The Lincoln Star Journal has more details than any normal person could ever want, of which this was easily the most hilariously depressing:
"Cathy" debuted in 1976 and appeared at its peak in 1,400 newspapers. Guisewite received the National Cartoonists Society's Reuben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist in 1992.
I begrudge no artist or writer their livelihood, but this was accomplished, as Malacandra said, doing literally nothing but "telling the same 5 jokes for 34 yrs".
There will now be a short pause while I reassess my entire life.
Dan Rostenkowski -- old Chicago at its best and worst -- dies Posted by Greg H. at 8/11/2010 11:22 AM CDT on Chicago Business Political insiders are confirming that former U.S. House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dan Rostenkowski — a decades-long fixture of Chicago's power structure — has passed away.
Mr. Rostenkowski, 82, has been ailing in recent months and apparently died overnight in Wisconsin, where his daughter lives, sources say.
Though Mr. Rostenkowski was forced out of office amid a political corruption scandal that resulted in him doing prison time, he remained a hero to Chicago's power elite. ...
To get a sense of Chicago politics as they were when Rosty towered over them, here is a video of the normally sure-footed congressman radically misreading the political and media landscapes and running smack into an AARP buzz-saw at the Original Town Hall meeting --
-- and a snippet from a 1994 Tribune article (emphasis added) about his last primary campaign before heading off to the House of Many Doors, and conducted at a time when virtually everyone in Chicago was pretty sure he was gonna to get stomped:
Netsch, Rostenkowski Win Congressional Stalwart Rolls Over Cullerton Election '94. March 16, 1994|By Hanke Gratteau and Ellen Warren, Tribune Staff Writers.
U.S. Rep. Dan Rostenkowski swept to victory in the toughest primary campaign of his life Tuesday, crushing all challengers and fending off, for now, questions about ethics and a lingering House Post Office scandal in Washington.
He did it the old-fashioned Chicago way, with a combination of strength on the street, important connections, a fat campaign war chest and constant reminders of the value of having a House Ways and Means Committee chairman from Chicago.
With 97 percent of the vote counted, Rostenkowski had 47 percent. State Sen. John Cullerton, a threat for a time, but not much of a threat on Election Day, had 29 percent. Former Ald. Dick Simpson got 13 percent; Michael Wojcik, 9 percent; and John McCarthy, 2 percent.
Perhaps more importantly, Rostenkowski made certain that Cullerton was outmanned, outspent and outmaneuvered as Election Day approached. The veteran congressman sent 700 workers into the field Tuesday, dwarfing the Cullerton effort and guaranteeing that every likely Rostenkowski voter knew it was time to go to the polls.
At the victory party, two supporters, Mike Pawlowski, 25, who works for the Sewer Department, and his brother-in-law, Mike Galichio, 32, who works for the Forest Preserve of Cook County, described a 14-hour day in the streets for the Rostenkowski effort. ...
Rostenkowski also paved his campaign with constant reminders of the federal bounty he has delivered to Chicago, underlining that connection with announcements that a new federal job training center would be coming soon, along with a Vietnam War-era helicopter for the Fire Department from the Department of Defense.
In his book "Naked economics: Undressing the Dismal Science", author Charles Wheelan wrote “We Chicagoans can drive around the city and literally point to things that Rosty built.”
Dan Rostenkowski did deliver federal funds for Chicago and the State of Illinois. Some of his notable projects include: securing 32 million dollars for the Blue Line of the Chicago Transit Authority which expanded travel from the loop to O’Hare Airport, $450 million to repave and expand the Kennedy Expressway, 25 Million to fix the dangerous S Curve on Lake Shore Drive[11] 4 billion dollars for the Deep Tunnel Project, which was designed to keep raw sewage from entering the Chicago River and Lake Michigan, while also protecting over half a million suburban and city home owners threatened by flooded basements.(Cohen,176)
He followed that with $42.4 million for reservoirs in McCook and Thornton Townships and by O'Hare airport, $16.8 million for downtown's State Street Mall renovation, $3.5 million for the construction of the Cook County Boot Camp, a military-style alternative for first-time youthful offenders. When the Chicago White Sox baseball team was considering moving to Florida, Rostenkowski secured a $150 million bond authority for the construction of US Cellular Field.
Once nearly abandoned and left in disrepair, he ensured $75 million in tax-free bonds for the remodeling of Navy Pier, which today has become Chicago’s preeminent tourist attraction.[citation needed]
To ease erosion that threatened Lake Shore Drive and several harbors and museums along the Chicago lake front, Rostenkowski secured $2.2 million for the Chicago Shoreline Protection Project, and laid the foundation for a coordinated partnership among the Army Corps of Engineers, the federal government and the City of Chicago.
He also was responsible for securing funding for the upkeep of Chicago area bridges including the Chicago Skyway, the Division, Cermak, and Roosevelt street bridges.
In January 1983 Plitt Theaters filed a lawsuit to obtain a permit to demolish the historic Chicago Theater. Mayor Jane Byrne and other civic leaders appealed to Rostenkowski to assist them in obtaining a federal Urban Development Action Grant to save the theater. Grants of this kind were being frozen from Chicago by housing secretary Samuel Pierce in reprisal for Rostenkowski's opposition to the Reagan administration's Urban Enterprise Zone bill. Rostenkowski considered these zones a Republican gimmick that would help businesses escape taxes without addressing chronic inner-city unemployment. Rostenkowski called his friend Vice President George H. W. Bush, “If I don’t get that grant,you're going to have one very pissed off chairman of the Ways and Means Committee for your administration's pending tax bill”.[12]
Shortly thereafter, Pierce phoned Rostenkowski to ask if he could come up and see him.
