And then there were two (plus guest bloggers galore)

Paul “Deacon” Mirengoff has dumped his Power Line bloviation gig rather than lose his cushy partnership at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld.

Power Line lets their readers know that Paul is dead:

As you probably know, Paul Mirengoff has taken a leave from blogging and has, for now anyway, resigned from the Power Line masthead. We’ve decided to fill the hole left by Paul’s departure by recruiting a series of guest posters.

Actually, if Power Line readers blinked, they missed Mirengoff’s departure. Short, and undoubtedly pre-approved by Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld who will be watching Mr. Mirengoff more closely in the future, especially given Assrocket’s “for now anyway” tease.

Not available: links to all of the Native American ass kissing Mirengoff had to do to keep his phony baloney job.

City Pages also rips Katherine Kersten for her obsession with the sex habits of Yalies, but fails to tie her latest prudish crusade to her hanging out with the Power Line crowd, a determined bunch of radically conservative Dartmouthians.

Also, TBogg.

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Pawlentyism: one strike and you’re out (unless you’re a Republican).

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Egypt:

Chris Hedges on corruption and force

Egyptian income inequality not as bad as it is in the USA

Roy Edroso on wingnuts on Egypt

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Slowing the ever upwards redistribution of wealth:

Ohio judges require attorneys to verify legitimacy of foreclosures (and a great wailing arose….)

OK, I thought I would find more links proving things are getting better.

My bad.

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The rest of the atrocities:

Undercover cops in AZ tell dealers they can’t legally buy guns, no problemo!

New Hampshire seeks to disenfranchise college students (but ALL college students have PICTURE IDs!)

Greenpeace blimp checks out Kochfest 2011 [more]

You do have to wonder if any non-whites have ever tried to blow up an American church, synagogue or mosque [more]

Israel’s Rodney King video

Zionistas!

40,000 intelligence violations since 9/11, and that’s just the FBI!

“We should be taking notes”

Vatican can’t be bothered by accountability (now bring me that altar boy! No, not that one — the deaf one)

Kelley Williams-Bolar op-ed

Profiling a talk radio listener

Ultimate Blackwater

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I’ve given up on wondering why we can’t build affordable housing, and am now just trying to figure out why builders worked so hard to develop unsafe housing.

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Chuck Schumer’s moving to ban certain kinds of bath salts accused of getting people “high.”

Shouldn’t he first have to prove that bath salts are more harmful than alcohol?

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Etc.:

Screw chart

“O” — not only was it written by a McCain campaign staffer, but the NYTimes’ reviewer says it sucks

NFL update

Scroll down for best Mustache of Understanding pic ever

As Oscars approach, I find myself in possession of 7 of the Top 10 Downloaded Movies of the Week

Romancing the barcode

Crying statues incorporated

Salon ties Charlie Sheen down and beats the bottoms of his feet with an old police report

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Get well wishes for Glenn Greenwald who’s come down with a case of dengue fever.

That’s gotta suck.

Spinning links

Hillary’s not dumb. When she says the U.S. is not pushing for Mubarak’s ouster, that just encourages Egyptians to depose him.

No sane people’s movement anywhere on this planet wants to do what the U.S. wants them to do.

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Lost in the hubbub of Republican caterwauling over the budget, Gov. Moonbeam cuts California’s state car fleet in half.

Let’s see Doug Christie match that.

More spin:

James Rainey calls out Frank Luntz

Bachmann and Pawlenty tied at 4% each in Iowa (there’s a price to be paid for all those UI cheerleader grazing jokes)

Death by GPS (not unlike taking your marching orders from Koch bros. intermediaries)

If Julie Powers Schenecker had been black, Fox News would have run her story over and over and over again (because she’s an Army intelligence officer’s wife originally from Muscatine and now living in a gated Tampa country club community, this is instead just an isolated tragedy unlike this front page Fox story or this, the only story their search engine finds when you confront it with Shawna Forde)

Bill Maher likens NFL and MLB to Dems and Republicans (but ignores the bread and circuses — just like both parties do)

David Brock starts a PAC (cue the lying liars who will claim this is different somehow from Fox subsidizing Republican candidates with free air time)

Authorities seeking Republican bag man for sexually battering a child (doesn’t say if boy or girl, just “child under the age of 12) (note: the school district that successfully prosecuted Kelly Williams-Bolar for trying to get her kids educated is still at large)

Lying about Social Security, cont. [the solution (same as it always is]

Dana Milbank bloviates about Beck and the rabbis, despite Fox dismissing their ad as Soros-driven (seriously, this guy gave Fox a pass for over a decade but now we’re supposed to listen to him about Glenn Beck? Milbank, btw, was a member of Skull & Bones at Yale, something he never mentioned once while covering either Bush)

Nasser Kazeminy sighting (I don’t search for this guy very often, but anytime his name shows up in my search stats, I know his spin team is trying to cover something up)

Spin gone bad

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If we still can’t agree about how the Civil War started, doesn’t that go a long way towards explaining why it never ended? And if lying assholes can float a strawman in a major newspaper article:

Harris said, history can’t be served and the ongoing debate won’t end as long as historians insist the Confederate Army was populated by obscenely wealthy slave owners.

