Moron, off the wagon, or something else entirely

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The adults are going to be in charge of the White House for only a few more weeks, unfortunately. I'm expecting a huge loss of dignity for the office of the presidency once Mr. Bush is gone.

Do you remember the Bush Administration's very first major lie, while Bush was still only President Elect? I do: click here if you don't.

Personally, I can't wait for the Obama team to tag the Resolute Desk; it would look so much more peppy that way. It would make Obama a President who I'd like to sit down with for an orange juice and baby greens.

Socks full of Vick's VapoRub

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In a comments thread for the Lieberman post on 7 November Big Rock Head suggested that I fill some warm socks with VapoRub and wear them to bed, or something, to treat my chest cold. Matter of fact, earlier yesterday I got email from VAR Of The DAR who suggested the same thing. I was feeling so miserable, and couldn't breathe, that I saw no harm in trying. So I greased up the soles of my feet and put on some socks, then went night-night. The damp chemical warmth was a little weird, but not too weird for Science.

Guess what? I had the best sleep of my illness. My airway stayed clear for the duration. This was not a formal scientific study because I also used a Vick's inhaler shortly before bed, and there was at least one other variable I temporarily forget (probably B&B). But I'm trying it again tonight. Will publish results sometime tomorrow, maybe with an update on my shaving razor field research!

Wise sayings

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President Elect Obama could never bring Malia to Nana's apartment because it is not hypoallergenic.

Wise sayings

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A very special moose-droppings-themed "wise saying":

Obama and Biden were more civil to Sarah Palin than her own campaign staff.

Another way to solve the Democrats' Lieberman problem

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I addressed this problem yesterday in a post where I shared a letter that I wrote to Senator Durbin about stripping "Tailgunner Joe" Lieberman of his Senate Homeland Security Committee chairmanship. But just now, after a night of no sleep, I had an even better idea: Obama should nominate Lieberman to be Ambassador to Israel. Then appoint a strong, knowledgeable Obama favorite to be Joe's highest-ranking deputy ambassador in order both to keep an eye on him and to be involved in all substantive matters.

This solution would be a three-fer for Barack: he could make a show of personal forgiveness and "reaching out" (which could, as an option, actually be genuine); he could delight both the Israelis and AIPAC by sending them our very own little Little Knesset Man (as the other BO calls him); and most importantly, he could finally rid the Sentate of this pathetic, creepy pest.

Bonus "fer": if Joe had not succeeded in bringing the Israelis along toward moderation and a netotiation framework after about a year, the President could tell the li'l fella his services were no longer required and then ceremoniously exterminate him altogether.

Mind-numbing media duplicity

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Republican hand-wringing about "one-party rule" in Washington is absurd enough even before you consider the childlike gullibility of celebrity pundits, such as those paid large salaries by "The Most Trusted Name In News" to cast GOP pearls before us swine. HuffingtonPost gives us a video in which Keith Olbermann (MSNBC) dutifully points out to the audience and unnamed CNN news personalities that it was in fact George W. Bush, not Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton, who most recently enjoyed the perks of one-party rule in DC. Does CNN truly not remember Denny Hastert and Bill Frist?

As an aside, on election night I noticed that CNN continually ran a screen graphic that stated Democrats need 60 Senate seats for a "majority." The corporate media bias in favor of Republicans runs, as The Boxtops sang, soul deep: the GOP rules the world from City Hall until Democrats can break Republican legislative filibusters. The trouble is that people absorb TV as reality. This past week alone, I've unexpectedly ended up in two short heated discussions when I suggested to people that TV news and commentary are not literally reality or even necessarily a close approximation of it. Even educated people seem preconditioned to sop up TV swill like tainted Chinese baby formula just because people with suave voices and professional makeup tell it to through an electric box perched in the the living room.

Moose droppings

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Via HuffingtonPost, the following headline is found on an LA Times story: Sarah Palin's Clothes: GOP Lawyer Dispatched To Alaska To Retrieve Some.

I call dibs on the dirty undies, fool! WORD! B&B, suckers!!!

[LOL ROFLMAO JK]

Blogging surge

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In case you're wondering, a severe cold plus OTC medicines plus liberal doses of B&B add up to favorable blogging conditions. Nevertheless, I still feel like the following:

Rahm Emanuel: radic-lib

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If anything there seems to be a proliferation of stupid talk now that Obama is President Elect. I heard a bite by John Boehner on the BBC World Service this evening (via local NPR affiliate; sorry, no link) complaining that Obama's first appointment --- Rahm Emanuel as Chief of Staff --- was "ironic" since Barack had promised to "govern from the middle." I guess Emanuel is being characterized by the corporate media as some kind of radic-lib who engineered the new Democratic House majority a few years ago. Coupla things:

First --- the "middle" is not whatever John Boehner thinks it is. And Obama can do whatever the fuck he wants without the blessing of John "Boner," as the BBC reporter pronounced it, because he'll be the fucking Unitary Executive soon. And Boehner needs to mind his own chief of staff, who rumor has it is possibly a gay Teletubbie.

Second --- Emanuel is no radic-lib, but a full-fledged member of the DLC. As such, he is closer to being a Rockefeller Republican than a Roosevelt Democrat. (And I'm not as worried about Emanuel as Mick at DLCWatch, either, for reasons given below.)

Third --- Emanuel had basically nothing to do with the 2006 Democratic insurgence back into the House. His defeated pet 2006 candidate, disabled veteran Tammy Duckworth, calls herself a "fiscal conservative and a social moderate" (i.e., a "new kind of Democrat" like the Clintons).* Significantly, Rahm is also responsible for this character getting the backing of the DCCC to run for the seat Mark Foley (another person reputed to have sexual impulse control problems) in Florida. Everybody who has closely followed Democratic politics for the past 6 or 7 years knows that Howard Dean is the unsung hero of the new Democratic majority, and that Everybody includes the President Elect.

Fourth --- I really think Obama is too smart to give his administration away to the DLC or any other faction. He knows where his contributions and volunteers come from, and it's not from the DLC. In fact, I believe the DLC may already be in hock to the Obama campaign for helping to bail Hillary Clinton out of some campaign debt. Although the following may be wishful thinking, I think as a former con law professor, Obama will strive for something analogous to a balance of power between the DLCers and traditional lefties in his administration. A coalition is a coalition, and it needs to remain intact to stay successful; by definition, they are formed by divergent interests to promote a candidate or a policy that they all are interested in. The coalition won't hold together unless every major faction --- including small campaign donors, collectively --- has a vested interest in the project. Other than Machiavelli Himself, who better to manage that sort of group than a community organizer?

Fifth --- The COS is really not a policy position; it's a execution position. The COS is there to things done, but they're the things that other people tell him to get done. Of course the COS is influential, but Obama is 10 times smarter than Emanuel, so I don't think Rahm will be in a position to do anything too pernicious while COS. If he pisses off too many members of the coalition, I'm certain that Obama would reassign him to other duties.

So, in conclusion, John Boehner is an ignorant jackass who needs to watch his mouf. Don't you agree? I do.

____________________

* I don't remember the exact amount of money, but Rahm wasted somewhere on the order of $2 million in DCCC funds trying to help elect Duckworth, but not surprisingly she was out-conservatived by her GOP opponent. I might expect to see Duckworth nominated by Obama for Secretary of Veterans Affairs, with Emanuel's blessing, which would be fine by me.

