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Scott Walker is pissing himself, should win a special political Darwin Award!


 
This is THE BEST: Hapless Wisconsin governor Scott Walker wants people who protest his administration to pay for their First Amendment rights! He even wants them to post a bond in advance. I thought Walker’s big hero was union-buster Ronald Reagan? Turns out it’s Il Duce!

This fuckin’ guy is—clearly—on an all out political suicide mission. How else could one possibly process the following news, as reported yesterday morning in the Milwaukee Wisconsin Journal-Sentinel?

Move aside, Herman Cain, it’s Scott Walker who is the real “Andy Kaufman” of the Republican party:

Gov. Scott Walker’s administration could hold demonstrators at the Capitol liable for the cost of extra police or cleanup and repairs after protests, under a new policy unveiled Thursday.

The rules, which several legal experts said raised serious free speech concerns, seemed likely to add to the controversy that has simmered all year over demonstrations in the state’s seat of government.

The policy, which also requires permits for events at the statehouse and other state buildings, took effect Thursday and will be phased in by Dec. 16. Walker administration officials contend the policy simply clarifies existing rules.

State law already says public officials may issue permits for the use of state facilities, and applicants “shall be liable to the state . . . for any expense arising out of any such use and for such sum as the managing authority may charge for such use.”

But Edward Fallone, an associate professor at Marquette University Law School, said the possibility of charging demonstrators for police costs might be problematic because some groups might not be able to afford to pay.

“I’m a little skeptical about charging people to express their First Amendment opinion,” he said. “You can’t really put a price tag on the First Amendment.”

Well, this fascist doofus already has: $50 an hour per member of the Capitol Police, or whatever it costs for freelance security, plus clean-up details!

I mean… WHAT?!??! This is laugh-out-loud hilarious for this idiot-faced goober to think he could get away with this! Of course it’s only had the effect of incensing the unions... and REALLY turning off the people who were undecided about Walker!

My god is this man a loathsome buffoon… but more power to ‘im, I sez!

Give Walker enough rope and he’s going to take down the entire Republican party in the state with him! This stiff won’t even be able to back-peddle away from this in any way, shape or form. He’s so screwed it’s just… superb!

Bonus douchebaggery: Tonight Walker is going to light the Christmas tree in the WI capitol that was put up with prison labor instead of hiring union workers. Let’s hope that tonight Walker enjoys his first—and last—time lighting the tree,

Posted by Richard Metzger
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12.02.2011
03:47 pm
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Judy is a Punk: Kindergartners channel Joey, Johnny and Dee Dee Ramone
12.02.2011
03:41 pm
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The kindergartners at the Sullivan School look like they’re having a damn good time singing “Judy is a Punk.”
 

 
Thank you, Lepus Rex!

Posted by Tara McGinley
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12.02.2011
03:41 pm
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A video guaranteed to put a smile on your face
12.02.2011
02:18 pm
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At first I was like, “Oh noes, this is going to be depressing.” And then I was like, “Oh, wow!”
 

 
(via The Daily What)

Posted by Tara McGinley
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12.02.2011
02:18 pm
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This is hardcore: Jarvis Cocker talks Pulp at Glastonbury, 1995
12.02.2011
02:10 pm
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Photo by Rankin

DM pal Rod Stanley, editor-in-chief of Dazed & Confused magazine (who is getting married tomorrow, congrats Rod!) recently interviewed the world’s last proper rockstar, Jarvis Cocker, about the moment when Pulp triumphed at their legendary show at the Glastonbury festival in 1995.

Dazed: I watched you play in 1995, when you replaced the Stone Roses at Glastonbury… I remember you walking out on to the stage and taking a photograph of the crowd – do you still have that photo?

Jarvis Cocker: I don’t even remember taking it. When we played there, we were added to the bill very last-minute so we had to camp on site. The night before, I had real trouble sleeping because I was so nervous… and there are these photographs of me there with this haunted look. So, I wish I did have that photograph. There are certain things of that night that are burned into my memory, I can remember going on and I can remember the end, but the middle bit has just been erased.

