It's time for a "Reckless Homicide Tax" [updated]

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In addition to empowering the Food and Drug Administration to regulate tobacco products, now let's levy a Reckless Homicide Tax on Big Tobacco. It's sole purpose would be to completely reimburse the Medicare and Medicaid programs for every single public health dollar spent to treat smoking-related diseases. The revenues from this tax would shrink the Medicaid funding crisis down to a size where we can drown it in the bathtub.

Update: it also appears that we may need to levy a Health Insurance Mafia Tax (to steal a term from Bob Cesca): a 100% tax on all proceeds, whether gains or the value of "paper losses" used for corporate tax breaks, by health insurers who invest in tobacco company stock. I'd also suggest that the Justice Department take a close look at all the tricky little words in the language of the RICO Act for possible future reference, just in case.

The Smirking Asshole Effect

It's Two-Part Quiz Time! Please answer in a short essay format (25 words or less). Because I know you're lazy, I'll provide the answer for you complete with background information available to you at click of a mouse!

Q1. What do you get 40 years after your state elects a smirking, reactionary asshole to be its Chief Executive Officer?

A1. An ungovernable state that recently had an economy larger than all but six nations on the planet.

Q2. What do you get when you cross a smirking, reactionary asshole, the American Medical Association, and President Barack Hussein Obama?

A2. Health insurance racketeers backstabbed by the AMA.

The Fox Effect [updated]

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Here's a timely example of The Fox Effect. It's about 30 seconds into a Glenn Beck segment:

"It's no longer dis... un... uh... respectable to be antisemitic on The Left."

Triple play! Some nobody on Fox immediately found a way to connect today's Nazi-inspired terrorism at the Holocaust Museum to the Palestinian people and American liberals while obscuring the fact that the suspect in custody for the shooting is an extreme right-winger with a history and a following. You know, just like Glenn Beck.

Yes, let's call it The Fox Effect. Even Shepard Smith knows it.

Update: as Martha Gellhorn's Ghost implies in the comments, The Fox Effect, like Mephistophiles, is known by many names. And it looks like she came up with a valid alternate coinage.

I have a better name for it

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Let's not call it "The Obama Effect." The correct name for it is "The Fox Effect."

This time the terrorist really *has* won

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For real.

Unlike a fertilized egg, Dr. Tiller did not have a right to life. Scott P. Roeder is a freedom fighter.

The outcome of Dr. Tiller's murder has been declared "bittersweet" by Kansas "abortion opponents." It is not really clear which part of it they thought was "bitter." The arrest, maybe. After all, the most important thing is that the "prayer was answered."

And in the article, the New York Times does a really nice job of balancing the viewpoints of physicians and advocates of reproductive rights versus people who support domestic terrorism.

Wise sayings

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"Nice" is the new "awesome."

Josh Marshall makes a funny

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Josh: "Modern day lynchings" seem to happen to people who get caught trying to do old-fashioned lynchings."

A sound piece of advice

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This, a wise saying of sorts, offered by a hillbilly-sounding guy* to his female companion while shopping at Schnuck's: "There's no more bein' any kinda way ya don't wanna be."

I liked it because it reminded me of Howard Beale's signature line, "I'm as mad as Hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" But instead of hearing some nobody utter a futile, meaningless expression that may have felt cathartic for an instant, I intuitively understood the drawling gentleman at the supermarket to be declaring a radical Everyman's manifesto for setting a final boundary between his own individuality and every external force trying to snuff it out. It's a concept open to deliberate misinterpretation and abuse, like most ideas, but nevertheless sound, and even unassailable, in its esoteric meaning.
________________

* This blog uses the term hillbilly to denote people who bear a surface resemblance to rednecks, but are primarily human beings. Please make a note of it.

Breaking!

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A positive link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda may finally have been documented. It appears that the link could have been one Richard Bruce Cheney.

Everybody needs to settle down about "torture porn"

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There's a kneejerk shitstorm of reaction today against Obama's decision to resist the release of more Cheney-era torture photos in response to a Freedom of Information Act request and a court decision supporting it. For once, however, I agree with the frequently odious Harry Reid: we've already seen enough torture pictures.

During the Cheney era, pictures of government-inflicted torture were hard evidence of crimes in progress --- crimes that were being denied and covered up in real time by the Bush administration. We have plenty of pictures now. More importantly, we have hard documentation of how Cheney-era torture policies were developed and implemented. I cannot see how the public release of more torture photos at this point in time contributes anything to public discussion of the subject. Pictures will sensationalize the issue, making it more difficult for the debate to proceed on its legal, logical, and philosophical bases.

All available effort, including the work of lefty bloggers, should be directed toward ensuring that the people who developed and implemented illegal and treaty-breaking interrogation policies for the U.S. government be criminally investigated and prosecuted. And elected officials who served as enablers for Cheney's monsters, especially gutless Democrats in the Congress, should be exposed and shamed for giving the Bush administration cover and comfort in this area.

Only prosecutions (and the imprisonment of those convicted) have a real chance to eradicate torture as a tool of U.S. military operations, intelligence, statecraft, and law enforcement. Horrifying pictures won't do it, except when introduced into evidence during criminal trials.

When torture prosecutions are completed, appeals have been exhausted, and the American public has understood for all time that torture is as unacceptable as terrorism or political assassination, then the pictures should be released to the national archives for examination by news organizations, scholars, and the public. They're part of our ugly history, and they need to be preserved and curated.

Meanwhile, professional "outspoken critics" should consider keeping their eyes on the real fucking ball if they want justice. The Congress and the President need to be lobbied mercilessly, shamed if necessary, into investigating and prosecuting those involved in the 8-year Cheney-era crime spree called the "Bush administration." Nobody must be let off the hook.

Proof that torture works

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Today Lindsey Graham (R-SC) asserted in a Senate hearing that torture must work because they've been using it successfully for 500 years.*

In other news, OBL asserted in a pimped-out mountain cave that terrorism must work because he's been using it successfully for 25 years.

* I heard him saying this on All Things Considered this afternoon but I can't find it on the NPR web site.

This blog sucks [updated]

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There's a reason why this blog has sucked for the past month but I don't wish to share it with you. We hope to resume normal operations within a day or two. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Love,

---SM

Update: in fairness to StuporMundi, let's say "mostly sucked."

My own little "torture memos"

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This weekend I'll be writing some torture memos of my own to Senators Durbin and Burris, as well as Rep. Tim Johnson and the President. My point is going to be, of course, that it's a false choice to have politicians declare we need to decide whether we're going to look backward or forward. We have to do both, all the time, and everybody knows it. The "look forward" meme is simply code for "informally pardon powerful white people for their crimes". According to this phony logic, Pat Fitzgerald should tear up his indictments of Rod Blagojevich and let him prance off to the jungles of Costa Rica to become a TV star.

I'll post my memo in case you, the highly esteemed reader, wish to repurpose my text and send it to your elected representatives and executives. But there's no reason why you can't just compose and send your own.

The five strands

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A guy named Drew Westen has an insightful article about modern "conservatism" on HuffingtonPost that I might have written myself if I had better analytical skills. Westen identifies five strands of thought --- each one incompatible with one or more of the others --- twisted into a chimera ideology that really shouldn't exist in the real world. (Pardon me for my chimera of a metaphor.)

Westen refines the "three-legged stool" concept that we often hear about Republicanism: that it is supported by the triple pillars of religious fundamentalists, gunslinging libertarian refusniks, and captains of the military-industrial complex. He also identifies a somewhat well-intentioned (or at least intelligently self-interested) fiscal conservative who accepts the general New Deal style of federal governance, but with a stingier safety net. And, finally, he points to the unrepentant bigot strand of modern conservatism, which tries to stay out of the view of polite society but considers the Republican (and presumably Libertarian) party to be its political home.

