You can go here for a great excerpt from Will Bunch's excellent new book on the kooky right--including a scoop on the bizarre story of how an ex-diet scammer now uses fear to get rich through Glenn Beck's website.

Below is a video about the book starring the author. I'm sharing because I couldn't be a bigger fan of Will's work--and from my experience, if you can get both Beck and Limbaugh to attack you (as you'll see in this video), you must be doing something right (or left). Buy it!:

The most recent issue of Lonestar Music Magazine is available online. Check out the article I contributed on Javi Garcia as well as the rest of the magazine:

Here.

Weather is really strange.

There are five named storms roaming the Atlantic right now. The biggest, hurricane Earl, is about to scrape the Outer Banks of North Caolina and could even pose a threat to New York City by Friday afternoon.

Tropical storm Fiona looks destined to strike Bermuda. Tropical storm Gaston is foaming up the central Atlantic and a new depression that should get its name by the end of the day is beginning to percolate off Cape Verde in Africa.

And then there's Danielle, which has been wandering the Atlantic around Bermuda like a drunk hooker. First a tropical storm, then a hurricane, then a tropical storm and now again, a hurricane. Danielle and Fiona have both been kept away from the coast of the US by a Bermuda high that's been sitting over the northeast, which has brought its own troubles to cities like New York, Boston, and DC.

Netanyahu, Obama and Abbas

Der Spiegel

Chris Nelson on Obama's big speech:

OBAMA IRAQ WAR SPEECH...the flat truth, but...
"PERSPECTIVE" George Packer deconstructs speech & war

SUMMARY: much of the news today is so transcendentally awful that it likely colors our reaction to the President's speech last night, and to the world situation itself.

Commentary on Obama's War, below. First...

What is there to say about a pistol-wielding "environmental activist" with a long record of harassing the Discovery Channel here in DC...the Discovery Channel, for gods' sake...for refusing his diatribes about "filthy human babies"?

Imagine a nation where a business owner apologizes to his employees for harming them?

Welcome to Chile!

Contrast that with the ham-handed way Massey Energy handled the West Virginia mine collapse in April of this year. Or the International Coal Groups' handling of 2006's Sago Mine Disaster. Or Murray Energy, the Crandall Mine collapse in 2007. And those are just in the past five years.

Michael Collins

I just read the presidents big speech tonight and it struck me. There were some key lines left out of the speech. You may have had the same response. For the sake of clarity and fairness, I've tried to reconstruct the missing lines. I'm sure that the omissions were just an accident. Or maybe that Robert Gibbs is up to his old tricks again. My insertions are in italics. They follow the president's words from the official White House transcript. White House, August 31, 2010 Here goes.

THE PRESIDENT: Good evening. Tonight, I’d like to talk to you about the end of our combat mission in Iraq, the ongoing security challenges we face, and the need to rebuild our nation here at home. But before I do that, we need a moment of truth. The Iraq war was based on a deliberate lie involving the White House distorting the National intelligence estimate on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). The report got it wrong on WMD. There were none. But it concluded that the only way the nonexistent WMD would be used against the United States was in retaliation for a US attack on Iraq that threatened Saddam Hussein. By deleting this information, the Bush-Cheney White House justified a preemptive invasion without any basis, a crime under international law that our nation helped establish after World War II.

Impressive indictment of Wall Street by Main Street

"Since that time the housing market has literally crashed with all signs pointing downward. The 2nd Quarter GDP was revised down. The unemployment numbers, both monthly and initial claims, were dramatically worse than expected. Regional economic surveys, such as the Philly Fed Index, have disappointed.

"The 'dumb money' didn't buy into the false hype. The 'smart money' did. Now the 'smart' money is stuck with these overpriced assets. What does this mean? It means that there is likely to be another Flash Crash in our not so distant future, driven by a lack of liquidity when the dumb money doesn't put a floor under the market, except this time it won't bounce right back.

"It won't bounce back until Washington decides to chase the crooks, mobsters, and thieves from Wall Street. The government must save capitalism from itself." The Revenge of Main Street, midtowng

Ever wondered what the directors at the nation's top think tanks make? Well, wonder no more, Alan McDuffee has the goods:

The Heritage Foundation, led since 1977 by Ed Feulner. Salary: $947,999.

The American Enterprise Institute, led since 2009 by Arthur Brooks, who was a business and government professor at Syracuse University. Salary of his predecessor: $675,000.

The Council on Foreign Relations, led since 2003 by Richard Haass, head of policy planning under Secretary of State Colin Powell. Salary: $664,000.

If there was any real world accountability none of these people would have jobs. But hey, that's the free market at work for you!

I just love this quote:

"Changes in the industry have forced some newspapers to fade or even close," said Clark Gilbert, Deseret News CEO and president. "At the Deseret News, we choose to lead and innovate."

How is doing the exact same thing that every other paper in the country is doing, leading and innovating?

