March 8, 2010 archive

4:05 AM somewhere in Los Angeles…

The last thing that I clearly remember is walking into a bar on Silver Lake Boulevard, and in a man-bites-dog scenario the bartender was trying to get my attention.

“Hey paparazzo,” he said, “I invented a new drink specially for you! You want to know what’s in it?”

“Five shots of vodka! Hahahahaha!”

This was supposed to be my last stop on the way to the Kodak Theatre, where Sandra Bullock would inevitably win Best Actress as the first female headliner of a movie grossing over $200 million, in her more or less irrelevant role as a University of Mississippi football booster so insanely gung-ho that she coincidentally adopts a huge, inarticulate, and unfriendly black teenager who is coincidentally a future All-American left tackle at Ole Miss.

This payoff for the relentlessly likeable Ms. Bullock would be followed as night follows day by Best Picture for “The Hurt Locker,” a passive-aggressive video game where Iraqi bombers mysteriously decline to blow up a bomb-squad honcho 800 times in a row, and nobody even wonders why!

It’s just those wacky Iraqis!

So now I’m at an after-after-after party with my new best friend, the inventive Silver Lake bartender.

“Hey paparzzo,” he says, “you want to know what I call your special drink?”

“The Oblivion Ha-Ha.”

Open Thread

There would have been no Wall Street bailout.  Instead, SWAT teams would have come with battering rams to AIG and Goldman Sachs, the windows would have been smashed in and the corporate officers would have been hauled away in orange jumpsuits and chains.  Then FBI agents would have been seen carrying off boxes of papers and computers.

If Obama was a socialist and the Democrats were socialists, there would never have been talk of “bipartisanship” from DAY ONE.

Instead, Obama would have run the White House the way that George W. Bush ran the White House, and Obama wouldn’t be talking with respect about Ronald Reagan.  Instead he would have been talking about the Republicanista Party in the same manner that George W. Bush referenced the “Democrat” party, and corporate CEOs would be invited not to lunch, but to testify at criminal inquiries.

If Obama and the Democrats were socialists, we wouldn’t now be debating how much of the taxpayer’s money to give the health “insurance” companies.

If Obama and the Democrats were socialists, the Democrats would be fighting and not asking people to vote for them because they did everything the Republicans wanted but the Republicans were still obstructing everything they did.

If Obama and the Democrats were socialists, the top federal tax rate on the highest earning Americans would be 70%-90%, not 35%.

If Obama and the Democrats were socialists, you might complain about the taxes, but the Federal Government wouldn’t be colluding with Microsoft and IBM about how many of your jobs to ship to India.

Fine, I am a Hatriot, sign me up.

Burning the Midnight Oil for Energy Independence

It often seems there is a deep canyon lying between what we can do and what needs to be done as a community, as a local region, as a state, as a national region, or as a nation.

But the Steel Interstate is a national program that a coalition of determined groups of advocates scattered across the country could get going. It bridges regional interest conflicts, and offers a way to advance some of the interests of so many – Interstate motorists, advocates of freedom from cars, organized labor, the largely disorganized army of the unemployed, advocates of ecological sustainability, advocates of mitigating climate chaos, and Progressive Patriots, to name just a few.

Of course, I want to talk process, but it seems to be network maps that catches people’s interest. So how I will go about this is alternating Map and Process.

Tom DeLay Delusion says that Sen. Jim Bunning was “brave” for blocking an extension in unemployment benefits.

DeLay subscribes to the notion that people only try to find jobs when their benefits run out.

This video is from CNN’s State of the Union, broadcast March 7, 2010

RawStory today