Some overriding health issues have caused me to have not a good night, thus, creating less-ability to compose coherent thoughts, and way-harder to transfer to blog lines (was about to write paper, but that’s so 1970s).
There’s plenty out yonder in the big, wide world to write about, but there’s a small imprint in the brain that wants to scream ‘Who Gives A Shit!’ except for those under barrage of that particular shit found in all corners of the globe.

Ugly unrest is on the peppered lips of today — the Occupy protests are getting not pretty, from the mess in Oakland, to a drive-in plunge in London, to more stun-gun episodes in Washington, DC.
People are only going to get even-more pissed.

(Illustration: “Extrangement of Vision — Edgar Allan Poe’s Optics” via M.C. Escher’s ‘Hand with Reflecting Sphere‘ found here).

One item did catch my blurred, Poed eyeball — in one of those Internet video “hangouts” yesterday on Google’s social network, Google+, also streamed live on YouTube, President Obama talked about a rare subject — the drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Via the BBC:

Asked about the use of drone strikes, which have increased in intensity during his presidency, he said “a lot of these strikes have been in the Fata”, or Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas.
The strikes target “al-Qaeda suspects who are up in very tough terrain along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan,” Mr Obama added.
“For us to be able to get them in another way would involve probably a lot more intrusive military action than the ones we’re already engaging in.”

A shitload of innocent people have been killed and wounded during these strikes, and folks in Pakistan are pretty-much getting pissed about the whole operation.
Obama, though, bypassed some important questions:

In a previous town hall-style event hosted by Facebook, the White House was criticised for ignoring one of most popular questions: Mr Obama’s stance on legalising marijuana.
He did not answer questions on drug policy in Monday’s event.

Dude, what’s the deal?

Poe knew.

A Dream Within A Dream

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

Poem found here.

Despite nerdom for six decades, I’ve always been satisfied.
So there, Mr. Cool Guy with shades.

Movies can also alter the spirit of a story to achieve broader appeal.
Think of everything you found charming about the movie Forrest Gump: the feather floating over the opening credits, the signature line that “life is like a box of chocolates,” or Tom Hanks’s graceful innocence as the title character.
You won’t find any of that in the original novel.
Winston Groom’s Gump is cynical, abrasive and swears like a marine.

(Illustration found here).

Not having read the book, the difference then must be is no, they’re not relations.

Yesterday, ‘Forrest Gump,’ the movie, along with 24 others, were installed by the the Library of Congress into its National Film Registry, a repository of motion pictures judged to be culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.
Forrest joins a killer/cannibal, a cute deer, a nasty alcoholic and a guitar-case carrying assassin, among others, in the new list, which now totals 575 movies.

“These films are selected because of their enduring significance to American culture,” said Library of Congress James Billington.
“Our film heritage must be protected because these cinematic treasures document our history and culture and reflect our hopes and dreams.”

Those so-called ‘hopes and dreams,’ though, live only in a darkened movie theater, not much in real life — reelly?

Out in the cold of Iowa there’s a shitload of GOP presidential contenders walking around, shaking hands and trying like the dickens to cuddle the hearts of those who will participate in the first big dump of the 2012 political year — the Iowa caucuses, due next Tuesday.
None of those clowns — including one clownette — is nowhere near Mr. Gump’s intelligence level.
The field is so shitty, there’s no clear front-runner.
Via CNN:

“It’s completely unprecedented to have a field and a cycle that has been this unpredictable, this turbulent late in the process,” Iowa Republican Party Chairman Matt Strawn told CNN.
Tim Albrecht, the Twitter-active spokesman for Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, is also surprised.
“I have never seen this level of undecided voters this late in the process. It’s a crazy year in that regard,” Albrecht said.

When Newt Gingrich couldn’t qualify for the the Virginia primary, he likened it to Pearl Harbor — remember he’s a historian.
Mitt Romney tweeted in response: “I think it’s more like Lucille Ball at the chocolate factory,” Romney said…
Fighting among losers.

