Get off my lawn!

Crabby Old Fart

If you haven’t heard of Donald Mills (aka “Crabby Old Fart”) then you’re missing some really funny stuff.  The site is called “The problem with young people today is . . .” and all his posts start with those words. Here’s an example:

The problem with young people today is that they sleep too much.

Back when I was a lad, young people were expected to be up at the crack of dawn every day. And earlier on Sundays. On Sundays, I had to get up in the middle of the night in order to iron my tie for church and still have time to rotate the tires on my old dad’s Packard.

But these young people today, they sleep 14-16-18 hours a day. Wrapped up in their silk sheets, down duvets and king sized beds like giant, swaddled, milk-fed babies while the rest us mine coal, cut down trees and trawl for fish. I didn’t have sheets when I was boy. I had a threadbare gunny sack and a bag of corn I used as a pillow.

It’s disgraceful. No wonder our economy is in the toilet. Half our god damned population can barely muster the energy required to repeatedly smack at the snooze button – let alone get their asses out of bed and look for a job.

The comments are almost as good as the posts themselves:

Mr. Mills. I am duly honored that my lazy assed son prompted such a rant.

Are you still coming over at 8:00 am Monday morning to beat the hell out of him with your cane?

I want to be just like this guy when I grow up.  I laughed so hard I had to change my Depends. Unfortunately I wasn’t wearing any.

Not so fast with the primaries, Atrios

Atrios did his best Rodney King imitation the other day.  Why can’t we all get along?  We’re all on the same side now.  We all want the same things on this side of the lefty blogosphere.  We should be cooperating instead of attacking each other.  Nice for him to say.  No one was calling him a stupid, racist c*nt last year, not that any of the name calling is true.  It doesn’t really bother me.  It just tears that whole cooperation thing to shreds.

In theory, I have to agree with him.  The lefty blogosphere is pretty much in agreement with regards to what we stand for and we should be working together to shift power our way.  Then he wrote something that shows that he still doesn’t get it:

“There was that primary business, of course, though the less said about the better.”

{{clearing throat, warming up typing fingers}}

Duncan, may I call you Duncan?  That was the dumbest thing you have ever written.  Well, you may have written dumber things but I may have missed them.  The reason why the lefty blogosphere is so impotent right now has everything to do with the primaries and how we have failed to discuss what happened to us.

Let’s look at what actually happened last year.  Barack Obama ran a terrible campaign.  Oh, I know this isn’t the conventional wisdom but that’s why conventional wisdom is so often wrong.  Obama spent a king’s ransom on trying to win the big states on SuperTuesday.  He couldn’t pull it off.  Instead, he focussed his attention on the caucuses, which were far easier to game.  And game them he did.  We have the affadavits to prove it.  But at the end of the day, he still needed the delegates from a state he didn’t even run in in order to get the nomination.  It all came down to Michigan.  Forget what ever the Obots were screaming about The Roolz.  The RBC had to bend the roolz to give Obama the win.

He wasn’t on the ballot in MI.  He wasn’t entitled to diddly-squat. In normal years, we would have called this a very foolish political decision.

But here’s the kicker: It wasn’t a normal year.

The powers that be wanted anyone but Clinton.  Now, we may all speculate who these powers are.  Clinton started out with a lot of committed superdelegates but lost nearly all of them before the final primary.  We can guess that the billionaire bankers saw the writing on the wall and pulled their weight for the weaker candidate.  Hillary would have been rehab; Obama was an enabler.  Anyone who paid attention to Obama skirting away from any controversial or politically sensitive stand in the past several years quickly realized that he doesn’t have a principled bone in his body.  Throwing people under the bus is his operant mode.  Heck, he rarely even referred to himself as a Democrat. But whatever.  Someone(s) wanted Clinton to fail.  So, they rigged MI.