The article does a nice job of arguing a point that most regular observers immediately feel in their guts: this whole complex of ideologies that goes by the name "conservatism" simply has never made any sense... except for the fact that they have managed to convince the nation otherwise since the days of Nixon. I agree with Westen's warning not to underestimate their ability to pull it back together and sell it to 51% of the voters again in the future. But, still, it is encouraging to me to see these lunatics and their sinister political cartel falling apart faster than a Chevy Cavalier.

Truly out of power [updated]

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In addition to all the obvious things that have been said about the tea-bag tax protests today, I have two observations.

First, it's really encouraging to me that self-identified conservatives are every bit as capable as liberals of ridiculously self-marginalizing public conduct. The tea parties are much, much stupider even than giant liberal puppets of George Bush.

Second, I take these events as the first real sign that the far right wing really, truly is out of political power for the first time since 1980. Yes, I include the 1990s, too, when Hillary Clinton's peckerwood husband did everything he could, intentionally and unintentionally, to keep the right wing appeased and emboldened. To me, this is huge news. After decades with their pudgy fingers all over the levers of power, the best they can do now is engineer ridiculous publicity stunts and (regrettably, still) haunt TV news-commentary shows where the corporate media continue to legitimize their absurd worldview.

That said, the ideas these people promote remain pernicious and influential, and the media are as much in thrall of them as ever.

Update: I added a sentence to the third paragraph that I forgot when posting last night.

Wise sayings

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If you have only one handkerchief with you while doing a 3-mile run, be sure to wipe the sweat out of your eyes before you blow your nose.

Wise sayings

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If you must take drugs while having sex, use Ritalin.

Three times seven

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One minute ago, a little googoo turned 21.

As seen on Atrios

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This past week I read this widely discussed AIGFP resignation letter, published on the New York Times Op/Ed page, penned by some millionaire girly man named Jake DeSantis who thinks the world owes him a living. Maybe you did too.

Today Atrios linked to this commentary regarding Mr. Former AIGFP Executive Vice President DeSantis, penned by Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi. It's a little long but worth a full read by anyone like me who needs help interpreting the meaning of atrocities committed by the free-lunch anarchists who have infested the corpse of our civil society for 30 years.

I don't have anything against the Times publishing the DeSantis letter --- just the opposite, in fact. But if they hired Taibbi to the editorial board I'd probably check the site once a week.

This burns-up me!

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This is an abominable idea, as well explained by this guy.

OK, the 2000 Three Stooges biopic was one thing. I don't know if it was any good, but I'd probably watch it. The intent of a biopic (other than to profit from the production) is at least to pay tribute to the subjects, and possibly to give modern audiences some insight into their sense of Duty and Humanity. But the idea of "recreating" the Three Stooges is so lame that not even Joe Besser would buy in, even if threatened with having shit slapped out of him by Kenneth MacDonald or being breathed on by a guy wearing a gorilla suit.

For starters, who is supposed to be the target market for a reinvention of the Stooge "franchise" --- Stooge fans?!? Every one of us will stay away and will warn everyone we know to do the same. The project is pre-moiderized in terms of profit potential.

Second, there is no way to duplicate the Stooge pace in a feature film format --- it's been tried and it failed every time. The world has enough Three Stooges feature films, such as The Three Stooges Meet Hercules. The Stooges' tautly plotted (or unplotted) action-packed scripts won't work in long form. Predictably, the one halfway decent idea the film developers toyed with --- packaging the film as four separate shorts --- was discarded: the script will now be "streamlined into a single narrative".

Third, it will be too violent and vulgar. Studio suits and focus groups will see to that. The Stooges were violent and vulgar, of course, but not too violent and vulgar. They produced family entertainment, at least for junior and pop if not necessarily for mom and sis.

Fourth, Hollywood will surely go all out with grotesque digital special effects in the upcoming 2010 atrocity, which will completely disrespect the craftsmanship that went into compiling the encyclopedia of hilarious analog special effects that the original Stooge crew developed using only basics such as invisible wires, dummies, fast-motion effects. The same goes for all those lovely, full-bodied audio slaps, cracks, thuds, glug-glugs, bonks, rusty hardware squeaks, nails being extracted from the skull or buttocks, and so on.

And finally, even assuming that Benicio del Toro (?!?), Sean Penn, and Jim Carrey (!!!) might be able to impersonate Moe, Larry, and Curly effectively, there is no way to recreate the contributions of the 4th -- nth stooges. I'm not talking about Shemp and his successors, but all the rest of the recurring cast, including Vernon Dent, Bud Jamison, Dudley Dickerson, Duke York, Christine McIntyre (the niece really was nice!), Emil Sitka, and the ever-renewable posse of dowager ladies and the gum-snapping vamps in shoulder pads.

So, even though I regret saying so, I sincerely hope this ill-advised Stooge-denigrating project by Peter and Bobby Farrelly (whoever the fuck they are) is plagued from start to finish by The Curse of King Rootin Tootin. I have a tapeworm and it's not even good enough for him!

That's some opinionifying

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I'm happy to beat a properly selected dead horse if it might help to tenderize the carcass for other critters to pick apart and digest. But I'm even happier when high-visibility media critics take center stage with their hobnailed boots.

Todd Gitlin at TPMCafe laughs at two puffinating "Timesmen" who, offended by President Obama's lack of deference toward their employer at the press conference last night, characterize him as some sort of "professor" boring the nation with his thoughtful answers to the media's ignorant questions.

Then this evening I discover that Jamison Foser of Media Matters scooped Gitlin by a whole 12 minutes. Apparently another "Timesman" also published some comments he intended to be withering about "Professor Barack Obama" (emphasis by the commentator) this morning. But it was a different guy, and a different Times: Andrew Malcolm of The Los Angeles Times. Now, Andrew Malcolm isn't just any full-of-shit corporate pundit --- his previous job was serving as Laura Bush's press secretary.

Corporate newspapers are like 21st century investment banks: hollow assets. We know what's keeping the banks alive, but it's a mystery to me what is keeping the newspapers alive.

The sickening collapse of professional journalism

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In a comment on my previous post, the prolific contributor "Anonymous" raised a point that I consider central to any understanding of our current (i.e., since 1979) epoch: the utter failure of professional journalism to do its job. I've had a hard time writing clearly and concisely about this topic due to the enormity of the development, which unfolded before my eyes at the same time I was learning and practicing the fundamentals of journalism as a simple country editor and, later, a graduate journalism student.

The failure of professional journalism has been even more pernicious than the plague of Reaganomics and modern Republicanism --- even though it is largely a product of same. A robust, independent journalism sector could have informed (and outraged) the public about the rapid and unprecedented "acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex." But didn't. It still doesn't. Journalism failed all of us by becoming part of the problem. Professional, independent journalism is central to the nation's ability to self-govern because it is supposed to "have our backs" and sound an early warning to massive abuses of political and economic power. I think this idea was in Jefferson's mind when he wrote:

Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

I am revisiting the issue this afternoon after reading this column, As Seen On Eschaton, in which Washington Post reporter Chris Mooney does a gentlemanly job of laying into George Will's global warming denial nonsense as a vehicle for a valuable, concise critique professional journalism. Mooney politely chastises his profession for failing to applying sufficient critical rigor in analyzing the pseudo-scientific claims of ideological bullshit artists who run political and media interference for entrenched interests. Hooray for Mooney!

Last post on AIGFP

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People with more expertise and better analytical skills than me have gotten to the heart of the AIGFP Bonus Baby Affair, as I understand it, much more directly than I was able to. So this will be my last word on the AIGFP bonuses, at least for this week.