Dazed: There were a lot of those fisherman hats in the crowd … John Squire had broken his arm… and there was a kind of “impress me” atmosphere – but you won them over. Was that gig an affirmation? You had been together for almost 15 years as a band at that point.

Jarvis Cocker: Yeah it definitely was, especially that particular concert, because the thing that changed things for Pulp was that ‘Common People’ was a big hit – that had happened in May, and we played Glastonbury in June. So, I think it was the first show we’d done since we had become popular… and it was quite a moment because everybody sang along, and you realized that you’d crossed over into a different kind of world. As you say, they weren’t throwing the Reni hats at us. Or stones, or roses… I think they threw more roses than stones.

Dazed: I saw you again at Glastonbury, 1998, when you headlined the main stage on the Sunday night.

Jarvis Cocker: Yeah… very wet.

Dazed: Absolutely mud-soaked. And you congratulated everyone for staying, shouting “You… Are… Hardcore!” And got pretty much the biggest cheer from any audience ever.

Jarvis Cocker: I’m always impressed by audiences… I’m such a poof I would just go home. Especially on Sunday, you know what Glastonbury can be like, it’s a psychic obstacle course – and if you’re wasted and wet and been there for three days and haven’t slept very much, you would be well in your rights to go home. So, the fact that people were still there, I was just grateful.

Read the rest at Dazed Digital.

Below, Pulp achieve lift-off at the Glastonbury Festival, 1995
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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12.02.2011
02:10 pm
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It ain’t hardcore porn, it’s wizardcore: Worst music video of 2011?
12.02.2011
01:25 pm
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Could Alternate Reality’s “The King That Never Was” be the worst song and music video of 2011? You tell me.

The video starts out with the aesthetic of a high budget porno, but then it unexpectedly turns into something else… wizardcore! Yep, I said wizardcore!  Seriously, this needs to been seen to be believed. Take that, Rebecca Black!

Does anyone else find it entertaining that the lead singer doesn’t even have a microphone?
 

 
(via reddit)

Posted by Tara McGinley
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12.02.2011
01:25 pm
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‘Useful Idiot’: Herman Cain really IS as dumb as he seems!
12.02.2011
01:24 pm
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And here is the proof: The Women for Cain website.

Barbara Dayan of Nimcompoop Nipomo, CA (supposedly) writes:

Dear Mrs. Cain Don’t pay attention to these pathetic husbandless women who are jealous of women like you in happy long-term marriages. These vindictive women can’t find a husband or keep one. They are like stalkers who try to latch on to any man who shows a bit of kindness or attention to them. When these unstable women come out of the woodwork to make accusations about Herman just say, “Honey, get a life, I believe my husband.” We want you to be our First Lady Mrs. Cain!”

Does this “Barbara Dayan” really exist? Or did Cain or that smoking guy weirdo write this?

This CAN’T be from a real woman!  Women see right through this guy. EVERYONE does!

That’s even a stock photo image of the four women!
 

 
Here’s another winner, supposedly from a “Robin Haraway” of Millington, TX.

“Sir, I firmly believe that you were sent to our nation through Divine Providence and I believe that you are the man to preserve our Republic for our children. Remember, you have overcome many adversities in your life. You have pulled yourself up by your bootstraps through sheer determination and honesty. You were delivered from cancer. My prayers are for strength and guidance for you and your beautiful family this weekend.

This one might be real, though. It’s from Adrienne (Caos) Sinclair, of, as she calls it: “CALIFORNIA, CA”

“Dear Mr Cain many years ago I find this not so unique for christians I knew a man Charles in died at 54 i knew him and and his wife and they were beautiful from the heart christians. at one point in my live i was going to lose my home and well he heard about it, so me at Maass and told me Adrinne I want you to go down to the bank Monday and there wil be a check for 40.000 dollars. I told him I dont know how in the world i would pay it back and he just said don.t worry you are young and you have your whole live to pass a blessing on to someone else, At any rate he died at 54 of a heart attack and when I went to the funeral I was not surprised to see at least 500 or more people at his funeral and I went up to his wife and she told me has helped so many people his whole life and I looked in those green eyes with flowing tears and I said I was one of those people! she looked at me and just hugged me and said you know he would always keep his giving between God and himself, I said yes not for others to see. That was a long time ago and it is funny and it is so normal men who have that kind of heart, My dad would give a waitress 100 dollar tips and I just thought since I was a child that was normal, giving unconditional that is true Christianity and I get Herman Cain and A president who will save the Republic, I wish there are more Herman Cains they don’t show up at big benefits they give and only God can see, that is real to me,,, yes and I have had a life where I can give even when it hurt to women men children, that was a good lesson to learn where only God can see.”

