Pancakes and chimpanzees

Nothing much in the news that moves me this morning. As usual my annual 4th of July posting break is well timed and I think the time off will do me some good.

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News:

Goldman admits to greater role in AIG fiasco

Ian Welsh on the Long Depression

Settling for pennies on the dollar because corporations shouldn’t have to make good on fraud

A Tiny Revolution rant about economics (with applause from Digby)

Isaiah J. Poole on the Senate’s second chance to make good on jobs and unemployment

Dave Johnson on the jobs deficit

Supreme Borks leave Vatican exposed

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The Mudflats’ Donald Craig Mitchell has a very good backgrounder on the history of Alaska politics leading up to the Sarah Palin endorsed teabagger challenge to Lisa Murkowski. Essential reading if you have any interest in AK politics whatsoever.

Other wingnuttery:

Greenwald with more on the whiney war flogger Jeffrey Goldberg

Digby on the inner workings of the teabagged GOP

Cuccinelli just keeps inching further and further out there

Mitch cheapshots me over at Mr. Dilettante’s, but for some reason I can’t get a reply to Mitch published?! (it seems rather odd to let Mitch liken conservatives to chimpanzees and then not allow any responses….)

More on Weigel from warflogger Michael Gerson who doesn’t spare the bile in ridiculing a man who truly understands where media whores like Gerson are coming from

No two ways about it: John Boehner wants to gut Social Security

When you wrap yourself up in God and shut your brain off, yes, you do end up sounding pretty fucking stupid more times than not

More on hating on Thurgood

Grassley takes a wrong step in his quest to get reelected (Iowa’s not one-tenth the gun state Minnesota is)

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Spotty on Koua Fong Lee. I emailed John Choi’s campaign to find out what his position is on Lee, but haven’t gotten a response yet. Again, David Schultz is talking about the Lee case, although he’s not really saying what he’d do about it.

I keep digging on this and the only thing I’ve learned is that Susan Gaertner is very unpopular with all the Dems I hang out with. Very much into prosecution, less so into justice, which was the impression I got back in the ’90s when Gaertner’s office played very rough with one of my clients who they suspected was helping her sleazebag con artist boyfriend.

Worse things could happen than for this fall’s election for County Attorney to be about Koua Fong Lee. More from KARE and the Strib. [No comments allowed at the Strib for some reason.]

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Jon Tevlin does a feature on Dan Lacey, the political pancake painter. Worth a read if only for the Orly Taitz cuckoo for cocoa puffs stuff:

Taitz was incensed over Lacey’s portrait, and smelled a conspiracy (what a surprise). Lacey told a writer for Mother Jones magazine that the Taitz portrait had been commissioned, but he declined to name who paid him. So Taitz looped Lacey into a lawsuit she had cooking against Obama.

In a motion for reconsideration in the case, Taitz said that she “cannot state with certainty who paid Dan Lacey, however it is common knowledge that billionaire George Soros, one of the biggest backers of Obama, through his organization Moveon.org, has commissioned numerous artists to promote Obama and denigrate his opponents and critics.”

Sorry, I just can’t make the connection between Orly Taitz and pancakes. Better choices would have been almost any kind of nut, bean or pickled produce.

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Scott Horton praises, then challenges Patrick Fitzgerald. Praise for the conviction of Commander Jon Burge of the Chicago Police Dept., but criticism over Fitzgerald’s investigative strategy into torture by the CIA.

Good questions to challenge a good man. If we had more Republicans like Patrick Fitzgerald, we wouldn’t be suffering from most of the problems we have today.

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Etc.:

A last column from Garrison Keillor before he takes a sabbatical to write a new book, more from Keillor on the UM

Markos sues his pollster, Mike Masnick delves into the numbers

FDL makes their fundraising goal, pushes for a little more (better than Daily Kos and the Huffington Post put together, imho)

Conan the Barbarian: The Musical (frankly, it’s better than most of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s crap)

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I’m not kidding when I say it was hard to get going this morning. False start to the day when a friend speed dialed me by mistake at 6:30 a.m. after a late night.

Plans are to roll out of town Friday morning and get back by Monday night. (This vacation gets shorter every year!)

Only an expert

I doubt righties are consuming enough fluids to piss on Robert Byrd and Thurgood Marshall simultaneously without risking serious dehydration.

