Wise sayings

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

What Naomi had to say at Smith Hall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As seen on Cesca

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



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

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

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

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

Joe The Plumber visits 2009

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

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

Moose droppings

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


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

Wise sayings

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

Local color [updated]

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

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

Second son of wise sayings

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

Wise sayings, Jr.

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

Wise sayings

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

SCOTUS does its job [updated]

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

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

Politicians make some funnys

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

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

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

We Joe, you decide

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

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

Joe The Trojan Horse [updated]

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

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

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

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

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

Joe The Plumber oppo

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

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

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

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

Final-debate snipes [updated]

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

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

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

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

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

Next up: vote thievery

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

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

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

From a cave somewhere in the universe

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

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

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

Josh Marshall makes a funny

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Like so!

Potentially scary situation [updated]

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

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

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

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

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