Requiescant in Pace

FRED Shuttlesworth was The Man. The Man of Men. Fred Shuttlesworth stood up when there wasn't even the marginal protection of not-exactly-sympathetic media around to give violent racists pause before acting, or to help identify them after the fact so all-white juries could yuck it up over the charges.

He stood up, because standing up was right.

Mr. Obama, a Medal of Freedom is in order. Like Martin, like Thurgood Marshall, posthumously, not alive and kicking like Tony Blair. Or Tenet and Bremer. Ask for theirs back, while you're at it, and rescind them with a signing statement or something if they refuse. You know, use that Alternate Presidential Reality Bush was so fucking fond of.

It's deserved.

And Jobs. Not the Medal, I mean. Look, I'm a Woz man, myself, We've had a Mac on the desk here since 1988, and there's a small, unplanned museum in the basement. I wasn't a fanboy, or no more than could be excused by my justifiable hatred of DOS in those days, but I admired the fact that Apple tried to be smart. Even, grudgingly, when System X, sorry, OS TEN, belatedly consummated our long relationship without bothering with the lube.

And of course the iPodiPhone Apple that everyone is celebrating through Steven Jobs this morning is another matter ("take iTunes. Please."), a carnival that's come to town, set up a tent next door, and gives every indication of playing that fucking calliope every night until Doomsday. I'm not a religious man, so I can only hope that that'll be the end of it, that my eternity in Gehenna Fire will not involve an endless steam of people's cat pictures shoved at me on screens the size of plover's eggs. With date stamps.

I like technology, it's just not what I want in my pocket. Apple (and Jobs) are right, and I'm wrong, in the same way that the bloated raccoon on the side of the road, with all four legs pointing to the daytime sky he never cared for, was wrong, and the speeding car was right. Even if it carried White Slavers fleeing the wrath of Greg Zoeller.

But I can't look at those Press obsequies this morning without remembering just whose side those people were on in the 90s, when Apple was the patchouli-redolent hippie in the corporate elevator, and the great Tech Wizard Forward-Looking Genius Hero was Bill Gates, the Sam Walton of software.

Could You Please Keep It Down? Some Of Us Are Trying To Get High And F**k.

SO I've mentioned what the backslide into Winter hours has done for my bicycle training, running me into increased traffic and forcing me to watch local morning news on the hopeless but evergreen assumption that the weather forecast will have something to do with the weather.

It's always been my Poor Wife who's done this, switching on the locals at 5 AM when she woke up early. She's constitutionally better prepared to take it than I. And then, when we sat down evenings to watch the First-String locals try to sound out phonetically what was on their teleprompters she'd already know the stories. Now, unfortunately, I do, too.

You are in all likelihood blissfully unaware that Super Bowl CMLXVII, or whatever it is, will be held in Indianapolis next February, a sop to the city for the NFL's extorting a new $1 billion football barn ("The House That Curtis Painter Built") out of us. Experienced Indianapolis watchers with a sense of the larger world outside that hasn't been acquired through the television--there are at least three of us--are accustomed to weathering these periodic bouts of mass delusions of Importance, or Greatness, or whatever it is media-driven civic boosterism inflicts on our fellow citizens. Indianapolis accidentally elected a proto-Teabagger, one Gomer P. Ballard, mayor four years ago. He expressly opposed the Democratic-Republican incumbent's efforts to bring the Super Bowl here. So, of course, he led the charge for it once we got it, and has been spending public monies on trying to impress people who have been to actual big cities with actual cultures and who will be here for four days, tops. Meanwhile, the massive public-funded improvements will be with us for generations, or, judging by the fate of earlier city spruce-up deals, about eight-twelve years before the sub-standard concrete begins crumbling.

Well, you can't start something like that rolling downhill without people finding out, and that includes state and local office holders. A few months ago some Texas-based group of public beggars, in cooperation with a few Lone Star law enforcement officials equally repulsed by the idea of people having sex, blew, you should pardon the expression, into town to regale Hoosier law enforcement officials with tales of people having sex on or near Super Bowl Sunday in Big D last year, while thumbing their noses at all the good people of Dallas who spent the day in church. The group has been collecting donations and haranguing the NFL ever since, with tales of Rolling Limousine Brothels clogging the streets and unlicensed kiosks on every corner selling nude fourteen-year-olds. The fact that none of this is reflected by anything which could be described as a Police Blotter just proves how invidious and all-powerful these sex traffickers are.

