the defeatists!

Well, the problem with history is that it is what makes today...

About a year ago, I was spending lots of time in a room with a bunch of my closest friends, the negotiating team from Ginormous Defense and our counterparts across the room, the Teamsters local, who in some cases are people I regard as friends. Anyway, the union honcho and I were talking about politics, and he said something acidic about Twitsheet de la Dweeb and his cohorts. I didn't disagree; however, I said that I blamed Jimmy Hoffa I for the mess we've got. He stared at me -- he's at a level in the union where they probably have arcane initiation requirements involving tatoos of Hoffa in sensitive places, secret oaths, and something like the Skull and Bones initiation sequence from The Good Shepard. He asked me what I was talking about and I said, the Construction Workers were probably as much to blame. Now he was definitely curious, and asked for clarification. I smiled at him and said, "Who'd the Teamsters and the Union Movement REALLY support in 1968? 1972? 1980? By stiffing Humphrey over cultural conservatism as opposed to supporting the most vocal champion of labor in the history of the Senate, the whole thing started to come down..." He looked at me, shook his head and nodded.

If you live long enough, and 40 years isn't all that long, you can see the cows, ducks, horses, chickens and wolves return.Krugman has a great column this morning on this aspect of the Republicans and their southern strategy, pointing out that the government by the parochially loyal but incompetent was inevitable. However, I differ from Paul on one point -- Bush is EVERYBODY"S fault. EVERYBODY with a vote, a buck or two, a degree of awareness and perhaps some values, beliefs and attitudes that reach beyond the reptillian part of the brain that reacts and is driven primarily by fear of "the other" to cite my French Existentialist subconscious.

The "other" is a mass of things -- in 1972, it was people with long hair, girls without bras and "niggers riding in cadillacs..." It's new -- and old --ideas like the Constitution of the United States, economic justice, free love, drugs and open sexuality. Now, from that partial list, some ideas are good ideas, some are bad ideas and some are kind of neutral. But, fearing ideas is bloody stupid. Being afraid of the other just because they are others is equally absurd. If Bush actually read The Stranger, he would have encounted exactly what put him in power and the inevitable, albeit often long delayed result. Let's have some Dylan --Roxy Music Style.

South Carolina -- come for the humidity, stay to watch the braindead!!!

You know, when Dick Cheney urges compassion, things are really not good. So, this move shows that, while the Democrats are going to be fucked up in their own lovable, hobbit way, for sheer troll-like viciousness and vileness, nothing but nothing beats a free market, right wing White Southern elected official. Contrary to opinion, not all of them are like that...of course, a lot of the old redneck assholes were populists who forgot the economic part of that when they decided to make their careers based solely on racism. That said, you have got to be fucking kidding me...

COLUMBIA, S.C. — Just hours before the unemployment benefits fund was to run out in South Carolina, the state with the nation’s third-highest jobless rate, Gov. Mark Sanford relented Wednesday and agreed to apply for $146 million in federal funds to top it up, after weeks of refusing to do so.

This dipshit was singing the Republican's favorite song about fraud, waste and abuse. Sheeeitfuck, as they say in Dixie, South Carolina is pretty warm and they can always kill a squirrel or a possum...in downtown Charleston. Seriously, I kinda like South Carolina -- every time I've been there the people have been friendly, helpful and polite (except for FT Jackson, but basic training is intended to be traumatic) and they have a Crackerbarrel restaurant every 8 feet or so. But, they elected these clowns, and this is what they get for it.

Now, if the UAW  and the rest of the labor movement has it's shit together and some money in the organizing fund, I'd attack the BMW and other manufacturers right now, running around with placards of this asshole. The reason the fund is out of money a year into the recession is that the unemployment fund taxes are too low. The legislature et al share responsibility, but the governor is supposed to be the executive and the guy with vision to see over the next bump in the road. Of course, I'd say that a crash course in poverty may be what this asshole and his buddies in the white's only golf club ( I mean, it goes without saying...)wanted to happen. A "temporary adjustment" that leaves the labor market permanently depressed.

