How much MORE hapless-looking can someone GET than beleaguered WI Governor Scott Walker?
The historical efforts to recall Republican Gov. Scott Walker will be kicking off Tuesday in Wisconsin with a late-night rally and early morning pajama parties. One hundred events across the state are planned for tomorrow as Democrats and unions begin signature gathering in earnest to recall Walker, Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefsich and at least three more Republican state senators in addition to the two who lost their seats earlier this year.
“I fully anticipate there will be signatures collected in every single Wisconsin county tomorrow,” said state Democratic Party Chairman Mike Tate, adding that he hoped to collect at least 600,000 signatures by the January 17, 2012 deadline. 540,000 names are required to trigger the election.
“We’ve made a lot of progress,” muttered the increasingly hapless-looking, politically tone-deaf Walker. “It’s a new day in Wisconsin.”
It’ll be a new day in Wisconsin when Gray Davis is buying you a beer, asshole!
A look at lick-spittle lackey of the 1%, Republican House Majority leader Eric Cantor, getting “mic-checked” by Occupy Houston and some Rice University grad students.
There is no schadenfreude quite as satisfying for me as Republican schadenfreude, but when something uncomfortable happens to Eric Cantor in particular, hey, it gets even better!
The Republican Party needs to be put out of its misery. A functioning Republic needs at least one opposition party, but the current and likely final iteration of the Republican Party is not it. The current iteration of the Democratic Party could be it, should it continue to fail to live up to its greatest history and increasingly mythological ideals, but that would depend on the creation of a legitimately viable progressive party, and for now at least that is not going to happen. But for the Democratic Party to recapture the magic of its greatest history, or failing that for a legitimately viable liberal party to emerge from the wreckage that is our current political system, the Republican Party must be put out of its misery. Whether you are a loyal Democrat, a wavering frustrated Democrat, a progressive Independent, or whether you are dreaming of the emergence of a legitimately viable liberal alternative, the Republican Party must be put out of its misery. All liberals and progressives should be able to unite behind that idea. Because if the Republican Party is put out of its misery, the Democrats no longer will be able to use the Republicans as excuse or foil and will once and for all finally be forced to prove what they are or aren’t really about.
The embarrassment of embarrasments that is the Republican presidential field ought to be the final proof that the Republican Party has ceased to serve any valuable role in our political system. The lunatics have taken over. The Republican rejection of science and rationality once served various tactical purposes, but in previous generations it always was a feint to the theocrats whose primary political purpose for the Republicans was to enable the kleptocrats and the neo-Royalists. But while the Republican financial base continues to be those extremely wealthy who lack all conscience, its voting base now is the ignorant and the reality challenged. Most of the current Republican presidential field is not merely playing to this base, it is of it. No serious person can look at Herman Cain or Rick Perry or Ron Paul or Michele Bachmann or Rick Santorum and see a future president. In a less surreal world these would be but cartoon characters. And yet one of them or someone equally absurd still may become the Republican presidential nominee. The base of the party desperately hopes so.
Continue reading The Republican Party’s time has come— and gone (Daily Kos)
In an inspiring Op Ed piece in today’s New York Times, Columbia University’s Jeffrey D. Sachs takes but a few paragraphs to thoroughly demolish the dominant ur-myths of the past three decades of Republican politics, and to illustrate how the New Progressive Era is already upon us.
Occupy Wall Street and its allied movements around the country are more than a walk in the park. They are most likely the start of a new era in America. Historians have noted that American politics moves in long swings. We are at the end of the 30-year Reagan era, a period that has culminated in soaring income for the top 1 percent and crushing unemployment or income stagnation for much of the rest. The overarching challenge of the coming years is to restore prosperity and power for the 99 percent.
Thirty years ago, a newly elected Ronald Reagan made a fateful judgment: “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” Taxes for the rich were slashed, as were outlays on public services and investments as a share of national income. Only the military and a few big transfer programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and veterans’ benefits were exempted from the squeeze.
Reagan’s was a fateful misdiagnosis. He completely overlooked the real issue — the rise of global competition in the information age — and fought a bogeyman, the government. Decades on, America pays the price of that misdiagnosis, with a nation singularly unprepared to face the global economic, energy and environmental challenges of our time.