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Seriously:

Noam Chomsky on Iran

Matt Taibbi on Lara Logan’s suckitude

Don Siegelman to finally a new day in court [more]

Commander Jon Bruge to get up to 45 years in prison

Alexandria blogger pulled from internet cafe by police, beaten to death

Mick on Sarbanes-Oxley

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Etc.:

Weigel lands at MSNBC [more, more]

More on Hastings/McChrystal [more, more, more] (really good mores, btw)

Having tried to listen to Jeff Sessions polite insults this morning, I can understand why Al nodded off

Embedded insurgents

Trig, amazingly, hasn’t gone away

Foxpocrisy

Giant St. Pete’s prick protest sets Guinness record for penile grafitti

When the correction’s half the story

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I was surprised to see that Laurie Anderson’s Only An Expert has been around a while and has undergone some serious lyrics changes. This version is five weeks shy of three years old and while the melody’s the same, the lyrics are substantially different from what’s on the new album.

There’s a more polished (but unembeddable) version here. More Oprah, more unemployment, and a darker tone.

On the new album, the experts are into bankstering, and that’s a tale about experts as well.

He’s back

The one and only.

Expert textperts snied

A twofer in the PiPress this morning. Engineers at URS mysteriously opted to use a different formula to calculate what shape the I-35 bridge was in. Sadly, there are no minutes of the meetings between URS and MNDOT to let us know just how strongly URS pushed for a more appropriate budget, or how hard the Pawlenty-starved MNDOT insisted there were no problems with that bridge.

Susan Gaertner’s office brought in two experts of their own to specifically trash the findings of other experts who’ve inspected Koua Fong Lee’s Camry of Death. One expert worked for General Motors for 37 years so, as Asst. Ramsey Co. Attorney Phil Carruthers pointed out, this guy’s previous work for GM meant he’d be biased against Toyota. A good thing to say when you just paid someone to expertly reassure you that the Toyota in question was defect-free.

The expert analyses are chock full of words like may, sufficiently, intentionally, inadvertent contact, some, cannot be ruled out, not uncommon, or the classic I have yet to personally find support for such claims.

Think back to the last time your computer went haywire on you in a way you couldn’t replicate later. Could you prove it did what it did? Probably not. And if Lee’s malfunction was initiated by the cruise control system, there would be precious little proof after the fact. Just like it’s hard to prove that MNDOT hired URS based on their willingness to conduct a substandard inspection for a state locked into nonspending mode by a rigidly ideological governor determined to keep the budget balanced no matter how many fees and lies were required.

Gov. BridgeFail is a Republican, County Attorney Gaertner is a Democrat, but they’re both ambitious lying jackasses.

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There was one bit of notable blather in the Strib today: they’re still cribbing odious editorials from the Chicago Tribune, this one trashing the Disclose Act for having the temerity to rein in corporate abuse of our Constitutional rights.

“It’s not up to Congress to decide which political speech is legitimate and which is not.”

Unless, of course, the hard right owns Congress and not the Supreme Court, as is currently the case. Then you’d see this editorial blasting the Court and praising Congress.

The right goes with whatever is convenient because they’re not conservatives, just assholes with an agenda abusing the rhetoric of conservatism to consolidate their corporate incursions into our Constitutionally guaranteed rights.

Al Franken ripped into the activist Roberts Court again yesterday. If he does nothing else of significance in his first five-year term as our U.S. Senator other than to trash talk our Supreme fixers, he’ll have accomplished a shitload more than senior Guardian ad Litem U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar.

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Franken doesn’t get to speak again until Thursday.

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It’s good to have regulators who are allowed to speak in public again. Only twenty years after health care professionals began noting the correlation between antibiotics in animals and early onset of puberty in young girls, the FDA is urging meat producers to CUT DOWN ON THE FUCKING ANTIBIOTICS IN LIVESTOCK.

In so doing they still “disappointed” the Union of Concerned Scientists who had called for even tougher restrictions.

That’s OK. You’re cool with your kids/grandkids being guinea pigs for corporate scientists, I’m sure.

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Natzinger spanks a supporter (while giving him a simulataneous reach around and yes, I think there’s a specific word for that maneuver but not being into priest-on-priest sex I’m afraid I don’t know the proper Latin term for it).

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Fox News: they only mention Larouchies when they’re afraid you’d otherwise mistake them for teabaggers.