Ah, well, enough venom. Happy New Years...and, some gratutious music for no particular reason except I'm in the mood to post music...

Figure out which way they're going and go the other way...

Now, let’s turn our attention to the U.S. Senate where a plan to bail out the auto industry went down the drain Thursday night. It was a stopgap measure, not necessarily the best bill in the world — although it did pass my own personal quality-control test, which is to find out what Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama thinks and go the other way.--Gail Collins

In the spirit of full disclosure, let me admit again that I have a dog in this fight. Actually, I have several. I have family members in the auto industry; I think that allowing the south to offer lower wages, benefits and taxes to industries, not just foreign ones, to lure them south was a large part of the class war waged against those of us who have to get up in the morning and do something as opposed to the obscenely wealthy and their lapdogs; I find the idea that we import far more than we make while we're in the business of exporting raw materials to be frightening. We're on the wrong end a lot of ways...

In other words, I'm an American and not terribly proud of the people running this goddamn country.  I'm not expecting manna, loaves, fishes and energy from him bouncing a basketball off inner-city asphalt, but things either will improve with a course correction, or we're all fucking doomed, and need to start learning French so we can move to Nova Scotia or Alberta as this fucking place implodes. (Oh, Canada , Canada is imploding, what with the invasion of the Robots and the Governor General locking Parliament. Never mind. Innuit --we need to learn Innuit. Except that area is melting...)

So I look at the various bailouts, and I get angrier and angrier. At myself, I admit, in large part, because these clowns the result of all of our indifference to economic and political reality. The fact is that the 14th Amendment didn't do a goddamn thing for economic justice, just for voting rights, and it still took 80 years to really make that happen. The blathering idiots in Wyoming, Alabama, South Carolina and other places are still tools of the moneyed interests. Most of the money is in the hands of the banks, and so the industrial sector that enabled us to be more than the fucking Cayman Islands with bigger lawns is behind the bankers in getting to the trough. Now, the foreign challengers to our own internal industry are further ahead than our own industry. So, I think what we see is a combination of sucking up to the truly rich and economic treason.

Treason. Odd word. But, the same damn thing is going on around the world, and the bankers are on top of the heap. The Mercedes, BMWs, Honda, Toyotas and Hyundais are slightly better off in their own countries than here, but not much. The Senators from Stuttgart, Munich, Seoul and Tokyo (DeMint, Shelby, McConnell, et al) and their statehouse cronies are bailing out those bastards by giving them sweetheart deals to entice them here, and then licking their balls to get them to stay. Granted, it's still cheaper to build a car in Korea than here, but not by much. As for the rest of them, we're a brown field in the terms of economic development. And the brownest of the fields are in Alabama...it costs a fuckofalot more to build a car in Stuttgart than in Boogaloosa, Alabama; or in Nagasaki than in California. Think about that last one, by the way. Even with the expenses of building stuff in California, it's cheaper to build and sell the car here than it is to build there and sell here. See, the bastards don't have to pay the freight to move the cars across all that ocean. Or the social security costs in Japan. Or the exhorbitant costs of real estate. They can just pass that all on to us. If the property taxes in California don't bother Toyota and Honda, who make a lot of cars here, California is a goddamn third world location to these people. If it was cheaper to make the shit in Kuala Lampur than here, that's where they'd make 'em. It probably is cheaper tp make a car sold in Kuala Lampur there than here, but...not cheaper to make one there and sell it here.

So, Gail Collins made a lot of sense to me today. We need to get beyond local interests and consider the common good. For the common good of the world, America needs to be strong, prosperous and principled. We have historically had high and low points in the principled regard, but that needs to be the goal. The American dream needs to be an attainable dream. I dream of replacing Keith Richard in the Stones, but it's attainable that I can learn to play in Drop G tuning.

