Romeo avoidance

I’d blame WordPress but everything Flash-related on my Mac is spazzing out like an epileptic coke fiend today. The bandwidth upgrade has made it more than obvious that my day to day computer malfunctions have nothing to do with bandwidth and everything to do with the reluctance of the Windowsverse to abandon the kludges of the past so we can get on with the business of the future so yeah, this is a post about the past.

Is it just me, or is Romeo Void finally getting their long overdue moment in the sun? The Awl ran this video of Never Say Never today, a version I’d never seen and one that’s visually is as layered as Debra Iyall’s gratifyingly complex lyrics.

Not to mention Peter Woods’ razor sharp riffs, Frank Zincavage’s lucid bass playing and Larry Carter’s Bonhamesque drumming.

Still, I’m amazed they had a top 40 hit or two, their music being much better than what you normally find on the pop charts.

5 things about Donald Trump

Apparently Donald Trump says fuck. A lot. [video] That doesn’t, however, make him a good guy. This is still the same Donald Trump who:

spent $85k in 1989 buying ads that helped convict five innocent NYC teens of rape (Trump used their case to push for bringing back the death penalty)

was a racist landlord

dodged the draft with a 1-Y deferment (same as Rush Limbaugh)

a serial filer for bankruptcy

and an unrepentant lying sack of shit

Is it any wonder that Republicans love this guy? He’s like Andrew Breitbart without the editing chops.  [video] [more] Or Blake Farenthold without the drool running down his chin.

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More reasons to despise Obama:

the DEA

Tim Geithner

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Etc.:

July 12 [more]

PW on MN’pug corruption

Torrent streams (if they make it work, yes, it will be a really big next thing)

Max Sparber revisits Taxi Driver, the first punk movie?

Vick interviews Jimmy Breslin

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Too much like what has gone before, but then again that’s a great description of just about everything, isn’t it?

Up, up in the header….

You will believe a man can hopelessly screw up his blog template.

Unless, of course, you’re reading this via RSS in which case you missed the whole technicolor fubar this afternoon as I juggled and jiggled templates and headers.

UPDATE: Couldn’t live with that hard to read type. More tweaking to follow, this redesign being infinitely more interesting than the current head-as-anal-depth-charge news cycle we’re in.

Superman renounces his American citizenship

Reuters is reporting that Superman will go to the United Nations to renounce his American citizenship. Nice try, but he was an illegal from the day he snuck past the Van Allen Belt in his rocketship.

Details in Action #900. I’d share more panels but WordPress doesn’t much care for my copyright abuses. Suffice it to say that it’s all about Lex Luthor again bending time and space in an evil plot so disgusting Superman feels the need to out himself as not having an American birth certificate.

Given how far in advance these comics are written, that’s fairly prescient. Donald Trump has always been the Bizarro world version of Lex Luthor, right down to his orange skin and less than credible hair.

Next issue: Clark Kent reveals that Superman is just an Ellis Island misspelling of his family name, Soetoro.

More.

Almost like eating apple pie

A reminder this morning from Paul Krugman:

Last month more than 14 million Americans were unemployed by the official definition — that is, seeking work but unable to find it. Millions more were stuck in part-time work because they couldn’t find full-time jobs. And we’re not talking about temporary hardship. Long-term unemployment, once rare in this country, has become all too normal: More than four million Americans have been out of work for a year or more.

Bullshit. It’s much worse than that. Government numbers always underestimate unemployment and poverty because of our twisted tendency to believe that no one else is in trouble, and that competent Americans all have decent jobs and are getting ahead in the game.

Except, of course, for the tens of millions of us who aren’t and the tens and tens of millions who aren’t fairly compensated or adequately challenged (you don’t need a college education to flip burgers). [scary economic indicator]

Krugman doesn’t have any solutions, but he’s increasingly willing to snipe at those whose views aren’t all that much different than the ones Krugman held in the Roaring ’90s when post-Reagan kowtowing to Wall Street went into overdrive.

I don’t think we’re over that yet, but if you need some better news to cheer you up, Dana Milbank actually Heathers out on the Beltway press corps today, ripping them over the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.

