Midsummer's Day

The summer solstice has arrived!

Losing Durbin On The Freeway

Sez the political traitor Senator Dick Durbin:

"When you read some of the graphic descriptions of what has occurred here -- I almost hesitate to put them in the record, and yet they have to be added to this debate. Let me read to you what one FBI agent saw. And I quote from his report:

On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold....On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor.

If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others -- that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.
It is not too late. I hope we will learn from history. I hope we will change course."

While the White House and its political cronies wax white with foam over the recent remarks by about the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo, they seem blithely unconcerned over the implications of the recently publicized UK memos.

"Appalling!" "Beyond belief!" "Egregious misjudgment!" cried the Armies of the Rule of Law, from deep within the tender sensibilities of their fine-tuned compassion.

"Reprehensible...disservice to our men and women in uniform...should apologize," sputtered well-known human rights activist Scott McClellan about Durbin this a.m on NPR. Meanwhile, when asked about the "forum" on the Downing Street Memo held by John Conyers, Jr. yesterday, he said "Our focus is not on the past, it's on the future..." And don't fucking trouble me with this twaddle again.

Durbin doesn't need me to defend him, he has plenty of more eloquent folks doing that. But Chris Hedges, in his new book, "Losing Moses On The Freeway", has something to say about the idols of the state, and state religion, that seems particularly apt:

"Those who sanctify their own power deny this mystery (that is God). They promise that God can not only be known but also manipulated. False prophets, who say they can harness the power of God for us, lead us away from the worship of God into the corrosive idolatry of self-worship. They seek to speak not only for God, but for the nation, fusing religion and nationalism into a dangerous brew that brings us to kneel before the idol of the state...
We depend on our idols to give us order and meaning. We depend on our idols to define our place in the world. Idols give us a world that appears logical and coherent. Idols free us from moral choice. Idols determine right and wrong. Idols render judgment. We follow. We conform.
When we see the hollowness of our idols, how they have led us to waste time and energy, when we smash these false gods and peer at the uncertainty of life, those who continue to revere the idol turn against us. We are expelled from the cult, stripped of identifying power and left alone. It is easier to remain silent, to pay homage to a false god, even after this god is exposed as a fraud. Those who worship idols deal harshly with those who become apostates."

Durbin has become apostate, and the cult has begun its work.

Fourth of July Meditation

When the jackboots infesting our govenment are hiding their tyrant's ambition behind the voodoo rattles of fear and paranoia, and when they jump on any opportunity to remove the safeguards for citizen control from the system, and when all their high talk about freedom thuds lifeless to the ground, emptier than an eggshell sucked dry by a dog...
then it's time to admit that anything may be possible, including the possibility that we can ultimately prevail over these dark times.

From the wonderful Mr. Fish, via Harper's:


It's my country, too, motherfuckers.

Your Lyin' Eyes

From Florida medical examiner Jon Thogmarton on the release of Terri Schiavo's autopsy report:

"...his examination turned up no sign of abuse or trauma -- allegations leveled by Terri Schiavo's parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, against her husband and legal guardian, Michael Schiavo.
A report from a neuropathologist who served as a consultant to the autopsy said Schiavo's brain was "grossly abnormal and weighed only 615 grams (1.35 pounds)." That weight is less than half of that expected for a woman of her age, said the report written by Dr. Stephen J. Nelson. "By way of comparison, the brain of Karen Ann Quinlan weighed 835 grams at the time of her death, after 10 years in a similar persistent vegetative state"...
Schiavo's brain damage "was irreversible, and no amount of therapy or treatment would have regenerated the massive loss of neurons," Thogmartin said.
He said, the vision centers of her brain were dead, meaning she was blind. And his examination showed she would have been unable to take nourishment by mouth because of the danger she might aspirate the food."

No evidence of abuse, no evidence of foul play. The response of Schiavo's parents to this?

"The lawyer for the Schindlers said at a news conference today that the parents continue to believe their daughter was not in a persistent vegetative state and thus should not have had her feeding tube removed."

Ever since the Rodney King video made self-delusion a national past-time, more and more people have been navigating by the comfortable worldmaps inside their own heads, rather than seeing what's right in front of their eyes. Now Schiavo's parents, confronted by information on their daughter's condition that fails to support their own beliefs, simply choose to ignore it, and are joined and even encouraged in this sad shadow play by the vultures of life.

