‘Stupid Is As Stupid Does’
Filed Under Madness, Media | Leave a Comment
What? Me worry?
(Illustration found here).
Since the last time I’d posted, there’s been a shitload of weird, dangerous and dumb stuff happen, but most of it apparently hasn’t had enough stupidity involved to really get me spiking the old keyboard again — this past week’s adventure via the Internet, though, has caused a return, made me want to comment somewhat on the complete low-level, gutter-trash rigmarole posing as politics nowadays.
USA peoples are in deep dodo.
By now, just about anybody that ain’t stupid has heard of the Shirley Sherrod escapade, and how everybody but a few “fringe” news people were punked by a video posted on a nutcase, right-wing freak’s website.
A dumb-shit feeding frenzy ensued: “In a matter of hours, Shirley Sherrod was attacked by politicians, denounced by pundits, criticized by that same NAACP, and told to resign her post, immediately – to literally pull over to the side of the road and submit her resignation on her Blackberry.
I guess she should be grateful they didn’t send a patrol car to arrest her for texting while driving.”
What a freakin’ mess.
And what damn-dumb-ass stupid.
An episode which fully illustrates the horror of modern communications — truth or not, just get a nifty, one-sided spin through the news cycle, and faster than you can say Fox News, people are near-instantly scared stupid.
Real horror of the incident, and the crux of that horror, is that these people who were so-quickly scared stupid, shouldn’t be, as they run the freakin’ country, and one of these people, the most-hoped-for-elected president in generations, maybe ever.
Impact of the right-wing media apparently carries a great deal of weight — if you’re stupid.
The story in a nutshell: Andrew Breitbart, a right-winger hardcase and Tea Party pusher-man, posted a short video on his jaundiced, nasty, weird-assed website, biggovernment, of Sherrod giving a speech last March to the NAACP in which she seemingly displayed some racist bullshit, and before one could mutter how-do-you-do, the shit quickly the fan — Fox News online ran with the story, the NAACP got all freaked, and Sherrod was asked to resign.
The tape, however, turned out to be nearly opposite the truth, edited for bad effect.
According to Jane Hall, an associate professor at American University and a former Fox News contributor, the Sherrod case was formed and spun “like a virtual world McCarthyism”, where just throwing something out there is considered true, despite it being a total lie, forcing a response/denial where none is required.
Journalism in the mainstream sucks.
And the entire shame is a nasty-type of long-time politics.
Salon’s Joan Walsh nails it:
The most important point is this: Fox News has, sadly, become the purveyor of a 50-state “Southern strategy,” the plan perfected by Richard Nixon to use race to scare Southern Democrats into becoming Republicans by insisting the other party wasn’t merely trying to fight racism, but give blacks advantages over whites (Fox News boss Roger Ailes, of course, famously worked for Nixon).
Now Fox is using the election of our first black president to scare (mainly older) white people in all 50 states that, again, the Democratic party is run by corrupt black people trying to give blacks advantages over whites (MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow laid out the history last week).
Where is the US nowadays?
Dumb-ass stupid is as dumb-ass-stupid does.
Another Gone
Filed Under Media, Musings | Leave a Comment
Highlights the desperate plight of news gathering: Editor&Publisher, an authentic cornerstone of journalism will cease publication at the end of this year.
The announcement was made Thursday on its online site.
An interview today with Greg Mitchell, E&P‘s editor since 2002, on the demise of the newspaper-trade industry/journo-icon can be found at Columbia Journalism Review.
Read a brief Wikipedia-history of E&P here — the magazine was founded in 1901 and six years later merged with a magazine most-aptly called, The Journalist.
And for reaction from the media here.
Sad state of affairs, that it be.
Crying on the Toilet — ‘Conspiracy, conspiracy…’
Filed Under Media, Musings, history | Leave a Comment
Nearly 50 years have passed since that fateful day in Dallas when JFK was assassinated, and now some new insights have surfaced into those few precious moments in the abrupt transition of presidential power — and it ain’t macho.
In a new book on the November 1963 event, The Kennedy Assassination–24 Hours After: Lyndon B. Johnson’s Pivotal First Day as President, by Steven Gillon, paints LBJ as near the break-down point.
(Illustration found here).
Reportedly, JFK’s military aide, Brigadier General Godfrey McHugh, could not find LBJ on Air Force One after people had told him Johnson was on board — everyone figured he had departed already on Air Force Two as Kennedy and Johnson arrived in Dallas on separate aircraft — until the general checked the shitter in the presidential bedroom.
Via a piece by Gillon at HuffPost:
What McHugh claimed to have witnessed next was shocking.
“I walked in the toilet, in the powder room, and there he was hiding, with the curtain closed,” McHugh recalled.
He claimed that LBJ was crying, “They’re going to get us all. It’s a plot. It’s a plot. It’s going to get us all.’” According to the General, Johnson “was hysterical, sitting down on the john there alone in this thing.”
I soon discovered that McHugh had told a similar story when he spoke by phone with Mark Flanagan, an investigator with the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA).
Ironically, McHugh gave the interview to the HSCA a week before he sat down with the Kennedy Library in May 1978.
“McHugh had encountered difficulty in locating Johnson but finally discovered him alone,” Flanagan wrote in his summary to the Committee.
Quoting McHugh, the investigator noted that the General found Johnson “hiding in the toilet in the bedroom compartment and muttering, ‘Conspiracy, conspiracy, they’re after all of us.’”