Posted: December 2, 2011 at 2:23 am

Talk about setting yourself up for a spectacular fall. Cain is one Republican hypocrite who does not disappoint! His preposterously rampant egomania is starting to look like clinical insanity. He’s got no one but himself to blame. What a profoundly idiotic man!

This one is almost heart-breaking. Almost!
 

Debbie Stevens-Paulsen, TULSA, OK

“Dear Mr. and Mrs. Cain, I want you to know that I fully support you! I’ve sent $9.99 several times, and will continue to do so every chance I get. I wish I could do more! I’m “reassessing” my Christmas List… instead of buying misc $10 gifts for people I barely know anyway, I’m sending all that money to you. YOU are who this country needs. Please don’t let the opposition win, they are vile liars and will face God for what they’ve done to you. How can We the People choose who WE want (you!) if you allow them to run you off? Gingrich has DONE all the things they’re accusing you of, and Romney is a RINO.. we call him Obama Lite. PLEASE don’t give up. Speak up loud and clear that you are not giving up, and please let Gloria speak out again. I’ll admit that when I heard that you sent $ to a woman w/out your wife knowing, it gave me pause.. I wouldn’t appreciate my hubby sending $ to another woman w/out my approval… but then I thought about and discussed it with everyone I know. We came to the conclusion that you’re a good man worth the benefit of the doubt. We figure that you’re probably a very busy man who comes in contact w/ tons of people daily, and that you probably both have friends the other isn’t friends with, and that you have helped other people, men and women, without discussing it, because that’s just what you do, you’re a softie (stop that now!) and got taken advantage of. That happens. I have NO doubts about you after thinking and praying about it. If Mrs. Cain is OK w/ what you did, I am. Please send her back to Greta again! That’s between you two anyway. Lots of couples have separate money and do what they want with it. That is ok! Don’t give up sir, please. Don’t make me beg! Don’t let the evil conspirators push you out of this race. I have signs, bumper stickers, your Book, I tweet constantly about you (@FoxieNews) and share everything I can about you and your plan to help America. I support you 100%. Please say you’ll press on and get back to actual campaigning! Don’t play their games anymore.. gloves OFF time! God bless you, your wife and family, and your staff always. Happy Holidays!!! .... and 9-9-9!!!!”

 
Here’s hoping that Herman Cain (and the rest of these GOP no-hopers) stay in the race until the bitter end, soaking up all of those hard-earned reactionary donations. Aside from the laughs, the candidacies of these clowns are an effective way to incinerate perfectly good Republican political donation$:

In this respect, Herman Cain is the literal definition of a useful idiot.

Via Little Green Footballs

UPDATE: Look, they removed the stock phone shot on the Women for Cain website (because they didn’t pay for the license?). Now it reads “Women… Cain”!

Posted by Richard Metzger
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12.02.2011
01:24 pm
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All the World (and the Media) is Your Stage: Occupy Wall Street, Act II


 
The clueless conservatives chatterboxes on Fox News and AM talk radio cheering on the evictions of the rapidly dwindling in number Occupy sites around the country have another thing coming if they think that the fun is over. It’s not the end of anything, no matter what smug frat-boys like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh or Eric Bolling claim to “think.”

The Occupy movement isn’t waning, it’s mutating into something different now. Something we can’t predict yet. The rightwing echo chamber acts as if standing around in freezing cold public spaces with the intention to annoy the “job creators” was the movement’s sole aim. I think these Marie Antoinette Republicans are… wrong.

Here’s what respected historian Todd Gitlin told Associated Press:

The Occupy movement is beginning to follow a familiar pattern, said Todd Gitlin, a sociologist at Columbia University and an authority on social movements. He noted that the 1960s anti-war movement grew gradually for years until bursting onto the world stage during the election year of 1968.