My concern about a retroactive targeted tax on the unethical bonuses, such as the one passed in the House today, would be its constitutionality. According to this authority, a Harvard law professor named Laurence Tribe, a tax of this sort could be crafted to comply with the Constitution. However, the first and only commenter on the Atlantic article in which Tribe is quoted suggests some chilling hypotheticals that could emerge from such a legal precedent, causing me to rethink my position on the Bonus Baby tax.

So here's an alternative approach I'd like to see, which differs somewhat from my previous suggestion. I'd like to hear President Obama say something along the lines of "OK, ya know, fuck it --- keep your bonuses. You're gonna need every cent of them when we turn the Justice Department, the SEC, and the FBI loose on your asses to fine out exactly what you've been up to for the past 10 years. And Geithner, Summers: clean out your desks by close of business tomorrow and return your keys to the four huge Secret Service brothers who will escort you to the parking lot."

Nothing will change until RICO Act investigations are initiated and the institutions of our Reaganomics-based phony economy are dismantled with extreme prejudice, brick by brick. At the moment, the count on Obama appears to be 0-2, and he's already fouled off a few. I really hope he's just presenting the illusion of impotence to fake us all out, just for dramatic effect before he pounds one out of the park.

Update before I'm done writing: OK, statements like this "Geithner is doing an outstanding job" shit from Obama on Jay Leno tonight are making me nervous. Fouled another one off; count remains at 0-2....

Drop in a bucket

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LuMac wonders aloud (email-wise, at least):

I... wonder what this relatively little (dollar wise, not symbolic wise) spat is distracting us from.

He is referring to the "mounting populist backlash" about the AIGFP retention bonuses that were given to executives after they had already bolted from the organization. I take his point, but I don't think the dollar amount of this corporate stunt-looting exhibition is relevant, and likewise I don't think it will really distract us from issues that schmucks like this want us distracted from.

First point: I agree that the dollar amount of the bonuses is trivial when compared with a trillion dollars or two. But in the case of a bankruptcy, a broken contract, a burglary, shoplifting --- whatever --- the law doesn't make many distinctions in how the loser or the guilty party is treated based on the amount of property involved. There are distinctions between "petty" and "grand", and undoubtedly some other ones I'm not aware of, but I find it unlikely that the courts are often admonished to look the other way because the value of property involved is trivial. No: these Bonus Babies are in fact being awarded mindblowing amounts of money for a highly visible and destructive failure in competence and ethics. If we're going to make financial comparisons, these bonuses amount to 10, 20, or more years of income even for a family earning $100,000 annually. The idea that the Bonus Babies are contractually entitled to these awards should be declared officially ludicrous by AIG shareholders and all parties who hold effectively void AIG contracts or the worthless "investment products" created by AIGFP. It is highly unlikely that the IRS, the Justice Department, the SEC, etc., could not find a large handful of airtight legal reasons to "abrogate" the AIGFP performance and retention bonuses; all they need are some facts and figures to wave in front of a few warty, sweating bankers sitting on card table chairs under bright lights.

Everybody knows that the most spectacular robbery of all times is unfolding in front of us. The U.S. Treasury is being looted by people who have mounds of money and influence that they simply assume they will get their way in the end. And why not? It now appears that people in Obama's Treasury Department and the Senate are complicit in granting these toads whatever wish is their command.

This kind of thing has been happening for decades, but somehow it has never initiated a critical mass of public fury. Mike Milken became the first superstar performance artist of financial fraud during the '80s, and the son of a sitting vice president --- Neil Bush --- was up to his eyeballs in the savings and loan collapse in the late 1980s. Financial crime sprees have been swept under the rug for 30 years, and I never sensed significant public outrage about it. But never has the pure cause-and-effect of it been this naked, and never has the economic collateral damage aproached these levels (with more to come, surely). One hopeful sign, to me at least, is that even the corporate media may be losing its ability to obscure these facts now, possibly because there are legions of unemployed, underemployed, and just plain scared and angry people who have ample time to watch Stewart and Colbert every night, and are motivated to make noise about it.

Second point: I don't believe that Bonusgate (let me be the first to use the term, thank you very much) is going to distract many of the key stakeholders in the U.S. economy for very long. I don't remember a more unstable political or legal situation since the Watergate era. The current epoch differs from 1973 because there is a large, educated, highly motivated segment of the population with powerful research and communication tools. The public was never in such a strong position to pressure both their elected officials and, even more importantly in my opinion, the corporate press. Information wants to be free: if the media don't release it to the public, then it will find its way to us (and eventually the media) via independent web-based journalists and bloggers. And I don't mean bloggers like me --- I mean bloggers who are working economists, attorneys, IT specialists, and reporters.

The sanctity of contracts [updated]

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Today on All Things Considered I heard some New York Times reporter named "Andrew Ross Sorkin" try packaging a lame apologia for criminally incompetent executives as good old American contrarian horse-sense. His point seems to be that the government can't just "rip up contracts" because we have laws, and therefore AIGFP retention bonuses (for example) "must" be paid if we (we-who, he didn't say) are to retain the fabric of trust in society. Or something.

To her credit, ATC co-host Melissa Block quizzed this fool about the difference between ripping up AIGFP executive bonus contracts and ripping up union contracts as part of the in-progress auto industry bailout. But I wish she would have told him that nobody is literally expecting the government to "rip up contracts." By failing to follow up insistently to question Sorkin's premise, she allowed him to waste 3 minutes of my time in the car that I could have been listening to "Playground Psychotics." Meanwhile, Sorkin explained to all us rubes that "we" really need to keep these AIGFP execs on board because they're the only ones how know how to "unwind" the exotic derivative securities that they conjured. Yes: they need to be paid excessive bonuses in addition to their salaries so they will continue to do the jobs they are contractually obligated to perform.

See, the way I process this in my cinder of a brain, I am convinced that both parties to an emploment contract need to honor said contract. Therefore, before we hear any more horseshit like this from reporter Sorkin, he needs to employ the Google, Nexis and Lexis, his telephone, and his Outlook address book to find out for the American public (who is an 80 percent majority shareholder in AIG) whether the AIGFP bonus recipients did in fact fulfill the terms of their contract. If he's too frightened, lazy, or unskilled to do that, then he could at least check TPM a few times a day to keep up with the facts of the story... just for appearances.

When it's time to unwind" the AIGFP mystery securities portfolio for real, we AIG majority shareholders won't need to pamper and coax reporter Sorkin's smarmy MBA pals to do that job. We will go to the real experts: auditors, bank examiners, criminal investigators, and federal prosecutors.

Update: that cute little Ezra Klein addressed a similar topic today, referencing Sorkin's NYT column as source material. There's a bit of ambiguity in his point, however, possibly due to the lack of vetting his text through a simple country editor. To make up for the ambiguity, there are a number of interesting remarks in the comments thread below the post. No, we can't confiscate money from a small, specific group of people without any valid legal framework. Yes, there are many possible ways to approach the quashing of the AIGFP bonuses, such as legislation about executive bonuses working in corporations that have accepted TARP funds or giving AIG a friendly reminder that they're fucking bankrupt and must settle up with a long line of customers and shareholders before making good on contracts that rewarded gross mismanagement or worse. One commenter suggests freezing the accounts out of which executive bonuses are to be paid pending the outcome of a fraud investigation; I like that one.

How to pay AIGFP bonuses and live happily ever after

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I wish I could take credit for the following brilliance, but in fact it came from one Lucious MacAdoo or someone very much like him.

We're told that AIG Financial Products (AIGFP) is contractually obligated to pay almost half a billion dollars in bonuses to AIGFP execs and other "key personnel", and that there is nothing Uncle Sam can do about it even though the U.S. Treasury owns 80 percent of the corporation's necrotic corpus. Josh Marshall took aim at that concept today with bullshit detector blazing. Meanwhile, NPR dutifully spent the day explaining to us rubes that not even the federal government can force a corporation to "abrogate" a contract. (Inexplicably, NPR did not tell us why it's possible for a corporation to abrogate its contracts with unions and pensioners.)