So then shortly thereafter we got press releases from local leos and the State AG Greg Zoeller…

who, by the way, has just reached the point in every Indiana Attorney General's first term where he looks around and realizes he's got nowhere to go politically excepting four more years of where he is, because his party, usually the Republicans, have all the national offices already filled with political non-entities and low-handicap golfers, and starts casting around for some reliable (i.e. wingnut, religious) source of political donations for a campaign he'll never run, before getting a semi-sinecure at some "conservative" or "bipartisan" DC firm. We're almost at the point where the last one--Steve Carter, Esq.--raided Planned Parenthood without a warrant, and told everyone between here and the hinterlands of the Bible Belt that there'd be plenty of arrests for shielding child prostitution rings just as soon as he went through all the files he stole. Zoeller's in an even worse position than most, because Mitch Daniels already appointed Mike Choirboy-Pence his successor, by giving Lt. Governor Becky Skillman an incurable but non-debilitating disease , in exchange for Pence not cockblocking Daniels' Presidential run. So Getting Right with Jesus is the first order of the day for ambitious Hoosier Republicans, and the Good Lord knows there's no better place to do so than on a mattress stuffed with tax-exempt religous wingnut dollars.

uh, press releases, I say, in which the allegations of Satanic Human Chattel Rolling Bisexual Butt Orgies taking over the Sacred, I mean the Super, Bowl, became fact, and in which our sworn officers of the law vowed to fight to the last man for the right of every wholesome reveler not to have to think about such icky stuff. Let alone participate.

The obliging City-County counsel was way ahead of them, having set aside their Constitutionally-prohibited-but-who-gives-a-shit anti-pandhandling crusade--the one they formally enacted a couple years ago, but are only planning to use for one particular week--long enough to enact stringent health regulations for massage parlors and new licensing requirements for people who subject other people to friction. And Monday the newly-empowered police force pounced, raiding thirteen good-time establishments, resulting in…lemme just double check those numbers…zero arrests, deportations, or flashy slave rescue efforts.

All wasn't lost, though:

"In one place they found rodent droppings," said Katie Bannon, Indianapolis Code Enforcement.

Though, if you'll forgive me, as a young man who tried desperately to come of age before the Sixties ended, it wouldn't surprise me to learn the cops brought their own.

Speaking of expert testimony, that same day brought the sounding-out of horrifying ("for Parents!") teleprompter news that more Marion county middle schoolers are on the marihuana than ever before in recorded time, according to what Marion county middle schoolers told some asshole who asked them about marihuana use.

Now let me just go on the record here: middle schoolers should not smoke weed, and they definitely should not drink alcohol, snort nutmeg, huff paint thinner, or watch television, all of which are worse. They should be too busy diddling themselves, and each other, to have the time, or anything approaching the necessary boredom.

Meanwhile, adults who've reached that demo without being, or becoming, credulous yokels shouldn't lie for money. A case in point being the hairdo who got to read this line as an intro to the thoughts of one Nancy Beal, spokesliar for something called Drug Free Marion County:

"Now while some say marihuana is harmless, others say that isn't necessarily the case."

Guess which side we actually got to hear say that?

Ms Beal's rebuke was that marihuana often caused paranoia as one "came down" from a "high". Which, you'll pardon the personal observation for a moment, caused me to suggest that she ought to consider what Mitch Daniels' educational scorched-earth policy does to teachers.

What I didn't get to hear I did read on Channel 8's website later, though, as Beal continued:

But among the best advice, Nancy Beal said, is to be suspicious.

"I think you still have to be suspicious,” she said. “I think you have to go through your kid’s backpack. I think you have to go through their room, and look for signs of trouble."

Gee, lady, I wonder why drugs turn people paranoid.

The Elephant In The Room (I've Got A Dozen Of These And I'm Usin' 'Em Up Edition)

The irony is that these are two of the demographics the Republican party is trying to kill.

Gene Robinson, "Chris Christie's big problem." September.

IT'S his Big problem, as in weight, and Gene Robinson fills a column with medical arguments against obesity.

Which, of course, is exactly what you'd do if you wanted to call Chris Christie fat for 800 words without actually doing so.

Robinson mentions that Christie's weight became fair game when he entered the public arena. True. I just seem to've forgotten exactly where Gene mentioned the corollary, that Christie's fitness, or lack thereof, would be a national, not a New Jersey, issue, if it were a Presidential issue. If say, for example, Chris Christie decided to run for President.

Look, unlike Gene Robinson I've got no vested interest in who Barack Obama faces. Well, there's a concern over the man chosen to lead The Free World for the next four years, except that's so over, as the kids say. America was a great idea, but it's not going to recover from turning into the place where the literal and figurative descendants of Her Backwoods Illiterates battle the 19th century in perpetuity. It could have made it anyway--overcoming, in the process, the cosmically bad-timing of Harry Truman followed by Dwight David Eisenhower, the Accidental and Unfortunate President followed by The Overpraised Dolt, who get a free pass these days for Perpetual War in Korea and The Post-Colonial Colonial Disaster in Indochina, though, to be fair, Truman really started that one, too--so, okay, Korea and Lifting Dick Nixon to National Office, respectively--but The Wealthy found comfort, solace, and a few loose coins they'd missed earlier in the disaffected rube vote, and here we are, moving backwards on the social fabric while simultaneously traveling at Turing speed in the economic and psychological manipulation of the populace, the bald-faced grab at civil liberties when the previous isn't enough, and incontinent military spending.

So, of course, our present political situation finds itself in the care of a dozen Teabagging Representatives who believe precisely the opposite, that the Key to Grrrr-REATer Freedomland is moving towards The New Feudalism, or Goshen, while lifting the shameful yoke of iniquity our largest political contributors struggle under. If you feel the United States is still capable of rising above this sort of shit, my hat's off to ya.

