Fake scandal No. 1: IRS and the Tea Party 501(c)4 groups

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Selective IRS scrutiny based on political beliefs, associations, or activities is (supposed to be) unlawful. Best I can tell is that the Cincinnati IRS people were using a certain criterion to flag new 501(c)4 applications to review. They exercised poor administrative judgment (I see that occasionally from my den in the woodwork of a government agency), and were ordered to stop by upper management. The Inspector General found no evidence of political motivation.

Still, it shouldn't happen. Clear rules for flagging potentially suspicious paperwork should be developed by IRS executives with participation from field offices. Also, the law needs to make it crystal clear that improper IRS scrutiny is unlawful not only when it affects the Tea Party, but also when it affects groups whose names contain words like occupy, environmental, progressive, peace, and so on. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out what I might be talking about.

Are Democrats using this occasion to point out (for once) that Both Sides Do It? To make sure that all Americans are protected from IRS harassment rooted in political criteria? No. They have been busy all week stepping on their own dicks, acting like Democrats invented the weaponization of the IRS. They should bring heinous examples of Republican abuse of IRS powers into the public record... not to excuse the Cincinnati field office, but to insist on a "bipartisan effort" to prevent the IRS from chilling political activity irrespective of which wing of The Property Party holds the presidency.

Even more dangerous than laissez-faire capitalism: Satire

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Texas Governor Rick Perry was disgusted by this political cartoon back in April. Too fucking bad. I recommend Pepto Bismol, an Ambien, and 5 years in a US Civics re-education camp for what ails him.

Wall Street Democrats

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This detestable specimen of politician, starting Hillary Clinton's peckerwood husband and including herself, Harry Reid, Dick Durbin, and about everybody short of Alan Grayson and Elizabeth Warren (so far as I know thus far), are the real drivers of ruination.

Despite what R.J. Eskow says in the article above, though I believe that President Obama knows exactly what he's doing when he drives liberals to distraction by "negotiating with himself" on promoting long-term rot of the safety net. The bait and switch method begins with bait---

According to The Narrative, he believes that conservatives will play nice with him on Capitol Hill if he shows that he's serious about "deficit reduction" at the expense of no one who works Capitol Hill.

No, President North Star is not naive. And neither are the politicians who I used to refer to as "spineless Democrats." Whether this is what Obama wanted when he was running for the office or he has just surrendered to the inevitability of global hegemony by a transnational military/industrial/banking/infotainment complex, he and his party are intentionally giving radical conservatives all the fertilizer they need to infest our polity like a tropical fungus.

Thanks to President North Star, the "left" position on safety net programs is that they must be "gradually" trimmed back because they are unsustainable. Pretending that he represents the adult faction within the monkey house, the President tells us that the way forward is for Republican thought leaders to erect a so-called permission structure (i.e., comfort zone) that will enable lunatics to fall in line... and endorse a policy that they've been drooling over for 50 years. Note the denial of the author of that linked post, though, and the denial evident at the top of the comments thread: they seem to think this is all the work of "centrist" Democrats. Well, other than the two I mentioned above, I'd be interested for someone to show me a Democrat national officeholder who isn't a centrist. That is, a Wall Street Democrat.

It is these despicable people, posing as traditional liberals, who are willing to accept cuts to a legacy of political genius that is not theirs to bargain away. They're not "naive," and they could turn it around in 6 months if they wanted to. But they don't.

Backlog

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I have lots of backlogged tabs to post about (or discard). Writing has been sparse because of some considerable but harmless pain---both elective and unbeckoned---that I've been enduring. Just distracting; not organic. But it does interfere with the focus.

Raise your hand if you smell horseshit

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NPR, my picture window into the corporate media bordello, has been flogging the marathon bombing story all week despite the fact that one of the suspects is as dead as bacon and the other one is in tighter custody than The Joker (Chechnyan pun intended). You see, it's just desperately important that we find out how Tamerlan was radicalized as long as there's some way we can link it to his overseas travel a few years ago. Because if we find that out, then we have a genuine case of "international terror" by "Muslim radicals." And that would give authorities to deploy killer drones in US skies under a plan that even the libertarian Rand Paul can approve of (see paragraph 5).

