Ex-tee, Ex-tree!

SAFARI 4 in beta (Windows or Mac). A page with up to twenty-four thumbnails of your favorite sites, or, in this case, mine. That cover flow, flipping-through-your-album-collection thing for your browsing history. Support for CSS 3 customizable fonts and other stuff I'm too lazy to ever learn. And apparently bitchin' fast, though you shouldn't go by me; I'm just attracted to bright shiny objects. And allow me to say again: it's in beta. I didn't say "OMG download it".

Interesting juxtaposition at Roy's, where successive posts find Rod Dreher, bedeviled by Dirty Hippies, 60s Division; CPAC attendees and commentators, bedeviled by the Librul Media; and Professor Reynolds, bedeviled by free enterprise, as personified by the Rocky Mountain News, R.I.P.

As usual, the interest is not in hearing what these people have to say but in charting which direction their melted brains are flowing this week.

Let's say that should we have unexpectedly acquired the habit of brevity overnight we'd note here that Phil Gramm was right about the nation of whiners, and merely wrong in the direction he was pointing, and leave it at that. The slow and painful revelation that Every Goddam Thing the American Right imagined it controlled under license from God--the world's most powerful war machine, its mightiest economy, the political debate in this country--has crumbled under their exclusive control has got to be like a kind of ceaseless ticking in the skull one ignores until one morning's application of Rogaine reveals the sagittal suture is now a half-inch gap with the consistency of Jell-O.

Or a Christian Scientist finding a lump. Y'know, it's interesting that the same sorta thing appears to be happening with newspapers, which now want us to remember their reporting, and expect us to forget the twenty years we begged them to do some, in vain, as they explained to us, because Tabloid was the new business model. And half a generation later, as if by magic, people who want tabloid trash can pick it up easier, more attractively, and in a more timely fashion anywhere, almost everywhere, and people who remember what newspapers used to be for are now rapidly exciting the last demographic they'll occupy where advertisers give a shit for 'em. This, by the way, is called a Business Model, and it's telling that such things cannot be crafted without involving Golf.

Look: I'm a goddam radical anarcho-leftist moderate. Not only do I not expect to win elections; I don't ever expect to get a fair hearing on cable news. Hell, the day you see Noam Chomsky on the tube, without the thing being expressly designed to make him apologize for Ward Churchill, you'll know we're really fucked. It is, frankly, the one position which offers the proper viewing angle to become aware that winning elections are about the second worst thing that can happen to you. Now, it may very well be that, having lost the one election that ever mattered to me (in a positive, not the Oh Christ Not Him sense), in 1972, to what proved to be (not exactly a surprise!) the Most Disgraceful Occupant of the Office in Modern Times with the Exception of Those who had Ant Farms in Place of Brains, and having been, as a result, excommunicated from the Democratic party for my effrontery in voting for its candidate, that I am in effect committing the same error as the Triumphalist Reagantots in reverse. Except that, again, Real Life, so studiously avoided by the right-wing pundit class as untidy, unprofitable, odorous, and bristling with disturbing genres of sexual penetration, teaches us the same lessons, as when we drive a vehicle, defrost a refrigerator, or avoid alimony nurture a lifetime of True Love and Togetherness: being fucking convinced that your tiniest cerebral event is unerring, that any evidence to the contrary is the result of massive conspiracies, possibly Marxist, Mormon, or Masonic, and that despite this, and any number of contrary examples, believing Everyone actually agrees with you, leads, almost inevitably, to immediate loss of steering control, expensive perishable foodstuffs, or Congress.

So maybe it's just too easy for me, but then maybe it's time you fuckers tried shutting the fuck up for awhile. Maybe just consider, for once, what being the party that behaves like a drunken high school jock whose girl was just asked out by an AV nerd has gotten you. In the 80s, like newspapers and teevee news, you doubled down on what you thought was a sure thing. That was a mistake. Not believing the results when they slap you in the face? That's psychosis. There's gotta be enough money in the coffers to buy Not Joe the Non Plumber a case of Crown Royal and a condo in a singles complex in Boise in exchange for his never speaking in public again. Tell Boehner you'll run Not Joe against him in the primaries if he doesn't shut up for the next six months. If you can't meet Palin's new asking price--or if Piyush Herbert Walker Jindal just blew up in your faces--well, shit; I don't have all the answers. But, look, maybe you'll get a few votes in gratitude for the intervening silence. It couldn't hurt.