Writed a letter

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I wrote this one to the only Senator I have left for the moment, Dick Durbin. Let's join me now as I express my opinion to him on an issue of the day:

Senator Durbin,

This evening I am writing to you in your capacity as a member of the Senate Democratic Steering and Outreach Committee. It is my understanding that Senator Lieberman may petition the Committee for the privilege of retaining his chairmanship of the Senate Homeland Security Committee. If he does, I urge you to do everything in your power as a committee member to reject Senator Lieberman's request.

I believe that President Elect Obama's ability to provide leadership in the area of national security will be encumbered or undermined if Senator Lieberman is permitted to retain his committee chairmanship. My conclusion seems self-evident as Mr. Lieberman has actively worked with the Bush/Cheney administration and the McCain campaign to thwart the will of most U.S. citizens as well as your party on critical security and constitutional issues within the purview of his committee.

Again, I urge you to do everything you can to remove Mr. Lieberman from this important committee chairmanship and act to replace him with a Senator whose views and objectives complement and harmonize with Mr. Obama's.

Thank you.

You weigh in on this issue with your own voice, if you like, or sign the electronic petition available here. Personally, I don't care for web petitions, so I rolled my own for Senator Durbin to put in his pipe and smoke, if he likes. Notice the fancy way I expressed my concern to my Senator in terms of national security rather than pure "partisan bickering." Watch and learn, my impressionable disciples.

I know that if Lieberman defects to the GOP when stripped of his Democratic chairmanship, the Democrats will be one vote further away from a filibuster-proof majority. Too bad: he can't be trusted so he has to go. Furthermore, he has to be punished as an example to any Blue Dogs who may want to push back against the better intentions of President Obama. Democrats quickly need to relearn the homespun skills of arm-twisting and/or persuasion --- Tip O'Neill style, maybe --- for use on so-called "moderate" Republicans to break filibusters on Obama's SCOTUS nominations (for one example). True, there really are no "moderate" Republicans --- only ones who pretend to be moderate for the consumption of their home constituencies. But I'm betting those phony creatures might wise up a bit now as Bush heads for his Poppy's basement in Kennebunkport, Cheney heads for Arkham Asylum, McCain heads for well earned oblivion, and Palin heads for the political equivalent of a shallow grave. Lieberman can launch a U.S. Likkud Party for all I care.

Illness creeps across the land

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I'm dealing with a 5-year cold event here, so I haven't felt like showering you with my well considered and smoothly phrased opinions about what happened on 4 November. I will try to check in this evening, but right now I'm all about some comfy rest in the blue recliner.

Wise sayings

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I'm not drunk; I'm just drinkin'. But for some reason my teeth are purple.

Networks "calling" things "for" candidates

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During recent national election evenings I've always been bemused by the concept of networks "calling" states for one candidate or the other. It's not the act of "calling" things, per se, but the way people react to these announcements. They're statistical projections only, twice removed from reality. Our only source for these network "calls" is an electronic box that transmits scripted interpretations of a third party's expertise to us in audiovisual format. That expertise is in turn based on the output of numerical models whose content is unknown to us out here in TV Land.

Back in 2000, when few people were looking in the middle of the night, one obscenely biased infotainment network started a stampede of network "calls" that declared victory for the candidate who, in fact, had fewer votes than his opponent. By morning, there was a mass media consensus that George Bush was our President Elect. It all happened in plain sight: the theft of a presidential election gained irreversible momentum because the herd of corporate news media said "me to" in order to share in the glory of the most awesome Fox News political "prediction" of all time.

I apologize in advance for any incoherence in this little essay; I am worried sick about systematic Republican efforts to disenfranchise Democratic voters, and the fact that virtually all of us mistake corporate network news as a reliable account of reality.

Rhetorical question

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Did the morbidly overweight person in Espresso Royale this morning order a large "carmel" latte or a large "karma" latte?

Wise sayings

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My vote is much less likely to go to Joe The Plumber than it is to Joe The Biden.

What Naomi had to say at Smith Hall

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Through the good offices of someone resembling Lucius MacAdoo I learned that Naomi Klein was speaking at the University of Illinois this evening, so I hustled myself on foot through the whispering breezes to hear what she might have to say. I deliberately left the steno book and camera at home so I could pay undivided attention.

I'm guessing her remarks were sort of her standard "stump speech" about the origins of what she calls disaster capitalism, based on The Shock Doctrine. I own the book but haven't summoned the moxie to read it yet. I'll share with you a few tidbits that were new to me instead of trying to recap her speech.

Tidbit 1: the topic of her first book, No Logo, is how regular people have begun to get fed up with global brand names and what they represent, and how marquee logos like Microsoft, Wal-Mart, and McDonald's can become liabilities when they become inseparably associated with corporate incompetence, predatory business practices, and mistreatment of personnel.

Tidbit 2: the corporate elite and their "elected officials" immediately began using the September 11 attacks to tie the antiglobalization movemement to terrorism. As an antiglobalizaiton activist, she ended up joining many like-minded people in Argentina early in 2002 because the political climate in the U.S. and Canada began feeling uncomfortably oppressive. Argentina was experiencing the aftermath of a catastrophic economic implosion, so she and her pals could act like disaster capitalists and get real cheap rent.

Tidbit 3: the response of the Argentinian public to the 19 December 2001 meltdown amounted to a spontaneous effort to prevent itself from going into shock and succumbing to a fatal loss of social direction. They literally drove the President out of his palace by banging on pots and pans in a spontaneous demonstration of rage and solidarity. As corporations withdrew capital and tried to close factories, workers in more than 20 of them said, basically, take a hike if you like, Senor, but we're staying here and will continue to run these factories without you.

Tidbit 4: the shock doctrine consists of three phases of shock. First, the shock of a monumental catastrophe, whether a coup, a natural disaster, or a war. Second, the shock of economic collapse, in which the population is preoccupied with staying fed, sheltered, and clothed. Third, the shock of repressive police or paramilitary power to make an example of those who resist or vocally oppose the disaster capitalism project. The three-part shock functions to create a gap in a nation's conceptual continuity --- an amnesia about national identity, values, and aspirations. Latin America in the 1970s was the test bed for this business model. I remember the visceral impact, if not many specific facts, of outstanding reporting from Latin America done by NPR in the 1970s, back when it was actually an impartial and progressive force in journalism. They were reporting on sinister experiments in political economy being conducted by a cabal of University of Chicago right-wing economists, with a major assist from people with names like Nixon and Kissinger.

I arrived at Smith Hall promptly at 7:30 p.m. and the place was mobbed; standing room only. I'd guess there were at least 700 people on the main floor and in the balcony. And all of us had to bail out on Obama's commercial and/or the Phillies World Series victory to be there.

Sidebar: Klein's speech coincides with some blog material I am preparing that is based on some newspapers lining the inside a Navy machinist's chest that I bought (really cheap) at a St. Joe antique shop earlier this month. They are sections from a Kokomo, Ind., daily newspaper, one of which is dated 10 September 1973, one day before Chile's own September 11 in which the elected Marxist president was overthrown and killed in the world's first documented example of disaster capitalism.

As seen on Cesca

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If I'd had a mush fulla merlot when I saw the photo below, I'd have spewed it all over the MacBook Pro:



The original was posted by Lindsay Beyerstein at The Campaign Silo. Cesca asks some reasonable questions:

How did the fetus get a flag in there? And why is the fetus inside of what appears to be a hand grenade?

