News On The March

In Police State News of the Day:

Tasering innocent diabetics and heart disease patients is fun and all, but the real rush for cops is on the way. The full story is at TPM Muckraker

The Miami-Dade Police Department could soon become the first police department in the country to employ unmanned drones, a technology that until now has been used for official purposes only in war zones and along the country's border.

 And have you heard of Darpa Tiap? No it's not the name of a Bollywood celebrity, it is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Total Information Awareness project. And though it may seem beyond the frontier of Orwellian conspiracy ravings, many elements for control of the meek citizenry are already functional. Elliot Cohen tells all in a Truthout interview.

Basically what I'm saying is that there's evidence for thinking that we're moving in a direction of a controlled society, a controlled culture. It isn't that we're one hundred percent there, but there are dangerous trends, and if we don't do anything to offset them, then we really will be in some serious trouble.

The problem with the public is that they're willing to take an extra step. First it's taking off your shoes and putting your stuff through scanners: "That makes sense, all right, we'll do that." Then it becomes more intrusive, and they'll say, "Okay, we'll do that." So you don't get to the end of this continuum immediately; you take gradual steps, and the problem is that with each gradual step, you don't realize how far you've gone down that road. But at some point, people are likely to turn around, and maybe not even realize it - it might just seem part of life. And the idea of freedom might still be discussed as though it exists - however, it won't.

It's All Over Now

So we can safely offer seasonal sacrilege. O'Reilly won the War on Christmas.

2010 Was Wacked

Let's look back on just a tasting of the lunacy on parade in 2010,
courtesy of Tom Tomorrow:

Solstice Total Lunar Eclipse

In the early morning of December 21 (That's tonight!), an extraordinary celestial spectacle will occur, transforming the moon into a brooding, reddish-orange specter.      A total lunar eclipse on the eve of the Winter Solstice has not happened since 1638!

All the info you need is on this NASA web page

Have a strange solstice!

The War On Foxmas

Don't they ever tire of spewing what they must know is utter bullshit?

Tom Tomorrow tries to reason with them in a Holiday Spirit kinda way:

And this is from 2004...plus ça change and all that....

My Favorite Holiday Vids

Here's a few of my faves. Will post more throughout the season.

The Drifters, White Christmas


Bob Dylan, Must Be Santa


Achmed the Dead Terrorist Christmas Song

Cognitive Dissonance

Handel's Hallelujah Chorus, brought to you by the good folks at Arby's and Fast Wok
(The short ad from the source comes with the video)

Reality Sucks

What is referred to as "news" is bitterly depressing.
Reality is far worse on almost every front.

Soooo... I'm stickin' with the comix!
The quality of relevant information is incalculably greater, they have nifty, non-threatening pictures...and I get to laugh.

                                                                R. Crumb

Tom Tomorrow

Ted Rall

Scott Adams


Robert Armstrong , coined the phrase "couch potato", singer and multi-instrumentalist with R. Crumb's Cheap Suit Serenaders, creator of Mickey Rat:

I've Looked At Bipartisanship From Both Sides Now

Tom Tomorrow sees all:

TSA! TSA! TSA!

A bit of north-of-the-border perspicacity from The Province

Four Loko Mania

Hot on the heels of the alcoholic energy drink/Four Loko ban in Michigan, New York City chef Eddie Huang (Xiao Ye) is rolling out an all-you-can-drink Four Loko night. Said Huang, who's been stockpiling the stuff in case of the apocalypse: "Four Loko is not a drink, it is chlorine in the gene pool. It weeds out all the people unfit for the next generation, like Darwin in a can."

Thinking Of Hunter

The immortal Hunter S. Thompson...

I nearly suffocated laughing when I first read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
40 years later it is still a reference point for my shaky foundation of reality.

But THIS, this transcends even that Olympian achievement, and is my favorite work by the Gonz. Why it suddenly overcame me like a demented apparition I have no clue, but am grateful for the visitation.

Read the whole thing at this link:
"The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved"

Or see below for easily digestible nibbles.