Sure, the congressman replied, just bring the papers for the theater project.
Love it or hate it, this is how things work in the real world, and you don't get to sit in one of the Big Chairs without understanding that right down to your fingertips.
But -- as the senior citizen "Wild in the Streets" clip shows -- the real world is not a static place, and when it changes, dinosaurs can perish fast and without ever really understanding why. From our great chronicler of Chicago clout, crime, politics, BBQ, softball and all things tavern-related, Mike Royko:
The Rules Kept Changing; Dan Rostenkowski Didn't
By Mike Royko
Chicago Tribune
HER name was Mary, and she was middle-aged, worked as a domestic, had little money and no medical plan, and was in need of some serious and expensive life-saving surgery.
But she had lived in her Northwest Side Chicago neighborhood for most of her life. And she knew somebody who knew somebody who knew a politician of considerable importance.
Some calls were made, the most important coming from the office of the politician.
The result was that Mary went to a good hospital, was treated by skilled physicians, was cured and went home with a bill of $0.00.
How the politician arranged this, I don't know. I assume that the hospital and the doctors owed him favors. That's the way things have always worked in Chicago, which can be good or bad. In this case, it was good.
And it wasn't the only time the politician did something like that. Using his political muscle to help people out was part of his trade. That's the good side of what used to be called machine politics.
I like to think of the late alderman Vito Marzullo, who usually placed one or two young lawyers in city or county patronage jobs. And one night every week, the lawyers came to Vito's ward office and handled legal chores for low-income people from the neighborhood. Free, of course.
In Mary's case, the politician who took care of her medical needs was Dan Rostenkowski, whose career in public service has just ended in a most tragic way.
Before anyone leaps for the phone, stationery or e-mail device, let me say that Rostenkowski and I are not pals. Far from it. We've never particularly liked each other, and our longest conversation has been about two minutes.
Many years ago, we sat together at a banquet honoring up-and-coming young Chicagoans in various fields. He was the young politician with a future, and I was the young columnist.
He was aloof and wary of talking to someone who just might stick it to him down the line. Which shows he was smart, because I later did exactly that.
That was a pity, really, because we had a lot in common besides our ethnicity. We came from the same neighborhood. My family once owned a tavern within a short walk of Rostenkowski's house. And his precinct captain never once hustled us for a fast buck.
We have mutual friends and share some of the same bad habits. But when he was grabbed for a DUI in Wisconsin some years ago, he had the good sense to be polite to the cops. ...
What I'm stumbling into saying is that nobody should be taking pleasure from Rostenkowski's misfortune. Not unless you have never, ever, broken even a minor law and gotten away with it, fudged a bit on your taxes or violated any of the Ten Commandments.
Only a few decades ago, none of this would have been happening. That's because the rules changed. Most of the things he was nailed for would have been legal and common or, at worst, nickel-dime offenses when he began his career in Congress.
That's the way it is in our society. The rules keep changing. Things we could once say or think are now taboo. And acts that were once considered gosh-awful are now embraced.
Rostenkowski's mistake was not changing. Maybe he didn't notice. Or maybe he didn't see the danger. ...
Man, I miss Royko.
In lieu of flowers, bales of money will be dropped from Chinook Helicopter
Desiree Rogers named CEO of Johnson Publishing Plans expansion for Ebony, Jet mags and cosmetics line Comments
August 11, 2010 BY SANDRA GUY sguy@suntimes.com
Desiree Rogers, President Obama's former White House social secretary, said Tuesday after being named CEO of Johnson Publishing Co. that she intends to expand Ebony and JET magazines' licensing and website presences, and grow the Fashion Fair cosmetics line.
Linda Johnson Rice, daughter of the company's founder who held the CEO title, will remain as chairman. The two women are good friends.
Rogers has no publishing experience, though she worked for a company 20 years ago that owned newsstands, and said she understands the workings of distribution, wholesaler relationships and positioning magazines to sell.
"I've been a generalist all of my career, focused on taking brands to the next level and integrating all of a company's functional expertise under one roof to move forward," she said. ...
While doing my weekly unemployment diligence, I used my mad interweb search skillz to scour USAJOBS, Illinois WorkNet, Career Builder and Monster dot Com for this ad:
"Generalist Wanted to 'take brand to the next level'. Must be expert in Microsoft Cliche 7.0".
I see that Hizzoner is finally realizing his life-long dream of ruining running the City like a business. (From Bloomberg News with a h/t to Roger Ebert):
Morgan Stanley's $11 Billion Makes Chicago Taxpayers Cry
Chicago drivers will pay a Morgan Stanley-led partnership at least $11.6 billion to park at city meters over the next 75 years, 10 times what Mayor Richard Daley got when he leased the system to investors in 2008.
Morgan Stanley, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and Allianz Capital Partners may earn a profit of $9.58 billion before interest, taxes and depreciation, according to documents for a $500 million private note sale by their Chicago Parking Meters LLC venture. That is equivalent to 80 cents per dollar of projected revenue. Standard Parking Corp., which runs 30,000 spaces at the city’s O’Hare and Midway airports, earned 4.84 cents on that basis last year, data compiled by Bloomberg show.
The deal illustrates how Wall Street banks, recipients of more than $300 billion in taxpayer bailouts in the worst credit collapse since the Great Depression, are profiting from helping states and cities close record recession-induced deficits by selling bonds and leasing public properties. Chicago gave up billions of dollars in revenue when it announced in 2008 that it leased Morgan Stanley its 36,000 parking meters, the third- largest U.S. system, for $1.15 billion to balance its budget, said Alderman Scott Waguespack. ...