A saner nation would have rounded up the Lyndon Larouche followers long ago, locking them up in camps with the Scientologists and Aryan Nation types.

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Etc.:

NAACP backs recreational pot use

Turks: Israeli raid was premeditated terrorist attack

Teaparty Jews earning special place in Hell?

Tax cuts for billionaires

Listening to AmericaSpeaks

I was poking through the news, sniffing around hoping to find something — anything — that would provoke me into doing a post but the good stuff was too depressing and the bad stuff was getting under my skin so I went to make supper.

The smell of fresh cut flowering basil took my mind off the news and the cutting and measuring of jalapeños, ground beef and store bought sauce helped to put me into a better place. That and a couple of bong hits. (In all fairness, the pot was much more helpful than the basil.)

The kids next door started getting kind of loud but for some reason I don’t mind their shrieking and hollering so much. Maybe that’s because after reading article after blog post after comment after excerpt about how the Republican Party of Teabaggistry is all about white privilege and the preservation of wealth, the sounds of Somali children playing next door is politically reassuring to me.

Those kids might well grow up to be Republicans, but it won’t be the same Dixiefied yahooliganism we’ve been putting up with for what now seems ages and in fact has been decades. The impenetrable minds of the irreparably misinformed, made all the denser by the willfully disinformative factoids fed to them by their cynical media handlers.

Richard Eskow and Digby and others were at the AmericaSpeaks national town meeting on Saturday. What happened reaffirmed my faith in this country. Despite being swamped with propaganda and false choices, the attendees consistently voted for the right reforms: not cutting expenditures on health care, raising taxes on corporations and the extremely wealthy, cutting defense spending, etc.

Eskow has his theories but what I think is happening is that people are becoming immunized to the rah rah jingoism of the corporate right. People are already in full retreat from the ideological right so that doesn’t leave much in that movement to attract people with. The right is failing on all levels and pissing on Robert Byrd’s still warm body isn’t helping them.

The media will do what they can to prop them up through to the elections, but election results are hard to argue with and I don’t see any national move to the right this fall. I just don’t. This 180° leap from you must obey the president to Obama’s to blame for everything is too much.

No, you’re not seeing a wave of liberal revivalism, not yet anyhow. But give it time. Give people a bit to catch their breath, squirm themselves into some sort of comfort position regarding the new austerity, and then let them reflect back on how we came to be where we’re at. All the bar graphs and charts and statistics are on our side now. The President is African American and the senior member of Congress as of today is Daniele Inouye, the first non-European to ever hold that distinction.

The country’s changing right beneath their feet and all the posing and huffing and posting and sign waving won’t change any of the facts. They’ve got boatloads of money and they won’t hesitate to spend it, further enriching the media giants who will then work even harder to keep Congress and the FCC from reining them in. That, however, will be an honest fight with no rightwing shills to get in the way as the main event is about to get under way:

Coming to this country shortly after the electoral destruction of the Republican party. It’s time to see who’s behind the curtain!

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Etc.:

Brauer weighs in on Kersten (I don’t think she’s gone)

This is very funny in a Dave Trott sort of inspirational way

Every Supreme Court nominee for the last several decades has been more conservative that the jurist they replaced

Art I really like

All that mineral wealth in Afghanistan? Turns out it makes for toxic sand

Ad fail

From my TruthDig RSS feed:

Groupon may wish to rethink their blind ad placements even if salmon isn’t something we get from the Gulf.

The Clusterfuck addendum

I missed Matt Taibbi’s return the other day. He’s writing about McChrystal so it’s a little dated, but he’s ripping on David Brooks, which is always timely.

You might as well follow up Taibbi’s delicious slanders with some of Juan Cole’s devastating facts, which also mention the Bud Light Lime General. And, since we’re already there, see also Alexander Cockburn on how McChrystal did Obama a favor.

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A Clusterfuck addendum to go with the Krugman in the previous post and more on that cheerless theme from David Moberg.

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Yes, she’s still around:

Cheap shot? I don’t think so, regardless of what she says. No one puts the Nazi into feminaziism like Sarah Palin. [More from Wolcott.]

Even the lapdog media is finding her act tiresome and are shopping around for new freaks to put in their sidebar sideshow.

How tired is this act? Their own crowds are now calling for jacking taxes on corporations and the rich, cutting military spending and creating a tax on securities transactions.

The masses, they are a-changing.

