentials that make Scott Walker look like an over-promoted Boy Scout. Among other things, Tim was the Chairman of California College Republicans, a member of the CA GOP State Executive Committee, and a GOP nominee for state Assembly. In other words, there is nothing liberal or Democratic about recognizing the fact that an assault on public education is an assault on equality.

I do not mean to minimize the extent of inequalities in American education that Jonathan Kozoll and Jennifer Hochschild have so ably documented. And Wisconsin is no different. Since 1993 the state has employed an insanely complicated system of "tiered" state and local funding that numerous analyses show has resulted in money being funneled toward wealthier districts and away from those most in need. The poorer districts in Wisconsin are already operating on a shoestring. But despite all its defects, it remains the case that in America, and specifically in Wisconsin, publicly funded education is a powerful equalizing force, almost the only one left.

Scott Walker's budget seeks to change all that. The budget that Walker unveiled on March 1st contains cuts to education that will devastate Wisconsin's traditionally fine system of public schools, including specific provisions that end state funding for Advanced Placement courses and "science, technology, engineering and mathematics programs," among many other things. There is a great deal to be said about those cuts and their likely consequences, but the cuts in state funding are actually not the most disturbing part of Walker's budget. What is even more disturbing is this: Walker's budget mandates a 5.5% cut in per-pupil local education spending, approximately $550 per pupil. This has absolutely nothing to do with balancing the state budget: it doesn't save the state a dime. This rule specifies that overall education spending must decline regardless of the wishes of the residents of a local district. No district will be permitted to maintain even its current level of property tax-based funding for education, let alone increase that tax to offset state cuts.

Again, this is a provision that does not save the state a dime (not to mention making a mockery of the idea of local control.) To mandate cuts in local spending on top of cuts in state spending is astonishing. Do the math (and thank your math teacher): cuts in state funding plus cuts in local funding equals the end of all those "special" programs. In poorer districts the effects will be even more extreme; here is an excellent analysis by Andre Reschovsky (LaFollete School of Public Affairs) of the distribution of economic effects across districts.

But never mind the poor districts for a moment. What's going to happen in the wealthier districts? I find it hard to believe that Wisconsin Republicans (let alone Democrats) will want to send their children to schools that offer no AP classes or advanced courses in math and science, not to mention drug education programs, language programs, and K-5 enrichment programs. And in fact, that's not likely to happen. Instead, what is likely to happen is a whole new level of inequality.

The first thing that is likely to happen is that families who can afford it will flee the public schools; Walker's budget is the best advertisement for Wisconsin private schools that could be imagined. One local private school in the Madison area reports double the number of inquiries compared with a year ago -- and that was before the budget was unveiled.

And there's another solution: privatize public education. That's what happened in Seattle. Years ago, confronted by deep cuts in education spending, local districts established private foundations. Alumni and current parents contribute money which is then spent in the district. One of the most successful is Roosevelt High School in Seattle: they boast the only full time drama program in the state, funded by private spending. Here's the web site for Roosevelt's private foundation. The list of current grants covers a range of items, including Chemistry textbooks. The school's principal is on the Board of Directors. Now take a look at the names on the Advisory Board: the name "Nordstrom" gives you some idea of the socioeconomic profile of the district. As for other districts that cannot sustain a private foundation? They'll just have to do without Chemistry textbooks. And Washington's shortage of funding for public education is nothing compared to the scenario that Governor Walker is unleashing on Wisconsin.

The budget that Governor Walker announced today cannot be described by any of the usual terms. This is a budget that is targeted like a guided missile, and its target could not be more clear: Governor Walker wants to destroy the state's system of publicly funded education and replace it with charter schools (teaching certification not required), private schools, and private funding.

This would be shocking anywhere -- in Wisconsin it is inconceivable. Let me tell you something about Wisconsin. We like to think we are not just another state. At the University of Wisconsin we talk a lot about "the Wisconsin Idea," the idea that we have a specific mission to serve the public of our state in the tradition of the land grant colleges. Every semester I have been here I have met at least one student who has told me that he or she is the first person in their family to go to college. Those students are the best thing about teaching at a public university. They are what public education is all about. They come from small towns in the northern part of the state, often from families that operate farms or small businesses in their communities. They leave here and they go on to become lawyers or scientists or teachers, or to start businesses of their own.

This is what the Tea Party's capture of the Republican Party has brought us. Right here in Wisconsin we are sounding the death knell for the single greatest mechanism of social and economic mobility that the world has ever known.

Union is the measure

2011-02-22T22:03:00.007-05:00

What a great @#$%^&* piece by Mark Sumner. Straight. Up. (click title for original post)

Union is the measure
by Mark Sumner
Sun Feb 20, 2011

There's a word in the very first line of the Constitution of the United States that describes the instrument through which freedom is held. It's a term for people acting in concert to secure their liberty and hold those rights against any opponent. That word is union.

From its founding, the story of this nation has been the story of union. It is the story of two centuries spent in building up the ability of ordinary citizens to treat with wealthy, powerful, politically connected entities. That story contains instances of tragedy. Thousands died in the struggle, many thousands more suffered poverty or were outcast from communities. But the story of union also contains far-reaching triumphs. Every paid vacation, every weekend, every overtime dollar, every protection from arbitrary dismissal and unfair treatment, everything that makes your working life tolerable, came because people stood together in union at risk to their own livelihoods and often their own lives. Some of those laws exist only because workers stood in union when not only corporations but their own government attacked them not just with guns, but with bombers. They paid the price. You reap the benefits.

When we talk about "the greatest generation" that brought the nation through World War II and built America into a post-war powerhouse, we're speaking of a population where nearly a third of workers were union members. It's no coincidence that the peak period of growth and progress coincides with the peak period of union membership. When people act in union, there's nothing they can't accomplish. When people cannot join in union, when everyone must face the powerful alone, all rights are nothing more than words.

Whether in a union of states and nations or a union of workers and citizens, only by working in concert can rights be wrested from oppressors and held against despots. That's why tyrants quake at the sound of union. That's why the right to act in union is the ability that the downtrodden most desire and authorities first attack. Union is the measure of freedom.

The outlawing of independent unions is the clearest and most consistent marker of despotism around the world. When Gaddafi seized control of Libya in 1969, his first speech proclaimed the end of labor unions. No sooner had he secured control of Cuba than Fidel Castro banned the ability of unions to strike or to bargain over salary and benefits, saying such demands were detrimental to "the national economy." In Colombia today, right-wing militias work together with corporations to keep down costs and demands for decent working conditions in the most effective way they know–they execute union leaders.

There's a good reason why governments and corporations alike show trepidation when people are able to organize. Union is effective. For all the pretty speeches and all the ham-handed threats, the signal that the Iron Curtain was finally rising didn't come in Berlin or Washington, D.C., it came in the shipyards of Gdańsk, when men dared to wave the flag of an independent union. Want to determine where governments are actually concerned about the rights of their people? You only have to look at how free people are to organize for a cause. Without that, no other rights matter. With it, all other rights will follow.

The First Amendment to the Constitution enshrines a number of freedoms including religion, speech and the press, but this amendment should not be read as a random list of disconnected items. Everything in it directly depends on the liberties held out in the closing words: the ability of the people to peacefully assemble and to petition for redress. When the Constitution extends the right of assembly, it's not just giving us the right to gather together for no purpose. What's protected is the right to join together in common cause, and to seek as a group to move institutions that would not respond to individuals acting alone.

The American dream—the dream that an average citizen can enjoy a decent life, raise a family, and hope for the future—was created in union, sustained by union, and is dependent on union. That dream stands on a knife edge. Already the forces that oppose union have torn away the hopes of many Americans. As union membership has fallen, decent pensions have disappeared. As union membership has fallen, health care costs have increased. As union membership has fallen, pay for workers has stagnated. As union membership has fallen corporate profits—and executive pay—have soared. The decline of union is the birthplace of inequity.

At this moment, the same forces that have ripped union away from most workers are acting against those few who still share the ability to speak with a collective voice. They want to wreck this last bastion, burn it down, stomp it, bury it, extinguish it forever, so that they can sleep safe knowing their power will not be challenged. They want to erase the work of two centuries, turn the American dream into a subject for nostalgia, and make the Bill of Rights into a sheet of paper.

That is what's on the line in Wisconsin.

Nothing has changed since the time that first line of the Constitution was written. Union is not just a means to oppose tyranny, it is the only means.

....the storming of the Wisconsin Statehouse.

Kanye, dude. Great new record, but your lyrics have gotten even worse, yo!

2011-02-11T16:35:00.006-05:00

a comment I made on a website earlier today, in lieu of "proper review"...

In case you're wondering, the new Kanye West record is very good, like all his records (the first 3 are great). I repeat: very good. the problem I have w/ giving this one "great" status, however, is his juveni...le lyrics/assertions/allusions are the worst they've ever been on any records; and there a lots of them on this one. they're just finally annoying me. since day #1 he's had a certifiable 'wack' style (one of the reasons many don't like him, and I do), and truth be told, has never strung together a complete record w/out some amount of weak-azz/bad lyrics. but the music/beats/vocals/songwriting/production and even good lyrics always overshadowed those. once again, the songs/vocals/guest contributions/beats & arrangements are off the charts/great on this new one. but it's littered w/ more bad/weak/immature lyrics than ever before. so many, it gets in the way, for me. was kind of hoping he'd get better in that regard. plus, Jay Z's on it (still), who's terrible, as usual.

Our Great Sin - by Devin Coldewey

2011-02-02T22:27:00.007-05:00

I just came across this today. It's fabulous. Have no idea who Devin Coldewey is, but i like him immediately. sj

Our Great Sin
Devin Coldewey
Feb 1, 2011

I recently watched, like many of our readers, the interview (1, 2) with Mike Daisey regarding the conditions under which Apple products are made in China. And at the risk of fomenting conflict with Mr. Daisey, I would like to editorialize on the topic in slightly broader and harsher terms.

Actually, it’s not that I disagree with the man, exactly. It’s that he doesn’t go far enough, and in doing so conveniently avoids requiring himself or anyone else from doing anything but being concerned. If you’re going to take on ideas like globalism, corporate responsibility, and cross-cultural morality, you don’t get off that easy. You can’t establish a predicate like “the way our lifestyle is made possible is immoral” and somehow avoid unpleasant conclusions.

The “great sin” isn’t Apple’s, or any one of the other major international corporations that use Foxconn or similar megafactories. And it isn’t Foxconn’s either. It’s clearly, inescapably, ours.

Now, I’m not going to get all Das Kapital on you. The idea here is simpler and closer to home than some grand idea of political and economic metatheory. The basic fact is this: an “ethical” iPhone would be too expensive. That’s literally all there is to it (replace iPhone with your device of choice). Everything follows from our own unwillingness to pay for the true cost of a device. People want a better world, but they don’t want to pay for it. Nothing new there, really.

To pretend otherwise is plain hypocrisy. The question is whether we are willing to take responsibility for our own immorality? We’re too cheap to care where our goods come from. Admitting to anything less is ridiculous.

There are three primary responses when confronted with incontrovertible proof of your own immorality:

Claim moral status and adjust actions
Claim moral status and justify actions
Claim no moral status and continue actions

There are precious few who will take door number one. It means giving up nearly everything that makes up the life of a first-world citizen. Very little in the way of consumer electronics, cars, and other status symbols is manufactured ethically. Door number one is abandoning the pleasant inequality inherent to the modern world. Can we be expected to do that? I guess it depends entirely on what we expect from ourselves, so I’m going to guess that no, we won’t be doing it.

Door number two is where you’ll find most people. I’m not sure how one does it, but you can apparently take the moral high ground while continuing the actions you condemn. Politicians have no trouble doing this, but their airport-bathroom dealings aren’t usually public (public information, rather). And millions of people will buy bottled water while deploring the state of the third world, and not feel the hypocrisy leaking from every pore. Last year everyone made a lot of noise over the supposed iPhone 4 suicide. The outrage was quickly forgotten and everyone became angry instead at Apple for a design flaw in the device. Easy come, easy go.

click HERE to see original piece and finish reading article (including the link to video interviews Devin is responding to). you'll be glad you did.

Kickspit Underground Rock Festival!!!

2011-02-02T21:51:00.004-05:00

just watch.

for those in the dark, Saturday Night Live is back to it's awesome form, the last several years.

I drank 763 beers last year. how many did you drink?

2011-02-01T21:55:00.020-05:00

As 2009 came to a close, out of nowhere, I had this thought: “I wonder how much beer I drank this year?” Too many, probably, I guessed. A day or two after I had that thought, I happened upon this article detailing how heavy drinkers, as well as just moderate drinkers of beer, have significantly higher risks of developing multiple cancers, such as esophageal, stomach, colon, liver, pancreatic and lung. Sobering, to say the absolute least:

“In general, the odds increased in tandem with the men's lifetime alcohol intake…with several cancers, men who drank at least one beer per day tended to have higher risks than those who drank on a regular, but less-than-daily, basis….when it came to esophageal cancer, for instance, men who drank one to six times per week had an 83 percent higher risk than teetotalers and less-frequent drinkers, while daily drinkers had a three-fold higher risk.”

Just one beer per day? A six-pack per week? Whoa. It’s not like I want to live forever, but I’d prefer to maximize the one life I have on this planet (if it’s not too much effort), and spend my old and alone years suffering in as little pain as possible.

“So,” I thought, “It’s simple: I’ll cut down in 2010, keep track of how much beer I actually drink, and then at the end of the year, I’ll take stock. If need be, I’ll cut down even more, in 2011.”

The very next thought I had was, “I need an easy way to keep track of every beer I drink in 2010. Perhaps there’s an app for this?” Sure enough, there was. Took me 4 seconds to find it. It’s called “Beer Counter.” Brilliant!

So in the first several minutes of 2010, with the press of a finger, I tapped on miPhone, entering the first beer I drank that year. Then another. And another.

I kept track of every single beer I drank last year, whether I was at home, out for dinner, at a rock show, a sports event, out of town, or hanging at a friend’s house. Every single one.

I finished my 763rd beer, as the clock struck midnight, ringing in 2011. That’s an average of 2 beers a day; 15 beers a week; or 64 beers a month. It’s roughly 32 cases a year. I also took pictures of every case of beer I bought. Here are just a few:

A few days into this year, I decided it would be awesome if I could decrease my beer intake from last year, by around 25%. This seemed like a do-able goal, I thought, and I’d be building on the previous year’s decrease.

Well, I’m just finishing my 47th beer right now, 31 days in. That’s just 1.5 beers a day – right on target!

I’ll check in with y’all this time next year for an update…

I always knew she was the cool one...

2011-02-01T21:24:00.008-05:00

After dozens of agonizing and horrific generations of Bush family members, one of them finally - mercifully - breaks the mold and does something compassionate, reasonable, positive, and with people's best interest in mind.

Ghandi, Stephen Colbert, Jesus Christ, & the GOP.

2011-01-26T00:02:00.016-05:00

Stephen Colbert is one of the greatest comedians, simplifiers and messengers of my generation. This video proves it. Here are two quotes from this 4-minute clip.

"If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn't help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we've got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy and then admit that we just don't want to do it."

"Jesus was always flapping his gums about the poor, but not once did he call for tax cuts for the wealthiest two percent of Romans."

(damn embed code is broken from Colbert site, so all I can do is link it for now; click HERE, nonetheless, and watch. it kills!)

Perhaps Mahatma Ghandi said it best:
"I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians.
Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."

John Kerry Serves Up a Reality Check

2011-01-25T23:16:00.005-05:00

From a Crooks and Liars post on Jan 16th. I know it's long, and no, it's not required reading. but it is very good. click title of this post for original piece, and worthy links.

John Kerry gave a speech last week at the Center for American Progress that should become the marching song for every liberal in this country. He was clear: The last 10 years have cost us too much, and if the hyper-partisan tone doesn't change to one of true concern for the direction of this country, we will cede any chance to lead to others.

He hits it all: Infrastructure, energy, debt, climate change. Every point. The one that hit home for me was when he talked about where we might have been, had Bush and the Republicans not unwound progress made during the Clinton administration.

Here's an example. We talk about how the Clinton tax rates generated a surplus, but we stop there. We don't talk about the fact that if the Clinton tax rates had remained in effect, the entire national debt would have been paid off by 2012. Imagine what a difference that would have made in today's dialogue. And more importantly, why aren't we hammering this home every single time one of those self-righteous Republican buffoons stands up and talks about how our national debt is killing the country?

Kerry points out that we would be at a point where our financial position would be at it's strongest point ever. What would that have meant when (or if) the bottom fell out of the economy? Most assuredly, we wouldn't have to be speaking of debt retirement and austerity.

We need to start going there. This shouldn't be swept under the rug. I can't recommend this highly enough. Take an hour out of your day and watch Kerry's speech. He really hits hard on the cost of NOT investing in the country and how it puts us behind on a global basis every single day.

Check out this headline from January 26, 2000, just 11 years ago:

Consumer Confidence Hits an All-Time High; Jobs Called 'Plentiful' : Clinton Sees An Early Payoff of U.S. Debt

Compare it to today's headlines (this one, from the Wall Street Journal, one of the biggest tax-cut pimps):

U.S. Ran $80 Billion Budget Deficit in December

I think we need to give Republicans full credit for everything they did for to us. We should be at least as loud as the anti-hcr folks are, and we should repeat it every single day in public, especially to anyone who still thinks Republicans are fiscally responsible.

Packers at Eagles today!!! ...predictions, analysis, babble

2011-01-09T09:07:00.009-05:00

"YEEE-HAHH!!!" Any day the Philadelphia Eagles are playing in the post-season is a great day! Here's what else I'm thinking...

In one respect, the Philadelphia Eagles dug their own grave by flat-out choking against the Vikings two weeks ago. Instead of resting this weekend w/ a BYE, hosting the Bears next weekend, then needing just one more win to punch their ticket to the SBowl, they now have to win this weekend's very tough game at home vs. Green Bay, travel to Chicago and beat the Bears, then beat Atlanta to make the SBowl; their current scenario made at least two to three times more difficult by getting run over by the Vikings.

But here is the other view: well before the season started, the entire city was collectively resigned to an 8 or 9-win season, and a "let Kolb take his lumps year." Look what actually happened: Kolb goes out w/ a concussion in week #1, and Michael Vick, now the every week starting QB for the first time out of prison, undeniably kicks ass the entire season. Just kills it. I like Kolb; both as a person and as a QB (although I still can't tell how good he's going to be), but he's no Mike Vick, and it's safe to say we wouldn't have a post-season game if Kolb was our starting QB all year. Mike Vick was on fire this season, and has carried this team all year. So in a way, we’re playing with “house money.” This team exceeded every expectation this year ALREADY; will it even hurt if we lose today?

Oh, side note: spare me the "Tom Brady is the MVP" assertions. While Tom Brady - and Brian Bellicheck for that matter - is again (sigh), having a phenomenal and a "just another day at the office" year, Michael Vick is the MVP of this league. The only thing that might stop the various writers/judges/voters of the multiple MVP awards given out each year from awarding Vick those accolades, is the fact he's a recent convicted felon, guilty of extremely despicable and depraved acts. But on the field, he truly has done more for his team than any one person in the NFL has, including Tom Brady.

But I digress...

Let it be said, I do find this weekend's game against Green Bay the Bird's biggest obstacle to the Superbowl. For various reasons - that I can hopefully think about more on Monday - I don't see any other matchups on their path to the Big Game being as difficult as this one. At absolute best, I see this game as a coin flip, with the most realistic, best-case scenario for the Eagles, being a last minute field goal or game-winning TD, perhaps on an interception return to seal the deal as time runs out. Andy Reid, Vick, McDermott, and the rest of the Eagles need to do everything right to win this game. If they don't do everything right, they need to get one or two big breaks that go their way, similar to the ones they got vs. the Giants a couple weeks ago (Giants punting to D. Jax, getting the onsides kick, an INT at the right time, a Special Teams TD, etc). Conversely, I don't think Green Bay needs to do 'everything right' or 'catch a break or two' to win. They just need to keep playing the way they've been playing. If Eagles do that, they'll lose. Let's not forget, for 52 minutes of that last Giants game, the Eagles were outplayed on every side of the ball, and our coaches were taken to school. It wasn't even close. Green Bay are definitely better than the Giants (they beat them soundly, 45-17, the day after Christmas). But I don't see a Green Bay blowout by any stretch; In No-Limit Hold 'em terms, I'd say Birds have about "9-outs, twice," or a 36% chance of winning.