I don't know, or care, whether Robinson, or Obama, fear, welcome, or are indifferent to a Christie candidacy. Personally, I'd love to see him run. A slobby White guy who shoots his mouth off? That's who should be the Republican nominee. Not just as the physical embodiment of the Base, and the metaphorical embodiment of the party at large. Not just because you look at that dais and say, "Why th' fuck not?" Christie'd at least be entertaining, and his girth would add an element of suspense. I'd like to see him squared off against Bachmann or Santorum, and see what becomes of that vaunted shoot-from-the-hip style.

There is all that. But mostly I'm thinkin' it'd be a good excuse to talk my Poor Wife into buying me a wide-screen teevee for Xmas.

Prince Of Whales

WHAT is there to say about Chris Christie that hasn't already been said about Rick Perry? Or Mitch Daniels? Or Michele Bachmann? Or Paul Ryan, Rudi Giuliani, Sarah Palin, Bobby Jindal, Jeb Bush, Fred Dumbo Thompson, or Donald For Chrissakes Trump?

Well, okay, that he's a slobbery slob who shoots his mouth off. A demo which is underrepresented among candidates in the teevee age, but is a mighty big slice of the electorate.

Sure, this Non-candidate du Jour phenomenon has become so common that even the mass-market media has noticed, though usually in a column listed somewhere under the boldfaced Will Christie Run? or Christie Makes Speech link. Those stories have as much effect on the Conventional Wisdom as all those Is Palin Presidential Material? and What Was The Media's Role In The 2000 Elections? stories do, and they know it. It's a free shot. If it was the sort of thing that people noticed the professional Right wing complainers would be all over it, meaning The Librul Media wouldn't dare it in the first place. It's not like they don't already know, with at least 98% certainty these days, what flies and what draws flies, and rational, sensible, adult discussion is clearly compost filler. I mean, sheesh, it's The Media, not the Republican party, which clubbed Serious Discussion to death back when that sort of thing put them in danger of being on the wrong side of Reaganmania. You gotta figure they still remember where the corpse is buried.

Yeah, the question gets asked, but it can't get answered, because the answer--The Republican Party is clearly, perhaps irrevocably, insane--undoes forty years of mass-market media genuflection towards the Nixonian Media Critique and thirty years of blowing Reagan.

We're going to ask this again: would a sensible person behave this way in real life? Faced with, say, a recurring electrical problem in the family Buick, or a perpetually surly, short-changing supermarket cashier, would one, time and again, approach the repeated obstacle as though one had never seen it before? Or, hell, even conceived of it as a possibility? And just take it back to the mechanic who'd failed to fix it ten times, or stand in that line instead of another and walk away without counting the change? Once or twice things might run counter to All Good Sense by coincidence. Every Fucking Time is another matter. As we've noted here and elsewhere: the 1988 Democratic presidential contenders were widely labeled The Seven Dwarfs, and Chris Christie's resumé wouldn't have gotten him in the door. Yet his speech at the Reagan Library and Casino makes headlines.

Seems to me the prudent course would be to wait a week, or two months, until he does decide to run, if he does, meanwhile polishing the What Th' Hell Happened to Christie? stories for when he tanks two weeks later.

The Republican Economic Gospel is now so mindless, so contrary to anyone's real experience, that it can't stand. It's just artificially suspended, propped up like a corpse in some bad Hollywood comedy in hopes the copper won't notice. And the only way the party can accomplish, or "accomplish" this is by sending Mitch Daniels out to tell people the only way we can solve The Greatest Financial Crisis in the History of the Republic is by making average Americans ever more envious of the wealthy. Which in turn, I guess, is supposed to lead to ever greater productivity gains at lower and lower compensation. It's not analysis. It's a wet dream.

And, lest we forget, that's Daniels on the hustings, contractual-obigatorily shilling the Idea behind his own presidential bid, the one which took two years to travel ten feet before sputtering to a halt he blamed on his wife. The only actual attempted solutions on the dais, beyond Jebus or Magic Underwear or Have Jebus Tax the Poor belong to Ron Paul, and would get someone without independent means committed for observation. What's Chris Christie's solution? Double cheese?

Daniels told Jon Stewart at least twice that he wanted to move forward; it was meant as a defense of his blaming Obama for his own, and his party's, sins. But I wonder if we're ever going to absorb the principle. As in, quit looking to Republican cutpurses and Randian blockheads to solve problems caused by listening to them in the first place.

Tell Ya What, I'll Let You Have The Rust Coating For One-Twenty-Five. That's Below My Cost!

Jon Stewart, The Mitch Daniels Interview. September 21

OKAY, so there ain't much to be said for the Extended Mix over the broadcast version. Not a big surprise, because Daniels has one answer, and isn't used to hearing the question it goes with.