Author Christopher Anderson claimed that McHugh shared a similar, although slightly more dramatic, version of this story when he interviewed the General for his book Jackie after Jack, published in 1998.
In complete contrast to LBJ’s blubberings, Jackie Kennedy was stoic and strong, seemingly in control despite the horror blowing around her.
She was only 34 then, the youngest First Lady in US presidential history.
In an interview (pdf) with historian Theodore White about a week after the shooting (Nov. 29, 1963), Jackie had this to say about the chaos on-board Air Force One, spinning the tale “one brief shinning moment that was known as Camelot”:
“…History…, everybody kept saying to me put a cold towel around my head” (and wipe the blood off: she is referring to the swearing-in scene at the plane, when Johnson is sworn in at the plant at Love Field and she was beside him)… “later, I saw myself in the mirror; my whole face spattered with blood and hair…I wiped it off with Kleenex.
History. I thought no one really wants me there.
Then one second later I thought, why did I wash the blood off?
I should have left it there, let them see what they’ve done…If I’d just had blood and caked hair when” (they took pictures of swearing in).
“Then later I said to Bobby what’s the line between histrionics and drama.
I should have left the blood on.”
In 1995, a year after Jackie’s death, The John F. Kennedy Library in Boston released the interview notes.
Another strange, little-known incident that day — US District Judge Sarah Tilghman Hughes, who administered the oath of office to Johnson, and JFK’s Bible and a three-by-five-inch file card containing the oath.
According to the National Archives:
Judge Hughes, in the process of stepping down the boarding steps, was hailed by a self-assured man who inquired if she wanted the two items she held in her hand.
Assuming he was a security man and because the items did not belong to her, Judge Hughes transferred to the man the file card and the President’s Bible, neither of which were ever located.
Kennedy’s assassination will always be clouded in conspiracy, pity and…romance.
‘Net Virus Hoax as Hoax
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A few scant seconds can mean the difference between truth and a lie.
Such as the case of Desiree Jennings, a 25-year-old training to become a Washington Redskins cheerleader, who has claimed the noted swine-flu vaccine she took last August gave her a rare, but terrible disease.
And from that came the “flu girl hoax” that spread across the Internet — see one example here.
A big problem, however, might lie in some kind of lie.
Sharp-eyed blogger Eric Metze might have uncovered a glitch:
I’ve used a web service called Splicd to highlight these five seconds of the original two minute piece from Inside Edition.
In this clip, you will see/hear a glitch in the video.
This glitch causes the narrator to say, “Doctors say what happened to Desire should [glitch] discourage people from getting a flu shot.”
Now listen to this longer clip so you can hear the glitch in context.
It’s obvious that the doctors say that even though this happened to the young woman, people should not be discouraged from getting the flu shot.
But considering how that clip is edited, it’s not exactly clear what they mean unless you happen to catch it.
…
What does this mean? It means that someone took the original Inside Edition article, chopped out the word “not”, and provided physical copies for people to upload. There are dozens (hundreds?) of people actively spreading an obvious propaganda virus that was edited by an anonymous person and injected into the veins of the internet.
Another Fox News moment — Run with a falsehood no matter the facts.
Info Ugly — News-Watching Sucks
Filed Under Media, Musings | Leave a Comment
There’s little doubt we’re alive in one of the most-interesting periods in world history as all kinds of nefarious enterprises are starting to come to real-bad fruition — unlike other past-historical upheavals, however (there’s a shitload of these chaos-in-civilization scenarios), we’ll be able to practically watch it unfold right before our collective eyeballs — and ironically, for the vast-mass wad of US and world’s peoples, the coming (please select word choice: cataclysm, calamity, catastrophe, disaster, tragedy) will come as a complete shock.
Bad news-gathering of bad news makes great TV.
This particular pontification on current events and social metaphors came about after a call last night from an old journalism friend, a long-time photographer who’d worked with me years ago on my last newspaper gig down on California’s Central Coast (the Times-Press-Recorder) and wondered if I’d be interested in contributing to an online magazine he was helping put together up in Washington state.
He explained the new publication would highlight stories with a positive news perspective, as most news media carries only bad shit, but would instead focus on good coming out of bad.
Good idea, I guess, and told him sure, I’ll see what can be done.
After reminiscing on personal and professional folklore in and out of the newsroom, we hung up.
A good conversation, as he’s a good friend and a most-excellent photographer (view his stuff here), but there was also something curious in the sense of it — I was tired, so I didn’t ponder the mysterious import feeling within the confine of my ears.
Until this morning — the odd sense, the ring of the idea, positive news, hamstrung the brain.
Although I really couldn’t understand the concept, positive news, apparently there’s a growing market for nothing but — in an age of ugly, seek out the pretty.
Last March, a piece in Newsweek viewed this trend:
People not only wanted to watch good-news reports, they had lots of their own good news to share.
I’m even learning to spin bad news into optimistic gold all by myself.
Watch this: more people losing their jobs has actually led to a massive increase in stay-at-home parents, which is great for childhood development.
Bam.
There’s already a Good News Network, with stories on things like jeans giant Levi Strauss to include A Care Tag for Our Planet on its products, and even a Good News on This Day in History segment (an example: today in 1797, Andre-Jacques Garnerin made the first recorded parachute jump over Paris, France).
Alas, however, good news after 30 days will be hidden behind a subscription firewall.
In reality, there is/are no good news anywhere, layered down, or on top, or spun out of whole cloth — an extreme-depressing proposition, I admit.
