Veteran Democratic fundraiser Jackson Browne says that he’ll still vote for Obama in November, but the legendary Laurel Canyon singer/songwriter is not exactly prepared to raise any more money for him as he told Sharon Waxman at The Wrap:
Are you involved in the presidential campaign?
No, I’m not. Actually I sort of turned a corner and decided that one of the problems in our political system is the money. However, I’m involved politically, and I’m very interested in the Occupy (Wall Street) movement.
I’m very interested in what people do individually and in groups, and it wouldn’t and shouldn’t be a fucking surprise to anybody that I’m going to vote for Obama—but honestly Obama once again has joined the ranks of the lesser of two evils. The great parade of people that the progressives get to vote for who are the lesser of two evils and who don’t really represent what I believe in any overwhelming balance.
But you’re not gonna—
No, I’m not going to raise money for people who don’t really… Look, Obama told me in a personal conversation that he wasn’t up for any new (nuclear) plants. Obviously, he changed his mind at some point. But what a surprise that one of his main supporters is the energy company, Exelon—which has nuclear plants—and that he would suddenly change his policy.
I don’t know what we would expect. He’s just as a beholden to the people who put him in office as any of the Republicans would be. But what’s a mystery to me is how he installed pretty much the exact same infrastructure in his administration that deals with finances as the administration that we thought we voted out. That’s really a shocker.
It’s a game of chicken. So I’m not going to participate. Every day it’s like a fever. Like, “Oh my God, if we don’t have $27,000 by tonight the DCC won’t think we’re being effective.” I mean I’m sorry, I can’t.
After a year and a half of heated debate, many brutally cold winter days and plenty of heroic, hard work, it’s judgement day in Wisconsin.
I hope for the best (a Tom Barrett win) but expect the worst (polls are tight, but favor Scott Walker), so first a little levity:
A CEO, a Tea Partier and a union organizer sit down at a table, on which there is a dish of 12 cookies.The CEO takes 11 of the cookies and says to the Tea Partier, “That union guy wants part of your cookie.”
Remember that joke, it’s going to come in hand—quite a bit, probably—in the coming years…
In the final stretch of the recall election, it cannot be denied, the Republicans did what they do best: They divided and now they look set to conquer. Who would have thought that even a $30 million dollar war chest would have been enough to turn the tide that saw well over a million signatures on Walker recall petitions?
Not me, to be honest. I should stop underestimating the GOP, I really should.
Why Scott Walker could be the new Nixon.
Walker himself said the other day that he’s meeting people all over the state who tell him how RESENTFUL they are that public sector employees have better benefits than they do.
A plan for DUMMIES and people who’ve had 30 million dollars worth of cynical propaganda and bullshit fill their mental space for months now…
Obviously there IS a class war going on in America today, but in Wisconsin, the GOP has (brilliantly) hit upon a new recipe for (probable) electoral success: Pit working class people vs OTHER working class people.
If Walker does manage to hold onto his job today, expect much more of this exact same strategy in the future, in other states and even on a national, presidential level. Wisconsin was a laboratory of how to subvert democracy and a popular uprising with lies, cynicism and lots and lots of money.
Whether or not it’s Walker or Tom Barrett who wins when the votes are counted tonight, the GOP has learned a seriously fucked up new trick that has grave implications for American democracy.
Pit the middle class against each other! It’s a genius move. The politics of resentment are in full flower in Wisconsin today.
The GOP will hold the red states until the end of time with that strategy.
This, I think is the biggest take-away lesson of the entire process, especially for the Republicans. A certain segment of Wisconsin’s population has been successfully “moronized” (in the sense that “father of the New Left” Herbert Marcuse used the term in the 1960s). They’ve got a working blueprint for doing it. Win or lose this one, the implications are fucking enormous for well-funded, state-of-the art Republican political campaigns moving forward.
If Walker wins today, as expected, team GOP will have pulled off an election miracle (albeit a very well-funded miracle). When you consider how the palpable anti-Walker tidal-wave that saw over one million signatures gathered on the recall petitions and compare that with where we are today, when the polls are all telling us that Walker will squeak by and get to hold his job… I mean fuck it, it must be said WELL DONE REPUBLICANS.