Why not more of a chance? well, let's see...

Green Bay has been playing better than us, plain and simple. They've won 7 of their last 10 games, and the last two they lost were because Aaron Rodgers was on the sidelines w/ a concussion. If he was in, they’d have won 9 of their last 10 (and finished the season w/ a record of 12 -4). Even w/ their back up in, a few weeks ago, they gave the Pats a run for their money in New England, losing to them just 31-27 (that’s a win if Rodgers played). The Eagles have won 6 of their last 10 (though I’m sure they would’ve beaten the cowpatties last week if their starters played), but have given up 24 points and more in 7 of them. They beat Dallas by only 3 in week #14; with the exception of the ‘almost-miracle’ 8 minutes of play at the meadowlands, they looked terrible; and against the Vikings (a bad Dome team) at home 2 weeks ago, they played their worst game of the season (perhaps the last couple of seasons). This is to say nothing of Andy Reid/Morningwheig forgetting how to coach/adjust/call plays the entire game.

I looked at team stats, rankings, etc; generally speaking, the teams are evenly matched. Birds are 2nd & 3rd in yards per game and points per game, respectively. Green Bay’s defense is 5th in points against per game, and 2nd in points against per game. Something obviously will give there… However, the Eagles defense has been inconsistent all season, and after 16 games is 21st in the league in giving up points. Packers are 9th in scoring, averaging 24 points a game (Birds are averaging 27). Packers defense is 5th against the pass, Eagles are 14th against the pass. Both of these teams pass all the time. But the Eagles defense, and especially their secondary has looked downright abysmal the last several games: Sean McDermott (defensive coordinator) has not been able to call a good game, and the secondary players have looked slow and out of position at every turn.

The key question for our defense is whether or not the Eagles can get to Aaron Rodgers. And they need to do it w/ their front 4, or maybe a 5th rusher. All-out blitzes are out of the question, because Rodgers is one of the best QB’s in football (I’d put him 4th, in a tie w/ Phillip Rivers, after Manning, Brady & Brees), and combined with their super-deep & talented WR/TE corps, our secondary is nowhere near good enough to handle them on their own (man to man). If we can rush, put pressure on Rodgers, and at the same time cover all their pass-catchers effectively, we can win (we need to double-team Greg Jennings most of the time). The good thing is, we don’t need to be that concerned w/ their run game; it’s not that good. They can run, they just don’t usually need to.

There are two concerns I have with our offense (versus their defense). The first, is the same issue I’ve had w/ Reid since I’ve first heard of him: will we run the ball enough? For all intents and purposes, the answer is always ‘no.’ Somehow we’re 5th in the league in yards rushing per game, which is awesome, but we still don’t run enough. That ranking is due primarily to LeSean McCoy’s talent, and rushing attempts when we’ve already had a lead, I’m sure of it (I can’t remember if we’re even in the top half of the league, in rushing attempts).

Now look, Green Bay’s defense is 5th in the NFL against the pass. They’re 19th against the run. We’re 5th in the league in rushing, and for the first time in Andy’s career, his dream of passing to set up the run is actually running! What would YOU do, pass or run against them? Exactly. We need to RUN against them in this game; early and often, even if it’s not working right away! Run, run, and run some more. THEN, try killing them w/ the pass. But Andy Reid TRULY does hate running the football. He doesn’t see the value in it, and he doesn’t commit to it. I’d say he’s actually committed to running the football somewhere in the neighborhood of 4 to 6 games, in his 12-years here. Anyone remember a time when the Eagles ran three running plays in a row? Me neither. Running makes Andy Reid sick to his stomach. But he needs to be comfortable with being sick in this game.

The second concern I have is whether our coaching staff can do it’s job and find out a good enough way to a) keep Vick from getting pummeled like he has been as of late and b) give him enough time to throw. The aforementioned running will help out a lot. How about having a bunch of screens ready to go, like they did not do during the Vikings matchup? How about two-tight end sets, or an extra blocker?

I am confident the Eagles will pass with some degree of proficiency/success, perhaps with a lot of success. I am confident Vick will have a very good day running/scrambling/passing; I expect him to have a great game. I expect the crowd to be insane. But that won’t be enough to win.

In closing, we need to score a lot of points, somewhere in the neighborhood of 27 to 30, to win. If our defense can keep the Packers to 25 points, I think we’ll win. The way to do it, against this Green Bay Packers team, is to get pressure on Rodgers rushing only 4 or 5 players; run the football with some consistency EARLY in the game, and protect Vick, giving him enough time to throw and work his magic.

Then the road to the Superbowl begins in earnest.

If you want it this way…
Pack O vs Birds D: edge to Pack.
Birds O vs Pack D: even
Coaching: even.
Special Teams: even.
Home field, crowd noise & “Mojo”: edge to Birds

Final score prediction:
Packers 34
Eagles 26

...oh, and the over/under on Morningwheig/Reid passing on 2nd and short (1 or 2 yds to go) or 3rd and short, when they should be running, is 4.5; a hair lower than usual.

40% of Americans still believe in creationism!

2011-01-09T08:59:00.003-05:00

Seriously? Yep. Seriously.

A new Gallup poll, released Dec. 17, reveals that 40 percent of Americans still believe that humans were created by God within the last 10,000 years. This number is slightly down from a previous high of 47 percent in 1993 and 1999.

Another 38 percent of respondents believe that humans have evolved from more basic organisms but with God playing a role in the process.

A mere 16 percent of respondents subscribed to the belief of "secular evolution": that humans have evolved with no divine guidance. However, this number has nearly doubled from nine percent of respondents in a poll from 1982.

The poll also revealed that beliefs in creationism and evolution are strongly related to levels of education attained. When results are narrowed to those with college degrees, only 37 percent of respondents maintain beliefs in creationism. Meanwhile, the belief in evolution without the aid of God rises to 21 percent.

With regards to political affiliation, a majority of Republicans (52 percent) subscribe to creationist beliefs. This is compared to only 34 percent among Democrats and Independents.

Views on human origins vary based on church attendance. Of those who attend church on a weekly basis, 60 percent believe in creationism while a mere 2 percent subscribe to "secular evolution". These numbers are flipped among those who rarely or never attend religious services. In this group, only 24 percent believe in creationism while 39 percent believe in evolution without divine guidance. This represents the only subset of data reported where "secular evolution" beats out creationism.

"Say it ain't so, Sal!"

2011-01-09T01:59:00.006-05:00

Sal Paolantonio is dead to me. he should be dead to anyone who considers themselves a philadelphia sports fan. not that he was ever great at reporting on, writing about, or analyzing philly sports, but now he's just embarrassing us. it's not that he just willfully misreported the truth (to the rest of the country), rather he did it just to make headlines on ESPN. in my neighborhood that's called a sellout.

I had to rewind my shitty comcast HD box (my 4th one in the last calendar year - HOLLA!), to make sure I really heard Sal say what I thought I heard him say on ESPN earlier tonight (I'm not paraphrasing, these were his precise words): "The Eagles offensive MVP this year is not Michael Vick. It's LeSean McCoy," as he led into a story about the Birds/Packers matchup later on Sunday.

Wow. He is either dumber than Howard Eskin and Tony Bruno combined, or he hasn't watched the Philadelphia Eagles this season. I've met the guy and talked to him before. I liked him. Now, I think he sucks ass. Sorry, it's just I expect a tad bit of objectivity when it comes to my sports consumption, especially coming from Philadelphia reporters who are from here.

Cliff Lee rejoins Phillies!

2010-12-14T01:18:00.002-05:00

this happened just moments ago. as a Phillies fan and Philly fan, I am beyond stoked. Of course, it never hurts to see the Yankees get fucked either. Is this now the best rotation in the modern era; all time? Who knows? Not me! But my other thought is this: how much longer until there are LeBron James comparisons, with regards to Cliff Lee's decision? There are some similarities, no? ...going to play w/ friends...loves the city...taking advantage of free agency...took less money....spurned New York... going to the team he felt had the best chance of bringing him a ring.. just sayin!

Rat Girl: A Memoir, by Kristin Hersh

2010-12-12T21:25:00.008-05:00

Kristin Hersh, primary songwriter and singer for the hard-to-categorize 80s/90s band Throwing Muses, has published a memoir, Rat Girl: A Memoir. It is based on a diary she kept from the spring of 1985 through the winter of 1986, a pivotal year in which her band moved from Providence, RI, to Boston. They became a fixture on the local music scene, began to get radio play, and eventually caught the attention of – and landed a recording contract with – 4AD Records. It was a year Hersh begins homeless, sleeping on the beach in Newport or in the abandoned apartment of a dead man in Providence or in the backyards of friends. She flees her own apartment because she fears its “evil energy” – this is the first indication of a mental illness, perhaps triggered by a bicycling accident, that deteriorates into a bipolar disorder and eventual breakdown. She’s prescribed lithium, which among other side effects causes her hands to shake uncontrollably when she plays guitar. Then just when 4AD offers to sign the band, she finds out she’s pregnant. She decides to stop her drug regimen and have the baby. When the band records their debut album, Kristin has to play the guitar sidesaddle to accommodate her belly, but at least her hands aren’t shaking. She is 19 years old. Vividly written, heroically composed in its accounts of chaos, blunt and unsentimental when confronting the series of personal disasters that accompanied the band’s emergence, Rat Girl is one of the best coming-of-age stories I’ve read in a long time.

As with Throwing Muses, so with this book: the high quality of the work isn’t in question so much as whether the work will find its ideal audience. (It was at #17,250 on Amazon’s Books List today.) Boston has long been an incubator for high-profile rock and roll, and Throwing Muses was just one among many bands that came out of Boston in the mid-to-late 80s – The Lemonheads, Dinosaur Jr., ‘til Tuesday, Mission of Burma, and The Pixies among them. And Throwing Muses’ other songwriter was Tanya Donnelly, who later had her own band, Belly, and teamed up with Kim Deal of the Pixies to form The Breeders. Donnelly is also Hersh’s stepsister and plays a supporting role in Rat Girl. But it is easy to see (and you may remember) how the Muses got lost in that crowd; they did for me at the time – I can remember the college-radio hits like “Dizzy” and “Counting Backwards,” but flipping through my CD collection, I realized that I didn’t own anything by the Muses. Maybe in my attic are cassettes of The Real Ramona and Hunkpapa, or maybe I just heard them so often on friends’ stereos or on WFNX that it just seemed like I owned them. However, I have to admit that I found the Muses less accessible than those other bands, all of whose CDs I have long since ripped to my iTunes library. Belly’s debut sold more copies than the entire Muses catalog – and why not? Belly was smart, stylish, complex but catchy, great to play on headphones, in the car, or when hanging out with friends. Throwing Muses was also smart, but complicated as well as complex. Hersh’s singing is dynamic, forceful, and passionate, but also often agonized. In Rat Girl, we can see from where some of that agony came.

Hersh explains in her introduction that she recently came across the diary she kept that year. A painter friend had suggested it as a way to fill “the interim between making noise and artful sublimation.” She has reworked that diary into a memoir, and she sets off typographically those excerpts of the diary that she’s repeating verbatim; the rest, by implication, is an after-the-fact reconstruction of the diary’s raw contents. She also drops in lines from her songs – some from that time period, others from later work – when the lines resonate with the incidents in the story. This because, “Songs’re weird: they tell the future and they tell the past, but they can’t seem to tell the difference.” Statements like this provide clues to Hersh’s method. Rat Girl reads like a diary insofar as we follow Kristin’s day-to-day life in a straight sequence throughout the year, but the hand of the memoirist also shows in the development some of the incidents receive, the eloquence of certain passages that seems fresh and authentic but not spontaneous, and the ordering of certain images (the snake, for instance, about which more later) that gives the book a thematic coherence. The total effect seems consistent with Hersh’s stated intention: “This is my old diary’s story, riddled with enormous holes and true.”

In the first of the book’s four sections, Kristin is preoccupied with writing songs and then figuring out how to get her band’s performances recognized in the relative backwater of the Providence music scene (then as now, the Pawtucket Red Sox to the more famous franchise up I-95 at Fenway). She hangs out with painters and musicians and junkies in the park. She takes occasional classes at an unnamed Rhode Island college (which seems to be Salve Regina College in Newport) where her father teaches philosophy. Hersh’s father is a very minor character, and her mother, divorced from Hersh’s father and remarried to Donnelly’s, makes only minor appearances. The teenage Kristin swerves alarmingly from one predicament to the next, sometimes literally: her old car has a damaged exhaust system and Kristin says, “I’ve perfected the art of slowing to a stop” rather than trust her failing brakes. One wants to ask, Where are this child’s parents?! In fact, the closest Kristin comes to having adult supervision comes in the character of Betty, the “oldest student at the college” introduced by Hersh’s father to Kristin, who at fourteen was the youngest student at the college. Betty is Betty Hutton, a former Hollywood and TV starlet of some note – how the star of Preston Sturges’s 1944 The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek came to be Kristin Hersh’s mentor in 1985 in Newport is never explained. But Betty gives Kristin unstinting moral support and a steady stream of earnest (if cryptic) life-advice either in the student coffee shops or hiding out in the women’s room of the library. She faithfully attends Throwing Muses concerts, and at one moment seems a real-life Norma Desmond, in the next a guardian angel. (Hersh dedicates the book to her memory.) But until the band is under contract with 4AD and the company’s producer needs to coax performances from the erratic and third-trimester Kristin, no adult character is important enough to be given a name. For instance, Kristin is counseled by a psychiatrist when she gets her diagnosis of bipolar disorder, and he helps her figure out how to back off her drugs when she decides to have her baby. But his name, she tells us, is unpronounceable. He is helpful and sympathetic – Kristin admits to him that she can’t remember his name so she calls him “Doctor Seven Syllables” and he chuckles, “Hee hee. Call me Seven” – but he’s also just one of the many “soothers” who can’t tell her how to be both a musician and a happy, healthy human being. The story’s central problem is that Kristin doesn’t want to be soothed or normal or happy. Nor does she want to lose access to “evil Kristin” – the voice she hears coming through her band’s best demo tapes. And worse, she doesn’t like that on lithium she no longer hears the voices or “sees the colors” that possess her when she is writing songs.

The tension between art and madness, the capacity of drugs to either conjure or soothe one’s demons, and the question of what will make a person truly happy: these themes put Hersh’s book not only in the tradition of rock and roll classics like Jim Carroll’s The Basketball Diaries, but also in the broader scope of coming-of-age tales, from Catcher in the Rye on the popular and literary side to films like Igby Goes Down or Rushmore on the cult-cinema side. Hersh even riffs on a famous scene from Salinger’s novel: Kristin and Tanya are in a green room, waiting to go on stage and keeping the pregnant Kristin out of the nausea-triggering, smoke-filled nightclub. Kristin lies flat on the floor and they are reading graffiti on the wall. Tanya, Holden Caulfield-like, is annoyed by a “fuck you” written on the wall.

Tea tries to rub the fuck you off the wall with her thumb. The wall bends in ominously. “Careful,” I say. “That could be load-bearing graffiti.”
“I don’t understand,” she says. “Are they trying to make us feel bad? Why? That’s not nice.” She thinks. “Should we feel sorry for a person who writes fuck you on a wall?”
We both look at it. “Could it be an ironic fuck you?” I ask. We continue staring. It doesn’t look ironic. “Fuck just means sex, though, right?” I say. She nods. “So maybe they’re talking about expressing love.”
“Yeah, probably,” she says. “Like love ya!”
“Love ya lots!”

Holden worries in Catcher in the Rye that, “If you had a million years to do it in, you couldn't rub out even half the Fuck you signs in the world. It’s impossible.” For him, this impossibility is depressing, a cause for despair. But Kristin doesn’t rub it out – she assigns irony to it, which subverts its obscenity. She hasn’t made the impossible possible, but she has disarmed it. It’s a great example of how Hersh discovers in her younger, troubled self the assertions of a deeper sanity.

In the book’s second section, Hersh describes her breakdown, but in terms that are so closely linked to her composition of songs that Kristin doesn’t – and we don’t – realize that what’s happening to her is psychosis. She just thinks she’s got insomnia, or that she’s still not fully recovered from the bicycling accident. Since that accident, she believes she doesn’t write songs; rather she hears songs and then writes them down. She also believes the accident was no “accident,” but a witch casting a spell on her. She falls asleep one night in a friend’s apartment and wakes to an hallucination:

I see the snake before I’m fully awake. By the time I sit up, it’s gone. You gotta be quick with a snake.
Then I see it again out of the corner of my eye. Shooting my hand out, I reach for it. For a split second, I see something that looks like an X-ray of a snake, but all I feel is the cool wooden floor. I stare at my hand, flooded with adrenaline. There is no snake.
My mind races. What’s the vocabulary for this?

This is about as good as a description of psychosis gets – not that I can vouch for it as an accurate or true description of psychosis, not from experience anyway. But as description, this and the scenes that follow ring true; they convincingly create the effect of how words break down. It’s not Hersh’s vocabulary that fails, but the syntax that holds vocabulary together. The paragraphs become shorter, sentences become fragmented, dialog becomes telegraphic, even semaphoric – just gesturing and flailing. Kristin can offer only a set of unanchored impressions or, in reply to something said by others, only “Huh?” The problem, she realizes, is that the symptoms of madness described by her clinicians are also her personality:

They also say it didn’t happen suddenly.
“Are you sure?” I asked them. I went to sleep on Jeff’s floor and then woke up broken. That’s pretty sudden. But they say I’ve spent the last couple years living with symptoms like… well, like my entire personality.

In the second half of the book, as the band’s fortunes improve, Kristin is trying to understand whether she’s sick and the “therapeutic level” of drugs makes her better or whether she’s a musician “muted by medication.” This dilemma is never resolved. Instead, Hersh presents a series of scenes that portray the struggle. After one particularly intense vocal in a studio recording a demo, she has this exchange with the producer:

“Are you okay?” Gary asks me in my headphones after a particularly yucky take.
“Whaddya mean?” A young rat stops and looks at me. “I wasn’t talking to you,” I whisper to it.
“You weren’t?” Gary whispers back.
“Yes. I mean no, I was.”
He pauses. “No, you were?”
“What did you mean, am I okay? Did it sound bad?”
“It sounded terrible,” he says. “In a good way.”
“Well, then, I guess I’m okay.”

So who is the crazy person here? And if it isn’t Gary, who thinks that you can sound “terrible in a good way,” then is it the singer who talks to hallucinated rats? Isn’t it crazy to be happy to sound terrible in a good way? The impressive power of the book comes from Hersh’s insistence on depicting these problems without resolving them. There is no simple answer. There’s just the complicated, distinctive music of Throwing Muses.

Instead of moving toward resolution, the story becomes further complicated when Kristin realizes she is pregnant. “I thought birth control worked,” she says to the pregnancy-test indicator. It is a terrific piece of understatement, and the whole thought process from the moment she knows she’s pregnant, through the decision to have the baby, to the realization that she’s putting at risk the long-awaited recording deal is handled in less than a page. When did she get pregnant? Who’s the father? These questions are ignored, passed over in the narrative. Because this isn’t a rock and roll star’s kiss-and-tell-all book: there is no “sex and drugs and rock and roll” here, at least not in the customary sense. There’s no sex at all, in fact, and the drugs are at first prescribed and later abandoned. What’s left is the music, the art. Or better, in this context – what’s left is creation, in several forms.