I have another one: why does the fetus in profile look like a cross between Trig Palin and Barack Obama?

Update: readers with highly literate senses of humor may notice that my opening couplet appears to be inspired by the comic stylings of Basil Wolverton. I just noticed that myself.

Joe The Plumber visits 2009

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Let me be the first fourth-tier blogger to predict the obvious: if the Republicans do not find an effective way to steal the 2008 presidential election through perpetrating massive vote fraud, declaring martial law, launching nuclear war on Spain, or staging a violent coup, then it seems certain that we may expect Larry Flynt Publications to try recruiting Joe the Plumber to star as himself (or someone exactly like himself) in a series of pornos paired with a Sarah Palin lookalike.

Personally, I don't think Joe will go for the bait. Sure, he could probably make $300K-plus per film on the basis of his cashbox name and likeness, but he wouldn't be able to afford the taxes Obama would impose on that income. And that would be bad for the economy.

Moose droppings

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The Palin campaign in pictures. One picture, in fact, covers the waterfront.


This is The Rest Of The Story, in case you have not read about it yet. Reality is even more disgusting than my sense of humor. Good day!

Wise sayings

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It appears that Mickey Mouse may in fact vote, after all, but we still can't be sure about Jive Turkey.

Local color [updated]

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RUDY SMASH!!! Now you know why the call him Rudy instead of Politey. Always be polite to Rudy.

Update: Uh oh! Looks like Big Otis will not stand idle while Rudy tries to bust up the joint. In pitched combat between the two, I'm afraid I'd have to put my money on Big Otis, but only because Rudy is 66 and doesn't have a heaping bag of Kellogg's OKs to strap on. Still, I'd bribe Rudy to take a dive, just in case Big Otis canna throw him "like a meatball."

Second son of wise sayings

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After spending the past 10 days rewiring portions of my house I remembered why I own three sets of screwdrivers.

Wise sayings, Jr.

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I still can't decide whether I'd rather be part of the 5 percent or part of the 95 percent. Both are scary thoughts.

Wise sayings

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There are many different ways of looking at a single thing.

SCOTUS does its job [updated]

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This is welcome news on the pushback-against-election-theft front: the U.S. Supreme Court knocked down the Republican attempt to intimidate 600,000 new voters when they come out to vote on November 4. Now Mickey Mouse and Jive Turkey will be free to try voting, if they dare. And so will Deli Meat's little pals at college as well as Joe The Plumber, whose name is misspelled on the Ohio voter registration rolls.

Update. In the comments thread, Anonymous pointed out that the ruling actually came from the U.S. high court, not the Ohio Supreme Court as I'd originally written. Judicial restraint --- how about that?

Politicians make some funnys

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HuffingtonPost has put up a report from the annual Al Smith Dinner, where politicians get to clown with some well written jokes, a number of them having an actual biting or even self-satiric edge. I leave it to me to tell you that the dinner is a fundraiser for Catholic Charities since the fool writing for HuffPo failed to mention that. (I haven't watched the video; just read the text.)

McCain said "That One" is his pet name for Obama, and that Obama has reciprocated by giving him the pet name "George Bush." Obama told the gathering that "My greatest strength would be my humility. My greatest weakness is that it's possible I am too awesome." There's some funny stuff there, but it looks like a few of McCain's gags may have bordered on being a bit too ill-spirited for the Al Smith gig. Maybe I'm being judgmental. You decide.

Eight years ago Al Gore and George Bush attended this dinner. At that time, Gore joked that he invented the internet. Bush made the remarks about "the haves and the have mores" being his base, which were unfairly lifted out of context by Michael Moore and spliced into Farenheit 911. This probably happened because Michael Moore is fat.

We Joe, you decide

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One more link for the Joe The Plumber Files, this one from the New York Times, spied via TPM. I don't get it. Joe runs his own plumbing business, but he wants to buy a plumbing business. He appears to be afraid that his annual income will rise above $250,000 per year and that, therefore, he would have to pay more taxes on said income next year than he would have had to pay this year, had he bought a plumbing business other than the one he runs. He also doesn't seem capable of distinguishing between the gross receipts of a business he wants to buy and the taxable income that he might draw from that business.

Bah --- I grow weary of this nonsense! StuporMundi has spoken!

Joe The Trojan Horse [updated]

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As Oil Can Harry hypothesized in a previous comments section on this blog, Joe The Plumber may have more in common with the McCain family than with us Main Streeters, Memory Laners, and other assortment of American flotsam. You see, Joe the Plumber thinks Social Security is a joke and "hates" it. Is it possible that Joe's resemblance to a dick is more than skin deep? Let's allow Joe himself to answer that.

Joe (from SkyNews): Speaking about his previous encounter with the Democrat, he said: "I asked the question but I still got a tap dance... almost as good as Sammy Davis Junior."

My sources say "yes." My sources, word- and picture-wise, are used for nonprofit research and education purposes as circumstantial evidence to support the hypothesis that Joe The Plumber may possibly be a racist dickhead.

Afterthought: Joe referred to the experience of seeing McCain and Obama talking to him on TV as "pretty surreal, man." Surreal. Don't you think it's a pretty elitist plumber who uses twenty-dollar words like that? Who does he think he is --- a graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Art (CIA) or something? And while I'm having afterthoughts, here's another one: does anyone think it's a fortunate coincidence that Senator McCain just happened to know about Senator Obama's audience with an everyman plumber at an Ohio political rally? Or that "[w]ithin six hours of the end of the presidential clash, Joe the Plumber T-shirts and baseball caps were on sale"?

Update: Oh the humanity! (Sorry about that. I generally try to avoid cliches like the plague.) Someone in the comments section of Lawyers, Guns and Money, where I found the link (after starting from Eschaton, for purposes of a complete cite) says the Martin Eisenstadt oppo material may be fishy. I don't know if it is fishy or not. And nobody is going to give a drizzle$#i+ about Joe The Plumber if the Dow loses another 1,000 points. But at the least it begins to look as if Joe The Plumber's 15 minutes of fame might be a media stunt brought to you by the McCain/Palin campaign. I say equal time for Josephine The Plumber! (She even talks like Palin!)

Joe The Plumber oppo

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Inspired by a comment in the previous comments thread by Oil Can Harry, I must interject a bit of reality into the procession toward a knee-jerk beatification (and, later, inevitable mockery) of America's newest sweetheart, Joe The Plumber.

The average annual salary for a plumber, as the editor of E&P claims in HuffPo, does not in fact appear to be $45,000. Here are some figures from WikiAnswers, which are more in line with my experience in hiring plumbers. A plumber's "helper" earns about $25 per hour, which would amount to $52,000 gross for a year assuming full-time employment and no benefits. A "decent" Journeyman (presumably a competent tradesman who can work independently with little supervision) earns $68 or more per hour. That would amount to more than $140,000 per year, assuming full-time employment. And a Master Plumber? Try $175 an hour. You do the arithmetic. Yes, I understand that many plumbing jobs may be cyclical, like constuction jobs. No, I do not know whether they receive healtcare benfits, paid vacation, etc. But it would seem that a journeyman plumber could work half time and make about $70,000 annually.