He predicted big rallies around the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., and the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C.

Until then, “I think there will be some kinds of occupations, but I don’t think they’ll be as big and as central,” Gitlin said.

When the dust settles and the history is written, Zuccotti Park will be seen as a “strange attractor” rallying place, a “temporary autonomous zone” and a very potent symbol of what could be, but that’s all it will be in the final narrative: The First Act.

And what a beginning it was. People in Wisconsin, in Ohio, in Michigan, in Los Angeles, in Oakland, previously apathetic Americans are starting to wake up to the stark and shitty realities of life in our times in an unprecedented manner and actually fight back. I’m someone who thought “the revolution” would have taken place by the end of the 1980s. I’ve been predicting something like this for 30 years. Even a stopped clock has the right time twice a day, I suppose, but it was getting ridiculous.

As everyone who was there knows, something really special happened in lower Manhattan. Now, no matter where you live, it’s time to use the winter months to organize for next year’s election. There is a chance to gain a lot of ground in 2012. The Reichwing is in a state of preposterously comic disarray with no savior in sight. It might even be possible to push Obama and the Democrats truly leftwards for a change (stranger things have happened, see also FDR; see also what REALLY happened during Great Depression). No one knows what is going to happen next, but I do suspect for there to be a lot of it about, to paraphrase Spike Milligan.

To get too bogged down in trying to hold on to some real estate would have merely become a distraction and as time went on, the “visuals,” as so many in the media like to say, would have taken on a different semiotic and not done the movement any favors in what is, essentially still a war of images. All things considered—and this is just one asshole’s opinion, mine—I think it’s probably the right time for the various Occupy encampments to disperse. It was starting to feel like the first act needed to come to a climax. And what a G-spot barnstormer that curtain-closer was.

Even as I was privileged to have witnessed Occupy Wall Street on three occasions in all of its life-affirming, carnivalesque glory, for anyone looking at the situation as a supportive outsider, the writing was on the wall in October about how long Zuccotti Park could reasonably be expected to be held by the wide cross-section of people who kick-started the movement. As more and more people were going to get peeled off because of the diabolically cold New York winter, it’s a blunt fact that after a certain point, only the chronically homeless would have still been camping out in that freezing cold concrete park. And Fox News would have been all over Zuccotti Park, the open-air homeless shelter.

Lest you think I am disparaging the homeless contingent at Occupy Wall Street, I’m not. In very little of the reporting I’ve seen or read on the OWS encampment, is there any mention of the extremely pivotal roles that were played by the hardcore homeless people and the gutterpunk types in what went down at Zuccotti Park. THEY are the ones who made it possible for the park to be held long enough for the others to join them. Nope, I’m not dissing the homeless participants in OWS, in the least, I think they were amongst the very first frontline heroes of the movement, but it’s just time to move past romancing this idea of the ragtag encampments. go back inside and get better organized. Some people, sympathetic to the movement’s goals are never in a million years going to do something “rash.” It’s time to reach out to them now, so the government knows what size crowd it’s dealing with! (That “silent majority” thing works both ways, as the establishment is finally starting to find out. Americans don’t like “Socialism” but they seem to LOVE socialist ideas, especially in times when their families are starving and they can’t afford to heat their homes. Just saying).

During the past few days, I’ve noticed quite a few more than just vaguely supportive “What’s next for the Occupy movement?” articles popping up in the mainstream media, including the front page of the New York Times, and from the Associated Press and Reuters. There’s also been some worried “What are we going to do about the OWS movement?” type things appearing in the conservative blogsphere.

A pretty good indicator of opinion on the right can be seen in Republican strategist Frank Luntz’s comments to the Republican Governors Association this week in Florida. Say what you will about Luntz—I hate his guts and think he’s made this country a much shittier, meaner, stupider place than had he never been born—the man, like Karl Rove, is an evil genius. But can even the sinister Mister Luntz do anything to stop the tidal wave of history? (To paraphrase the Carol Beer character in Little Britain, “Dialectic says ‘NO’”).