But why not? Hasn't the political and public reaction to the revelations of Abu Ghraib, Guuantanamo, and Bagram Air Base demonstrated that Americans have a talent for this that is nearly phenomenal? Eventually respect for the truth and the desire to seek it out must begin to wear thin, when you live in a world where no evidence is ever enough. You start to suspect that, ultimately, finding out what's real and sharing that with others is not only a waste of time, it could even get you hurt. You stop trying.

And maybe that is the point.

Countries That Sweat Together...

It's been stiflingly hot here on the East Coast this week. Just walking down the street feels like more like swimming in a jacked-up hot tub. And it has made me think about the kind of heat the folks in Iraq are dealing with, the problems they've had with rolling blackouts in the summers since we invaded, and the misery it's caused for lack of air conditioning and fans.

While the rah-rah pro-war stories (Iraq is actually "the victim of success"?) increasingly paint life over there as one big liberated party of progress on repairs to the infrastructure, our own Department of Energy has this to say recently about the electricity situation there (you'll have to scroll more than halfway down to get past the voluminous fretting over the oil situation):

"As of late May 2005, reports indicated that Iraq had around 4,000-5,000 megawatts (MW) of available, operable power generating capacity, well below projected peak 2005 summer demand of 8,000 MW. As a result, Iraqis are likely to face shortages this summer, even if capacity increases by the 1,700 MW Electricity Minister Ayham al-Samarra'i has indicated is possible if adequate fuels can be made available. The shortage of electric generating capacity in Iraq has been caused by numerous problems, including sabotage, looting, lack of security for workers, disruptions in fuel supplies for the plants, difficulty in procuring replacement parts at the aging stations, lack of training for workers, and obsolete technology. In early March 2005, Samarra'i said that unless $5 billion were allocated to Iraq's electricity sector, the situation could become disastrous."

Now remind me again how much money we have poured into restoring infrastructure there?

Not So Much "Froth" As A Cataract

Think we aren't watching a housing bubble blowing up? On Morning Edition today, Ketzel Levine just did a story on a physician-real estate "strategist" whose main talent seems to be driving up the cost of housing in depressed areas and converting hospitals and schools into condos.

Here's the thing: Levine reports that in the area her subject "strategizes", the housing market has been rising by 3% a month.

Chemical Soup

My big thing is posted at The American Street today.

I'm exhausted.

Sex Is Destiny: The Freudian Right

Friday over at TAPPED, Garance Franke-Ruta observed some gleanings from that universally-respected think tank, Primetime Live:

"...let's remember that, even though women are more broadly socially liberal than men, their liberalism is a form of tolerance, not libertinism. Overall, women are much more behaviorally conservative than men -- they have fewer sex partners, start having sex later, are less likely to do drugs, commit crimes, etc. -- and their greater tolerance is an outgrowth of an ethos of personal restraint that respects and is sympathetic toward the autonomy of others, not necessarily out of a progressive political mindset. Men, meanwhile, are much more judgemental of others, even while being personally adventurous themselves (which is how you wind up with creatures like Bill O'Reilly of falafel fame).
ABC's Primetime Live reported some interesting differences between the sexes when it comes to what are in political circles known as values questions:
Women are more conservative about sex ..."

There follows numerous stats on the views of men and women toward aspects of sex, proving her point, including that women are less sexually adventurous, think there's too much sex on TV, care less for pre-marital sex, and spend less time in/on sex chat rooms and websites. She continues:

"No great surprises there, but how could all of this not have some kind of political implications in an era where the culture is a matter for political contestation? Maybe it just takes until they have kids for women's greater conservatism on values questions to overide their greater tolerance and swing them over to the GOP side. But their greater conservatism is there from the get go."

"Greater conservatism on values questions"? You mean, like war? Child hunger? Abortion? Job security and fair wages? On each of these things women are generally more liberal than men, and none of it has anything to do with sex. To assume that, because a woman is more conservative sexually it is therefore an indication of her general political temper, is to ignore the roots of that sexual conservatism. When sexuality is used as a weapon or method of exploitation against you, when you grow up being told to be wary of the predators of the opposite sex who may hurt you sexually, emotionally, or physically if you let down your guard, the resulting "sexual conservatism" is merely common sense. It does not automatically extend to the rest of your life and outlook.

Didn't we spend years trying to get away from the idea that a woman's sexuality determined her entire personality? Yes, I avoid porn sites and think there is too much sex on TV, but I'm about as liberal as they get. And I became even more progressive after I had a child.