One can imagine the band’s reaction to Kristin’s pregnancy at just this point in their career. But as portrayed in the book, the band had already accommodated itself to Kristin’s illness and now they are ready to support her in her pregnancy. They help her select healthy foods; they insist the drummer “play quietly” during rehearsals; they decode the labels on vitamin supplements – is Vitamin C ascorbic acid or citric acid? Kristin has this latter conversation with her bass player while also discussing a fan’s reaction to Kristin’s pregnancy – a male fan during a show yells at her from the audience, “Haven’t you ever heard of birth control?”

“He was pissed off,” Leslie says.
“What the hell does that mean? What was he pissed off about?”
“Well,” she explains, “most people think teenage pregnancy’s a bad thing.”
I look at her. “It is a bad thing.” Leslie takes a bottle of pink juice out of the fridge, then sits in the seat across from me. She nods. “Nineteen is hardly a teenage, though,” I say.
“Yeah. But most people think you’re thirteen.”

That she looks 13 is news to the 19 year-old Kristin, but the memoirist Hersh had made it clear all along that part of what makes her younger self so bizarre and exceptional is that she looks so young and her intensity can be not just unattractive but off-putting. The pregnancy, seen this way, is just another example of Throwing Muses’s knack for bad p.r.

Which returns to my original point: Throwing Muses always found it hard to find its audience. They could be unattractive and off-putting. In this respect, Kristin Hersh belongs to the line of women rockers for whom sexiness was not the major selling point. Patti Smith is the most obvious precursor for Hersh, and in this book Hersh, like Smith, is a crafty and craft-full worker in words disengaged from music. But Throwing Muses could also be off-putting in the sense that their quirkiness defied conventional expectations about what a pop band or rock band or punk band could be. Rat Girl also frustrates if you were hoping for a conventional or “soothing” ending: There is no grand, climactic scene in the delivery room, nor an elaborate, celebratory record-release party. We never learn the baby’s name and wouldn’t know the gender if Kristin didn’t tell us, on the last page, “He’s my baby, so everything’s okay.” The next line, the last line is, “I absolutely did not invent this.”

Throwing Muses held together for nearly a decade, producing a string of critically admired commercial failures. Kristin Hersh continued -- and continues -- to record solo albums. Her highest-charting song was “Your Ghost” from her 1994 solo album, Hips and Makers. You can also find on line – for free! – her most recent album, Power + Light, with her current band project, 50 Foot Wave, which I also recommend highly. Its sound is closer to the take-no-prisoners rock of Throwing Muses than the acoustic arrangements of the solo albums. It’s a nice pairing – the memoir and the recent album. There is a sense in both of an artist who has maintained a clear vision of what her work should be. Rock music has always been about the problems of growing up; but it always has problems actually growing up. At 19, looking 13, Kristin Hersh suddenly grew up much too fast in just one year. Her “soothers” worried that she wouldn’t survive, that she’d kill herself – 20% of people diagnosed as bipolar, Dr. Seven Syllables tells her, eventually do kill themselves. But Rat Girl isn’t the typical “I survived my Rock and Roll Youth” memoir. It is always about how to create art, how to go down the rabbit holes and rat holes of imagination and what you might come back up with. Yeats says that politics is the argument with others and art is the argument with oneself. Hersh lived through and seems still to thrive in the argument with herself: these seem to be the only terms that ever really mattered to her, and to that extent she has given us an excellent portrait of the artist as a young woman.

Many scenes in Rat Girl are located along the stretch of Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue from the Rathskeller (“The Rat”) punk club in Kenmore Square to The Paradise showcase nightclub in Boston University’s West Campus. In 1985 and 1986 – not to mention a good number of years on either side of those dates – I was also located on that same stretch of road, a graduate student at B.U. I was more likely found in the Mugar Library, a couple blocks from The Paradise, or Fenway Park, just around the corner from The Rat, but I assume that I crossed paths on Comm Ave with Kristin Hersh or her bandmates at some point in those days. I’m a few years older than Hersh, and in 1986 I was teaching freshman comp and Intro to Lit courses to students Kristin’s age – an undertaking profoundly less interesting than fronting a rock band and even less likely to result in commercial success for its practitioners. However, teaching gave me the authentic non-commercial reward of working daily with smart, young people just discovering how language – both as words written and words read – is a powerful tool of self-discovery and self-invention. And I have happy memories of those times when I managed to put a good book in the hands of a person who was transformed by it. Often these were books about coming of age – Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping and Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer, for instance, were novels that, for the right kid at the right time, could make a brilliant, ordering light go off in that kid’s head.

It seems to me that Rat Girl, for the right reader, could be similarly transformative. Hersh’s prose is compelling, her tale is riveting, her self-deprecation is charming, and in her story, she doesn’t just come of age, she saves her own life. I suspect that there are many readers eager to hear this kind of story. I’ll bet that along the sidewalks of Comm Ave – along sidewalks anywhere – there are plenty young, intense, smart, unattractive Rat Girls and Rat Boys who can’t figure out if they are mad or possessed or just terribly out-of-place. Should such readers find this book, Hersh will have managed an impressive accomplishment: she will have demonstrated that the book (or song) you write as an act of self-preservation may also throw a lifeline to the reader (or listener) who needs to know that such acts occur and who can find there their own strength to persevere – that is, she will have found her audience.

Andy "&€%#£+! " Reid

2010-12-05T00:21:00.000-05:00

Q: How many Andy Reids does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: None. Just pass the ball.

sent via miPhone...

What the Fuck has Obama Done so Far?

2010-11-04T20:20:00.003-04:00

If you haven't seen this yet, you're missing out, plain and simple. Most of us know how much Obama, Pelosi, Harry Reid and the Democrats have accomplished the last two years. Too many people don't. Especially the less-educated and less-informed people of the country (Rush Limabaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity to name just a few).

Well, when you click on the title of this post, or here, you'll get dozens of the policies, bills and legislation that Obama and his administration have established and implemented the last two years, in a "couldn't-be-easier-to-read" format. Next time your whining "independent" or libertarian friend alludes to him not doing anything, just point them towards whatthefuckhasobamadonesofar.com and tell them to shut the fuck up.

I don't know who Shavanna Miller, Will Carlough and Richard Boenigk are, but they are to be seriously commended for thinking this up. Great job peoples!

below are just two screen shots. check the rest out now, here!

fuck the GOP, fuck the Teabaggers & fuck the "Independent" voter.

2010-11-04T20:17:00.002-04:00

Get a grip, people. Do just a smidge of #$%^*(@ homework!

2010-09-29T21:21:00.005-04:00

from Atlantic's Daily Dish (image via Mark Shea)...sj

It's easy as pie to generalize to millions of people the crimes of a few. We Catholics have had it done to us. And we can have it done to us again. So we should be bloody cautious about insane schemes to do it to 18 million fellow citizens.

The grotesque excuse "But the the first amendment is dead, and Islam killed it. There is no 'freedom of speech' or 'freedom of religion' with the threat of Muslim violence hanging over your head" is rubbish. Cancelling the rights of 307 million people because you are, by your own admission, afraid is neither patriotism, nor courage, nor Christian fortitude. It is cowardice. And it is extra-special cowardice when you are ready to cancel your most precious national heritage because you are afraid of a speck.

Eat the Rich: Bill Maher's "New Rule: Rich People Who Complain About Being Vilified Should be Vilified"

2010-09-29T20:27:00.005-04:00

He consistently nails it. Whatever the 'it' is. This New Rule from his recent "Real Time with Bill Maher" -sj

New Rule: The next rich person who publicly complains about being vilified by the Obama administration must be publicly vilified by the Obama administration. It's so hard for one person to tell another person what constitutes being "rich", or what tax rate is "too much." But I've done some math that indicates that, considering the hole this country is in, if you are earning more than a million dollars a year and are complaining about a 3.6% tax increase, then you are by definition a greedy asshole.

And let's be clear: that's 3.6% only on income above 250 grand -- your first 250, that's still on the house. Now, this week we got some horrible news: that one in seven Americans are now living below the poverty line. But I want to point you to an American who is truly suffering: Ben Stein. You know Ben Stein, the guy who got rich because when he talks it sounds so boring it's actually funny. He had a game show on Comedy Central, does eye drop commercials, doesn't believe in evolution? Yeah, that asshole. I kid Ben -- so, the other day Ben wrote an article about his struggle. His struggle as a wealthy person facing the prospect of a slightly higher marginal tax rate. Specifically, Ben said that when he was finished paying taxes and his agents, he was left with only 35 cents for every dollar he earned. Which is shocking, Ben Stein has an agent? I didn't know Broadway Danny Rose was still working.

Ben whines in his article about how he's worked for every dollar he has -- if by work you mean saying the word "Bueller" in a movie 25 years ago. Which doesn't bother me in the slightest, it's just that at a time when people in America are desperate and you're raking in the bucks promoting some sleazy Free Credit Score dot-com... maybe you shouldn't be asking us for sympathy. Instead, you should be down on your knees thanking God and/or Ronald Reagan that you were lucky enough to be born in a country where a useless schmuck who contributes absolutely nothing to society can somehow manage to find himself in the top marginal tax bracket.

And you're welcome to come on the show anytime.

Now I can hear you out there saying, "Come on Bill, don't be so hard on Ben Stein, he does a lot of voiceover work, and that's hard work." Ok, it's true, Ben is hardly the only rich person these days crying like a baby who's fallen off his bouncy seat. Last week Mayor Bloomberg of New York complained that all his wealthy friends are very upset with mean ol' President Poopy-Pants: He said they all say the same thing: "I knew I was going to have to pay more taxes. But I didn't expect to be vilified." Poor billionaires -- they just can't catch a break.

First off, far from being vilified, we bailed you out -- you mean we were supposed to give you all that money and kiss your ass, too? That's Hollywood you're thinking of. FDR, he knew how to vilify; this guy, not so much. And second, you should have been vilified -- because you're the vill-ains! I'm sure a lot of you are very nice people. And I'm sure a lot of you are jerks. In other words, you're people. But you are the villains. Who do you think outsourced all the jobs, destroyed the unions, and replaced workers with desperate immigrants and teenagers in China. Joe the Plumber?

And right now, while we run trillion dollar deficits, Republicans are holding America hostage to the cause of preserving the Bush tax cuts that benefit the wealthiest 1% of people, many of them dead. They say that we need to keep taxes on the rich low because they're the job creators. They're not. They're much more likely to save money through mergers and outsourcing and cheap immigrant labor, and pass the unemployment along to you.

Americans think rich people must be brilliant; no -- just ruthless. Meg Whitman is running for Governor out here, and her claim to fame is, she started e-Bay. Yes, Meg tapped into the Zeitgeist, the zeitgeist being the desperate need of millions of Americans to scrape a few dollars together by selling the useless crap in their garage. What is e-Bay but a big cyber lawn sale that you can visit without putting your clothes on?

Another of my favorites, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann said, "I don't know where they're going to get all this money, because we're running out of rich people in this country." Actually, we have more billionaires here in the U.S. than all the other countries in the top ten combined, and their wealth grew 27% in the last year. Did yours? Truth is, there are only two things that the United States is not running out of: Rich people and bullshit. Here's the truth: When you raise taxes slightly on the wealthy, it obviously doesn't destroy the economy -- we know this, because we just did it -- remember the '90's? It wasn't that long ago. You were probably listening to grunge music, or dabbling in witchcraft. Clinton moved the top marginal rate from 36 to 39% -- and far from tanking, the economy did so well he had time to get his dick washed.

Even 39% isn't high by historical standards. Under Eisenhower, the top tax rate was 91%. Under Nixon, it was 70%. Obama just wants to kick it back to 39 -- just three more points for the very rich. Not back to 91, or 70. Three points. And they go insane. Steve Forbes said that Obama, quote "believes from his inner core that people... above a certain income have more than they should have and that many probably have gotten it from ill-gotten ways." Which they have. Steve Forbes, of course, came by his fortune honestly: he inherited it from his gay egg-collecting, Elizabeth Taylor fag-hagging father, who inherited it from his father. Of course then they moan about the inheritance tax, how the government took 55% percent when Daddy died -- which means you still got 45% for doing nothing more than starting out life as your father's pecker-snot.

We don't hate rich people, but have a little humility about how you got it and stop complaining. Maybe the worst whiner of all: Stephen Schwarzman, #69 on Forbes' list of richest Americans, compared Obama's tax hike to "when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939." Wow. If Obama were Hitler, Mr. Schwarzman, I think your tax rate would be the least of your worries.

"get ready, criminals: hell is coming to breakfast"

2010-09-15T21:54:00.011-04:00

Obama nails it. No ambiguity. Elizabeth Warren has been hired to protect Americans from evil, and put financial institutions, predatory lenders, and other criminal entities in check. This is what real change looks like, baby!

clicking on title of this post will bring you to HuffPo piece, filled with mad information and details on who she is, why she rules, and what the particulars are; including an incredibly-simple breakdown of just how easy it was for the mortgage brokers and financial services industry to hoodwink americans and just how they were responsible for the near-depression we find ourselves still in. Following are some excerpts....sj

"Anyone who knows her knows that she would only take a position that had real meat to it," said one source who had worked closely with Warren in the past. "I mean, seriously, you've seen her in action. Do you really think she's going to be anyone's lapdog? She bites hard."

"Republicans, too, began to endorse her. A former top official in the Reagan administration said a vote for Warren was akin to a vote for capitalism and free markets."

"Later that year, her opposition widened to include much of the House GOP. Republicans on the House Financial Services Committee introduced an amendment to the pending financial reform legislation intended to prevent Warren from ever heading the agency. It was defeated."

Wanna see why she rules? Watch this...

my current favorite song: Cold Cave's "Love Comes Close"

2010-09-15T00:01:00.005-04:00

just discovered this. love it. poetic. sad. beautiful. and although one is instantly reminded of many other great artists from the past (and perhaps some bad ones), upon hearing this song and band, it doesn't bother me in this case, like it does other times; I still find this song highly original, and downright lovely.

"Love Comes Close" by Cold Cave

Everything changes - will all change again
Sun sheds the light as the life sheds its skin.
You kiss your wish to the heart of the world
Secrets are safe with, will not break the spell.

Come on, lets go home.
Buried in your womb.
Sing a song of death,
Til' there's none left.

Love comes close
But chooses to spare me
Death comes close
But ceases to take me
I want to twist, the knife a bit deeper
To siphon the love from the hearts I believed in
Look outside, world is exploding,
Stay inside, still never knowing.
Taking cover, with each other,
Sleeping off the century of hope.

Everydays changing will remain the same.
Silhouettes shy as rain rots the drain.
Everydays decay debases the dream,
The ghosts that will haunt you are not what they seem.
Still you say you're dead
To depravity,
But that can't be true, 'cause I know you can hear me.

Love comes close
But chooses to spare me
Death comes close
But ceases to take me
I want to twist, the knife a bit deeper
To siphon the love from the hearts I believed in
Look outside, world is exploding,
Stay inside, still never knowing.
Taking cover, with each other,
Sleeping off the century of hope.

(repeat once more)

2010-08-30T23:31:00.004-04:00

the silly "mosque at ground zero" debate

2010-08-17T09:19:00.002-04:00

Keith Olberman sums it up best. There are also some interesting facts in here I'm sure the readers were unaware of.... sj

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Virtual Runner 2010

2010-07-22T16:53:00.004-04:00

This is one of many worthy causes, but it's one from which I can directly see the effects.

It's simple: I run some road races (and maybe a few cross-country), and whoever feels like helping out kids donates to the Epilepsy Association through my link. The donors are the "virtual runners" and I'm the actual runner they sponsor.

Why? My daughters have a friend named Lucy, who has epilepsy. A year and a half ago, it seemed that Lucy would never be able to return to school, play like any other kids, or even be able to learn her ABC's. Her seizures were that bad.

Thanks in large part to the Epilepsy Association, Lucy's parents (who are good friends of mine and Mrs. Pilgrim99) discovered a treatment regimen that includes a very strict diet which has transformed Lucy's life. Instead of life-threatening seizures, Lucy plays with her friends, is able to go to school again, and knows a lot more than just the alphabet.

If you are so inclined, please click the link to my donation page. If not, thanks for reading!

Epilepsy Association Virtual Runner

"I've Got Drugs" - by the Frogs

2010-07-22T09:22:00.002-04:00

man, I gotta get some Frogs back into my rotation. perhaps the funniest band ever.

sheeple? haters? barely-casual fans of B-Ball?

2010-07-21T00:30:00.003-04:00

new poll!

"percentage of Americans who did NOT hate LeBron before he left Cleveland, that hate him now: 1.78%."

shoe fit?

America got better today! Another great achievement for Obama & the Democrats

2010-07-16T15:47:00.013-04:00

This new financial reform legislation the Democrats passed yesterday is worth celebrating. It's a victory for those who prioritize fiscal responsibility, a victory for conservatives, progressives, libertarians, all Americans, really! This is what change looks like. This is what those of us who voted for Obama wanted. Like, fix stuff. He's delivered, with another campaign promise fulfilled, straight from the Democratic playbook (and platform). Again, thanks for NOTHING, congressional Republicans (w/ the exception of 2 or 3)! I've compiled a few of the best takes/articles on what the legislation means, what it doesn't mean, some of the people involved, and what's next. - sj

Wall Street Reform Passes
Ryan Grim
Shahien Nasiripour
Huffington Post

Nearly two years after major banks brought the global financial system to the brink of collapse, triggering a steep economic decline and crisis-levels of unemployment, Congress passed its Wall Street reform package, 60-39, with only three Republicans joining every Democrat (but one). The president will sign it into law next week.

The bill became stronger as the nation's focus moved from health care to Wall Street reform and became tougher still as the debate was held in the open on the Senate floor and during televised conference committee negotiations. Bank lobbyists were able to beat back the most serious threats to their business model, but enough significant reforms remain to earn the opposition of the American Bankers Association and other Wall Street titans.

When Democrats last reformed the financial sector in the midst of the Great Depression, they had several advantages that today's party lacks:
(click on title of this piece for more of the informative article)

FinReg Vote Passes, Will Become Law
by David Dayen
Firedoglake

The Senate passed their cloture vote, as expected, on the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory reform bill. The vote was 60-38, with Scott Brown, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins supporting from the Republican side, and Russ Feingold opposing. Senatus says that the final vote will be taken up this afternoon, but I haven’t confirmed that. (UPDATE: It’s confirmed that passage will happen today, around 2pm ET.)

The bill is a landmark consumer protection and anti-predatory lending bill. It goes fairly far in that direction, though not quite far enough – the auto dealer exemption is a disappointment. But the mortgage reforms are actually pretty solid, and I have confidence that the consumer protection bureau can have an impact on ending a culture where certain predators in the financial services industry make their profits largely based on how well they can trick people.

As for the Wall Street part of the Wall Street reform bill, the public has no sense whatsoever that it will work. More important, most experts don’t either.
(click on title of this piece for more of the informative article)

FinReg vs Wall Street Reform
by Ezra Klein
Washington Post

Matt Yglesias calls it "the underrated FinReg bill," and I take that headline as a personal victory of sorts.

But he's right about the legislation. The desire for a bill that does more has obscured a clear picture of a bill that does a lot. "We’ve tended to focus much more on what’s not in the bill than on what is in the bill," Yglesias says. "What is in the bill is a consumer protection setup that would be considered a major progressive win as a standalone item. What is in the bill is a 'resolution authority' that will let future regulators avoid the bailout-or-crisis dynamic that plagued us in 2008. What is in the bill are regulatory tools that even Simon Johnson likes. The bill clarifies lines of regulatory authority and responsibility and should cut down on abusive 'competitive regulation.' "

I'd add a few more major wins. Bringing derivatives onto exchanges and into clearinghouses is a huge victory. In 2007, the over-the-counter -- and almost entirely unregulated -- derivatives market was worth about $700 trillion in notional value, and regulators had no idea what went where and few firms had serious capital or margin requirements. Those days are over.
(click on title of this piece for more of the informative article)

Rockology - Part One

2010-07-12T22:35:00.003-04:00

JT is an extreme artist, undeniably-hilarious, and one of the most creative people I've ever met. He's a friend, and also someone I've had the pleasure of working with in the recording studio. Original Sins (one of his bands), are, BY A MILE, the greatest rock band you never heard of. I will be posting some links to his website soon, and detailing more about him; including a list of records you have to go out and get. For now, enjoy this first installment of Rockology.