The fun begins, appropriately enough, at the offices of the American Gas Association, where White House reporters are feted by the lobbyists of the Quinn Gillespie firm. More lobbyist-sponsored entertainment comes from the Motion Picture Association. Along the way, journalists wind up serving as pimps: We recruit Hollywood stars to entertain the politicians, and we recruit powerful political figures to entertain the stars. Corporate bosses bring in advertisers to gawk at the display, and journalists lucky enough to score invitations fancy ourselves celebrities.

Cee Lo Green sings for us. Seth Meyers tells us jokes.Lindsay Lohan’s ex, Samantha Ronson, is our DJ. All the cool kids — Sean Penn, Kate Hudson, Steven Tyler, Paula Abdul, Courteney Cox, David Byrne and Bristol Palin — want to party with us. A Johnnie Walker “cigar tent” furnishes us with scotch and hand-rolled stogies. We are handed Fiji water, or Grey Goose vodka, to slake our thirsts, and Sea Terra Organics Vanilla Body Butters to soothe our pores.

The correspondents’ association dinner was a minor annoyance for years, when it was a “nerd prom” for journalists and a few minor celebrities. But, as with so much else in this town, the event has spun out of control. Now, awash in lobbyist and corporate money, it is another display of Washington’s excesses.

There are now no fewer than 20 parties, plus a similar number of receptions at the Washington Hilton before the dinner. A pre-dinner brunch, once an intimate affair in a TV producer’s backyard, was moved this year to the Georgetown mansion of multimillionaire Mark Ein. Democratic and Republican consultants shell out five figures apiece to join the Café Milano owner as hosts. (Cafe Atlantico’s owner, by contrast, is cooking for the Atlantic’s party.)

….Hungover hobnobbers reconvene Sunday morning at Politico publisher Robert Allbritton’s Georgetown manse to “nosh on hand-rolled sushi and dim sum prepared by Wolfgang Puck’s The Source.” The press release continues :“The Allbrittons’ lush garden, filled with 200-year-old poplar trees, will feature a white century-style tent adorned with blue-and-white ceramics” – not to mention Ashley Judd and Janet Napolitano.

The press is supposed to sneak into events like these to expose the culture of clubby corruption. Just like meat processors are supposed to be obsessed with germs and financial counselors make it job #1 to look out for your retirement nest egg.

And I’m sure kids reading this have no idea what I’m talking about. They’ve grown up in a world where the Supreme Borks just decreed that large corporations need never step into a courtroom, the right to arbitration being fully embraced by the Constitution which is also OK with paying off class action suits with gift certificates for jelly beans or two-for-one burger coupons.

Tennessee says Frist!

Masnick’s take

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Etc. (crack sprinkles):

A teabagger annotated long form birth certificate

Making the trains run on time isn’t easy

Manning Marable’s new book on Malcolm X may force DOJ to reopen his murder case

Owning is important, sharing/selling less so (what’s the point of having stuff other people get to enjoy?)

Taylor with a nugget about Obama Sr.

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Netroots Nation is coming soon and you can help send a kid to socialist camp where he can learn how to make organic whole wheat macaroni portraits of Chairman Obama.

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Stayed up late watching the NBA playoffs and I’m not really awake yet which is why this post looks a lot like my old posts.

I have other excuses but first I need to drink some more tea. (Apples in my tea last night which was maybe a bit too subtle, but the tea-soaked apple chunks tasted great afterwards, almost like eating apple pie.)

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Orlando Bosch, rot in hell

It’s a white thing

A blisteringly scornful editorial from the NYTimes on the long-form birth certificate this morning, ripping the right so hard they dared not mention just whose assholes were being reamed. A missed opportunity, to be sure.

Calling out the liars by name is a good way to cut down on the lies in our public discourse. The Times, the newspaper of New York City, home to The Donald, would have been the ideal medium in which to address the cancerous bluster emanating from some of our most opportunistic frauds.