I took the expressway out to the track, driving very fast and jumping the monster car back and forth between lanes, driving with a beer in one hand and my mind so muddled that I almost crushed a Volkswagen full of nuns when I swerved to catch the right exit.

"Hell, this clubhouse scene right below us will be almost as bad as the infield. Thousands of raving, stumbling drunks, getting angrier and angrier as they lose more and more money. By midafternoon they'll be guzzling mint juleps with both hands and vomitting on each other between races. The whole place will be jammed with bodies, shoulder to shoulder. It's hard to move around. The aisles will be slick with vomit; people falling down and grabbing at your legs to keep from being stomped. Drunks pissing on themselves in the betting lines. Dropping handfuls of money and fighting to stoop over and pick it up."

Steadman wanted to see some Kentucky Colonels, but he wasn't sure what they looked like. I told him to go back to the clubhouse men's rooms and look for men in white linen suits vomitting in the urinals. "They'll usually have large brown whiskey stains on the front of their suits," I said. "But watch the shoes, that's the tip-off. Most of them manage to avoid vomitting on their own clothes, but they never miss their shoes."

Here is Wikipedia's description of the demented one's writing technique in creating this literary creature.

Accompanied by Ralph Steadman's sketches (the first of many collaborations between Thompson and Steadman) the genesis of the article has been described by Thompson as akin to "falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool of mermaids". Faced with a deadline and without any coherent story for his editors, Thompson began tearing pages from his notebook, numbering them, and sending them to the magazine. The resulting story, and the manic, first-person subjectivity that characterized it, were the beginnings of the Gonzo style.

Shortly after Thompson's suicide in 2005, Steadman recalled their meeting at the Kentucky Derby to the British newspaper The Independent. In the article Steadman remembered his first impression of Thompson that day:

"I had turned around and two fierce eyes, firmly socketed inside a bullet-shaped head, were staring at a strange growth I was nurturing on the end of my chin. 'Holy shit!' he [Thompson] exclaimed. 'They said I was looking for a matted-haired geek with string warts and I guess I've found him.' [...] This man had an impressive head chiselled from one piece of bone, and the top part was covered down to his eyes by a floppy-brimmed sun hat. His top half was draped in a loose-fitting hunting jacket of multi-coloured patchwork. He wore seersucker blue pants, and the whole torso was pivoted on a pair of huge white plimsolls with a fine red trim around the bulkheads. Damn near 6-foot-6 of solid bone and meat holding a beaten-up leather bag across his knee and a loaded cigarette holder between the arthritic fingers of his other hand."

 I sure do miss him.

Some Things Never Change

Case in point; Republican conservative ideology.

As William Faulkner noted, "The past is never dead. It's not even past".

H.P. Lovecraft wrote this in 1936:

"As for the Republicans — how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical 'American heritage'…) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead".

• Letter to C.L. Moore (August 1936), quoted in "H.P. Lovecraft, a Life" by S.T. Joshi, p. 574

Thanks to The Mystery of the Haunted Vampire by way of Digby

Happy Friggin' Halloween!

Woe Is Us

Listening to Beck or Limbaugh is like standing nose to nose with a derelict whose brain and senses are benumbed by cough syrup and angel dust, and who has just chugged a Red Bull and Ipecac cocktail; whatever comes out of his mouth will make no sense, and you will definitely be splattered with foul-smelling vomit.

Yet millions of our fellow citizens eagerly choose to stand and be slimed, ravenously gobbling and swallowing puke chunks. And our badly corrupted corporate media conglomerates validate this stenchified feedback loop by transcribing the bleats of these addled gnomes and printing and broadcasting it without any filter of reason or fact.

Is it any wonder that the childish, misinformed voters of this heinously ignorant country are quite probably going to vote into power a collection of extremist freaks and old guard Republican corporatist stooges who will dismantle whatever remains of our nearly departed civilized society?

There is but a week remaining to defuse the doomsday bomb before it detonates and destroys the future for our descendants. Please, please, please do whatever you can to prevent this apocalypse. This is nothing less than a battle for the soul of our nation...it is bloodsport.