On the minus side, the business he has chosen to run it like is the hellbeast mutant spawn of WalMart and Enron.
If you're interested in a little, local, foul-mouthed and highly subjective back-story from yours truly regarding how my city got this fucked up, may I suggest:
And in case you were worried, no, this will have no effect whatsoever on Hizzoner's future bid for a seventh term as Mare For Life of the Great City of Chicago: a campaign in which I fearlessly predict he will run for a few weeks as a -- no kidding --maverick outsider populist, during which he will publicly debate no one, and after which he will once again triumph with numbers so lopsided they would make the late Saddam Hussein blush.
... It [education] may be the economic issue of our time," he said. "It's an economic issue when the unemployment rate for folks who've never gone to college is almost double what it is for those who have … when nearly eight in ten new jobs will require workforce training or a higher education [degree] by the end of this decade."
Obama noted his administration's overhaul of the federal student loan program in March.
"Under the old system, we'd pay banks and financial companies billions of dollars in subsidies to act as middlemen," he said. "But this year we said, enough is enough. … As a result, instead of handing over $60 billion in unwarranted subsidies to big banks and financial institutions … we're redirecting that money to make college more affordable."
The reform package expanded the Pell grants and allocated $2 billion to community colleges to create career-adjustment programs for displaced workers.
Urging his audience to embrace the "promise … at the heart of our colleges and universities," Obama called the value of education an "essential truth" of the American experience.
"It’s what led our parents and grandparents to put a generation of returning GIs through college, and open the doors of our schools and universities to people of all races, broadening opportunity, growing our middle class, and producing a half century of prosperity," he said. ...
And here's what came out of the backside of my Wingnut Babelfish:
"Blah blah blah.
"I'm gonna take money away from the hard-working heroes of capitalism and give it to undeserving brown people and lazy, collectivist losers.
Socialism 4 Evah!"
Which is weird, because for the last 18 months it seems that no matter what Obama speech or policy or legislative accomplishment I feed into the translator, my Wingnut Babelfish always poops out exactly the same results.
Usually I try to cover the waterfront on these little Sunday excursions through the ankle-deep sewage that is American mainstream political conversation. But because this weekend was so perfectly bookended by Charles Krauthammer and Tony Perkins explaining the Master Race talking points on same sex marriage -- and because Krauthammer unleashed some of the most nakedly despotic and anti-democratic sentiments I have heard on the "highbrow" end of the teevee machine in a long, long time -- I think they have earned the lion's share of the spotlight.
The strategy is clearly as simple as this: chain this issue to the vox populi bumper and drag it the Hell away from any discussion of civil rights as far and fast as possible. Just keep repeating that it's really all about "activist judges" and the thwarting the righteous will of the mob, which will have the unfortunate effect (make sure you pause while you take out your cryin' hanky) of dividing America!
Because dividing America makes Baby Jesus cry, just like when the Dirty Liberal Supreme Court said that snooty, non-rich/white ladies actually owned their own uteri and had the right to, say, refuse to bear their rapist's child!
And, golly, everybody knows that if there's anything the Pig People hate more than NASCAR, guns and hot trailer cousin sex it is a ginned up Conservative culture war that distracts the ADD media from the fallout from fucked up Conservative economic policies!
So remember, brownshirts, if anybody asks, sinful, Yahweh-wrath -inducing queer marriage has NO PARALLEL with civil rights for niggers...coloreds...spades...African Americans, and Jim Crow and segregation were solely about voting and had nothing to do with who was permitted to marry whom.
Got it?
Charles Krauthammer gassed up and launched the trial balloon on "Inside Washington" on Friday (transcription is sloppy-but-fast accurate, except where it is obviously not)...
Craphammer: This will be a Pyrrhic victory. Regardless of what you think of the merits of the issue either way, this is not the way to do it. We should have learned our lesson with the abortion decision in '73. Ruth "Badass" Ginsberg herself once said that the abortion decision...
Craphammer has declared that the issue of "Who you can marry" has nothing to do with civil rights, and is only and exclusively analogous to "the abortion decision" because...
Craphammer: (quoting Ginsberg) It preempted any democratic resolution. Took it out of the hands of legislators. Prevented the stable resolution of (blah blah blah...) Why would you want to "step on the process" and take it our of any political and democratic influence?
According to Craphammer, a judge ruling on a matter of law is actually an "undemocratic" act and would be "a tragic mistake."
Colby King trotted out the "Brown v. Board of Education" example and tried doggedly to drag "Who you can marry" back where it belongs -- into the civil rights arena -- and point out that rights are not things that other people get to vote you into or out of: you either have them or you don't.
Hard, sweaty work for Craphammer. Fortunately, in between doing everything short of glaring at his watch, drumming his fingers on the desk and loudly humming "Hello I must Be Going"
to demonstrate his complete disinterest in being there, the professionally narcoleptic Evan Thomas was on-hand to keep Krauthammer's gonads cool and well-moistened.
"Gay marriage is coming...are we going to do it through slow, democratic process or by judicial fiat. I'm for gay marriage, but I'm on Charles' side on this. It's better for the country...," said the straight wealthy White guy from whom no perk of American Democracy has ever been denied.
King tried again, saying that if someone has a right to something, you don't say you have a right to it but you have to wait until we get around to making every sour old fuck in Stone Mountain, Georgia comfy with the idea.
Craphammer would have none of it. And being an imperious prick right down to his constituent molecules, could not help really hauling back and making his overweening contempt for democracy plain by saying the most amazing thing:
Craphammer: It's no more a "right" than abortion is a "right". Rights are in the eye of the beholder and our decisions about them change.