I understand the desire to get a handle on how the world works by trying to fit difficult problems into pre-fabricated pegholes, but rather than clarify and explain, this kind of summing up just helps maintain the fog of confusion.

Riggsveda's Tiny Universe Gets Expanded

The one and only Riggsveda progeny headed down to TN on Thursday without a banjo on her knee, hepped up to see the Bonnaroo. Dare I admit it? I had no clue as to what she was talking about, until she sat down at the computer and pulled up the website. It states: "A four-day, multi-stage camping festival held on a 700-acre farm in Manchester, Tennessee, the event’s first three annual installments each sold out up to 90,000 tickets with no traditional advertising—an unprecedented achievement...In addition to dozens of epic performances, the festival buzzes with round-the-clock attractions and activities including a classic arcade, cinema, comedy club, theater performers, beer festival, playground, kids area, artist workshops, yoga classes, and a music technology village, not to mention over a hundred vendors, cafes, and concessionaires providing high quality crafts and foods."
What a lineup! Everybody from Karl Denson's Tiny Universe to Bela Fleck, with Madeleine Peyroux and Herbie Hancock in between. Allman Bros., Black Crowes, Dave Matthews, Allison Krauss, Toots and the Maytalls, Ollabelle, De La Soul, Earl Scruggs, and ...Jesus, what an eclectic line-up. Plus movies, games, auctions, charities, yoga, a masquerade ball, and too much more. I'm thinking this may be my second chance to do the Woodstock thing, and giving serious consideration to going next year.

I hear the barbecue in TN is fabulous.

UPDATE: I stumbled over Mouthful of Feathers' website, and whaddya know? Bonaroo blogging! (Very nice site.)

Haloscan Alert

It's gone mad, I tell you, mad.

Bear with us till the geeks have herded the appropriate cats.
Thanks.

Michael Kinsley To The Republic's Rescue

What could be more cutting than the discovery that someone you have respected for years, someone you defended against attacks by others who felt he was a rudderless punk, this person has pretty well single-handedly undercut one of the most important revelations the left has been able to use since Bush was appointed Dauphin by his daddy's buddies? Granted, he's not fuzzy lovable, and he has an acid tongue, but for years I overlooked his New Republicitis. I wonder what his predecessor and successor Lewis Lapham has to say about Michael Kinsley these days?

Well, Kinsley has shot his keyboard off, no doubt in the service of "balance", and unleashed a spray of indiscriminate fire across the bow of the LA Times:

"After about the 200th e-mail from a stranger demanding that I cease my personal cover-up of something called the Downing Street Memo, I decided to read it. (By mentioning 200 e-mails, I do not intend to brag. I'm sure Tom Friedman got many more.) It's all over the blogosphere and Air America, the left-wing talk-radio network: This is the smoking gun of the Iraq war. It is proof positive that President Bush was determined to invade Iraq a year before he did so. The whole "weapons of mass destruction" concern was phony from the start, and the drama about inspections was just kabuki: going through the motions.
Although it is flattering to be thought personally responsible for allowing a proven war criminal to remain in office, in the end I don't buy the fuss. Nevertheless, I am enjoying it, as an encouraging sign of the left's revival. Developing a paranoid theory and promoting it to the very edge of national respectability takes ideological self-confidence. It takes a critical mass of citizens with extreme views and the time and energy to obsess about them. It takes a promotional infrastructure and the discipline to settle on a story line, disseminate it and stick to it.
It takes, in short, what Hillary Clinton once called a vast conspiracy. The right has had one for years. Even moderate and reasonable right-wingers benefit from a mass of angry people even further right. This overhang of extremists makes the moderates appear more reasonable. It has pulled the center of politics, where the media try to be and where compromises on particular issues end up, in a rightward direction. Listening to extreme views on your own side is soothing even if you would never express them and may not even believe them."

Gosh, thanks for the broadbrush libel, Michael. Oh, I'm not quoting any more of it, it's full of snarky disdain and ho-ho-ho condescension. But what prompted this unplanned post was finding this poison in the op-ed pages of the Washington Post. And not only in WaPo, but with a weathervane for it on the front page.

So I'm at mithras' blog, and I go:

"Well, the density and incuriousness of the American public is enough of an obstacle without Michael Kinsley (who used to edit Harper's and had some credibility until he decided to mud-wrestle with Susan Estrich) popping off in the pages of the LA Times about how the blogosphere's Loony Left has gotten its panties in a bunch over some no-news memo that doesn't prove a thing about Bush's intentions, and how we poor deluded fools are weaving conspiracy theories out of information that was in plain sight clear back in 2002. His piece drips with such disdain and scorn that I woudn't be surprised if LGF and the RNC sticky-post it on their front pages for the next two weeks.
With ex-liberals like Kinsley purging the ranks of us "fringe elements", who needs Karl Rove?"