Enter Lucious with a fine idea, possibly overheard from his own id: force the AIGFP execs to accept their bonuses in the form of the "innovative financial products" they created. In my opinion, this would represent the most elegant solution to any problem ever conceived since the dawn of human history. Think of how easily these wizards could sell their bonus portfolios at huge profits on the unregulated open market for financial derivatives, then spend the proceeds on goods and services crafted by American workers who, early every Saturday morning, spring out of bed and drive to big box stores to purchase massive amounts of swag using credit cards that are readily available with no questions asked.

Snapshot [updated]

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Iron Post, Urbana, Illinois, about 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, 11 March 2009. This is the 14-piece Parkland College In Your Ear Big Band, halfway through their first set. Big bands don't tour much because they're expensive and, presumably, don't attract enough revenue to cover decent salaries. The name-brand ones mainly play at festivals and otherwise mostly just stick to recording. Not sure why big band economics worked out OK during the '30s and '40s, but not any more for celebrity acts. But who needs celebrities when you can see a pickup community group open their chops once a month for the low low admission price of $2? These gentlemen and ladies play Basie-esque charts and, every now and then, some '70s-vintage fusion stuff arranged for a big, mostly unplugged group. The band includes veteran schoolteachers, university jazz faculty, regular old college students, a few talented high school kids, and stray community members who have been doing it for years.

In the photo I tried to capture the early spring sunset colors streaming in through the west windows, silhouetting the director while showing the band. But with an iPhone camera there was no hope of that --- it would be a tough exposure to balance manually using any camera without lighting the group from in front. Still, the handsome devil with the vintage silver Chu Berry tenor shows up OK.

And in case you might wonder why they call the place "The Iron Post," I assume it's because there's one in plain view no matter what direction you look in --- usually right in front of your bean.

Update: that's right, I can't count --- 5 reeds + 8 horns + 3 rhythm = 16 pieces. Sheesh....

Wise sayings

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It is highly probable that the Dow Jones Industrial Average will fall by 500 points tomorrow.

Somatic delusions

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From the Mind Hacks blog, here is an excerpt from the case history of a somatic delusion I'd prefer never to experience:

From September, [the patient] felt that “there is another lower jaw with teeth between the real upper jaw and real lower jaw, and there is another tongue between the false lower jaw and the real lower jaw”; “the teeth on the false lower jaw are growing steadily”; “I try to cut the false teeth off with the real teeth, but the false teeth do not stop growing”; “the false teeth melt into holes in the false lower jaw, but later grow again from those holes”; “something like spaghetti is coming into and going out from the holes” and “the false lower jaw rolls up and is coming into the throat.”

Yeesh. The Mind Hacks article indicates that a "somatic delusion" is a persistent distorted perception or awareness of one's own body. Through a brain scan, the patient was found to have reduced blood flow in the parietal lobe, which helps to provide a person's own "body image." The Mind Hacks writeup can be found here.

Diagram of everything (DOE) [updated]

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I'd say almost everything loves a good Theory Of Everything (TOE). I do. I even like a good Theory Of Theories Of Everything, and accordingly have started formulating one. It is inspired by the brilliance of David Deutsch's The Fabric Of Reality. Deutsch, an Oxford physicist, was "the first person to formulate a specifically quantum computational algorithm," but surprisingly and happily to me, his TOE is not anchored solely in physics.

A person's TOE is his or her religion, in a real sense. In fact, the religions I'm familiar with all purport to be TOEs, including atheism. They are explanatory with respect to their own limited vocabularies, and they either "cherry pick" their data to avoid paradoxes or try to resolve the paradoxes without substantively revising the core TOE. Deutsch's thesis departs from the single-principle approach: he believes that homo sapiens have now collectively formulated sufficient knowledge to prepare a very rough draft of a TOE, at least to the extent that we know approximately the theoretical ground it must encompass. Quantum physics (including Everett's many worlds interpretation) seems essential to any truly explanatory TOE, but so are (in Deutch's view) the fields of epistemology, computational theory, and evolutionary theory. My Theory of TOEs is that Deutsch is about right, except that I would consider substituting the term information theory in place of computational theory, because I suspect that the former may sufficiently encompass the latter while also leaving room for due consideration of aspects of consciousness such as memes and psychological archetypes. These last two items, among many others no doubt, should be important if core human phenomena like consciousness and religion are ever to be scientifically understood to any significant degree beyond their superficial mechanisms.

I am not educated or intelligent enough to contribute anything as sweeping as a TOE to the knowledge of the world. But I grow increasingly interested in sketching a Diagram Of Everything --- a DOE. As a Simple Country Editor, I am a generalist who finds it more interesting and useful to try diagramming the universe than to diagram sentences. I also have some smart friends who are good at both humoring me and, more importantly, helping me to test and evolve my DOE. So, to summarize, my Theory Of TOEs is characterized by the core conviction that, as Deutsch believes, a TOE must incorporate great swathes of information from multiple, partially exclusive domains of knowledge. A corollary to that conviction, for me, is that generalists may be in the best position to synthesize knowledge from the semi-separate domains without being distracted by the prejudices of scientific, academic, or philosophical specialization. Therefore, my shot at synthesis will take the form of a DOE, not a TOE. Specialists are as important to drafting a TOE as generalists are --- they are the ones who have to do the heavy lifting after outlier ideas start becoming more plausible in the face of implausible new scientific discoveries that don't fit our current conceits.

The hypothesis that drives the emergence of my DOE is that there are far fewer bright lines in the universe (i.e., multiverse) than we now assume. First and foremost, I am convinced at a deep intuitive level that there is no bright line between living and nonliving matter at any scale. If that hypothesis were testable and found to be verifiable, the implications would be staggering for theories of physics, evolution, and consciousness. The general hypothesis is, of course, not my own original formulation. But there are not currently many members of the scientific community (for understandable reasons) who are extended out on that limb, NSF-grantwise, to investigate StuporMundi's putatively crackpot hypothesis. I actually do not even find that discouraging.

I intend to use this blog to develop my DOE in the form of quanta (i.e., stand-alone tasty morsels) of speculation, cross-referenced to scientific literature. There will be no order to the presentation, but I will try to develop uniform keywords that may in good time be used to unify and edit the emerging diagram. And cheer up: I intend for the posts to be much shorter than this introductory one.

To close for now, for your consideration, here are two tasty morsels:

1. An NYROB review of The Superorganism, coauthored by Edward O. Wilson, in which ant colonies are revealed to have evolved essential aspects of civilization (namely agriculture and ranching) tens of millions of years before Zinjanthropus was even a gleam in his dad's eye. And even more awe-intriguing, the individuals coordinate their activity in a mode that a top-drawer giant like Wilson insists on referring to as a superorganism.

2. A BBC science and nature article on a new paper in the journal Current Biology which provides evidence that a cunning and aggressive chimp at a Swedish zoo has premeditated hundreds of instances of attempted assault and battery on zoo patrons. This unpleasant simian, named Santino, calmly stockpiles rocks before visiting hours, apparently anticipating his need to fling them at zoo visitors later when he knows he'll be all cheesed-off and territorial.

Both of the reviews linked above report findings which feed my conviction that the bright lines drawn by science --- maybe even all of them --- are myopic and smell of false pride. And one of them hints at why I am afraid that the Specialists Of The World (scientific and religious) are trained to stockpile rocks.

Update: I see in the AP version of the BBC chimp article, via this guy's blog, that zoo officials ended up castrating Santino in an effort to thwart his seasonal stone-throwing. The blogger, Mithras, notes his bemusement that "premeditated violence is the hallmark of human-like behavior". Zoo management had better hope that Santino isn't a capable enough planner to jack a chef knife and hunt down the motherfucker who ordered his sexual mutilation.