Instead of slashing costs, cutting core staff and a core of the knowledge base, why not try something different? Something truly innovative, like accepting lower, more realistic earnings? Why not invest money in your paper? Expand it by hiring local bloggers for key news beats and paying them a living wage? How about working with the community you serve to increase the quality of reporting? Instead of doing the same with less, why not do most with more?

I guess because it is easier to make the "hard decisions," than it is to make the right ones.

Just another example of how misplaced our priorities are:

in collegiate athletics market forces are artificially influenced by several factors: (a) no monetary compensation is paid to the workforce, the athletes; (b) intercollegiate sports benefit from substantial tax privileges; (c) there are no shareholders demanding dividend distributions or boards demanding higher profits; (d) athletic departments are nourished by university and state financial support; and (e) coaches’ salaries are negotiated by athletic directors whose own worth rises with the salaries of their employees.

So, let's unwrap this, item by item: first, exploitation of labor. Second: no real taxes paid. Third: no accountability. Fourth: the enterprises have extensive state subsidies taking state tax dollars away from those who need them. Fifth: massive conflicts of interest.

Behold the power of the free market!

Sounds just like Wall Street, if you ask me.

. . . does an about face? I wonder if all the wingnuts that previously cited him will change their tunes also?

Last week, to show a poet using the verbal to try to do the visual, I posted a poem by Howard Nemerov on the paintings of Vermeer. Today, as promised, here is another poet trying to pull off something similar with Vermeer. But in this case, it's Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, who has also taken stabs at doing this with the work of Thoreau and Gogol, as well as with the music of Grieg and Schubert. Here is his riff on Veermeer.

Vermeer
No sheltered world . . . on the other side of the wall the
noise begins
the tavern begins
with laughter and bickering, rows of teeth, tears, the din
of bells
and the mentally disordered brother-in-law, the bearer
of death that everyone must tremble for.
The great explosion and the delayed tramp of rescuers
the boats that strut at anchor, the money that creeps into
the pocket of the wrong person
demands piled on demands
Cusps of gaping red flowers that sweat premonitions of
war
Away from there and straight through the wall into the
bright studio
into the second that goes on living for hundreds of years.
Paintings titled The Music Lesson
or Woman in Blue Reading a Letter --
she's in her eighth month, two hearts kicking inside her.
On the wall behind her hangs a wrinkled map of Terra
Incognita.
Breathe calmly . . . An unknown blue material is nailed
to the chair.
The gold upholstery tacks flew in with unheard-of speed
and stopped abruptly
as if they had never been anything but stillness.
The ears ring with either depth or height.
It's the pressure from the other side of the wall
that leaves every fact suspended
and holds the brush steady.
It hurts to go through walls, it makes you sick
but it's necessary.
The world is one. But walls . . .
And the wall is part of yourself --
Whether you know it or not it's the same for everyone,
everyone except little children. No walls for them.
The clear sky has set itself on a slant against the wall.
It's like a prayer to emptiness.
And the emptiness turns its face to us
and whispers,
"I am not empty, I am open."

– Tomas Tranströmer, 1986

A review of Keith L. Shimko, The Iraq Wars and America's Military Revolution. Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Over the last twenty years, the US has engaged in wars in Iraq (twice), the Balkans, Somalia, and Afghanistan. It has done so with a fearsome military that has availed itself of technological advancements since the seventies. Shimko looks at this “revolution in military affairs” (RMA) in the context of military change over the years and the recent wars the US has been in.

The US military went hi-tech before the term was widely used. Over the last forty years, precision-guided munitions (chiefly those delivered by airpower), surveillance systems, communications equipment, and other technologies have been adopted and their lethal capabilities have been demonstrated in several conflicts. This RMA has offered the promise of shorter wars that use smaller forces and inflict far fewer civilian casualties than in previous wars. If that last part seems dubious, compare Baghdad in 2003 and Berlin fifty-eight years earlier. Baghdad was pockmarked; Berlin was flattened.

Is this RMA truly a revolution? That is, do these changes constitute a military revolution comparable to the one effected by the French when they fielded huge armies against enemies of the Revolution or the one Germany set loose on Poland and France in World War Two? Shimko believes it does but gives fair treatment of those who disagree – so fair that a reader might come to agree with the other school. But that debate is one for conclaves at political science meetings, not for policy makers or concerned citizens.

. . . a deal: If you feel that strongly that Obama has done the right thing and has managed politics in the last year and nine months then you will most assuredly take the challenge. It's time to put your money where your mouth is, so to speak.

Also, to prove my good faith: I'll vote for the Democrats in this election.

So, here's the deal: if the Democrats break-even or gain seats in the House and break even in the Senate, I will go out with my shotgun (20 gauge) and shoot a crow. I'll come in, cook it up, and eat it. And I will post the photos.

If the Democrats don't break even in both houses you get to eat the crow and post the photos.

Any takers? Care to put your money where your mouth is?

. . . the hippies, once again.