And he goes:

""

Which is about all there is left to say.

John Conyers Demonstrates How To Represent

He's doing his job.

Now you do yours.

Sign here.

Update On Hedges: His Enemies Speak

Ironically, as I was typing in the previous post, I was missing a chance to watch Chris Hedges on PBS' NOW last night, his second appearance as far as I know. What I did catch was former judge and Old Testament fan Roy Moore defend the idea that an American Sikh would have to submit to a Christian God in a courtroom, and complain bitterly about why a statue of a Greek goddess (representing Justice) could remain while his beloved big old rock had to go. Moore evidently would have difficulty understanding that the winged messenger logo used by FTD is not an obeisance to the Greek pantheon, but subtleties and nuances are not usually the forte of the Christian right.

The NOW site gives even more background on Hedges:

"Hedges was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years. He joined the staff of THE NEW YORK TIMES in 1990 and previously worked for THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS, THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, and National Public Radio. He holds a B.A. in Enlish Literature from Colgate University and a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, and Princeton University.

Hedges was a member of THE NEW YORK TIMES team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for the paper's coverage of global terrorism, and he received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism."

The site also notes that Stanley Kurtz of the National Review wrote a comeback to Hedges' Harper's article on the Christian Right, the quote of which completely mis-interprets (deliberately?) one of Hedge's sentences:

"The most disturbing part of the Harper’s cover story (the one by Chris Hedges) was the attempt to link Christian conservatives with Hitler and fascism. Once we acknowledge the similarity between conservative Christians and fascists, Hedges appears to suggest, we can confront Christian evil by setting aside “the old polite rules of democracy.” So wild conspiracy theories and visions of genocide are really excuses for the Left to disregard the rules of democracy and defeat conservative Christians — by any means necessary."

Now, look. I have the article in question, and it clearly does not use that sentence to mean that we on the left must disregard the rules of democracy and law in forwarding some kind of agenda of destruction of the Christian right. Here is the sentence in context:

" I can’t help but recall the words of my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, Dr. James Luther Adams, who told us that when we were his age, and he was then close to eighty, we would all be fighting the “Christian fascists.”
He gave us that warning twenty-five years ago, when Pat Robertson and other prominent evangelists began speaking of a new political religion that would direct its efforts at taking control of all major American institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government, so as to transform the United States into a global Christian empire. At the time, it was hard to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously. But fascism, Adams warned, would not return wearing swastikas and brown shirts. Its ideological inheritors would cloak themselves in the language of the Bible; they would come carrying crosses and chanting the Pledge of Allegiance.
Adams had watched American intellectuals and industrialists flirt with fascism in the 1930s. Mussolini’s “Corporatism,” which created an unchecked industrial and business aristocracy, had appealed to many at the time as an effective counterweight to the New Deal. In 1934, Fortune magazine lavished praise on the Italian dictator for his defanging of labor unions and his empowerment of industrialists at the expense of workers. Then as now, Adams said, too many liberals failed to understand the power and allure of evil, and when the radical Christians came, these people would undoubtedly play by the old, polite rules of democracy long after those in power had begun to dismantle the democratic state. Adams had watched German academics fall silent or conform. He knew how desperately people want to believe the comfortable lies told by totalitarian movements, how easily those lies lull moderates into passivity."

There is no implication here that Christianists must be dealt with "by any means necessary". There is a warning that they must be taken seriously, and we should not be lulled into sleepy acceptance, or be comforted by some notion that "it can't happen here". Which sounds entirely reasonable to me.

I smell a religious war, and it doesn't involve Islam.

"Mama"

I've been wrapped up today in Chris Hedges, a 15-year veteran war correspondent who was working for the NYTimes when his book, "War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning", hit the shelves. In the May issue of Harper's he wrote a piece on the recent convention of the National Religious Broadcasters in Colorado Springs. This morning he was interviewed on Philly's WHYY by Marty Moss-Coane on her radio show "Radio Times", about his life, his ideas, and his new book, "Losing Moses On The Freeway: America's Broken Covenant With The 10 Commandments". Hearing him talk, I heard many of my own interests and concerns being discussed, and I wanted to put a post together that presented a digest of many of his interviews.