Wow.
Furthermore, the fact that he was spared the ickiness of seeing married queers at the farmer's market or the theater or walking around being gay under his balcony at his weekend retreat at Borktesgaden for the first 220 years of American history carries a lot of weight with the K-Man.
"Why not do it democratically?" sneers the monarchist.
You mean like Bush v. Gore?
King pushes back yet again:
"If civil rights for black people had been put to a vote in 1954, it would have failed in the South."
Here, Krauthammer drops the last veil and utters yet another genuinely amazing lie....
"The reason that was a different case is because Jim Crow deprived African American's of the right to vote. So they had no avenue for them to express themselves."
Got that? Civil rights is ONLY about voting. And once everyone can vote, if the majority votes to strip a minority of any other rights, well tough titties on them I guess. And, more importantly, the question of "Who you can marry" and legacy of Jim Crow have nothing to do with each other.
Evan Thomas bestirred himself from his midsummer nap long enough --
"Brown" upheld a more fundamental right than this decision.
-- to concur on behalf of the bored, White ruling class, and again make it Very Clear that he feels Very Inconvenienced having to sit there and explain the difference between "real" rights and "just for fun" rights to the hired help.
Of course, the great, big issue here is that Krauthammer is just fucking lying. Lying spectacularly. And on PBS no less!
And being a smart person, I am forced to assume he is lying deliberately, given that the single most famous marriage discrimination case in American history was all about race. Race and segregation and the putrid White Male Privilege perversion of Christianity that for centuries Southern bigots have rabidly insisted was actually the Will of Almighty God and therefore must needs be the Law of the Land.
Surely Krauthammer knows this, just as he surely must know that this most famous of marriage rights cases had to be decided by the courts precisely because the popular law it overturned was based on Virginia's depraved inversion of real Christianity.
Precisely because the Dregs of Dixie were every bit as horrified at the thought of blacks and whites marrying
as today's Christopaths are at the thought of two men or two women tying the knot.
Horror of Teh Gay has always stood shoulder to hairy, Neanderthal shoulder with horror of race-mixing and miscegenation in the filthy little hearts of bigots everywhere.
Don't believe me?Well, just go ask the Ku Klux Klan's ladies axillary (Actual Motto: "Fighting for White Rights for over 140 Years" -- Possible Alternate Motto: "Keeping Charles Krauthammer safe from being creeped out by the antics of uppity Mud People for 140 years even though he is a Jew and all"-- and, no, I am not going to provide a link to the Klan) for whom Homosexuality and Race Mixing are both held to be equal abominations against their monstrous bastardization of the teachings of Jesus, the specifics of which are to be found literally on the same page of their online hatebook:
HOMOSEXUALITY ... Its extremely clear what our Father in heaven has to say about homosexuals. Other Old Testament verses on the subject can be found in 1 Kings 14:24 and 15:12, II Kings 23:7, Isaiah 3:9 and Jeremiah 23:14. There are more verses in the Bible on this subject, but I think I have made my point. Some say the New Testament does not address homosexuality at all. So, let us read 1 Corinthians 6:9 "No ye not that the unrightous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived, neither fornicators, nor idolators, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind." Also in Jude 7, Romans 1:22-32 and 1 Timothy 1:10. By the way, for those that don't know the meaning of the word effeminate it means a man that takes on the characteristics of a woman.
So, as you can see, if any Judeo-Christian minister does not preach against homosexuality, he is a liar and a deceiver. Homosexuality, like a cancer, must be cut out of our society or it will grow until it kills the body, like a cancer. This is not the words of the Klan, this is the word of Yahweh.
RACE MIXING
The Klan has always taken a strong stance against interracial marriage. What most people don't understand is it's against our Heavenly Father's law.
White's have practiced segregation throughout our history for a couple of basic reasons. If White's had never kept themselves separate from the other peoples of the world the White race would be extinct.
Here in America, because of the acceptance of some of our people to intermarry with non-whites we see a future in which Whites will be a minority. When presented with this argument many people say "so what". To the Klan; the survival of our race is important and I find it unbelievable that the Klan is condemned for the simple fact that we want to exist and maintain our racial purity. But, the most important reason we practice racial segregation is it's our Heavenly Fathers' law. The Klan has been told time and time again that there is no scriptures in the Bible to defend our position on the mixing of the races. The Bible is full of instructions for practicing segregation, for example.
Exodus 33:16 "So shall we be separated: I and thy people, from all the people that are upon the face of the earth." ...
Hell, if the Ladies Who Lynch aren't enough, just ask Tony Perkins, who was invited onto “Face the Nation” because apparently the views of religious fanatics with good hair don't get nearly enough airtime on American teevee.
Fortunately David Boies (American Foundation for Legal Rights) was waiting for him.
Of course, anyone over the age 35 who was ever going to budge on this issue did so long ago, so the fact that yet another front man for that grotesque cult known as Conservative Fundamentalism has again been publicly exposed as a hollow, hateful fraud will not change a single mind nor touch a single heart on the Right.
David Gregory wore the corners off of NBC’s Exclamation Point machine by having Exclusive! White House Energy Adviser Carol Browner on to talk about exactly what Thad Allen said on "Face the Nation", after which, Oompa Loompa Sprayontan Dude
rolled in to lie -- Exclusively! -- about taxes and such.
Thence came Harold Ford, Jr. – Wall Street Blue Dog who has been out of office for years but still has a book to sell – who wished that his Party would capitulate more to Conservatives.
So sad that we suck so bad!
Republican Congressmen and professionally innumerate Talking Points dispenser Mike Pence was very, very sad that the Obama Administration had failed utterly at everything.