The Right-Wing, Sell-out-to-the-Rich Germans and Japanese movement in the south is economic treason. Collins points out that when Jim DeMint babbles about riots in the streets over folks laid off in his state, they need to be prepared for some, oh, pushback...

It’s just too easy for lawmakers to dodge the tough vote by reminding their constituents that somebody else is getting more breaks than they are...Which somebody always is. If Senator DeMint’s constituents are going to riot over a bailout for the auto industry, they’ll wind up being met by tool-and-die makers waving torches and yelling about soybean subsidies. If the lawmakers from Alabama say their constituents do not want their tax money going to bail out Michigan, the people in Michigan are going to say that they never really enjoyed paying more taxes to the federal government than their state received in aid, while Alabama got a return of $1.61 on the dollar. And anytime a representative from the Great Plains opens his mouth, the people from New York are going to point out that while every state gets the same number of senators, there are more people waiting for a subway in Brooklyn in rush hour than inhabit all of Wyoming...Any mammal can obsess about fairness...The real human trick is to get past the quid pro quo and try to focus on the common good. Set a better example, guys. It’s two years until the next election.(AXE emphasis, but no snark.)

So there we are. Shelby, DeMint, McConnell et. al are goddamn lapdogs of the rich, ignorant assholes,and, of yeah, traitors. They were the Hallaleujah chorus to Bush's assualt on the constitution, and now they are selling out their countries to the economic and geo-political advantage of other countries. They are failing to represent the best interests of the nation and of their own constituents. Sounds like Treason to Me...so, stealing a piece of lyric from their own, albeit limited,intellectual quiver...

"Treason doth never prosper, what's the reason?
Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason"

Totally batshit and bullshit...why you need to pay attention!

I spent most of my adult life getting hurt on the job. I was a soldier, and duh...it went with the turf. You have to be tough and work hurt because when it's real, you probably can't complain about nicks and cuts and sprains and aches and keep yourself and others alive. That said, except for professions like the military, police, firefighters, professional athletes and a few others, worker safety is a critical duty of employers. Now, employers are not soul-less bastards, for the most part. But, corporations are soul-less entities, which is one of the reasons Adam Smith opposed the goddamn things from the moral and ethical point of view. Corporations may do the right thing because the leadership is honorable, decent and concerned about their fellow man. They may do so because of fear of bad publicity. However, they are most likely to do so because if they don't, they'll lose horrendous amounts of money and some of the leadership will go to jail. That gets their attention.

So, when I saw this piece as an Op-ed in the Times, I got interested really quickly. Now, many of the states have stronger protections than the Feds, but others have almost none. And, OSHA is so underfunded that they have outsourced a lot of their stuff to the states. It works well in places like Massachusetts, Washington, New York and California. In places like Texas, Louisiana, Nevada not so much. So horrendous things happen and nobody knows about them...

My colleagues and I were shocked to learn that an employer who breaks the nation’s worker-safety laws can be charged with a crime only if a worker dies. Even then, the crime is a lowly Class B misdemeanor, with a maximum sentence of six months in prison. (About 6,000 workers are killed on the job each year, many in cases where the deaths could have been prevented if their employers followed the law.) Employers who maim their workers face, at worst, a maximum civil penalty of $70,000 for each violation.

The author goes on to point out that OSHA is somewhat toothless and then says that Congress should change the law. "In the 38 years since Congress enacted the Occupational Safety and Health Act, only 68 criminal cases have been prosecuted, or less than two per year, with defendants serving a total of just 42 months in jail. During that same time, approximately 341,000 people have died at work, according to data compiled from the National Safety Council and the Bureau of Labor Statistics by the A.F.L.-C.I.O."

Ok, AXE so what's the deal? Forget Congress. The Bush administration has made it clear that they have no concerns for the regulatory function of government. They obviously have no concern for the Bill of Rights, but they really don't get the body of the constitution either. Congress is explicitly given the authority to regulate interstate commerce. Under the narrowest construction, in todays world it is impossible to find a "real" business that is not engaged in some form of interstate commerce. Next, the preamble talks about "in order to establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense and promote the general welfare..." I don't believe that protecting corporations at the expense of their workers is promoting the general welfare or establishing justice. The domestic tranquility bit is something I find disturbing. We have become such sheep that we don't realize that John McCain is a Judas Goat...

