Eternal truths

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Women with perfect hair and makeup at a coffee shop on a weekend morning prefer men who wear khaki-colored cargo shorts.

[Note to regulars: Yes, this is one of my "new features." It took me 2 months to think of a title other than "Deep Thoughts," which has already been claimed by Jack Handy and Atrios.]

SCOTUS, not VP

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To this, I say this: I think the Clinton for VP issue is a red herring. There's no way she'll get the VP nomination, and I'm sure she doesn't want it. There's a much bigger incentive for her to go out and help nail down the "bitter" vote for Obama: SCOTUS. And after replacing Stevens, she would even be in a position to make history for women by, later, being named the first female Chief Justice (after Roberts and Alito are impeached for being "disingenuous" during their confirmation hearings). In this way she could easily trump the so-called legacy of her peckerwood husband.

[I said it first in a comment on Bob Cesca's blog because I wasn't thinking fast enough for my own good. That's just how selfless I am with my bon mots.]

War hero?

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Just wondering....

Infrared

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The photo below is by my little pal Nadia J., longtime friend of my family. I loaned her my Sony Cybershot, and she immediately went to work documenting artifacts around my house using the "night vision" mode. This mode records a scene at the infrared wavelength by emitting said radiation to reflect off objects within a few yards of the lens. It works best when there is little or no ambient light.

Nadia's little pictures are brilliant, and they make me feel dumb for never having tried the same thing during some otherwise boring rainy evening. This particular one radiates a certain amount of social commentary, which is to me all the more poignant for the fact that it probably was not the motivating intent for creating the image. I think Nadia may be the Cartier-Bresson of my bungalow, curiously finding the "decisive moment" in creating her little still lifes using the junk laying around here. I'll post more of these periodically because I like them, and I hope you do, too.

This tinto tastes like paint!

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Actually, the Spanish wine I'm drinking at Kopi right now tastes more like Pixie Stix. And that's not all bad, flashwise regarding taste. Much better than vinegar or a gym bag.

In my most recent blogging hiatus I have been planning for the future, blogwise. I've been dissatisfied with how much attention I felt compelled to focus on Hillary Clinton's self-obsessed behavior during the latter half of the Democratic primary process. Too much vitriol from me, as well as Clinton. So I just wanted to say "hi" and assure you that great new features are coming your way!

But for right now I want to post one awesome idea for Barack Obama: a deal that he might make with Hilary that would get her out on the campaign trail and truly working hard to help him sew up the bitter middle-age female and hillbilly vote. He should offer to nominate her for the first SCOTUS vacancy! That would provide Senator Clinton an escape hatch from some discomfort that awaits her in the Senate, and would install her at the highest level of one of our three coequal branches of government. I'll bet she'd go for that. Now, I don't trust her for a second in any elected capacity, but I do think it's possible that an appointment to SCOTUS would allow her to revisit her youthful idealism and dedication to liberal democratic principles. And maybe even give her an opportunity to dump her peckerwood husband. So how about those apples, My Friends?

It was a simpler time

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From the Science & Engineering Desk, and apropos of nothing (as our correspondent often says), I present to you an invention for the ultimate in comfort and convenience during the reportedly grueling act of childbirth: behold U.S. Patent 3,216,423 --- Apparatus For Facilitating the Birth of a Child By Centrifugal Force (1965). Notice the cruciform plan of said apparatus, providing subliminal reassurance to all of an immaculate delivery, if not conception. And, no, it's not a nutty idea, regardless of what you may think! Click the image to enlarge detail. My favorite feature is the safety net for Junior.

Listen, I'm a busy man!!!

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I must apologize for using my discretionary time for activities other than blogging.

I have been busy with some side work that will enable me to feed my addictions for another month. Hopefully, these addictions will destroy me before I feel the need to overwork myself to such an extent again.

Very late update: This is my occasional reminder that, as a Simple Country Editor, I edit. To include judicious deletions, and stuff like that there. It is hoped that not even regular visitors will have any idea what I am taking about at this point.