¡ESPANA! Campeones del mundo.

2010-07-11T19:06:00.003-04:00

It might not have been the prettiest match, but the better team did win.

LeBron, pro-sports, blathering & beyond...

2010-07-08T14:48:00.006-04:00

I love LeBron James. I love watching him play. I love him because he flat-out dominates, and he does some things NO ONE before him has ever done on a basketball court. I love him because he's one of the best and most unique players to ever the play the game. And while I’ll concede that everything happening off the court currently is indeed nonsense, it doesn't take away from him having a lifelong respect for the game, being a true student of the game, a tireless worker on the court, a superb teammate and an extraordinary talent.

To be clear, LeBron’s #1 goal is to win a championship; preferably championships. It’s just plain silly to insinuate or think otherwise (he's apparently losing more than $20,000,000 if he leaves Cleveland, no matter where he goes). He’s already achieved pretty much every other goal there is in basketball, as well as life. He wants a championship like any other competitive athlete in any sport does. Can’t hate him for that. Feeding his ego and whatever other stupid assessments are being thrown about, with regards to his MO are either nonsense, or missing the point. Can we move beyond that now?

Since winning a championship is the goal, LeBron is simply looking at the best alternatives to facilitate that. In my opinion, if he goes to Miami or Chicago, he will most assuredly win at least one championship. If he stays in Cleveland he won’t; and if he goes to New York, it’s possible, however, it’s not a sure thing, like in the other places.

Personally, I SOOOooooo hope he doesn’t go to New York, for obvious reasons. Oh, not obvious? Okay, here’s why: because I love the guy, but I would have to stop supporting him and watching him play with the same passion I do now, because, well, he’d be playing for New York. And I, like the rest of America (NY residents excluded), hate all New York sports teams (although, I’ve always respected the Giants).

He’s a free agent, one of the best players in the NBA (as well as of all time), and he’s allowed to go (or stay) wherever he sees fit. These are the facts. Everything else is media & TV-induced mega-hype. Sure, he’s a star, and has an ego, as well as hundreds of millions of dollars, and is doing things a lot different than other people would, but who cares? With this ‘decision show’ he’s having, he’s also donating everything it makes to an awesome national charity. Let’s also not forget, that for every person who’s annoyed by the pomp & circumstance, there are ten who are WAY into it – or it wouldn’t be happening!

This brings me to my main point: I’m a bit shocked at all the whining and half-sincere blather I’m hearing this week about it all: LeBron not being a good role model, the NBA jumping the shark, “where are the league's values?,” “the game’s gone to pot!,” etc. These people talk about the current state of affairs in the NBA like it’s not going on in their favorite sport; like all other pro sports in America aren’t a mutated, dysfunctional mess also!

Peeps, news flash for you: every pro-sport in America is just as bad off and fucked up as the NBA, and has been for YEARS-ah. The games are a SHELL of what they used to be. Who you trying to kid? Don’t hate the players (unless they’re Kobe or NY players); first and foremost, hate the T.V. (and other mediums), advertisers, corporate sponsors and their desire to “win over the casual fan” of all these sports, for the sole purpose of making more money. After that, you can blame our economic model (capitalism), and the American people, themselves.

These are the entities who bastardized the actual game itself. The MLB, the NHL, NFL and the NBA have gone to shit the last 2 decades, and THIS is the real problem, not the pomp & circumstance, commercials, and dumb shows like LeBron’s having tonight. The games themselves have been compromised forever. The endless rule changes (for the worse), the post-season formats (and tv scheduling), the overtimes, and more, have turned all four major sports into an almost unwatchable affair.

If you still don’t think pro sports is more about entertainment than the actual competition, integrity of the play, and the game itself, then you don’t watch pro sports. The same goes for college sports these days. Hell, I have to go watch high school football games now, to see pure competition anymore. Enough with blaming the players, or whining about what sports are ‘becoming.’ They are ALREADY there.

Who are these people whining about LeBron and tonight’s show anyway? Are the throngs of people complaining even basketball fans? Probably not. Are they LeBron fans? Doubt it. Are they Kobe fans? Who are they exactly?

By the way, If they’re Kobe fans, they are hypocrites of the third kind: Kobe did the same thing in 2004 when he courted just as many teams, and took more time making a decision, for one. Even worse, the prima donna, selfish bastard did it when he was drafted by Charlotte, refusing to go anywhere but the Fakers. Why? So he could win championships! Worked out fine for him, no?

Let me say this now, for all the Kobe lovers/LeBron haters: NO one has more of an ego and selfish attitude off and ON the court, than Kobe (LeBron’s nowhere close to the personal dysfunction or terrible personality that Kobe embodies). While he is no doubt one of the greatest to ever play the game, and I’ll concede, more of a complete player than LeBron is (though I still think LeBron beats him one on one!), he is a total and undeniable punk and weasel.

And here’s another fact (and I suppose getting back to the root of LeBron’s decision today): If Kobe was on Cleveland, he’d have exactly no championships. If LeBron was on the Fakers, he’d have five championships.

In summary(!), LeBron is going to do what he thinks is best to get him some championships. It’s what ANYone would do, including you, reading this. You shan’t blame him for that. All the other absurdity and nonsense surrounding the decision is inconsequential. Completely. If you’re gonna be upset about all the hype, or ‘the game’ or what it’s become, be mad at those who made it that way. LeBron has nothing to do with that.

CA split evenly on Prop 19: the full legalization of marijuana

2010-07-02T15:19:00.007-04:00

"..oh the times, they are-a changin'.." Bob Dylan said it best. Medicinal marijuana? Science has spoken; old news now. So here's where we are now with legalizing recreational use of weed, the same we all recreationally use coffee, beer, rum, whiskey, wine, cigarettes, prescription meds, and everything else (except, without all the the side effects and people dying). Once a state or two makes this law, the rest will surely follow. There just isn't a reason not to: it's safe, the legalization, taxation and distribution of it will save oceans-full of money on fighting the crime now surrounding it, and of course, most importantly, governments (local, state, federal, if it wants to) will make lots of money. Oh yeah, and the people like it (and the people are the government, right?). Here's an update from Firedoglake on CA's upcoming referendum to fully legalize marijuana (clik on title of this post for original piece).-sj

By: Jon Walker
June 30th, 2010
California Split Almost Evenly on Prop 19; Few Left Undecided about Marijuana Legalization

Proposition 19, the newly numbered California initiative to legalize, tax and regulate cannabis, would lose by a very close margin if the election was held today, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll:

"The poll, which has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points, also found that 48 percent of voters would support legalizing marijuana, compared to 50 percent opposed."

While voters who oppose Prop 19 slightly outnumber those who support it , the two-point difference is well within the poll’s margin of error, so the state is effectively evenly split on the issue. The numbers mirror the findings of a poll from the Public Policy Institute of California (PDF) taken back in May. It gave the pro-marijuana legalization side a slight edge, 49-48, also within the poll’s margin of error.

An interesting thing to note in both of these polls is how incredibly few undecideds there are. It seems almost all Californians have already taken at least a tentative initial position on the issue. Previous experience will tell you that persuading people to change their minds one way or the other is often a fairly difficult endeavor.

Prop 19 supporters’ best hope might be to find a way to increase turnout among young people (under-25 voters overwhelmingly favor legalizing marijuana, but tend to vote in very low numbers in midterm elections). If the issue remains this closely divided all the way through to November, Prop 19’s fate could easily rest on whether or not the issue gets young voters politically engaged in higher-than-usual numbers.

"I don't care - I want an iPhone 4"

2010-07-02T15:09:00.005-04:00

just watch this. it's bleepin' hilarious. btw, I'm w/ the brown bear (if that's what they are), as all "appleheads" are!! (yes, u may need to sit thru a 30-second ad)- sj

iPhone 4 Vs HTC Evo - Watch more Funny Videos

wow. she'll run naked through the streets if Paraguay wins it all? like woah.

2010-07-01T00:54:00.032-04:00

I was pulling for Japan in their recent match against Paraguay, and I like Ghana and Netherlands, as well. But unless the Netherlands pull, what I consider to be a fairly big upset and beat Brazil, it will be an Argentina/Brazil final match for the biggest & bestest bragging rights ever. But nevermind them bollocks for now. Perhaps it might actually be best if Paraguay wins it all (though they have almost no chance of beating Argentina, even if they beat Spain this Saturday). Check this out. And don't you just love where she keeps her cell phone?!-sj

Paraguay's success at the World Cup continued on Tuesday, with the country's soccer team beating Japan on penalty kicks to advance to the tournament's quarterfinals. Now, with only eight teams remaining, the Paraguayans may have a few more fans to help win it all.

Larissa Riquelme, a curvy lingerie model who loves her national team, has been cheering the Paraguay squad on from Asuncion, clad in revealing outfits. The 24-year-old beauty has pledged to run naked through the streets "with my body painted with the colors of Paraguay" if Paraguay wins the World Cup.

The gorgeous football fanatic is not the first person to promise to streak in the event of a World Cup win. Argentina's coach Diego Maradona was the first prominent person to issue such a guarantee, and his team has also made the quarterfinals.

click title of this post for HuffPo story (and more pics).
click here for more.

Gaga Love It...

2010-06-08T23:27:00.002-04:00

Lady Gaga recently... "I love the rumor that I have a penis. I'm fascinated by it. In fact, it makes me love my fans even more that this rumor is in the world because 17,000 of them come to an arena every night and they don't care if i'm a man, a woman, a hermaphrodite, gay, straight, transgendered, or transsexual. They don't care! They are there for the music and the freedom. This has been the greatest accomplishment of my life- to get young people to throw away what society has taught them is wrong. Gay culture is at the very essence of who I am and I will fight for women and for the gay community until I die."

really random observations...

2010-06-03T22:07:00.021-04:00

You know how I knew the movie was going to be unwatchable? because for one, I saw the commercial for it. but mostly, because the show sucked. why did the show suck? because the writing sucked, the actors sucked, the casting sucked, and everything about it sucked. not to mention the fashion and "styles." Just LOOK at these outfits, hairstyles, and the accessories! For god's sake, that scarf-hat SJP is wearing is inexcusably-hideous! enough said. "Bomb, baby, Bomb!" Perhaps this is the very last time we ever HEAR or see this pathetic lot.

This is one of the best business names EVAH! It's a graphite/marble/tile/natural stone products shop, on Rte 611 in Horsham. It's called, "Let's Get Stoned, Inc." !!! May be THE best brick and mortar business name I've seen. I plan on going in here once just to check it out!

from the "art imitating life imitating art imitating life" department...I know 50 Cent is making a movie about a friend who dies of cancer, but man: W...T...F?! Then again, I've been whining about needing a new Robert DeNiro for almost two decades now; maybe we've found him in this homie!

Just love this - don't even know where I saw it/found it!

just desserts?

2010-05-26T19:19:00.004-04:00

"It was a serious goring. Almost his entire mouth was destroyed. It's too early to talk of recovery."

what else is there to say, really? - sj

Paul Krugman dropping science....

2010-05-26T19:09:00.003-04:00

Paul Krugman's recent piece in NY TImes...

May 20, 2010
Lost Decade Looming?
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Despite a chorus of voices claiming otherwise, we aren’t Greece. We are, however, looking more and more like Japan.

For the past few months, much commentary on the economy — some of it posing as reporting — has had one central theme: policy makers are doing too much. Governments need to stop spending, we’re told. Greece is held up as a cautionary tale, and every uptick in the interest rate on U.S. government bonds is treated as an indication that markets are turning on America over its deficits. Meanwhile, there are continual warnings that inflation is just around the corner, and that the Fed needs to pull back from its efforts to support the economy and get started on its “exit strategy,” tightening credit by selling off assets and raising interest rates.

And what about near-record unemployment, with long-term unemployment worse than at any time since the 1930s? What about the fact that the employment gains of the past few months, although welcome, have, so far, brought back fewer than 500,000 of the more than 8 million jobs lost in the wake of the financial crisis? Hey, worrying about the unemployed is just so 2009.

But the truth is that policy makers aren’t doing too much; they’re doing too little. Recent data don’t suggest that America is heading for a Greece-style collapse of investor confidence. Instead, they suggest that we may be heading for a Japan-style lost decade, trapped in a prolonged era of high unemployment and slow growth.

Let’s talk first about those interest rates. On several occasions over the past year, we’ve been told, after some modest rise in rates, that the bond vigilantes had arrived, that America had better slash its deficit right away or else. Each time, rates soon slid back down. Most recently, in March, there was much ado about the interest rate on U.S. 10-year bonds, which had risen from 3.6 percent to almost 4 percent. “Debt fears send rates up” was the headline at The Wall Street Journal, although there wasn’t actually any evidence that debt fears were responsible.

Since then, however, rates have retraced that rise and then some. As of Thursday, the 10-year rate was below 3.3 percent. I wish I could say that falling interest rates reflect a surge of optimism about U.S. federal finances. What they actually reflect, however, is a surge of pessimism about the prospects for economic recovery, pessimism that has sent investors fleeing out of anything that looks risky — hence, the plunge in the stock market — into the perceived safety of U.S. government debt.

What’s behind this new pessimism? It partly reflects the troubles in Europe, which have less to do with government debt than you’ve heard; the real problem is that by creating the euro, Europe’s leaders imposed a single currency on economies that weren’t ready for such a move. But there are also warning signs at home, most recently Wednesday’s report on consumer prices, which showed a key measure of inflation falling below 1 percent, bringing it to a 44-year low.

This isn’t really surprising: you expect inflation to fall in the face of mass unemployment and excess capacity. But it is nonetheless really bad news. Low inflation, or worse yet deflation, tends to perpetuate an economic slump, because it encourages people to hoard cash rather than spend, which keeps the economy depressed, which leads to more deflation. That vicious circle isn’t hypothetical: just ask the Japanese, who entered a deflationary trap in the 1990s and, despite occasional episodes of growth, still can’t get out. And it could happen here.

So what we should really be asking right now isn’t whether we’re about to turn into Greece. We should, instead, be asking what we’re doing to avoid turning Japanese. And the answer is, nothing.

It’s not that nobody understands the risk. I strongly suspect that some officials at the Fed see the Japan parallels all too clearly and wish they could do more to support the economy. But in practice it’s all they can do to contain the tightening impulses of their colleagues, who (like central bankers in the 1930s) remain desperately afraid of inflation despite the absence of any evidence of rising prices. I also suspect that Obama administration economists would very much like to see another stimulus plan. But they know that such a plan would have no chance of getting through a Congress that has been spooked by the deficit hawks.

In short, fear of imaginary threats has prevented any effective response to the real danger facing our economy.

Will the worst happen? Not necessarily. Maybe the economic measures already taken will end up doing the trick, jump-starting a self-sustaining recovery. Certainly, that’s what we’re all hoping. But hope is not a plan.

The Gong That Roared

2010-04-30T22:51:00.003-04:00

April is National Poetry Month. A friend of mine, Cynthia, during this month, asks friends/people to give her a title. She then proceeds to write poems from the titles people give her. Cool, huh? I think so. Just a cool thing to do, seriously. I'm gonna do it next time April rolls around, I love the idea so much (as long as she doesn't mind me stealing her idea!).

So she asked me. I gave her the title, "the gong that roared." It was the first thing to come to mind, for the following reason: her husband is a drummer, and I was trying to coordinate borrowing a gong from him. Why? Because I'm currently assisting a rock band - Brother Eye - with a record in the studio, and the drummer and I, at the same exact time while listening back to a particular song, thought this one exact spot, called for a gong! It was truly strange when this realization hit both of us, simultaneously, in the studio. Seriously, what are the odds? Here is her poem:

The Gong that Roared
4/19/10
By Cynthia Wilson
Title by spacejace

An element of surprise,
when the music softens,
It was the gong that roared,
which is heard ever so often.
It was a discovery that occurred
with a meeting of the minds.
And a friend made it a reality
just in the nick of time.
This sound that triumphs
will wake the bored.
The gong created the element
that they needed to explore.
A vibration lingering,
with a gasp and a release,
Yes, the band loved it.
It was the missing piece.

White Priviledge

2010-04-28T00:09:00.001-04:00

Thoughts on this, anyone?

Let’s play a game, shall we? The name of the game is called “Imagine.” The way it’s played is simple: we’ll envision recent happenings in the news, but then change them up a bit. Instead of envisioning white people as the main actors in the scenes we’ll conjure - the ones who are driving the action - we’ll envision black folks or other people of color instead. The object of the game is to imagine the public reaction to the events or incidents, if the main actors were of color, rather than white. Whoever gains the most insight into the workings of race in America, at the end of the game, wins.

So let’s begin.

Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition.

"dude. we need you to use your skills to save the game; not destroy it!"

2010-04-21T22:57:00.003-04:00

Roger Goodell, the NFL commissioner is fucking nuts. straight. up. He is also a true leader, resolute, and appears to be good person. He is most definitely the best at what he does: hyper-aggressively implementing the NFL's core value of clocking as much dough as stinking possible, even if it means kissing good-bye the game of football as we have come to love it.

Heard him on espn radio the other day w/ Mike & Mike. I'm paraphrasing, barely:

They were discussing ratings, viewers (aka "dollars" and "advertisers"), exposure, getting more people to watch - or rather, (gasp!) not...turn...away(!), etc, and Golic asked him, "so what have you done to kind of improve the issue, regarding teams that have already clinched, resting their starters for a game or two or three, at the end of the regular season?"

issue? what issue? being competitive?!

Goodell: "well, we've stacked the schedule so that there are 2 to 3 more divisional games, the last 3 weeks of the season this year, than last year" (meaning playoff spots and slots might still be hinging on the divisional games, and coaches wouldn't have the "luxury" of resting their players. He also said every game or almost every wk #17 game featured divisional opponents). "So, we're gonna see how that works out."

You have to play your divisional opponents twice a year. fine. who cares when they are? But then, this exchange:

Golic: "If that doesn't work, are you prepared to do something else?"

What a strange question to ask! "Do something else?" About what? Sith Lord, Darth Sidious setting a trap for Jedi Skywalker? I like Golic a lot, but c'mon, man, you're not playing anymore! There is no need to kiss the commissioner's ass every time you speak with him! As a matter of fact, you should be taking him to task! Tell him to take a chill pill! Seriously.

"How about making the GAME better!?!?"

Anyway, here was the Commissioner's answer: "We are definitely prepared. There are things we have discussed; several things. And we are prepared use them if we have to, to make sure we're putting the best product out there on the field for the people."

"WE ARE PREPARED TO USE THEM IF WE HAVE TO!" Does no one but me see the madness? Are they going to fine everyone in the organization $2,000 if Peyton Manning doesn't play 3 quarters the last game of the season, when they have home field locked up? (kidding, Roger, kidding; just a joke)!

ugh. I could go on forever - and I do at times - about the NFL's state of the union, right now; about how the rule changes the last 15-20 years have polluted the game, and made it weaker; much more. And I will, I'm sure of it! But now, I must open a bottle of Chianti Classico Riserva!

Oh, let me say, the NFL has, over the years (but especially recently, thanks to Goodell's leadership and GOOD ideas), done phenomenal, w/ regards to affirmative action initiatives, charity work, and helping to guide/steer the youth of today, who enter their ranks, among other great things.

I just can't stand that the NFL, Commissioner of the NFL (who genuinely admire, ans find interesting), and the other people running the league right now, are choosing to weaken the game, and destroy the history and traditions of professional football, instead of improving it. Especially, when they can still pocket their same billions doing the right thing.

...wow, I wasn't going to post about Goodell right now, just log some random/miscellaneous thoughts down on Soundgarden, Guru from Gang Starr dying, the Pope, of course, but I started w/ this one and brain cells were streaming!

South Park - facebook

2010-04-16T00:35:00.006-04:00

Trey Parker & Matt Stone are STILL killin' it, after all these years.