A recorded fact of the Confederate “draft,” Harris said, was that men who owned 20 or more slaves, were exempt from fighting.

“This was not an army of hundreds of thousands of plantation owners who thought their wealthy would be taken,” Harris said. “A majority of Confederate soldiers were poor farmers or what we would call middle class today, who didn’t even own slaves. So you have to ask yourself why they’d risk their lives for an institution they had no personal part in. They fought, because they believed their ability to operate their farms and conduct trade was threatened.”

what hope is there for the truth? Obviously the war wasn’t fought by the wealthy? What war is? What happened in the South is exactly what’s going on today: trailer trash and low-income workers supported policies that did not benefit them, but did so because their asses were packed full of sand by the newspaper editorialists and community leaders who scapegoated the North just as Fox News scapegoats liberals today.

Of course it was complicated, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t overriding beliefs that drove us to a war between the states, and the profoundly evil belief that one man can own another was the number one reason we went to war with ourselves. Nothing the Northern industrialists were doing threatened tobacco growers or truck farmers, but if you can’t stand to think that slavery was the cause, then suck on the universal bottom line: rich assholes in the South couldn’t stand the rich assholes in the North, and a lot of poor chumps died as a result.

Saying the Civil War wasn’t about slavery is like saying WWII wasn’t about killing Jews. Yes, there were other things going on, but no one lights memorial candles over excessive tariffs.

The good news is that if you made it to the last page of that article, truth was spoken:

“Let’s be blunt. This will require whites to acknowledged that whatever the more detailed political battles — over commerce, trade, tariffs, and so on — they were all rooted in slavery,” Ely said. “Without slaves, commerce in the South would’ve ground to a halt, because profit margins did not factor in the costs of paid labor. That’s indisputable fact. It is also true that slavery was an expensive enterprise and may have died on its own eventually. But even though most Southern farmers didn’t have slaves or didn’t have many, the wealthy men with whom they did business did have slaves. You just can’t escape it.”

Ely pointed to South Carolina records that show in the months leading up to the start of the Civil War, state officials proudly cast the war as being about the right to own slaves and the preservation of whites as the dominant racial group in America.

But after the war started and it quickly became clear that the Confederacy was outmanned, South Carolina officials changed their tune and began framing the war as one over business rights, Ely said, in the hopes of winning the support of foreign governments.

Even then spin was everything.

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Etc.:

Your daily dose of Charlie Sheen — and kudos to the publicist who was first to leave this comment:

USAPatriot at 6:54 AM January 30, 2011

Given all the millions that Charlie Sheen donates to charities throughout the year, the $30,000 on cocaine and whores is a pittance.

Vintage Tucker found, sells for $800k (would have topped a million if it had been restored and running)

Bowling brawl (if you make it to the end you’ll see that it is not easy to get a fat woman into a patrol car if she doesn’t want to get in)

Climber survives 1,000-foot fall

This is cute (but please do NOT leave a comment as innocence, once taken away, can never be returned)

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I’d forgotten how much better your day goes when you start out with a medium-rare sirloin steak.

But I’ll never forget how many years I ate crap for breakfast because the government’s food pyramid is full of shit.

Screederific

Shorter takes:

Gary Fine on Egypt: If you stonewall peace forever and let your intelligence services run amok, you will eventually destabilize all your neighbors thereby proving you were right not to trust them with peace.

Katherine Kersten on young men: it’s not their fault when they act out in unChristian ways because young girls are such sluts, mostly because they hang out with porn stars and homosexuals and such not.

Convicted Iran-Contra conspirator Elliot Abrams: George W. Bush was right about everything and Egypt is proof.

Also, new Strib columnist John Rash bemoans the failure of cable systems to carry Al-Jazeera English. Yes, that refusal to give Americans access to non-corporate-controlled news is significant but, like a couple of dozen other pundits in recent days, he seems focused only on his own news-gathering needs.

A good job of punditry (given how few column inches he gets, it’s tough to think of him as a columnist) would delve into the reasons why Americans can’t watch Al-Jazeera on cable or dish. Rash speaks to should when the real story is why. Why, why, why?

I’d like to see 750 words from Rash some weekend. I think I’d have a better clue what was going on here if they let him write long. Three-hundred and fifty words isn’t a column, it’s an item, and items aren’t long enough to present the whole story (which means it’s the perfect length for Katherine Kersten).

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Michele Bachmann mocked on SNL. The skit is on target, but not terribly funny.

Salvageable, I think. Kristen Wiig needs to practice staring into mirrors until she perfects the laser-sharp intensity of Bachmann’s no one’s home 1,000-inch stare. (Every video I’ve seen of Bachmann, she always seems to be looking at the person right behind you.)

I like Frank Rich’s take:

[T]he night’s storyline inevitably shifted to the reliable diva antics of Michele Bachmann, the founder of the House’s Tea Party Caucus. For all the Republican male establishment’s harrumphing, it couldn’t derail her plan to hijack the party’s designated State of the Union response with one of her own. More Katherine Harris than Sarah Palin, Bachmann is far more riveting television bait than Paul Ryan, the bland congressman officially assigned the Bobby Jindal memorial slot after the New Jersey governor Chris Christie was savvy enough to take a pass….

