36 Hours of Darkness

The power just returned to my street.

After spending the last day and a half resenting perfectly nice people on all the other streets in my neighborhood—I'll have to make amends somehow...muffin baskets, secret yard work?

Irene

Living in the northeast, I naturally have respect for a Category 1 hurricane.

What kills me as I search for an accurate news account of the storm's approach, is how canned and scripted the media is. The "story" is a devastating Category 4 hurricane that is threatening to topple the Empire State Building, while the reality is a Category 1 hurricane that will quickly become a tropical storm once it gets beyond Connecticut's shore.

The news readers aren't even aware of how ridiculous they sound when they conflate the reality of a large but weakening storm and the rhetoric of a killer storm crafted by their writers 72 hours ago.

The news media really sucks.

Updated: The Empire State Building still stands, but western MA, and Vermont are reeling from the flooding. Months of re-building ahead in those areas.

The Grand Old Party

So we're back to arguing first principles with silly young men embarrassingly proclaiming that our great nation requires that (lazy) old people depend on their children to support them or go begging in the streets, like they used to do, essentially so "productive" people won't have to pay taxes for anything but lots of cops and lots of soldiers. Isn't that what America is really all about?

From here.

Lots of cops and soldiers. But those damn cops better not try to unionize, we'll send the soldiers after them.

Damn Government Bureaucrats!

Jen Sorensen

Wednesday Soundtrack

Bikini Kill

Feels Blind

Privatize Profit and Secretly Socialize the Losses

Wall Street Aristocracy Got $1.2 Trillion From Fed

But unemployment insurance, Social Security, and Medicare are always too expensive to sustain.

Ratbastards all.

Updated:
The individual bank breakdown.

Screwed

There are more unemployed people in the U.S. than there are people in the state of Illinois, the fifth largest state.

In fact there, there are more unemployed people in the U.S. than there are people in 46 of the 50 states, all but Florida, New York, Texas and California.

There are more unemployed than the combined populations of Wyoming, Vermont, North Dakota, Alaska, South Dakota, Delaware, Montana, Rhode Island, Hawaii, Maine, New Hampshire, Idaho and the District of Columbia.

If they were a country, the 13.9 million unemployed Americans would be the 68th largest country in the world, bigger than the population of Greece or Portugal (each of which has 10.8 million people) and more than twice the population of Norway (4.7 million.)

From here.

I was going to add something funny, can't— a statistic so tragic, it resists snark.

h/t Dependable Renegade

I Rarely Feel Pain...There's No Such Thing As Pain.

The very serious people who run things are selfish morons.

Yet policy wonks who don’t even use the post office (and presumably have the mobility that affluence offers) argue,

I’m fully aware of people who need the post office, but we can’t have them on every corner. Always going to be a balance…

…& cost has to matter. At some point it’s just not economically practical.

Fratto got a lot quieter when I pointed out the postal service deficit–$238 billion over the next decade–was actually peanuts compared to what we spend dropping bombs in Afghanistan and other forever wars.

Elite pundits increasingly seem to be making the argument that we simply can’t afford to be a nation-state anymore–we can’t afford to offer the most basic federal services to our poor and rural citizens. Yet they rarely consider how easily we manage to come up with unbelievable sums to remain an empire.

From emptywheel.

Sunday Soundtrack

Panic in Detroit

The Shock Doctrine...

...is the default solution to any negative economic event.

Naomi Klein

...when the leaders decided, collectively, not to do anything to punish the bankers for any of this, nor to do anything serious to prevent a similar crisis from happening again. Instead they would all go home to their respective countries and force sacrifices on the most vulnerable. They would do this by firing public sector workers, scapegoating teachers, closing libraries, upping tuition fees, rolling back union contracts, creating rush privatisations of public assets and decreasing pensions – mix the cocktail for where you live. And who is on television lecturing about the need to give up these "entitlements"? The bankers and hedge-fund managers, of course.

                                         .    .    .

...you can't cut police budgets at the same time as you cut everything else. Because when you rob people of what little they have, in order to protect the interests of those who have more than anyone deserves, you should expect resistance – whether organised protests or spontaneous looting. And that's not politics. It's physics.

From here.

Thursday Soundtrack

Dum Dum Boys


The Passenger

I'm With Stupid

Tom Tomorrow

Tuesday Soundtrack

The Plutocrat's Plan or Just A Free Market Coincidence?

They're predicting that within five years certain Southern U.S. states will be among the cheapest manufacturing locations in the developed world -- and competitive with China.

For years advisers like the Boston Consulting Group got paid big bucks to tell their clients to produce in China. Now, they say, rising wages there, fueled by worker unrest, and low wages in Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina mean that soon it won't be worth the hassle of locating overseas.

From here.

If you make Americans desperate for work, they'll take anything and like it—especially those red state rubes who worked so hard to put Republicans in power. It couldn't happen to a better bunch of wage slaves.

Winning.

Really?

Maybe all the anti-gay, anti-sex candidates should simply avoid eating at campaign events. They know these photos will appear...right?

And a frothy...um, frosty chocolate cone—fish in a barrel.

Updated: A late entry.

Omega Theta Pi*

Rick Perry
Texas A&M, 1968-72

I'm not an expert, but I've seen *Animal House enough times to know that this guy was seriously uncool.

He was also a cheerleader...sound familiar?

George W. Bush

Perry image from here.

Saturday Soundtrack

Neil Young

Violent Side

I've always thought this song was hilarious...fighting to control the violent side.
One of my favorites.

Thursday Soundtrack

Whole Lotta Love

And strictly funk.

Guitar Big Band

1966

Trouble Every Day