Since it's still somewhat early in terms of crafting the official marathon bomber narrative, it's a good time to observe how the process works. News editing decisions help to create a bias toward an official narrative by highlighting certain facts (or rumors or unsourced assertions) that support it while ignoring other facts that don't fit the story line. And so this week the storytellers are busy composing a portrait of vicious, desperate international terrorists who had New York City in its sights next. The trouble with that story line is this and this. Have any of you heard, via mainstream news media, that there are good reasons to ask whether our present-day Saccho and Vanzetti really were planning to take their pressure cookers to Manhattan? I haven't. Yet mitigating facts are right out there in public, non-obscure reporting channels like The Boston Globe and Esquire.

And furthermore, how about this: despite initial media reports depicting a teenage Chechnyan desperado shooting it out with police from his bunker in a Watertown, MA, drydocked cabin cruiser, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was not armed when he was captured. He was halfway shot to pieces, though. My point isn't to second-guess how police do their jobs in a situation like this, but to second-guess the editorial judgments being applied. Those judgments make sense to me only as intentional decisions to shape and burnish a narrative.

Dave's Delivery Door

Editor's note: Big Rock Head has resumed his visual art enterprise, entitled Dave's Delivery Door. It will be in syndication at most of these same blogs as long as he permits. Click it to enlarge it. All Delivery Doors are copyrighted by the artist sometimes known as Big Rock Head.

Speaking of The Narrative

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Charlie Pierce made this contribution to the discussion the other day at his verbose and annoying, yet quite rightminded blog at Esquire:

We had the event. Then we had the mourning. Then we had "Indomitability Day." Then we had the healing of the interfaith service at which the president gave a fine speech, and the demonstrations of solidarity at the Bruins game. That is the pattern of these things in our public lives, until the next one of these things happens, and then we do it all over again. We did it for Tucson after Columbine. We did it for Aurora after Tucson. We did it for Sandy Hook after Aurora. And, this week, we did it for Boston after Sandy Hook. It's the modern Stations of the Cross, with theme music, and logos, and Wolf Blitzer. We were done. We were healed. And then the Tsarnaev brothers came home. And one of them got away.

Pretty much so.  In the editing racket, we refer to that kind of thing as "boilerplate." It's worth contemplating how this news media narrative---and all the others---emerge into our lives as the Official Account of Public Occurrences.

The Narrative

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I woke up this Saturday morning listening to NPR "correspondents" stitch together a narrative of Boston Marathon international intrigue with Scotch tape and John McCain's used dental floss. As far as I can tell, an NPR "correspondent" does no actual reporting, but spends his or her workdays gleaning bon mots from think-tank experts, corporate spokesmen, and politicians speaking on the condition of anonymity.

The two suspects immigrated to this country from Chechnya (when the youngest was 8 or 9), you see, so therefore they must have been Muslim sleeper agents. It doesn't matter to the liberal NPR that no verified fact in the public domain indicates any foreign connection other than the suspects' country of origin and one trip to Russia by the older brother to renew his passport. Or that no third-party financing or logistical sophistication is evident in the known facts. Or that evidence known to date link only the older suspect to radical Islamic thought (via YouTube content)... and only within the past 5 years or so.

Meanwhile, NPR dutifully informs us that even though Boston police say the public threat has ended, Federal officials are likely to use a "public safety" exception to the surviving suspect's Miranda rights in order to grill him for "intelligence" (not "evidence") without a lawyer present. Then, implicitly accepting that possible approach to American law enforcement as legitimate on its face, they inform us that Senators McCain and Lindsey Graham are demanding that the surviving suspect be tried as an "enemy combatant."

Watch how this unfolds. I think it is an excellent opportunity to observe how corporate media assemble a narrative for the public. It is a feat of rhetoric, not news reporting. Techniques for producing a mass-media news narrative include the unwarranted emphasis of some facts over others; the omission of certain facts that don't fit the emerging narrative; unsupportable extrapolation from known facts to serve as a sort of roadmap for fleshing out the consensus narrative; injection of purported facts from anonymous sources; and so on. Watch how the coverage plays out and pretend you're the front-page editor for the Fifty50 Daily Pap-Smear---ask yourself where each presented fact came from, whether there are conflicting facts on the record, whether the item presented is a sourced fact, an opinion, or a speculation.

Also, ask yourself why officials and corporate media were reluctant to call the Boston Marathon bombing an act of terrorism until the suspects could be publicly branded as foreigners.

