January 2011 archive
Jan 05 2011
Late Night Karaoke
Jan 05 2011
Barack Obama Reviews “It Begged For Death” By Jacob Freeze
As if feeding my dog “magic” brownies and telling Jarrett I like Axelrod better than her weren’t enough, now my idiot sock-puppet Jacob Freeze wants to publish It Begged For Death: American Culture and Society in the Age of Obama!
Of course I immediately stamped that thing top-secret and disappeared it down the memory hole in Michelle’s White House garden, and of course my stoner dog dug it up again, and again, but I’m posting a review of it anyway just so you know what I have to put up with in the Oval Office, with my DFH dog always yipping for munchies and Axelrod demanding $500 for wedgie-proof underpants because Valerie Jarrett…
Oh, forget it!
So my idiot sock-puppet’s dismal tome would be totally worthless except for some cover art he stole from Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre’s photo-book about the ruins of Detroit, that garbage-metropolis which only remains in existence because we’re all too broke and lazy to knock it down, and the rest of America likewise, with our imbecile cartoon-movie culture, Jersey Shore on TV, and a “sociopathic con-man” in the White House, as if Snooki in that hamster ball on New Year’s Eve wasn’t classic TV!
Jan 05 2011
Barack Obama Reviews “It Begged For Death” By Jacob Freeze
As if feeding my dog “magic” brownies and telling Jarrett I like Axelrod better than her weren’t enough, now my idiot sock-puppet Jacob Freeze wants to publish It Begged For Death: American Culture and Society in the Age of Obama!
Of course I immediately stamped that thing top-secret and disappeared it down the memory hole in Michelle’s White House garden, and of course my stoner dog dug it up again, and again, but I’m posting a review of it anyway just so you know what I have to put up with in the Oval Office, with my DFH dog always yipping for munchies and Axelrod demanding $500 for wedgie-proof underpants because Valerie Jarrett…
Oh, forget it!
So my idiot sock-puppet’s dismal tome would be totally worthless except for some cover art he stole from Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre’s photo-book about the ruins of Detroit, that garbage-metropolis which only remains in existence because we’re all too broke and lazy to knock it down, and the rest of America likewise, with our imbecile cartoon-movie culture, Jersey Shore on TV, and a “sociopathic con-man” in the White House, as if Snooki in that hamster ball on New year’s Eve wasn’t classic TV!
Jan 05 2011
Pakistan’s Punjab Governor Taseer Assassinated
News Being Ignored by the cable TeeVee AMSM Dept, not that we’re in a covert war or anything:
Tuesday, Jan 4, 2011. The governor of Pakistan’s Punjab province, Salman Taseer, age 56, has been assassinated in the northern capital of Islamabad by one of his bodyguards. Taseer was a member of the Bhutto legacy Pakistan People’s Party. In 2008, the president of Pakistan, Zadari, appointed him governor of Punjab, which is Pakistan’s wealthiest province and in the east along the Indian border. According to Al Jazeera, Taseer, who was visiting Islamabad, was not being guarded by his usual security detail. The alleged assassin was from Rawalpindi, which is slightly south of Islamabad, and that is where former PM Benazir Bhutto was also killed in 2007 by a bomb explosion. Rawalpindi is the headquarters of the Pakistani Army and Air Force.
Tomorrow, January 5th, was to be the anniversary celebration of the birth of Bhutto’s father, Zufikar Ali Bhutto.
The government has closed parliament and announced a three day period of mourning.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worl…
Last month he publicly supported Aasia Bibi, a Christian woman and mother of three who has been sentenced to death for allegedly insulting the prophet Muhammad. Bibi’s case has triggered a fresh debate around the blasphemy laws, which human rights groups say are frequently abused to settle scores or target minorities.
—
Enraged PPP supporters took to the streets across Pakistan, chanting slogans and weeping. A procession of ashen-faced ministers and officials trailed into the Islamabad hospital where Taseer’s body was taken after the shooting. “These are the forces that are ranged against us,” said Latif Khosa, a former attorney general. “Every time our party comes to power, its leaders are assassinated or disappear.”
Foreshadowing ?
Monday, Jan 3rd, 2011.http://www.reuters.com/article…
Pakistan’s Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani’s government lost its parliamentary majority Sunday when the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) announced it would go into opposition over fuel price policies.
The former military chief (Musharraf), who came to power in a bloodless coup in 1999, has lived in self-imposed exile since he stepped down under threat of impeachment in 2008. He spends most of his time in London and Dubai.
Musharraf said: “I must return (to Pakistan) well before the next elections, whenever that may be. I strongly believe the real momentum for my party will start once I reach Pakistan. So we are trying to create an environment for me to reach there.”
Jan 04 2011
TEA what TEA, Hard Stuff from now on
Gotta keep these cushy jobs!
Elected As Cost Cutters, GOP Freshmen Will Party With Fatcats Tonight
Tea Party Populists Will Be Among Republicans At Private High Roller Gala
Hey it’s a hard work a comin, what with more destruction that wasn’t finished in the 109th, gotta make friends with the cash cows.
Jan 04 2011
Banned Books: Editing Mark Twain
Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain’s classic novel, was initially published in 1884. And it has survived as an important book for more than a century without ever being edited. For offensiveness. Or more specifically to eliminate offensive, racist words. At least until now.