More reading recommendations

One of the least examined  but most important trends taking place in the United States today is the broad decline in the status and treatment of American workers — white-collar and blue-collar workers, middle-class and low-end workers — that began nearly three decades ago, gradually gathered momentum, and hit with full force soon after the turn of this century. A profound shift has left a broad swath of the American workforce on a lower plane than in decades past, with health coverage, pension benefits, job security, workloads, stress levels, and often wages growing worse for millions of workers. That the American worker faces this squeeze in the early years of this century is particularly troubling because the squeeze has occurred while the economy, corporate profits, and worker productivity have all been growing robustly. In recent years, a disconcerting disconnect has emerged, with corporate profits soaring while workers’ wages stagnated.

Validation can be important. Steven Greenhouse has written an interesting, just published book on the screwing of the American worker -- all of us. He's a labor and business reporter for the Times, and they have excerpted the first chapter. I've already one-clicked on a reseller's for $12.50, but I recommend it strongly. If we know what's being done to us, we might actually do something about it. I don't expect that a lot of coal-miners or Wal Mart workers read the Defeatists and I'm goddamn sure that their senior management doesn't. But, the people who do look at this page and not in the misguided pursuit of porn, need to get it. I honestly don't know why we aren't rioting in the streets...

Since 1979, hourly earnings for 80 percent of American workers (those in private-sector, nonsupervisory jobs) have risen by just 1 percent, after inflation.  (Yeah, work hard and study and the old American dream will stay just out of reach --AXE) The average hourly wage was $17.71 at the end of 2007. For male workers, the average wage has actually slid by 5 percent since 1979. (Ain't feminism great! We're attacking wage discrimination in gender from both ends-marginally increasing the wages of women while hacking away at those of men.)Worker productivity, meanwhile, has climbed 60 percent. If wages had kept pace with productivity, the average full-time worker would be earning $58,000 a year; $36,000 was the average in 2007. The nation’s economic pie is growing, but corporations by and large have not given their workers a bigger piece. The squeeze on the American worker has meant more poverty, more income inequality, more family tensions, more hours at work, more time away from the kids, more families without health insurance, more retirees with inadequate pensions, and more demands on government and taxpayers to provide housing assistance and health coverage. Twenty percent of families with children under six live below the poverty line, and 22 million full-time workers do not have health insurance... the number of housing foreclosures and personal bankruptcies more than tripled in the quarter century after 1979. Economic studies show that income inequality in the United States is so great that it more closely resembles the inequality of a third world country than that of an advanced industrial nation. (AXE Emphasis)

On a marginally less depressing because more philosophical plain (Boethius did write The Consolations of Philosophy in prison awaiting execution) Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason is really well worth the time. I'd probably wait for the paperback, but the fact is that that will be a ripoff too. Books are expensive but few things that are worthwhile are cheap. She does an excellent job of dissecting the reason for the lack of reason in contemporary discussion. While she calls out the usual suspects, she shows that reason is well on the way to being undermined. I'm having to do this the old fashioned way, typing in text instead of cutting and pasting, but it's worth the effort.

There is certainly a valuable and legitimate role to be played by intellectuals -- both liberal and conservative -- in public life, and presidents and other politicians will naturally draw on the intellectual community most closely allied with their own views. But the relationship of intellectuals to power is more problematic today than it was forty years ago because of the decline in the cultural literacy on the part of the public and the public's elected representatives....there is no question that both Kennedys, unlike Bush, had the brains and the intellectual background to understand what the eggheads were talking about...There is nothing in George Bush's record to suggest that he has ever questioned the expertise or the judgment of his most conservative house intellectuals -- or that he would ever hire or keep anyone on staff who disagreed with his views...The value of intellectuals' contributions to government depends entirely on the capacity of their elected boss to absorb and assess not only the ideas but the quality of the evidence present to him by people who...have to been elected to represent anyone. (AXE emphasis)