All you need to know about primary coverage

Click through this link for a first-rate primer on the job that insider campaign spinners and the official media do on John Q. and Mary S. Public every day there is a presidential primary election in the United States. Gullible "political junkies" who get their juice from the likes of Tim Russert, Chris Matthews, and Cokie Roberts need to consider the possibility that their chosen narrators of life are unreliable with the facts and untrustworthy in their motives.

Concurrent update: Apologies for filing this link after the Tuesday primaries, but it really pertains to the political media-industrial complex in perpetuity.

WPE cafe blogging!

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I heart my new MBP and am taking a smidgen of time away from the Simple Country Editor grind to blog, just because I can now, in style.

A certain meme, documented in this case by Atrios, has been floating around since Our President has fallen into disfavor with a majority of die Volk. Specifically, the meme is that George W. Bush is the most unpopular president "in modern times." I wonder: why the qualification? Do we really know of any president who has been more unpopular? A more important question, in my opinion, is why it took a majority of the people 7 years to reach this opinion. Everything about Mr. Bush --- literally everything --- was apparent on its face since before his election, when I remember news reports of him standing at a Florida stock car track or something, repeatedly bleating "W" in high-school Spanish to a crowd of frothed-up Cuban exiles, with the learned media commentators asserting that this behavior displayed not only Governor Bush's fluency in a foreign language, but also his deep connections to the "Hispanic" community.

I believe there is one, and only one, reason why Mr. Bush's popularity ratings are so dismal: people are afraid that they can't afford all their great stuff any more.

Acronym alert: for the benefit of all you puny humans out there, WPE means "Worst President Ever."

Assignment desk: Question for McCain

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In a Florida speech today, John McCain said it's time to put Americans "back in charge" of their own health care. The idea is that you and I are in the best position to shop for healthcare insurance. If by "are in the best position" he means "don't know crap about how to", then he may be right.

I respectfully suggest that a reporter ask McCain if he has ever shopped for his own healthcare insurance, and whether he had any difficulties selecting a plan. Then ask him if all of his "friends" can sign up for the same healthcare plan that he is covered by, for an affordable price. And whether he supports full, immediate enrollment in that same plan for all combat veterans from all wars as a paid-in-full benefit of the GI Bill.

PS: click through to the NPR transcript and get a load of the commentary by one Regina Hertzlinger, a Harvard Business School professor and "leader in the consumer-driven health care movement." Something about people wanting a Toyota when their employer would rather buy them a tricked-out Harvardmobile, and how that would be a shame, or something. I think Dr. Hertzlinger might be better described as a " leader in the right-wing idiotic simile movement."

Scribefire!

Pay no attention: I'm just trying a Firefox plug-in called Scribefire, which supposedly will let me post to this blog without actually logging in. The purpose of this technology? I have no idea. But it's sure awesome!

Immediate update: Scribefire messes with my precious ledding (that's line-spacing to you nonspecialists). Therefore, my interest in it has seriously declined over the past 90 seconds.

Fifty50 in-depth analysis: Pennsylvania Democratic Primary

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You've heard the liars and BS craftsmen spinning their primary analysis to the craven official media. Everybody wants to tell you what it all means. Well, allowing for the fact that I have my own biases, I think a few basic facts are hard to dispute. And the meaning is self-evident to us rubes in Champaign, Illinois, if not the bitter imbeciles of central Pennsylvania and the Beltway Cocktail Circuit.

First, look at these Pollster.com charts. I'm not good at this stuff, and these are probably not the best charts to use, but they look good enough to show that Obama has been steadily been closing the gap on Clinton's lead since the beginning of 2007 or the beginning of 2008 --- take your pick. As far as I can tell, that fact has not been widely reported, or reported as being significant. You may remember that a similar failure of communication led to stories about how Obama got trounced in the New Hampshire primary, even though he steadily gained on Clinton up until primary day. (Obama got "trounced" because he did not live up to the hype or inaccurate opinion polling after the Iowa caucuses.)