Bachmann, like such other newly empowered Tea Party tribunes as Rand Paul and Jim DeMint, rattles G.O.P. leaders because she doesn’t pull punches in specifying how she would wield an ax. The only public opinion she cares about is that of her base. But as it turned out, Bachmann specified no cuts on Tuesday night, if only because she was too busy attacking Obama with unreconstructed pre-Tucson vitriol. In the end, her substance differed little from Ryan’s. She chastised government spending six times (vs. Ryan’s 13), and, like him, mentioned the twin federal money pits — Social Security and Medicare — not once.

She’s not just Minnesota’s nutter anymore. Now Michele Bachmann belongs to the entire nation.

Enjoy.

Also, Steven Pearlstein on Davos if Bachmann had headlined.

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I steer clear of the lege because I’m not from here. For weeks I’ve been getting spammed by Carly Melin without ever once twigging to the fact that she was running for a seat from the Iron Range.

Yesterday the DFL endorsed her over five other candidates for a primary to be held this Tuesday.

Actual democracy: so close, yet so very far away.

If they’d let the people decide on Tuesday, that would be democracy. What happened was not democracy, it was the DFL in action.

The article doesn’t say nearly enough. Who got to vote? Sixty percent of that vote is how many voters, exactly? Why did they wait until literally the last second? Could anyone show up and vote, or was this restricted to just people who showed up at their last caucus (winnowing down the anointed few to just those whose great-grandfather had been registered to vote).

But mostly, why didn’t they caucus next weekend so they could endorse the voters’ choice?

Yes, that would be scary.

Voters are harder to control than DFL activists.

But voter-selected candidates win more often than DFL-selected candidates and I’ve reached the point where I wonder if maybe that is the point.

Are the Koch brothers funding the DFL?

To learn less about this story, read today’s PiPress coverage. For the official DFL press release, read the Strib.

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Politicizing fast food.

Actually, everything should be politicized. If a company decides to take a stand, it’s OK to boycott them if you don’t like that stand. It’s also OK to shop there if you support that stand.

It’s not OK to pretend you don’t have to care one way or the other.

Let the right piss on their favorite product lines all they like. Either you want your purchases with pee, or without. Or maybe you’re particular about what kind of pee goes best with your snack crackers.

I’m no longer pee-free, but that doesn’t mean I check in with Ralph Nader before hitting the mall. Instead, I just skip the mall and only shop when I absolutely have to.

Consumerism has always been spelled with a pee. Less for you is more for everyone else. Since there isn’t enough to go around, less is best.

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If the iPad were it’s own company, it would be in the Fortune 200.

Quality will out when given half a chance. Microsoft almost leveraged their once near absolute monopoly into the death of Apple but, thanks to non-corporate America, the Apple survived and now sells its products to everyone.

You don’t need to buy a new iPod every year. Old iPads won’t end up in the trash. Old Macs run forever even if they do eventually (after 5-6 years) lose most of their value for internet purposes (my eight-year-old G4 is sitting in the closet, but if you need a computer to watch movies or jukebox music with, it runs just fine even if you can’t update the Java [which means online commercials won't run and page loads may freeze]).

My first Mac was used and I bought it in 1990 and used it to write thousands of resumes. Since then I’ve only had to buy four more and the Mini I’m working on right now is doing just fine. Five work horse computers in 19 years. Any of you PC owners that can top that?

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More later, probably, but for right now I’ve got run some errands.

Experts on what you should have done

I’m not terribly fond of drive-by comments. You know the kind, someone who’s never been to your blog before reacts vehemently to something you’ve written. My drive-by commenters all too often offer no facts and are overreacting to casual remarks, but I do try to respond to them when they’ve put some thought into responding to something I put some thought into writing.

So yeah, I leave angry comments at other people’s blogs. But when Philip Greenspun wrote Rethinking 99 weeks of unemployment, I hit him with some major facts that I had at my fingertips thanks to having written resumes for over 7,000 job seekers. I wish I’d saved a copy of it because Greenspun deleted it.

Dude isn’t shy about wading into his comments to debate people, but if you whack him hard enough, he whacks back with the delete key.

Greenspun’s point is that no one should need 99 weeks of unemployment because anyone can turn their life around much more quickly than that. Here’s his list of things you can do in 99 weeks:

• earn most or all of a bachelor’s degree if done at an efficient school such as University of Phoenix where courses are self-paced and/or in session all year rather than the lazy half-the-year calendar of a legacy university
• earn an MBA (1 year at a modern school; 2 years at a legacy school)
• become a competent video editor in Final Cut or Adobe Premiere (two weeks?)
• become a competent photo editor in Adobe Photoshop or The Gimp (two weeks?)
• develop reasonably fluency in a foreign language, even without an instructor, using tools such as RosettaStone (one year, possibly including a trip to Guatemala or China or wherever)
• start and finish an aviation maintenance degree and FAA certification (typically about 1.5 years)
• learn heavy equipment operation
• complete almost any trade school, e.g., plumbing or electrician
• go from zero computer knowledge to being a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer or a Cisco network engineer

All of these things have one very big assumption in common: the moment you’re laid off or fired, you intuit that you’re not going to get a new job and have to instead improve your skills. That’s an assumption that hardly anyone makes because most laid off/fired workers are too busy trying to find new jobs.