These ‘green shoots‘ of optimism are just a cultural perception of the old “The future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades” view of good vs bad.
Not many feel-good stories came out of the Great Depression era, hence, the 1930s were alive with screwball, romantic movie comedies, and a big song of the time: ‘We’re in the Money.”
In bad times, even lottery ticket sales increase — good news come from dreams.
And the factuality coming at humanity, though, is embodied within the worst form of dreaming — a nightmare.
One aspect of the Internet is speed, how quickly events can be recorded, disseminated and digested across the globe — those damn, freakin’ cellphone cams!
Iran’s presidential election last summer is a pure, prime example.
Online allows anyone, anywhere at anytime to become a reporter, or more like it, a chronicler of events, places and things.
Videos of just about every human situation has cropped up online to be viewed potentially near-instantly by billions of people, which makes the point — way, way-too-much information is thrown at the brain nowadays, and it’s not just via the Internet — witness all that horrifying shit bill-boarded off racked magazines on grocery-store check-out lines; we’re trapped there, forced to read glaring headlines on all kinds of cultural-personality-obsessed, dumb-fuck stories.
(Read a loony essay I wrote last year on media here).
Mixed in with all uploading/downloading/viewing/listening is the professional media — newspapers, TV, magazines, whatnot.
These guys have morphed into something real ugly in the last three decades — the national people, especially all the TV types, pursue nearly-wholly other interests than real journalism (Katherine Graham would indeed let her tit (be) caught in a big fat wringer if she could see her Washington Post as it is today) and the real loser is the US peoples.
Just one glaringly-sad example — the New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning story on the Pentagon’s TV propaganda military-analyst ploy in the run-up to the Iraq invasion — few Americans know anything about that story as it was blacked out by ALL the TV networks (as they were co-conspirators in the scam) except one (PBS).
The continuing loss of anything-near what’s been called accountability journalism is similar to all those failed banks from last year recently giving the same asshole employees huge bonuses — the fat get fatter.
While the national media parades around full of itself, making much of balloon boy and David Letterman’s peccadilloes, the two biggest stories facing the planet are way under-reported – peak oil and climate change, especially the latter, as its influence might be worse than the former, and its arrival quicker.
Although the subjects have been discussed/debated in public, the actual consequences of what’s really occurring and the likely worse-case scenarios approaching have been viewed as fringe or nutcase, and no full-blown balloon-boy-like examinations by the media.
Even with a major climate conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, only weeks away.
The BBC reports nothing of substance will emerge from Denmark, despite the obvious:
Nevertheless, what is clear from the interview is that what is agreed at Copenhagen is likely to fall so far short of original expectations.
Let’s not forget what is at stake here.
The Copenhagen conference is reckoned by many to be pretty much the last chance the world has to begin to cut greenhouse gas emissions before catastrophic climate change becomes inevitable.
And to make a matters worse, Sen. James Inhofe, a wingnut GOPer from Oklahoma, will supposedly visit the Copenhagen meeting with a “a truth squad of three” to undermine any kind of global-warming agreement in an original-classic case of hauling-off and striking himself along with everybody on the planet directly in the nuts.
Inhofe and others of his ilk will in the near future most-likely be viewed as more than just loudmouth dumb-asses, but near criminals.
Despite the evidence, a Pew Research poll released today reports only 57 percent of US peoples in the survey think there is solid evidence that the average temperature on earth has been getting warmer over the past few decades. In April 2008, 71% said there was solid evidence of rising global temperatures.
And this: fewer also see global warming as a very serious problem — 35% say that today, down from 44% in April 2008.
The best sites for info: The Oil Drum and Climate Progress.
Coupled with the environment and fuel is capitalism/economics.
And there ain’t nothin’ purty there either.
Might be hard to cobble together a positive news perspective in today’s money woes — except for the mentioned Wall Street assholes — but there are ‘good’ stories there.
I could part of a ‘good’ economic story.
In my day-job/offline profession as a liquor-store clerk, there’s not really a recession, though, business is not booming, sales have maintained a strong course the past two years.
Whiskey is a good tax revenue and when times are bad, people will still smoke and drink, but are frugal about what they inhale — according to Gallup last June, The percentage of U.S. adults who consume alcohol is fairly steady at 64%, and there has been little change in self-reported drinking volume.
Now it’s more bang for the buck: Whiskey, of all the spirits, is making a bit of a comeback, the council said, and showed good performance in a slow market. Premium rum, super premium tequila and premium vodka also grew.
Mine is just one story in the Naked City.
The rest are experiencing a financial nightmare without an apparent end.
As the US Senate haggles over extending unemployment benefits, 7,000 US unemployed a day loose that small income — US employment at 9.8 percent and California at 12 — and one has the fixings for a shitload of bad stories with new jobless claims higher than expected.
Although there’s some indication an economic recovery is on the way, banks are still biting at the gold-plated chafe, so says Elizabeth Warren, TARP’s oversee chair: “You really begin to wonder what it’s going to take to get the attention of the people in charge of these very large corporations…”
Never-ending story with a bad ending.
Here’s a good one.
From SatireWire:
Unwilling to wait for their eventual indictments, the 10,000 remaining CEOs of public U.S. companies made a break for it yesterday, heading for the Mexican border, plundering towns and villages along the way, and writing the entire rampage off as a marketing expense.