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Hans Von Spakovsky: everything I just said about Palin except shorter and uglier.

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Byrd’s passing may mean curtains for the Wall Street reform legislation.

I’m not entirely sure that’s a bad thing. Over at the Great Orange Satan Dante Atkins writes about Atlas-holes and Republicans’ never-ending love affair with themselves and their penchant for rewarding same said selves excessively.

If no Republicans are financially ruined by its passing, it’s not real reform.

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Etc.:

Yes, Denny from C.R. made it to the live Star Trek fan aggregation in Riverside (with a heat index of 105°, we’re probably lucky he’s still with us)

I’m frequently surprised to discover that bloggers I long thought to be my private secret are really quite well known: Avedon Carol, for example (this link is still good, btw)

In which I learn that I am an illegal

Cutting taxes until your state fair turns to shit

110 stories about the precious fragility of Beltway culture

14 links about Honduras

Finally, an intelligent story about illegal online sports streaming, or how I watch the NBA without a cable account

Oh, and PZ gets to keep the beard.

DeBogging time

First things first. Robert Byrd is dead. The Governor of West Virginia is a Democrat.

Any other questions?

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Paul Krugman is calling this the Third Depression.

[T]here were only two eras in economic history that were widely described as “depressions” at the time: the years of deflation and instability that followed the Panic of 1873 and the years of mass unemployment that followed the financial crisis of 1929-31.

Neither the Long Depression of the 19th century nor the Great Depression of the 20th was an era of nonstop decline — on the contrary, both included periods when the economy grew. But these episodes of improvement were never enough to undo the damage from the initial slump, and were followed by relapses.

Krugman goes on to list all the things Europe and the U.S. are doing wrong but the tag line is pretty much exactly what you’d expect:

[W]ho will pay the price for this triumph of orthodoxy? The answer is, tens of millions of unemployed workers, many of whom will go jobless for years, and some of whom will never work again.

Wars that never end, vampire squid, the BP oil spill, 21 fouls called on the Celtics in the 4th quarter of Game 7 . . . is there anything left for these geniuses to fuck up?

But yeah, the music’s getting better. It always does when the suckitude is of this magnitude.

More from Ian Welsh.

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Yes, the TBogg thing is done. No, he’s not back yet but the pressure to be pithy was wearing me down and as hard as I tried the links kept sneaking back in.

The new header is the view from my place in the rain, which is what it’s been doing a lot of here.

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Reader Odin Langfjaeran is in Norway. He says there have been no holidays that he’s noticed, but I’m not entirely sure he was checking very hard. 106 years ago today, for example, the SS Norge ran aground and sank. Surely that’s worth a drink.

Today is also the 41st anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in NYC, good for a drink in a lot of places, I would think. [UPDATE: Another reason to commemorate Stonewall.] That and I’m sure many prominent Swedes have died on this day in history so really there’s no reason not to hoist a few.

Not to mention a toast to Robert Byrd.

We’ve had worse Senators and yes, I’m talking about Strom Thurmond.

And, if for no other reason, you can always drink to the economy. Or because of it.

In defense of beards

From PZ. Consider donating if you can.

I have a beard and mustache not for vanity’s sake, but because I’m too lazy to shave. That they make me look vaguely satanic is just a bonus.

This picture was taken in the bathroom mirror five minutes ago and no, I haven’t shaved in at least a week. What you see is what grows on my face.

The handlebar isn’t by choice or design. I keep cutting off the ends and they keep growing/curling back. Frankly, I think it’s a cowlick thing.

Elusively my third eye refuses to be photographed. If I try to enhance it with photo editing tools my nose looks like it’s on fire and my eyes glow when the truth is I never look like that before 5.

I do, however, occasionally reset the clocks to Oslo time to more properly commemorate Norwegian holidays of which I’m sure today is one.

As was yesterday, the day before, and the day before that. This being Norwegian holiday season, after all.

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UPDATE: I should have pointed out that I suffer from the kind of timeless good looks that really aren’t impacted by the presence or lack of facial hair. PZ is not so lucky and you should consider donating if only to avoid the prospect of a hairless PZ in Pharyngula’s sidebar. (I’m assuming he’ll shave his head at the same time as the facial defoliation if only because of the why not? factor. Trauma is trauma and he may as well exacerbate it all at once.)