That alone queers most of Greenspun’s points. He’s the kind of guy who, after you lose the love of your life to cancer and then spend a couple of years in mourning, tells you how much happier you’d be if you’d moved on immediately and gotten hitched to someone else. Got cancer? Great chance to catch up on your online graduate studies! Lost your farm because of three straight years of drought? Why didn’t you sell it before the drought started?

Mr. Greenspun is a man who solves other people’s problems without benefit of personal experience. His list is inane. Learn a new language? As a fucking monolingual American adult? Learn heavy equipment operation? Has this guy got a clue how hard it is to get a year-round job in heavy equipment operation? Or how little employers value schooling in this area, preferring instead to entrust half-million dollar pieces of major equipment to those who’ve already been paid to operate them?

Become a competent Adobe Photoshop photo editor? And this leads to jobs how, exactly? I’m not saying it’s not a cool skill to have, I’m just saying the need for inexperienced photo editors is slim. In fact, that’s the #1 criticism I have of most of Greenspun’s “solutions”: employers in a tight job market don’t care about schooling, they care about actual experience. I’ve been through enough recessions to know that being a new college grad in a downturn sucks. I can’t imagine being self-taught in a software app helps much.

I could go on and on easily: Greenspun’s list is that easy to pick on. But I really want to share the one fact I hit him with in my now deleted comment. Most — if not all — states cut off your unemployment the second you enroll in college. Their assumption is that if you’re in school, you’re not looking for work.

Greenspun’s solutions do make sense…unless you need that unemployment check, and almost all laid off workers do.

Our system for dealing with the unemployed doesn’t make sense, I’ll give him that. But solutions need to be reality-based. The reality of being unemployed in a down economy is that each day is filled with apprehension and worry. You don’t learn well when you’re apprehensive, and the jobless are very much caught up in the despair of the moment. That or busy projecting themselves into a new job.

Taking time out to learn new things? Yeah, after the fact you can see where you should have done that but after the fact is a little late to be filling in your 99-week planner for a job search you’d thought was only going to take a few weeks.

Digby has more on real world realities that eclipse think tank theologies.

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Juan Cole on Egypt.

The more I read, the less I understand. Good luck to the Egyptians. If they win, I hope it works out for them.

Also, what Atrios just posted:

Clearly

The best next step is a 150,000 person US occupation of Egypt so we can write their constitution, figure out who their interim leader should be, and then spend 10 years training security forces.

Also mercenaries. Lots and lots of mercenaries.

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More from Dave Neiwert on how the right choreographed their New Black Panther party fright footage.

Goebbelsian Potemkinism and yes, only the confused American right could so easily encompass both fascist and czarist strategies for misdirection.

[more]

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Eric Fuller update.

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Christianist U.S. Air Force Academy expels five students for “illegal drug use” for having purchased the entirely legal synthetic pot that’s going around.

A general order issued last April by academy superintendent Lt. Gen Michael Gould specifically warned the cadet wing against the use of spice or “inhaling household chemicals and other chemical inhalants and abusing over-the-counter medications.”

Gould said in a written statement on Friday that illegal drug use by cadets “threatens our military readiness.”

“The U.S. Air Force Academy has a zero tolerance regarding the use of these intoxicating substances, and certainly illegal drug use or possession,” Gould said.

Surely this includes alcohol, and given the reputation military pilots have for being drunks, maybe that’s a good thing.

If he’s including alcohol. If not, then Gen. Gould is just another hypocritical drug warrior, something we have too many of.

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Etc:

The Exiled on Charlie Sheen

Even gossip rags can’t figure out why Shawna Forde’s trial isn’t bigger news

Sleigh Bells’ new video (coming to the Cities May 19 — see Derek and Alexis live with someone you used to love)

Bhopali, a new documentary [background]

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Wolves again tonight. I used to love back-to-backs but that was years ago when we’d usually win at least one of them.

 

 

Did you know?

I’ve been floundering between ignoring politics and getting sucked back in, but what I really meant to say all along has just neatly been enumerated by Barbara Ehrenreich.

The most important step? Number one:

#1 Don’t talk, write or argue about Obama, who has proved himself irrelevant to the progressive project, no matter how narrowly that project is defined. Similarly, don’t conflate progressives with Democrats, since the latter category prominently includes Obama.

And her conclusion comes right to the point:

We either fight back or get pummeled into the dust.

Dusty’s not a bad word for how I felt when I was avoiding politics. It’s hard to be relevant when you’re avoiding central issues, just as it’s hard to stay focused when the legislative arena has degenerated into Corporate Smith Goes to Washington to Fight Corporate Jones Winner Takes All Pocketbooks, also remade as the smash hit porno, John Q. Public Gets Double-Penetrated While Reading About Charlie Sheen’s Teen Porn Stars.

Besides, the more you read from the mainstream media, the more disinformed you become. Did you know that:

Bradley Manning’s commanders knew he was a loose cannon before they sent him to Kuwait?

Our conservative, anti-activist judge Supreme Borks have dismantled the Fourth Amendment?

Scientists have proven that cars and factories emit 100x more carbon than volcanoes?

More U.S. troops committed suicide last year than died in combat?

Libertards think we’re better off without blue collar jobs?