…
Calling themselves the CEOnistas, the chief executives were first spotted last night along the Rio Grande River near Quemado, where they bought each of the town’s 320 residents by borrowing against pension fund gains.
…
Law enforcement officials and disgruntled shareholders riding posse were noticeably frustrated.
“First of all, they’re very hard to find because they always stand behind their numbers, and the numbers keep shifting,” said posse spokesman Dean Levitt. “And every time we yell ‘Stop in the name of the shareholders!’, they refer us to investor relations. I’ve been on the phone all damn morning.”
Maybe, it’s the end of the world as we know it, but I feel like smiling — for just a few minutes, at least until the next good story.
‘Managed’ News
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Journalists covering the White House, especially those from TV, sometimes tend to think of themselves as above the crowd, as better than the average asshole reporter digging for stories down in the trenches.
As Nadia Bilbassy, White House correspondent for the Dubai-based satellite TV network MBC, told Think Progress last month: I found that I think they really think that if you make it to cover the White House then you must be bigger than God, therefore, you know, you have to be treated as such.
Except for one gal, the dean (or headmistress) of the WH press corp: Helen Thomas.
(Illustration found here).
Thomas has been covering WH antics for nearly 50 years, starting with JFK (in the photo above) and still running strong into a new millennium with President Barack Obama (photo below).
She still maintains that pure journalism appeal: Those in power hate her.
During his WH press conferences, George Jr. didn’t call on Thomas for three years!
In May 2006, he wished he’d made it four years.
An exchange on the Iraqi War:
Thomas: They didn’t do anything to you or to our country.
Bush: Look — excuse me for a second, please. Excuse me for a second. They did. The Taliban provided safe haven for al-Qaeda. That’s where al-Qaeda trained –
Thomas: I’m talking about Iraq –
Bush: Helen, excuse me. That’s where — Afghanistan provided safe haven for al-Qaeda. That’s where they trained. That’s where they plotted. That’s where they planned the attacks that killed thousands of innocent Americans.
(Illustration found here).
Yesterday, Time magazine held a Q&A with Thomas on the publication of her newest book, Listen Up Mr. President: Everything You Always Wanted Your President to Know and Do, and she was still up-front and right-on:
How is Obama’s approach to the press?
Everybody in the White House tries to manage us. There’s always the spin. When Kennedy came in, which was the first year I started covering the White House, there was something called “managed news.” And through the years it has been perfected to an art.
…
Not more than any other President. Nobody likes criticism, and nobody likes to feel attacked, of course. But I think it behooves all Administrations to tell the truth as much as they can, to bring the people with them. You cannot have a democracy without informed people. It shouldn’t be a shock when the public finally learns things.
How’s the WH on secrecy?
All of them are secretive. All of them. But I think we got a lot more out of President Kennedy and especially President [Lyndon] Johnson. He would summon us — the entire press corps — to the South Lawn and we’d stroll around the grounds with him. We’d call them the Bataan Death Marches because the women wore really high heels with pointed toes, and we would be falling all over each other. But we’d take these walks, and he would really let his hair down. We’d get real insight into how much he was suffering with Vietnam. He’d tell us a lot of things, then he would say it was all off the record. But we knew that he wanted us to write it without attribution.
And bloggers?
Everyone with a laptop thinks they’re a journalist. Everyone with a cell phone thinks they’re a photographer. So our profession is sidelined in a way. There’s no turning back. It’s frightening because you can ruin lives and reputations willy-nilly without realizing it. No editors. No standards. No ethics. We’re at the crossroads. So many newspapers that are so valuable are going down the drain. It’s a crisis.
…
I’m praying. I’m praying that we’ll still have newspapers. That’s where you get in-depth information. You can’t get it from headline news or these very brief things on TV or on blogs. They don’t explain anything.
And advice for future presidents?
It would be, Do the right thing. There’s no other place to go.
Continue hanging, Helen, we’d all better off if you did.
Whoa!
Filed Under Media, Musings, Politics | Leave a Comment
Friday morning shocker: President Obama has has won the Nobel Peace Prize — “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”
And the Nobel Committee added: “He has created a new international climate.”
(Illustration found here).
This will indeed piss-way-off the GOP and all wingnuts as the award comes much, much early in Obama’s tenure in power — an unprecedented event.
As one reader at Talking Points Memo pointed out this morning: Isn’t it a little soon for this? Maybe after he brokers an Israeli-Palestinian agreement or something like that.
It sounds like the, ‘boy is the world relieved you guys didn’t choose McCain’ award.
GOP chairman Michael Steele responded: “The real question Americans are asking is, What has President Obama actually accomplished?”… and it’s “unfortunate that the president’s star power has outshined tireless advocates who have made real achievements working towards peace and human rights.” And the president won’t be…“receiving any awards from Americans for job creation, fiscal responsibility, or backing up rhetoric with concrete action.”
Whether Obama deserves the award is not the real excitement — the horror stories now will pour forth from the conservative aisle and it will be much fun.
Climate Change Choo Choo
Filed Under Environment, Media | Leave a Comment
There’s something I just don’t understand regarding climate change/global warming, although there’s plenty of opinions (Truism — opinions are like assholes, everybody’s got one) about this horrifying weather/sky/ground/ocean-related event barreling square at humanity, and with seemingly a lot of multi-verified science to warrant near panic — Why isn’t climate change taken more seriously?
Does many more of the earth’s so-called civilized urban centers have to become Mars-looking Melbourne, Australia (depicted in the surreal artwork at left), before real action is taken — way more than just tree-hugging, plastic-hating and recycling.