Today NPR reports that a “New Edition Of ‘Huckleberry Finn’ Will Eliminate Offensive Words”:
Jan 04 2011
The Seeds of Development Strategy
The seeds of development strategy is for a country like the Democratic Republic of Congo, trapped between a massive, oppressive debt burden left it by a preceding less than legitimate regime which grabbed power with both hands but left responsibility on the table for someone else to pick up, with collapsing infrastructure, and a far less than progressive head of state working with an even weaker governing majority in the legislature.
So, nothing like the US situation, after all, but still …
… build from the bottom up. Create local producer cooperatives, to ensure fair markets in the central market town for a set of villages. Give jobs to a cadre of mostly younger people looking to establish themselves to serve continuing education, primary health care, local credit union, local cooperative work on maintaining paths for transport to the central market town and transport beyond. Trial fields to prove out crops fitted to local conditions and then make seeds and cuttings available to local farmers.
Minimize hard currency purchased inputs, maximize leverage of local resources, to keep the official value of the activity low, to stay off the radar scope of the locusts known as International Aid Agencies.
Cooperatives will fail. Some of the young cadre will be incompetent. Some of the field trials will be failures.
BUT, as opposed to the United States Agency for Locust Deployment, the low external resource cost and high leverage of abundant local labor means that instead of having to put all the resources into one trial, there are thousands of trials spread around.
Jan 04 2011
Waaaaaoooow: We is left-wing as heeeeeyyyll!!!
Most Americans say tax rich to balance budget: poll
NEW YORK (Reuters via YahooNews) – Most Americans think the United States should raise taxes for the rich to balance the budget, according to a 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll released on Monday.
President Barack Obama last month signed into law a two-year extension of Bush-era tax cuts for millions of Americans, including the wealthiest, in a compromise with Republicans. . . .”
Well this is kind of a fun headline to read. But again, I find it a bit on the subtle side of things. Perhaps a more eye-catching headline might read:
Poll: Holy Shitballs! Who let all these left wingers in?
or perhaps
Poll: MMMMYeah . . . . about that whole ‘center-right nation’ thing
Jan 04 2011
Betsie Gallardo: We’re Doing Great So Far, But January 5th Is Key
Since Christmas we’ve been talking about the story of Betsie Gallardo, a woman who is dying of cancer in a Florida prison.
When we last met, she was being starved to death, literally, at the direction of the Florida Department of Corrections (DOC), who had decided not only to withhold further treatment for her inoperable cancer, but to withdraw nutritional support as well.
Her adopted mother is fighting to have her discharged from prison so that she can die at home-and the DOC have recommended that she be released.
On December 9th, Florida’s Board of Executive Clemency (“the Board”) chose to ignore the DOC advice.
Since then, thanks to a whole bunch of outside pressure, things have changed, for the better, which we’ll be talking about today.
On January 5th, the Board meets again-and if we do this right, we can bring some closure to this story.
Jan 04 2011
JP Morgan Chase Exec For WH Chief of Staff?
Things I Couldn’t Make Up If I Tried, continued:
William Daley, an executive with JP Morgan Chase in Chicago, is under consideration to replace Rahm Emanuel, who is running for Mayor of Chicago, as President Obama’s Chief of Staff.
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-…Emanuel hopes to succeed outgoing Mayor Richard M. Daley, the brother of William Daley. Like Emanuel, Daley would be a choice with strong ties to the president’s hometown of Chicago.
The decision comes at a critical point of turnover for the Obama administration, as it pivots toward the back half of its first term, and looks toward re-election in 2012.
Jan 04 2011
On Mandatory School Busing here in Boston:
Unlike many, if not most of the Southern areas, Boston’s busing program was confined to the city limits, which was also partly why Boston became so explosive during the mid to late 1970’s when mandatory school busing was implemented there. A Metropolitan solution was considered in a number of areas including Boston, but it got scrapped. People in Boston’s all-white suburbs would not accept it, and Boston’s black community, already small, and fearful that the limited amount of influence and power that they had, would be “diluted in the sea of suburbia”, also rejected it.
However, the Boston area also had a METCO program (I forget what the letters stand for), in which black students from Boston were bused in to a number of the outer-lying bedroom communities, including my old hometown, which implemented METCO later. The METCO program was a voluntary program aimed at inner city students from Roxbury, Mattapan and North Dorchester who wished to participate in it, and a great many METCO kids benefited by getting a better education at better schools in wealthier communities.
Jan 04 2011
Six In The Morning
Texas Where Even The Innocent Are Guilty
Texas man who spent 30 years in prison likely to have conviction quashed
An exoneration hearing for Cornelius Dupree Jr. is scheduled for Tuesday in Dallas. If his conviction is overturned, he would have spent more time wrongly imprisoned than any other DNA exoneree in Texas.
The district attorney’s office said on Monday it supports Dupree’s innocence claim.
Dupree was charged in 1979 with raping and robbing a 26-year-old woman and sentenced in 1980 to 75 years in prison for aggravated robbery.
He was released on parole in July. DNA test results came back 10 days after his release, excluding him as the rapist.