Bosnians harvested Serbians’ organs? (article doesn’t say if they were sold to Israeli wholesalers or Chinese geriatrarchs)

A map of home foreclosures looks like a poppy field?

Racist thugs don’t recognize the authority of our courts?

Small government conservatives love to micromanage rape laws?

People who run our prisons think D&D is a manifestation of gang behavior?

Iranians wearing Polish Army uniforms have attacked Arizona?

Possible cures for paralysis, diabetes and blindness have been thwarted by obstructionist patent holders?

Affirmative reactionaries can change the rules whenever it suits them?

Black is white and right is left?

The more you read newspapers, watch cable news and network news, the less you know and the more full of shit you become.

Avedon Carol isn’t doing Obama either.

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Cliff Schechter on the NRA, a radical organization run by corporate stooges who, if they weren’t peddling guns, would be cutting crack with rat poison.

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Capitol Hill Cafeteria contractors have settled with Dennis Kucinich over the olive pit.

That was the only imaginable outcome when dealing with a member of Congress, but the fact that it went public does show the contempt corporate America holds Kucinich in.

Expect the wingnut bloggers to spend at least as much time pawing over this as they do rummaging through Barney Frank’s dirty laundry basket.

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Another Russian bombing, but this one had a happy ending thanks to a spammed text message.

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Etc.:

Twelve-minute video that shows how much special effects you can create for only $300

35W bridge collapse hero retires (at least she stayed on the job longer than Gov. Bridgefail von Domecollapse, and obviously accomplished much, much more)

MN court does handstands trying to avoid the clever heads-we-win/tails-you-lose legal trap our drug warriors have laid for headshops

Which ISPs perform best?

What O.J. Mayo, Rashard Lewis and Manny Ramirez have in common

Media Blitz Radio, because it’s been that kind of week

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David Frye, R.I.P.

Charlie Callas too.

Guns-R-U.S.

Really don’t have anything to say about Egypt, not quite yet. Weird-assed religious shit is involved so it’s really hard to say what the best outcome would be, not that I would miss the Mubarak government in the slightest.

Let me know which side Israel is on, and I’ll take the other side. [Note: Joe Biden just said something nice about Mubarak, so that's one strike against him]

Still Turtledoving out on the Kindle. Blood & Iron now, an interesting look at American history IF the Confederates had won the Civil War. Hard to discuss Turtledove’s timeline without spoilers (don’t click that link if you’re thinking about reading them), but let’s just say that after a WWI in which the Union and Confederacy take different sides, the loser of that fight experiences hyperinflation and the rise of bombastic demagoguery.

And they don’t even have Rupert Murdoch throwing kerosene on the fire.

.

Then again, neither did Hitler.

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I’m not really enjoying getting back into politics. My exposure to Glenn Beck’s factual byproducts has skyrocketed even as Fox News forgives him for offending Jews (again) because the complaining rabbis all interned under George Soros back in the day when the Jewish teenager was running concentration camps and patenting improved oven cleaner technologies among other things including grinding up Christian babies to make matzoh balls.

More:

Whine Scampf: The Irving Kristol Story

Arctic Ocean warmest it’s been in 2,000 years

Krugman on Paul Ryan’s euroshit

End of cheap food era? More like the beginning of actually paying farmers era — they can’t help it that you’re not getting paid squat either in this most bankster of bankstered worlds!

Americans spending at record rate (not anyone you or I know, but hey, someone seems to have money to burn)

Abortion

Nothing would give me greater joy than to see the court-anointed Rahm lose the primary, preferably to a minority GLBT anti-Zionist

L.A. Times less than impressed by the factually challenged Bachmann who is now seeking to defund Planned Parenthood

Trespassing as a capital offense comes to Iowa (behind every NRA thug serving in the lege, there’s a Bernie Goetz waiting to fill your liberal pussy ass with holes) [more on wingnut gun crack]

Their masters beckon (I’m sure all the grassroots Teabaggers were invited, right? right?)

Andy Birkey on Pawlenty (and why am I beginning to suspect that Gov. Bridgefail von Domecollapse would be the worst fucking president ever?) (more on godly godsters)

Driftglass on David Brooks (no clue if this is good or not as I can’t even stand to read parodies of Brooks’ bullshit anymore)

More unaired footage comes to light and once again it appears that yet another wingnut Constitutional pantswetting crisis relied heavily on manipulative video editing

Powerwhiner Paul Mirengoff’s job at risk after he trash talks a Native American prayer at a Tucson memorial service even though his law firm gets paid by tribes to defend Native American rights (every tribe in the country should be calling Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP right now screaming for Mirengoff’s scalp) [more]

Banksters’ feelings hurt

Fighting to see who will rule us

And, all the reasons you’d ever need to hate Democrats forever.

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Snowstorm pictures from out East are always weird, imho.

That shot could as easily have been captioned as “Late September in Duluth.”

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Easily, one of the lamest things about the PiPress is their lazy use of wire stories. Sean Connery is being honored by the unveiling of a bronze sculpture in Estonia? OK, but where’s the picture?

They do this a lot. You read the story, look for the picture that obviously should run with it and . . . nada?

To see what Sir Sean looks like in bronze, go to the Monterey County Herald where the staff actually read the story and ran the picture.