(Illustration found here).
The earth is in such a fix, major adjustments are required, and from what I’ve gleaned from a little bit of knowledge (and far-less-real-science jargon understanding) is yesterday might have been too late — can mankind step back quickly from the threshold, or in the words of David Letterman, “We Are Dead Meat“?
Seemingly to me, the main focus is the mix of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere — detailed to parts per million (ppm) — the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its report in 2007 with a 450 ppm as the stated goal to flatten CO2 and thus reduce global warming — in the last couple of years that benchmark, however, has been lowered, now to 350 ppm. (As an aside: I could never write any kind of science blog, just don’t got the brains — I can understand while reading, but within seconds that knowledge is most likely replaced by something off ‘Family Guy’).
Best site to stay informed is climateprogress.org — a good timely piece was posted there this afternoon with the timely and apt title: Is it just too damn late? Part 1, the Science.
The short answer: No.
The money snip:
I don’t think the basic story should be a surprise to regular readers of this blog. We’re in big, big trouble, and we’re not yet politically prepared to do what is necessary to avert catastrophe — as I’ve said many times. But that is quite different from concluding it’s too late and we’re doomed.
A good rendition/background and the economics of the 450 ppm and the 350 ppm CO2 situation can be found here.
The big problem that I can see is the advancement of climate change — a lot of these scientific research papers and reports are based on models and a lot of science-laced predictions.
Climate change is happening faster than previously supposed — stories here and here.
A snippet from the site Global Warming:
The IPCC Fourth Report confirms that over the past 8,000 years, and just before Industrialisation in 1750, carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere increased by a mere 20 parts per million (ppm).
The concentration of atmospheric CO2 in 1750 was 280ppm, and increased to 379 ppm in 2005.
That is a whopping increase of 100 ppm in 250 years.
For comparison and at the end of the most recent ice age there was approximately an 80ppm rise in CO2 concentration. This rise took over 5,000 years, and higher values than at present have only occurred many millions of years ago.
Another factor in the ability to combat approaching bad levels of climate change is the intense and turbulent anxiety of the age — most-likely for the vast bulk of US peoples climate-change consequences are just on the peripheral vision of thought, if there at all.
Two horrible wars — one about to implode — a coming oil problem and a US economy described as a dead man walking does present major preoccupation notions.
Only time will upset the cart.
‘Bratty’ And Not At All Funny
Filed Under Media, Politics | Leave a Comment
“I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.”
– Oscar Wilde
(Illustration found here).
The so-called Republican Party — the GOP — has descended into nothing more than bullshit, and the hard part is that a certain segment of US society takes these assholes for serious, a point that would make Barry Goldwater spin in his grave.
According to reports, when it was announced a couple of days ago Chicago didn’t make the 2016 Olympic cut, a meeting for Americans For Prosperity, a conservative group opposing health care reform, “erupted in cheers,” only because they viewed the news as a blow to President Obama.
Not that it was a blow to all US peoples.
And idiot-face Bill Kristol, the rightest of right-wing nitwits, was overjoyed:
“You couldn’t help but be amused by it,” Kristol said on Fox News Sunday.
Kristol said that Obama’s liberal world view should have prompted him to campaign against his adopted home town of Chicago, and support Rio de Janeiro’s winning bid.
“By Barack Obama’s view of the world, he should have been rooting for Brazil to get the Olympics. South America’s never gotten them. It’s a rising power. It would help Brazil. We don’t need the Olympics. We’ve had them a million times. Our economy doesn’t need the boost of the Olympics,” said Kristol, who evidently is very good at emulating “liberal” talking points when he wants to be.
Has Kristol read any, any-at-all US economic stats lately?
Talking Points Memo has a run-down on the GOP cheer squads.
And GOP bigwigs are cruising all over the world to take a slap at Obama, though, in reality they’re slapping at the whole US — Politics and not America is the over-all concern.
TPM also has a nice list of GOPers on the move: Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) is visiting Honduras in order to support the recent military coup against a leftist president, which has been opposed by the Obama administration and all the surrounding countries in the region … Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) will be going to the upcoming climate change conference in Copenhagen, bringing a “Truth Squad” to tell foreign officials there that the American government will not take any action … House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) traveled to Israel, where he spoke out against President Obama’s opposition to expanded settlements … Rep. Mark Kirk (R-IL) boasted in June that he told Chinese officials not to trust America’s budget numbers.
What the livin’ shit?
Are these clowns Americans?
The New York Times‘ Paul Krugman nailed it this morning:
So what did we learn from this moment?
For one thing, we learned that the modern conservative movement, which dominates the modern Republican Party, has the emotional maturity of a bratty 13-year-old.
But more important, the episode illustrated an essential truth about the state of American politics: at this point, the guiding principle of one of our nation’s two great political parties is spite pure and simple.
If Republicans think something might be good for the president, they’re against it — whether or not it’s good for America.
Be afraid, be really, really freakin’ afraid.
Work is Job One
Filed Under Finance, Media | Leave a Comment
Today one year ago, Hank Paulson and his boys ignited TARP — Troubled Asset Relief Program — the $700 billion bank bullshit bailout that has done nothing to relieve the economic woes of US peoples.
An example of fighting symptoms and not the cause of disease:
“If you get a very expensive treatment that saves your life, but you don’t sort out the underlying problem, it may not come back for awhile, but it will come and get you again,” said Simon Johnson, professor of global economics and management at MIT.
