hell in a handbasket, i tell you

36 million people are on food stamps, Black Friday sales are up, and pious, self-righteous indignation from every angle wants to either burn, shame, or starve the suffering. The operative word there being: suffering. And where there’s smoke (the discourse online) there’s fire (everywhere else). The danger in this isn’t that people are starving, or that people might be stealing from the community chest, or that the people who’re well on their way to going hungry are lighting sparks under the Hindenburg of their personal finances by lining up at Best Buy earlier than they’ve ever arrived to work, though, that’s all fairly disturbing. No: the real American Tragedy here’s that people are castigating and savoring the suffering of others, without discretion or discrimination. It ends in either a whimper or a bang; until then, there’s a lot of very loud, angry noise drowning out anything remotely resembling the sound of progress.

via gawker. i don’t think i need to comment on the disturbing fact that many people in this country seem to think dickensian-era policies and laws re: the poor were a good thing.

success!

ok, so like two weeks ago i remembered seeing this cartoon, and it seemed essential to some point i was trying to make, and i looked everywhere and i couldn’t find it, and then today i saw a link to it on AMERICAblog, which was the one place i hadn’t scoured.

so, naturally, i have no idea what point i wanted to make. but i love the cartoon, and i wanted to archive it here, should i ever recall what i wanted to say.

But who was phone?!

If Bush is actually more liberal than accepted does that mean I have to start disliking Obama? It gets so confusing trying to figure out which way the knee is supposed to jerk anymore.

Shocking

Jon Voight’s daughter thinks  Obama is a “socialist in disguise,” which is just the sort of insightful analysis that it is sure to get a large numbers of morons to stop on a dime and make an instantaneous pivot away from telling Hollywood to shut its fucking mouth so real Americans can talk.

Commander-In-Chief of the Armed Forces[' Justice System]

Navy SEALs Face Assault Charges for Capturing Most-Wanted Terrorist – Iraq | War | Map – FOXNews.com.

Fox seems to have omitted the words covering, up, black, eye, administered, in, process, and of from their headline here. Is it ideal for SEALs to face punishment for punching a terrorist in the process of capturing him? No, but then it isn’t ideal for them to lie to their superiors either and of the three charges listed only one of them has to do with the punch. You know what’s coming right?

Much gnashing of teeth and KSM-gets-a-civilian-trial based snark from the usual suspects, who apparently exist in some alternate universe where Obama is not only bringing these guys up on charges personally but presiding over the court martial as well. I just don’t see the connection, but the rightwing blogger nutballs are babbling about it so I’m sure the traditional media will be along to tell us why this is bad for Obama and how it affects Sarah Palin’s 2012 election prospect shortly. I mean, I’m sure it’s dreadfully unserious to bring up the topic of who was president when a bunch of shit went down that might’ve made the military a bit sensitive to detainee-abuse issues.

This Means NY-23 Gets To Seat Two Dems Right?

It takes a special someone to lose one race twice.

The Conservative Party candidate is conceding the race for New York's 23rd District for the second time, saying he doesn't have enough votes.

Doug Hoffman had withdrawn his first concession to Democratic Rep. Bill Owens, saying the race was close enough that absentee ballots could change the outcome in the closely watched New York Congressional race.

Now, Hoffman said he has no hope of winning.

via Hoffman Re-Concedes NY House Race – Politics News Story – WPTZ Plattsburgh.

“But that is exactly what happened, Mr. Mayor.”

I wonder what the world would look like if the national media acted like this for a single day?

Heh, for juuuuuust a second at the beginning there it looked like Newsom had himself convinced he’d get away with answering “$522.2 million shortfall” and moving on. Too bad for him the local press isn’t big on leaving it at that.

Another Revealing Moment

Without clicking through to the article, does a piece headlined “Chain e-mail claims Obama has visited more countries in first six months of presidency than predecessors” refer to praise or criticism?

Close Enough

So far as bungled epigraphs go, [Palin's] third chapter is arguably the winner so far, attributing this nugget of wisdom to the renowned former UCLA basketball coach John Wooden:

Our land is everything to us…. I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land. We remember than our grandfathers paid for it — with their lives.

Now, if that’s not the sort of thing you’d expect a hall of fame basketball coach to say, that’s because, of course, he didn’t. Students of American Indian history might recognize that passage as belonging instead to John Wooden Legs, the post-WWII Northern Cheyenne tribal leader who — though a contemporary of John Wooden’s — was not the same guy.

via Lawyers, Guns and Money: Going Rogue, Chapter 3.

amen, sister friend

jezebel user otakugirl, commenting on this article, says what i would like to say, in much better words:

OK, here’s why I’m finally going to lose it the next time someone implies I’m an “elitist, liberal snob” because I’ve got an advanced education and live in a very large, coastal city: I just got home from a week-long visit to the rust-belt, flyover town I grew up in, where my family on both sides goes back at least four generations. And every time I visit that place, I’m reminded how those generations toiled, and busted their asses in steel mills and oil refineries, and died too young from stress or industrial poisons or inopportune uncontrolled baby-making (I’m looking at you, Catholic Church), and still, bit by bit, sent their kids off to get more and better schooling and made better lives for them, until we got here, now, with me and my siblings and gazillion cousins all doing pretty much all right for ourselves.

And now, after all that work and sacrifice, some opportunistic, semi-literate, jingoistic fuckwit is going to tell me, and through me those generations of my family, that all that work and learning and improvement was bad or immoral or a betrayal of something somehow, and that we should’ve just stayed where we were?

Fuck you, Palin, and fuck everything you stand for. I may work a white-collar job, but I still throw a blue-collar right, and me and the people who got me here would like a quick chat about what the words “real” and “American” mean.