That's his schtick, and that's the response to President Mitch Daniels? He's 62 years old, and he talks like a fairly bright high-school senior who thinks he's twice as bright as he is. And once again, this is the result of forty years, now, of American "conservatives" talking only to themselves. The thirty-years-and-counting disaster Capital-R Reagan Republicanism has wrought on Americans of Less Than Independent Wealth--thirty years of precisely his policies--lies behind the man like a tornado-blasted trailer park, and he talks This Way to Prosperity, Folks! Sure, the man is a professional liar, so it can be tough to know exactly where the line is drawn between open-mouthed credulity and sheer horseshit. (I know Jon Stewart doesn't want to hear me talking like that. Conversely, I don't want to hear Jon Stewart apologizing for lumping Mitch Daniels in with the rest of America's Pirate Class just because Daniels objects. For that matter, I don't need to hear Stewart say that "everyone basically agrees" that we have to slash "entitlements" during a fifteen-minute discussion of the Deficit which never once mentions Defense spending. We're not going to achieve national unity--assuming anybody wants to--when you can't even believe the things that come out of some people's mouths.)

Somebody at Hoover, or Hudson, or Heritage, gave Mitch his one talking point: that revenue actually increased after the Bush Tax Cuts, relative to GDP; this, not surprisingly, turns out to depend on who's counting and where they choose to start and stop, and what they choose to ignore in the interim. Tax revenues were higher in the 1990s (again, relative to GDP) than they were in the Naughts. Isn't that the end of the argument? And those tax cuts were supposed to make the GDP zoom, which…lemme look that up…they didn't. So tax cutting benefits from its own lyin' incompetence. Much like Mitch Daniels.

(In fact, revenues have plummeted every time we've enacted this miracle cure, to the extent that the new argument seems to be that Tax Cuts don't claim to increase revenues, just increase the amount of money in rich people's pockets. Thanks for clearing that up.)

Wasn't Me Who Said That! and I Don't Know How You Got that Impression! That's Daniels' Defense, too, and you can't really fault him much since, as a Republican, he's never been required to play any his adult life. He told Stewart twice that Jon was talkin' to the wrong man. Daniels, it turns out, is fully in favor of revenue enhancement. He's just metaphysically certain that none of it should come from wealthy people. Dunno how anybody misses the distinction. (I kept waiting for Stewart to push it to the point that Daniels would say, "Hell, I raised sales taxes 17%!")

This is Daniels' sole claim to "moderation", and for the life of me I can't figure out why it works. He makes amorphous statements about guaranteeing a social net for young Americans, and no one ever mentions that we have that now and that the one risk to it is Republicans with a gutting knife. He gets to pretend that "wanting to make it more economical for companies to hire Americans" doesn't mean "the working class takes it in the shorts". He gets to slip in a line about Regulation without anyone saying "You mean environmental safety and public health, right?" The "compromises" Mitch Daniels talks about--and they're all supposed to lead to the enactment of his high-school Randian vision, by the way--are the sort currently on offer from the House Republicans. Easy to be conciliatory when you get to have your way.

Where Stewart was ready for him--the Bush Tax Cuts contribution to the Deficit, the continued White Fluffy Cloud Land of the Top One Percenters--Daniels just ignored him and plowed ahead with the Randian Immoral Certitudes. We need to strengthen the Middle Class by giving it the opportunity for Advancement! This is like asking a bald man about hair tonic, or a Bush about the price of milk. The Middle Class--what's left of it--by and large prefers to stay Middle Class. It wants good jobs, decent schools, and hi-def flat screens. Striking It Rich is a silly, and an acknowledgedly silly, dream. The real constituency for The Continued Ability To Advance Ownself is the Wealthy, who know they'll stand to rake in 65% of whatever hits the table.

Stewart did a pretty good job, apart from all the apologizing. True, I had a vested interest in this one, whereas the Poor Wife and I usually skip his political interviews altogether and head straight for Colbert. I hope America--or at least that part of it I have any hope left for--truly appreciated the President it didn't get.

I ♥ Charles Pierce, Vol. Six Thousand Something

DUE to various weekend and peri-weekend events--marathon, ecstasy-fueled debauchery, the crying jag that inevitably follows (mine, of course), an unrelated head injury, cats--it was Sunday morning before I got to see the redacted, broadcast version of Jon Stewart's interview with sometime Indiana Governor Mitch "Check That Book Cover Glamor Shot" Daniels, and I've yet to get through the full, online version while taking notes. It was no surprise, and only a tiny bit disconcerting, that Stewart referred to the man who raised Indiana's most regressive tax 17%, slashed the state budget using the bed of Procrustes as a template, then dumped the bleeding stumps on local governments, as "fiscally responsible"; even assuming the nationals researched this sort of thing, what would they do with it? Ruin a perfectly serviceable script? No, the remarkable thing, for any Hoosier, certainly, was that Daniels had to sit there and take it, because Holy Commerce was at stake. Back Home Again, when he's merely the democratically-elected chief executive of the state, he tells anyone who disagrees with him that the sty isn't gonna muck itself, nor their closest girl relative impregnate herself, and to quit wasting time questioning their betters.