The son of a protestant minister who graduated from Harvard Divinity School, he speaks eloquently and wisely of the face of war, the lies told by governments to facilitate waging them, and from first-hand experience of the true horror and of it for those who actually particpate in it, and the addictive quality of its intensity. He also talks with the experience of the initiate about the co-optation of our national dialogue by the evangelical Right, and particularly about the Dominionists, militant Christianists whose ultimate goal is to gain political power and convert American government to a theocracy.

This is the guy, if you remember, who was literally chased off the stage at Rockford College in Illinois, tha alma mater of philosopher/social worker Jane Addams, when he gave an anti-war commencement speech shortly after the start of the Iraq Clusterfuck in 2003. A man who spent 15 years watching from the front lines of the worst wars on earth, speaking out against it and being attacked by clueless pups to whom the coward Bush's winks and nods were more credible and comforting than the hard-won experience of a veteran of war. This is from his pre-war 2003 interview on PBS' NOW with Bill Moyers:

MOYERS: I read your book last night. One of the most chilling and haunting scenes in here is when, I think you were in El Salvador, and a young man was near you, calling out "Mama".
HEDGES: Yeah.
MOYERS: "Mama".
HEDGES: It's not uncommon when soldiers die that they call out for their mother. And that always seems to me to cut through the absurd posturing of soldiering.

He also gave interviews to TomPaine.com, Poynter Online (especially insightful into the difference between embedded reporters and real war correspondents), and Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, all of which are excellect perspectives on his character and experiences. In addition, he's done a couple articles for The Nation, and wrote an unforgettable piece on the Palestinians for Harper's.

Please, check out his work.

UPDATE: More on Hedges that relates to his reporting and thoughts about Christianist and Dominionist influence in my next post here.

And James Wolcott agrees.

Chicken-Blogging Friday

I like a chicken once in awhile.

Because when a chicken looks you in the eye, you know you've been looked in the eye.

As Flies To Wanton Boys, Are We To The Gods (Pop Music Lyrics Edition)

.
"Lord, if you won't take care of us,
Won't you please please let us be?"
--Randy Newman, God's Song

The Oracle of Nuthin' Much speaks:

"Over the past year, the pace of economic activity in the United States has alternately paused and quickened. The most recent data support the view that the soft readings on the economy observed in the early spring were not presaging a more-serious slowdown in the pace of activity. Consumer spending firmed again, and indicators of business investment became somewhat more upbeat. Nonetheless, policymakers confront many of the same imbalances and uncertainties that were apparent a year ago."

Translation:
That's life, that's what all the people say.
You're riding high in April,
Shot down in May
But I know I'm gonna change that tune,
When I'm back on top, back on top in June.

--Frank Sinatra, That's Life

Or, for those of us less poetically inclined, who knows what tomorrow may bring? Not the Geezer-in-Residence, though you'd never know it by the genuflections the press makes in his direction every time he shows his face in a quasi-official capacity and babbles some incomprehensibly contradictory bushwa. He goes on to assure us, as he has more recently, that while a housing bubble is unlooked for, a bit of froth on the old cappucino can probably be expected. Or maybe not. In fact, who really knows? Not him--his job is to sit back and inhale the incense from the offerings we light to him every time the market gets a little jittery. So, what other pearls of cluelessness does the Oracle grace us with?

"Excluding a large but apparently transitory surge in bonuses and the proceeds of stock option exercises late last year, overall hourly labor compensation has exhibited few signs of acceleration. Thus, the rise in underlying unit labor costs has been mainly the result of the slower growth of output per hour. At the same time, evidence of increased pricing power can be gleaned from the profit margins of nonfinancial businesses, which have continued to press higher even outside the energy sector. Whether that rise in unit costs will feed into the core price level or will be absorbed by a fall in profit margins remains an open question."

You'd never know that these were human beings whose lives he so blithely stuffs into such bloodless econ-numbnuts babble. In other words, excluding some fat cats' golden parachutes, wages didn't go up, and where the cost of employing the peons rose, it wasn't because they were paid more, but because the lazy slobs slacked off. After squeezing the working man and woman out of a raise, and hiking retail and wholesale costs to consumers, it's still a crapshoot as to whether it will all even out or whether business will come out on top. And he gets paid for this. But let's turn our attention to that perennial favorite, the housing market:

"It appears that a substantial part of the acceleration in turnover reflects the purchase of second homes--either for investment or vacation purposes. Transactions in second homes, of course, are not restrained by the same forces that restrict the purchases or sales of primary residences--an individual can sell without having to move. This suggests that speculative activity may have had a greater role in generating the recent price increases than it has customarily had in the past.
The apparent froth in housing markets may have spilled over into mortgage markets. The dramatic increase in the prevalence of interest-only loans, as well as the introduction of other relatively exotic forms of adjustable-rate mortgages, are developments of particular concern. To be sure, these financing vehicles have their appropriate uses. But to the extent that some households may be employing these instruments to purchase a home that would otherwise be unaffordable, their use is beginning to add to the pressures in the marketplace."