Here are some worthwhile activist organizations who are fighting to the end, have real smarts and power, and boast a track record of electoral success:

Act Blue
MoveOn
Bold Progressives 

Here are some blogs that are extremely informative and well written. Their front page writers practice a high level of what used to be called reporting and journalism before our corporate mass media began featuring right wing dictation and infotainment. Each of these hard news sites features candidate profiles in vital races, with links to effective political action:

Hullaballoo
Daily Kos
Firedoglake

There are pathetically few TV news shows that have any journalistic integrity.
For fact-based news reporting, fronted by studiously prepared and well informed anchors with a work ethic, three come to mind:

Rachel Maddow, The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC


Keith Olbermann, Countdown, MSNBC


And the King, The REAL Most Trusted Name in News:
Jon Stewart, The Daily Show, Comedy Central

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Indecision 2010 - Unforced Errors Edition
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Rally to Restore Sanity

Eight False Things The Public “Knows” Prior To Election Day

Saw this at Digby's Hullaballoo this morning. Just goes to show ya that:
a) Conventional Wisdom should be re-dubbed Incontrovertible Ignorance, and
b) Our corporate mass media does a thoroughly shitty job of informing the public
(I suspect this is entirely intentional).

Like the age old game show question asked: Who Do You Trust?

Dave Johnson has written a very handy piece called: Eight False Things The Public “Knows” Prior To Election Day:

1) President Obama tripled the deficit.
Reality: Bush's last budget had a $1.416 trillion deficit. Obama's first reduced that to $1.29 trillion.
2) President Obama raised taxes, which hurt the economy.
Reality: Obama cut taxes. 40% of the "stimulus" was wasted on tax cuts which only create debt, which is why it was so much less effective than it could have been.
3) President Obama bailed out the banks.
Reality: While many people conflate the "stimulus" with the bank bailouts, the bank bailouts were requested by President Bush and his Treasury Secretary, former Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson. (Paulson also wanted the bailouts to be "non-reviewable by any court or any agency.") The bailouts passed and began before the 2008 election of President Obama.
4) The stimulus didn't work.
Reality: The stimulus worked, but was not enough. In fact, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the stimulus raised employment by between 1.4 million and 3.3 million jobs.
5) Businesses will hire if they get tax cuts.
Reality: A business hires the right number of employees to meet demand. Having extra cash does not cause a business to hire, but a business that has a demand for what it does will find the money to hire. Businesses want customers, not tax cuts.
6) Health care reform costs $1 trillion.
Reality: The health care reform reduces government deficits by $138 billion.
7) Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, is "going broke," people live longer, fewer workers per retiree, etc.
Reality: Social Security has run a surplus since it began, has a trust fund in the trillions, is completely sound for at least 25 more years and cannot legally borrow so cannot contribute to the deficit (compare that to the military budget!) Life expectancy is only longer because fewer babies die; people who reach 65 live about the same number of years as they used to.
8) Government spending takes money out of the economy.
Reality: Government is We, the People and the money it spends is on We, the People. Many people do not know that it is government that builds the roads, airports, ports, courts, schools and other things that are the soil in which business thrives. Many people think that all government spending is on "welfare" and "foreign aid" when that is only a small part of the government's budget.

Read on for more.

I've been having some interesting chats with mildly interested voters. And this is exactly the kind of thing that is really helpful in winning them over. They are busy, they are dealing with these issues in a very haphazard fashion and a lot of their ideas come from a sort of conventional wisdom osmosis. If you can present them with some simple explanations about why things are not as they think, they're receptive to it.

I'm not talking about the tea partiers, of course. They are "informed" by Glenn Beck and there's no getting to them. But your average independent voter or casual liberal voter is persuadable on this stuff.

RIDUCKULOUS

I love this so much, I just had to post it again. I'm considering making it a permanent feature at the top of the blog; at least until that charlatan Glenn Beck retires to his Scrooge McDuck gold vault.

 

Attention WalMort Shoppers!

UPDATE: As usual, comix nail it, while our deeply incompetent and corrupt corporate media tie themselves in knots attempting to avoid the direct, aggressive reporting desperately called for.

