Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Official White House Transcript

The Obama Campaign’s Marriage Equality Conundrum

By: David Dayen, Firedog Lake

Monday May 7, 2012 12:19 pm

There’s not more than a handful of voters in America who are bigoted enough to hold a position on marriage equality against a candidate for President above all else, or at least not more than a handful who wouldn’t already be voting against Obama because they already think he endorses what he has strained not to endorse. So when I say “the only people who care about this issue,” I’m talking about those gay rights activists who have given millions to the re-election effort and who want to see a President take their side on this matter of importance to them. Moreover, the only impression you get from this word-parsing and game-playing is one of a cynical campaign operation unable to articulate a strong statement of principle. It spills over into areas other than just the gay rights sphere.

In the words of Chuck Todd (about as Villager as they come) “gay money in this election has replaced Wall Street money. It has been the gay community that has put in money in a way to this President that is a very, very important part of the fundraising operation for the President Obama campaign.”

Two points- after the consistent disrespect and lack of commitment from the White House starting with Donnie McClurkin and recently evidenced by the rejection of enforcing ENDA standards on Federal Contractors and non-existent support for the opposition to NC One, why are the institutional LGBT activism organizations even giving him the time of day?

Second point- exactly what constituency is this president pandering to?

I have my suspicions and it’s not white male Republicans.

Greek Voters Punish 2 Main Parties for Economic Collapse

By RACHEL DONADIO and NIKI KITSANTONIS, The New York Times

Published: May 6, 2012

The parliamentary elections were the first time that Greece’s foreign loan agreement had been put to a democratic test, and the outcome appeared clear: a rejection of the terms of the bailout and a fragmentation of the vote so severe that the front-runner is expected to have extreme difficulty in forming a government, let alone one that can either enforce or renegotiate the terms of the bailout.

…

In the upper middle-class Psychiko neighborhood in Athens, many supporters of the Socialist party, known here as Pasok, said they had voted for radical-left Syriza for the first time, in protest. “I voted in anger,” said Evangelia Grillaki, 65, a retired florist. “We feel 1,000 percent betrayed. The only people who voted for Pasok are either jerks or vested interests.”

The biggest winner in the elections appeared to be Syriza, a coalition of leftist parties founded in 2004, which included splinter groups from Greece’s more hard-line Communist Party. Its campaign slogan was “They chose without us, we’re moving on without them,” and it appeared to receive the bulk of the Socialist protest vote. Led by Alexis Tsipras, an energetic 38-year-old, the party is in favor of Greece remaining in the euro zone and the European Union but has opposed the loan agreement.

Funny how it is that when regular voters are allowed to express their opinion of Bankster Bailouts they overwhelmingly reject them and the Plutocrat Pandering Politicians who are complicit in their criminality.

Fire them all.

Bonafide Hero: Captain Duck Dodgers is the series finale and originally aired November 11, 2005.

Since I started posting these episodes slightly over 39 weeks ago many of them have been pulled for whatever reason which I think is a shame.

At some point I may attempt to put together this collection again, but I’ll try to find some other long format content for the immediate future.  As always your suggestions are welcome, hope you enjoyed the show.

This was no ordinary homecoming.  This was a do-or-die attempt to lay the ghost of years of rejection from the horse-rearing elite and the literati who sat in those privileged boxes overlooking the track and those unprivileged craven hordes who grovelled around the centre-field where he had suffered as a boy.

The clubhouse as I remember was worse, much worse than I had expected.  It was a mess.  This was supposed to be a smart, horsey clubhouse, oozing with money and gentry, but what I saw had me skulking in corners.  It was worse than the night I spent on Skid Row a month later, back in New York.  My feet crunched broken glass on the floor.  There seemed no difference between a telephone booth and a urinal; both were used for the same purpose.  Foul messages were scrawled in human excrement on the walls and bull-necked men, in what had once been white, but were smeared and stained, seersucker suits, were doing awful things to younger but equally depraved men around every corner.  The place reminded me of a cowshed that hadn’t been cleaned in fifteen years.  Somehow I knew I had to look and observe.  It was my job.  What was I being paid for?  I was lucky to be here.  Lots of people would give their drawing arm to be able to see the actual Kentucky Derby which was now hardly an hour away.  Hunter understood and was watching me as much as he was watching the scene before us.