They might be evil geniuses, but they are geniuses, nevertheless.
Esquire’s Charles P. Pierce summed up, very eloquently, the, I suppose, existential reality on the ground in Wisconsin this morning in a piece called “Beyond the Money, the Great Wisconsin Recall Election of 2012 Has Been the Fight Our Democracy Deserves.” His pre-vote observations about what has happened in the deeply divided state of Wisconsin—ironically a state known, until recently, for the geniality of its residents—were striking, indeed,:
Later, as night fell over Milwaukee, Walker rocked the Serb Hall, presenting himself as a man of courage and big ideas who is trying to move Wisconsin forward, only to be stymied by backward-thinking Democrats and out-of-state “special interests.” (We pause here for a moment to laugh loudly enough that the Koch Brothers to hear us.) The governor’s speech was just as spirited as Barrett’s was, but oddly disjointed. “Isn’t it amazing,” he asked the crowd, “that politics is the only business where you get credit for courage just for keeping your word?” He also deplored the recall for what he said was the uncertainty it had created among the “job creators” and the small-business community in the state. “Truth,” he told the crowd, “is on our side.”
Out in the parking lot, I fell into conversation with Phil Waseleski, who was wearing a T-shirt celebrating the U.S. Postal Service that was festooned with Scott Walker buttons. Phil was a letter carrier in the neighborhoods around the Serb Hall for nearly 40 years, but he retired last year when his days were cut back to three a week as part of the fiscal crisis forced upon the USPS by Republican legislators who would like to see it go away entirely.
“A friend once told me, ‘Well, we only need mail three or four days a week,’” Phil told me. “I politely told him, ‘Dave, we’re gonna have to agree to disagree.’ I could have told him, ‘Dave, you know, maybe at that engineering place where you work, they only need you three days a week, and then you could come help us.’
“The politicians, I think, it’s a tough call, because if you don’t keep the postal service in business — you and I will both agree that there’s nothing more personal than taking pen in hand to write to your mother, sister, or brother. Until June of last year, I gave my heart and soul to my job. I worked right through lunch most days.”
Eventually, I asked him why he was here, at the Serb Hall, supporting Scott Walker, whose politics were far more in tune with the people who are trying to strangle the postal service than they are with the people who still work there. Phil told me that it was about his sister-in-law. “The problem is that, when you start handing out free health care out to teachers, that annoys me to no end,” he said. “I never got free health care. My brother’s wife is a teacher and I once asked her, when I was getting my teeth worked on, what it cost her and she said, ‘Nothing.’ It should never get to that point where somebody’s getting free health care. Something’s way out of whack there.”
Something IS, of course, out of whack, but it’s not what Phil Waseleski—a man who was himself a GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEE—perceives it to be. Why on earth would one working person who himself saw his work days cut back support a union-busting asshole like Scott Walker in order to see that the hard fought gains of other middle-class people LIKE HIMSELF will get erased???
The answer, of course, is that Phil Waseleski and other fucking idiots like him have been cynically manipulated to essentially cast a vote AGAINST other working people so that billionaire “job creators” like the Koch brothers can move on to breaking the backs of the private sector unions, too, and rape and pillage the state of Wisconsin without much further ado.
Phil, that’s what you voted for, buddy. Do you realize how stupid you—a former GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEE with a chest full of Scott Walker buttons—appear to someone who is (there is no delicate way to put this) smarter than you are? You don’t quite get it, do you, Phil?
It’s sheer idiocy for the working man to support Scott Walker and the Republicans. Nothing but sheer blinkered, uncut idiocy… and you, Phil, with a USPS tee-shirt and Walker badges could be the idiot’s poster boy…
Phil Waseleski, are you really the kind of man who wants to cast your vote in a democracy to cut other working people down to size and take what was theirs and give that to people like the Kochs and Diane Hendricks who make more in ONE HOUR than you did in your best year ever?
Charles Pierce must’ve puked in his mouth a little when he heard you speak this nonsense, you old coot!
