Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Code Pink 1; Karl Rove 0


So Karl Rove goes to Beverly Hills to spew lies and sign books for a bunch of brownshirt altercockers but the Code Pink Gals showed up to shout him down. They tried to make a citizen's arrest for his war crimes but he was having no part of it; he blusters about the "totalitarianism of the left" and squirts out a few more lies and then departs without signing autographs for the kneepadded fascists. The editors of the film report linked to above are very, very careful to give Karl his say, without (as usual) any critique or fact-checking whatsoever, including the assertion that "The Downing Street Memos are a complete fabrication...." and also that the Leftist Totalitarians "believe in free speech only for themselves," as if the Code Pink gals aren't performing their duty of counterspeech, and also as if Karl hasn't been free for decades to pour his poison into the ears of the nation, to promote the most preposterous and destructive falsehoods on the most prestigious talking-head shows, to spill the secrets of the state with impunity -- yet somehow his free speech is being suppressed.


Well fuck Karl Rove and fuck any of them (left or right) who have the megaphone of television with which to blast the nation: when they're out in public it's the public's turn to respond and say anything they like, short of threats, over and over, even if it impedes the comfortable intimacy of the well-paid celebrity with The People.
Bonus Link: Teabonics -- the dubious grasp of spelling, English, logic, and reality amomg the sign-wielding TeaBaggers (click the slideshow at upper-right).


Friday, March 26, 2010

Goniffs


In the great Miller's Crossing, Joel and Ethan Coen have the hero observe this about the Jewish siblings around whom the plot turns, "She's a grifter, just like her brother. They probably had grifter parents and grifter grandparents and someday they'll each spawn little grifter kids."


Myrna Birnbaum, spoken of here, sounds a little like Sarah Palin, only she finally is shown to be a tart with a heart, too much heart to finally pull the trigger on her detractor.


I wonder, still, if there are odd family traditions of what we goyim call "grifting" in Jewish communities, a legacies of shady operation passed down from father to son and daughter. In any case, I know this: the word often associated with the Cantor clan in the Richmond, Virginia, Jewish community where Eric Cantor gew up is gonif -- which apparently is something between an outright thief and a shady operator. The word doesn't seem misapplied to Eric when you consider all the cash the banksters funnel to him through his wife the bagman/lobbyist.


This morning I awoke to hear local News Channel 8 telling Washingtonians that both Republicans and Democrats were getting threats of violence over the passage of health care reform. A moronic blonde bimbette catapulted this propaganda for Cantor. According to the station's website, yesterday Cantor came out with this:

"A bullet was shot through the window of my campaign office in Richmond this week, and I've received threatening e-mails." Cantor said. He refused to release details, however, saying it would only encourage more threats, and refused to take questions.

According to the website, the Richmond PD, not a notoriously liberal outift (believe me), say this however:


Later Thursday, however, Richmond police said in a news release that the bullet had been fired into the air around 1 a.m. Tuesday. It finished its arc back to earth at a sharp downward trajectory, breaking a window pane on the bottom floor of the two-story brick building where Cantor's campaign leases the top floor.


So a bullet fired at random and spending its last energy on a building where Cantor has very infrequently gone, somehow becomes an attack on his politics, proving to the bimbette, that, despite what her own station's wensite publishes, there is (as usual) equal wrong on both sides.


Now there is a story here, and that is that the Minority Whip got caught in a deliberate, obvious, and preposterous lie, which he was telling to make political hay, but that is not the story our on-air "journalists "want to tell.


Journalism is not even writing any more. They just mix up a cocktail of rumor, propaganda, superstition and statistics into a he-said/she-said controversy and call it news. No need to worry about the truth of the matter. That seems like kind of a grift to me.


Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Who knew?


Who knew that the sun was made of shag carpet, the same kind that was inside my friend Dale's van, the Shag Wagon, circa 1972? Astronomy Picture of the Day knew, that's who!

Monday, March 22, 2010

Pyrrhic Victory?


I'm not getting any warm thrills over the passage of "health care reform," because I doubt if it will actually do much good for the people who really need it, and the health-insurance mandate will provide a club for the Republicans to beat their betters with for some time. I can't see that many Democrats covered themselves with honor in this process and I suspect that some really, really shitty deals were cut so as to keep Saint Barry from suffering a catastrophic defeat.


This said, surely this development will cause some brownshirt somewhere to have a coronary. That's may be a very small thing, but it's a good one.