In October, MSNBC’s Martin Bashir figured Rick Perry was a lot like Forrest Gump, except Forrest won a medal of honor: “I guess it’s a case of desperate man, desperate measures, as candidate Rick Perry finds himself floundering at the wrong end of the latest poll.”

Maybe Perry’s just running scared: “Now you wouldn’t believe me if I told you, but I could run like the wind blows. From that day on, if I was going somewhere, I was running!”

Tomorrow’s another…

Meanwhile, in Connecticut a woman lost her parents and children in a house fire: “It is a terrible, terrible day,” Mayor Michael Pavia told reporters at the scene of the fire. “There probably has not been a worse Christmas day in the city of Stamford.”

(Illustration found here).

Some bad things are worse than others, but as the world continues to construct its own coffin, the news in the immediate future won’t be pretty.
Maybe its the high-level ability to communicate anything really quickly — there’s no hush, hush any more, not for any length of time any way, and the pulse of life will only quicken as the days grow shorter, quicker.
Technology might have made it too easy to fail.

And be driven crazy.
From the San Francisco Chronicle:

A 1-year-old boy survived on Christmas after being thrown out of a second-floor window in San Jose by his mother, who then leaped out after him, police said.
…
Baby and mother were rushed to Santa Clara Valley Medical Center.
The baby, whose name is being withheld, is in fair condition in the pediatrics unit where doctors are checking for possible brain injury, said Donna Etchell, a nursing supervisor.
He is expected to survive.
…
“We are exploring the possibility that she does have some mental health issues,” he (Sgt. Jason Dwyer, a police spokesman) said.
“It’s not something we can talk about at length, but we do believe that did have something to do with the motive and why she took the actions that she took today.”
…
“Everybody’s going to put their heads together and try to figure out the best thing to do,” he said.
“It’s not the kind of call we want to go to ever, especially on Christmas Day.”

Or maybe any other day.

Close with Mark Twain: Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing the matter with this, except that it ain’t so.
Not by humans, anyway.

Happy Monday!

So last night, I ventured out for a view of David Fincher’s “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” at the urging of a daughter now staying with me — she’d just finished the book, and wanted a look-see.
Hey, what the heck, there’s nothing else going on, so off we went…

‘Dragon Tattoo‘ sucked — up-chucking the old idiom, ‘that’s 158 minutes I’ll never get back.’

(Illustration found here).

Director Fincher, to me anyway, is one of those hit-or-miss guys that could make an interesting film all the way through, or create brilliant spots in otherwise  over-drawn and tedious movies — tons of peoples (my daughters included — Brad Pitt, duh!) blubber endlessly and wax delightful over “Fight Club,” but I didn’t catch the point, the only person I felt for was the crazy character played by Helena Bonham Carter, which retardedly reveals how my sense of sensibility tracks.
If Fincher had cut about 90 percent of the first half of the intriguing “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” he’d had a really good movie on his hands — the whole, entire plot didn’t jell until the ages of Ben and Daisy had coincided — but instead another bit of tedious storytelling.
Of course, he scored big with his recent “The Social Network,” but then he had one of the better visual-arts writers around, Aaron Sorkin, on-board.

Fincher shit in his mess kit, though, with ‘Dragon Tattoo.’

My daughter also disliked it — she said the only good part of the movie was the sound/graphics with the opening credits; the whole project went downhill from there.
Indeed, the sequence was inspiring — Trent Reznor and Karen O re-shaped Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song,” a hard, pulsating tune, into a fluid, exploding optical scenario setting up an anticipation of a dangerous, weird and quick-paced piece of entertainment.
Wrong.

