Wait, I thought the whole birther thing died out. No?
Maybe the Republicans in New Hampshire are just stupider than they are in the rest of the country?
Right Wing Watch reports that crazy lady Orly Taitz and half a dozen loony Republican legislators threw a red-faced group hissy fit when New Hampshire’s Attorney General Michael Delaney declined to review their “evidence” and kicked that can down to the state’s Ballot Law Commission.
In a mostly overlooked episode earlier this month, the so-called “Birther Queen” Orly Taitz appeared before the New Hampshire Ballot Law Commission to call for the removal of President Obama from the state’s presidential ballot. Taitz, the Soviet-born lawyer-dentist-real estate agent, has been on a multi-year mission to prove Obama is secretly Kenyan, and no amount of evidence will dissuade her. But she’s not alone – nine members of the NH state house signed on to her complaint.
It came as no surprise to see Taitz embarrassing herself in yet another venue, but I found it remarkable that there are still elected officials willing to lend their names to her effort. Then I watched the video of Taitz’s presentation and the angry antics of the state representatives supporting her, and it made more sense – they’re no better than Taitz.
Have a laugh at the expense of dumbshit GOP Rep. Harry Accornero who (STILL!) believes there is “overwhelming” evidence that Obama was not born in this country as he gets his panties in a twist with his incontinent anger towards the Ballot Law Commission asking them “Why don’t you rip up the Constitution and throw it out?” and telling them “You all should be accused of treason, and we’ll get people to do that.”
Oooooh, hollow threats from a Tea-brained birther moron. I’m sure the AG is quaking in fear over that one… Lawyers always love empty threats.
The Ballot Law Commision, of course, unanimously dismissed the complaint, causing several audience members to shout “traitors!” Then another Republican nutcase, Rep. Susan DeLemus, began berating NH Assistant Attorney General Matt Mavrogeorge. Repeatedly.
At one point Mavrogeorge and Assistant Secretary of State Karen Ladd locked themselves in an office “out of fear for their safety due to the aggressive behavior of the crowd that included several legislators.”
Regarding this preposterous incident, Attorney General Michael Delaney said, “No state employee should find himself in this situation, and I am asking the General Court to take whatever steps it deems appropriate concerning the standards of conduct exhibited by these elected officials.”
Oh dear. Forever 21 is selling the “homemade” Kurt Cobain version of a Flipper t-shirt made popular when Cobain sported his on Saturday Night Live in 1992. There’s even a “Ha, Ha, Ha” t-shirt I found on their site, although, I doubt it has anything to do with Flipper.
To me, Flipper was always the band who I thought of as making the best soundtrack for sniffing glue. I wonder what people who’d buy this product at Forever 21 think about Flipper?
This amazing animation was originally projected behind Pink Floyd when they promoted the Animals album on their “In the Flesh” tour in 1977. It was directed by Gerald Scarfe who also worked on the album cover, tour, film and theatrical adaptation of The Wall .
Eventually the record label turned it into a music video and it can been seen from time to time on Vh1 Classics. Can you imagine what this was like to see screened back then and with this number being played live and loud by Pink Floyd?
It’s still mind-blowing. I’ve always loved this song, but this film gave me a new appreciation for it. The film is included in the new Wish You Were Here Immersion box set in a 5.1 surround mix.
Christians For A Moral America took to his (their?) Twitter feed, claiming that Michael “has AIDS” and calling for people to pray for the singer’s death because of his “satanic lifestyle.”
Our Grim Reaper who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy multiple names and personalities.
Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in the US as it is in Iran.
Give us this day our daily hate tweets and forgive us our satanic pop singers and we will never forgive those who gay-marry against us.
And lead us not into compassion, but deliver us from empathy.
For Thine is the homophobia and the death prayers and the hypocrisy forever and ever.
Or else.
Here’s hoping George Michael makes a complete and quick recovery.
Ian Malcolm: From Chaos by John Larriva oil on panel 12” x 9” $500
The JP Show (Just People) exhibit, curated by artists Brandon Bird and Julia Vickerman, pays homage to only the human characters featured in the Jurassic Park film series. The Jeff Goldblum portrait above by John Larriva had me in stitches.
The JP Show runs December 3rd & 4th, 2011 at Nucleus in Los Angeles.
Jurassic Jeff by Lisa Hanawalt watercolor 9” x 12” $275
I’m not putting up a Christmas tree this year, but if I were to, I’d top it with Yoda… and his lightsaber. He’s available for purchase over at the NetoShop for $59.95.