So…hey! Let’s cut some taxes!
David Gregory: But…you…don’t pay for anything? How are you running on slashing deficits and still cutting taxes?
Pence: Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.....Jobs!
Ford: This is the only reason my pussy, loser Party might stand a chance. My Dear Close Personal Friend Mike Pence is top-full of top-grade manure.
Gregory: Are you in favor of raising the retirement age for Social Security?
Pence: The Republican have tried So Very Hard to reach out to Barack Obama, but have been spurned – spurned I tells ya! – at every turn.
Reached out with a blowtorch and everyone knows it.
Sitting almost exactly where her husband sat the week before, Mrs. Alan Greenspan tossed a little grenade into Pence’s lap by letting the cat out of the bag that the reason the Debt Commission legislation didn’t pass is that the few Republicans who originally supported it, ran away from it like devils fleeing a Holy Water thunderstorm the minute it looked like it might get real.
Mrs. Alan Greenspan: Republicans are so terrified of their bugfuck nuts base that there is no incentive whatsoever for working together in the House and the Senate.
Pence: The problems with this Administration is not due to the media…or “decisive Republicans” in the Congress! Its because that damned Kenyan Usurper hates America!
Finally, over on “Fox News Sunday”The Big Republican Show, Republican Ted Olson talked very nobly about gay marriage, after which Republican Governor Mitch Daniels talk about many things not gay-marriage-related.
Like why anyone would raise taxes, fer Christ’s Sake! When everyone knows that the only way to tempt risk-taking, Randite hero plutocrats into “investing” and “creating jobs” by dipping into the 200-mile-high mountains of money they have already piled up thanks to decades of tax-cuts…is to give them more fucking tax cuts!
Weird, how when Republican Governor Mitch Daniels is asked to list the “difficult” things that we will need to do to survive as a nation, all he – or any Republican – can ever seem come up with are “solutions” that involve punching soon-to-be-poor-and-disenfranchised Middle Class Americans in the face and further fucking over the already-poor-and-disenfranchised.
It’s almost as though Republicans hate this country and wish it were some other country. From some other era.
A few channels away, Chris Matthews -- who has been relentlessly and almost-singlehandedly flogging his pet gossip that Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden will swap jobs in 2012 for weeks -- wanted to know if “all this talk” about Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden will swapping jobs in 2012 is “for real”.
In other words, nobody knows a fucking thing, and Tweety is projecting his own masturbatory fantasies onto the blank iPad that this complete absence of information creates. John Heilmann obligingly jumped in to help Matthews work his chubby, so Tweety gave his book a quick pimp in return.
Auto-political asphyxiation at its stickiest; Felt like a fucking peep show.
So, in conclusion, there is nothing to worry about, citizens.
The Status Quo is safe.
The Villager's walled garden of 10,000 establishmentarian verities and enchantments remains protected.
The egos of those darn “independent” voters...
...who want…
…to cut deficits... …to keep benefits... …to keep the Bush tax cuts...
..were sufficiently flattered to guarantee... ...that they won't stop buying pudding. And penis-pills. And shares in Boeing. And lizard-based car insurance.
And not a single Dirty Commie Liberal Was allowed to get anywhere near Today's Mouse Circus.
Explains the political realities of public Presidential endorsements on gay rights issues.
As those realities existed in the 90s.
But the 90s are long over, those realities have radically changed, and the real President of the United States needs to quit watching re-runs of "The West Wing".
Last Sunday, the good people at Kink On Tap were kind enough to invite me over for what I understood was going to be a wholesome 90 minute conversation about recipes, butterflies, scrapbooking and how to get rid of that "not so fresh feeling" using common-sense Conservative freedom solutions!
However much the various factions and splinter groups on the Right may bite each other's ankles in rage and shock at each other's alleged heresies against the True Faith, the blunt truth is that they're all the same species of drunk drinking from the same bottle, all bombed out of their minds and hanging from the same rail in the same stinkhole bar: The House of Reagan.
From the bitterest Expats to the hardest-core Palinite Cultist, their internecine pissing matches are always over who the "real" inheritors of Ronald Reagan's legacy really is. And the truth is, they are all Reagan's ugly babies.
"...old and disgusting canard devised by the Becks and Hannitys and Limbaughs in the tradition of Wallace and Atwater and McCarthy."
-- notice how carefully and gingerly he skips right one over the disgusting race-baiting of two of his Conservative Heroes (Ronald Reagan and Bush the Elder) who both waved the Confederate Flag and worked the racist dog-whistle with exactly the same, cold Brietbartian premeditation, and for exactly the same reason: because every Conservative knows deep in their heart that sucking Confederate and Fundamentalist dick is the only way they ever gain power, prestige, profit and victory.
And so they do it, knowing that people like Sullivan and David Brooks will forgive them.
Andd excuse them.
And forget...
...forget...
...forget.
And that specific, mutagenic strain of "Wingnut Doublethink" -- the training of an entire generation of Conservatives to mindlessly attack!attack!attack! the "Left" while holding themselves willfully and belligerently ignorant of what their Movement is really doing and who is really running it -- is, in the end, Ronald Reagan's most potent and vile political legacy: Strategic Forgettery.
Because however much one may agree with some of the Conservative Expat crowd over specific issues such as same sex marriage and marijuana legalization, as long as they cling to their own, obsessive Strategic Forgettery, they will always be fools and clowns and chumps. Because as long as they depend on their own Big Conservative Lie to tuck them in at night and tell them that they're good little Reaganites, they cede any pretense of occupying any moral high ground from which to render judgment on the Palinites and the Beckians.