Friday Night Fish Fry

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Tonight, for some reason, I feel like offering something violent for our entertainment. But not cheaply topical with respect to certain national news events of the week. So put this in your pipe and smoke it:



In case you can't understand the words, this performance is a medley of perspectives on nonapproved drugs---namely, bassist Mark Sandman's musings on his own daily drug experimentation upon himself sandwiching a succinct description of US war-on-drugs policy. I selected this specific video to show this oddly instrumented power trio in action. If you like the feel of it, find a higher-resolution version of this song on YouTube and play it back at earbleed level through your little earbuds. You really need to hear their studio performances on CD-grade recordings to hear what this combo is all about.

There are half a dozen reasons why this is one of my favorite bands of all time, but I won't use the present space to tell you why, and it doesn't matter anyway. I'll just say that I can't think of any other band that sounds so unusual and accessible at the same time.

Test Tube Baby/Shoot 'em Down, Morphine (live at Nightstage, Cambridge, MA, 26 May 1992 [recording provenance unknown] ), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial commentary, critical discussion, and educational purposes.

Boston strangler marathon bombing tea party

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I'll confine my contribution to the story of America's Bombing with a few stray notes about media coverage of it that I haven't seen in writing yet.

First, I'll look for some Beltway celebrity pundit to declare that during the "national tragedy" in Boston, the social media "came of age." Specifically, I expect someone to compare the Reddit crowdsourcing detective forums as well Facebook and Twitter sleuthing to how television news reporting "came of age" on the day JFK was assassinated in Dallas. The contribution of Reddit editors is certainly significant and worth considering, but celebrity commentators are always compelled to turn one thing into another, well known thing that we all can relate to. I'll leave the topic (for the moment) by stating that any such comparison is shrinkwrapped horseshit.

Second, instead of regurgitating all the corporate media reporting failures this past week, not limited to CNN and Murdoch's New York Post, I'll point to a really competent aggregator of confusing and contradictory breaking news reports: Greg Mitchell's Pressing Matters blog. He has been way ahead of other aggregators I follow (such as TPM and Huffington Post), pulling together news from a wide variety of sources and commenting minimally to provide a professional, old-school journalist's interpretation. Most of his remarks are directed at helping the reader to avoid overinterpreting the reporting or to point out examples of bad journalistic practice. I only noticed one or two ham-handed quips in all his liveblogging over the past 2 or 3 days.

Third: Boston was not on "lockdown," as all media were breathlessly reporting this morning. I say this because the use of that term is nonsensical. You can't put a city on "lockdown"! As far as I can tell, no curfew was declared either: the police told people in Boston and environs to stay off the streets and to "shelter in place." Both seem to be sensible recommendations. And I'll add that the phrase shelter in place is a legitimate term of art for terrorism and hostage-type situations. The use of lockdown, though, is an example of what I see as a creeping compulsion by media and their slavish consumers to glamorize every aspect of life as if it were an action movie or made-for-TV drama. The news, you see, becomes much more thrilling to consume if described in terms of entertainment programming. I think of it as a social disease---an infection of real culture with the virus of mass media narrative. In my lifetime I've seen journalism migrate from (1) traditional news reporting, to (2) finding the "story" in the news to "help" the audience understand, to (3) intentionally communicating durable "story lines" to which facts are fit and cherrypicked against. This last stage is The Narrative. Many media and political scholars argue that the narrative long predates my perception of memory of it, and I wouldn't argue against that. But I think my basic point here remains intact.

Last: NPR's so-called counterterrorism correspondent on All Things Considered tonight, "Dina Temple-Raston," behaved like a colossal douchebag by repeatedly telling everyone how taking the suspect alive was a top priority in order to get "intelligence" from him about "the plotters," with thick implications that we already know that the bombing was a coordinated foreign terrorist operation. No verified fact reported so far remotely supports that kind of language; everything that I've read and heard up to this moment indicates that two guys created some crude antipersonnel IEDs out of household materials and may have had their getaway car in queue for work at a body shop as late as Wednesday morning. Some plot! It may actually turn out to be true, but even the liberal NPR should know that it's best to wait for some facts to emerge before extrapolating too far along The Narrative.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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On account of I miss hearing from Gurlitzer lately, here is some bait to lure herself out of her lair. I'm pretty sure she was in our party at the Roosevelt University Auditorium in Chicago in December 1971 to hear the boys "premier" (or so they said) this very song: Mother.