People are speculating on houses, and artificially raising purchase prices. They can't afford them. Who knows what may happen if they have to sell and can't get back what they invested? Long-term interest rates have stayed low though he keeps raising short-terms. Lawdy, me, whatever could be the matter? He later slips the possiblility of large-scale bankruptcies in there and then glides right past it as if someone broke wind at the luncheon and the only polite thing to do is to pretend you didn't hear it. He ends with this cryptic statement:

"...despite some of the risks that I have highlighted, the U.S. economy seems to be on a reasonably firm footing, and underlying inflation remains contained...Nonetheless, the Committee will respond to changes in economic prospects as needed to fulfill its obligation to maintain price stability."

Yes, I'm so fucking reassured...watching the price of ticky-tacky cheeseboxes spiral sky-high while dime-a-dozen 3rd tier lawyers and marketing managers cream themselves over their latest acquisitions of preening McMansions and Jurassic SUVs. Meanwhile, this dementia victim is still selling the mythology of the Bush economy.

Please, God, send a miracle. Or lacking that, at least someone who isn't nearly brain-dead.

Sadly, Yes

Who makes this shit up? Good Christ, people, get outside for a bit and have some exercise. What's next, a pantheon of gods?


via Andrew at The Poor Man, who has a better sense of humor about it than me.

Thespian Love

eRobin over at Fact-esque hit me with a movie blogtag that originated from Thomas at Newsrack, and as this is my first, I figure I damn well better get to it. What are the categories?

The envelope, please...

Total Number of Films Owned: Does this include the Beta tapes I can no longer play? I would guess, combining all media, that it's about 150.

Last Film Bought: I picked up 2 at the same time--Big Fish and The Big Lebowski. I'm mad about Tim Burton, the Coens, and Jeff Bridges (ubermensch).

Last Film Watched: Aliens (collector's edition).

Five Favorite Films That I Watch Frequently or That Mean A Lot To Me: Because no human being of heart should have to answer this question under these limitations, I'm just throwing out some of the ones that I love. This is not to say there aren't others I don't love as much or more. But it's hard to circumscribe oneself so drastically, when it comes to such a sensual art form. So: John Sayles' "Matewan"; Ridley Scott's "Alien", "Angels In America", "King's Row", "School Daze", "O Brother Where Art Thou?", "The Magnificent Ambersons", "The Natural", "Bound", "Titus", anything by Sam Mendes, "Stop Making Sense", oh, enough.

I'll just post a list of movies I own, later. The problem is I can't choose amongst them...they're like my children and this is like Sophie's choice.

A polenta for sure. Thanks, Robin.

UPDATE: I'm tagging Jackie over at The Airing of Grievances, poputonian at Kidding on the Square, and grannyinsanity--On The Edge in Montana. Get busy, you.

Mayer On The Side

Click on the John Mayer link to the left in the sidebar, and sit back and listen to tune after tune from this generous artist's website.

Elements of jazz, blues, rock, and spacy improv, combined with a husky, sexy voice and smart lyrics, all in a package that avoids cliches while reminding me of sources as varied as Jimi Hendrix and Blue Nile.

And it all goes down as easy as a Mai Tai after a hit off a water pipe. What's not to like?

Saving The People From Themselves

Bush's war on the old, the sick and the weak continues apace, assisted by those activist liberal judges on the Supreme Court:

"Federal authorities may prosecute sick people whose doctors prescribe marijuana to ease pain, the Supreme Court ruled Monday, concluding that state laws don't protect users from a federal ban on the drug.
The decision is a stinging defeat for marijuana advocates who had successfully pushed 10 states to allow the drug's use to treat various illnesses.
Justice John Paul Stevens, writing the 6-3 decision, said that Congress could change the law to allow medical use of marijuana."

