(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Day By The Blog's Second-Favorite Canadian)
OK, so everybody has had fun the past couple of days bathing in the warm waters of Lake Schadenfreude. (Me? My fingertips may never unwrinkle.) And I have no doubt that the already-building tsunami of wingnut paranoia is going to be the best comedy to hit TV since Barney Miller went off the air. ("NO AMERICANS EVER DIED FROM CAMPAIGN FINANCE FRAUD!! BENNNNNNGHAAAAAAAAAZZZZZZIIIIIII!!!") But this is the smallest of potatoes, and the Kochs and the DeVos family still have more money than God's hedge fund, which is more than enough to buy the whole system and have enough left over to put a swimming pool in the backyard of every member of Congress, and a chest of gold doubloons at the bottom of the deep end of all of them. This is what really matters...
Photo Illustration by DonkeyHotey via Flickr/Special to The Politics Blog
Gallup just released the findings from its "Mood of the Nation" poll, and unsurprisingly, the mood is very bleak as Congress continues to prove there is no bottom to the approval rating barrel...
Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images
I feel all warm and fuzzy today because I just learned that John Boehner and I are a whole lot more alike than I thought we were.
“I do drink red wine. I smoke cigarettes. And I'm not giving that up to be the President of the United States,” the Republican House Speaker told Jay Leno on Thursday, about his unwillingness to ditch his vices for higher office. ... “I play golf, ride a bike, cut my own grass,” Boehner (R-Ohio) said, denying ever using tanning beds or spray. “Not once ever.”
Yeah, me neither John. Hey, I'm having a few girls over and we're going to split a couple bottles of our favorite bottom shelf pinot noir. Then I want to discuss how you get your "glow" without tanning or spraying, because you and I seem to follow the same do-nothing regimen, and yet I'm still pasty white. Care to join?
Vetta
Welcome back to our weekly survey of what's goin' down in the several states where, as we know, the real work of governmentin' gets done, and where Ma Rainey and Beethoven once unwrapped a bedroll.
We begin this week in Missouri, where the citizens are simply not doing their part, vice-wise.
State budget director Linda Luebbering says revenues from casinos, cigarettes sales and the Missouri Lottery all are coming in lower than budgeted this year. Those revenues all are earmarked for education.
C'mon, Missouri. Double down! Roll dem bones! Smoke, smoke, smoke them cigarettes! Won't somebody please think of the children?
Now that we've moved into an actual election year, there is some intriguing fauna out there for us to study in the field. For example, there's this nice lady in Illinois who would like you to know that God is so angry at what men are doing with their pee-pees that He gave your grandfather Alzheimer's Disease...
One of the more dishonorable ways to discuss the what our all-too-human, but curiously error-prone, heroes of the NSA have been up to since we all decided to hide under the bed in 2001 is to make it all about Edward Snowden, International Man Of Luggage, and what he did, and about Glenn Greenwald, and what he did. But the fact is that the available evidence is that the NSA was at the very least barbering its own regulations, and at the very most breaking the law. And it's not just Snowden saying this. The New York Times is not edited by fanbois, and there is no better reporter on this stuff anywhere in the world than Charlie Savage, who is not a wild-eyed lefty, or an "anarchist" devoted to bringing down the surveillance apparatus because he hates "the modern liberal state" or whatever it is that Sean Wilentz is so worried about as he slides steadily into his new career as the Scoop Jackson of the cyber-age. In fact, I give Charlie credit for being as puckish as Mother Times likely would allow.
The report is likely to inject a significant new voice into the debate over surveillance, underscoring that the issue was not settled by a high-profile speech President Obama gave last week.
You think?
Revolutions start in the oddest places and over the oddest things. A monopolistic company tries to muscle people over tea. Vaclav Havel loves The Beatles. Young Russians develop a taste for Western clothing and rock and roll. The only places in the world where there is still Communism today are the places where we actually made real, hot war against it. We left the rest of the Soviet bloc to blue jeans and the White Album and it all fell apart at once.
But viewers in Iran found themselves rubbing their eyes in disbelief when the morning programme broadcast the musicians playing traditional Persian instruments, because for many it was the first time they had seen such instruments on national television. Although the Islamic republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) tolerates non-western music - albeit to an extent - and singers are regular guests there, musical instruments have been banned on state TV for more than three decades. But on Saturday Avaye Parsian (Persian voice), led by musician Saman Alipour, were filmed in the studio of the Good Morning Iran show for IRIB's Channel 1 playing santoor, a trapezoid-shaped Persian dulcimer played by wooden hammers, tar (Iranian lute) and kamancheh, a bowed string instrument.
(First of all, how cool is it that there's a show called Good Morning Iran?)
This blog is about politics, which, according to Aristotle, a truly veteran scribe, is the result of humans being the only herd animals capable of speaking to one another. Or shouting at one another, or giving to each other the ol' bazoo, for all of that, although there is no translation for "bazoo" in the ancient Greek. Thus, for our purposes here, this blog will be about politics in its most basic form — to wit, how we speak to each other for the purposes of governing, or choosing not to govern, ourselves as a small-r republican political commonwealth. It will be the policy of this blog not to treat ignorance with respect simply because that ignorance profits important and powerful people. It will be the policy to operate on the principle that, while there may be two sides to every question, rarely are they both right. If this blog sees a man walking down the street with a duck on his head, it will report that it saw a man walking down the street with a duck on his head. It will not need two sources for that. It will not seek out someone to tell it that what it really saw was a duck walking down the street with a guy on its ass. It will be the belief of this blog that, as Christopher Hitchens once said, the only correct answer to the question, "Is nothing sacred?" is "No." And there will be fun.
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