My apologies, Steve, for jumping in ahead of you, but I was up early this morning and started the day with this:

He's got a new album out too, with good reviews, and headlines this one which sounds pretty good. More apologies for the stupid ad that precedes it.

Bad Mom:

Raised in a $1.5 million Barrington Hills, Ill., home by their attorney father, two grown children have spent the last two years pursuing a unique lawsuit against their mom for "bad mothering" that alleges damages caused when she failed to buy toys for one and sent another a birthday card he didn’t like.

The alleged offenses include failing to take her daughter to a car show, telling her then 7-year-old son to buckle his seat belt or she would contact police, "haggling" over the amount to spend on party dresses and calling her daughter at midnight to ask that she return home from celebrating homecoming.

Last week, at which point the court record stood about a foot tall, an Illinois appeals court dismissed the case, finding that none of the mother’s conduct was "extreme or outrageous." To rule in favor of her children, the court found, "could potentially open the floodgates to subject family childrearing to ... excessive judicial scrutiny and interference."

It's begun in earnest. Flying bullshit. From simple torquing of the truth and subtle grey-shade values to out-and-out lies, the the Rhetoric of Wrong has become the earmark of this and every other presidential campaign.

In a story this morning deconstructing some of the effluent that emanated from the Iowa caucus, Romney and Bachmann, among others, show themselves for what they are: willow trees that bend away from every factual breeze that comes near them.

I believe virtually nothing I read about these people and what they claim any more. And it's only just started.

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.

--Philip K. Dick

Up until today, I have not yet uttered one bad word about Obama. No one who followed the vile Bush/Cheny combine could piss me off...until now.

An editorial in today's NYT:

The Obama administration has long been bumbling along in the footsteps of its predecessor when it comes to sacrificing Americans’ basic rights and liberties under the false flag of fighting terrorism. Now the Obama team seems ready to lurch even farther down that dismal road than George W. Bush did.

Instead of tightening the relaxed rules for F.B.I. investigations — not just of terrorism suspects but of pretty much anyone — that were put in place in the Bush years, President Obama’s Justice Department is getting ready to push the proper bounds of privacy even further.

The rest is here. It's not good.

Approximately 50% of the time Maureen Dowd hits the keyboard, I emphatically disagree with her. But today's column falls into the "Amen" category. Regarding the self-flagellation many Americans are indulging in over the elimination of Osama Bin Laden, and some international finger-waggling as well, she writes:

In another inane debate last week, many voices suggested that decapitating the head of a deadly terrorist network was some sort of injustice.

Taking offense after Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, said he was “much relieved” at the news of Bin Laden’s death, Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, posted the Twitter message: “Ban Ki-moon wrong on Osama bin Laden: It’s not justice for him to be killed even if justified; no trial, conviction.”

I leave it to subtler minds to parse the distinction between what is just and what is justified.

and:

Christophe Barbier, editor of the centrist French weekly L’Express, warned: “To cry one’s joy in the streets of our cities is to ape the turbaned barbarians who danced the night of Sept. 11.”

Those who celebrated on Sept. 11 were applauding the slaughter of American innocents. When college kids spontaneously streamed out Sunday night to the White House, ground zero and elsewhere, they were the opposite of bloodthirsty: they were happy that one of the most certifiably evil figures of our time was no more.

Morally and operationally, this was counterterrorism at its finest.

We have nothing to apologize for.

Yes America, you are too stupid to even cross the street listening to music, so we'll make it Illegal.

try these one-liners

"So do you guys split up all the confiscated loot after a big haul over the weekend?"

"Wow, where were you in Junior High when I couldn't even find a girl to kiss me?"

"There may be a fiver in this for you, provided you give me a little more friction and a smile."

"Let me know if you pick up a whiff of swamp ass while you're snooping around down there."

"No, that's not a cucumber, but thank you for the squeeze and compliment."