So which kind of plumber do you think our hero Joe might be? How many plumber's "helpers" do you think could be in a position to buy a plumbing business on a salary of $50,000 or $60,000 a year? On that salary a guy is lucky if he can pay his mortgage, make his car payment, keep a 12-pack in the fridge every weekend, and take a 2-week camping trip once a year. However, if Joe is a Master Plumber, earning $364,000 a year (i.e., working 8 hours rather than 10 or 12 a day), then he might have reason to be concerned about losing his Bush tax cut. And if that's the case, then he can eat shit before he gets any sympathy from me. Fuggin' plutocrat.

PS: here is a nice picture of Oil Can Harry for you. It is presented here for nonprofit education and research purposes only, in order to show you what the nemesis of Mighty Mouse looked like in the 1950s. Boss zoot suit!

Final-debate snipes [updated]

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John McCain thinks autism is the same thing as Down syndrome. He thinks his running mate has an autistic baby.

John McCain said "We need to change the culture of America." In that respect, he has more in common with Osama than with Obama.

John McCain said several times that Barack Obama is "eloquent." I guess that's even worse than being "elitist."

Barack Obama joined in the fun tonight by talking with McCain's imaginary friend, Joe The Plumber. He missed a chance to pick up some stray Hillary voters by failing to invoke Josephine The Plumber, however.

Update: ZOMGZ! Joe The Plumber is actually real! Well, by those same standards, then so is Josephine. Except that I have no reason to think Josephine, in real life, was a stupid jackass.

Next up: vote thievery

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Sadly for my record as a clairvoyant political strategist, but happily for the nation, it really does seem too late for Republicans to pull off a bait-and-switch ticket to any avail before election day. That fear is now trumped by a mundane but effective extralegal way that Republicans influence election outcomes: voter suppression schemes. What curdles my blood is the institutionalization of voter suppression plots through a cynical GOP "concern" about widespread voter fraud.

This one, unfolding in Ohio, has my gut in a small knot. I've hoped all along that so many people turn out on election day for Obama and Biden that no feasible amount of voter fraud could steal the day. And if we are fortunate enough get that far without a first-tier demonstration of the "shock doctrine," there are many more perils to occupy our vigilance. One involves a petulant, demented child-king and red buttons that he could push. The most worrisome by far, in my opinion, is that time-tested American response to the emergence of a new popular leader: someone takes a shot at him. And, finally, after an electoral victory and the cone of security provided by the USSS and others, there is the banality of evil: wingnut media assailants, enabled by supine celebrity corporate journalists and pundits.

I've recently been startled to notice how much I crave a return to normalcy in this country. Not the so-called normalcy associated with a "new kind of Democrat" who is actually a stalking horse for establishing the global hegemony of transnational corporations. Not the so-called normalcy of a humming economy based on information exchange, pointless consumerism, and manufacturing war materiel. I'm hoping for the normalcy of a functioning democracy and adversarial media, neither of which is any longer dominated by authoritarian ideologues and both of which re-legitimize the concept of liberalism. The startling aspect of my craving for such normalcy is that I haven't felt it since Jimmy Carter was the President.

From a cave somewhere in the universe

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This photo is a found object from the Astronomy Photograph of the Day widget that Mac users can install for free. A week or two ago I clicked past it thinking that it was an artist's conception of how the sky would look from some cave on a rocky moon orbiting Saturn. But last night I read the caption that the widget serves up on demand: was astonished that this is a genuine single-exposure photograph of the night sky shot right here in the good old USA.

The short story is that the photographer, one Wally Pacholka, lugged his gear to a remote cave and archeological site called False Kiva located in Canyonlands National Park, Utah. He waited for Terra to revolve the central band of the Milky Way into view, with Jupiter tagging along near the upper left of the cave arch. It looks like he used a fairly wide lens --- probably no longer than 50 or 55 mm (photo has no metadata, so I can only guess). The cave appears to be facing almost due south, judging from the orientation of the galaxy edge. The exposure is long, which was necessary to get any detail at all from the band of stars. Pacholka "painted" the inside of the cave with light from a flashlight during the long expusure.

Speaking as a photographer, I can tell you that this guy knows his stuff. Plus, speaking as someone who has dabbled in astronomy, it must have been flurking cold on location, even if it was mid-July. The photo above is copyright Wally Pacholka and is used here only for nonprofit educational or research purposes. The photo below, from the web site of a guy named Eric Zelermyer, shows a more routine view of False Kiva as seen during the day. But getting there is not routine, evidently requiring a certain degree of physical conditioning and foolhardiness to find within Canyonlands. The Zelermyer picture is copyrighted by the photographer and is displayed here for nonprofit educational or research purposes.

Josh Marshall makes a funny

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Like so!

Potentially scary situation [updated]

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I have fears that these Palin/McCain experiments with inciting mobs to violence could be the prelude to something unspeakably ugly. Consider what might happen if, in the next 2 weeks or so, that dark-skinned thugs appeared at Republican rallies and started scuffling with GOP nutbags in order to "defend" Obama. Those thugs would certainly be what the French call "agents provocateurs", and they would somehow, indirectly as hell, be on the payroll of some very, very bad people who have a very keen interest in making sure that Obama never sets foot in the White House.

It would create a public atmosphere ripe for backlash against Obama, not to mention much more sordid or violent potential impacts. The corporate media would be the enablers. I'm not saying it would even work. But think about how heinously effective such an idea could seem to desperate, criminal white men.

Update: in acknowledgment of anon in my comments section, here's a shot of actual paranoia ripped from the comments section of this Politico post:

Between 8:45 PM and 9:15 PM tonight (Oct 8) on Intrade, someone just bet a LOT of money against Obama winning the presidency. And I mean a LOT. His stock, which has been over 70 for a couple of days now and at 76 most of the time today dipped down to 64 or so in those 20 minutes under heavy betting before recovering immediately after 9:15 to 73... Very strange.. is there something someone knows?? What is the news tomorrow, JMart?" Posted By: intrade | October 08, 2008 at 11:54 PM

If you need me tomorrow, I'll be in the bunker with my 50 bottles of wine.

Local color

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The iced tea at the Iron Post tastes like paint.

Two short notes on 2d presidential debate

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1. Obama seemed preternaturally composed and focused tonight, like a veteran airline captain telling the passengers that there will be some turbulence ahead --- someone who could inspire confidence in a captive audience exposed to peril.

2. McCain tonight was using this creepy, pseudo-earnest hissing whisper when trying to drive home certain points, a cartoon voice that Palin overused until it made me sick during her debate with Biden.

That's all. The first-tier bloggers will tell you the rest of what you need to know, including confirmation that Tom Brokaw is a has-been, and not a very bright one.

Editor's note to BD: yes, I know I'm supposed to be doing more important stuff than this evening, but I worked 10 hours and I got no neurotransmitters left. Some more will grow by tomorrow morning.

"Without preconditions"

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I don't understand why Obama doesn't just decisively knock down this stupid Republican talking point that a party can enter negotiations with "preconditions." Setting preconditions for negotiations is a deliberate attempt to humiliate your negotiation partner. It is a way to win concessions without negotiating at all. Setting preconditions for a negotiation is disingenuous horseshit. It means that the party setting preconditions does not intend to enter the negotiation in good faith. Perhaps Obama could explain to the corporate media that "one thing John McCain doesn't understand is the definition of 'negotiate.'