(Illustration found here).
This little misfire has indeed already come back around to get us again.
For the first time in my lifetime, there’s more people about to loose it all.
According to Bloomberg:
The chart of the day shows the average duration of unemployment is now 26.2 weeks, longer than the 26 weeks of state benefits normally provided to workers who lose their jobs.
It’s the first time that has occurred since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began keeping records in 1948.
The jobless rate rose to 9.8 percent in September, while payrolls fell by 263,000, a Labor Department report showed today in Washington.
Which leads on to personal bankruptcies, which has soared this year to 1,046,449 in the first nine months, compared to 773,810 in the same period of 2008 — and in September alone there were 124,790 filing, a 41 percent increase over the same month last year.
And those people out hunting for jobs will have to stand in a long, long line as employers will only keep cutting jobs, not adding any, and most “experts” predict a 10.2 percent unemployment rate for next year.
Since December 2007, the US economy has lost 7.2 million jobs — “This recovery looks like roadkill,” said Christopher Rupkey, economist at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi. “The heavy layoffs have stopped, but there are simply no new jobs available, and the harder the jobs are to get, the harder and longer this road to recovery is going to be.”
When one adds those poor souls who have quit seeking work, and those working part-time, but would work more and those still looking, the unemployment rate is a whopping 17 percent.
The US taxpayer is expected to loose some $200 billion out of the TARP fiasco, and banks still keep failing, except of course all those Wall Street assholes, who are only getting fatter — where did the cash go?
In Paulson’s original version of TARP no one would know: Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.
And it’s worse than the numbers.
According to the financial site Calculated Risk:
Instead of 7.2 million net jobs lost since December 2007, the preliminary benchmark estimate suggests the U.S. has lost over 8.0 million net jobs during that period.
Even before the annual revision, the current employment recession was already the worst recession since WWII in terms of percent of job losses.
The benchmark revision shows this recession was even deeper.
The revision will be reported in February … just something to remember over the next few months.
And the banks?
Three were closed Friday, bringing the total to 98 bank failures this year with an average of 10 a month, the highest level since 1992 — This year’s failures have reduced the FDIC’s insurance fund to $10.1 billion from $45 billion a year ago.
And where are we going from here?
Paul Krugman says down:
Stocks are up. Ben Bernanke says that the recession is over. And I sense a growing willingness among movers and shakers to declare “Mission Accomplished” when it comes to fighting the slump. It’s time, I keep hearing, to shift our focus from economic stimulus to the budget deficit.
No, it isn’t. And the complacency now setting in over the state of the economy is both foolish and dangerous.
…
Wait. It gets worse.
A new report from the International Monetary Fund shows that the kind of recession we’ve had, a recession caused by a financial crisis, often leads to long-term damage to a country’s growth prospects. “The path of output tends to be depressed substantially and persistently following banking crises.”
And so it goes…
News! Cat Wags Dog’s Tail
Filed Under Madness, Media | Leave a Comment
A lot of shit bubbling in modern life’s drainage ditch — on the toilet with a bit of news.
General Alarm
In pushing President Obama even further back into the corner of Afghan war escalation, Gen. Stan McNasty — oops, sorry — Gen. Stan McChrystal rejected calls for scaling down military objectives and the only way to win over there is with way-more troops, knocking VP Joe Biden in the process.
In a speech today in the UK, the hardcase general balked at an audience question on Biden’s idea of paring down the GIs while hunting insurgents with drones and such: “The short answer is: no,” he said. “You have to navigate from where you are, not where you wish to be. A strategy that does not leave Afghanistan in a stable position is probably a short-sighted strategy.”
(Illustration found here).
Dude, what’s the long answer…hahaha, hahaha…’Get outta my chair!‘
Higher Anxiety
Marijuana being illegal is bad on the health, so says Dr. Julie Holland, a psychiatrist at the New York University School of Medicine and author of Weekends at Bellevue.
Holland reports the feelings of shame and suspicion in taking a toke makes everything just so much more worse: “The fact that [marijuana is] illegal is a very big deal,” Holland said. “People have to hide and they feel like criminals and there’s a lot of shame and guilt, and it ends up making … it decreases self-esteem a little bit and it makes [the habit] more adrenalized. The fact that you add adrenaline into it, and you have to hide and you have shame, can make it more addictive and more dangerous.”
And with something that’s not dangerous to begin with, what, would it still be less dangerous?
Or…
Lower Anxiety
Hot-shot female stoners, that’s what.
From Marie Claire:
According to a recent study by The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, an estimated 8 million American women smoked up in the past year — a lowball figure that reflects only those willing to cop to it.
Among them is the upper-middle-class Pottery Barn set: One in five women who admitted to indulging in the previous month lives in a household earning more than $75,000 a year.
They cut a wide swath across the professional spectrum, including lawyers, editors, insurance agents, TV producers, and financial biggies, looking nothing like the blotto hippie teens of Dazed and Confused or the unemployed, out-of-shape schlubsters who are a staple of the Judd Apatow canon.
By all outward appearances, they are card-carrying, type A workaholics who just happen to prefer kicking back with a blunt instead of a bottle.
The magazine’s editor-in-chief Joanna Coles disagrees with the psychiatrist on pot’s social stigma:
“I have to say, that’s not what we are hearing from readers,” she said on the Today Show. “First of all, it’s decriminalized in 13 states, and I don’t think this is a generation of people who get excited about the fact that it’s illegal.”