Grim optimist that I am, I keep hoping to find signs that the national paranoia that inspired the Patriot Act, that turned air travel into a nightmare, that turns a U.S. border crossing for Americans and foreigners alike into a Gestapo-like encounter--in short, a paranoia that has eaten the spirit of this country alive, is in remission.

It's not.

This, courtesy of Garrison Keillor & The Writer's Almanac:

On this day in 1936, the Dust Bowl heat wave was so intense that Kansas and Nebraska experienced their all-time hottest temperatures, unbroken to this day. In Alton, Kansas, the temperature was 121 degrees, and in Minden, Nebraska, it was 118.

During the summer of 1936, a total of 15 states recorded all-time hottest temperatures that still have not been broken. And not all of the states were in the Dust Bowl region. Earlier in the month, Runyon, New Jersey, was 110, Moorhead, Minnesota, hit 114, and Martinsburg, West Virginia, 112. By early August, Ozark, Arkansas, and Seymour, Texas, had hit 120 degrees.

The term "Dust Bowl" had first been used on April 15, 1935, the day after "Black Sunday," when dust storms were so bad on the Great Plains that the sky was totally black during the day and there were winds up to 60 miles per hour. The term "dust bowl" was coined by Robert Geiger, a reporter and sports fan, and he might have been comparing the bowl-like formation of the Great Plains, ringed by mountains, to the appearance of the arenas for the Rose Bowl or Orange Bowl. He used it offhandedly — two days later, he referred to the same region as "the dust belt." But "dust bowl" stuck.

In The Grapes of Wrath (1939), John Steinbeck wrote: "And then the dispossessed were drawn west — from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico; from Nevada and Arkansas, families, tribes, dusted out, tractored out. Carloads, caravans, homeless and hungry; twenty thousand and fifty thousand and a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand. They streamed over the mountains, hungry and restless — restless as ants, scurrying to find work to do — to lift, to push, to pull, to pick, to cut — anything, any burden to bear, for food. The kids are hungry. We got no place to live. Like ants scurrying for work, for food, and most of all for land."

Don Ford writes frequently, both here and in his new book Ruminations From the Garden, about a world that will soon be without oil.

While the rest of us bury our heads in the sand, a few people are getting ready.

I went to a dinner party this past weekend and the conversation devolved into an argument about who was the most culpable for the health care crisis--the insurance companies or the drug companies. Points were made that each side was the root of all this evil.

I remained neutral and just listened but found myself wondering what my Agonist confreres would have to add.

Whaddya think?

According to today's Wapo, it seems that a number of individuals claiming to represent Australia's aboriginal people feel their oxen have been gored by Russian ice dancers Oksana Domnina and Maxim Shabalin who have adopted some sort of sartorial mutation that mocks the native costume. Questions ensue.

The list of cultures that have been ransacked in the name of style is long and includes African American, Jewish, Indian, Caribbean, Native American, Middle Eastern, African and so on. Is anyone is off-limits?

You are a subculture unto yourselves.

This lady's crazy (in a good way). Worth a read every other day.

Porcine felines here

Several provisions of The Patriot Act are scheduled to expire on January 1. This piece is a fairly comprehensive story on the three-way battle among the House, the Senate and the Oval Office on who wants to retain what. Several good links included.

...same as the old Boss."

"Chances are fading for an expansive and searching review of the USA Patriot Act, which was the whole point of having some of its central provisions expire. The Judiciary Committee’s deliberations are scheduled to resume on Thursday. It is one more critical chance to add missing civil liberties and privacy protections, address known abuses and trim excesses that contribute nothing to making America safer."
NYT Editorial

Years pass. The number and frequency of my posts here (or anywhere else) grow smaller. This is why: nothing has changed. No matter how strident our protests, no matter the degree of indignation, the Powers That Be grow more alike every day, just like the pigs in Animal Farm.

Remember when the Democrats took power in congress? How happy we all were? How we were all "NOW we'll see some regieme change around here..."?