Wise sayings

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This edition of wise sayings is provided courtesy of Jean N., girl reporter. Take it away, Jean:

Too much sympathy makes everyone weaker.

Breaking!

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StuporMundi has returned to the World Wide Web. Please make a note of it. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Wise sayings

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[Editor's note: this edition of wise sayings was provided courtesy of the Champaign, Ill., criminal justice community.]

"The more you feed the backseat monster, the bigger it will get."

No point in "bipartisanship" [updated]

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Now that Democrats have sleazed up the economic stimulus package with regressive GOP measures, such as tax cuts targeted at the wealthy, Republicans have predictably withheld their support of it completely along party lines in the first House vote. The linked article predicts that at least a few Republicans will vote for the parallel bill in the Senate. Democrats need to stop worrying about Republican support now; they need to worry about voter support in the next round of national elections.

Maybe congressional Democrats will surprise all of us by using some strategy, brains, and guts now. One move that would demonstrate those qualities might be to strip all compromises they previously made with Republicans out of the stimulus package when it goes to the conference committee. Compromising with modern Republicans is ridiculous... unless its for the purpose of laying a trap to show that Republicans lie about bipartisanship and will do anything to prevent the majority party from rehabilitating the economy. Democrats should hit all the blab shows pounding on the theme that Republicans wasted almost 2 weeks extracting compromises on the stimulus package in bad faith solely for purposes of obstructing the new political majority in this country. They should explain that all compromises made with Republicans in the stimulus package now have been overcome by events, and that Democrats will restore the bill to its original intent in order to jolt the economy back into action in ways most aligned with the national interests.

I did not vote for Barack Obama or Dick Durbin to be bipartisan... unless it is part of a cunning strategy to be highly partisan on my behalf.

Updates: Maybe --- who knows???

GOP rebranding suggestion

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Here is my contribution toward helping to bring the Republican Party's national image into line with the zeitgeist. Even before designing a new logo, effective rebranding requires the composition of a bulletproof mission statement. I offer, at no cost to the party, my suggestion for one:

Failure is not an option. It is our strategic plan.

That idea; where have I heard that idea before?

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...the idea of Senate Democrats leaning on moderate Republican Senators like Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins for support on economic and healthcare initiatives, that is.

Oh, yes: I heard it right here, last month. The Democrats don't need a veto-proof majority in either chamber of Congress. There are surely some Republicans in Congress who would like to ride the coattails of an improving economy back into office in 2010. And healthcare reform. And whatever. All that pragmatic Republicans have to do is tell Mitch McConnell and John Boehner to go fuck themselves from time to time. After all, what could McConnell and Boehner possibly do about that?

Wise sayings

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[Editor's note: this edition of wise sayings was provided by "Ralph" Keenan, Chicago, Ill., 60660.]

"Market liquidity is a measure of the amount of available suckers."

The "inevitability" play

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It didn't work for Hillary Clinton, and it looks like it didn't work for Caroline Kennedy either.

Down and out [updated]

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It seems Dick Cheney is so unpopular that he cannot even find a few pals to help him move boxes to his new secure undisclosed location.

One might think Mr. Cheney could use some of his deferred compensation from Halliburton to hire a moving van and a few heavies. But maybe it's hard to find a competent box mover who also has a TOP SECRET clearance.

Lying until the end and beyond....

Update: seriously... what could have been so important in those boxes that half-invalid cardiac patient Richard Bruce Cheney had to risk injury by carrying them himself?

Asymmetric presidential pardon tactics

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If I were President Bush and I were a total dick, at about 10 a.m. Eastern Standard Time on the morning of 20 January 2009 I would pardon Rod Blagojevich.

More slick politics by Harry Reid

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Senate President Harry Reid says that Senate Democrats will not "attempt" to seat Al Franken, Minnesota's certified Senator elect, when the new session of Congress opens tomorrow. Maybe Reid thinks Franken's election was "tainted" by the fact that Franken actually won the recount, as opposed to losing it like Norm Coleman did. Perhaps Reid does not want to risk seeing his good Republican friends across the aisle humiliate themselves by filibustering the conclusion of a federal election, as certified by a bipartisan state election commission. Reid must think that Mitch McConnell can still get 40 Republicans to vote in lockstep against cloture on an asinine, futile filibuster against the U.S. electoral system.

Harry Reid does not appear to understand which political party holds the majority of votes in Congress these days. I hope liberal activists will consider rechanneling their outrage about Rick Warren into a $20 million fundraising effort for a Democratic primary fight against Reid next time he's up for re-election.

I don't need this kind of aggravation at bedtime. Now I need to heal my brain with more liquor.

Just seat Burris, already

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I believe that Harry Reid will be making a stupid and avoidable error if he refuses to seat former Illinois Attorney General Roland Burris in the U.S. Senate Tuesday. There are two problems:

1. Burris is the official appointee to Obama's vacant Senate seat as selected by the duly elected Governor of Illinois. The U.S. Senate does not have the power to usurp the executive authority of a state governor irrespective of how crooked or insane he is accused of being. Rod Blagojevich has not been impeached, indicted, or convicted.

2. By pulling a stunt like barring Burris from the Senate, Reid and his Democratic supporters forfeit any moral high ground they may have in the face of Republican efforts to block Al Franken from taking his seat.

3. Burris is famous in Illinois only for having been the state's first African American Attorney General and for not having been accused of political corruption. But as a U.S. Senate candidate in 2010, first in a Democratic primary election, Burris will have his tailbone handed to him by current Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan or just about anyone else with statewide name recognition this side of Lieutenant Governor and professional bozo Pat Quinn. No one in the Illinois Democratic Party is interested in sending a 70-year-old freshman to the Senate who will achieve meaningful seniority for the state about the time his last artery hardens, so that makes Burris an excellent 2-year caretaker for the seat.

So just seat Burris, already. It's not up to the Senate President to choose between tainted and untainted Senators when allocating the deck chairs. Burris would be harmless to the Democrats during a short term in the Senate. He would be totally out of his league as a Senate freshman, and therefore totally dependent on direction from senior Senator Dick Durbin, not to mention Rahm Emanuel and President Obama. Therefore, Burris presents no significant political problem either for the statewide Democratic Party or for the Obama administration. The voters of Illinois can purge the taint themselves, so to speak, in the senatorial elections of 2010.

Unfortunately for Burris on a personal level, he sort of doofed into this appointment, and he hasn't handled it with the acumen or grace of a real professional. Burris could have capped off his career with a noble gesture of public service by declaring that he'd accept the Blagojevich appointment reluctantly, and only to ensure that Illinois has full representation in the U.S. Senate during this difficult time; and that he would not seek permanent election to the post in 2010. Opportunity: blown. Advantage: taint. Oh: well.

Meanwhile, could we have DHS check the Senate plumbing system to determine whether someone is putting stupid pills into Harry Reid's water cooler?

Handling petulant Senate Republicans

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I do not understand why the threatened Senate Republican filibuster against the seating of Al Franken should be considered a problem by Senate Democrats. My gut reaction is that by using that tactic, John Cornyn and his radical clique would be luring Senate Democrats into using the nuclear option to break the filibuster, about which they would then wail in despair. They'd call it "liberal fascism," and the corporate media would dutifully take up that story line and run for the goals with it. Sounds pretty tiresome, doesn't it?