Sunday, March 21, 2010

Nice to Know


I've been writing a lot of other stuff, which at least subjects me to a slightly different form of dementia, and so I've been pretty deliberately not paying much attention to the news, or "Noise" as Olbermann would have it. But this morning I did peruse the Sunday Times at The Lobbyist's place. (She cancelled her subscription to the Post at about the time they hired another former Bush mouthpiece and torture advocate to be an op-ed writer.) I note that the Times public editor had finally taken slight, grudging and belated note of how badly their suck-ass Judith Miller Class reporters bungled the ACORN-Pimp story, though he goes way out of his way to assure everyone that, whatever was said, not said, distorted or left to speak for itself on those heavily edited tapes (of which he hasn't seen the originals) on those ACORN is evil and deserves to die, we just need a little more orderly proress in their lynching. Clearly ACORN needed defunding a lot more than say Blackwater, aka Thrill Killers R Us.


Within the book review Ross "Jowls" Douthat reviews Voodoo Histories and -- surprise! -- decides that Democrats and liberals are just as guilty of paranoia as Brownshirts like himself. He ends by reassuring us that we need not worry about the Tea Partiers and their enablers on Capitol Hill, because "for now, at least, it's more of a sideshow than a clear and present danger."


I feel safer already. On the other hand the Tea Partiers were up the hill last week calling people nigger, and faggot and spitting on Congressmen. Apparently that's all covered under free speech. Nice to know.


Above find the Ministry of Elegance, at Sunrise on the Equinox a ray of light bounces down the hall near my office, eventually immuminating, in its ralking light, an otherwise invisible inscription, which proved to be the a web-address for the Illuminati's You Tube of Jesus and Magadalen's honeymoon highlights. There's a whole lot of rising again, if you catch my drift.


Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Profiles in Discouragement


I had a few sharp words with The Lobbyist this morning, about Olympia Snowe, whom she said is good on The Lobbyist's issues, stands up for abortion rights, and some other things. "Then why is she a Republican?" I wondered. Olympia goose-stepped to Karl Rove's orders for eight years voting consistently for some of the worst shit ever based in legislation, worst appointees ever to befoul their offices. And she still identifies with the gang that includes the Tea Party, which, despite claims to the contrary is owned and operated by the GOP. So it doesn't really matter if her heart's in the right place on a few small things.


These days even the Democrats are the moral equivalent of Klansmen or Stasi. What a commited Republican has for a conscience I can't imagine.

Friday, March 12, 2010

When Movies Didn't Suck


Yadda, yadda. Health care reform, Massa, snorkeling. Massa. Torture, what torture? According to the Ninth Circuit, "one nation under God" doesn't amount to a government espousal of superstition. Pay no attention to the trillions going out the door to our wars. It's all sooooo depressing, enraging I can't really watch the news. Even Olberman and Rachel are pretty tame and sucky. Prince Larry is way too into Massa's Satanic gayness. I can't stay up for Jon and Colbert, so I have to catch them on the intertubes.


Lately I've just been turning on TCM and zoning to long ago and far away. The cat loved Fred and Ginger in The Gay Divorcee, and last night I loved The Lady Eve, a Preston Sturgess sendup, much inform it seemed to me, by the more madcap side of Jane Austen. Barbara Stanwyck is to die for, and the actual snake gets to do several comic turns!


Friday, March 05, 2010

Crap, Not News


As I have probably said before, one of the most dismaying aspects of our devolution into a truly fascist state is the putrefaction of our media. I note with a mixture of despair and bewilderment how truly awful the people on TV and in the newspapers are, stupid, bigoted and, above all, smug, and I have to wonder, again and again: was it always like this? Is it just a matter of my increased awareness of their universal awfulness, or have our "journalists" always been such hacks.


The very despicable embodiment of said atrocity is Wolf Blitzer, now working overtime to catapult the utterly phony and deeply McCarthyite propaganda of the Cheney cabal, pushing the story of the "Al Quaeda 7" in the Justice Department. As Glenn Greenwald points out here, it really seems to be some kind of new low, for this country at least.


I have run into Wolf on occasion (most recently at a swanky party The Lobbyist took me to at the Kennedy Center) and what a dumpy, seedy, rather unclean little fellow he is, always talking smugly, very stupidly and yet very knowlingly out the side of his mouth. I am resolved, next time I see him, I will take him sharply to task for this story.

Tuesday, March 02, 2010

God Is a Bad Novelist


I was visiting family in wintry New England last weeked and my sister pointed out to me how once again, God has shown himself to be a bad novelist. If he were not there would be at least one of these "traditional values" Republicans who didn't have a guilty sex-secret -- except that the "secret" always seems to out somehow. Exhibit 973, 446: Daniel Stout, who Represents Paulding County in the Georgia legislature, having replaced the former Speaker of the House who, in the way of these things, had resigned after his affair with a lobbyist became common knowledge. After Stout was elected it became water-cooler talk that, while his first wife was pregnant, he'd had an affair with said wife's mother. (For a lively take on this story check out this, and especially the comments.) Of course this is Georgia, where Newt is still revered, despite having served his wife divorce papers in the cancer ward. "Traditional values" has a sort of Orwellian ring down there, meaning it's pretty much synonymous with its traditional antonym. Kinda like conservatism.