Basic needs, unmet and unattended

Someplace in Marx, I believe, he states a goal of socialism as "to each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities." Or, of course, words to that effect.  If nothing else, it appears that the Edwards campaign had that as a focus, and Batboy's bitterness comment touches a nerve. The fact is that in todays America, people are disposable, and none so disposable as the American worker. As people talk about the party of Lincoln, imagine how he would react to this. The Republican Party was founded on the idea of freeing the slaves both as a moral imperative and as a way of ensuring jobs. Its roots were in the Whigs and in the Know-Nothings. It was a protectionist party aimed at salvaging the soul of the nation. Lincoln would be sounding a lot like Edwards, and in his melancholy  way, echoing Batboy.

Hourly workers had come a long way from the days when employers and unions negotiated a way for them to earn the prizes of the middle class — houses, cars, college educations for their children, comfortable retirements. Even now a residual of that golden age remains, notably in the auto industry. But here, too, wages are falling below the $20-an-hour threshold — $41,600 annually — that many experts consider the minimum income necessary to put a family of four into the middle class.

The Times has a series of articles this morning on the screwing of the American worker. This article focuses on one issue -- the loss of jobs paying $20 or more. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that $20 is the minimum to put a family of four in the middle class. I frankly don't see that, by the way. Both earners making $20 an hour is probably needed. It points out that the UAW first achieved this for its members, and is currently working with the manufacturers to preserve jobs at the expense of wages.

This time the auto workers weren’t first. They ratified a practice that had spread to tire makers, heavy-equipment manufacturers, parts plants, groceries, retailers and longshoremen, diluting older workers’ resistance by preserving their status, while lowering earning power for new hires. Two tiers is one tactic. Another is filling middle-income jobs with temporary workers earning less. Add outsourcing to the list, and the off-shoring of such middle-income work as computer programming and radiology. Then there are the manufacturers who close a union plant and shift production to a nonunion one, often in the South but also in the Midwest.

Crusader AXE is sitting second chair, whatever that really means, on a contract negotiation. Under the Service Contract Act, we have to pay at least the prevailing wage at Ginormous Inc. Catch 1 is that whatever we negotiate is the prevailing wage. Catch 2 is that damn few of our employees are at the $20 an hour rate. Catch 3 and Catch 4 lie in the government controls what we have to spend, and they are trying to force us to do a lot of oddball takeaways including doing some things that are questionable legally, while holding the line at a 3% average annual increase over the life of our contract with them. Catch 5 is that the cost of living in the Crossroads of Opportunity has gone up exponentially in the past 4 years. Nobody factored in $4 a gallon gas. Now, I handle the dynamic tension I feel between my beliefs that we need to pay these guys more -- and the exempt employees too, but that's a personal problem -- and my job to help get the best deal we can for the employees through anger and bitterness. Err, that is, the practice of seeking calm and maintaining a positive focus. That's Catch 6, because the only way we can get them what they want is to lay off a lot of people. We can't discuss that with the workers, because that would constitute an unfair labor practice, although we've been pretty blunt with the union negotiators. I suspect they don't believe us, which is Catch 7.  All told, Catch 22 - just do the math.

The American worker is stuck in this morass, struggling to get out and heading toward the quicksand. Meanwhile, at the top, the CEO is doing incredibly better than the worker. I'm not going to equate the jobs, of course -- but, an Executive making $25M makes an hourly rate of $120192. Now, I am no longer anything that looks like a Christian, but the folks advocating additional tax cuts for the rich, eliminating the "death tax" and all the rest of that crap tend to wrap themselves in Jesus, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. And, because we are idiots, they throw in Reagan who, if their metaphysics is right, is currently roasting in the dumb-ass section of hell. Jesus said something supposedly along the lines of "the laborer is worthy of his hire!" Lincoln was fairly clear, although the thing he was looking at was slavery, "the house divided against itself cannot stand."  Roosevelt was even more direct, especially when he was running as the Progressive Party, the BULL MOOSE, nominee for a second elected term.