Or, at least they’re claiming it’s a bust of Connery. Frankly, I think the artist was working from photos, and not very good ones.

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PZ uploaded two chat threads last night, one labeled LOVE, the other HATE. So far HATE is winning 268 comments to 263 and no, I never once thought it would be that close.

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Fucking fracking tied to earthquakes.

This is will be investigated never.

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Etc.:

Kevin Love’s PR video for getting named to the NBA All-Star game reserves (dude is collecting the most awesome rebounding numbers in thirty years)

Mexican druglords go medieval on the border: Catapots? I like the sound of that (more than I do the thought of cartels shopping in Guns-R-U.S. Arizona)

Thirty years later, pot smuggler convicted in absentia arrested because there is no statute of limitations if they finish the trial without you (this is a war and that makes drug dealers war criminals)

Taco Bell responds to being outed for using pseudobeef with an ad campaign (good enough for me, extra faux sour cream on that near burrito, s’il vous plait)

The Politics of the Oscars, cont.

The Politics of Accuracy in Filmmaking

Unauthorized supplements suspected in Univ. of Iowa rhabdomyolysis outbreak that hospitalized 13 football players [because when you use athletics for your bread'n'circuses, there's no incentive for athletes to respect their bodies given that the sport will destroy them anyhow — isn't it time some fucking Christians start to take notice of our new Lion Chow NFL?]

But the important thing is that none of the stricken Hawkeyes were gay

Funny, I thought it was illegal to cut off electricity to Minnesotans in the winter? (it really is all about the money, the money and nothing but the money so help them prosperity gospel Jesus amen)

When they never punish bad cops, every cop becomes a bad cop (but when Allen Stanford gets thumped, everyone wins) (and the FBI, of course, is something else entirely)

Banning earbuds for pedestrians?

David Bowie link of interest to über fans only

O’s anonymous author IDed, not an Obama staffer but instead a John McCain speechwriter, Mark Salter (I love how the publisher lied when they provided cover for this fraud)

A list that’s actually interesting and somewhat clever and, I suspect, was hard to put together

Best cartoon I’ve seen in weeks

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Charlie Sheen, one of these days

And when he passes, I won’t feel sorry for the sumbitch, no way. Five porn stars? Greedy bastard. And I’ll give you odds that if you added up all their ages, you wouldn’t break 100.

One of his “steadies” won a porn award her first year in the industry because she looks very young for her age and no, I haven’t seen her I.D. but you would think post-Tracy Lords that the industry would check these things carefully.

You would think that, but actual copies of Tanner Mayes’ birth certificate seem to be as rare as Birther-certified copies of Obama’s.

And yes, had I not trimmed this photo, I doubt very much WordPress would be amused.

Norwegianity: still not safe for work.

Npm (like public radio but less pee-em-essy)

[image liberated from Barefoot and Progressive]

Al Franken’s new mentee is saying we have to rethink our bottomless barrel approach to subsidizing Israel’s pissantry.

President Barack Obama in late 2009 approved an additional $2.77 billion for Israeli foreign aid in 2010, and another $30 billion over the next decade.

That’s got to stop, according to Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who told CNN host Wolf Blitzer recently that with such a crushing economic picture in the US, “we just can’t do it anymore.”

“What I’m concerned about,” Paul said, is that “if we do nothing — if we coast along as we’ve been coasting — entitlements and interest will consume the whole debt within a decade; will consume the whole budget. There will be nothing left for anything else. My fear is we could have a precipitous calamity where nobody gets any checks from government, so security fails, Medicare fails, unless we start making the difficult decisions now.

I disagree with Paul about a lot of things but the fact he’s been buddying up to Franken and now says this is . . . interesting. Either he’s messing with Al, or Al’s had damn good reasons for not saying much about Israel all these years.

I hope the latter, but the former would be entertaining so…win-win, I think.

Not totally unrelated:

O’Keefian mischief draws FBI scrutiny (yes, another abortion link but one that could actually have a happy outcome)

Despite Obama’s example, some still think the left’s solutions lie in organizing, organizing, organizing (as opposed to the right’s solution of targeting, targeting, targeting) [Driftglass sums this debate up in seven words]

Politician trespasses, breaks leg and then sues (more, including his party affiliation and the fact that he withdrew the suit after being publicly ridiculed)

Tex-asses

Craig Ferguson on Olbermann’s departure (video, and not half bad)

Insufficiently hyphenated voter suppression modifiers

His Fraudulence, Justice Thomas

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Growing up on a farm, I’m well acquainted with small town culture and how fashion often goes awry when no one in town is sartorially qualified to judge how you dress. Still, Rep. Tony Cornish seems to be unaware of the history of dudes in black shirts and ties promoting gun culture.

Yes, a handcuffs lapel pin.

No, seriously, tell us what you really think Tony. I know what I think. I think the Minnesota right is so deep into their own shit they’ve lost track of what’s really going on.

What’s really going on?