Second, there is some irritating and disingenuous "conventional wisdom" being dispensed about how the Democrats are doing themselves tremendous harm through self-destructive negative campaigning tactics. Well, no, that's not really true: Hillary Clinton and her peckerwood husband, and their surrogates, have been directly appealing to the bigot vote by invoking the names of Scary Negroes and their purported association with Obama. Then there's her disingenuous shot-and-beer pandering to morons who think Chablis and Merlot are not manly, and her ridiculous purported love affair with guns. And she has been aided in her tactics by the official media, especially Gibson and "George" on the ABC debate. As far as I can tell, Obama has retaliated by referring to Hillary as "Annie Oakley."

To summarize, both a casual and a careful reader of the news would be justified in concluding that after months of throwing the kitchen sink, all the rolling pins in the drawers, and a bushel of bigoted personal attacks at her opponent, Hillary Clinton was not able to stop the slow and steady gains made by Obama in Pennsylvania over the past year or two.

Update while I'm still writing the original post: now The New Republic is comparing Obama to McGovern, meaning that he is a Don Quixote figure with an increasingly isolated band of fanatics as his only support. Expect to hear a lot of this "meme" in the next two weeks and beyond. Obama will be portrayed as the Democrat who is tearing the party apart.

Bill Clinton: against fearmongering before he was for it

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Josh Marshall, my online journalistic hero with at least one editorial foot of clay, posted this video flashback of Bill Clinton yesterday. It's from 2004; click through after you read Josh's introduction.

It's difficult for me to understand why smart younger guys like Marshall, as well as Atrios and others, still lionize the Bill Clinton of the past and to this day cannot understand that they bought a Bill of goods back in the early 1990s. The words Clinton speaks in Josh's video clip are fine words, and true, even if they reflect irony on the campaign of his wife today, 4 years hence. But those fine and true words were uttered by a slippery peckerwood who has even stopped trying to sound sincere since he started earning $50K/hour flicking his silver tongue at corporate audiences following his "retirement."

Look, fellas: Bill Clinton was never a liberal, and was never even a "progressive." His program has always been basically the same as the Rockefeller Republicans, including their twisted heirs such as G.H.W. Bush. Not liberal. Not progressive. Not concerned in the slightest about you or me. This fact was obvious to liberal adults in 1988 and 1992 and 1996. So guys, stop waxing nostalgic about the "old" Bill Clinton. The "new" one is same as the "old" one.

Do you disagree, Puny Human? OK: send me one example of any truly liberal or progressive initiative that arose from either of the two Clinton administrations. And Al Gore accomplishments don't count. Neither do things that just look liberal in comparison with the Reagan/Bush administration. Neither do botched healthcare policy reforms....

A Brooks & Shields joint

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Driving south on Prospect last night I had the misfortune of punching the radio through a transcription of the PBS NewsHour, and some insane punditry by Mark Shields and David Brooks. You just have to listen to it to appreciate the, what --- I don't know: stupidity, mendacity, mental illness? Depends on who was talking at a given moment. Examples:

1. Listen to how Shields immediately goes off the deep end in renouncing debate moderator questions about flag lapel pins while at the same time implying that people who agree with his opinion may be internet-based left-wing conspiracy nuts.

2. Marvel at how smarmy Brooks sounds right out of the gate, lecturing Shields (but really lecturing all of us rubes in the audience) about how important it is for moderators to ask presidential candidates questions to discover whether they are really like "us," possibly not aware of the fact that most of "us" wear lapel pins of any kind, and even fewer wear lapels.

3. Wrap your puny human mind around this bit of analysis by Shields: Pennsylvania have lost 237,00 manufacturing jobs since the beginning of the Bush administration; change has not been good for Pennsylvanians, and change is not a welcome message for these people because change has hurt them. Therefore, Pennsylvania is a "good fit" for Hillary Clinton. [I solemnly swear that my paraphrase of his clanging is accurate.]