If you find yourself reading this, Phil, can you please explain to the people who read your comments to Charles Pierce (in the comments either here or at Esquire), how you came to think this way. I cannot for the life of me understand how Walker and his billionaire reichwing patrons were able to convince one working person to resent other middle-class wage-earners, wish to see them economically punished and to reward two billionaires who inherited their money in the first place? It all makes zero sense to me. I need your help.
It’s not exactly a secret that the Republican party’s natural constituency is obscenely wealthy people and older, easily-manipulated idiots, especially Fox News watchers. Phil, as an obvious older idiot, would you mind, please, explaining to Dangerous Minds readers what happened in Wisconsin, from your perspective as an easily manipulated fool?
PS Phil, have you ever seen this clip? Which one of these guys is you? This is not a trick question, I promise:
Another month, another PCP face-eating incident – it’s difficult to imagine this particular drug ever wholly shedding its unfortunate association with spontaneous cannibalism.
All such occurrences recall to me a curious chat I once had with an engaging crank who claimed disembodied and malevolent spirits liked to haunt pubs and bars, as sufficiently inebriated souls (if sufficiently weak-minded) were easy to “hitch a ride with” – hence the middling mayhem that forever orbits serious boozing.
Accordingly, might we posit that PCP can open channels to some very unpleasant (not to mention peckish) entities indeed?
If you keep an eye out for these incidents, you might also observe that some of the other, generally better-regarded recreational drugs appear to induce comparable states of spiritual vulnerability. To my mind, one of the most illustrative (not to mention blackly comic) examples of this phenomenon took place in 2004, when the then 24-year-old Daniel Gonzales – aka “Zippy” aka “The Freddy Krueger Killer” and the “Mummy’s Boy Killer”– ended up going on a four day knife-wielding killing spree around Sussex and North London after a night’s raving – killing four and attacking two others.
An insight into the singularly bizarre turn of Zippy’s mind was provided when an old friend of his sold their correspondence (conducted after Zippy was convicted and locked up in a maximum security psychiatric institution) to an English tabloid. In this correspondence, Zippy comes across as a truly ungodly mixture of Ali G and Jack the Ripper. Generally buoyant – “Bruv, it’s Zippy, your favourite serial killer!” – but forever pining for his beloved Ketamine and Doomcore (a fast, particularly unpleasant form of techno), the least effort at introspection reduces Zippy to a state of bewildered incoherence.
“Did you read my story in da paper? Enuff of dat cos it’s doin my head in, I just wanted to be like the guy in Scream or Halloween nuffin wrong wiv dat iz there? Wouldn’t you wanna be like Mike Meyers? But it ain’t worth it. U ’ave to pay the price.”
Deep. But however hard our “favourite serial killer” on occasion tries to meditate upon his actions (“I done somefin sick + I can’t believe it”), Zippy’s thoughts tend more towards raving than redemption:
“I know you will still be partying when I get out so we can go to Amsterdam together and all that. I won’t be in here forever so not to worry – as long as you stay goin partys and snortin K.”
You’ve got to admire Zippy’s conviction that, in the extraordinarily unlikely eventuality of his release (Zippy’s judge recommended he be incarcerated indefinitely – and poor Zippy actually died in custody in 2007), his old pals would be so keen to pick up where they left off – skipping over to the ’dam to feast on psychedelics with a geriatric serial killer. Certainly Zippy’s “eccentricities” were generously tolerated prior to his arrest, as the following vignette (offered by Zippy’s correspondent in the accompanying tabloid interview) vividly demonstrates:
“Only a year before the murders we were round a friend’s house when Zippy pulled a map out of his pocket and unfolded it. He’d marked several churches in red ink and also named vicars serving at each. Someone asked what it was and he said he was studying it because he planned to kill all of the vicars in one, long rampage. Everyone just burst out laughing.”
A retrospectively sinister moment, you imagine! And one that arguably fits the hypothesis of possession – as might the following account of the killings themselves. Walk us through it, Zip, how did it all come to pass?