Listen to the intro by poor Terry Kath: he sounds like his brain has been toasted to the size and mental capability of a raisin. I think it's hilarious that he start's picking out the stock lullaby theme (go-to-sleep, go-to-sleep...) as he's talking, then dribbles off like he's got the somnambulas.

As an adult I became pretty critical of Chicago because I felt they squandered their talent. I stopped following them after their third album, from which this is, er, from. (Not counting Carnegie Hall, which was their fourth.) I feel that none of the members improved an iota, technically, after "Chicago Transit Authority." Knowing little about the band, biographically speaking, I would assume that they were a victims of their meteoric rise to fame and hip-capitalist management. I can almost hear it: You boys could be as big as The Beach Boys if you let us help you write some "relevant" lyrics and pick out some nice "threads". We can also make your hair look sexier while still being hip! Yeah---and you can have all the "pot" you want for free! So I feel the fellas became too famous, wealthy, and high for their own good, and ours too. Maybe that's unfair, but I felt that much of their second album was pretty much only going through motions dictated by some insidious devitalizing force. By the third, it all sounded canned and labeled to me. Their lyrics explored the safe perimeter of pseudo-profundity, and the ensemble horn arrangements mostly sounded like rote variations or fantasias on riffs from Ballet For A Girl In Buchannon.

No one in the band was a virtuoso... and I feel that's actually OK. After all, Chicago was just a rock band... of which some of us had unduly high expectations if we were suckered by the most-of-them-studied-music-at-college marketing. (There's not a thing wrong with a good street-quality jazz-rock band in my book, but I wanted Chicago to exceed the high points of the first album every time out.)
 
The Carnegie Hall album is full of distracted, mediocre moments. But this track is not one of them, despite Kath's soporific introductory ramble. The composition isn't much but isn't bad either---head-shop-type lyrics about man's inhumanity to Mother Nature, changing meters several times before a 5/8 section that is supposed to "resemble industry, and money-making, and pollution". But what a surprise to my cynical 21st century earbones! I'd forgotten. Everybody sounds like they really mean it on this cut, especially during the 5/8 jam! James Pankow starts it with some frantic trombone that may draw from bop chops he learned at college. And Walt Parazaider, bless his heart, really takes his chances on tenor. Maybe he's just running up and down arpeggios from his methods book, but he just gives it up and dives in. Hard to believe this is the same guy who struggled with improvising Dixie and Battle Hymn of The Republic on flute a little earlier in the program. Then Pankow comes back at the end with quite a sensitive elegy-type solo that even made me feel emotional when I reheard it for the first time after buying the Rhino reissue several months ago. The whole collection, even with its flaws, is like an under-appreciated friend.

Mother, Chicago (1971, from "At Carnegie Hall," CD reissue Rhino R2 76174), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial commentary, critical discussion, and educational purposes.

Agenda 21 and sympathy for the wingnut

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The slang term wingnut, as I understand it, as I understand it, originally referred to someone who was considered to be deranged or seriously unbalanced. These would be people who expressed fervent belief in highly improbable phenomena such as abduction by aliens, Soviet mind-control infrastructure, or water fluoridation as a government plot to accomplish something other then reduction of toot decay. At some point it began to be associated mostly with right-wing paranoids and political reactionaries. People referred to as "Birthers," "Truthers," and "conspiracy theorists" would fall under the definition of "wingnut."

Liberals and moderates gleefully dismiss the concerns of wingnuts. TPM's new-media mogul Josh Marshall, born in 1969, has written derisively of the idea that any reasonable person could believe there was a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy. An even more reality-based (and fiercer) commentator, the Jesuit-educated Charlie Pierce, routinely makes fun of wingnuts who fear that the UN's Agenda 21 will steal our golf courses. Even if we agree that Pierce is correct in his explicit critique that paranoia about World Government is a long-established reactionary article of faith and political lever for Republicans---and I do agree---it's still very much worth taking a closer look at possible explanations for that underlying fear.

Have you ever heard of the Trans-Pacific Partnership? Me neither---not until last week:

The Trans-Pacific Partnership isn't getting enough attention (by design, it seems.) The idea is that a supranational body would be empowered to override national regulations if a country had a regulatory regime in, say environmental policy or copyright policy, that was more restrictive than other countries, it would be forced to bring its regime in line with the others.