Please do not tell me that MI wasn’t going to count.  It was always going to count and count fully.  Withholding Clinton’s MI and FL delegates from her win column just made her look like a loser all primary season.  The whole thing was smoke, mirrors and psychological one upsmanship.  It was a haka.  We knew it but would people listen to us? But I digress.

The reason why the 2008 primaries are still important is because the powers that rigged them emerged triumphant.  Not only did they rig them and get away with it, they had the support of half of the people they were planning to screw with the continuation of Bush’s policies.  Obama has capitulated to the bankers, he’s capitulated to the religious right on gays and women, he’s making no effort to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and he’s become a party to torture.

The torture issue is particularly relevent in this case because the left has been the most vociferous in insisting that we pull back the curtain on what happened.  We have been arguing that if we don’t know what happened and who instigated it, we won’t be able to re-establish the rule of law, our consitutional principles and our honor.  Every one of our men and women in uniform will be subject to the same treatment in the hands of our enemies.  Every US citizen is at risk of abuse from powers both foreign and domestic.  We need to out the people responsible, figure out how they subverted the law and put a stop to it or we are all vulnerable. Therefore, we press our representatives to not just sweep this infamy under the rug.  We need to ferret it out and hold it up for examination of all its ugliness or it will happen again.

For the same reasons, we need to investigate what happened in the primaries and find out who was responsible both inside and outside of the party.  Those people invalidated the votes of more than half of the party by allowing the rules to be redrafted at the RBC hearing to favor Obama over Clinton.  If we do not, we will continue to allow the party power players to turn a deaf ear to anything the liberal and left side of the political spectrum stands for.  That means there will be more Joe Lieberman’s defying his party’s primary without penalty in 2006.  It means more Arlen Specters rather than Joe Sestaks in PA.  It means more Proposition 8’s in CA, more retreat in the face of the health insurance industry’s demands, more lax standards for the banking industry and more hearbreak for unions. And the primaries of 2008 are only a taste of things to come.  If we let things stand as they are, it won’t be long before the voting machines are rigged as well.  Voting will become a pointless exercise for show.  And when that happens, we as citizens will lose our right of self-determination.  THAT is why examining the primaries is so important.

The left is suffering from a moral sickness.  It wanted an outcome so badly that it was willing to sacrifice its own personality and principles to get it.  That sickness happened through clever psychological manipulation and unethical behavior on the part of the Obama campaign and its backers.  It is deeply rooted in the Democratic Party right now.  That party no longer has a foundation built on the working class.  It no longer stands for social justice.  It serves a new master now.

The left has been torn in half.  Our institutions have been bought off.  Congress doesn’t have to be accountable to us anymore because they were able to keep their seats by undermining us.  And the media, who Big Tent Democrat was content to let have its way, has become stronger than ever because the one candidate who was capable of neutralizing them by virtue of winning in spite of them, was stabbed in the back by her own party. At this point in time, it doesn’t matter if we all share the same values.  We are toothless.

The only way to get back on the right track as a movement is to take a good look at how we got to this spot.  It is going to be painful for many of us.  It requires a sort of Truth and Reconciliation Commission.  Now is not the time for apologies.  Now is the time for unearthing the truth and for reflection.  It is time for us to achieve what the Greeks called sophrosyne.  That is, “moral sanity and from there self control or moderation guided by true self-knowledge”.  In Greek tragedies, the lesson was only cathartic if the protagonist came to this understanding.

What has happened to us has been truly tragic.  But we can’t fix it by pushing it under a rock and moving on.  We need to face it and deal with it so we can stop getting played.

“Let all the worms that lurk in the mud hatch out”

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Hullaballo – A Fauxgressive Freeperville

(Do not watch the above video unless you have a strong stomach – I’m not even going to describe what’s in it.)

Last week we discussed Digby’s role in last year’s meltdown of progressive blogosphere.  Digby was one of the most well respected bloggers until last year and Hullaballoo used to be one of my favorite stops in Left Blogistan.