Like that's going to happen. Right off, there was this from John "Correct Thought" Walters, Minister of Propaganda for National Drug Control Policy, who said:

"Our national medical system relies on proven scientific research, not popular opinion. To date, science and research have not determined that smoking marijuana is safe or effective."

As opposed to, say, ingesting Vioxx? Remember, this is the administration whose political manipulation of and quashing of scientific data for its own ends became so intolerable that the Union of Concerned Scientists had to register a formal protest. The people who put a faith healer in charge of women's health policy. Yes, I'm sure that concern for the scientific method is exactly what motivates these fine folks.

But let me not to the inconsistency of true hypocrisy admit impediments. There's also this gem from Stevens, writing for the majority:

"Our cases have taught us that there are some unscrupulous physicians who overprescribe when it is sufficiently profitable to do so."

Indeed. Based on this criterion, I suggest we immediately suspend all prescription-writing, until such time as exacting scientific methodology and research can guarantee that no such slovenly overprescribing will continue.

But what's odd about the dissenting votes is who is behind them: Rehnquist, who got his start intimidating black voters away from the polls, in bed with Clarence "Lumpy" Thomas, who never heard of discrimination. O'Connor brings up the rear guard, as befits a woman in the brave new world of progressive conservatism, making little token mewling sounds about states' rights that you and I know she has never really believed, at least not since she sided against them on behalf of her boy Bushie in election year 2000.

Round and round we spin, lovin' the spin we're in, under that old black magic that's turning our country into a vat of fools and curs. Or is it curds and whey?

It's all so confusing.

Attention Must Be Paid

uggabugga has an incredible table up at his site on the number of judicial nominees given the high hat by Republicans during Clinton's presidency, and Diane Feinstein's eloquently pissed off speech to the Senate pointing up the stunning hypocrisy of their behavior then and now. Just go see it.

Drunken Notions

I used to swear I would never blog personal shit, but I guess I've failed to live up to that commitment for some time. Nonetheless, I will spare the occasional passerby the trials and tribulations of my most recent interesting (in the Chinese sense) life chapters, and simply say that the political is indeed the personal, and one day I will have my revenge. Even if revenge takes the form of folding my hands primly against my defeated body and saying, finally, "Fuck it, life is too short to obsess over other people's petty meannesses---let the cosmos deal with it."

If you only just tuned in, this makes no sense to you. That is my gift to you. In the meantime...

It occurred to me that I used to blog about things that mattered to me, even if they might have been completely off the radar. Now, since I started writing for higher-profile blogs, I've felt tempted to write about the things that everyone else is talking about, because after all, if everyone else is blogging it, it must be what people want to read, and it will be what rises to the top of the Google pile. Which shames me into remembering why I started this in the first place: to blow off steam, and put my ideas in order and maybe try to think a little more clearly...none of which has anything to do with seducing other people into reading what I write. Yet there it is. Even the little interest that's been stirred by what I write has tainted my stuff with ambition. And it gets all mixed up with the legitimate desire to be heard and maybe make a little bit of difference, of wanting to be a conduit for information and knowledge, which inevitably leads to a confusion of intent and the rationalization of less-than noble methods. I really never wanted that. Maybe I took on too much in accepting offers to add my voice to bigger blogs, and the whole gestalt suffers as a result.

So much emphasis is put on getting readership, and mentions in the Daou, and getting noticed by the big fish, that I wonder if we haven't become one giant echo chamber, blatting the same old shit around day after day, and mentally masturbating to the porn of the most recent David Brooks column or the latest outrage from the West Wing (God knows, there are so many). This, too, is not a new observation, but really...what's it all for? Isn't life too short to waste screaming into the void or preaching to the converted?

You write something that seems to have great significance, and even may point out something you haven't yet read elsewhere, and who gives a shit? Then you post a picture of some totally irrelevant triviality, and the hits just keep on coming. You start to get the sense that even progressive thinkers are prone to the old bottom-line, lowest common denominator of pop culture attractions, and you may just as well post pictures of two-headed calves and gruesome stories of freak accidents. Maybe I'm just giving in to the stubborn old cynic in me that I've never been able to kill off, and this is just a test of my resolve.

How well can I hold to my own voice and keep from giving in to the inner pressure to do safe, familiar things, things that many others do and do better? I guess time will tell. In the meantime, I have to live with some erratic posting and some personal baggage creeping into the work I do post. And I want to re-commit to writing things that interest me, not the random troller, while acknowledging that I do have a few readers that have pulled me into being part of a community whose give and take I greatly enjoy. You know who you are. Thanks.