"we don't want out government doing ANYthing for us!" *

2010-04-15T23:46:00.005-04:00

*actual quote from a libertarian at a Glenn Beck rally earlier this year. some poor soul said the same exact thing at a tea party rally earlier today.

see earlier cx3 post for a 1 minute clip of "Somalia: Libertarian Paradise!"

Donovan McNabb: "I'd like to thank the ungrateful, over-expecting, oftentimes-racist fans of philadelphia"

2010-04-14T13:17:00.007-04:00

this is from the onion. a classic from them, containing truths (both real and hidden), fun. I will be posting upwards of 10 rants (in the next few days) I've made on various sites, boards & blogs, from the last week. We in Philly will most definitely miss Donovan, however, not as much as we would've NOT missed Coach Andy Reid, if he was fired like he shoul've been. - sj

Sports News In Brief
Donovan McNabb: "I'd like to thank the ungrateful, over-expecting, oftentimes-racist fans of philadelphia"
April 10, 2100 - the Onion

WASHINGTON—During an emotionally charged press conference Monday, newly minted Redskins quarterback Donovan McNabb expressed gratitude to the unappreciative, abusive, and intolerant fans of the Philadelphia Eagles for their total lack of support over the years. "I'd like to thank all the Eagles fans who were always there to demand the whole world from me every week, who expected me to do everything with almost nothing, and who blamed me for the team's every failure," said the six-time Pro Bowler, who also apologized for his failure to shore up the Eagles defense and his inability to keep Brian Westbrook healthy while leading the team to five NFC championship games. "I can't thank them enough for the constant insults or tell you what their lack of support meant to me when Rush Limbaugh made racist comments about me. My only regret, besides every fucking awful moment of the past 11 years, is that I couldn't give these people what they wanted most: drafting Ricky Williams back in 1999. No fans deserved it more." McNabb then wished probable Eagles starting QB Kevin Kolb luck winning the next 25 Super Bowls "because nothing else will be enough," gave all Philly fans the finger "because I can't give them all cancer," sighed with pleasure, and went to turn in his Eagles playbook to the Redskins' defensive coordinators.

Education is Slavery

2010-04-13T22:57:00.004-04:00

Loved spacejace's link below, and started reading other things by the author. This piece on the changes in education funding struck me as very strong as well:

"Given the stakes -- which are nothing short of the future of the country -- it's quite possible that the way the conservatives have changed our national consensus on education may be the single most radical thing they've done over the past 30 years. (And yes, that includes sanctioning torture, which wouldn't have been even possible if we hadn't deprived two generations of Americans of a decent civics education.) Those of us over 45 still remember those very differnt assumptions about who deserved an education, and what college was for, and how it should be paid for. We're absolutely horrified at the way those assumptions have been turned on their heads. Everybody should be."

I've thought more than once that the disdain of the right for "intellectuals" and "academics" (people who - horrors! - spend a lot of time learning and thinking and trying to help others learn and think) was aimed at keeping the base as ignorant as possible by devaluing the institutions and people that exist to transfer and increase knowledge; such rhetoric has certainly been deployed with that aim in other countries.

None Dare Call It Sedition

2010-04-13T19:21:00.002-04:00

This is a must-read, in light of the arrest of the militia nutjobs that planned to attack police officers, and the violent and overheated "eliminationist" rhetoric of the right.

From Campaign for America's Future:

it's time to openly confront the fact that conservatives have spent the past 40 years systematically delegitimizing the very idea of constitutional democracy in America. When they're in power, they mismanage it and defund it. When they're out of power, they refuse to participate in running the country at all -- indeed, they throw all their energy into thwarting the democratic process any way they can

Full article: None Dare Call It Sedition

Wikileaks' "Collateral Murder"

2010-04-06T22:55:00.015-04:00

OK, I know this is heavy. And I want to say right from the front that I do not know that this is murder except insofar as I see all war as such. A near as I can tell, the soldiers are by and large being good soldiers: as this analyst notes, begging a guy to give you an excuse to shoot him means that you are exercising control and following the rules of engagement; while what they have to say disturbs me deeply, I agree that their language is relatively low key, and their attitude a reflection of necessary dissociation. I think that the second shooting goes beyond the rules of military engagement as I understand them (I'm going off the overview here), but hope I'm seeing these soldiers making a terrible unintentional error, not knowingly committing war crimes by firing on recognized civilians. I feel awful for them...what a thing to live with. And I feel terrible for them even before that, for the things they have chosen to do, and the ways it hurts and changes them.

My real concern is that this pretty much does reflect war: as the above link notes, "90% of what occurs in that video has been commonplace in Iraq for the last 7 years, and the 10% that differs is entirely based on the fact that two of the gentlemen killed were journalists."

With respect to our military (in which people I know, love, and admire currently serve) and all here - I know spacejace has served, and he knows my pacifist stance - should we not take a hard look at the rules of engagement? At least 100,000 and possibly over a million civilians have been killed since we arrived in Iraq, and it's a tragedy and a trauma encompassing everyone involved. The way we fight guarantees that innocent people will be killed, and when you look back over the history of wars, civilian casualties outnumber military deaths. Is there any way to at least keep the warring limited to professional combatants? I admit, I'm not sure that there is. And if there is not...well, that's where we start getting into the value of war as a method of misery reduction.

Edited to add this link. This scenario would get us to a million casualties, I think.

Also ETA this: "By now we’ve heard plenty of people’s opinions on the now famous WikiLeaks video showing the U.S. military killing 12 Iraqi civilians — from Defense Secretary Robert Gates to Stephen Colbert to Josh Stieber, a former soldier turned conscientious objector who would have been on the mission over Baghdad that day. But missing from the discussion have been the voices of Iraqis themselves, those who witnessed the slaughter, and especially those whose loved ones were killed."

Howdy, Folks!

2010-04-02T00:22:00.026-04:00

For me, there’s something “at a party with 99% strangers” about this first blog post. I have that awkward blurty thing going that I always fight right when I meet people, when I have no idea what to say unless, God be praised, baseball is in season. But I will start by thanking spacejace for inviting me to post here: I’ve enjoyed the thoughts of the other folks in the community, and hopefully I’ll justify my invite to the party.

I guess I should do a quick rundown of my stats: I live in San Francisco, and am the mom of a toddler whom I adore, and am hitched to her dad, whom I also adore (lucky me). I’ve got a spectacularly impractical B.A. and an almost equally spectacularly impractical M.A. (yes, English) from a couple nifty universities, the resources of which I was apt to underutilize; on the up side, the Master’s got me interested in human rights issues, which is sort of the direction I’m headed in these days, and certainly one of the things in which I’m most interested. At this point, I’ve spent about half of my adult life either learning or teaching in higher education; the other half is split about evenly between working retail, being a mom, and being a total dumbass. I’ve found both halves of my life pretty useful, and the “being a total dumbass” part invaluable.

Like I mentioned, these days, I live with my husband in San Francisco. For the last year or so, I’ve gotten to be a full-time mom to my soon to be three-year-old daughter, who thinks she’s a dinosaur these days, which her mom thinks is freaking awesome. I’m interested in all kinds of things: mainly, I’m interested in figuring out what the hell is wrong with the world, because even more so, I’m interested in figuring out how to fix what’s wrong. I am 100% certain I will never, ever even come close to getting my hands around those things, but hey: shoot high! Politically, I’m…weird. Spiritually, I’m a Friend, of the quite liberal sort (which can be used as insight into the political weird, especially if you salt it with the fact that I am somewhat knowledgeable about and no fan of authoritarianism).

So…what will I be yapping about? Just…ideas, I guess. National and international events will likely be starting points, but I’m hoping (with your help), to do some interesting analysis and contextualization. I may just also poke at what I think is an interesting idea, and see what comes of it – there are often interesting, unexpected, and illuminating connections to be made that you don’t know about until you get to them. I am an enthusiastic learner, which is to say that I place value on listening openly to all perspectives, and if I hear something that makes more sense that what I’m thinking, I’m happy to have been offered the chance to see things more clearly – I’d not remain more ignorant than I have to, and am pleased to have clarification of the state of affairs.

Today's idea is this one:

If you don’t know, this is about whom he is talking.

This is one of those ideas that I can't believe nobody (including me) came up with before now: it’s brilliant, and I freaking adore it. I have seen the people who show up with messages of love to counter the Westboro Baptist Church’s hate (in fact, I was one when they swung by SF a couple months ago), but what this person does breaks the frame of what is going on in a way that my telling the WBC folks that I loved them despite their misguided assholery just didn’t (though I adore these people).

To me, there are a couple of interesting things to ponder about this, alongside the more readily apparent awesome of worthy groups getting more funds (and you’d have to think they’d do well under those circumstances – I’d clean out my wallet, and I can’t be the only one). The first is wondering how, should the practice become widespread and effective, the WBC theology-type-thing would handle their protests resulting in positive good for the groups to which they so virulently object. It would certainly drive them around the twist emotionally, but would they modify their message delivery system? Currently, I’m leaning no: “nuanced” isn’t a word that anyone is going to use to describe Fred Phelp’s notions of religion (also missing: “grace-filled,” “loving,” and “any marbles at all”), and I suspect that he feels like one rails at the sinners as they laugh and mock (I’d bet good money he’s a big fan of Jeremiah ). Still…it might give them pause.

The other, and to me more interesting, thing that I am led to wonder is if we should really want for them to stop showing up places. I mean: yes, if it’s because everyone has gotten themselves a highly qualified round-the-clock shrink and a firm commitment to reentering reality. But it’s worth thinking about with what they will replace these demonstrations. Honestly, I’m not sure what that would be…billboards? Sky writing? Ads during Glenn Beck (sorry – couldn’t help it)? Right now, it seems likelier to me that they would have to retreat into electronic communication. They’ve already got themselves a web page, a Facebook page, and they tweet merrily away, so it’s not like they aren’t already there. But I’m not sure that they will be content with that: if their worldview requires things that the picketing provides (which it likely does – that’s an incredibly structured thing Fred Phelps has going, whether or not the structuring is conscious), I’m not sure that bodiless written screeds and vlogs are going to satisfy their need for the abject immediacy of required Godly confrontation with those they perceive as the hellbound vile. That is not to say that the general public is going to suffer too greatly if their illness is quarantined in cyberspace, but I suspect things in the Phelps circle would get even weirder and uglier: Fred Phelps teaches predestination of the elect, and I’m betting that no church member is considered 100% definitely elect except for Fred Phelps, meaning that any of them could become targets for the frustrated need. Because I am firmly convinced that there are good and terribly damaged people who need help somewhere inside the gleeful judgers of others (apparently, they missed Matt. 7:1-2), not to mention small and deeply psychologically vulnerable children, I hate to see that poison get even more concentrated within the group. You have to figure that within a couple generations of Phelps getting the shock of his afterlife , things will start normalizing around there, but isolating the group and plugging vents doesn’t seem like the best way to minimize damage to the next generation of Phelpses, who get to live with the hatred that we only have to look at on signs. It may be tempting to want for them to keep their bile to themselves, but it seems to me that the greatest harm that the Phelpses really do is to themselves, and all that isolating them does is increase the harm where it is already at its greatest. Add to that that them coming to town gives us a chance to stretch those valuable First Amendment muscles, provides the opportunity for the community to counter-protest (often in heartening numbers), increases awareness of the unacceptability of hate, creates spaces for dialog, and potentially raises funds to address the problems which the WBC exemplifies, and I find I want for the Phelpses to keep hauling their hatefest around the country. Yeah, they drive me nuts, but when I get past that, I’m finding there’s a bigger picture, complete with additional details, to take into account.

And this all gets me to back around to that video. When I see the person in it advocating using a WBC protest as an opportunity for wider good, I see him asking us to make our pictures bigger and more detailed, and to not only extend the boundaries of our contexts, but ground ourselves more firmly in reality. Implicit in his appeal is the idea that our contexts should expand beyond the immediate confrontation between a hate group and those who are appalled by them, to the organizations the WBC protests and the missions (often life-saving) of those organizations. He asks us to think about what larger principles are worth investing in, with the WBC as a compelling counterpoint. And once we’ve made those determinations, reality calls: the possibly dismissible as clearly troubled Phelpses are the far end of a globe-spanning spectrum of hatred still overcrowded by all sorts of less exuberant and clearly sane folk. The situation yet requires remedy, and if we want to see change, we’d probably do well to think of the groups that fight it when we decide how we spend our money (on ourselves, or something bigger?). In my minimal personal experience (seen ‘em once), ground zero of a WBC protest felt limited to the people present and the immediate debate. The idea of raising funds rejects that frame (one that sure works for the Phelpses), replacing it with a much larger one – one that accommodates a much larger picture. I find that seriously f$#%ing cool.

So...some questions – can we make the framework even bigger for this one? Or is there another framework we can think of that is in desperate need of a roomier replacement?
Let me all know what you think, and nice to meet you!

P.S. An addendum to the Facebook note of mine that spacejace posted: I was somewhat delighted to learn that if you divide the cost of the 2008 campaign cycle (the most expensive ever at $5.3 billion) by the number of Americans (308,984,000), we’ve got a per-person cost of $17.15 (or $38.40 per taxpayer, of which there are 138 million). Midterm cycles cost about half as much. It makes one wonder why the damn things aren’t already publicly funded….wait, I don’t wonder that at all.

P.P.S. Fave song listened to while writing this: it's a tie between these two:

(“when I was driving once I saw this painted on a bridge: "I don't want the world, I just want your half")

"Happy Birthday to me...."

2010-03-31T22:42:00.003-04:00

Yes, today is my birthday. The greatest day of my life. And this utterly hilarious video was sent to me by a friend.

two of the coolest, funniest (and cutest!) artists in the world.

2010-03-29T22:20:00.010-04:00

if you haven't heard about Garfunkel & Oates yet, then you're in luck! Check out their website, and enjoy, enjoy, enjoy! Here's a pic and a clip..

former Bush speechwriter: 'we have only ourselves to blame' on HCR passing. 'it's Waterloo, all right; ours.'

2010-03-23T22:37:00.005-04:00

This is an absolute SUPERB summary, with fantastic & concise insight on the passing of health care reform, from the perspective of an honest Republican. Dead. On. See original post at David Frum's really nice blog, Frum Forum. - sj

Waterloo
March 21st, 2010.
by David Frum

Conservatives and Republicans today suffered their most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s.

It’s hard to exaggerate the magnitude of the disaster. Conservatives may cheer themselves that they’ll compensate for today’s expected vote with a big win in the November 2010 elections. But:

(1) It’s a good bet that conservatives are over-optimistic about November – by then the economy will have improved and the immediate goodies in the healthcare bill will be reaching key voting blocs.

(2) So what? Legislative majorities come and go. This healthcare bill is forever. A win in November is very poor compensation for this debacle now.

So far, I think a lot of conservatives will agree with me. Now comes the hard lesson:

A huge part of the blame for today’s disaster attaches to conservatives and Republicans ourselves.

At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration. No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo – just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994.

Only, the hardliners overlooked a few key facts: Obama was elected with 53% of the vote, not Clinton’s 42%. The liberal block within the Democratic congressional caucus is bigger and stronger than it was in 1993-94. And of course the Democrats also remember their history, and also remember the consequences of their 1994 failure.

This time, when we went for all the marbles, we ended with none.

Could a deal have been reached? Who knows? But we do know that the gap between this plan and traditional Republican ideas is not very big. The Obama plan has a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts plan. It builds on ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican counter-proposals to Clintoncare in 1993-1994.

Barack Obama badly wanted Republican votes for his plan. Could we have leveraged his desire to align the plan more closely with conservative views? To finance it without redistributive taxes on productive enterprise – without weighing so heavily on small business – without expanding Medicaid? Too late now. They are all the law.

No illusions please: This bill will not be repealed. Even if Republicans scored a 1994 style landslide in November, how many votes could we muster to re-open the “doughnut hole” and charge seniors more for prescription drugs? How many votes to re-allow insurers to rescind policies when they discover a pre-existing condition? How many votes to banish 25 year olds from their parents’ insurance coverage? And even if the votes were there – would President Obama sign such a repeal?

We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.

There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or – more exactly – with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother?

I’ve been on a soapbox for months now about the harm that our overheated talk is doing to us. Yes it mobilizes supporters – but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information, overheated talk has made it impossible for representatives to represent and elected leaders to lead. The real leaders are on TV and radio, and they have very different imperatives from people in government. Talk radio thrives on confrontation and recrimination. When Rush Limbaugh said that he wanted President Obama to fail, he was intelligently explaining his own interests. What he omitted to say – but what is equally true – is that he also wants Republicans to fail. If Republicans succeed – if they govern successfully in office and negotiate attractive compromises out of office – Rush’s listeners get less angry. And if they are less angry, they listen to the radio less, and hear fewer ads for Sleepnumber beds.

So today’s defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their listeners and viewers will now be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio. For them, it’s mission accomplished. For the cause they purport to represent, it’s Waterloo all right: ours.

Follow David Frum on Twitter: @davidfrum

"So..I think I have an idea that would change the world. Mind helping me figure out what's wrong with it?" - by Kate

2010-03-21T10:50:00.006-04:00

Kate is a well-informed, well-read, passionate person I recently met, whom I happen to agree with on most things. I've learned many things from her in the short time I've know her. I asked her if she'd like to contribute to this blog from time to time, and she said, "yes." The cx3 blog just got better. Sometime in the near future she'll make her first post, but in the meantime, I wanted to re-post a note/thought/question she recently posted on her facebook page here. This has to do with (or was born out of) the recent SCOTUS decision that now allows corporations & unions to give ludicrous amounts of money to political campaigns at all levels, based on the First Amendment (free "speech"). Welcome, Kate! We're glad to have you along for the ride - where we're going, no one knows! - sj

Title covers it: I have this idea, but I also lack all kinds of information that could change the picture and could also just plain be missing something. So I'm hanging this like a piñata on FB for people to whack at, and if it passes muster with my many insightful and intelligent friends, maybe it's worth thinking about some more. I've tagged the folks I've tagged because they've either seen parts of this thought before, or like talking about this kind of stuff, but I hope anyone with interest will chime in. And by the way, if anyone knows anyone who isn't on my friend list who they think would like to jump in on this, let me know and I'll make it visible outside of my own friends, or be friends with whomever :). Fwiw, while I did come up with this on my own, I'd be surprised to be the only one to have followed this line of thought. I've looked around a bit for other work about this without luck, but if anyone knows about what anyone else has to say about this, please let me know :).

So...this is coming out of my understanding of the of the Citizen's United v. FEC decision (see here, if you want to brush up). I agree that money is sufficiently inseparable from speech that to remove it would have a deeply chilling effect (ask me if you want to know why; otherwise I'll spare everyone the tangent :) ). And while corporations are not people, the First does not restrict its protections to people, stating only that speech shall not be abridged. Add to that the Constitutionally protected right to associate, and you've got a workable argument that corporations should be considered entities with certain rights, among them, speech. So I think those two avenues to getting corporate money out of politics are barred, or at least murky as heck.

However, I don't think that what they are producing is speech. Follow me here: political speech is communications about political values or desires. I believe that in order for such speech to be valid *as speech*, it must both completely voluntary and accurately reflect the political values or desires of the speaker. I do not believe that corporate speech is either of those things. First, the corporation claims the right to speak as an entity with a unified and distinct opinion, and I do not believe that they have that: both employees and owners frequently disagree, and strongly, with lobbying efforts by the corporations who are claiming to speak for the group. Thus, the speech fails to accurately represent the interests of the entity, speaking only for a portion of the group. But even if it did represent the unified will of the corporation, the speech is not voluntary. Unless a person is free to dissent, the speech is coerced, and order to not speak, a person would have to leave their place of employment, and I believe that that is an unreasonably high bar to dissent. So, corporate speech is not speech, in that it both fails to represent the unified will of the entity, and is coerced, to boot. It's as if, in order to keep a job, I had to agree that every week, using funds generated in part through my efforts, my company could take out a full-page ad in the paper every week supporting a political position with my name (as well as that of every other employee) included as a supporter of that position, but I would never be consulted, nor could I decline to have my name among those listed, and my name would be used against my will to give dishonest weight to an argument with which I disagreed. Foundationally, this strikes me as perilously close in kind to allowing a corporation to cast my vote for me, according to what they think are the best principles.