I wonder how it would look if Obama agreed to another debate only on the precondition that McCain stop lying through his wooden teeth.

Fire Prevention Week!

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Whilst quietly editing a journal paper by the picture window of Kopi my attention was involuntarily directed outdoors as about a mile-long parade of firefighting equipment suddenly blared its way up North Walnut. Fire trucks from Champaign, Urbana, Tolono, Pesotum, and obscure districts from around the county. A few cool antique ones. Giant hazmat response trailers. Some of these behemoths had slowly-rotating tri-lobal pinwheels with hemispherical luminaries, both functional and retro stylish.

I almost always hate parades. For some reason, I associate them with that really smelly, impacted mucus jelly that issues forth at the end of a long sinus infection (completely true). But fire engine parades during Fire Prevention Week are the exception. Who among us doesn't love fire engines? All that racket on this crisp, sunny morning carried me back to an early October day when I was about 4.5, tearfully threatening my Dad that if he did not let me ride on the fire engine I would not share my million dollars with him whenever I got it. The good news: I got to ride the fire engine. The bad news: I haven't shared my million dollars with Bunka yet.

Moose droppings

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Lucius MacAdoo, from the comments of an earlier post, wonders aloud if we even know for a fact whether Governor Palin can read. Since she recently refused to tell Katie Couric even one news publication she reads --- not even two "gimmes" like the Anchorage Daily News or the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman --- LMA's question may not be considered completely frivolous.

Now, today, in a post-debate Fox interview (as seen through TPM), Palin let the cat out of the bag. She reads the Post and the Times (both brutes of the "liberal media"), even the Economist. She also is aware of all those "investment publications" that come up to interview her about her prodigious energy development accomplishments, but doesn't name one --- not even Fortune, doggone it!

Someone has done a great job of teaching Palin how to make her words drip with earnest, sincere condescension. Listening to the clip from TPM, I realized that I now find Palin to be the creepiest person in the public eye. She can belch daisy chains of discredited lies as if they were her secret recipe for those special brownies she whips up for "her guy" after he's spent a hard day snowmobiling over the necks of baby harp seals.

Consider Palin's supernatural capacity to repeat lies without even an iota of self-awareness to dignify herself alongside stuff like this, where we even find so-called fact-checkers ignoring documented facts. If for no other reason, U.S. political events over the past few months may in the future be considered a historic watershed: politicians have now, for the first time, begun overtly using the Big Lie technique live, repeatedly, in nationally televised broadcasts. They show no embarrassment about being caught, but express anger that anyone should make such an accusation even when their own lies are read back to them verbatim. When private individuals do this, we call them sociopaths.

Do a thought experiment: imagine what the public discourse would be like if the Big Lie strategy (and in this case I think it is a strategy, not merely a tactic) goes unchallenged this fall and takes its place in our national political and social vernacular. What kinds of transactions could people have with each other if half of the population decides, like Ronald Reagan, that facts are stupid things? The first task would be to figure out which half of the population was which:

"Ma'am, that will be $3.50, please."
"I already paid you. Where's my change?"
"No, you didn't pay me."
"Yes I did."
"No you didn't."
"Yes I did."
"No you didn't."

Local color

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This morning on WILL-AM, during the weather segment, did Jay Pearce refer to a "Sunday Soccerfest" or to "Sunday's Hockerfest"? My attendance of the event would likely depend on the answer to that question.

Fish with lipstick

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Haha! Just kidding. It's really the threatened and endangered Southwestern Maverickfish (j. mcainiacus mavericocious). Tastes like chicken, they say.

[Editor's note: photograph copyright Associated Press, 1 October 2008, accessed via this link. Fair use is claimed for nonprofit education and research purposes.]

Expect swooning

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That's my prediction. Sarah Palin will, for the moment, be America's darling once again because the corporate media will agree that she avoided any moose-in-the-headlights moments (even though I believe she had several small but noticeable ones). The media were put on notice that they were being mean to her, so now they will be nice.

Celebrity journalists and pundits will not point out her repeating of discredited lies, because she did it with poise, in their eyes. They will not comment on how she dodged every question of Republican accountability for the past 8 years by scolding Joe Biden for "looking backward" and "playing the blame game" while she took several openings to invoke the glory of Ronald Reagan and the lying, filthy ideology he used on behalf of others to start destroying the U.S. economy, accelerating assaults on the environment, and nibbling away at the rule of law. Looking back is only OK if we are worshipping Ronald Reagan, but not if we are trying to hold his heirs accountable for rendering America into a necrotic basket case, twitching itself toward oblivion in the planet's newest back alley.

Looking composed and glamorous while she recites canned little speeches and Big Lies does not qualify Sarah Palin to be Vice President any more than my Calvin Klein underwear and full head of hair qualify me to stand in as George Clooney's body double.

I have not looked at any news sites or blogs yet tonight, but that is my prediction: expect swooning, completely uncalled-for. I would not even be surprised by a momentary upward twitch for the GOP in the tracking polls. But don't worry: by Monday we may be talking about the decaying financial system once again. And, after all, it's October. Are you ready for your big surprise?

This has been another edition of Moose droppings.

The peckerwood holds forth (in a constructive way, for a change)

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Well well: something worthwhile finally dropped out of the mouth of Hillary Clinton's peckerwood husband. Campaigning for Obama and Biden in Florida today, he argued that Republicans have gotten things so jacked up at home and around the world that we citizens will really need our new Vice President to be worth somewhat more than a "bucket of warm piss".

Please note that Mr. Clinton did not actually use the term "piss" in his remarks, to the best of my knowledge. I am using an interpretive form of commentary here in order to entertain and educate you, the reader.

Solution to Reaganomics: the NFL model

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My blogworld pal Dan Solomon writes a column called Down and Distance for a separate blog. His general topic is the nexus between politics and football that endlessly invites people to draw metaphors between the two domains. In his latest column, Dan points out something completely obvious that only Senator Bernie Sanders could possibly grasp (assuming he's a Patriots fan): the NFL is a wildly successful business enterprise because it has transformed its business model to include a huge helping of Socialism while retaining its fundamentally competitive character. Check it out, because it has a certain amount of relevance to this.

Rhetorical question

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If John McCain can't even face down Obama in a debate, how can he chase down Osama in a cave?

The eyes have it

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A small throwaway question today from Atrios:

What's wrong with McCain's left eye?

I haven't noticed anything wrong with it, but evidently more observant people have, including Big Otis. Keep an "eye" on this detail because (some highly suspicious individuals think) it could be the raw meat for an unprecedented, premeditated "October Surprise" involving the withdrawal of Senator McCain from the Republican presidential ticket.

Since the press started calling McCain/Palin out on their overt lying (about almost everything) in the past 10 days, I've been inviting friends to consider two interrelated questions: How can John McCain remain as the Republican presidential nominee for another 2 weeks at the rate he is now going? Where do you see his campaign 3 weeks from now, given that celebrity journalists are calling him a liar, a mudslinger, and a bumbler?