Meanwhile, we get acid reflux, Charlie Pierce gets insights:

Jon Huntsman, poor dear, truly is a lost soul. He came here this weekend, for the Florida presidential debate and the ensuing straw poll, running what appeared to be a complicated simulacrum of a national presidential campaign. This placed him in a subcategory of Republican contenders along with Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, and, oddly enough, Rick Santorum, who is running a show not unlike Huntsman's, although Huntsman appears to be trying to get elected leader of the United States of America while Santorum seems to be angling for the job of patriarch of Antioch. Most everybody else — the rising Herman Cain, the faltering Michele Bachmann, and Ron Paul, who's always been really good at it — seems to be content with fashioning a cult of personality. And then there's Newt Gingrich, who is actually on an extended book tour.

Read, as they like to say, the whole thing.

2012: The Lesser Of Two Banalities

FOR starters, Ron Suskind can go on The Daily Show and try to soft-soap the host, and the audience, about their President, if that's what he thinks it takes to sell books in that Demo, but there's no explanation for Larry Summers and Tim Geithner; a couple years in the Senate cannot possibly have convinced an educated man in possession of both his faculties and the rudiments of current events that there was such a thing as Compromise just waiting for the right promotion to open everyone's eyes to it. Barack Hussein Obama, State Senator from Illinois' 13th District, ran for the US Senate in the Swiftboat and Purple Bandaid Election of 2004. He served in The Deliberative Body during the heyday of the Gang of Fourteen; did they squidge your little tiddle cup to brimming with confidence in the combined wisdom of our two parties? Barack Obama entered national service under threat of The Nuclear Option, and switched branches four years later with Perpetual Filibuster the whole of the Republican agenda. Did you miss this fact? The people he listened to were the ones he put in the position to talk to him in the first place. He was so damned enamored of Ronald Reagan he might've remembered that the Reagan administration was still blaming Jimmy Carter in 1987. The incoming Bush the Dumber administration tried to blame Bill Clinton for the recession it had tried to talk into existence on the campaign trail in 2000, and Clinton had the best economic record of any postwar President. Barack Obama was dealt a bad hand. He played it abysmally. No fucking excuses.

Speaking of the incomprehensible, who had "2 weeks" in the Rick Perry=Fred Thompson Over/Under? Christ, Thompson lasted longer, by the simple expedient of not campaigning at all. How th' fuck does it take you three televised debates to figure out that Perry is a dolt? He's been governor of Texas for three terms now. Isn't that enough? (Christ, he'd already managed to be a national disgrace as Lieutenant Governor.)

By the same token we'd like to know how Republicans keep getting away with this sad-ass parade, how they once again field a daisful of scoundrels, simpletons, and snake-oil peddlers without it being termed the Seven Dwarfs or Eight Loonies or Nine Nutjobs by the Gentlemen of the Press. This is the Republican Presidential Sweepstakes history since 1988 (not that Reagan wasn't the King of the Simpletons and Patron Saint of Patent Nostrum Pushers before that; it's just that, once he became inevitable, the entire party managed to keep its mouth shut about it), but it sure ain't reflected in the Conventional Wisdom.

Could you please just fucking decide if you're a party of complete imbeciles, or just marginal ones? If Sarah Palin/Rick Perry/Michele Bachmann/Herman Cain/Rick Santorum/Fred Thompson/Sam Brownback/Alan Keyes/Gary Bauer/Pat Buchanan/whatever other both-sides-of-the-borderline sociopathic personalities I'm forgetting at the moment can't be elected, or make it through a debate season without setting off alarm bells, then do something about it. Likewise, if you don't like Mitt Romney, John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Bob Dole, George Herbert Walker Panamanicus Bush--let alone any of the supposed serious, supposed "moderate", alternate-Brooksian-Universe candidates like Mitch Daniels or Haley Barbour--then quit nominating them. That Daniels business began in 2009, and was clearly a measure of how desperate the Money Boys were to save the party from Sarah Palin. So did Mitch Daniels ever mention her name? The goddam money shot of the whole Non Campaign Campaign is him saying that the Culture War might have to be put on the back burner, then immediately turning around and trying to finesse that with Laura Ingraham. If you're even talking to Laura Ingraham you need to reconsider your life's path.

The Bantam Menace worked for Ronald Reagan. What beef can he have with Sarah Palin? The only difference is that Ol' Dutch read his lines like a second-rate actor, while she reads 'em like the alternate weekend weathergirl on Bismark's second-rated channel. Same lines.

Being afraid to cross the base and its even-weirdening collection of litmus tests and town-idiot candidates has worked to keep y'all at or near the levers of Power--and rich--but it means you can't do anything with them once you get ahold of them. Your bullshit moderates have zero courage and even less credibility. Your leading marginally non-certifiable, not-presently-under-indictment candidate has, basically, run a five-year campaign based on how much he's willing to pander to get nominated. The only moderate on the stage is the second of two Mormons, fer chrissakes; who th' hell wants those people on his doorstep, let alone with the launch codes and signing statements?

Finally, let us do ask, again, how long it takes before the last thirty years of the colossal social failure that is Reaganism becomes recognized as such? It didn't take thirty years for the Right to denounce the New Deal. It didn't take thirty years for it to denounce the Great Society. It didn't take thirty years for Brown to become the Fort Sumter of the War on Public Education, and it didn't take anywhere near that long for the Press to join in. The Republican party has been promising a Return To National Greatness for decades (the way it promised to focus on Jobs in the 112th Congress) while we slid instead into a National Morass, and the only consequence has been a doubling down of the rhetoric that got us here. When's that become a campaign issue? Not until we get a campaign that means something?