This line of thinking has some serious ripple effects. If we follow it, unions aren't allowed to lobby either. While, unlike corporations, they do get to vote, the vote need not be unanimous for lobbying to proceed, and in order to not participate in union lobbying efforts, people would have to leave their union shop jobs.

That leaves interest groups with voluntary individual membership in the political lobbying ring, and they fit my criteria: the speech is voluntarily produced and can be assumed to be an intentional and desired expression of the associated members, as if it were not, they would leave the group and deprive it of the support of their presence (and possibly funding). So the NRA, the ACLU, the Sierra Club, et al are fine. However, their funding is going to take a dive, as I do not think that corporations can donate to these groups, either - I think that's basically ventriloquism.

As you'll note, this sucks almost all of the money out of the political process, as only individuals can donate (though individuals can certainly form associations to promote an industry or market sector and can certainly donate to such groups as individuals, I think they'll have a lot more difficulty masking who benefits from the policies they advocate when we see who is actually doing the advocating). That's going to create the need for public financing of political campaigns, and I suspect the resulting campaigns are going to be a lot less flashy, and win way fewer of Ad Age's "Marketer of the Year" awards (yes, Obama won it in '08). And I think that's a good thing.

In fact, I think there are a lot of good things about this. Corporations get to stop wasting money trying to influence the field of competition, and just start competing, and maybe even hire some people with all of the money they just saved. With corporations not lobbying, unions can refocus on collective bargaining within the industry, and shed all of the union bureaucracy devoted to lobbying, coming out of this a leaner and more effective organization, with fewer higher-up in it for DC power thrills and ego stroking, and lower union dues for members, with dues used in ways that have more direct benefits to members. Yes, advocacy groups get the short end of the stick in this, but they will also hopefully have different battles to fight, and get to fight them with far greater effectiveness. And voters should be offered broader candidate fields with fewer of the participants entering politics for money and the power it leverages, as well as knowing that the people we do elect are accountable to voters, not donors. It won't get rid of all of the problems by any stretch, but I don't think it's a bad first hose-down of the Augean stables that is American politics today. At least we'd have a way clearer view of what precisely is going on.

Summary, then: both corporate and union speech lack the unified and uncoerced nature that characterizes true political speech, and effectively allows associations to co-opt and control the political voices of other people; in addition, the money vacuum that ending such coerced speech will produce demands public financing of campaigns. All of that actually happening would, I believe, significantly change the runnings of this country, and therefore...change the world :).

So, does that make sense? What else do I need to think about, and what am I missing?

Thank you, Alex.

2010-03-17T23:13:00.002-04:00

Alex Chilton passed away today, at the age of 59, of a heart attack, apparently. When this song was a number 1 international hit, in 1967, I was less than 5 months old. He was 17 years old, and lead singer of the Box Tops. Soon after, he would go on and form Big Star, and release one of the best rock records of all time, "#1 Record." We have your songs to always remember you by, Alex, so you'll never be too far away.

No Uncomfortable Questions Left Behind

2010-03-17T17:32:00.014-04:00

I liked pilgrim99's blog on education issues the other day. I also laughed at spacejace's posting of Bill Maher's "Fire the Parents" rant. Like them, I am ambivalent about the Obama administration's proposed changes to No Child Left Behind, despite what is still -- for me -- much admiration and high expectations for the president.

However, some thoughts, if not exactly disagreements, of my own. I'll work backwards.

Regarding Obama on holding teachers responsible and the wisdom of wholesale firings, like the one that occurred in Central Falls, Rhode Island: the key word (or buzzword) has been responsibility. If students fail, the argument goes, someone must be responsible, someone must be held accountable. Would that this were true! But failures occur all the time and only sometimes is anyone held accountable. So I will quibble with the imperative, the word must in that statement. Crimes go unpunished, mistakes are orphaned, lies go unchallenged, secrets go to the grave -- all the time. Whether someone is held accountable for the failure of children or not, this truth persists: schoolwise, too many children have failed. I would prefer a world in which this were not so, but for now, can we recognize that this failure, this particular kind of failure, belongs to us all? And belong is not the same as the fault of? Because until we recognize this, there will be no progress toward the world I’d prefer. When the president points his finger at the Central Falls faculty and staff, it is not that he's wrong, it is that he is only so very partially right. He has stopped pointing too soon. His grade on this test is Incomplete.

Bill Maher’s standup routine begins to fill the gap between where Obama points and where he failed to point. Certainly parents also need a good talking to. But Maher's rant is, finally, only a routine, the more or less funny work of a funny man. He doesn't really know any better than the president seems to know about how to stop failing children. For instance, when he says "According to all the studies, it doesn't matter what teachers do," this is flatly untrue. ALL the studies? It doesn’t matter at all what teachers do? Really? That statement on its face is so stupid, so plainly false, that it can only be a joke. And what follows in that paragraph is the crafted patter of a talk-show comedian, ("Although everyone appreciates foreplay," is the next line), the comic exaggerations of a licensed buffoon going about his buffoony business. In short, don't take your talking points from Bill Maher any more often or seriously than you would want to hear someone dittoing Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck.

Pilgrim99 gets much closer to the heart of the problem than Obama or Maher, as we would expect from someone who has worked close to that heart. (Maher probably hasn't been near a classroom since the Carter administration. He doesn't impress me as someone who actually reads books -- though he might skim a guest’s ghostwritten pages in preparation for his show. Obama, however, is not only a famously adept student, but he was an accomplished law professor at a prestigious college -- what's his excuse?) But I hear two notes of uncertainty even in Pilgrim99's post. First, the refrain is posed as a question -- rhetorical, perhaps, but still: "When [the student] failed, was I the reason?" Every teacher, I think, when dealing with a failing student, will ask himself or herself this question -- and not rhetorically. My own college teaching experience only infrequently confronted me with this problem literally – I had no shortage of C students, but rarely an honest-to-god F -- but when I did, I would ask myself, with the pen poised above the grade sheet, did it really have to come to this? Do I really have to fail this student? Sometimes the answer was, yes. However, I also supervised and trained teachers for several years. And I had to confront teachers all the time with the question regarding the failure of students to learn: Were you the reason? But in a properly run school, the answer to this question is never alone a basis for terminating a teacher’s employment. Rather, it is a tool by which teachers and their supervisors and peers can evaluate their practice of their profession. Criticism and self-criticism and improvement are an important part of the job. What saddens me in Pilgrim99’s post is that he was apparently not allowed to ask himself in a useful way whether or to what extent he was a reason for each failing student’s failure.

Second, Pilgrim99 points out that his own solution to the problem was to leave an under-performing, dysfunctional school system for the presumably better-funded exurban district. This is the solution for many teachers and educators. And thank goodness! It is very good news for me and my children, living in a famously well-supported public school district. Good teachers and administrators give our search committees plenty of sound candidates for any open position – even though they are rarely paid enough to afford to live in the city where they wish to work. This is a system that is good for me but encourages exactly the opposite of what Obama tells us it should. Who can believe that the teachers qualified to fill vacancies in my city will be eager to take the newly-opened vacancies in Rhode Island?

And Pilgrim99’s point about the redistribution upward of educational wealth is only part of the bad news. Consider this point:

In the 1950s, smart women, except for truly determined trailblazers, had few professional options beyond teaching. Ditto for blacks and other minorities. If you had a particularly smart and ambitious daughter, people would say, "I bet she grows up to be a teacher!" While many things have happened to public schools over the last 50 years, one of the most important is that this low-cost captive labor pool of extremely talented men and women has evaporated completely—and along with it the respect that was once automatically accorded to those who entered the profession. Today, with so many more (and better-paying) careers to choose from, it's unclear [why any bright person] would be a teacher at all.

This is from a Slate review of Diane Ravitch’s new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System. I’ve not read it yet, but it is making quite a splash because Ravitch, for years a fairly reliable ally of social conservatives and Republican administrations, now rejects the articles of faith on which is based much of No Child Left Behind and Ravitch’s advocacy for those and similar policies. Among people who follow such things, Ravitch’s conversion against the gospel of standardized testing and data-driven administration and merit pay and standards-based evaluation and charter schools is truly unsettling. (I have this book on my to do list. So more later when I've read it. Meanwhile, I’m following a forum on tnr.com with Ravitch and several critics.) What’s striking in the Slate review is that the reviewer dares to mention one of the most grim truths about our society: There were people willing to teach our parents who, given it to do over again, would not teach our children -- much less the children of Central Falls, Rhode Island.

The problem -- how to teach children, how to make them smart, how to make them ready to live in the world we’re leaving them -- is so damned hard. Way too hard for a cable TV comic, too hard maybe even for our very smart president and his very smart Secretary of Education. Pilgrim99 tells us he can only resolve, sort of, his own little corner of the problem – and Allah bless his efforts! Diane Ravitch (it seems) tells us that after forty years of wrestling with the problem, she only knows that what she has tried has also failed. For me, ten years after having abandoned my own career in education, I still feel compelled to serve on the local School Councils and volunteer for city committee work and help, whenever I can, any high schooler who will sit still long enough to take some help. I don’t know whether merit pay or mass firings or portfolio evaluations will solve the enduring human problem of how to teach. But I think that the equally inextinguishable desire to learn is our only real resource in this struggle. If that’s true, then the questions we should all ask -- ceaselessly, relentlessly, ruthlessly -- are: How many impediments can I remove from a student’s desire to learn? How can I not fail the children in my charge?

new Lady Gaga extended music vid/short film for "Telephone" - It's awesome.

2010-03-17T00:51:00.004-04:00

Just saw this for the first time just now. Kind of blown away.

you can view it here, on her site, in a wider-screen format.

a vacation destination for Libertarians and tea-bag mutants!!

2010-03-16T23:38:00.004-04:00

Sure, this is a half-assed production, but it's still worth posting, and is good for a couple laughs, anyway. I love the imbecile at the Glenn Beck/Alamo rally who says, "we don't want our government to do anything for us!"

Hollis P. Monroe: never heard of him, but I love this rap...

2010-03-16T00:19:00.010-04:00

So I stumbled upon this dude on facebook, as we have a mutual friend. clicked on the info tab, saw this rap on there and loved it:

"the old-school raver, the thong and panty saver, the kid that's best on bad behavior
the best friender, the leg bender, running up in spots that say "do not enter"
the unwilling procrastinator, the apparent quebecois fascinator, reading futures: that belt will be unfastened later
the music maker, the ass shaker, orgasm faker as not to be a heart breaker
the deep house music lover, the wack circle dancer shover, staring deep into her eyes when i'm standing above her
the no class dismisser, the dumb young girl disser, the takin' care of business, powersuit wearin' MILF kisser
the true love seeker, the tb-303 tweeker, over in the corner dancing by the speaker
the non-smoker non-drinker, the naughty thoughts thinker, whenever on the islands coconut bra clinker
the unpredictable, the pleasantly atypical, keeping my ambition linear and all my love cyclical
the anything once tryer, the shell toe adidas buyer, the peeps i don't know me trying add me deny-er
well actually, that's just for myspace, i'm more open on the book after face, anything can happen in that case."

it cracked me up. requested him as friend, live chatted a bit, and here I am posting about him. I'll be checking out his work 'more for sure' when I get a chance. he's got a Philly connection and a big fan base. If anyone wants to add more about him - clue me in, basically - please do, in comments!

here's his facebook page with lots more links..and here's the intro from the home page of one of his websites

"welcome and thanks for coming. most of you already know the gist of my story. i'm an electronic music producer and occasional dj. since 1994, i have sporadically released material under various pseudonyms with the most popular being dj decent, universal agents (with g-pal) and of course, my given name, hollis p monroe. within, you will be able find out some of the details...."

"What up Hollis!?!"

New Rule from Bill Maher: Don't Fire the Teachers; Fire the Parents!

2010-03-13T08:54:00.006-05:00

This is a perfect follow up rant/partner piece to Pilgrim 99's great (and personal) post earlier this week (a couple posts below this one, or click here), about the mass firing of school teachers at a Rhode Island high school.

Maher nails it, as only he can. Let me state, for the record, Bill Maher is one of the good guys. He's an extraordinary talent, always calls things like he sees them, and is funny as hell doing it. He's done a lot for my generation, with regards to educating the masses, and fighting the good fight. I've been an avid fan of his since 1990 when his "politically incorrect" show first aired on cable. I've seen his stand-up 4 times, and met him twice. My wife and I even got in a bizarre shouting match with him one time, outside the backstage door, that had him running for his limo! We scared him I think, but he was cracking up also! - sj

New Rule: Let's Not Fire the Teachers When Students Don't Learn--Let's Fire the Parents
Bill Maher
Friday, March 12, 2010
Host of HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher"

New Rule: Let's not fire the teachers when students don't learn - let's fire the parents. Last week President Obama defended the firing of every single teacher in a struggling high school in a poor Rhode Island neighborhood. And the kids were outraged. They said, "Why blame our teachers?" and "Who's President Obama?" I think it was Whitney Houston who said, "I believe that children are our future - teach them well and let them lead the way." And that's the last sound piece of educational advice this country has gotten - from a crack head in the '80's.

Yes, America has found its new boogeyman to blame for our crumbling educational system. It's just too easy to blame the teachers, what with their cushy teachers' lounges, their fat-cat salaries, and their absolute authority in deciding who gets a hall pass. We all remember high school - canning the entire faculty is a nationwide revenge fantasy. Take that, Mrs. Crabtree! And guess what? We're chewing gum and no, we didn't bring enough for everybody.

But isn't it convenient that once again it turns out that the problem isn't us, and the fix is something that doesn't require us to change our behavior or spend any money. It's so simple: Fire the bad teachers, hire good ones from some undisclosed location, and hey, while we're at it let's cut taxes more. It's the kind of comprehensive educational solution that could only come from a completely ignorant people.

Firing all the teachers may feel good - we're Americans, kicking people when they're down is what we do - but it's not really their fault. Now, undeniably, there are some bad teachers out there. They don't know the material, they don't make things interesting, they have sex with the same kid every day instead of spreading the love around... But every school has crappy teachers. Yale has crappy teachers - they must, they gave us George Bush.

According to all the studies, it doesn't matter what teachers do. Although everyone appreciates foreplay. What matters is what parents do. The number one predictor of a child's academic success is parental involvement. It doesn't even matter if your kid goes to private or public school. So save the twenty grand a year and treat yourself to a nice vacation away from the little bastards.

It's also been proven that just having books in the house makes a huge difference in a child's development. If your home is adorned with nothing but Hummel dolls, DVD's, and bleeding Jesuses, congratulations, you've just given your children the gift of Duh. Sarah Palin said recently she wrote on her hand because her father used to do it. I rest my case.

When there are no books in the house, and there are no parents in the house, you know who raises the kids? That's right, the television. Kids aren't keeping up with their studies; they're keeping up with the Kardashians. We're allowing the television, as babysitter, to turn us into a nation of slutty idiots. By the way, one sign your 9-year-old may be watching too much One Tree Hill: if she has an imaginary friend with benefits.

visit Bill's "Blogga Please" blog here

59% in favor of health care reform; 30% against!

2010-03-10T19:55:00.004-05:00

from Daily Kos, last Friday...
(click here for original post, w/ hi-lighted links in post)

Digging into the Polls on HCR: Public Wants Stronger Reform
by mcjoan

Barry Sussman, editor of the Nieman Watchdog Project at Harvard's Nieman Foundation for Journalism, goes beyond the headlines screaming public opposition to healthcare reform.

Comes now (Feb. 26-28) a McClatchy/Ipsos poll of 1,076 people that on first glance offers rocks to sling at Obama. The lead question asks, “As of right now, do you favor or oppose the health care reform proposals presently being discussed?” Forty-one percent said they favored them, 47 percent said they were opposed, and the rest said they were unsure. Those are numbers the Republican leaders could work with.

But the pollsters went a step further, asking those opposed – 509 people in all – if they were against the proposals because they “don’t go far enough to reform health care” or because they go too far. Thirty-seven percent said it was because the proposals don’t go far enough. Thus – are you ready for this? – the addition of an obvious, simple follow-up question completely turns the tables. The overall numbers switch to 59 percent in favor of health care reform, 30 percent against. Putting aside those with no opinion, it becomes 66 percent in favor of health care reform, 34 percent against. Some would call that a consensus, or these days, a super majority.

Whoa, what happened here: a plurality against health care reform actually is a landslide in favor of it? In the same poll? If other surveys turn up similar data, will Republican leaders stop citing public opinion as the basis for opposing Obama’s health care legislation? Fat chance.

The poll did find resistance to key measures in the legislation. Seven of ten interviewed said they opposed putting “new taxes on the most expensive insurance policies;” six of ten opposed “a government requirement that everyone buy health insurance.”

There is still the opportunity to maximize the popularity of what ends up passing in the reconciliation package--make reform stronger with real competition for insurers, make sure the excise tax does not hit the middle class, and offset the mandate with some kind of public option, possibly Medicare buy-in. There's very strong policy and political arguments for making this bill as strong as possible--the 66 percent of Americans who want reform being no small part of that. That's a message the Blue Dogs particularly need to hear.

I suppose these folks are part of the 30% against health care reform! - sj

Blame the Teachers

2010-03-09T03:17:00.003-05:00

Here's a story, in light of the mass firing of an entire high school staff at a "failing" school in Rhode Island.

When I began my teaching career way back in 1994 in Youngstown, Ohio, I was well aware that working in an urban, "inner city" district would pose significant challenges. First off, though the population of the high school was racially mixed, though not "balanced" (whatever that was supposed to mean), it was the product of a downsizing merger in which the entire population of one school had been moved to one of the three remaining high schools in the city at the time. My school, naturally, had the largest number of the new students.

In their wisdom, the district administration had taken a large number of youngsters who were members of a social organization known as the Bloods and crammed them into a school with an already established social organization known as the Crips. Two smaller social clubs known as Vice Lords and the Folk also shared the halls.

And every one of them was a great kid. They didn't have much use for each other, but they were never a problem for me. Just like any other school, there was a wide range of abilities and effort represented. Just like any other school, there were wide-ranging discussions of literature and current events. Just like any other school, the vast majority of the staff did everything they could to help kids succeed.

But there was an awful lot going on outside of the school.

There was a rule that staff had to be out of the building by 3:15, so they could lock down the building. The door to the staff parking lot had a bullet-hole just below the reinforced glass window. I had nice morning conversations with the police officer who spent his entire shift out in that parking lot, as well as his five colleagues stationed inside the school every day.

There were plenty of fights each week, mostly between girls, but I can only remember one time that the officers had to actually chase down one of the male students. He was a 20 year-old sophomore who had been so horribly abused by his alcoholic father that he was considered permanently disabled and already collecting SSI. When he failed was I the reason?

One of my favorites was a petite girl named Tania. She was pregnant when school began, and had to leave around Thanksgiving to be with her baby for a while. She came back just as the winter weather was turning to spring. She was far behind, of course, and would make every effort while at school, but had very little time or willingness to work on anything outside school. By the time we said goodbye for the summer, she had become pregnant again. She had just turned 16. When she failed, was I the reason?

When it came time for parent-teacher conferences, my roommate (in a shared classroom) advised me to bring a book to read. I was appalled. After all, we had an entire day without students set aside, and an evening as well. I had a total of three parents show up, one of whom was so drunk he couldn't remember what class I taught for his son. When the son failed, was I the reason?

Every so often, I would arrive at school and notice a couple of unmarked police vans in the lot. Weapons check. That meant an absence rate of close to 50% sometimes, but at least 25%. Some of the police would walk around the building and search the bushes after the school day began. They always found a few knives. Once, a .22 pistol.

When these kids did abysmally on tests (and not all of them did), was it really the teachers' fault? For some, it was a small miracle that they even got to school every day. For many of them it meant two guaranteed meals that day, so that was all it took.

Now, I'm highlighting some of the more dramatic cases of what I experienced, but keep in mind that this was not at all unusual for high-poverty districts. It still isn't unusual for high-poverty districts to be faced with overall failure.