Harry Reid and Dick Durbin should let Cornyn and McConnell and the others filibuster the seating of Franken as long as they like. While House Democrats assemble an economic stimulus package and get it passed, Republican Senators can read Bible verses on the floor of the Senate without interruption. Democrats, meanwhile, may visit the cable news shows and recommend that all of us who have an interest in preventing an economic depression consider carpet-bombing the Republican National Committee and Senate offices with hostile phone calls and emails demanding an end to the moronic petulant frenzy. Don't you think it would be great TV to see Louisiana Senator David Vitter reading passages from the Old Testament in order to block the seating of Minnesota's newest duly elected Senator? Don't you think it would be a serious tactical blunder, at the very least, for Republicans to filibuster anything while the rest of America "eats cake" waiting for economic governance? I do.

But wait. Now I remember why a Republican filibuster of seating Franken should be considered a problem by Senate Democrats: it's because Democrat leadership is spinless and does not understand that everybody now hates Republicans.

Happy New Year 2009

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As seen 22.5 hours ago in my living room: two-thirds of Jackanapes! From left to right, Mike, Mike, Mike, Dave. Apologies to James (acoustic bass guitar) and Chris (hand drums), who didn't fit in the lens. These boys play "acoustic gypsy punk," known to some people as "gypsy shit," in Champaign, Ill. Thanks, fellers!

Wise sayings

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I used to think life was too short not to say whatever you want, but now I'm starting to think that life is actually too long to say whatever you want.

A Christmas anecdote

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I was walking down a long hallway in the research complex where I work and spied a pleasant co-worker approaching me from the opposite side of a set of double doors. He is a pleasant fellow, as I mentioned, but sometimes just a bit too breezy in communication style to conform to my expectations for professional interpersonal communications.

I said to myself, "I'll bet this joker is going to say 'Happy Happy!" as a greeting when he walks by me, so I must restrain the demon within me that wishes to laugh in his face or even, on a cranky day, punch him in the neck. Yet also I must reply with an appropriate degree of Yuletide good will in order that I not mar or dent his high spirits."

So this gentleman straight-arms the double doors, bursting through immediately with the following tidings: "Have a Happy and a Merry!!!"

"Same to you!" I replied, and I really meant it at the maximum sincerity level of which I am capable in such exchanges.

As we walked our separate directions, I heard him saying, "I fully intend to... if only the weather will cooperate... murble snurble muf noff etc...."

Holiday Greetings from StuporMundi. Have a Merry and a Happy!!! It has been so decreed. Long live StuporMundi.

My last word on Rick Warren

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Media coverage of issues like the ongoing hissy fit over Rick Warren can make me momentarily forget that the homosexual "community" is not really very homogeneous at all. This lulu, by a HuffingtonPost blogger named Chris Durang, is in my eyes really the nadir of self-marginalizing liberal political thought, and invites both knee-jerk derision and stereotyping even from a kind gentleman such as me. Although he acknowledges, with qualifications, that Pastor Rick "is good on the environment and on AIDS in Africa", Durang's overriding issue is he feels "hurt and upset" by Obama's decision to include Warren in the inauguration. The implication of Durang's argument is that politics are mainly about people's feelings, and that the feelings of gay people are more important the feelings of evangelical-minded people.

Today, as I skimmed over the decreasingly useful HuffPost I did notice some gay and liberal pushback against the guilt-by-association stuff that has been written about Obama. The best one, by Bob Ostertag, ceremoniously dismantles idea that gay marriage is a major political issue for most gay people. The issue, he says, is (as always) equal rights for everyone. Ostertag helpfully notes that weird evangelical beliefs about gay marriage are rooted in even weirder beliefs, such as that the God of The Universe literally sent his only Son to die for earthly sinners, however that might work. The substrate of Ostertag's text is some solid horse sense about political pragmatism from which I think liberals in general could benefit if they paid attention. Furthermore, in a nice act of journalistic integrity, Ostertag also provides some fuller context about Rick Warren's thoughts on gays, as extracted from a widely read beliefnet.com interview that I don't feel like linking to. The upshot is that Warren isn't quite the know-nothing cartoon character he has been painted as by the angry gays and liberals over the past few weeks.

The Ostertag piece is a bit long, but I strongly recommend it. He directly nails several points I was trying to make in my previous post, but he has the benefit of writing about gay and liberal activism as an insider (i.e., he actually knows what he is talking about from experience).

Josh Marshall makes a funny

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His latest deep thought truly rises to the level of a wise saying:

"It's going to take a lot of money to make the rich people rich again."

Liberal priorities

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I said to LuMac the other day that I believe liberal ideas are too important to entrust to liberals. He was amused. Here's what I meant:

Everybody knows that liberalism and democracy are inseparable. Even neocon scum talk in terms of "liberal democracy" when criticizing nations whose authoritarian governments prevent U.S. corporations from stealing their national resources. Liberal ideas are that important: even fascist-leaning swine are forced to pay lip service to them as a desirable way of life. My observations and direct experience with self-identifying liberals have led me to conclude that liberalism became a very different thing in the late 1960s than it had been through the New Deal and earlier times.

Baby boom conformists searching for a unique identity put on liberalism the same way they slipped into their railroad-striped bell bottoms and tee shirts with the Zig-Zag man on them. The minuscule reproduction of a '60s rock show poster (upper left) shows an example of how readily liberal ideas --- in this case the doubly political overtones of the headlining group's name: Big Brother And The Holding Company --- were conflated with accouterments of youth counterculture lifestyle. In order to prove that one was a real hippie in the 1960s, and not just one of those white suburban phonies, the young person had to learn the liturgy of mainstream counterculture liberalism and talk about it earnestly enough to be considered Genuine. The more earnest you were, the more genuine you were. The idea was to never say or do anything to jeopardize your counterculture credentials in the eyes of people who were even hipper than you. Likewise, you could never pass up an opportunity to demonstrate that you were hipper-than-thou, and the easiest way to do that was to "make a statement." Turn everything into a political issue.

I'd guess that maybe 30 percent of the people I am characterizing here chose to calcify in their juvenile roles as rabble-rousing freaks, and the other 70 percent became Reagan Republicans after freaking out on dope, or catching an unpronouncable social disease, or growing tired of living like bums. I dropped out of college in 1973, as Watergate was boiling over in pus, then re-enrolled in 1977. Campus liberalism had changed significantly during that span. It was expressed strictly in terms of lifestyle choices, and I remember very little political awareness being expressed --- a bit of interest in U.S. atrocities in Latin America and some anti-corporation rhetoric published in the newspaper I edited as a senior. For most of my latter-day campus peers, the transition from a "liberal" lifestyle into a Reagan Revolutionary presented no real dilemma. As the disco era smeared into the Reagan era, any valuable core of liberal conterculture ideals defaulted into the hands of self-proclaimed "true hippies" who were retrenching in defiance of their fading youth.

To this day the survivors of the liberalism-as-lifestyle tradition don't understand that activities like making earnest statements and contriving political theater have no impact on policy formation. Worse, these obsolete schmoes do not understand how their anachronicstic and self-centered behavior helps to margnalize important ideas of which they purport, by implication of their acting out, to be the sole stewards. Unfortunately for the preservation and promotion of liberalism, many smart and articulate people of the baby boom generation act as if its more important to maintain their self-image than to applying presure in pragmatic ways.

In short, nobody who knows a goddam thing about how power works gives a fuck that Obama selected Pastor Rick Warren to offer the invocation at the inauguration. It's only "optics," as the celebrity pundits now like to say. The decision was a political calculation, just like one might expect from the smartest political strategic thinker we've seen since Kevin Phillips. Does anyone really remember who gave the invocation at Bush's last inaugural? Or his first one? Or either of Clinton's? Or Nixon's? Did the words spoken at those inaugurations by the Holy Men have any impact on policy formation?

I understand that gay people have their reasons for disliking or despising Rick Warren. I do not understand why high-visibility liberals would waste their time with fist-pounding denunciations of Obams's "poor judgment" in this matter if their intent is to "make a difference." Their petulance will not make a difference. But by co-opting Rick Warren for his inauguration, Obama is probably shielding himself from a significant amount of criticism from the middle should he decide, for example, to lift the ban on gays serving in the uniformed military forces.