They don’t call it crank because it makes you smile

Vick reviewed Methland — the Death and Life of an American Small Town this week. I didn’t catch it until today but it immediately inspired me to ditch the tea and go with some Dunn Bros. Brazilian French Roast.

It’s amazing what a little caffeine will do for the creative muses when you’ve been starving them on weak tea and regular sleep cycles.

My main client started taking ephedrine “fat burning” pills recently. I was worried but unsurprisingly she discovered that when you’re in perfect shape (other than carrying an extra five pounds of invisible fat), sleep well and stay active, speed is a downer, not an upper. Up for a while, yeah, but the crash is no fun and she was already enjoying beaucoup energy from her healthy lifestyle. Ephedrine was a just a drag on her system, like racing your engine at a red light.

If we legalized all drugs, there would be a brief spike in fatalities and ER visits, followed by an immediate leveling off as people saw with their own eyes that bad drugs don’t give you anything more than a little respite from the real world.

The problem isn’t that drugs are available. The real problem is that the real world bites excessively thanks to the really greedy few, the chumps they elect to Congress, and the liars who report on them.

As I mentioned in an (as yet) unpublished comment at Vick’s, speed came to my small town in Iowa before pot did. Speed drives drug abuse in rural America. Pot comes later for when people decide that they really need to try to get some sleep.

I suspect that if the waste water was analyzed at the next Teabagger convention, more than a trace of methamphetamine would be detected.

Nothing fuels conspiracy theories like a mind whose throttle is stuck open like a Toyota racing up an off-ramp. Sadly, in the real world it’s a closed track so in true brickyard fashion wingnuts just go in circles faster and faster but never get anywhere, and if a car crashes or goes off the track you can bet Jews (not to be confused with Zionists) will figure into the conversation.

Assuming, of course, that there will be another teabagger convention.

It’s hard to maintain your momentum after the speedy rhetoric has faded from your system and your body’s demanding that you go into stasis for the next twenty years (or however long it takes for Americans to forget what a clusterfuck the last rightwing takeover of government was).

Is America finally emerging from our long, reptilian retreat into the bigotries of our Congo-like past? DARPA hiring CompLit grads sounds a lot like a return to sanity, or at least the reintegration of liberal arts majors into the corridors of power.

Let’s hope so, even though the continuing backflap over Dave Weigel’s firing still makes it easy to believe that amidst the paranoid ravings of the unhinged right there are still more than a few establishmentarian “centrists” fuming because fewer crankheads means a smaller market for other poisons (Zionism, drugs, oil, guns, war, easy money, hate, etc.).

Wolcott on the Weigel that was:

Who’s the bigger asshole, Jeffrey Goldberg or Tucker Carlson?

This is truly a toughie. it would take the wisdom of Solomon or, failing that, Judge Judy, or failing that, the cast of The View, to render a verdict, which in the case of The View gals would probably result in a split decision.

The argument arises over an incident this week in which Dave Weigel, a familar name and contributor on the Interweb, was fired as anthropologist-investigator of the Tea Party movement and other rightwing maladies by The Washington Post after emails in a private listserv for journalistas–Journolist, started by Ezra Klein–were leaked to Matt Drudge and Tucker Carlson’s punk-ass Daily Beast wannabee, The Daily Caller (no link, ever).

The incident inspired a smarm inflammation from Goldberg that combined gloating, Michael Kelly-ish smirking, self-serving sanctimony, and Israeli defense posturing, the latter provoking Josh Marshall to sigh, “Oy Gevalt.”

….So a flaming asshole Carlson undeniably is, and yet I think a better, more precise, term applies (and, moreover, it rhymes): ratfucker.Driftglass–who is holding a fundraiser; go, give–analyzes the origins and political psychopathology of ratfucking here, and how it became the operating system of the conservative movement.

Atrios says it more succinctly: “Of course Weigel didn’t lose his job because he had opinions, he lost his job because he had the wrong ones.”

More links about Weigel:

Ian Welsh

Keith Olbermann

Jonathan Schwarz

Julian Sanchez

Roy Edroso

Glenn Greenwald

Some are beginning to suspect that this fall won’t be the bloodbath for Democrats so widely predicted by the punditocracy. Me? I’ve had a ten dollar bet on that since last August.

No, it won’t necessarily be a win or even a tie, but it’s hard to lose when the next Congress will feature a fractured right not on speaking terms with itself, half the party having burned through their campaign funds hosting parties to celebrate their own genius.