Washington still channels Reaganomics. The federal budget for nonsecurity discretionary outlays — categories like highways and rail, education, job training, research and development, the judiciary, NASA, environmental protection, energy, the I.R.S. and more — was cut from more than 5 percent of gross domestic product at the end of the 1970s to around half of that today. With the budget caps enacted in the August agreement, domestic discretionary spending would decline to less than 2 percent of G.D.P. by the end of the decade, according to the White House. Government would die by fiscal asphyxiation.
Both parties have joined in crippling the government in response to the demands of their wealthy campaign contributors, who above all else insist on keeping low tax rates on capital gains, top incomes, estates and corporate profits. Corporate taxes as a share of national income are at the lowest levels in recent history. Rich households take home the greatest share of income since the Great Depression. Twice before in American history, powerful corporate interests dominated Washington and brought America to a state of unacceptable inequality, instability and corruption. Both times a social and political movement arose to restore democracy and shared prosperity.
Sachs goes on to state what already seems self-evident to many of us:
This is just the beginning.
The young people in Zuccotti Park and more than 1,000 cities have started America on a path to renewal. The movement, still in its first days, will have to expand in several strategic ways. Activists are needed among shareholders, consumers and students to hold corporations and politicians to account. Shareholders, for example, should pressure companies to get out of politics. Consumers should take their money and purchasing power away from companies that confuse business and political power. The whole range of other actions — shareholder and consumer activism, policy formulation, and running of candidates — will not happen in the park.
Dutch sociologist Abram De Swaan interviews John and Yoko for the TV program Rood Wit Blauw at the practice of Lennon’s Knightsbridge dentist. The interview took place on December 12, 1968, just after their Two Virgins album had come out.
In the first part, while John was in the dentist’s chair, Yoko discusses Fluxus, the underground vs. the establishment, her own approach to art, why she abores “professionalism” and more.
When Lennon joins them, in reel four, he talks about revolution, reincarnation, taxes and money.
This is the single best vintage Yoko Ono interview I’ve ever seen, a real treat for Yoko fans.
After the jump, Yoko discusses living her life with Lennon in public and how their first meeting was a “miracle.”
“The anti-globalization movement was the first step on the road. Back then, our model was to attack the system like a pack of wolves. There was an alpha male, a wolf who led the pack, and those who followed behind. Now the model has evolved. Today we are one big swarm of people.” —Raimundo Viejo
The “story” of Occupy Wall Street has been in small chunks via thousands of articles, news reports, viral videos and blog posts—my personal account of what I saw is here—but this in-depth report from Jeff Sharlet at Rolling Stone is a particularly insightful look at the movement from the earliest days (ahem, STILL less than two months ago!). Sharlet actually slept in Zuccotti Park himself, one of the first journalists I’ve read who has done so. I didn’t find anything in this article that didn’t jibe with my own direct experiences of what I saw at OWS myself. This is some good journalism:
On August 2nd, the New York City General Assembly convened for the first time in Lower Manhattan, right by the market’s bronze icon, “Charging Bull,” snorting in perpetuity. It wasn’t the usual protest crowd. “The traditional left – the unions, the progressive academics, the community organizations – wanted nothing to do with this in the beginning,” says Marisa Holmes, a 25-year-old filmmaker from Columbus, Ohio, who was working on a BBC documentary called Creating Freedom, about why people rebel. “I think it’s telling that, of the early participants, so many were artists and media makers.”
Even the instigators and architects present at the creation marvel at how things just happened. “It was a magic moment,” says Kalle Lasn, Adbusters’ 69-year-old co-founder. “After that, things took on a life of their own, and then it was out of our hands.”
Adbusters’ call to arms had been timid by the standards of the movement quickly taking form. The magazine had proposed a “worldwide shift in revolutionary tactics,” but their big ideas went no further than pressuring Obama to appoint a presidential commission on the role of money in politics. In Lasn’s imagination, though, that would be just the start. “We knew, of course, that Egypt had a hard regime change where a torturous dictator was removed,” he says, “but many of us felt that in America, a soft regime change was possible.”
Possible, but not likely. They were still thinking in inches. “To be perfectly honest, we thought it might be a steppingstone, not the establishment of a whole thing,” says David Graeber, a 50-year-old anthropologist and anarchist whose teaching gig at Yale was not renewed, some suspect, because he took part in radical actions. It was Graeber who gave the movement its theme: “We are the 99 percent.” He also helped rescue it from the usual sorry fate of the left in America, the schisms and infighting over who’s in charge. He had shown up at the August 2nd meeting thinking it was an Adbusters thing; he was surprised to find a rally dominated by the antiquated ideas of the Cold War left. “This is bullshit,” Graeber thought. He recognized a Greek anarchist organizer, Georgia Sagri, and with her help identified kindred spirits. “We looked around. I didn’t recognize faces, everybody was so young. I went by T-shirts – Zapatistas, Food Not Bombs.” Anarchists in name or inclination. He calls them the “horizontal crowd” because they loathe hierarchy. “It was really just tapping on shoulders. And a lot of people said, ‘Shit, yeah.’”