Something splattered the page I was drawing on and, as I moved to wipe it away, I realized too late it was somebody’s vomit.  During the worst days of the Weimar Republic, when Hitler was rising faster than a bull on heat, George Grosz, the savage satirical painter, had used human shit as a violent method of colouring his drawings.  It is a shade of brown like no other and its use makes an ultimate statement about the subject.

‘Seen enough?’, asked Hunter, pushing me hastily towards an exit that led out to the club enclosure.  I needed a drink.  ‘Er… one more trip to the inner-field Ralph I think,’ I heard Hunter say nervously.  ‘Only another half-hour to the big race.  If we don’t catch the inner-field now, we’ll miss it.’  So we went.

While the scene was as wild here as it had been in the clubhouse, it had a warmer, more human face, more colour and happiness and gay abandon – the difference in atmosphere between Hogarth’s Gin Lane and Beer Street.  One harrowed and death-like the other bloated with booze but animal-healthy.

Who would have thought I was after the gristle, the blood-throbbing veins, poisoned exquisitely by endless self-indulgence, mint juleps, and bourbon.  Hide, anyway, behind the dark shades you predatory piece of raw blubber.

The race was now getting a frenzied response as Dust Commander began to make the running.  Bangles and jewels rattled on suntanned, wobbling flesh and even the pillar men in suits were now on tip-toe, creased skin under double-chins stretched to the limit into long furrows that curved down into tight collars.

Mouths opened and closed and veins pulsed in unison as the frenzy reached its climax.  One or two slumped back as their horses failed, but the mass hysteria rose to a final orgasmic shriek, at last bubbling over into whoops of joy, hugging and back slapping.  I turned to face the track again, but it was all over.  That was it.  The 1970 Kentucky Derby won by Dust Commander with a lead of five lengths – the biggest winning margin since 1946 when Triple Crown Champion, Assault, won the Derby by eight lengths.

‘I think it’s time I was thinking of getting back to New York.  Let’s have a meal somewhere and I can phone the airline for plane times.  What day is it, we seem to have lost a weekend.  I need a drink.’

‘You need a lynching.  You’ve upset my friends and I haven’t written a goddamn word.  I’ve been too busy looking after you.  Your work here is done.  I can never come back here again.  This whole thing will probably finish me as a writer.  I have no story.’

‘Well I know we got a bit pissed and let things slip a bit but there’s lots of colour.  Lots happened.’

‘Holy Shit!  You scumbag!  This is Kentucky, not Skid Row.  I love these people.  They are my friends and you treated them like scum.’

Ralph Steadman- The Joke’s Over

The Kentucky Derby and the Slow Death of Horse Racing

By Andrew Cohen, The Atlantic

May 3 2012, 12:31 PM ET

This dark and stormy Derby week, there is no other way to put it. These are dismal days for horse racing in North America. We once said, in the grandstands and along the backstretches, that all horse racing needed to reassert itself onto the American sporting scene was a Triple Crown winner. But the last 3-year-old colt to accomplish that task was Affirmed in 1978. And that means that a third of a century, an entire generation, has come and gone without such a champion. In the meantime, chaos. The great gaming monopoly that once was horse racing has devolved into a rudderless mess.

All across the continent, from Ontario to Kentucky, from Maryland to California, the industry and the sport are under siege. From venal legislators, who have raided gaming coffers to cover their own budgetary failures. From the politically connected gaming industry, which sees horse racing as a mere nuisance. From underfunded and lazy regulators, who are more concerned about securing their own patronage than they are about enforcing the rules. And from cheating owners, trainers, jockeys, and drivers, who are laughing at the rest of us as they deposit their ill-gotten gains.