I have never believed that John McCain would a viable candidate for president in 2008. I do believe that no one in the GOP inner circle saw this result in the making last winter, thinking instead that Rudy Guiliani or Fred Thompson would steal Amerika's heart. Ever since McCain became the last man standing in the moribund Republican field this past spring, I've believed that he has only been some kind of "placeholder" who will move or be moved out of the way when the time comes. For a month or two, recently, I blogged extensively about my hypothesis (i.e., fear) that the Republican Brain Trust would pull a sensational last-minute sleight of hand maneuver before or during the Minnesota convention, and roll out a "serious" dream team of Petraeus/Lieberman '08 to the nation's surprise and delight. That did not happen, thankfully. But I think it's clear that the Republican grandstand play involving Sarah Palin was sufficient "proof of concept" that a nonlinear political media development involving some telegenic unknown could set the corporate press off into a shit-eating fugue for weeks on end, because that is exactly what happened. However, the Republicans missed out on their big legal bait-and-switch opportunity, I think, by failing to be really bold at the convention. That leaves only extralegal tactics from this point forward.

Big Otis thinks the Petraeus ploy may still be in the works, except with Mike Bloomberg pinch-hitting for Lieberman. I think that direct scenario is much less likely now than it was in August, though, because any good stage magician knows that you don't repeat the same trick in front of the same audience twice during the same show. That is not to say I would rule out the possibility that Petraeus and Bloomberg (or even Lieberman) will be heading the Executive Branch in 6 months. But if it happens, I now believe it will happen as the endgame of a complex and probably extralegal "Plan C."

Shuffling McCain aside would be the easiest part of any Machiavellian political coup in the works by shadowy interests. Remember that left eye observation and keep it in mind. Lots of medical problems could cause a person's left eye to go "wrong." Both B.O. and I were close to someone whose personality changed radically, and who subsequently lost the capacity to take care of herself, due to the effects of brain tumors that may have spread there from other affected organs. Believe me: if something like that were responsible for the disintegration of McCain's personality over the past year (not that it was all that together before then, according to every impartial report I've read), then it's not funny. Not a topic for mockery, or schadenfreude, or glee. But it could provide the opportunity that the soulless power within the bowels of the GOP requires to package the most devastating October Surprise ever delivered to Americans. If Michael Myers really existed, he would be the Republican Minister of Propaganda.

"To create jobs"

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I challenge any politician, economist, or journalist to point to the corporate charter of a single Fortune 500 company whose stated mission is "to create jobs." Until this Fifty50 Challenge is successfully met, all politicians, economists, and journalists need to shut the fuck up about how businesses create jobs.

Businesses are not founded "to create jobs"; they are founded to enrich their owners. Corporations are not chartered "to create jobs"; they are chartered to earn profits for their stockholders and dodge taxes.

I have spoken. Long live StuporMundi.

Bush bailout speech: I report, you decide

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Coupla things struck me while listening to Bush's address to the nation about the financial crisis a few minutes ago.

First, as McCain "suspends" his campaign to chicken out of his first debate with Obama... um, I mean, fly to Washington and save America Herself, The President of the United States --- "our first MBA president", in fact, as NPR's Adam Davidson informed me --- could barely spare 14 minutes before his bedtime to read a canned speech about the proposed $1 trillion Republican Wall Street welfare package.

Second, President Bush spent almost all his time stumbling through his sanitized Republican textbook version of the origins of the investment banking collapse, but neglected to mention either the role of Reaganomics or the cost of his proposed giveaway. Neither omission is surprising, but large slices of his audience have at least some understanding of both those issues, and some citizens may consider the President (even more) cowardly (than usual) for not acknowledging their own intelligence regarding the salient facts.

Third, he sounded completely disinterested in what he was saying as if he already knew that he would be moving into his parents' cushy basement in Kennebunkport on 20 January 2009. (The got a big-screen TV down there, and five different kinds of beer --- in their own kegs!)

And fourth, he ended his speech with the plaintive closing, "Thank you for listening." To which I say, "You're welcome, man, you're welcome for wasting 15 of my precious minutes." Doesn't this fool understand that some of us have blogs to tend to?!?

I have no idea what Bush's handlers thought his speech might accomplish considering that 80-something percent of Americans think the country is on the wrong track, and by a margin of 2 to 1 they believe that Republicans are responsible for current U.S. economic problems, and 0% believe the U.S. economy is improving. My hypothesis is that Cheney made him give the speech just to "torture" him; just to submit him to a little more humiliation plus the unpleasantness of staying up on a Wednesday night past bedtime.

Update before I've even posted: Blogger's spell checker flags Kennebunkport as a misspelling. The options it offers for correcting the error are "Outspokenness" and "Drunkenness"!

Vocabulary note to Senator Obama

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Dear Senator Obama,

There is no such thing as a Republican "economic philosophy." Philosophy is "[l]ove and pursuit of wisdom by intellectual means and moral self-discipline." I think the term you are searching for is Republican "economic ideology." Ideology is "[a] secular religion, inferior to spiritual religion owing to its absence of love, wisdom, morality, and self-discipline; but equivalent to it in terms of reliance on absolute authority, dogma, wishful thinking, and inattention to applied reality."

Please make a note of it.

Your friend,

---StuporMundi

Wise sayings

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Fuck Morgan Stanley: I'm plowing all my money into Morgan David!

By George, I think I have it!

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Taxpayer-funded universal healthcare for U.S. citizens is Socialism, but taxpayer-funded welfare for global financial corporations is Free-Market Capitalism.

Happy Sunday

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Some people are beginning to think that a fascist free-market coup is rapidly coming to fruition after decades of false starts and persistent efforts. I fervently hope that point of view is an overreaction to garden-variety sinister events. But I have not felt so uneasy about current events since October 1973, when the Yom Kippur War broke out around the time that Nixon was actively quashing the independent investigation of Watergate crimes that was being led by special prosecutor Archibald Cox. Memories are hazy, but I seem to remember rumors of behind-the-scenes nuclear brinksmanship versus the USSR at that time, which were feared in part to be an insane "wag the dog" exercise (during a shooting war in the mideast!) decades before the term had been coined.

Happy Sunday. Write to your Senators and Representative immediately about the enormous criminal transfer of wealth that has been "proposed" by the Bush Administration.

Where the cow things roam

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For my little niece-y, who visited Uncle's blog yesterday, I present a picture of a cow thing. Is this the mighty creature that was tapping gently at your patio window one dark and scary Corn Belt night, sweety?


Editor's note: picture is copyrighted by some guy named "johncabranes", and was downloaded from his Flickr photostream for purposes of personal, not-for-profit research or education only.

Wise sayings

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It is OK if Republicans chant "drill, baby, drill", but it is not OK if Democrats chant "burn, baby, burn".

Big Otis checks in

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From his maize-infested midwestern outpost where the "cow things" sometimes roam after dark, Big Otis shares his economic and political concerns of the day:

It's coytens I tell ya. Like a fucking bomb went off. Everything is fucked up --- not just what we own. This week only gold keeps me in the game.

McCain must feel like a damned janitor who somehow ended up in an operating room with an anesthetized patient in front of him, a scalpel in his hand, a full surgical crew standing by awaiting his command, and millions watching him on the TV monitor. And then someone lets a pig wearing lipstick into the OR.

As a bonus, Mr. Otis, M.S., also provides a link to this HuffingtonPost column by an economics professor who does a very workmanlike job of explaining what is happening in the financial sector right now. The author of the essay, Howard Schweber, also provides a bonus "conspiracy theory" that sounds a lot like the kind of stuff Naomi Klein talks about in The Shock Doctrine.