At this point, 11 nations are participating in negotiations to establish the rules. The Electronic Frontier Foundation argues that this "partnership" would impose the most restrictive copyright laws, particularly the odious US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, on all member nations, overriding any less-restrictive member-nation laws. The DMCA inserts copyright law into every transaction and purchase that involves computer software, and is responsible for postmodern customs such as electronic automobile keys that cost $300 and the outlawing of hacking consumer products that you have legally purchased.

The broader idea is the elimination of national regulatory authority over production and distribution of manufactured goods, natural resources and "intellectual property."  To be clear, this is not an instance of "free trade." The elimination of the public domain under copyright law is a restriction on trade. A bad one.

For purposes of this presentation, I'll go a step further to say that the "broader idea" is to eliminate the concept of national sovereignty wherever it interferes with the extractive corporate business model, whether the mission is to mine natural resources without restriction, lock up cultural resources permanently, or extort wealth out of a nation.

If you think the Trans-Pacific Partnership sounds like a skunk works for developing the procedural infrastructure for a "world government," you might be a wingnut. You might also be correct. I'm not prepared to say one way or the other at this point. But I am pretty sure that there is something underneath all of it that should be very concerning to everybody, including clear-eyed moderates and liberals.

Could a person be in favor of the Trans-Pacific Partnership while opposing Agenda 21? I'll bet a Republican could. The point would be to distract The Base (including people I might refer to as "innocent wingnuts") with a terror of the pan-racial "liberal" UN and its black helicopters. Meanwhile, transnational corporations could consolidate their control of the globe using national governments as their agents. But it's interesting to consider what might happen if wingnuts were to gain a clearer view of the real threat to their national sovereignty at the same time polite society tried to appreciate the fears of a wingnut.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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This is very cute. Be sure to watch the post "performance" "interview" with Dick Clark.



It may be my modern sensibilities, but I think that Dick Clark is being a bit of a dick with the boys, at least unintentionally. It appears there's a partial language barrier to which Mr. Clark may not be sensitive. However, he does seem to try to provide some context after the fact by explaining that big-time entertainers (such as himself) don't know their own itineraries most of the time.

I notice that the group spells the word "premiere" the way I remember learning it. For a coupla decades I had assumed that I'd just learned an incorrect spelling of the word in my remedial elementary school education.

I post this song with respect to Senor Rodolpho Murga, who taught me how to make pozole last weekend. Tonight I tried my own batch solo. Tomorrow will tell how it came out.

Farmer John, The Premieres (1 August 1964, live lipsynced* performance on American Bandstand, ABC-TV), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial commentary, critical discussion, and educational purposes.
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*The fellas should have at least put someone on stage holding a tenor sax to produce a better illusion.

Wise sayings

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In Free-Market America, money spends you!

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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I'm happy that the robot oldies stations haven't put this jam into stress rotation up to this point in history. Nothing ruins an oldie like an oldies station.



These lads say "fuck the second and fourth---we're gonna hammer the first and third too, and maybe even the uh-four!" Even in 7th grade,  through the 2.5 in. speaker of my turquoise GE tabletop AM radio, I could tell there was something huge about the sound of this tune. But luckily we had a tube-driven, all-in-one Olympia entertainment console (with 9 in. elliptical satellite speaker!) so I could hear it up close in hi fi after school on the Dex Card show. It's a monster!

Try Too Hard, The Dave Clark Five (1966, 45 rpm single, Epic 10004 [US]*), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial commentary, critical discussion, and educational purposes.

* I've got the disc squirreled away in my Felix The Cat-type doctor bag with a few dozen other 45s I picked up in thrift stores during the '70s for about a dime apiece.

Wake up, Useless!

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It's time for another cartoon!



In this episode, Waldo and his entourage are pursued by the hapless stock Jay Ward mafioso One-Way Waldrip, who speaks in the Bogart-like voice often heard in other Ward features such as Super Chicken and Tom Slick.

The Wikipedia writeup on this series is flawed and ambiguous, but offers some clues about why my memory of this Hoppity Hooper is so fragmentary. First, the production history is odd. "Ring-A-Ding Spring" was produced by Ward studios in 1960, but when the series was sold to ABC, production went to Gamma Studios. The scripts and voices were all Ward, but the visuals were animated by the same outfit that did Tennessee Tuxedo, Underdog, and Commander McBragg. Hoppity didn't have any native second features, but was filled both by recycled shorts from Rocky and His Friends, The Bullwinkle Show, and some of the Gamma features noted above. The Rocky show, Bullwinkle, and George of the Jungle, by contrast, all had a suite of dedicated shorts (with some cross-pollination from Rocky to Bullwinkle). As a show, Hoppity had a weak identity, even at the level of kid experience. A Marxist media critic might say that this represents an inflection point where the American art of the "cartoon show" overtly succumbed to commodification. Ironically, that view could partially explain why Hoppity Hooper is not today commercially available as a boxed set: it wouldn't "package" well as a series. A related problem is that it might be difficult to acquire the rights to recreate a Hoppity package featuring shorts from other Gamma productions.