“I’m so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I’m frightened to death,”  Luntz told the GOP governors. “They’re having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism.”

In a series of talking points (you can read them all in Chris Moody’s article “How Republicans are being taught to talk about Occupy Wall Street” on Yahoo News) Lutz gave the GOP leadership advice like: Don’t say capitalism.

“I’m trying to get that word removed and we’re replacing it with either ‘economic freedom’ or ‘free market,’ ” Luntz told them. “The public . . . still prefers capitalism to socialism, but they think capitalism is immoral. And if we’re seen as defenders of quote, Wall Street, end quote, we’ve got a problem.”

You could read into that statement a lot of different ways. I’ll leave you to your own interpretation.

Another thing I see happening, and I applaud the editors who are sharp enough to get why this would be a good idea, is that people who have actually physically been at the various Occupy encampments and were writing from an “on the ground perspective” there, are starting to get hired by some of the major newspapers to cover current events, and the arts, from the point of view of the Occupy movement.

One of these individuals is Arun Gupta, the founding editor of The Indypendent, who wrote “This is a movement for anyone who lacks a job, housing or healthcare, or thinks they have no future” in a fascinating essay, “The Revolution Begins at Home An Open Letter to Join the Wall Street Occupation” that I read on Naomi Klein’s website. I’ve taken notice of his byline ever since.

He’s now covering the Occupy movement for Salon, but in the pages of The Guardian, Gupta wrote what I thought was a gobsmacking vision of what America has become in the intro to his sensational interview with novelist Arundhati Roy

“This is uniquely American,” I remark to Roy about interviewing her while both in cars but thousands of miles apart. Having driven some 7,000 miles and visited 23 cities (and counting) in reporting on the Occupy movement, it’s become apparent that the US is essentially an oil-based economy in which we shuttle goods we no longer make around a continental land mass, creating poverty-level dead-end jobs in the service sector.

If that last bit didn’t drain the blood out of your face, then read it again.

From the interview with the author of the Booker Prize-winning novel, The God of Small Things:

Arun Gupta: Why did you want to visit Occupy Wall Street and what are your impressions of it?

Arundhati Roy: How could I not want to visit? Given what I’ve been doing for so many years, it seems to me, intellectually and theoretically, quite predictable this was going to happen here at some point. But still I cannot deny myself the surprise and delight that it has happened. And I wanted to, obviously, see for myself the extent and size and texture and nature of it. So the first time I went there, because all those tents were up, it seemed more like a squat than a protest to me, but it began to reveal itself in a while. Some people were holding the ground and it was the hub for other people to organise, to think through things. As I said when I spoke at the People’s University, it seems to me to be introducing a new political language into the United States, a language that would be considered blasphemous only a while ago.

Arun Gupta: Do you think that the Occupy movement should be defined by occupying one particular space or by occupying spaces?

Arundhati Roy: I don’t think the whole protest is only about occupying physical territory, but about reigniting a new political imagination. I don’t think the state will allow people to occupy a particular space unless it feels that allowing that will end up in a kind of complacency, and the effectiveness and urgency of the protest will be lost. The fact that in New York and other places where people are being beaten and evicted suggests nervousness and confusion in the ruling establishment. I think the movement will, or at least should, become a protean movement of ideas, as well as action, where the element of surprise remains with the protesters. We need to preserve the element of an intellectual ambush and a physical manifestation that takes the government and the police by surprise. It has to keep re-imagining itself, because holding territory may not be something the movement will be allowed to do in a state as powerful and violent as the United States.

Arun Gupta: At the same, occupying public spaces did capture the public imagination. Why do you think that is?

Arundhati Roy: I think you had a whole subcutaneous discontent that these movements suddenly began to epitomise. The Occupy movement found places where people who were feeling that anger could come and share it – and that is, as we all know, extremely important in any political movement. The Occupy sites became a way you could gauge the levels of anger and discontent.

Arun Gupta: You mentioned that they are under attack. Dozens of occupations have been shut down, evicted, at least temporarily, in the last week. What do you see as the next phase for this movement?