There is probably only but one man in America who seriously believes that Newton Leroy Gingrich could ever become the President of the United States and that one man also happens to be named Newton Leroy Gingrich. The idea that this repulsive, hypocritical turd will ever be in a position of elected power again, is, of course, as ridiculous and as preposterous on the face of it as, well, Gingrich himself. More people loathe him than can tolerate him. He polls about as well as Sarah Palin nationally.
It’s hard to even get worked up or irate when this doofus says things like he says in the below video, to a rightwing Christian audience, because A) he’s a joke, so who cares what this pudgy prick thinks? and B) WHO in their right minds would think electing Newt Gingrich president would be a way to “take back” America from the “minority elites, in the first place, even this audience? That doesn’t make… any sense (As Paul Krugman recently quipped Gingrich is a “stupid man’s idea of what a smart person sounds like.” He went on to add “but he is more plausible than the other guys they’ve been pushing up”! How true, how pithy! How very Idiocracy...)
It’s amazing to contemplate that this universally disliked, self-satisfied “conservative intellectual” is currently the front runner for the GOP nomination. Who’d have thunk this was possible? How low will they go? Bachmann. Perry. Cain. Gingrich? You’re joking, right? Will Sarah Palin jump into the race to “save” the party from these people? Will ole “frothy mix” Rick Santorum get his day in the Republican sun? What about the least influential man in the world, Tim Pawlenty? If Gingrich can rally a comeback, why can’t he? (Imagine being T-Paw and seeing a no-hoper like Gingrich in the cat bird seat. Even it it only lasts a couple of weeks, that’s gotta be pretty galling!)
Don’t get me wrong, it would be fantastic to see Newt get the GOP nod, strictly from the lulz perspective of seeing the Republicans utterly destroyed in a national election, but you’d have to sift through trillions upon trillions of alternate universes to find the one in which the disgusting toad that his pretty blonde “Stepford wife” Calista kissed would turn into the POTUS (it’s a parallel dimension where gravity has failed, “fun” has been outlawed and Snookie is the Secretary of Spray Tans). It’s never, ever going to happen. Scott Walker has a better chance of holding on to his job than Gingrich does of taking Obama’s. These are the cold and clammy facts.
The mainstream media taking Gingrich seriously again as a candidate, has got a shelf life of how many… days do you think? Anybody want to start a betting pool on how long his front-runner status lasts?
And one more question: What EXACTLY does well-fed fascist mean by the curious phrase “Classical America” when he’s saying it to an audience comprised of Christian evangelicals?
“But we have allowed ourselves to be bullied, harassed, intimidated, and dominated by a tiny elite using the courts, using the news media, using the entertainment community, using the bureaucracy to coerce the American people against their will. It is fundamentally anti-freedom, fundamentally anti-democratic and the core meaning of the 2012 is to stand up and say “no, the eighty percent of the country that actually believes in classical America is now about to take back power from the minority elite.”
Whatever, dude… I just… can’t be bothered getting worked up about you or even to take you seriously.
And have you seen this harsh video that Ron Paul’s campaign just dropped on Gingrich’s big fat head? Ouch!
UPDATE: I have to admit that I laughed with Newt on this one...
Discovering reggae in the early 1970s was like discovering rock and roll all over again. Along with Jimmy Cliff, The Pioneers and Toots And The Maytals, one of the first reggae groups to blow me away were The Heptones. Their soulful harmonies and hooky melodies reminded me of artists I was familiar with like the Temptations, Smokey Robinson And The Miracles and Little Anthony And The Imperials but it was the tight yet supple Afro-Caribbean grooves, slathered with some New Orleans and Memphis funk, that seduced me. The Heptones created music you could languish and relax in, like a hammock constructed of sound. Motown on marijuana.
So it saddens me to report that one of The Heptones founders, Barry Llewellyn, passed away on Nov. 23 in St. Andrew, Jamaica. Cause of death was pneumonia. He was 63.
Leroy Sibbles was the vocalist on most of The Heptones recordings, but it was Llewellyn who sang lead on The Heptones’ biggest hit and one of the most sublime reggae songs ever recorded, “The Book Of Rules.”
I put together this little video in honor of Barry Llewellyn. The idea was to keep it funky and fun while reminding everyone of how deep roots music runs.
This surprisingly good documentary includes interviews with people who know what they’re talking about. Unexploitive and free of the usual finger wagging.
“One of them (The Sex Pistols) had to be a casualty to make the myth work, and Sid was only too willing to do it.” Steve Severin (Siouxsie And The Banshees).