“Well I guess u wanna no wot happened! Remember that party wot we went to, it all happened after that party. I went out + killed 4 people cos I was so bored, basically I don’t know why I done it.”
So it would seem. At the time, the tabloids launched a half-baked witch hunt for Doomcore, but quickly lost interest after establishing that Zippy was one of about seven people who actually liked it. You’d think they’d have gone after recreational drugs (or even slasher films) instead. But, possession theory aside, I would recommend steering clear of anyone whose ideal night in consists of Doomcore, Freddy Kruger, and a gram of Ketamine. And whatever you do, don’t give them any PCP.
A friend of Macdonald’s who witnessed a man smoke scorpion in the Afghan town of Peshawar described the reaction:
‘The effect was instantaneous with the man’s face and eyes becoming very red, “much more than a hashish smoker” …. He also seemed very intoxicated but awake and alert, although he stumbled and fell over when he tried to rise from a sitting position …. the smoke tasted “sweeter” than that of hashish, although … it smelled foul, and the intoxicating effect lasted much longer.’ (1, p. 247)
As with most drugs, anecdotal reports of scorpion’s effects vary widely. It is likely that the numerous Afghan scorpion species have divergent psychoactive properties. Scorpion has been reported to keep one awake, cause severe headaches, and rival the effects of a “strong mescaline trip.” (1, p. 248) One Kabul man who had smoked between 20 and 30 times reported the effects to last three days. During these periods he had difficulty opening his eyes, his head spun, and he had constant visual hallucinations.
Below, a video in which a 65-year-old Afghan man claims he gets high by eating up to 50 scorpions a day. Allegedly—according to the YouTube write-up—black scorpions will give you a “stronger buzz.”
Breathing is a beautiful and affecting short by Anna Österlund (Ravishing Mad) and Truls Bråhammar. The film is based on an original composition by multi-talented composer Mikael Karlsson, taken from his series of “Talk Pieces” called Traps.
The film shows two little girls seemingly at play in the forest, but as we linger with them we start noticing that they’re measuring time and behaving in irrational, robotic or animal ways. They’re on a very strict and hectic schedule somehow, and [our] watching them worries them.
An effective society sometimes forces people into apathetic behaviour in order to cope with everyday life and the sense of being trapped in a treadmill can be frightening. What do we do in situations when inexplicable routines traps us like animals, do we manically continue forward or do we protest?
”A creature in captivity is often driven to pointless, repetitive behaviour.”
Starring Ada Bråhammar and Olivia Holmgren, with Karlsson’s music is performed by the Sirius Quartet.
“The first new dogmatism I embraced after rejecting the Marxist BS (belief system) was Ayn Rand’s philosophy (not yet called Objectivism in those days.) _The Fountainhead_ had exactly the appeal for me that it has retained, decade after decade, with alienated adolescents of all ages. (The average youthful reader of _Thus Spake Zarathustra_ decides he is the Superman, and the average youthful Randroid decides she is an Alienated Super Genius.) LIke most Randroids, I went around for a few years mindlessly parroting all the the Rand dogma and imagining I was an ‘individualist.’
“Some years later, after becoming a published writer, I actually was invited to meet Ayn Rand once. (I was ‘summoned to the Presence,’ as Arlen said.) I confessed my doubts about certain Rand dogmas and was Cast Out Into the Darkness forever to wail and gnash my teeth in the Realm of Thud. It was weird. I thought the Trots and Catholic priests were dogmatic, but Ayn Rand made both groups look like models of tolerance by comparison.
“I thought she was a clinical paranoid. It was nearly 30 years later that I found out Rand was merely on Speed all the time, which creates an effect so much like paranoia that even trained clinicians cannot always tell the difference, and some even claim there is no difference.”
In the article, Bottari lists who has been charged and what the charges are so far in Wisconsin’s ‘John Doe’ investigation that’s circling ever tighter around embattled Gov. Scott Walker, with the long-awaited recall vote now just hours away:
So far the investigators have charged six people with 15 felonies; one person, who turned himself in to prosecutors, was convicted on two counts:
* Timothy Russell (former deputy chief of staff to Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker) was charged with two felonies, and one misdemeanor related to embezzlement of donations intended for Wisconsin veterans in a special fund, which was created at Walker’s direction. The money was used by Russell and his partner, Brian Pierick, to take a few vacations. Read the criminal complaint here.