To destroy this invisible government , to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day....'This country belongs to the people. Its resources, its business, its laws, its institutions, should be utilized, maintained, or altered in whatever manner will best promote the general interest.This assertion is explicit...

While politicians prattle about the Homeland, the real agenda of many of them lies in protecting those who pay to put them in power and keep them their. Meanwhile, we drift aimlessly, damning each other and babbling about bitterness when we should be mad as hell and slamming these bastards on the economic front. The Times story had this marvelous picture:

These guys are at the end of their shift in a steel mill waiting to do a grip and grin and possibly hear something from Batboy. They're tired, dirty and they represent all of us who are not CEOs and don't make $120K an hour. They're not off to Pilates class or going to stop off for a $40 a bottle Chateau du Musk Oxen or whatever. They're going home to some Mac and Cheese, some Rolling Rock and maybe a ball game on cable. And, the tragedy is that no one is looking out for them, and by extension, for the rest of us. Bitterness? Rage would be infinitely more appropriate. Or at least some real expression of irony...where's Johnnie Cash when we need him?

Why I'm optimistic about the future...

From Ken Layne at Wonkette:

Watch and listen. Most trenchant analysis yet of government and democracy in the 21st century at the end of video.

Why my master plan is probably going to fail and go tits up...

It's not a spotlight, Willard. It's a car...

Despite the urging of Crusader AXE, I do not believe that the people of Michigan are going to select Rodent Romney as the recipient of their delegates. It's really simple -- they have absolutely no reason to like the guy. Huckleberry is right on one thing -- I can hang out with this guy who hangs out with people who make more money in a year than I'll make in my life or I can hang out with Chuck Norris' buddy who, hell, might bring Chuck Norris.

Slate has a pretty accurate assessment --

On the campaign trail, Romney has presented himself alternately as a Christian Coalition ideologue and as a pragmatic, can-do corporate fixer-upper in the mold of Chrysler savior Lee Iacocca. He pledges to do for America what he did for corporations when he ran Bain Capital's private equity business. But these days, private equity is a dirty word for many Michigan voters—even the Republican members of the managerial class. Private equity doesn't signify profits and fortunes. It signifies Cerberus, the new owner of Chrysler, which is presiding over huge job cuts. That's probably why Mike Huckabee's decided to turn his dig at Romney—"most Americans want their next president to remind them of the guy they work with, not the guy who laid them off"—into a television advertisement. --

Now, first of all it's impossible to channel Jerry Falwell and Lee Iaocca. Not happening. Next, the Chrysler cattle drive just added cow chips to the main drag - the average Michiganer looks at Bobby Nardelli and Mitt Romney and thinks about deer hunting. For Bobsled Bob and Rodent. Not happening. Next, he blows up at a question and then says in response to a question -- oddly unscripted, how'd that happen? I wonder if Bill Ford asked it? -- at the Detroit Rich Dickheads Club about how exactly Jesus and Henry Ford I are going to return and lead the state to the promised land of post-industrial relevance, that "I'm not going to read my speech again."  Ana Marie Cox of Swampland save us having to listen to the ruling class lackey. She admits some head scratching in the press about what the Willie the Weasel is talking about and uncovers this gem...

"First, we have to tackle the problems head on. If I am your President, in my first 100 days, I will roll up my sleeves, and I will personally bring together industry, labor, Congressional and state leaders to develop a plan to rebuild America's automotive leadership. It will be one that works for Michigan and that works for the American taxpayers." … "From legacy costs, to health care costs, to increased CAFE standards, to embedded taxes, Detroit can only thrive if Washington is an engaged partner, not a disinterested observer. The plan should include increases in funding for automotive related research and new tax benefits including making the research and development tax credit permanent."