A 21-year-old Minnesota National Guard member just killed his wife and then sucked on the same gun rather than deploying to Kuwait with his Red Bulls unit. [link]

Shawna Forde is on trial for executing an Hispanic family in Arizona, but major media won’t report on her crimes or the race war the right is engaged in. [link]

Thanks to insanely “liberal” gun laws, Arizona has turned into America’s abbatoir. [link]

Gun dealers “lose” 56 firearms a day, despite our so-called stringent gun laws. [link]

Like Apartheid South Africa refusing to let archeologists dig (lest they find proof that black Africans occupied that nation first), the NRA actively blocks research into gun violence. [link]

And every time there’s a high profile act of gun violence, the NRA amps up their offensive, including pushing like-minded gun fetishists into pushing legislation that more or less lets anyone buy a gun for any reason. [link]

Fuck your black shirt and black fucking tie you black-hearted, fascist asshole. You don’t live in a metropolitan area, and you shouldn’t get to make the rules for people who have to live and work in urban areas that have more guns per square mile than any place on earth not quartering military troops.

Guns don’t make anyone safer, but assholes sure seem to think so. Assholes not being the brightest of elected luminaries.

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More on Kelly Williams-Bolar, the uppity bitch who’s gwine go to jail on account of she dast snuck ‘cross district lines to enroll her chilluns where her own daddy done live despite being a negress and her kids being pick-a-ninnies and all, y’all.

[facts about Akron school districts]

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Yes, I’m doing Palin again, but I wash myself with antibacterial soap afterwards.

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Once more into the breech: Obama keeps doing online Q&As and the pro-legalization folks keep freeping them with drug questions. If he cavalierly dismisses these questions with a joke again this year, next time he comes to town I’ll be outside standing with the Tea Partyers waving a sign of my own.

This shit’s getting old, Mr. President. Millions of presently and formerly incarcerated Americans deserve a straight answer and not more bong jokes.

You haven’t given us more jobs.

You haven’t raised our wages.

You haven’t halted the flow of wealth from producers to the parasitical rich.

At least let us get fucked up at night so we can go to bed thinking about something other than Wall Street’s dick which has been parked up our collective asses since Reagan started deregulating.

UPDATE: Asked and answered, altho hardly to my or anyone else’s satisfaction. The time for talk was thirty years ago. If not now, just admit you’re saying never.

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I don’t like to get caught up in too many ongoing memes, side discussions, etc. because they throw off casual visitors and, to my way of thinking, get way too chatty and self-involved. But if you read my posts you know that I screwed up a social engagement last night and watched basketball instead.

If you read the comments (and lord knows I try to avoid them), you know that Mike was late to his own one-man show. Which doesn’t make me feel better because it means I could have checked the address and gotten to the show on time, which is to say not quite as late as Mike did.

Otoh, I should get points for having gone out, even if I only went and came back and didn’t actually stop anywhere.

It’s a start, anyway. And it’s hard not to think about how much cheaper it is to pass out at home instead of in some nice place where they think less of you for having enjoyed yourself so thoroughly.

More thoughts on this to come, I’m sure.

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Etc.:

Very cool art school app

Will copyright destroy our libraries and culture of shared knowledge?

Vick on Ron Reagan Jr.’s new book (Ron Sr. was personable and beloved — too bad he wasn’t as engaged and thoughtful as truly great leaders must be)

Final Jeopardy: The Trailer (a must click if you’re into artificial intelligence)

Hottest fucking year ever, cont.

Bits

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I don’t care if you don’t like it, NorPM is even worse, and no power on earth could get me to use PMianity.

If I do any evening posts, I’m thinking Pissoir ce Soir, which may be French (but I’m guessing only kinda).

Buttockicizing Michele

No catchy hook to start the day, the Wolves having sucked that out of me last night.

Newsie links:

DC in the dark, jokes to follow

Conoco demands tax cuts to go with record profits

Kucinich sues cafeteria vendor (jokes already in progress, but had a GOoPer broken his tooth, I’m betting they would have paid immediately and made a big campaign donation)

Oil dispersants found deep in Gulf (Gulf? Oil? is this related to some other news story? why does this sound vaguely familiar?)

Maybe Zionists should wonder why it’s necessary to pixelate the faces of settlers when they act out (is it possible that with enough evidence you could go to prison for killing an Arab teen in Israel?) [more on the hate from Max] [bonus hate link]

400 rabbis protest Glenn Beck

Hans fucking von Spakovsky citing

Crooks and Liars on a crook and liar

No justice for Bradley Manning, but maybe a little less torture now that everyone’s watching

Another abortion link

Yet another abortion link

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This is step one. Step two is taking away Social Security from people who break the law. Step three is cutting Social Security benefits to anyone who offends them. Step four? We don’t need no steenkin’ Social Security!

[See also, Rall, Ted]

[more Rall (animated)(recommended)]

Not Rall and not even directly related, but this fits, somehow:

And let’s not even talk about the banksters…. and don’t let me get started on the insurance pricks or the cretins who offer advice to the unemployed.

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A little late, but I think this sums up the SOTU seating chart quite well:

In all candor, I think this cartoon would have worked without the seating chart if Republicans had free will. Democrats at least have the ‘nads to disagree with their leaders in public. I also can’t remember the last Dem who tried to french kiss the President as he left the chamber.

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A very cool animated GIF that just happens to ridicule a Palin but that’s not why I’m linking to it and I have other arty links to prove it. [more] [more] [scary more (as in if they embalmed people with their eyes open scary)]

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Bernie!