* Brian Pierick (partner of Timothy Russell): charged with two felonies involving child solicitation. It appears Russell’s phone records led to Pierick and a nasty story about two men soliciting a 17-year old minor for sex. Read the criminal complaint here.
* Kevin Kavanaugh (appointed by Walker as a county veterans’ official): charged with five felonies related to embezzlement from the veterans fund. Kavanaugh appears to have been raiding the funds separately from Russell. Read the criminal complaint here.
* Kelly Rindfleisch (former deputy chief of staff to then-Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker): charged with four felonies relating to campaign fundraising while on the county payroll. Rindfleish’s worked on a secret wifi system in her office just steps away from Walker’s office. Rindfleisch continued to work for Walker’s campaign until she was charged. Read the criminal complaint here.
* Darlene Wink (former aide to then-Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker): pled guilty to two unclassified misdemeanors as part of a deal that she made with the prosecutors relating to working on campaign fundraising while on the county payroll. Winks office was down a short hallway from Walker’s. Read the complaint here.
* William Gardner (President and CEO of Wisconsin & Southern Railroad): Gardner pled guilty to felony violations of Wisconsin’s election campaign laws in April of 2011. Gardner tried to convince prosecutors that his $50,000 in illegal contributions to Walker, which he funneled through his employees and a girlfriend, was an innocent mistake, except he had done the same thing the previous year. Read the criminal complaint here.
I can certainly appreciate Walker supporters and undecideds who might conclude that there is nothing that has been inserted into the debate by anyone with first hand knowledge of the investigation that would support the claims being made by opponents. I can additionally appreciate that, in America, we are all innocent until proven guilty and that even an indictment, should it occur, is an accusation—not a conviction.
Accordingly, a voter might well decide that the Governor is entitled to the benefit of the doubt at this point in time.
But one can certainly see how a Wisconsin voter might be concerned over what an indictment might mean to the state going forward.
Indeed, a voter who concludes that there is likely to be some truth to the increasing reports of a pending indictment, might view the potential of charges being filed against a sitting governor as another major distraction that will only make an already bad situation worse. It would also seem fair to at least consider that, even if Scott Walker was not involved in the shenanigans going on under his nose in the Milwaukee County Executive office, what does it say about an executive who operated without any knowledge of crimes that were being committed just a few steps from his office by people who have already been convicted or granted immunity in exchange for their testimony against fellow Scott Walker employees?
It would be nice to say that this all ends on Tuesday.
Yet, by all appearances, there is some reason to anticipate that a Walker win may only be the end of the recall process while just the beginning to an, arguably, even more disturbing era in Wisconsin government.
Or not. On this one, it’s up to Wisconsin voters to make the call.
What’s ultimately depressing is reading something like this, from Reuters:
Victoria Marone, who has several “Stand With Walker” signs in the yard of her Milwaukee home, said on Saturday she was worried that the massive union effort could still overcome Walker’s efforts.
“Unions ... are like rabid dogs with their jaws clenched down on your arm and won’t let go,” said Marone, who was a school teacher for more than 50 years.
Walker far outspent Barrett and the Democrats on television advertising in the run-up to the recall.
John Larrabee, a truck driver who also had a “Stand with Walker” sign in his Milwaukee yard, said he agreed with Walker that joining a union should be voluntary.
“This is class warfare,” Larrabee said. “They’re trying to pit those that are successful with those that want to sit on their butt.”
You’re backin’ the wrong team, buddy… You’re the one being USED like a pawn in the game (unless I missed something and you’re a millionaire truck driver…).
Can’t get enough of the Spin Doctors’ “Two Princes?” I didn’t think so. Well, here’s enough to make you puke.
I can’t tell you what a thrill it is to be the first member of the Dangerous Minds’ team to post something related to the Spin Doctors. Coming up: Phish and Blues Traveler.