In this case, behold the master, Tom Tomorrow at work:

Here is all you need to know to understand the foreclosure fraud pandemic, brought to you by the good folks at BankWorld Discorporated:

NEW YORK (AP) — In an effort to rush through thousands of home foreclosures since 2007, financial institutions and their mortgage servicing departments hired hair stylists, Walmart floor workers and people who had worked on assembly lines and installed them in "foreclosure expert" jobs with no formal training, a Florida lawyer says.

In depositions released Tuesday, many of those workers testified that they barely knew what a mortgage was. Some couldn't define the word "affidavit." Others didn't know what a complaint was, or even what was meant by personal property. Most troubling, several said they knew they were lying when they signed the foreclosure affidavits and that they agreed with the defense lawyers' accusations about document fraud.

The deposed employees worked for the mortgage service divisions of banks such as Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase, as well as for mortgage servicers like Litton Loan Servicing, a division of Goldman Sachs

For a housing recovery to occur, all the foreclosed properties — which could account for 40 percent of all residential sales by 2012 — need to be re-scrutinized by the banks and resold on the market. Now, with so much inventory under a legal threat, the process will become severely delayed.

And a taste of what is coming down the foreclosure pipeline:

Meanwhile, the public outrage continues to mount. In what is perhaps a sign of things to come, a Simi Valley, Calif., couple and their nine children broke into their foreclosed home over the weekend and moved back in, according to television station KABC of Simi Valley. The couple, Jim and Danielle Earl, say they were working with the bank to catch up on payments until they discovered a $25,000 difference between what they owed and what the bank said they owed. The family was evicted from their Spanish-style two-story in July. The home has been sold, and the new owner was due to move in soon.

The Earls and their attorney now allege that they were victims of fraudulent paperwork.

Please go to the above link and read the rest of the report.

If you want more detail in an easy-to-grok format I urge you to check out Foreclosure Fraud For Dummies, this series at the well informed site Rortybomb

It would all be so very  hilarious if human misery were not involved. The Keystone Kops truly run our clown car of a financial system.

Weak Tea

Matt Taibbi's latest screed in Rolling Stone digs down deep into the sclerotic piss pump that is the Fox News Tea Party.

                             These people need to wear their Depends over their mouths.

This is an immensely informative and horrifyingly entertaining piece of journalism. I stopped reading Wenner's Folly when it went gaga for grunge, but Taibbi is among the best and most insightful reads in all of wordom.

Some highlights:

Scanning the thousands of hopped-up faces in the crowd, I am immediately struck by two things. One is that there isn't a single black person here. The other is the truly awesome quantity of medical hardware: Seemingly every third person in the place is sucking oxygen from a tank or propping their giant atrophied glutes on motorized wheelchair-scooters.

A hall full of elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing against government spending and imagining themselves revolutionaries as they cheer on the vice-presidential puppet hand-picked by the GOP establishment. If there exists a better snapshot of everything the Tea Party represents, I can't imagine it.

Vast forests have already been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what it means, where it's going. But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I've concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They're full of shit. All of them. At the voter level, the Tea Party is a movement that purports to be furious about government spending — only the reality is that the vast majority of its members are former Bush supporters who yawned through two terms of record deficits and spent the past two electoral cycles frothing not about spending but about John Kerry's medals and Barack Obama's Sixties associations. The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending — with the exception of the money spent on them.

A loose definition of the Tea Party might be millions of pissed-off white people sent chasing after Mexicans on Medicaid by the handful of banks and investment firms who advertise on Fox and CNBC.

 Taibbi also makes stops at Rand Paul World, the GOP T-Party Puppet Show,
The Altar of the Oligarchy and even a detour to the Creation Museum.

If some of your favorite topics are hypocrisy, corporatist domination, the termination of the American dream, and mind-numbing narcissistic stupidity, you won't want to miss a word of this masterpiece.

Please- go read it.

The Quacker and the Quack

Found this on my favorite economics blog, Naked Capitalism

 

Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here