In order to tackle something head on, you have to get out in front of it. The auto makers are chasing the Japanese, the Koreans, the Germans and each other in every decreasing circles. There are some interesting things out there this year, but the lead is not going back to Detroit. His response to the problem is to have Dick Cheney chair a committee...and, then give the auto companies tax credits. I actually am in favor of tax credits for a lot of stuff as opposed to tax deductions, by the way. Tax credits reduce your tax; deductions reduce your taxable income. If Ford gets a tax deduction of $10M, it saves $3.5M in federal income taxes. However, if it gets a tax credit, it shaves $10M off it's tax bill. And, then it probably exports the great new US technology to somebody else and the cars are built in Malaysia or some goddamn place.

So, we have two cliche's that are absurd in context and a give-away to the wealthy. Helluva plan.  Helluva guy? 

I'm busy but...

Point the first -- I'm not sure where Janet Maslin of the Times is coming from but she's concerned about Dana Milbank's new book, Homo Politicus. In her review, she says: “Homo Politicus” ought to be a solemn book, but it reeks of unseemly glee. Although Dana Milbank, The Washington Post’s “Washington Sketch” columnist, has collected a rich compendium of astoundingly ill-advised acts and statements on the parts of public officials, he fails to register the threat posed by such ineptitude. Instead he treats greed, egomania, ruthlessness, corruption, stupidity and extreme feats of partisanship lightly. (From the office of Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma: “Mars Has Global Warming Despite Absence of S.U.V.s.”) It’s as if he thinks these things are funny." Well, duh. They are. Asking Milbank to get moralistic about this stuff is like asking HL Mencken to do the same. Not happening. Dana has shown some signs of outrage as a guest commentator on Countdown, but that's not who he is. I suggest that she read some of Dulcinea Dowd and maybe she'll get the picture. Molly Ivins comes to mind. Now, Molly never really wrote a grand scheme of things sort of deal, but she never pulled punches. Maybe she ought to read some Carlylse, some Churchill, some Robert Scheer. Or, maybe she's being fake moralistic, and really gets the picture. The way to hold all these assholes accountable is to first make them obviously ridiculous. They largely are -- Hillary Clinton and Rudy Guiliani are front-runners because people know their names not because anyone has paid that much attention to their positions. Bush is a legacy president but comparisons to John Quincy Adams are absurd. Adams was an intellectual and statesman who made the mistake of trusting people to get him elected in the House and ran afoul of Andy "by God!" Jackson. Bush's puppetmasters fixed the system. Anyway, I've already done my pre-order.

Point B. The Times solemnly announces that Fehr and Selig are going to meet to discuss steroids and growth hormone. That's nice. Irrelevant, but nice. For this HR Executive up to his nose in labor negotiations, this is a marvelous example of why unions are making themselves irrelevant. The impact on baseball is interesting, but the impact on the players will be different. Clemens won a lot of games when he got older and left Boston and probably started juicing; it's intriguing to me that there was a lot of public speculation about Bonds but not about Clemens; racism lives. On the other hand, Clemens had a crazily intense training regimen while Bonds didn't until he got older. In the meantime, some weasel announces that he's on the list but only took the stuff once. That is about as absurd an admission as Clinton's "didn't inhale" crap. One shot of steroids would do absolutely nothing; in much the same way, Andy Petite's claim of four uses of growth hormone is equally silly. If I could afford growth hormone, I'd bathe in the shit. Unlike steroids, it's incredibly expensive. Even for a star pitcher and baseball player, it would be noticable.

They haven't tried R. Kelly for child pornography yet? And, his tour bus gets stopped by the police for speeding in UTAH? Rap music for Mormons but a pedophile. (Ok, alleged pedophile...however, listen to Chris Rock on this guy; he's probably the real thing.

doo-wop (that thing it is you do?)

shorter Atrios:

                                    TREEHORN
                         People forget,

              He taps his forehead with one finger.