I Give Up

Spot the errors

Glenn "Thrash" Thrush, "Obama sparks middle-of-road rage". September 21

ONE: thinking up a headline, then concocting a story to fit it? I know times are tough, but maybe you should shop your resumé around to major advertising firms on your own time. TWO: Just because the headlines say Liberals now heart Barack Obama like it's 2004 again doesn't make it so. For the life of me I can't understand how a supposedly literate Press corps views things this way. And by that I do not mean "personally believes it", since I'm convinced that practically to the last man the Press believes in nothing whatsoever; I mean how it believes that such storylines convince anyone of anything (though, again, "convince" is undoubtedly the wrong word here. "Deflect" is more like it). It is, of course, about a hundred times worse once election season rolls 'round, and the open bar starts pouring premium liquor. "Romney Says Cheney Would Make Excellent Running Mate", or "Michele Bachmann Demonstrates Her Competence in First Debate" for example. You wouldn't let somebody who really tried to convince you of something like that cut your hair, would you? Or sell you a fedora?

THREE, and MOST TELLINGLY: Your Middle-of-the-Road Ragers--please return your seat-back and folding tray to the upright position!--are David Brooks, Ben Nelson, and Mark Fucking Penn, one of whom wrote a column, while the other two commented. See you at the Revolution!

Like this ain't bad enough--y'know, you could've held on to that headline until Gallup confirmed that moderates were leaving the President in droves because he'd turned into FDR, but then that isn't going to happen, is it?--we get this:

Then there was Brooks, Obama’s highest-profile centrist champion in the mainstream press, who sounded downright distraught in his Tuesday column — a lot like the progressive hand-wringers who once accused Obama of colluding with moderates like, well, Brooks.

“Being a sap, I still believe that the president’s soul would like to do something about the country’s structural problems. I keep thinking he’s a few weeks away from proposing serious tax reform and entitlement reform. But each time he gets close, he rips the football away,” he wrote.

Okay, I thought about blogging that Brooks column the other day, and then I figured there were only so many ways to call the man a fucking coward and an even bigger fraud, and I'd done 'em all in my sleep. Brooks owes his sinecure at the Times precisely to this sort of nonsense. He hasn't "championed" Obama, except for the two-week period in early January 2008 when it began to look like the man was the great Republican hope for defeating Hilary. Brooks occasionally allows as how if it were up to him he'd be willing to compromise and take only 95% of his Friedmaniac agenda, even though that 5% deficit would prevent it from working its pleophoric miracles. This is known as Protecting the Franchise. It's not to be confused with imagining David Brooks is some sort of thinker, moderate or otherwise.

This shit doesn't even stand up if we take the man at his word. Brooks reacts to a single--albeit major and campaign-theme test-marketing--speech; "Liberals" were supposed to have championed the man from day one, despite the repeated, even constant, application of wet-mackerel facials. No one familiar with Brooks' work--hell, no one who's seen one of his sniveling performance pieces on News Hour--could believe any of this.

And, okay, I'm not the most objective observer of the American political scene to be found on the internets. But Lonesome Barack Obama gives one speech in which he suggests that, perhaps, the wealthiest 2% of Americans might be asked to do a little something to show their appreciation for the government of the United States ceding control of its economy to them for the last thirty years, without bothering to ask the other 98% first--a position, by the way, which Obama advanced for all of thirty minutes at the beginning of the Debt Ceiling Crisis--and suddenly the Ghost of Saul Alinsky is loose upon the land (again)? And poor David Brooks barely made it to the fainting couch in time. Sure.

Y'know, for the life of me, I'm starting to think that the solution to the Educational Crisis in this country is to drop all the pretense and just quit trying.

Back Home Again: USA America In A Nutshell, Appropriately, Edition

AS reported earlier, I'm fighting a losing battle with the horizon; even before the Equinox I'm forced to wait until 7:30 in the morning for enough light to safely ride a (lighted) bicycle in the streets, streets which are increasingly filled with drivers who apparently owe their licenses, if any, to the pseudo-Randian takeover of the BMV in 2005. (There are two possible explanations for this. The first is that there are orders from On High, or, in Mitch Daniels' case, Short, in conjunction with Indiana's Okey-Dokey Double-Constitutional Voter ID law, for the Bureau to license white people indiscriminately to balance out all the African-American voter fraud. The other is that malcontented Bureau employees forced, in 2005, to don the Official Worker Uniform of blue golf shirt,--wait for it--khaki pantaloons, and pained* smile, had turned rogue or gone Luddite.) That would include the Carmelite driver--we're coming back to you, Car-mel**--who stopped this morning three feet beyond the intersection of the Monon Trail and whatever side street in the old neighborhoods of Old Town Carmel ™ she was driving on, so she could hold her iPhone up high enough to read the text. And text back, which somehow is against the law in Indiana, though perhaps this does not include Hamilton county.