Gregory Rodriguez says this is all part of the war of whites against whites, and given what we’ve seen from Obama, I think that’s exactly the right context to put this crap in. David Neiwert speaks directly to the problem:

Right-wing populism is always fueled and populated by right-wing authoritarians — people who believe that the nation/state needs strong rulers and that it’s the duty of citizens to obey them assiduously. This why they suffer so much cognitive dissonance when the nation’s top authority is a Democrat/liberal/socialist/Marxist/fascist — and why their first impulse, in such situations, is to embark on a vicious campaign of delegitimization (see, e.g., Bill Clinton). It’s why they basically go insane.

….Nothing Obama does will ever satisfy the likes of Liz Cheney. Right-wing authoritarians believe above all in bowing and adhering to those in authority — and the thought of bowing to a Democratic president, liberal or otherwise, as a legitimate president is too much cognitive dissonance for them to handle

Black people don’t come any whiter than Obama, but still they cannot bend their stiff necks to acknowledge who our current elected leader is.

That says a lot about the right. For many of them it really isn’t about color. It’s much deeper than that. It’s about us and them, and they will never follow us because while we do follow them when they’re in charge, we don’t do so enthusiastically enough. The fact remains, however, that — to our shame and discredit — we did follow George Bush.

Congress gave Bush what he wanted but that wasn’t enough for the right. The gap between our camps is immense, but not terribly deep. The left, having been shoved all the way to the middle, has nothing left to give. The right, having indulged themselves beyond the wildest fantasies of their outermost ideologues, deals in made-up issues that have little to do with governance, and everything to do with breaking our spirit and making us into them: flag-waving followers who do not question those who pander to them on the stump, then ignore them once in office.

We are at war with ourselves, but this is not a civil war. There are no warring ideological camps here, only those who wish to restore our democracy versus those who’ve cluelessly done their best to create an oligarchy where greed trumps principles and angry shouts drown out voices of reason.

They’ll never be happy until Senators are again appointed by legislatures, and only property holders are allowed to vote. There will be other criteria as well, to be arrived at after the fact once they’ve determined what would be most convenient for them and yes, I’m back where I was last fall, disgusted and tired of it all. We’re not arguing over real things, we’re arguing over placesettings and parking arrangements.

Even if we win every fight, every battle, nothing will change because we’re sweating the little stuff. The kings and queens sit back in their penthouses while their pawns litter the board setting trash cans on fire and throwing empties at their neighbors. Long after the last biliously resentful, spittle-spewing redneck worshipper of talk radio has wet farted their way into the long sleep, the self-obsessed greedheads who pulled their strings will still have more money and power than god, and will start funding new foundations to rehabilitate themselves and their movement of the rich, by the rich and for the rich. Give them twenty years and they’ll be back at the gates with a new army fired up by more false grievances and pent up resentments ready for yet another Shermanesque march through American beliefs and culture.

And yes, we’ll still be in Afghanistan and Iraq, and maybe Libya and probably Syria because the forever war is a big part of who we are, and why we’re not where we should be. Enjoy the rest of your life in these United States of What Could Have Been.

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Madame Nhu, R.I.P.

Antidisaggregationism

TechDirt with the open wireless router story to end all open wireless router stories. A Buffalo SWAT team broke into a guy’s house and in front of his children accused him of being a pervert because someone had accessed his wifi to download child porn.

None of which makes Buffalo cops even half as stupid as Oklahoma lawmakers.

A bill that mandates a sentence of up to life in prison for converting marijuana or marijuana oil into hashish is heading to Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin’s (R) desk after being passed by the state Legislature on Monday.

House Bill 1798 makes the conviction of a first time offense of manufacturing hashish a felony with a prison mandatory minimum sentence of two years and a maximum sentence of life in prison.

Insanely stupid. Hash is to marijuana like homemade brandy is to fruit wine. Nothing’s being added. Making hash is just about concentrating the product. They’re not upping the penalty because it’s been proven to be medically bad for you, they’re jacking the consequences because they don’t smoke and you do, and for disagreeing with them you should be locked up in their prison.