In this case, the best suggestion I've read for a liberal response to this non-event comes from Atrios: if you're present at the inauguration and deplore the presence of Rick Warren, then turn your back on the invocation. It could be a silent bit of political theater that might actually be heard by the media. Meanwhile, I wish the marquee names in liberal blogging and commentary would try to grow up soon and get their priorities straight. The host of a religious invocation at a public event is not a good reason to "go to the mat," as the wrestlers say. They need to save their zeal for promoting core liberal policy priorities, like progressive taxation, full employment, sustainable economics, and law & order in the worlds of business and finance.

Update before I'm done writing: I predict a small number of inauguration attendees will be arrested for throwing shoes in Warren's direction.

Shoe-hurling hilarity [updated]

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Even though some late-night TV jokers have made a few good funnies based on the Iraq shoe-throwing incident, I don't consider the attack to be all that entertaining. What hilarity: someone tried to assault the President of the United States with shoes! I'm sure there is all sorts of liberal "schadenfreude" justification for the cackling.

Would it have been funny if it had been President Obama at that podium in Iraq on Sunday? And if Obama had been hit? And if the shoes were rocks? Or hand grenades? And if the hurler was wearing a white hood? A regular laff riot! Hey, remember the "shoe bomber"? What was up with that guy anyway?!?

How the fuck does something like this happen in a controlled space in a war zone without the perpetrator getting a Secret Service bullet in the ear before he's done with his first follow-through?

Imagine how we all would have roared with laughter in 1963 if Kennedy had only gotten a dumdum bullet through the crown of his fedora instead of the crown of his skull. But that's not the way history played out. What did happen, though, starting in 1964, was a statistically improbable increase in naming newborn baby boys "Lee Harvey".

Update: shoe throwing is not just for laughing at. It's also a golden opportunity for narcissistic liberal sanctimony. Things like this tempt me to launch an "Oh brother..." feature on this blog.

Bye, Bettie

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A lot of stories like these have been published in the past day about the passing of Bettie Page, who died Thursday evening, December 11, in Los Angeles. In the various reports I've read or heard on the radio, Bettie is packaged as some sort of bellwether of the '60s sexual revolution or an "infamous" bondage model. I am not a Bettie expert, but I do know a little about her and her contemporaries in the figure modeling profession. The obits are generally heavy on caricature and short on context.

First, Bettie did not "set the stage for the sexual revolution"; that had been under way since World War II even if it was mostly excluded from Hollywood movies and the other popular media. Second, she was really not a superstar in her day. She was a popular figure model who posed in lingerie and various stages of nudity, but only one of many, and I strongly doubt that she was ever the most popular pinup model even during her heyday --- the early and middle 1950s. At that time, the colossal sex symbols were burlesque and strip-tease superstars like Tempest Storm, Blaze Starr, and Lili St. Cyr (prononced "Sincere"), some of whom were pulling down four-figure wages per week in Las Vegas while bedding first-tier entertainers and mobsters, not to mention the occasional state governor or president. Then there was also Marilyn Monroe, who really did traipse fairly unabashed sexuality into middle class consciousness via the movie screen. And third, Bettie was certainly not the most infamous cutie to pose in fetish gear, bondage poses, or catfight vignettes --- there were plenty who specialized in that market, as advertised "back of the book" in pulpy paper in men's "cheesecake" and "adventure" magazines. But that fact is known mainly to the original purchasers of such photos and to latter-day collectors, not to corporate journalists looking for a way to sensationalize a light, campy takeout on the death of a faded sex symbol.

Photographers and publishers made carloads of money selling copies of Bettie's likeness. She was left to deal with exploitation and broken marriages, and a past of sexual abuse by her father, by herself. I've read that even though she turned to Christianity at the end of the Eisenhower era and remained devout to the end, she never disowned or even expressed shame about her modeling career. That struck me as touching, and an indication of strong character.

News media have their reasons for sensationalizing Bettie now, possibly because it allows even NPR to talk about her "endless legs, tiny waist, and beautiful bustline" --- not to mention bondage and leather --- in respectable, well modulated tones of voice. I, as an admirer of vintage figure and pinup art, have my own reasons, and here they are:

In terms of anatomy alone, during her prime time, Bettie was a force of nature. Physically, every molecule of Bettie was in exactly the right place when she posed. Strictly speaking, the molecules were the product of her genetic heritage. But I feel that what arranged those molecules so exquisitely in front of a lens was her spirit. The magic had to have been her personality. A few of Bettie's contemporaries may have rivaled her "physical plant." Lili St. Cyr comes to mind, but her molecules radiate aloofness and even arrogance. Others, such as Rose La Rose and Betty Howard, exuded terrific personalities but may have lacked certain indispensable fine points, for example, below the knees and above the ankles. Winnie Garrett, my favorite model, was a tall, "flaming redhead" who by all accounts overflowed with personality, intelligence, and genuine niceness. No red-blooded American he-man could ask for more, then or now. But even so, I must admit that Winnie was a bit exotic-looking in the direction of "school marm"; that's fine by me, but it nevertheless falls short of Bettie's unfailing appeal to almost anyone with a Y chromosome.

As in the Irving Klaw snapshot above, from my photography collection, Bettie stands alone. She was not a trailblazer or a self-promoter: she was exploited for her charm and forgotten by some of those who profited from the light that her molecules reflected and her personality radiated. I can't remember ever seeing a picture of Bettie in which she looks tired, bored, or bitter. It's as if the camera brought her to life, and she returned the favor. Bettie was stunning without even a hint of self-importance. She could clown for the camera without seeming stupid or trivial. She was supremely generous --- not to her photographer, but to her audience. Look at any picture of Bettie: you can almost hear her Tennessee accent, thick as pine tar, declaring "Sir, I am so glad to be able to share this picture with you."

Land of Lincoln sanity checks

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Governor Blagojevich returned to "business as usual" today, which for him is the administrative equivalent of spraying a tommy gun inside the capital rotunda hollering "Made it, Ma! Top of the world!" Meanwhile, most state officials are making serious noises about meeting to develop a framework to draft a resolution calling for the study of possibly impeaching our modern day Baby Face Nelson. Our remaining U.S. Senator, Dick Durbin, pulled a blindingly stupid PR stunt on Tuesday when he immediately called for a special election to fill Obama's vacant Senate seat. Dumb idea: the next Congress will have been in session for months by the time a special election is set up and concluded. Nobody even knows how one would be administered in Illinois under current circumstances. And a special election would open the seat to being won by any Republican skilled enough to play the backlash card of downstate resentment of corrupt city slickers. Anybody who thinks that couldn't happen is a fool: the Land of Lincoln is not as "blue" as celebrity journalists seem to think. If I were Obama, I'd be tempted to have Durbin skinned with poultry shears for throwing a special election on the table. Bonehead.

And Armageddon must be near: I agree with a Republican. Former governor Jim Edgar said on public radio Wednesday morning that he thinks a special election is a bad idea because it would get partisanship all stirred up at a time when we need two U.S. Senators in Washington. He also suggested that Blagojevich's successor appoint a panel to help select the new senate nominee. That could work, but I don't think it's necessary: the appointment power lies with whomever is governor or acting governor.

I figured that the legislature could have Blagojevich impeached by Christmas if there was a will to do it, but serious observers seem to think that impeachment requires hard evidence of criminality and a reasonable-doubt standard for guilt. I doubt it. They don't have to impeach Blagojevich for bribery: lawyers can figure it out. For example, if Blagojevich were insane enough to appoint someone to the seat, I believe he would be violating at least the spirit of Illinois state ethics laws in the conflict-of-interest arena. [Allow me to interject that anyone accepting a Senate appointment by Blagojevich now would be an imbecile... unless Blago pulled the supreme jiu jutsu move of appointing an Republican to the seat. Think about it. You heard it here first.]