Sid’s short and controversial life with The Sex Pistols and Nancy Spungen is profiled with new interviews from Jah Wobble, Steve Severin, Vivienne Westwood, Malcolm McClaren, Dave Vanian, Rat Scabies, Marco Pironi, Viv Albertine, and many others who actually knew Sid.
Seeing a very fucked-up Sid performing onstage at Max’s with Jerry Nolan and his band The Idols (Jerry was a friend of mine and another dope casualty) was one of the saddest spectacles I’ve ever had the displeasure of witnessing. A train wreck in slooooow motion.
The last few gigs that Sid played at Max’s before his death (and Nancy’s) had become freak shows drawing crowds of curious bridge and tunnel punks to watch the ex-Pistol crash and burn right in front of their eyes. Something to share with your grandchildren as you tug your beard and run your fingers through your thinning gray Mohawk.
Beatle George Harrison died ten years ago on November 29, 2001.
Below, you can watch the entire historic Concert For Bangladesh performance featuring George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Ravi Shankar, Leon Russell, Ringo Starr, Billy Preston, Badfinger, Jesse Ed Davis, Klaus Voorman and Mother of Invention Don Preston.
Harrison walks onstage at 22 minutes in—after a fiery opening set by Ravi Shankar—and the supergroup (led by bandleader Leon Russell) launch into his blistering anti-Macca number “Wah Wah,” one of the best songs on his sprawling All Things Must Pass album.
(You might not want to wait too long to watch this one, who knows how long this is going to last on YouTube…)
There’s been a lot of hand-wringing lately from so-called moderate Republicans over the brainless crew of chuckleheaded “leadership” running their party headlong over a steep cliff.
Even David Frum (David Frum???) has taken to expressing his exasperation with his party in a recent New York magazine article titled “When Did The GOP Lose Touch With Reality?”:
The Bush years cannot be repudiated, but the memory of them can be discarded to make way for a new and more radical ideology, assembled from bits of the old GOP platform that were once sublimated by the party elites but now roam the land freely: ultralibertarianism, crank monetary theories, populist fury, and paranoid visions of a Democratic Party controlled by ACORN and the New Black Panthers. For the past three years, the media have praised the enthusiasm and energy the tea party has brought to the GOP. Yet it’s telling that that movement has failed time and again to produce even a remotely credible candidate for president. Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich: The list of tea-party candidates reads like the early history of the U.S. space program, a series of humiliating fizzles and explosions that never achieved liftoff. A political movement that never took governing seriously was exploited by a succession of political entrepreneurs uninterested in governing—but all too interested in merchandising. Much as viewers tune in to American Idol to laugh at the inept, borderline dysfunctional early auditions, these tea-party champions provide a ghoulish type of news entertainment each time they reveal that they know nothing about public affairs and have never attempted to learn. But Cain’s gaffe on Libya or Perry’s brain freeze on the Department of Energy are not only indicators of bad leadership. They are indicators of a crisis of followership. The tea party never demanded knowledge or concern for governance, and so of course it never got them.
In an NPR interview, Frum discusses how people who listen to talk radio or watch Fox News have a completely different set of facts than the rest of us. He’s correct there, of course… and he’s David freakin’ Frum!
I’m perplexed, but grateful for small miracles that at least there is one conservative pundit out there who can translate their brain-damaged behavior (to a certain extent) for the rest of us. And will you look at that: They seem fucking crazy to him, too!
And then there’s today’s column, also at New York, from Jonathan Chait titled “The Agony of the Moderate Republican,” where he observes that former Bush speech writer, Michael Gerson, “[w]hen confronted with a relatively straightforward description of the party’s agenda, he instinctively recoils — not at the agenda, but at the description itself.
“As president, Obama has asserted that Republicans want the elderly, autistic children and children with Down syndrome to “fend for themselves,” and that the GOP plan is “dirtier air, dirtier water, less people with health insurance.” In what context would these claims be true?”
Here’s how Chait parses the question posed by Gerson and turns it right around on him.
In what context? Well, let’s see. The House Republican budget would cut Medicaid — a bare-bones health insurance program for the poor, disabled, and elderly — by $750 billion over ten years, ramping up the scale of cuts until funding has been reduced by 35 percent by 2022. When you’re slashing the funding of a program that’s far cheaper than private insurance and not replacing it with anything, you’re pretty much leaving people to fend for themselves.
As for children with Down syndrome, they’re an important part of the Medicaid program. (People with disabilities account for 42 percent of the cost of Medicaid.) Unsurprisingly, disability advocates were apoplectic about the Republican budget.