Again, my daughter wondered how people who’d not read the book could understand the plot.
True — beyond the basics, I not only couldn’t follow, but also couldn’t grasp the reasoning behind the story.
The basics being: Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig), an investigative journalist, just losing a big libel case and most of his bank account, takes a freelance job with a big industrialist (Christopher Plummer) to find out what happened to the old guy’s favorite niece, who’d disappeared 40 years earlier.
Some circumstances later, Blomkvist teams with hacker Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), the girl of the title.
The plot blunders along, but there’s no emotion, no rationale to why we in the audience should even want to follow, a storyline of a serial killer amongst the industrialist’s family and a lot of time doing really nothing, just being cold as in Sweden.
The LA Times pretty-well sums it up in its review of the film:

As readers of the Stieg Larsson novel and viewers of the recent Swedish film version know all too well, what’s on offer is a bleak and savage story of crime and punishment that features generous portions of sadistic rape, twisted torture and murders that can charitably be called grotesque.
…
Screenwriter (Steven) Zaillian has adroitly pared down the 500-plus-page book (the chatter about a change to the ending is a tempest in a teapot) and what’s on screen also benefits from the work of “Social Network” collaborators including production designer Donald Graham Burt, editors Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall and composers Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross.
But unlike that film, which profited from Eisenberg’s humanity in a not particularly human role, “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” is too frigid around the heart to be really effective.

The only bit worth noting in the film is when Salander is on screen.
And she’s a character for the ages, most definitely a child of the now — in ‘Dragon Tattoo‘ she’s a wafer-thin 25, possessing a photographic memory coupled with being a most-brilliant computer hacker, a load of facial piercings, a Gothic-punk-rockish make-up and a sullen, distrustful demeanor.
As heroine of Larsson’s trilogy — “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” “The Girl Who Played With Fire,” and “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest ” — she’s the poster child for the damaged soul who’s both much-more intelligent and integrity-minded than appearances would indicate.
Don’t get me wrong, however, Salander would in a heart-beat kick your sorry ass real bad if wronged.
My daughter says several characters from the book were completely left out of the movie, and apparently Salander might have suffered from Asperger syndrome, characterized by significant difficulties in social interaction, which would explain the apparent attitude — good at heart, but she just can’t communicate feelings, though, at first (or maybe second) glance, Salander would come across to most folks as surly and nasty.
But it ain’t so.

Some other background not in the Fincher film (via Politics Daily):

She has many secrets, some more awful than others, and has endured horrific physical and mental pain, rape and torture, and will inflict revenge swiftly, without mercy.
…
She’s a child of the millennium, and she’s old, older than hell.
She’s beautiful, and odd, very odd.
She tried to kill her father when she was 11 years old after years watching him rape and beat her mother. She set him on fire by using a milk carton filled with gasoline and throwing it into his car with a lighted match.
He was not killed but was maimed.
She was committed to a psychiatric facility and placed under a guardian who went on to torture and rape her before her 13th birthday.

I felt for Salander, in the way she moved and looked at people — long a ward of the state,  her older caretaker (I didn’t catch his name),  suffers a stroke and the sweetness of her care for him reveals a sincere concern.
Underneath the tough was the soft.
Too bad ‘Dragon Tattoo‘ couldn’t have been all about Salander, or at least have her more screen time — on appearance, she always warmed an otherwise frigid film.

Now most likely, I’ll have to DVD the Swedish ‘Dragon Tattoo,’ which came out two years ago without much fanfare.
One nutty thing about Fincher’s version is why?
Robert Roger Ebert (gave the Swedish adaption four stars,  proclaiming in the lede to his review: “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” is a compelling thriller to begin with, but it adds the rare quality of having a heroine more fascinating than the story.
Yes!

My Saturday night at the movies was a waste, though.
And it cost $25 for two adult tickets and a couple of small Cokes — Tattoo You!

In wars and rumors of wars, earthquakes and pestilence, understanding of the great scheme of things seems to be drowned in an unknown pool of mystery — unless one considers the GOP presidential race, where there’s absolutely nothing but puzzlement, but no mystery — and the wave of unprecedented problems appears to have come from nowhere, but actually have been here all along.

We live in a most-interesting age.

(Illustration found here).