4. Mystify yourself wondering why Brooks thinks it's appropriate to slip in an endorsement of retired Senator and unretired DLC A-hole Sam Nunn for VP. What?! That's some nice "being in touch," there, fella.

The insight of the evening, which both of these soiled specimens seemed to think they were uttering for the first time in American history: these (Democratic) people will just say whatever it takes to get elected without any regard for what they would actually have to do once in the Oval Office! Next week: Soylent Green is PEOPLE!

Epiphany

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Small-town crackers are so stupid that they need elitist pundits to convince them that Barack Obama condescended to them.

Should-Never-Have-Left Department

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Jeez, I take a sabbatical and the political discourse becomes so unimaginably stupid that I'm literally frightened to say anything about it.

I believe that thinking people, and especially people of good intentions, are natural suckers in what passes for political discourse today. We behave all politely and try to address the disingenuous points made by professional right-wing liars and troublemakers. We try to play by civil rules of discourse, and observe the principles of logic. And they don't. I wonder when a political leader or presidential candidate will just say to Russert or Matthews or Stephanopolous, live on TV, that no, he or she will not answer the moderator's carefully engineered double-bind question because it was deliberately contrived to elicit an answer that can be interpreted by the elite media to offend a significant portion of the population. Or that it is just too stupid to answer, and that an answer would offend the intelligence of the viewing audience. What would someone like Obama have to lose with a statement like that? Really.

It terrifies and sickens me that the elite media present right-wing talking points as if they're the touchstone of fact that we must all acknowledge before we are allowed to utter a sound. I can assure all you young people out there that there was a time when journalism and public discourse at least resembled a truth-seeking activity.

Yes, all that I'm presenting here are gross generalities, but it's time to jump back into the blog again, so this is where and when I choose to do it. Consider this a bit of throat-clearing. But, really, where can I intelligently begin when the hottest topic in the establishment media for the past week has been an off-the-cuff remark by Obama, taken entirely out of context, liberally spiced with dog-whistle racism and anti-gay subtext, courtesy of the sociopaths running Hillary Clinton's campaign (i.e., the Clintons) and the sociopaths who make their living talking on your TV, your radio, and probably, soon, in the fillings of your molars?

My fervent hope is that, finally, we are on the verge of a watershed event: someone (the Republican/DLC establishment) may finally go broke by underestimating the intelligence of the American people. First chance I get, I'm sending $25 to Obama, if for no other reason than I'm awed by his ability to maintain his dignity so far.

Will return soon

Occasionally, regular, hideous life takes a front seat to blogging. This past week has been, collectively, one of those occasions. I promise to return soon in order to provide more of the mature commentary and creative fugues that you have come to expect.

Executive summary on Reaganomics

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Jane Smiley is a novelist who writes really clear-headed and lively commentary for HuffingtonPost. Her latest post is a brilliant and concise description of... well, just go read it. I have some younger readers, and I hereby command them to click through and get a short course in post-1970s American political economy. Don't worry, kids: it's actually quite entertaining.

In my opinion, Smiley's column covers everything a regular, everyday person needs to know about Reaganomics, other than the self-evident observation that it has been a miserable failure in all it ever has attempted, even by its own standards, except its efforts to dismantle U.S. democratic institutions, transfer public wealth to private corporations, and maintain a perpetual state of war. And fear. And pestilence.

I do disagree with one detail in Smiley's analysis, though. The ultimate problem really isn't the sociopathic economists, but the transformation of the free press into a house organ for the Reagan Revolution over the past 25 years. These free-market goons would have been humiliated and laughed off the stage by real, two-fisted reporters even before they had their right foot out of the green room two decades ago.

Funny

Hillary Clinton supporters are staging a writer's strike at DailyKos. They feel they are victims of meanness.

Doodooodoot duhdootdoot! I interrupt this blog to bring you a special bulletin: No One Cares.

Hillary Clinton: monster

Actually, much worse than a monster: Republican.