…
On pot, “people are unwinding and they’re relaxing, but they’re also able to think and maybe analyze or think clearly … I think cannabis is … more functional than alcohol, certainly in terms of anxiety. It can be a treatment or a medicine.”
Dude, where’s my money?
Cash and Civilization Change
Via The Oil Drum:
Presumably an economist would notice something odd if he sat down at a lunch counter, ordered the daily special, and was handed instead a box of socket wrenches, even if the price of the wrenches was exactly the same as the daily special.
If the economist was starving on a desert island and a crate that washed ashore proved to contain socket wrenches rather than food, the difference would be a matter of life or death.
This latter is uncomfortably close to our position just now, as the world’s energy companies race each other and the clock to extract fossil fuels in nearly unimaginable volumes from the Earth’s dwindling supplies.
If we allow ourselves to wait until those supplies start to run short, it will be much too late to start retooling our civilization for some other energy resource, even if one happens to turn up.
Read the entire fascinating article here.
Live and Stay Dead in Detroit
In a town where there’s 28 percent unemployment and the local annual budget of $21,000 for burying folks is way-used up, the dead stay frozen in time.
From CNN: Inside the Wayne County morgue in midtown Detroit, 67 bodies are piled up, unclaimed, in the freezing temperatures. Neither the families nor the county can afford to bury the corpses. So they stack up inside the freezer.
Albert Samuels, chief investigator for the morgue, said he has never seen anything like it during his 13 years on the job. “Some people don’t come forward even though they know the people are here,” said the former Detroit cop. “They don’t have the money.”
Pornographic
Newt Gingrich has to be one the great assholes of our time, almost, but not quite in the Dick Cheney league, but damn-sure close.
Gingrich’s conservative group, Business Defense and Advisory Council, has done it again — they sent out another award-message naming a 2009 Entrepreneur of the Year, and this time to the owner of a strip club in Dallas, Texas.
However, once Gingrich’s boys discovered the error — they reversed course and told the owner of the strip club (or ‘Gentlemen’s Club’ as it were) to eat shit.
According to the Dallas News, Dawn Rizos, owner of The Lodge, had been at first “thrilled” with the whole affair, but now it seems these guys are just idiots.
Says Dawn:
“I’m not going to argue with them, if that’s their story,” said Rizo, who is owner and CEO of the club.
“I think they should be a lot more careful and maybe Google the person they’re going to give an award to before they make all of their plans.”
Yes…
Last month, Allison Vivas of Pink Visual — a porn DVD superstore headquartered in California — was given the same treatment: She won an Entrepreneur of the Year award too, from the same bunch of knuckleheads, and also had it rescinded.
The message was “inadvertently” sent, says Gingrich’s boys.
Via Think Progress:
“Allison was disappointed to receive a call this morning from an ASWF representative stating that the fax had been sent to her ‘inadvertently,’” Boyer told AVN.com.
“We’re not entirely clear on how one ‘inadvertently’ sends a fax to the right person at the correct fax number, so our sense is that this is damage control on the part of a group that is having second thoughts about either recognizing the excellent work of a porn company entrepreneur in light of their own conservative political and social orientation, or having second thoughts about their promotional methodology and communication protocols.”
(h/t: Raw Story).
Privatizing the Bacon Smell
A mysterious mercenary unit, the American Police Force, has taken over a small, unused but expensive jail in Hardin, Montana, with plans to build a law enforcement training facility on the property.
According to Talking Points Memo: APF has said it plans to invest $30 million in the site, including $17M in the training facility, where law enforcement will get sniper training and learn “DNA analysis” skills.
And where is American Police Force getting the money for this venture? Company spokeswoman Becky Shay — until about a week ago the Billings Gazette reporter covering APF — says they are no plans to answer that question. She did not respond to a request for comment.
WTF!
More from TPM here and here.
MJ was Healthy: Still Dead
Via Raw Story:
Michael Jackson’s arms were covered with punctures, his face and neck were scarred and he had tattooed eyebrows and lips, but he wasn’t the sickly skeleton of a man portrayed by tabloids, according to his autopsy report obtained by The Associated Press.
In fact, the Los Angeles County coroner’s report shows Jackson was a fairly healthy 50-year-old before he died of an overdose. His 136 pounds were in the acceptable range for a 5-foot-9 man. His heart was strong with no sign of plaque buildup. And his kidneys and most other major organs were normal.
…
The coroner also found Jackson was actively producing sperm.
What a thriller…
Literary Moose Maiden
Sarah Palin is a writer! We’re doomed!
Palin’s upcoming book — 400 pages written in four months — entitled, “Going Rogue: An American Life,” has already jumped to the top of the charts, and it’s not even coming out until next month.
According to NBC News:
Pre-orders of the ex-Alaska guv and GOP veep candidate’s new memoir topped the charts Wednesday on Amazon.com and on Barnes & Noble’s website, The Associated Press reported.
Palin’s 400-page tome outsold Sen. Ted Kennedy’s “True Compass,” Mitch Albom’s “Have a Little Faith” and even “Da Vinci Code” author Dan Brown’s newest pot-boiler, “The Lost Symbol.”
In Alaska, a handful of bookstores the AP surveyed reported customers were already clamoring for copies of “Going Rogue” ahead its Nov. 17 release.
But Julie Drake, co-owner of Anchorage’s largest indie bookstore, Title Wave, said her customers hadn’t shown any interest.