And in the recent death of Kim Jong il is another mystery — how did he live as long as he did?
The answer: By being an international village-idiot man of mystery, who was fairly smart.
From Time magazine this past Wednesday:

Soon after U.S. President George W. Bush branded North Korea a member of the “axis of evil” in 2002, Kim travelled to Russia to meet with then President Vladimir Putin, and he asked Pulikovsky to do him a peculiar favor.
“He told me, ‘Konstantin, when the official meeting [with Putin] is over, I want to sit down with him in private for ten minutes, with no one in the room, not even interpreters. I need to tell him something.”
That evening, the private meeting was arranged, and as Pulikovsky escorted Kim back toward the border afterward, his curiosity got to him.
“I asked him, ‘Comrade Kim, if it’s no secret, why did you need these ten minutes?’” Pulikovsky says.
“And he smiled at me and said, ‘What’s the difference? The point is for Bush to wonder what we were talking about.’
For me that was classic Kim.
He always found some way to get snagged in your thoughts, to make himself into a mystery.”

And he did indeed drive George Jr. even more crazed than he already is and helped foster the fright of a North Korea.

This week a natural mystery — a metallic ball fell out of the sky onto the plains of Africa’s Namibia, although the object has been called “man made,” what it is and exactly where it came from is…
From Australia’s ABC News:

The hollow ball with a circumference of 1.1 metres was found near a village in the north of the country some 750 kilometres from the capital Windhoek, according to police forensics director Paul Ludik.
Locals had heard several small explosions a few days beforehand, he said.
With a diameter of 35 centimetres, the ball has a rough surface and appears to consist of “two halves welded together”.
It was made of a “metal alloy known to man” and weighed six kilograms, Mr Ludik said.
The ball was found 18 metres from its landing spot, a hole 33 centimetres deep and 3.8 metres wide.
Several such balls have dropped in southern Africa, Australia and Latin America in the past 20 years.

Life is getting real peculiar when big, metal balls start falling from the sky — Chicken Little don’t know shit.

KCNA eventually noted Kim suffered a heart attack and couldn’t be saved despite the use of “every possible first-aid measure” — a heart way-bloated by too much Hennessy, lobster and women.

(Illustration found here).

Keeping it tight, within hours of the announcement, a South Korean news agency said the north tested an unspecified number of short-range missiles in a kind of wake-up notice that just because Kim is dead, his so-called country is still bat-shit crazy.

Kim Jong Un, one of Kim Il’s sons, is believed to be now in charge, though no one knows for sure, in fact, no one seems to even know the boy’s age, other than he’s in his 20s.
And that is the way-crux of the problem — the darkness of information.
Via the BBC: Val Hamer in South Korea tweets: “I live in South Korea. Military on high alert. Choppers everywhere. Strange tension in the air.#kimjongil #northkorea.”
How this whole scenario plays is fairly crucial due to the horrible fact that North Korea is both unstable, and they possess a shitload of material for nuclear weapons, and as the above rocket-launch announcement dictates, can throw that material around the region.

The US White House played it softly, commenting only that officials are “closely monitoring reports that Kim Jong Il is dead.”
The BBC, though, did report President Obama and South Korean President Lee Myung-bak have spoken by telephone, keeping all eyes on the pathic north.

Although Kim Il was greatly disliked by the rest of the world, he scared people.
A retort from a US version of a political shithead: “I loathe Kim Jong Il,” former President George W. Bush once told journalist Bob Woodward, calling him a “pygmy” and a “spoiled child.”

Some background via the LA Times:

Kim was born Feb. 16, 1941, in the Russian city of Khabarovsk, where his father was stationed with other Korean and Chinese guerrillas being trained by the Soviet army to fight the Japanese.
The North Korean propaganda machine later claimed his birth took place a year later on Mt. Paektu, a sacred peak in Korean folklore, and that it was heralded by a double rainbow.
It was only the first of many outlandish legends in a cult of personality that also credited him with writing dozens of books and operas and making 11 holes-in-one in a single round of golf.
…
He borrowed heavily from Christian imagery (nobody was any the wiser since the Bible was banned in North Korea, along with other religious literature) to create the myth of a holy family destined to rule.
He was credited with designing the little red badge bearing a portrait of his father that North Koreans to this day are required to wear on their lapels.
Kim eventually became director of the party’s bureau of agitation and propaganda.
The position gave him an excuse to get involved with one of his great passions: cinema.
He expanded North Korea’s film studios and wrote a book, or at least had one published under his name.
In that 1973 tome, “On the Art of Cinema,” he espoused the theory that “revolutionary art and literature are extremely effective means for inspiring people to work for the tasks of the revolution.”