[more]

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Bill Keller on Julian Assange who, imho, understands how big media works perfectly. It’s Keller I worry about.

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I may bluster, cuss and engage in all manner of rudeness in these posts, but at least I did not do what Lori Sturdevant just did. In fact, it would never occur to me to compare Tim Pawlenty with Hubert Humphrey, or Michele Bachmann with Gene McCarthy.

Never. Really, I’m embarrassed for the entire state that it has come to this. A proud state once led by giants now known for the aberrant quality of our leadership (and comparing our present Senators to those Senators doesn’t help).

[walks away shaking head]

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In other local news, the PiPress’s annual Treasure Hunts heats up with Clue #5.

Also:

MN GOoPers’ voter suppression bill

Didn’t read about it in the Strib or PiPress or even a music mag, but the ChiTrib says Wilco’s forming its own label

Iowa political analyst buttockicizes Michele Bachmann

A politics-free Deets feed is now available (but why?)

High voltage lines don’t fuck up human beings, but they do kill cattle (¿!)

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Etc.:

The kids are stressing out (thank heaven guns aren’t widely available or this could end badly)

Sinclair Lewis’s secretary writes alt-history book about John Wilkes Booth

‘cylopedia of London street life, circa 1850

The Politics of Oscar (told you this would be a series)

Pirating the Oscars (with spreadsheets)

Blogger eating her way through 300-item Thai menu

Remind me again, if you can’t even kill little girls with pot, why is this shit controlled? (and why do crunchy cons hate this stuff so much?) (well, yeah, besides the fact that they hate to see anyone enjoy themselves)

Food and depression (and yes, cleaning up my diet had a huge impact on my moods but the sick part is that the more I cheat, the better I write)

Long piece on Thomas Kinkade that isn’t nearly rude enough

Extra 54 years for dick sucking offer

Kevin Smith update and no, I didn’t know that tickets were $70! [more]

And belated b’day wishes to The BradBlog. Later, when cooler heads prevail and they begin to ask how could this have happened, they’ll find that The BradBlog documented it all in real time.

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Mr. Aly, R.I.P.

Now who will serve the punditocracy their juice and salmon? Checking GWill’s twitter feed, I see that he’s been inquiring into the health of the MtP pedicurist.

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Charlie Louvin, R.I.P.

Respect must be played.

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Daniel Bell, R.I.P.

He wrote about what should have been, not what did happen and we’re the losers for that.

“When I had my Bar Mitzvah,” he once recalled, “I said to the Rabbi, ‘I’ve found the truth. I don’t believe in God … I’m joining the Young People’s Socialist League.’ So he looked at me and said, ‘Kid, you don’t believe in God. Tell me, do you think God cares?’”

God should have.

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And yes, if they take down this blog again I may call the next one Buttockracy! Or maybe Buttcrackacy!

Still thinking on it. I could go either way.

UPDATE: Buttockgraphy really needs to be on that list as well.

Scammin D. Phish calling

Checked the blog stats and saw about two dozen hits from some site I never heard of so I checked to see what scam they were hyping and got taken to this page:

If you were totally blotto, I could see how you might get sucked in. Somehow they swiped the Safari browser’s log in for a friend’s Amazon account and went to a bogus page (I think the URL and the title bar sort of give that away).

I shudder to think what would happen if they got her credit card info.

But, like I’ve been telling you, the new Kindle is hot. When they use your product for bait and you’re not Apple, you’ve got a hot item.

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Cripes. After posting I took a third look and realized it was an ad banner thing. I’m so used to ignoring ads I didn’t pay any attention to it. And, in all likelihood, that’s the last item purchased with that account. So they’re exploiting some weakness in Safari, not WordPress.

Feel free to explain this to me in the comments.

The Maroon Chronicles

I am a maroon. That or I have some rare syndrome the possession of which should make you feel sorry for me. Increasingly I’m assuming things and then forgetting to verify them.

Buddy Mike emailed me that he was reading poetry at Trotter’s Cafe tonight. I looked at the address, thought, I bet I know where that is, then put it on my iCal and forgot about it.

iCal goes off today, I remember the gig, and get my act together. No clue who’ll be there or not so I popped the Kindle into one pocket and the iPad into another and took off. Got to where I was going and then drove blocks looking for parking. Half the sidewalks were snowpacked and slippery walking but I got to the place in plenty of time, was impressed by the crowd and then noticed that I was in the Blue Dog Pub.

I’ll admit it. I cursed. Realized that I was supposed to be at Cleveland and some other street but I couldn’t remember which one but I was kind of sure the place was called the Tango. I drove home to check the invite.

Yes, I could have made it to the reading but not on time and the Wolves are tipping off right now.

OK, we scored first, I’m staying in.

Sorry Mike. I tried. Hope you were up first. If I find out you didn’t read until nine, I’ll feel bad.

4-2 Oklahoma City. Crap, this isn’t working out either.

UPDATE: Now I feel like a real heel. It wasn’t a poetry reading so much as a one-man show and given that much canvas Mike’s pretty entertaining.

That and the Wolves lost by 1 in OT after having a chance to go for double OT if they had just made both free throws.

I could have been entertained but instead I watched the Wolves.

That was unfair. The game was entertaining, but losing gets tiresome. Still, the pups played their hearts out.