Arundhati Roy: I don’t know whether I’m qualified to answer that, because I’m not somebody who spends a lot of time here in the United States, but I suspect that it will keep reassembling in different ways and the anger created by the repression will, in fact, expand the movement. But eventually, the greater danger to the movement is that it may dovetail into the presidential election campaign that’s coming up. I’ve seen that happen before in the antiwar movement here, and I see it happening all the time in India. Eventually, all the energy goes into trying to campaign for the “better guy”, in this case Barack Obama, who’s actually expanding wars all over the world. Election campaigns seem to siphon away political anger and even basic political intelligence into this great vaudeville, after which we all end up in exactly the same place.

—snip—

Arun Gupta: You’ve written about the need for a different imagination than that of capitalism. Can you talk about that?

Arundhati Roy: We often confuse or loosely use the ideas of crony capitalism or neoliberalism to actually avoid using the word “capitalism”, but once you’ve actually seen, let’s say, what’s happening in India and the United States – that this model of US economics packaged in a carton that says “democracy” is being forced on countries all over the world, militarily if necessary, has in the United States itself resulted in 400 of the richest people owning wealth equivalent [to that] of half of the population. Thousands are losing their jobs and homes, while corporations are being bailed out with billions of dollars.

In India, 100 of the richest people own assets worth 25% of the gross domestic product. There’s something terribly wrong. No individual and no corporation should be allowed to amass that kind of unlimited wealth, including bestselling writers like myself, who are showered with royalties. Money need not be our only reward. Corporations that are turning over these huge profits can own everything: the media, the universities, the mines, the weapons industry, insurance hospitals, drug companies, non-governmental organisations. They can buy judges, journalists, politicians, publishing houses, television stations, bookshops and even activists. This kind of monopoly, this cross-ownership of businesses, has to stop.

The whole privatisation of health and education, of natural resources and essential infrastructure – all of this is so twisted and so antithetical to anything that would place the interests of human beings or the environment at the center of what ought to be a government concern – should stop. The amassing of unfettered wealth of individuals and corporations should stop. The inheritance of rich people’s wealth by their children should stop. The expropriators should have their wealth expropriated and redistributed.

Standing ovation!

The interview concludes when Gupta asks Roy if the term “occupation” can be reclaimed: She tells him “We ought to say, “Occupy Wall Street, not Iraq,” “Occupy Wall Street, not Afghanistan,” “Occupy Wall Street, not Palestine.” The two need to be put together. Otherwise people might not read the signs.”

Arundhati Roy: ‘The people who created the crisis will not be the ones that come up with a solution’ (The Guardian)

Look for more of Arun Gupta’s work on Salon. Follow him on Twitter.

Another strong—and often very amusing—new voice emerging from the media on the Left is Tina Dupuy, the managing editor of the mighty Crooks and Liars blog. She’s a powerful and persuasive writer and a sometime stand-up comic. Dupuy gave a fascinating firsthand description of what she saw the other night when Occupy Los Angeles—the largest of all the encampments—was evicted, when she was on Sam Seder’s Majority Report yesterday. I’m glad this woman is out there on the frontlines. Tina Dupuy could be another Rachel Maddow. It can’t be long until Current TV or MSNBC snaps her up (Or The Daily Show for that matter. They could use a real Lefty…)
 

 
And then there is this survey, which suggests to me that some of the marks are wising up. At The New York Times blog, The Caucus, Kate Zirnike writes in “Support for Tea Party Drops Even in Strongholds, Survey Finds

In Congressional districts represented by Tea Party lawmakers, the number of people saying they disagree with the Tea Party has risen sharply over the year since the movement powered a Republican sweep in midterm elections, so that almost as many people disagree with the Tea Party as agree with it, according to the poll by the Pew Research Center.

Support for the Republican Party has fallen more sharply in those places than it has in the country as a whole. In the 60 districts represented in Congress by a member of the House Tea Party Caucus, Republicans are viewed about as negatively as Democrats.

The survey suggests that the Tea Party may be dragging down the Republican Party heading into a presidential election year, even as it ushered in a new Republican majority in the House of Representatives just a year ago.