The homunculi who are left inside the Big Tent Batshit Thunderdome are either stupid, evil or nuts...or some cocktail of all three. And if the trend lines of the last 30 years have proven anything, it's that Conservatives are such willing collaborators in their own brainwashing that neither the Expats or the Palnites and their Elite Enablers are capable of retaining any political inconvenient fact longer than 13 seconds (or, in the case of the Palinites, reacting to anything other than what Rupert and Rush tell them to be angry about this time.)
There is absolutely nothing left sifting around inside their mushy, angry skulls except that sparkly aluminum sand that good people at Ohio Arts use to make the Etch-a-Sketch.
Shake-shake-shake...and Ronald Reagan never sold weapons to terrorists, funded an illegal war, raised taxes four times, or left behind the largest deficit in American history up until that time.
Shake-shake-shake...and Bush the Elder never hired Lee Atwater.
Shake-shake-shake...and what Southern Strategy?
Shake-shake-shake...and George W. Bush is the Greatest President Ever, you filthy, Liberal traitors!
Shake-shake-shake...and where did you ever get the idea that anyone in the Conservative Movement supported that "Progressive" George W. Bush?
Shake-shake-shake...George Bush who?
Shake-shake-shake...Sarah Palin never supported the bailout!
Shake-shake-shake...Deficits don't matter.
Shake-shake-shake...Deficits are worse than six Hitlers!
Shake-shake-shake...the Kenyan Usurper's deficits are destroying America.
Shake-shake-shake...why do you keep calling me a "Republican"? I'm a Conservative!
Shake-shake-shake...why do you keep calling me a "Conservative"? I'm an Independent!
Shake-shake-shake...why do you keep calling me a "Independent"? I'm a Independent/Conservo/Libertarian!
To win elections, crush the New Deal and sell the United States into perpetual corporate serfdom, it was Ronald Reagan and the rest of the Conservative Elites who spent years and years and literally billions of dollars to create the infinitely reprogrammable army of imbeciles from which many of those same Conservative Elites now flee in horror.
And however hard they try, will never let them forget it.
The final three sentences of today's David Brooks column ("The Summoned Life") --
... The first vision is more American. The second vision is more common elsewhere. But they are both probably useful for a person trying to live a well-considered life.
-- summoned me to share with the Young Writer out there exactly how you too can learn to write a New York Times Opinion Page Editorial just like America's Last Reasonable Conservative, David Brooks!
In just 10 Easy Steps you'll be punditting like a pro!
1) Pick a subject. Any subject. From Tasseled Loafers to Torture, it literally does not matter.
2) Quote extensively from one person or group on the subject. It's OK to just more-or-less copy and paste in big hunks of what whatever-you-happen-to-be-reading-at-the-moment to flesh out your 800-word column. Here at the Times we call that "research"!
3) Quote from some other person or group on the same subject who appears to hold a different opinion. If no actual opposition exists, just put on your Magic Green Jacket and invent an opposing opinion.
4) Although such is not the case with today's subject, as often as possible, try to impute these fictional distinctions to the different hemispheres of the political Universe. So no matter how bigoted, reckless or just bugfuck crazy the Right behaves, you just go right ahead and blandly assert with no supporting evidence whatsoever that the Left is equally and oppositely bad in exactly the same qualities and quantities. Here at the Times we call that "seriousness"!
5) Discover in your final paragraph or two that -- amazingly! -- the precise midpoint between those two completely artificial positions on an imaginary spectrum just happens to be exactly the Right and Reasonable answer!
Oh boy!
6) Rinse and repeat. No matter what the subject, no matter how false or bizarre the equivalence, just rinse and repeat. Twice a week.
7) Every week.
8) Year.
9) After year.
10) After year.
Long ago this stopped being a "style", and started being a fetish, Mr. Brooks
It's called "Asymmetriphobia": a horror of asymmetrical things.
Seek help.
FYI, this posted started life as a comment on the NYT website where it clearly ran afoul of somebody and was wished into the cornfield along with all other bad things.
Like a seemingly-infinite set of nested Matryoshka Dolls origami-ed out of moldering back issues of The National Review, it seems that every week another Conservative Apostate -- for one reason or another -- dares to boldly quit huffing the Burma Shave out of Reagan's Underpants for five seconds, slowly rubs their widdle eyes and for once in their worthless god-damned lives focus on something other than Bill Buckley' hairy ass-crack and a faded, sepia-toned photograph of a glorious Conservative Golden Age that never fucking existed.
Then these sad little Parlor Punks of the Revolution That Never Was stagger around the ideological alleys all kinda teary-eyed and dispossessed for a new nanoseconds before stumbling their way into the 24/7 pity party of the the League of Extraordinary Conservative Gentlemen, where they find a whole mole-rat's warren full of like-minded, suddenly-single, political frottage buddies with whom the can cross-link and dry-hump all day long about their Shock!Shock! that...
...at some point, while they were all busy quoting Burke at each other, and laughing at Stupid Liberals who were desperately trying to warn them that their Glorious Movement was in fact nothing but a massive, oligarchic sham being rammed through by an army of rabid, mangy, bigoted hellbeasts, and giving themselves yet another awesome, club-tie, trans-Atlantic daisy-chain reacharound...
...some person or persons unknown very carelessly left the Ayn Rand Memorial Objectivist Doggie Door unlatched and in swarmed several million rabid, mangy, bigoted hellbeasts who chewed up all the "Firing Line" souvenir throw pillows, ripped the throats out of all the pretty little Noonington Songbirds and generally shit all over the entire Glorious Cause (which is why we can't have nice things!) and chased everyone up a single, slender sapling...