Tomorrow I'm finna run out to Borders and purchase my copy of the 2009 -- 2012 Mayan calandar while my dollar is still worth a Jefferson nickel.

The double cutout

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I am becoming unnerved. Something abominable is happening to this country. It is much too big even for my supreme capabilities in analysis and synthesis. The improbable, certifiably stupid and insane Republican presidential ticket is only the tip of an enormous iceberg, as if that weren't by itself enough to make me suck my thumb in wonder by the banks of my own lagoon. This post is a preamble to a large interpretive writing project that I will compose and publish in a series of concise, nonsequential essays.

To address just this iceberg tip at the moment, consider this: for more than 2 weeks our national mass-media dialog (monologue, actually) has largely fixated on a snide, petty, unintelligent nonentity of a provincial politician, Sarah Palin, who was elevated to the status of national sensation by the Republican party and the corporate media. During those 2 weeks Palin has been revealed to be a serial liar, a possible obstructor of justice in an Alaska investigation of prohibited personnel practices, and ridiculously ignorant of political and economic fundamentals... for starters. Her running mate --- "former POW" John McCain --- and his campaign organization have absurdly played the "sexism card" to preempt criticism of her, or even making her the subject of parody on Saturday Night Live. McCain has finally gone off the deep end with his serial lying and slander of Barack Obama, and is no longer even trying to hide it. All this has been reported widely, and it makes me sick to even recap it for conversational purposes. It is even being reported with some degree of accuracy in certain quarters of the corporate media a the same time as some opinion polls appear to show that the Republican Big Lie Campaign is working with "voters." All that is enough to fray the nerves. But there are hints that something more interesting may be happening.

It is now the middle of September. The Republican campaign is utterly out of control by any traditional measure. Only residual decorum now prevents celebrity journalists from saying the obvious on TV: that McCain is mentally, emotionally, and morally unfit for the presidency, and that Sarah Palin is a lightweight joke whose ethical hijinx and lack of intelligence will not stand up to another month of even mild media scrutiny. So what happens in October? Surprises, that's what.

The ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin are the tactical equivalent of a deadlocked Republican Convention. By that I mean the current GOP ticket is untenable, even if the polls say most Americans want to be led by war-crazed moral degenerates. War is bad for children and other living things, as the dumb old hippie poster revealed to us, but furthermore it is also bad for the quarterly profit targets of most transnational corporations. The plutocrats and organizations with the greatest vested material interest in running the U.S. government own far too much of the status quo to allow a President McCain or Palin to get us into a nuclear exchange with Russia or Pakistan.

So Big Otis has got me thinking, once again: what is the real significance of Karl Rove and U.S. News calling out McCain on his filthy campaign of lies? Is the Money Wing of the Money Party preparing to pull the rug out from under John and Sarah? If so, what next? Big Otis seem to think that McCain and Palin may essentially be what are called "double cutouts" in the espionage profession --- "agents" who are enlisted to execute a plot, but not the plot they believe they were recruited for. It is not hard to think of at least one story line in which an aging, confused senator and a mendacious, narcissistic governor will have served their purposes within the next few weeks and are brushed aside in a move much more sensational even than the coming out part of Sarah Palin. Shock and awe.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that anything violent or even illegal would be required to brush McCain and Palin aside. Any method would serve, because it would quickly pale in significance to the rollout of the most mind-bending quadrenniel October Surprise ever. Petraeus/Lieberman '08? Possibly, but the details hardly matter at this point. Anything that gets the corporate media quivering with excitement and the "moderate, undecided voter" throbbing with patriotism would suffice.

This has been my "preamble," admittedly a bit overwrought and driven by anxiety. My exegesis on what the submerged bulk of the iceberg consists of will begin soon. As of now, my working keywords for the exegesis are cognition and awareness. Don't you dare miss it!

Work in progress [updated]

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A two-week project that probably will be completed successfully this weekend: right-brain residential wiring. Just tested the circuit and loops; one dumb mistake (black load at top left not actually connected to panel) and one understandable one (not visible, relating to some hidden wiring).


Snapshot taken on Sony F717 is lit by low-intensity fluorescent Sears worklight, hand-held at 1/30 second manual exposure at ISO 800, messed-with a bit in Adobe Camera Raw (my favorite new photo post-processing tool). Noisy exposure, as would be expected, but not bad in terms of sharpness; was expecting at least a bit of motion blur since it usually feels like I have the DTs when I'm trying to force myself to hold something very, very still.

Update: my slow but peerless right-brain circuit analysis capabilities turned out to be correct, and I have officially cracked the Circuit A15 atom! The black lead to the stove hood (upper left) was incorrectly spliced into a kitchen wall switch loop and the lead to the overhead sink lights (not visible) wasn't spliced into anything at all. The solution is shown below for education purposes; note how the junction has been simplified. The new snapshot was produced with the same camera, lighting, and Adobe Raw settings used in the earlier one, but my hand wasn't as steady (I really do have the DTs this morning, I think). Anyway, I have to go now: I'm waiting for those three new plumbers I just hired.

Moose droppings!

It's time for a Moose droppings! riddle!

Q: How do you turn a sow's earmark into a silk purse?

A: By lying and lying and lying about it!

Editor's note: as you can see, and therefore it goes without saying, today's edition of Moose droppings! would not have been possible without Josh Marshall and Talking Points Memo. [Holy crap! Four military fighter jets just scrambled about a mile outside my home office window at about 800 ft --- no kidding! I gotta log off now and head for the basement --- might be a "maverick" flying one of those birds!]

Moose droppings!

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Editor's note: "Moose droppings" is your Fifty50 dispensary for links to mind-bending stories about "Amerika's Governor," or "Alaska's GILF," or the "Pig With Lipstick," or whatever you wish to call Sarah Palin. Credit for the title of this hopefully short-term feature must go to VAR Of The DAR, who originally invented it for an even more ridiculous blog than the one you are now reading.

Today's dropping: Mayor Sarah's BYORK* policy!
______________

* Buy your own "rape kit."

It was a simpler time

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Back before Michelle Obama had something to hide, before the Bush Doctrine, even before September 11 was a pre-conjugal glint in the eyes of some oily transnational villains, it was a simpler time. A time when Mavericks Roamed The Earth. A time when politicians considered each-other's families off limits. It was a time when high-profile political wives had nothing to hide.

Josh Marshall makes a funny

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One of the things I like about TPM is the style of humor employed by Josh Marshall. It's sort of a throwback to a more innocent time in that he rarely swears or relies on topical pop culture references. When he uses terms like "malarkey" and "bamboozlement" they have an automatic ring of authenticity, and they arrest the eye for a moment.

Today Josh and company seem to have gotten impatient with Obama's defense of his "lipstick on a pig" remark, in the face of McCain's phony outrage about it, even though McCain has repeatedly used the phrase himself (not to mention his own well documented public sexist insults of Chelsea Clinton, Janet Reno, his second wife, and others). So the TPM gang does its part to help the Obama campaign and other weak-kneed Democrats get over their defensiveness and "embrace the pig."

I think the logo is cute and devastating. And TPM even provides an example of how to employ the pig in a commercial. Very nice --- wicked, but not vicious. This is the kind of stuff that the "moderate undecided voter" can instantly understand. And the laughter at the end is a nice touch.