Anyway, YouTube lets us see episodes of this almost-lost series. And thanks to the good offices of a fellow traveler, cartoonly speaking, I momentarily have access to other episodes not currently uploaded to the web. The obscurity of Hoppity Hooper really enhances their "flash value" to me.

"Ring-A-Ding Spring, Part 3," Hoppity Hooper (1962, Jay Ward Productions), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial commentary, critical discussion, and educational purposes.

The best-case scenario sucks anus

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Ever since liberals discovered that President North Star isn't too damn proactive about being liberal---maybe around the time of his stimulus initiative---there's been an annoying denial meme. There are several flavors.

One varietal is that Obama is "naive" about bipartisanship and the good faith that supposedly validates it. This idea is based on the premise that "he doesn't understand that he's dealing with maniacs."

A related variant is that Obama has been a tactical blunderer, always pre-negotiating his policy proposals with himself in order to present a reasonable centrist position that everyone should be able to agree upon without rancor. His losing tactics are the consequence of his belief in the good faith of the "maniacs."

One other variation of the denial meme is that President North Star would really do this or that progressive thing, as we all wish he would, if only it were possible in the "present political climate." Unfortunately, the situation forces him to aim low.

As I say, all of these ideas are forms of denial by people grieving a betrayal of their expectations.

Obama is not naive about the politicians who are deranged by the fact that he's a (two-term) presidential usurper---he's the Jackie Fucking Robinson of major league politicians, and even had to deal with the indignities of racist campaign tactics from Hillary Rodham B. Anthony Sojourner Truth Isis Clinton and her loathsome taxidermied pachyderm dick of a campaign manager, Mark Penn. So, no, if he's betraying the expectations of liberals, it is not because he's naive about his political enemies.

Obama is also not tactically incompetent at politics. His mastery of retail politics is obvious, considering those three certain things he had to overcome in order to be elected to his present office---he's black, he has a Muslim-sounding name, and he's a Democrat in a bombastically conservative "post-911" political ecology. His approval ratings have soared the more he speaks like a progressive. Destroying the right-wing ideologues, rubes, and crypto-Confederates in Congress should be simplicity for a youthful, media-savvy Harvard-educated constitutional lawyer with considerable rhetorical skill.

And finally, no, Obama is not constrained by the "politics of the possible." (Refer to the previous two paragraphs.) He knows how to lead and he knows how to go over the head of Congress to the American public.

To borrow a phrase, I think these denial memes amount to "the soft bigotry of low expectations" by liberal Obama partisans. Here's what I think is the truth: President North Star is pursuing the exact policies he is looking for and, to a large extent, achieving them. Obama is arguably no more liberal than either Clinton---willing to embrace corporatism, globalism, and Reaganomics while surrendering the concepts of public goods and services, meaningful progressive taxation, and government as the necessary protector of American human rights.

As pertains to the sequester, but also to the longer political game over the next 4 years, I'm bummed to agree with Heather Digby Parton:

Look, he's never been straight with the American people about this, I don't care what anyone says. He never admits that he's put cuts to Social Security on the table, ( and even hardcore deficit hawks like Alice Rivlin admit that Chained-CPI is a cut.) He never says upfront that he's been willing to raise the eligibility age for Medicare. He always says he's willing to make "tough choices" and will do things "his own party won't like." He never comes right out and says what her means about "entitlement" cuts.

President North Star has already conceded on fundamentals. His fans will consider it a victory if we "only" have to settle for raising the Social Security and Medicare eligibility ages, and indexing their benefits to the chained CPI.

Here's our partisan ecology today: Democrats are Republicans; Republicans are Confederates; the Tea Party is the Brownshirts; and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are the Democrats.

Wake up, Useless!

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It's time for another cartoon!



In which we discover the secret of Ring-A-Ding Spring. Sorry about the "spoiler" in the YouTube preview thumbnail above.