In 1978, overcome with a passion for movies, Kim IL ordered the kidnapping of Choi Eun Hee and Shin Sang Ok, a South Korean film couple — she an actress, he a director — to improve the North’s film industry.
The couple were held for eight years before escaping:

The pair had covert tape recordings of their conversations with Kim and later wrote a memoir containing one of the few firsthand accounts of his personality.
They described a man who could be alternately imperious and self-deprecating, once quipping to Choi about his height, “Small as a midget’s turd, aren’t I?”

A funny, strange little man, who was a self-centered asshole:

Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, tales of Kim’s eccentricities spread throughout the world.
Defectors told of wild drinking parties and naked dancers.
Some of the stories were hyped by South Korea’s fiercely anti-communist propaganda machine, but many were corroborated.
Kim imported $650,000 worth of Hennessy’s finest cognac in a single year.
His appetite for women and drink was exceeded by a love for the finest foods.
He hired for his private kitchens a sushi chef from Tokyo and a pizza chef from Italy, both of whom wrote accounts of their experiences.
At the time, North Korea was in the midst of a famine that would eventually kill as many as 2 million people, up to 10 percent of the population, and leave many of them permanently stunted.
Homeless, starving children became a common sight at North Korean train stations.
Kim nonetheless sent couriers on shopping excursions to buy rice cakes in Tokyo, mangoes in Thailand, cheese in France.

And what happens now with the Great Face-Stuffer gone?
The son could keep the hideous shit going like the dad: “The latest move indicates Kim Jong-Un is being put forward formally as a powerful leader like his father,” Sejong Institute analyst Cheong Seong-Chang, a specialist in the succession issue, told the AFP news agency in October. “Jong-Un is known to have the potential to become a strong, ruthless leader,” added Cheong. “He has a take-charge personality.”

Time will tell if he takes charge of some awful shit.

A good piece this morning  in the New York Times, illustrating why global peoples are in for some way-hard, climate-change-days due to the fact that although nearly every other nation accepts climate change as a pressing problem, America has turned agnostic on the issue.

And nobody seems to be paying much attention to this: The authors state it is already too late for a transition to a global economy that no longer depends on fossil fuels to function. Thus, the world is seemingly destined towards a future of economic damage that will get worse and worse.

Now we’re in for what I call, The Double Bitch Bang — the twin horrors of climate change and peak oil, both arriving on scene near-about together.

(Illustration found here).

Oddly in  tune with the theme, catch this wonderful bit off The Dish: One must always keep a sense of humor, might be the best way to handle the future — laugh your ass off.
John Cleese observes that not only is laughter the best medicine, but “laughter connects you with people.”

Laughing with somebody is way-better than fighting them.

Update: Joe Romm at Climate Progress on a reason US peoples have gone ‘agnostic‘ about climate change: MSM’s non-coverage and its inability to put the pieces together, or ‘connect the dots’ to the uptick in extreme weather events and climate change.

(Illustration found here).

Early Tuesday here on California’s northern coast and listening to neighbors act like loud assholes at this early hour makes me want to scream, lash out into the dark, pierce the clear, clean air with a shitload of curses.
Although I’ve been awake awhile, and I’m fully awake right now, the disturbance to the quiet upsets the creative juices — hard to be innovative when there’s anger.