Really, everyone who smokes pot/hash should stop right now and write them a letter of apology. You have no idea how mightily your bad behavior (and fancy schmancy long form birth certificate) offends them.

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Cleaning up some loose ends which is not the same as aggregation so just stop already.

Some of you may remember that Rex Sorgatz had a bet with Nick Denton that the Gawker redo would kill their traffic. Looks like Sorgatz won that bet hands down. In other news of teh tech, Netflix’s super cheap streaming rates are actually depressing filesharing numbers in the U.S., mine included (still watching Dexter but I streamed an epsidoe of Penn & Teller’s Bullshit! over the weekend for my houseguest).

I haven’t been following any of the Scott “Dilbert” Adams stories, but On The Media neatly wraps up a very sad tale of yet another celebrity moron Streisanding himself.

Amanda Marcotte on Gov. Bridgefail (couldn’t resist sharing after seeing Kip’s faux Ludlum link: The Pawlenty Inevitability).

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If I — or any other blog — links to the NYTimes, you can read the story without getting the paywall, but you don’t have to wait for someone to link to a story to read it. Just open the page and then “select all,” “copy” and paste the contents into a word processing document. Tons of clutter but that’s easily cleaned up.

It’s not a paywall unless you’re dumber than Trump or lazier than a Sunday morning talk show factchecker.

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Your moment of duh.

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Black tea with fresh mango. So so. Ditto the oolong with starfruit. The black tea with strawberries made for a great first cup, but the longer the strawberries stayed in the tea, the darker and nastier it got. The steeped strawberries tasted nasty, the starfruit was about the same but the mango tasted pretty good even if it was slipperier than usual (frankly, I’m surprised no one uses mangos as a lubricant).

Still to try: apples, fragrant pears, apple pears, oranges, dragonfruit and nectarines. The bananas I just ate as I couldn’t imagine them being good in tea.

Not really looking to become the flavored tea guy, but this friend left me with so much fruit I’ve become quite creative in trying to use it up but once it’s gone, that’s that. I’ve checked out the rest of the fridge and see no reason to try chorizo black tea or Vietnamese sausage oolong. Green tea with corn might be worth a try though.

Game, set and 2012

Obama’s releasing the original “long form” birth certificate today.

Modern day Republicans really are the stupidest people on earth. Having hanged George Bush’s massive deficit and two-war fuckup around Obama’s neck, they gave 2012 away with crazy aunt-in-the-attic candidates, napkin-based economics and a sucker’s penchant for believing their own propaganda.

They had him by the balls but, being teabaggers, they just had to go from licking to sucking. Call them the original Lollipop Twins, call them southern-fried crackheads, but don’t call them the future of this country because thanks to their antics, we’ve got another four years of Obama looming before us in all its glory holed Wall Streeted splendor.

Fuck us all, each and every one of us because this was our best case outcome.

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And when did the Donald become so orange?

And why is Fox drinking their own koolaid? (Seriously, they may well be the biggest liars of all time.)

Troy ounces: the Achilles heel of the right

Still weening myself off my Google Reader RSS subs (again) and there are a few stories that amply illustrate why I can’t keep aggregating about fools and liars.

You may remember Jerry Kane. He and his stepson shot it out with Arkansas cops last year, not that that had anything to do with militia mentalities or the humongous sense of victimhood the ultra-hard right labors under. Speaking of which, his widow is suing the West Memphis Police Department for $75k for the loss of her husband and another $75k for her son.

OK, $75,000 isn’t a lot as far as these things go, but here’s the kicker: she wants to be paid in gold @ the official gold nut price of $38 a troy ounce. That would be the same gold that’s trading at over $1,500 an ounce right now. The difference? [quick does some math] About $1.9 million, assuming the Widow Kane doesn’t spend all her troy ounces at Glenn Beck’s Post-Apocalypse Trading Post where heirloom seeds go for gold nut prices.

Isolated nutters . . . whaddya gonna do? Besides letting the good widow have her own panel at the next National Organization for Marriage convention. NOM is launching their own investigation of a private law firm’s decision to drop the Defense Of Marriage Act case. Speaker Boehner hired a ridiculously overpriced attorney to defend this Congressionally-approved bit of hate speech, and when the attorney decided he’d rather not, NOM freaked out.