Hoppity's hometown, Foggy Bogg, Wisconsin, shares a bucolic Great Lakes vibe with Frostbite Falls, Minnesota, but sounds much more inviting to me (preferring temperate swamps to gangrenous toes). Waldo and Fillmore are itinerant swindlers, but adopt the town as their hideout/headquarters.

From what I read, this set of episodes was the Ward/Scott pilot for the series. The fist two episodes were produced in 1960, with Alan "Fred Flintstone" Reed voicing Fillmore before being contracted to portray the Kramdenesque caveman for ABC. Bill "Bullwinkle" Scott took over Fillmore duties in parts 3 and 4, but I don't detect any jarring change in the bear's tone or manner with that change.

Surprisingly to me, Hoppity is not voiced by June "Rocky" Foray, but by a woman named Chris Allen. I can find little about her with my limited search engine skills (partially due to her very common name), but most of her credits seem to be with the Hanna-Barbera studio. I think she's pretty good.

Hans Conreid, a Hollywood character actor whose career was extended by Ward for the benefit of all of us, creates a perfect maniac in Professor Wigglesworth. Another thing I like about the character is the percussion accompaniment to his brainstorms, starting in this episode at about 1:20 in the background and rising to a crescendo (with reprise!) over the next 25 seconds or so. This sound effect appears in most Ward/Scott creations, but only very briefly. I wonder if it was created by Spike Jones or an associate. It really should be a standard ringtone for the iPhone. (And I'm gonna make it one or my name isn't Lattimore!)

This episode is music-heavy, which I've noticed in a handful of shorts from this era of the studio's output. It may have been experimentation; to my ears it sounds somewhat awkward. I assume they went sparser in the sound bed for economic reasons, though, as opposed to purely aesthetic ones. Also take note of the general style of art, especially the backgrounds, which is very similar to the landscapes featured in the Metal Munching Moon Mice story on Rocky and His Friends around that time.

"Ring-A-Ding Spring, Part 2," Hoppity Hooper (1962, Jay Ward Productions), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial commentary, critical discussion, and educational purposes.

Saturday Night Fish Fry!!!

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I don't think anybody plays the role of comical ultraviolent maniac like Louis Jordan.



I don't know about you, but to me this guy sounds scarier than any rap-chart "gangsta" I've ever heard. There's no preening here; he's a natural-born Method Actor. In the right time---meaning at least 15 years after his prime, unfortunately---I think Jordan might have been a very successful mainstream comic actor.

(Editor's note: not my fault, but I apologize for the crappy visuals that the poster attached to the front end of the video. At least he uploaded a masterpiece for us to enjoy, though.)

Dad Gum Ya Hide, Boy, Louis Jordan & His Tympany Five (1954, from "One Guy Named Louis: The Complete Aladdin Sessions"; CD reissue Capitol Jazz CDP 7 96804 2 [1992]), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial commentary, critical discussion, and educational purposes.

Fascists always get the best stuff

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For us progressive amateur aesthetes, it's always been somewhat unsettling that so much top-drawer design has emerged from 20th century European fascist regimes. Does anybody have any insight into why that might be? My first guess would have something to do with repressed homoerotic urges.

Meanwhile, Behold the 1938 Hispano-Suiza Dubonnet Xenia:

I wonder what Franco's army tanks looked like. We do know that his son, a military pilot, thought that the bombs he dropped on unarmed Ethiopians looked like flower blossoms when they exploded.

The only company I'm aware of that consistently produces world-class industrial design today is Apple, which thrust itself into the public mind with it's "iconic" (and in my opinion overrated) 1984 Superbowl commercial. Old-timers will remember that the archetypal living symbol of Freedom and Justice For All---noted war hero, business executive, and human-rights crusader Ronald Reagan---was presiding over the American Experiment at that very moment in history.

It may be hard to believe that, at one time, high design in computer technology could be achieved with putty-colored plastic, a 9 in. monochrome TV picture tube, and a handful of simple picto-glyphs and 16-bit screen fonts. You had to be there; your mainstream business-grade alternative was an IBM (or clone) PC box about the size of Francisco Franco's tombstone displaying its data on a bile-green 8-bit VGA monitor, or amber if you were really uptown. No mouse necessary, or available! (And, yes, Amiga fascists, I do know about your pet machine. Highly respectable, but no design awards from this amateur aesthete.)

Mac 128 image above ganked from this blog, but it certainly doesn't belong to him!