Inside Occupy Wall Street: How a bunch of anarchists and radicals with nothing but sleeping bags launched a nationwide movement (Rolling Stone)
How young and beautiful, Marc Bolan looks in this TV interview from 1970. Filmed during the writing of songs for the first album as the abbreviated T.Rex - after 4 as Tyrannosaurus Rex - Marc can be seen working on “Children of Rarn” and “Suneye”, as he discusses the process of writing. Like many artists (David Lynch comes to mind), Bolan claimed he just pulled the songs out, as if they were already there, fully formed. He also said he was used by “melody” as if it were a being. O, to be touched by the Muse.
There is something quite charming about these short Pathé News Films from the 1950s.
In the first, model Carol Archer visits a boutique in Soho, London, where she tries on a variety of novelty ear-rings, including miniature champagne bottles, cuckoo clocks, and hands.
Redditor burt_flaxton posted the above photo and said, “Friend’s father died—they found these after. He must have handed them out to the womens at bars.” Apparently these joke buisness cards were passed around in the 60s and 70s for a laugh.
They all seem to promise “revolution” and arms smuggling. One saucy detail I noticed that all three of these cards have in common: orgies.
This commercial ran three times during Wednesday night’s episode of The O’Reilly Factor. It’s also aired on Bloomberg, ESPN, the History Channel and elsewhere
If you’d like to chip in to buy more national media time for this Occupy Wall Street ad and others, you can do so via Loudsauce.
After seeing over two million voters deliver a whopping 61% to 39% rejection of his party’s strong-arm tactics to strip collective bargaining rights from public employees, Ohio Republican Governor John Kasich did one of those “open mouth and remove all doubt” things they tell fools not to do:
At a news conference Tuesday night, Mr. Kasich congratulated the winners and said he would assess the situation before proposing any new legislation. “It’s time to pause,” he said. “The people have spoken clearly.”
When asked about the people’s message, Mr. Kasich said, “They might have said it was too much too soon.”
“They might have said”? Might? Might nothing asshole, it was a 61% to 39% vote! Even reliably Republican counties voted against harming their friends and neighbors. No one except stupid people in the state ever believed GOP union-busting had anything to do with creating jobs. And to demonize teachers, fire fighters and police officers as lazy, coddled bums? I mean the whole thing was just so… predictable.
“Too much, too soon”? Jon Stewart, here comes an easy work day, courtesy of one of the most tone-deaf politicians in America.. More people turned up to vote against SB-5 than voted for Kasish himself in the last election, even. This man is a fucking plank.
Attention Republicans! Let me spell it out for you:
The majority of the general public—the ones who aren’t braying asses, at least—does not want to cut government programs for people like themselves.
The American people are starting to wise up in an unprecedented manner to the bleak future our corporate overlords and their craven vassals like Kasish have planned for us. And so the Reichwing is starting to get a better sense of how deep the backlash is. This is why the GOP is stepping up their efforts to discourage voter registration among younger, older and poorer voters who tend to vote for Democrats. If you can’t beat ‘em… uh… try to change the rules mid-game, I suppose?
There’s a big problem in their math, though, and it’s a fatal error indeed: There are more of us than there are of them…
99 to one? I’ll take those odds!
As I am fond of reminding myself, demographics are a bitch for the Republican party... Even with the 1%‘s special interest money behind them, they’re still gonna lose and keeping losing until they’re just a minority party of cranky racist stingy “olds.” That’s pretty much what they are now, but when the Baby Boomers start dying off en masse (and it won’t be long before that happens) the Republican Party is toast.
Think of Republicans as newspaper subscribers. That’s how I think of them. Comforting thought isn’t it?
Meanwhile over in Wisconsin, Scott Walker must be absolutely pissing himself as he contemplates how brief his tenure in the governor’s office will have been and what his next career move will be since elected politics will probably not be much of an option for him moving forward…
The Walker recall efforts in WI got a big shot in the arm from labor’s HUGE win in Ohio. If you’d like to contribute to boot that Koch whore from office, you can donate at ActBlue.