…

No matter who wins, every racing fan everywhere mostly prays that none of these beautiful animals (or any others) get hurt on Saturday. Remember Eight Belles? She was the filly who raced a brave second to Big Brown in the Derby in 2008 before breaking down on the track. I hosted a Derby party that year and there were maybe half a dozen children watching that race. They were rightly horrified by Eight Belles’ on-track death and I daresay that none are likely to ever want to see a horse race ever again. That’s why horse racing has to do much more to better protect the horses.

That protection begins and ends with the vices and failings of the human connections who surround every racehorse. Although there is a healthy and continuous debate within racing about the efficacy of the drugs that are lawfully given to horses, the fact is that the pervasive use of such drugs (not to mention the illegal blood-doping ones) has had a devastating long-term impact upon the horses. We breed them for speed, we push them to race early, and then we have the nerve to pump them full of drugs to hide their ailments or to make them run faster.

…

There is no excuse for this, on any level. The owners are to blame for permitting their trainers and veterinarians to give drugs to their horses on such a scale. The trainers are to blame for putting their financial interest above the interests of their horses’ welfare. The veterinarians are to blame for allowing themselves to be used as instruments of the horses’ destruction. Track officials are to blame for not taking seriously their obligations to ensure the safety of the horses. And regulators are to blame for not punishing even the obvious offenders.

The reason all these people so often don’t do right by their horses is because the horses are perceived as fungible property rather than as the irreplaceable centerpieces of the sport. Insiders lament the breakdowns but perceive them to be exceptions to the rule. The problem is, the public doesn’t see it that way. To the lay person, each and every breakdown is proof that racing is a brutal and violent sport and, just as importantly, that the humans in charge of it aren’t doing enough to protect the horses. The cumulative effect of that perception has severely damaged the sport’s reputation and the industry’s ability to attract new fans.

There is no carrot and no stick-no economic incentive to play fair and no fear of swift and severe punishment for transgressors. It’s a system where integrity is talked about more than it is practiced, where everyone blames everyone else. Track officials blame the regulators for not enforcing the rules. Regulators blame legislators for not giving them enough statutory power. Defense attorneys hired by the alleged transgressors are allowed by state judges to make a mockery of the justice system-often delaying suspensions until their clients are ready to take their vacations.

…

No one wants to be regulated. No one wants to give up what little power and control they have over their corner of the industry. And too few, clearly, are willing to spend the money it would take to increase the pace of drug testing and enforcement or to aggressively market and lobby for the sport in bold new ways. Folks will pay millions for a nice colt. But they won’t pay millions to save the sport. The industry talks and talks and talks. And its leaders ponder incremental changes when great strides are desperately needed. In the meantime, too many of the fans, owners, and bettors have gone.

…

It’s not rocket science. It just takes will. And sacrifice. And humility. And money. All it would take for the sport to give itself a fighting chance for the future would be for stakeholders to hold each other, and themselves, more accountable. You can’t grow horse racing today without ensuring the safety of the horses. You can’t ensure the safety of the horses without limiting the drugs in the sport and punishing the cheaters.  And you can’t market any of it until potential fans realize that the industry takes its responsibilities seriously.

Hmm… remind you of anything?

If you want to you can watch Kentucky Derby coverage from 11 am ET (on Vs. where it actually started on Wednesday) until 7 pm (on NBC, where they spare you the pre-race hype until 4).

I suppose this is good thing since you can hardly be expected to follow Horse Racing unless you’re a tout or plunger in one of the few forms of gambling deemed socially acceptable (as opposed to Poker, which is not gambling at all) and 2 year olds don’t have much of a record to handicap.

Ice Cream.  Get your Tutsi Frootsie Ice Cream.

It’s really mostly an excuse to wear hats that would be rejected from a 5th Avenue Easter Parade or Royal Wedding and get tanked up on Bourbon that is best sipped with a soda chaser and not muddled up with mint.

