They believe in power, greed, and ambition.
Paul Krugman asks a question that puzzles me, too.
It’s five o’clock somewhere…
…and that means it’s probably gonna be 6:30 somewhere soon as well.
(Image swiped from First Draft.)
Orange Crate Art: SOME PEOPLE ARE TOXIC AVOID THEM.
via Orange Crate Art: SOME PEOPLE ARE TOXIC AVOID THEM..
the important thing that I can tell you is that there is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have a drink or go for dinner or you go to a ball game. It doesn’t matter very much but at the end of that time you observe whether you are more energised or less energised. Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible and I suggest that you use it for the rest of your life.
Read the whole post, and the comments, too.
I dunno, what do YOU think?
The irony, she is delicious!
Blogs Falling in an Empty Forest
According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.
Luckily, since this whole thing was started without lofty aspirations – or anything beyond avoiding mumbling out loud to myself in publicy sharing my thoughts as pixels on a screen – its still – if peripatetically – here.
So I guess I got that going for me…
Indeed, he is my president.
When Sesame Street founder Joan Ganz Cooney met Obama at a fundraiser last year, she was prepared to hear what she always does. “I’d have bet you a million dollars,” she says, “that [Obama] would tell me how his kids watched Sesame Street.” But instead the President-to-be told her that he and his little sister watched the show. “I realized that this is the first President young enough to say that.”
Sesame Street, as my now frighteningly conservative parents frequently remind me, helped teach me how to read. It really resonates with me that my president – for the first time in my memory – shares some part of my life and upbringing.
What’s On Friday?
The last 15 on the iPod:
1st Movement – Electric Light Orchestra
Enormous Critics – Slovenly
Chant Number Nine – Axemen
Anyone Else But You – The Moldy Peaches
Poor Man – Tav Falco’s Panther Burns
Tear Drop City – The Monkees
Eugene’s Lament – Beastie Boys
Shake Your Rump – Beastie Boys
This Just Doesn’t Seem To Be My Day – The Monkees
I Wonder What She’s Doing Tonight – Boyce & Hart %
Kassi Koun – Abdoulaye Diabate *
Bule Bule – Los Rockin’ Devils *
Don’t Have To Be So Sad – Yo La Tengo
Kill Your Sons – Tommy Keene
So I Can Love You – The Emotions
* courtesy Mark
% courtesy Rodney
On huffing, fucking critters and verbal jiujitsu.
I collect lawyers like some people used collect matchbook covers. I’m not as litigious as my Dad, so I’ve never actually needed one – yet – but whenever I befriend one or a friend passes the bar somewhere, his or her name goes into to my mental rolodex, filed under ‘pettifogger’, ready for whenever I want to file suit (nuisance or otherwise) or need to defend myself against whatever slings and arrows might come my way from the great unwashed.
So it concerned me when one of my attorneys, in the course of some email bantering, suddenly quoted me the local statutes on having bestial relations:
17 PNC § 2803: “Every person…who shall have any carnal connection in any manner with a beast, shall be guilty of sodomy, and upon conviction thereof shall be imprisoned for a period of not more than 10 years”
Jesus Christ! What sort of god-awful tort slinging has he gotten himself involved in, that he has THAT nugget at his fingertips? If he needs to know that sort because of his current clientele, he might make a handier lawyer for certain kinds of work than my current specialist in that sort of work, a barrister who has made his special niche in defending non-English speaking ‘guests’ of our country who have had the misfortune of committing minor traffic violations with an open jug of paint thinner in their lap and a soggy rag in their shifting hand.
Make no mistake; it’s a handy thing indeed to have an attorney who has that sort of thing at his fingertips. There’s a famous, possibly apocryphal, anecdote about Lyndon Baines Johnson that goes like this:
When Lyndon Johnson ran for Congress, legend says, he wanted to spread the rumor that his opponent was a pig-fucker. Johnson’s campaign manager said, “Lyndon, you know he doesn’t do that!” Johnson replied, “I know. I just want to make him deny it.”
That version is from a SF Weekly story, but there are millions around the web.
If I ever choose to run for office again (following my abortive run for Kenosha County Executive, back in the day), I’ll need both of those guys on my team.
But not our current Executive-In-Chief. He’s pretty obviously got some good lawyerin’ skills, as well as an excellent consigliere for when the speechifyin’ doesn’t work so well – a man who doesn’t seem afraid to work the small subtle knocks when he has his opponent covering up in the corner of the ring, the shots that the ref doesn’t see, but leave you pissing blood from tortured kidneys three weeks after the bout.
But I’m talkin’ ‘bout Obama here, not Rahm. Right now, I’m marveling from afar how the conversation at large has shifted from a question of IF we tortured people to the USEFULNESS of that torture. I’m not sure the right wing realizes it, but they’ve already lost an important battle here. Even their after-the-fact Jack Bauer ‘ticking time bomb’ rationalizations fall flat. They no longer have the high ground here – it’s all playing defense as they’re pushed off the hill.
Yes, I probably am attributing too much to O’s savvy skills here, but I think the important thing here is that his success is the residue of good planning. He’s hired smart people, people who (for now, at least – I have no doubts that this house of cards will come tumbling down as those people are tempted away by Machiavellian dreams of their own glory and power) have his back.
The Repubs might have had that, back in the glory days of the oxymoronic ‘compassionate conservatism’ but I think their house of cards actually fell down pretty quickly and only the fear of 9/12 kept it standing as long as it did.
Here’s hoping the good guys can keep THEIR house of cards standing longer, without those awful braces.