The Brunette and I drove out to the Hill Country this weekend, passing through Johnson City, the home of President Johnson. In the early thirties this region was one of extreme rural poverty. Not your typical Southern poverty, however, as African-Americans have never much been in evidence here. The Hill Country was a region of mostly German and Scotch-Irish extraction. The Hill Country has always been a strange place, open to progressive economic ideas, but a touch xenophobic and racist. LBJ and other New Deal Democrats had a great deal of success here. The New Deal Social Contract lasting here until the early eighties. I say all this as a semaphore of sorts to my argument.

As we drove through Johnson I saw an old, fifties-style sign that read, "Johnson City, Home of the Pedernales Electric Co-op. Most people don't realize but it was LBJ and the New Deal that brought electricity to these areas in the 30s. Fresh farm to market roads, as well. And many other government projects that improved people's lives. That the region was (and remains) a touch xenophobic and racist, didn't matter. "Good economic policy," as I told The Brunette, "real benefits they could see is what made these people vote Democratic for almost two generations."

More after the jump.

At Saturday's rally, attended by dozens of people, Glenn Beck claimed the mantle of "religious leader".

Behind the scenes, he has worked to form what he calls the "Black Robe Regiment," a coalition of Christian leaders to foster Christian values in American society. Sounds kinda icky, almost like the KKK in a photo negative.

Or Hitler's Sturmabteilung, the Brownshirts or volunteer stormtroopers of the Nazi party.

Here's Glenn Smith on the Huffington Post:

A mysterious fire last Friday destroys all of the voting machines in Harris County (Houston), Texas. Arson investigators have not yet issued an opinion. Meanwhile, a well-funded right-wing group emerges in Houston and begins raising unfounded allegations of widespread voter fraud. A video on their website pictures only people of color when it talks of voter fraud. White people are shown talking patriotically about the need for a million vigilantes to suppress illegal votes.

Details here.

You know, if "restoring honor" has anything to do with threatening violence against the President and wanting to "shoot illegals on site."

Welcome to Glenn Beck's world:

Two score and seven years ago the nation’s dispossessed thronged the Lincoln Memorial to hear Martin Luther King define the struggle for African-American civil rights.

Today it was the turn of the nation’s disenfranchised to gather at the same place, lamenting their lost supremacy as a superior race, and longing for a prophet to lead them back to the mountain top. That prophet, America's self-anointed Jeremiah, was FOX News entertainer Glenn Beck.

Glenn Beck, a man who only ten years ago was wallowing in drug addiction, is a reformed sinner who has seen the light and believes he has a God-given obligation to bring America out of the wilderness. Whether God has anything to do with Glenn Beck’s mission is subject to personal belief, but no one can doubt that Glenn Beck has someone as powerful as God behind him – Rupert Murdoch.

So, you cut back on your lifestyle; performed a so un-Greek personal austerity reset but your credit card balance is still creeping up; or perhaps you are slowly burning through your savings; or you are at the end of the line; abandon ship. Whatever, you have a lot of company out there.

Why is it so hard to make ends meet these days? The days of living high on the credit hog are over and we all have to get small but in the end, we still have to make ends meet; we have to pay for food, pay for utilities, buy gas, etc. How to make that work?

We all bought a lot of stuff during those days of easy credit. Debt driven demand drove up the value of lots of things. Homes increased in value so much that they became a kind of income harvested through a home equity line of credit. Autos got big and powerful again making them unaffordable to buy and operate now that we have to live within our means. Cell phones replaced land lines and cost a lot more; especially when everyone in the family has to have one. Maybe you have a home that you cannot sell and you are stuck living 20 miles or more from your workplace and your car is fast reaching the point when you will need a new one just to get to work.

Michael Collins
(Satire)

A restaurant opening in Berlin offers gourmets something completely different, human flesh on the main menu. The restaurant aiming to serve man is called FLIME. The web page boasts that, "Flime is the first restaurant in the world to serve you a menu of original Wari tradition." What tradition would that be? It's the tradition of Amazonian cannibalism practiced through 1960 by the Wari culture. (Image)

Vanderbilt University researchers found that members of the Wari culture, located in the Peruvian Amazon, would eat their enemies in battle as, "an intentional expression of anger and disdain for the enemy." They also ate their loved ones as a part of the burial ritual. This was, according to the researchers, "done out of affection and respect for the dead person and as a way to help survivors cope with their grief." Researchers mentioned that a chalky aftertaste is frequently reported by some ritual participants.

Sabbath eve, August 27, 2010

Corn harvest is near done and the end can’t come soon enough. I am seriously considering not planting corn again as a commercial crop. Like many that have studied sustainable agriculture, I decided to get away from genetically modified grains. So the corn we planted was non-Roundup-ready corn. Not only non-Roundup-ready corn, but also a non-hybrid. The idea was to grow corn from which I could keep back my own seed.

Our fields lie along the banks of two rivers, the San Marcos and the Guadalupe. We had an unusually wet spring and early summer this year, a good thing. Actually, too much of a good thing. Every time we cultivated the field it rained and some of the weeds survived the disruption. After the third pass through the field, we had a single day rain of ten inches and much of our field land was flooded, particularly the 120 acre field bordering the San Marcos. By the time the ground had dried, the corn was too tall to cultivate again.