P.S.--I wasn'r really drunk first thing on a Sunday morning...it just took me awhile to finally post this. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

A House Is Not A Home

Lots of folks have been speculating on the direction of the housing market since the old soothsayer Greenspan made his cryptic comment on the state of the "froth".

Personally, I look to Britain, where the whole thing seems to have been a few years ahead of us, and where they now see a serious cooling of the market. They're not ready to call it a crash, but when they're giving away an entire first year of your mortgage paid, just to entice you to buy up one of their brand-new surplus houses, it's hard to think of it as anything else. Does this sound familiar?

"The boom has seen the value of homes triple in seven years, driven by falling interest rates and rising incomes and employment. That has pushed the ratio of house prices to average earnings to an all-time high."

Or this?

"But [the Nationwide's] survey confirms the view of the Bank of England's monetary policy committee that its five increases in interest rates to 4.75% between November 2003 and August 2004 has taken the heat out of the market. " (Emphasis mine.)

They're on the downward spiral over there, now, with the inflation of housing prices having fallen to their lowest level in 9 years, a slowdown in consumer spending, and the expected continuance of rising interest rates. And because the path of our own housing market has followed theirs so weirdly, I can't help think we're seeing the future over there.

We rent. We're waiting for it.

A Cautionary Note

I don't know. I'm in some kind of a rant mode, and I can't seem to get out. Please excuse my weirdness this week, but I think I have to just cycle through.


In the meantime,
there's
chicken shit bingo.

Note: I had to change the chicken bingo link, since the previous one seems to have stopped working. But it's all the same good, clean fun.

A Good Ride Spoiled

It’s been a long, peaceful respite, away from the news and the shameless, preening babblefest we can always expect from our government any time of the year that patriotically-themed holidays are on the calendar. We’ll be getting another in 35 short days, and then again in November. (Flag Day, June 14, seems curiously lacking in interested parties, but as it has always been focused on the cloth and not the blood spilled around it, I expect it holds too little titillation for all the armchair warriors who so enjoy blatting about the joy of death on behalf of those who can no longer give an opinion.)

But I couldn’t even get through the 10 hour ride home without my blood pressure skyrocketing to stroke level every time I heard snippets of the Memorial Day speech coming out of that slack-jawed hayseed that squats in the West Wing like a foul toadstool, let alone his riposte to the Amnesty International report, him and his henchman, Is that the best you could manage, George, you impotent worm? In one breath he pushes for a totally bogus evisceration of Social Security, saying "The easy path is to say, `Oh, we don't have a problem. Let's ignore it -- yet again", while almost at the same time waving away the thousands of pages of ACLU evidence, the army and FBI's own reports, with the words:

"It's an absurd allegation. The United States is a country that promotes freedom around the world," he said, adding: "We've investigated every single complaint against the detainees. It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on the word of — and the allegations by — people who were held in detention, people who hate America, people that had been trained in some instances to disassemble — that means not tell the truth. And so it was an absurd report."

That's right, people who've been trained to disassemble! As in, disassemble the truth.

But that pack of bald-faced lies and brazen Orwellisms was a mere amateur's work compared to the Memorial Day speech. I give you:

"America has always been a reluctant warrior."

Lies! He sought this war; he manipulated every event, turned every phrase, pressured every iuntelligence analyst, to make the war he so dearly wanted a reality. And this:

"Because of the sacrifices of our men and women in uniform, two terror regimes are gone forever, freedom is on the march, and America is more secure. "

More lies! The Taliban are alive and well in Afghanistan (where women are still looking for that marching freedom), making inroads just about everywhere except Kabul, and Kabul isn't looking so well these days. The civil war we unleashed in Iraq is gaining ground and shows no sign of containment. Our own Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Strategic Communication warned last year that our actions since 9/11 have actually made us less safe. But his hubris and gall know no bounds. He reads from letters written by the dead, to families back home, reads the parts that say things like this:

"...I gave my life so you could live. Not just live, but live free"

He goes on to tie it up neatly with this:

"And we must honor them by completing the mission for which they gave their lives, by defeating the terrorists, advancing the cause of liberty, and building a safer world."

Where did he get these letters? How did he get his hands on them? How do we even know they're real? And how do you "defeat" terrorists, when every violent act only creates another one?

What a bitter homecoming, to have to listen to a man not fit to lick my cat's ass "disassemble" the truth from atop the pile of dead he has made, and watch him wrap himself in the borrowed glory and pity of those lives left broken and shattered in his own hateful wake.