 ”We will convene a panel of legal experts and ethicists to determine if any rules of professional conduct have been violated, or if the firm has acted illegally in reaching their decision,” NOM President Brian Brown said in a statement posted on their website. “We already know they have violated the moral imperative of acting in good faith and fair dealing. If our review concludes that the firm has violated any statutes or rules of professional conduct, we will initiate the appropriate disciplinary complaints.”

For me, it always comes back to Robert Altman’s visionary take on Popeye wherein Olive Oyl’s father, Cole Oyl, has exactly one line that he repeats throughout the movie:

Republicans, however, have two lines they repeat constantly: You owe me an apology, and we’re going to investigate your unAmerican ass.

Because nothing’s more American than investigating other Americans, especially the ones who refuse to apologize to you.

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Another way in which Obamaism is indistinguishable from Boehnerism: the State Dept. now wants passport applicants to share their ENTIRE employment history, as well as every address you’ve ever lived at.

I’ve had over 40 jobs and almost as many addresses. The jobs I can mostly remember but the addresses? I can barely remember all the towns I’ve lived in, let alone the street addresses.

Prick-faced, cunt-assed, list-making authoritarians, the lot of them.

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In other news of the same old same old, a new poll reaffirms my tiresomely repetitious refrain that Southern Democrats and Republicans have switched places:

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Also, fruit juice in my tea. Having recently been gifted with way too much fruit, I’ve been experimenting to see which kinds of fruit best impact the taste of black tea.

Plums are good, and after the tea is gone the tea-soaked plum chunks are good eating. Honey tangerines didn’t do a lot for the tea, but the tea vastly improved the flavor of the tangerine segments. Regular tangerines? Suck city but oddly grapefruit goes wonderfully with the Nilgiri Chamraj tea I drink.

My most important finding? Fruit juice eradicates the tannic taste you get from oversteeping or resteeping tea, not that you coffeeholics give a palm civet shat about that.

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Too many links, I think. I promise the next post will have even fewer.

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Atlas Shrugged, R.I.P.

It actually lasted two weeks. For a movie with nothing to recommend it, that’s pretty impressive.

I’m back

I’m back, but I’m not back. As it turns out, a couple weeks off was more than time enough to ween me off the intertubes. I wish I could say I lost my anger in the process, but today’s Toles explains why that’s not possible.

The worst people in the world have doubled down on the dumb, putting their life savings into Laffer Curve derivatives and their political capital into birtherist hedge funds, all part and parcel of an arcane belief system based on equal parts of Randist dildonics, talk radio libel, Beckism, Foxist bimboushkas and Latter Day Reaganists.

In retrospect, I cannot imagine what I was thinking when I turned my life over to blogging in 2003. What was once a noble hobby became a filthy habit. The same time and effort could have been used more productively. Instead of writing thousands of never-again-to-be-read aggregation posts, I could have:

translated the Minneapolis phone book into Old Norse runes

built a 1:1000 scale model of Buckingham Palace for Barbie dolls

hand-shoveled the manure from every hog lot in northern Iowa

created a life-sized replica of MinnPost from toothpicks

cleaned my apartment

But no, instead I read newspapers and blogs and shared the links to the stuff I thought was good, none of which changed anything. We still live on Earth Two where the head of Richard Nixon rules our world and the Flash wears some kind of stupid WWI doughboy helmet with wings and Elvis Presley has an album in the #85 slot of the Billboard 200, just three places ahead of a collection of extended versions of songs by Foreigner.

The only thing I have learned is that I’m not good at walking away from this blog. I’m getting better, however, at neglecting it.

More posts to come, but I don’t care when or why. Norwegianity will never die, but that doesn’t mean I have to feed or water it with any regularity.

Oh, and the apartment, while not actually clean in any meaningful sense of the word, is now navigable, which is to say that you can go from room to room without stepping over or around things.

It’s a start.