I was safely in lowered gear and heightened alert; it's a heavy pedestrian area with a couple little street crossings that can be dangerous, and one--the Old Town Main Drag--which can be dangerous and infuriating, so I watch out. This did not prevent me from the loud proclamation of a curse word still considered ill-mannered among the Uppers, and both she and some Carmel-homeless guy (over 19, still living with parents, possibly in or out of college, possibly walking to a local restaurant job, hipster mien; believe me, there are no real homeless people in Carmel. Not for two days running there aren't) replied with shouts, but I couldn't make either of 'em out since I had the iPod on, and was past before they finished their thoughts.

Pardon the digression. It's not like I routinely abuse the privilege. When Mitch "Turns Out Freedom Is Free" Daniels first got hold of the state's infrastructure, he named as BMV director some guy with a retail background, most recently having helmed Galyan's Sporting Goods Empire as Dick's Sporting Goods Empire came into its home market and pushed it off the monkey bars, and made it cry. Within weeks he closed branches (surprise!), removed the clocks from those that remained, and thunk up that dress code. (Asked whether he'd be wearing it, too, he replied that he would, whenever he was working in a Branch.) He also oversaw the utterly incompetent switch to a major computer program overhaul, which had been in the works for several years. It got so bad he was cashiered. These days, truth be told, it's the best it's ever been in my memory, except way back in the day when you could just pick one, wherever it was located, and a quick trip to farm country more than made up for the extra drive. They seem to've done something with all the small-time car dealers who used to clog the system first thing in the morning. Like putting them on the Honor system.

Anyway, with the tardy sunrise I've been watching the local morning teleprompter readers out of some latent masochistic streak, and yesterday, swear to God, there was a story on how Wendy's/Burger King/Waste Management was going to put more meat in their burgers. And today came news--it made me pine for a teletype chattering in the background--that Coca-Cola™ would be offering its flagship product in somewhere between two and five new sizes; the announcer was so excited I never quite got the actual count.

Just tell me where this comes from. Yes, indeedy, it's traceable to the contagion of Happy Talk News, circa 1972, when it was decided that news coverage should not neglect the National Morale and the tonic effects of an adorable dog who fought a fire or traveled a long and mysterious road to return to the house and the family which had secretly dumped him while on vacation 1500 miles away and now had to clench the bowels of self-loathing and never, ever, admit having done so. But the switch to Coupon News and Arby's New Sauce Selections features is of more recent vintage.

Of course, chatter of any sort clenches the bowels in the day's first spasm of Potential Pre-Cancer at that hour. (Or does so for those over, say, 15, which, assuming this is in fact the target audience, explains everything.) But I'm mystified by the process that decides this is the sort of thing The Masses wanna know about before they brush their teeth.

The effect on the unwashed brain at that hour I leave to the Sociology Department, but the signs do not augur well. A commenter on the story at the Star writes:

Many realize that Carmel is a Republican stronghold with many entrepreneurs. When you have a city of this caliber, people come to expect the best. Insurance was offered to the city council members which as Mayor Brainerd pointed out is an option not out of the ordinary in the United States. People who complain about these type of options seem to want the nation to deteriorate to the point where no one is offered benefits. The small minded, if I don't get that then they don't get that, simply overlooks all the factors involved in maintaining competent individuals.

Now first, I'd like to fully endorse Entrepreneur as the Official Republican PC Code for "White". Second, it is perhaps our duty, again, to remind the reader innocent of Central Indiana geography that the Sleepy Burg of Carmel owes its growth beyond the charming two-block area of Old Town to the Interstate Highway System venturing a little too close for its own good. Or ours. Supplemented by the Second White Flight, post-Nixon, the one in the mid-late 70s, the one that jumped the Marion county line in three directions, outside the Eisenhower Circle around the big, Africanizing city, the way one can trace the migration of the Iroquois by the bulge their neighbors made in getting as far away from them as practicable. That's Carmel, Indiana, Entrepreneurial Heaven. It's done a better job than its bucolic neighbors, Fishers and Westfield, of avoiding turning every square inch of fertile loam over to strip malls.

I like Entrepreneur. And Grifter's even better.



_________

* They're actually quite nice, and genuine, practically without exception, at least in these parts.

** Car-mel, accent on the final syllable as with Carmel-by-the-Sea, and not the locally acknowledged first syllable, is 1) one favored way to determine whether the recorded announcer is from out of town, and/or 2) the way the rest of us pronounce it sometimes, with either an implied distain or mock superciliousness, for some reason. I'm not sure why. It's one of those things like "Dead as a doornail" that you just say.

Surprise!

Benjamin H. Friedman and Caitlin Talmadge, "What Defense Cuts?" September 19

PUTS me in mind of the two middle-aged Midwestern sisters who skimped and saved and finally got to take a vacation to California and see the ocean for the first time.

"Look at all that water," says one.

"Yes," says the other. "And that's just the top of it."

...the Senate Appropriations Committee last week unveiled its spending caps for fiscal year 2013 — without a big defense cut. The appropriators proposed nonwar defense spending (“base” spending) just $2.9 billion below 2011. That cut, less than 1 percent, comes entirely from the military construction and family housing budget — not exactly the pointy end of the spear….