The Attorney General, Lisa Madigan, can appeal to the Illinois Supreme Court to remove a governor who is incapable of performing his duties. Madigan has indicated that she is smart enough to wait for awhile, though, necessarily letting state government twist in the wind long enough so even a mischevous Republican justice might think twice about voting against a removal petition. (The Supreme Court decision must be unanimous.) Normally, I would have thought Madigan would have been a slam-dunk appointment to the Senate seat. But under these circumstances, and given her likely role as Blagojevich's putative executioner, the Lieutenant Governor might find it awkward to be seen as "rewarding" her for the kill.

I know that people smarter than me don't believe this is a serious danger, but he longer chaos persists in Illinois government, the better it is for Republicans here. At the state level, Illinois Republicans are pathetic: divided, devoid of viable leaders, and they stand for nothing except fueling resentment against Chicago. But nothing unites Republicans like chaos.

And it's also better for the national Republican Party: without a Democrat in Obama's seat by January, the new President has one less vote to beat down the twin menace of Mitch McConnell and "Diaper" Dave Vitter.

Editor's note: the illustration of James Cagney from White Heat is used above solely for nonprofit education and research purposes, and this fair use is believed not to diminish the commercial value of the image to the copyright holder.

Where I've been

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There's just too much to unpack in Illinois and national politics these days for me to try documenting everything I write here with links to source material. Part of the problem is that I've taken on an exciting new role in life that dominates my free time: raising a set of illegitimate triplets I unexpectedly sired last winter... er, I mean, helping to administer my aged mother's transition into assisted living. Both of these factors have crimped my substantive blogging output.

For the time being, just for the sake of writing something on a regular basis, I must devolve to basic punditry and speculation modes. Unfortunately, my posts will mainly be supported only by my background knowledge, the considerable amount of news reports that I blow through every day, my need to think like Machiavelli, and my joy in fabricating hypotheses and strategies.

I rarely expect anyone to take anything I say just on the basis of my own authority anyway, but now that the lack of time forces me to relinquish some of my documentary rigor, caveat emptor totally, OK? I don't like it, but I don't like shutting up even less.

Blago blogging

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I apologize if the title of this post isn't original to you. But it's new to me as of 21:08 CST.

It would be naive to think that a state governor has never tried to play high-stakes tit-for-tat with a Senate seat appointment. Wouldn't it? But what are we to think, really, of a state governor --- under federal investigation for at least 3 years with "imminent indictment" rumors swirling around the state for several months?

Stupid? I know it's "cute" to say so, and Blago may barely scrape into three digits, IQ-wise. But his reported behavior really can't satisfactorily be explained away that easily. Chutzpah may get a little closer to serving as a feasible explanation, if that word encompasses epic-scale obliviousness to the consequences of planning a criminal conspiracy without using code words and euphemisms. But what could account for such an Olympian disconnect from reality?

If Blago is really guilty of trying to shake down the President elect and even possibly Warren Buffett, then it's clear to me that he's criminally insane. The guy belongs in Arkham Asylum.

In TPM's fantasy movie about Blago, David Kurtz would cast Steve Carrell on the basis of appearance and the ability to portray cluelessness. But I'd recommend Michael Badalucco, who portrayed Baby Face Nelson in O Brother Where Art Thou. Badalucco would be perfect: more babyfaced than the gangster, like Blago; nuts the size of coffee cans, acting-wise; and a peerless performance as a bipolar criminal thrill-seeker. The photo above is the historical George "Baby Face" Nelson. I curse the World Wide Web for not having a readily available picture of Badalucco strutting his stuff with speeding sedans, tommy guns, and dairy cows.

Another reason why "Hoover" means "suck"

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Josh Marshall has a few posts up today puzzling over the possible resurgence of the Herbert Hoover wing of the Grand Old Party. Given how unlikely it is that a "neo-Hooverite" pro-depression economic ideology will sweep the nation (like the Mudshark) anytime soon, Josh wonders whether the new Hooverite vanguard is motivated by

“strictly economic reasons (creditors can do well in a deflationary economy), moral reasons (need a good hard recession to re-teach the poor moral values) or just because they're economic illiterates....”

One TPM reader offered a fourth hypothesis that I think best explains why these creatures are trying to rally the party around the legacy of Herbert Hoover instead of swarming back under their rocks for a few decades. He says:

“Given the new demographic realities of the country, Obama's presidency must be a failure if Republicans are to ever emerge from the political wilderness. The more they obstruct, the more Obama and Congressional Democrats will be forced to water down economic policy. And a watered-down policy just won't cut it at this moment in history. This is sabotage, pure and simple.”

Oh goody --- I truly hope so! I think a Republican strategy like that would be outstanding for the country, especially without a Democrat supermajority in the Senate. Now, for progressive legislation to be enacted rapidly, some Republicans are going to have to vote with Democrats. And I’m certain they will do exactly that if they want their political careers to remain intact for long.

I think some people are forgetting that the GOP no longer has unified political leadership let alone any power to reward and punish. This may not have sunk in on Republicans yet. I can’t think of any reason why the likes of Olympia Snowe or Susan Collins would support a long Republican filibuster of, say, a national healthcare bill or an infrastructure program just because Mitch McConnell decrees it... especially since Democrats can wheel, deal, and threaten to gain the support of moderates who want a piece of the action. It's feasible that we could see the so-called "Gang of 14" working backwards, drawing its Republican members over to vote with Democrats.

For that matter, I can’t think of any good reason why a moderate Senate Republican wouldn’t consider shedding his or her toxic brand and switching parties. Obama’s magnanimity toward Lieberman, considered from this perspective, might be seen as a shrewd move to subliminally invite a few more conservative Senators into the Democrat tent. The opportunity to be treated with respect might have its attractions for a handful of the more reality-based Republicans.

Meanwhile, on CNN and Fox News, Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Shopper can enjoy the spectacle of Republican stalwarts creating gridlock in the Congress for purposes of burnishing Herbert Hoover’s legacy (i.e., The Great Depression). In the process, they may even learn that there is already a widely accepted modern name for neo-Hooverite doctrine: Reaganomics.

Holy crap: wait a minute!

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I just discovered that today is the first anniversary of my astounding blog!

I truly believe this is the finest blog available on the web today that does not shove a PayPal "tip jar" or Amazon "wish list" down your virtual craw on the home page. I am able to provide this information and entertainment service to you, the public, free of charge owing to my hobby of robbing gas stations on the weekend.

Fantasy derivatives I'd like to buy

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I wish someone would come up with a way to convert stupidity into an investment product. I'm not talking about bundled subprime mortgages or credit default swaps: the short sellers figured out a way to do that back in September. That was a bubble. I want a product that promises 20 percent growth annually out until about the time our distant descendants grow a third eye. I want someone to find a way to monetize Stupidity with a capital S.

Stocks plunged today on news that Ben Bernanke said the U.S. economy remains under "considerable stress." Because last Friday everybody thought the economy had turned the corner since the Dow climbed by 10 percent in 4 days. God damn Ben Bernanke for shattering the faith of the children. That was pretty Stupid of him. But not as Stupid as Wall Street Masters of the Universe who are shocked to hear that we're "officially" in a recession. Do you see the growth potential?

Unfortunately, I probably won't be able to invest in Stupid Pill Futures any time soon thanks to the socialist Obamislamofascists who are now poised to swarm the shining city on the hill like sheets of Keynesian cockroaches.

Tomorrow's news today: "Wall Street rebounds on bargain hunting." Here, have a Stupid Pill. The first one is free.