Mint Julep

Ingredients

• 4 cups bourbon
• 2 bunches fresh spearmint
• 1 cup distilled water
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• Powdered sugar

Directions

Post Time is 6:24 pm ET.

The name simply means “The Fifth of May” and it’s an oddly U.S. American holiday.

Except in the State of Puebla they don’t much celebrate the victory over the French at the Battle of Puebla in Mexico which makes it much more like Patriot’s Day that we here in New England get to celebrate almost every year as an extra filing day (I understand there’s also a foot race in Boston).

Interestingly enough it was a stand up fight against the banksters which they lost (those who do not remember history…).  Some people say that the French intervention was intended to establish a supply line to aid the Slave Owner’s Rebellion (or as the more charitable put it, The War of the Rebellion).

Not Congressionally recognized until 2005, celebrations started in California as early as the mid 1860s and for over 100 years were most common in Southwestern States with a large population of people of Mexican descent.  Now of course it’s just another excuse to over consume the cheap crappy Tequila and Beer that Mexico exports (don’t get me wrong, there are good Mexican Beers and Tequila but Corona, Dos Equis, and Jose Cuervo are not them) and ignore real, actual factual Mexican history because we’re so fucking exceptional that understanding and caring about the countries we border is as beneath us as even knowing which ones they are.

Just don’t mistake it for Grito de Dolores.

Well, then do us all a favor and quit you incompetent assholes!

Pre-recession unemployment rate is out of reach

A new report authored by a Federal Reserve president says unemployment cannot fall to pre-recession levels without an inflationary impact. So get used to high unemployment.

By Nin-Hai Tseng, Fortune

May 4, 2012: 11:50 AM ET

On Thursday, John Williams, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, suggested that perhaps Americans should lower their expectations given the challenges workers faces. A research note co-authored by Williams estimated that the lowest level of joblessness that can be reached without leading to inflation could be 6.5%. Before the recession, the unemployment rate was generally at around 5%.

…

In early 2009, eligibility for unemployment benefits was extended from 26 weeks to up to 99 weeks.

While such benefits reduce hardships for the unemployed, they might also “reduce the incentive of the unemployed to seek and accept less desirable jobs,” according to the report.

…

If workers are latching on to any hope that the economy has turned a corner, perhaps they’d be more realistic by hoping for a little less.

Don’t let the door hit you, you lazy useless gits.

Art valuation datapoints of the day

Felix Salmon, Reuters

May 3, 2012 11:11 EDT

As you have no doubt heard by now, The Scream sold at Sotheby’s for $120 million yesterday, prompting Mark Gongloff to wax apocalyptic about “the big squeaky speculative bubble in the art world”. He’s absolutely wrong: whether there’s a bubble or not, this purchase was not speculative.

…

Remember the Card Players which sold for $250 million? Or, for that matter, the Jeff Koons Rabbit I wrote about earlier this week, which is probably worth the same amount of money as The Scream, more or less? The three artworks all have something in common: they’re editions, broadly speaking. There are four Screams, five versions of the Card Players, and four Rabbits. And in each case, the value of any given work goes up, not down, as a result of the existence of the others.

That’s because what people are buying, when they buy one of these pieces, is a cultural icon, something instantly recognizable. As Clyde Haberman says of the Scream, “if you’ve never seen a tacky facsimile of it, there’s a chance that you have also never seen a coffee mug, a T-shirt or a Macaulay Culkin poster”. And truth be told, it’s not exactly Good Art.

…

The real value of the Scream, then, the reason that a pastel on cardboard sold for $82 million more than the price of the oil-on-canvas Vampire, lies precisely in all those mugs and t-shirts and Home Alone one-sheets. Whatever was being bought, here, it wasn’t really art, in any pure sense. It was more the result of a century’s worth of marketing and hype.

…

Or, to take another example, an old porcelain bowl, roughly the size of your hand, and looking like nothing so much as the thing which lives by the door where you keep your keys, sold for $27 million at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong last month. It might be a trophy, but it’s not an obvious, branded trophy in the way that the Scream is.