Not anymore.  Digby discusses Palin vs. Letterman in her post “On Nuts ‘N Sluts” and starts out pretty good:

First of all, Sarah Palin does not look or act like a “slut” and it’s nothing more than a sexual fantasy to think of her that way. She married her high school sweetheart and has five kids. She’s a born again Christian. She does not dress provocatively, and she has said that she put her hair up and wore glasses specifically to take her looks off the table as much as possible. She’s an attractive 40 something politician, she’s not a Playboy model (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and it would be nice if she didn’t have to put up with that stuff. She’s not trying to “sex herself up” for the camera or anything else. There’s enough to criticize her for.

But she soon takes a right turn onto WTF? lane:

And making Palin into a feminist hero because of this cheapens feminism. This woman is defending herself and her own daughter, but as Governor she never quite finds the voice to defend other women who have average real life problems, like workplace discrimination, rapes or unwanted pregnancies. Her complaints are not coming from feminist principle but rather political opportunism.

Yeah, we all know that Sarah Palin doesn’t care about feminism because SHE’S AN EVIL REPUBLICAN CONSERVATIVE!!!!

If Sarah Palin were exactly the same person with the same opinions but she had gone to some Ivy League university and had a “D” instead of an “R” after her name she would be the darling of the progressive blogosphere despite her stance on abortion. The A-listers in Left Blogistan would fall all over themselves rationalizing her conservative moderate views because she comes from a red state.  UInfortunately for her she’s a Republican with a degree from a state college so she’s a “hillbilly from Wasilly”

But it it’s the comment thread to Digby’s post that is sickening:

With Sarah Palin in charge, by the way, if her daughter did get raped, she’d have to pay the police for the cost of a rape kit.

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That Bristol was the subject of the joke was clear. Palin and her husband are either

1) Incredibly stupid or

2) Incredibly dishonest and just using this as a way to keep the camera on themselves.

I’m voting for number 2 personally. I don’t think there’s the slightest bit of honest outrage on the part of the Palins here.

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Sarah Palin is using the supposed insult to her 14-year old daughter to pick a fight with a media elite, singing to her victimology-loving base. Letterman’s jokes were in poor taste; he’s admitted that.

But that this story remains aloft is entirely due to Sarah and Todd Palin, who have proven (yet again) that they will use their own children to advance the Governor’s political ambition.

Who’s the exploiter now?

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Yeah, well, I’d still tap it…….

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Sarah Palin does not look or act like a “slut”

Yes, she does. She talks and sparkles and winks like a cocktail waitress with a table of out-of-town convention-goers.

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Digs…puh-lease. You say Ms. Palin does not dress provocatively. I demure: her skirts are always ass-hugging tight, her jackets tailored to show off the boobage, and don’t get me started on those little fuck-me pumps with the painted toenails.

Now, it is true that Sarah’s ass, tits, and toes are very Christian, but she does thend to, as Rupaul would say, “work it.”

Are we to think this is professional attire for a vice presidential aspirant? Maybe Barack should have worn low hangers to the debates to work his ass crack for votes too.

Sarah Palin is a hypocrite and a light weight media creation; Letterman was and is spot-on. I salute his bad taste; his “apology” was more entertaining than the original jokes. And anyone who thinks he was actually apologizing is not hearing the words and the tone.

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And you’ll remember the Clintons didn’t parade their daughter out all the time as a model for all children, etc.

Not that I ever loved the Clintons, but c’mon people, you know they didn’t ask for it like Palin has.

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Sorry, but Palin does look like a slutty airline attendant. She acts like one as well. She cakes on the make-up, and the joke was about buying make-up. She works her looks to attract GOP males. She is fair game.

Change “Sarah Palin” to “Hillary Clinton” and “slut” to “lesbian” and the crap thrown at Sarah isn’t much different from the wingnut slime of the nineties. Crap like that is why we moderate comments. Hit the delete button and let the sexist slugs and low-life misogynists go exercise their free speech rights somewhere else.