And this is one of those morning when I can’t come up with any decent, well-meaning subject in which to post, despite a ton of weird, frightening, sad, and more than just a little bat-shit crazy news out there, from that simple seamstress mutilated in Syria, to the dangers of selling booze in Iraq, to Michele Bachmann knowing for an absolute certainty President Obama is a one-termer.
Plenty of news, but nothing overwhelming as unique or even beyond the ‘new normal.’

And apparently if there wasn’t bad news, there’d be no news at all.
US peoples are glum, too, feeling bad about everything — in a new Harris Poll:

Looking at the President’s ratings, just one in five Americans (21 percent) give him positive ratings on his handling of the economy while 79 percent give him negative ratings.
In July, 26 percent of U.S. adults gave the President positive ratings while 74 percent gave him negative marks.
When it comes to his handling of the economy, even large majorities of Democrats (58 percent) and Liberals (64 percent) give President Obama negative ratings.
…
In July, one-quarter of Americans (23 percent) expected the overall economy to improve in the coming year, two in five (41 percent) thought it would stay the same and a little over one-third (37 percent) thought it would get worse.
This month, 45 percent think the economy will stay the same, 34 percent believe it will get worse and 21 percent think it will get better in the coming year.
…
Two-thirds of Americans (67 percentage) rate the current job market in their region of the country as bad, one in ten (11 percent) rate it as good and 22 percent say it is neither good nor bad.
In July, 64 percent of U.S. adults said the job market was bad, 12 percent said it was good and 24 percent said it was neither good nor bad.

Misery and no end in sight.

In all this woe, the economic situation for the non-rich is making more and more US peoples to ‘double up:’ This spring, there were 21.8 million “doubled-up” households across the nation, a 10.7 percent increase from the 19.7 million households in the spring of 2007, the Census Bureau said. That means 18.3 percent of all households were combined households.

And maybe there’s no loud, obnoxious neighbors because more and more US peoples live on the street: “The economic downturn and the government’s deep cuts to welfare will drive up homelessness over the next few years, raising the spectre of middle class people living on the streets, a major study warns. The report by the homelessness charity Crisis says there is a direct link between the downturn and rising homelessness as cuts to services and draconian changes to benefits shred the traditional welfare safety net.”

And man-folk can’t find work, the worse male jobs situation since WWII: “Employers are increasingly giving up on the American man. Men who do have jobs are getting paid less. After accounting for inflation, median wages for men between 30 and 50 dropped 27 percent—to $33,000 a year— from 1969 to 2009, according to an analysis by Michael Greenstone, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics professor who was chief economist for Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. “That takes men and puts them back at their earnings capacity of the 1950s,” Greenstone says. “That has staggering implications.”

(h/t AlterNet)

People much wiser than I am said,
“I’d rather have my son watch a film with 2 people making love
than 2 people trying to kill one another.
I, of course, can agree.
It is a great sentence.
I wish I knew who said it first.
I agree with that but I like to take it a step further.
I’d like to substitute the word Fuck for the word Kill in all of those movie cliches we grew up with.
“Okay, Sherrif, we’re gonna Fuck you now, but we’re gonna Fuck you slow.”
– George Carlin

(Illustration found here).

Have a most-tantalizing Tuesday.

In August, during some nasty fallout over the horrifying debt-ceiling spectacle, even the Chinese heaped scorn and disgust at the US: “The U.S. government has to come to terms with the painful fact that the good old days when it could just borrow its way out of messes of its own making are finally gone…” and scolded Americans to “cure its addiction to debts,” stop being hogs and “live within its means…”
Ouch!

Obesity is an US problem, of course, and in gaining all that fat, US peoples have allowed its system of existence to be hijacked by pure-and-simple greed, and a clear example is politics nowadays — incompetence compounded by incertitude on one side, and across the aisle, nastiness and cruel ignorance.
What a choice for the fat-ass US voter, huh?

In Massachusetts, however, voters there will at least get a chance to put some backbone back in government with Elizabeth Warren’s run for the senate seat now occupied by GOPer Scott Brown.
And Brown’s already spooked — after a Public Policy Polling survey last week gave Warren a slight 46-44 percent edge among likely voters, Brown didn’t want to hear it: “There’s going to be plenty of polls. I don’t think about polls. Never been a big poll guy,” he said.
Good, heard that it could make you go blind.