...where they have built themselves a little, "Shipwreck Kelly" perch that shudders and wobbles precariously whenever the wind blows in from the direction of Reality...
...and from which they all now frown fiercely down at the nearly limitless army of Palinite killbots and Beck myrmidons -- each with "Made in the U.S.A. by Ronald Wilson Reagan, The Moral Majority and The Southern Strategy" clearly stamped on the soles of their feet --
Stockman's Diagnosis: Still True 02 Aug 2010 10:47 am
It's the kind of op-ed that has one sitting up straight with the sting of fresh memory. Back in the 1980s, I was a Thatcherite. I believed in low taxes but I also believed in - you know - balanced budgets as a core principle of, you remember, conservatism. It was odd coming to America to be told that here, for the first time in human history, you could cut taxes and raise revenue at the same time! It was triply odd, coming from green eye-shade Thatcher-land, to hear that "deficits don't matter." In his first term, of course, even Reagan felt it necessary to adjust from this madness - a madness that, far from "starving the beast", simply made Americans believe that the beast never needed full funding
... But the central point Stockman makes is that all of this was not conservatism as it should be, but the degenerate mockery of conservatism that has come to dominate the GOP: a blend of fiscal abandon, politicized religion, lawless foreign policy and utter electoral cynicism. Until this is confronted, owned and refudiated, we may have a Republican future ahead, but not a conservative one.
... The day of national reckoning has arrived. We will not have a conventional business recovery now, but rather a long hangover of debt liquidation and downsizing — as suggested by last week’s news that the national economy grew at an anemic annual rate of 2.4 percent in the second quarter. Under these circumstances, it’s a pity that the modern Republican Party offers the American people an irrelevant platform of recycled Keynesianism when the old approach — balanced budgets, sound money and financial discipline — is needed more than ever.
And later, Sullivan again:
The Embarrassment Of Being A Sane Conservative 02 Aug 2010 11:31 am Let us count the ways we wince. ...
It's getting to be embarrassing to be a conservative.
These days it's getting increasingly embarrassing to publicly identify oneself as a conservative. It was bad enough when George Bush 43, the K Street Gang, and the neo-cons were running up spending, fighting an unnecessary war of choice in Iraq, incurring massive deficits, expanding entitlements, and all the rest of the nonsense I cataloged over the years in posts like Bush 43 has been a disaster for conservatives.
These days, however, the most prominent so-called conservatives are increasingly fit only to be cast for the next Dumb and Dumber sequel. They're dumb and crazy. ...
... Once, the iconic figures on the political right were urbane visionaries and builders of institutions — like William F. Buckley Jr., Irving Kristol and Father Richard John Neuhaus, all dead now. Today, far more representative is potty-mouthed Internet entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart, whose news and opinion website, Breitbart.com, is read by millions. In his most recent triumph, Breitbart got a U.S. Department of Agriculture official pushed out of her job after he released a deceptively edited video clip of her supposedly endorsing racism against white people.
What has become of conservatism? ... With its descent to baiting blacks, Mexicans and Muslims, its accommodation of conspiracy theories and an increasing nastiness and vulgarity, the conservative movement has undergone a shift toward demagoguery and hucksterism. Once the talk was of "neocons" versus "paleocons." Now we observe the rule of the crazy-cons. ...
I am not a libertarian, and I remain committed to the right and the Republican party, but I feel Brink's pain. Here's the consolation however: the party system as we have seen it these past few years is not the party system of tomorrow. The Republican party cannot survive as a coalition of the rural and the elderly - and Republicans are very determined to survive. Democrats have in recent months made a fateful choice to depart from the centrist economics of the Clinton years in favor of bold new exercises in very unlibertarian state control.
-- and solemnly promise each other that they're all gonna form an even cooler club, with even more awesome songbirds and throw pillows.
Meanwhile not one of them -- not a single fucking one of them -- has the guts to answer this simple question:
Doesn't the fact that you have spent nearly your entire adult life suspended in a state of willful, toxic, profitable and genuinely spectacular ignorance about the true nature and purpose of your Glorious Movement mean that, by any objective measure, your career as a public intellectual has been a failure and a fraud, and that your opinions about politics should treated as suspect to the point of worthlessness?
Why Is Simon & Schuster Spreading the Wild Conspiracy Theories of an Unhinged Islamophobic Blogger?
Pamela Geller has some crazy ideas, which the corporate media seem content to disseminate uncritically.
July 31, 2010
By Elon Green
Threshold Editions, the imprint upon which megapublisher Simon & Schuster dumps books it’s too ashamed to release under its own name, made a ballsy bet: that Pamela Geller -- a deeply unhinged blogger who famously claimed that Barack Obama is the bastard child of Malcolm X -- has an audience sufficiently large and loyal to justify a six-figure advance. Makes sense! If MSNBC, Fox, NBC and CNN have Geller on, the pool of inbred, 50-something Tea Partiers desirous of an icky melange of silicone and Tom Tancredo
talking points cannot possibly have gone dry. Right?
Mary Matalin, the head of the imprint, is making a play for a crowd that can’t spell “niggar” but won’t mind reading a book about a man they see as just that -- so long as it confirms their half-baked theories. What better way to siphon off Tea Partiers than through a lady who cheerfully befouls the Upper West Side with a toxic brew of rotating hatreds? On days ending in Y this includes Muslims (“The motor of this presidency is submission to Islam”), transgenders (“Does [Obama] chill with anyone who is normal?”) and health care reform -- or as she calls it, “rape.”