                        that the brain is the
                        biggest erogenous zone--

                                    DUDE
                        On you, maybe.

                                    TREEHORN
                        Of course, you have to take the good with
                        the bad.  The new technology permits
                        us to do very exciting things in
                        interactive erotic software.  Wave
                        of the future, Dude.  100% electronic.

                                    DUDE
                        Hmmm.  Well, I still jerk off
                        manually.

we here at Defeatist Central have flung ourselves all willy-nilly onto our swords on many an occasion.  it's fun!  now I run mostly on intuition, and four things stick out to me about the defeatists in our midst: 1.if what you're doing, blogging, is not fun or fulfilling (something) in some way, then why are you doing it?  2.show me how exactly blogging has changed or upset the structures that bind us.  3.show me how you've infiltrated the existing structures and morphed them from within (via the internet, like arthroscopically and shit).  4.what sort of sad person does not do this for fun, and thinks this is the new means for ch ch ch changes!? (sing it) 

now, there is nothing as satisfying or enjoyable as being completely and utterly useless.  that is simple and resistant anarchy:

That's when [Fry Pan Jack] told me - you know, he'd been tramping since 1927 -
he said, "I told myself in '27, if I cannot dictate the conditions of my labor,
I will henceforth cease to work."  Hah!  You don't have to go to college to
figure these things out, no sir!  He said, "I learned when I was young that the
only true life I had was the life of my brain.  But if it's true the only real
life I have is the life of my brain, what sense does it make to hand that brain
to somebody for eight hours a day for their particular use on the presumption
that at the end of the day they will give it back in an unmutilated condition?"
Fat chance!

but to sit up at attention in one's barcalounger and bellow across the tubes that this is simply not the case, and to whack those that are pointing out a simple truth, and to settle back into the chair, somehow satisfied, is well...sad.

It's rather odd to spend all your time following political news and blogs if the only reason to do it is to provide justification for your view that All Is Lost. Just go out and have some fun instead.

I don't know what he does for work, but I work tangentially for a local government, which is constantly pointing out to me how hopeless everything is, because even at this level, it's bad, real bad, and if I didn't have this to entertain myself, I might just go insane. 

so entertain myself I will.  and we do.  one of the best scenes, I think, from the favorite of all favorite Defeatist movies, TBL, is this:

                                    CHIEF
                         Mr. Treehorn draws a lot of water in
                         this town, You don't draw shit Lebowski.
                         Now we got a nice quiet little beach community
                         here, and I aim to keep it nice and quiet.
                         So let me make something plain.  I don't like you
                         sucking around bothering our citizens,
                         Lebowski.  I don't like your jerk-
                         off name, I don't like your jerk-off
                         face, I don't like your jerk-off
                         behavior, and I don't like you, jerk-
                         off. Do I make myself clear?

               The Dude stares absently.

                                     DUDE
                         I'm sorry, I wasn't listening.

if there is one thing the internet and blogs have helped the "royal we" sharpen, cultivate and hone, it is the art of the Fuck You.  which I think is the greatest thing ever, because it is one of the best tools we have for upsetting the powers that be.  (from fruitcake to f-bombs and back again, baby!)  I can probably find a fake picture of Bush humping two midget twins on the internet somewhere, and I can also find amazing essays and posts that tickle the best parts of my brain, that inspire and invoke and sadden.  (maybe we're making rebel music)  both of these products of blogging do in fact shape and manipulate the political, if that is the intention.  both are as useful as they are useless.  but, what is the utility, or the effectiveness, of blogging, or for that matter, a blogger?  feh!  not one damn thing I do or write on the internet is going to un-President the President, bring the troops home, dismantle our government, or bring about any noticeable change to the machine.  a million of us chirping away in the tubes won't either.  what we're here for, really, is to commiserate, to backslap, to create a little, to share, and to maybe, you know, learn something in the process.  because no matter how hard we try, when we close the browser window, we go back to the world as we know it. 

nothing is as defeatist as thinking otherwise.