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Punk’d

The Two Faces of Obama

This would be funny if it wasn’t tragic.  Obama throws some more of his most loyal supporters under the bus:

This week, the Obama administration is facing the ire of gay rights groups after it filed a brief in California federal court defending the Defense of Marriage Act and calling it a “valid exercise of Congress’ power” that is saving taxpayers money.

This is an occasion where there is no pleasure in saying “We told you so!”  Okay, well maybe a little – Kool-aid blogger John Aravosis:

We just got the brief from reader Lavi Soloway. It’s pretty despicable, and gratuitously homophobic. It reads as if it were written by one of George Bush’s top political appointees. I cannot state strongly enough how damaging this brief is to us. Obama didn’t just argue a technicality about the case, he argued that DOMA is reasonable. That DOMA is constitutional. That DOMA wasn’t motivated by any anti-gay animus. He argued why our Supreme Court victories in Roemer and Lawrence shouldn’t be interpreted to give us rights in any other area (which hurts us in countless other cases and battles). He argued that DOMA doesn’t discriminate against us because it also discriminates about straight unmarried couples (ignoring the fact that they can get married and we can’t).

Andy Sullivan is barely starting to realize he should have spent more time looking at Obama’s homophobic BFF’s and less time rummaging through Sarah Palin’s panty drawer.

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Human Rights Campaign, Lambda Legal, NCLR, GLAD, the ACLU and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force  issued a joint statement:

Your Breakfast Read, Served By The Confluence (Very Abbr. Edition)

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Economy Watch

Members’ fortunes see steep declines

Well-heeled lawmakers like Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), two of the richest politicos on Capitol Hill, saw paper losses worth tens of millions of dollars, although the recent Wall Street rally may have helped them recoup those losses.

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War On Terror

Europeans to U.S. on taking Guantanamo inmates: You first

U.S. officials trying to relocate detainees face skepticism from EU nations, who want to know why the U.S. can’t taken them itself if they pose no risk.

Top Sunni lawmaker killed outside mosque in Baghdad

Gates urges end to Afghan casualties

The United States and its allies must reduce the number of civilians killed in the hunt for the Taliban in Afghanistan, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates said yesterday. He called the deaths “one of our greatest strategic vulnerabilities.”

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Around The World

Rivals both claim victory in Iran’s election

Iran’s Interior Ministry claimed hard-line incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was heading for a surprise landslide victory Saturday in the country’s stormy presidential elections. But his pro-reform rival countered that he was the clear victor and accused authorities of voter fraud.

American Testifies in Her Murder Trial in Italy

An American college student charged with the murder of a housemate took the witness stand for the first time on Friday, defending herself against the charges and accusing the Italian police of poor treatment while she was being questioned.

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Healthcare Battle

Oh no! Not again.
Health firms paid Nancy-Ann DeParle $5.8 million
The official overseeing White House health care reform efforts earned more than $5.8 million in the past three years from her work for major medical companies, according to a personal financial disclosure and other public records.

Healthcare senators have industry ties

Members of both parties have industry connections, including Democrats Jay Rockefeller and Tom Harkin and Republicans Tom Coburn, Judd Gregg, John Kyl, and Orrin Hatch, financial disclosure reports showed yesterday.

Who The F*@k are these “Centrists”?
Centrist Democrats raise big concerns

A coalition of more than 100 moderate House Democrats is hoping to unify as they attempt to limit the size and scope of a government-sponsored health insurance option — a key sticking point as health reform enters a delicate phase of negotiations.

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Changing The Ways of Washington, DC

No change: Obama ambassadorships still go to fundraisers, friends

President Barack Obama promised change, but he’s following one time-honored tradition: doling out plum ambassadorships to friends and big-money party donors.

Obama removes AmeriCorps’s IG in spat with friend

Obama’s move follows an investigation by IG Gerald Walpin finding misuse of federal grants by a nonprofit education group led by Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, who is an Obama supporter and former NBA basketball star.

Ousted AmeriCorps watchdog defends waste probe

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