And the House Republican budget would repeal the Affordable Care Act and put in place nothing whatsoever to cover the uninsured, thereby increasing their ranks by some 32 million.
Now, Republicans can certainly contest Obama’s description. I’m sure they have arguments as to why weakening laws that have produced cleaner air and water will not actually make the air and water less clean, and why cutting or eliminating programs that provide medical care to people who can’t afford it won’t deny them medical care. But Gerson doesn’t merely consider Obama’s description to be contestable. He considers it a lie so obvious it requires no rebuttal. [Emphasis added]
That’s interesting, isn’t it? Like there’s this weird blind spot that conservatives have about their own biases that makes it awfully difficult to even talk sensibly with them anymore. I doubt Jon Huntsman would have much of a quarrel with that statement in private, what do you think?
How a party can so nakedly represent only the top 1 percent while at the same time trying to stop anything that will help the economy, and survive while doing it, is beyond me.
More from Tomasky:
Every blessed once in a great while, all artifice is stripped away, rhetoric collapses under the weight of its own absurdity, and we get to see things as they really are. Such will be the case later this week when the Senate tries to vote on extending the payroll-tax holiday. The Republicans will oppose it—that is to say, the Republicans will support a tax increase on working Americans. And why? Because the Democrats want to pay for it with a small surtax on the very top earners. So the choice couldn’t be more direct: which is more important, giving the middle class a tax cut or protecting those who make more than $1 million a year? Republicans are making it clear. This vote alone should destroy them.
The facts: The Social Security payroll tax comes to 12.4 percent of an employee’s salary—employers and employees each pay 6.2 percent. The money goes into the Social Security Trust Fund and finances benefits. At the end of last year, the Obama administration, in exchange for temporarily extending the Bush tax rates on all income levels, got Congress to agree to a one-year 2 percent payroll-tax holiday for employees, down to 4.2 percent. For a $50,000 earner, that meant paying $1,000 a year less in payroll taxes. It was agreed in that law that the holiday would cost the Social Security Trust Fund nothing—the depleted revenue would be replaced out of the general treasury. So the holiday adds to the general deficit but does not affect the trust fund.
The cut proved popular, or is presumed to be popular, so now, as many people predicted last year, Congress wants to extend it. Republicans of course say (as they say of everything) that it hasn’t done any good. But economists attest to its stimulative value. Two economists at the Economic Policy Institute say ending the holiday would reduce GDP by $128 billion and cost 972,000 jobs in 2012. The EPI is a liberal outfit, but Mark Zandi of Moody’s, who advised John McCain in 2008, agrees that raising the payroll tax back to where it was could cause another recession.
And besides those macroeconomic concerns, there is the simple question of money in people’s pockets as they try to tough out the economy. A thousand dollars to a $50,000 earner, or $1,500 to a $75,000 earner, isn’t nothing.
What the Senate Democrats want to do now is this. They want to increase the employee’s reduction from 2 percent to 3.1 percent (that is, to cut it in half from the normal 6.2 percent rate). And they now want, for the first time, to extend the holiday to employers as well. This is important, and it probably won’t be well explained in very many places. But the Democrats would have employers pay 3.1 percent (rather than the 6.2 percent they now pay) on the first $5 million of their payroll. Also, if employers add to their payrolls, they would pay no payroll tax on new hires. So the new bill is specifically aimed at helping the job creators. The total cost is $255 billion.
The Democrats want to pay for it with a 3.5 percent surtax on dollars earned over $1 million per year. In other words, if someone earns $1.3 million a year, she will pay the extra 3.5 percent only on the last $300,000 in earnings; that is, an extra $10,500 a year (bear in mind that this person takes home, after taxes, around $30,000 every two weeks). So it certainly raises the taxes of the very wealthiest. But it gives more money back to middle-class people, and it stimulates the economy, perhaps to the tune of 50,000 jobs a month, maybe even more.
How, I ask you HOW, HOW do these feckless “Marie Antoinette Republicans” think they can vote against this and still hold EVEN THE DUMBEST members of their base? How many Senate Republicans will vote for this? One? Two? None? It’s incredible to contemplate what this will do to them. I’ve always hoped to see the suicidal self-immolation of the Republican Party, but I was afraid I wouldn’t get to see it in my lifetime. At the rate these buffoons are heading for the cliff, it could happen before Christmas!
Tomasky concludes:
Obama should give an Oval Office speech Wednesday night and say: “If you are an employee and make less than $1 million, or if you are an employer of any size, I am trying to give you a tax cut. If you are an employee who makes more than $1 million a year, you should write and thank your Republican senator, because the Republicans are blocking me and helping you.”