This is bull goose loony territory, but it happens to be the language of modern conservatism. William Buckley’s body had not been in the ground 10 minutes before the National Review embraced Geller, happily laundering stories they wouldn’t publicly touch with a 10-foot noose. ...
When your grand-kids ask you "Grandmoops, what finally killed the American publish industry?", at some point during your dissertation, remember to point to this.
So let the bidding war over Lindsay Lohan's "Letters From a Birmingham an LA County Jail" begin!
Lindsay Lohan released from jail, goes to rehab Associated Press
LOS ANGELES - Lindsay Lohan has been released from jail, but she's not exactly a free woman.
The actress was discharged at 1:35 a.m. Monday after serving 14 days of a 90-day sentence for violating her probation in a 2007 drug case, a sheriff's spokesman said. She is now required to begin a three-month stint in rehab.
A prosecutor has said that Lohan cannot be released early and will have to spend the entire time in treatment.
Lohan's abbreviated stay was not unexpected, although it was considerably longer than the 84 minutes she spent at the same facility in 2007. ...
Obviously, the really big news today that overshadowed everything else was that present-day human/dried-apple hybrid and Pope of All Capitalism Alan Greenspan… …attempted to teleport himself back in time to warn his Somewhat Younger but Every Bit as Shriveled previous-self that all tax cuts are not good tax cuts (especially if all they really amount to are welfare checks to billionaires using money borrowed from Communist Chinese Banks and underwritten by the American middle class)…
…only to find that things had gone horribly wrong, and he had instead landed back in 1956, where -- over the course of one, drunken weekend at a Milton Friedman “Smaller is Better” sex party -- he met, seduced and made sweet, sweet Objectivist love to a young Ayn Rand doppelganger/acolyte who went by the nom du wingnut “Dagny Taggart”…
…but who, it turned out, was actually a Slightly Younger but Still Hideously Prunishly Corrugated Alan Greenspan…
…who had been born switchably hermaphroditic, and was, at the moment, passing as her favorite Heartless Heroine…
…and who would, in nine months, give birth to a Slightly Younger Still but Still Freakishly Crumpled Alan Greenspan, who would, in turn…
…be packed off to the "Our Lady of Irrational Exuberance Home for Gnarly, Middle-Aged Babies", raised on lemon juice, Saltines and Hayek, run away to join Goldman & Sachs’ Traveling Pandemonium Carnival, and, eventually, grow up to be his own mother, his own father and the Pope of All Capitalism inside the horrible, temporal loop of a Universe his wizened dick and depraved ideology has trapped all humanity.
So, y'know, pretty big story. Unless, or course, you are one of the unfortunates living inside the Greenspan Temporal Paradox. In that case, everything just seems perfectly, grotesquely normal.
Meanwhile:
On “Meet the Press”, Billionaire Mayor Mike Bloomberg was worried by the 2,000-paginess of Financial Regulation, and is sure that maintaining tax cuts for Billionaire Mayors is a very good thing.
And...
David Gregory wanted to know why this Administration sucks ass when it comes to Wall Street? After all, aren’t giant corporations such as the one that pays David Gregory’s salary the real heroes? And shouldn’t the Dirty Hippie Socialist Obama regime respond to being reviled by the same people they have thrown trillions of dollars at by being even more docile and obedient to Wall Street’s every whim?
Billionaire Mayor Mike Bloomberg: Fuck yeah! You know, everyone in America has been fired. Or knows someone who as been fired. Well, everyone but me. And the only viable solution for Average Americans is to play clips from “Wall Street” and ask capitalists nicely if they would mind very much not hunting them for sport.
Over on “Fox News Sunday” The!Big!Republican!Show!, Conservative Underwire Bra Chris Wallace asked the Wingnut Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother Sarah Palin and Republican Princelings John Boehner and Mitch McConnell about Vital Issues.
Reverend Mother Palin used her awesome Wasilla Weirding Facebook powers to change Elitist Lamestream laws of space and time, while Tweedledim and Tweedledimmer celebrated the repeal of arithmetic. (h/t Blue Gal for the perfect graphic)
So “yay” for them.
Back on “Meet the Press”the Mark Halperin Robot sat on NBC’s Brand New Set and made angry whirry-clicky noises as his Political Cachet Batteries ran down to the point where now they stick him on the same panel with Doris Kearns Goodwin.
Probably regretting rubbing that Jello in Gregory’s hair and calling him a callow corporate hack at Villager Sleepaway Camp now, aren’t ya Marky Mark?
Finally, on “This Week”George Stephanopoulos… Terry Moran … Jake Tapper Christiane Amanpour wagged a token finger at George Will and tried to ingratiate herself on a Brand New Set that ABC executives have clearly spared no expense to buy at a...
...BBC News yard sale,
ship across the pond...
...and reassemble around their new, overseas-friendly host.
In other words, just another fabulous day at the Mouse Circus.
Meanwhile, a few miles away, the Serious Press continued to shit their own bed and roll ecstatically around in it as if it were a cool, 2,000 thread Egyptian cotton sheet on a hot day (from Yahoo News):
Fox News gets front row White House seat
The White House Correspondents Association is moving Fox News up to the front row in the briefing room, according to sources familiar with the process. The WHCA board's decision was unanimous. [It's now confirmed; see update below]
Since veteran journalist Helen Thomas retired, three news organizations—Fox News, Bloomberg News, and NPR—have argued that they should move to the front row. Fox News will join the broadcast networks and CNN up front.
However, Fox News will not be taking Thomas's long-held seat in the center.
The Associated Press moves to the center under the new set-up, with Fox News taking the wire service's spot in the front row. (The Upshot reported last week on briefing room speculation that this is how the move would play out). ...