I check in every once in awhile with the folks over at Lawsuit Abuse just for the entertainment value. Ever since I joined The Agonist, I've held on to the tagline "Lord! What fools these Mortals be!"...a quick read of some of the lawsuits in progress will confirm for you that truer words were never spoken. To wit:

Tourist sues hotel, claiming swimming pool got daughter pregnant

Man sues Burning Man festival after tripping and falling into fire

Man sues Apple, claiming iPod equipped to receive threats from Mafia

First, suffer through this one:

Five hundred thousand dollars — the amount President Obama wants to set as the top pay for banking executives whose firms accept government bailout money — seems like a lot, and it is a lot. To many people in many places, it is a princely sum to live on. But in the neighborhoods of New York City and its suburban enclaves where successful bankers live, half a million a year can go very fast...
For more than a few of the New York-based financial executives who would have their pay limited are men whose identities are entwined with living a certain way in a certain neighborhood west of Third Avenue: a life of private schools, summer houses and charity galas that only a seven-figure income can stretch to cover.

Now swallow this:

Welcome to the American dream in high reverse. Lehigh Acres is one of countless sprawling exurbs that the housing boom drastically reshaped, and now the bust is testing whether the experience of shared struggle will pull people together or tear them apart.

Which America needs the help?

The ramifications of a woman, married or single, wealthy or indigent, mentally enabled or non compos mentis electing to add eight babies to her already, barely-manageable brood of six has drawn myriad opinions from myriad cultural niches: religion, theology, science and, of course, politicians. Today's WaPo has a good compendium of these opinions and brings the reader up to speed where things now stand.

The last couple of graphs of Maureen Dowd's otherwise whiney, snarky, cheap-shot-as-usual column today, she changes gears and raises some really good points:

Companies that have gotten bailouts continue to make a mockery of taxpayers.

Until it came to light Tuesday, Wells Fargo, which received $25 billion in federal funds, was blithely planning a series of “employee recognition outings” to Las Vegas luxury hotels this month.

As ABC reported, Bank of America took its $45 billion in bailout funds and sponsored a five-day carnival outside the Super Bowl stadium, and Morgan Stanley took its $10 billion in bailout money and held a three-day conference at the Breakers in Palm Beach. (Morgan Stanley had also still planned to send top employees to Monte Carlo and the Bahamas, events just canceled.)

The New York Post revealed that Sandy Weill, former chief executive of Citigroup, took a company jet to fly his family for a Christmas holiday to a $12,000-a-night luxury resort in San José del Cabo, Mexico. No matter that the company just got a $50 billion federal bailout and laid off 53,000 worldwide.

The interior of the 18-seat jet, as described by The Post, is posh, with a full bar, fine-wine selection, $13,000 carpets, Baccarat crystal glasses, Cristofle sterling silver flatware and — my personal favorite — pillows made from Hermès scarves.

Aux barricades!

Click this. An unbelievable view. Have fun with the zoom...you can see Cheney's nostril hairs...if you're of a mind ;)

We all have themes, memes and, well, "hot buttons" that give our consciousness, our consciences and our adrenal glands a little extra squeeze,when, in the course of a day, one of our oxen is gored.

Personal Responsibility--and the lack thereof in 21st century life--is one of mine.

Walter Kirn, writing in today's NYT Magazine, continues the debate very well, I think:

"Blame is real, assignable and calculable, and the true measure of a person’s character — the sort of character that all should cultivate, but especially people of power and position — consists, first of all, in the strength to say, “I did it.”

More at the link.

When Chrysler spent more than $100K on a full-page ad in the NY Times, did anyone wonder if the Idiot Management was, yet again, completely clueless with regard to financial decision-making? Apparently Mark Cuban did...

This is me eating humble pie...or crow...or whatever metaphor or aphorism seems to fit.

More than two years ago, when the Obama movement was beginning to stir, I bluntly and pompously stated that America would not elect a black or a woman President; I said that we "weren't there yet," and that while I shared this community's desire for positive change, I didn't think it was going to come from anyone other than an establishment white guy.

I'm very glad to be wrong. Here's to you, America.