Political gang fight metaphors

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Earlier this campaign season I heard someone from the Obama campaign --- maybe The Man himself --- talk about bringing a gun to the Republican knife fight that is a political campaign. At the time I appreciated the sentiment but not the metaphor.

Instead of bringing a gun to the Karl Rove knife fight, Obama needs to break out the Jackie Chan moves. Aerobatic wheel kicks transmigrating into fists pumping like the pedals of Vinnie Paul's kick drums. Head butts, scampering up walls like an insane hermit crab, then dropping his shell 15 feet down right to where McCain is getting "a little thin on top." Bonking people with their own weapons in outstandingly humorous ways. That kinda thing.

In fact, I believe there are now some early signs that Obama may have this very suite of tactics in his game plan. (Can't find the @#$#^@! links I had earlier and am too tired and irascible to go harvest them again; I'm finna go to sleep now.)

Armageddon is not just for church

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Sometimes Atrios irritates me with his reasonable-liberal-everyman shtick. Even though he is a proud and closed-minded atheist, he sometimes tries to show how liberal-minded he is by insisting that a candidate's religion should not enter into the public discussion.

I agree with his core principle, of course: the domain of governing and public policy-making should be completely divorced from everyone's religious doctrines. But because Republicans have been working for over a generation to conflate Church and State, and to demonize all political opponents for not being members of their club --- and because the corporate media have completely normalized that concept to most of us --- sometimes it is prudent and appropriate to pay attention to the religious dogma to which officials and candidates subscribe.

So what if Sarah Palin truly believes the dogma of her Assembly of God Pentacostal denomination, which according to CNN includes a belief in "the 'end times' --- a violent upheaval that they believe will deliver Jesus Christ's second coming"? Wouldn't it be useful to know whether Governor Palin or her congregation believe that humans are empowered to help God implement Armageddon? Because in a few months Palin or someone like her may gain possession of The Football, and I think it would be best if that person is not one who comes into the game thinking it's first-and-goal.

Wise sayings

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Cannonball Adderley was Charlie Parker not on heroin.

Rudy sez...

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"Ya ever seen the inside of one-uh them new lightbulbs? I broke one the other day. Ya know what's in there? Diodes an' shit! I thought there was just supposed to be gas in there! I'm not puttin' any-uh those in my house! I don't want the government watchin' everything I do all night!"

As seen on dansolomon.com [updated]

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Last night I responded to an open invitation for guest posts issued by my blog-world friend Dan Solomon, who is busy resettling back in the U.S.S.A. after living in teh England. I offered Dan a StuporMundi Exclusive looking back on my Petraeus/Lieberman '08 fugue, and why I believe the principles behind my strategy would have been sound for Republicans. I'm very gratified that he posted it, and I thank him. Take a look if you like.

Update: Go read my post on dansolomon.com, goddamit!!!

Fantasy presidential debate question

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Moderator: Senator McCain, do you think the pregnancy of Governor Palin's underage daughter out of wedlock demonstrates the failure of abstinence-only sex education programs in Alaska, or does it merely indicate that the Palins failed to raise their daughter according to homespun Christian family values?

Senator McCain: That is a private matter, my friend. Although I am reluctant to speak of it publicly, I once was a war hero!

Home-made applied research [updated]

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This evening, 1 September, I begin the first part of a two-phase experiment in which I test and compare the longevity of two different kinds of shaving razors. The objectives are to (1) see how long each razor can provide an acceptable shave and (2) determine whether the disposable give-aways that I steal from the gym are of higher quality than the replaceable cartridges I obtain in exchange for cash at the drug store.

First up: a disposable teal-colored Shick Xtreme3 ComfortPlus Xtra-Smooth "flexible" razor with "Vitamin E & Pre-shave Oil". Don't you agree that's quite a name for something what takes whiskers off your face? The performance period of Phase I is estimated to be approximately 2 months.

Update: I forgot to tell you my @#$%*#@^&! hypothesis! I wish to determine whether the promotional giveaways provide superior quality and performance to the blades you have to buy. If that is not the case, then it is difficult for me to figure out why the manufacturer would provide such largess. The object of the giveaway must be to persuade the gym rat to abandon an established brand preference in favor of the sampled brand. My experiment inaugurates a new topical area for this blog: brilliance in marketing. "Ask for yours today!"

Work in progress

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I'm periodically reproducing recent photographs under the heading of Work in progress. What's "in progress" isn't the perfection of a given picture, but my work toward developing some genuine technical skill in photography. Several of my jobs dating back to 1977 have included photography as a central duty. In the '70s I was mostly interested in subject matter that appealed to me, composition, and capture of Cartier-Bresson's "decisive moment". Matters such as film exposure and high-quality darkroom printing were of theoretical interest, but they were too much to think about or too much trouble to achieve. So now, as I resume a formal interest in photography after a 25-year hiatus, I am starting with fundamentals. But they are the fundamentals of digital image-making, the technology of which in fact makes it possible to develop technical skill much faster, with less waste, and with much less expense.

The photo below was taken at the head of an odd little nature trail that occupies a vacant lot between two vintage commercial buildings across the street from WEFT, Champaign's community-operated radio station. The nature trail was constructed by a gentleman called "The Prairie Monk," who hosts a weekly radio show on WEFT. He has gardened the lot with plants typical of the native midwestern prairie, and littered it with purposeful-looking junk. I shot this view with the Sony F717, and was quite surprised by how much color the photo captured versus how I had halfway seen it via eyeball. Unfortunately, there is one small patch where the highlights are blown out by a sunray at left foreground.

I processed the Sony's JPEG using CS3's Camera RAW tool. Warmed the white point a bit, cranked up highlight recovery to 100, brightened a bit, sharpened somewhat using the clarity slider, and very slightly increased vibrance. The shot doesn't look like much at small scale, but I believe it would be much more interesting printed at a large scale where the forms and textures could pop out at you. Click the thumbnail below for a larger view.

As an aside, I will say that I'm surprised how differently the photo renders through a web browser versus what it looks like displayed directly in Photoshop or Bridge. Fortunately, Adobe provides a program called Adobe Device Central so one can inspect how a photo is rendered for different end uses (inkjet printer, browser, cell phone, etc.); unfortunately, I lack the energy to learn anything about it at this point in the evening.

Status quo we can believe in [updated x 2]

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Item 1, from HuffingtonPost: "In November 2006, then gubernatorial candidate Sarah Palin declared that she would not support an abortion for her own daughter even if she had been raped."

Item 2, from Reuters via TPM: "The 17-year-old daughter of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is pregnant, Palin said on Monday in an announcement intended to knock down rumors by liberal bloggers that Palin faked her own pregnancy to cover up for her child."

I believe it's true that in most states, having sex with a 17-year-old constitutes statutory rape whether it was forcible or not. In at least some jurisdictions, a minor male can be prosecuted for statutory rape even if he is the same age as the female.

Supply your own analysis.

Update: an anonymous McCain aide told Reuters that rumors" about Bristol Palin's pregnancy were spread by the Obama campaign. Next up, no doubt: rumors that baby Palin is Obama's love child.

Later update: And when famous preachers and right-to-lifers start crying crocodile tears about how liberals are trying to politicize the Palins' private family matter, I hope that someone reminds them (with a blunt object) that the so-called right-to-life movement politicized everyone's unplanned pregnancy a generation ago --- including Bristol Palin's --- with their strident ideological opposition to reproductive rights for women.