Other polls have shown a decline in support for the Tea Party and its positions, particularly because its hard line during the debate over the debt ceiling and deficit reduction made the Tea Party less an abstraction. In earlier polls, most Americans did not know enough about the Tea Party to offer an opinion.

But the Pew survey shows that Tea Party support has declined even in places where it had been particularly robust.

“We know that the image of the G.O.P. has slipped, but to see it slip so dramatically in Tea Party districts is pretty surprising,” said Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew center. “You think of those as bedrock Republican districts. They are the base.”

Tea-hee! Superb!

More from Reuters:

In an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll taken earlier this month, 76 percent agreed that the “current economic structure of the country is out of balance and favors a very small proportion of the rich over the rest of the country.” In another recent poll, by The Washington Post/ABC News, respondents were asked: “Do you think the federal government should or should not pursue policies that try to reduce the gap between wealthy and less well-off Americans?” A majority – 60 percent – said the government should pursue such policies.

Meanwhile, public concern about the Tea Party’s linchpin issues – taxes and the deficit – has receded. Asked in late October to name the most important issue facing the country, just 5 percent of respondents to a New York Times/CBS News poll named the budget deficit. A majority said jobs and the economy. This same poll included another result that should give Democrats hope: A strong 69 percent of respondents agreed that the policies of Republicans in Congress “favor the rich” while just 12 percent thought the same thing about Obama’s policies.

Actually that poll should do more than just provide the Democrats with some “hope”—it should give them SOME FUCKING IDEAS. Here’s one for free: TAX THE RICH.

And lastly, here’s the New Statesman blog had a look at the numbers from big strike in the UK:

The unions claim that around 2 million people were on strike yesterday, but ministers dispute this, putting the number closer to 1.2 million.

Well they would say that, wouldn’t they? Either way that’s well over a million people striking. And David Cameron calls that “a damp squib”? What number would it take to really rattle the boy Prime Minister? Let’s hope we get to find out soon!
 

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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12.02.2011
09:58 am
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‘Oscar’: Documentary on the importance of being Wilde
12.01.2011
08:00 pm
Topics:
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oscarwilde
 
Writer Michael Bracewell examines the importance of being Oscar Wilde, through the events and works of the great poet’s life.

Here, Wilde is compared to an Existential hero, a man who was brave enough to set an example for all of us - to relish in the essence of who we are.

Wilde was rarely modest, and best explained himself in a letter to his lover Alfred Douglas, Jan-Mar. 1897:

‘I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age…The gods had given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring: I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men and the colors of things: there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder.

I treated Art as the supreme reality, and life as a mere mode of fiction: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.’

First aired in 1997, this is a fascinating documentary explaining why Oscar Wilde still really matters, with contributions from Tom Stoppard, Stephen Fry, Neil Tennant and Ulick O’Connor.
 

 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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12.01.2011
08:00 pm
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Stanley Kubrick: Photographs of New York from the 1940s
12.01.2011
06:11 pm
Topics:
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kubrickny
 
Before he began directing films, Stanley Kubrick was a photo-journalist with Look magazine, starting his career in 1946, and was, apparently, their youngest photographer on record. Kubrick snapped over 10,000 pictures, sometimes hiding his camera in a paper bag to achieve a more intimate and natural image.

Kubrick’s photographs of New York in the 1940s, have the look of gritty movie stills from some imagined film noir, revealing intriguing personal narratives, for which the viewer can compose their own script.

A selection of Kubrick’s photographs are available to buy from V and M, with proceeds going to the Museum of the City of New York.
 
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More of Kubrick’s photographs, after the jump…
 
Via Flavor Wire with thanks to Tara McGinley
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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12.01.2011
06:11 pm
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‘The Artist Formerly Known As Captain Beefheart’ - the complete documentary
12.01.2011
06:06 pm
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Captain Beefheart t-shirt by Black And White T-shirts

This excellent documentary from 1997, narrated by John Peel and shown as part of a commemorative BBC Peel Night, has been online for a while but finally arrives in one 50 minute long piece thanks to uploader abrahamisagreatman. You may have seen this before, but it’s definitely worth another watch:

Posted by Niall O'Conghaile
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12.01.2011
06:06 pm
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