“Maybe we’re all going rogue, going all mavericky,” she said.
You betcha…
And finally this…
Considerate Sex
From CNN:
A new policy at Tufts University prohibits students in dorms from having sex while their roommate is in the room, according to the university’s 2009-2010 student handbook.
The Massachusetts university’s formal rule also bars so-called “sexiling” — exiling a roommate from the room so the other roommate can engage in sexual activity.
The new policy “is really about consideration and respect for others and the need for students to be mindful of their roommates’ need for privacy, study and sleep,” university spokeswoman Kim Thurler told CNN.
Hey kid! How long ya gonna be in there?
Spies, Lies and No Video Tape
Filed Under Madness, Media, Orwellian | Leave a Comment
A major, major story, though few in the US are even aware of it.
(Illustration found here).
Via The Brad Blog on Monday, Marc Grossman, a former US ambassador to Turkey and George Jr.’s third-ranking State Department honcho — right behind Colin Powell and Richard Armitage — was targeted as part of a “decade-long investigation” by the FBI, according to an 18-year veteran manager of the bureau’s Counterintelligence and Counterespionage departments.
The disclosure for the first time confirms that the US is lying to everybody about just about everything, especially when it comes to nukes, money and power.
And the news also further authenticates under-oath testimony of Sibel Edmonds, a 39-year-old former Turkish language translator for the FBI, who turned whistleblower after too much stupid, ugly shit began to pile up around her.
The Edmonds’ saga has now endured way-more than half-a-decade, since before being “fired from her position as a language specialist at the FBI’s Washington Field Office in March, 2002, after she accused a colleague of covering up illicit activity involving foreign nationals, alleging serious acts of security breaches, cover-ups, and intentional blocking of intelligence which, she contended, presented a danger to the United States’ security.”
Whoa! A mouthful that, especially if one’s mouth is gagged.
Despite US Senate Judiciary Committee hearings in the summer of 2002, despite all kinds of mounting evidence calling for Congressional investigations, all were nil as efforts were stifled by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft with mutant-use of the State Secrets Privilege in order “to make her statements “classified” — including previously public statements and journalism quoting her on the case.”
I myself didn’t connect onto Edmonds’ story until a piece appeared in the UK’s Sunday Times in January 2008.
She’d skirted Ashcroft’s order by the written word: In a series of open letters to various officials and news media, Edmonds pleaded her case, but only since last August has she been able to talk freely about the the whole affair.
In a most-recent interview in The American Conservative magazine, Edmonds detailed the whole ugly story, including this bottom line on if any of this would ever make it to the general public:
“When I saw that Obama’s choice of chief of staff was Rahm Emanuel, knowing his relationship with Mayor Richard Daley and with the Hastert crowd, I knew we were not going to see positive changes. Changes possibly, but changes for the worse. It was no coincidence that the Turkish criminal entity’s operation centered on Chicago.”
(Illustration found here).
There have been few news stories in the US press on Edmonds — a partial list can be found here — and NONE by broadcast journalism — a damn-sad state of affairs.
The situation is not all that remarkable, considering the MSM news people and reminds me of the black-out on the New York Times‘ Pulitzer Prize winning story on the Pentagon pundit caper from last year — the story won journalism’s top award, for shit’s sake — and most US peoples haven’t a clue.
The media is a big chunk of the problem.
Take Bob Woodward (please!) of the Washington Post.
Woodward, of Watergate fame and books on everybody fame, and one of the more notorious talking heads of Washington DC “insider” journalists, broke the story last week on Gen. Stan McChrystal’s “secret assessment” of the Afghanistan war as a perfect example of a major reporter playing political tag with the DOD.
McChrystal followed that up with a “60 Minutes” interview on the same damn thing — push President Obama into sending more US troops into the Afghan wilderness.
Woodward is nothing more than a lackey for the rich and the established, the same spot were the vast, vast majority of top-tier US journalists play and practice their so-called craft.
And for instance, how does the Arab media feel about US reporters?
Via Think Progress — Nadia Bilbassy, White House correspondent for the Dubai-based satellite TV network MBC:
I found that I think they really think that if you make it to cover the White House then you must be bigger than God, therefore, you know, you have to be treated as such.
So for them the foreign media is invisible. … So I think they’re opportunistic, rude, as I said, really self-centered. … I find them, not even on like a – people again, the people at the State Department, it’s a different story altogether.
But what I’m talking to now are the people in the White House that occupy the first two, three rows, with exception to two or three people you know.
I’m talking about all the networks and all the organizations.
So I find the relationship is a bit strange.
The rest of the planet knows a lot more than the average US person.
In other words, the US media can not to be trusted.
An example just this week — the hysteria over a “newly” discovered Iranian nuke facility, which according to the New York Times on Monday (with all kinds of satellite and high-altitude photos), the mullahs are building a nuclear device to strike the US heartland within scant minutes.
A similar smell as the run-up to the Iraq invasion.
Chris Floyd has a good post here on the bat-shit crazy warmongers, and so does antiwar.com‘s Justin Raimondo, dipping into another bad-sounding bottom line:
The pro-war ads have already begun and the “liberal” media lining up behind its commander in chief.
All the actors are in their places, and now the drama — an all-too-familiar drama — begins.
“Weapons of mass destruction,” phony intelligence, a compliant media: all the ingredients are there.
All that’s needed is a spark that sets off the conflagration…
And absolutely no film at 11.
keep looking »