In the case of the Rhode Island high school, the town of Central Falls has a population of about 18,600 and a per capita income of $10,800. According to Wikipedia, over 40% of the population under age 18 lives in poverty.

So our Hope&Change president had this to say:

"If a school continues to fail its students year after year after year, if it doesn't show signs of improvement, then there's got to be a sense of accountability…And that's what happened in Rhode Island last week at a chronically troubled school, when just 7 percent of 11th-graders passed state math tests -- 7 percent."

Thanks, man.

Couldn't we make the case that it isn't so much the school that's "chronically troubled," but the neighborhood or town itself? In fact, shouldn't we take into consideration that the number one predictor of academic success is the education level of the parents and the accessibility of books (and reading) in the home? Should we maybe consider that poverty and lack of academic progress are consistently found to be related phenomena, that failing schools also have dismal attendance rates, high numbers of transient students and are usually in areas that over-rely on property taxes for school funding (a model that was found unconstitutional by the Ohio Supreme Court four times before a Republican majority was elected to the Court, which promptly overturned the decision)?

Seriously, Mr. President? That's all you've got?

Update 3-10-10: Here's a link to a blog called Tempered Radical,where the author says pretty much the same thing as I did (a colleague pointed out the similarity to me). Only, he published earlier, so hat tip to him. We even zeroed in on the same quote from Obama (originally from WaPo), which I cribbed from another blog about the speech. Personally, though I agree with this blogger on this issue, I don't have the same sense of disappointment overall. Yet.

I don't teach in Youngstown anymore. I found a job in a wealthy exurban district that is able to easily sweep all of its troubles under a rug. More on that another time.

perhaps the best ad (and reason) yet for indy-energy and fighting climate change

2010-03-06T10:47:00.003-05:00

Listen to These Vets
by John Kerry, U.S. Senator from Massachusetts
posted March 4th, 2010 (on HuffPo)
The Senate needs to listen to these veterans: Enough words have been spoken in Washington, with none as powerful as what these vets have to say. Let's keep it simple and straight. Politicians have talked for years about the link between foreign oil and global terrorism.

And these veterans are doing their duty once again when they remind politicians in Washington that it's not "tough" to vote for legislation that creates jobs, cuts pollution, and strengthens our national security -- what's tough is what happens when we don't and our troops shoulder that awful burden instead.

And it's true. Don't believe me? The Pentagon recently released their quadrennial defense review, and they included the instability from climate change as a factor that could cost the lives of the men and women who serve in our armed forces.

The Center for Naval Analysis brought together a blue-ribbon panel of generals and admirals who concluded that "climate change is a serious national security threat." And General Anthony Zinni said flatly that if we don't deal with climate change now, "we will pay the price later in military terms. And that will involve human lives."

And these veterans know it already does.

The politicians don't have it tough. The troops do. End of story. Now the Senate needs to do its job -- for them.

couple let baby starve to death while raising virtual baby on-line

2010-03-06T10:39:00.004-05:00

this world we live in and life we live will never stop being cruel and strange. - sj

A Korean couple allowed their child to starve to death because of their addiction to raising a 'virtual' child in a Second-Life-style game online known as Prius, reports say.

Kim Yoo-chul, 41, and Choi Mi-sun, 25, would feed their three-month-old baby only when not at 12-hour-online sessions in a local internet café. The pair were obsessed with raising their internet child, called Anima, resulting in the neglect of their unnamed real daughter.

After one such session in September the couple found their daughter dead and called police. An autopsy found the baby died from prolonged malnutrition.

"The couple seemed to have lost their will to live a normal life because they didn't have jobs and gave birth to a premature baby," Chung Jin-Won, a police officer, told Korean press.

"They indulged themselves in the online game of raising a virtual character so as to escape from reality, which led to the death of their real baby."

The pair were arrested in the city of Suweon, south of Seoul, on Friday after months on the run.

"Online game addiction can blur the line between reality and the virtual world," Professor Kwak Dae-kyung of Seoul's Dongguk University told press. "It seems that taking care of their on-line game character erased any sense of guilt they may have had for neglecting their daughter."

Venus and Mars 2010

2010-03-04T16:36:00.002-05:00

So many of us watched the Super Bowl- some for the spectacle, some for The Who (The Two) and some even for the football. I watch it mostly for the ads, which had been building over the years to a celebration of high concept, high budget marketing displays in the interstitial format. This year was a big letdown though. I might say it was the economy, but there was enough quantity of advertising, its just that the quality, and in this example the tone was way off.

Here's an ad for the Dodge Charger, as out of time a vehicle as there ever was but hey guys like cars (truism) and we're henpecked dolts ( FAIL ) watch:

Yeah I'm an enlightened, but emasculated prig 'cause I didn't find that ad smart or even chuckle worthy, right? Right.

Anyhow what was smart was this follow up video "Womans Last Stand" watch:

I like scratching my nuts as much as the next guy, but I adore and respect women, don't believe that they are bio-neurologically different from us and think that equality exists, if only in a cerebral sense most of the time. Ahh enough ranting for a while, I've got laundry to do...

Alan Alda

Read this article by Al Gore, on global warming. Seriously.

2010-03-03T22:18:00.005-05:00

"...January was seen as unusually cold in much of the United States. Yet from a global perspective, it was the second-hottest January since surface temperatures were first measured 130 years ago....Similarly, even though climate deniers have speciously argued for several years that there has been no warming in the last decade, scientists confirmed last month that the last 10 years were the hottest decade since modern records have been kept."

This editorial by Al Gore was originally run in last week's NY Times. It's a good read, with some good links. Most importantly, it's filled with facts. Remember those? - sj

We Can't Wish Away Climate Change
by Al Gore
Op-Ed Contributor
The New York Times
Published: February 27, 2010

It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.

Of course, we would still need to deal with the national security risks of our growing dependence on a global oil market dominated by dwindling reserves in the most unstable region of the world, and the economic risks of sending hundreds of billions of dollars a year overseas in return for that oil. And we would still trail China in the race to develop smart grids, fast trains, solar power, wind, geothermal and other renewable sources of energy — the most important sources of new jobs in the 21st century.

But what a burden would be lifted! We would no longer have to worry that our grandchildren would one day look back on us as a criminal generation that had selfishly and blithely ignored clear warnings that their fate was in our hands. We could instead celebrate the naysayers who had doggedly persisted in proving that every major National Academy of Sciences report on climate change had simply made a huge mistake.

click here for rest of original piece, with great and informative links throughout

most leotarded current fad: Rahm-bashing

2010-03-03T22:08:00.002-05:00

here's a comment I made on HuffPo after reading another Rahm-bashing piece, this one by Dan Froomkin, who I like, actually. - sj

Yawn. Rahm-bashing is SOooo 2009. The only way Rahm goes anywhere is if Obama makes another avoidable rookie mistake and cans him. Rahm has done more for the Democratic party than Froomkin or these other bloggers making a fashion statement could ever dream of. Expect this Rham-bashing festival by amateur progressive dems to be a distant memory in a matter of months. I'm a hardcore, radical, liberal dem progressive and I respect the guy, agree with him on most everything, and like him. And btw, Rahm was EXACTLY right: the progressives who wanted to spend their hard earned/raised cash to run ads against conservadems? It was an extremely stupid idea.

Raise your kids right

2010-02-27T12:15:00.006-05:00

You know the best part about getting older? Fucking nothing.

I do try and raise my two sons, ages 12 and 6 with a keen eye and a sense of independence in thought and spirit. I still absolutely wonder at the world around me and I find that sloganeering aside, I actually get less cynical as I get older. Kids'll do that (sometimes). When they were younger we did the nursery rhymes and Raffi, and even tried the Dan Zanes and Brady Rhymer etc. I'm not knocking any of it as I guess it was done to me and I turned out more or less OK.

The older boy, James is 12 and a full hard-on teenager (intentional). He is amazing on guitar; on this snowy Saturday walking around the house dressed in just his black robe, a ski hat and unplugged electric slung low, and asks the old man for a good song for him to learn now that he has mastered the canon of Green Day and Nirvana. Being the Good Father I went old school on him and dug this out, appealing to my longing to keep my boy--well, a boy, while also considering how right in the gut cool it is that I can turn him on to irrefutably exceptional music like San Francisco's Flipper. Saving Sex bomb for another (sniff) poignant shared moment together someday soon.

"Isn't it Sinister to swallow a Minister"

Melissa Theuriau: french journalist and anchorwoman

2010-02-24T17:03:00.007-05:00

Thoughts On Not Being Gay

2010-02-22T21:53:00.003-05:00

great thought here, from a person named Paul, I've never met; I completely agree. Perhaps we'll see more of him on cx3 blog... - sj

Thoughts On Not Being Gay
by: Paul Lubaczewski

I spend alot of time and effort on gay rights,and Im straight. Why? Because I dont care.

What do I mean?

I dont want to care. Frankly, I dont like to picture any of my friends knocking boots, regardless of the boots they care to knock.
And its not fair that my gay friends are pushed into a situation where they constantly feel the need to defend themselves for their own sexuality; just the basic them of who they are. They get so drawn in to a corner, that being gay becomes their identity, because they have to mentally protect themselves against the backlash they know is coming.

We can do better then that. We can and should reach a level of tolerance where we really dont give a flying fuck about what two consenting adults do in the privacy of their own bedroom.

So as long as I have gay friends, and as long as society paints them in to a corner and tries to keep them there, I'll fight for them.
When society lets them serve in the military and the board rooms, and nobody cares one way or the other, then I'll put down my sword.

Until then, its on.

L.O.V.E.M.U.F.F.I.N.

2010-02-21T10:40:00.000-05:00

anyone know what this is from?

League Of Villainous Evildoers Maniacally United For Frightening Investments & Naughtiness.

or: L.O.V.E.M.U.F.F.I.N.

here's what my iPod played on shuffle, this AM..

2010-02-21T10:31:00.003-05:00

...in the kitchen, as I ground my French Roast coffee beans, and began to clean up the mess!
Doom - Gazillion Ear
Huffamoose - We've Been Had Again
Smashing Pumpkins - Siva
Police - Hole In My Life
Sierra Maestro - Son Para Ti
Butthole Surfers - Whirling Hall of Knives
Beastie Boys - in 3's
Led Zep - Rock n Roll
Cornershop - Candyman
The Ethiopians - Train to Skaville
Hives - Declare Geurre Nucleaire
Original Sins - Happy Birthday Jesus
Alice Donut - Tiny Ugly World
Outkast - I'll Call Before I Come
Caterpillar - I'm OK, You're OK
Kanye West - Barry Bonds
Joy Division - The Only Mistake
Jesu - Silver
Paul Morelenbaum - Brigas Nunca Mais

NBC news report on 2nd day of Sex Pistols U.S Anarchy Tour, Jan 1978

2010-02-18T22:11:00.004-05:00

some really good and funny stuff in here...

nevermind "Wolfman" - this is the REAL scary stuff...National Debt & Budget Deficit summary, and how it affects unborn Americans...

2010-02-17T09:14:00.001-05:00

Drowning in Debt: What the Nation's Budget Woes Mean for You
Economists Predict Cutbacks, Tax Increases That 'Aren't Even Imaginable'
By DEVIN DWYER
WASHINGTON, Feb. 17, 2010—

American political and economic leaders have sounded the alarm for years about the red ink rising in reports on the federal government's fiscal health.

But now the problem of mounting national debt is worse than it ever has been before with -- potentially dire consequences for taxpayers, according to a report by the nonpartisan Peterson-Pew Commission on Budget Reform.

"It keeps me awake at night, looking at all that red ink," said President Obama in Nashua, N.H., on Feb. 2. "Most of it is structural and we inherited it. The only way that we are going to fix it is if both parties come together and start making some tough decisions about our long-term priorities."

Obama will sign an executive order tomorrow that establishes a bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform to make recommendations on how to reduce the country's debt.

Over the past year alone, the amount the U.S. government owes its lenders has grown to more than half the country's entire economic output, or gross domestic product.

Even more alarming, experts say, is that those figures will climb to an unprecedented 200 percent of GDP by 2038 without a dramatic shift in course.

"Within 12 years&the largest item in the federal budget will be interest payments on the national debt," said former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker. "[They are] payments for which we get nothing."

(click below for rest of scary story...)

National Debt, Budget Deficit: A Scary Forecast for Taxpayers? - ABC News

the Who's Super Bowl halftime show rocked. I don't care what anyone says.

2010-02-08T21:15:00.014-05:00

I thought the Who's Superbowl 44 halftime show rocked. Mindblowing? No. the best I've ever heard them? No. Great venue? Hardly. But they did rock. They sounded great (the TV mix was perfect, actually; and surprisingly). The stage, and lighting design/platform that surrounded it was awesome. And Daltrey, who never sings as good you want him to - including 4 decades ago - was good enough; I've heard him before, markedly worse than I did yesterday. Pete's guitar sounded great, and so did his vocals. The other musicians played well, and the backup vocals were good also. They had fun. I kind of felt like I was right there, having fun with them. It was just cool seeing the legends up there, rocking it, in front of the largest TV audience EVER.

Most of the people I was watching with - a large majority - agreed with me. I'd say, "good" to "really good" were the responses. But today, I can't view a single media outlet without hearing about how much they sucked. Why did it suck? How did it suck? Can anyone tell me how or why the performance, or the Who sucked? Seriously.

Was it because SBowl halftime venues suck? Well, that can't matter. It was a SBowl halftime venue - yes the "venue" sucks! Sure I'd like to see them at the Knitting Factory, but the Superbowl wasn't played there.

Was it because they're old? Well, they're old! But they still held their own, and sound better at this stage of their lives than the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and Brian Wilson put together (at their late late late stages)!

Was it the song selection? (M)eh. Sure, I'd personally like to hear other songs, but they're up there playing to millions and millions of people who were hearing them for the first time and/or seeing them for the first time! Why not play the hits?! Played out to us, maybe, but not everyone.

Was it the medley? They got 12 minutes; what's wrong w/ a medley? I loved how they went from "pinball wizard" into "baba o'riley!"

Have you seen the other halftime Superbowl shows? Prince's was as good, perhaps better than the Who's, but no one else has come close. People need to put the 12-minute, Superbowl half-time shows in the proper context, and expect a little less. It's entertainment for a global audience, and if you're lucky, you see a really good performance. The Who's show was worthy rock.

Here's a quote from both Roger and Pete, on their performance, shortly afterwards... Roger: "It didn't even feel like a concert. It's a television show. And what can you do in 12 minutes? I thought it went OK. I understand. It's a TV show. Cameras were everywhere" And Pete: "We were trying to put on a great show. We had as much fun as we could have."

Perhaps Rachel Sklar at Medialite.com put it best: ""If you love The Who and are old enough to remember how awesomely groundbreaking they were, then you loved the 2010 Superbowl Half-Time Show. Amid the flashing lights and super-stadium pyrotechnics, there was a real honest-to-goodness rock concert," she wrote.

I totally agree.

um...can anyone tell me the teams facing off in today's lingerie bowl?

2010-02-07T11:01:00.003-05:00

...so Lingerie Bowl VII will be televised during halftime this evening. I've searched plenty on line. I can't find the teams that are facing off against each other! why do I care?!?!

Super Bowl XLIV musings, considerations, predictions and other nonsense...

2010-02-07T10:41:00.009-05:00

I have never been so conflicted with considering a winner for a football game. Seriously. Both teams are bleepin’ sick; without question, the best two teams in football. Colts are 16 & 2 right now. If they didn’t sit their top players/starters during the second half, in the only 2 games they did, they’d be 18 and 0; w/ a chance to achieve only the second perfect season in the modern era of football. By the way, the Colts (and the Saints to some extent) proved again, that resting players and taking losses, once the post-season goal of home field thru the playoffs is achieved, works perfectly.

Here's a post from Nov 16th (after week 12, NFL) on my fantasy football msg board when both Saints and Colts were undefeated. Believe it or not, I took flack for posing this obvious question:

"Is it too early to discuss a Colts/Saints superbowl as inevitiable? Colts have whipped off 18 straight regular season wins; they have a defense (not everyone is the Pats offense), and Manning has thrown for 300 yards in 6 of their 8 games! NUTS. And how about the Colts playcalling? it's ridiculous. Do Colts even have an O-Coordinator? And look out for the Saints; their defense is for real as well."

The only team I though could MAYBE beat the Saints was the Vikings; there was no one I thought could beat the Colts.

I’m bored w/ all the numbers and stats at this point (yards per game, points against, blah, yadda, etc), so I’m gonna focus on the other aspects of the teams and matchup. With regards to the numbers, suffice it to say, both teams, on both sides of the ball have very similar numbers; on offense, the numbers are tremendous; on defense, both teams are above average units, but have similar issues w/ consistency and yards against.

The Saints offense has more weapons than the Colts O (#1 offense this season). They have 3 legitimate running backs, who are all good! Pierre Thomas is a personal favorite of mine; a great team player, always positive (I follow him on twitter!), a smart runner, and catches well, out of the backfield. His back-up is Mike Bell, a very hard runner, who’s been averaging 10 carries a game, roughly, through the season. And of course, the still underrated Reggie Bush. Who is awesome. Nevermind all the fantasy-geeks (I myself, am one) crying about him not “putting up the numbers.” If you watch him play, you know. That long run he made for a TD (vs. Vikes?) this post-season, is what he’s capable of on ANY play. The reason he’s not used more is because this offense has SO many other great weapons, there just isn’t a need to use him more. It keeps everyone more energized, less beat up, and even more importantly, keeps the defenses guessing.

They also have a stacked WR corps, probably as good as the Colts, even taking Dallas Clark into account. Marques Colston, who is great, to be sure, might only have the third best set of hand out of them. Robert Meachem (in his third year, I think, and arguably the best WR on the team), and Devery Henderson both can actually catch the ball better; Colston is bigger, more physical and has more experience, which is why he’s the more known, and commands the double team, if any defense chooses to go that route. Lance Moore, their 4thWR is the best #4 in the leaugue! And Jeremy Shockey has proven all year, he can handle anything, when the game or a first down is on the line.

Drew Brees, has been awesome for years. And I mean awesome. If you watched him play for San Diego, you already knew this. Chargers might have a SBowl by now, if they kept him and got rid of Phillip Rivers, instead. He’s about as accurate as Manning and Warner, super-smart, very physical, and a born leader. Not sure how many MVP votes he got, but he should’ve gotten more.

Saints offensive line, however, while it appears very good to me, isn’t as good as the Colts offensive line. That is the only spot on the offense where the Colts have a marked advantage, when comparing offenses.

Colts offense? It’s the kind you dream about. When Manning’s career is eventually over – and it’s gonna be a long time, still, HATERS! – I don’t see any reason he won’t be considered the greatest QB of ALL TIME. He’s a bleepin’ master; he has mastered the QB position. Seriously.

Their running game is slightly above average, but just slightly. Saints is definitely better. Joseph Addai has had a great year for a seasoned veteran, and is definitely a force to catch out of the backfield, whenever Manning needs to go that route; he’s got good hands. Back up Donald Brown, in his first year, appears to be a good runner also. When don’t’ the Colts have good and great running backs, WR’s, tight ends, and QB’s? Seriously. THAT’s ownership. Colts can’t run the ball consistently, but they don’t need to, when you have as much talent in the passing/receiving game as the Colts do.

Speaking of receiving corps. It’s quite extraordinary. Reggie Wayne is one of the best in the league. He has been, is, and will be. Their next best WR is actually their tight end, Dallas Clark. STATS for him. Austin Collie is a rookie NUMBERS? And Pierre Garcon is a second-year guy, and BOTH have fantastic hands! They’re both physical, run amazing routes, and are very smart. It’s because of Peyton, these two already have the mental capacity and football smarts of 5-year players.

All that being said, former coach Tony Dungy is tripping ballz, for making this statement earlier in the week: “I would be absolutely shocked if the Colts lose Sunday.” If he’s serious, he’ll be the only one.