Compared with 2011 spending, the deal requires only a minor trim in security budgets: $4.5 billion in 2012 and $2.5 billion in 2013. And that reduction — pocket change in a $529 billion annual defense budget — need not even come from the Pentagon.

The legislation defines “security” spending as Defense, Homeland Security, Veterans, State and the National Nuclear Security Administration, a part of the Energy Department.

To get under the 2012 cap, Senate appropriators took $3.5 billion from State and around a half-billion from Homeland Security. Veterans and NNSA got small increases. Defense dodged the bullet — save for that military construction trim.

I was tempted to ask if anyone here was old enough to remember how well Gramm-Rudman worked, but, of course, that would be like marveling that Bernie Madoff would dare run a pyramid scheme even though Charles Ponzi went to prison.

Friday Olio: We're Arguing About What's Truly Fake Now? Edition

• No surprise that Slate rises to the defense of Poor Sarah Palin So Unfairly Attacked By Joe McGinniss, since subtracting "double reverse surprise contrarianism with a backward twist" from both sides of the equation yields "defending really stupid shit". As usual, this blog refuses to make "poking fun at The XX Factor, and Rachael Larimore in particular" anything more than a semi-annual fungo shag, but, c'mon:

Unfortunately, whatever meritorious reporting there might be on Troopergate or legislation she worked on as governor or her expertise or lackthereof on energy issues, it has to compete with [McGinniss'] anonymously sourced musings on Palin’s parenting skills and his sympathy for Levi Johnston’s mother.

1) How many Hillary Clinton books are there, again? 2) Palin and her brood have now been artificially-colored, may-contain-nuts media products for twice as long as she was governor of Alaskahoma. Th' fuck should a Sarah Palin book be about? Her contributions to the language? and 3) "lacktherof"?

Weigel, at least, is smart enough to term some of the Prairie Snooki stories "outrageous" without explaining which direction the outrage is supposed to be coming from, but then he has a vested interest in Palin staying out of the race so Michele Bachmann can continue to impress.

• SAT scores plummet to their lowest level in forty years, which, since the test was dumbed down in 1995, essentially means lowest level ever.

This is after fifteen years of school reform, and a decade of high-stakes testing designed to focus 90% of school-day energies precisely on those subjects the SATs evaluate.

Once again: how long does this reform shit get to fail before we focus on its failures?

• CERN: Higgs boson 'God particle' likely does not exist. So it's exactly like God.

• NASA brainiacs nickname planet with two suns "Tatooine". And we're talking about de-funding the Post Office?

• Finally, a reason to own a teevee: Fred Dumbo Thompson, shilling a reverse mortgage plan when he should be planning his re-election campaign, emphasizes that reverse mortgages are government insured.

The Vermiform Cerebral Ganglia And Circumpharyngeal Connective That Is American Politics

E.J. Dionne, Jr., "The GOP establishment's Rick Perry problem". September 14

DUDE, at least Rip Van Winkle had the decency to act confused when he woke up:

The Republican establishment is said to have grave qualms about Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s presidential campaign. Here’s the problem: There is no Republican establishment. It squandered its authority by building up the Tea Party’s brigades and then fearing them too much to do anything to check their power.

Fer chrissakes, this has been going on for thirty years. It's been going on so long that Jerry Falwell's latest, last, and best career move was four years ago. The Republican establishment didn't miscalculate its estimation of the Teabaggers. The Republican establishment created the Teabaggers, in response to the fact that the Bush administration, and the 2008 elections, had not simply repudiated the Republican establishment, but had revealed it for all time as the criminal enterprise it has been since the end of Reconstruction, and the brain-dead criminal enterprise it's been since Reagan.

The big "point" of Teabagging was supposed to be how the Republicans were conceding religio-social issues for the tainted-meat-and-potatoes of economic issues. Never mind, of course, that the wrecked global economy could be laid squarely on the doorstep of their gated island community in the clouds.

In this, for some reason, they received the unexpected aid of a Democratic president elected in the wake of all this (plus the comparable international disaster directly traceable to thirty years of trying for that Golden Vietnam Do-Over), who decided to meet them under a flag of truce. Or surrender. I get those two confused. As does he.

It's not like this is a first for the Democratic party. And it's not like The Liberal Media, E.J. Dionne, Jr., card-carrying member, hasn't been worshipping at the altar of Ronald Reagan since 1980. A big part of that has been the convenient belief that the whole of Flyover Country was one big Praise Jesus, snake-handlin' cult one was required to tread very carefully around, lest it wake up to larger realities and start pressing the Republican party for something real in exchange for its votes.

How much more so are "establishment" or "moderate" Republicans responsible for this shit? They didn't wink at it over cocktails; they celebrated it. Whether that was cynically, for votes, or cynically, to maximize profits, doesn't matter. This isn't something which suddenly rose up and bit 'em on the ass. Rick Perry isn't some sui-generis cowboy/religious nut. He is the Republican party. If a few Republican power-brokers of the Mitch Daniels sort hope he's not the nominee, it's just because they don't think that Jebus crap will work in the general; if they had any real concern about the crazy Jebus people they'd have fled the party long ago.