And Warren’s surging popularity just within days of an announced run, has already jarred the GOP into the attack mode of desperately seeking dirt on Warren, anything true/untrue to sling out into the airwaves, but is finding not much soiled-soil there.

(Illustration found here).

And as a political novice, Warren still talks real.
A hard charge before the starting gate.
During a pre-campaign tour in August, Warren discussed tax increases for the wealthy as being “class warfare:”

“I hear all this, you know, ‘Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever,’” Warren said.
“No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own.
Nobody.”
“You built a factor out there?
Good for you.
But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for.
You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.”
She concluded, “Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless.
Keep a big hunk of it.
But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

And supposedly that’s what’s been generally considered the American way — nothing really new for generations.
Except for nowadays.
The little speech above has become a “kick-ass” video across the Internet, giving Dems a boost and further pissing off the right — but there’s not much to play with when you’re dumb.

Along with being a Harvard law professor, Warren came to the limelight, of due course, as chairperson of the Congressional Oversight Panel for TARP back in the day (2008!) and helped put together the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
The director of the new bureau seemed like the job Warren was born for — but nooo!
President Obama showed waffling, and more back-bone-less-ness under GOP nasty looks when he passed her over in favor of this other guy, Richard Cordray.
A move that Scott Brown must now wish didn’t happen, and which now means he has to face reality and become a big poll guy.

And the only decent face on the right side of the street for more than a decade has been near-pure absent from any political discourse this year — former Nebraska senator Chuck Hagel.

I’ve always liked Hagel — seemed to be the only GOPer who had sense, had any sort of heart, and usually talked straight.
(Illustration found here).

Hagel is a different Republican bird, and he strongly opposed George Jr.’s venture into Iraq.
From a New York Times profile in February 2006:

Chuck Hagel never became a dove, but he became a bird that’s nearly as rare in the Republican aviary.
He became an internationalist, someone who’s capable of feeling intensely about alliances, multilateral endeavors, the value of global institutions; a fellow traveler of the Council on Foreign Relations, a politician who actually reads Foreign Affairs.
A singular Great Plains Republican, in other words, who cares about the rest of the world for reasons that don’t begin and end with agricultural exports.
Tellingly, when he was elected to the Senate in 1996, he was the one new Republican whose first choice for a committee assignment was the Foreign Relations Committee, which had declined steadily in prestige since the Vietnam-era days of a Democratic chairman he sometimes mentions as a role model, J. William Fulbright.

Hagal was no follower.

And with Iraq it was no-go from the git-go: ”Things aren’t getting better; they’re getting worse,” said Hagel, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee. ”The White House is completely disconnected from reality. It’s like they’re just making it up as they go along. The reality is that we’re losing in Iraq.”
The big problem, though, is we don’t believe George Jr. was ever connected to reality.

Hagel has been mostly quiet after announcing in 2007 he wouldn’t seek a third term.
He did give an interview with the UK’s Financial Times in August, and once again let loose some blunt talk about the state of the GOP, especially over the debt-ceiling fiasco and the influence of the Tea Party.
Via The Hill:

“The irresponsible actions of my party, the Republican Party over this were astounding.
I’d never seen anything like this in my lifetime,” said Hagel.
“I was very disappointed, I was very disgusted in how this played out in Washington, this debt ceiling debate.
It was an astounding lack of responsible leadership by many in the Republican Party, and I say that as a Republican.”
…
“I think the Republican Party is captive to political movements that are very ideological, that are very narrow.
I’ve never seen so much intolerance as I see today in American politics,” he said.

Again, well spoken.
And due to the most ugly of political scenes, I can understand Hagel’s reluctance to get involved — and due to the GOP being as it is today, Hagel couldn’t get elected dog catcher.
He’s just a footnote — a loss for US peoples.