Tired of writing, so I’ll skip over the defense. Both teams have relatively the same type of defenses: any number of individual players are very good, and/or fast, and they fly to the ball and create turnovers. Saints, I think, led the league in Defensive TD’s. Both teams are aggressive, but neither is a shut-down D, or even consistent when they need to be. Here’s an irony, I suppose: since both offenses can, and will, score a lot, the defense will most likely be the deciding factor in the game.

The problem I’m having w/ deciding on a winner, is borne out of not knowing which D is actually going to play better today, or which QB will be able to make more plays, when the D finds the right blend of pressure and coverage. Ugh. Not sure yet.

Coaching edge goes to Saints. I don’t know a damn thing about COLTS coach, except he’s doing a fine job, without question. “Not getting in the way,” is highly underrated, when it comes to coaching in pro sports. Many coaches are in the way all the time (Reid), and can’t see the scoreboard for the clipboard. Or just don’t have any sense about what is actually going on in the field. COLTS coach is smart enough to guide the team, coach the team when necessary, and ‘see’ the team.

But make no mistake, this Saints team is the team that Sean Payton built. Did they award Coach of the Year, yet? Sean Payton (along w/ Brad Childress) is deserving. He truly has a great sense of how a game is going, and possesses a nice blend of simultaneously being both measured and thinking outside the box. He’s a good motivator, and a student of the game.

Experience. Colts have been there, done that. And without question, this is a legitimate advantage. Big, big game experience (and everything that leads up to it), begets more focus in subsequent games. I can assure you, Colts have shed some of the extra baggage – as fun as it is – that has overwhelmed, and still is overwhelming the Saints.

Honestly, I’m calling Colts O vs. Saints D, and Saints D vs Colts O, even. Completely even. I can’t see a single advantage either way. If Dwight Freeney plays, he’s going to be a shell of what he normally is, and a detriment to the team. The guy hasn’t STOOD ON HIS FEET all week, including last night’s practice. And ESPN, NFL Network, and other sports media should be ashamed of themselves for making him the lead story all week Sad, sad, journalism. Raheem Brock (former Eagle!), his backup, is a DE that could start on most teams in the NFL. He’ll be fine. It’s a hit, but he’ll be fine. Both QB’s are SO good, cerebrally, they’ll both be able to do almost anything they want against the opposing defense. THAT being said, the D will makes a little more plays, maybe even just ONE more play than the other, will decide the game. That notwithstanding, these defenses are just about equal.

So confused…

Who do I WANT to win? Even that is tough! I’ve been a Colts fan since the mid-70’s, and I still have fond memories of seeing some Colts games at Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium, with my dad (who’s folks lived just outside Baltimore), when Ted Marchibroda was coach, and Lydell Mitchell and Bert Jones led the team! Oh, and how could I forget the Colts cheerleaders! To this day, the Colts’ cheerleaders had the best costumes, featuring a single blue upside horseshoe, on the rear (forget which side!) of white short shorts, and almost knee-high, white boots; awesome (couldn’t believe it, looked on line and couldn’t find a single pic of this era’s Colts cheerleaders)!

I love the colors, the logo (the upside down horseshoe is one of my favorite luck charms), and have loved that team through the ages. I also think Bill Polian and the Colts ownership is the best in football. Talk about leading, and managing a team! I’ll take this moment to state I think the Eagles ownership sucks, and has for years. Oh, and I don’t have all those other problems Baltimore fans have w/ the Colts leaving town in the “dead of night.” Whatever. It’s the NFL. Dumb, annoying shit happens.

And the Saints? They’re an awesome team, one of the most talented offenses I’ve ever seen in my 38 years of being a football fan, likeable, and if they win, they deserve it. The fans deserve it. And the town of New Orleans is one f America’s best. And they’ve never won. It’s very easy to pull for them.

So, for the first time ever, I decided I am not rooting for a team in the Superbowl - awesome!

Okay, a couple very specific predictions:

---Bush will run back at least 1 PR for a TD. Now, this is predicated on the Colts not “pitching around” him; which, they should be doing, by the way. He can’t break on if he never has the ball. They may – and I would, If I was coach – use him on Kickoffs.

---There will not be an onsides kick except a desperation kick. A surprise or strategical one is out of the question. Neither one of these defenses is a good enough match up against the other’s offense. That would be dumb.

---Manning will throw at least one interception.

---Sean Payton will engineer a very nice game plan, and call an excellent game, w/ a few obscure/trick plays thrown in. I am impressed w/ this guy’s creativity when it comes to play calling.

---The refs will make two inexcusable calls, both, going the Colts way.

---The game day announcers will be incredibly annoying. Find an AM station to listen to.

---The Who will rock at halftime, but Roger Daltry will still sing too much.

Final thoughts on the game…

If Colts take a 14 point lead at ANY point in the game, then Manning and the Colts get their second championship in the last several years (Colts w/ their third overall). The game will still be fun to watch, but Saints cannot come back from that. They would have to get a turnover, or defensive TD or a special teams TD to get back in it and have a chance.

The Saints must – and that cannot be emphasized enough – score on either a special teams TD or defensive TD, and create two turnovers, or they won’t win. It wouldn’t hurt for them to score first either.

For what it’s worth, I did take the Saints and 6 points for a small chunk of change. That decision, at least, I feel fairly confident about.

My absolute, best guess, on the final score:

Saints: 36
Colts: 33

The Saints will win on a long (40 yard+) game-winning field goal, as time runs out.

I'd pay $1000 to punch Oliver North in the face. Seriously. Just sayin'!

2010-02-06T21:06:00.010-05:00

You know, I don't say this often, but anti-american, convicted felon, GOP-er, sorry-excuse-for-a-Marine, and all around asshole, Oliver North, deserves to get the living shit beat out of him, or run over by a car, for his latest drivel. He sincerely deserves it. I'm already looking forward to the "good riddance, asshole!" I'm going to shout out when he eventually dies. Just watch this video.

It's the height of irresponsibility, and FOX Noise should be ashamed of themselves. Seriously. They are selling this 100%, untrue ignorant garbage to tens of millions of Americans.

For Oliver North to invoke and equate NAMBLA, and other felonious, psychotic, HETEROSEXUAL adult men who rape, abuse, torture, and physically and mentally scar little boys for life, with adults who actually deserve their civil rights as law-abiding americans, is a FUCKING OUTRAGE! I hate this fucker.

for text, and original piece, go here.

Lookout! Demon Sheep!

2010-02-05T22:52:00.010-05:00

This is awesome. Bat-shit-crazy-awesome. This attack ad (3.5 minutes, bottom of this post) for a CA GOP primary, was released 2 days ago, and all things Demon Sheep went viral for 48-hours (and counting). While funny as hell (because it's real!), it's nowhere near as funny as the @demonsheep twitter feed, it spawned (if you like this kind of humor, like I do); check out a few tweets from whatever crazy soul is twittering under the name "Demon Sheep:"-sj

"Offered Todd Palin to help them kill wolves in AK, but he's afraid I'd eat his sled dogs for fun. He's probably right."

"Yes, I have started following some people. How else do you expect me to catch and dismember them?"

"Why do humans worry about 2012? I will never allow you to live that long."

"I am responsible for the very worst atrocities that have befallen mankind: War, Famine, James Cameron's Avatar."

"You know all those pants that are foolishly on the ground? You're welcome."

Here's Jason Linkin's take, from HuffPo: HOLY CRAP, AMERICA. Mere days after a teensy little Orleans Parish Coroner's election offered the opening salvo in the Attack Ad Wars of Campaign 2010, we have this ad from Carly Fiorina, running for the Senate in California that is a straight-up game-changing, shock-and-awe slice of pure, mountain-grown BONKERS.

In this THREE-AND-A-HALF MINUTE LONG video, the Fiorina campaign goes after former California Congressman Tom Campbell, who leads the Republican field in the primary race to unseat incumbent Senator Barbara Boxer. The Fiorina campaign's main point is that Campbell is a "Fiscal Conservative In Name Only." It's a fairly standard issue claim -- or at least it would be, if the video that presented the argument didn't play like Terry Gilliam and Ingmar Bergman collaborated on a campaign-year sequel to "The Wicker Man".

The epic ad begins with a voice-over narrator intoning, "Purity...piety..." against the backdrop of galloping sheep. Then, Monty Python animation kicks in, elevating one sheep on a giant column into the ionosphere. Then: THUNDER! LIGHTNING! Darkening skies! A new voice-over narrator -- the cheapest Morgan Freeman imitator money could buy -- starts impugning Campbell, amid jump cuts of Campbell and sheep and pigs and graphs and quotes, while Satan's opera company chants dark recitatives in the background.

"And sadly, we're just getting started..." Cheap Morgan Freeman says. And sadly, THEY ARE! JUST! GETTING STARTED! More accusations and quotes and scary question marks, until it achieves its apotheosis: DEMON-EYED SHEEP!

By the way: this whole metaphor of Campbell pretending to be a heroic cutter of budgets and limiter of government DOES NOT REALLY WORK when you refer to him as a "wolf in sheep's clothing." Surely, the brave fiscal conservatives are the more vulpine breed! Ideally, the Fiorina campaign would want to contend that Campbell is a SHEEP in WOLVES' clothing. Right? Take off his disguise and he's just another member of the herd? I guess it's hard to work in the DEMON-EYED SHEEP image, in that case.

Also, when the ad gets around to mentioning that Fiorina is the better choice, maybe its makers should have killed the Satan Opera for a more optimistic piece of music?

Fiorina campaign: you should totally call me for ideas!

And OMFG, the poor guy who had to crawl around on all fours in a field wearing a sheep's pelt to make this ad! I have the most pity for that individual. I also have pity for California State Assemblyman Chuck DeVore, the twittering loser who is also running in this primary race that no one takes seriously, and who probably has a sad that he's not earned his own attack ad like this.

That said, this advertisement is just beyond belief. I dare anyone to top this.

snowboarding in downtown Philly (reason #79 Philly rules)!

2010-02-04T12:41:00.007-05:00

Saw this on Philebrity (reason #80, Philly rules) yesterday, with this headline: "OK, The Impromptu Temple University Snowboarding Park is Pretty Much the Most Awesome Thing Ever" - and I agree, it is awesome. Check it out. The tipster who submitted this clip to Philebrity, said: "In what other major city can you find an abandoned lot to build a world class snowboard park, lite a fire, set off fireworks, obtain a redbull can (legally?), jib a keg – and not hear one single police siren? Hmmm? I rest my case!”

Ima Betta Jibba Temple University Snowboard Club from Temple U Snowboard Club on Vimeo.

They live among us! The 2010 comprehensive Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll of self-identified republicans

2010-02-03T22:30:00.017-05:00

Okay, folks this is too much. The new poll from Markos Moulitsas (a hero of my mine) and Daily Kos. And it's 100% independent and legitimate, as you can read the COMPLETE methodology at bottom of poll. There are links to the complete story, and analysis below; the poll is long, but the the findings are truly extraordinary. The summaries are short, but all are worth reading. This is too damn important to not read, and I sincerely urge you to do so.

I learned years ago, I lived among tens of millions of Americans who aren't that bright (too put it nicely), but honestly, I didn't know it was this many. And I didn't know the extent of their gullibilty (is that a word?!) and ignorance. At a time when information and facts are at everyone's disposal, we STILL have millions of people who apparently forgo fact, for fiction, and choose to believe the craziest batshit out there (it especially helps when Rush/Rove/Hannity/FAUX news tell them what to believe)! Well, in this case, it's solely republicans I'm speaking about, as only self-described republicans were polled independently for this survey. No, not all republicans are clueless (in all seriousness, I have plenty of friends and neighbors who are republicans, and many of them are far from clueless; not all of them though). But according to these poll results, LOTS of them are! These are their OWN answers! Just look at them! So w/out further rambling, I'll try and get the whole of the poll on this post, w/ a few summaries/results printed, and links to the original stuff.-sj

by Kos
Tue, Feb 02, 2010, at 08:58:03 AM PST

As I've mentioned before, I'm putting the finishing touches on my new book, American Taliban, which catalogues the ways in which modern-day conservatives share the same agenda as radical Jihadists in the Islamic world. But I found myself making certain claims about Republicans that I didn't know if they could be backed up. So I thought, "why don't we ask them directly?" And so, this massive poll, by non-partisan independent pollster Research 2000 of over 2,000 self-identified Republicans, was born.

The results are nothing short of startling.

Ultimately, these results explain why it is impossible for elected Republicans to work with Democrats to improve our country. Their base are conspiracy mongers who don't believe Obama was born in the United States, that he is the second coming of Lenin, and that he is racist against white people. They already want to impeach him despite the glaringly obvious lack of high crimes or misdemeanors. If any Republican strays and decides to do the right thing and try to work in a bipartisan fashion, they suffer primaries and attacks. Even the Maine twins have quit cooperating out of fear of their homegrown teabaggers.

Given what their base demands, and this poll illustrates them perfectly, it's no wonder the GOP is the party of no.

(just a few brief results followed by thought; click on link just below these for the rest! - sj)

Should Barack Obama be impeached, or not?
Yes39
No32
Not Sure29
...for what? who the heck knows. who needs high crimes and misdemeanors when...

Do you believe Barack Obama wants the terrorists to win?
Yes24
No43
Not Sure33
...not just a quarter of Republicans believe this ludicrous premise, but another third think it's a matter open to debate. How do you negotiate with a party whose rank and file are that divorced from reality?

Do you believe Barack Obama was born in the United States, or not?
Yes42
No36
Not Sure22
...We still have over a half of Republicans who don't think Obama was born in the US or think it's a matter open to debate.

click here for the summary, breakdown, captions and comments.

click here for the actual & complete poll, hard numbers, questions, answers and methodology.

"Needle In Your Eye" by War on Drugs

2010-02-03T21:25:00.002-05:00

War on Drugs is a rock band from my hometown, Philly. Kurt Vile used to be in them. Adam Granofsky who is in the band, also plays w/ Kurt Vile now. Honestly, don't know a lot of their catalog, but if it's as good as this, then I'm gonna love 'em. This, from Wiki: "The group's sound has been described as influenced by Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and My Bloody Valentine." Click here for their myspace page.

awesome quotes I heard this week...

2010-02-02T21:37:00.019-05:00

"You don't have to be straight to be in the military; you just have to be able to shoot straight." - Barry Goldwater

I LOVE this. And from one of the Grandfathers of the conservative movement! This has been tossed around a lot the last few days, as the Obama administration is finally getting around to fulfilling a promise it made during the Presidential campaign: getting rid of the ludicrous "Don't ask, don't tell" (otherwise known in the tweet/status update/mobile device world as DADT) policy we have in the military. It's time. Look, there was a time when DADT was better than nothing. And it definitely was an important 'baby step.' And of course, it was Democrats who cared enough to pass it. Time's have changed, however. Right? Or left? For an up to the minute report (and links to others), on Defense Secretary Robert Gate's and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff's standoff with select members of the Senate today, click here.

"Fucking retarded." - Rham Emanuel. He said this last August, at a weekly strategy session featuring liberal groups and White House aides. Some attendees said they were planning to air ads attacking conservative Democrats who were balking at Mr. Obama's health-care overhaul.

Now, I love this quote too, but with an (*) asterisk. Asterisk: The word "retarded" is offensive to many, and the President's Chief of Staff should know this, and should've used better judgement (it's 2010, now Rahm; we use the word, "leotarded" in these instances now!). But the sentiment he was conveying, I agree with. And his directness I find refreshing. And it's FUNNY as hell. And I say this as a hardcore liberal/dem, who's got all kinds of problems with Obama's lack of leadership on healthcare/insurance reform. These particular Dems just weren't looking at the big picture. For the original Wall St. Journal piece, click here. To read about Sarah Palin calling for his resignation, and more fallout/analysis, click here.

"Bon Jovi. Their own tribute band." - John Agnello, via twitter, during their Grammy performance, 2 nites ago.

Seriously. I know Jon is a very nice person, a homeboy, a BIG Obama supporter, and highly charitable. But, what. the. fuck. How many more decades do I need to watch this shitty band perform on TV? How many more? I NEVER got this tired of the Rolling Stones, or Dick Clarke, or Evander Holyfield when they never went away! C'mon!

Obama smacks down SCOTUS activist judges in his first SOTU address

2010-01-29T23:19:00.003-05:00

Barack Obama's first State of the Union Address was very, very good. Some say excellent. Beck and Hannity "HATED IT!" Well, here's one of the highlights. Just weeks ago, The Supreme Court of the United States struck down a decades-old law that limited what corporations could pay to support presidential campaigns. How did this happen? Well, there are 5 Republicans on the bench now, unfortch. both pilgrim99 and me spoke about this in earlier posts, just before the one. Well here's Barack's take on it, and we see (Republican) Justice Alito mouth "that's a lie" after Barack states the truth about the decision. Good times.

Dysfunction on Parade, or, the Senate

2010-01-28T19:42:00.004-05:00

This is a pretty good summary of the asininity (yes, it's a word) that is the US Senate. I single out Joe "I need some attention so I'm gonna whine" Lieberman as a particularly odious example of a complete shithead, but at least 40 other of his colleagues could easily stand in for him to pinch hit on that lineup card. Couple that with a majority party with spines of Jell-O, and you have a full-on dysfunction worthy of comedic film....

"Minority obstructionism, of course, can be principled. But its chief attraction is that it absolves the opposition of responsibility for anything while making the majority look, well, stupid. As former British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin once said of the press, this kind of "power without responsibility" has been "the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages."

An Aggregation of Nincompoops | Foreign Policy

Truth be told, I'm hoping for a "Damn the torpedoes!" moment in which the 18 seat majority party goes full-on nuclear and gets rid of the filibuster. F**k the consequences down the road. Nobody would be stupid enough to undo a real healthcare reform package once it was passed....

...but then again, there are Republicans there, too....

update: added the blockquote, which I forgot at first.

conference championship weekend predictions

2010-01-24T09:56:00.002-05:00

Colts 27
Jets 19
...Colts are too good. Jets had a nice run though.

Saints 34
Vikings 29
...Saints have better matchups and better players. not by much, but they do.

The Foreign Takeover Will Be Televised

2010-01-22T19:30:00.006-05:00

So here's an interesting take from The Center For Public Integrity. Say a foreign-owned corporation decides they want to influence American political processes. All they have to do is...

...write a check or three:

One prominent examples is CITGO Petroleum Company — once the American-born Cities Services Company, but purchased in 1990 by the Venezuelan government-owned Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. The Citizens United ruling could conceivably allow Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who has sharply criticized both of the past two U.S. presidents, to spend government funds to defeat an American political candidate, just by having CITGO buy TV ads bashing his target.

How's that for protecting state sovereignty? Teabaggers, are you listening?

And it’s not just Chavez. The Saudi government owns Houston’s Saudi Refining Company and half of Motiva Enterprises. Lenovo, which bought IBM’s PC assets in 2004, is partially owned by the Chinese government’s Chinese Academy of Sciences. And Singapore’s APL Limited operates several U.S. port operations. A weakening of the limit on corporate giving could mean China, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and any other country that owns companies that operate in the U.S. could also have significant sway in American electioneering.

Think about it, though it may be painful. Don't worry, we'll donate some ibuprofen for you. Since corporations have full personhood now, just like you or I, they will be able to advocate directly on behalf of any candidate they wish, with as much dinero as they want to spend. So if our friend Hugo (who I don't find as odious as a lot of other people do) decided to influence our electoral process, all he would have to do is direct the state-owned Citgo Corp. to make some payments for airtime, etc.

If you for even a second think that we have a more even playing field now, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I'm happy to accept bids on.

Democracy died yesterday. R.I.P.

Full article here:Will the Citizens United Ruling Let Hugo Chavez and King Abdullah Buy U.S. Elections?

This is great. Posted without comment.

2010-01-22T16:52:00.001-05:00

SCOTUS says we can outright buy politicians (instead of doing it secretly)

2010-01-21T17:13:00.004-05:00

Now that the Supreme Court has decided money equals free speech, I'd like to suggest that Congresscritters, now legally purchased by corporations, adopt a new dress code. Something like these:

Now THAT'S transparency!